>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis I want to lay out my 2020 predictions using insights gleaned from theCUBE blended with ETR spending data. You know, 2019 marked our 10th year of doing theCUBE. Over that time we've had the pleasure of covering nearly 1000 events and milestones, including the exit from the great softness of 2008 and 2009. You know theCUBE has extensively tracked a 10 year bull market. We've covered the era of data. We saw the rise and profitless prosperity of the big data and opensource Hadoop movement, where we predicted the practitioners, not vendors, would benefit the most from big data. We've covered many dozens of acquisitions including the 60 billion dollar chess move made by Michael Dell acquiring EMC, and a launch of hundreds of startups in flash, hyper-converged, big data, AI, blockchain, crypto, security and SaaS. There'll be other days to talk about theCUBE and review that, today's all about predicting the future, using spending data and insights from the thousands of interviews we've done on theCUBE. So let's get right into the ETR data and start with the high-level spending. Remember in October, ETR released its survey results and stated that we're coming out of a multiyear investment cycle in digital transformation. Enterprise IT buyers have learned what works, and on which technologies they're going to double down. They're now narrowing their investments on emerging technologies, picking those winners for the next gen tech, and at the same time, they're cutting redundancies from legacy players that they were keeping on as a hedge. Buyers are picking bundled suites from a handful of mega vendors, and solidifying their investments. We're seeing a multi-generational dynamic repeat itself, where buyers are creating a balance between the convenience of packaged offerings, i.e. bundles, and leveraging best of breed technologies to drive innovation. So on balance, the ETR data shows that a contraction in spending and tepid CIO sentiment is impacting both emerging vendors as well as traditional players, and these trends are most pronounced in the very largest organizations, which have always been the best bellwether in ETR's data sets. Let me share with you what one IT executive said recently that I think really sums up the situation quite well. He said, "ETR's findings mirror what we're doing today, "in that we spend most of 2018 bringing in "a lot of the new, core technology. "I believe what you're seeing now is not a lull in spend, "but an operationalization of what we've already purchased. "We're not spending on what's next yet, "because we're still rolling out what we just bought." This is from a VP of global IT at a large public manufacturing company, I said he, it could be a she as well. I think that she's summing it up correctly, and it reflects many of what customers on theCUBE tell us. Now, let's take a look at the macroeconomy. GDP growth is going to come in at about 2.3% this year, give or take. It's not going to hit the Trump administration's goal of 3% plus, but consumers are clearly powering steady growth. At least for now. IT spending should grow at about a point or two above GDP, so let's put that at, say, 4%. We're right in the middle of a Santa Claus rally, and the S&P is above 3200 today. Tech has been a powerful tailwind for stocks, and I think stocks, tech stock's going to take a breath in early 2020, but I expect continued strong growth in the economy and tech spending after a Q1 pause. I could see the S&P flirting with 3700 or even higher in 2020, and I think the tech sector will be a benefactor of that momentum, providing an impetus for continued growth. Here's my thinking on that. So much of 2020 is going to be about the election, and to me the election is going to be really about the economy. And I predict the economy is going to remain steady. And as the IT leader I quoted earlier said, customers will be operationalizing what's been previously purchased. Here's what's different in 2020. Tech projects have historically been very risky investments, and have required higher internal rates of return, IRRs, to get approved by CFOs. But the cloud has altered two factors. One, is that it's allowed more experimentation for way less money. The second is cloud, by shifting CAPEX to OPEX, allows for much more incremental, lower risk investments. So I think you'll see continued steady growth, powered by the cloud, which allows experimentation, and importantly higher hit rates of success. These successful projects will throw off cash for companies, and CFOs are getting on board because they realize it's driving innovation. They also realize that IT does matter, maybe not in the form that Nick Carr envisioned, but a new generation of IT that creates competitive advantage. This brings me to my first main prediction, which is the growth of cloud computing is going to moderate, but the cloud will continue to steal significant share from on-prem spending. Now the narrative that the pendulum is swinging back in my view, is a false narrative. Rather, the pendulum has swung, and the cloud is the underpinning of innovation. Now having said that, I do think we're seeing a bit of an equilibrium in spending, where buyers have identified those workloads that are going to remain on-prem, which is why you see, for example, AWS, Azure, and Google making moves in hybrid. Hybrid slash on-prem offerings. What this chart here shows from ETR, so from 2010 through October '19 survey on cloud spending, I had to block out the 2020 survey as it's currently in the field, I'm not allowed to show that data. The yellow line is market share, which in ETR parlance, as you remember, is pervasiveness, or mentions in their survey. The blue line is spending momentum, measured as net score, which essentially subtracts the percent of customers spending less from those spending more. The long, steady march of cloud, as you can see, continues, and there's no indication that it's going to abate. That said, the penetration of cloud has become much more meaningful, so share gains will be more hard-fought for the cloud guys. Now, you may see this as a non-prediction, or a hedge. It's not, let me be clear. Cloud will continue to steal share from on-prem, but share gains for the cloud vendors will be more difficult. Which brings me to part B of this prediction. What I'm showing in this chart is market share from ETR's January 2016 survey through October '19. And I'm showing spending for three on-prem vendors within AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud accounts. And I'm picking on Oracle, IBM, and Dell EMC as three prominent on-prem proxies, and you can see the steady decline in market share for these companies. And even though there's a bit of an uptick in October, I don't see this as a reversal. What's going to happen is that traditional on-prem vendors are going to step up their cloud strategies. Specifically with multicloud management. This is going to be the case with Dell, who's going to leverage VMware, and in the case of IBM, they'll try to take advantage of Red Hat in that multicloud game. Now both IBM and Oracle, who each have public clouds are going to dig their heels in, they're going to get customers in a headlock, and provide big financial incentives for them to use their captive clouds. All right, so with the high-level spending comments that I made earlier, and that cloud discussion that we just had as a backdrop, the question is, which companies will do well in the coming year? I'm going to call out five companies, that I want to highlight where the ETR data intersects what we're seeing on theCUBE. The prediction is these five players will do well in 2020, they're going to power through any downturn in spending, and they're going to thrive in the face of the cloud share shift. So the chart here shows data from the ETR October 2019 survey, and it lays out net score or spending momentum for these companies, that I am predicting will be winners in 2020 and beyond. And the five companies are UIPath, Snowflake, Databricks, HashiCorp, and Rubrik. Let me start with UIPath. They are the leader in robotic process automation. I think RPA is going to do well even in a downturn, because more companies will be looking to automate and save money, even in a softer climate. Automation Anywhere is another player in this space, they're doing pretty well, and I predict that UIPath will come out on top of this space, but both UIPath and Automation Anywhere can thrive. Next company is Snowflake, they are changing the analytic database market, and I've covered them before in previous Breaking Analysis segments. They are going to continue to grow nicely in my view. They are 100% cloud-based, and they participate in all popular cloud platforms. Now ironically, they compete with AWS RedShift, who continues to copy some of the innovations that Snowflake has popularized. But AWS and Snowflake are strong partners, so there's room for both companies to thrive. Snowflake especially, as they play in clouds other than just AWS. Which brings me to Databricks. We're seeing a new type of workload emerge in the cloud for modern analytic databases, where organizations are taking all this data that they have, lots of it in the cloud, and they're structuring it within a Snowflake database, or RedShift, and they're bringing Databricks tooling to the equation to be able to query and visualize the data in near real time. Now of course, as I say, AWS plays here with RedShift, and they're selling a lot of EC2, so they love Snowflake. All major cloud players are seeing this type of workload enter the mix, and it's going to be a strong area of growth in 2020 and beyond. Next thing I want to talk about is HashiCorp. HashiCorp is capitalizing on this trend toward cloud-native computing. The company provides opensource tooling for developers, and is all about simplifying application deployment independent of the underlying platform, whether it's virtual, container, or cloud. Five years ago, the players in the space that got all the attention on theCUBE were Chef, Puppet, Ansible and Salt, and today, especially again on theCUBE, you hear the most about Hashi and Ansible, and in fact we were at AnsibleFest with theCUBE, and we heard lots about HashiCorp, so they both complement and compete with the older players. To me, this reminds me of Spark within the Hadoop ecosystem. Hashi has raised about 174 million in VC, and as you can see they have very strong spending momentum in the ETR dataset, with a net score, as shown, of 63%. Now finally, I want to talk about Rubrik, which has been a consistent performer in the ETR dataset. They're trying to transform backup into data management as a discipline. They compete with established players in the data protection space, guys like Veritas, Dell EMC, IBM and CommVault. Now Rubrik is not the only new or newish player here, that's doing very well, Cohesity, who's relatively new, Veeam, which has been around for a decade, both doing very well and showing up strong in ETR surveys, especially Veeam, but Rubrik has been a consistently strong performer and has been outpacing the others, so I want to call them out. Look for these five to do very well in 2020, and into the next decade. So that brings me to my next prediction, I want to talk about Kubernetes. This prediction is twofold. Kubernetes is going to continue its strong showing as this data from ETR shows. This is Kubernetes' market share in the October 2019 survey, so Kubernetes spend had a 76% net score. So very very strong. But the other part of the prediction is that Kubernetes will become embedded into virtually every platform, and people will stop thinking about it as a separate market. Already today, there's little discussion of the idea of a Kubernetes distro, I mean Anthos is an example of a Kubernetes stack, but it can be run in the cloud, it can be run on-prem, anywhere. VMware Tanzu, Microsoft Azure Arc are other examples, they're really not stacks, but they're management platforms that can manage anyone's Kubernetes instances. I like to think of this as kind of like flash. You remember when everyone looked at flash storage as a separate market, well today it's just embedded everywhere. And that's kind of what's happening with Kubernetes. So spending momentum is going to continue to be strong, but by 2023, Kubernetes will be ubiquitous, and not really thought of as a separate entity. All right, for my next prediction, I want to talk about cybersecurity. I did a Breaking Analysis earlier this year on security, and I showed this slide. And as you can see, I've added a little something in the red stars for my prediction. So what this chart shows is two views of net score, the left-hand side shows the ranking by net score, and you can see CrowdStrike, Okta, Shape Security, which was just, by the way, bought by F5, that was an announcement. Twistlock, which is now Palo Alto Networks, and you can see the others down that list. On the right-hand side is net score, but it's ranked by shared N, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the ETR dataset. What I've added is the four star companies, that is those companies that have both spending momentum and are pervasive in the ETR survey. So the prediction is 2020 we'll see the four star companies maintain their position and gain strength in 2020. These include established players with portfolios where they can bundle like Microsoft, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, Proofpoint, Fortinet, and CyberArk Software. And then the newer companies like Okta and CrowdStrike are going to continue to gain share faster than the larger players. Now you also may see companies like SailPoint, Illumio, and SentinelOne emerge as four star companies over the next 24 months. Now the one company that's not on this list that is a major player in security is AWS. AWS is the cloud security leader, and is in a category all by itself in many ways. As I said in my security segment earlier this year, the market is incredibly fragmented, and it's going to stay that way. Each year we look back and say "Did we spend more on security?" and "Are we more safe?" And every year the answer is yes, and no. And 2020 will be no different. Now if you look at the various data sources, we spend approximately 120 billion dollars annually on cybersecurity. The worldwide economy is about 85 trillion in dollar terms, so on balance, we spend about .14% on securing our economy, so we're barely scratching the surface. The market is going to remain highly fragmented, the rich will get richer if they have four stars, new players will continue to enter the space, and M&A will continue to be robust. Now if you exclude my long shot that the S&P will break through 3700 next year, that makes nine predictions. For my 10th and final prediction, I don't have hard data from ETR, but I have a strong opinion on this, and that is that the edge will be won by developers, you've heard me talk about this before. Specifically, platforms like Outposts, which are essentially programmable infrastructure which bring a cloud development platform to the edge, is how that space will evolve. It won't be won by shoving traditional servers and storage boxes out to the edge. Rather, it will grow by coders being able to build new applications and workloads on top of infrastructure as code. Okay, that wraps up my 2020 predictions. I'd very much like to hear your opinion, so you can leave your thoughts or your own predictions in the comments sections of this video, or go to my LinkedIn posts. You can reach me @DVellante on Twitter, love to hear your thoughts. And don't forget, this series is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other podcast platforms for your listening pleasure. I'd like to wish everyone a safe and restful holiday season and a prosperous, healthy 2020. Enjoy your families, enjoy this time, this is Dave Vellante, signing out from the latest episode of theCUBE Insights powered by ETR, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. (techno music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation, here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program, William Toll who is the head of product marketing, at Acronis. Fresh of the Acronis Global Cyber Summit, down in Miami. Thanks so much for joining us William. >> Great. Thanks Stu, thanks for having me. >> All right, so you had your customers, your partners, you had the speakers. Miami Beach, (mumbles) lovely view down there. It's a little chillier up here in the Boston area. Why don't you bring us some of the energy and announcements that you had at the show for those who might not have caught it. >> Sure, I have to say it was and amazing event. The feedback that we've gotten from our partners, from our customers, from everyone that attended was fantastic. For a company like Acronis, we've been in business for 17 years. Providing data protection, cyber protection solutions. We really hit the ball out of the park, for our first customer event, the eco-system really came together and it was a couple days of learning and understanding the future of cyber protection. >> So William, while the term Cyber is on everyone's lip these days. You can't turn on the news without hearing about the latest security threat. Everyone's concerned about this. Maybe just give us Acronis's definition of what cyber protection is. >> Sure, cyber protection is the combination of data protection and cyber security. We believe that the world is becoming more digital, and data's becoming more valuable. It is essential that cyber protections solutions protect that data, protect it from being lost. Protect that data from being stolen. And protect that data from being manipulated. When you look at traditional data protection solutions that really don't incorporate any kind of security solutions, you're really putting that data at risk and the future is cyber protection. >> Okay so when I talk to data protection companies, all of them were talking about ransomware as one of the pieces. Ransomware, everyone has a solution, that helps that piece of it. Maybe help understand where Acronis fits. Cyber security is a broad piece. There's no silver bullet to solve security we know, it is more of a practice and everyone needs to be involved with it. What announcements were made at the show? Help us understand where Acronis fits in the overall security landscape. >> Sure, so the biggest announcement at the show was the fact that our Acronis Cyber Cloud Solution has been expanded to include Acronis Cyber Protect. And this is a suite of cyber security solutions that essentially democratizes enterprise grade security, for the SNB and beyond. If we think about vulnerability assessments and patch management and other solutions that really are inaccessible to the SNB. Our manned service provider partners and resellers are now able to take what was once isolated point solutions, and bring that together and protect that data, where the data lives. >> That's great. My background is more in the enterprise, and we've talked about things that the enterprise can do now that before you needed to be a nation state. But when you talk about bringing these solutions down to the SNB, is this the enabler of cloud, help us understand a bit more why it's so critically important for us. >> It's a very different world right? Acronis was the first data protection solution to integrate ransomware protection. Acronis was also the first solution provider that brought block chain based security solutions that authenticates files. So our customers are able to demonstrate that that file is authentic and has not been manipulated. That's not something that is front and center with the Acronis solutions, but it demonstrates our desire to really protect that data from loss, theft and manipulation. >> Okay. You were talking earlier about data, we know data is one of the most important resources for companies today. And security now is a board level discussion, so Acronis is not new to the industry. Tell us why kind of now is so important in the Acronis's history? >> Sure, just last year for example, we blocked over 400,000 ransomware attempts across the millions and millions of devices that we're protecting. When you think about data, data lives in multiple occasions now. It's getting harder and harder for organizations to protect that data. Acronis specializes in protecting data at the edge. So this is outside of the corporate data center, where it's more and more important that that data is protected, and has the same policies and requirements met for protecting that data as the systems inside the corporate data center. >> All right, William we had a bunch of big announcements at the show. Give our audience a bit of a look forward. What should we be expecting to see from Acronis and your partners as we head towards 2020. >> Sure, so another one of the big announcements we made was Acronis cyber platform. And that's the opening of our API's and our SDK's. So now Acronis is opening the possibility for developers and ISV's and our service provider partners, to integrate additional solutions, to have data protection, cyber protection. So and example would be, any of the SaaS applications or ISV's that want to imbed native cyber protection, right into their solution. Another example would be a service provider that want's to automate more and more of their cyber protections operation solutions. Now developers can come and visit developer.acronis.com. They can register on the Acronis developer network and then they can get busy with integrating additional data sources for cyber protection and even add new data destinations for that storage, data destinations for the storage of cyber protection. >> Yes, so important. I'm just off of one of the large public cloud conferences there, and in the security space that was one of the discussions, how do I API's how do I share as the different ISV's data between them so that security will be more than just a bunch of point pieces that don't work together but have the industry as a whole are trying to protect companies and their data. >> It needs to be integrated and it needs to be native. And that's what were enabling at the Acronis cyber platform. >> Right William, give you the final word for Acronis and how people should be thinking about-- >> Sure, cyber protection is the future. A recent report by one of the big industry analysts firms demonstrated the power of bringing the back up team with the cyber security team, traditionally silo's, together. Because at the end of the day, everyone's doing the same thing, and that's protecting the data. >> All right. Well William Toll, thank you so much. We know how critically important data is and everything around protecting that cyber security of course. Helping to pull everything together. As always I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis I want to talk to you about what I learned this week at Dell Technology's financial analyst meeting in New York. They gathered all the financial analysts, Rob Williams hosted it, he's the head of IR, Michael Dell of course was there. They had Dennis Hoffman who is the head of strategic planning, Jeff Clarke who basically runs the business and Tom Sweet, of course, who was the star of the show, the CFO, all the analysts want to see him. Dell laid out its longterm goals, it provided much clearer understanding of its strategic direction, basically focused on three areas. Dell believes that IT is getting more complex, we know that, they want to capitalize on that by simplifying IT. We'll talk about that. And then they want to position for the wave of digital transformations that are coming and they also believe, Dell believes, that it can capitalize on the consolidation trend, consolidating vendors, so I'll talk about each of those. And so let me bring up the first slide, Alex, if you would. The takeaways from the Dell financial analyst meeting. Let me share with you the overall framework that Tom Sweet laid out. And I have to say, the messaging was very consistent, these guys were very well-prepared. I think Dell is, from a management perspective, very well-run company. They're targeting three to 5% growth on what they're saying is a 4% GDP forecast. Or sorry, 4%, I have GDP here, it's really 4% industry growth. GDP's a little lower than that obviously. So this is IDC data, Gartner data, 4% industry growth. So that's an error on my part, I apologize. The strategies to grow relative to their competition. So grow share on a relative basis. So whatever the market does, again, not GDP, but whatever the market does, Dell wants to grow faster than the market. So it wants to gain share, that's its primary metric. From there they want to grow operating income and they want to grow that faster than revenue, that's going to throw off cash. And then they're going to also continue to delever the balance sheet. I think they paid down 17 billion in debt since the EMC acquisition. They want to get to a two X debt to EBITA ratio within 18 months. And what they're saying is, you know, they talked about, Tom Sweet talked about this consistent march toward investment-grade rating. They've been talkin' about that for awhile. He made the comment, we don't need to have a triple A rating but we want to get to the point where we can reduce our interest expense, and that will, 'cause they'll drop right into the bottom line. So they talked about these various levers that they can turn, some of them under the P and L, gaining share, some are their operating structure and their organizational structure, and one big one is obviously their debt structure. The other key issue here is will this cut the liquidity discount that Dell faces? What do I mean by that? Well, VMware has about a $60 billion valuation. Dell owns about 80% of VMware, which would equate to 48 billion. But if you look at Dell's market cap, it's only 37 billion. So it essentially says that Dell's core business is worth minus 11 billion. We used to talk about this when EMC owned VMware. Its core business only comprised about 40% of the overall value of the company, in this case because of the high debt, Dell has a negative value. And it's not just the high debt. Michael Dell has control over the voting shares, it's essentially a conglomerate structure, there's very high debt, and it's a relatively low margin business, notwithstanding VMware. And so as a result, Dell trades at a discount relative to what you would think it should trade at, given its prominence in the market, $92 billion company, the leader in every category under the sun. So that's the big question is can Dell turn these levers, drop EBITA or cash to the bottom line, affect operating income, and then ultimately pay down its debt and affect that discount that it trades at? Okay, bring up, if you would, Alex, the next slide. Now I want to share with you the takeaways from the Dell line of business focus. This really was Jeff Clarke's presentations that I'm going to draw from. Servers, we know, they're softer demand, but the key there is they're really faced tough compares. Last year, Dell's server business grew like crazy. So this year the comparisons are lessened. But there's less spending on servers. I'll share with you some of the ETR data. Storage, they call it holding serve, you saw last quarter I did an analysis, I took the ETR data and the income statement, it showed Pure