>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2020 online. Of course, instead of all gathering together in Las Vegas, we were getting to talk to participants of the community where they are around the globe. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest on the program, he's part of the opening keynote I'm sure most of you saw, Simon Kofkin-Hansen, chief technology officer for VMware Solutions inside of IBM. Simon, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, it's a pleasure to be here. >> All right, so you know, obviously we know IBM quite well. We at theCUBE at you know, the virtual events, both RedHat Summit and IBM Think not too long in the past there. Talking a lot about you know, the open hybrid cloud many of the messages that I hear from Veeam remind me of what I heard at their environments you know, it, multicloud environment, we need flexibility in what we're doing, we, you know, need to of course you know, data is such an important piece of what's going on. Maybe before we get into it too much, give us a little bit about you know, your role there, where you fit into that whole discussion of what IBM is with Cloud. >> So Stu, yeah, I'm the chief technology officer of IBM, of Veeam solutions on the IBM cloud. Primarily involved and helped create the partnership that exists between IBM and VMware today. Basically, I'm providing automated solutions for our clients. Automated, secure solutions for our clients around the VMware and the IBM Cloud infrastructure space. >> Yeah, well, Simon, it's interesting stuff, you've got some good history there, maybe you might remind our audience you know, I remember at VMWorld, before there was a big partnership, that VMware made with a certain public cloud provider that gets talked about a lot, IBM was the first and if I saw you know, correctly, I'd love for you to be able to provide the data behind it. There are more VMware customers on the IBM Cloud than any other cloud is what I believe is the data I saw, I think. So bring us in little bit more, explain that relationship. >> So yes, we were, as IBM, beginning of all of this, I mean VMware and IBM have had a long relationship. And in fact, IBM manages over 850,000 predominantly VMware workloads on-prems, and have done for the last 10+ years. But in the latest iteration of this partnership, we brought together our automation and our codified experience from dealing with these, our client accounts around the world and brought that expertise along with VMware's product side to align this automated stdc stack on cloud platforms. And first to market with that automated stdc stack called VMware Cloud Foundation. First to market out and we've had a great ongoing relationship since then. It's really resonated with many of our clients and our enterprise clients out there. >> All right well Simon, one of the most important pieces of that, you know, VMware stdc message is that I have VMware, I know how, I manage that environment, and it's got a really robust ecosystem, so, of course Veeam started exclusively in the VMware environments, now lives across many environments, but you know the comment I've made on some of these interviews for VeeamON is, wherever the VMware solution and VMware Cloud goes, Veeam could just go along for the ride, really, if it were. There's obviously some integration work and testing, but help dig into a little bit, what that means for you know, solutions like Veeam tying into what VMware is doing, and what VMware is doing in the IBM Cloud. >> Well particularly at the beginning of this relationship, part of this partnership with VMware was its rich partner ecosystem. And I was given the remit and had the luxury to choose the best of the best products that's out there. Which wasn't necessarily IBM's products in this particular space. Obviously we chose Veeam for backup. I mean Veeam's reputation out there's the backup, it's known as the market leader for the backup of its actual workloads. So it was very important for us to embrace that ecosystem. And it's been a great partnership from the very, very beginning. Getting the backup products out into our platform and as we've done more recently, bringing in the new enhancements like Veeam Cloud Connect to deal with data replication and more use cases around migration and the movement of data in a hybrid cloud sense. And Veeam has been right there with us every step of the way. >> Yeah, so Simon, you're a CTO, so bring us in a little bit architecturally because when I think about hybrid cloud or even you know having to move my data between you know different data centers, you know there are, you know, the physics challenges, and you know sometimes I can, you know, get closer, I can (microphone cuts out) through there, and then there's the financial considerations. So give us to how we have to think about that, what is data movement in 2020, you know, what considerations do we have to have here, and how does IBM maybe differentiate a little bit from some others? >> So I'll answer your first question, I'll answer some of the last questions first. What does data movement in 2020 look like? Well, to be perfectly honest, Stu, we never imagined what would happen this year, but data mobility and the movement of data in a hybrid scenario has never been more acute or prevalent because of the stage that the world is currently in and the conditions that we're living in today. Being able to use familiar based tooling that represents what is used in an on-premises state, over in the cloud, enabling Veeam, or people who have existing investments in Veeam, to use that tooling for multiple different use cases. Not just backup, but that actual data replication functionality has become ever more prevalent in these cases. I was saying similar messages back in 2019 and 2018 and as long as back in 2010. I feel as though, I look at that, it's been almost a decade now, talking about the need or the capabilities of hybrid cloud and this movement of data. But I've absolutely seen an absolute increase in it over the last few years and particularly in 2020 in this current situation. The major difference from an IMB perspective is I would say, is our openness, and our, how we're dealing with the openness in the community, and our commitment to open source. Our flexibility, our security, and the way we actually deal with the enterprise. And one of the major differentiations is the security to the core. Actually building up the security, looking at the secure elements, making sure their data is safe from tampering, it's encrypted both in transit and at rest. And these are many of the factors that our enterprise clients actually demand of us and particularly when we look at the regulated industries with their heavy focus on the financial services sector. And Veeam, with its capabilities and its ability to both do the backup and migration functionality, sort of clients are expecting a two-for-one deal, in these days when they're trying to cut costs, and get out of their own data centers in an effort to cut their costs. >> Excellent. Well, Simon, you know you laid out really the imperative for enterprises, you know today and how they're dealing with that, bring us in as to what differentiates the IBM-Veeam relationship versus just IBM is open and flexible, so there are a lot of options. You know what particularly is there about Veeam that makes that relationship special? >> Well, I think it all down to the partnership and the deep willingness to work together. The research that we're doing in the products, yeah? Looking at ways that we can take Veeam beyond the VMware space and into bare metals and containers. But maintaining that level of security and flexibility that clients demand. I mean, many clients, if they've invested in a particular technology to do their backups, back up and DR, because of the heavy data requirements are still one of the most important if not the most important use case that many cloud users or many of our clients actually go for. So having that partnership with Veeam, in not only dealing with the traditional base, which is the VMware backups, but really pushing the boundaries and looking how we can extend that into migrations, into containers, and bare metal, by still keeping that level of security and flexibility. It's a difficult balance. Sometimes to make it more secure, you have to make things less flexible. And vise-versa, having things more flexible, they become less secure. So being willing to work us and actually define that difficult balance, and still provide the level of the user experience and the level of functionality that our clients demand, and keeping both client sets happy, both IBM and Veeam. It's challenging at times, but I guess it's what makes the job interesting and exciting. >> Yeah Simon, I'm actually glad you mentioned containers as one of the you know, modernization efforts going on there. Of course from Veeam's standpoint, when vSphere 7 rolls out, that they are being supported in you know one of the first work in that. I'd love to hear your viewpoint, what you're hearing from customers, how you expect, as a VMware partner for cloud, that movement of VMs and containers and how they're going together. What should we be looking for as that kind of matures and progresses? >> So I would absolutely watch this space. Particularly as we move into this. Containers and VMs living very much side-by-side. With VMware's announcements around Project Pacific and tanzu, it's very interesting. It's certainly a furor around the market. And we as IBM are very closely working with them with our acquisition last year of RedHat and its containerization platform. All while maintaining our ability in the OpenShift community around Kubernetes. So Stu, obviously I'm privy to a lot more information which I really can't really say and dig into too much detail around this particular angle but just to say that, watch this space. There's a lot going to happen. You're going to see a lot of announcements in the back half of 2020 and in the first few halves of 2021, particularly around the carburetions between containers and VMs and seeing how the different offerings from the different companies shape-- (mic cuts out) interesting times ahead. >> Yeah, absolutely. Simon, maybe you're right, don't want to get you in trouble as looking too much into the future, but maybe bring us into, I'm sure you're having lots of conversations with customers, what's their mindset, you talked about, you know, there's bare metals, virtualization, containers, you know application modernization, I've always said the long haul of the dent in any transformation and modernization (mic stutters) doing, so you know, 'cause some of the challenges and opportunities that you're hearing from customers that you and your partner are helping to solve? >> So some of the challenges around this containerization is containerization (mic stutters) is taking a lot longer and its taking a lot more time than we originally anticipated or expected. So the realization is actually hitting that VMware is going to be around for a while. I mean, the idea that people are thinking that they're just going to transform their applications, or all their VMs over a six or 12-month period, is just not reality. So we're living in this hybrid platform way, where you have VMware, you have virtual machines, and containers coexisting. Certain parts of the application, namely the, if I take the three-tier web app as an example, consisting of a http server, an application server, and a database. When you containerize that, or modernize that, it's very easy to modernize the http server, which turns into the ingress/egress servers on the container. It's very easy to modernize the application server, which is fairly static and you can just put a container. But as we know, Stu, data is sticky. So what many enterprises the data migration, or the way that the database is transformed, is the thing that takes the longest. So we're seeing out there in the enterprises people who are running their apps both with the ingress/egress service, the application server container containerized, but the database still living on a virtual machine, for a extended period of time. And until that made the final jump or chone their data service, they make that move. I do see this being, I personally, I honestly don't believe in my lifetime VMs will actually disappear. Because we're seeing that in some cases it's actually too costly for organizations to actually transform their applications or there's no real business case. It works perfectly well with the existing process. There's no need to modernize. But they're looking at ways and what parts of the architecture can be modernized, and containers are definitely the future for all the attributes that we know and love. But there is going to be this hybrid world. So having tools and partners like Veeam, who are willing to cross the ecosphere of the different platforms, is critical for our clients today and critical for partnerships that we have. Like the one we have with Veeam. >> All right well Simon, it goes back to one of those IT maxims, you know, is IT always additive. We almost never really get rid of anything, we just keep adding to it and changing it and as you said, data is that critical component and I think you highlighted nicely how you know, Veeam fits in you know, very much for that story. So Simon, thank you so much for joining us, pleasure having you on the program, glad to have you in theCUBE alumni ranks at this point. >> Thank you Stu, and thank you, it was a pleasure. Take care. >> All right stay tuned for lots more coverage from VeeamON 2020 online, I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

foreign continued coverage of AWS re invent my name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited to be joined by two brilliant blokes in the space of efficiency and performance whether you're on Prem or in the cloud today's discussion is going to be fascinating please welcome Brad and Simon to the show how are you Simon coming in from the UK how you feeling well thank you excellent and Brad we have you coming in from Seattle how are you this morning doing fine thank you excellent and feeling bookish given your background love that I know that you both really care about efficiency and performance it's a very hot topic both of the show and in the industry right now I'm curious I'm going to open it up with you Simon what challenges and I think you've actually continued to tackle these throughout the course of your career what challenges were you facing and wanting to solve when you started yellow dog um really we're just looking at cloud and coming from an on-premise environment really wanted to be able to make accessing Cloud particularly a volume to be simple and straightforward um if you look at today at the number of instance types available from the major Cloud providers there's more than seven thousand different instance types whereas on-prem you go along you select your processes you select your systems it's already be really easy when you hit the cloud you've just got this amazing amount of choice so really it was all about how can you make Intelligent Decisions for you know are you going to run your workload how to match it with what you've got on premise and that was really the inspiration for Rafael so staying there for just a second what does yellow dog provide customers is a SAS system so um you get to it by accessing through the yellow platform and what it allows people to do is to be able to make Intelligent Decisions about where to run their workload would that be on premise or in the cloud it has a wealth of information it understands the costs the performance the latency and the availability of every different instance type in all different clouds it really allows people to uh to be able to make use of that information provision exactly what they need and to be able to run their workloads yeah it also includes a provisioner and it also includes a scheduler as well which is a cloud native scheduler so it's designed to be able to cope with um with cloud in terms of things like spots and interruptions and be able to uh to reschedule and fail over between clouds if there's ever need to do so yeah that sounds incredible and I know this means a lot for partners like AMD Brad talk to me about the partnership and what this means for AMD for your customers yeah absolutely it you know we're excited to be aligned with the uh with a company like yellow dog it's it's um you know the the importance of compute is becoming more and more prevalent every day and it's it's always been top of mind but especially now when you think about what the uh what the economy and the rest of the world is kind of facing over the next you know probably a year or longer it's so important that um that you're able to maximize your dollars and your spend and doing away with uh with uh with absolute certainty that you've got the right type of people behind you uh ensuring that you're your dollars are being spent very wisely and the great thing about yell dogs that they have tremendous insight into uh into cost optimization computer optimization across the entire Globe their their indexes is quite remarkable and what it does is it allows uh customers to actually see just how performant and cost efficient AMD is so it allows us to really put our best foot forward and and gives customers a chance to understand something that they probably weren't uh more familiar with the fact that uh that AMD uh is a tremendous a tremendous value in the marketplace yeah and and uh Simon can you tell us a little bit more about the yellow dog index I'm glad you brought that up Brad yes the yellow index is uh is essentially it's live it's available for anyone to access you can just go to index.yam.tech and you'll be able to see pretty much every single instance type that's available from all the major Cloud providers and be able to make your selection are you looking for GPU type nodes are you looking for AMD processors are you looking just for performance essentially what you're able to do is create a live view of effectively what's available in different data centers around the world and the price at this moment in time also just uh as Brad mentioned in terms of you know cost efficiency and uh and being taking green values seriously as we should we should do the yellow index also has the ability to be able to see at that point in time where the best place to be at a runner job is based upon the lowest carbon impact of running at this moment in time and that for many organizations gives an amazing Insight in not just about being able to find the the understand fishing processes but being able to ensure the greenest energy possible is powering that process when you want to be able to run your workload it's so powerful what you just said and I think when we exactly it's not just about it's not just about power but it's about place when we are are looking at Global Computing at scale what I know that there's ESG advantages in and ESG being a very hot topic when we're talking about AMW on AWS and and and leveraging tools like yellow dog what other sorts of advantages Beyond being least carbon impactful can your Mutual customers benefit from so it's not like I say there's many other features you know a very important thing when you're running a high performance Computing workload is being able to match the instruction set that you're running on premise and then being able to use that in the cloud as well and also to be able to make Intelligent Decisions of where should something run should would something be more efficient um to build on premise should we always try and maximize our on-premise resources before going into the cloud there's a lot about being able to just be able to make decisions and yellow itself it makes thousands of decisions per second to be in a workout where the the best and most optimized places to to run your workload yeah so Brad you work with a lot of companies at scale what type of scale is possible when leveraging Technologies like AMD and yellow dog combined well you know I love the fact that you mentioned uh you know HPC and it's one of the areas that actually is most exciting for for me personally and for and for AMD with the combination of yellow dog and AWS and AWS launched the very first HPC uh instance type last year and you know we're we're we haven't even begun to answer a question we haven't gotten to see um the full-scale capability in the cloud when it comes to these uh these very coordinated and very refined workloads that are running at massive scale and and uh you know we've got some some products we'll be launched in the near future as well that are incredibly performant and you know to be honest I don't think I don't think we have even come close to seeing the scale relative to somebody's very optimized workloads in HPC uh that that we're capable of so um we're excited we're excited for the next few years to see how how we can wrap in um some of the tremendous success that AMD has had on-prem in these these these massive compute centers and replicating that same success inside AWS with companies like yellow dog it's uh it we're excited to see what uh what's what's going to come forward can you give us a preview of anything on the record that gets you really excited about the future I was going to ask you what what had you looking forward to 2023 and Beyond but nothing well not nothing official of course uh but um I will say this you know AMD has recently successful had the launch for Genoa uh it's our next next-gen release and it is um it is proving to be it absolutely is the dominant compute engine it at this point that exists and you know when you start to couple that with the the prowess of AWS you know you could see that over time becoming something potentially that um you know um can really start to change the compute landscape quite a bit so we're hopeful that you know in the future we'll have something along those lines uh with AWS and others and um we're very uh we're very bullish in that area love it uh Simon what about you you've been passionate about low carbon I.T for a long time is carbon neutral Tech in our future what I realize is a bold and lofty claim for you but feel free to give us any of your future predictions um yeah so well I started here trying to build solutions for you know many years ago so 2006 um I was part of a team that launched the the world's lowest powered Windows PC that was actually based on the AMD technology back then so uh you can tell that AMD have been working on a low power for us for a long time in terms of carbon neutral yes I think um certainly there's a there's a few data centers around the world now that are getting very close to uh to carbon neutral some of which may have already achieved it so that's really interesting but so you know the the second part of that is really the the manufacturer of everything that goes into those Services systems and being able to to get to uh you know a net zero on those over a period of time and when we do that which is yeah not without challenges but but certainly possible then we really will have carbon neutral I.T which will be uh a benefit to everyone you know mankind itself yeah casual statement and I have to say that I wholeheartedly agree I think that it's one of the greater challenges of Our Generation especially as what we're able to do in HPC in particular since we're talking about it is only going to grow and scale and magnitude and the amount of data that we have to organize certain process is is wild even today so I love that I'm curious is there anything that you can share with us that's in the pipeline for Yellow Dog anything coming up in the future that's very exciting um so we're coming up very soon um we're going to release something called um version 4 again log which contains um what we call a resource framework which is all about making sure you've got everything you need before you run a job either on-prem or in the cloud so that might be anything from making sure you've got the right licenses making sure that your data is all in the right location making sure you've got all aspects of your workflow ready before you start launching compute and start really but you know burning through dollars with computer could potentially sat there uh not not doing anything until other tasks keep catch up so we're really excited about this new V4 release which will uh which will come out very soon awesome we can't wait to learn more about that hopefully here again on the cube Brad what do Partnerships with companies like yellowdog meme for you and for the customers that you're able to serve yeah it's it's incredibly important I it's you know there's one of the difficulties in in compute that we have today especially in Cloud compute there's there's so much available at this point I mean there was a point in time it was very simple and straightforward it's not even close to being that anymore green so you know one of the things I love about yellow dog itself is actually it does a great they do a great job of making very complex situations and environments fairly simple to understand especially from a business perspective and so one of the things that we love about it is it actually helps our customers you know the AMD direct customers better understand how to properly use our technology and to get the most out of it and so it's difficult for us to articulate that message because you know we are a Semiconductor Company so sometimes it's a little tough to be able to articulate workloads and applications in the way that our customer base will be able to understand but you know it's it's so critical to have companies like yellow dog in the middle that can actually you know make that translation for us directly to the customer um you know and and especially too when you start thinking about ESG and environmental relationships and I'd like to make a comment and one of the things that is fantastic about AMD AWS and yellow we all share the same Mission and we're very public about those missions about just being better to the to the planet and um you know AMD has taken some very aggressive uh targets through 2025 much beyond anything that the industry has expected and you know because of that we are you know we are the most um we are the most power efficient xa6 product on the marketplace and it's not even close and you know I look forward to the day when uh you know you start looking at instance types inside these public Cloud providers in conjunction with the old dog and you can actually even start to see maybe potentially what that carbon footprint is based on those decisions you make on compute and um you know considering that more than half to spend for everybody is generally compute in these environments it's critical to really know what your true impact in the world is and um it's just one of the best parts about a partnership like this oh what a wonderful note to close on and I love both the Synergy between all the partners on a technology level but most importantly on a mission level because none of it matters if we don't have a planet that we can continue to innovate on so I'm I'm really grateful that you're both here fighting a good fight working together and also making a lot of information available for companies of all different sizes as they're navigating very complex decision trees in and operating their stack so thank you both Simon and Brad I really appreciate your time it's been incredibly insightful and thank you to our audience for tuning in to our continuing coverage of AWS re invent here on thecube my name is Savannah Peterson and I look forward to learning more with you soon foreign [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe, 2022. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain, a KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townsend alongside Paul Gillon, Senior Editor, Enterprise Architecture for SiliconANGLE. We are, I think at the half point way point this to be fair we've talked to a lot of folks in open source in general. What's the difference between open source communities and these closed source communities that we attend so so much? >> Well open source is just it's that it's open it's anybody can contribute. There are a set of rules that manage how your contributions are reflected in the code base. What has to be shared, what you can keep to yourself but the it's an entirely different vibe. You know, you go to a conventional conference where there's a lot of proprietary being sold and it's all about cash. It's all about money changing hands. It's all about doing the deal. And open source conferences I think are more, they're more transparent and yeah money changes hands, but it seems like the objective of the interaction is not to consummate a deal to the degree that it is at a more conventional computer conference. >> And I think that can create an uneven side effect. And we're going to talk about that a little bit with, honestly a friend of mine Alex Ellis, founder of OpenFaaS. Alex welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, good to see Keith. >> So how long you've been doing OpenFaaS? >> Well, I first had this idea that serverless and function should be run on your own hardware back in 2016. >> Wow and I remember seeing you at DockerCon EU, was that in 2017? >> Yeah, I think that's when we first met and Simon Foskett took us out to dinner and we got chatting. And I just remember you went back to your hotel room after the presentation. You just had your iPhone out and your headphones you were talking about how you tried to OpenWhisk and really struggled with it and OpenFaaS sort of got you where you needed to be to sort of get some value out of the solution. >> And I think that's the magic of these open source communities in open source conferences that you can try stuff, you can struggle with it, come to a conference either get some advice or go in another direction and try something like a OpenFaaS. But we're going to talk about the business perspective. >> Yeah. >> Give us some, like give us some hero numbers from the project. What types of organizations are using OpenFaaS and what are like the download and stars all those, the ways you guys measure project success. >> So there's a few ways that you hear this talked about at KubeCon specifically. And one of the metrics that you hear the most often is GitHub stars. Now a GitHub star means that somebody with their laptop like yourself has heard of a project or seen it on their phone and clicked a button that's it. There's not really an indication of adoption but of interest. And that might be fleeting and a blog post you might publish you might bump that up by 2000. And so OpenFaaS quite quickly got a lot of stars which encouraged me to go on and do more with it. And it's now just crossed 30,000 across the whole organization of about 40 different open source repositories. >> Wow that is a number. >> Now you are in ecosystem where Knative is also taken off. And can you distinguish your approach to serverless or FaaS to Knatives? >> Yes so, Knative isn't an approach to FaaS. That's simply put and if you listen to Aikas Ville from the Knative project, he was working inside Google and wished that Kubernetes would do a little bit more than what it did. And so he started an initiative with some others to start bringing more abstractions like Auto Scaling, revision management so he can have two versions of code and and shift traffic around. And that's really what they're trying to do is add onto Kubernetes and make it do some of the things that a platform might do. Now OpenFaaS started from a different angle and frankly, two years earlier. >> There was no Kubernetes when you started it. >> It kind of led in the space and and built out that ecosystem. So the idea was, I was working with Lambda and AWS Alexa skills. I wanted to run them on my own hardware and I couldn't. And so OpenFaaS from the beginning started from that developer experience of here's my code, run it for me. Knative is a set of extensions that may be a building block but you're still pretty much working with Kubernetes. We get calls come through. And actually recently I can't tell you who they are but there's a very large telecommunications provider in the US that was using OpenFaaS, like yourself heard of Knative and in the hype they switched. And then they switched back again recently to OpenFaaS and they've come to us for quite a large commercial deal. >> So did they find Knative to be more restrictive? >> No, it's the opposite. It's a lot less opinionated. It's more like building blocks and you are dealing with a lot more detail. It's a much bigger system to manage, but don't get me wrong. I mean the guys are very friendly. They have their sort of use cases that they pursue. Google's now donated the project to CNCF. And so they're running it that way. Now it doesn't mean that there aren't FaaS on top of it. Red Hat have a serverless product VMware have one. But OpenFaaS because it owns the whole stack can get you something that's always been very lean, simple to use to the point that Keith in his hotel room installed it and was product with it in an evening without having to be a Kubernetes expert. >> And that is and if you remember back that was very anti-Kubernetes. >> Yes. >> It was not a platform I thought that was. And for some of the very same reasons, I didn't think it was very user friendly. You know, I tried open with I'm thinking what enterprise is going to try this thing, especially without the handholding and the support needed to do that. And you know, something pretty interesting that happened as I shared this with you on Twitter, I was having a briefing by a big microprocessor company, one of the big two. And they were showing me some of the work they were doing in Cloud-native and the way that they stretch test the system to show me Auto Scaling. Is that they bought up a OpenFaaS what is it? The well text that just does a bunch of, >> The cows maybe. >> Yeah the cows. That does just a bunch of texts. And it just all, and I'm like one I was amazed at is super simple app. And the second one was the reason why they discovered it was because of that simplicity is just a thing that's in your store that you can just download and test. And it was open fast. And it was this big company that you had no idea that was using >> No >> OpenFaaS. >> No. >> How prevalent is that? That you're always running into like these surprises of who's using the solution. >> There are a lot of top tier companies, billion dollar companies that use software that I've worked on. And it's quite common. The main issue you have with open source is you don't have like the commercial software you talked about, the relationships. They don't tell you they're using it until it breaks. And then they may come in incognito with a personal email address asking for things. What they don't want to do often is lend their brands or support you. And so it is a big challenge. However, early on, when I met you, BT, live person the University of Washington, and a bunch of other companies had told us they were using it. We were having discussions with them took them to Kubecon and did talks with them. You can go and look at them in the video player. However, when I left my job in 2019 to work on this full time I went to them and I said, you know, use it in production it's useful for you. We've done a talk, we really understand the business value of how it saves you time. I haven't got a way to fund it and it won't exist unless you help they were like sucks to be you. >> Wow that's brutal. So, okay let me get this right. I remember the story 2019, you leave your job. You say I'm going to do OpenFaaS and support this project 100% of your time. If there's no one contributing to the project from a financial perspective how do you make money? I've always pitched open source because you're the first person that I've met that ran an open source project. And I always pitched them people like you who work on it on their side time. But they're not the Knatives of the world, the SDOs, they have full time developers. Sponsored by Google and Microsoft, etc. If you're not sponsored how do you make money off of open source? >> If this is the million dollar question, really? How do you make money from something that is completely free? Where all of the value has already been captured by a company and they have no incentive to support you build a relationship or send you money in any way. >> And no one has really figured it out. Arguably Red Hat is the only one that's pulled it off. >> Well, people do refer to Red Hat and they say the Red Hat model but I think that was a one off. And we quite, we can kind of agree about that in a business. However, I eventually accepted the fact that companies don't pay for something they can get for free. It took me a very long time to get around that because you know, with open source enthusiast built a huge community around this project, almost 400 people have contributed code to it over the years. And we have had full-time people working on it on and off. And there's some people who really support it in their working hours or at home on the weekends. But no, I had to really think, right, what am I going to offer? And to begin with it would support existing customers weren't interested. They're not really customers because they're consuming it as a project. So I needed to create a product because we understand we buy products. Initially I just couldn't find the right customers. And so many times I thought about giving up, leaving it behind, my family would've supported me with that as well. And they would've known exactly why even you would've done. And so what I started to do was offer my insights as a community leader, as a maintainer to companies like we've got here. So Casting one of my customers, CSIG one of my customers, Rancher R, DigitalOcean, a lot of the vendors you see here. And I was able to get a significant amount of money by lending my expertise and writing content that gave me enough buffer to give the doctors time to realize that maybe they do need support and go a bit further into production. And over the last 12 months, we've been signing six figure deals with existing users and new users alike in enterprise. >> For support >> For support, for licensing of new features that are close source and for consulting. >> So you have proprietary extensions. Also that are sort of enterprise class. Right and then also the consulting business, the support business which is a proven business model that has worked >> Is a proven business model. What it's not a proven business model is if you work hard enough, you deserve to be rewarded. >> Mmh. >> You have to go with the system. Winter comes after autumn. Summer comes after spring and you, it's no point saying why is it like that? That's the way it is. And if you go with it, you can benefit from it. And that's what the realization I had as much as I didn't want to do it. >> So you know this community, well you know there's other project founders out here thinking about making the leap. If you're giving advice to a project founder and they're thinking about making this leap, you know quitting their job and becoming the next Alex. And I think this is the perception that the misperception out there. >> Yes. >> You're, you're well known. There's a difference between being well known and well compensated. >> Yeah. >> What advice would you give those founders >> To be. >> Before they make the leap to say you know what I'm going to do my project full time. I'm going to lean on the generosity of the community. So there are some generous people in the community. You've done some really interesting things for individual like contributions etc but that's not enough. >> So look, I mean really you have to go back to the MBA mindset. What problem are you trying to solve? Who is your target customer? What do they care about? What do they eat and drink? When do they go to sleep? You really need to know who this is for. And then customize a journey for them so that they can come to you. And you need some way initially of funneling those people in qualifying them because not everybody that comes to a student or somebody doing a PhD is not your customer. >> Right, right. >> You need to understand sales. You need to understand a lot about business but you can work it out on your way. You know, I'm testament to that. And once you have people you then need something to sell them that might meet their needs and be prepared to tell them that what you've got isn't right for them. 'cause sometimes that's the one thing that will build integrity. >> That's very hard for community leaders. It's very hard for community leaders to say, no >> Absolutely so how do you help them over that hump? I think of what you've done. >> So you have to set some boundaries because as an open source developer and maintainer you want to help everybody that's there regardless. And I think for me it was taking some of the open source features that companies used not releasing them anymore in the open source edition, putting them into the paid developing new features based on what feedback we'd had, offering support as well but also understanding what is support. What do you need to offer? You may think you need a one hour SLA for a fix probably turns out that you could sell a three day response time or one day response time. And some people would want that and see value in it. But you're not going to know until you talk to your customers. >> I want to ask you, because this has been a particular interest of mine. It seems like managed services have been kind of the lifeline for pure open source companies. Enabling these companies to maintain their open source roots, but still have a revenue stream of delivering as a service. Is that a business model option you've looked at? >> There's three business models perhaps that are prevalent. One is OpenCore, which is roughly what I'm following. >> Right. >> Then there is SaaS, which is what you understand and then there's support on pure open source. So that's more like what Rancher does. Now if you think of a company like Buoyant that produces Linkerd they do a bit of both. So they don't have any close source pieces yet but they can host it for you or you can host it and they'll support you. And so I think if there's a way that you can put your product into a SaaS that makes it easier for them to run then you know go for it. However, we've OpenFaaS, remember what is the core problem we are solving, portability So why lock into my cloud? >> Take that option off the table, go ahead. >> It's been a long journey and I've been a fan since your start. I've seen the bumps and bruises and the scars get made. If you're open source leader and you're thinking about becoming as famous as Alex, hey you can do that, you can put in all the work become famous but if you want to make a living, solve a problem, understand what people are willing to pay for that problem and go out and sell it. Valuable lessons here on theCUBE. From Valencia, Spain I'm Keith Townsend along with Paul Gillon and you're watching theCUBE the leader in high-tech coverage. (Upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Okay, we're back in theCUBE. We said we were signing off for the night, but during the hallway track, we ran into old friend Stu Miniman who was the Director of Market Insights at Red Hat. Stu, friend of theCUBE done the thousands of CUBE interviews. >> Dave, it's great to be here. Thanks for pulling me on, you and I hosted Red Hat Summit before. It's great to see Paul here. I was actually, I was talking to some of the Red Hatters walking around Boston. It's great to have an event here. Boston's got strong presence and I understand, I think was either first or second year, they had it over... What's the building they're tearing down right down the road here. Was that the World Trade Center? I think that's where they actually held it, the first time they were here. We hosted theCUBE >> So they moved up. >> at the Hines Convention Center. We did theCUBE for summit at the BCEC next door. And of course, with the pandemic being what it was, we're a little smaller, nice intimate event here. It's great to be able to room the hall, see a whole bunch of people and lots watching online. >> It's great, it's around the same size as those, remember those Vertica Big Data events that we used to have here. And I like that you were commenting out at the theater and the around this morning for the keynotes, that was good. And the keynotes being compressed, I think, is real value for the attendees, you know? 'Cause people come to these events, they want to see each other, you know? They want to... It's like the band getting back together. And so when you're stuck in the keynote room, it's like, "Oh, it's okay, it's time to go." >> I don't know that any of us used to sitting at home where I could just click to another tab or pause it or run for, do something for the family, or a quick bio break. It's the three-hour keynote I hope has been retired. >> But it's an interesting point though, that the virtual event really is driving the physical and this, the way Red Hat marketed this event was very much around the virtual attendee. Physical was almost an afterthought, so. >> Right, this is an invite only for in-person. So you're absolutely right. It's optimizing the things that are being streamed, the online audience is the big audience. And we just happy to be in here to clap and do some things see around what you're doing. >> Wonderful see that becoming the norm. >> I think like virtual Stu, you know this well when virtual first came in, nobody had a clue with what they were doing. It was really hard. They tried different things, they tried to take the physical and just jam it into the virtual. That didn't work, they tried doing fun things. They would bring in a famous person or a comedian. And that kind of worked, I guess, but everybody showed up for that and then left. And I think they're trying to figure it out what this hybrid thing is. I've seen it both ways. I've seen situations like this, where they're really sensitive to the virtual. I've seen others where that's the FOMO of the physical, people want physical. So, yeah, I think it depends. I mean, reinvent last year was heavy physical. >> Yeah, with 15,000 people there. >> Pretty long keynotes, you know? So maybe Amazon can get away with it, but I think most companies aren't going to be able to. So what is the market telling you? What are these insights? >> So Dave just talking about Amazon, obviously, the world I live in cloud and that discussion of cloud, the journey that customers are going on is where we're spending a lot of the discussions. So, it was great to hear in the keynote, talked about our deep partnerships with the cloud providers and what we're doing to help people with, you like to call it super cloud, some call it hybrid, or multi-cloud... >> New name. (crosstalk) Meta-Cloud, come on. >> All right, you know if Che's my executive, so it's wonderful. >> Love it. >> But we'll see, if I could put on my VR Goggles and that will help me move things. But I love like the partnership announcement with General Motors today because not every company has the needs of software driven electric vehicles all over the place. But the technology that we build for them actually has ramifications everywhere. We've working to take Kubernetes and make it smaller over time. So things that we do at the edge benefit the cloud, benefit what we do in the data center, it's that advancement of science and technology just lifts all boats. >> So what's your take on all this? The EV and software on wheels. I mean, Tesla obviously has a huge lead. It's kind of like the Amazon of vehicles, right? It's sort of inspired a whole new wave of innovation. Now you've got every automobile manufacturer kind of go and after. That is the future of vehicles is something you followed or something you have an opinion on Stu? >> Absolutely. It's driving innovation in some ways, the way the DOS drove innovation on the desktop, if you remember the 64K DOS limit, for years, that was... The software developers came up with some amazing ways to work within that 64K limit. Then when it was gone, we got bloatware, but it actually does enforce a level of discipline on you to try to figure out how to make software run better, run more efficiently. And that has upstream impacts on the enterprise products. >> Well, right. So following your analogy, you talk about the enablement