>>Everyone, welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special presentation on Cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. I'm John Furry, your host of The Cube. We've got a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Mattor Makki, who's the co-founder and VP of Product of Platform nine. She's gonna go into detail around Arlon, the open source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud native at scale. Bickley the chief architect of Platform nine Cube alumni. Going back to the OpenStack days. He's gonna go into why Arlon, why this infrastructure as code implication, what it means for customers and the implications in the open source community and where that value is. Really great wide ranging conversation there. And of course, Vascar, Gort, the CEO of Platform nine, is gonna talk with me about his views on Super Cloud and why Platform nine has a scalable solutions to bring cloud native at scale. So enjoy the program, see you soon. Hello and welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube. Pleasure to have here me Makowski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. >>Thank you for having >>Me. So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on Super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good and a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model, where you have a few large distributors of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of micro sites. These micro sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think super cloud is a, is an appropriate term for >>That. So you brought a couple things I want to dig into. You mentioned Edge Notes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. Wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got iot, o ot, and it kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around cloud flare shutting down a site here, there's policies being made at scale. These new challenges there. Can you share because you can have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because it's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenge. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud across multiple edges and >>Regions? Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have, deploy number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other access you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that skill really needs some well thought out, well-structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when you scale, is not at the level. >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're talking about at scale Yep. Challenges here. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is, you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this change, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, It's not working. The exact same problem now happens and these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer's site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on all of these various factors at their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >>Okay. So I have to ask about scale because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success cloud native, you know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can configure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotpot is. And when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the, the two factors of scale is we talked about start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and POS from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to try us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because yeah, you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say you radio sell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did it, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes like ishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that these security policies are configured properly. >>So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching, Can you share what our lawn is, this new product, What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arwan is, it's an open source project and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end to end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So what alarm lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what this solves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in. What's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, >>What would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right online. And if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of online, we, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each components, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage. But again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what Arlon really does. That's like the I pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency >>For those. So keeping it smooth, the assembly on things are flowing. C C I CD pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, the developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of application that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secure properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability integrated. And so it solves problems for both those >>Teams. Yeah. It's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud native developer. The OP teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, Kubernetes really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, c communities clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in a declarative way. And Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so online addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>Ed, do I wanna get into the benefits? What's in it for me as the customer developer? But I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over at platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model on from model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fi, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why opensource and also opensource because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a block box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. I mean, what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that, Well, but that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for helpers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating me metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and you know, two things. I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SAS hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production >>Environment. I have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer, why should I be enthused about Arlo? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo customer? >>Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native es, and then we have our C I CD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS CD pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of their groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Spico would be delighted. The folks that we've talked, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on s Amazon and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us >>Stability. Yeah, I think people are scared, not sc I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And, and I think this is gonna come up at co con this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Lon uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open source tools that's out there, right? It's created by folks that are as part of Intuit team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is arlon also makes use of cluster api capi, which is a ES sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with algo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what Algo CD can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to a point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, Platform nine has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Alon at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DEF test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that sla. >>And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with, that are familiar with, with Argo and then Arlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo CD and they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our line before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and, you know, give you an inventory and that, >>So customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. So >>Especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yeah. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. >>And you provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. >>Yes. That's the key value >>Here. That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale up >>Profile and policy based declarative configuration and life cycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables Super club, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there's at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way so that our lot solves then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And alon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And, you know, alarm flows >>In one. Okay, so now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. There's under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me, seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge to their, where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for >>That. So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this Arlo solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, there's designed to do, the question is, what did, does the current pain look like of the apps breaking? What does the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo, and, and, and on all the other goodness to automate, What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, Is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely would be in indications of things are effed up a little bit. >>Yeah. More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so you are, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this because the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your, your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you are looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your, So those are, those are the >>Signals. This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the IIA terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. The company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and see, and boards is saying, how is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yeah. Do you see that same thing? >>Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloudnative at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things with things. So just >>Taking care of, and the CIO doesn't exist. There's no CSO there at the beach. >>Yeah. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for having >>Me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching. Welcome back everyone to the special presentation of cloud native at scale, the cube and platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here at Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine b. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or well later, earlier when opens Stack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of platform nine. >>Thank you very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now was realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just a success Exactly. Of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructure's code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our R lawn you guys just launched, the infrastructure's code is going to another level. And then it's always been DevOps infrastructure is code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon, connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructures code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it, everybody or most people know about infrastructures code. But with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure as configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D instead with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specify. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah, yeah. And, and that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. Not declaring, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source, so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code. It's code being developed. And so it's into integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new, new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space that, >>That's, I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is the new breed, the trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your >>View? It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at our GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the by intu. They had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, Vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our inaugural event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or application specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so to deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer too is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna continue. >>It's interesting. I just really wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD Stock is down arm has been on rise, we've remember pointing for many years now, that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in, in this community of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at ar GoCon, which came out of Intuit. We've had Maria Teel at our super cloud event, She's a cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? Yeah, >>So the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built AR lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, And >>What's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the, the, this abstraction or thin layer below the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads at the end of the day, and I talk to CXOs and IT folks that, that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructure's code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And here's my workloads running effectively. So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, right? >>So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem, like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's coming like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We've heard people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with AR loan you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call the profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, So >>It's essentially standard, like creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook, just deploy it. Now what there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I can just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructure as configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things are controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure as configuration is built kind of on, it's a super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years. I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Kubernetes has value. We're gonna hear this year at CubeCon a lot of this, what does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state, and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot rogue, that CubeCon coming up and now this'll be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at this year? It's the big story this year. What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jockeying for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of coupon and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career VMware over decades with them within 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here a platform. I you's been around for a while at this game, man. We talked about OpenStack, that project we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a Cloud Aati team at that time. We would joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform Nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? Opens Stack was an example and then Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah, I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you, Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing, doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud need of its scale? >>The, the hyper squares? >>Yeah, yeah. A's Azure Google, >>You mean from a business perspective, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep well, >>They got great performance. I mean, from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes. That's gonna be key, >>Right? Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyper skaters really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the, the new risk and arm ecosystems, the platforms. >>Yeah. Not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh the cloud is one big distributed computer. It's, it's hardware and you got software and you got middleware and he kinda over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. Yes, >>Exactly. >>It's, we're back in the same game. Thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud, cloud native develop for developers. And John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up. Hey, welcome back everyone to Super Cloud 22. I'm John Fur, host of the Cuba here all day talking about the future of cloud. Where's it all going? Making it super multi-cloud is around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and Edge. Got a great guest here, Vascar Gorde, CEO of Platform nine, just on the panel on Kubernetes. An enabler blocker. Welcome back. Great to have you on. >>Good to see you >>Again. So Kubernetes is a blocker enabler by, with a question mark I put on on there. Panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's just thing about what you guys are doing at Platform nine? Is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform nine while you're at the helm, right? >>Absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you to run the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what where we come into >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were kind of talking about the glory days in 2000, 2001 when the first ASPs application service providers came out. Kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloud-like >>It wasn't, >>And web services started then too. So you saw that whole growth. Now, fast forward 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now, when you look back then to here and all the different cycles, >>In fact, you know, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same but also extremely different. But more importantly now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have everybody's in the journey somewhere. >>Everyone is going digital transformation here. Even on a so-called downturn recession that's upcoming inflations sea year. It's interesting. This is the first downturn, the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. And if you look at the tech trends, GDPs down, but not tech. Nope. Cause pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming even in, in tech. So this is a unique factor which proves that that digital transformation's happening and company, every company will need a super cloud. >>Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernize their infrastructure. And modernizing infrastructure is not just some, you know, new servers and new application tools. It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. >>I wanna get your thoughts on Super Cloud because one of the things Dave Alon and I want to do with Super Cloud and calling it that was we, I, I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can, I'll speak from, he can speak for himself. We didn't like multi-cloud. I mean not because Amazon said don't call things multi-cloud, it just didn't feel right. I mean everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365. But it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized, it wasn't truly cloud enabled. It didn't, it felt like they're not ready for a market yet. Yet public clouds booming on premise. Private cloud and Edge is much more on, you know, more, More dynamic, more unreal. >>Yeah. I think the reason why we think Super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. Okay, you have a productivity cloud, you have a Salesforce cloud, you may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? So, but they're not connected. So you can say, okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's, you know, multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically. Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure, you need, but at the same time you need a single pan or a single platform for you to build your innovations on, regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think Super Cloud is actually a more tightly integrated orchestrated management philosophy we think. >>So let's get into some of the super cloud type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is as a pilot to get the conversations flowing with, with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products and the builders, Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third Cloudworks in public cloud. We see the use cases on premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit, but a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that open stack. We need an orchestration. And then containers had a good shot with, with Docker. They re pivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you got containers booming and Kubernetes as a new layer there. >>What's, >>What's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new defacto enabler? It >>Is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have 1, 2, 3 container based, Kubernetes based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here. It is in production at scale by many customers. And it, the beauty of it is yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team, right? So it's, it's one thing to buy a tool and >>Just be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. >>We provide, provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service and it can run anywhere. It can run in public private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge, it runs at this in stores about thousands of stores in a retailer. So we provide that and also for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons. We also un on-prem as an air gap version. Can >>You give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your customer? Right. >>So I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have hundreds of products, hundreds of r and d teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at few years back, each one was doing it on a different platforms, but they really needed to bring the agility. And they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev pro platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light out operation. In fact, the customer says like, like the Maytag service person, cuz we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. >>So it's kinda like an SRE vibe. One person managing a >>Large 4,000 engineers building infrastructure >>On their tools, >>Whatever they want on their tools. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform. What >>Benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? >>Speed, definitely. Okay. Definitely they're speeding. Speed uniformity because now they're building able to build, so their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. >>So a big problem that's coming outta this super cloud event that we're, we're seeing and we heard it all here, ops and security teams. Cause they're kind of part of one thing, but option security specifically need to catch up speed wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right? >>So we, we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams and we layer on top of that. We have like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you have multiple teams, okay, but you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually, you know, the product divisions of companies that are looking at or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally cio definitely. So it it's, it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure. But the ideal one we are beginning to see now many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams. So >>You working two sides to that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side. >>Okay. Another customer that I give an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail, retail, you know food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000. And they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy or browse or sit there. They have applications that were written in the nineties and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store or they can't move everything to the cloud because the store operations has to be local. The menu changes based on it's classic edge. It's classic edge, yeah. Right? They can't send it people to go install rack access servers then they can't sell software people to go install the software and any change you wanna put through that, you know, truck roll. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that >>You, you say little servers like how big one like a box, like a small little box, >>Right? And all the person in the store has to do like what you and I do at home and we get a, you know, a router is connect the power, connect the internet and turn the switch on. And from there we pick it up. >>Yep. >>We provide the operating system, everything and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage thousands of >>Them. True plug and play >>Two, plug and play thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So, so that's another example where on the edge then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds. Okay. But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the locations. >>So you guys got some success. Congratulations. Got some traction there. It's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that's come up is what is truly cloud native? Cuz there's lift and shift of the cloud >>That's not cloud native. >>Then there's cloud native. Cloud native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says what's cloud native, what isn't cloud native? >>Right. Look, I think first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud native, is CNC foundation. And I think it's very well documented, very well. >>Tucan, of course Detroit's >>Coming so, so it's already there, right? So we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20 year old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud native. Okay? You can't put to cloud, not you have to rewrite and redevelop your application in business logic using modern tools. Hopefully more open source and, and I think that's what Cloudnative is and we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now everybody wants to be cloudnative, but it's not that easy, okay? Because it's, I think it's first of all, skill set is very important. Uniformity of tools that there's so many tools there. Thousands and thousands of tools you could spend your time figuring out which tool to use. Okay? So I think the complexity is there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly being done. >>And I'll give you an example, I don't know how clear native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours, but you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how dominoes actually increase their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not, I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch what's happening, how it's delivered. There were a pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud native can provide. >>Being agility and having that flow to the application changes what the expectations >>Are >>For the customer. Customer, >>The customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn. >>That's to wrap it up. I wanna just get your perspective again. One of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you part of the Super Cloud 22 is you've seen many cycles, you have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career where you've been and what you've done and now let's CEO platform nine, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? And you've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now put into context this moment in time around Super Cloud. >>Sure. I think as you said, a lot of battles. CARSs being been in an asb, being in a real time software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side, I did the infrastructure right and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to go through to become cloud native and digitalize. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on is a couple of paddles come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced to honors like y2k. Everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for y2k. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive right across all industries. >>And disruptive. >>And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. Yeah. I think we are at that pivotal moment now in companies trying to become digital and cloudnative. You know, that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce is interesting and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this is that it's not just completely changing the gain, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of e-commerce, just putting up a shopping cart that made you an e-commerce or e retailer or an e e e customer, right? Or so. I think it's the same thing now is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you gonna operate? How are you gonna service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not gonna work. >>Nascar, thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of Super Cloud 22. We really appreciate, we're gonna keep this open. We're gonna keep this conversation going even after the event, to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open in the community. And we're gonna keep this going for, for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with cloud cloud computing. I'm Sean Fur with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Hello and welcome back. This is the end of our program, our special presentation with Platform nine on cloud native at scale, enabling the super cloud. We're continuing the theme here. You heard the interviews Super Cloud and its challenges, new opportunities around solutions around like Platform nine and others with Arlon. This is really about the edge situations on the internet and managing the edge multiple regions, avoiding vendor lock in. This is what this new super cloud is all about. The business consequences we heard and and the wide ranging conversations around what it means for open source and the complexity problem all being solved. I hope you enjoyed this program. There's a lot of moving pieces and things to configure with cloud native install, all making it easier for you here with Super Cloud and of course Platform nine contributing to that. Thank you for watching.

>>Hello, welcome to the Cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special presentation on Cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. I'm John Furr, your host of The Cube. We had a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Meor Ma Makowski, who's the co-founder and VP of Product of Platform nine. She's gonna go into detail around Arlon, the open source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud native at scale. Bickley the chief architect of Platform nine Cube alumni. Going back to the OpenStack days. He's gonna go into why Arlon, why this infrastructure as code implication, what it means for customers and the implications in the open source community and where that value is. Really great wide ranging conversation there. And of course, Vascar, Gort, the CEO of Platform nine, is gonna talk with me about his views on Super Cloud and why Platform nine has a scalable solutions to bring cloudnative at scale. So enjoy the program. See you soon. Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Furry, host of the Cube. A pleasure to have here, me Makoski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. Thank >>You for having me. >>So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good, in a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributions of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of microsites, these microsites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think supercloud is a, is an appropriate term for that. >>So you brought a couple of things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. Wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got iot, ot, and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infras infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale, These new challenges there. Can you share because you can have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because there's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud or across multiple edges and regions? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have deploy a number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other axis you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when you scale, is not at the level. >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're talking about at scale Yep. Challenges here. Yeah, >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is, you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So I, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this chain, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, It's not working. The exact same problem now happens and these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies, or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors are their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >>Okay. So I have to ask about scale, because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success of cloud native. You know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can figure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is in when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the two factors of scale, as we talked about, start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and pos from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to triage us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say your radio cell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes nightmarishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem, another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that these security policies are configured properly. >>So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching. Can you share what Arlon is this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. Very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arlon is, it's an open source project, and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end to end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the site of those clusters, security policies, your middleware, plug-ins, and finally your applications. So what our LA you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, what >>Would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right? Our line, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of online, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale, creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage. But again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what arlon really does. That's like the deliver pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for >>Those. So keeping it smooth, the assembly on things are flowing. See c i CD pipe pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of applications that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secure properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability integrated. And so it solves problems for both >>Those teams. Yeah. It's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud needed developer's. That's right. The option teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, ES really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, s clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined a declarative way, and Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>And do I want to get into the benefits? What's in it for me as the customer developer? But I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over at Platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fision, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why opensource and also open source, because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a block box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. And what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that long. But that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for developers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating met metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and you know, two things. I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SAS hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production >>Environment. I have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer. Yep. Why should I be enthused about Arla? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo? I'm a >>Customer. Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native Kubernetes, and then we have our C I C D pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS c D pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of that groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Ops FICO would be delighted. The folks that we've talk, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on ecos Amazon, and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the >>Ability to, Yeah, I think people are scared. Not sc I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And, and I think this is gonna come up at co con this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Arlan uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest and used CD open source tools that's out there. Right's created by folks that are as part of into team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Alon also makes use of Cluster api cappi, which is a Kubernetes sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with Argo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what City can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to a point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, platform line has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy online at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DEF test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that >>Sla. And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with that are familiar with, with Argo and then rlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo adn, they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our land before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customers' hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment, as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and you know, give you an inventory. And that will, >>So if customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. So >>Especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yep. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. And >>You provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. >>Yes. That's the key value here. >>That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale up, >>Well profile and policy based declarative configuration and lifecycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables supercloud, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there's at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way so that our lot solves then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And arlon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And you know, our alarm fills in >>One. Okay. So now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. Is under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me, seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge to their, where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for that. >>So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this RLO solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, they're designed to do, the question is, what did does the current pain look like of the apps breaking? What does the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo and, and all the other goodness to automate? What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, Is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely would be indications of things are effed up a little bit. Yeah. >>More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so you are, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they're, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this because they're the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you are looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So those are, those are the signals. >>This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the maybe terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. Company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and boards is saying, How is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yep. Do you see that same thing? >>Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloudnative at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are >>Just taking care of the CIO doesn't exist. There's no ciso, they're at the beach. >>Yep. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for >>Having me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching. Welcome back everyone to the special presentation of cloud native at scale, the cube and platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here with Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine Pick. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or later, earlier when OpenStack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of platform nine. >>Thank you very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now has realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just the success Exactly. Of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructures code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our, our lawn, and you guys just launched the infrastructures code is going to another level, and then it's always been DevOps infrastructures code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon, connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructure as code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it, everybody or most people know about infrastructures code. But with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure is configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D instead with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specified. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah. And that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. That declare, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code, this code being developed. And so it's into integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space. >>That's, I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is a new breed. The trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your view? >>It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at AR GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the community meeting by in two, they had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our in AAL event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or applications specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so of deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer two is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think that the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna >>Continue. It's interesting. I just, when I wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD stock is down arm has been on a rise. We remember pointing for many years now that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in in this community of, of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at Argo Con, which came out of Intuit. We've had Mariana Tessel at our super cloud event. She's the cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? >>Yeah, so the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and, you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself. You can, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built our lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, And >>What's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the the, this abstraction or thin layer below as the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads. At the end of the day, you know, I talk to CXOs and IT folks that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructures code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And is my workloads running effectively? So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, >>Right? So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's kinda like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We very, people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with Armon you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call a profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, so >>Essentially standard creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook. You deploy it. Now what's there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I could just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructures configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things about controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure has configuration is built kind of on, it's as super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring and saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years? I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Could be nice, it has value. We're gonna hear this year coan a lot of this. What does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot road that CubeCon coming up and obviously this will be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at Coan this year? What's the big story this year? What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jogging for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of cons and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career, VMware over decades with them obviously in 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here at Platform. Now you guys have been around for a while at this game. We, man, we talked about OpenStack, that project you, we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. And I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a cloud ERO team at that time. We would to joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys tr pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? OpenStack was an example when the Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah, I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you, Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud native of its scale? >>The, the hyperscalers, >>Yeahs Azure, Google. >>You mean from a business perspective? Yeah, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep, >>Well they got great I performance, I mean from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes, that's gonna be key, right? >>Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyperscalers really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the the new risk and arm ecosystems and the platforms. >>Yeah, not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh the cloud is one big distributed computer, it's, it's hardware and he got software and you got middleware and he kind over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. >>Yes, >>Exactly. It's, we're back on the same game. Vic, thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud Cloud Native Phil for developers and John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up. Hey, welcome back everyone to Super Cloud 22. I'm John Fur, host of the Cuba here all day talking about the future of cloud. Where's it all going? Making it super multi-cloud clouds around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and edge. Got a great guest here, Vascar Gorde, CEO of Platform nine, just on the panel on Kubernetes. An enabler blocker. Welcome back. Great to have you on. >>Good to see you >>Again. So Kubernetes is a blocker enabler by, with a question mark. I put on on that panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's interest thing about what you guys are doing at Platform nine? Is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform nine while you're at the helm? Yeah, right. >>Absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you do on the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what we, we come into, >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were gonna talk about the glory days in 2000, 2001, when the first as piece application service providers came out, kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloudlike. >>It wasn't, >>And and web services started then too. So you saw that whole growth. Now, fast forward 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now, when you look back then to here and all the different cycles, >>I, in fact you, you know, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same but also extremely different. But more importantly now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have everybody's in the journey somewhere. >>Everyone is going digital transformation here. Even on a so-called downturn recession that's upcoming inflation's here. It's interesting. This is the first downturn in the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. And if you look at the tech trends, GDPs down, but not tech. >>Nope. >>Cuz the pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming even in, in tech. So this is a unique factor which proves that that digital transformation's happening and company, every company will need a super cloud. >>Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernize their infrastructure. And modernizing Infras infrastructure is not just some new servers and new application tools, It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. >>I wanna get your thoughts on Super Cloud because one of the things Dave Ante and I want to do with Super Cloud and calling it that was we, I, I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can, I'll speak from, he can speak for himself. We didn't like multi-cloud. I mean not because Amazon said don't call things multi-cloud, it just didn't feel right. I mean everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365. But it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized, it wasn't truly cloud enabled. It didn't, it felt like they're not ready for a market yet. Yet public clouds booming on premise. Private cloud and Edge is much more on, you know, more, more dynamic, more real. >>Yeah. I think the reason why we think super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. Okay, you have a productivity cloud, you have a Salesforce cloud, you may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? So, but they're not connected. So you can say okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's you know, multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically. Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure, you need, but at the same time you need a single pain, a single platform for you to build your innovations on regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think Super Cloud is actually a more tightly integrated orchestrated management philosophy we think. >>So let's get into some of the super cloud type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is to, as a pilots, to get the conversations flowing with with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products and the builders, Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third cloudworks in public cloud. We see the use cases on premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit, but a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that open stack. We need an orchestration and then containers had a good shot with, with Docker. They re pivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you got containers booming and Kubernetes as a new layer there. What's the, what's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new defacto enabler? It >>Is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere else in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have won two, three container based, Kubernetes based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here, it is in production at scale by many customers. And the beauty of it is, yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team, right? So it's, it's one thing to buy a tool >>And just be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. >>We provide, provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service and it can run anywhere. It can run in public private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge, it runs at this in stores are thousands of stores in a retailer. So we provide that and also for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons. We also un OnPrem as an air gap version. >>Can you give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your >>Customer? Right. So I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have, I dunno, hundreds of products, hundreds of r and d teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at few years back, each one was doing it on a different platforms but they really needed to bring the agility and they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev pro platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light out operation. In fact the customer says like, like the Maytag service person cuz we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. >>So it's kinda like an SRE vibe. One person managing a >>Large 4,000 engineers building infrastructure >>On their tools, >>Whatever they want on their tools. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform. >>What benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? >>Speed, definitely. Okay. Definitely they're speeding. Speed uniformity because now they're building able to build, so their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. >>So a big problem that's coming outta this super cloud event that we're, we're seeing and we've heard it all here, ops and security teams cuz they're kind of too part of one theme, but ops and security specifically need to catch up speed wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right. >>So we, we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams and we layer on top of that. We have like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you have multiple teams, okay, but you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually, you know, the product divisions of companies that are looking at or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally cio definitely. So it it's, it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure. But the ideal one we are beginning to see now many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams, >>You working two sides of that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side side, okay. >>Another customer like give you an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail, retail, you know food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000. And they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy or browse or sit there. They have applications that were written in the nineties and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store or they can't move everything to the cloud because the store operations has to be local. The menu changes based on, It's a classic edge. It's classic edge. Yeah. Right. They can't send it people to go install rack access servers then they can't sell software people to go install the software and any change you wanna put through that, you know, truck roll. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that >>You, you say little servers like how big one like a net box box, like a small little >>Box and all the person in the store has to do like what you and I do at home and we get a, you know, a router is connect the power, connect the internet and turn the switch on. And from there we pick it up. >>Yep. >>We provide the operating system, everything and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage >>Thousands of them. True plug and play >>Two, plug and play thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So, so that's another example where on the edge then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds. Okay. But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the location. So >>You guys got some success. Congratulations. Got some traction there. It's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that's come up is what is truly cloud native? Cuz there's lift and shift of the cloud >>That's not cloud native. >>Then there's cloud native. Cloud native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says what's cloud native, what isn't cloud native? >>Right. Look, I think first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud native, is CNC foundation. And I think it's very well documented where you, well >>Con of course Detroit's >>Coming here, so, so it's already there, right? So, so we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20 year old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud native. Okay? You can't put to cloud native, you have to rewrite and redevelop your application and business logic using modern tools. Hopefully more open source and, and I think that's what Cloudnative is and we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now everybody wants to be cloudnative, but it's not that easy, okay? Because it's, I think it's first of all, skill set is very important. Uniformity of tools that there's so many tools there. Thousands and thousands of tools you could spend your time figuring out which tool to use. Okay? So I think the complexities there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly them. >>And I'll give you an example. I don't know how clear native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours, but you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how dominoes actually increase their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not, I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch what's happening, how it's delivered. There were a pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud native can provide. >>Being agility and having that flow to the application changes what the expectations of the, for the customer. >>Customer, the customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn >>Best car. To wrap it up, I wanna just get your perspective again. One of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you part of the Super Cloud 22 is you've seen many cycles, you have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career where you've been and what you've done and now the CEO platform nine, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? And you've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now put into context this moment in time around Super >>Cloud. Sure. I think as you said, a lot of battles. Cars being been, been in an asp, been in a realtime software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side, I did the infrastructure right and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with a lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to go through to become cloud native and digitalize. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on is a couple of paddles come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced to honors like y2k. Everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for y2k. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive right across all industries. >>And disruptive. >>And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. Yeah. I think we are at that pivotal moment now in companies trying to become digital and cloudnative that know that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce was interesting and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this is that it's not just completely changing the game, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think, and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of eCommerce, just putting up a shopping cart didn't made you an eCommerce or an E retailer or an e e customer, right? Or so. I think it's the same thing now is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you gonna operate? How are you gonna service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not gonna work. >>Mascar, thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of Super Cloud 22. We really appreciate, we're gonna keep this open. We're gonna keep this conversation going even after the event, to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open in the community. And we're gonna keep this going for, for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with cloud cloud computing. I'm Sean Feer with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. >>Hello. Welcome back. This is the end of our program, our special presentation with Platform nine on cloud native at scale, enabling the super cloud. We're continuing the theme here. You heard the interviews Super Cloud and its challenges, new opportunities around the solutions around like Platform nine and others with Arlon. This is really about the edge situations on the internet and managing the edge multiple regions, avoiding vendor lock in. This is what this new super cloud is all about. The business consequences we heard and and the wide ranging conversations around what it means for open source and the complexity problem all being solved. I hope you enjoyed this program. There's a lot of moving pieces and things to configure with cloud native install, all making it easier for you here with Super Cloud and of course Platform nine contributing to that. Thank you for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. This is season two, episode four of the ongoing series covering the exciting hot startups from the AWS ecosystem. Here we're talking about cybersecurity in this episode. I'm your host, John Furrier here we're excited to have CUBE alumni who's back Snehal Antani who's the CEO and co-founder of Horizon3.ai talking about exploitable weaknesses and vulnerabilities with autonomous pen testing. Snehal, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming back. >> Likewise, John. I think it's been about five years since you and I were on the stage together. And I've missed it, but I'm glad to see you again. >> Well, before we get into the showcase about your new startup, that's extremely successful, amazing margins, great product. You have a unique journey. We talked about this prior to you doing the journey, but you have a great story. You left the startup world to go into the startup, like world of self defense, public defense, NSA. What group did you go to in the public sector became a private partner. >> My background, I'm a software engineer by education and trade. I started my career at IBM. I was a CIO at GE Capital, and I think we met once when I was there and I became the CTO of Splunk. And we spent a lot of time together when I was at Splunk. And at the end of 2017, I decided to take a break from industry and really kind of solve problems that I cared deeply about and solve problems that mattered. So I left industry and joined the US Special Operations Community and spent about four years in US Special Operations, where I grew more personally and professionally than in anything I'd ever done in my career. And exited that time, met my co-founder in special ops. And then as he retired from the air force, we started Horizon3. >> So there's really, I want to bring that up one, 'cause it's fascinating that not a lot of people in Silicon Valley and tech would do that. So thanks for the service. And I know everyone who's out there in the public sector knows that this is a really important time for the tactical edge in our military, a lot of things going on around the world. So thanks for the service and a great journey. But there's a storyline with the company you're running now that you started. I know you get the jacket on there. I noticed get a little military vibe to it. Cybersecurity, I mean, every company's on their own now. They have to build their own militia. There is no government supporting companies anymore. There's no militia. No one's on the shores of our country defending the citizens and the companies, they got to offend for themselves. So every company has to have their own military. >> In many ways, you don't see anti-aircraft rocket launchers on top of the JP Morgan building in New York City because they rely on the government for air defense. But in cyber it's very different. Every company is on their own to defend for themselves. And what's interesting is this blend. If you look at the Ukraine, Russia war, as an example, a thousand companies have decided to withdraw from the Russian economy and those thousand companies we should expect to be in the ire of the Russian government and their proxies at some point. And so it's not just those companies, but their suppliers, their distributors. And it's no longer about cyber attack for extortion through ransomware, but rather cyber attack for punishment and retaliation for leaving. Those companies are on their own to defend themselves. There's no government that is dedicated to supporting them. So yeah, the reality is that cybersecurity, it's the burden of the organization. And also your attack surface has expanded to not just be your footprint, but if an adversary wants to punish you for leaving their economy, they can get, if you're in agriculture, they could disrupt your ability to farm or they could get all your fruit to spoil at the border 'cause they disrupted your distributors and so on. So I think the entire world is going to change over the next 18 to 24 months. And I think this idea of cybersecurity is going to become truly a national problem and a problem that breaks down any corporate barriers that we see in previously. >> What are some of the things that inspired you to start this company? And I loved your approach of thinking about the customer, your customer, as defending themselves in context to threats, really leaning into it, being ready and able to defend. Horizon3 has a lot of that kind of military thinking for the good of the company. What's the motivation? Why this company? Why now? What's the value proposition? >> So there's two parts to why the company and why now. The first part was what my observation, when I left industry realm or my military background is watching "Jack Ryan" and "Tropic Thunder" and I didn't come from the military world. And so when I entered the special operations community, step one was to keep my mouth shut, learn, listen, and really observe and understand what made that community so impressive. And obviously the people and it's not about them being fast runners or great shooters or awesome swimmers, but rather there are learn-it-alls that can solve any problem as a team under pressure, which is the exact culture you want to have in any startup, early stage companies are learn-it-alls that can solve any problem under pressure as a team. So I had this immediate advantage when we started Horizon3, where a third of Horizon3 employees came from that special operations community. So one is this awesome talent. But the second part that, I remember this quote from a special operations commander that said we use live rounds in training because if we used fake rounds or rubber bullets, everyone would act like metal of honor winners. And the whole idea there is you train like you fight, you build that muscle memory for crisis and response and so on upfront. So when you're in the thick of it, you already know how to react. And this aligns to a pain I had in industry. I had no idea I was secure until the bad guy showed up. I had no idea if I was fixing the right vulnerabilities, logging the right data in Splunk, or if my CrowdStrike EDR platform was configured correctly, I had to wait for the bad guys to show up. I didn't know if my people knew how to respond to an incident. So what I wanted to do was proactively verify my security posture, proactively harden my systems. I needed to do that by continuously pen testing myself or continuously testing my security posture. And there just wasn't any way to do that where an IT admin or a network engineer could in three clicks have the power of a 20 year pen testing expert. And that was really what we set out to do, not build a autonomous pen testing platform for security people, build it so that anybody can quickly test their security posture and then use the output to fix problems that truly matter. >> So the value preposition, if I get this right is, there's a lot of companies out there doing pen tests. And I know I hate pen tests. They're like, cause you do DevOps, it changes you got to do another pen test. So it makes sense to do autonomous pen testing. So congratulations on seeing that that's obvious to that, but a lot of other have consulting tied to it. Which seems like you need to train someone and you guys taking a different approach. >> Yeah, we actually, as a company have zero consulting, zero professional services. And the whole idea is that build a true software as a service offering where an intern, in fact, we've got a video of a nine year old that in three clicks can run pen tests against themselves. And because of that, you can wire pen tests into your DevOps tool chain. You can run multiple pen tests today. In fact, I've got customers running 40, 50 pen tests a month against their organization. And that what that does is completely lowers the barrier of entry for being able to verify your posture. If you have consulting on average, when I was a CIO, it was at least a three month lead time to schedule consultants to show up and then they'd show up, they'd embarrass the security team, they'd make everyone look bad, 'cause they're going to get in, leave behind a report. And that report was almost identical to what they found last year because the older that report, the one the date itself gets stale, the context changes and so on. And then eventually you just don't even bother fixing it. Or if you fix a problem, you don't have the skills to verify that has been fixed. So I think that consulting led model was acceptable when you viewed security as a compliance checkbox, where once a year was sufficient to meet your like PCI requirements. But if you're really operating with a wartime mindset and you actually need to harden and secure your environment, you've got to be running pen test regularly against your organization from different perspectives, inside, outside, from the cloud, from work, from home environments and everything in between. >> So for the CISOs out there, for the CSOs and the CXOs, what's the pitch to them because I see your jacket that says Horizon3 AI, trust but verify. But this trust is, but is canceled out, just as verify. What's the product that you guys are offering the service. Describe what it is and why they should look at it. >> Yeah, sure. So one, when I back when I was the CIO, don't tell me we're secure in PowerPoint. Show me we're secure right now. Show me we're secure again tomorrow. And then show me we're secure again next week because my environment is constantly changing and the adversary always has a vote and they're always evolving. And this whole idea of show me we're secure. Don't trust that your security tools are working, verify that they can detect and respond and stifle an attack and then verify tomorrow, verify next week. That's the big mind shift. Now what we do is-- >> John: How do they respond to that by the way? Like they don't believe you at first or what's the story. >> I think, there's actually a very bifurcated response. There are still a decent chunk of CIOs and CSOs that have a security is a compliance checkbox mindset. So my attitude with them is I'm not going to convince you. You believe it's a checkbox. I'll just wait for you to get breached and sell to your replacement, 'cause you'll get fired. And in the meantime, I spend all my energy with those that actually care about proactively securing and hardening their environments. >> That's true. People do get fired. Can you give an example of what you're saying about this environment being ready, proving that you're secure today, tomorrow and a few weeks out. Give me an example. >> Of, yeah, I'll give you actually a customer example. There was a healthcare organization and they had about 5,000 hosts in their environment and they did everything right. They had Fortinet as their EDR platform. They had user behavior analytics in place that they had purchased and tuned. And when they ran a pen test self-service, our product node zero immediately started to discover every host on the network. It then fingerprinted all those hosts and found it was able to get code execution on three machines. So it got code execution, dumped credentials, laterally maneuvered, and became a domain administrator, which in IT, if an attacker becomes a domain admin, they've got keys to the kingdom. So at first the question was, how did the node zero pen test become domain admin? How'd they get code execution, Fortinet should have detected and stopped it. Well, it turned out Fortinet was misconfigured on three boxes out of 5,000. And these guys had no idea and it's just automation that went wrong and so on. And now they would've only known they had misconfigured their EDR platform on three hosts if the attacker had showed up. The second question though was, why didn't they catch the lateral movement? Which all their marketing brochures say they're supposed to catch. And it turned out that that customer purchased the wrong Fortinet modules. One again, they had no idea. They thought they were doing the right thing. So don't trust just installing your tools is good enough. You've got to exercise and verify them. We've got tons of stories from patches that didn't actually apply to being able to find the AWS admin credentials on a local file system. And then using that to log in and take over the cloud. In fact, I gave this talk at Black Hat on war stories from running 10,000 pen tests. And that's just the reality is, you don't know that these tools and processes are working for you until the bad guys have shown. >> The velocities there. You can accelerate through logs, you know from the days you've been there. This is now the threat. Being, I won't say lazy, but just not careful or just not thinking. >> Well, I'll do an example. We have a lot of customers that are Horizon3 customers and Splunk customers. And what you'll see their behavior is, is they'll have Horizon3 up on one screen. And every single attacker command executed with its timestamp is up on that screen. And then look at Splunk and say, hey, we were able to dump vCenter credentials from VMware products at this time on this host, what did Splunk see or what didn't they see? Why were no logs generated? And it turns out that they had some logging blind spots. So what they'll actually do is run us to almost like stimulate the defensive tools and then see what did the tools catch? What did they miss? What are those blind spots and how do they fix it. >> So your price called node zero. You mentioned that. Is that specifically a suite, a tool, a platform. How do people consume and engage with you guys? >> So the way that we work, the whole product is designed to be self-service. So once again, while we have a sales team, the whole intent is you don't need to have to talk to a sales rep to start using the product, you can log in right now, go to Horizon3.ai, you can run a trial log in with your Google ID, your LinkedIn ID, start running pen test against your home or against your network against this organization right now, without talking to anybody. The whole idea is self-service, run a pen test in three clicks and give you the power of that 20 year pen testing expert. And then what'll happen is node zero will execute and then it'll provide to you a full report of here are all of the different paths or attack paths or sequences where we are able to become an admin in your environment. And then for every attack path, here is the path or the kill chain, the proof of exploitation for every step along the way. Here's exactly what you've got to do to fix it. And then once you've fixed it, here's how you verify that you've truly fixed the problem. And this whole aha moment is run us to find problems. You fix them, rerun us to verify that the problem has been fixed. >> Talk about the company, how many people do you have and get some stats? >> Yeah, so we started writing code in January of 2020, right before the pandemic hit. And then about 10 months later at the end of 2020, we launched the first version of the product. We've been in the market for now about two and a half years total from start of the company till present. We've got 130 employees. We've got more customers than we do employees, which is really cool. And instead our customers shift from running one pen test a year to 40, 50 pen test. >> John: And it's full SaaS. >> The whole product is full SaaS. So no consulting, no pro serve. You run as often as you-- >> Who's downloading, who's buying the product. >> What's amazing is, we have customers in almost every section or sector now. So we're not overly rotated towards like healthcare or financial services. We've got state and local education or K through 12 education, state and local government, a number of healthcare companies, financial services, manufacturing. We've got organizations that large enterprises. >> John: Security's diverse. >> It's very diverse. >> I mean, ransomware must be a big driver. I mean, is that something that you're seeing a lot. >> It is. And the thing about ransomware is, if you peel back the outcome of ransomware, which is extortion, at the end of the day, what ransomware organizations or criminals or APTs will do is they'll find out who all your employees are online. They will then figure out if you've got 7,000 employees, all it takes is one of them to have a bad password. And then attackers are going to credential spray to find that one person with a bad password or whose Netflix password that's on the dark web is also their same password to log in here, 'cause most people reuse. And then from there they're going to most likely in your organization, the domain user, when you log in, like you probably have local admin on your laptop. If you're a windows machine and I've got local admin on your laptop, I'm going to be able to dump credentials, get the admin credentials and then start to laterally maneuver. Attackers don't have to hack in using zero days like you see in the movies, often they're logging in with valid user IDs and passwords that they've found and collected from somewhere else. And then they make that, they maneuver by making a low plus a low equal a high. And the other thing in financial services, we spend all of our time fixing critical vulnerabilities, attackers know that. So they've adapted to finding ways to chain together, low priority vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and dangerous defaults to become admin. So while we've over rotated towards just fixing the highs and the criticals attackers have adapted. And once again they have a vote, they're always evolving their tactics. >> And how do you prevent that from happening? >> So we actually apply those same tactics. Rarely do we actually need a CVE to compromise your environment. We will harvest credentials, just like an attacker. We will find misconfigurations and dangerous defaults, just like an attacker. We will combine those together. We'll make use of exploitable vulnerabilities as appropriate and use that to compromise your environment. So the tactics that, in many ways we've built a digital weapon and the tactics we apply are the exact same tactics that are applied by the adversary. >> So you guys basically simulate hacking. >> We actually do the hacking. Simulate means there's a fakeness to it. >> So you guys do hack. >> We actually compromise. >> Like sneakers the movie, those sneakers movie for the old folks like me. >> And in fact that was my inspiration. I've had this idea for over a decade now, which is I want to be able to look at anything that laptop, this Wi-Fi network, gear in hospital or a truck driving by and know, I can figure out how to gain initial access, rip that environment apart and be able to opponent. >> Okay, Chuck, he's not allowed in the studio anymore. (laughs) No, seriously. Some people are exposed. I mean, some companies don't have anything. But there's always passwords or so most people have that argument. Well, there's nothing to protect here. Not a lot of sensitive data. How do you respond to that? Do you see that being kind of putting the head in the sand or? >> Yeah, it's actually, it's less, there's not sensitive data, but more we've installed or applied multifactor authentication, attackers can't get in now. Well MFA only applies or does not apply to lower level protocols. So I can find a user ID password, log in through SMB, which isn't protected by multifactor authentication and still upon your environment. So unfortunately I think as a security industry, we've become very good at giving a false sense of security to organizations. >> John: Compliance drives that behavior. >> Compliance drives that. And what we need. Back to don't tell me we're secure, show me, we've got to, I think, change that to a trust but verify, but get rid of the trust piece of it, just to verify. >> Okay, we got a lot of CISOs and CSOs watching this showcase, looking at the hot startups, what's the message to the executives there. Do they want to become more leaning in more hawkish if you will, to use the military term on security? I mean, I heard one CISO say, security first then compliance 'cause compliance can make you complacent and then you're unsecure at that point. >> I actually say that. I agree. One definitely security is different and more important than being compliant. I think there's another emerging concept, which is I'd rather be defensible than secure. What I mean by that is security is a point in time state. I am secure right now. I may not be secure tomorrow 'cause something's changed. But if I'm defensible, then what I have is that muscle memory to detect, respondent and stifle an attack. And that's what's more important. Can I detect you? How long did it take me to detect you? Can I stifle you from achieving your objective? How long did it take me to stifle you? What did you use to get in to gain access? How long did that sit in my environment? How long did it take me to fix it? So on and so forth. But I think it's being defensible and being able to rapidly adapt to changing tactics by the adversary is more important. >> This is the evolution of how the red line never moved. You got the adversaries in our networks and our banks. Now they hang out and they wait. So everyone thinks they're secure. But when they start getting hacked, they're not really in a position to defend, the alarms go off. Where's the playbook. Team springs into action. I mean, you kind of get the visual there, but this is really the issue being defensible means having your own essentially military for your company. >> Being defensible, I think has two pieces. One is you've got to have this culture and process in place of training like you fight because you want to build that incident response muscle memory ahead of time. You don't want to have to learn how to respond to an incident in the middle of the incident. So that is that proactively verifying your posture and continuous pen testing is critical there. The second part is the actual fundamentals in place so you can detect and stifle as appropriate. And also being able to do that. When you are continuously verifying your posture, you need to verify your entire posture, not just your test systems, which is what most people do. But you have to be able to safely pen test your production systems, your cloud environments, your perimeter. You've got to assume that the bad guys are going to get in, once they're in, what can they do? So don't just say that my perimeter's secure and I'm good to go. It's the soft squishy center that attackers are going to get into. And from there, can you detect them and can you stop them? >> Snehal, take me through the use. You got to be sold on this, I love this topic. Alright, pen test. Is it, what am I buying? Just pen test as a service. You mentioned dark web. Are you actually buying credentials online on behalf of the customer? What is the product? What am I buying if I'm the CISO from Horizon3? What's the service? What's the product, be specific. >> So very specifically and one just principles. The first principle is when I was a buyer, I hated being nickled and dimed buyer vendors, which was, I had to buy 15 different modules in order to achieve an objective. Just give me one line item, make it super easy to buy and don't nickel and dime me. Because I've spent time as a buyer that very much has permeated throughout the company. So there is a single skew from Horizon3. It is an annual subscription based on how big your environment is. And it is inclusive of on-prem internal pen tests, external pen tests, cloud attacks, work from home attacks, our ability to harvest credentials from the dark web and from open source sources. Being able to crack those credentials, compromise. All of that is included as a singles skew. All you get as a CISO is a singles skew, annual subscription, and you can run as many pen tests as you want. Some customers still stick to, maybe one pen test a quarter, but most customers shift when they realize there's no limit, we don't nickel and dime. They can run 10, 20, 30, 40 a month. >> Well, it's not nickel and dime in the sense that, it's more like dollars and hundreds because they know what to expect if it's classic cloud consumption. They kind of know what their environment, can people try it. Let's just say I have a huge environment, I have a cloud, I have an on-premise private cloud. Can I dabble and set parameters around pricing? >> Yes you can. So one is you can dabble and set perimeter around scope, which is like manufacturing does this, do not touch the production line that's on at the moment. We've got a hospital that says every time they run a pen test, any machine that's actually connected to a patient must be excluded. So you can actually set the parameters for what's in scope and what's out of scope up front, most again we're designed to be safe to run against production so you can set the parameters for scope. You can set the parameters for cost if you want. But our recommendation is I'd rather figure out what you can afford and let you test everything in your environment than try to squeeze every penny from you by only making you buy what can afford as a smaller-- >> So the variable ratio, if you will is, how much they spend is the size of their environment and usage. >> Just size of the environment. >> So it could be a big ticket item for a CISO then. >> It could, if you're really large, but for the most part-- >> What's large? >> I mean, if you were Walmart, well, let me back up. What I heard is global 10 companies spend anywhere from 50 to a hundred million dollars a year on security testing. So they're already spending a ton of money, but they're spending it on consultants that show up maybe a couple of times a year. They don't have, humans can't scale to test a million hosts in your environment. And so you're already spending that money, spend a fraction of that and use us and run as much as you want. And that's really what it comes down to. >> John: All right. So what's the response from customers? >> What's really interesting is there are three use cases. The first is that SOC manager that is using us to verify that their security tools are actually working. So their Splunk environment is logging the right data. It's integrating properly with CrowdStrike, it's integrating properly with their active directory services and their password policies. So the SOC manager is using us to verify the effectiveness of their security controls. The second use case is the IT director that is using us to proactively harden their systems. Did they install VMware correctly? Did they install their Cisco gear correctly? Are they patching right? And then the third are for the companies that are lucky to have their own internal pen test and red teams where they use us like a force multiplier. So if you've got 10 people on your red team and you still have a million IPs or hosts in your environment, you still don't have enough people for that coverage. So they'll use us to do recon at scale and attack at scale and let the humans focus on the really juicy hard stuff that humans are successful at. >> Love the product. Again, I'm trying to think about how I engage on the test. Is there pilots? Is there a demo version? >> There's a free trials. So we do 30 day free trials. The output can actually be used to meet your SOC 2 requirements. So in many ways you can just use us to get a free SOC 2 pen test report right now, if you want. Go to the website, log in for a free trial, you can log into your Google ID or your LinkedIn ID, run a pen test against your organization and use that to answer your PCI segmentation test requirements, your SOC 2 requirements, but you will be hooked. You will want to run us more often. And you'll get a Horizon3 tattoo. >> The first hits free as they say in the drug business. >> Yeah. >> I mean, so you're seeing that kind of response then, trial converts. >> It's exactly. In fact, we have a very well defined aha moment, which is you run us to find, you fix, you run us to verify, we have 100% technical win rate when our customers hit a find, fix, verify cycle, then it's about budget and urgency. But 100% technical win rate because of that aha moment, 'cause people realize, holy crap, I don't have to wait six months to verify that my problems have actually been fixed. I can just come in, click, verify, rerun the entire pen test or rerun a very specific part of it on what I just patched my environment. >> Congratulations, great stuff. You're here part of the AWS Startup Showcase. So I have to ask, what's the relationship with AWS, you're on their cloud. What kind of actions going on there? Is there secret sauce on there? What's going on? >> So one is we are AWS customers ourselves, our brains command and control infrastructure. All of our analytics are all running on AWS. It's amazing, when we run a pen test, we are able to use AWS and we'll spin up a virtual private cloud just for that pen test. It's completely ephemeral, it's all Lambda functions and graph analytics and other techniques. When the pen test ends, you can delete, there's a single use Docker container that gets deleted from your environment so you have nothing on-prem to deal with and the entire virtual private cloud tears itself down. So at any given moment, if we're running 50 pen tests or a hundred pen tests, self-service, there's a hundred virtual private clouds being managed in AWS that are spinning up, running and tearing down. It's an absolutely amazing underlying platform for us to make use of. Two is that many customers that have hybrid environments. So they've got a cloud infrastructure, an Office 365 infrastructure and an on-prem infrastructure. We are a single attack platform that can test all of that together. No one else can do it. And so the AWS customers that are especially AWS hybrid customers are the ones that we do really well targeting. >> Got it. And that's awesome. And that's the benefit of cloud? >> Absolutely. And the AWS marketplace. What's absolutely amazing is the competitive advantage being part of the marketplace has for us, because the simple thing is my customers, if they already have dedicated cloud spend, they can use their approved cloud spend to pay for Horizon3 through the marketplace. So you don't have to, if you already have that budget dedicated, you can use that through the marketplace. The other is you've already got the vendor processes in place, you can purchase through your existing AWS account. So what I love about the AWS company is one, the infrastructure we use for our own pen test, two, the marketplace, and then three, the customers that span that hybrid cloud environment. That's right in our strike zone. >> Awesome. Well, congratulations. And thanks for being part of the showcase and I'm sure your product is going to do very, very well. It's very built for what people want. Self-service get in, get the value quickly. >> No agents to install, no consultants to hire. safe to run against production. It's what I wanted. >> Great to see you and congratulations and what a great story. And we're going to keep following you. Thanks for coming on. >> Snehal: Phenomenal. Thank you, John. >> This is the AWS Startup Showcase. I'm John John Furrier, your host. This is season two, episode four on cybersecurity. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> As you know by now, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is stepping aside from his CEO role and AWS CEO, Andy Jassy, is being promoted to head all of Amazon. Bezos, of course, is going to remain executive chairman. Now, 15 years ago, next month, Amazon launched it's simple storage service, which was the first modern cloud offering. And the man who wrote the business plan for AWS, was Andy Jassy, and he's navigated the meteoric rise and disruption that has seen AWS grow into a $45 billion company that draws off the vast majority of Amazon's operating profits. No one in the media has covered Jassy more intimately and closely than John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And John joins us today to help us understand on theCUBE this move and what we can expect from Jassy in his new role, and importantly what it means for AWS. John, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. >> Hey, great day. Great to see you as always, we've done a lot of interviews together over the years and we're on our 11th year with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. But I got to be excited too, that we're simulcasters on Clubhouse, which is kind of cool. Love Clubhouse but not since the, in December. It's awesome. It's like Cube radio. It's like, so this is a Cube talk. So we opened up a Clubhouse room while we're filming this. We'll do more live hits in studio and syndicate the Clubhouse and then take questions after. This is a huge digital transformation moment. I'm part of the digital transformation club on Clubhouse which has almost 5,000 followers at the moment and also has like 500 members. So if you're not on Clubhouse, yet, if you have an iPhone go check it out and join the digital transformation club. Android users you'll have to wait until that app is done but it's really a great club. And Jeremiah Owyang is also doing a lot of stuff on digital transformation. >> Or you can just buy an iPhone and get in. >> Yeah, that's what people are doing. I can see all the influences are on there but to me, the digital transformation, it's always been kind of a cliche, the consumerization of IT, information technology. This has been the boring world of the enterprise over the past, 20 years ago. Enterprise right now is super hot because there's no distinction between enterprise and society. And that's clearly the, because of the rise of cloud computing and the rise of Amazon Web Services which was a side project at AWS, at Amazon that Andy Jassy did. And it wasn't really pleasant at the beginning. It was failed. It failed a lot and it wasn't as successful as people thought in the early days. And I have a lot of stories with Andy that he told me a lot of the inside baseball and we'll share that here today. But we started covering Amazon since the beginning. I was as an entrepreneur. I used it when it came out and a huge fan of them as a company because they just got a superior product and they have always had been but it was very misunderstood from the beginning. And now everyone's calling it the most important thing. And Andy now is becoming Andy Jassy, the most important executive in the world. >> So let's get it to the, I mean, look at, you said to me over holidays, you thought this might have something like this could happen. And you said, Jassy is probably in line to get this. So, tell us, what can you tell us about Jassy? Why is he qualified for this job? What do you think he brings to the table? >> Well, the thing that I know about Amazon everyone's been following the Amazon news is, Jeff Bezos has a lot of personal turmoil. They had his marriage fail. They had some issues with the smear campaigns and all this stuff going on, the run-ins with Donald Trump, he bought the Washington post. He's got a lot of other endeavors outside of Amazon cause he's the second richest man in the world competing with Elon Musk at Space X versus Blue Origin. So the guy's a billionaire. So Amazon is his baby and he's been running it as best he could. He's got an executive team committee they called the S team. He's been grooming people in the company and that's just been his mode. And the rise of AWS and the business performance that we've been documenting on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, it's just been absolutely changing the game on Amazon as a company. So clearly Amazon Web Services become a driving force of the new Amazon that's emerging. And obviously they've got all their retail business and they got the gaming challenges and they got the studios and the other diversified stuff. So Jassy is just, he's just one of those guys. He's just been an Amazonian from day one. He came out of Harvard business school, drove across the country, very similar story to Jeff Bezos. He did that in 1997 and him and Jeff had been collaborating and Jeff tapped him to be his shadow, they call it, which is basically technical assistance and an heir apparent and groomed him. And then that's how it is. Jassy is not a climber as they call it in corporate America. He's not a person who is looking for a political gain. He's not a territory taker, but he's a micromanager. He loves details and he likes to create customer value. And that's his focus. So he's not a grandstander. In fact, he's been very low profile. Early days when we started meeting with him, he wouldn't meet with press regularly because they weren't writing the right stories. And everyone is, he didn't know he was misunderstood. So that's classic Amazon. >> So, he gave us the time, I think it was 2014 or 15 and he told us a story back then, John, you might want to share it as to how AWS got started. Why, what was the main spring Amazon's tech wasn't working that great? And Bezos said to Jassy, going to go figure out why and maybe explain how AWS was born. >> Yeah, we had, in fact, we were the first ones to get access to do his first public profile. If you go to the Google and search Andy Jassy, the trillion dollar baby, we had a post, we put out the story of AWS, Andy Jassy's trillion dollar baby. This was in early, this was January 2015, six years ago. And, we back then, we posited that this would be a trillion dollar total addressable market. Okay, people thought we were crazy but we wrote a story and he gave us a very intimate access. We did a full drill down on him and the person, the story of Amazon and that laid out essentially the beginning of the rise of AWS and Andy Jassy. So that's a good story to check out but really the key here is, is that he's always been relentless and competitive on creating value in what they call raising the bar outside Amazon. That's a term that they use. They also have another leadership principle called working backwards, which is like, go to the customer and work backwards from the customer in a very Steve Job's kind of way. And that's been kind of Jobs mentality as well at Apple that made them successful work backwards from the customer and make things easier. And that was Apple. Amazon, their philosophy was work backwards from the customer and Jassy specifically would say it many times and eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. That was a key principle of what they were doing. So that was a key thesis of their entire business model. And that's the Amazonian way. Faster, cheaper, ship it faster, make it less expensive and higher value. While when you apply the Amazon shipping concept to cloud computing, it was completely disrupted. They were shipping code and services faster and that became their innovation strategy. More announcements every year, they out announced their competition by huge margin. They introduced new services faster and they're less expensive some say, but in the aggregate, they make more money but that's kind of a key thing. >> Well, when you, I was been listening to the TV today and there was a debate on whether or not, this support tends that they'll actually split the company into two. To me, I think it's just the opposite. I think it's less likely. I mean, if you think about Amazon getting into grocery or healthcare, eventually financial services or other industries and the IOT opportunity to me, what they do, John, is they bring in together the cloud, data and AI and they go attack these new industries. I would think Jassy of all people would want to keep this thing together now whether or not the government allows them to do that. But what are your thoughts? I mean, you've asked Andy this before in your personal interviews about splitting the company. What are your thoughts? >> Well, Jon Fortt at CNBC always asked the same question every year. It's almost like the standard question. I kind of laugh and I ask it now too because I liked Jon Fortt. I think he's an awesome dude. And I'll, it's just a tongue in cheek, Jassy. He won't answer the question. Amazon, Bezos and Jassy have one thing in common. They're really good at not answering questions. So if you ask the same question. They'll just say, nothing's ever, never say never, that's his classic answer to everything. Never say never. And he's always said that to you. (chuckles) Some say, he's, flip-flopped on things but he's really customer driven. For example, he said at one point, no one should ever build a data center. Okay, that was a principle. And then they come out and they have now a hybrid strategy. And I called them out on that and said, hey, what, are you flip-flopping? You said at some point, no one should have a data center. He's like, well, we looked at it differently and what we meant was is that, it should all be cloud native. Okay. So that's kind of revision, but he's cool with that. He says, hey, we'll revise based on what customers are doing. VMware working with Amazon that no one ever thought that would happen. Okay. So, VMware has some techies, Raghu, for instance, over there, super top notch. He worked with Jassy, directly in his team Sanjay Poonen when they went to business school together, they cut a deal. And now Amazon essentially saved VMware, in my opinion. And Pat Gelsinger drove that deal. Now, Pat Gelsinger, CEO, Intel, and Pat told me that directly in candid conversation off theCUBE, he said, hey, we have to make a decision either we're going to be in cloud or we're not going to be in cloud, we will partner. And I'll see, he was Intel. He understood the Intel inside mentality. So that's good for VMware. So Jassy does these kinds of deals. He's not afraid he's got a good stomach for business and a relentless competitor. >> So, how do you think as you mentioned Jassy is a micromanager. He gets deep into the technology. Anybody who's seen his two hour, three hour keynotes. No, he has a really fine grasp of the technology across the entire stack. How do you think John, he will approach things like antitrust, the big tech lash of the unionization of the workforce at Amazon? How do you think Jassy will approach that? >> Well, I think one of the things that emerges Jassy, first of all, he's a huge sports fan. And many people don't know that but he's also progressive person. He's very progressive politically. He's been on the record and off the record saying things like, obviously, literacy has been big on, he's been on basically unrepresented minorities, pushing for that, and certainly cloud computing in tech, women in tech, he's been a big proponent. He's been a big supporter of Teresa Carlson. Who's been rising star at Amazon. People don't know who Teresa Carlson is and they should check out her. She's become one of the biggest leaders inside Amazon she's turned around public sector from the beginning. She ran that business, she's a global star. He's been a great leader and he's been getting, forget he's a micromanager, he's on top of the details. I mean, the word is, and nothing gets approved without Andy, Andy seeing it. But he's been progressive. He's been an Amazon original as they call it internally. He's progressive, he's got the business acumen but he's perfect for this pragmatic conversation that needs to happen. And again, because he's so technically strong having a CEO that's that proficient is going to give Amazon an advantage when they have to go in and change how DC works, for instance, or how the government geopolitical landscape works, because Amazon is now a global company with regions all over the place. So, I think he's pragmatic, he's open to listening and changing. I think that's a huge quality >> Well, when you think of this, just to set the context here for those who may not know, I mean, Amazon started as I said back in 2006 in March with simple storage service that later that year they announced EC2 which is their compute platform. And that was the majority of their business, is still a very large portion of their business but Amazon, our estimates are that in 2020, Amazon did 45 billion, 45.4 billion in revenue. That's actually an Amazon reported number. And just to give you a context, Azure about 26 billion GCP, Google about 6 billion. So you're talking about an industry that Amazon created. That's now $78 billion and Amazon at 45 billion. John they're growing at 30% annually. So it's just a massive growth engine. And then another story Jassy told us, is they, he and Jeff and the team talked early on about whether or not they should just sort of do an experiment, do a little POC, dip their toe in and they decided to go for it. Let's go big or go home as Michael Dell has said to us many times, I mean, pretty astounding. >> Yeah. One of the things about Jassy that people should know about, I think there's some compelling relative to the newest ascension to the CEO of Amazon, is that he's not afraid to do new things. For instance, I'll give you an example. The Amazon Web Services re-invent their annual conference grew to being thousands and thousands of people. And they would have a traditional after party. They called a replay, they'd have a band like every tech conference and their conference became so big that essentially, it was like setting up a live concert. So they were spending millions of dollars to set up basically a one night concert and they'd bring in great, great artists. So he said, hey, what's been all this cash? Why don't we just have a festival? So they did a thing called Intersect. They got LA involved from creatives and they basically built a weekend festival in the back end of re-invent. This was when real life was, before COVID and they turned into an opportunity because that's the way they think. They like to look at the resources, hey, we're already all in on this, why don't we just keep it for the weekend and charge some tickets and have a good time. He's not afraid to take chances on the product side. He'll go in and take a chance on a new market. That comes from directly from Bezos. They try stuff. They don't mind failing but they put a tight leash on measurement. They work backwards from the customer and they are not afraid to take chances. So, that's going to board well for him as he tries to figure out how Amazon navigates the contention on the political side when they get challenged for their dominance. And I think he's going to have to apply that pragmatic experimentation to new business models. >> So John I want you to take on AWS. I mean, despite the large numbers, I talked about 30% growth, Azure is growing at over 50% a year, GCP at 83%. So despite the large numbers and big growth the growth rates are slowing. Everybody knows that, we've reported it extensively. So the incoming CEO of Amazon Web Services has a TAM expansion challenge. And at some point they've got to decide, okay, how do we keep this growth engine? So, do you have any thoughts as to who might be the next CEO and what are some of their challenges as you see it? >> Well, Amazon is a real product centric company. So it's going to be very interesting to see who they go with here. Obviously they've been grooming a lot of people. There's been some turnover. You had some really strong executives recently leave, Jeff Wilkes, who was the CEO of the retail business. He retired a couple of months ago, formerly announced I think recently, he was probably in line. You had Mike Clayville, is now the chief revenue officer of Stripe. He ran all commercial business, Teresa Carlson stepped up to his role as well as running public sector. Again, she got more power. You have Matt Garman who ran the EC2 business, Stanford grad, great guy, super strong on the product side. He's now running all commercial sales and marketing. And he's also on the, was on Bezos' S team, that's the executive kind of team. Peter DeSantis is also on that S team. He runs all infrastructure. He took over for James Hamilton, who was the genius behind all the data center work that they've done and all the chip design stuff that they've innovated on. So there's so much technical innovation going on. I think you still going to see a leadership probably come from, I would say Matt Garman, in my opinion is the lead dog at this point, he's the lead horse. You could have an outside person come in depending upon how, who might be available. And that would probably come from an Andy Jassy network because he's a real fierce competitor but he's also a loyalist and he likes trust. So if someone comes in from the outside, it's going to be someone maybe he trusts. And then the other wildcards are like Teresa Carlson. Like I said, she is a great woman in tech who's done amazing work. I've profiled her many times. We've interviewed her many times. She took that public sector business with Amazon and changed the game completely. Outside the Jedi contract, she was in competitive for, had the big Trump showdown with the Jedi, with the department of defense. Had the CIA cloud. Amazon set the standard on public sector and that's directly the result of Teresa Carlson. But she's in the field, she's not a product person, she's kind of running that group. So Amazon has that product field kind of structure. So we'll see how they handle that. But those are the top three I think are going to be in line. >> So the obvious question that people always ask and it is a big change like this is, okay, in this case, what is Jassy going to bring in? And what's going to change? Maybe the flip side question is somewhat more interesting. What's not going to change in your view? Jassy has been there since nearly the beginning. What are some of the fundamental tenets that he's, that are fossilized, that won't change, do you think? >> I think he's, I think what's not going to change is Amazon, is going to continue to grow and develop their platform business and enable more SaaS players. That's a little bit different than what Microsoft's doing. They're more SaaS oriented, Office 365 is becoming their biggest application in terms of revenue on Microsoft side. So Amazon is going to still have to compete and enable more ecosystem partners. I think what's not going to change is that Bezos is still going to be in charge because executive chairman is just a code word for "not an active CEO." So in the corporate governance world when you have an executive chairman, that's essentially the person still in charge. And so he'll be in charge, will still be the boss of Andy Jassy and Jassy will be running all of Amazon. So I think that's going to be a little bit the same, but Jassy is going to be more in charge. I think you'll see a team change over, whether you're going to see some new management come in, Andy's management team will expand, I think Amazon will stay the same, Amazon Web Services. >> So John, last night, I was just making some notes about notable transitions in the history of the tech business, Gerstner to Palmisano, Gates to Ballmer, and then Ballmer to Nadella. One that you were close to, David Packard to John Young and then John Young to Lew Platt at the old company. Ellison to Safra and Mark, Jobs to Cook. We talked about Larry Page to Sundar Pichai. So how do you see this? And you've talked to, I remember when you interviewed John Chambers, he said, there is no rite of passage, East coast mini-computer companies, Edson de Castro, Ken Olsen, An Wang. These were executives who wouldn't let go. So it's of interesting to juxtapose that with the modern day executive. How do you see this fitting in to some of those epic transitions that I just mentioned? >> I think a lot of people are surprised at Jeff Bezos', even stepping down. I think he's just been such the face of Amazon. I think some of the poll numbers that people are doing on Twitter, people don't think it's going to make a big difference because he's kind of been that, leader hand on the wheel, but it's been its own ship now, kind of. And so depending on who's at the helm, it will be different. I think the Amazon choice of Andy wasn't obvious. And I think a lot of people were asking the question who was Andy Jassy and that's why we're doing this. And we're going to be doing more features on the Andy Jassy. We got a tons, tons of content that we've we've had shipped, original content with them. We'll share more of those key soundbites and who he is. I think a lot of people scratching their head like, why Andy Jassy? It's not obvious to the outsiders who don't know cloud computing. If you're in the competing business, in the digital transformation side, everyone knows about Amazon Web Services. Has been the most successful company, in my opinion, since I could remember at many levels just the way they've completely dominated the business and how they change others to be dominant. So, I mean, they've made Microsoft change, it made Google change and even then he's a leader that accepts conversations. Other companies, their CEOs hide behind their PR wall and they don't talk to people. They won't come on Clubhouse. They won't talk to the press. They hide behind their PR and they feed them, the media. Jassy is not afraid to talk to reporters. He's not afraid to talk to people, but he doesn't like people who don't know what they're talking about. So he doesn't suffer fools. So, you got to have your shit together to talk to Jassy. That's really the way it is. And that's, and he'll give you mind share, like he'll answer any question except for the ones that are too tough for him to answer. Like, are you, is facial recognition bad or good? Are you going to spin out AWS? I mean these are the hard questions and he's got a great team. He's got Jay Carney, former Obama press secretary working for him. He's been a great leader. So I'm really bullish on, is a good choice. >> We're going to jump into the Clubhouse here and open it up shortly. John, the last question for you is competition. Amazon as a company and even Jassy specifically I always talk about how they don't really focus on the competition, they focus on the customer but we know that just observing these folks Bezos is very competitive individual. Jassy, I mean, you know him better than I, very competitive individual. So, and he's, Jassy has been known to call out Oracle. Of course it was in response to Larry Ellison's jabs at Amazon regarding database. But, but how do you see that? Do you see that changing at all? I mean, will Amazon get more publicly competitive or they stick to their knitting, you think? >> You know this is going to sound kind of a weird analogy. And I know there's a lot of hero worshiping on Elon Musk but Elon Musk and Andy Jassy have a lot of similarities in the sense of their brilliance. They got both a brilliant people, different kinds of backgrounds. Obviously, they're running different things. They both are builders, right? If you were listening to Elon Musk on Clubhouse the other night, what was really striking was not only the magic of how it was all orchestrated and what he did and how he interviewed Robin Hood. He basically is about building stuff. And he was asked questions like, what advice do you give startups? He's like, if you need advice you shouldn't be doing startups. That's the kind of mentality that Jassy has, which is, it's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart, but Elon Musk is a builder. Jassy builds, he likes to build stuff, right? And so you look at all the things that he's done with AWS, it's been about enabling people to be successful with the tools that they need, adding more services, creating things that are lower price point. If you're an entrepreneur and you're over the age of 30, you know about AWS because you know what, it's cheaper to start a business on Amazon Web Services than buying servers and everyone knows that. If you're under the age of 25, you might not know 50 grand to a hundred thousand just to start something. Today you get your credit card down, you're up and running and you can get Clubhouses up and running all day long. So the next Clubhouse will be on Amazon or a cloud technology. And that's because of Andy Jassy right? So this is a significant executive and he continue, will bring that mindset of building. So, I think the digital transformation, we're in the digital engine club, we're going to see a complete revolution of a new generation. And I think having a new leader like Andy Jassy will enable in my opinion next generation talent, whether that's media and technology convergence, media technology and art convergence and the fact that he digs music, he digs sports, he digs tech, he digs media, it's going to be very interesting to see, I think he's well-poised to be, and he's soft-spoken, he doesn't want the glamorous press. He doesn't want the puff pieces. He just wants to do what he does and he puts his game do the talking. >> Talking about advice at startups. Just a quick aside. I remember, John, you and I when we were interviewing Scott McNealy former CEO of Sun Microsystems. And you asked him advice for startups. He said, move out of California. It's kind of tongue in cheek. I heard this morning that there's a proposal to tax the multi-billionaires of 1% annually not just the one-time tax. And so Jeff Bezos of course, has a ranch in Texas, no tax there, but places all over. >> You see I don't know. >> But I don't see Amazon leaving Seattle anytime soon, nor Jassy. >> Jeremiah Owyang did a Clubhouse on California. And the basic sentiment is that, it's California is not going away. I mean, come on. People got to just get real. I think it's a fad. Yeah. This has benefits with remote working, no doubt, but people will stay here in California, the network affects beautiful. I think Silicon Valley is going to continue to be relevant. It's just going to syndicate differently. And I think other hubs like Seattle and around the world will be integrated through remote work and I think it's going to be much more of a democratizing effect, not a win lose. So that to me is a huge shift. And look at Amazon, look at Amazon and Microsoft. It's the cloud cities, so people call Seattle. You've got Google down here and they're making waves but still, all good stuff. >> Well John, thanks so much. Let's let's wrap and let's jump into the Clubhouse and hear from others. Thanks so much for coming on, back on theCUBE. And many times we, you and I've done this really. It was a pleasure having you. Thanks for your perspectives. And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft ambient music)

(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)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle, everybody to Cuban cloud. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'll be here throughout the day with my co host, John Ferrier, who was quarantined in an undisclosed location in California. He's all good. Don't worry. Just precautionary. John, how are you doing? >>Hey, great to see you. John. Quarantine. My youngest daughter had covitz, so contact tracing. I was negative in quarantine at a friend's location. All good. >>Well, we wish you the best. Yeah, well, right. I mean, you know what's it like, John? I mean, you're away from your family. Your basically shut in, right? I mean, you go out for a walk, but you're really not in any contact with anybody. >>Correct? Yeah. I mean, basically just isolation, Um, pretty much what everyone's been kind of living on, kind of suffering through, but hopefully the vaccines are being distributed. You know, one of the things we talked about it reinvent the Amazon's cloud conference. Was the vaccine on, but just the whole workflow around that it's gonna get better. It's kind of really sucky. Here in the California area, they haven't done a good job, a lot of criticism around, how that's rolling out. And, you know, Amazon is now offering to help now that there's a new regime in the U. S. Government S o. You know, something to talk about, But certainly this has been a terrible time for Cove it and everyone in the deaths involved. But it's it's essentially pulled back the covers, if you will, on technology and you're seeing everything. Society. In fact, um, well, that's big tech MIT disinformation campaigns. All these vulnerabilities and cyber, um, accelerated digital transformation. We'll talk about a lot today, but yeah, it's totally changed the world. And I think we're in a new generation. I think this is a real inflection point, Dave. You know, modern society and the geo political impact of this is significant. You know, one of the benefits of being quarantined you'd be hanging out on these clubhouse APS, uh, late at night, listening to experts talk about what's going on, and it's interesting what's happening with with things like water and, you know, the island of Taiwan and China and U. S. Sovereignty, data, sovereignty, misinformation. So much going on to talk about. And, uh, meanwhile, companies like Mark injuries in BC firm starting a media company. What's going on? Hell freezing over. So >>we're gonna be talking about a lot of that stuff today. I mean, Cuba on cloud. It's our very first virtual editorial event we're trying to do is bring together our community. It's a it's an open forum and we're we're running the day on our 3 65 software platform. So we got a great lineup. We got CEO Seo's data Practitioners. We got a hard core technologies coming in, cloud experts, investors. We got some analysts coming in and we're creating this day long Siri's. And we've got a number of sessions that we've developed and we're gonna unpack. The future of Cloud computing in the coming decade is, John said, we're gonna talk about some of the public policy new administration. What does that mean for tech and for big tech in General? John, what can you add to that? >>Well, I think one of the things that we talked about Cove in this personal impact to me but other people as well. One of the things that people are craving right now is information factual information, truth texture that we call it. But hear this event for us, Davis, our first inaugural editorial event. Robbo, Kristen, Nicole, the entire Cube team Silicon angle, really trying to put together Morva cadence we're gonna doom or of these events where we can put out feature the best people in our community that have great fresh voices. You know, we do interview the big names Andy Jassy, Michael Dell, the billionaires with people making things happen. But it's often the people under there that are the rial newsmakers amid savory, for instance, that Google one of the most impressive technical people, he's gotta talk. He's gonna present democratization of software development in many Mawr riel people making things happen. And I think there's a communal element. We're going to do more of these. Obviously, we have, uh, no events to go to with the Cube. So we have the cube virtual software that we have been building and over years and now perfecting and we're gonna introduce that we're gonna put it to work, their dog footing it. We're gonna put that software toe work. We're gonna do a lot mawr virtual events like this Cuban cloud Cuban startup Cuban raising money. Cuban healthcare, Cuban venture capital. Always think we could do anything. Question is, what's the right story? What's the most important stories? Who's telling it and increase the aperture of the lens of the industry that we have and and expose that and fastest possible. That's what this software, you'll see more of it. So it's super exciting. We're gonna add new features like pulling people up on stage, Um, kind of bring on the clubhouse vibe and more of a community interaction with people to meet each other, and we'll roll those out. But the goal here is to just showcase it's cloud story in a way from people that are living it and providing value. So enjoy the day is gonna be chock full of presentations. We're gonna have moderated chat in these sessions, so it's an all day event so people can come in, drop out, and also that's everything's on demand immediately after the time slot. But you >>want to >>participate, come into the time slot into the cube room or breakout session. Whatever you wanna call it, it's a cube room, and the people in there chatting and having a watch party. So >>when you're in that home page when you're watching, there's a hero video there. Beneath that, there's a calendar, and you'll see that red line is that red horizontal line of vertical line is rather, it's a linear clock that will show you where we are in the day. If you click on any one of those sessions that will take you into the chat, we'll take you through those in a moment and share with you some of the guests that we have upcoming and and take you through the day what I wanted to do. John is trying to set the stage for the conversations that folks are gonna here today. And to do that, I wanna ask the guys to bring up a graphic. And I want to talk to you, John, about the progression of cloud over time and maybe go back to the beginning and review the evolution of cloud and then really talk a little bit about where we think it Z headed. So, guys, if you bring up that graphic when a W S announced s three, it was March of 2000 and six. And as you recall, John you know, nobody really. In the vendor and user community. They didn't really pay too much attention to that. And then later that year, in August, it announced E C two people really started. They started to think about a new model of computing, but they were largely, you know, chicken tires. And it was kind of bleeding edge developers that really leaned in. Um what? What were you thinking at the time? When when you saw, uh, s three e c to this retail company coming into the tech world? >>I mean, I thought it was totally crap. I'm like, this is terrible. But then at that time, I was thinking working on I was in between kind of start ups and I didn't have a lot of seed funding. And then I realized the C two was freaking awesome. But I'm like, Holy shit, this is really great because I don't need to pay a lot of cash, the Provisional Data center, or get a server. Or, you know, at that time, state of the art startup move was to buy a super micro box or some sort of power server. Um, it was well past the whole proprietary thing. But you have to assemble probably anyone with 5 to 8 grand box and go in, and we'll put a couple ghetto rack, which is basically, uh, you know, you put it into some coasting location. It's like with everybody else in the tech ghetto of hosting, still paying monthly fees and then maintaining it and provisioning that's just to get started. And then Amazon was just really easy. And then from there you just It was just awesome. I just knew Amazon would be great. They had a lot of things that they had to fix. You know, custom domains and user interface Council got better and better, but it was awesome. >>Well, what we really saw the cloud take hold from my perspective anyway, was the financial crisis in, you know, 709 It put cloud on the radar of a number of CFOs and, of course, shadow I T departments. They wanted to get stuff done and and take I t in in in, ah, pecs, bite sized chunks. So it really was. There's cloud awakening and we came out of that financial crisis, and this we're now in this 10 year plus boom um, you know, notwithstanding obviously the economic crisis with cove it. But much of it was powered by the cloud in the decade. I would say it was really about I t transformation. And it kind of ironic, if you will, because the pandemic it hits at the beginning of this decade, >>and it >>creates this mandate to go digital. So you've you've said a lot. John has pulled forward. It's accelerated this industry transformation. Everybody talks about that, but and we've highlighted it here in this graphic. It probably would have taken several more years to mature. But overnight you had this forced march to digital. And if you weren't a digital business, you were kind of out of business. And and so it's sort of here to stay. How do you see >>You >>know what this evolution and what we can expect in the coming decades? E think it's safe to say the last 10 years defined by you know, I t transformation. That's not gonna be the same in the coming years. How do you see it? >>It's interesting. I think the big tech companies are on, but I think this past election, the United States shows um, the power that technology has. And if you look at some of the main trends in the enterprise specifically around what clouds accelerating, I call the second wave of innovations coming where, um, it's different. It's not what people expect. Its edge edge computing, for instance, has talked about a lot. But industrial i o t. Is really where we've had a lot of problems lately in terms of hacks and malware and just just overall vulnerabilities, whether it's supply chain vulnerabilities, toe actual disinformation, you know, you know, vulnerabilities inside these networks s I think this network effects, it's gonna be a huge thing. I think the impact that tech will have on society and global society geopolitical things gonna be also another one. Um, I think the modern application development of how applications were written with data, you know, we always been saying this day from the beginning of the Cube data is his integral part of the development process. And I think more than ever, when you think about cloud and edge and this distributed computing paradigm, that cloud is now going next level with is the software and how it's written will be different. You gotta handle things like, where's the compute component? Is it gonna be at the edge with all the server chips, innovations that Amazon apple intel of doing, you're gonna have compute right at the edge, industrial and kind of human edge. How does that work? What's Leighton see to that? It's it really is an edge game. So to me, software has to be written holistically in a system's impact on the way. Now that's not necessarily nude in the computer science and in the tech field, it's just gonna be deployed differently. So that's a complete rewrite, in my opinion of the software applications. Which is why you're seeing Amazon Google VM Ware really pushing Cooper Netease and these service messes in the micro Services because super critical of this technology become smarter, automated, autonomous. And that's completely different paradigm in the old full stack developer, you know, kind of model. You know, the full stack developer, his ancient. There's no such thing as a full stack developer anymore, in my opinion, because it's a half a stack because the cloud takes up the other half. But no one wants to be called the half stack developer because it doesn't sound as good as Full Stack, but really Cloud has eliminated the technology complexity of what a full stack developer used to dio. Now you can manage it and do things with it, so you know, there's some work to done, but the heavy lifting but taking care of it's the top of the stack that I think is gonna be a really critical component. >>Yeah, and that that sort of automation and machine intelligence layer is really at the top of the stack. This this thing becomes ubiquitous, and we now start to build businesses and new processes on top of it. I wanna I wanna take a look at the Big Three and guys, Can we bring up the other The next graphic, which is an estimate of what the revenue looks like for the for the Big three. And John, this is I asked and past spend for the Big Three Cloud players. And it's It's an estimate that we're gonna update after earning seasons, and I wanna point a couple things out here. First is if you look at the combined revenue production of the Big Three last year, it's almost 80 billion in infrastructure spend. I mean, think about that. That Z was that incremental spend? No. It really has caused a lot of consolidation in the on Prem data center business for guys like Dell. And, you know, um, see, now, part of the LHP split up IBM Oracle. I mean, it's etcetera. They've all felt this sea change, and they had to respond to it. I think the second thing is you can see on this data. Um, it's true that azure and G C P they seem to be growing faster than a W s. We don't know the exact numbers >>because >>A W S is the only company that really provides a clean view of i s and pass. Whereas Microsoft and Google, they kind of hide the ball in their numbers. I mean, I don't blame them because they're behind, but they do leave breadcrumbs and clues about growth rates and so forth. And so we have other means of estimating, but it's it's undeniable that azure is catching up. I mean, it's still quite distance the third thing, and before I want to get your input here, John is this is nuanced. But despite the fact that Azure and Google the growing faster than a W s. You can see those growth rates. A W s I'll call this out is the only company by our estimates that grew its business sequentially last quarter. Now, in and of itself, that's not significant. But what is significant is because AWS is so large there $45 billion last year, even if the slower growth rates it's able to grow mawr and absolute terms than its competitors, who are basically flat to down sequentially by our estimates. Eso So that's something that I think is important to point out. Everybody focuses on the growth rates, but it's you gotta look at also the absolute dollars and, well, nonetheless, Microsoft in particular, they're they're closing the gap steadily, and and we should talk more about the competitive dynamics. But I'd love to get your take on on all this, John. >>Well, I mean, the clouds are gonna win right now. Big time with the one the political climate is gonna be favoring Big check. But more importantly, with just talking about covert impact and celebrating the digital transformation is gonna create a massive rising tide. It's already happening. It's happening it's happening. And again, this shift in programming, uh, models are gonna really kinda accelerating, create new great growth. So there's no doubt in my mind of all three you're gonna win big, uh, in the future, they're just different, You know, the way they're going to market position themselves, they have to be. Google has to be a little bit different than Amazon because they're smaller and they also have different capabilities, then trying to catch up. So if you're Google or Microsoft, you have to have a competitive strategy to decide. How do I wanna ride the tide If you will put the rising tide? Well, if I'm Amazon, I mean, if I'm Microsoft and Google, I'm not going to try to go frontal and try to copy Amazon because Amazon is just pounding lead of features and scale and they're different. They were, I would say, take advantage of the first mover of pure public cloud. They really awesome. It passed and I, as they've integrated in Gardner, now reports and integrated I as and passed components. So Gardner finally got their act together and said, Hey, this is really one thing. SAS is completely different animal now Microsoft Super Smart because they I think they played the right card. They have a huge installed base converted to keep office 3 65 and move sequel server and all their core jewels into the cloud as fast as possible, clarified while filling in the gaps on the product side to be cloud. So you know, as you're doing trends job, they're just it's just pedal as fast as you can. But Microsoft is really in. The strategy is just go faster trying. Keep pedaling fast, get the features, feature velocity and try to make it high quality. Google is a little bit different. They have a little power base in terms of their network of strong, and they have a lot of other big data capabilities, so they have to use those to their advantage. So there is. There is there is competitive strategy game application happening with these companies. It's not like apples, the apples, In my opinion, it never has been, and I think that's funny that people talk about it that way. >>Well, you're bringing up some great points. I want guys bring up the next graphic because a lot of things that John just said are really relevant here. And what we're showing is that's a survey. Data from E. T. R R Data partners, like 1400 plus CEOs and I T buyers and on the vertical axis is this thing called Net score, which is a measure of spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is is what's called market share. It's a measure of the pervasiveness or, you know, number of mentions in the data set. There's a couple of key points I wanna I wanna pick up on relative to what John just said. So you see A W S and Microsoft? They stand alone. I mean, they're the hyper scale er's. They're far ahead of the pack and frankly, they have fall down, toe, lose their lead. They spend a lot on Capex. They got the flywheel effects going. They got both spending velocity and large market shares, and so, but they're taking a different approach. John, you're right there living off of their SAS, the state, their software state, Andi, they're they're building that in to their cloud. So they got their sort of a captive base of Microsoft customers. So they've got that advantage. They also as we'll hear from from Microsoft today. They they're building mawr abstraction layers. Andy Jassy has said We don't wanna be in that abstraction layer business. We wanna have access to those, you know, fine grain primitives and eso at an AP level. So so we can move fast with the market. But but But so those air sort of different philosophies, John? >>Yeah. I mean, you know, people who know me know that I love Amazon. I think their product is superior at many levels on in its way that that has advantages again. They have a great sass and ecosystem. They don't really have their own SAS play, although they're trying to add some stuff on. I've been kind of critical of Microsoft in the past, but one thing I'm not critical of Microsoft, and people can get this wrong in the marketplace. Actually, in the journalism world and also in just some other analysts, Microsoft has always had large scale eso to say that Microsoft never had scale on that Amazon owned the monopoly on our franchise on scales wrong. Microsoft had scale from day one. Their business was always large scale global. They've always had infrastructure with MSN and their search and the distributive how they distribute browsers and multiple countries. Remember they had the lock on the operating system and the browser for until the government stepped in in 1997. And since 1997 Microsoft never ever not invested in infrastructure and scale. So that whole premise that they don't compete well there is wrong. And I think that chart demonstrates that there, in there in the hyper scale leadership category, hands down the question that I have. Is that there not as good and making that scale integrate in because they have that legacy cards. This is the classic innovator's dilemma. Clay Christensen, right? So I think they're doing a good job. I think their strategy sound. They're moving as fast as they can. But then you know they're not gonna come out and say We don't have the best cloud. Um, that's not a marketing strategy. Have to kind of hide in this and get better and then double down on where they're winning, which is. Clients are converting from their legacy at the speed of Microsoft, and they have a huge client base, So that's why they're stopping so high That's why they're so good. >>Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a little preview. I talked to gear up your f Who's gonna come on today and you'll see I I asked him because the criticism of Microsoft is they're, you know, they're just good enough. And so I asked him, Are you better than good enough? You know, those are fighting words if you're inside of Microsoft, but so you'll you'll have to wait to see his answer. Now, if you guys, if you could bring that that graphic back up I wanted to get into the hybrid zone. You know where the field is. Always got >>some questions coming in on chat, Dave. So we'll get to those >>great Awesome. So just just real quick Here you see this hybrid zone, this the field is bunched up, and the other companies who have a large on Prem presence and have been forced to initiate some kind of coherent cloud strategy included. There is Michael Michael, multi Cloud, and Google's there, too, because they're far behind and they got to take a different approach than a W s. But as you can see, so there's some real progress here. VM ware cloud on AWS stands out, as does red hat open shift. You got VM Ware Cloud, which is a VCF Cloud Foundation, even Dell's cloud. And you'd expect HP with Green Lake to be picking up momentum in the future quarters. And you've got IBM and Oracle, which there you go with the innovator's dilemma. But there, at least in the cloud game, and we can talk about that. But so, John, you know, to your point, you've gotta have different strategies. You're you're not going to take out the big too. So you gotta play, connect your print your on Prem to your cloud, your hybrid multi cloud and try to create new opportunities and new value there. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we'll get to the question, but just that point. I think this Zeri Chen's come on the Cube many times. We're trying to get him to come on lunch today with Features startup, but he's always said on the Q B is a V C at Greylock great firm. Jerry's Cloud genius. He's been there, but he made a point many, many years ago. It's not a winner. Take all the winner. Take most, and the Big Three maybe put four or five in there. We'll take most of the markets here. But I think one of the things that people are missing and aren't talking about Dave is that there's going to be a second tier cloud, large scale model. I don't want to say tear to cloud. It's coming to sound like a sub sub cloud, but a new category of cloud on cloud, right? So meaning if you get a snowflake, did I think this is a tale? Sign to what's coming. VM Ware Cloud is a native has had huge success, mainly because Amazon is essentially enabling them to be successful. So I think is going to be a wave of a more of a channel model of indirect cloud build out where companies like the Cube, potentially for media or others, will build clouds on top of the cloud. So if Google, Microsoft and Amazon, whoever is the first one to really enable that okay, we'll do extremely well because that means you can compete with their scale and create differentiation on top. So what snowflake did is all on Amazon now. They kind of should go to azure because it's, you know, politically correct that have multiple clouds and distribution and business model shifts. But to get that kind of performance they just wrote on Amazon. So there's nothing wrong with that. Because you're getting paid is variable. It's cap ex op X nice categorization. So I think that's the way that we're watching. I think it's super valuable, I think will create some surprises in terms of who might come out of the woodwork on be a leader in a category. Well, >>your timing is perfect, John and we do have some questions in the chat. But before we get to that, I want to bring in Sargi Joe Hall, who's a contributor to to our community. Sargi. Can you hear us? All right, so we got, uh, while >>bringing in Sarpy. Let's go down from the questions. So the first question, Um, we'll still we'll get the student second. The first question. But Ronald ask, Can a vendor in 2021 exist without a hybrid cloud story? Well, story and capabilities. Yes, they could live with. They have to have a story. >>Well, And if they don't own a public cloud? No. No, they absolutely cannot. Uh hey, Sergey. How you doing, man? Good to see you. So, folks, let me let me bring in Sergeant Kohala. He's a He's a cloud architect. He's a practitioner, He's worked in as a technologist. And there's a frequent guest on on the Cube. Good to see you, my friend. Thanks for taking the time with us. >>And good to see you guys to >>us. So we were kind of riffing on the competitive landscape we got. We got so much to talk about this, like, it's a number of questions coming in. Um, but Sargi we wanna talk about you know, what's happening here in Cloud Land? Let's get right into it. I mean, what do you guys see? I mean, we got yesterday. New regime, new inaug inauguration. Do you do you expect public policy? You'll start with you Sargi to have What kind of effect do you think public policy will have on, you know, cloud generally specifically, the big tech companies, the tech lash. Is it gonna be more of the same? Or do you see a big difference coming? >>I think that there will be some changing narrative. I believe on that. is mainly, um, from the regulators side. A lot has happened in one month, right? So people, I think are losing faith in high tech in a certain way. I mean, it doesn't, uh, e think it matters with camp. You belong to left or right kind of thing. Right? But parlor getting booted out from Italy s. I think that was huge. Um, like, how do you know that if a cloud provider will not boot you out? Um, like, what is that line where you draw the line? What are the rules? I think that discussion has to take place. Another thing which has happened in the last 23 months is is the solar winds hack, right? So not us not sort acknowledging that I was Russia and then wish you watching it now, new administration might have a different sort of Boston on that. I think that's huge. I think public public private partnership in security arena will emerge this year. We have to address that. Yeah, I think it's not changing. Uh, >>economics economy >>will change gradually. You know, we're coming out off pandemic. The money is still cheap on debt will not be cheap. for long. I think m and a activity really will pick up. So those are my sort of high level, Uh, >>thank you. I wanna come back to them. And because there's a question that chat about him in a But, John, how do you see it? Do you think Amazon and Google on a slippery slope booting parlor off? I mean, how do they adjudicate between? Well, what's happening in parlor? Uh, anything could happen on clubhouse. Who knows? I mean, can you use a I to find that stuff? >>Well, that's I mean, the Amazons, right? Hiding right there bunkered in right now from that bad, bad situation. Because again, like people we said Amazon, these all three cloud players win in the current environment. Okay, Who wins with the U. S. With the way we are China, Russia, cloud players. Okay, let's face it, that's the reality. So if I wanted to reset the world stage, you know what better way than the, you know, change over the United States economy, put people out of work, make people scared, and then reset the entire global landscape and control all with cash? That's, you know, conspiracy theory. >>So you see the riches, you see the riches, get the rich, get richer. >>Yeah, well, that's well, that's that. That's kind of what's happening, right? So if you start getting into this idea that you can't actually have an app on site because the reason now I'm not gonna I don't know the particular parlor, but apparently there was a reason. But this is dangerous, right? So what? What that's gonna do is and whether it's right or wrong or not, whether political opinion is it means that they were essentially taken offline by people that weren't voted for that. Weren't that when people didn't vote for So that's not a democracy, right? So that's that's a different kind of regime. What it's also going to do is you also have this groundswell of decentralized thinking, right. So you have a whole wave of crypto and decentralized, um, cyber punks out there who want to decentralize it. So all of this stuff in January has created a huge counterculture, and I had predicted this so many times in the Cube. David counterculture is coming and and you already have this kind of counterculture between centralized and decentralized thinking and so I think the Amazon's move is dangerous at a fundamental level. Because if you can't get it, if you can't get buy domain names and you're completely blackballed by by organized players, that's a Mafia, in my opinion. So, uh, and that and it's also fuels the decentralized move because people say, Hey, if that could be done to them, it could be done to me. Just the fact that it could be done will promote a swing in the other direction. I >>mean, independent of of, you know, again, somebody said your political views. I mean Parlor would say, Hey, we're trying to clean this stuff up now. Maybe they didn't do it fast enough, but you think about how new parlor is. You think about the early days of Twitter and Facebook, so they were sort of at a disadvantage. Trying to >>have it was it was partly was what it was. It was a right wing stand up job of standing up something quick. Their security was terrible. If you look at me and Cory Quinn on be great to have him, and he did a great analysis on this, because if you look the lawsuit was just terrible. Security was just a half, asshole. >>Well, and the experience was horrible. I mean, it's not It was not a great app, but But, like you said, it was a quick stew. Hand up, you know, for an agenda. But nonetheless, you know, to start, get to your point earlier. It's like, you know, Are they gonna, you know, shut me down? If I say something that's, you know, out of line, or how do I control that? >>Yeah, I remember, like, 2019, we involved closing sort of remarks. I was there. I was saying that these companies are gonna be too big to fail. And also, they're too big for other nations to do business with. In a way, I think MNCs are running the show worldwide. They're running the government's. They are way. Have seen the proof of that in us this year. Late last year and this year, um, Twitter last night blocked Chinese Ambassador E in us. Um, from there, you know, platform last night and I was like, What? What's going on? So, like, we used to we used to say, like the Chinese company, tech companies are in bed with the Chinese government. Right. Remember that? And now and now, Actually, I think Chinese people can say the same thing about us companies. Uh, it's not a good thing. >>Well, let's >>get some question. >>Let's get some questions from the chat. Yeah. Thank you. One is on M and a subject you mentioned them in a Who do you see is possible emanate targets. I mean, I could throw a couple out there. Um, you know, some of the cdn players, maybe aka my You know, I like I like Hashi Corp. I think they're doing some really interesting things. What do you see? >>Nothing. Hashi Corp. And anybody who's doing things in the periphery is a candidate for many by the big guys, you know, by the hyper scholars and number two tier two or five hyper scholars. Right. Uh, that's why sales forces of the world and stuff like that. Um, some some companies, which I thought there will be a target, Sort of. I mean, they target they're getting too big, because off their evaluations, I think how she Corpuz one, um, >>and >>their bunch in the networking space. Uh, well, Tara, if I say the right that was acquired by at five this week, this week or last week, Actually, last week for $500 million. Um, I know they're founder. So, like I found that, Yeah, there's a lot going on on the on the network side on the anything to do with data. Uh, that those air too hard areas in the cloud arena >>data, data protection, John, any any anything you could adhere. >>And I think I mean, I think ej ej is gonna be where the gaps are. And I think m and a activity is gonna be where again, the bigger too big to fail would agree with you on that one. But we're gonna look at white Spaces and say a white space for Amazon is like a monster space for a start up. Right? So you're gonna have these huge white spaces opportunities, and I think it's gonna be an M and a opportunity big time start ups to get bought in. Given the speed on, I think you're gonna see it around databases and around some of these new service meshes and micro services. I mean, >>they there's a There's a question here, somebody's that dons asking why is Google who has the most pervasive tech infrastructure on the planet. Not at the same level of other to hyper scale is I'll give you my two cents is because it took him a long time to get their heads out of their ads. I wrote a piece of around that a while ago on they just they figured out how to learn the enterprise. I mean, John, you've made this point a number of times, but they just and I got a late start. >>Yeah, they're adding a lot of people. If you look at their who their hiring on the Google Cloud, they're adding a lot of enterprise chops in there. They realized this years ago, and we've talked to many of the top leaders, although Curry and hasn't yet sit down with us. Um, don't know what he's hiding or waiting for, but they're clearly not geared up to chicken Pete. You can see it with some some of the things that they're doing, but I mean competed the level of Amazon, but they have strength and they're playing their strength, but they definitely recognize that they didn't have the enterprise motions and people in the DNA and that David takes time people in the enterprise. It's not for the faint of heart. It's unique details that are different. You can't just, you know, swing the Google playbook and saying We're gonna home The enterprises are text grade. They knew that years ago. So I think you're going to see a good year for Google. I think you'll see a lot of change. Um, they got great people in there. On the product marketing side is Dev Solution Architects, and then the SRE model that they have perfected has been strong. And I think security is an area that they could really had a lot of value it. So, um always been a big fan of their huge network and all the intelligence they have that they could bring to bear on security. >>Yeah, I think Google's problem main problem that to actually there many, but one is that they don't They don't have the boots on the ground as compared to um, Microsoft, especially an Amazon actually had a similar problem, but they had a wide breath off their product portfolio. I always talk about feature proximity in cloud context, like if you're doing one thing. You wanna do another thing? And how do you go get that feature? Do you go to another cloud writer or it's right there where you are. So I think Amazon has the feature proximity and they also have, uh, aske Compared to Google, there's skills gravity. Larger people are trained on AWS. I think Google is trying there. So second problem Google is having is that that they're they're more focused on, I believe, um, on the data science part on their sort of skipping the cool components sort of off the cloud, if you will. The where the workloads needs, you know, basic stuff, right? That's like your compute storage and network. And that has to be well, talk through e think e think they will do good. >>Well, so later today, Paul Dillon sits down with Mids Avery of Google used to be in Oracle. He's with Google now, and he's gonna push him on on the numbers. You know, you're a distant third. Does that matter? And of course, you know, you're just a preview of it's gonna say, Well, no, we don't really pay attention to that stuff. But, John, you said something earlier that. I think Jerry Chen made this comment that, you know, Is it a winner? Take all? No, but it's a winner. Take a lot. You know the number two is going to get a big chunk of the pie. It appears that the markets big enough for three. But do you? Does Google have to really dramatically close the gap on be a much, much closer, you know, to the to the leaders in orderto to compete in this race? Or can they just kind of continue to bump along, siphon off the ad revenue? Put it out there? I mean, I >>definitely can compete. I think that's like Google's in it. Then it they're not. They're not caving, right? >>So But But I wrote I wrote recently that I thought they should even even put mawr oven emphasis on the cloud. I mean, maybe maybe they're already, you know, doubling down triple down. I just I think that is a multi trillion dollar, you know, future for the industry. And, you know, I think Google, believe it or not, could even do more. Now. Maybe there's just so much you could dio. >>There's a lot of challenges with these company, especially Google. They're in Silicon Valley. We have a big Social Justice warrior mentality. Um, there's a big debate going on the in the back channels of the tech scene here, and that is that if you want to be successful in cloud, you have to have a good edge strategy, and that involves surveillance, use of data and pushing the privacy limits. Right? So you know, Google has people within the country that will protest contract because AI is being used for war. Yet we have the most unstable geopolitical seen that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime going on right now. So, um, don't >>you think that's what happened with parlor? I mean, Rob Hope said, Hey, bar is pretty high to kick somebody off your platform. The parlor went over the line, but I would also think that a lot of the employees, whether it's Google AWS as well, said, Hey, why are we supporting you know this and so to your point about social justice, I mean, that's not something. That >>parlor was not just social justice. They were trying to throw the government. That's Rob e. I think they were in there to get selfies and being protesters. But apparently there was evidence from what I heard in some of these clubhouse, uh, private chats. Waas. There was overwhelming evidence on parlor. >>Yeah, but my point is that the employee backlash was also a factor. That's that's all I'm saying. >>Well, we have Google is your Google and you have employees to say we will boycott and walk out if you bid on that jet I contract for instance, right, But Microsoft one from maybe >>so. I mean, that's well, >>I think I think Tom Poole's making a really good point here, which is a Google is an alternative. Thio aws. The last Google cloud next that we were asked at they had is all virtual issue. But I saw a lot of I T practitioners in the audience looking around for an alternative to a W s just seeing, though, we could talk about Mano Cloud or Multi Cloud, and Andy Jassy has his his narrative around, and he's true when somebody goes multiple clouds, they put you know most of their eggs in one basket. Nonetheless, I think you know, Google's got a lot of people interested in, particularly in the analytic side, um, in in an alternative, hedging their bets eso and particularly use cases, so they should be able to do so. I guess my the bottom line here is the markets big enough to have Really? You don't have to be the Jack Welch. I gotta be number one and number two in the market. Is that the conclusion here? >>I think so. But the data gravity and the skills gravity are playing against them. Another problem, which I didn't want a couple of earlier was Google Eyes is that they have to boot out AWS wherever they go. Right? That is a huge challenge. Um, most off the most off the Fortune 2000 companies are already using AWS in one way or another. Right? So they are the multi cloud kind of player. Another one, you know, and just pure purely somebody going 200% Google Cloud. Uh, those cases are kind of pure, if you will. >>I think it's gonna be absolutely multi cloud. I think it's gonna be a time where you looked at the marketplace and you're gonna think in terms of disaster recovery, model of cloud or just fault tolerant capabilities or, you know, look at the parlor, the next parlor. Or what if Amazon wakes up one day and said, Hey, I don't like the cubes commentary on their virtual events, so shut them down. We should have a fail over to Google Cloud should Microsoft and Option. And one of people in Microsoft ecosystem wants to buy services from us. We have toe kind of co locate there. So these are all open questions that are gonna be the that will become certain pretty quickly, which is, you know, can a company diversify their computing An i t. In a way that works. And I think the momentum around Cooper Netease you're seeing as a great connective tissue between, you know, having applications work between clouds. Right? Well, directionally correct, in my opinion, because if I'm a company, why wouldn't I wanna have choice? So >>let's talk about this. The data is mixed on that. I'll share some data, meaty our data with you. About half the companies will say Yeah, we're spreading the wealth around to multiple clouds. Okay, That's one thing will come back to that. About the other half were saying, Yeah, we're predominantly mono cloud we didn't have. The resource is. But what I think going forward is that that what multi cloud really becomes. And I think John, you mentioned Snowflake before. I think that's an indicator of what what true multi cloud is going to look like. And what Snowflake is doing is they're building abstraction, layer across clouds. Ed Walsh would say, I'm standing on the shoulders of Giants, so they're basically following points of presence around the globe and building their own cloud. They call it a data cloud with a global mesh. We'll hear more about that later today, but you sign on to that cloud. So they're saying, Hey, we're gonna build value because so many of Amazon's not gonna build that abstraction layer across multi clouds, at least not in the near term. So that's a really opportunity for >>people. I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm dating myself, but you know the date ourselves, David. I remember back in the eighties, when you had open systems movement, right? The part of the whole Revolution OS I open systems interconnect model. At that time, the networking stacks for S N A. For IBM, decadent for deck we all know that was a proprietary stack and then incomes TCP I p Now os I never really happened on all seven layers, but the bottom layers standardized. Okay, that was huge. So I think if you look at a W s or some of the comments in the chat AWS is could be the s n a. Depends how you're looking at it, right? And you could say they're open. But in a way, they want more Amazon. So Amazon's not out there saying we love multi cloud. Why would they promote multi cloud? They are a one of the clouds they want. >>That's interesting, John. And then subject is a cloud architect. I mean, it's it is not trivial to make You're a data cloud. If you're snowflake, work on AWS work on Google. Work on Azure. Be seamless. I mean, certainly the marketing says that, but technically, that's not trivial. You know, there are latent see issues. Uh, you know, So that's gonna take a while to develop. What? Do your thoughts there? >>I think that multi cloud for for same workload and multi cloud for different workloads are two different things. Like we usually put multiple er in one bucket, right? So I think you're right. If you're trying to do multi cloud for the same workload, that's it. That's Ah, complex, uh, problem to solve architecturally, right. You have to have a common ap ice and common, you know, control playing, if you will. And we don't have that yet, and then we will not have that for a for at least one other couple of years. So, uh, if you if you want to do that, then you have to go to the lower, lowest common denominator in technical sort of stock, if you will. And then you're not leveraging the best of the breed technology off their from different vendors, right? I believe that's a hard problem to solve. And in another thing, is that that that I always say this? I'm always on the death side, you know, developer side, I think, uh, two deaths. Public cloud is a proxy for innovative culture. Right. So there's a catch phrase I have come up with today during shower eso. I think that is true. And then people who are companies who use the best of the breed technologies, they can attract the these developers and developers are the Mazen's off This digital sort of empires, amazingly, is happening there. Right there they are the Mazen's right. They head on the bricks. I think if you don't appeal to developers, if you don't but extensive for, like, force behind educating the market, you can't you can't >>put off. It's the same game Stepping story was seeing some check comments. Uh, guard. She's, uh, linked in friend of mine. She said, Microsoft, If you go back and look at the Microsoft early days to the developer Point they were, they made their phones with developers. They were a software company s Oh, hey, >>forget developers, developers, developers. >>You were if you were in the developer ecosystem, you were treated his gold. You were part of the family. If you were outside that world, you were competitors, and that was ruthless times back then. But they again they had. That was where it was today. Look at where the software defined businesses and starve it, saying it's all about being developer lead in this new way to program, right? So the cloud next Gen Cloud is going to look a lot like next Gen Developer and all the different tools and techniques they're gonna change. So I think, yes, this kind of developer ecosystem will be harnessed, and that's the power source. It's just gonna look different. So, >>Justin, Justin in the chat has a comment. I just want to answer the question about elastic thoughts on elastic. Um, I tell you, elastic has momentum uh, doing doing very well in the market place. Thea Elk Stack is a great alternative that people are looking thio relative to Splunk. Who people complain about the pricing. Of course it's plunks got the easy button, but it is getting increasingly expensive. The problem with elk stack is you know, it's open source. It gets complicated. You got a shard, the databases you gotta manage. It s Oh, that's what Ed Walsh's company chaos searches is all about. But elastic has some riel mo mentum in the marketplace right now. >>Yeah, you know, other things that coming on the chat understands what I was saying about the open systems is kubernetes. I always felt was that is a bad metaphor. But they're with me. That was the TCP I peep In this modern era, C t c p I p created that that the disruptor to the S N A s and the network protocols that were proprietary. So what KUBERNETES is doing is creating a connective tissue between clouds and letting the open source community fill in the gaps in the middle, where kind of way kind of probably a bad analogy. But that's where the disruption is. And if you look at what's happened since Kubernetes was put out there, what it's become kind of de facto and standard in the sense that everyone's rallying around it. Same exact thing happened with TCP was people were trashing it. It is terrible, you know it's not. Of course they were trashed because it was open. So I find that to be very interesting. >>Yeah, that's a good >>analogy. E. Thinks the R C a cable. I used the R C. A cable analogy like the VCRs. When they started, they, every VC had had their own cable, and they will work on Lee with that sort of plan of TV and the R C. A cable came and then now you can put any TV with any VCR, and the VCR industry took off. There's so many examples out there around, uh, standards And how standards can, you know, flair that fire, if you will, on dio for an industry to go sort of wild. And another trend guys I'm seeing is that from the consumer side. And let's talk a little bit on the consuming side. Um, is that the The difference wouldn't be to B and B to C is blood blurred because even the physical products are connected to the end user Like my door lock, the August door lock I didn't just put got get the door lock and forget about that. Like I I value the expedience it gives me or problems that gives me on daily basis. So I'm close to that vendor, right? So So the middle men, uh, middle people are getting removed from from the producer off the technology or the product to the consumer. Even even the sort of big grocery players they have their APs now, uh, how do you buy stuff and how it's delivered and all that stuff that experience matters in that context, I think, um, having, uh, to be able to sell to thes enterprises from the Cloud writer Breuder's. They have to have these case studies or all these sample sort off reference architectures and stuff like that. I think whoever has that mawr pushed that way, they are doing better like that. Amazon is Amazon. Because of that reason, I think they have lot off sort off use cases about on top of them. And they themselves do retail like crazy. Right? So and other things at all s. So I think that's a big trend. >>Great. Great points are being one of things. There's a question in there about from, uh, Yaden. Who says, uh, I like the developer Lead cloud movement, But what is the criticality of the executive audience when educating the marketplace? Um, this comes up a lot in some of my conversations around automation. So automation has been a big wave to automate this automate everything. And then everything is a service has become kind of kind of the the executive suite. Kind of like conversation we need to make everything is a service in our business. You seeing people move to that cloud model. Okay, so the executives think everything is a services business strategy, which it is on some level, but then, when they say Take that hill, do it. Developers. It's not that easy. And this is where a lot of our cube conversations over the past few months have been, especially during the cova with cute virtual. This has come up a lot, Dave this idea, and start being around. It's easy to say everything is a service but will implement it. It's really hard, and I think that's where the developer lead Connection is where the executive have to understand that in order to just say it and do it are two different things. That digital transformation. That's a big part of it. So I think that you're gonna see a lot of education this year around what it means to actually do that and how to implement it. >>I'd like to comment on the as a service and subject. Get your take on it. I mean, I think you're seeing, for instance, with HP Green Lake, Dell's come out with Apex. You know IBM as its utility model. These companies were basically taking a page out of what I what I would call a flawed SAS model. If you look at the SAS players, whether it's salesforce or workday, service now s a P oracle. These models are They're really They're not cloud pricing models. They're they're basically you got to commit to a term one year, two year, three year. We'll give you a discount if you commit to the longer term. But you're locked in on you. You probably pay upfront. Or maybe you pay quarterly. That's not a cloud pricing model. And that's why I mean, they're flawed. You're seeing companies like Data Dog, for example. Snowflake is another one, and they're beginning to price on a consumption basis. And that is, I think, one of the big changes that we're going to see this decade is that true cloud? You know, pay by the drink pricing model and to your point, john toe, actually implement. That is, you're gonna need a whole new layer across your company on it is quite complicated it not even to mention how you compensate salespeople, etcetera. The a p. I s of your product. I mean, it is that, but that is a big sea change that I see coming. Subject your >>thoughts. Yeah, I think like you couldn't see it. And like some things for this big tech exacts are hidden in the plain >>sight, right? >>They don't see it. They they have blind spots, like Look at that. Look at Amazon. They went from Melissa and 200 millisecond building on several s, Right, Right. And then here you are, like you're saying, pay us for the whole year. If you don't use the cloud, you lose it or will pay by month. Poor user and all that stuff like that that those a role models, I think these players will be forced to use that term pricing like poor minute or for a second, poor user. That way, I think the Salesforce moral is hybrid. They're struggling in a way. I think they're trying to bring the platform by doing, you know, acquisition after acquisition to be a platform for other people to build on top off. But they're having a little trouble there because because off there, such pricing and little closeness, if you will. And, uh, again, I'm coming, going, going back to developers like, if you are not appealing to developers who are writing the latest and greatest code and it is open enough, by the way open and open source are two different things that we all know that. So if your platform is not open enough, you will have you know, some problems in closing the deals. >>E. I want to just bring up a question on chat around from Justin didn't fitness. Who says can you touch on the vertical clouds? Has your offering this and great question Great CP announcing Retail cloud inventions IBM Athena Okay, I'm a huge on this point because I think this I'm not saying this for years. Cloud computing is about horizontal scalability and vertical specialization, and that's absolutely clear, and you see all the clouds doing it. The vertical rollouts is where the high fidelity data is, and with machine learning and AI efforts coming out, that's accelerated benefits. There you have tow, have the vertical focus. I think it's super smart that clouds will have some sort of vertical engine, if you will in the clouds and build on top of a control playing. Whether that's data or whatever, this is clearly the winning formula. If you look at all the successful kind of ai implementations, the ones that have access to the most data will get the most value. So, um if you're gonna have a data driven cloud you have tow, have this vertical feeling, Um, in terms of verticals, the data on DSO I think that's super important again, just generally is a strategy. I think Google doing a retail about a super smart because their whole pitches were not Amazon on. Some people say we're not Google, depending on where you look at. So every of these big players, they have dominance in the areas, and that's scarce. Companies and some companies will never go to Amazon for that reason. Or some people never go to Google for other reasons. I know people who are in the ad tech. This is a black and we're not. We're not going to Google. So again, it is what it is. But this idea of vertical specialization relevant in super >>forts, I want to bring to point out to sessions that are going on today on great points. I'm glad you asked that question. One is Alan. As he kicks off at 1 p.m. Eastern time in the transformation track, he's gonna talk a lot about the coming power of ecosystems and and we've talked about this a lot. That that that to compete with Amazon, Google Azure, you've gotta have some kind of specialization and vertical specialization is a good one. But of course, you see in the big Big three also get into that. But so he's talking at one o'clock and then it at 3 36 PM You know this times are strange, but e can explain that later Hillary Hunter is talking about she's the CTO IBM I B M's ah Financial Cloud, which is another really good example of specifying vertical requirements and serving. You know, an audience subject. I think you have some thoughts on this. >>Actually, I lost my thought. E >>think the other piece of that is data. I mean, to the extent that you could build an ecosystem coming back to Alan Nancy's premise around data that >>billions of dollars in >>their day there's billions of dollars and that's the title of the session. But we did the trillion dollar baby post with Jazzy and said Cloud is gonna be a trillion dollars right? >>And and the point of Alan Answer session is he's thinking from an individual firm. Forget the millions that you're gonna save shifting to the cloud on cost. There's billions in ecosystems and operating models. That's >>absolutely the business value. Now going back to my half stack full stack developer, is the business value. I've been talking about this on the clubhouses a lot this past month is for the entrepreneurs out there the the activity in the business value. That's the new the new intellectual property is the business logic, right? So if you could see innovations in how work streams and workflow is gonna be a configured differently, you have now large scale cloud specialization with data, you can move quickly and take territory. That's much different scenario than a decade ago, >>at the point I was trying to make earlier was which I know I remember, is that that having the horizontal sort of features is very important, as compared to having vertical focus. You know, you're you're more healthcare focused like you. You have that sort of needs, if you will, and you and our auto or financials and stuff like that. What Google is trying to do, I think that's it. That's a good thing. Do cook up the reference architectures, but it's a bad thing in a way that you drive drive away some developers who are most of the developers at 80 plus percent, developers are horizontal like you. Look at the look into the psyche of a developer like you move from company to company. And only few developers will say I will stay only in health care, right? So I will only stay in order or something of that, right? So they you have to have these horizontal capabilities which can be applied anywhere on then. On top >>of that, I think that's true. Sorry, but I'll take a little bit different. Take on that. I would say yes, that's true. But remember, remember the old school application developer Someone was just called in Application developer. All they did was develop applications, right? They pick the framework, they did it right? So I think we're going to see more of that is just now mawr of Under the Covers developers. You've got mawr suffer defined networking and software, defined storage servers and cloud kubernetes. And it's kind of like under the hood. But you got your, you know, classic application developer. I think you're gonna see him. A lot of that come back in a way that's like I don't care about anything else. And that's the promise of cloud infrastructure is code. So I think this both. >>Hey, I worked. >>I worked at people solved and and I still today I say into into this context, I say E r P s are the ultimate low code. No code sort of thing is right. And what the problem is, they couldn't evolve. They couldn't make it. Lightweight, right? Eso um I used to write applications with drag and drop, you know, stuff. Right? But But I was miserable as a developer. I didn't Didn't want to be in the applications division off PeopleSoft. I wanted to be on the tools division. There were two divisions in most of these big companies ASAP. Oracle. Uh, like companies that divisions right? One is the cooking up the tools. One is cooking up the applications. The basketball was always gonna go to the tooling. Hey, >>guys, I'm sorry. We're almost out of time. I always wanted to t some of the sections of the day. First of all, we got Holder Mueller coming on at lunch for a power half hour. Um, you'll you'll notice when you go back to the home page. You'll notice that calendar, that linear clock that we talked about that start times are kind of weird like, for instance, an appendix coming on at 1 24. And that's because these air prerecorded assets and rather than having a bunch of dead air, we're just streaming one to the other. So so she's gonna talk about people, process and technology. We got Kathy Southwick, whose uh, Silicon Valley CEO Dan Sheehan was the CEO of Dunkin Brands and and he was actually the c 00 So it's C A CEO connecting the dots to the business. Daniel Dienes is the CEO of you I path. He's coming on a 2:47 p.m. East Coast time one of the hottest companies, probably the fastest growing software company in history. We got a guy from Bain coming on Dave Humphrey, who invested $750 million in Nutanix. He'll explain why and then, ironically, Dheeraj Pandey stew, Minuteman. Our friend interviewed him. That's 3 35. 1 of the sessions are most excited about today is John McD agony at 403 p. M. East Coast time, she's gonna talk about how to fix broken data architectures, really forward thinking stuff. And then that's the So that's the transformation track on the future of cloud track. We start off with the Big Three Milan Thompson Bukovec. At one oclock, she runs a W s storage business. Then I mentioned gig therapy wrath at 1. 30. He runs Azure is analytics. Business is awesome. Paul Dillon then talks about, um, IDs Avery at 1 59. And then our friends to, um, talks about interview Simon Crosby. I think I think that's it. I think we're going on to our next session. All right, so keep it right there. Thanks for watching the Cuban cloud. Uh huh.

(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)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering space and cybersecurity. Symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly. Yeah, Lauren, Welcome to the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 put on by Cal Poly and hosted with Silicon Angle acute here in Palo Alto, California for a virtual conference. Couldn't happen in person this year. I'm John for a year. Host the intersection of space and cybersecurity. I'll see critical topics, great conversations. We got a great guest here to talk about the addressing the cybersecurity workforce gap, and we have a great guest, a feature speaker. Stewart Knox, the undersecretary with California's Labor and Workforce Development Office. Stewart Thanks for joining us today. >>Thank you so much, John. Appreciate your time today and listening to a little bit of our quandaries with making sure that we have the security that's necessary for the state of California and making sure that we have the work force that is necessary for cybersecurity in space. >>Great, I'd love to get started. I got a couple questions for you, but first take a few minutes for an opening statement to set the stage. >>Sure, realizing that in California we lead the nation in much of cybersecurity based on Department of Defense contractors within the Santa California leading the nation with over $160 billion within the industry just here in California alone and having over 800,000 bus workers. Full time employment in the state of California is paramount for us to make sure that we face, um, defense manufacturers approximate 700,000 jobs that are necessary to be filled. There's over 37,000 vacancies that we know of in California, just alone in cybersecurity. And so we look forward to making sure that California Workforce Development Agency is leading the charge to make sure that we have equity in those jobs and that we are also leading in a way that brings good jobs to California and to the people of California, a good education system that is developed in a way that those skills are necessarily met for the for the employers here in California and the nation, >>One of the exciting things about California is obviously look at Silicon Valley, Hewlett Packard in the garage, storied history space. It's been a space state. Many people recognize California. You mentioned defense contractors. It's well rooted with with history, um, just breakthroughs bases, technology companies in California. And now you've got technology. This is the cybersecurity angle. Um, take >>them into >>Gets more commentary to that because that's really notable. And as the workforce changes, these two worlds are coming together, and sometimes they're in the same place. Sometimes they're not. This is super exciting and a new dynamic that's driving opportunities. Could you share, um, some color commentary on that dynamic? >>Absolutely. And you're so correct. I think in California we lead the nation in the way that we developed programs that are companies lead in the nation in so many ways around, uh, cyberspace cybersecurity, Uh, in so many different areas for which in the Silicon Valley is just, uh, such a leader in those companies are good qualified companies to do so. Obviously, one of the places we play a role is to make sure that those companies have a skilled workforce. Andi, also that the security of those, uh, systems are in place for our defense contractors onda For the theater companies, those those outlying entities that are providing such key resource is to those companies are also leading on the cutting edge for the future. Also again realizing that we need to expand our training on skills to make sure that those California companies continue to lead is just, um, a great initiative. And I think through apprenticeship training programs on By looking at our community college systems, I think that we will continue to lead the nation as we move forward. >>You know, we've had many conversations here in this symposium, virtually certainly around. The everyday life of consumer is impacted by space. You know, we get our car service Uber lyft. We have maps. We have all this technology that was born out of defense contracts and r and D that really changed generations and create a lot of great societal value. Okay, now, with space kind of on the next generation is easier to get stuff into space. The security of the systems is now gonna be not only paramount for quality of life, but defending that and the skills are needed in cybersecurity to defend that. And the gap is there. What >>can we >>do to highlight the opportunities for career paths? It used to be the day when you get a mechanical engineering degree or aerospace and you graduated. You go get a job. Not anymore. There's a variety of of of paths career wise. What can we do to highlight this career path? >>Absolutely correct. And I think it starts, you know, k through 12 system on. I know a lot of the work that you know, with this bow and other entities we're doing currently, uh, this is where we need to bring our youth into an age where they're teaching us right as we become older on the uses of technology. But it's also teaching, um, where the levels of those education can take them k through 12. But it's also looking at how the community college system links to that, and then the university system links above and beyond. But it's also engage in our employers. You know, One of the key components, obviously, is the employers player role for which we can start to develop strategies that best meet their needs quickly. I think that's one of the comments we hear the most labor agency is how we don't provide a change as fast as we should, especially in technology. You know, we buy computers today, and they're outdated. Tomorrow it's the same with the technology that's in those computers is that those students are going to be the leaders within that to really develop how those structures are in place. S O. K. Through 12 is probably primary place to start, but also continuing. That passed the K 12 system and I bring up the employers and I bring them up in a way, because many times when we've had conversations with employers around what their skills needs were and how do we develop those better? One of the pieces that of that that I think is really should be recognized that many times they recognized that they wanted a four year degree, potentially or five year, six year degree. But then, when we really looked at the skill sets, someone coming out of the community college system could meet those skill sets. And I think we need to have those conversations to make sure not that they shouldn't be continue their education. They absolutely should. Uh, but how do we get those skill sets built into this into 12 plus the two year plus the four year person? >>You know, I love the democratization of these new skills because again. There's no pattern matching because they weren't around before, right? So you gotta look at the exposure to your point K through 12 exposure. But then there's an exploration piece of whether it's community, college or whatever progression. And sometimes it's nonlinear, right? I mean, people are learning different ways, combining the exposure and the exploration. That's a big topic. Can you share your view on this because this now opens up mawr doors for people choice. You got new avenues. You got online clock and get a cloud computing degree now from Amazon and walk in and help. I could be, you know, security clearance, possibly in in college. So you know you get exposure. Is there certain things you see? Is it early on middle school? And then I'll see the exploration Those air two important concepts. Can you unpack that a little bit exposure and exploration of skills? >>Absolutely. And I think this takes place, you know, not only in in the K 12 because somebody takes place in our community colleges and universities is that that connection with those employers is such a key component that if there's a way we could build in internships where experiences what we call on the job training programs apprenticeship training pre apprenticeship training programs into a design where those students at all levels are getting an exposure to the opportunities within the Space and Cybersecurity Avenue. I think that right there alone will start to solve a problem of having 37 plus 1000 openings at any one time in California. Also, I get that there's there's a burden on employers. Thio do that, and I think that's a piece that we have to acknowledge. And I think that's where education to play a larger role That's a place we had. Labor, Workforce, Development Agency, player role With our apprenticeship training programs are pre apprenticeship training programs. I could go on all day of all of our training programs that we have within the state of California. Many of the list of your partners on this endeavor are partners with Employment Training Panel, which I used to be the director of the Brown administration of um, That program alone does incumbent worker training on DSO. That also is an exposure place where ah worker, maybe, you know, you know, use the old adage of sweeping the floors one day and potentially, you know, running a large portion of the business, you know, within years. But it's that exposure that that employee gets through training programs on band. Acknowledging those skill sets and where their opportunities are, is what's valid and important. I think that's where our students we need to play a larger role in the K 12. That's a really thio Get that pushed out there. >>It's funny here in California you're the robotics clubs in high school or like a varsity sport. You're seeing kids exposed early on with programming. But you know, this whole topic of cybersecurity in space intersection around workforce and the gaps and skills is not just for the young. Certainly the young generations gotta be exposed to the what the careers could be and what the possible jobs and societal impact and contributions what they could be. But also it's people who are already out there. You know, you have retraining re Skilling is plays an important role. I know you guys do a lot of thinking on this is the under secretary. You have to look at this because you know you don't wanna have a label old and antiquated um systems. And then