was gaining share at like 22% growth from the income statement standpoint. Dell was 0% growth but is actually growing faster than its competitors. With the exception of Pure. It's growing faster than the market. So Dell actually gained share with 0% growth. Dell's really focused on consolidating the portfolio. They've cut the portfolio down from 80, I think actually the right number is 88 products, down to 20 by May of 2020. They've got some new mid-range coming, they've just refreshed their data protection portfolio, so again, by May of next year, by Dell Technologies World they'll have a much, much more simplified portfolio. And they're gaining back share. They've refocused on the storage business. You might recall after the acquisition, EMC was kind of a mess. It was losing share before the acquisition, it was so distracted with all the Elliott Management stuff goin' on. And kind of took its eye off the ball, and then after the acquisition it took awhile for them to get their act together. They gained back about 375 basis points in the last 18 months. Remember a basis point is 1/100th of 1%. So gaining share and their consistent focus on trying to do that. Their PC business, which is actually doin' quite well, is focused on the commercial segment and focused on higher margins. They made the statement that the PCs are kind of undersupply right now so it's helping margins. There's a big focus in Jeff Clarke's organization on VMware integration. To me this makes a lot of sense. To the extent that you can take the VMware platform and make Dell hardware run VMware better, that's something that is an advantage for Dell, obviously. And at the same time, VMware has to walk the fine line with the ecosystem. But certainly it's earned the presence in the market now that it can basically do what I just said, tightly integrate with Dell and at the same time serve the ecosystem, 'cause frankly, the ecosystem has no choice. It must serve VMware customers. The strategy, essentially, is to, as I say, capitalize on vendor consolidation, leverage value across the portfolio, so whether it's pivotal, VMware integration, the security portfolio, try to leverage that and then differentiate with scale. And Dell really has the number one supply chain in the tech business. Something that Dave Donatelli at HP, when he was at HP, used to talk about. HPE doesn't really talk about that supply chain advantage anymore 'cause essentially it doesn't have it. Dell does. So Jeff Clarke's reorganization, he came in, he streamlined the organization, really from the focus on R and D to product to collaboration across the organization and the VMware integration. I actually was quite impressed with when I first met Jeff Clarke I guess two years ago now, what he and the organization have accomplished since then. No BS kind of person. And you can see it's starting to take effect. So we'll keep an eye on that. The next slide I want to show you, I want to bring in the ETR data. We've been sharing with you the ETR spending intention surveys for the last couple of weeks and months. ETR, enterprise technology research, they have a data platform that comprises 4,500 practitioners that share spending data with them. CIOs, IT managers, et cetera. What I'm showing here is a cut off of the server sector. So I'm going to drill down into server and storage. So these are spending intentions from the July survey asking about the second half of 2019 relative to the first half of 2019. And this is a drill-down into the giant public and private firms. Why do I do that? Because in meeting the ETR, this is the best indicator. So it's big, big public companies and big private companies. Think Uber. Private companies that spend a ton of dough on IT. UPS before it went public, for example. So those companies are in here. And they're, according to ETR, the best indicators. What this chart shows, so the bars show, and I've shared this with you a number of times, the lime green is we're adding, we're new to this platform, we're new adoption. The evergreen is we're spending more, the gray is we're spending the same, the light red or pink is we're spending less, and the dark red is we're leaving the platform. So if you subtract the red from the green you get what's called a net score, and that's that blue line. And this is the overall server spending intentions from that July survey. The end is about 525 respondents out of the 4,500. And this is, again, those that just answered the question on server. So you can see the net score on server spend is dropping. And you can see the market share on server is dropping. The takeaway here is that servers, as a percentage of overall IT spend, are on a downward slope, and have been for quite some time. Back to the January '16 survey. Okay, so that's going to serve us. Let's take a look at the same data for storage. So if, Alex, if you bring up the storage sector slide, You can see kind of a similar trend. And I would argue what's happening here, a couple of things. You've got the CLOB effect, I'll talk about that some more, and you've also got, in this case, the flash, all-flash array effect. What happened was you had all-flash arrays and flash come into the data center, and that gave performance a huge headroom. Remember, spinning disk was the last bastion of mechanical movement and it was the main bottleneck in terms of overall application performance. IO was the problem. Well you put a bunch of flash into the system and it gives a lot of headroom. People used to over-provision capacity just for performance reasons. So flash has had the effect of customers saying, hey, my performance is good, I don't need to over-provision anymore, I don't need to buy so much. So that combined with cloud, I think, has put down the pressure on the storage business as well. Now the next slide, Alex, that I want you to bring up is the vendor net scores, the server spending intentions. And what I've done is I've highlighted Dell EMC. Now what's happening here in the slide, and I realize it's an eye chart, but basically where you want to be in this chart is in the left-hand side. What it shows is the spending intentions and the momentum from the October '18, which is the gray, the April '19, which is the blue, and then the July '19 which is the most recent one. Again, the end is 525 in the servers for the July '19 survey. And you can see Dell's kind of in the middle of the pack. You'd love to be in the left-hand side, you know, Docker, Microsoft, VMware, Intel, Ubuntu. And you don't want to be on the right-hand side, you know, Fujitsu, IBM, is sort of below the line. Dell's kind of in the middle there, Dell EMC. The next slide I want to show you is that same slide for storage. And again, you can see here is that on-- So this is vendor net scores, the storage spending intentions. On the left-hand side it's all the high growth companies. Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, Pure, VMware with vSAN, Veeam. You see Dell EMC's VxRail. On the right-hand side, you see the guys that are losing momentum. Veritas, Iron Mountain, Barracuda, HitachiHDS, Fusion-io still comes up in the survey after the acquisition by Western Digital. Again, you see Dell EMC kind of holding serve in the middle there. Not great, not bad. Okay, so that's kind of just some other ETR data that I wanted to share. All right, next thing we're going to talk about is the macros market summary. And Alex, I've got some bullet points on this, so if you bring up that slide, let me talk about that a little bit. So five points here. First, cloud continues to eat away at on-prem, despite all this talk about repatriation, which I know does happen. People try to throw everything to the cloud and they go, whoa! Look at my Amazon bill, yeah, I get that. That's at the margin. The main trend is that cloud continues to grow. That whole repatriation thing is not moving the on-prem market. On-prem is kind of steady eddy. Storage is still working through that AFA injection. Got a lot of headroom from performance standpoint. So people don't need to buy as much as they used to because you had that step function in performance. Now eventually the market will catch up, all this digital transformation is happening, all this data is flowing through the system and it will catch up, and the storage market is elastic. As NAN prices fall, people will, I predict, will buy more storage. But there's been somewhat of a lull in the overall storage market. It's not a great market right now, frankly, at the macro level. Now ETR does these surveys on a quarterly basis. They're just about to release the October survey, and they put out a little glimpse on Friday about this survey. And I'll share some bullet points there. Overall IT spending clearly is softening. We kind of know that, everybody kind of realizes that. Here's the nuance. New adoptions are reverting to pre-2018 levels, and the replacements are rising. What does this mean? So the number of respondents that said, oh yes, we're adopting this platform for the first time is declining, and the replacements are actually accelerating. Why is that? Well I was at ETR last week and we were talking about this and one of the theories, and I think it's a good one, is that 2016, 2017 was kind of experimentation around digital transformation. 2018, people started to put things into production or closer to production, they were running systems in parallel, and now they're making their bets, they're saying, hey, this test worked, let's put this heavy into production in 2019, and now we're going to start replacing. So we're not going to adopt as much stuff 'cause we're not doing as much experimentation. We're going to now focus and narrow in on those things that are going to drive our business, and we're going to replace those things that aren't going to drive our business. We're going to start unplugging them. So that's some of what's happening. Another big trend is Microsoft. Microsoft is extending its presence throughout. They're goin' after collaboration, you saw the impact that they had on Slack and Slack stock recently. So Slack Box, Dropbox, are kind of exposed there. They're goin' after security, they've just announced a SIM product. So Splunk and IBM, they're kind of goin' after that base. The application performance management vendors. For instance, New Relic. Microsoft goin' after them. Obviously they got a huge presence in cloud. Their Windows 10 cycle is a little slower this time around, but they've got other businesses that are really starting to click. So Microsoft is one of the few vendors that really is showing accelerated spending momentum in the ETR data. Financial services and telcos, which are always leading spender indicators, are actually very weak right now. That's having a spillover effect into Europe, which is over-banked, if I can use that term. Banking heavy, if you will. So right now it's not a pretty picture, but it's not a disaster. I don't want to necessarily suggest this as like going back to 2007, 2008, it's not. It's really just a matter of things are softening and it's, you know, maybe taking a little breath. Okay, so let me summarize the meeting overall. Again, it was a very well-run meeting. Started at 9:00, ended at 12:00, bagged lunch, go home. Nice and crisp. So these guys are very well-prepared. I think, again, Dell is a extremely well-managed company. They laid out a much clearer vision for Wall Street of its strategy, where it's headed. As they say, they're going after IT complexity. I want to make a comment on this. You think about Legacy EMC. Legacy EMC was not the company that you would expect to deal with complexity. In fact, they were the culprit of complexity. One of the things that Jeff Clarke did when he came in, he said, this portfolio's too complex, needs to be simplified. Joe Tucci used to say, overlap is better than gaps. Jeff Clarke said we got too much overlap. We don't have a lot of gaps so let's streamline that portfolio. Taking advantage of vendor consolidation, this is an interesting one. Ever since I've been in this business, which has been quite a long time now, I've been hearing that buyers want to consolidate the number of vendors that they have. They've really not succeeded in doing that. Now can they do that now 'cause there are less vendors? Well, in a sense, yes, there are less sort of on-prem big vendors. EMC's no longer in the market, you don't have companies like Sun and Digital anymore, Compact is gone. HP split in two, but still. You're not seeing a huge number of new vendors, at scale, come into the market. Except you've got AWS and Google as new players there. So I think that injects sort of a new dynamic that a lot of people like to put cloud aside and kind of ignore it and talk about the old on-prem business, but I think that you're going to see a lot of experimentations and workload ins and outs, particularly with AWS and Google and of course Azure, which is in itself, their cloud is almost a separate force. So we'll see how that shakes up. As I say, servers right now, Dell's got a very tough compare. I think Dell will be fine in the server space. Storage, it's all about simplifying the portfolio, they've got a refreshed portfolio focused on regaining share. They've rebranded everything Power, so their whole line is going to be Power by, if it's not already, by May of next year, Dell Technologies World. It's a much more scalable portfolio. And I think Dell's got a lot of valuation levers. They're a $92 billion company, they've got their current operations, their current P and L, their share gains, their cross-company synergies, particularly with VMware, they can expand their TAM into cloud with partnerships like they're doing with AWS and others, Google, Microsoft. The Edge is a TAM expansion opportunity to them. And also corporate structure. You've seen them. VMware acquired Pivotal. They're cleaning that up. I'm sure they could potentially make some other moves. Secureworks is out there, for example. Maybe they'll do some things with RSA. So they got that knob to turn and they can delever. Paying down the debt to the extent that they can get back to investment grade, that will lower their interest rates, that'll drop right to the bottom line, and they'll be able to reinvest that. And Tom Sweet said, within 18 months, we'll be able to get there with that two X ratio relative to EBITA, and that's when they're going to start having conversations with the rating agencies to talk about you know, hey, maybe we can get a better rating and lower our interest expense. Bottom line, did Wall Street buy the story? Yes. But I don't think it's going to necessarily change anything in the near term. This is a show me from Missouri, prove it, execute, and then I think Dell will get rewarded. Okay, so this is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching this Cube Insights powered by ETR. We'll see ya next time. (electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. (techno music) Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special Cube Insights, powered by ETR. We've been running these Breaking Analysis Segments and today we're going to talk about some spending data that shows that there's continued interest in hyperconverged infrastructure. So we've been running these segments over the last several weeks with our partner ETR. They've got a database of about 4,500 IT Practitioners and CIOs. They go out quarterly and ask spending intentions. So we've been sharing that, along with our opinions. These are completely independent segments. I want to disclose that a number of the companies that we're talking about today: Nutanix, VMware, Dell EMC, Cisco, HPE. They sponsor theCube, but they have absolutely no input into editorial. They don't affect our opinion in any way, shape or form. So let's get into it. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu is an expert in this field. He's covered the space. Stu, let's look at some of the fundamentals. What do people need to know... Alex, if ya put up the slide, Stu, maybe you could talk to it. >> Yeah. Dave, thanks. I've been watching you have some fun with this. I enjoyed swimming in some of the data here and as you know, Dave, we've been watching since before hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, was a term that everybody talked about. We've been looking at how these hyperscale trends are going to impact the Enterprise. We put out our server SAN research years and years ago, so we know all these companies really well. And despite the latest AI and cloud and everything, the data shows, HCI, the simplification of the data center, building out what we would call True Private Cloud is important today. So right, we wanted to know when you look at the data, first of all, how are the vendors doing? Who are the leaders in this space here? There were a whole number of startups that came in this space. When we first analyzed the market it was companies like Microsoft and VMware that owned the operating system we thought would be hugely important. If you look in the big names this environment: Dell partnered with everyone, of course they bought Dell, bought EMC, which included a stake in VMware. What's that relationship with Nutanix? How is that shaping the market? As well as how is cloud impacting things? Both from a spending standpoint, has cloud sucked away revenue from HCI as that specter has overhung everybody in the IT space? And also, how does HCI fit into multicloud and how does that fit? >> Okay, great. So thanks for that setup, Stu, now let's get into some of the data. Alex, if you bring up the slide, the next slide. This is spending intentions for Nutanix, VMware and some other vendors. I'll go through that. But it's basically showing Nutanix and VMware are fighting it out. You know they're in this internecine battle and in social, and (chuckles) there's a war goin' on, because there's big money to be made here. So for those of you who are familiar with these segments, this is data from Enterprise Technology Research, from their July 2019 Spending Intentions Survey. So they're asking about spending intentions for the second half of 2019. The end of the survey, out of the 4,500 people in the panel, 1,068 responded to this survey. So on the left hand side you see the vendors: Nutanix, VMware with vSAN, Dell EMC with VxRail, specifically. Then SimpliVity, and then Springpath, or Cisco. So what the chart shows is what we call, Net Score. And net score is calculated by taking the red, on the bar, which is, we're going to leave the platform, that's the dark red. The lighter red, which is, we're going to spend less in the second half. The gray, which their spending's going to be flat. The dark green, or the evergreen, which says, we're going to increase spending. And the lime green, which I'm going to add to the platform. You take the green, minus the red, you get net score. Higher the net score, the better. You can see, Nutanix and VMware with vSAN are leading the pack. And then we'll go through that. But then you see, Shared Accounts. That's the number of indications for spending that they received out of those 1068. So Stu, what is this data telling you? >> So first of all, Dave, it confirmed kind of the general market share numbers that we hear out there. The vendors that track that on quarterly. VMware has the most customers, has the largest revenue, and their largest partner for that, of course, is Dell. VMware and Dell go to market, joint product development, joint engineering, joint go to market and it's the biggest piece of vSAN, so that's where we specifically wanted to look at the VxRail. And vSAN and VxRail, doing very well. They're adding new customers; was interesting to me that you saw VxRail kind of ramping up a little more on the, attracting new companies, but also looked to be losing some on the tail end of the dark red. As opposed to vSAN in general, is a little bit more stable. We know how many thousands of customers they have out there, and Vmware's a software story as opposed to VxRail is that full appliance. Nutanix is the second horse in this two-horse race that we're really talking about here, from HCI. There's some discussion in the marketplace after two quarters being down, is Nutanix showing weakness? What's happening there? The most recent quarter announcement was that Nutanix is doing well, seems to... They had a little bit of change as they're going through their move to a software model and sorting things out with sales and marketing in their channel. The data here shows that the second half of the year looks good for Nutanix. So to some of the questions I asked in the first slide, Dave, Nutanix and VMware, of course the clear leaders in this space. SimpliVity, which was of course bought be HP, Springpath which is the hyperflex from Cisco, are far behind those two out there. And it seems that even though Dell and VMware are fighting, very much with Nutanix, that is not heavily dampening Nutanix's from the respondents in this survey. >> Okay, and just a word on the data, so you see 184 shared accounts for Nutanix, 174 for VMware and down the line. Only 42 for SimpliVity and only 18 for Springpath, and Cisco. It's an indication of the size of the install base, obviously the more shared accounts, the more mentions, the larger the install base. Again, they're statistically significant; ETR does a very good job of that. Let's look Stu, at... Oh, actually I want to make another point here. So how are these net scores? Well let's put 'em in context. The hottest net scores we've seen recently are: Snowflake, and UiPath, with 80% plus, net score. Okay, so that's really, they're off the charts, they're growing like crazy. We saw Salesforce with 55%, so, and Workday sort of in there as well. Companies that are growing share. So SAP in the 30% range, and so you see the Dell EMC, VxRail, that's kind of holding serve. It's not like, dramatically gaining share, but they're growing a little bit and then-- >> And I think it's a lot, Dave, it shows to the maturity of this market. HCI is not new, both Nutanix and VMware have thousands of customers, specifically with V's then we're talking VMware. So it was more, when I saw some of your charts, Microsoft has a similar net score. >> Right >> Well liked, good install based, still growing and the like. And brings in the discussion of when we did some cross section of the analysis looking at cloud companies and how does this impact their public cloud spend; is this detracting if this customer's also doing public cloud? And the long and the short of it is VMware and Nutanix are pretty much the same if not actually a little bit better when you talk about a customer that's looking at their overall cloud spend. So to me that really signals that both VMware and Nutanix are doing a good job into how their solution fits into the customer's overall hybrid cloud strategy. >> All right, let's take a look at the next slide, which talks to time series. So this is hyperconverged infrastructure spending intentions again, for the second half of 2019, over time. So the July '19 Survey you can see is the most recent one. We go all the way back to January '17 and you can see Nutanix on the top, VMware or vSAN on the bottom. We just selected those two. We're just repeating the net score and the shared accounts. And you can see these things tend to bounce around a little bit. You can see Nutanix maintains a lead, but the market's startin' to converge. These two companies are coming together. We hear a lot about vSAN doing very well, it's kind of held on. You can see a slight downward pressure in July, in the July survey. It's unclear what that means. That could be an indication of just some uncertainty in the marketplace. Some economic macro concerns. Tariffs, potential headwinds there, so there could be some uncertainty there. But what do you takeaway from this slide, Stu? >> Yeah, first of all right. As you show, Dave, VMware is a bit more steady, Nutanix gone up for bit and come down. Both of them stayed relatively stable. Somewhere between kind of the 45 and 55 lately. A little bit, if you look at the overall trend, Nutanix is down. VMware could surpass them from the net score in the future, if this trend holds. But both of them doing quite well. When you looked at all the other vendors in there, of course the scale is just showing 40-70%, if you put all the others, which are down much lower, you can see once again, that kind of the clear leadership. These two companies, just strong lead. Does not look like there any challengers in this space that are ready to be a clear number three yet, in the market. >> But Nutanix at one point had no competition. >> Yeah. >> Okay, now vSAN comes in and of course-- >> Oh no, absolutely. So no, SimpliVity and Scale Computing, and there were a whole host of startups. There's all the brand new startups in the space. Everything from little companies like Diamante, Pivot3, who was around doing this before it came. So there's always been a lot there, but Nutanix is the one that separated from the pack. The only one in this space that's gone IPO. But VMware's there, Microsoft won that, they rebranded their Azure Stack HCI for what they put in the data center last year. So expect Microsoft partnering with all of the big server manufacturers to push farther into HCI, but really has not directly impacted this market too much, just yet. >> But there's definitely been some pressure on Nutanix from an earning standpoint, the stock's been hit. You've had some executive departures. There's some rumors about acquisition with Google. Your thoughts on-- >> Yeah, definitely. So John Furrier just had Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO of Nutanix, in our Palo Alto studio, leading up to the Copenhagen show for Nutanix that I will be at. Sure. Sunil Potti who was basically the number two at Nutanix, is now working for Thomas Kurian, TK, over at Google Cloud. My indication from what I hear, he is not over there to help broker a deal. Sunil had a great run at Nutanix, there was a clean break there, but there is a mostly new executive team at Nutanix. Now a couple of years past the IPO and the team at Nutanix, they have their platform. The have a bunch of SaaS offerings that they're doing there. Do they have a relationship with Google? Absolutely! They had Diane Greene at one of their events a couple of years ago. They did joint engineering. But I actually saw that engineering effort cool off a little bit in the last year or so since the new regime came on in Google Cloud. So does Nutanix have a lot of Enterprise accounts and know how to work with the Enterprise and could that be a boon to Google? Absolutely! But the personnel of a Nutanix executive over at Google, and Brian Stevens who's the CTO of Google Cloud being on the Board of Nutanix? I do not think that that is telegraphing that an acquisition is going to happen. It could. We see lots of big acquisitions. Nine or 10 billion dollars from Nutanix could be interesting for Nutanix and help them get in a lot of places and help Google. But Dave, I goin' on record say, I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think Cisco is going to buy Nutanix. Infrastructure's not the real push for Chuck Robbins and that team. And at the Google Cloud event, Dave, that we were at, we saw Sanjay Poonen from VMware up on stage touting how deeply VMware was going to partner. So both VMware and Nutanix are partnering