to the desktop, Linux was a huge influence on allowing the individual person to write code and write software, and what's happening in the EV, it's software platform. All of these innovations that we're seeing across industries, it's how is software transforming things. We go back to the mark end reasons, software's eating the world, open source is the way that software is developed. Who's at the intersection of all those? We think we have a nice part to play in that. I loved tha- Dave, I don't know if you caught at the end of the keynote, Matt Hicks basically said, "Our mission isn't just to write enterprise software. "Our mission is based off of open source because open source unlocks innovation for the world." And that's one of the things that drew me to Red Hat, it's not just tech in good places, but allowing underrepresented, different countries to participate in what's happening with software. And we can all move that ball forward. >> Well, can we declare victory for open source because it's not just open source products, but everything that's developed today, whether proprietary or open has open source in it. >> Paul, I agree. Open source is the development model period, today. Are there some places that there's proprietary? Absolutely. But I had a discussion with Deepak Singh who's been on theCUBE many times. He said like, our default is, we start with open source code. I mean, even Amazon when you start talking about that. >> I said this, the $70 billion business on open source. >> Exactly. >> Necessarily give it back, but that say, Hey, this is... All's fair in tech and more. >> It is interesting how the managed service model has sort of rescued open source, open source companies, that were trying to do the Red Hat model. No one's ever really successfully duplicated the Red Hat model. A lot of companies were floundering and failing. And then the managed service option came along. And so now they're all cloud service providers. >> So the only thing I'd say is that there are some other peers we have in the industry that are built off open source they're doing okay. The recent example, GitLab and Hashicorp, both went public. Hashi is doing some managed services, but it's not the majority of their product. Look at a company like Mongo, they've heavily pivoted toward the managed service. It is where we see the largest growth in our area. The products that we have again with Amazon, with Microsoft, huge growth, lots of interest. It's one of the things I spend most of my time talking on. >> I think Databricks is another interesting example 'cause Cloudera was the now company and they had the sort of open core, and then they had the proprietary piece, and they've obviously didn't work. Databricks when they developed Spark out of Berkeley, everybody thought they were going to do kind of a similar model. Instead, they went for all in managed services. And it's really worked well, I think they were ahead of that curve and you're seeing it now is it's what customers want. >> Well, I mean, Dave, you cover the database market pretty heavily. How many different open source database options are there today? And that's one of the things we're solving. When you look at what is Red Hat doing in the cloud? Okay, I've got lots of databases. Well, we have something called, it's Red Hat Open Database Access, which is from a developer, I don't want to have to think about, I've got six different databases, which one, where's the repository? How does all that happen? We give that consistency, it's tied into OpenShift, so it can help abstract some of those pieces. we've got same Kafka streaming and we've got APIs. So it's frameworks and enablers to help bridge that gap between the complexity that's out there, in the cloud and for the developer tool chain. >> That's really important role you guys play though because you had this proliferation, you mentioned Mongo. So many others, Presto and Starbursts, et cetera, so many other open source options out there now. And companies, developers want to work with multiple databases within the same application. And you have a role in making that easy. >> Yeah, so and that is, if you talk about the question I get all the time is, what's next for Kubernetes? Dave, you and I did a preview for KubeCon and it's automation and simplicity that we need to be. It's not enough to just say, "Hey, we've got APIs." It's like Dave, we used to say, "We've got standards? Great." Everybody's implementation was a little bit different. So we have API Sprawl today. So it's building that ecosystem. You've been talking to a number of our partners. We are very active in the community and trying to do things that can lift up the community, help the developers, help that cloud native ecosystem, help our customers move faster. >> Yeah API's better than scripts, but they got to be managed, right? So, and that's really what you guys are doing that's different. You're not trying to own everything, right? It's sort of antithetical to how billions and trillions are made in the IT industry. >> I remember a few years ago we talked here, and you look at the size that Red Hat is. And the question is, could Red Hat have monetized more if the model was a little different? It's like, well maybe, but that's not the why. I love that they actually had Simon Sinek come in and work with Red Hat and that open, unlocks the world. Like that's the core, it's the why. When I join, they're like, here's a book of Red Hat, you can get it online and that why of what we do, so we never have to think of how do we get there. We did an acquisition in the security space a year ago, StackRox, took us a year, it's open source. Stackrox.io, it's community driven, open source project there because we could have said, "Oh, well, yeah, it's kind of open source and there's pieces that are open source, but we want it to be fully open source." You just talked to Gunnar about how he's RHEL nine, based off CentOS stream, and now developing out in the open with that model, so. >> Well, you were always a big fan of Whitehurst culture book, right? It makes a difference. >> The open organization and right, Red Hat? That culture is special. It's definitely interesting. So first of all, most companies are built with the hierarchy in mind. Had a friend of mine that when he joined Red Hat, he's like, I don't understand, it's almost like you have like lots of individual contractors, all doing their things 'cause Red Hat works on thousands of projects. But I remember talking to Rackspace years ago when OpenStack was a thing and they're like, "How do you figure out what to work on?" "Oh, well we hired great people and they work on what's important to them." And I'm like, "That doesn't sound like a business." And he is like, "Well, we struggle sometimes to that balance." Red Hat has found that balance because we work on a lot of different projects and there are people inside Red Hat that are, you know, they care more about the project than they do the business, but there's the overall view as to where we participate and where we productize because we're not creating IP because it's all an open source. So it's the monetizations, the relationships we have our customers, the ecosystems that we build. And so that is special. And I'll tell you that my line has been Red Hat on the inside is even more Red Hat. The debates and the discussions are brutal. I mean, technical people tearing things apart, questioning things and you can't be thin skinned. And the other thing is, what's great is new people. I've talked to so many people that started at Red Hat as interns and will stay for seven, eight years. And they come there and they have as much of a seat at the table, and when I talk to new people, your job, is if you don't understand something or you think we might be able to do it differently, you better speak up because we want your opinion and we'll take that, everybody takes that into consideration. It's not like, does the decision go all the way up to this executive? And it's like, no, it's done more at the team. >> The cultural contrast between that and your parent, IBM, couldn't be more dramatic. And we talked earlier with Paul Cormier about has IBM really walked the walk when it comes to leaving Red Hat alone. Naturally he said, "Yes." Well what's your perspective. >> Yeah, are there some big blue people across the street or something I heard that did this event, but look, do we interact with IBM? Of course. One of the reasons that IBM and IBM Services, both products and services should be able to help get us breadth in the marketplace. There are times that we go arm and arm into customer meetings and there are times that customers tell us, "I like Red Hat, I don't like IBM." And there's other ones that have been like, "Well, I'm a long time IBM, I'm not sure about Red Hat." And we have to be able to meet all of those customers where they are. But from my standpoint, I've got a Red Hat badge, I've got a Red Hat email, I've got Red Hat benefits. So we are fiercely independent. And you know, Paul, we've done blogs and there's lots of articles been written is, Red Hat will stay Red Hat. I didn't happen to catch Arvin I know was on CNBC today and talking at their event, but I'm sure Red Hat got mentioned, but... >> Well, he talks about Red Hat all time. >> But in his call he's talking backwards. >> It's interesting that he's not here, greeting this audience, right? It's again, almost by design, right? >> But maybe that's supposed to be... >> Hundreds of yards away. >> And one of the questions being in the cloud group is I'm not out pitching IBM Cloud, you know? If a customer comes to me and asks about, we have a deep partnership and IBM will be happy to tell you about our integrations, as opposed to, I'm happy to go into a deep discussion of what we're doing with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. So that's how we do it. It's very different Dave, from you and I watch really closely the VMware-EMC, VMware-Dell, and how that relationship. This one is different. We are owned by IBM, but we mostly, it does IBM fund initiatives and have certain strategic things that are done, absolutely. But we maintain Red Hat. >> But there are similarities. I mean, VMware crowd didn't want to talk about EMC, but they had to, they were kind of forced to. Whereas, you're not being forced to. >> And then once Dell came in there, it was joint product development. >> I always thought a spin in. Would've been the more effective, of course, Michael Dell and Egon wouldn't have gotten their $40 billion out. But I think a spin in was more natural based on where they were going. And it would've been, I think, a more dominant position in the marketplace. They would've had more software, but again, financially it wouldn't have made as much sense, but that whole dynamic is different. I mean, but people said they were going to look at VMware as a model and it's been largely different because remember, VMware of course was a separate company, now is a fully separate company. Red Hat was integrated, we thought, okay, are they going to get blue washed? We're watching and watching, and watching, you had said, well, if the Red Hat culture isn't permeating IBM, then it's a failure. And I don't know if that's happening, but it's definitely... >> I think a long time for that. >> It's definitely been preserved. >> I mean, Dave, I know I read one article at the beginning of the year is, can Arvin make IBM, Microsoft Junior? Follow the same turnaround that Satya Nadella drove over there. IBM I think making some progress, I mean, I read and watch what you and the team are all writing about it. And I'll withhold judgment on IBM. Obviously, there's certain financial things that we'd love to see IBM succeed. We worry about our business. We do our thing and IBM shares our results and they've been solid, so. >> Microsoft had such massive cash flow that even bomber couldn't screw it up. Well, I mean, this is true, right? I mean, you think about how were relevant Microsoft was in the conversation during his tenure and yet they never got really... They maintained a position so that when the Nadella came in, they were able to reascend and now are becoming that dominant player. I mean, IBM just doesn't have that cash flow and that luxury, but I mean, if he pulls it off, he'll be the CEO of the decade. >> You mentioned partners earlier, big concern when the acquisition was first announced, was that the Dells and the HP's and the such wouldn't want to work with Red Hat anymore, you've sort of been here through that transition. Is that an issue? >> Not that I've seen, no. I mean, the hardware suppliers, the ISVs, the GSIs are all very important. It was great to see, I think you had Accenture on theCUBE today, obviously very important partner as we go to the cloud. IBM's another important partner, not only for IBM Cloud, but IBM Services, deep partnership with Azure and AWS. So those partners and from a technology standpoint, the cloud native ecosystem, we talked about, it's not just a Red Hat product. I constantly have to talk about, look, we have a lot of pieces, but your developers are going to have other tools that they're going to use and the security space. There is no such thing as a silver bullet. So I've been having some great conversations here already this week with some of our partners that are helping us to round out that whole solution, help our customers because it has to be, it's an ecosystem. And we're one of the drivers to help that move forward. >> Well, I mean, we were at Dell Tech World last week, and there's a lot of talk about DevSecOps and DevOps and Dell being more developer friendly. Obviously they got a long way to go, but you can't have that take that posture and not have a relationship with Red Hat. If all you got is Pivotal and VMware, and Tansu >> I was thrilled to hear the OpenShift mention in the keynote when they talked about what they were doing. >> How could you not, how could you have any credibility if you're just like, Oh, Pivotal, Pivotal, Pivotal, Tansu, Tansu. Tansu is doing its thing. And they smart strategy. >> VMware is also a partner of ours, but that we would hope that with VMware being independent, that does open the door for us to do more with them. >> Yeah, because you guys have had a weird relationship with them, under ownership of EMC and then Dell, right? And then the whole IBM thing. But it's just a different world now. Ecosystems are forming and reforming, and Dell's building out its own cloud and it's got to have... Look at Amazon, I wrote about this. I said, "Can you envision the day where Dell actually offers competitive products in its suite, in its service offering?" I mean, it's hard to see, they're not there yet. They're not even close. And they have this high say/do ratio, or really it's a low say/do, they say high say/do, but look at what they did with Nutanix. You look over- (chuckles) would tell if it's the Cisco relationship. So it's got to get better at that. And it will, I really do believe. That's new thinking and same thing with HPE. And, I don't know about Lenovo that not as much of an ecosystem play, but certainly Dell and HPE. >> Absolutely. Michael Dell would always love to poke at HPE and HP really went very far down the path of their own products. They went away from their services organization that used to be more like IBM, that would offer lots of different offerings and very much, it was HP Invent. Well, if we didn't invent it, you're not getting it from us. So Dell, we'll see, as you said, the ecosystems are definitely forming, converging and going in lots of different directions. >> But your position is, Hey, we're here, we're here to help. >> Yeah, we're here. We have customers, one of the best proof points I have is the solution that we have with Amazon. Amazon doesn't do the engineering work to make us a native offering if they didn't have the customer demand because Amazon's driven off of data. So they came to us, they worked with us. It's a lot of work to be able to make that happen, but you want to make it frictionless for customers so that they can adopt that. That's a long path. >> All right, so evening event, there's a customer event this evening upstairs in the lobby. Microsoft is having a little shin dig, and then serves a lot of customer dinners going on. So Stu, we'll see you out there tonight. >> All right, thanks you. >> Were watching a brewing somewhere. >> Keynotes tomorrow, a lot of good sessions and enablement, and yeah, it's great to be in person to be able to bump some people, meet some people and, Hey, I'm still a year and a half in still meeting a lot of my peers in person for the first time. >> Yeah, and that's kind of weird, isn't it? Imagine. And then we kick off tomorrow at 10:00 AM. Actually, Stephanie Chiras is coming on. There she is in the background. She's always a great guest and maybe do a little kickoff and have some fun tomorrow. So this is Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman, Paul Gillin, who's my co-host. You're watching theCUBEs coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We'll see you tomorrow. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science, WiDS 2022, coming to live from Stanford University. I'm Lisa Martin. My next guest is here. Nandi Leslie, Doctor Nandi Leslie, Senior Engineering Fellow at Raytheon Technologies. Nandi, it's great to have you on the program. >> Oh it's my pleasure, thank you. >> This is your first WiDS you were saying before we went live. >> That's right. >> What's your take so far? >> I'm absolutely loving it. I love the comradery and the community of women in data science. You know, what more can you say? It's amazing. >> It is. It's amazing what they built since 2015, that this is now reaching 100,000 people 200 online event. It's a hybrid event. Of course, here we are in person, and the online event going on, but it's always an inspiring, energy-filled experience in my experience of WiDS. >> I'm thoroughly impressed at what the organizers have been able to accomplish. And it's amazing, that you know, you've been involved from the beginning. >> Yeah, yeah. Talk to me, so you're Senior Engineering Fellow at Raytheon. Talk to me a little bit about your role there and what you're doing. >> Well, my role is really to think about our customer's most challenging problems, primarily at the intersection of data science, and you know, the intersectional fields of applied mathematics, machine learning, cybersecurity. And then we have a plethora of government clients and commercial clients. And so what their needs are beyond those sub-fields as well, I address. >> And your background is mathematics. >> Yes. >> Have you always been a math fan? >> I have, I actually have loved math for many, many years. My dad is a mathematician, and he introduced me to, you know mathematical research and the sciences at a very early age. And so, yeah, I went on, I studied in a math degree at Howard undergrad, and then I went on to do my PhD at Princeton in applied math. And later did a postdoc in the math department at University of Maryland. >> And how long have you been with Raytheon? >> I've been with Raytheon about six years. Yeah, and before Raytheon, I worked at a small to midsize defense company, defense contracting company in the DC area, systems planning and analysis. And then prior to that, I taught in a math department where I also did my postdoc, at University of Maryland College Park. >> You have a really interesting background. I was doing some reading on you, and you have worked with the Navy. You've worked with very interesting organizations. Talk to the audience a little bit about your diverse background. >> Awesome yeah, I've worked with the Navy on submarine force security, and submarine tracking, and localization, sensor performance. Also with the Army and the Army Research Laboratory during research at the intersection of machine learning and cyber security. Also looking at game theoretic and graph theoretic approaches to understand network resilience and robustness. I've also supported Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies, other governments, NATO. Yeah, so I've really been excited by the diverse problems that our various customers have you know, brought to us. >> Well, you get such great experience when you are able to work in different industries and different fields. And that really just really probably helps you have such a much diverse kind of diversity of thought with what you're doing even now with Raytheon. >> Yeah, it definitely does help me build like a portfolio of topics that I can address. And then when new problems emerge, then I can pull from a toolbox of capabilities. And, you know, the solutions that have previously been developed to address those wide array of problems, but then also innovate new solutions based on those experiences. So I've been really blessed to have those experiences. >> Talk to me about one of the things I heard this morning in the session I was able to attend before we came to set was about mentors and sponsors. And, you know, I actually didn't know the difference between that until a few years ago. But it's so important. Talk to me about some of the mentors you've had along the way that really helped you find your voice in research and development. >> Definitely, I mean, beyond just the mentorship of my my family and my parents, I've had amazing opportunities to meet with wonderful people, who've helped me navigate my career. One in particular, I can think of as and I'll name a number of folks, but Dr. Carlos Castillo-Chavez was one of my earlier mentors. I was an undergrad at Howard University. He encouraged me to apply to his summer research program in mathematical and theoretical biology, which was then at Cornell. And, you know, he just really developed an enthusiasm with me for applied mathematics. And for how it can be, mathematics that is, can be applied to epidemiological and theoretical immunological problems. And then I had an amazing mentor in my PhD advisor, Dr. Simon Levin at Princeton, who just continued to inspire me, in how to leverage mathematical approaches and computational thinking for ecological conservation problems. And then since then, I've had amazing mentors, you know through just a variety of people that I've met, through customers, who've inspired me to write these papers that you mentioned in the beginning. >> Yeah, you've written 55 different publications so far. 55 and counting I'm sure, right? >> Well, I hope so. I hope to continue to contribute to the conversation and the community, you know, within research, and specifically research that is computationally driven. That really is applicable to problems that we face, whether it's cyber security, or machine learning problems, or others in data science. >> What are some of the things, you're giving a a tech vision talk this afternoon. Talk to me a little bit about that, and maybe the top three takeaways you want the audience to leave with. >> Yeah, so my talk is entitled "Unsupervised Learning for Network Security, or Network Intrusion Detection" I believe. And essentially three key areas I want to convey are the following. That unsupervised learning, that is the mathematical and statistical approach, which tries to derive patterns from unlabeled data is a powerful one. And one can still innovate new algorithms in this area. Secondly, that network security, and specifically, anomaly detection, and anomaly-based methods can be really useful to discerning and ensuring, that there is information confidentiality, availability, and integrity in our data >> A CIA triad. >> There you go, you know. And so in addition to that, you know there is this wealth of data that's out there. It's coming at us quickly. You know, there are millions of packets to represent communications. And that data has, it's mixed, in terms of there's categorical or qualitative data, text data, along with numerical data. And it is streaming, right. And so we need methods that are efficient, and that are capable of being deployed real time, in order to detect these anomalies, which we hope are representative of malicious activities, and so that we can therefore alert on them and thwart them. >> It's so interesting that, you know, the amount of data that's being generated and