a lot of them are, and they're evolving and they're being modernized by digital transformation. So what does the role of retraining and skill development these programs play? Can you share what you guys are working on in your vision for that? >>Absolutely. That's a great question. And I think that is where we play a large role, obviously in California and with Kobe, 19 is we're faced with today that we've never seen before, at least in my 27 years of running program. Similar Thio, of course, in economic development, we're having such a large number of people displaced currently that it's unprecedented with unemployment rates to where we are. We're really looking at How do we take? And we're also going to see industries not return to the level for which they stood at one point in time. Uh, you know, entertainment industries, restaurants, all the alike, uh, really looking at how do we move people from those jobs that were middle skill jobs, topper skilled jobs? But the pay points maybe weren't great, potentially, and there's an opportunity for us to skill people into jobs that are there today. It may take training, obviously, but we have dollars to do that generally, especially within our K 12 and are que 14 systems and our universities. But we really wanna look at where those skill sets are are at currently. And we want to take people from that point in time where they said today, and try to give them that exposure to your point. Earlier question is, how do we get them exposed to a system for which there are job means that pay well with benefit packages with companies that care about their employees? Because that's what our goal is. >>You know. You know, I don't know if you have some visibility on this or ah opinion, but one observation that I've had and talking to whether it's a commercial or public sector is that with co vid uh, there have been a lot of awareness of the situation. We're adequately prepared. There's, um, readiness. But as everyone kind of deals with it, they're also starting to think about what to do. Post covert as we come out of it, Ah, growth strategy for a company or someone's career, um, people starting to have that on the top of their minds So I have to ask you, Is there anything that you see that they say? Okay, certain areas, maybe not doubling down on other areas. We're gonna double down on because we've seen some best practices on a trajectory of value for coming out of co vid with, you know, well, armed skills or certain things because you because that's what a lot of people are thinking right now. It's probably cyber is I mean, how many jobs are open? So you got well, that that's kind of maybe not something double down on here are areas we see that are working. Can you share your current visibility to that dynamic? >>Absolutely. Another great question. One of the key components that we look at Labor Workforce Development Agency. And so look at industries and growth modes and ones that are in decline boats. Now Kobe has changed that greatly. We were in a growth rate for last 78 years. We saw almost every industry might miss a few. You know that we're all in growth in one way or enough, obviously, that has changed. Our landscape is completely different than we saw 67 months ago. So today we're looking at cybersecurity, obviously with 30 plus 1000 jobs cos we're looking at Defense Department contractor is obviously with federal government contracts. We were looking at the supply chains within those we're looking at. Health care, which has always been one, obviously are large one of our large entities that has has grown over the years. But it's also changed with covered 19. We're looking at the way protective equipment is manufactured in the way that that will continue to grow over time. We're looking at the service industry. I mean, it will come back, but it won't come back the way we've seen it, probably in the past, but where the opportunities that we develop programs that we're making sure that the skill sets of those folks are transferrable to other industries with one of the issues that we face constant labor and were forced moment programs is understanding that over the period of time, especially in today's world again, with technology that people skill sets way, don't see is my Parents Day that you worked at a job for 45 years and you retired out of one job. Potentially, that is, that's been gone for 25 years, but now, at the pace for which we're seeing systems change. This is going to continue to amp up. I will stay youth of today. My 12 year old nephew is in the room next door to me on a classroom right now online. And so you know, there. It's a totally different atmosphere, and he's, you know, enjoying actually being in helping learning from on all online system. I would not have been able to learn that way, but I think we do see through the K Through 12 system where we're moving, um, people's interest will change, and I think that they will start to see things in a different way than we have in the past. They were forced systems. We are an old system been around since the thirties. Some even will say prior to the thirties came out of the Great Depression in some ways, and that system we have to change the way we develop our programs are should not be constant, and it should be an evolving system. >>It's interesting a lot of the conversation between the private and public partnerships and industry. You're seeing an agile mind set where it's a growth mindset. It's also reality based mindset and certainly space kind of forces. This conversation with cyber security of being faster, faster, more relevant, more modern. You mentioned some of those points, and with co vid impact the workforce development, it's certainly going to put a lot of pressure on faster learning. And then you mentioned online learning. This has become a big thing. It's not just putting education online per se. There's new touch points. You know you got APS, you got digital. This digital transformation is also accelerating. How do you guys view the workforce development? Because it's going to be open. It's gonna be evolving. There's new data coming in, and maybe kids don't want to stare at a video conference. Is there some game aspect to it? Is there how do you integrate thes new things that are coming really fast? And it's happening kind of in real time in front of our eyes. So I love to get your thoughts on how you guys see that, because it will certainly impact their ability to compete for jobs and or to itself learn. >>I think one of the key components of California's our innovation right and So I think one of the things that we pride ourselves in California is around that, um that said, that is the piece that I think the Silicon Valley and there's many areas in California that that have done the same, um, or trying to do the same, at least in their economy, is to build in innovation. And I think that's part of the K through 12 system with our with our our state universities and our UCS is to be able to bridge that. I think that you we see that within universities, um, that really instill an innovative approach to teaching but also instill innovation within their students. I'm not sure there yet with our fully with our K 12 system. And I think that's a place that either our community colleges could be a bridge, too, as well. Eso that's one component of workforce development I think that we look at as being a key. A key piece you brought up something that's really interesting to me is when you talk about agile on day, one of the things that even in state government on this, is gonna be shocking to you. But we have not been an agile system, Aziz. Well, I think one of the things that the Newsome administration Governor Newsom's administration has brought is. And when I talk about agile systems, I actually mean agile systems. We've gone from Kobol Systems, which are old and clunky, still operating. But at the same time, we're looking at upgrading all of our systems in a way that even our technology in the state of California should be matching the technology that our great state has within our our state. So, um, there in lies. It's also challenges of finding the qualified staff that we need in the state of California for all of our systems and servers and everything that we have. Um, currently. So you know, not only are we looking at external users, users of labor, workforce development, but we're looking at internal users that the way we redevelop our systems so that we are more agile in two different ways. >>You just got me. I triggered with COBOL. I programmed in the eighties with COBOL is only one credit lab in college. Never touched it again. Thank God. But this. But this >>is the >>benefit of cloud computing. I think this is at the heart, and this is the undertone of the conference and symposium is cloud computing. You can you can actually leverage existing resource is whether there legacy systems because they are running. They're doing a great job, and they do a certain work load extremely well. Doesn't make sense to replace what does a job, but you can integrate it in this. What cloud does this is Opening up? Can mawr more and more capabilities and workloads? This is kind of the space industry is pointing to when they say we need people that can code. And that could solve data problems. Not just a computer scientist, but a large range of people. Creative, um, data, science, everything. How does California's workforce solve the needs of America's space industry? This is because it's a space state. How do you see that? Let your workforce meeting those needs. >>Yeah, I think I think it's an investment. Obviously, it's an investment on our part. It's an investment with our college partners. It's an investment from our K 12 system to make sure that that we are allocating dollars in a way through meeting the demand of industry Onda, we do look at industry specific around there needs. Obviously, there's a large one. We wanna be very receptive and work with our employers and our employee groups to make sure that we need that demand. I think it's putting our money where our mouth is and and designing and working with employer groups to make sure that the training meets their needs. Um, it's also working with our employer groups to make sure that the employees are taken care of. That equity is built within the systems, Um, that we keep people employed in California on their able to afford a home, and they're able to afford a life here in California. But it's also again, and I brought up the innovation component. I think it's building an innovation within systems for which they are employers but are also our incoming employees are incumbent workers. And you brought this up earlier. People that already employed and people that are unemployed currently with the skill set that might match up, is how do we bridge those folks into employment that they maybe have not thought about. We have a whole career network of systems out throughout the city, California with the Americans job Centers of California on day will be working, and they already are working with a lot of dislocated workers on day. One of the key components of that is to really look at how do we, um, take what their current skills that might be and then expose them to a system for which we have 37 plus 1000 job openings to Andi? How do we actually get those books employed? It's paying for potentially through those that local Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act, funding for Americans job centers, um, to pay for some on the job, training it Z to be able to pay for work experiences. It's to be able to pay for internships for students, um, to get that opportunity with our employers and also partner with our employers that they're paying obviously a percentage of that, too. >>You know, one of the things I've observed over my, um, career 54 times around the sun is you know, in the old days when I was in college in school, you had career people have longer jobs, as you mentioned. Not like that anymore. But also I knew someone I'm gonna be in line to get that job, maybe nepotism or things of that nature. Now the jobs have no historical thing or someone worked longer in a job and has more seniority. Ah, >>lot of these >>jobs. Stewart don't HAVA requirements like no one's done them before. So the ability for someone who, um, is jumping in either from any college, there's no riel. It's all level set. It's like complete upside down script here. It's not like, Oh, I went to school. Therefore I get the job you could be Anyone could walk into these careers because the jobs air so new. So it's not where you came from or what school you went to or your nationality or gender. The jobs have been democratized. They're not discriminating against people with skills. So this opens up mawr. How >>do you >>see that? Because this really is an opportunity for this next generation to be more diverse and to be mawr contributed because diversity brings expertise and different perspectives. Your thoughts on that? >>Absolutely. And that was one of the things we welcome. Obviously we want to make sure that that everybody is treated equally and that the employers view everyone as employer employer of choice but an employee of choices. Well, we've also been looking at, as I mentioned before on the COVITZ situation, looking at ways that books that are maybe any stuck in jobs that are don't have a huge career pathway or they don't have a pathway out of poverty. I mean, we have a lot of working for people in the state of California, Um, that may now do to cope and lost their employment. Uh, this, you know, Let's let's turn back to the old, you know? Let's try, eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. How do we take those folks and get them employed into jobs that do have a good career pathway? And it's not about just who you knew or who you might have an in with to get that job. It is based on skills, I think, though that said there we need to have a better way to actually match those jobs up with those employers. And I think those are the long, ongoing conversations with those employer groups to make sure that one that they see those skill sets is valid and important. Um, they're helping design this crew sets with us, eh? So that they do match up and that were quickly matching up those close skills. That so that we're not training people for yesterday skills. >>I think the employer angles super important, but also the educators as well. One of the things that was asked in another question by the gas they they said. She said The real question to ask is, how early do you start exposing the next generation? You mentioned K through 12. Do you have any data or insight into or intuition or best practice of where that insertion point is without exposure? Point is, is that middle school is a elementary, obviously high school. Once you're in high school, you got your training. Wheels are off, you're off to the races. But is there a best practice? What's your thoughts? Stewart On exposure level to these kinds of new cyber and technical careers? >>Sure, absolutely. I I would say kindergarten. We San Bernardino has a program that they've been running for a little bit of time, and they're exposing students K through 12 but really starting in kindergarten. One is the exposure Thio. What a job Looks like Andi actually have. I've gone down to that local area and I've had three opportunity to see you know, second graders in a health care facility, Basically that they have on campus, built in on dear going from one workstation as a second grader, Uh, looking at what those skills would be and what that job would entail from a nurse to a Dr Teoh physician's assistant in really looking at what that is. Um you know, obviously they're not getting the training that the doctor gets, but they are getting the exposure of what that would be. Andi, I think that is amazing. And I think it's the right place to start. Um, it was really interesting because I left. This was pre covet, but I jumped on the plane to come back up north. I was thinking to myself, How do we get this to all school district in California, where we see that opportunity, um, to expose jobs and skill sets to kids throughout the system and develop the skill set so that they do understand that they have an opportunity. >>We're here at Cal Poly Space and Cybersecurity Symposium. We have educators. We have, um, students. We have industry and employers and government together. What's your advice to them all watching and listening about the future of work. Let's work force. What can people do? What do you think you're enabling? What can maybe the private sector help with And what are you trying to do? Can you share your thoughts on that? Because we have a range from the dorm room to the boardroom here at this event. Love to get your thoughts on the workforce development view of this. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the mix. I mean, I think it's going to take industry to lead A in a lot of ways, in terms of understanding what their needs are and what their needs are today and what they will be tomorrow. I think it takes education, toe listen, and to understand and labor and workforce development also listen and understand what those needs will look like. And then how do we move systems? How do we move systems quickly? How do we move systems in a way that meets those needs? How do we, uh, put money into systems where the most need is, but also looking at trends? What is that trend going to look like in two years? What does that train gonna look like in five years. But that's again listening to those employers. Um, it's also the music community based organizations. I think, obviously some of our best students are also linked to CBS. And one way or another, it may be for services. It maybe for, uh, faith based. It may be anything, but I think we also need to bring in the CBS is Well, ah, lot of outreach goes through those systems in conjunction with, but I think that's the key component is to make sure that our employers are heard on. But they sit at the table like you said to the boardroom of understanding, and I think bringing students into that so that they get a true understanding of what that looks like a well, um, is a key piece of this. >>So one of the things I want to bring up with you is maybe a bit more about the research side of it. But, um, John Markoff, who was a former New York Times reporter with author of the book What the Dormouse, said It was a book about the counter culture of the sixties and the computer revolution, and really there was about how government defense spending drove the computer revolution that we now saw with Apple and PC, and then the rest is history in California has really participated. Stanford, uh, Berkeley and the University of California School system and all the education community colleges around it. That moment, the enablement. And now you're seeing space kind of bringing that that are a lot of research coming in and you eat a lot of billionaires putting money in. You got employers playing a role. You have this new focus space systems, cybersecurity, defending and making it open and and not congested and peaceful is going to enable quickly new inflection points for opportunities. E want to get your thoughts on that? Because California is participate in drove these revolutions that created massive value This next wave seems to be coming upon us. >>Yeah, absolutely. And again, Nazis covered again as too much of ah starting point to this. But I think that is also an opportunity to actually, because I think one of the things that we were seeing seven months ago was a skill shortage, and we still see the skills shortage, obviously. But I think a key piece to that is we saw people shortage. Not only was it skills shortage, but we didn't have enough people really to fill positions in addition to and I think that people also felt they were already paying the bills and they were making ends meet and they didn't have the opportunities. Thio get additional skills This again is where we're looking at. You know that our world has changed. It changed in the sixties based on what you're you're just expressing in terms of California leading the way. Let's like California lead the way again in developing a system from which labor, workforce development with our universities are, you know, are amazing universities and community college system and structure of how do we get students back into school? You know, a lot of graduates may already have a degree, but how do they now take a skill so that they already have and develop that further with the idea that they those jobs have changed? Whales have a lot of folks that don't have a degree, and that's okay. But how do we make that connection to a system that may have failed? Ah, lot of our people over the years, um, and our students who didn't make it through the school system. How do we develop in adult training school? How do we develop contract education through our community college system with our employer sets that we developed cohorts within those systems of of workers that have amazing talents and abilities to start to fill these needs? And I think that's the key components of hearing Agency, Labor, Workforce Development Agency. We work with our community. Colleges are UCS in our state universities t develop and figure that piece out, and I think it is our opportunity for the future. >>That's such a great point. I want to call that out This whole opportunity to retrain people that are out there because these air new jobs, I think that's a huge opportunity, and and I hope you keep building and investing in those programs. That's that's really worth calling out. Thank you for doing that. And, yeah, it's a great opportunity. Thes jobs they pay well to cyber security is a good job, and you don't really need to have that classical degree. You can learn pretty quickly if you're smart. So again, great call out there question for you on geography, Um, mentioned co vid we're talking about Covic. Virtualization were virtual with this conference. We couldn't be in person. People are learning virtually, but people are starting to relocate virtually. And so one observation that I have is the space state that California is there space clusters of areas where space people hang out or space spaces and whatnot. Then you got, like, the tech community cybersecurity market. You know, Silicon Valley is a talented in these hubs, and sometimes cyber is not always in the same hubs of space. Maybe Silicon Valley has some space here, Um, and some cyber. But that's not generally the case. This is an opportunity potentially to intersect. What's your thoughts on this? Because this is This is something that we're seeing where your space has historical, you know, geography ease. Now, with borderless communication, the work boat is not so much. You have to move the space area. You know what I'm saying? So okay. What's your thoughts on this? How do you guys look at this? Is on your radar On how you're viewing this this dynamic? >>It's absolute on our radar, Like you said, you know, here we are talking virtually on and, you know, 75% of all of our staff currently in some of our department that 80% of our staff are now virtual. Um you know, seven months ago, uh, we were not were government again being slow move, we quickly transitioned. Obviously, Thio being able to have a tele work capacity. We know employers move probably even quickly, more quickly than we did, but we see that as an opportunity for our rural areas. Are Central Valley are north state um, inland Empire that you're absolutely correct. I mean, if you didn't move to a city or to a location for which these jobs were really housed, um, you didn't have an opportunity like you do today. I think that's a piece that we really need to work with our education partners on of to be able to see how much this has changed. Labor agency absolutely recognizes this. We are investing funding in the Central Valley. We're investing funding in the North State and empire to really look a youth populations of how the new capacity that we have today is gonna be utilized for the future for employers. But we also have to engage our universities around. This is well, but mostly are employers. I know that they're already very well aware. I know that a lot of our large employers with, um, Silicon Valley have already done their doing almost 100% tele work policies. Um, but the affordability toe live in rural areas in California. Also, it enables us to have, ah, way thio make products more affordable is, well, potentially in the future. But we want to keep California businesses healthy and whole in California. Of course, on that's another way we can We can expand and keep California home to our 40 plus million people, >>most to a great, great work. And congratulations for doing such a great job. Keep it up. I gotta ask about the governor. I've been following his career since he's been office. A za political figure. Um, he's progressive. He's cutting edge. He likes toe rock the boat a little bit here and there, but he's also pragmatic. Um, you're starting to see government workers starting to get more of a tech vibe. Um um just curious from your perspective. How does the governor look at? I mean, the old, almost the old guard. But like you know, used to be. You become a lawyer, become a lawmaker Now a tech savvy lawmaker is a premium candidates, a premium person in government, you know, knowing what COBOL is. A start. I mean, these are the things. As we transform and evolve our society, we need thinkers who can figure out which side the streets, self driving cars go on. I mean, who does that? I mean, it's a whole another generation off thinking. How does the Governor how do you see this developing? Because this is the challenge for society. How does California lead? How do you guys talk about the leadership vision of Why California and how will you lead the future? >>Absolutely no governor that I'm aware of that I've been around for 26 27 years of workforce development has led with an innovation background, as this governor has a special around technology and the use of technology. Uh, you know, he's read a book about the use of technology when he was lieutenant governor, and I think it's really important for him that we, as his his staff are also on the leading edge of technology. I brought a badge. I'll systems. Earlier, when I was under the Brown administration, we had moved to where I was at a time employment training panel. We moved to an agile system and deported that one of the first within within the state to do that and coming off of an old legacy system that was an antique. Um, I will say it is challenging. It's challenging on a lot of levels. Mostly the skill sets that are folks have sometimes are not open to a new, agile system to an open source system is also an issue in government. But this governor, absolutely. I mean, he has established three Office of Digital Innovation, which is part of California and department technology, Um, in partnership with and that just shows how much he wants. Thio push our limits to make sure that we are meeting the needs of Californians. But it's also looking at, you know, Silicon Valley being at the heart of our state. How do we best utilize systems that already there? How do we better utilize the talent from those those folks is well, we don't always pay as well as they dio in the state. But we do have great benefit packages. Everybody does eso If anybody's looking for a job, we're always looking for technology. Folks is well on DSO I would say that this governor, absolute leads in terms of making sure that we will be on cutting edge of technology for the nation, >>you know, and, you know, talk about pay. I mean, I know it's expensive to live in some parts of California, but there's a huge young population that wants a mission driven job and serving, um, government for the governments. Awesome. Ah, final parting question for you, Stuart, is, as you look at, um, workforce. Ah, lot of people are passionate about this, and it's, you know, you you can't go anywhere without people saying, You know, we got to do education this way and that way there's an opinion everywhere you go. Cybersecurity is a little bit peaked and focused, but there are people who are paying attention to education. So I have to ask you, what creative ways can people get involved and contribute to workforce development? Whether it's stem underrepresented minorities, people are looking for new, innovative ways to contribute. What advice would you give these people who have the passion to contribute to the next cyber workforce. >>Yeah, I appreciate that question, because I think is one of the key components. But my secretary, Julie Sue, secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Agency, talks about often, and a couple of us always have these conversations around. One is getting people with that passion to work in government one or on. I brought it up community based organizations. I think I think so many times, um, that we didn't work with our CBS to the level of in government we should. This administration is very big on working with CBS and philanthropy groups to make sure that thing engagement those entities are at the highest level. So I would say, You know, students have opportunities. Thio also engage with local CBS and be that mission what their values really drives them towards Andi. That gives them a couple of things to do right. One is to look at what ways that we're helping society in one way or another through the organizations, but it also links them thio their own mission and how they could develop those skills around that. But I think the other piece to that is in a lot of these companies that you are working with and that we work with have their own foundations. So those foundations are amazing. We work with them now, especially in the new administration. More than we ever have, these foundations are really starting to help develop are strategies. My secretary works with a large number of foundations already. Andi, when we do is well in terms of strategy, really looking at, how do we develop young people's attitudes towards the future but also skills towards the future? >>Well, you got a pressure cooker of a job. I know how hard it is. I know you're working hard, appreciate you what you do and and we wish you the best of luck. Thank you for sharing this great insight on workforce development. And you guys working hard. Thank you for what you do. Appreciate it. >>Thank you so much. Thistle's >>three cube coverage and co production of the space and cybersecurity supposed in 2020 Cal Poly. I'm John for with silicon angle dot com and the Cube. Thanks for watching

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE! Covering the Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Upgrade 2020. It's the NTT Research Summit covering a lot of really deep topics around a lot of the basic core research that NTT is sponsoring. Kind of like the old days of Mobell or some of the other kind of core research. And we're excited to have our next guest to go. A little bit beyond the core research and actually talk about working with people today. So we'd like to welcome in Alex Bennett. He is the global senior vice president of the intelligent workplace for NTT. Alex, good morning? >> Good morning, Jeff. How are you doing. >> Terrific. So I think for a lot of people, you know, probably know the NTT name, certainly in the States, but are not familiar with, I think, you know, the degree of which you guys have this huge business around services and workplace collaboration, I wonder if you can give us kind of a high level summary of the services angle at NTT, you know, beyond just putting in communications infrastructure equipment. >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, the NTT, as you said, is it's a huge organization, Very well known in Japan and growing in last year that we brought together about 32 different brands under the entity limited brand and we have NTT data services as well. So our role is really to look at the client requirements, the business needs that they have and be able to provide end to end solutions and wrap them with our services to make sure they've got, you know, efficiency gains, but also improving employee experience and experience around, you know, improving how they connect to their customers as well. >> Right, right. So obviously COVID-19, what was, you know, kind of a light switch moment back in March has now turned into, you know, kind of an ongoing, a new normal here we are six months plus into this, into this thing, really no end in sight in the immediate term. So, you know, people were thrown into the situation where work from home, work from anywhere had to happen with no prep. You've been in the business for a long time working on solutions. So there's the obvious things like security and access, but what are some of the less obvious things that people should be thinking about when they think about supporting their employees that are not now coming into the office? >> Well, I mean, it's been interesting, right. I said I have been in the sector for a long time and a lot of the themes have been the same for the last 10, 15 years, you know, how do we improve employee experience? How do we start to look at things like wellbeing? You know, how does it have an impact on productivity? And how do you make sure that we make it simple for people to carry out their tasks? Now, something I get asked a lot is this idea of how do we make it frictionless? A lot of the time, people don't really care about the brand or the technology. They just want to be able to carry out their role from whatever industry sector they aren't doing it efficiently and do it well, but also to be able to interact. I think it's been really important. And this pandemic has brought about this view, that people haven't been able to socialize in the same way they have in the past and work is really about people, you know, the workplace is also about people and how you connect those people into customers and provide efficiencies in that area. So the conversations I've been having in the last, you know, six to seven months, it's been quite interesting that the programs they were taking 18 months, 24 months, 36 months over, have had to be accelerated and really deployed in about three months. And then that's brought about the lows of operation on policy concerns. So as you mentioned, as you start to have this new, what we're calling, you know, distributed workforce, especially those organizations which have been perhaps more enterprise specific, you know, which are going into carpeted office environments, they've been requested by governments to only work from home. And that's brought about a huge impact to how people work, but also socialize. So from a technology standpoint, you've asked people, right, you're going to work from home, actually, do you have network connectivity? Can you actually connect with a technology tool? Like, you know, collaboration to be able to speak to your customers, to speak to your GOPs. Now what device are you actually working on? So we saw this real drive around what is this sort of immediate business continuity requirement for a secure remote worker. >> Right. And that brought about other concerns as well. >> Right. So there's so many layers to this conversation. I'm psyched to dig into it. But one of the ones I want to dig in is kind of tools overload, you know, this idea of collaboration and, you know, trying to get your work done and trying to get bears removed. At the same time though, it just can't seems like we just keep getting more tools added to the palette that we have to interact with every day, whether it's lack or a sauna or Salesforce or box, or you know, the list goes on and on and on. And the other thing that just seems strange to me is that right, all of these things have a notification component. So it's almost like the noise is increasing. I don't hear a lot of people ripping out old tooling or ripping out old systems. So how do you help guide people to say, that there's all these great collaboration tools, there's all these great communication tools, but you can't have all of them firing all the time and expect people to actually have time to get work done. >> Yeah. And it's also, you know, some people are used to that, you might have a digital native who's used to using multiple tools, but you don't have others that actually haven't been taught or a learning program about how to use different tools for different applications. And that becomes that person becomes frustrated and their productivity levels can go down. I think that what we'd really try and do is understand what are the business requirements by the persona? And also if you think of that distributed worker, that's now having to work from home and go into the office for specific tasks that are allowed, are they a sales person? No. Are they actually working in HR? What do they need and what are the tasks they need? And that start to provide the right types of tools and technology specifically for them and make sure they have a learning path that's driven around how they actually enable that technology. But you're right though. I think one of the thing that COVID founder's that doesn't happen overnight, you know, that's an engagement process. COVID hit and everyone was at home straight away. So we did see this huge transition from what may have been a legacy on premise application to starting to use more cloud based applications. And almost everyone was thrown in at the deep pant. Right? Well, here you go, just get on and use it. And at the same time they had WeChat or they had no other types of applications like WhatsApp and there were all these channels were happening. And they always had an impact on things like compliance and security, because all of a sudden, you're not using a corporately approved platform and solution. And you're starting to talk about perhaps confidential information. That's not in a way that is actually retained inside of a corporate network for the compliance and regulatory components. Right. So it's been a really interesting time in the last few months. >> Right. Well, so let's just touch on security for a minute. 'Cause obviously security is a huge concern. As you said, there's a whole bunch of security. You get kind of new security issues. One is just, everybody's working from home, whether they've got to VPN or not, or they're on their... You know, whatever their cable provider. You don't know what devices they're on, right? There's so many different devices and too as these apps have proliferated all over all these devices, whether access Salesforce on my phone or on my laptop or on my computer at work. Right. All very different. So when you look at the kind of security challenge that has come from distributed workforce with this super acceleration, you know, how many customers are ready for it, it's just caused a complete, you know, kind of fire, a hair on fire reaction to get up to speed, or, you know, are a lot of the systems of the monitored system relatively well locked down. So it wasn't a giant, you know, kind of adjustment back in March. >> Really. It depends on the type of company culture it was before. You know, what we've actually seen from some research we've done very recently across 1500 different companies, those organizations that have really invested become more digital disruptors. Now that they've embedded an idea of agility, they've actually already got a distributed workforce. They've already started to move a lot of their platforms and applications to the cloud. They've started to think about these IT policies and security. Previously, they've been very successful in how they've been able to pivot and drive this business continuity. I think for others that have been, no have large installed base of employees, no have set policies in place it's been harder for them to transition. And what we've seen is that they're the organizations that have really tried to integrate some of the new technologies into the old and that that's quite difficult sometimes. So, you know, around security, out of those 1500 organizations, nearly 70% of them said that they have a higher level of risk and concern about this. You're already in compliance today than they had prior to the pandemic. >> Right. >> What also is brought about is this idea of moving from a sort of perimeter security now where you'd come into an office and you have this perimeter where the network's secure, the physical location, and security, containerize the applications. And you've got to empower employees more now because you know, people are going to be mobile. They're going to be using multiple devices in different locations, all around the world. So we're seeing this transition as people move to cloud based platform, security is starting to get embedded into the application and it goes back to that persona aspect. So you can start to initiate things like you know, data loss protection and rights management about the content an individual has based on their location or the confidentiality of that document or piece of information. So that's where we're seeing this move is sort of really accelerating to the group, take the stress away from the employee embedded into an actual system and an application. And that has the intelligence to work out the security and the compliance on behalf of the individual. >> Right. You know, where I was going to go is, you know, there's a lot of conversations now about certain companies announcing that people can just work from home for the foreseeable future, especially here in Silicon Valley. And you mentioned that, you know, for some people that were already kind of down at digital transformation path, they're in good shape. Other people, you know, weren't that far, and of course all the means on social media are, you know, what drove your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know the answer to the question. So I just want to get, you know, kind of a longterm perspective. You've been in this space for a long time. I think there's going to be, you know, a significantly increased percentage of people that are working from home. A significantly increased percentage of the time, if not a hundred percent of the time. How do you see this kind of, you know, extending out and how will it impact the way that people motivate? 'Cause at the end of the day, you've written a ton of blog posts on this, you know, motivation equals profitability. And a motivated engaged people do better work and do get better results on the bottom line. How do you see this as this as (indistinct) rules for six months, 12 months, 24 months, when there's some mishmash of combination of work from home and work from the office? >> I think probably the first thing to say is that from the research we've done, we think that's going to differ by different geographies. I mean, it's interesting when you look at areas like India and perhaps South Africa where the network connectivity home is actually not as good as in Northern Europe or North America, and actually it becomes quite hard to carry out your role and task at home. And it can become really frustrating. There's also sort of health and safety components to also working at home. Now we've had a lot of people, especially the younger generation who are in shared home, shared facilities. Now who's going to pay for the internet, the bundles, you know, and actually you only have your bedroom and is it healthy to work at your bedroom all day? So when you really sort of peel back the layers of this, this is a really complex environment, and it's also dependent on the industry sector you are. You're actually driving. But at a high level, one thing we're really seeing is most people still want to have a level of human interaction. That we as humans like to like to work together and engage together. And in fact, about 80% of the respondents of our report actually said, they want to come back to the office. Now this, this speaks to this idea of choice and flexibility. 'Cause it's not just about coming back for five days a week, eight to five, it's about going actually I've got a task to carry out. It'd be really helpful if I was with my team face to face. >> Right. >> And I can come in for four hours, book my time in that physical space, carry that out, and then I can go home and do that sort of really the research based work which I can do in the safety of my own environment. So that's what we're seeing across the industry whereas before. Now, I think everyone's trying to build these really nice big offices that looked fantastic, more huge and talked about your brand. Most organizations now are repurposing space 'cause they're not going to have as many people inside of those physical locations, but they're motivating for them to come in for creative work, you know, to be social, to think about how they do cross agile team development. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that's what we're starting to see today. >> Yeah. It's really interesting you think of some young engineer that just graduated from school, gets a job at Google and you know, you get all your food there and they'll do your dry cleaning and they'll change the oil in your car and they'll, you know, take care of everything. And, and so there's this little growth in these little micro houses. Well guess what, now you don't have any of that stuff anymore. The micro house with no kitchen or kitchen that does look so attractive. And I want to shift gears a little bit more detail on NTT. You know, we've talked to lots of people about new ways to work. IBM, Citrix, you know, VM-ware has a solution and you work with big company. So how does NTT fit in, you know, kind of a transformation process big and that on the big scale, but more kind of an employee engagement and a work from anywhere type of engagement. How do you guys fit within, you know, big system integrators, like a center that are driving organizational change and, you know, kind of all this other suite of technology that they might already have in place. >> Yeah. I mean, we sort of sit in that role of a service delivery organization as well as systems integrator. So our role is to actually go into those clients and sit down with them, which is now virtually, rather than in person a lot of the time. And really understand what are those business KPIs they have and help them shape that strategy. And to do that, you've got to understand what they have today, that view of the assets. And that goes across multiple components as you said, from, you know, desktop application, security, inclusive of culture, property assets, network. And what we do is really take a holistic view of those areas that go for you to reach that business goal, that KPI, you know, this is the project that you're going to have to do. And anything around employee engagement ultimately is fed also by how good your network is and how secure that network is to deliver those applications efficiently for that employee to carry out their task in that frictionless way. So we have a very holistic view about how we then deliver Upgrade. That the core infrastructure, we do that secure by design is our sort of policy and everything we do, you know, security is embedded into what we do, and then we deliver that outcome. But then we erupt things like adoption services. I think one thing in the past, you know, people say here's a technology, go on and do it. Especially nowadays, you've got quite complex platforms. You've got to really understand how do you give information to people to self serve them, that sort of nudge technology, so they can understand how to carry it out on that idea of adoption training. Change of management is becoming ever increasingly important for our clients. >> Right. So I wan shift gears again, Alex, and talk about the show Upgrade 2020. Lot of (laughs) a lot of really heavy science going on here in healthcare, in IT, in a whole bunch of areas. Pretty exciting stuff, you know, we've talked to some other guests about some of the real details and I'm definitely going to attend some sessions and have my brain exploded I'm sure. But I'm just curious of how it fits with what your doing, you know, you've been involved, as you said, not necessarily the NTT, but you've been involved in kind of workplace collaboration tools for a long, long time. You know, how do you see, you know, kind of basic research and some of this really fundamental research, you know, kind of helping you and your customers and your solutions, you know, as we kind of moved down the road. >> Alright, hold at that. The main conversation we're having with executives today is this idea of employee wellbeing and experience is fundamental to the success of their business. 