with all of the clouds. VMware of course has a very deep relationship with VMware. They're going deeper with Google, they are even partnering with the old enemy of Microsoft, so I would give VMware definitely has a deeper and more public relationship with all the public cloud providers but Nutanix is also partnering and expanding their portfolio to give themselves good growth beyond just the core HCI market. >> HP's another one. So Nutanix and HPE are workin' together. Kind of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Nutanix was not at VMworld this year; they're kind of booted out. So they belly up to HP. >> Yeah, HP loves having, they have their, "As a service offerings," and Nutanix is one of those as well as Nutanix can sell the HP. So as the, right, the Dell relationship is likely going to die down over time, as Michael Dell on the team, want to sell more Dell hardware with VMware software. HPE is another... And they also partner with Lenovo on the Nutanix side. >> All right, Stu, bring it home. What are the key takeaways on this cube Insights. >> Okay, so HCI, who is a two-horse race right now. There are interesting companies to look at beyond the two, but if you want to understand who the leaders are in the space it is: VMware, especially with their VxRail and Nutanix, are the two leaders in that space. Really looking and understanding how they're expanding into multicloud and hybrid cloud solutions. VMware very much with their VCF offering, which packages vSAN to go into the VMware cloud offerings. And Nutanix with an interesting strategy, both with how they really spread some of their services like what they're doing with Xi Cloud, as well as some SaaS offerings, which some of them really have a disconnect. Not in a bad way, but just are not tied directly to the hardware. What the infrastructure companies have tried to do for years. Both of them, VMware's done tons of acquisitions. Nutanix has done quite a few acquisitions too. >> So your second point here, what's the impact of Dell VMware versus the Nutanix battle? You say not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. I mean there's clearly some evidence that those two markets are comin' together, that VMware's pressuring Nutanix. But why do you say, yet? What do you expect? I mean is it the OEM deal with Dell? >> It's the OAM relationship. There is huge pipeline of Dell hardware with Nutanix software and they're at loggerheads. So absolutely, the Dell family: Dell, EMC and VMware are doing all they can to dial that down. So they put pressure on the channel. And even some of the most loyal Nutanix channel partners that work with Dell, have had pressure to do more and more VxRail. So I expect it to have impact, but just as, Dave, I'll dial back the clock. You probably remember when EMC had a relationship with HP and HP killed the OEM of EMC storage. EMC stormed back and got a lot of those accounts. Same thing happened when EMC and Dell broke up a couple of years before the acquisition. So Nutanix is storming to go with HPE as one of their server partners, and (mumbles). So can Nutanix keep their growth and momentum going as Dell is no longer their biggest partner? >> Well, they're fighting a two-front war. They've got one with Dell VMware and they're also fighting the war with the public cloud guys, even though they're partnering with the public cloud guys. All right, they're sort of taking that cloud model but of course it's on prim. So you say how this public cloud affects HCI spending; not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. Can I infer from that that you do expect there to be pressure on that second front? >> Yeah, so as I've talked about before Dave, when we look at VMware and VMware gives the VMware cloud in AWS. Some say, "Great, that gives me a nice path to be able to use public cloud. But maybe I don't need some of this VMware licensing and software in there." The question for Nutanix is very similar. What services do they have? How do they become more sticky in customer environments? And absolutely, they're driving a roadmap for that in working with their customers. >> Well the thing about Nutanix is that customer's really happy. The customer's really like Nutanix. They like the simplicity. I've talked to a number of Nutanix customers that are very happy in that regard. And they have a leading product in that regard. But they're aiming at the multicloud space and can they play there? >> And Dave, you make a really good point. The killer use case, what did HCI deliver? It delivered simplicity. Today, if you talk about public cloud in general or even hybrid or multicloud, (chuckles) simplicity is not how you would describe this. So can the customers, the companies that did HCI, so, VMware, Nutanix, HPE and Cisco, they're all fighting for that hybrid and multicloud environment. And if they can help deliver simplicity of management, simplicity of leveraging my data, they can be successful in that space. >> Okay, so you're sort of positive on the multicloud, their position in multicloud. Even though they're not one of the big five. >> Yeah, and the good news for a Nutanix is that they're growing off of a much smaller base then say VMware, when you say they have five or 600,000 customers. Hey, how big of an impact will public cloud have on them? >> All right, so we don't pick stocks. We're not making recommendations. (laughs) But, do you feel like it's overdone, that it's undervalued? Independent of the macro. Do you feel like the pressure on Nutanix is warranted, or do you feel like it's got legs? >> So I feel Wall Street tends to over adjust when they go through things. When I talk to my friends on the Wall Street stuff. Definitely Nutanix took more of a beating probably then they should have. But they had two quarters that weren't great. And some of that was the management changes, they blamed that they couldn't hire sales and marketing fast enough. Something we'd asked, if you're a company in the Valley and you've gone from a few hundred people to a few thousand people. How do you keep adding good quality people? That's challenging. So yes, I think we've actually seen Dave, in the last week, or so Nutanix has been one of the fastest growing stocks in the tech market. So they're adjusting some. So I still think Nutanix has plenty of room for growth. The question is, what's their path to say, two billion dollars? Or is it an exit for 9-10 billion dollars down the road? >> All right, Stu, some great stuff. Thank you for that analysis. And thank you for watching this episode of theCube Insights, powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante, for Stu Miniman, we'll see ya next time. (techno music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE! (techno music) Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi. I'm Stu Miniman and this is a Cube Conversation from our Boston area studio. Welcome back to the program. Bobby Patrick, who is the Chief Marketing Officer of UiPath. Bobby, good to see you. >> Great to be here Stu. >> Alright. Bobby, we're going to tackle head-on an interesting discussion that's been going on in the industry. Of course, Artificial Intelligence is this wave that is impacting a lot when you look at earnings reports, everyone's talking about it. Most companies are understanding how they're doing it. It is not a new term. I go back reading my history of technology, Ada Lovelace, 150 years ago when she was helping to define what a computer was. She made the Lovelace objective, I believe they said - >> Right. >> Which was later quoted by Turing and the like is that if we can describe it in code, it's probably not Artificial Intelligence cause their not building new things - >> Right. >> And being able to change on there, so there's hype around AI itself, but UiPath is one of the leaders in Robotic Process Automation and how that fits in with AI and Machine Learning, all of these other terms it can get a bit of an acronym soup and we all can't agree on what the terms are. So, let's start with some of the basics Bobby. Please give us RPA and AI and we'll get into it from there. >> Well, Robotic Process Automation, according to the analysts, like Forester are part of the overall AI broader kind of massive, massive market. AI itself has many different, different, routes. Deep learning right, and machine learning, natural language processing, right and so on. I think AI is a term that covers many different grounds. And RPA, AI applies two ways. It applies within RPA and that we have a technology called Computer Vision. It's how a robot looks at a screen like how a human does, which is very, very difficult actually. You look at a citrix terminal session, or a VDI session, different than an Excel sheet, different than as SASAB, and most processes across all of those, so a robot has to be able to look at all of, all of those screen elements, and understand them right. AI within Computer Vision around understanding documents, looking at unstructured data, looking at handwriting. Conversational understanding. Looking at text in an email determining context, helping with chatbots. But a number of those components, doesn't mean we have to build that all ourselves. What RPA does is we bring it all together. We make it easy to automate and build and create the data flow of a process. Then you can apply AI to that, right. So, I think, two years ago when I first joined UiPath, putting RPA and AI in the same sentence people laughed. Year ago we said, ya know what, RPA is really the path to AI in business operations. Now, ya know we say that we're the most highly valued AI company in the world and no one has ever disagreed. >> Yeah, so it's good to lay out some of the adopting cause one of the things to look at and say if I looked at this product two or three years ago, it's not the product that it is today. We know how fast software - >> Right. Is making changes along the line. Second thing, automation itself is something we've been talking about my entire career. >> Right. When I look at things we were doing 5, 10, 15 years ago, and calling automation, we kind of laugh at it. Because today, automation absolutely is making a lot of changes. RPA is taking that automation in a very strategic direction for many companies there. It's the conversation we had last year at your conference was, RPA is the gateway drug if you will. >> Right. >> Of that environment because automation has scared a lot of people. Am I just doing scripts, what do I control, what do I set? Maybe just give us that first grounding of where that automation path is, has come and is going. >> So, there's different kinds of automation right as you said. We've had automation for decades, primarily in IT. Automation was primarily around API to API integration. And that's really hard, right. It requires developers, engineers, it requires them to keep it current. It's expensive and takes a longer time. Along comes the technology, RPA and UiPath, right were you can automate fairly quickly. There's built in recorders and you can do it with a drag and drop, like a flow chart. You can automate a process, and that, that automation is immediately beneficial. Meaning that outcome, is immediate. And, the cost to doing that is small in comparison. And I think, maybe it's the longtail of automation in some ways. It's all of these things that we do around a SAP process. The reality is if you have SAP, or you have Oracle, or you have Workday, the human processes around that involve still a Spreadsheet. It involves PDF documents. A great, one of my favorite examples right now on YouTube with Microsoft is Chevron. Chevron has hundreds of thousands of PDF's that is generated from every oil rig every day. It has all kinds of data in different formats. Tables, different structured and semi-structured data. They would actually extract that data, manually. To be able to process that and analyze that, right. Working with Microsoft AI and UiPath RPA they're able to automate that entire massive process. And now they're on stage talking about it, Microsoft and UiPath events right. And, they call that AI. That's applying AI to a massive problem for them. They need the robot to be completely accurate though. You don't to worry that the data that is being extracted from the PDF's is inaccurate, right. So, Machine Learning goes into that. There's exception management that's a part of that process as well. They call it AI. >> Yeah, some of this is just, people in the industry, the industry watchers is, we get very particular on different terminology. Let's not conflate Artificial Intelligence, or Augmented Intelligence with Machine Learning, because their different environments. I've heard Forester talk about, right, it's a spectrum though, there's an umbrella for some of these. So, we like to get not too pedantic on individual terms itself. >> Right. >> Um - >> Let me give you more examples. I think the term robotic and RPA, yes, it's true that the vast majority of the last couple of years with RPA have been very rules based, right. Because most processes today like in a call center, there's a rule. Do this and this, then this and this. And so, you're automating that same rules based structure. But once that data's flowing through, you can actually then look at the history of that data and then turn a rules based automation into an experience based automation. And how do you do that? You apply Machine Learning algorithms. You apply Data Robot, LMAI, IBM Watson to it, right. But, it's still the RPA platform that is driving that automation, it's just no longer rules based it's experience based. A great example at UiPath Together Dubai recently, was Dubai customs. They had a process where when you declared something, let's say you box of chocolate, they had to open up a binder and find a classification code for that box of chocolate. Well, they use our RPA product and they make a call out to IBM Watson as a part of the automation, and they just write in, pink box of candy filled chocolate. And it takes its Deep Learning, it comes back with a classification code, all part of an automated process. What happens? Dubai customs lines go from being a two hours to a few minutes, right. It's a combination of our RPA capability and our automation board capability and the ability to bring in IBM Watson. Dubai customs says they applied AI now and solved a big problem. >> One of the things I was reading through the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant on RPA, and they had two classifications. One was, kind of the automation does it all, and the other was the people and machines. Things like chatbox, some of the examples you've been giving there seem to be that combination. Where do those two fit together or are those distinctions that you make? >> Yeah, I mean Gartner's interesting. Gartner's a very IT-centric analyst firm, right and IT often in my view are often very conventional thinkers and not the fastest to adopt breakthrough technologies. They weren't the fastest to adopt Cloud, they weren't the fastest to adopt on-demand CRM, and they weren't the fastest to jump onto RPA because they believe, why can't we use API for everything. And the Gartner analysts is kind of, in the beginning of the process of the Magic Quadrant, they spent a lot of time with us and they were trying hard to say that was, you should solve everything with an API. That's just not reality, right? It's not feasible, and it's not affordable, right? But, RPA is just not the automation of a task or process, it's then applying a whole other set of other technologies. We have 700 partners today in our ecosystem. Natural Language processing partners, right. Machine learning partners. Chatbox partners, you mentioned. So we want to be, we want to make it very easy. In a drag and drop way. To be able to apply these great technologies to an automation to solve some big problem. What's fun to me right now is there's a lot of great startups. They come out of say insurance, or they come out of financial services and they've got a great algorithm and they know the business really well. And they probably have one or two amazing customers, and they're stuck. We, for them, this came from a partner of ours, you're becoming, you UiPath, you're becoming our best route to market because you have the data. You have the work flow. Our job I think in some ways, is to make it easy to bring these technologies together to apply them to an automation to make that through a democratized way where a non-engineer can do this, and I think that's what's happening. >> Yeah, those integrations between environments can be very powerful something we see. Every shop has lots of applications, has lots of technical data and they're not just sweeping the floor of everything they have. What are some of the limits of AI and RPA today, what do you see things going? >> I think, Deep Learning we see very little of that. It's probably applied to some kind of science project and things within companies. I think for the vast majority of our customers, they use machine learning within RPA for Computer Vision by default. But, ya know they're still not really at a stage of mass adoption of what algorithms do I want to apply to a process. I think we're trying to make it easier for you to be able to drag and drop AI we call it, to make it easier to apply. But, I think we're in very early days. And as you mentioned, there's market confusion on it. I know one thing from our 90 plus customers that are in our advisory boards. I know from them they say their companies struggles with finding an ROI in AI, and, you know, I think we're helping there cause we're applying to real operations. They say the same thing about Blockchain. I don't know Stu. Do you know of a single example of a Blockchain ROI, great example? >> Yeah, it reminds me, Big Data was one of those, over half of the people failed to get the ROI they want. It's one of those promises of certain technology - >> Right. >> That high-level, you know let's poo-poo Bobby things that actually have tangible results - >> Yeah. >> And get things done. But you weren't following the strict guidelines of the API economy. >> Right, well true, exactly right. What I find amazing is, I mentioned in another one of our talks conversations that 23,000 have come to UiPath events this year. To our own events, not trade events and other shows, that's different. They want to get on stage and talk. They're delighted about this. And their talking about, generally speaking, RPA's helping them go digital. But they're all saying their ambition is to apply AI to make those processes smarter. To learn from - to go from rules based to experience based. I think what's beautiful about UiPath, is that we're a platform that you can get there overtime. You can apply - you can predict perhaps the algorithm 's you're going to want to use in two or three years. We're not going to force you, you can apply any algorithm you want to an automation work going through. I think that flexibility is actually for customers, they find it very comforting. >> It's one of those things I say, most companies have a cloud strategy. That needs to be written in, not etched in stone. You need to revisit it every quarter. Same thing with what happening AI and in your space things are changing so fast and they need to be agile. >> That's right. >> They need to be able to make changes. In October, you're going to have a lot of those customers up on stage talking. Where will this AI discussion fit into UiPath forward in Las Vegas. We talk a lot about our AI fabric, framework it's around document understanding, getting heavy robots getting smarter and smarter, what they see on the screen, what they see on a document, what they see with handwriting, and improving the accuracy of visual understanding. Looking at the, face recognition and other types of images and being able to understand the images. Conversational understanding. The tone of an email. Is this person really upset? How upset? Or, a conversational chatbot. Really evolving from mimicking humans with RPA to augmenting humans and I think that story, both in the innovations, the customer examples on stage, I think you're going to see the sophistication of automation's that are being used through UiPath grow exponentially. >> Okay, so I want to give you the final word on this. And I don't want to talk to the people that might poo-poo or argue RPA and AI and ML and all these things. Bring us inside your customers. What...where, how does that conversation start? Are they coming it from AI, ML, RPA or is there, ya know a business discussion that usually catalyzes this engagement? >> Our customer's are starting with digital. They're trying to go digital. They know they need digital transformation, it's been very, very hard. There's a real outcome that comes quickly from taking a mundane task that is expensive, and automating that. The outcomes are quick, often projects that involve our partners like Accenture and others. The payback period on the entire project with RPA can be 6 months, it's self-funding. What other technologies doing B2B is self-funding in one year? That's part of the incredible adoption birth. But, every single customer doesn't stop there. They say okay, I also want to know that this automation is, I want to know that I can go apply AI to this. It's in every conversation. So there's two big booms with UiPath and our RPA. The first is when you go digital, there's some great outcome. There's productivity gain, it's immediate, right. I guess I said the payback period is quick. The second big one is when you go and turn it from a rules based to an experience based process, or you apply AI to it, there's another set of business benefits down the road. As more algorithms come out and things, you keep applying to it. This is sort of the gift that keeps on giving. I think if we didn't have that connection to Machine Learning or AI, I think the enthusiasm level of the majority of our customers would not be anywhere near what it is today. >> Alright, well Bobby really appreciate digging into the customerality, RPA, AI all the acronym soup that was going on and we look forward to UiPath Forward at the Bellagio in Las Vegas this October. >> It'll be fun. Alright, I'm Stu Miniman, as always thank you so much for watching theCube.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube! Now, here's your host, Dave Velante. >> We're back with Patrick Osborne. All right Patrick, we've been talking about how customers want to be data-driven, they're doing digital transformation, they want to put data at the core of the enterprise. All sounds good. What's your strategy as HPE in terms of helping them get there? >> Yeah so, for our customers, this is a common theme, right. Some feel that they're going to be disrupted, they've been disrupted, right, and one of the key threads that runs through that is that they want to get more AI driven, right, so they want to use analytics as a way to provide new services around their products, get these services out faster, be able to use all that data they have in their enterprise. So for us, it's being able to have that conversation of whether the data sits out in the edge, right, you guys are very familiar with our Edge strategy, using Edgeline and Aruba, our core infrastructure in the data center, which we've had-- for a long history of helping customers with that, and then more recently around Hybrid Cloud, right, so most of the products, services, experiences we have there have Hybrid Cloud built in from the ground up. So for us, all those conversations have to do with data. >> So you recently made an acquisition of BlueData. >> Correct. >> What was that all about? Was that your AI play? Was it a software-as-a-service play? Explain that. >> Yeah, certainly a little bit of both. BlueData's a fantastic platform and it allows you to virtualize, containerize the application, so we know that in the market, you've got mode one applications, you've got mode two applications, a lot of mode one apps, you know, business applications, mission critical applications, have been virtualized. But what we also see is that a lot of the new product development is around these mode two applications that are using things like big data, whether it's a dupe in H-D-F-S, fast data - some of the streaming services - and now you're doing things around A-I inferencing, modeling, all using essentially containers as a way to do that, fuel that application development. So when we saw BlueData, it's essentially a platform to be able to virtualize all of these container-based applications. And as customers, big data and analytics and A-I platforms and their pipeline gets bigger and more complicated, it allows us to, A) manage that, increase their time to value, unlock a lot of the resources on the data scientists side, right, who have the responsibility of managing all of those applications, and it's a really great platform, great people, right, so they have a team of data scientists to be able to help customers implement this, not only within the product but within their own enterprise. And then we've got some really, really big logos that we're going to build off of for the BlueData ecosystem. >> So things are moving very fast. You've got all this data, you're applying machine intelligence and quickly moving from a world that was all batch to one that's real time, and we blinked and real time flew by. Now you've got this machine intelligence world where systems are acting, they're sensing, they're hearing, they're smelling... >> Yup. >> And so, is that what you're seeing with customers? Are they trying to build these sort of new systems that will act on their behalf? >> Absolutely. We see it on our own. If you take a look at some of our strategy, as HPE, especially within our storage and big data division, one of the big things that we're doing is introducing all of our products with the capability of A-I ops, right. And so all of our products that go out the door, using platforms like Infosite, will have this A-I ops capability to, not only just start with support automation, predictive analytics, and now you've got predictive A-I driving the actual management experience of these products. And it lets our customers ultimately unlock those resources that were doing mundane, repeatable tasks to focus on where they're going to add value. >> So I got to ask you, you guys do-- obviously a lot of your revenue comes from indirect channels. So you've seen the cloud, the cloud is not about selling boxes anymore, now you're seeing all this machine intelligence and automation. What does all this mean for partners? Where's the opportunity for those guys? >> Yeah so, I would say that when we go and make an acquisition like Blue Data, it's a great, like we said before, it's a great product, it's a good platform, right, they've got great engineers and great people within the organization and certainly some big logos. The reason why they got those logos was partly based on the product, but it's also a very services led methodology. So for-- I'd say for our partner community, being able to do discovery services, to understand what they're requirements are, a lot of folks that use BlueData and these type of platforms are builders. They're building a platform that has services on it for their end user customers. So being able to gather those requirements, do implementation, certainly be able to take a lot