collected is growing exponentially. There's also, you know, some concerning challenges, not just with respect to data that's reinforcing social biases, but also with cyber warfare. I mean, that's a huge challenge right now. We've seen from a cybersecurity perspective in the last couple of years during the pandemic, a massive explosion in anomalies, and in social engineering. And companies in every industry have to be super vigilant, and help the people understand how to interact with it, right. There's a human component. >> Oh, for sure. There's a huge human component. You know, there are these phishing attacks that are really a huge source of the vulnerability that corporations, governments, and universities face. And so to be able to close that gap and the understanding that each individual plays in the vulnerability of a network is key. And then also seeing the link between the network activities or the cyber realm, and physical systems, right. And so, you know, especially in cyber warfare as a remote cyber attack, unauthorized network activities can have real implications for physical systems. They can, you know, stop a vehicle from running properly in an autonomous vehicle. They can impact a SCADA system that's, you know there to provide HVAC for example. And much more grievous implications. And so, you know, definitely there's the human component. >> Yes, and humans being so vulnerable to those social engineering that goes on in those phishing attacks. And we've seen them get more and more personal, which is challenging. You talking about, you know, sensitive data, personally identifiable data, using that against someone in cyber warfare is a huge challenge. >> Oh yeah, certainly. And it's one that computational thinking and mathematics can be leveraged to better understand and to predict those patterns. And that's a very rich area for innovation. >> What would you say is the power of computational thinking in the industry? >> In industry at-large? >> At large. >> Yes, I think that it is such a benefit to, you know, a burgeoning scientist, if they want to get into industry. There's so many opportunities, because computational thinking is needed. We need to be more objective, and it provides that objectivity, and it's so needed right now. Especially with the emergence of data, and you know, across industries. So there are so many opportunities for data scientists, whether it's in aerospace and defense, like Raytheon or in the health industry. And we saw with the pandemic, the utility of mathematical modeling. There are just so many opportunities. >> Yeah, there's a lot of opportunities, and that's one of the themes I think, of WiDS, is just the opportunities, not just in data science, and for women. And there's obviously even high school girls that are here, which is so nice to see those young, fresh faces, but opportunities to build your own network and your own personal board of directors, your mentors, your sponsors. There's tremendous opportunity in data science, and it's really all encompassing, at least from my seat. >> Oh yeah, no I completely agree with that. >> What are some of the things that you've heard at this WiDS event that inspire you going, we're going in the right direction. If we think about International Women's Day tomorrow, "Breaking the Bias" is the theme, do you think we're on our way to breaking that bias? >> Definitely, you know, there was a panel today talking about the bias in data, and in a variety of fields, and how we are, you know discovering that bias, and creating solutions to address it. So there was that panel. There was another talk by a speaker from Pinterest, who had presented some solutions that her, and her team had derived to address bias there, in you know, image recognition and search. And so I think that we've realized this bias, and, you know, in AI ethics, not only in these topics that I've mentioned, but also in the implications for like getting a loan, so economic implications, as well. And so we're realizing those issues and bias now in AI, and we're addressing them. So I definitely am optimistic. I feel encouraged by the talks today at WiDS that you know, not only are we recognizing the issues, but we're creating solutions >> Right taking steps to remediate those, so that ultimately going forward. You know, we know it's not possible to have unbiased data. That's not humanly possible, or probably mathematically possible. But the steps that they're taking, they're going in the right direction. And a lot of it starts with awareness. >> Exactly. >> Of understanding there is bias in this data, regardless. All the people that are interacting with it, and touching it, and transforming it, and cleaning it, for example, that's all influencing the veracity of it. >> Oh, for sure. Exactly, you know, and I think that there are for sure solutions are being discussed here, papers written by some of the speakers here, that are driving the solutions to the mitigation of this bias and data problem. So I agree a hundred percent with you, that awareness is you know, half the battle, if not more. And then, you know, that drives creation of solutions >> And that's what we need the creation of solutions. Nandi, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure talking with you about what you're doing with Raytheon, what you've done and your path with mathematics, and what excites you about data science going forward. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. >> Good, for Nandi Leslie, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science 2022. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest. (upbeat flowing music)

welcome back to the cube's presentation of the aws executive summit at re invent 2021 made possible by accenture my name is dave vellante we're going to look at how digital infrastructure is helping to transform consumer experiences specifically how an insurance company is changing its industry by incentivizing and rewarding consumers who change their behavior to live healthier lives a real passion of of mine and getting to the really root cause of health with me now are simon guest who's the chief executive officer of generality vitality gmbh and niels mueller who's the managing director at the cloud first application engineering lead for the european market at accenture gentlemen welcome to the cube thanks for having us you're very welcome simon generally vitality it's a really interesting concept that you guys have envisioned and now put into practice tell us how does it all work sure no problem and thanks for for having us on dave it's a pleasure to be here so look uh generally vitality is in its uh it's core pretty simple concepts so it's uh it's a program that you have on your phone and the idea of this program is that it's a it's a wellness coach for you as an individual and it's going to help you to understand your health and where you are in terms of the state of your health at the moment and it's going to take you on a journey to improve your your lifestyle and your wellness and hopefully help you to lead a healthier and a more sort of mindful life i guess is is the best way of summarizing it from um from our point of view with insurance company of course you know our historical role has always been to uh be the company that's there if something goes wrong you know so if unfortunately you pass away or you have sickness in your in your life or in your family's life that's that's historically been our role but what we see with generality vitality is something a little bit different so it's a program that really is uh supposed to be with you every day of your life to help you to live a healthier life it's something that we already have in in four european markets in fact in five from this week i'm a little bit behind the time so we're live already in in germany in france in austria and italy and in spain and fundamentally what we what we do dave is too is to say to customers look if you want to understand your health if you want to improve it by moving a little bit more by visiting the doctor more by eating healthier by healthy choices on a daily basis we're going to help you to do that and we're going to incentivize you for going on this journey and making healthy choices and we're going to reward you for for doing the same so you know we partner up with with great companies like garmin like adidas like big brands that are let's say invested in this health and wellness space so that we can produce really an ecosystem for customers that's all about live well make good choices be healthy have an insurance company that partners you along that journey and if you do that we're going to reward you for for that so you know we're here not just in the difficult times which of course is one of our main roles but we're here as a partner as a lifetime partner to you too to help you feel better and live a better life i love it i mean it sounds so simple but but it's i'm sure it's very complicated to to make the technology simple for the user you've got mobile involved you've got the back end and we're going to get into some of the tech but first i want to understand the member engagement and some of the lifestyle changes simon that you've analyzed what's the feedback that you're getting from your customers what does the data tell you how do the incentives work as well what what is the incentive for the the member to actually do the right thing sure look i think actually the the covered uh situation that we've had in the last sort of two years has really crystallized the fact that this is something that we really ought to be doing and something that our customers really value so i mean look just to give you a bit of a sort of information about how it works for for customers so what we try to do with them is is to get customers to understand uh their current health situation you know using their phone so uh you know we ask our customers to go through a sort of health assessment around how they live what they eat how they sleep you know and to go through that sort of process uh and to give them what a vitality age which is a sort of uh you know sort of actuarial comparison with their real age so i'm i'm 45 but unfortunately my my vitality age is 49 and it means i have some work to do to bring that back together uh and what we see is that you know two-thirds of our customers take this test every year because they want to see how they are progressing on an annual basis in terms of living a healthier life and if what if what they are doing is having an impact on their life expectancy and their lifespan and their health span so how long are they going to live healthier for so you see them really engaging in this in this approach of understanding their current situation then what we know actually because the program is built around this model that uh really activity and moving and exercise is the biggest contributor to living a healthier life we know that the majority of deaths are caused by lifestyle illness is like you know poor nutrition and smoking and drinking alcohol and not exercising and so a lot of the program is really built around getting people to move more and it's not about being an athlete it's about you know getting off the the underground one station earlier walking home or making sure you do your 10 000 steps a day and what we see is that that sort of 40 of our customers are on a regularly basis linking either their phone or their their exercise device to our program and downloading that data so that they can see how how much they are exercising and at the same time what we do is we set we set our customers weekly challenges to say look if you can move a little bit more than last week we are going to to reward you for that and we see that you know almost half of our customers are achieving this weekly goal every week and it's really a fantastic level of engagement that normally is an insurer uh we don't see the way the rewards work is is pretty simple it's similar in a way to an airline program so every good choice you make every activity you do every piece of good food that you eat when you check your on your health situation we'll give you points and the more points you get you go through through a sort of status approach of starting off at the bottom status and ending up at a gold and then a platinum status and the the higher up you get in the status that the higher the value of the rewards that we give you so almost a quarter of our customers now and this is accelerated through provide they've reached that platinum status so they are the most engaged customers that we we have and those ones who are really engaging in the in the program and what we really try to create is this sort of virtuous circle that says if you live well you make good choices you improve your health you you progress through the program and we give you better and stronger and more uh valuable rewards for for doing that and some of those rewards are are around health and wellness so it might be that you get you get a discount on on gym gear from adidas it might be that you get a discount on a uh on a device from garmin or it might be actually on other things so we also give people amazon vouchers we also give people uh discounts on holidays and another thing that we we did actually in the last year which we found really powerful is that we've given the opportunity for our customers to convert those rewards into charitable donations because we we work in generality with a with a sort of um campaign called the human safety net which is helping out the poorest people in society and some what our customers do a lot of the time is instead of taking those financial rewards for themselves they convert it into a charitable donation so we're actually also thinking wellness and feeling good and insurance and some societal good so we're really trying to create a virtuous circle of uh of engagement with our customers i mean that's a powerful cocktail i love it you got the the data because if i see the data then i can change my behavior you got the gamification piece you actually have you know hard dollar rewards you could give those to charities and and you've got the the most important which is priceless can't put a value on good health i got one more question for simon and niels i'd love you to chime in as well on this question how did you guys decide simon to engage with accenture and aws and the cloud to build out this platform what's the story behind that collaboration was there unique value that you saw that that you wanted to tap that you feel like they bring to the table what was your experience yeah look i mean we worked at accenture as well because the the the sort of construct of this vitality proposition is a pretty a pretty complex one so you mentioned that the idea is simple but the the build is not so uh is not so simple and that that's the case so accenture's been part of that journey uh from the beginning they're one of the partners that we work with but specifically around the topic of rewards uh you know we're we're a primarily european focused organization but when you take those countries that i mentioned even though we're next to each other geographically we're quite diverse and what we wanted to create was really a sustainable and reusable and consistent customer experience that allowed us to go and get to market with an increasing amount of efficiency and and to do that we needed to work with somebody who understood our business has this historical let's say investment in in the vitality concept so so knows how to bring it to life but that what then could really support us in making uh what can be a complex piece of work as simple and as as replicable as possible across multiple markets because we don't want to go reinventing the wheel every time we do we move to a new market so we need to find a balance between having a consistent product a consistent technology offer a consistent customer experience with the fact that we we operate in quite diverse markets so this was let's say the the reason for more deeply engaging with accenture on this journey thank you very much niels why don't you comment on on that as well i'd love to to get your thoughts and and really really it's kind of your role here i mean accenture global si deep expertise in industry but also technology what are your thoughts on this topic yeah i'd love to love to comment so when we started the journey it was pretty clear from the outset that we would need to build this on cloud in order to get this scalability and this ability to roll out to different markets have a central solution that can act as a template for the different markets but then also have the opportunity to localize different languages different partners for the rewards there's different reward partners in the different markets so we needed to build in an asset basically that could work as a tempos centrally standardizing things but also leaving enough flexibility to to then localize in the individual markets and if we talk about some of the more specific requirements so one one thing that gave us headaches in the beginning was the authentication of the users because each of the markets has their own systems of record where the basically the authentication needs to happen and we somehow needed to still find a holistic solution that comes through the central platform and we were able to do that at the end through the aws cognito service sort of wrapping the individual markets uh local idp systems and by now we've even extended that solution to have a standalone cloud native kind of idp solution in place for markets that do not have a local idp solution in place or don't want to use it for for this purpose yeah so you had you had data you have you had the integration you've got local laws you mentioned the flexibility you're building ecosystems that are unique to the to the local uh both language and and cultures uh please you had another comment i interrupted you yeah i know i just wanted to expand basically on the on the requirements so that was the central one being able to roll this out in a standardized way across the markets but then there were further requirements for example like being able to operate that platform with very low operations overhead there is no large i.t team behind generally vitality that you know works to serve us or can can act as this itis backbone support so we needed to have basically a solution that runs itself that runs on autopilot and that was another big big driver for first of all going to cloud but second of all making specific choices within cloud so we specifically chose to build this as a cloud native solution using for example manage database services you know with automatic backup with automatic ability to restore data that scales automatically that you know has all this built in which usually maybe a database administrator would take care of and we applied that concept basically to every component to everything we looked at we we applied this requirement of how can this run on autopilot how can we make this as much managed by itself within the cloud as possible and then land it on these services and for example we also used the the api gateway from from aws for our api services that also came in handy when for example we had some response time issues with the third party we needed to call and then we could just with a flick of a button basically introduce caching on the level of the api gateway and really improve the user experience because the data you know wasn't updated so much so it was easier to cache so these are all experiences i think that that proved in the end that we made the right choices here and the requirements that that drove that to to have a good user experience niels would you say that the architecture is is a sort of a data architecture specifically is it a decentralized data architecture with sort of federated you know centralized governance or is it more of a centralized view what if you could talk about that yeah it's it's actually a centralized platform basically so the core product is the same for all the markets and we run them as different tenants basically on top of that infrastructure so the data is separated in a way obviously by the different tenants but it's in a central place and we can analyze it in a central fashion if if the need arises from from the business and the reason i ask that simon is because essentially i look at this as a as largely a data offering for your customers and so niels you were talking about the local language and simon as well i would imagine that that the local business lines have specific requirements and specific data requirements and so you've got to build an architecture that is flexible enough to meet those needs yet at the same time can ensure data quality and governance and security that's not a trivial challenge i wonder if you both could comment on that yeah maybe maybe i'll give a start and then simon can chime in so um what we're specifically doing is managing the rewards experience right so so our solution will take care of tracking what rewards have been earned for what customer what rewards have been redeemed what rewards can be unlocked on the next level and we we foreshadow a little bit to to motivate to incentivize the customer and as that data sits in an aws database in a tenant by tenant fashion and you can run analysis on top of that maybe what you're getting into is also the let's say the exercise data the fitness device tracking data that is not specifically part of what my team has built but i'm sure simon can comment a little bit on that angle as well yeah please yeah sure sure yeah sure so look i think them the topic of data and how we use it uh in our business is a very is very interesting one because it's um it's not historically being seen let's say as the remit of insurers to go beyond the you know the the data that you need to underwrite policies or process claims or whatever it might be but actually we see that this is a whole point around being able to create some shared value in in this kind of product and and what i mean by that is uh look if you are a customer and you're buying an insurance policy it might be a life insurance or health insurance policy from from generali and we are giving you access to this uh to this program and through that program you are living a healthier life and that might have a you know a positive impact on generali in terms of you know maybe we're going to increase our market share or maybe we're going to lower claims or we're going to generate value out of that then one of the points of this program is that we then share that value back with customers through the rewards on the platform that we that we've built here and of course being able to understand that data and to quantify it and to value that data is an important part of the of the the different stages of how you of how much value you are creating and it's also interesting to know that you know in a couple of our markets we we operate in the corporate space so not with retail customers but with with organizations and one of the reasons that those companies give vitality to their employees is that they want to see things like the improved health of a workforce they want to see higher presenteeism lower absenteeism of employees and of course being able to demonstrate that there's a sort of correlation between participation in the vitality program and things like that is also is also important and as we've said the markets are very different so we need to be able to to take the data uh that we have out of the vitality program uh and be able in in the company that that i'm managing to to interpret that data so that in our insurance businesses we are able to make good decisions about the kind of insurance products we i think what's interesting to uh to make clear is that actually that the kind of health data that we generate stays purely within the vitality business itself and what we do inside the vitality business is to analyze that data and say okay is this is this also helping our insurance businesses to to drive uh yeah you know better top line and bottom line in the in the relevant business lines and this is different per company and per mark so yeah being able to interrogate that data understand it apply it in different markets and different uh