'Cause it drives customer centricity productivity gains. You've got to think about how technology can underpin that and deliver insights to you. So, you know, the new currency is data. And what I find really interesting around and what we're talking about with Upgrade 2020 is this ideas of digital twins. So when you think of this concept of a digital twin, it all is based on this idea of extensibility. So all your decisions that you're making right to today, you know, these short term decisions you having to do for business continuity, you've got to think about the longterm impact of how you're going to be able to ingest that data from all those systems into a central area, to give you insight. Now, from that insight, you've then got the, you know, the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to actually say right, for this component how many of my employees really are? Then well, are they doing well in the productivity gains? And from my property estate, you know, how many of my properties are actually reducing the energy consumption? And are we adhering to our sustainability goals? Are they well? So the actual physical environment is safe for those employees. So all of those disparate platforms have to come together into that one area and give you insight. So that the marrying of physical space with the how humans interact all into a digital twin, I think is really interesting and something I'm speaking to clients about day in, day out. >> I love that, that is awesome. You know, we're first exposed to the digital twin concept years ago, doing some work with general electric, because they were doing a lot of digital twin work around, you know, engines on airplanes and, you know, simulate an airplane engine that's running on a plane in the Middle East, it's going to act very different than a plane that's running in Alaska. And then, you know, I love the concept of digital twin around the context of people in medicine, right. And modeling a heart or modeling a behavior system or cardiovascular system. How are you talking about digital twins? 'Cause it sounds like you're talking about kind of a combination between, you know, kind of individual people and how they're doing versus some group of people as a unit or organization. And then you even mentioned, you know, sustainability goals and buildings. So when you're talking about digital twin in this context, what are the boundaries? How are you organizing that thing that you can then do, you know, kind of tests and kind of predictive exercises to see how the real thing is going to do relative to what the digital twin did. >> Yeah. But it goes back to defining those business outcomes. And most of the discussions we're having is, yeah, obviously increased productivity, but it's also a reducing costs. A big one we've seen in my area is attraction retention of talent. You know, intellectual property is going to differentiate organizations in the future as technology sort of standardizes. But sustainability again from the research we've done is really high up on the executives agenda. You know, the idea that we, as NTT as well, we have a duty to society to actually start giving back a view of how technology can improve the sustainability goal. And in fact, we've just become the business Avenger for the UN sustainability goal, number 11, around the idea of communities and smart cities. So the clients that I'm speaking to when they're looking at those business objectives are no 10, 15% of my, my actual costs associated to my property. We've now got a new distributed workforce, but I've got a huge amount of energy going into those properties. Now we can actually connect now building management systems into now that digital twin. We can also start to look at the other platforms such as lifts, you know, also all the heating and air ventilation. And start to get the data that allows us to model and predict when certain issues may occur. So, you know, as less people start coming in, you'll have occupancy data. You'll be able to say, you're actually, this location has only been used 30% capacity. We could reduce the amount of space we have, or in fact, we don't need that space at all. And in that space, we know that we're running an HVAC system and air conditioning a hundred percent of the time. You start to actually reduce that and you can reduce energy consumption by 30%. Now goes back to this whole idea of extensibility on one building that can have a big impact, but across 500 buildings that we're NTT have, that's a significant amount of energy that we can change. >> Jeff: Right. >> And also you can then start to think about the idea of, you know, more different type of power purchasing agreement with sustainable energy going into those environments. >> So many, you know, kind of so many interesting twists and turns on this journey since, you know, that COVID hit. And it is going to be really fascinating to see kind of what sticks and, you know, and the longterm ramifications. 'Cause we're not going back to the way that it was. I think that's not even a question. Just the last thing on kind of the data, you know, we saw some really, I think not such great things early on in this thing where, you know, you get put us basically a sniffer on and you know, our people sitting in front of their computer all day. I saw some nasty thing on Twitter the other day. My boss wants me to be on Zoom calls all day long. I mean, do people get it that, you know, there's an opportunity to increase motivation, not decrease motivation by, you know, a responsible use and a good use of this data versus, you know, a potential perception of, well now they're just big brothering me to death. >> It's such a hot topic, right? I mean, even before COVID we had, you know, the GDPR compliance in Europe. But that ultimately is a global compliance and the West coast America also got a similar one now about what data you're actually keeping about me as an individual. And I should have access to that and I can not speak to my company about it. And is it big brother or actually using that data to help inform me as an individual ways of improving the way I work or working in a way that has a better balance for me as an individual. And we're having these conversations with our clients right now about how we do this, because they having to work with workers counselors in countries like Germany. Because track and trace does have that view of that sort of big brother. What, where are you? What are you doing? And how long have you been on your computer? I think it's down to the culture of your business and the purpose that you have and how you engage with your employees, that you show that data to be about all benefiting them as an individual. Now, I'm going back to that digital twin, that the view of ingesting data, then from perhaps platforms like, you know, Cisco WebEx or Office 365, and you can see how long they are actually in front of their screen. You can then start to predict and see where you may have burnout or in fact affect change where you say RHR policy should dictate, you shouldn't be working 14 hours a day. That's not good for you. It's not good for us. And actually nudge them and teach them about taking no time away from the desk and actually having a better work balance. And that's important because it all goes back to increases the productivity longterm, but it's great brand association and it's good for attraction and retention of talent. >> Right, Right. Well, I think the retention and attraction is a huge thing. You keep talking about productivity and obviously in your blog post talking about engagement, right. And engagement is such a direct tie to that. And then at the bottom line (giggles) it's kind of like diversity of opinion. It actually makes good business sense. And you actually put more money in the bank at the end of the day, when you do some of these more progressive, you know, kind of approaches to how you manage the people. 'Cause they're not machines, they're people. >> Yeah. And you should allow them to make decisions. You know, that again, distributed working, you've got to think of how to empower them with the tools that gives them the choice to make decisions. And you know, that that decision making is more democratized inside of organizations that are successful. But if you don't have the technology that allows them to do that, it goes back to a hierarchical decision making. And that takes time, it's slower to market, and then you know, you're not as successful as your competition. So we're really trying to prove that this idea of thinking about people first using the data that backs it up you know, with empirical data to show the benefits, is the way forward for organizations today. >> Yeah. Alex, great conversation. Certainly nothing but opportunity (laughs) I had for you and what you do in this really fast evolving and transformative space, which is so important. Which is how do people work? How do they feel good? How are they engaged? How are they productive and really contribute? And at the end of the day, it is good business. So exciting times, good luck on the show and some of this crazy research coming out of it on the digital twin, and we look forward to continuing to watch the story unfold. >> Thank you very much, Jeff. >> Alright. He's Alex. I'm Jeff. You're watching Upgrade 2020. The continuous coverage from theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! Covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020. Hosted by Cal Poly. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, put on by Cal Poly and hosted with SiliconANGLE theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California for a virtual conference. Couldn't happen in person this year, I'm John Furrier, your host. The intersection of space and cybersecurity, obviously critical topics, great conversations. We've got a great guest here to talk about the addressing the cybersecurity workforce gap. And we have a great guest, and a feature speaker, Stewart Knox, the undersecretary with California's Labor and Workforce Development Office. Stewart, thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you so much, John. I appreciate your time today and listening to a little bit of our quandaries with making sure that we have the security that's necessary for the state of California and making sure that we have the workforce that is necessary for cybersecurity in space. >> Great. I'd love to get started. I've got a couple of questions for you, but first take a few minutes for an opening statement to set the stage. >> Sure, realizing that in California, we lead the nation in much of cybersecurity based on Department of Defense contractors within the state of California, leading the nation with over 160 billion dollars within the industry just here in California alone and having over 800,000 plus workers full time employment in the state of California is paramount for us to make sure that we face defense manufacturers, approximately 700,000 jobs that are necessary to be filled. There's over 37,000 vacancies that we know of in California, just alone in cybersecurity. And so we look forward to making sure that California Workforce Development Agency is leading the charge to make sure that we have equity in those jobs and that we are also leading in a way that brings good jobs to California and to the people of California, a good education system that is developed in a way that those skills are necessarily met for the employers here in California, and the nation. >> One of the exciting things about California is obviously look at Silicon Valley, Hewlett Packard and the garage story, history, space, it's been a space state, many people recognize California. You mentioned defense contractors. It's well rooted with history, just breakthroughs, bases, technology companies in California. And now you've got technology. This is the cybersecurity angle. Take a minute to give some more commentary to that because that's really notable, and as the workforce changes, these two worlds are coming together and sometimes they're in the same place, sometimes they're not. This is super exciting and a new dynamic that's driving opportunities. Could you share some color commentary on that dynamic? >> Absolutely. And you're so correct. I think in California, we lead the nation in the way that we develop programs, that our companies lead in the nation in so many ways around cyberspace, cybersecurity in so many different areas, for which in the Silicon Valley is just such a leader and those companies are good, qualified companies to do so. Obviously one of the places we play a role is to make sure that those companies have a skilled workforce. And also that the security of those systems are in place for our defense contractors and for the feeder companies, those outlying entities that are providing such key resources to those companies are also leading on a cutting edge for the future. Also again, realizing that we need to expand our training and skills to make sure that those California companies continue to lead, is just such a great initiative. And I think through apprenticeship training programs, and looking at our community college systems, I think that we will continue to lead the nation as we move forward. >> You know, we've had many conversations here in this symposium virtually, certainly around the everyday life of a consumer is impacted by space. You know, we get our car service, Uber, Lyft, we have maps, we have all this technology that was born out of defense contracts and R and D that really changed generations and created a lot of great societal value. Okay, now with space kind of going to the next generation, it's easier to get stuff into space. The security of the systems is now going to be not only paramount for quality of life, but defending that, and the skills are needed in cybersecurity to defend that. And the gap is there. What can we do to highlight the opportunities for career paths? It used to be the day where you get a mechanical engineering degree or aerospace and you graduate and you go get a job, not anymore. There's a variety of paths, career-wise. What can we do to highlight this career path? >> Absolutely correct. And I think it starts, you know, K through 12 system. And I know a lot of the work that (indistinct) and other entities are doing currently. This is where we need to bring our youth into an age where they're teaching us, right, as we become older, on the uses of technology, but it's also teaching where the levels of those education can take them, K through 12, but it's also looking at how the community college system links to that. And then the university system links above and beyond, but it's also engaging our employers. You know, one of the key components, obviously as the employers play a role, for which we can start to develop strategies that best meet their needs quickly. I think that's one of the comments we hear the most, at Labor Agency is how we don't provide a change as fast as we should, especially in technology. You know, we buy computers today and they're outdated tomorrow. It's the same with the technology that's in those computers is that those students are going to be the leaders within that to really develop how those structures are in place. So K through 12 is probably our primary place to start, but also continuing that past the K-12 system. And I bring up the employers and I bring them up in a way, because many times when we've had conversations with employers around what their skills needs were and how do we develop those better? One of the pieces of that, that I think really should be recognized, many times they recognize that they wanted a four year degree, potentially, or a five year or six year degree. But then when we really looked at the skillsets, someone coming out of the community college system could meet those skillsets. And I think we need to have those conversations to make sure, not that they shouldn't be continuing their education. They absolutely should. But how do we get those skillsets built into this into a K-12 plus the two year plus the four year person? >> Yeah, I love the democratization of these new skills, because again, there's no pattern matching 'cause they weren't around before, right? So you got to look at the exposure, to your point, K through 12 exposure, but then there's an exploration piece of it, whether it's community college or whatever progression, and sometimes it's nonlinear, right? I mean, people are learning different ways, combining the exposure and the exploration. That's a big topic. Can you share your view on this? Because this now opens up more doors for people, choice, you got new avenues, you got online, I can get a cloud computing degree now from Amazon and walk in and help. I can be, you know, security clearance possibly in college. So, you know, you get exposure. Is there certain things you see, is it early on? Middle school? And then obviously the exploration, those are two important concepts. Can you unpack that a little bit, exposure and exploration of skills? >> Absolutely, and I think this takes place not only in the K-12 system, but it takes place in our community colleges and our four year universities is that, that connection with those employers is such a key component, that if there's a way we could build in internships, work experiences, what we call on the job training programs, apprenticeship training, pre-apprenticeship training programs, into a design where those students at all levels are getting an exposure to the opportunities within the space and cybersecurity avenue. I think that right there alone will start to solve a problem of having 37 plus thousand openings at any one time in California. Also, I get that there's a burden on employers to do that. And I think that's a piece that we have to acknowledge, and I think that's where education can play a larger role. That's a place we at Labor Workforce Development Agency play a role with our apprenticeship training programs, our pre-apprenticeship training programs. I could go on all day of all of our training programs that we have within the state of California. Many of the list of your partners on this endeavor are partners with Employment Training Panel, which I used to be the director of the Brown administration of. That program alone does incumbent worker training. And so that also is an exposure place where a worker may be, you know, I use the old adage of sweeping the floors one day and potentially writing a large portion of the business, within years. But it's that exposure that that employee gets through training programs, and acknowledging those skill sets and where their opportunities are, is what's valid and important. I think that's where our students, we need to play a larger role than the K-12 system, really, to get that pushed out there. >> It's funny, here in California, you were the robotics clubs in high school are like a varsity sport, you're seeing kids exposed early on with programming, but it's, you know, this whole topic of cybersecurity and space intersection around workforce, and the gaps in the skills, it's not just for the young, certainly the young generation's got to be exposed to what the careers could be and what the possible jobs and societal impact and contributions, what they could be, but also it's people who are already out there. You know, you have retraining, re-skilling, this plays an important role. I know you guys do a lot of thinking on this as the undersecretary, you have to look at this because you know, you don't want to have a label "old and antiquated" systems. And a lot of them are, and they're evolving and they're being modernized by digital transformation. So what does the role of retraining and skill development for these programs play? Can you share what you guys are working on and your vision for that? >> Absolutely. That's a great question. 'Cause I think that is where we play a large role, obviously in California and with COVID-19 is we are faced with today that we've never seen before. At least in my 27 years of running programs, similar to all workforce and economic development, we are having such a large number of people displaced currently that it's unprecedented, we've got employment rates to where we are. We're really looking at how do we take, and we're also going to see industries not return to the level for which they stood at one point in time, you know, entertainment industries, restaurants, all of the alike, really looking at how do we move people from those jobs that were middle skill jobs to upper skill jobs, but the pay points maybe weren't great, potentially. And there's an opportunity for us to skill people into jobs that are there today. It may take training, obviously, but we have dollars to do that, generally, especially within our K-12 and our K-14 systems and our universities. But we really want to look at where those skillsets are at, currently. And we want to take people from that point in time where they sit today, and try to give them that exposure to your point earlier question is how do we get them exposed to a system for which there are job with means that pay well, with benefit packages, with companies that care about their employees. 'Cause that's what our goal is. >> You know, I don't know if you have some visibility on this or an opinion, but one of the observations that I've had and talk to whether it's a commercial or public sector, is that with COVID, there's been a lot of awareness of the situation. We're adequately prepared. There's some readiness, but as everyone kind of deals with it, they're also starting to think about what to do post-COVID as we come out of it, a growth strategy for a company or someone's career. People are starting to have that on the top of their minds. So I have to ask you, is there anything that you see that they say, "Okay, certain areas, maybe not doubling down on other areas, we're going to double down on because we've seen some best practices on a trajectory of value for coming out of COVID with, you know, well-armed skills or certain things." 'Cause that's what a lot of people are thinking right now. And certainly cyber is, I mean, how many jobs are open? So you got "Well that that's kind of maybe not something to double down on, here are areas we see that are working." Can you share your current visibility into that dynamic? >> Absolutely. Another great question. One of the key components that we look at at Labor Workforce Development Agency is to look at the industries in growth modes and ones that are in decline modes. Now COVID has changed that greatly. We were in a growth mode for the last seven, eight years. We saw almost every industry, minus a few, that were all in growth in one way or another, but obviously that has changed. Our landscape is completely different than we saw six, seven months ago. So today we're looking at cybersecurity, obviously with 30 plus thousand job openings, we are looking at Defense Department contractors, obviously, with federal government contracts. We are looking at the supply chains within those. We are looking at healthcare, which has always been one of obviously our large, one of our large entities that has grown over the years. But it's also changed with COVID-19. We're looking at the way protective equipment is manufactured and the way that that will continue to grow over time, we're looking at the service industry. I mean, it will come back, but it won't come back the way we've seen it probably in the past, but where are the opportunities that we develop programs that we are making sure that the skill sets of those folks are transferable to other industries. We have one of the issues that we face constantly in Labor and Workforce Development programs is understanding that over the period of time, especially in today's world, again, with technology, that people's skillsets, we don't see as in my parents' day that you worked at a job for 45 years and you retired at one job potentially. That's been gone for 25 years, but now at the pace for which we are seeing systems change, this is going to continue to amp up, and I will say, youth of today, my 12 year old nephew is in the room next door to me, in a classroom right now online. And so, you know, it's a totally different atmosphere and he's enjoying actually being at home and learning from an all online system. I would not have been able to learn that way, but I think we do see through the K through 12 system, the way we're moving, people's interests will change. And I think that they will start to see things in a different way than we have in the past. They were forced systems. We are an old system, been around since the 30s. Some even we'll say prior to the 30s, came out of the Great Depression in some ways. And that system, we have to change the way we develop our programs. It should not be constant and it should be an evolving system. >> It's interesting. A lot of the conversations between the private and public partnerships and industry, you're seeing an agile mindset where it's a growth mindset, it's also a reality-based mindset and certainly space kind of forces this conversation with cybersecurity of being faster, faster, more relevant, more modern. And you mentioned some of those points, and with COVID impact, the workforce development is certainly going to put a lot of pressure on faster learning. And then you mentioned online learning. This has become a big thing. It's not just putting education online per se. There's new touchpoints. You know, you've got apps, you've got digital. This digital transformation is also accelerating. How do you guys view the workforce development? Because it's going to be open. It's going to be evolving. There's new data coming in and maybe kids don't want to stare at a video conference. Is there some game aspect to it? Is there, how do you integrate these new things that are coming really fast, and it's happening kind of in real time in front of our eyes. So I'd love to get your thoughts on how you guys see that because it'll certainly impact their ability to compete for jobs and/or to self-learn. >> Well, I think one of the key components of California is our innovation, right? And so I think one of the things that we pride ourselves in California is around that. That said, that is the piece that I think the Silicon Valley, and then there's many areas in California that have done the same, or tried to do the same, at least in their economy is to build in innovation. And I think that's part of the K through 12 system, with our state universities and our UCs is to be able to bridge that. I think that you, we see that within universities that really instill an innovative approach to teaching, but also instill innovation within their students. I'm not sure we're there yet fully, with our K-12 system, and I think that's a place that either our community colleges could be a bridge to as well. So that's one component of workforce development I think that we look at as being a key piece. You brought up something that's really interesting to me is when you talk about agile, and one of the things that even in state government, this is going to be shocking to you, but we have not been an agile system as well. I think one of the things that the Newsom administration, Governor Newsom's administration has brought is, and when I talk about agile systems, I actually mean agile systems. We've gone from COBOL systems, which are old and clunky, still operating, but at the same time, we're looking at upgrading all of our systems in a way that even in our technology, in the state of California should be matching, the technology that our great state has within our state. So therein lies, it's also challenges of finding the qualified staff that we need in the state of California for all of our systems and servers and everything that we have currently. So, you know, not only are we looking at external users of labor workforce development, but we're looking at internal users, that the way we redevelop our systems so that we are more agile in two different ways. >> You just got me triggered with COBOL. I programmed in the 80s with COBOL, only one credit lab in college. Never touched it again, thank God. But this is the benefit of cloud computing. I think this is at the heart and this is the undertone of the conference and symposium is cloud computing, you can actually leverage existing resources, whether they're legacy systems, because they are running, they're doing a great job and they do a certain workload extremely well. Doesn't make sense to replace if it does a job. You can integrate it and that's what cloud does. This is opening up more and more capabilities and workloads. This is kind of what the space industry is pointing to when they say "We need people that can code and that can solve data problems," not just the computer scientists, but a large range of people, creative, data, science, everything. How does California's workforce solve the needs of America's space industry? This is because it's a space state. How do you see the labor workforce meeting those needs? >> Yeah, I think it's an investment. Obviously it's an investment on our part. It's an investment with our college partners. It's an investment from our K-12 system to make sure that we are allocating dollars in a way through meeting the demand of industry. And we do look at industry-specific around their needs, obviously this is a large one. We want to be very receptive, and work with our employers and our employee groups to make sure that we meet that demand. I think it's putting our money where our mouth is and designing and working with employer groups to make sure that the training meets their needs. It's also working with our employer groups to make sure that the employees are taken care of and that equity is built within the systems, that we keep people employed in California, and they're able to afford a home and they're able to afford a life here in California, but it's also again and I brought up the innovation component. I think it's building an innovation within systems for which they are employers, but are also our incoming employees and our incumbent workers. And you brought those up earlier, people that are already employed and people that are unemployed currently with a skill set that might match up is how do we bridge those folks into employment that they maybe have not thought about? We have a whole career network of systems out throughout The City of California with the America's Job Centers of California, and they will be working, and they already are working with a lot of dislocated workers. And one of the key components of that is to really look at how do we take what their current skillset might be, and then expose them to a system for which we have 37 plus thousand job openings, too, and how do we actually get those folks employed? It's paid for potentially through that local Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act funding through our America's Job Centers, to pay for some on the job training. It's to be able to pay for work experiences, it's to be able to pay for internships for students to get that opportunity with our employers and also partnering with our employers that they're paying, obviously a percentage of that too. >> You know, one of the things I've observed over my career, 54 times around the sun is, you know, in the old days, when I was in college and school, you had career, people had the longer jobs, as you mentioned it's not like that anymore. But also I knew someone I'm going to to be in line to get that job, maybe nepotism or things of that nature. Now the jobs have no historical thing or someone worked longer in a job and has more seniority. A lot of these jobs, Stewart, don't have requirements, like no one's done them before. So the ability for someone who is jumping in, either from any college, there's no real, it's all level set, it's a complete upside down script here. It's not like, "Oh, I went to school, therefore I get the job." It can be, anyone can walk into these careers because the jobs are so new. So it's not where you came from or what school you went to or your nationality or gender. The jobs have been democratized. They're not discriminating against people with skills. This opens up more. How do you see that? Because this really is an opportunity for this next generation to be more diverse and to be more contributive because diversity brings expertise and different perspectives. Your thoughts on that. >> Absolutely, and that was one of the things we welcome, obviously. We want to make sure that that everybody is treated equally and that the employers view everyone as an employer of choice, but an employee of choice as well. We've also been looking at, as I mentioned before on the COVID situation, looking at ways that folks that are maybe stuck in jobs that don't have a huge career pathway, or they don't have a pathway out of poverty. I mean, we have a lot of working poor people in the state of California that may now due to COVID lost their employment. This, you know, let's turn back to the old adage, let's turn lemons into lemonade. How do we take those folks and get them employed into jobs that do have a good career pathway? And it's not about just who you knew, or who you might have an in with to get that job. It is based on skills. I think though, that said, we need to have a better way to actually match those jobs up with those employers. And I think those are the ongoing conversations with those employer groups to make sure that, one, that they see those skill sets as valid and important. They're helping design those career sets with us so that they do match up and that we're quickly matching up those close skillsets so that we're not training people for yesterday's skills. >> I think the employer angle's super important, but also the educators as well. One of the things that was asked in another question by the guest, they said, she said, the real question to ask is, how early do you start exposing the next generation? You mentioned K through 12, do you have any data or insight into or intuition or best practice of where that insertion point is, that exposure point? Is it middle school? Is it elementary, honestly, high school, once you're in high school, you got your training wheels are off, you're off to the races, but is there a best practice? What's your thoughts, Stewart, on exposure level to these kinds of new cyber and technical careers? >> Sure, absolutely. I would say kindergarten. We, San Bernardino has a program that they've been running for a little bit of time, and they're exposing students K through 12, but really starting in kindergarten. One is the exposure to what a job looks like. And then actually I've gone down to that local area and I've had the opportunity to see, you know, second graders in a healthcare facility, basically, that they have on campus built-in. And they're going from one workstation as a second grader, looking at what those skills would be and what that job would entail from a nurse to a doctor, to a physician's assistant, and really looking at what that is. You know, obviously they're not getting the training that a doctor gets, but they are getting the exposure of what that would be. And I think that is amazing. And I think it's the right place to start. It was really interesting 'cause as I left, this was pre-COVID, but as I jumped on the plane to come back up north, I was thinking to myself, "How do we get this to all school districts in California where we see that opportunity to expose jobs and skill sets to kids throughout the system and develop those skill sets so that they do understand that they have an opportunity?" >> We are here at Cal Poly Space and Cybersecurity Symposium. We have educators, we have students, we have industry and employers and government together. What's your advice to them all watching and listening about the future of work, this workforce, what can people do? What do you think you're enabling? What can maybe the private sector help with and what are you trying to do? Can you share your thoughts on that? Because we have a range from the dorm room to the boardroom here at this event. I'd love to get your thoughts on the workforce development view of this. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the mix. I mean, I think it's going to take industry to lead, in a lot of ways in terms of understanding what their needs are and what their needs are today and what they will be tomorrow. I think it takes education to listen, and to understand, and labor and workforce development to also listen and understand what those needs will look like. And then how do we move systems? How do we move systems quickly? How do we move systems in a way that meets those needs? How do we put money into systems where the most need is, but also looking at trends? What is that trend going to look like in two years? What is that trend going to look like in five years, (indistinct), again, listening to those employers, it's also listening to the community-based organizations. I think obviously some of our best students are also linked to CBOs in one way or another. It may be for services, it may be for faith-based, it may be anything, but I think we also need to bring in the CBOs as well. A lot of outreach goes through those systems in conjunction with, but I think that's the key component is to make sure that our employers are heard and that they sit at the table, like you said, to the boardroom of understanding, and I think bringing students into that so that they get a true understanding of what that looks like as well, is a key piece of this. >> Stu, one of the things I want to bring up with you is maybe a little bit more about the research side of it, but John Markoff, who was a former New York times reporter, but author of the book, "What the Dormouse Said," it was a book about the counterculture of the 60s and the computer revolution. And really it was about how government defense spending drove the computer revolution that we now saw with Apple and PC. And then the rest is history in California, has really participated, Stanford, the Berkeley, and the University of California school system, and all the education community colleges around it. That moment, the enablement, and now you're seeing space kind of bringing that, a lot of research coming in, need a lot of billionaires putting money in, you've got employers playing a role. You have this new focus, space systems, cybersecurity defending and making it open and, not congested and peaceful, is going to enable quickly, new inflection points for opportunities. I want to get your thoughts on that because California's participated and drove those revolutions, that's created massive value. This next wave seems to be coming upon us. >> Yeah, absolutely. And again, not to use COVID again as too much of a starting point to this, but I think that is also an opportunity to actually, 'cause I think one of the things that we were seeing seven months ago was a skill shortage, and we still see the skill shortage, obviously. But I think a key piece to that is we saw a people shortage. Not only was it skill shortage, but we didn't have enough people really to fill positions in addition, too, and I think that people also felt they were already paying the bills and they were making ends meet and they didn't have the opportunities to get additional skills. This again is where we're looking at, you know, our world has changed. It changed in the 60s based on what you're just expressing in terms of California leading the way. Let's let California lead the way again in developing a system for which labor workforce development with our universities, our amazing universities and community college system structure, of how do we get students back into school? You know, a lot of graduates may already have a degree, but how do they now take a skill set that they already have and develop that further with the idea that those jobs have changed? We also have a lot of folks that don't have a degree, and that's okay, but how do we make that connection to a system that may have failed a lot of our people over the years, and our students who didn't make it through the school system, how do we develop an adult training school? How do we develop contract education through our community college system with our employer sets, that we develop cohorts within the systems of workers that have amazing talents and abilities to start to fill these needs. And I think that's the key components that here at Labor Workforce Development Agency, we work with our community colleges, our UCs and our state universities to develop and figure that piece out. And I think it is our opportunity for the future. >> That's such a great point. I want to call that out, this whole opportunity to retrain people that are out there because these are new jobs. I think that's a huge opportunity and, I hope you keep building and investing in those programs. That's really worth calling out. Thank you for doing that. And yeah, it's a great opportunity to gain these jobs. They pay well, too, cybersecurity's a good job and you don't really need to have that classical degree. You can learn pretty quickly if you're smart. So again, great call out there. A question for you on geography. You mentioned COVID, we're talking about COVID, virtualization, we're virtual with this conference. We couldn't be in person. People are learning virtually, but people are starting to relocate virtually. And so one observation that I have is the space state that California is, there's space clusters of areas where space people hang out, or space spaces and whatnot. Then you got like the tech community, the cybersecurity market, you know, Silicon Valley, you know, the talent is in these hubs. And sometimes cyber's not always in the same hubs as space. Maybe Silicon Valley has some space here, and some cyber, but that's not generally the case. This is an opportunity potentially to intersect. What's your thoughts on this? Because this is something that we're seeing, where space has historical, you know, geographies. Now with borderless communication, the work mode is not so much "You have to move to this space area." You know what I'm saying? So what's your thoughts on this? How do you guys look at, this is on your radar, and how you're viewing this dynamic. >> It's absolutely on our radar. Like you said, you know, here we are, talking virtually, and you know, 75% of all of our staff currently, in some of our departments, it's 80% of our staff, are now virtual. Seven months ago, we were not. Government, again, being slow move, we quickly transitioned, obviously, to being able to have a telework capacity. We know employers moved probably even more quickly than we did, but we see that as an opportunity for our rural areas, our Central Valley, our Northstate, Inland Empire. That you're absolutely correct. I mean, if you didn't move to a city or to a location for which these jobs were really housed, you didn't have an opportunity like you do today. I think that's a piece that we really need to work with our education partners on, to be able to see how much this has changed. Labor Agency absolutely recognizes this. We are investing funding in the Central Valley. We're investing funding in the Northstate and Inland Empire to really look at youth populations, of how the new capacity that we have today is going to be utilized for the future for employers. But we also have to engage our universities around this as well, but mostly our employers. I know that they're already very well aware. I know that a lot of our large employers within Silicon Valley have already done it. They're doing almost 100% telework policies, but the affordability to live in rural areas in California, also enables us to have a way to make products more affordable as well, potentially in the future. But we want to keep California businesses healthy and whole in California, of course. And that's another way we can expand and keep California home to our 40 plus million people. >> Well Stewart, great work and congratulations for doing such a great job. Keep it up. I got to ask you about the governor. I've been following his career since he's been in office as a political figure. He's progressive, he's cutting edge. He likes to rock the boat a little bit here and there, but he's also pragmatic. You're starting to see government workers starting to get more of a tech vibe. Just curious from your perspective, how does the governor look at, I mean, the old, I won't say "old guard," but like, you know, it used to be, you become a lawyer, you become a lawmaker. Now a tech savvy lawmaker is a premium candidate, is a premium person in government. Knowing what COBOL is, is a start. I mean, these are the things that as we transform and evolve our society, we need thinkers who can figure out which side of the streets self driving cars go on. I mean, who does that? It's a whole nother generation of thinking. How does the governor, how do you see this developing? Because this is the challenge for society. How does California lead? How do you guys talk about the leadership vision of why California and how will you lead the future? >> Absolutely. No governor that I'm aware of, and I've been around for 26, 27 years of workforce development, has led with an innovation background as this governor has, especially around technology and the use of technology. You know, he's wrote a book about the use of technology when he was lieutenant governor. And I think it's really important for him that we, as his staff are also on the leading edge of technology. I brought up agile systems earlier. When I was under the Brown administration, we had moved to where I was at the time, Employment Training Panel, we moved to an agile system and deployed that. One of the first within the state to do that and coming off of an old legacy system that was an antique. I will say it is challenging. It's challenging on a lot of levels. Mostly the skill sets that our folks have, sometimes are not open to a new agile system, to an open source system is also an issue in government. But this governor absolutely, I mean, he has established the Office of Digital Innovation, which is part of California Department of Technology, in partnership with, and that just shows how much he wants to push our limits to make sure that we are meeting the needs of Californians. But it's also looking at, you know, Silicon Valley being at the heart of our state, how do we best utilize systems that are already there? How do we better utilize the talent from those folks as well? We don't always pay as well as they do in the state, but we do have great benefit packages, everybody knows. So if anybody's looking for a job, we're always looking for technology folks as well. And so I would say that this governor absolutely leads in terms of making sure that we will be on cutting edge technology for the nation. >> And, you know, talk about pay, I mean, I know it's expensive to live in some parts of California, but there's a huge young population that wants a mission-driven job, and serving the government for the government, it's awesome. A final parting question for you, Stewart, is as you look at the workforce, a lot of people are passionate about this and it's, you know, you can't go anywhere without people saying, you know, "We've got to do education this way, and that way," there's an opinion everywhere you go. Cybersecurity, obviously a little bit peaked and focused, but there are people who are paying attention to education. So I have to ask you what creative ways can people get involved and contribute to workforce development, whether it's STEM, underrepresented minorities, people are looking for new, innovative ways to contribute. What advice would you give these people who have the passion to contribute to the next cyber workforce? >> Yeah, I appreciate that question because I think it's one of the key components that my secretary, Julie Su, secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Agency, talks about often. And a couple of us always have these conversations around one is getting people with that passion to work in government, one, or, and I brought it up community-based organizations. I think so many times that we didn't work with our CBOs to the level that in government, we should, this administration is very big on working with CBOs and philanthropy groups to make sure that the engagement of those entities are at the highest level. So I would say, students have opportunities to also engage with local CBOs and be that mission, what their values really drives them towards. And that gives them a couple of things to do, right? One is to look at ways that we're helping society in one way or another through those organizations, but it also links them to their own mission and how they can develop those skills around that. But I think the other piece to that is in a lot of these companies that you are working with and that we work with, have their own foundations. So those foundations are amazing. We work with them now, especially in the Newsom administration, more than we ever have. These foundations are really starting to help develop our strategies. My secretary works with a large number of foundations already, and we do as well in terms of strategy, really looking at how do we develop young people's attitudes towards the future, but also skills towards the future? >> Well, you got a pressure cooker of a job. I know how hard it is. I know you're working hard and appreciate what you do. And, and we wish you the best of luck, thank you for sharing this great insight on workforce development. And you guys are working hard. Thank you for what you do. Appreciate it. >> Great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. >> This is theCUBE coverage and co-production of the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 with Cal Poly. I'm John Furrier with siliconangle.com and theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

our Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hey welcome back they're ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios today to have a conversation with a really exciting company they've actually been around for a while but they've raised a ton of money and they're doing some really important work in the world in which we live today which is a lot different than the world was when they started in 2010 so we're excited to welcome to the studio he's been here on before Mohit ladee is the CEO and co-founder of Thousand Eyes mode great to see you great to see you as well as pretty to be here yeah welcome back but for people that didn't see the last video or not that familiar with Thousand Eyes tell them a little bit kind of would a thousand eyes all about absolutely so in today's world the cloud is your new data center the Internet is your new network and SAS is your new application stack and thousand eyes is built to be the the only thing that can really help you see across all three of these like it's your own private environment I love that I love that kind of setup and framing because those are the big three things and as you said all those things have moved from inside your control to outside of your control so in 2010 is that was that division I mean when you guys started the company UCLA I guess a while ago now what was that the trend what did you see what yes what kind of started it so it's really interesting right so our background as a founding company with two founders we did our PhD at UCLA in computer science and focused on internet and we were fascinated by the internet because it was just this complex system that nobody understood but we knew even then that it would meaningfully change our lives not just as consumers but even as enterprise companies so we had this belief that it's going to be the backbone of the modern enterprise and nobody quite understood how it worked because everyone was focused on your own data center your own network and so our entire vision at that point was we want people to feel the power of seeing the internet like your network that's sort of where we started and then as we started to expand on that vision it was clear to us that the Internet is what brings companies together what brings the cloud closer to the enterprise what brings the SAS applications closer to the enterprise right so we expanded into into cloud and SAS as well so when you had that vision you know people had remote offices and they would set up they would you know set up tunnels and peer-to-peer and all kinds of stuff why did you think that it was gonna go to that next step in terms of the internet you know just kind of the public Internet being that core infrastructure yes we were at the at the very early stages of this journey to cloud right and at the same time you had companies like Salesforce you had office 365 they were starting to just make it so much easier for companies to deploy a CRM you don't have to stand up these massive servers anymore its cloud-based so it was clear to us that that was gonna be the new stack and we knew that you had to build a fundamentally different technology to be able to operate in that stack and it's not just about visibility it's about making use of collective information as well because you're going from a private environment with your own data center your own private network your own application stack to something that's sitting in the cloud which is a shared environment going over the Internet which is the same network that carries cat videos that your kids watch it's carrying production traffic now for your core applications and so you need a different technology stack and you need to really sort of benefit from this notion of collective intelligence of knowing what everybody sees together as one view so I'm here I think I think Salesforce was such an important company in terms of getting enterprises to trust a SAS application for really core function which just sales right I think that was a significant moment in moving the dial was there a killer app for you guys that was you know for your customers the one where they finally said wait you know we need a different level of his ability to something that we rely on that's coming to us through an outside service so it's interesting right when we started the company we had a lot of advisors that said hey your position should be you're gonna help enterprises enforce SLA with Salesforce and we actually took a different position because what we realized was Salesforce did all the right stuff on their data centers but the internet could mess things up or enterprise companies that were not ready to move to cloud didn't have the right architectures would have some bottlenecks in their own environment because they are backhauling traffic from their London office to New York and then exiting from New York they're going back to London so all this stuff right so we took the position of really presenting thousand eyes as a way to get transparency into this ecosystem and we we believe that if we take this position if we want to help both sides not just the enterprise companies we want to help sales force we want to have enterprise companies and just really present it as a means of finding a common truth of what is actually going on it works so much better right so there wasn't really sort of one killer application but we found that anything that was real-time so if you think about video based applications or any sort of real-time communications based so the web access of the world they were just very sensitive to network conditions and internet conditions same with things that are moving a lot of data back and forth so these applications like Salesforce office 365 WebEx they just are demanding applications on the infrastructure and even if they're done great if the infrastructure doesn't it doesn't give you a great experience right and and and you guys made a really interesting insight too it's an it's an all your literature it's it's a really a core piece of what you're about and you know when you owned it you could diagnose it and hopefully you could fix it or call somebody else to fix it but when you don't own it it's a very different game and as you guys talked about it's really about finding the evidence or everyone's not pointing fingers back in and forth a to validate where the actual problem is and then to also help those people fix the problem that you don't have direct control of so it's a very different you know kind of requirement to get things fixed when they have to get fixed yeah and the first aspect of that is visibility so as an example right you generally don't have a problem going from one part of your house to another part of your house because you own the whole place you know exactly what sits between the two rooms that you're trying to get to you don't you don't have run into surprises but when you're going from let's say Palo Alto to San Francisco and you have two options you can take the 101 or 280 you need to know what you expect to see before you get on one of those options right and so the Internet is very similar you have these environments that you have no idea what to expect and if you don't see that with the right level of granularity that you would in your own environments you would make decisions that you have you know you have no control over right the visibility is really important but it's giving that lens like making it feel like a google maps of the internet that gives you the power to look at these environments like it's your private network that's the hard part right and then so what you guys have done as I understand is you've deployed sensors basically all over the Internet all at an important pops yeah an important public clouds and important enterprises etc so that you now have a view of what's going on it I can have that view inside my enterprise by leveraging your infrastructure is that accurate correct and so this is where the notion of being able to set up this sort of data collection environment is really difficult and so we have created all of this over years so enterprise companies consumer companies they can leverage this infrastructure to get instant results so there's zero implementation what right but the key to that is also understanding the internet itself and so this is where a research background comes in play because we studied we did years of research on actually modeling the internet so we know what strategic locations to put these probes that to give good coverage we know how to fill the gaps and so it's not just a numbers game it's how you deploy them where you deploy them and knowing that connectivity we've created this massive infrastructure now that can give you eyes on the internet and we leverage all of their data together so if let's say hypothetically you know AT&T has an issue that same issue is impacting multiple customers through all our different measurements so it's like ways if you're using ways to get from point A to point B if Waze was just used by your family members and nobody else it would give you completely useless information values in that collective insight right and then now you also will start to be able to until every jamel and AI and you know having all that data and apply just more machine learning to it to even better get out in front of problems I imagine as much as as is to be able to identify it so that's a really interesting point right so the first thing we have to tackle is making a complex data set really accessible and so we have a lot of focus into essentially getting insights out of it using techniques that are smarter than the brute-force techniques to get insights out and then present it in manners that it's accessible and digestible and then as we look into the next stages we're going to bring more and more things like learning and so on to take it even further right it's funny the accessible and digestible piece I've just had a presentation the other day and there was a woman from a CSO at a big bank and she talked about you know the problem of false positives and in in early days I mean their biggest issues was just too much data coming in from too many sensors and and too many false positives to basically bury people so I didn't have time to actually service the things that are a priority so you know a nice presentation of a whole lot of data that's a big difference to make it actual it is absolutely true and now that the example I'll give you is oftentimes when you think about companies that operate with a strong network core like we do they are in the weeds right which is important but what is really important is tying that intelligence to business impact and so the entire product portfolio we've built it's all about business impact user experience and then going into connecting the dots or the network side so we've seen some really interesting events and as much as we know the internet every day I wake up and I see something that surprises me right we've had customers that have done migrations to cloud that have gone horribly wrong right so we the latest when I was troubleshooting with the customer was where we saw they migrated from there on from data center to Amazon and the user experience was 10x worse than what it was on their own data the app once they moved to Amazon okay and what had happened there was the whole migration to Amazon included the smart sort of CDN where they were fronting your traffic at local sites but the traffic was going all over the place so from if a user was in London instead of going to the London instance of Amazon they were going to Atlanta they were going to Los Angeles and so the whole migration created a worse user experience and you don't have that lens because you don't see that in a net portion of that right that's what we like we caught it instantly and we were able to showcase that hey this is actually a really bad migration and it's not that Amazon is bad it's just it's been implemented incorrectly right so ya fix these things and those are all configurations all Connecticut which is so very easy all the issues you hear about with with Amazon often go back to miss configuration miss settings suboptimal leaving something open so to have that visibility makes a huge impact and it's more challenging because you're trying to configure different components of this environment right so you have a cloud component you have the internet component your own network you have your own firewalls and you used to have this closed environment now it's hybrid it involves multiple parties multiple skill sets so a lot of things can really go wrong yeah I think I think you guys you guys crystallize very cleanly is kind of the inside out and outside in approach both you know a as as a service consumer yep right I'm using Salesforce I'm using maybe s3 I'm using these things that I need and I want to focus on that and I want to have a good experience I want my people to be able to get on their Salesforce account and book business but but don't forget the other way right because as people are experiencing my service that might be connecting through and aggregating many other services along the way you know I got to make sure my customer experience is big and you guys kind of separate those two things out and really make sure people are focusing on both of them correct and it's the same technology but you can use that for your production services which are revenue generating or you can use that for your employee productivity the the visibility that you provide is is across a common stack but on the production side for example because of the way the internet works right your job is not just to ensure a great performance in user experience your job is also to make sure that people are actually reaching your site and so we've seen several instances where because of the way internet works somebody else could announce that their google.com and they could suck a bunch of traffic from the Internet and this happens quite routinely in the notion of what is now known as DP hijacks or sometimes DNS hijacks and the the one that I remember very well is when there was the small ISP in Nigeria that announced the identity of the address block for Google and that was picked up by China Telecom which was picked up by a Russian telco and now you have Russia China and Nigeria in the path for traffic to Google which is actually not even going to Google's right those kinds of things are very possible because of the way the internet how fast those things kind of rise up and then get identified and then get shut off is this hours days weeks in this kind of example so it really depends because if you are let's say you were Google in this situation right you're not seeing a denial of service attack T or data centers in fact you're just not seeing traffic running it because somebody else is taking it away right it's like identity theft right like I somebody takes your identity you wouldn't get a mail in your inbox saying hey your identity has been taken back so I see you have to find it some other way and usually it's the signal by the time you realize that your identity has been stolen you have a nightmare ahead of you all right so you've got some specific news a great great conversation you know it's super insightful to talk people that are in the weeds of how all the stuff works but today you have a new a new announcement some new and new offering so tell us about what's going on so we have a couple of announcements today and coming back to this notion of the cloud being a new data center the internet your new network right two things were announcing today is one we're announcing our second version of the cloud then benchmark performance comparison and what this is about is really helping people understand the nuances the performance difference is the architecture differences between Amazon Google ad your IBM cloud and Alibaba cloud so as you make decisions you actually understand what is the right solution for me from a performance architecture standpoint so that's one it's a fascinating report we found some really interesting findings that surprised us as well and so we're releasing that we're also touching on the internet component by releasing a new product which we call as Internet insights and that is giving you the power to actually look at the internet more holistically like you own the entire internet so that is really something we're all excited about because it's the first time that somebody can actually see the Internet see all these connections see what is going on between major service providers and feel like you completely owned the environment so are people using information like that to dynamically you know kind of reroute the way that they handle their traffic or is it more just kind of a general health you know kind of health overview you know how much of it do I have control over how much should I have control over and how much of I just need to know what's going on so yeah so in just me great question so the the best way I can answer that is what I heard CIO say in a CIO forum we were presenting it where they were a customer it's a large financial services customer and somebody asked the CIO what was the value of thousand I wasn't the way he explained it which was really fascinating was phase one of thousand eyes when we started using it was getting rid of technical debt because we would keep identifying issues which we could fix but we could fix the underlying root cause so it doesn't happen again and that just cleared the technical debt that we had made our environment much better and then we started to optimize the environments to just get better get more proactive so that's a good way to think about it when you think about our customers most of the times they're trying to just not have their hair on fire right that's the first step right once we can help them with that then they go on to tuning optimising and so on but knowing what is going on is really important for example if you're providing a.com service like cube the cube comm right it's its life and you're providing it from your data center here you have two up streams like AT&T and Verizon and Verizon is having issues you can turn off that connection and read all your customers back live having a full experience if you know that's the issues right right the remediation is actually quite quite a few times it's very straight forward if you know what you are trying to solve right so do you think on the internet insights this is going to be used just more for better remediation or do you think it's it's kind of a step forward and getting a little bit more proactive and a little bit more prescriptive and getting out ahead of the issues or or can you because these things are kind of ephemeral and come and go so I think it's all of the about right so one the things that the internet insights will help you is with planning because as you expand into new geo so if you're a company that's launching a service in a new market right that immediately gives you a landscape of who do you connect with where do you host right now you can actually visualize the entire network how do you reach your customer base the best right so that's the planning aspect and if you plan right you would actually reduce a lot of the trouble that you see so we had this customer of ours that was deploying Estevan software-defined man in there a she offices and they used thousand eyes to evaluate two different ISPs that they were looking at one of them had this massive time-of-day congestion so every time every day at nine o'clock the latency would get doubled because of congestion it's common in Asia the other did not have time of day congestion and with that view they could implement the entire Estevan on the ice pea that actually worked well for them so planning is important part of this and then the other aspect of this is the thing that folks often don't realize is internet is not static it's constantly changing so you know AT&T may connect to where I is in this way it connects it differently it connects to somebody else and so having that live map as you're troubleshooting customer experience issues so let's say you have customers from China that are having a ton of issues all of a sudden or you see a drop of traffic from China now you can relate that information of where these customers are coming from with our view of the health of the Chinese internet and which specific ISPs are having issues so that's the kind of information merger that simply doesn't happen today right promote is a fascinating discussion and we could go on and on and on but unfortunately do not have all day but I really like what you guys are doing the other thing I just want to close on which which I thought was really interesting is you know a lot of talked about digital transformation we always talk about digital transformation everybody wants a digital transfer eyes it but you really boiled it down into really three create three critical places that you guys play the digital experience in terms of what what the customers experience you know getting to cloud everybody wants to get to cloud so one can argue how much and what percentage but everybody's going to cloud and then as you said in this last example the modern when as you connect all these remote sites and you guys have a play in all of those places so whatever you thought about in 2010 that worked out pretty well thank you and we had a really strong vision but kudos to the team that we have in place that has stretched it and really made the most out of that so excited good job and thanks for for stopping by sharing the story thank you for hosting always fun to be here absolutely all right well he's mo and I'm Jeff you're watching the cube when our Palo Alto studio is having a cube conversation thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music]

(upbeat music) >> From the Silicon Valley Media Office in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this exclusive CUBE conversation. Here's the setup. The storage industry has been drowning in complexity for years. Companies like Pure Storage and Nutanix, you know they reached escape velocity last decade, primarily because they really understood well how to deliver great products, that were simpler to use. But as we enter the 2020's, virtually every player in the storage business is trying to simplify it's portfolio. And the mandate is coming from customers, that are under huge pressure to operationalize and bring to market their major digital initiatives. They simply can't spend time managing infrastructure that the way they used to. They have to reallocate resources up the stack, so to speak to more strategic efforts. Now, as you know post the acquisition of EMC by Dell, we have followed closely, and been reporting on their efforts to manage the simplification of the storage portfolio under the leadership of Jeff Clark. IBM is one of those leading companies, along with Dell EMC, NetApp, and HPE that are under tremendous pressure to continue to simplify their respective portfolios. IBM as a company, has declared the dawn of a new era. They call it Chapter II of Digital and AI. Whereas, the company claims it's all about scaling and moving from experimentation to transformation. Chapter II, I will tell you unquestionably is not about humans managing complex storage infrastructure. Under the leadership of General Manager, Ed Walsh, the companies storage division has aligned with this Chapter II vision, and theCUBE has been able to secure an exclusive interview with Ed, who joins me today. Great to see you my friend. >> Thanks very much for having me. >> So, you're very welcome. And you heard my narrative. How did we get here? How did the industry get so complex? >> I like the way you kicked it off, because I think you nailed it. It's just how the storage industry has always been. And there was a reason for it twenty years ago, but it's almost, it's run its course, and I could tell you what were now seeing, but everyone there's always a difference between high end solutions sets, and low end solution sets. In fact their different, there's custom silicon on the high end. So think about EMC Matrix in the day, it was the ultimate custom hardware and software combination. And then the low end storage, well it didn't have any of that. And then there's a mid tier. But we actually, everything is based upon it. So you think about the right availability, the right price port, feature function, availability features. It made sense that you had to have that unique thing. So, what's happened is, we're all doing sustaining innovation. So we're all coming out with the next high end array for you. EMC's next one is Hashtag, Next Generation storage, right, mid-range. So they're going to redo their midrange. And then low end, but they never come together, and this is where the complexity is, you're nailing it. So no one is a high end or a low end shop, they basically use it all, but what they're having to do, is they have to manage and understand each one of those platforms. How to maintain it, it's kind of specialized. How to report on it, how to automate, each the automation requirements are different, but different API to actually automate it. Now the minute you say, now help me modernize that and bring me to a hybrid multi-cloud, now you're doing kind of a complex thing over multiple ways, and against different platforms, which are all completely different. And the key thing is, in the past it made sense to a have high end silicon with high end software, and it made sense. And different low end, and basically, because of some of the innovation we've driven, no longer do you have to do that. There's one platform that allows you to have one platform to meet those different requirements, and dramatically simplify what you're doing for enterprises. >> So, we're going to talk a little bit more about what you guys are announcing. But how do you know when you get there, to this land of simple? >> One it's hard to get there, we can talk about that too. But it's a, when a client, so we just had a call this morning with our board advisor for storage, our division. And they're kind of the bigs of the bigs. Up on the need, more on the high end side, just so you know the sample size. But literally, in the discussion we were talking about the platform simplification, how do you get to hybrid cloud, what we're going to do with the cyber incident response type of capabilities have resiliency. And literally in the call they are already emailing their team, saying we need to do something more strategic, we need to do that, we need to look at this holistically. They love the simplicity. Everything we just went through, they can't do anymore. Especially in Chapter II, it's about modernizing your existing mission critical enterprises, and then put them in the context of Hybrid multi-cloud. That's hard, you can't do it with all these different platforms, so they're looking for, let me spend less. Like you said, to get my team to do up-stack things, they definitely don't want to be managing different disparate storage organizations. They want to move forward and use that freed up resource to do other things, so. When I see big companies literally jumping at it, and giving the example. You know I want to talk about the cyber resiliency thing, I've had four of those this week. That's exactly what we need to have done, so it's just, I haven't had a conversation yet that clients aren't actually excited about this, and it's actually pretty straightforward. >> So I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and again we'll get there, but assuming your there. Why do you think it took you so long? You kind of mentioned it's hard. >> So, transformations are never easy, and typically whoever is the transformation engine, gets shot in the back of the head, right. So it's really hard to get teams to do something different. So imagine every platform, EMC has nine now, right. So it is through acquisition of others, you have VP's, you know. VP of development, offering and maybe sales, and then you have whole teams, where you have founders you've acquired. So you have real people, that they love their platform, and there's no way they're going to give it up. They always come up with the next generation, and how it's going to solve all ills, but it's a people transformation. How do you get we're going to take three and say, hey, it's one platform. Now to do that it's a operational transformation challenge. It's actually driving the strategy, you don't do it in matter of a week, there's development to make sure that you can actually meet all the different use cases, that will take you literally years to do, and have a new platform. But, I think it's just hard to do. Now, anyone that's going to do that, let's say you know EMC or HP wants to do it. They're going to have to do the same thing we did, which is going to take them years of development. But also, it's managing that transition and the people involved, or the founders you've acquired, or it just it's amazing. In fact, it's the most wonderful part of my job is dealing with people, but it can frustrate you. >> So we've seen this over the years, look at NetApp, right with waffle, it was one size fits all for years, but they just couldn't cover all markets. And then they were faced with TAM expansion, of course now the portfolio expands. Do you think -- >> And now they have three and -- >> And David Scott at HPE, Storage VP at the time used to talk about how complex EMC's portfolio was, and you see HPE has to expand the portfolio. >> We all did, including IBM. >> Do you think Pure will have to face the same sort of -- >> We are seeing Pure with three, right. And that's without the file, so I'm just talking about what we do for physical, virtual, and container workloads and cloud. If you start going to what we're going to scale up to object we all have our own there too. And I'm not even counting the three to get to that. So you see Pure doing the exact the same thing, because they are trying to expand their TAM. And you have to do some basic innovation to have a platform actually meet the requirements, of the high end requirements, the mid range, and the entry level requirements. It's not just saying, I'm going to have one, you're actually have to do a lot of development to do it. >> All right, let's get to the news. What are you guys announcing? >> So basically, we're announcing a brand new, a dramatic simplification of our distributed storage. So, everything for non-Z. If you're doing physical boxes, bare metal, Linux. You're doing virtual environments, VMware environments, hyper-V, Power VM, or if you're doing container workloads or into the cloud. Our platforms are now one. One software, one API to manage. But we're going to actually, we're going to do simplification without compromise. We're going to give you want you need. You're going to need an entry level packaging, midrange and high end, but it's going to be one software allows you to meet every single price requirement and functionality. And we'll be able to do some surprises on the upside for what we're bringing out to you, because we believe in value in automation. We can up the value we bring to our clients, but also dramatically take out the cost complexity. But one thing we're getting rid of, is saying the need, the requirement to have a different hardware software platform for high end, midrange and low end. It's one hardware and software platform that gets you across all those. And that's where you get a dramatic simplification. >> So same OS? >> Same OS? >> Normally, you'd do, you'd optimize the code for the high end, midrange and low end. Why are you able to address all three with one OS? How are you able to do that? >> It took us three and half years, it was actually, I will talk about a couple innovation pieces. So, on the high end you have customized silicon, we did, everyone does, we had a Texas Memory Systems acquisition. It was the flash drawer 2U, about 375 TB, uncompressed de dup, pretty big chunky, you had to buy big chunks. So it was on the high end. >> That was the unit of granularity, right. >> But it gave you great value, but also you had great performance, latency better than you get in NVMe today, before NVMe. But you get inline compression, encryption, so it was wonderful. But it was really ultra high end. What we did was we took that great custom silicon, and we actually made it onto what it looks like a custom, or to be a standard NVMe SSD. So you take a Samsung NVMe, or a WD and you compare it to what we call our flash core module. They look the same and they go interchangeably into the NVMe standard slot. But what's in there is the same silicon, that was on this ultra high end box. So we can give the high end, exactly what we've did before. Ultra low latency, better than NVMe, but also you can get inline compression de dup and the were leveling, and the stuff that you expect in the custom silicon level. But we can take this same NVMe drive and we can put it in our lowest end model. Average sale price $15,000. Allows you to literally, no compromise on the high end, but have unbelievable surprises on the midrange and the low end, where now we can get the latency and the performance and all those benefits, to be honest on a much lower box. >> Same functionality? >> Same functionality, so you lose nothing. Now that took a lot of work, that wasn't easy. You're talking about people, there was roadmaps that had to be changed. We had to know that we were going to do that, and stick to our guns. But that'll be one. Other things is, you know you're going to get some things on the upside that you're not expecting, right. Because it's custom silicon, right, I might have a unique price performance. But also cost advantages, so I'm going to have best price performance or density across the whole product line. But also, I'm going to do things like, on the high end you used to unbelievable operational resiliency. Two site, three site, hyper-swap, you know two boxes that would act like one. Have a whole outage, or a site outage and you don't really miss a transaction, or multi-sites. But we're going to be able to do that on the low end and the midrange as well. Cyber resiliency is a big deal. So I talked about Operational Resiliency. It's very different coming back when it's cyber. But cyber incident response becomes key, so we're going to give you special capabilities there which are not available for anyone in the industry. But is cyber incident response only a high end thing, or is it a low end thing. No, it's across everywhere. So I think we're going to shock on the upside a lot of it, was the development to make sure the code stack, but also the hardware, we can at least say no compromise if you want entry-level. I'm going to meet anyone at that mote. In fact, because the features of it, I'm able to compete at an unfair level against everyone on the low end. So you say, midrange and high end, but you're not losing anything because your losing the custom silicon. >> So let's come back to the cyber piece, what exactly is that? >> All right, so, listen, this is not for data breaches. So if a data breach happens, they steal your database or they steal your customer name, you have to report to, you know you have to let people know. But it's typically than I call the storage guy and say hey, solve it. It was stolen at a different level. Now the ones that doesn't hit the media, but happens all the time actually more frequently. And it definitely, gets called down to the operations team and the storage team is for cyber or malicious code. They've locked up your system. Now they didn't steal data, so it's not something you have to report. So what happens is call comes down, and you don't know when they got you. So it's an iterative process, you have to literally find the box, bring up, maybe it's Wednesday, oh, bring it up, give it to application group, nope, it's there. Bring up Tuesday... it's an iterative process. >> It's like drilling for oil, a 100 years ago, nope, not it, drill another hole. >> So what happens is, if it's cyber without the right tools, you use your backup, one of our board advisors, literally major bank, I had four of those, I'll give you one. It took me 33 hours to bring back a box. It was a large database 30 TB, 33 hours. Now why did you backup, why didn't he use his primary storage against DR copies of everything. Well they didn't have the right tool sets, so what we were able to do is, tape is great for this air gap, but it takes time to restore and come back up and running. The modern day protection we have like Veeam or Cohesity allows the recovery being faster, because your mounting backup copies faster. But the fastest is your primary snapshot and your replicated DR snapshots. And if you can leverage those, the reason people don't leverage it, and we came upon this, almost accidentally. We were seeing our services brethren from IBM doing, IBM SO or outsourcing GTS, when they did have a hit. And what they want to do is, bring up your snapshots, but if you bring up a snapshot and you're not really careful, you start crashing production workloads, because it looks like the VM that just came up. So you need to have, and we're providing the software that allows you to visualize what your recovery points are. Allows you to orchestrate bringing up environments but more importantly, orchestrate into a fenced network environment, so it's not going to step on production workloads and address this. But allows you to do that, and provide a URL to the different business users, that they can come and say yes, it's there or it's not. So even if you don't use this software before this incident, it gives you visibility, orchestration, and then more importantly a fence, a safe fence network, a sandbox to bring these up quickly and check it out, and easily promote to production. >> So that's your safe zone? >> Safe zone, but it's just not there. You know you start bringing up snapshots, it's not like a DR case, where you're bringing things up, you have to be really smart, because you bring it up, and checking out. So without that, they don't want to trust to use the snapshots, so they just don't use primary storage. With it, it becomes the first thing you do. Because you hope you got it within a week, or week and a half of your snapshots. And it's in the environment for ninety days, now you're going to tape. Now if you do this, if you put this software in place before an incident, now you get more values, you can do orchestrated DR testing. Because where doing this orchestrated, bring up application sets it's not a VM, it's sets of VM's. Fenced network, bring it up, does it work. You can use it for Test/Dev data, you can use it for automatic DR. But even if you don't set it up, we're going to make it available so you can actually come back from these cyber incidents much faster. >> And this is the capability that I get on primary storage. Because everybody's targeting you know the backup corpus for ransomware and things of that nature. This is primary storage. >> And we do put it on our backups. So our backups allows you to do the exact same thing and do the bootable copies. And so if you have our backup product, you could already do this on primary. But, what we're saying is, regardless of who your using, we're still saying you need to do backup, you need to air a cup your backup. 'cause you know Want to Cry was in the environment for 90 days, you know your snapshots are only for a week or two. So the fact of the matter is that you need it, but in this case, if you're using the other guys, you can also, we're going to give it just for this tool set. >> How does immutability does it factor? I know like for instance AWS Reinvent they announced an immutability capability. I think IBM may have that, because of the acquisition that you made years ago, Clever Safe was fundamental to that, their architecture. Is that a way to combat ransomware? >> So immutability is obviously not just changes. So ransomware and you know malware typically is either encrypting or deleting things. Encrypting is what they do, but they have the key, so. The fact of the matter is that they're deleting things. So if it's immutable, than you can't change it. Now if you own the right controls, you can delete it, but you can't change it, they can't encrypt it on you. That becomes critical. So what you're looking for, is we do like for instance all of our flash system allows you to do these snapshots, local or remote that allow you to have, go to immutable copies either in Amazon, we support that or locally on our object storage, or in IBM's cloud. It allows you to do that. So the different platforms have this immutability that our software allows you integrate with. So I think immutability is kind of critical. >> How about consumption models? The way in which your packaging and pricing. People want to, the cloud is sort of change the way we think about this, how have you responded to that? >> So, you hit upon our Chapter II. We, IBM, actually resonates to the clients. In Chapter I, we are doing some lift and shift, and we're doing some new use cases in the cloud. And they had some challenges but it worked in general. But we're seeing the next phase II, is looking at the 80% of your key workloads, your mission critical workloads, and basically how you transfer those in. So basically, as you look at your Chapter 2, you're going to do the modernization, and you might move those into the cloud. So if you're going to move into the cloud, you might say, I'd like to modernize my storage, free my team up, because it's simple, I don't have to do a lot of things. But you need to simplify so you can now, modernize so you can transform. But, I'm going to be in the cloud in 18 months, so I don't want to modernize my storage. So what we have, is of course we have so you can buy things, you can lease things, we have a utility model, that is great for three to five years. But we have now a subscription model, which think of just cloud pricing. No long term commitment. Use what you use, up and down, and if it goes to zero, call us we'll pick it up, and there's no expense to you. So, no long term commitments and returns. So in 14 months, I've done my modernization, you've helped me free up my team. Let me go, and then we'll come and pick it up, and your bill stops that day. >> Cancel at anytime? >> Yeah, cancel at anytime. >> Do you expect people to take advantage of that? Is there a ton of demand at this point in time? >> I think everyone is on their own cloud journey. We talk a lot about meeting the client where they are, right. So how do I meet them where they're at. And everyone is on their own journey, so a lot of people are saying, hey, why would I do anything here, I need to get there. But if they can modernize and simplify what they're doing, and again these are your mission critical. We're not talking, this is how you're running your business, if we can make it better in the mean time, and then modernize it, get it in containers, get it into a new platform, that makes all the sense in the world. And because if we can give them a flexible way, say it's cheaper than using cloud storage, like in Amazon or IBM cloud. But you can use it on-prem, free you up, and then at anytime, just return it, that's a big value that people say, you know what, you're right, I'm going to go do that. You're able to give me cloud based pricing, down to zero when I'm done with it. Now I can use that to free up my team, that's the value equation. I don't think it's for everyone. But I think for a segment of the market, I think it's critical. And I think IBM's kind of perfectly positioned to do it with a balance sheet to help clients out. >> So how do you feel about this? Obviously, you've put a lot of work into it. You seem pretty excited. Do you feel as though this is going to help re-energize your business, your customer base, and how do you think competitors are going to respond? >> Good question. So, I think simplification, especially we can talk about value equation. I think I can add more value to you Mr. Customer. I can bring things you're not expected, right, and we're get to this cyber in a second, that would be one of the things they would not expected. And reduce the costs and complexity. So we've already done this a couple of times, so we did it with our Mainframe storage launch in the fall. It bar none, the best box for that workload. Lowest latency, most integration, encrypt, pervasive encryption, encryption in flight. But also, we took it from nine variants, to two. Because we could. We go, why did you need all those, we'll there's reasons for it in the past, but no longer. We also got rid of all the hard disk drives. We also add a little non-volatile cache and allowed you to get rid of all those battery backups. All these custom things that you used to have on this high end box. And now it's dramatically simpler, better. And by the way, no one asked, hey what are my other seven variants went. It was simpler, it was better, faster, but then it was the best launch we've had in the history of the product line. It think we can add better value and simplify for our clients. So that's what we'll do. You asked about how people respond. Listen, they're going to have to go through the same thing we did, right. A product line has people behind it, and it's really hard, or a founder behind it. You mentioned a couple, they're acquiring companies. I think they're going to have to go this, it's a transformational journey, that they'll have to go through. It's not as simple as doing a PowerPoint. I couldn't come to you and say, I can simplify without compromise. I can help you on the low end, the midrange, high end with same platform unless I did a lot of fundamental design work to make sure I could do that. Flash core modules being one of them, right. So I think it's going to be hard. It'll be interesting, well, they're going to have to go through the same thing I did, how about that. >> Usually when you make a major release like that, you're able to claim Top Gun, at least for a while with things like latency, and bandwidth and IOP's and performance. Are you able to make that claim? >> So, basically you saw it in the launch today. But basically you saw the latency which is one, because we're bringing a custom silicon down, our latency you'll see like I'll give you Pure bragging on their websites, their lowest latency is 70 microseconds, which by the way is pretty, you know. It's gonna be 150 microseconds, pretty good bragging rights. We're at 70 microseconds, but that's on the X90 using storage class memory. So literally we are 2x faster than on latency, how fast can you respond to something. But we can do it not only on our high end box, but we can also do it on our average sale price $15,000 box. Because I'm bringing that silicon up and down. So we can do the latency, now EMC the highest and PowerMax box. Two big chassis put together, that can do 100 microseconds. Again, still we're 70 microseconds, so we're 30% faster. And that's epitomized of the high end custom silicon software. So latency we got it. IOP's, so look at the biggest baddest two boxes of EMC, they'll do you know 15 million IOPs on their website. We'll do 18 million IOPs, but instead of two racks, it's 8U. It is 12x better IOPs per rack space, if you want to look at it that way. Throughput, which if you could do, it's all about building for our businesses. It's all about journey of the cloud and building for our businesses, everyone's trying to do this. Throughput in analytics becomes everything, and we you can do analytics in everything. Your DBA's are going to run analytics, so throughput matters. Ours is for every one of our boxes, that you can kind of add up and cluster out, it's 45 Gb/s. Pure, for instance their bragging rights, is 18, and they can't cluster anymore. So what we're able to do is on any of the, and most of those are high end, but I'll say, I can do the same thing up and down my line, because of where I'm bringing the custom silicon. So on bragging rights, and that's just kind of website, big bragging rights, I think we got a cold, and if you look price performance, and just overall price per capacity, we're inline to be the most the cost effective across everyone. >> Yeah, up and down the line, it's very interesting, it's kind of unique. >> And then you mentioned resiliency, I'll tell you that's the hottest thing, so. You mentioned the cyber incident response, that is something that we did on the Mainframe. So, we did the last Mainframe cycle, we allow you to do the same thing, and it literally drove all the demand for the product sets. It's already the number one thing people want to talk about, because it becomes a you're right, I needed that this week, I needed it last week. So, I think that's going to really drive demand? >> What worries you? >> (laughs) On this launch, not much. I think it's how fast and far we can get this message out. >> Wow, okay, so execution, obviously. You feel pretty confident about that, and yeah, getting the word out. Letting people know. Well, congratulations Ed. >> No, thank you very much, I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming in. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hey welcome back here ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios today to have a cube conversation with a really exciting company they've actually been around for a while but they've raised a ton of money and they're doing some really important work in the world in which we live today which is a lot different than the world was when they started in 2010 so we're excited to welcome to the studio he's been around before Mohit lad he is the CEO and co-founder of thousand ice mode great to see you great to see you as well thrilled to be here yeah welcome back but for people that didn't see the last video or not that familiar with thousand ice tell them a little bit kind of would a thousand eyes all about absolutely so in today's world the cloud is your new data center the Internet is your new network and SAS is your new application stack and thousand eyes is built to be the the only thing that can really help you see across all three of these like it's your own private environment I love that I love that kind of setup and framing because those are the big three things and as you said all those things have moved from inside your control to outside of your control so in 2010 is that was that division I mean when you guys started the company UCLA I guess a while ago now what was that the trend what did you see what yes what kind of started it so it's really interesting right so our background is a founding company with two founders we did our PhD at UCLA in computer science and focused on Internet and we were fascinated by the internet because it was just this complex system that nobody understood but we knew even then that it would meaningfully change our lives not just as consumers but even as enterprise companies so we had this belief that it's gonna be the backbone of the modern enterprise and nobody quite understood how it worked because everyone was focused on your own data center your own network and so our entire vision at that point was we want people to feel the power of seeing the internet like your network that's sort of where we started and then as we started to expand on that vision it was clear to us that the internet is what brings companies together what brings the cloud closer to the enterprise what brings the SAS applications closer to the enterprise right so we expanded into into cloud and SAS as well so when you had that vision you know people had remote offices and they would set up they would you know set up tunnels and peer-to-peer and all kinds of stuff why did you think that it was going to go to that next step in terms of the Internet you know just kind of the public Internet being that core infrastructure yes so we were at the at the very early stages of this journey to cloud right and at the same time you had companies like Salesforce you had office 365 they were starting to just make it so much easier for companies to deploy a CRM you don't have to stand up these massive servers anymore its cloud-based so it was clear to us that that was gonna be the new stack and we knew that you had to build a fundamentally different technology to be able to operate in that stack and it's not just about visibility it's about making use of collective information as well because you're going from a private environment with your own data center your own private network your own application stack to something that's sitting in the cloud which is a shared environment going over the Internet which is the same network that carries cat videos that your kids watch it's carrying production traffic now for your core applications and so you need a different technology stack and you need to really sort of benefit from this notion of collective intelligence of knowing what everybody sees together as one view so I'm curious force was such an important company in terms of getting enterprises to trust a SAS application for really core function with just sales right I think that was a significant moment in moving the dial was there a killer app for you guys that was you know for your customers the one where they finally said wait you know we need a different level of visibility to something that we rely on that's coming to us through an outside service so it's interesting right when we started the company we had a lot of advisors that said hey your position should be you're gonna help enterprises enforce SLA with Salesforce and we actually took a different position because what we realized was Salesforce did all the right stuff on their data centers but the internet could mess things up or enterprise companies that were not ready to move the cloud didn't have the right architectures would have some bottlenecks in their own environment because they are backhauling traffic from their London office to New York and then exiting from New York they're going back to London so all this stuff right so we took the position of really presenting thousand eyes as a way to get transparency into this ecosystem and we we believe that if we take this position if we want to help both sides not just the enterprise companies we want to help sales force we want to have enterprise companies and just really present it as a means of finding a common truth of what is actually going on it works so much better right so there wasn't really sort of one killer application but we found that anything that was real-time so if you think about video based applications or any sort of real-time communications based so the web access of the world they were just very sensitive to network conditions and internet conditions same with things that are moving a lot of data back and forth so these applications like Salesforce office 365 WebEx they just are demanding applications on the infrastructure and even if they're run great if the infrastructure doesn't it doesn't give you a great experience right and and and you guys made a really interesting insight to its and it's an all your literature it's it's a really a core piece of what you're about and you know when you owned it you could diagnose it and hopefully you could fix it or call somebody else to fix it but when you don't own it it's a very different game and as you guys talked about it's really about finding the evidence or everyone's not pointing fingers back in and forth a to validate where the actual problem is and then to also help those people fix the problem that you don't have direct control of so it's a very different you know kind of requirement to get things fixed when they have to get fixed yeah and the first aspect of that is visibility so as an example right you generally don't have a problem going from one part of your house to another part of your house because you own the whole place you know exactly what sits between the two rooms that you're trying to get to you don't you don't have run into surprises but when you're going from let's say Palo Alto to San Francisco and you have two options you can take 101 or 280 you need to know what you expect to see before you get on one of those options right and so the Internet is very similar you have these environments that you have no idea what to expect and if you don't see that with the right level of granularity that you would in your own environments you would make decisions that you have you know you have no control over right the visibility is really important but it's giving that lens like making it feel like a google maps of the internet that gives you the power to look at these environments like it's your private network that's the hard part right and then so what you guys have done as I understand is you've deployed sensors basically all over the Internet all at an important pops yeah and a point in public clouds and important enterprises etc so that you now have a view of what's going on it I can have that view inside my enterprise by leveraging your infrastructures that accurate correct and so this is where the notion of being able to set up this sort of data collection environment is really difficult and so we have created all of this over years so enterprise companies consumer companies they can leverage this infrastructure to get instant results so there's zero implementation in what right but the key to that is also understanding the internet itself and so this is where a research background comes in play because we studied we did years of research on actually modeling the Internet so we know what strategic locations to put these probes that to give good coverage we know how to fill the gaps and so it's not just a numbers game it's how you deploy them where you deploy them and knowing that connectivity we've created this massive infrastructure now that can give you eyes on the internet and we leverage all of their data together so if let's say hypothetically you know AT&T has an issue that same issue is impacting multiple customers through all our different measurements so it's like ways if you're using ways to get from point A to point B if Waze was just used by your family members and nobody else it would give you completely useless information values in that collective insight right and then now you also will start to be able to leverage ml and AI and you know having all that data and apply just more machine learning to it to even better get in get out in front of problems I imagine as much as as is to be able to identify so that's a really interesting point right so the first thing we have to tackle is making a complex data set really accessible and so we have a lot of focus into essentially getting insights out of it using techniques that are smarter than the brute-force techniques you get insights out and then present it in manners that it's accessible and digestible and then as we look into the next stages we're going to bring more and more things like learning and so on to take it even further right it's funny the accessible and digestible piece I was just had a presentation the other day and there was a woman from a CSO at a big bank and she talked about you know the problem of false positives and in in early days I mean their biggest issues was just too much data coming in from too many sensors and and too many false positives to basically bury people so they didn't have time to actually service the things that are a priority so you know a nice presentation of a whole lot of data makes a big difference to make it action it is absolutely true and now that the example I'll give you is oftentimes when you think about companies that operate with a strong network core like we do they're in the weeds right which is important but what is really important is tying that intelligence to business impact and so the entire product portfolio we've built it's all about business impact user experience and then going into connecting the dots or the network side so we've seen some really interesting events and as much as we know the internet every day I wake up and I see something that surprises me right we've had customers that have done migrations to cloud that have gone horribly wrong right so we the latest when I was troubleshooting with the customer was where we saw they migrated from there on from data center to Amazon and the user experience was 10x worse than what it was on their own data of the app once they moved to Amazon okay and what had happened there was the whole migration to Amazon included the smart sort of CDN where they were fronting your traffic at local sites but the traffic was going all over the place so from if a user was in London instead of going to the London instance of Amazon they were going to Atlanta or they were going to Los Angeles and so the whole migration created a worse user experience and you don't have that lens because you don't see that in a net portion of that right that's why we like we caught it instantly and we were able to showcase that hey this is actually a really bad migration and it's not that Amazon is bad it's just it's been implemented incorrectly right so yeah fix these things and those are all configurations all Connecticut which is so very easy all the issues you hear about with with Amazon often go back to miss configuration miss settings suboptimal leaving something open so to have that visibility makes a huge impact and it's more challenging because you're trying to configure different components of this environment right so you have a cloud component you have the Internet component your own network you have your own firewalls and you used to have this closed environment now it's hybrid it involves multiple parties multiple skill sets so a lot of things can really go wrong I think I think you guys you guys crystallized very cleanly is kind of the inside out and outside in approach both you know a as as a service consumer yeah right I'm using Salesforce I'm using maybe s3 I'm using these things that I need and I want to focus on that and I want to have a good experience I want my people to be able to get on their Salesforce account and book business but but don't forget the other way right because as people are experiencing my service that might be connecting through and aggregating many other services along the way you know I got to make sure my customer experience is big and you guys kind of separate those two things out and really make sure people are focusing on both of them correct and it's the same technology but you can use that for your production services which are revenue generating or you can use that for your employee productivity the visibility that you provide is is across a common stack but on the production side for example because of the way the internet works right your job is not just to ensure a great performance in user experience your job is also to make sure that people are actually reaching your site and so we've seen several instances where because of the way internet works somebody else could announce that their google.com and they could suck a bunch of traffic from the internet and this happens quite routinely in the notion of what is now known as DP hijacks or sometimes DNS hijacks and the the one that I remember very well is when there was the small ISP in Nigeria that announced the identity of the address block for Google and that was picked up by China Telecom which was picked up by a Russian telco and now you have Russia China and Nigeria in the path for traffic to Google which is actually not even going to Google's right those kinds of things are very possible because of the way the internet how fast those things kind of rise up and then get identified and then get shut off is this hours days weeks in this kind of example so it really depends because if you are let's say you were Google in this situation right you're not seeing a denial of service attack to your data centers in fact you're just not seeing traffic running in because somebody else is taking it away right it's like identity theft right like I somebody takes your identity you wouldn't get a mail in your inbox saying hey your identity has been taken back so easy you have to find it some other way and usually it's the signal by the time you realize that your identity has been stolen you have a nightmare ahead of you alright so you got some specific news a great great conversation you know it's super insightful to talk to people that are in the weeds of how all the stuff works but today you have a new a new announcement some new and new offering so tell us about what's going on so we have a couple of announcements today and coming back to this notion of the cloud being a new data center the internet your new network right two things were announcing today is one we're announcing our second version of the cloud then benchmark performance comparison and what this is about is really helping people understand the nuances the performance difference is the architecture differences between Amazon Google as your IBM cloud and Alibaba cloud so as you make decisions you actually understand what is the right solution for me from a performance architecture standpoint so that's one it's a fascinating report we found some really interesting findings that surprised us as well and so we're releasing that we're also touching on the internet component by releasing a new product which we call as internet insights and that is giving you the power to actually look at the internet more holistically like you own the entire internet so that is really something we're all excited about because it's the first time that somebody can actually see the Internet see all these connections see what is going on between major service providers and feel like you completely owned the environment so are people using information like that to dynamically you know kind of reroute the way that they handle their traffic or is it more just kind of a general health you know kind of health overview you know how much of it do I have control over how much should I have control over and how much of I just need to know what's going on so yeah so it just me great question so the the best way I can answer that is what I heard CIO say in a CIO forum we were presenting at where they were a customer it's a large financial services customer and somebody asked the CIO what was the value of thousand I wasn't the way he explained it which was really fascinating was phase one of thousand eyes when we started using it was getting rid of technical debt because we would keep identifying issues which we could fix but we could fix the underlying root cause so it doesn't happen again and that just cleared the technical debt that we had made our environment much better and then we started to optimize the environments to just get better get more proactive so that's a good way to think about it when you think about our customers most of the times they're trying to just not have their hair on fire right that's the first step right once we can help them with that then they go on to tuning optimizing and so on but knowing what is going on is really important for example if you're providing a.com sir is like cube the cube comm right it's its life and you're providing it from your data center here you have two up streams like AT&T and Verizon and Verizon is having issues you can turn off that connection and let all your customers back live having a full experience if you know that's the issues right right the remediation is actually quite quite a few times it's very straightforward if you know what you're trying to solve right so do you think on the internet insights this is going to be used just more for better remediation or do you think it's it's kind of a step forward and getting a little bit more proactive and a little bit more prescriptive and getting out ahead of the issues or or can you because these things are kind of ephemeral and come and go so I think it's all of the about right so one the things that the internet insights will help you is with planning because as you expand into new geo so if you're a company that's launching a service in a new market right that immediately gives you a landscape of who do you connect with where do you host right as now you can actually visualize the entire network how do you reach your customer base the best right so that's the planning aspect and if you plan right you would actually reduce a lot of the trouble that you see so we had this customer of ours that was deploying Estevan Software Defined one in there a she offices and they used thousand eyes to evaluate two different ISPs that they were looking at one of them had this massive time-of-day congestion so every time every day at nine o'clock the latency would get doubled because of congestion it's common in Asia the other did not have time of day congestion and with that view they could implement the entire Estevan on the ice pea that actually worked well for them so planning is important part of this and then the other aspect of this is the thing that folks often don't realize is Internet is not static it's constantly changing so you know AT&T might connect to Verizon this way it connects it differently it connects to somebody else and so having that live map as you're troubleshooting customer experience issues so let's say you have customers from China that are having a ton of issues all of a sudden or you see a drop of traffic from China now you can relate that information of where these customers are coming from with our view of the health of the Chinese Internet and which specific ISPs are having issues so that's the kind of information merger that simply doesn't happen today right promote is a fascinating discussion and we could go on and on and on but unfortunately do not have all day but I really like what you guys are doing the other thing I just want to close on which which I thought was really interesting is you know a lot of talk about digital transformation we always talk about digital transformation everybody wants the digital transfer eyes it but you really boiled it down into really three create three critical places that you guys play the digital experience in terms of what what the customers experience you know getting to cloud everybody wants to get to cloud someone can argue how much and what percentage but everybody's going to cloud and then as you said in this last example the MA when as you connect all these remote sites and you guys have a play in all of those places so whatever you thought about in 2010 that worked out pretty well thank you and we had a really strong vision but kudos to the team that we have in place that has stretched it and really made the most out of that so excited good job and thanks for for stopping by sharing the story thank you for hosting always a fun to be here absolutely all right well he's mo and I'm Jeff you're watching the cube when our power out the studio's having a cute conversation thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music]

>>from New York. It's the Q covering Escape. 19. >>Welcome back to the Cube coverage here in New York City for the first inaugural multi cloud conference called Escape, where in New York City was staying in New York, were not escaping from New York were in New York. It's all about multi Cloud, and we're here. Lisa Marie Nancy, developer advocate for Port Works, and Eric Conn, vice president of Products Works. Welcome back. Q. >>Thank you, John. Good to see >>you guys. So, um, whenever the first inaugural of anything, we want to get into it and find out why. Multi clouds certainly been kicked around. People have multiple clouds, but is there really multi clouding going on? So this seems to be the theme here about setting the foundation, architecture and data of the two kind of consistent themes. What shared guys take Eric, What's your take on this multi cloud trend? Yeah, >>I think it's something we've all been actively watching for a couple years, and suddenly it is becoming the thing right? So every we just had ah, customer event back in Europe last week, and every customer there is already running multi cloud. It's always something on their consideration. So there's definitely it's not just a discussion topic. It's now becoming a practical reality. So this event's been perfect because it's both the sense of what are people doing, What are they trying to achieve and also the business sense. So it's definitely something that is not necessarily mainstream, but it's becoming much more how they're thinking about building all their applications. Going forward, >>you know, you have almost two camps in the world. Want to get your thoughts on this guy's Because, like you have cloud native and people that are cloud native, they love it. They born the cloud that get it. Everything's cracking along. The developers air on Micro Service's They're agile train with their own micro service's. Then you got the hybrid I t. Trying to be hybrid developer, right? So you kind of have to markets coming together. So to me, I see multi cloud as kind of a combination of old legacy Data center types of I t with cloud native, not just ops and dead. But how about like trying to build developer teams inside enterprises? This seems to be a big trend, and multi club fits into that because now the reality is that I got azure. I got Amazon. Well, let's take a step back and think about the architecture. What's the foundation? So that to me, is more my opinion. But I want to get your thoughts and reactions that because if it's true, that means some new thinking has to come around around. What's the architecture? What are you trying to do? What's the workloads behavior outcome look like? What's the work flows? So there's a whole nother set of conversations that happened. >>I agree. I think the thing that the fight out there right now that we want to make mainstream is that it's a platform choice, and that's the best way to go forward. So it's still an active debate. But the idea could be I want to do multi club, but I'm gonna lock myself into the Cloud Service is if that's the intent or that's the design architecture pattern. You're really not gonna achieve the goals we all set out to do right, So in some ways we have to design ourselves or have the architecture that will let us achieve the business schools that were really going for and that really means from our perspective or from a port works perspective. There's a platform team. That platform team should run all the applications and do so in a multi cloud first design pattern. And so from that perspective, that's what we're doing from a data plan perspective. And that's what we do with Kubernetes etcetera. So from that idea going forward, what we're seeing is that customers do want to build a platform team, have that as the architecture pattern, and that's what we think is going to be the winning strategy. >>Thank you. Also, when you have the definition of cod you have to incorporate, just like with hybrid I t the legacy applications. And we saw that you throughout the years those crucial applications, as we call them People don't always want them to refer to his legacy. But those are crucial applications, and our customers were definitely thinking about how we're gonna run those and where is the right places it on Prem. We're seeing that a lot too. So I think when we talk about multi cloud, we also talk about what What is in your legacy? What is it? Yeah, I >>like I mean I use legacy. I think it's a great word because I think it really puts nail in the coffin of that old way because remember, if you think about some of the large enterprises, these legacy applications, they've been optimized for hardware and optimize their full stack. They've been build up from the ground up, so they're cool. They're running stuff, but it doesn't always translate to see a new platform designed point. So how do you mean Containers is great fit for their Cooper names. Obviously, you know is the answer. We you guys see that as well, but okay, I can keep that and still get this design point. So I guess what I want to ask you guys, as you guys are digging into some of the customer facing conversations, what are they talking about? The day talking about? The platform? Specifically? Certainly, on the security side, we're seeing everyone running away from buying tools to thinking about platforms. What's the conversation like on the cloud side >>way? Did a talk are multiplied for real talk at Barcelona? Q. Khan put your X three on Sudden. Andrew named it for reals of Izzy, but we really wanted to talk about multiplied in the real world. And when we said show of hands in Barcelona, who's running multi cloud? It was very, very few. And this was in, what, five months? Four months ago? Whereas maybe our customers are just really super advanced because of our 100 plus customers. At four words, we Eric is right. A lot of them are already running multi cloud or if not their plan, in the planning stage right now. So even in the last +56 months, this has become a reality. And we're big fans of communities. I don't know if you know Eric was the first product manager for Pernetti. Hey, he's too shy to say it on Dhe. So yeah, and we think, you know, and criminal justice to be the answer to making all They caught a reality right now. >>Well, I want to get back into G, K, E and Cooper. Very notable historic moment. So congratulations, But to your point about multi cloud, it's interesting because, you know, having multiple clouds means things, right? So, for instance, if I upgrade to office 3 65 and I kill my exchange server, I'm essentially running azure by their definition. If I'm building it, stack on AWS. I'm a native, this customer. Let's just say I want to do some tensorflow or play with big table or spanner on Google. Now >>we have three >>clouds now they're not. So they have work clothes, specific objectives. I am totally no problem. I see that like for the progressive customers, some legacy be to be people who like maybe they put their toe in the cloud. But anyone doing meaningful cloud probably has multiple clouds. But that's workload driven when you get into tying them together and is interesting. And I think that's where I think you guys have a great opportunity in this community because if open source convene the gateway to minimize the lock in and when I say lock and I mean like locking them propriety respect if his value their great use it. But if I want to move my data out of the Amazon, >>you brought up so many good points. So let me go through a few and Lisa jumping. I feel like locking. People don't wanna be locked >>in at the infrastructure level. So, like you said, if >>there's value at the higher levels of Stack, and it helps me do my business faster. That's an okay thing to exchange, but it is just locked in and it's not doing anything. They're that's not equal exchange, right, So there's definitely a move from infrastructure up the platform. So locking in >>infrastructure is what people are trying to move away from. >>From what we see from the perspective of legacy, there is a lot of things happening in industry that's pretty exciting of how legacy will also start to running containers. And I'm sure you've seen that. But containers being the basis you could run a BM as well. And so that will mean a lot for in terms of how V EMS can start >>to be matched by orchestrators like kubernetes. So that is another movement for legacy, and I wanted to acknowledge that point >>now, in terms of the patterns, there are definitely applications, like a hybrid pattern where connect the car has to upload all its data once it docks into its location and move it to the data center. So there are patterns where the workflow does move the ups are the application data between on Prem into a public cloud, for instance, and then coming back from that your trip with Lisa. There is also examples where regulations require companies to enterprise is to be able to move to another cloud in a reasonable time frame. So there's definitely a notion of Multi Cloud is both an architectural design pattern. But it's also a sourcing strategy, and that sourcing strategy is more regulation type o. R. In terms of not being locked in. And that's where I'm saying it's all those things. I'd >>love to get your thoughts on this because I like where you're going with this because it kind of takes it to a level of okay, standardization, kubernetes nights, containers, everyone knows what that is. But then you start talking about a P I gateways, for instance, right? So if I'm a car and I have five different gateways on my device, I ot devices or I have multiple vendors dealing with control playing data that could be problematic. I gotta do something like that. So I'm starting. Envision them? I just made that news case up, but my point is is that you need some standards. So on the a p I side was seeing some trends there. One saying, Okay, here's my stuff. I'll just pass parameters with FBI State and stateless are two dynamics. What do you make of that? What, What? What has to happen next to get to that next level of happiness and goodness? Because Bernays, who's got it, got it there, >>right? I feel that next level. I feel like in Lisa, Please jump. And I feel like from automation perspective, Kubernetes has done that from a P I gateway. And what has to happen next. There's still a lot of easy use that isn't solved right. There's probably tons of opportunities out there to build a much better user experience, both from the operations point of view and from what I'm trying to do is an intense because what people aren't gonna automate right now is the intent. They automate a lot of the infrastructure manual tasks, and that's goodness. But from how I docked my application, how the application did it gets moved. We're still at the point of making policy driven, easy to use, and I think there's a lot of opportunities for everyone to get better there. That's like low priority loving fruitcake manual stuff >>and communities was really good at the local food. That's a really use case that you brought up. Really. People were looking at the data now and when you're talking about persistent mean kun is his great for stateless, but for state full really crucial data. So that's where we really come in. And a number of other companies in the cloud native storage ecosystem come in and have really fought through this problem and that data management problem. That's where this platform that Aaron was talking to that >>state problem. Talk about your company. I want to go back to to, um, Google Days. Um, many war stories around kubernetes will have the same fate as map reduce. Yeah, the debates internally at Google. What do we do with it? You guys made the good call. Congratulations on doing that. What was it like to be early on? Because you already had large scale. You were already had. Borg already had all these things in place. Um, it wasn't like there was what was, >>Well, a few things l say one is It was intense, right? It was intense in the sense that amazing amount of intelligence amazing amount of intent, and right back then a lot of things were still undecided, right? We're still looking at how containers or package we're still looking at how infrastructure kit run and a lot of service is were still being rolled out. So what it really meant is howto build something that people want to build, something that people want to run with you and how to build an ecosystem community. A lot of that the community got was done very well, right? You have to give credit to things like the Sig. A lot of things like how people like advocates like Lisa had gone out and made it part of what they're doing. And that's important, right? Every ecosystem needs to have those advocates, and that's what's going well, a cz ah flip side. I think there's a lot of things where way always look back, in which we could have done a few things differently. But that's a different story for different. Today >>I will come back in the studio Palop of that. I gotta ask you now that you're outside. Google was a culture shock. Oh my God! People actually provisioning software provisioning data center culture shock when there's a little >>bit of culture shock. One thing is, and the funny thing is coming full circle in communities now, is that the idea of an application? Right? The idea of what is an application eyes, something that feels very comfortable to a lot of legacy traditional. I wanna use traditional applications, but the moment you're you've spent so much time incriminates and you say, What's the application? It became a very hard thing, and I used to have a lot of academic debates. Where is saying there is no application? It's It's a soup of resources and such. So that was a hard thing. But funny thing is covered, as is now coming out with definitions around application, and Microsoft announced a few things in that area to so there are things that are coming full circle, but that just shows how the movement has changed and how things are becoming in some ways meeting each other halfway. >>Talk about the company, what you guys are doing. Take a moment. Explain in context to multi cloud. We're here. Port works. What's the platform? It's a product. What's the value proposition? What's the state of the company. >>So the companies? Uh well, well, it's grown from early days when Lisa and I joined where we're probably a handful now. We're in four or five cities. Geography ease over 100 people over 150 customers and there. It's been a lot of enterprises that are saying, like, How do I take this pattern of doing containers and micro service is And how do I run it with my mission? Critical business crinkle workloads. And at that point, there is no mission critical business critical workload that isn't stable so suddenly they're trying to say, How do I run These applications and containers and data have different life cycles. So what they're really looking for is a data plane that works with the control planes and how controlled planes are changing the behavior. So a lot of our technology and a lot of our product innovation has been around both the data plane but a storage control plane that integrates with a computer controlled plane. So I know we like to talk about one control plane. There's actually multiple control planes, and you mentioned security, right? If I look at how applications are running way after now securely access for applications, and it's no longer have access to the data. Before I get to use it, you have to now start to do things like J W. T. Or much higher level bearer tokens to say, I know how to access this application for this life cycle for this use case and get that kind of resiliency. So it's really around having that storage. More complexity absolutely need abstraction >>layers, and you got compute. Look, leading work there. But you gotta have >>software to do it from a poor works perspective. Our products entirely software right down loans and runs using kubernetes. And so the point here is we make remarries able to run all the staple workloads out of the box using the same comment control plane, which is communities. So that's the experiences that we really want to make it so that Dev Ops teams can run anywhere close. And that's that's in some ways been part of the mix. Lisa, >>we've been covering Dev up, going back to 2010. Remember when I first was hanging around San Francisco 2008 joint was coming out the woodwork and all that early days and you look at the journey of how infrastructures code We talked about that in 2008 and now we'll get 11 years later. Look at the advancements you've been through this now The tipping point. It's just seems like this wave is big and people are on it. The developers air getting it. It's a modern renaissance of application developers, and the enterprises it's happening in the enterprise is not just like the nerds Tier one, the Alfa Geeks or >>the Cloud native. It's happening in the >>everyone's on board this time, and you and I have been in the trenches in the early stages of many open source projects. And I think with with kubernetes Arab reference of community earlier, I'm super proud to be running the world's largest CNC F for user group. And it's a great community, a diverse community, super smart people. One of my favorite things about working for works is we have some really smart engineers that have figured out what companies want, how to solve problems, and then we'll go creative. It'll open source projects. We created a project called autopilot, really largely because one of our customers, every who's in the G s space and who's running just incredible application. You can google it and see what the work they're doing. It's all there publicly, Onda We built, you know, we built an open source project for them to help them get the most out of kubernetes. We can say so. There's a lot of people in the community system doing that. How can we make communities better halfway make commitments, enterprise grade and not take years to do that? Like some of the other open source projects that we worked on, it took. So it's a super exciting time to be here, >>and open source is growing so fast now. I mean, just think about how these projects being structured. Maur and Maur projects are coming online and user price, but a lot more vendor driven projects to use be mostly and used, but now you have a lot of vendors who are users. So the line is blurring between Bender User in Open source is really fascinating. >>Well, you look at the look of the landscape on the C N. C f. You know the website. I mean, it's what 400 that are already on board. It's really important. >>They don't have enough speaking slasher with >>right. I know, and it's just it. It is users and vendors. Everybody's in this community together. It's one of things that makes it super exciting. And it it's how we know this is This was the right choice for us to base this on communities because that's what everybody, you guys >>are practically neighbors. So we're looking for seeing the studio. Palo Alto Eric, I want to ask you one final question on the product side. Road map. What you guys thinking As Kubernetes goes, the next level state, a lot of micro service is observe abilities becoming a key part of it, Obviously, automation, configuration management things are developing fast. State. What's the What's the road map for you guys? >>For us, it's been always about howto handle the mission critical and make that application run seamlessly. And then now we've done a lot of portability. So disaster recovery has been one of the biggest things for us is that customers are saying, How do I do a hybrid pattern back to your earlier question of running on Prem and in Public Cloud and do a d. R. Pale over into some of the things at least, is pointing out that we're announcing soon is non series autopilot in the idea, automatically managing applications scale from a volume capacity. And then we're actually going to start moving a lot more into some of the what you do with data after the life cycle in terms of backup and retention. So those are the things that everyone's been pushing us and the customers are all asking for. You >>know, I think data they were back in recovery is interesting. I think that's going to change radically. And I think we look at the trend of how yeah, data backup and recovery was built. It was built because of disruption of business, floods, our gains, data center failure. But I think the biggest disruptions ransomware that malware. So security is now a active disruptor. So it's not like it after the hey, if we ever have, ah, fire, we can always roll back. So you're infected and you're just rolling back infected code. That's a ransomware dream. That's what's going on. So I think data protection it needs to be >>redefined. What do you think? Absolutely. I think there's a notion of How do I get last week's data last month? And then oftentimes customers will say, If I have a piece of data volume and I suddenly have to delete it, I still need to have some record of that action for a long time, right? So those are the kinds of things that are happening and his crew bearnaise and everything. It gets changed. Suddenly. The important part is not what was just that one pot it becomes. How do I reconstruct everything? What action is not one thing. It's everywhere. That's right and protected all through the platform. If it was a platform decision, it's not some the cattlemen on the side. You can't be a single lap. It has to be entire solution. And it has to handle things like, Where do you come from? Where is it allowed to go? And you guys have that philosophy. We absolutely, and it's based on the enterprises that are adopting port works and saying, Hey, this is my romance. I'm basing it on Kubernetes. You're my date a partner. We make it happen. >>This speaks to your point of why the enterprise is in. The vendors jumped in this is what people care about Security. How do you solve this last mile problem? Storage. Networking. How do you plug those holes in Kubernetes? Because that is crucial to our >>personal private moment. Victory moment for me personally, was been a big fan of Cuban is absolutely, you know, for years. Then there were created, talked about one. The moments that got me that was really kind of a personal, heartfelt moment was enterprise buyer. And, you know, the whole mindset in the Enterprise has always been You gotta kill the old to bring in the new. And so there's always been that tension of a you know, the shiny new toy from Silicon Valley or whatever. You know, I'm not gonna just trash this and have a migration za paying that. But for I t, they don't want that to do that. They hate doing migrations, but with containers and kubernetes that could actually they don't to end of life to bring in the new project. They can do it on their own timetable or keep it around. So that took a lot of air out of the tension in on the I t. Side because they say great I can deal with the lifecycle management, my app on my own terms and go play with Cloud native and said to me, that's like that was to be like, Okay, there it is. That was validation. That means this Israel because now they can innovate without compromising. >>I think so. And I think some of that has been how the ecosystems embrace it, right. So now it's becoming all the vendors are saying my internal stack is also based on community. So even if you as an application owner or not realizing it, you're gonna take a B M next year and you're gonna run it and it's gonna be back by something like awesome. Lisa >>Marie Nappy Eric on Thank you for coming on Port Works Hot start of multiple cities Kubernetes big developer Project Open Source. Talking about multi cloud here at the inaugural Multi cloud conference in New York City. It's the Cube Courage of escape. 2019. I'm John Period. Thanks for watching