of this dynamic application ecosystem that is either very new, it's nascent, when you take a look at A-I or it's even in the open source arena, being able to de-risk that for the customers, from a services perspective, is a huge opportunity. >> Okay, great, so that's exciting because it's new frontier for those folks. So think about HPE, the tech that you guys have, the partner opportunity that you just described, how are you going to change the life of a data scientist? And maybe we could add in some other personas as well. >> Yeah, so, as a lot of our customers and partners certainly know, data scientists don't grow on trees, right, and they're very important folks within these large organizations, right, so you want to unlock their capabilities. So for us at the end of the day, we're trying to have a platform and as a service experience around A-I that unlocks the value of these data scientists. So for example, if I have a production environment or a U-A-T or a test dev environment, I can very quickly spin up your entire toolchain as a data scientist, right, so your toolchain, your models, your H-D-F-S data lakes, you can tap into existing data lakes, all of my streaming data, Kafka, Spark, all this stuff, very dynamic ecosystem, complex application dependencies. What I can do is I can sandbox that, I can test it, I can iterate, and I can very, very quickly provide that type of environment for your developers and your data scientists (snaps) just like that. >> So, in addition to the data scientist, is the chief data officer somebody that you guys are interacting with? There's also the application developer. Are you trying to sort of effect this collaboration amongst those different roles and personas? >> Yeah I think one of the greatest things for the partners and we've seen this at HPE too, is that you're going to be calling on new buyer personas. Right, so in the case of infrastructure, working a lot with enterprise architects, data center manager, infrastructure manager, C-I-O. In the case of BlueData and some of these A-I and analytics projects, right, you're at the front of the budget cycle, right, so you're talking to line of business, application developers, data scientists, analytics team, and now the rise of the C-D-O, the chief data officer. So you not only get to establish value with the infrastructure team, who are going to have to support this, right, you're going to go make some new friends and be able to get on the front of the budget cycle with a whole new set of buyer personas, and I think that's very exciting for partners. >> So, we talk a lot about A-I and, sort of this machine learning environment, machine intelligence. Software-defined is a hot topic. It's kind of a buzzword but it has meaning. What does it mean to you? Where does it fit in this whole equation? >> It's very adjacent to the big data and A-I analytics conversation. I think that what we see in software-defined, it's heavy on scale, right, so now that you're into petabytes, tens of petabytes, hundreds of petabytes, scaling, scaling, scaling, you need some new architectures to be able to do that cost-effectively. And you think about automated cars for example. They're-- each car is spinning off terabytes of data a day, so think about how am I going to store that, it's a monumental task. You got scale on your mind, you also have automation, right, so not only the scale of being able to store that effectively from a price-point, to be able to automate that. So you want to keep your-- the folks who are managing that infrastructure, they're going to have to increase the amount of systems, capacity under management, and the only way you can achieve that is through automation. And so, we see some themes around that and software-defined is really, kind of stepping in in that angle where you've got N-V-M-E, S-S-Ds, can saturate-- two N-V-M-E can saturate a C-P-U at this point, right, and now you're moving to hundred gig fabrics, so this rack-scale architecture that you can provide and paint on different software-defined personalities onto it is something that customers are definitely leaning in towards right now. >> And what you've been describing-- you mentioned autonomous vehicles-- data's at the edge, it's at the core, it's everywhere, and so, easier to bring, maybe, let's call it, ten meg of code to a petabyte of data than the reverse. >> Yeah, and what we see too is customers want to-- they want to dip their toe in this water, right, starting with very large enterprises, and we're able to, as HPE, bring a vetted ecosystem, whether from a workload perspective, 'cause we always talk about follow the workload, in software-defined, if you need something like scale-out file for A-I workloads, or you need scale-out file for more of a high performance, capacity-driven architecture, you're looking for object storage, you're looking for hyper-converged secondary, right, we bring an ecosystem of partners running on our infrastructure that's scalable, automated, and customers can feel confident in. >> Awesome. Well thank you Patrick, love the story. >> Yeah, thank you so much. >> You're welcome. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this preview of HPE's, Discover Madrid storage news. We're gonna unpack that. My name is Dave Vellante and Hewlett Packard Enterprise has a six-month cadence of shows. They have one in the June timeframe in Las Vegas, and then one in Europe. This year, again, it's in Madrid and you always see them announce products and innovations coinciding with those big user shows. With me here is Patrick Osborne who's the Vice President and General Manager of Big Data and Secondary Storage at HPE. Patrick, great to see you again. >> Great to be here, love theCUBE, thanks for having us. >> Oh, you're very welcome. So let's, let's unpack some of these announcements. You guys, as I said, you're on this six-month cadence. You've got sort of three big themes that you're vectoring into, maybe you could start there. >> Yeah, so within HP Storage and Big Data where, you know, where our point of view is around intelligent storage and intelligent data management and underneath that we've kind of vectored in on three pillars that you talked about. AI driven, so essentially bringing the intelligence, self-managing, self-healing, to all of our storage platforms, and big-data platforms, built for the Cloud, right? We've got a lot of use cases, and user stories, and you've seen from an HPE perspective, Hybrid Cloud, you know, is a big investment we're making in addition to the edge. And the last is delivering all of our capabilities, from product perspective, solutions and services as a service, right? So GreenLake is something that we started a few years ago and being able to provide that type of elastic, you know, purchasing experience for our customers is gonna weave itself in further products and solutions that we announce. >> So I like your strategy around AI. AI of course gets a lot of buzz these days. You guy are taking a practical approach. The Nimble acquisition gave you some capabilities there in predictive maintenance. You've pushed it into your automation capabilities. So let's talk about the hard news specifically around InfoSight. >> Yeah, so InfoSight is an incredible platform and what you see is that we've been not only giving customers richer experiences on top of InfoSight that go further up into the stack so we're providing recommendation engines so we've got this whole concept of Cross-stack Analytics that go from, you know, your app and your virtualization layer through the physical infrastructure. So we've had a number of pieces of that, that we're announcing to give very rich, AI-driven guidance, to customers, you know, to fix specific problems. We're also extending it to more platforms. Right, we just announced last week the ability to run InfoSight on our server platforms, right? So we're starting off on a journey of providing that which we're doing at the storage and networking layer weaving in our server platform. So essentially platforms like ProLiant, Synergy, Apollo, all of our value compute platforms. So we are, we're doing some really cool stuff not only providing the experience on new platforms, but richer experiences certainly around performance bottlenecks on 3PAR so we're getting deeper AI-driven recommendation engines as well as what we call an AI-driven resource planner for Nimble. So if you take a look at it from a tops-down view this isn't AI marketing. We're actually applying these techniques and machine learning within our install base in our fleet which is growing larger as we extend support from our platforms that actually make people's lives easier from a storage administration perspective. >> And that was a big part of the acquisition that IP, that machine intelligence IP. Obviously you had to evaluate that and the complexity of bringing it across the portfolio. You know we live in this API-driven world, Nimble was a very modern platform so that facilitated that injection of that intelligence across the platform and that's what we're seeing now isn't it. >> Yeah, absolutely. You go from essentially tooling up these platforms for this very rich telemetry really delivering a differentiated support experience that takes a lot of the manual interactions and interventions from a human perspective out of it and now we're moving in with these three announcements that we've made into things that are doing predictive analytics, recommendations and automation at the end of the day. So we're really making, trying to make people's lives easier from an admin perspective and giving them time back to work on higher value activities. >> Well let's talk about Cloud. HP doesn't have a public Cloud like an Amazon or an Azure, you partner with those guys, but you have Cloud Volumes, which is Cloud-like, it's actually Cloud from a business model perspective. Explain what Cloud Volumes is and what's the news here? >> Yeah, so, we've got a great service, it's called HPE Cloud Volumes and you'll see throughout the year us extending more user stories and experiences for Hybrid Cloud, right. So we have CloudBank, which focuses on secondary storage, Cloud Volumes is for primary storage users, so it is a Cloud, public Cloud adjacent storage as a service and it allows you to go into the portal, into your credentials. You can enter in your credit card number and essentially get storage as a service as an adjacent, or replacement data service for, for example, EBS from Amazon. So you're able to stand up storage as a service within a co-location facility that we manage and it's completely delivered as a service and then our announcement for that is that, so what we've done in the Americas is you can essentially apply compute instances from the public Cloud to that storage, so it's in a co-location facility it's very close from a latency standpoint to the public Cloud. Now we're gonna be extending that service into Europe, so UK, Ireland, and for the EMEA users as well as now we can also support persistent storage work loads for Docker and Kubernetes and this is a big win for a lot of customers that wanna do continuous improvement, continuous development, and use those containerized frameworks and then you can essentially, you know, integrate with your on-prem storage to your off-prem and then pull in the compute from the Cloud. >> Okay so you got that, write once, run anywhere sort of model. I was gonna ask you well why would I do this instead of EBS, I think you just answered that question. It's because you now can do that anywhere, hybrid is a key theme here, right? >> Yeah, also too from a resiliency perspective, performance, and durability perspective, the service that we provide is, you know, certainly six-nines, very high performant, from a latency perspective. We've been in the enterprise-storage game for quite some time so we feel we've got a really good service just from the technology perspective as well. >> And the European piece, I presume a lot of that is, well of course, GDPR, the fines went into effect in May of 2018. There's a lot of discussion about okay, data can't leave a particular locality, it's especially onerous in Europe, but probably other places as well. So there's a, there's a data locality governance compliance angle here too, is there not? >> Yeah, absolutely, and for us if you take a specific industry like healthcare, you know, for example, so you have to have pretty clear line of sight for your data provenance so it allows us to provide the service in these locations for a healthcare customer, or a healthcare ISV, you know, SAS provider to be able to essentially point to where that data is, you know, and so for us it's gonna be an entrance into that vertical for hybrid Cloud use cases. >> Alright so, so again, we've got the AI-driven piece, the Cloud piece, I see as a service, which is the third piece, I see Cloud as one, and as a service is one-A, it's almost like a feature of Cloud. So let's unpack that a little bit. What are you announcing in as a service and what's your position there? >> Yeah, so our vision is to be able to provide, and as a service experience, for almost everything we have that we provide our customers. Whether it's an individual product, whether it's a solution, or actually like a segment, right? So in the space that I work in, in Big Data and secondary service, secondary storage, backup is a service, for example, right, it's something that customers want, right? They don't want to be able to manage that on their own by piece parts, architect the whole thing, so what we're able to do is provide your primary storage, your secondary storage, your backup ISV, so in this case we're gonna be providing backup as a service through GreenLake with Vim. And then we even can bring in your Cloud capacity, so for example, Azure Blob Storage which will be your tertiary storage, you know, from an archive perspective. So for us it really allows us to provide customers an experience that, you know, is more of an, it's an experienced, Cloud is a destination, we're providing a multi-Cloud, a Hybrid-Cloud experience not only from a technology perspective, but also from a purchasing flex up, flex down, flex out experience and we're gonna keep on doing that over and over for the next, you know, foreseeable future. >> So you've been doing GreenLake for awhile here-- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So how's that going and what's new here? >> Yeah, so that's been going great. We have well over, I think at this point, 500 petabytes on our management under GreenLake and so the service is, it's interesting when you think about it, when we were designing this we thought, just like the public Cloud, the compute as a service would take off, but from our perspective I think one of the biggest pain points for customers is managing data, you know, storage and Big Data, so storage as a service has grown very rapidly. So these services are very popular and we'll keep on iterating on them to create maximum velocity. One of the other things that's interesting about some of these accounting rules that have taken place, is that customers seed to us the, the ability to do architecture, right, so we're essentially creating no Snowflakes for our customers and they get better outcomes from a business perspective so we help them with the architecture, we help them with planning an architecture of the actual equipment and then they get a very defined business outcome in SLA that they pay for as a service, right? So it's a win-win across the board, is really good. >> Okay, so no Snowflakes as in, not everything's custom-- >> Absolutely. >> And then that, so that lowers not only your cost, it lowers the customer's cost. So let's take an example like that, let's take backup as a service which is part of GreenLake. How does that work if I wanna engage with you on backup as a service? >> Yeah, so we have a team of folks in Pointnext that can engage like very far up in the front end, right, so they say, hey, listen, I know that I need to do a major re-architecture for my secondary storage, HPE, can you help me out? So we provide advisory services, we have well-known architectures that fit a set of well-known mission critical, business critical applications at a typical customer site so we can drive that all the way from the inception of that project to implementation. We can take more customized view, or a road-mapped approach to customers where they want to bite off a little bit at a time and use things like Flex Capacity, and then weave in a full GreenLake implementation so it's very flexible in terms of the way we can implement it. So we can go soup to nuts, or we can get down to a very small granular pieces of infrastructure. >> Just sticking on data protection for a second, I saw a stat the other day, it's a fairly well, you know, popular, often quoted stat, it was Gartner I think, is 50% of customers are gonna change their backup platform by like 2023 or something. And you think about, and by the way, I think that's a legitimate stat and when you talk to customers about why, well things are changing, the Cloud, Multicloud, things like GDPR, Ransomware, digital transformation, I wanna get more out of my data then just insurance, my backup then just insurance, I wanna do analytics. So there's all these other sort of evolving things. I presume your backup as a service is evolving with that? >> Absolutely. >> What are you seeing there? >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing that the secondary storage market is very dynamic in terms of the expectations from customers, are, you know, they're changing, and changing very rapidly. And so not only are providing things like GreenLake and backup as a service we're also seeking new partners in this space so one of the big announcements that we'll make at Discover is we are doing a pretty big amplification of our partnership in an OEM relationship with Cohesity, right, so a lot of customers are looking for a secondary platform from a consolidation standpoint, so being able to run a number of very different disparate workloads from a secondary storage perspective and make them, you know, work. So it's a great platform scale-out. It's gonna run on a number of our HPE platforms, right, so we're gonna be able to provide customers that whole solution from HPE partnering with Cohesity. So, you know, in general this secondary storage market's hot and we're making some bets in our ecosystem right now. >> You also have Big Data in your title so you're responsible for that portfolio. I know Apollo in the HPC world has been at a foothold there. There's a lot of synergies between high-performance computing and Big Data-- >> Absolutely. >> What's going on in the Big Data world? >> Yeah, so Big Data is one of our fastest growing segments within HPE. I'd say Big Data and Analytics and some of the things that are going on with AI, and commercial high-performance applications. So for us we're, we have a new platform that we're announcing, our Gen10 version of Apollo 4200, it's definitely the workhorse of our Apollo server line for applications like, Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, we see Apache Spark, Kafka, a number of these as well as some of these newer workloads around HPC, so TensorFlow, Caffe, H2O, and so that platform allows us with a really good compute memory and storage mix, from a footprint perspective, and it certainly scales into rack-level infrastructure. That part of the business for us is growing very quickly. I think a lot of customers are using these Big Data Analytics techniques to transform their business and, you know, as we go along and help them it certainly, it's been a really cool ride to see all this implemented at customer sites. >> You know with all this talk about sort of Big Data and Analytics, and Cloud, and AI, you sort of, you know, get lost, the infrastructure kinda gets lost, but you know, the plumbing still matters, right, and so underneath this. So we saw the flash trend, and that really had a major impact on certainly the storage business specifically, but generally, the overall marketplace, I mean, you really, it'd be hard to support a lot of these emerging workloads without flash and that stack continues to evolve, the pyramid if you will. So you've got flash memory now replacing much of the spinning disk space, you've got DRAM which obviously is the most expensive, highest performance, and there seems to be this layer emerging in the middle, this storage-class memory layer. What are you guys doing there? Is there anything new there? >> Yeah, so we've got a couple things cooking in that space. In general, like when you talk about the infrastructure it is important, right, and we're trying to help customers not only by providing really good product in scalable infrastructure, things like Apollo, you know our system's Nimble 3PAR. We're also trying to provide experience around that too. So, you know, combining things like InfoSight, InfoSight on storage, InfoSight on servers and Apollo for Big Data workloads is something that we're gonna be delivering in the future. The platforms really matter. So we're gonna be introducing NVME and storage class memory into our, what we feel is the industry-leading portfolio for our, for flash storage. So between Nimble and 3PAR we'll have, those platforms will be, and they're NVME ready and we'll be making some product announcements on the availability of that type of medium. So if you think about using it in a platform like 3PAR, right, industry leading from a performance perspective allows to get sub 200 millisecond performance for very mission-critical latency intolerant applications and it's a great architecture. It scales in parallel, active, active, active, right, so you can get quite a bit of performance from a very, a large 3PAR system and we're gonna be introducing NVME into that equation as a part of this announcement. >> So, we see this as critical, for years, in the storage business, you talk about how storage is growing, storage is growing, storage is growing, and we'd show the charts upper to the right, and, but it always like yeah, and somehow you gotta store it, you gotta manage it, you might have to move it, it's a real pain. The whole equation is changing now because of things like flash, things like GPU, storage class memory, NVME, now you're seeing, and of course all this ML and deep learning tech, and now you're seeing things that you're able to do with the data that you've never been able to do before-- >> Absolutely. >> And emerging use cases and so it's not just lots of data, it's completely new use cases and it's driving new demands for infrastructure isn't it? >> Absolutely, I mean, there's some macro economic tailwinds that we had this year, but HP had a phenomenal year this year and we're looking at some pretty good outlooks into next year as well. So, yeah, from our perspective the requirement for customers, for latency improvements, bandwidth improvements, and total addressable capacity improvements is, never stops, right? So it's always going on and it's the data pipeline is getting longer. The amount of services and experiences that you're tying on to, existing applications, keeps on augmenting, right? So for us there's always new capabilities, always new ways that we can improve our products. We use for things like InfoSight, and a lot of the predictive Analytics, we're using those techniques for ourselves to improve our customers experience with our products. So it's been, it's a very, you know, virtual cycle in the industry right now. >> Well Patrick, thanks for coming in to theCube and unpacking these announcements at Discover Madrid. You're doing a great job sort of executing on the storage plan. Every time I see you there's new announcements, new innovations, you guys are hittin' all your marks, so congratulations on that. >> HPE, intelligent storage, intelligent data management, so if you guys have data needs you know where to come to. >> Alright, thanks again Patrick. >> Great, thank you so much. >> Talk to you soon. Alright, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE. We'll see ya next time. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Welcome to theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the shows to help extract the signal from the noise, and we are really excited. Oracle OpenWorld's coming up and we have an exclusive here on theCUBE, first time, welcoming Larry to the program. Wait. This is not the Larry I was expecting. Who do we have here? I know, sitting over there, Brian Reagan, CMO of Actifio. Brian, great to see you, >> Stu. >> I feel like I have a differently Larry than I was expecting. >> Stu, it's always a pleasure to be here, and I mean this is a big day. Obviously we take, you know, databases very seriously. We take Oracle OpenWorld very seriously. It's an important show for us, and we're excited to bring Larry the Bear back for the second year in a row at Oracle OpenWorld. Many might know him as the Database Beast, and so, he's excited to be here. What other Larry were you expecting, just out of curiosity? >> Well, we're talking about Oracle and database at the center. There's a certain Larry that most people expect. I was in Oracle OpenWorld once and Larry didn't show up because he was at the boat show. The boat race. But- - >> Larry the Bear is a big boat fan, too, but that's actually one of the reasons why we're excited to be out there. The other Larry I think that you might be referring to, the other Larry is how they refer to him out there too, is really Larry the Bear's hero, and if you think about a database beast, someone who's really dedicated their lives to databases, they really wanna meet the one and only King of Databases. And so, you know, he wants to live his dream next week, and meet the one and only Larry, his namesake, and really bond. >> Well, he, you know, having been to that show a few times, they are ecstatic to talk about databases. You've just got, you know, non-stop DBAs geeking out, digging into the weeds, and, you know, database, we've said many times on theCUBE, is the stickiest of applications in the environment, but, you know, there's a lot of money spent on this and a lot of manpower, so, you know, taming that environment is definitely a huge challenge for enterprises. >> Absolutely. We think the same, and in fact, Larry believes that databases- - The only thing stickier is probably like a big vat of honey. So, this is a bear who was- - Have you seen The Revenant, Stu? >> I'm familiar with it, and it has me a little bit worried. >> Yeah, that really was Larry a couple years ago. I mean, it was just, you know, he was untamed. He was going out of control like many databases in a lot of enterprises, until he discovered Actifio, and really discovered what could become of giving him back time in the day to hunt for salmon or pick berries, or whatever it is that bears do in their free time when they're not dealing with large databases. I mean, that's what Actifio brought to him, and he really wants to share that next week out at Oracle OpenWorld. >> Okay, and tell me, you said Larry got to know Actifio, where did Larry come from? >> So, Larry's originally from Chicago. >> Big Bears fan. >> And Cubs, go Cubs. >> He's relocated to Boston now that he's joined Actifio, and he's really taken with the Bruins. I think he's excited for this season, but Larry has been really in the enterprise for his entire life, and has probably grappled with some of the biggest databases you've seen. Again, this is the database beast. Yeah, it used to be bad. >> Alright, Larry, anything else we should know about your background and what has you so excited about the show? >> Yeah, no, that's a good point. So, among the many things that Larry is eager to do next week, is to find out from others, you know, just what type of database beast they have in their data center. And in fact, he invites people to our booth number 3105, to come and share their experiences. In fact, for those who mention theCUBE and his appearance on the cube, we've got a special giveaway for them. But we're eager to- - We and Larry are eager to hear what people are dealing with out there in the database community and understand how Actifio can really help them solve their biggest Oracle challenges. >> Great. Any final things we should know about, Larry, before we send it? >> Obviously, I mean this is a- - You know, Larry is smarter than the average bear, Stu, and that's one of the reasons why he joined Actifio. He comes from a long line of IT centric bears. I mean, obviously, his cousin Smokey in the D.R. Arena. Yoga- - Yogi, rather. So it's, you know, very long bear history. He's excited about Oracle OpenWorld. He couldn't be more excited about being on theCUBE. He's been talking about it for weeks, and we're just excited that you were able to fit him in. >> Alright, well Larry, I hope your dream comes true and that you get to meet the other Larry at the show. Brian, always a pleasure to catch up with you. >> You too, Stu. >> Once again, thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our coverage and see us, and some of the interesting guests we get on throughout the industry. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the saas. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the sass. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in our Boston-area studio, happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Brian Kelly, who's the Co-founder and CEO of CLoudGenera. Brian, thanks so much for joining me. >> Stu, thank you so much for having us here. >> All right, first of all Brian, we always love. We get you know a co-founder on the program, you got to bring us back to kind of the why. You know, why was CLoudGenera formed? We've had a chance to dig into it but CLoudGenera, there's cloud in the name, there's generation. Tell me about the company, the name, and a little bit about your background. >> Be glad to. So like most great companies, our company was born of the market's necessity. We saw trend happening as many businesses we're shifting the way they manage their IT and the trend took the form of this buzzword cloud. And so you know CLoudGenera as a company absolutely helps businesses figure out their most efficient path towards leveraging cloud technologies. But our value proposition is actually greater than that. Our business exists to help companies determine the best IT services to support the needs of their organization. >> Great. Well luckily cloud's simple. Enterprise IT, we just have a button we press, and everything works awesome. I think the reality is though, nobody ever gets rid of anything. Changing applications is really tough and it's a really complicated and super fast changing market out there. So maybe, drill in just a tiny bit and explain what it is that you do and why that's a little bit different than some of the other things happening in the marketplace. >> Sure. Well the big easy button does exist, when you push it nothing happens. Maybe it makes a funny sound. As the name would suggest, CLoudGenera specializes in the formation of clouds and to the point that you made, this is not simple, this is not easy. Cloud is not a target state. Unlike virtualization, which was a target state, cloud is really an operating model. And also as you highlighted, there's so much variability and complexity associated with cloud. Am i talking about infrastructure? Am i talking about platforms? Am i talking about software as a service? Cloud for us can be any of those things. It can be you managing your infrastructure. Can be somebody else managing your infrastructure, all the way up through your apps. And so what our business aims to do is to demystify all the variability and complexity associated with making cloud decisions. Really it's about helping people figure out where to place their workloads and what we commonly see is that the migration does not generate success unless you've considered how to optimize your workloads in advance of selecting a new execution venue. So as a business our software, our technology, helps customers to determine how do I optimize my workloads, regardless of whether or not I'm going to move them. And ultimately, how do I get the best value for my spend at IT services as I'm contemplating cloud as a model for hosting my apps? >> Yeah, so every vendor I talk to out there, if I'm a cloud platform vendor or if I'm an infrastructure vendor, they all have these tools that say hey, here's how the experience is going to be on our platform. Maybe it compares against a couple of things out there but you're not pushing hardware, you're not pushing platforms. Explain how you fit into kind of the ecosystem and you're not just, when you say cloud it's it's not just public cloud, it's you know, talk a little bit about the spectrum of things that you support. >> Okay, be happy to. So first, what I would say is that when you look at a vendor strategy, their strategy is to drive you to adopt their technologies, their solutions. And so any of the tools that they're bringing to market, any of the services that they're bringing to market, are biased towards the outcome that they're trying to achieve. This was actually when I say CLoudGenera was born of the market's necessity, the market really needed a solution that was agnostic and unbiased to the outcome. Something that would be so bold is to recommend not doing anything if that was the best option available to your business. That's really what makes CLoudGenera special. We are the best place to go in the market to get that unbiased agnostic viewpoint that's tailored to your needs as an organization and guides you to the right vendors and the right solutions. >> Yeah. It's interesting you think about like there's consulting companies that would get involved and send a bunch of people and help you through your journey. We talked about there's been lots of tools out that have poked at this but there's a big elephant in the room and it's a little tough to kind of figure out where to start. So I just want to, talk a little bit about kind of the breadth and depth of what you do. How do you keep up with all of these things? I mean, while we were talking I'm pretty sure Amazon released one or two new features. And the next time Intel comes out with a spin, you've got a billion SKUs that you have to update. So how does this impact you and how do you help keep up with it? >> So Stu, this is really what creates the longevity and value proposition for my business. The market is changing at breakneck speed. To your point, the major providers both in data center as well as in cloud have probably released a half a dozen new services for the market to contemplate just in our conversation. So CLoudGenera addresses this in a couple of different ways. But all of it born in automation and intelligence. And so we have a cloud research function as a part of our platform that is continually ingesting the data around what the market can offer. So this could be services you could consume from public cloud providers like the Microsoft Azure, the Amazon EC2, the Google Compute as an example, but we're not an infrastructure play. We actually move up and down the stack. So if you want to look at platform as a service solution like Cloud Foundry as an example, you're moving towards no SQL, as an example, for managing data. Do I do that is infrastructure? Do I do it as a platform, as a service? Right, what level of service is available in the market? Our automation, our intelligence, gathering that market data is the big value for our customers because through that automation we give them something that have avoids their need to spend a lot of money on consultants or to spend a lot of time internally trying to assess what the market can offer. And then most importantly once you have that data, how do you turn it into insights? How do you take that data and make it actionable for your business based upon your needs and the requirements of your workloads? So that that's a big part of our secret sauce. A big part of our IP. We stay current with the market so that you don't have to. And what's interesting about our business is that we don't just do point in time comparisons. In fact, we sit on historical data and trends, both how you can modernize in your data center and how you can leverage cloud services and that data set is over four years large, I like to say, not four years old. And so in that way we can even predict where the market is headed so if you're if you're leveraging us or doing this manual as opposed to leveraging our automated methods, we've got the recipe of how to make good decisions and really it is staying current on the market. That's the only way that that you can address it. Love to touch on another aspect of the question you asked, which is consultancies. If there's one thing that we're disrupting in the market, it is the ability to do this analysis at scale. Many of our clients tell us that it's cost prohibitive to hire an army of consultants to come in and assess their current capabilities and then attempt to map that to what the market can offer. If you're using a manual method powered by labor, you're likely going to have an answer that reflects the market ninety days ago, 180 days ago. CLoudGenera gives you the power at your fingertips to get those sort of insights immediately. And when I talk about disruption, it's really doing in minutes what normally took months. it's also a fraction of the cost, Both productivity and labor as well as the true costs if you're leveraging consultants to do this sort of analysis. and so in that way we can scale to servinG customers that are as large and as complicated as the Global Five. We can also scale far and wide to serve many customers in the market at the same time. Again, it's because we're using algorithms. We're using data science. We're not trying to solve this problem with labor. >> Yeah, I love that and you talked about, it's not just about the platform, you're looking at what we've said for years. Customers need to look at their data, they need to look at their applications, and that's where you need to start. I'd like you to talk a little bit about your users because you know, talked to so many companies, it's like oh, they've tried either building their own in-house solution or going to a service provider or going to a public cloud and they get one or two apps. Some critical one or some real important or some cool new one and then they're like okay, I've got hundreds or thousands of other apps and trying to figure out how they do that, you got to use some intelligence. You need to use some, you know, it needs to be driven by software. It can't be some big process that I'd have some consultancy or a thing like that. Do you have some customer examples you can bring us through or talk to how that typically works? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll share a few patterns that we see in the market. One pattern and it doesn't have a bias towards a particular industry vertical or a particular size of customer. But there's an illusion out there in the market that you'll be able to lift and shift your workload from your data center to Amazon's data center, as an example, and then magically that's going to take care of all your problems. Amazon's going to manage your mess for less. Well, the harsh reality that customers are finding is that while Amazon, as an example, might be an excellent provider of IT services for your business, if you're not optimizing your workload to leverage that provider, you're not going to get the benefits that you'd hope. And so one trend we see commonly in the industry and it's a mistake we hope folks make, whether they leverage our service or they solve this problem some other way, is you know please don't try to do the lift and shift. In fact, another big trend we see in the industry of companies that have gone that route is they do what we like to call repatriation. Where they made the full-fledged push into migrating their workloads to a new venue and ultimately to figure out that the lift and shift was not successful for them. And the larger the client, the more pain they've experienced because the more money they're spending on IT and the harder that gets. >> Just to poke at that a tiny bit and I know we don't have a lot of time to dig into it but it's if you lift and shift and that's the step one of doing, I need to break something apart, I want to refactor some pieces, and eventually know I'll get there. But is that okay and are there paths to get there? Or are you saying hey, you want to sort those pieces out first before you get to the cloud? >> There's some use cases where lift and shift absolutely has a benefit, absolutely has a value. If you're dedicating IT capacity and it's dedicated towards something that's used sporadically, well just the usage model alone, you could potentially get a benefit out of a lift and shift. You're getting the benefit of the optimization just by being able to leverage the elasticity of cloud. But beyond some of those low hanging fruit use cases, we actually see this as a detriment to many company's success. I like to use the analogy of a moving company. The last thing you want to do is pack the box, pick up the box, move the box, and then move it three or four times before you actually get to the destination. That's what lift and shift is really doing. You just pick up what you had in your data center, you put it in somebody else's data center, and now you're in a foreign land and you're going to try to break that thing apart and re-engineer it there. That's actually going to be a lot harder in practice than what we've seen as more of a better option, which is optimized where you are. If you're if your target state for the next innovation is to get to containers, figure out how to containerize before you make the migration as an example. If your endgame is to move from a database on infrastructure to a platform as-a-service, well optimized that databases deployment, optimize that workload before you attempt to transition it to the path. So I would say nine times out of ten, you're probably going to want to treat an application workload before you attempt to move it someplace else. Otherwise, you're just going to be lifting and carrying that box several times. >> Yeah, it unfortunately reminds me of anybody that's moved and you know, you move someplace and three to five years later you run across that box and you're like why did I even move this to my environment. I've outgrown it, I don't need it. I could have either gotten rid of it or done something else with it. Last piece of the technology I want to cover for today is we've talked a bunch about the public cloud, you do a lot with service providers and with the in-house data center stuff. Maybe talk a little bit as to what you cover. Public clouds, there's a few really big ones but there's so many service providers. What do you engage with? What do you cover there and in the data center there's just, I can't imagine how many options there are. What's the scope of what you cover? >> So this might be a little controversial for some folks because if you read the the trade rags, cloud is the answer. Whatever cloud may be, moving to cloud is the answer. Our philosophy as a company is that public cloud is not the only game in town, nor will it be the only game in town in the future. We believe in companies investing in technology to get the best value for their spend. And as a result there's a continuum of options that we see existing far into the future and those include regional data center providers. Frequently we see them being value-added because they can offer a level of service that's not yet been implemented in public cloud. Who's going to manage the stuff that an Azure doesn't manage, as an example. These regional providers, these service providers, many of whom are evolving to do managed services and other people's data centers, not just their own, are going to play a key role in this next wave of technology. And so again, these regional providers, we see them being very important for delivering the service level that customers expect. There's also and this is a very prominent topic right now, there's concerns about data privacy and data sovereignty. While the hyper scalars have done a great job of building a global footprint, they still have gaps. And so if companies are concerned about GDPR in Europe, as an example. If they're concerned about PIPEDA up in Canada, as an example. These regional service providers have the compliance capabilities, they have the protection already in place to not just deliver a high service level but also to deliver a solution that can be lower risk for your business. And so that's really where we see service providers fitting in the market and we see customers having the right mix of public cloud and service provider powered infrastructure. As well as for large companies, they may still have the buying power, and they may still have the level of expertise in house, so like my Fortune 50 clientele but you could even take it down probably to the Fortune 500. Where it's more cost-effective for them to still operate in their data center. Today, because we're a data-driven company and we live in the data and the insights it provides, still the majority of the workloads, either for service level security or if you're a large company, the economics to run IT are still better suited in data center. We don't know that it's always going to be the majority in your data center. We see this evolving as the public cloud providers continue to mature, over the last few years they've matured greatly. But again, we see a continuum of options for customers to consider. We think those options will get smaller but we still think you're going to have a purpose to consider in your data center, in a regional service provider, as well as considering a hyper scalar for your needs. >> All right. Brian, last thing. Need to get speeds and feeds on CLoudGenera. How many employees you have, how many customers you have. Can talk anything about the funding? And tell us about this looking south. >> The Silicon South. Well, let me start there. One of the things we're very proud about is being a company that's headquartered here on the East Coast and specifically in the South. That said, we're already a global company. We have customers around the world. There's well over a thousand subscribers of our cloud assist technology, which is where you can both model future uses of technology as well as load in your existing inventories and analyze your business at scale. What I would share again about the Silicon South is that we're one of these cool companies that is helping the southeast kind of rise up as a technology center. Not one of the normal places that folks think of as innovation hubs but very much in the Carolinas in particular, we have a market that's on the rise with very smart data scientists, very smart developers, and very strong business leaders. And so that's one of the things we are very proud of as a company. There are 22 employees in CLoudGenera today. As I mentioned, we have a global footprint in terms of customers. I gave you a stat just around our cloud assist product. One of the cool things about us is that we serve both the consumer, so that would be the enterprise that's trying to figure out what to do with their technology investments. We also serve their suppliers. We will not bias ourselves so they can't bias the output of our software but what they can do is leverage our software to guide their customers decisions. In fact, our relationship with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are relationships where they know sometimes our software will recommend an outcome that they can't monetize but they still choose to work with us and they still choose to recommend us and in some cases, leverage us for their clients to make sure their clients are getting the best value for their spent. >> Well, Brian Kelly, Charlotte North Carolina based CLoudGenera. Appreciate you joining. Thanks so much for sharing with us some of the nuance and complexity that you're trying to help enterprises glean through. We'll be back. Check out lots more coverage at theCUBE.net. So many shows where companies are trying to sort through this very complicated space. So be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the videos. Wikibon.com where we're digging through with our analysis on our team. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Speaker: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's TheCube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special Cube conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program Bobby Allen, who's the chief technology officer and chief evangelist at CloudGenera. Bobby thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, thanks for having us. >> Alright so Bobby we had a great conversation with your CEO Brian Kelly talking about CloudGenera, helping customers if, in my own words I'll say, there's this great mess of the cloud and service providers and data centers and things are changing all the time. And here's a great tool to help people understand this. Now, I've had people asking me for years, it's like "Hey, I've got my app, "or I'm building a new app, where do I do this?" And I've always said well, there are certain things that are really easy. If it's going to be up for a really short period of time, and it's something there, it's like you're not going to spend the time to rack and stack and build and do this. hey, Cloud was great for that. And on the other end of the spectrum now, the public clouds might disagree, but if I have something that's just like it's going to be cooking along and it's not changing and it's there, the rent versus buy analogy once again goes towards kind of doing it in a hosted or my own data center. But there's a whole lot of stuff in the middle, That is, well, it depends. There's there's this uncertainty in the world and that's where you live, so bring us in a little bit as to some of the thinking as to how CloudGenera helps and where let's get into it. >> That's a great question Stu. So, we feel like the market is actually changed, in the sense that information is coming faster and faster, there's more and more information that people are inundated and honestly overwhelmed by. And so when people ask us for more information, we typically tell them you don't need more information in our opinion, you really want to move from information to clarity to insight, "What should I actually do?" And so to go back to the real estate analogy you talked about, I think people think of cloud as a house. Cloud is at least a neighborhood if not a state, and you need to figure out where should I live within that state or that neighborhood. So, let's take AWS for example. AWS is a vendor that has many, many, many services, but also different flavors of how you can run things. So before people would look at CloudGenera as a company that can compare different execution venues. Do I want to run this in Amazon or Azure or Google? Still we increasingly get people that want to understand which flavor of Amazon should I do? Do I do the multi-tenant, do I do the dedicated, do I do the VMware cloud on AWS? And those are all valid choices for us. And so for us, we don't really care where a customer wants to evaluate. Let's define what you need and map that to the relevant or interesting options in the marketplace, and then take the guesswork out of it so you have some data-driven decision making. >> Yeah, I love that because I have been covering Amazon for many years, and boy I go to the show and it was like "Alright, I thought I got my arms around Aurora and now there's the serverless based Aurora, and there's 17 different database options inside of Amazon so, oh boy," and then, right. Let's not even talk about all the compute instances. I think it's more complicated to pick a compute instance in the public cloud than it is if I was going to put something in my own rack these days. >> Bobby: Yes, yes it is. >> So, but that being said I want to for a second before we talk about the public cloud, talk to your viewpoint, how are you helping customers in kind of the service provider to data center world. And because that's a complicated and very I have to say fragmented space. >> It is. >> How does CloudGenera help there? >> So CloudGenera deals with the consumers, so ones who actually want to benefit from the technology themselves, but also from the service provider side. So if you're Joe's Cloud Shack, or regional cloud provider or Vmware service provider, anyone who is offering technology services, you may want to know number one, how do you compare with the large hyperscale providers, and then number two, how can you showcase your valued proposition next to those. So maybe Amazon and Azure and Google are on the top of peoples' minds, but how do your services compare to those? So in our platform you can actually show a Joe's Cloud Shack next to an Amazon next to something like a Synergy or SimpliVity. So options inside and outside the data center that you thought about and then ones that you didn't can all be kind of presented in a fair way, so you take the guesswork out of how they compare to each other. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the big raging debates we've had out there is, "Oh I wish I had a cloud concierge." And it's like well, it's not a utility, and therefore, I could stand up something in my data center or I could put a Paz in my environment or there's so many layers in the stack and so much nuance that it's the paradox of choice I think that most people have. So, maybe walk us through a customer. When do they tend to come to you, what are some of those patterns, and what are the things that really help get accelerated when they use a platform like yours? >> So, some of the things that people think about are they have workloads that they want to move maybe they want to exit a data center, or what really happens commonly is there's a new leader in town. New CIO comes in, "We're going to have a cloud-first strategy." And we're not opposed to that. The biggest principle for us is do you understand why you're doing, and whether this is the right time, the when? Because if you don't do the right thing at the right time for the right reason there's a hole in your strategy. And so what we look at is, okay what is it that you're trying to move or change or transform, What are the things that are interesting to you or strategic, and then let's look at putting those things together. Now when you define what you need, you shouldn't define what you need in terms of where you're going, right. I don't decide my venue based on the airline I want to get on, I decide I need to be in Vegas for this conference at this time, and then I see the airline that can get me there on time for the best price, hopefully. And we take that same approach when it comes to helping customers. Let's talk about what you need in a vendor agnostic way that's divorced from the options in the market. Because your needs are not impacted by Amazon or Azure or HPE or Dell. And so then, after we define your expectations and your requirements let's map those to the things that you're curious about, or that your leadership says are strategic, and then let's make sure that we understand what we call the concept of logical equivalence. The spirit of your requirement may be called x in one provider and y in a different one, are they really the same as a tomato to-mah-to, or are they really two different types of, excuse me, services or entities altogether? So let's, let's evaluate then, how well your needs are met by these different vendors. Is it just a semantics issue or are these really two different things? Yes, they're both different types of block storage but the requirements are different. The latency is different, the redundancy is different, the pricing is certainly different. How close are these things to meeting the spirit of what you asked for? And the other parts too that I'll just offer that we see a lot is people are concerned overly about cost. How much does it cost? And we feel like the problem is not a problem of cost, it's a problem of value. People go to look for cost calculators but really what they need are value calculators, right? I take a Porsche and an F-150. An F-150 is a bigger vehicle but the Porsche is more expensive for a reason. There's a different experience than just space. And so the reality is people don't mind paying more if they know what they're paying for. Transparency is really the key. >> On that cost piece though, how much of the total equation do you look at? So I think about, my data center there's everything like the power, space, and all those pieces, if I go to a service provider, if it's my stuff, if I still have to manage it, versus some of the operational expenses. How much of kind of the, I hate to say total cost, but how much of that spread do you look at? >> We try to be pretty comprehensive, Stu. So, if you go to a public provider for example you're not paying for power but you're paying for a certainly hourly charge typically on an (mumbling) basis that accommodates a lot of the things that I'll say are platform or hypervisor and below. Now where I think a lot of the other people that are in this space maybe fall short, and our opinion is that they don't look at things above the hypervisor. If I move a workload to an AWS, they may have some great services I can take advantage of. The labor and the licensing and the other considerations that we consider to be carryover costs are things that I still need to accommodate. If I put a workload in Amazon, someone still needs to patch the OS, maybe manage the database, maybe audit security. Those are things that have labor and licensing and software considerations that we try to look at. So we try to be as comprehensive as possible, but we also look at SLA, we also look at security, so you may need to bring another manage services or consulting or software packages to fill those other gaps, so we try to be as holistic and comprehensive as possible. >> What other kind of patterns and data do you bring for CloudGenera? So thinking things either from a vertical standpoint or kind of size of company. I just think there's been certain movements in virtualization and containers and the like where there's been kind of that data and how do I understand what's going to make sense for me, so. Does CloudGenera get into any of that? >> We do get into some of that. So we try again not to force anything down someone's throat. We try to look at where you are, but also understand that there are some patterns. So for example, when we talk about different industry verticals it's very aligned to security and compliance for example. So we know that there are certain providers that are interesting but not ready for primetime because they don't have HIPAA, high tech, high trust, things that are typically relevant for the healthcare industry, so we're very quickly able to say this is something that may not be right for you just yet. Or if you have certain regional concerns, maybe you're looking at GDPR in Europe, you're looking at IRAP in Australia, we can, again, typically guide them to, this provider has some very interesting services but they don't have the security or the SLA that you need. So we try to do that to kind of whittle it down. The other thing that we're seeing though, Stu, is that honestly, many enterprises are biting off more than they can chew. They try to do too much at once, and so some of the things that we talked about, even off camera, is I would ask the question "Does the industry have a POT problem? "Are we trying to do too much at once?" And when I say POT I'm using that to represent the acronym of, to me, three pieces that we need to break this down to. Number one is parity, number two is optimization, and then number three is transformation. Many enterprises in our opinion are trying to eat an elephant with a spoon. They have no idea how to get there and they really don't understand what is too much in terms of the cost, and so when they're evaluating how much they can handle, how much change is too much, in terms of people, process, and technology, the thing to us is, what does parity look like? And that may mean a lift and shift in some cases, it may not, but you at least have to define what success looks like if you take what you're doing in your data center and move that somewhere else. But then, the middle ground is optimization. How do I take the spirit of what I'm doing, move it to that venue and then kind of clean it up or optimize it a little bit, and then once I'm there and I can evaluate the unintended consequences of change, what are the things that I didn't think about? The impacts to my people, the retraining, the other software package I need to put in place for monitoring and management, and so forth. Once I have a handle on that, then I can finally move from optimization to transformation, but that's not, that's not glamorous. That's not interesting. People don't want to talk about that. They want to go whole hog and change everything all at once and we get into trouble doing that. >> Bobby you've given me flashbacks. I worked in the storage industry for a decade, and migrations, you still kind of wake up in the middle of the night, screaming a little bit because it's always challenging, there's always all of those things to work through. You think you've gone through all of your checklists and then, oh wait, something didn't work. Database migrations, big discussion going on there. From Wikibon David Floyer has just been like, it's so many horror stories. People get there but it's, if you don't have to, maybe you don't want to, but there's so many reasons why you want to, so, I guess I want to highlight, we're not telling people not to change, and moving faster and getting on board, some modernization's a good thing, everywhere. You've got a virtualization environment, there's lots you can do today that we couldn't do two or four years ago. So, how do we get over this POT problem then? >> I think part of it is, so again going back to the moving analogy, if I'm going to move, Stu, it would be foolish for me to move without getting an estimate. And there are times when an estimate should be able to come in my house and tell me "It's actually better for you to sell that piano "than to try to move it, 'cause it's not worth it." I would want someone, if I were CIO in an enterprise today, to tell me, "Don't waste your time focusing on this, "this is really where you need to focus your time "because this is going to be the Pareto principle "that saves you the time and the money." The reality is bringing someone who's benefited from the land mines and the pitfalls, so in our opinion, bringing whether that's an SI, consultancy, a data service company like CloudGenera that's benefited from a lot of the things we've seen in the industry, don't hit things on your own that other people have stumbled on, right? Benefit from others' mistakes to allow you to take a look at the whole thing. So the challenge that I think we're having, Stu, is that we're proficient in talking about these things, there aren't enough use cases in terms of mature of cloud transformations to really look back at anecdotal data this comprehensive. We're still figuring a lot of this stuff out, and I know people don't want to hear that, but that's my opinion. >> So, Bobby, is there some place when I'm filling out these forms that I put in here's the skill set my team has, and a little alarm goes off and says, "Hey, time to do some retraining, some reskilling, "maybe bringing on some new people "to handle some of these new areas." How do you handle that side of it? >> I think part of it is honestly, and this may sound a little trite, I think people that are willing to raise their hand and say that we need some help or that "We don't have this all figured out," or that "There are some things that we need to bring in "a little bit of help to help us get that estimate "before we look to move everything," that's really the skill set you want to have. People that are not saying, "I'm the (mumbles) "juggernaut of everything cloud," because those people don't exist yet in my opinion. There are people that have pockets of expertise in things that they have really deep knowledge about, but we need to mix that with, I think, a healthy appreciation for the fact that there's still a lot of things that we're learning about together. The other part of that, Stu, is it's a community and it's a network. You may know storage migrations, I may know database migrations, let's put our heads together about how we can work together as an enterprise and make sure that we minimize impact to the users, because at the end of the day, that's really the challenge, is not to do a cool project, it's to deliver value to the business, and that's what I think we're loosing sight of with all this cool technology sometimes. >> Alright, so Bobby you've got over a thousand people using the tool. What are some of the big areas that people are like, "Oh wow, this is the stuff that's saving me "either lots of time, lots of money, saving my business, "and heck if I'm running the show, keeps my job"? >> I think storage is a big one. So people are oftentimes unaware that there are so many different ways that you can run storage in a given provider. So Amazon for example has four to six different ways you can just run block storage in their particular multi-tenant cloud, and people aren't aware of that. So there's a case that we did for a major bank. We showed them that a terabyte of storage in Amazon can run from 300 dollars up to 26 thousand dollars depending on the level or performance that you want to hit. Egress is another one, so what does the network behavior look like in those applications? Because people often will estimate the resources but not the traffic. What are the estimates to have a level of parity around security. So I don't have HIPAA compliance or SOP compliance in this particular provider. What is it going to take me to get to that level of parity that I need to have, because if I save money, Stu, but I have to spend all that on my lawyer because my data got accessed, then I've still got a problem, I've just kind of moved that down the road. So lots of things out there that I believe we're hiding in plain sight. Again, information is out there that we just don't have the filters to find. What I would say is a lot of people think that cloud is a commodity, we're not there yet. There're providers to this day, I can't give any names to protect the innocent, but the same service is literally triple in one provider what it costs in another one for almost exactly the same service. And there're examples like that that have been out there for years, we just can't see them. >> So, Bobby, last question, if somebody wanted to get started with CloudGenera, is there like a trial version, or how would somebody get involved? >> Yeah, so a couple things that are really interesting. So there's a try now button on our website that lets you kind of answer a few questions and actually get a sample mini-assessment, download a sample report, and actually see the type of analysis that we provide, number one. Number two, CloudGenera is a software company but also a services company. If you want to purchase the software, great, and we actually have trials that we can set up for you to do that. We also do what we call proofs of value. If you want to engage our team to come in and do five to ten applications to see how those might look with our analysis, and then they go at scale and look at your whole CMDB. We want to make sure we're meeting the needs of the business and not trying to boil the ocean if they're not ready for that yet. >> Bobby Allen, CTO and chief evangelist to CloudGenerate, thanks so much for joining me. So much happening in the cloud world. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of our coverage, as well as wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks for watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman.

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special presentation, The Future of Converged Infrastructure, my name is David Vellante, and I'll be your host, for this event where the focus is on Dell EMC's converged infrastructure announcement. Nearly a decade ago, modern converged infrastructure really came to the floor in the marketplace, and what you had is compute, storage, and network brought together in a single managed entity. And when you talk to IT people, the impact was roughly a 30 to 50% total cost of ownership reduction, really depending on a number of factors. How much virtualization they had achieved, how complex their existing processees were, how much they could save on database and other software licenses and maintenance, but roughly that 30 to 50% range. Fast forward to 2018 and you're looking at a multibillion dollar market for converged infrastructure. Jeff Boudreau is here, he's the President of the Dell EMC Storage Division, Jeff thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. So we're going to set up this announcement let me go through the agenda. Jeff and I are going to give an overview of the announcement and then we're going to go to Trey Layton, who's the Chief Technology Officer of the converged infrastructure group at Dell EMC. He's going to focus on the architecture, and some of the announcement details. And then, we're going to go to Cisco Live to a pre-recorded session that we did in Barcelona, and get the Cisco perspective, and then Jeff and I will come back to wrap it up. We also, you might notice we have a crowd chat going on, so underneath this video stream you can ask questions, you got to log in with LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, I prefer Twitter, kind of an ask me anything crowd chat. We have analysts on, Stu Miniman is hosting that call. We're going to talk about what this announcement is all about, what the customer issues are that are being addressed by this announcement. So Jeff, let's get into it. From your perspective, what's the state of converged infrastructure today? >> Great question. I'm really bullish on CI, in regards to what converged infrastructure and kind of the way the market's going. We see continued interest in the growth of the market of our customers. Driven by the need for simplicity, agility, elasticity of those on-prem resources. Dell EMC pioneered the CI market several years ago, with the simple premise of simplify IT, and our focus and commitment to our customers has not changed of simplifying IT. As our customers continue to seek for new ways to simplify and consolidate infrastructure, we expect more and more of our customers to embrace CI, as a fast and easy way to modernize their infrastructure, and transform IT. >> You talk about transformation, we do a lot of events, and everybody's talking about digital transformation, and IT transformation, what role does converged infrastructure play in those types of transformations, maybe you could give us an example? >> Sure, so first I'd say our results speak for themselves. As I said we pioneered the CI industry, as the market leader, we enabled thousands of customers worldwide to drive business transformation and digital transformation. And when I speak to customers specifically, converged infrastructure is not just about the infrastructure, it's about the operating model, and how they simplify IT. I'd say two of the biggest areas of impact that customers highlight to me, are really about the acceleration of application delivery, and then the other big one is around the increase in operational efficiencies allowing customers to free up resources, to reinvest however they see fit. >> Now since the early days of converged infrastructure Cisco has been a big partner of yours, you guys were kind of quasi-exclusive for awhile, they went out and sought other partners, you went out and sought other partners, a lot of people have questions about that relationship, what's your perspective on that relationship. >> So our partnership with Cisco is strong as ever. We're proud of this category we've created together. We've been on this journey for a long time we've been working together, and that partnership will continue as we go forward. In full transparency there are of course some topics where we disagree, just like any normal relationship we have disagreements, an example of that would be HCI, but in the CI space our partnership is as strong as ever. We'll have thousands of customers between the two of us, that we will continue to invest and innovate together on. And I think later in this broadcast you're going to hear directly from Cisco on that, so we're both doubling down on the partnership, and we're both committed to CI. >> I want to ask you about leadership generally, and then specifically as it relates to converged infrastructure and hyper converged. My question is this, hyper converged is booming, it's a high growth market. I sometimes joke that Dell EMC is now your leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrants, 101 Gartner Magic Quadrants out of the 99. They're just leading everything and I think both the CI and the HCI categories, what's your take, is CI still relevant? >> First I'd say it's great to come from a leadership position so I thank you for bringing that up, I think it's really important. As Micheal talks about being the essential infrastructure company, that's huge for us as Dell Technologies, so we're really proud of that and we want to lean into that strength. Now on HCI vs CI, to me it's an AND world. Everybody wants to get stock that's in either or, to me it's about the AND story. All our customers are going on a journey, in regards to how they transform their businesses. But at the end of the day, if I took my macro view, and took a step back, it's about the data. The data's the critical asset. The good news for me and for our team is data always continues to grow, and is growing at an amazing rate. And as that critical asset, customers are really kind of thinking about a modern data strategy as they drive foreword. And as part of that, they're looking at how to store, protect, secure, analyze, move that data, really unleashing that data to provide value back to their businesses. So with all of that, not all data is going to be created equal, as part of that, as they build out those strategies, it's going to be a journey, in regards to how they do it. And if that's software defined, vs purpose built arrays, vs converged, or hyper converged, or even cloud, those deployment models, we, Dell EMC, and Dell Technologies want to be that strategic partner, that trusted advisor to help them on that journey. >> Alright Jeff, thanks for helping me with the setup. I want to ask you to hang around a little bit. >> Jeff: Sure. >> We're going to go to a video, and then we're going to bring back Trey Layton, talk about the architecture so keep it right there, we'll be right back. >> Announcer: Dell EMC has long been number one in converged infrastructure, providing technology that simplifies all aspects of IT, and enables you to achieve better business outcomes, faster, and we continue to lead through constant innovation. Introducing, the VxBlock System 1000, the next generation of converged infrastructure from Dell EMC. Featuring enhanced life cycle management, and a broad choice of technologies, to support a vast array of applications and resources. From general purpose to mission critical, big data to specialized workloads, VxBlock 1000 is the industry's first converged infrastructure system, with the flexible data services, power, and capacity to handle all data center workloads, giving you the ultimate in business agility, data center efficiency, and operational simplicity. Including best-of-breed storage and data protection from Dell EMC, and computer networking from Cisco. (orchestral music) Converged in one system, these technologies enable you to flexibly adapt resources to your evolving application's needs, pool resources to maximize utilization and increase ROI, deliver a turnkey system in lifecycle assurance experience, that frees you to focus on innovation. Four times storage types, two times compute types, and six times faster updates, and VME ready, and future proof for extreme performance. VxBlock 1000, the number one in converged now all-in-one system. Learn more about Dell EMC VxBlock 1000, at DellEMC.com/VxBlock. >> We're back with Trey Layton who's the Senior Vice President and CTO of converged at Dell EMC. Trey it's always a pleasure, good to see you. >> Dave, good to see you as well. >> So we're eight years into Vblock, take us back to the converged infrastructure early days, what problems were you trying to solve with CI. >> Well one of the problems with IT in general is it's been hard, and one of the reasons why it's been hard is all the variability that customers consume. And how do you integrate all that variability in a sustaining manner, to maintain the assets so it can support the business. And, the thing that we've learned is, the original recipe that we had for Vblock, was to go at and solve that very problem. We have referred to that as life cycle. Manage the life cycle services of the biggest inner assets that you're deploying. And we have created some great intellectual property, some great innovation around helping minimize the complexity associated with managing the life cycle of a very complex integration, by way of, one of the largest data center assets that people operate in their environment. >> So you got thousands and thousands of customers telling you life cycle management is critical. They're shifting their labor resource to more strategic activities, is that what's going on? Well there's so much variation and complexity in just maintaining the different integration points, that they're spending an inordinate amount of their time, a lot of nights and weekends, on understanding and figuring out which software combinations, which configuration combinations you need to operate. What we do as an organization, and have done since inception is, we manage that complexity for them. We delivery them an outcome based architecture that is pre-integrated, and we sustain that integration over it's life, so they spend less time doing that, and letting the experts who actually build the components focus on maintaining those integrations. >> So as an analyst I always looked at converged infrastructure as an evolutionary trend, bringing together storage, servers, networking, bespoke components. So my question is, where's the innovation underneath converged infrastructure. >> So I would say the innovation is in two areas. We're blessed with a lot of technology innovations that come from our partner, and our own companies, Dell EMC and Cisco. Cisco produces wonderful innovations in the space of networking compute, in the context of Vblock. Dell EMC, storage innovations, data protection, et cetera. We harmonize all of these very complex integrations in a manner where an organization can put those advanced integrations into solving business problems immediately. So there's two vectors of innovation. There are the technology components that we are acquiring, to solve business problems, and there's the method at which we integrate them, to get to the business of solving problems. >> Okay, let's get into the announcement. What are you announcing, what's new, why should we care. >> We are announcing the VxBlock 1000, and the interesting thing about Vblocks over the years, is they have been individual system architectures. So a compute technology, integrated with a particular storage architecture, would produce a model of Vblock. With VxBlock 1000, we're actually introducing an architecture that provides a full gamut of array optionality for customers. Both blade and rack server options, for customers on the UCS compute side, and before we would integrate data protection technologies as an extension or an add-on into the architecture, data protection is native to the offer. In addition to that, unstructured data storage. So being able to include unstructured data into the architecture as one singular architecture, as opposed to buying individualized systems. >> Okay, so you're just further simplifying the underlying infrastructure which is going to save me even more time? >> Producing a standard which can adapt to virtually any use case that a customer has in a data center environment. Giving them the ability to expand and grow that architecture, as their workload dictates, in their environment, as opposed to buying a system to accommodate one workload, buying another system to accommodate another workload, this is kind of breaking the barriers of traditional CI, and moving it foreword so that we can create an adaptive architecture, that can accommodate not only the technologies available today, but the technologies on the horizon tomorrow. >> Okay so it's workload diversity, which means greater asset leverage from that underlying infrastructure. >> Trey: Absolutely. >> Can you give us some examples, how do you envision customers using this? >> So I would talk specifically about customers that we have today. And when they deploy, or have deployed Vblocks in the past. We've done wonderful by building architectures that accommodate, or they're tailor made for certain types of workloads. And so a customer environment would end up acquiring a Vblock model 700, to accommodate an SAP workload for example. They would acquire a Vblock 300, or 500 to accommodate a VDI workload. And then as those workloads would grow, they would grow those individualized systems. What it did was, it created islands of stranded resource capacities. Vblock 1000 is about bringing all those capabilities into a singular architecture, where you can grow the resources based on pools. And so as your work load shifts in your environment, you can reallocate resources to accommodate the needs of that workload, as opposed to worrying about stranded capacity in the