distribution systems and different kinds of approaches to insurance is an is an important one yes it's an excellent example of a digital business in in you know we talk about digital transformation what does that mean this is what it means i i'd love i mean it must be really interesting board discussions because you're transforming an industry you're lowering overall cost i mean if people are getting less sick that's more profit for your company and you can choose to invest that in new products you can give back some to your corporate clients you can play that balancing act you can gain market share and and you've got some knobs to turn some levers uh for your stakeholders which is which is awesome neil something that i'm interested in i mean it must have been really important for you to figure out how to determine and measure success i mean you're obviously removed it's up it's up to generality vitality to get adoption for for their customers but at the same time the efficacy of your solution is going to determine you know the ease of of of delivery and consumption so so how did you map to the specific goals what were some of the key kpis in terms of mapping to their you know aggressive goals besides the things we already touched on i think one thing i would mention is the timeline right so we we started the team ramping in january or february and then within six months basically we had the solution built and then we went through a extensive test phase and within the next six months we had the product rolled out to three markets so this speed to value speed to market that we were able to achieve i think is one of the key um key criteria that also simon and team gave to us right there was a timeline and that timeline was not going to move so we needed to make a plan adjust to that timeline and i think it's both a testament to to the team's work that they did that we made this timeline but it also is enabled by technologies like cloud i have to say if i go back five years ten years if if you had to build in a solution like this on a corporate data center across so many different markets and each managed locally there would have been no way to do this in 12 months right that's for sure yeah i mean simon you're a technology company i mean insurance has always been a tech heavy company but but as niels just mentioned if you had to do that with it departments in each region so my question is is now you've got this it's almost like non-recurring engineering costs you've got that it took one year to actually get the first one done how fast are you able to launch into new markets just from a technology perspective not withstanding any you know local regulations and figuring out to go to market is that compressed yeah so if you are specifically technology-wise i think we would be able to set up a new market including localizations that often involves translation of because in europe you have all the different languages and so on at i would say four to six weeks we probably could stand up a localized solution in reality it takes more like six to nine months to get it rolled out because there's many other things involved obviously but just our piece of the solution we can pretty quickly localize it to a new market but but simon that means that you can spend time on those other factors you don't have to really worry so much about the technology and so you've launched in multiple european markets what do you see for the future of this program come to america you know you can fight you can find that this program in america dave but with one of our competitors we're not we're not operating so much in uh but you can find it if you want to become a customer for sure but yes you're right so look i think from from our perspective uh you know to put this kind of business into a new market it's not it's not an easy thing because what we're doing is not offering it just as a as a service on a standalone basis to customers we want to link it with with insurance business in the end we are an insurance business and we want to to see the value that comes from that so there's you know there's a lot of effort that has to go into making sure that we land it in the right way also from a customer publishing point of view with our distribution and they are they are quite different so so yeah look coming to the question of what's next i mean it comes in three stages for me so as i mentioned we are uh in five markets already uh in next in the first half of 2022 we'll also come to to the czech republic and poland uh which we're excited to to do and that will that will basically mean that we we have this business in in the seven main uh general markets in europe related to life and health business which is the most natural uh let's say fit for something like vitality then you know the next the sort of second part of that is to say okay look we have a program that's very heavily focused around uh activity and rewards and that that's a good place to start but you know wellness these days is not just about you know can you move a bit more than you did historically it's also about mental well-being it's about sleeping good it's about mindfulness it's about being able to have a more holistic approach to well-being and and covert has taught us and customer feedback has taught us actually that this is something where we need to to go and here we need to have the technology to move there as well so to be able to work with partners that are not just based on on on physical activity but also also on mindfulness so this is how one other way we'll develop the proposition and i think the third one which is more strategic and and we are you know really looking into is there's clearly something in the whole uh perception of incentives and rewards which drives a level of engagement between an insurer like generali and its customers that it hasn't had historically so i think we need to learn you know forget you know forgetting about the specific one of vitality being a wellness program but if there's an insurer there's a role for us to play where we offer incentives to customers to do something in a specific way and reward them for doing that and it creates value for us as an insurer then then this is probably you know a place we want to investigate more and to be able to do that in in other areas means we need to have the technology available that is as i said before replicable faster market can adapt quickly to to other ideas that we have so we can go and test those in in different markets so yes we have to we have to complete our scope on vitality we have to get that to scale and be able to manage all of this data at scale all of those rewards at real scale and uh to have the technology that allows us to do that without without thinking about it too much and then to say okay how do we widen the proposition and how do we take the concept of vitality that sits behind vitality to see if we can apply it to other areas of our business and that's really what the future is is going to look like for us you know the the isolation era really taught us that if you're not a digital business you're out of business and pre-kov a lot of these stories were kind of buried uh but the companies that have invested in digital are now thriving and this is an awesome example jeff another point is that jeff amebacher one of the founders of cloudera early facebook employee famously said about 10 12 years ago the best and greatest engineering minds of our my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads and this is a wonderful example of how to use data to change people's lives so guys congratulations best of luck really awesome example of applying technology to create an important societal outcome really appreciate you your time on the cube thank you thanks bye-bye all right and thanks for watching this segment of thecube's presentation of the aws executive summit at reinvent 2021 made possible by accenture keep it right there for more deep dives [Music] you

>>I want to welcome back to the cubes coverage. We're here at another event in person I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We've got to CNCF coop con cloud native con for in-person 2021. And we're back. It's a hybrid event and we're streaming lives on all channels, as well as all the folks watching a great guest kicking off the show here from the co-chairs from cataract coast. Is that right? Danielle Cook. Who's the vice president at Fairwinds and John Foreman director at Accenture. Thanks for coming on your co-chair. Your third co-chair is not here, but you guys are here to talk about the cloud maturity model. Pretty mature funding is flowing tons of announcements. We're going to have a startup on $200 million. They're announcing in funding and observability of all of all hot spaces. Um, so the maturity is it's the journey in the cloud native space now is crossed over to mainstream. That's the we've been telling that story for a couple of years. Now, you guys have been working on this. Tell us about the cloud maturity model you guys worked on. >>So we got together earlier this year because we, um, four of us had been working on maturity models. So Simon Forester, who is one of the co-chairs, who isn't here, he had worked on a maturity model that looked at your legacy journey, all the way to cloud native, um, myself, I had been part of the Fairwinds team working on the Kubernetes maturity model. So, and then, um, we have Robbie, who's not here. And John Foreman, who we all got together, they had worked on a maturity model and we put it together and I've been working since February to go, what is cloud native maturity and what are the stages you need to go through to achieve maturity. So put this together and now we have this great model that people can use to take them from. I have no idea what cloud native is to the steps they can take to actually be a mature organization. >>And, you know, you've made it when you have a book here. So just hold that up to the camera real quick. So you can see it. It's very much in spirit of the community, but in all seriousness, it book's great, but this is a real need. What was the pain point? What was jumping out at you guys on the problem? Was it just where people like trying to get more cloud native, they want to go move faster. It was a confusing, what were the problems you solve in? >>Well, and if anything is, if we start at the beginning, right, there was during the cloud journey DevSecOps and the Kootenays being a thing that then there's journeys to DevSecOps tributaries as well. But everything is leading to cloud native. It's about the journey to cloud native. So everybody, you know, we're taught to go John, the ecosystem's an eyesore man. If I look at, you know, landscape, >>The whole map I >>Need, it's just like in trend map, it's just so confusing what we do. So every time we go to, I revert the wheel and I get them from zero to hero. So we just put together a model instead that we can re reuse yeah. As a good reference architecture. So from that is a primary, how we built because the native trademark you have with us today. So it's a five scale model from one to five what's twice today, or how to, to, you know, what our job is getting to a five where they could optimize a really rocket rolling. >>You know, it's interesting. I love these inflection points and, you know, being a student of history and the tech business there's moments where things are the new thing, and they're really truly new things like first-time operationalized dev ops. I mean the hardcore dev ops or early adopters we've been doing that, you know, we know that, but now mainstream, like, okay, this is a real disruption in a positive way. So the transformation is happening and it's new, new roles, new, new workflows, new, uh, team formations. So there's a, it's complicated in the sense of getting it up and running so I can see the need. How can you guys share your data on where people are? Because now you have more data coming in, you have more people doing dev ops, more cloud native development, and you mentioned security shepherds shifting left. Where's the data tell you, is it, as you said, people are more like a two or more. What's the, what's the data say? >>So we've had, so part of pulling this model together was your experience at Accenture, helping clients, the Fairwinds, um, experience, helping people manage Kubernetes. And so it's from out dozens of clusters that people have managed going, okay, where are people? And they don't even know where they are. So if we provide the guidelines from them, they can read it and go, oh, I am at about two. So the data is actually anecdotal from our experiences at our different companies. Um, but we, you know, we we've made it so that you can self identify, but we've also recognized that you might be at stage two for one application, but five for another application. So just because you're on this journey, doesn't mean everything is in, >>It's not boiler plate. It's really unique to every enterprise because they everyone's different >>Journey. Put you in journey with these things. A big part of this also torn apart one to five, your clients wants to in denial, you know? So, so Mr. CX level, you are level two. We are not, there's no way we would deal with this stuff for years. You've got to be a five. No, sorry. You're too. >>So >>There's use denial also about this. People think they do a cloud-native director rolling, and I'm looking at what they're doing and go, okay, do you do workups security? And they go, what's that? I go, exactly. So we really need to peel back the onion, start from seed year out and we need to be >>All right. So I want to ask more about the, um, the process and how that relates to the themes are involved. What are some of the themes around the maturity model that you guys can share that you see that people can look at and say, how do I self identify? What's the process will come to expect? >>Well, one of the things we did when we were putting it together was we realized that there were themes coming out amongst the maturity model itself. So we realized there's a whole people layer. There's a whole policy layer process and technology. So this maturity model does not just look at, Hey, this is the tech you need to do. It looks at how you introduce cloud native to your organization. How do you take the people along with it? What policies you need to put in place the process. So we did that first and foremost, but one of the things that was super important to all of us was that security was ever present throughout it. Because as everything is shifting left, you need to be looking at security from day one and considering how it's going to happen and roll out from your developers all the way to your compliance people. Um, it's super important. And one of the themes throughout. >>So, so it would be safe to say, then that security was a catalyst for the maturity models because you gotta be mature. I mean, security, you don't fool around security. >>About the last year when I created the program for, since I worked with Cheryl Holland, from CCF, we put together the community certification, her special program. I saw a need where security was a big gap in communities. Nobody knew anything about it. They wanted to use the old rack and stack ways of doing it. They wanted to use their tray micro tombs from yesteryear, and that doesn't work anymore. You need a new set of tools for Kubernetes. It's the upgrade system. It's different way of doing things. So that knowledge is critical. So I think you're part of this again, on this journey was getting certifications out there for people to understand how to do better. Now, the next phase of that now it's how do we put all these pieces together and built this roadmap? >>Well, it's a great group. You guys have the working groups hard to pronounce the name, but, uh, it's a great effort because one of the things I'm hearing and we've been reporting this one, the Cubans looking angle is the modern software developers want speed, and they don't want to wait for the old slow groups now and security, and it are viewed as blockers and like slow things down. And so you start to see a trend where those groups could provide policy and then start putting, feeding up, uh, data models that allow the developers in real time to do their coding, to shift left and to be efficient and move on and code not be waiting for weeks or days >>Comes to play. So today is the age of Caleb's right now, get up this emerging we're only to have now where everything is code policies, code, securities, code policies, cookie figures, code. That is the place for, and then again, walk a fusion more need for a cargo office. >>Okay. What's your thoughts on that? >>So I think what's really important is enabling service ownership, right? You need the developers to be able to do security, see policy, see it live and make sure that, you know, you're not your configuration, isn't stopping the build or getting into production. So, you know, we made sure that was part of the maturity model. Like you need to be looking continuous scanning throughout checking security checking policy. What is your process? Um, and we, you know, we made that ever present so that the developers are the ones who are making sure that you're getting to Kubernetes, you're getting to cloud native and you're doing it. >>Well, the folks watching, if you don't know the cloud native landscape slide, that ecosystem slide, it's getting bigger and bigger. There's more new things emerging. You see role of software abstractions coming in, automation and AI are coming in. So it makes it very challenging if you want to jump right in lifting and shifting to the clouds, really easy check, been there, done that, but companies want to refactor their applications, not just replatform refactoring means completely taking advantage of these higher level services. So, so it's going to be hard to navigate. So I guess with all that being said, what you guys advice to people who are saying, I need the navigation. I need to have the blueprint. What do I do? How do I get involved? And how do I leverage this? >>We want people to, you can go on to get hub and check out our group and read the maturity model. You can understand it, self identify where you're at, but we want people to get involved as well. So if they're seeing something that like, actually this needs to be adjusted slightly, please join the group. The cardiograph is group. Um, you can also get copies of our book available on the show. So if you, um, if you know, you can read it and it takes you line by line in a really playful way as to where you should be at in the maturity model. >>And on top of that, if you come Thursday was Sonia book. And of course, a lot of money, one day, I promise >>You guys are good. I gotta ask, you know, the final question is like more and more, just more personal commentary. If you don't mind, as teams start to change, this is obviously causing a lot of positive transformation if done, right? So the roles and the teams are starting to change. Hearing SRS are now not just the dev ops guys provisioning they're part of the, of the scale piece, the developers shifting left, new kind of workflows, the role of certain engineers and developers now, new team formations. Why were you guys seeing that evolve? Is there any trends that you see around how people are reconfiguring their team makeup? >>I think a lot of things is going to a single panic last tonight, where I'm taking dev and ops and putting them one panel where I can see everything going on in my environment, which is very critical. So right now we're seeing a pre-training where every client wants to be able to have the holy grail of a secret credit class to drive to that. But for you to get there, there's a lot of work you've got to do overnight that will not happen. And that's where this maturity model, I think again, will enhance that ability to do that. >>There's a cultural shift happening. I mean, people are changing there's new skillsets and you know, obviously there's a lot of people who don't have the skill. So it's super important that people work with Kubernetes, get certified, use the maturity model to help them know what skills they need. >>And it's a living document too. It's not, I mean, a book and I was living book. It's going to evolve. Uh, what areas you think are going to come next? So you guys have to predict if you had to see kind of where the pieces are going. Uh, obviously with cloud, everything's getting, you know, more Lego blocks to play with more coolness you have in the, in this world. What's coming next with Sue. Do you guys see any, any, uh, forecasts or >>We're working with each one of the tag groups within the CNCF to help us build it out and come up with what is next based on their expertise in the area. So we'll see lots more coming. Um, and we hope that the maturity grows and because of something that everybody relies on and that they can use alongside the landscape and the trail map. And, um, >>It's super valuable. I think you guys need a plug for any people want to, how they join. If I want to get involved, how do I, what do I do? >>Um, you can join the Carter Garfish group. You can check us out on, get hub and see all the information there. Um, we have a slack channel within the CNCF and we have calls every other Tuesday that people can see the pools. >>Awesome. Congratulations, we'll need it. And super important as people want to navigate and start building out, you know, you've got to edge right around the corner there it's happening real fast. Data's at the edge. You got cloud at the edge. Azure, AWS, Google. I mean, they're pushing really hardcore 5g, lot changes. >>Everybody wants to cloud today. Now one client is, one is more cloud. At least both the cloud is comfortable playing everywhere. One pump wife had DevOps. >>It's distributed computing back in the modern era. Thank you so much for coming on the keep appreciating. Okay. I'm Jennifer here for cube con cloud native con 2021 in person. It's a hybrid event. We're here live on the floor show floor, bringing you all the coverage. Thanks for watching station all day. Next three days here in Los Angeles. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021 made possible by Accenture. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to look at how digital infrastructure is helping to transform consumer experiences, specifically how an insurance company is changing its industry by incentivizing and rewarding consumers who changed their behavior to live healthier lives, a real passion of mine, and getting to the really root cause of health. With me now are Simon Guest, who's the Chief Executive Officer of Generali Vitality, GmbH, and Nils Muller-Sheffer, who's the Managing Director at the Cloud First Application Engineering Lead for the European market at Accenture. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome Simon. Simon, Generali Vitality is a really interesting concept that you guys have envisioned and now put it into practice. Tell us how does it all work? >> Sure. No problem. And thanks for having us on David, pleasure to be here. So look, Generali Vitality is in its core a pretty simple concept. It's a program that you have on your phone. And the idea of this program is that it's a wellness coach for you as an individual, and it's going to help you to understand your health and where you are in terms of the state of your health at the moment, and it's going to take you on a journey to improve your lifestyle and your wellness, and hopefully help you to live a healthier and a more sort of mindful life, I guess, is the best way of summarizing it. From our point of view as an insurance company, of course, our historical role has always been to be the company that's there if something goes wrong. So if unfortunately you pass away or you have sickness in your life or your family's life, that's historically been our role. But what we see with Generali Vitality is something a little bit different. So it's a program that really is supposed to be with you every day of your life to help you to live a healthier life. It's something that we already have in for European markets and in fact, in five from this week, I'm a little bit behind the times. So we're live already in Germany, in France, in Austria, in Italy and in Spain. And fundamentally what we do Dave, is to say to customers, "Look, if you want to understand your health, if you want to improve it by moving a little bit more, or by visiting the doctor more, by eating healthier, by healthy choices on a daily basis, we're going to help you to do that. And we're going to incentivize you for going on this journey and making healthy choices. And we're going to reward you for doing the same." So, we partner up with great companies like Garmin, like Adidas, like big brands that are, let's say, invested in this health and wellness space so that we can produce really an ecosystem for customers that's all about live well, make good choices, be healthy, have an insurance company that partners you along that journey. And if you do that, we've going to reward you for that. So, we're here not just in a difficult times, which of course is one of our main roles, but we're here as a partner, as a lifetime partner to you to help you feel better and live a better life. >> I love it, I mean, it sounds so simple, but I'm sure it's very complicated to make the technology simple for the user. You've got mobile involved, you've got the back end and we're going to get into some of the tech, but first I want to understand the member engagement and some of the lifestyle changes Simon that you've analyzed. What's the feedback that you're getting from your customers? What does the data tell you? How do the incentives work as well? What is the incentive for the member to actually do the right thing? >> Sure, I think actually that the COVID situation that we've had in the last sort of two years is really crystallized the fact that this is something that we really ought to be doing and something that our customers really value. Just to give you a bit of a sort of information about how it works for our customers. So what we try to do with them, is to get customers to understand their current health situation, using their phone. So, we asked our customers to go through a sort of health assessments around how they live, what they eat, how they sleep, and to go through that sort of process and to give them all the Vitality age, which is a sort of actuarial comparison with their real age. So I'm 45, but unfortunately my Vitality age is 49 and it means I have some work to do to bring that back together. And what we see is that, two thirds of our customers take this test every year because they want to see how they are progressing on an annual basis in terms of living a healthier life. And if what they are doing is having an impact on their life expectancy and their lifespan and their health span. So how long are they going to live healthier for? So you see them really engaging in this approach of understanding that current situation. Then what we know actually, because the program is built around this model that's really activity and moving, and exercise is the biggest contributors to living a healthier life. We know that the majority of deaths are caused by lifestyle illnesses like poor nutrition and smoking and drinking alcohol and not exercising. And so a lot of the program is really built around getting people to move more. And it's not about being an athlete. It's about, getting off the underground one station earlier and walking home or making sure you do your 10,000 steps a day. And what we see is that that sort of 40% of our customers are on a regularly basis linking either their phone or their exercise device to our program and downloading that data so that they can see how much they are exercising. And at the same time, what we do is we set our customers weekly challenges to say, look, if you can move a little bit more than last week, we are go into to reward you for that. And we see that almost half of our customers are achieving this weekly goal every week. And it's really a level of engagement that normally as an insurer, we don't see. The way that rewards work is pretty simple. It's similar in a way to an airline program. So every good choice you make every activity to every piece of good food that you eat. When you check your on your health situation, we'll give you points. And the more points you get, you go through through a sort of status approach of starting off at the bottom status and ending up at a golden and a platinum status. And the higher up you get in the status, the higher the value of the rewards that we give you. So almost a quarter of our customers now, and this has accelerated through COVID have reached that platinum status. So they are the most engaged customers that we have and those ones who are really engaging in the program. And what we really tried to create is this sort of virtuous circle that says If you live well, you make good choices, you improve your health, you progress through the program and we give you better and stronger and more valuable rewards for doing that. And some of those rewards are around health and wellness. So it might be that you get a discounts on gym gear from Adidas, it might be that you get a discount on a device from Garmin, or it might be actually on other things. We also give people Amazon vouchers. We also give people discounts on holidays. And another thing that we did actually in the last year, which we found really powerful is that we've given the opportunity for our customers to convert those rewards into charitable donations. Because we work in generosity with a sort of campaign called The Human Safety Net, which is helping out the poorest people in society. And so what our customers do a lot of the time is instead of taking those financial rewards for themselves, they convert it into a charitable donation. So we're actually also linking wellness and feeling good and insurance and some societal goods. So we're really trying to create a virtuous circle of engagement with our customers. >> That's a powerful cocktail. I love it. You've got the data, because if I see the data, then I can change my behavior. You've got the gamification piece. You actually have hard dollar rewards. You could give those to charities and you've got the most important, which is priceless, you can't put a value on good health. I got one more question for Simon and Nils I'd love for you to chime in as well on this question. How did you guys decide, Simon, to engage with Accenture and AWS and the cloud to build out this platform? What's the story behind that collaboration? Was there unique value that you saw that you wanted to tap, that you feel like they bring to the table? What was your experience? >> Yeah, we work with Accenture as well because the sort of constructs of this Vitality proposition is a pretty complex one. So you mentioned that the idea is simple, but the build is not so simple and that's the case. So Accenture has been part of that journey from the beginning. They are one of the partners that we work with, but specifically around the topic of rewards, we're primarily European focused organization, but when you take those countries that I mentioned, even though we're next to each other geographically, we're quite diverse. And what we wanted to create was really a sustainable and reusable and consistent customer experience that allowed us to go get to market with an increasing amounts of efficiency. And to do that, we needed to work with somebody who understood our business, has this historical, let's say investment in the Vitality concepts and so knows how to bring it to life, but then could really support us in making what can be a complex piece of work, as simple, as replicable as possible across multiple markets, because we don't want to go reinventing the wheel every time we knew we moved to a new market. So we need to find a balance between having a consistent product, a consistent technology offer, a consistent customer experience with the fact that we operate in quite diverse markets. So this was, let's say the reason for more deeply engaging with Accenture on this journey. >> Thank you very much, Nils, why don't you comment on that as well? I'd love to get your thoughts and really is kind of your role here, an Accenture global SI, deep expertise in industry, but also technology, what are your thoughts on this topic? >> Yeah, I'd love to love to comment. So when we started the journey, it was pretty clear from the outset that we would need to build this on cloud in order to get this scalability and this ability to roll out to different markets, have a central solution that can act as a template for the different markets, but then also have the opportunity to localize different languages, different partners for the rewards, there's different reward partners in the different markets. So we needed to build an asset basically that could work as a template, centrally standardizing things, but also leaving enough flexibility to then localize in the individual markets. And if we talk about some of the most specific requirements, so one thing that gave us headaches in the beginning was the authentication of the users because each of the markets has their own systems of record where the, basically the authentication needs to happen. And if we somehow needed to still find a holistic solution that comes through the central platform, and we were able to do that at the end through the AWS cognitive service, sort of wrapping the individual markets, local IDP systems. And by now we've even extended that solution to have a standalone cloud native kind of IDP solution in place for markets that do not have a local IDP solution in place, or don't want to use it for this purpose. >> So you had data, you had the integration, you've got local laws, you mentioned the flexibility, you're building ecosystems that are unique to the local, both language and cultures. Please, you had another comment, I interrupted you. >> No, I just wanted to expand basically on the requirements. So that was the central one being able to roll this out in a standardized way across the markets, but then there were further requirements. For example, like being able to operate the platform with very low operations overhead. There is no large IT team behind Generali Vitality that, works disservice or can act as this backbone support. So we needed to have basically a solution that runs itself that runs on autopilot. And that was another big, big driver for first of all, going to cloud, but second of all, making specific choices within cloud. So we specifically chose to build this as a cloud native solution using for example, managed database services, with automatic backup, with automatic ability to restore data that scales automatically that has all this built in which usually maybe in a database administrator would take care of. And we applied that concept basically to every component, to everything we looked at, we applied this requirement of how can this run on autopilot? How can we make this as much managed by itself within the cloud as possible, and then lend it on these services. For example, we also use the API gateway from AWS for our API services that also came in handy when, for example, we had some response time issues with the third party we needed to call. And then we could just with a flick of a button basically, introduced caching on the level of the API gateway and really improve the user experience because the data wasn't updated so much, so it was easier to cache. So these are all experiences I think that that proved in the end that we made the right choices here and the requirements that drove that to have a good user experience. >> Would you say that the architecture is a sort of a, data architecture specifically, is it a decentralized data architecture with sort of federated, centralized governance? Or is it more of a centralized view, wonder if you could talk about that? >> Yeah, it's actually a centralized platform basically. So the core product is the same for all the markets and we run them as different tenants basically on top of the infrastructure. So the data is separated in a way, obviously by the different tenants, but it's in a central place and we can analyze it in a central fashion if the need arises from the business. >> And the reason I asked that Simon is because essentially I look at this as largely a data offering for your customers. And so Nils, you were talking about the local language and Simon as well. I would imagine that the local business lines have specific requirements and specific data requirements. And so you've got to build an architecture that is flexible enough to meet those needs yet at the same time can ensure data quality and governance and security. And that's not a trivial challenge. I wonder if you both could comment on that. >> Yeah, maybe I'll give a start and then Simon can chime in. So what we're specifically doing is managing the rewards experience, so our solution will take care of tracking what rewards have been earned for what customer, what rewards have been redeemed, what rewards can be unlocked on the next level, and we foreshadow a little bit to motivate incentivize the customer and asset that data sits in an AWS database by tenant fashion. And you can run analysis on top of that. Maybe what you're getting into is also the, let's say the exercise data, the fitness device tracking data that is not specifically part of what my team has built, but I'm sure Simon can comment a little bit on that angle as well. >> Yeah, please. >> Yeah, sure. I think the topic of data and how we use it in our business is a very interesting one because it's not historically been seen, let's say as the remit of insurance to go beyond the data that you need to underwrite policies or process claims or whatever it might be. But actually we see that this is a whole point around being able to create some shared value in this kind of products. And what I mean by that is, if you are a customer and you're buying an insurance policy, it might be a life insurance or health insurance policy from Generali, and we're not giving you access to this program. And through that program, you are living a healthier life and that might have a positive impact on generosity in terms of, maybe we're going to increase our market share, or maybe we are going through lower claims, or we're going to generate value of that then. One of the points of this program is we then share that value back with customers, through the rewards on the platform that we've built here. And of course, being able to understand that data and to quantify it and to value that data is an important part of the different stages of how much value you are creating. And it's also interesting to know that, in a couple of our markets, we operate in the corporate space. So not with retail customers, but with organizations. And one of the reasons that those companies give Vitality to their employees is that they want to see things like the improved health of a workforce. They want to see higher presenteeism, lower absenteeism of employees, and of course, being able to demonstrate that there's a sort of correlation between participation in the Vitality program and things like that is also important. And as we've said, the markets are very different. So we need to be able to take the data that we have out of the Vitality Program and be able in the company that I'm managing to interpret that data so that in our insurance businesses, we are able to make good decisions about kind of insurance product we have. I think what's interesting to make clear is that actually that the kind of health data that we generate states purely within the Vitality business itself and what we do inside the Vitality business is to analyze that data and say, is this also helping our insurance businesses to drive better top line and bottom line in the relevant business lines? And this is different per company. Being able to interrogate that data, understand it, apply it in different markets, in different distribution systems and different kinds of approaches to insurance is an important one, yes. >> It's an excellent example of a digital business and we talked about digital transformation. What does that mean? This is what it means. It must be really interesting board discussions because you're transforming an industry, you're lowering overall costs. I mean, if people are getting less sick, that's more profit for your company and you can choose to invest that in new products, you can give back some to your corporate clients, you can play that balancing act, you can gain market share. And you've got some knobs to turn, some levers, for your stakeholders, which is awesome. Nils, something that I'm interested in, it must've been really important for you to figure out how to determine and measure success. Obviously it's up to Generali Vitality to get adoption for their customers, but at the same time, the efficacy of your solution is going to determine, the ease of delivery and consumption. So, how did you map to the specific goals? What were some of the key KPIs in terms of mapping to their aggressive goals. >> Besides the things we already touched on, I think one thing I would mention is the timeline. So, we started the team ramping in January, February, and then within six months basically, we had the solution built and then we went through a extensive test phase. And within the next six months we had the product rolled out to three markets. So this speed to value, speed to market that we were able to achieve, I think is one of the key criteria that also Simon and team gave to us. There was a timeline and that time I was not going to move. So we needed to make a plan, adjust to that timeline. And I think it's both a testament to the team's work that we met this timeline, but it also is enabled by a technology stack cloud. I have to say, if I go back five years, 10 years, if you had to build in a solution like this on a corporate data center across so many different markets and each managed locally, there would've been no way to do this in 12 months, that's for sure. >> Yeah, Simon, you're a technology company. I mean, insurance has always been a tech heavy company, but as Nils just mentioned, if you had to do that with IT departments in each region. So my question is now you've got this, it's almost like nonrecurring engineering costs, it took one year to actually get the first one done, how fast are you able to launch into new markets just from a technology perspective, not withstanding local regulations and figuring out the go to market? Is that compressed? >> So you asked specifically technology-wise I think we would be able to set up a new market, including localizations that often involves translation of, because in Europe you have all the different languages and so on, I would say four to six weeks, we probably could stand up a localized solution. In reality, it takes more like six to nine months to get it rolled out because there's many other things involved, obviously, but just our piece of the solution, we can pretty quickly localize it to a new market. >> But Simon, that means that you can spend time on those other factors, you don't have to really worry so much about the technology. And so you've launched in multiple European markets, what do you see for the future of this program? Come to America. >> You can find that this program in America Dave, but with one of our competitors, we're not operating so much in the US, but you can find it if you want to become a customer for sure. But yes, you're right. I think from our perspective, to put this kind of business into a new market is not an easy thing because what we're doing is not offering it just as a service on a standalone basis to customers, we want to link it with insurance business. In the end, we are an insurance business, and we want to see the value that comes from that. So there's a lot of effort that has to go into making sure that we land it in the right way, also from a customer proposition points of view with our distribution, they are all quite different. Coming to the question of what's next? It comes in three stages for me. So as I mentioned, we are in five markets already. In the first half of 2022, we'll also come to the Czech Republic and Poland, which we're excited to do. And that will basically mean that we have this business in the seven main Generali markets in Europe related to life and health business, which is the most natural at let's say fit for something like Vitality. Then, the sort of second part of that is to say, we have a program that is very heavily focused around activity and rewards, and that's a good place to start, but, wellness these days is not just about, can you move a bit more than you did historically, it's also about mental wellbeing, it's about sleeping good, it's about mindfulness, it's about being able to have a more holistic approach to wellbeing and COVID has taught us, and customer feedback has taught is actually that this is something where we need to go. And here we need to have the technology to move there as well. So to be able to work with partners that are not just based on physical activity, but also on mindfulness. So this is how one other way we will develop the proposition. And I think the third one, which is more strategic and we are really looking into is, there's clearly something in the whole perception of incentives and rewards, which drives a level of engagement between an insurer like Generali and its customers that it hasn't had historically. So I think we need to learn, forgetting about the specific one or Vitality being a wellness program, but if there's an insurer, there's a role for us to play where we offer incentives to customers to do something in a specific way and reward them for doing that. And it creates value for us as an insurer, then this is probably a place that we'd want to investigate more. And to be able to do that in other areas means we need to have the technology available, that is, as I said before, replicable faster market can adapt quickly to other ideas that we have, so we can go and test those in different markets. So yes, we have to, we have to complete our scope on Vitality, We have to get that to scale and be able to manage all of this data at scale, all of those rewards that real scale, and to have the technology that allows us to do that without thinking about it too much. And then to say, okay, how do we widen the proposition? And how do we take the concept that sits behind Vitality to see if we can apply it to other areas of our business. And that's really what the future is going to look like for us. >> The isolation era really taught us that if you're not a digital business, you're out of business, and pre COVID, a lot of these stories were kind of buried, but the companies that have invested in digital are now thriving. And this is an awesome example, and another point is that Jeff Hammerbacher, one of the founders of Cloudera, early Facebook employee, famously said about 10, 12 years ago, "The best and greatest engineering minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads." And this is a wonderful example of how to use data to change people's lives. So guys, congratulations, best of luck, really awesome example of applying technology to create an important societal outcome. Really appreciate your time on theCUBE. Thank you. >> Bye-bye. >> All right, and thanks for watching this segment of theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021 made possible by Accenture. Keep it right there for more deep dives. (upbeat music)