architecture. >> Okay where do you go from here with the architecture, can you share with us, to the extent that you can, a little roadmap, give us a vision as to how you see this playing out over the next several years. >> Well, one of the reasons why we did this was to simplify, and make it easier to operate, these very complex architectures that everyone's consuming around the world. Vblock has always been about simplifying complex technologies in the data center. There are a lot of innovations on the horizon in VME, for example, next generation compute platforms. There are new generation fabric services, that are emerging. VxBlock 1000 is the place at which you will see all of these technologies introduced, and our customers won't have to wait on new models of Vblock to consume those technologies, they will be resident in them upon their availability to the market. >> The buzz word from the vendor community is future proof, but your saying, you'll be able to, if you buy today, you'll be able to bring in things like NVME and these new technologies down the road. >> The architecture inherently supports the idea of adapting to new technologies as they emerge, and will consume those integrations, as a part of the architectural standard footprint, for the life of the architecture. >> Alright excellent Trey, thanks very much for that overview. Cisco obviously a huge partner of yours, with this whole initiative, many many years. A lot of people have questioned where that goes, so we have a segment from Cisco Live, Stu Miniman is out there, let's break to Stu, then we'll come back and pick it up from there. Thanks for watching. >> Thanks Dave, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at Cisco Live 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. Happy to be joined on the program by Nigel Moulton the EMEA CTO of Dell EMC, and Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks Stu. >> Looking at the long partnership of Dell and Cisco, Siva, talk about the partnership first. >> Absolutely. If you look back in time, when we launched UCS, the very first major partnership we brought, and the converged infrastructure we brought to the market was Vblock, it really set the trend for how customers should consume compute, network, and storage together. And we continue to deliver world class technologies on both sides and the partnership continues to thrive as we see tremendous adoption from our customers. So we are here, several years down, still a very vibrant partnership in trying to get the best product for the customers. >> Nigel would love to get your perspective. >> Siva's right I think I'd add, it defined a market, if you think what true conversion infrastructure is, it's different, and we're going to discuss some more about that as we go through. The UCS fabric is unique, in the way that it ties a network fabric to a compute fabric, and when you bring those technologies together, and converge them, and you have a partnership like Cisco, you have a partnership with us, yeah it's going to be a fantastic result for the market because the market moves on, and I think, VxBlock actually helped us achieve that. >> Alright so Siva we understand there's billions of reasons why Cisco and Dell would want to keep this partnership going, but talk about from an innovation standpoint, there's the new VxBlock 1000, what's new, talk about what's the innovation here. >> Absolutely. If you look at the VxBlock perspective, the 1000 perspective, first of all it simplifies an extremely fast successful product to the next level. It simplifies the storage options, and it provides a seamless way to consume those technologies. From a Cisco perspective, as you know we are in our fifth generation of UCS platform, continues to be a world class platform, leading blade service in the industry. But we also bring the innovation of rack mount servers, as well as 40 gig fabric, larger scale, fiber channel technology as well. As we bring our compute, network, as well as a sound fabric technology together, with world class storage portfolio, and then simplify that for a single pane of glass consumption model. That's absolutely the highest level of innovation you're going to find. >> Nigel, I think back in the early days the joke was you could have a Vblock anyway you want, as long as it's black. Obviously a lot of diversity in product line, but what's new and different here, how does this impact new customers and existing customers. >> I think there's a couple of things to pick up on, what Trey said, what Siva said. So the simplification piece, the way in which we do release certification matrix, the way in which you combine a single software image to manage these multiple discreet components, that is greatly simplified in VxBlock 1000. Secondly you remove a model number, because historically you're right, you bought a three series, a five series, and a seven series, and that sort of defined the architecture. This is now a system wide architecture. So those technologies that you might of thought of as being discreet before, or integrated at an RCM level that was perhaps a little complex for some people, that's now dramatically simplified. So those are two things that I think we amplify, one is the simplification and two, you're removing a model number and moving to a system wide architecture. >> Want to give you both the opportunity, gives us a little bit, what's the future when you talk about the 1000 system, future innovations, new use cases. >> Sure, I think if you look at the way enterprise are consuming, the demand for more powerful systems that'll bring together more consolidation, and also address the extensive data center migration opportunities we see, is very critical, that means the customers are really looking at whether it is a in-memory database that scales to, much larger scale than before, or large scale cluster databases, or even newer workloads for that matter, the appetite for a larger system, and the need to have it in the market, continues to grow. We see a huge install base of our customers, as well as new customers looking at options in the market, truly realize, the strength of the portfolio that each one of us brings to the table, and bringing the best-of-breed, whether it is today, or in the future from an innovation standpoint, this is absolutely the way that we are approaching building our partnership and building new solutions here. >> Nigel, when you're talking to customers out there, are they coming saying, I'm going to need this for a couple of months, I mean this is an investment they're making for a couple years, why is this a partnership built to last. >> An enterprise class customer certainly is looking for a technology that's synonymous with reliability, availability, performance. And if you look at what VxBlock has traditionally done and what the 1000 offers, you see that. But Siva's right, these application architectures are going to change. So if you can make an investment in a technology set now that keeps the premise of reliability, availability, and performance to you today, but when you look at future application architectures around high capacity memory, adjacent to a high performance CPU, you're almost in a position where you are preparing the ground for what that application architecture will need, and the investments that people make in the VxBlock system with the UCS power underneath at the compute layer, it's significant, because it lays out a very clear path to how you will integrate future application architectures with existing application architectures. >> Nigel Moulton, Siva Sivakumar, thank you so much for joining, talking about the partnership and the future. >> Siva: Thank you. >> Nigel: Pleasure. >> Sending back to Dave in the US, thanks so much for watching The Cube from Cisco Live Barcelona. >> Thank you. >> Okay thanks Stu, we're back here with Jeff Boudreau. We talked a little bit earlier about the history of conversion infrastructure, some of the impacts that we've seen in IT transformations, Trey took us through the architecture with some of the announcement details, and of course we heard from Cisco, was a lot of fun in Barcelona. Jeff bring it home, what are the take aways. >> Some of the key take aways I have is just I want to make sure everybody knows Dell EMC's continued commitment to modernizing infrastructure for conversion infrastructure. In addition to that was have a strong partnership with Cisco as you heard from me and you also heard from Cisco, that we both continue to invest and innovate in these spaces. In addition to that we're going to continue our leadership in CI, this is critical, and it's extremely important to Dell, and EMC, and Dell EMC's Cisco relationship. And then lastly, that we're going to continue to deliver on our customer promise to simplify IT. >> Okay great, thank you very much for participating here. >> I appreciate it. >> Now we're going to go into the crowd chat, again, it's an ask me anything. What make Dell EMC so special, what about security, how are the organizations affected by converged infrastructure, there's still a lot of, roll your own going on. There's a price to pay for all this integration, how is that price justified, can you offset that with TCO. So let's get into that, what are the other business impacts, go auth in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, Twitter is my preferred. Let's get into it thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you in the crowd chat. >> I want IT to be dial tone service, where it's always available for our providers to access. To me, that is why IT exists. So our strategy at the hardware and software level is to ruthlessly standardize leverage in a converged platform technology. We want to create IT almost like a vending machine, where a user steps up to our vending machine, they select the product they want, they put in their cost center, and within seconds that product is delivered to that end user. And we really need to start running IT like a business. Currently we have a VxBlock that we will run our University of Vermont Medical Center epic install on. Having good performance while the provider is within that epic system is key to our foundation of IT. Having the ability to combine the compute, network, and storage in one aspect in one upgrade, where each component is aligned and regression tested from a Dell Technology perspective, really makes it easy as an IT individual to do an upgrade once or twice a year versus continually trying to keep each component of that infrastructure footprint upgraded and aligned. I was very impressed with the VxBlock 1000 from Dell Technologies, specifically a few aspects of it that really intrigued me. With the VxBlock 1000, we now have the ability to mix and match technologies within that frame. We love the way the RCM process works, from a converged perspective, the ability to bring the compute, the storage, and network together, and trust that Dell Technologies is going to upgrade all those components in a seamless manner, really makes it easier from an IT professional to continue to focus on what's really important to our organization, provider and patient outcomes.

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman. >> For several years now, the analysts at WikiBound have been talking about taking the cloud, the public cloud, operating model, and bringing it to your data, wherever that data lives. Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to HCI: A Foundation For IT Transformation. We're here with Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, at Dell EMC. Chad, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, glad to be here, good to spend time with you guys. >> So, we talk a lot about, you know, VxRail, speaking of foundations. Give us a quick update. What is it, and what's new with VxRail? >> Okay, well big news in VxRail land, right, we just completed our transition under the 14th generation of Dell Power Edge servers, so this gives us a substantially more powerful platform, a substantially more predictable performance, and a lot more configuration options that make it fit a lot of different workloads that our customers have, so it really makes it prime time for HCI. >> So, where is the power and performance come from? Is that predominantly, kind of, new compute? >> That's a big piece of it. Some of that is software as well, right? vSAN underlies VxRail as a software defined storage layer, and we've seen pretty amazing increases in performance, just from software, from our 13G, to our 14G transition, but when we look at that performance now, on 14G servers, with the Intel Skylake chipset, we're seeing 2x performance over the last generation, and we're seeing latencies that are very, very low. And that has to do with, more and faster memory channels, more threads, overall faster processors, so really off the hook, in terms of the performance that we're seeing. >> Chad, when we look at HCI, it's really about the software layer, often, it gets overlooked, you know, what actually has to happen between the software and that underlying hardware? Are there optimizations, does it matter if I'm using the software, you know, what's optimized for that next generation Intel chip? >> Yeah, it's all about the software, or so our software vendor would say, but we know that when you're treating something as a system, you need that hardware and that software to work together, in perfect unison, as a system, and, you know, we've done a lot in this generation, working with the PowerEdge team to make sure that we have the right hardware, hooks, and design points that are focused on HCI. That goes from things like the devices that we use to boot up, and where we would execute the hypervisor kernel, to network connectivity, and really importantly, to the inband channels that we use to update all of the little pieces of firmware that operate the hardware inside the system, right? You need to be able to treat those as a system, update, lifecycle manage those, all in context of one another, so having direct and deep, meaningful access into that hardware is critically important when you're operating a system like this. >> When we've looked at, kind of, our cloud strategy, in general, it's about the data. We talk about data, it's things like predictability and latency, it's about, kind of, the power of the underlying thing, maybe, give us a little bit more specifics, as to what you're getting in this generation. >> So, the big difference here, above and beyond the performance, which is about 2x what we saw from the last generation, if we look at the same hardware, the same software, running on the two different pieces of hardware, about 100% better. But that's really just part of the story. It's the predictability of latency that's critically important. If you're going to migrate Tier 1 workloads under this infrastructure, you need to ensure that other workloads are not going to disturb that performance. So when we look at this, we look at how the IOs per second increases, and we look at the overall latency. How long does that latency line stay flat, right? So when we look at this generation, we see over 2x the IOPS, but the horizontal line where we look at the response time in latency, it stays flat nine times longer in this generation than in the last. So if you've got that sub-millisecond response time, even at very high IOPS, you can put a lot of different workloads on that same infrastructure, and still get predictable performance. >> I think, the other thing that people don't understand, is that, oh, HCI, it's just like, it's that little LEGO block you build, but it's not just one LEGO block, what have you seen from customers, what's kind of, the portfolio, what are the decisions that they have to make, to kind of, pick the right configuration? >> Sure, so yeah, when you're a kid and you get your first LEGO set, you get a lot of pretty generalized blocks, they're all, you know, square and some are rectangle, but not a lot of variability. When you get up into the big leagues of the LEGO Star Wars set, right, you've got a lot of specialized parts, and you can do really advanced, really cool things. That's really where we're at with HCI right now. If you want to really tune the infrastructure for the workloads that you have, you need a lot of variability in the processors you choose, the amount of memory, the speed of memory, and even the storage. It could be hybrid, some people still choose hybrid HDDs, but even within flash, people will choose SAS or SATA drives depending on the performance and cost benefits that they want to realize. So being able to scale up and down the processors, the memory, different types of storage, is critically important, so you can fit it into those different workloads. Also, a lot more people use this for VDI, and for high end imaging. So the ability to pack these things full of graphical processing units, and still be able to power and cool the things, is critically important. We have a lot of applications in those verticals where there's video processing and these are required. So, we don't just have one model of VxRail, we've got a number of different VxRail models, all of which can scale up, and then of course, HCI can intrinsically scale out. So that lets you really fine-tune it and get to that expert level, in terms of your LEGO building blocks. >> So Chad, a minute ago, you mentioned workloads. So as you're bringing this sort of 14th generation server technology to VxRail, how has it affected workloads, what are you seeing is the sweet spot for workloads? >> So if I were to think back a year, the question that every customer would ask, is how do I know which workload is right for HCI? And a lot of times they even lack the vocabulary and taxonomy to say, okay, that fits, that doesn't fit. What's happened in the meantime though, are the software's gotten so much better, the hardware's gotten so much faster and more predictable, that the question is, well, what workloads are not right for HCI yet? And there are very few that aren't. So, we've seen people generally start off with one workload, right? Maybe it's VDI, maybe it's a database, and then they start to move other, as they get comfortable with it, they move other workloads over to it. Obviously, we've got a big install block, or install base of VxBlock, and Vblock. We see a lot of those customers start to migrate workloads from there onto a layer of HCI. And more and more, those are becoming Tier One workloads. Crate & Barrel is a great example, a great customer of ours. They're moving their point of sale systems onto VxRail. Now for a retailer, your point of sale system, that's about as mission critical as you can possibly get, so they and others now have the confidence to start to move these things over. The only outliers that we see are some of these very big data applications that are hugely write intensive, and we actually usually end up selling a layer of hyper-converge with our Isilon arrays, to store that data, and then put a layer of hyper-converge compute around it, because in some ways, hyper-converged is just a better way to server, if you know what I mean. >> Wondering if you can talk about the business impact, what a customer's seeing, how are they quantifying the value of these systems, share some stories, or color there. >> Sure, it's all about operational expense savings, right? How much more efficiently am I going to be able to operate this infrastructure? It's not so much about capital acquisition costs. So when you look at the typical operational expense savings, and that comes from us doing all the lifecycle management of the hardware, of the software, of the cluster as a system, you see those costs go down. Really good example, is First Credit of British Columbia. Another one of our good customers. Now, they've deployed this, they've seen 30% OPEX savings and they've seen 50% power and space savings. You get a smaller package because you don't have separate storage array, separate servers, but, you also have really, one function that needs to operate your environment and that's the virtual administrator. He or she is the one that really operates everything, you don't have separate storage, separate compute, separate virtualization teams that have to look after the infrastructure. So, that first run is very easy, very fast to deploy, but it's day two through 700 and day 900 where you see that recurring operational expense saving where it really pays off for customers, all the updates and updates and life cycle management. >> Yeah, so Chad you talk about the success and all the customers. What about the customers that haven't looked at kind of the HCI space yet? What are they missing? You know, what do you say to those customers that maybe, you know, aren't sure if the waters right to jump in yet? >> So there's really three ways that you're going to encounter a customer who's going to consider HCI. You're either going to refresh a server, you know, your servers are up for maintenance and you're going to take a look at HCI as the next step in your evolution of your compute strategy. Or you're going to refresh your storage, and you're going to look at hyperconvergence as the next step in the evolution of your storage strategy. Or you've got that one workload that's probably net new and it's going to be, sort of, an isolated case and they need an infrastructure and they need to stand if up fast. That third case is really the one that drove the initial adoption of HCI, I can't tell you how many of our customers started with VDI. I mean, it's so cliched now to talk about VDI as killer app for HCI, but that's how so many people started. Because it's, you know, a very bound, isolated infrastructure and from there they get comfortable with it and they start to bring other workloads onto it. So, if you're thinking about refreshing your servers and if you're thinking about refreshing storage, it's time to kick the tires onto HCI. If you've got a workload that you need to stand up quickly and you don't know how big it's going to be, you know, one, two, three years down the road. It's another opportunity to look at HCI. Because you can start with a very small infrastructure, but you can grow it to a very very large one. >> What if we could talk a little bit about digital transformation, I mean, everybody's talking about digital transformation, and to us, digital transformation is all about how you leverage data and the edges exploding. We've envisioned sort of a three tier data model. You've got the edge, you've got maybe an aggregation point and you bring it back to the cloud. And that cloud can be a public cloud or it can be on-prem. So you've got to have some kind of cloud infrastructure to manage all this data. So where does this fit in the context of transformations and why does hardware matter? >> Yep, well let's go from the end and work back to the beginning. Hardware matters because of form factor, for one. As you start to push compute out to the edge, right, you want form factors that are small, don't consume a lot of power but, you know, still have a lot of processing power and can manipulate that data. Right, the whole internet of things phenomenon that is, creating all this data out at the edge, you know, presents us with a conundrum right? The data itself is not that valuable, the insights that we get from the data are immensely valuable. Bringing all that data back to the core to do something with is not cost effective. So, it's how do we turn the data at the edge into information and then how do we funnel that valuable information back to the core and leave the unvaluable data out where it is. hyper-converge fits really well there because you can have, you know, devices of very small form factors that are very quick to deploy, very easy to manage remotely. At the aggregation point you can have, simply, larger versions of the same thing or more of the same thing. And then finally at the core you can have very large clusters of hyperconverged appliances, like VxRail, to do your processing. Now the key is from an operational perspective you've still got a single pane of glass that manages everything. Right, it's still the same set of tools, it's still the same hardware and software lifecycle management process that happens out at the edge, at the aggregation point and at the core. So again, it comes back to the operational expense of making decisions closer to the data and then managing everything with a consistent set of tools. >> So I wondered if we could also talk about the competition and when Stu and I think about competition in this sphere we look at, first of all this all sort of software defined, everything can moved into software defined. So we see two vectors, one is head to head competition with other software defined suppliers, and the second big competitor is, hey, I'm just going to roll on my own. >> Chad Dunn: Right >> So let's start with the former, why Delium C vs vendor A, B, C or D? >> Sure, sure it really gets down to what your goal is as a customer and we obviously have multiple options within our own portfolio and those perfectly, you know, find solutions for a lot of people. But, you know, number one if you're a VMware user and you want to optimize around the VMware user experience, then VxRail is the way to go. Because we do co-engineer this with Vmware, it's not just a regular partnership, we have engineers and marketing people and product managers at Vmware that functionally role up to our team and so we do behave as one engineering and one product management organization to really optimize the user experience for VMware. Secondly, architecturally from a VCM perspective, this is a service that's baked into the kernal of vSphere. So, in terms of performance and the overhead that it creates on CPU, memory, et cetera. This is the best game in town. We can do more IO more predictably with flatter latency than really any other solution that's on the market in the HCI space. Every other one takes a virtual storage appliance approach where they have something running on top of the hypervisor. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> The very long and circuitous data path, we'll performance test against solutions like that all day long, every day, that doesn't worry us at all. So, if you're a vSphere customer, VMware customer it's the most obvious choice and from a performance perspective you're not giving up anything right? We don't want users to have to sacrifice the storage functionality, the performance, the compute functionality. Just because it's hyper-converge and you scale out doesn't mean you can compromise on any to those axis. >> Okay, what about the guys who like to change their own oil in the car and the spark plugs and tune it up and they want to roll on their own. >> (laughs) It's been a long time since I've been able to work on my own car. So I encounter these kind of customers all the time. It's the build your own crowd and it's what they've been doing for a long time. And it's great, alright, I build my own computers at home and I have my own ESX server that I put together. I can't afford a VxRail. (laughing) There's no employee discount. So I'll tell you a story that will hopefully make sense, my first job when I got into this business, I went to Boston College, my first job and work study was to keep a spreadsheet that had all the MAC addresses and all the IP addresses for every host on the BC network and keep those in sync. >> You're really good at that I bet. >> I was excellent at that. That is not a skill set that is in demand right now. Or really even at that time. But when you think about what it means to take a software defined storage product like VMware vSAN and take an x86 server and put those together. Yes, you're getting to the same destination of running vSphere on a host with software defined storage. You're missing the systemness, right? We go to a lot of trouble to make sure we're managing all of things things in the context of the cluster level. All of the little pieces of firmware, and they're roughly 12 or so pieces of firmware that we have to take care of. From the BIOS to the drive controller firmware, the drives, the boss card, which is our boot media, the iDRAC firmware, the backplane, power supplies. In legacy EMC we spent 30 years building arrays. We had all those same challenges with all the different pieces of firmware and software that all had to function as a system, we did that. And we guaranteed that it would live up to 5/9ths of availability for the customer. That's exactly what we do when we deliver VxRail's hyperconverge. If you want to choose to build those things yourself that's fine if you have the skills and that's how you want to operate your business. The 5/9ths is now on you though. Right, because you're the one responsible for bringing all those parts together. So, yeah it's certainly a valid path for others but, the market is shifting and we see more often than not, people are moving towards a buy approach rather than build. >> You bring up a great point. I remember back in the early days before we even called it HCI, you think about vSAN, oh well is the storage admin going to buy it? Is the virtualization admin going to take that over? What's excited me about this wave is the oh, heres the cool stuff that companies are doing now that they're not spending their time keeping spreadsheets of MAC addresses. >> Chad Dunn: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> What is the kind of, you know, owner of this, look like in your environment? And any cool stories you're hearing from customers transforming their organization. >> By and large the operator is your virtual admin. The person who is at home in vCenter and vROps, you know, maybe even vRA if they're going full infrastructure as a service. That's really the user of this, and the dynamic you mention is similar to what we had with Vblock, right. Customers who went Vblock, who said, I'm going to change my operating model to a virtual administrator versus compute, storage, network. You know, customers who didn't change the operating model were not happy Vblock customers. Ones that did change the model did. And, I'll tell ya a real off script anecdote, recently I was traveling in Europe, and I started playing a game with the sales guy we were traveling with. Because in Europe, very often, they have more of an affinity to putting their logos on the sides of buildings in a lot of European cities. So, as we would go to these different cities and we went from Stockholm all the way down to Rome, to Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You know, we're just spotting VxRail customers, right, whose going to spot the most. And the one really interesting one is we checked into a hotel, you know, late night in Switzerland. Next morning we meet for breakfast and he goes, "Did you spot the rail customer?" I said "Who was it?" We went into the bathroom and they have these, you know, squeeze bottles that have the soap in the shower and it's a cosmetics company and they're located in Germany. And they do, obviously, a ton of business all over Europe, and they had outsourced a lot of their IT because, you know, their core competency is not IT, it's cosmetics. And they now have one guy that looks after all of IT for this company rather than outsource it to two different companies to manage all this and he runs it all on VxRail. So, transformative yes, to that company very transformative. But, at a very small scale, but that pattern sort of repeats itself the higher that you scale. >> Alright we're out of time but where can people go to get more information on this and other products your HTI strategy. >> If I were them I'd go to dellemc.com/hci. >> Excellent, Chad, thanks very much, Stu appreciate you co-hosting with me and check out videos on thecube.net, this and other videos will be up there. Thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman we'll see you next time! (techno music)

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and after many travels around the globe with theCUBE, really happy to be back in the Boston area studio, and happy to welcome to the program first time guest and first time we've had OpenLink on the program, Rich Grossi who's the CEO. Coming up from Long Island, appreciate you joining me up here and looking forward to discussing with you. >> Understood. >> So, first OpenLink, as I said, company, first time we've had on theCUBE. Why don't you give the audience a little bit of background, how long the company's been existing and what the focus is. >> Well, we're celebrating this year our 25th anniversary. So we serve the energy, financial, trading and treasury markets. We're based in Long Island with offices around the world serving about 500 clients or so in those different markets. I'm happy to be here today to talk about some of the innovation that we have going on. >> Great. Before we get into the OpenLink, Rich, give us a little bit about your background. You've been with OpenLink for a good part of the journey. >> I have. I've been with the company for 21 years in a variety of different roles. I've spent some time in operations, in development. Prior to the CEO position I spent some time in operations and prior to this role I was the CTO of the company. >> Okay, well congrats on the new role, Rich. So tell me, what is OpenLink today? You talked about kind of the industries you focus on. How do you fit in the markets today? >> So we are the market leader for the categories I mentioned. So we'll play in the energy and the commodity space. I will plan the financial services, banking, treasury space. We're well-known for our risk management capabilities and we serve top-tier clients in all those markets around the globe. >> Yeah, Rich, it's interesting. I think there's not a single segment in the market that's not going through some significant change. Disruption is on everyone's mind. What's changing for your customers and how is OpenLink really kind of adjusting to meet those needs? >> Yeah, it's always been a high degree of sensitivity towards risk. That's been our strong point as a company for a long time, and we serve the clients through kind of advanced analytics that provide them with that capability. But more frequently, we're seeing total cost of ownership driving a lot of the decisions made by our clients, right. So in markets that have some head wounds coming in and just kind of steady-state markets, looking for how to use technology to benefit them but also reduce the total cost of ownership. >> Okay, and so explain what that means. You say things like risk, things like analytics, you know, data, super important to all customers. How do we make sure they have the right data, how do they make sure that they're not getting a tax on what they have. Where does OpenLink help their-- what do the products look like? >> Yes, I mean, so we have a pretty advanced trading and risk-management platform. We also provide treasury and cash management solutions. And in those spaces what we're doing is we're providing our clients with the ability to manage their risk, manage their positions, take a peek ahead to see what's coming in the markets. Do sensitivity analysis to ensure that as they trade and as they train dex, and to your point, as they manage to the logistics. It's all done with a system capture from front to back, and it's all done with a view towards the risk of the application and a risk of the markets that they're in. >> Okay, you had a recent launch that was OpenCloud. Maybe explain what that is, how that fits with the broader discussion of Cloud. >> Sure, OpenLink's been in the private Cloudspace now for about 11 years. So this was our hosting application. And through those years, we built up the technology to support more of the, kind of, online, so predominantly we're a perpetual-based company, on-prem. And now our clients are looking for a little bit more ownership. A little bit more security. And they're looking for that single vendor to manage their applications within the could. So there's a big transformation in our markets where many of our large tier one energy financial services clients are looking for that reduction of total cost, and they're looking for OpenLink to be the provider that can offer them that service within the could environments. >> Okay, so is this a SAS offering? Is it living on some of the public Clouds? Help us, kind of, get our weeds a little bit. You're a former CTO. >> Sure, so, I mean, it's a similar technology to what we've built over the years. So, we're still managing scaleability and performance. We still have created security in the application. Still managing a lot of the monitoring and logging in application security within that. But it is in the Microsoft Azure environment, so we're working with Microsoft, partnered with them to build up a Cloud environment for our customers, such as they can manage this remotely as you would in any Cloud environment, and then provide all the advantages of Microsoft Azure on top of the technology that OpenLinks built over time. >> Okay, so it sounds, you know, similar to what you were doing before, but a lot of changes. How organizationally do you have to change for this, and maybe walk us through a customer, why would they choose one versus the other? What are the big advantages of the new way? >> Sure, so organizationally, we do have Cloud-dedicated teams now, right? So a lot of knowledge required to take your product, not only Cloud-enable it, but make it feature functionality-rich for the clients within the could. So we've built Cloud operations teams, we built SOx and NOx. We leverage our employee base around the world. We put a lot of technology advantages into the new software that is Cloud enabled. So, things like performance is just a big topic for us. So, allowing our clients to drive greater performance through scaleability and dynamic scaleability within the could. That's a big advantage to our clients. >> Yeah, you think back a couple of years ago if you talked about Microsoft and Google, and the Amazons of the world, it's like, 'Well, I'm worried about the security, the government is challenging.' I was just at one of the bigger Cloud shows and they said security is actually opportunity. You get to kind of get a re-do on security. Government seems to be something that we're sort of doing-- what's your customer's experiences? Is there still hesitancy, or are people, you know, kind of jumping in the waters nice? >> Well, I think there's still the question, and I think it's changing very rapidly for our client base. So, a couple years ago our clients were interested in the could but not necessarily moving to the could. And I think you're absolutely right in the sense that some of them were concerned about the security of their trading data being out in something like Microsoft Azure. Many of them recognize today that the security benefits of a Microsoft Azure, as an example, could be far greater than what they're doing in-house today. And as you look at the technology of OpenLink we've built layers of security on top of everything we used to have within the core application, encryption and the like. And now using some of the key vault technologies and some of the scaleability technologies of Microsoft Azure, we feel like we're able to provide a higher level of security than they even have on-prem using the could up close. >> Yeah, one of the other big advantages if you plug into, kind of, that ecosystem and platform of the public Cloud, what opportunities there-- Microsoft, you think of, like, you know, active directory, all of the business functionality. What do you gain today and maybe give us a little roadmap as to what this looks like down the road? >> Yeah, so our clients are looking for a handful of things. So they're looking for that reductioning of ownership. We've been able to save them on average about 30 per cent, just coming from them their on-prem or their data centers today. They're also looking for that single source of support. So today, we're working with their network engineers and they're DBAs. In the could version we're able to provide them with those same services, coupled with our support applications so that we're providing single line of visibility into their overall trading and risk-management application. And they're also looking for performances, I mentioned before, and security. So with the could application, we're not only able to provide them with the feature functionality of our application, but also the could technology that sits around it. >> One of the other things if you look at, kind of managing the environment versus going to the public Cloud, usually the public Cloud, you know the joke I have is: What version of Azure are you running on? Well, Microsoft takes care of it. A similar thing in your environment? >> Very similar. So, the ability to upgrade, the ability to leverage the scaleability of Microsoft Azure, the new technology coming out in Microsoft Azure. All the could feature functionality, that all comes with it for free. And to your point, providing our clients with a manage service so that we can manage not only their day-to-day environment, but we can also manage the infrastructure and the business needs that they have in using our application. So, all that combined has provided our clients with a great leg up in terms of how they use our software and how they manage it moving forward. >> Yeah, I'm curious: do the customers have to choose one over the other? The on-prem or the could? Do you have some customers that may be migrating, being to the Hybrid Multi-Cloud is kind of a big issue for a lot of customers these days. >> Yeah. So we have a large number of clients today that are still on-prem, and they're probably staying on-prem for awhile. But the evolution of the could as it relates to our client-base is quite rapid. So, a couple years ago we would talk to our clients and they were interested. Last year we announced our proof of concept coming and what we were building. We launched our public Cloud just in quarter three of this year. And the feedback from our client-base was dramatic. So now they're all looking to migrate over. We respond to ROPs quite often and I would estimate maybe about nine per cent of those coming have some interest in the public cloud moving forward. >> Okay, Rich, what do you want your clients to really know about OpenLink? And, the two pieces, just kind of today, and if they knew OpenLink, say, five years ago. You know, what's the big change? >> Yeah, well I think, well we have a tagline that says we like to solve the complex, right? And make it simple. You'll see many of our clients, the bigger names, avengers that are out there using our software to solve really complicated problems, right? So our software is pretty configurable and also addresses some of the larger challenges that we have within the spaces that OpenLink sits in. So, our clients are well-known in that area, and OpenLink is well-known in there, and our ability to solve those problems. When you take that, and you take the total cost of ownership, and you take the public Cloud capabilities and you build all that technology that we've advanced over the past, you know, 25 years, it's a pretty compelling application and company that we work for. >> Alright, well, Rich, appreciate the updates on everything happening at OpenLink. Wish you the best of luck with the could offering. We'll be back with more coverage here. Always check out thecube.net for all the coverage, and thanks for watching this, theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program a guest we've had on a number of times but first time in the role, Nancy Pearson, now the CMO of Openlink. Nancy, thanks for joining us here in the office, and great to see you. >> Great to see you, Stu. >> Alright, so we've had you on in your previous role at a number of big events. Tell us, what led you to Openlink? >> Well, I was really attracted to Openlink because of the position that they hold in the market in terms of being the leader of trading treasury and risk management across multiple industries. And I also took a look at their clients, and they have a pretty impressive client roster, companies and businesses that are really instrumental to the industry, and I wanted to have an impact in that kind of environment, so that's why I looked at Openlink. >> Yeah, Nancy, your whole career, you've been looking at, there's so much change happening in the industry. Digital is more than just a buzzword. What are you seeing today in your clients here at Openlink? >> Yeah, what I see, and going from a large enterprise environment where people jumped on the digital bandwagon fairly early, in many other industries, it's been a little bit of a struggle to understand, what does that really mean for our business? And one of the first things I noticed about coming to Openlink is they really weren't on the digital network. They were doing events, very heavily into email, et cetera, that type of marketing, but it was really important to get them on the digital platform. So that's digital advertising, and to really think about a digital first data driven campaign type approach for demand generation as well. >> And what does digital mean for your customers? >> Well it's really important to them as well. They're modernizing their business. Digital is disrupting their business. So on the side of their health, they have to actually embrace it and understand, what does that mean for my business? What do I need to put in place to be more visible? To understand the new game of engaging the clients in a digital format? I mean, 70% of clients and prospects actually do the investigatory work to actually understand which vendors they're going to be partnering with before they ever actually reach out to that client. So it's really important that you have a very strong website, and that was one of the first things that we started with at Openlink. >> What kind of things do you change to the website to make it more modern, more digital? >> Well we completely redesigned the website from the bottom up. So a new content management system, a totally new designed website with engagement, everything from thought leadership down to rethinking how we actually presented our products, as well as adding personalization. So you're able to really find what you want by your role, by industry, and by even deeper subject matter expertise and areas of focus. >> What's the mindset of your customers? I think a couple years it ago, it was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to get Netflixed. "I'm going to get disrupted by digital." Is this now a weapon or an opportunity for them, or is it still a mix? >> No, it's definitely an opportunity, because digital levels the playing field for companies. So, it doesn't matter the size of the business, the complexity of the business. The winner is the person that at the end of the day can engage clients through their digital website, and also through Google, through LinkedIn, through all the different mechanisms today where you can engage with personalization. You can see and understand what your clients' needs are, and whoever serves that best is going to be the winner at the end of the day, which is why I say digital really helps create a level playing field. But you have to know how to use the tools. >> Love to hear more about what are your customers doing? How's Openlink helped them? >> So for example, one of the big questions right up front is usually, "How important is digital and social media?" And a lot of large enterprise clients struggle with that. The ones that have learned to use it as a tool really well and targeted can extend their reach triple-fold out in the market, and really get their story out in a way they couldn't previously. So digital and social media is one thing related to awareness and your share voice in the market. But your website, how you design that website through a client journey is really what makes all the difference. It turns opportunity into demand and leads and helps clients take action along the way. So a combination of being on the digital network, having a very strong website, and then modernizing the rest of your marketing tools for personalization. >> Any examples you can give kind of anonymized from your clients? I think most people know the big consumer brand, retail, how they interact. I know I travel a lot and see how the airlines are super responsive, but you've got some pretty specific industries. >> It's true, and we do some very highly targeted marketing. So, for example, knowing where our clients go to get their information. Knowing how to mirror that type of content through even third-party and how we build content on our own website to attract them and have them coming back for more is really the intricacies of how you actually build engagement and how you convert that engagement to leads, annuity. And then client references, story telling. So we really turned our content from pushing out content to telling stories. You'll see that everywhere. You'll see a lot of the very sophisticated players using storytelling. A lot of commercials today are storytelling mode, but we can do that within business, and it's the most powerful marketing you can create. >> Yeah, we in theCUBE, we always talk about extracting the signal from the noise, and you've got to be more personalized. You've got to tell those stories. Otherwise it just becomes noise, and it's tough for people to find something that captures them, and that they're going to want to glom on to. >> And learn from, frankly. >> That's great. Nancy, CMO role, have to imagine it's gone through a lot of changes recently. What are you seeing? Is there various types of roles as CMO? What are you seeing as some of the major changes there? >> I think the CMO role's changed a lot in the last five to seven years. And in particular, it's no longer a push mechanism of your message out into the market. It's establishing that relationship with clients, doing it through your website, doing it where they go on digital and social media. And the message is really important. What is your specific differentiation, and how does that help clients solve their business problems? So for Openlink, we did an effort right up front that really talked about understanding the purpose that we have within our client environments, defining three core messages, that we help clients establish and create a single source of the truth. For risk, and in their business for trading treasury and risk. We also help them solve complex business problems, and we bring expertise that they really can't get otherwise, because Openlink is a very unique solution. It's the leader. A platform that's really extensible across their enterprise for medium-sized businesses to large-sized businesses. So getting that message out and being very specific about it with detail is an important part of getting the value to your clients. >> There's a tough dynamic of, we have the data, but how do I make sure I'm securing that data? The governance risk. A lot of shows this year, GDPR's been a topic that's been popping to make sure that if I've got that data, I need to make sure, oh, if a customer comes to me I can make sure that that's being used in the right ways, not being used into. How's the changing landscape affecting your customers? >> Well, I think data is the new commodity, right. A new economy is being built from data and how you utilize it. So for Openlink, we have a platform that for, whether it's energy companies, airlines, these large enterprises that are data-rich, data-intensive environments, we have a huge opportunity to help them get more value from their data, and creating a single view of that data across the silos of their business gives them the visibility and insight to be able to innovate. And innovation is the name of the game for our clients. Things like getting into cloud, monetizing data and creating new services for different revenue streams. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity, and that's really in the sweet spot of this business. >> Openlink cloud is a new announcement that you had out. >> Nancy: It is. >> How does that impact how you reach your customers, how you market to your customers? >> Well, first of all, we've had a tremendous amount of uptake from the cork lines that we have to move to cloud, and so it's created a lot of opportunity for us. Everyone is needing to modernize and reduce their reliance on cost related to infrastructure, and cloud is in innovation platform. So in our business, this is our innovation platform, and they can build on top of that once they move to that type of an environment and realize some of those cost benefits. The future is innovation as it relates to our Openlink cloud, and we're really excited and really positive about the interest from our clients. And everyone needs to innovate today. Your point up front about disruption, you're either being disrupted or you're disrupting your industry. Those are the choices you have to make today. >> Yeah, right. Do you want to set the menu or be on the menu? (laughter) >> Nancy: Exactly. >> Nancy, you talked about the website. What other changes have you been making to Openlink so far? And love to hear what's on your plate for the next six to 12 months. >> Well, right up front the objective was to make marketing a strategic partner to the CEO and to the leadership. And so we're continuing on that journey. So we rebranded the business and really modernized our logo; as I mentioned, grounded back our message around differentiators from a client perspective, and really being in touch with that; created a foundational website that's best of breed and leading edge; and now what I want to do going into 2018 is really just build on top of that. So how do we create demand? How do we provide more thought leadership and build content in a way that's meaningful to the industry and to our clients to help them increase their own proficiency in the spaces that we serve? And be able to help make them successful as well. >> All right, talk about leveling the playing field, whether you're a hundred year old company, a 25 year old company or a six month old company, what does it mean in today's market? >> It means that you can compete. It means that you can have the same voice, and you don't have to have the same budget. You don't have to have the same sized business. But if you know how to use the tools today, and you know how to create incredible content, you can have an equal voice. >> Nancy Pearson, CMO of Openlink. Great to catch up with you. Thanks so much for sharing with us all the updates. We look forward to tracking the progress of you and Openlink. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)