>>Hey, welcome to the cubes coverage of splunk.com 21. I'm licensed Lisa Martin here. I've got some in Demis with me, a VP in APAC at Splunk Simon. Welcome to the program. >>So here we are, unfortunately at another virtual conference, but there has been a tremendous amount of there's an understatement, right? That we've seen in the last 18 months. We've seen this massive distribution of the workforce. We've seen huge increases in the threat landscape. We've seen things like solar winds, ransomware, increasing significantly acceleration and digital transformation. As companies tried to do whatever they could to enable digital workspaces. I wanted to unpack with you, uh, this 20, 21 state of security report that Splunk has. What are some of the key findings? And then we'll dig into some of the things that you're seeing in the APAC region. >>Yeah, look, we're excited about the report. It really highlighted, I think what a lot of organizations are going through. Um, one of the statistics that stood out for me was, um, 75% of infrastructure users are multi-cloud, but expecting to get that these expecting to increase to 87% of customers will be using multicloud environments. So the reason why that's important is the complexity that creates, uh, for cyber professionals in terms of trying to protect and defend, um, becomes exponentially harder with every new iteration or generation of infrastructure that companies consume. Um, most interesting. Um, we actually saw about a third of users or already using three cloud providers, but that is going to grow to 50% of, of customers will grow to being using three cloud providers or more within the next two years. So again, just that, that trend is going to continue. Uh, the leveraging of cloud infrastructures is a core way of businesses digitizing and modernizing. Um, and as cyber professionals, we have to think about how we're going to address that. >>Definitely. One of the things that I've been seeing and hearing in the last 18 months from a security perspective is that organizations say, you know, it's, it's really not a matter of if we get hit with ransomware, it's when, and I was really surprised to see the, that the state of security report found that 70% of security and it leaders worry they're going to be hit by a solar winds style attack. So the security landscape changing dramatically in the last 18 months. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think the, the, the research is feeding back what we were already hearing from the customers, um, around how this is a critical, uh, motion. And I think the one thing that we've seen as well as the board level agenda now, the risk and cyber has, and, uh, an organization's ability to react or recover. Um, when you have an, an event, um, is now becoming a high priority for organizations, we're seeing a lot of increased spending in cybersecurity as this becomes more and more, um, pretty for organizations for breasts. So yeah, the, the, on the ground experiences certainly matching what we're seeing in the research there. Um, and all of that is a data problem, right? Security is a data problem when something happens, how do I, how do I know? Where, how do I know when, how do I know what, and then how do I know what actions to take based upon the data that we need to get? >>So security being a data problem talked about the complexity of the multi-cloud environments, that percentages of organizations that are adopting that now what that trend is moving towards. Also complexity, I can imagine with data volumes only increasing, what are some of the key challenges that APAC organizations specifically are seeing as they are accelerating digital transformation and doing what they can to enable this distributed workforce? >>Yeah. So, so the hybrid multicloud environment you use, I guess, an indicator of increased complexity, I think we often overlook the fact that I think the hybrid world is here to stay as well. So nobody is a hundred percent cloud and nobody's a hundred percent on prem anymore. It's very much an environment now where I need to, um, I need to protect and defend across that entire surface area and increasingly with edge computing. Um, and as we're looking at, uh, organizations pushing, processing out to the edge of their, um, their operations and whether that's a distributed workforce or sensor-based environments, um, that becomes critical as well. We've got organizations like Intel, uh, that use us to basically monitor not only the cyber infrastructure, but the entire customer infrastructure that they're providing the fabric by census of course, environments, where you can imagine that the security becomes even more important. >>So I think that complexity and the data sources that are now being generated and the explosion of that is, is kind of critical. Um, for apex specifically, we saw some interesting trends we saw about 37% of organizations are using data to now support the compliance environments. Um, about 36% are bringing in non-security data. Um, and about 36%, it really started to use AI or machine learning tools to help them in that, that large scale data volume processing, um, that they weren't able to do before. And then lastly, security analytics really is starting to become, uh, a critical tool in the arsenal of cyber professionals with 34% of organizations saying they're already using some form of security analytics to help them address the threat actors. >>Is there a silver lining in terms of the it folks and the security folks becoming better collaborating better? Anything that you've seen in this report? >>Uh, well in the report, but also in the way that we're seeing SOC organizations use tools. Um, so, uh, the orchestration remediation and automation is a big industry trend, particularly when you look at things like implementing zero trust and how you would use that for, um, putting that additional layer of protection around an organization. Um, and that's where the ability to identify using machine learning or AI, uh, trends or events, understand the actions that need to be taken, understand the data sources that help address and remediate those and be able to automate that frees up the time and cyber security professionals. Um, and that's a critical step we're seeing because there's a shortage of skills and that's been an ongoing challenge, not only in Asia Pacific, but I think worldwide, >>Right. It has been a challenge worldwide. I was actually doing some cyber security work in the last month or so. And I read that this is the fifth consecutive year of that cybersecurity skills gap. So definitely a challenge there, but also if you flip the coin and opportunity. So in terms of some of those challenges that you mentioned, what are some of the key things that organizations and APAC can do to confront and combat those security challenges that are no doubt just only going to grow? >>Yeah, so I think, I think it's about, um, visibility, uh, and getting control, uh, and that's where again, data becomes key to that. So making sure you're capturing the right data, making sure that data is available, um, to your professionals, or if you're using a service provider, making sure that data is captured and available to the service providers, because that is increasingly what we see as the critical step to be able to, when something happens, how do you recover what your meantime to remediation, um, as, as the kind of critical motion. And so that's, again, what we could coming back to is security is a data problem. >>Security is a data problem. Got it. I do want to, uh, unpack a little bit some of the visibility challenges. That is one of the things that was identified. You mentioned that with so much complexity, multi-cloud being, uh, as, as hybrid work, something that's going to stay, what are some of the things that organizations can do and how can Splunk help to remove and mitigate those visibility challenges? >>So we've we just another interesting piece of research, um, it's called the state of data innovation report. Um, that really looked at the way organizations that categorize that data and organizations that actually build a data strategy, um, are actually much more prepared to react, uh, to engage and then to leverage that data for competitive differentiation in their markets. Um, and interestingly 33% of APAC organizations particularly rated their usage of data as better, uh, than, um, the industry average. Um, and 54% of APAC organizations already said they're using technologies like observability, which really helps them innovate around the data. Thinking about that next generation of service they're trying to provide. >>Did you see those are great numbers? It's about a third, um, are, are working on implementing technologies 54% were focused on that observability. Did you see any industries in particular that really leading edge there? Of course, every industry being affected by the pandemic, but I'm just curious if there were any, any ones that stood out >>So many great customer examples that we've got, uh, where we see organizations thinking differently about the way they engage their customers as a result of the digital transformation. Um, for me, one of the ones that stands out is Lenovo, um, you know, 50 billion plus multinational company servicing 180 markets around the world, um, when they looked at their observability approach and tried to understand how they were going to approach troubleshooting, um, when they had issues, if you think about the e-commerce experience for their consumers, um, they were able to reduce the, uh, reduce the downtime, um, and improve, um, the remediation time when there were incidents, uh, even though they had a 300% increase in traffic. And so for the ability for an organization to handle that kind of surge in digital, uh, interactions with their customers and do that to have clear visibility, using metrics, traces, and logs, to understanding exactly what's going on across complex, siloed multi, uh, services, uh, environments was, was critical to the Novo success. And, um, you know, not only from a cybersecurity point of view, but also having real time visibility into their infrastructure became critical as they service their customers. >>Right? One of the things I think we learned Simon during the pandemic, one of the many things is that access to real-time data real-time visibility real time, rather than visibility is no longer a nice to have it's. It was something that in the beginning was sort of organizations needing it to survive. Now organizations needing it to thrive it's that, that real-time visibility is really table stakes for organizations in any industry. >>W we, we kind of saw organizations go through three phases. There was the react phase. Then there was the adapt phase. So, you know, reacting was, first of all, kind of keep my people safe. The adapt phase was how am I going to work? And now we're seeing that next generation, which is really the evolve phase, right? Given the pandemic is still well COVID is still with us. Um, whether it's your, most of the countries, which are treating it more as an endemic or whether you're on the number of the countries still on that journey. And you're in Asia Pacific, we see different levels of, of vaccination status, different levels of, uh, companies starting to open up or countries starting to open up their borders and, um, life getting back to the, what is the new normal, um, all of that is still gonna evolve with a different way of working, moving forward, a different way of engaging our customers and our, our, uh, constituents, if you're a public sector, organization and data is underlying all of that. And for that, where we're kind of excited to be helping some of the largest organizations with that across, across the region, >>Did it is absolutely critical. You know, one of the things that we've also, I think observed in the last year and a half is the, the patients or the fuses of people getting smaller and smaller. So for organizations to have that visibility into data so that they can service their customers, whether it be healthcare or financial services or the tech sector for, for example, the access to that data is critical for brand reputation, reducing churn. And of course, ensuring that the customers are getting what they need to from that data. >>Yeah. A hundred percent. Um, gosh, so many examples across the region. One of the ones that jumps to mind is Flinders university, right? When, when they had to go remote, they had to go virtual, um, 25,000 students overnight, um, suddenly needing to be interacting by digital channels. How do you keep them secure? How do you keep them safe? How do you get insights, uh, in terms of the services that they need to, to protect that student population? >>So if you, if you kind of distill this down into data opportunities for organizations, we'll start with APAC, what do you think the top three data opportunities are of security as a data problem? What are the opportunities to combat that for an organization to be really successful? >>So I think, I think visibility is the first one. So making sure we're capturing the data, making sure we're capturing the right data. Um, and so the ability, uh, not only to capture the data, but to time sequence the data so I can actually understand what's happened. And when, um, the second then is, is, uh, control. Um, so ensuring that the right people have access to the right data, but we, we control that in a way that is specific to our organization. Um, and then lastly compliance. Um, and I think we're seeing a lot of new legislation starts coming around critical infrastructure, um, recognizing the importance of the digital infrastructure to the broader economy, um, and making sure that you're compliant with that critical infrastructure kind of requirements and environments as well as then the traditional regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, um, become critical in that approach. So thinking about those three elements, and then thinking about how do I then use tools like automation and security analytics to really accelerate, um, the capabilities that we have as an organization. >>So observability control compliance, give me the 32nd pitch of how Splunk can help organizations achieve all three of those. >>So observability really is about getting insights into all of your environments. So, uh, it's all about metrics, traces and logs, which is about understanding exactly what's going on with every experience of every digital interaction I have with every customer and the ability to Splunk through that with zero, uh, zero sampling or full fidelity of that data is something we see our customers, particularly Navy, um, security, uh, look for me to it's all about orchestration and analytics. So how do I, how do I get that understanding that, that user behavior understanding the analytics around that, and then how machine learning becomes a critical part of that to help me scale my cyber infrastructure and defend. And then lastly resilience is really the core for all it systems in a digital world. Um, and being able to not only harden deliver resilient services like going over, I was able to do the 300% increase in their web traffic. Um, but also when something does go wrong and be able to remediate quickly become critical as well. >>Right? That quick remediation is because, like I was saying earlier, it's no longer a, if we get hit it's when organizations need to have that resilience baked in. Well, Simon, thank you for joining me, breaking down. Some of those reports what's going on in APAC, some of the trends and also some of the opportunities, security being a data problem, um, and organizations, what they can do to remediate that we appreciate your time. Thanks for having my pleasure for Simon Davies and Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of splunk.com 21.

(fastpaced upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCubes coverage of the power of N and the collaborations between HPE Aruba and Pensando. Where the two companies are setting out to create a new category in network switching. Joining me now is Simon McCormack, who looks after product management at HPE Aruba. Welcome Simon. Good to see you. >> Good morning. Thanks for having me today. >> You're very welcome. So Simon, we've been talking all day about the Aruba switching fabric that you're bringing to market, embedding the Pensando technology. Can you tell us what's the primary value prop that AFC brings to its customers? >> Sure. Aruba Fabric Composer. This is orchestration and management for the Aruba wide switching platform. Primarily for data centers. It does a lot of things. I'll give you three key ones just to get a feel for it. So in data center networking, there's a lot of complex technologies. I'm afraid to say, lease spines, overlays, underlays, EDP and OSPF BGP. I can throw out loads of acronyms for you. Fabric Composer can really simplify through a bunch of intent based workflows, the deployment and management of these fabrics. We can do it either interactively through a UI or fully API driven, if you want to. So it really takes away a lot of the plexity there makes it dead easy to deploy these and that scale. Number two, in a data center, a lot of compute storage hypervisor technologies that you have to interact with the THEO network products. So in Fabric Composer, we built an integration layer into it that interacts with other orchestrators, vCenter, VMware vcenter is a good example of that. So an operator may make changes to vCenter that affect the network. You don't want to call the network team for it. Fabric Composer can automate that network side configuration on the Aruba switch, making your day to operations, insertion of new services, much more simpler. And then finally, number three, because we've got all these capabilities I've just told you about. We actually have a great typology model that we build from it. And we can use that to visualize this virtual to physical network layer that is really powerful for troubleshooting the environment. >> Great? So three things, actually four right. To simplify or integrate and automate. And it's kind of two and two way, I'm going to to call it. and then the visualization piece for troubleshooting. Awesome. What about security policy? How are you thinking about that in this release? >> Yeah, so that's where in this release, we're extending it with the Pensando PSM technologies embedded into the 10K. Now we can use Aruba Fabric Composer to actually orchestrate the policy in addition to the network. So you think about today, Fabric Composer does network primarily. You bring policy into it. You've got one single pane of glass now that does network and policy. It actually provides a really powerful capabilities for operators of different skill sets to be able to manage and orchestrate this environment. >> What about the sort of operational model as it pertains to the network and security, I'm interested in how flexible that is. For instance, if a customer wants to use their own tooling or operational frameworks. What if they want to leverage multi-vendor fabrics like a third-party spine? How do you deal with all of that? >> Yeah, and I think that's, we built that into essentially the DNA of this technology is that we're, we're expecting to often go into brownfield environments. Where they've already got best practices for security and networking. They've already got networking vendors there. The 10K is a very powerful lease switch on its own. We want those lease switches to go in all of these different environments, not just Greenfield. It's really great for Greenfield. And I'm going to explain this a little bit in a few ways. First of all, the technology we have with Aruba fabric Composer and Pensando PSM, you can do a pure operational split between them SecOps, NetOps. A lot of customers that's how they deal with it. They've got the security operations team, network operations team. If they're split, you can use the two tools and make a fantastic product using that. However, if they're not split, and you've got a single policy for it. You can use Aruba Fabric Composer to do both of them. So you've got the options there and we fully embrace that in the architecture of what we built. This extends to multiple layers for the technology build as well. Again, as I said, the 10K's is a lease switch, it can connect to third-party spines. So you could use Fabric Composer to manage this lease Spitch and the policy you could use Fabric Composer just to manage the least switch and connect and interoperate the lease to the spine, or you can do a full Aruba solution, the full Aruba spine and use that operating model. There's one final thing in this area is fabric Composers are a UI based orchestrator, API driven. Some customers love it. Some customers love their CLIs. We fully embrace the operational model where customers still use their own APIs and their own CLIs. So the customer may be using Ansible to automate through API. They can still use that directly to the switch and they can use it to AFC and mix the two. If you talk directly to a switch and change it, Fabric Composer detects it and basically sinks its configuration together. So we can insert all or any part of this solution into existing or new Netflix. >> Yeah, that's nice. Right? Because I mean, so there's the network hard guys, right they, they want that CLI access. So you you're accommodating that. And then as well, being able to bring those SecOps view and the netOps view together is important because let's say, let's face it. A lot of organizations, especially some of the smaller ones, they don't actually have a full blown SecOps team. That's really the netOps responsibility. And so that's nice flexibility, you can handle both worlds. How about segmentation? What a customer is telling you that they want regarding segmentation and how are you guys approaching that? >> Yeah, I mean, it's, it's actually a key feature of what we're doing in this area. Now the iland segmentation generates it's kind of a wide area with many layers to it and we could talk about it for hours. So let me talk briefly about some of the areas we're going into when it comes to the segmentation. But particularly of a compute and virtual type environment. So when you, when you're typically creating policies in today's world, current policies based on addresses, IP addresses, or Mac addresses. You have lots of rules and big lists of addresses. It's really annoying. Customers generally don't talk in addresses. They talk in machines and names of machines. So if you think about what I've already told you with the Fabric Composer, we've already got these hooks in the compute hypervisor layer. So we didn't know about the virtual machines? So it said obviously, a natural extension now for you to be able to create these policies based on the machines. So there's, there's a scale problem in policy distribution at two levels, at the top and the bottom. The top level is your chronic create the policy. You've got this massive distribution addresses. So Fabric Composer can really help you by allowing you to then create these groups, sensible groups, using the names then you can distribute. The 10K solution with the distributed architecture of the bottom layer, now allows us to distribute these policies and rules across your racks within your data center. So it scales really well, but that's one level I've described. You know, you're creating groups of machines with names, so it's easier to define it, but there's auto and automation angle to this as well. You might not want to even create it interactively. Now a lot of customers with VMware vCenter, For example, are tagging the virtual machines. So the tag tells you a group information. Again, Fabric Composer can already get the tag within its database model. So we can use the tag now either to fully automate or use as a hint to creating these groups. So now I've got a really simple way to basically just categorize my machines into the groups so that now I can push rules down onto them. And there's one, one final thing that I just want to tell you before, before we move on. There's, there's often a zero trust model you want to do in the data center for segmentation. Meaning I've got two virtual machines on the same network on the same host. Normally they can talk to each other, nothing's stopping them, but sometimes you want to isolate even those two. You can do it in products like vCenter with PV land technologies. A bit cumbersome to configure on the vSphere side, you got to match it with what you see on the switch side. It's one of those that's a real headache, unless you've got an orchestrator to do it. So Fabric Composer could basically orchestrate this isolated solution. You're now grouping your machines and you're saying they're isolated. We can do the smarts and both of the vCenter side and the switch side, get them in sync, get it all configured. And now the masses can start to do this kind of segmentation at scale. >> Got it. Thank you Simon. Can the Fabric Composer kind of be used as the primary prism for troubleshooting? How do you handle troubleshooting and this art combined architecture? Who, who do I call when there's a problem? How do you approach that? >> Well, definitely start by calling me or actually call my product first, so fabric Composer. If you're using it, use that as the front tool for what you're going to try and figure out what's going on. There is a global health dashboard. It encompasses networking security policy across the solution, across the fabric. So that's your, tells you what's going on immediately. Down to port stats on what's happening within the physical topology of the network. Down to the end-to-end view, we have in terms of policy connectivity between machines. So Fabric Composer is your first port of call, but we built a solution here that we don't want to hide the pieces underneath it. Any networking guy knows when they're deep troubleshooting networking stuff, they're going to end up with the switch. So you started the orchestrator, but sometimes in the deep troubleshooting, not day-to-day, hopefully. You'll go to the switch and you'll troubleshoot that way. We've got the same technology here with the policy, with the firewall rules, with Pensando PSM. We still fully embrace for deep troubleshooting, go to Pensando PSM. They have really advanced tools in their bag of tricks in the product to give you advanced troubleshooting down to the policy layer. They have a really powerful firewall log capability, where you can search and sort, and see exactly what role is allowing or stopping any traffic going through the environment. And the two orchestrated model, we really like it 'cause it scales really well. It allows Fabric Composer to remain lightweight, PSM focused on the policy orchestration bit. But again, if your that customer that wants to do single pane of glass use Fabric Composer for the standard day-to-day stuff. But you've got the tools there to do the advanced troubleshooting between the different elements that we have within the Pensando and the Aruba tools. >> Yeah, really well thought out. You got the simplification angle nailed, the integration automation we talked about that, the visualization and the topology map, zero trust. And then remediation with deep^ened inspection. Simon, thanks so much for taking us through the announcements. Really appreciate your insights and time today. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. Okay. Keep it right there, this is Dave Vellante for theCube. More content from the HPE Aruba Pensando announcements coming right up. (soothing music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the cubes coverage of the power of N and the collaborations between HPE Aruba and Pensando. Where the two companies are setting out to create a new category in network switching. Joining me now is Simon McCormack, who looks after product management at HPE Aruba. Welcome Simon. Good to see you. >> Good morning. Thanks for having me today. >> You're very welcome. So Simon, we've been talking all day about the Aruba switching fabric that you're bringing to market embedding the Pensando technology. Can you tell us what's the primary value prop that AFC brings to its customers? >> Sure. Aruba fabric composer. This is orchestration and management for the Aruba wide switching platform, primarily for data centers. It does a lot of things. I'll give you three key ones just to get a feel for it. So in data center, networking, there's a lot of complex technologies. I'm afraid to say, lease spines, overlays, underlays, EDPs, OSPs PGP. I can throw out loads of acronyms for you. Fabric composer can really simplify through a bunch of intent based workflows, the deployment and management of these fabrics. We can do it either interactively through a UI or fully API driven if you want to. So it really takes away a lot of the complexity there makes it dead easy to deploy these and that scale. Number two, in a data center, a lot of compute storage hypervisor technologies that you have to interact with with your network products. So in fabric composer, we built an integration layer into it, that interacts with other orchestrators. V-Center, VMware Vcenter is a good example of that. So an operator may make changes to V-Center that affect the network. You don't want to call the network team for it. Fabric composer can automate that network side configuration on the Aruba switch, making your day to operations, insertion of new services, much more simpler. And then finally, number three, because we've got all these capabilities I've just told you about. We actually have a great typology model that we build from it. And we can use that to visualize this virtual to physical network layer that is really powerful for troubleshooting the environment. >> Great, so three things actually for right simplify, you integrate and automate, and it's kind of two and two way I'm going to call it and then the visualization piece for troubleshooting. Awesome. What about security policy? How are you thinking about that in this release? >> Yeah, so that's where in this release, we're extending it with the Persando PSM technologies embedded into the 10 K. Now we can use Aruba fabric composer to actually orchestrate the policy in addition to the network. So you think about today, fabric poser does network primarily you bring policy into it, you've got one single pane of glass now that doesn't network in policy, it actually provides a really powerful capabilities for operators of different skill sets to be able to manage and orchestrate this environment. >> What about the sort of operational model as it pertains to the network and security, I'm interested in how flexible that is. Like for instance, if a customer wants to use their own tooling or operational frameworks or frameworks so what if they want to leverage multi-vendor fabrics like a third-party spine? How do you deal with all of that? >> Yeah, and I think that's, we built that into essentially the DNA of this technology is that where we're expecting to often go into brownfield environments where they've already got best practices for security and networking. They've already got networking vendors there. The 10 K the very powerful lease switch on its own. We want those lease switches to go in all of these different environments, not just Greenfield. It's really great for Greenfield. And I'm going to explain this a little bit in a few ways. First of all, the technology we have with Aruba fabric composer and Pensando PSM, you can do a pure operational split between them. SecOps, NetOps a lot of customers that's how they deal with it. They've got the security operations team network operations team. If they're split, you can use the two tools and make a fantastic product using that. However, they're not split and you've got a single policy for it. You can use Aruba fabric composer to do both of them. So you've got the options there and we fully embrace that in the architecture of what we built. This extends to multiple layers for the technology build as well. Again, as I said, the 10 K's at Leafs, which it can connect to third-party spines. So you could use fabric composer to manage this lead switch and the policy you could use fabric composer just to manage the lease switch and connect and inter-operate the Leaf's to a spine, or you can do a full Aruba solution, the full Rube Leaf spine and use that operating model. There's one final thing in this area is fabri Composers are a UI based orchestrator, API driven. Some customers love it. Some customers that love their CLIs, we fully embrace the operational model where customers still use their own API APIs and their own CLIs. So the customer may be using Ansible to automate through API. They can still use that directly to the switch and they can use it to AFC and mix the two. If you talk directly to a switch and change it, fabric composer detects it and basically sinks its configuration together. So we can insert all or any part of this solution into existing or new Networks. >> Yeah, that's nice. Right? Because I mean, so there's the network hard guys, they want that CLI access, so you you're accommodating that. And then as well, being able to bring those SecOps view and the NetOps view together is important because let's face it. A lot of organizations, especially some of the smaller ones, they don't actually have a full blown SecOps team, that's really the NetOps responsibility. And so that's nice flexibility. You can handle both worlds. How about segmentation? When a customer is telling you that they want regarding segmentation and how are you guys approaching that? >> Yeah, I mean, it's actually a key feature of what we're doing in this area. Now the land segmentation generates it's kind of a wide area with many layers to it and we could talk about it for hours. So let me talk briefly about some of the areas we're going into when it comes to the segmentation, particularly the compute-virtual type environment. So when you, you're typically creating policies in today's world, current policies based on addresses, IP addresses, or Mac addresses. You have lots of rules and big lists of addresses. It's really annoying. Customers generally don't talk in addresses. They talk in machines and names of machines. So if you think about what I've already told you with a fabric composer. We've already got these hooks in the compute hypervisor layer. So what do we know about the virtual machines? So it's undoubtedly a natural extension now for you to be able to create these policies based on the machines. So there's a scale problem in policy distribution, at two levels, at the top and the bottom. The top level is your chronic create the policy. You've got this massive distribution addresses. So fabric composer can really help you by allowing you to then create these groups, sensible groups, using the names. Then you can distribute the 10 K solution with the distributed architecture of the bottom layer, now allows us to distribute these policies and rules across your racks within your data center. So it scales really well, but that's one level I've described. You know, you're creating groups of machines with names, so it's easier to define it, but there's also an automation angle to this as well. You might not want to even create it interactively. A lot of customers with VMware Vcenter for example, are tagging the virtual machines. So the tag tells you a group information. Again, fabric composer can already get the tag within its database model. So we can use the tag now either to fully automate or use as a hint to creating these groups. So now I've got a really simple way to basically just categorize my machines into the groups so that now I can push rules down onto the, and there's one, final thing that I just want to tell you before we move on, There's often a zero trust model you want to do in the data center for segmentation, meaning I've got two virtual machines on the same network on the same host. Normally they can talk to each other, nothing's stopping them, but sometimes you want to isolate even those two. You can do it in products like V-Center with PV land technologies. A bit cumbersome to configure on the VSphere side, you've got to match it with what you see on the switch side. It's one of those, that's a real headache, unless you've got an orchestrator to do it. So fabric composer could basically orchestrate this isolated solution. You're now grouping the machines and you're saying they're isolated. We can do the smarts and both of the center side and the switch side, get them in sync, get it all configured. And now the masses can start to do this kind of segmentation at scale. >> Got it. Thank you Simon. Can the fabric composer kind of be used as the primary prism for troubleshooting? How do you handle troubleshooting and this art combined architecture? Who, who do I call when there's a problem? How do you approach that? >> Well, definitely start by calling me or actually call my product first, so fabric composer. If you're using it, use that as the front tool for what you're going to try and figure out what's going on. There is a global health dashboard. It encompasses networking security policy across the solution, across the fabric. So that's your tells you what's going on immediately, down to port stats on what's happening within the physical topology of the network down to the end to end view, we have in terms of policy connectivity between machines. So fabric composer is your first port of call, but we built a solution here that we don't want to hide the pieces underneath it. Any networking guy knows when they're deep troubleshooting networking stuff, they're going to end up at the switch. So you started the orchestrator, but sometimes in the deep troubleshooting, not day-to-day hopefully, you'll go to the switch and you'll troubleshoot that way. We've got the same technology here with the policy, with the firewall rules, with Pensando PSM, we still fully embrace. For deep troubleshooting, go to Pensando PSM. They have really advanced tools in their bag of tricks in the product to give you advanced troubleshooting down to the policy layer that they have a really powerful firewall log capability, where you can search and sort and see exactly what role is allowing or stopping any traffic going through the environment. And the two orchestrated model, we really like it because it scales really well. It allows fabric composer to remain lightweight, PSM focused on the policy orchestration bit. But again, if you're the customer that wants to do single pane of glass, use fabric composer for the standard day-to-day stuff. But you've got the tools there to do the advanced troubleshooting between the different elements that we have within the Pensando and the Aruber tools. >> Yeah, really well thought out, you get the simplification angle nailed, the integration automation we talked about that, the visualization and a topology map, zero trust, and then remediation with deepened spend inspection. Simon, thanks so much for taking us through the announcements, really appreciate your insights and time today. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. Okay. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. More content from the HPE Aruba Pensando announcements, coming right up. (soft music)

>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of H. P. S. Big customer event. Patrick Moorehead is here of moor insights and strategy is the number one analyst in the research analyst. Business. Patrick. Always a pleasure. Great to see you, >>David. Great to see you too. And I know you're you're up there fighting for that number one spot to. It's great to see you and it's great to see you in the meetings that were in. But it's even more fun to be here on the cube. I love to be on the cube and every once in a while you'll even call me a friend of the cube, >>unquestionably my friend and so and I can't wait second half. I mean you're traveling right now. We're headed to Barcelona to mobile World Congress later on this month. So so we're gonna we're gonna see each other face to face this year. 100%. So looking forward to that. So you know, let's get into it. Um you know, before we get into H. P. E. Let's talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the market. We've got, you know, we we finally, it feels like the on prem guys are finally getting their cloud act together. Um it's maybe taken a while, but we're seeing as a service models emerge. I think it's resonating with customers. The clearly not everything is moving to the cloud. There's this hybrid model emerging. Multi cloud is real despite what, you know, >>some some >>cloud players want to say. And then there's this edges like jump ball, what are you seeing in the marketplace? >>Yeah. Davis, as exciting as ever in. Just to put in perspective, I mean the public cloud has been around for about 10 years and still only 20% around 20% of the data in 20% of the applications are there now will be a very important ones and I'm certainly not a public cloud denier, I never have been, but there are some missing pieces that need to come together. And you know, even five years ago we were debating dave the hybrid cloud. And I feel like when amazon brought out outposts, the conversation was over right now, what you have is cloud native folks building out hybrid and on prem capabilities, you have a classic on, on prem folks building out hybrid and as a service capabilities. And I really think it boils down 22 things. I mean it's, it's wanting to have more flexibility and you know, I hate to use it because it sounds like a marketing word, but agility, the ability to spin up things and spin down things in a very, a quick way. And uh you know what they've learned, The veterans also know, hey, let's do this in a way that doesn't lock us in too much into a certain vendor. And I've been around for a long time. David and I'm a realist too. Well, you have to lock yourself into something. Uh it just depends on what do you want to lock yourself into, but super exciting and what H. P. E. You know, when they further acts in the sea with Green Lake, I think it was four years ago, uh I think really started to stir the pot. >>You know, you mentioned the term cloud denial, but you know, and I feel like the narrative from, I like to determine as I think you should use the term veteran. You know, it's very, they're ours is the only industry patrick where legacy is a pejorative, but so, but the point I want to make is I feel like there's been a lot of sort of fear from the veteran players, but, but I look at it differently, I wonder what your take is. I, I think, I think I calculated that the Capex spending by the big four public clouds including Alibaba last year was $100 billion. That's like a gift to the world. Here we're gonna spend $100 billion like the internet. Here you go build. And so I, and I feel like companies like HP are finally saying, yeah, we're gonna build, we're gonna build a layer and we're gonna hide the complexity and we're gonna add value on top. What do you think about that? >>Yeah. So I think it's now, I wish, I wish the on prem folks like HP, you would have done it 10 years ago, but I don't think anybody expected the cloud to be as big as it's become over the last 10 years. I think we saw companies like salesforce with sas taking off, but I think it is the right direction because there are advantages to having workloads on prem and if you add an as a service capability on top of the top of that, and let's say even do a Coehlo or a managed service, it's pretty close to being similar to the public cloud with the exception, that you can't necessarily swipe a credit card for a bespoke workload if you're a developer and it is a little harder to scale out. But that is the next step in the equation day, which is having, having these folks make capital expenditures, make them in a Polo facility and then put a layer to swipe a credit card and you literally have the public cloud. >>Yeah. So that's, that's a great point. And that's where it's headed, isn't it? Um, so let's, let's talk about the horses on the track. Hp as you mentioned, I didn't realize it was four years ago. I thought it was, wow, That's amazing. So everybody's followed suit. You see, Dallas announced, Cisco has announced, uh, Lenovo was announced, I think IBM as well. So we, so everybody's sort of following suit there. The reality is, is it's taken some time to get this stuff standardized. What are you seeing from, from HP? They've made some additional announcements, discover what's your take on all this. >>Yeah. So HPD was definitely the rabbit here and they were first in the market. It was good to see. First off some of their, Um, announcements on, on how it's going and they talked about $428 billion 1200 customers over 900 partners and 95% retention. And I think that's important. Anybody who's in the lead and remember what aws I used to do with the slide with the amount of customers would just get bigger and bigger and bigger and that's a good way to show momentum. I like the retention part two which is 95%. And I think that that says a lot uh probably the more important announcements that they made is they talked about the G. A. Of some of their solutions on Green Lake and whether it is A. S. A. P. Hana. Ml apps HPC with Francis, VD. I was Citrus and video but they also brought more of what I would call a vertical layer and I'm sure you've seen the vertical ization of all of these cloud and as a service workloads. But what they're doing with Epic, with EMR and looseness, with financial payments and Splunk and intel with data and risk analysis and finally, a full stack for telco five G. One of the biggest secrets and I covered this about five years ago is HPV actually has a full stack that Western european carriers use and they're now extending that to five G. And um, so more horizontal, uh, and, and more vertical. That was the one of the big swipes, uh, that I saw that there was a second though, but maybe we can talk about these. >>Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, so the other piece of that of course is standardization right there there because there was a, there was a, there was a lot of customization leading up to this and everybody sort of, everybody always had some kind of financial game they can play and say, hey, there's an adversary as a service model, but this is definitely more of a standardized scalable move that H P E. Is making with what they call Lighthouse. Right? >>Yeah, that's exactly right. And I've talked to some Green Lake customers and they obviously gave it kudos or they wouldn't have HP wouldn't have served them up and they wouldn't have been buying it. But they did say, um, it took, it took a while, took some paperwork to get it going. It's not 100% of push button, but that's partially because hp allows you to customize the hardware. You want a one off network adapter. Hp says yes, right. You want to integrate a different type of storage? They said yes. But with Green Lake Lighthouse, it's more of a, what you see is what you get, which by the way, is very much like the public cloud or you go to a public cloud product sheet or order sheet. You're picking from a list and you really don't know everything that's underneath the covers, aside from, let's say, the speed of the network, the type of the storage and the amount of the storage you get. You do get to pick between, let's say, an intel processor, Graviton two or an M. D processor. You get to pick your own GPU. But that's pretty much it. And HP Lighthouse, sorry, Green Lake Lighthouse uh is bringing, I think a simplification to Green Lake that it needs to truly scale beyond, let's say the White House customers that HP Yeah, >>Well done. So, you know, and I hear your point about we're 10 years in plus. And to me this is like a mandate. I mean, this is okay, good, good job guys about time. But if I had a, you know, sort of look at the big player, it's like we have an oligopoly here in this, in this business. It's HP, Cisco, you got Dell Lenovo, you've got, you know, IBM, they're all doing this and they all have a different little difference, you know, waste of skin of catch. And your point about simplicity, it seems like HP HP is all in antony's like, okay, here's what we're going to announce that, you know, a while ago. So, and they seem to have done a good job with Wall Street and they got a simple model, you know, Dell is obviously bigger portfolio, much more complicated. IBM is even more complicated than that. I don't know so much about Lenovo and in Cisco of course, has acquired a ton of SAAS companies and sort of they've got a lot of bespoke products that they're trying to put together. So they've got, but they do have SAS models. So each of them is coming at it from a different perspective. How do you think? And so and the other point we got lighthouse, which is sort of Phase one, get product market fit. Phase two now is scale, codify standardized and then phase three is the moat build your unique advantage that protects your business. What do you see as HP ES sort of unique value proposition and moat that they can build longer term. >>That's a great, great question. And let me rattle off kind of what I'm seeing that some of these players here, So Cisco, ironically has sells the most software of any of those players that you mentioned, uh with the exception of IBM um and yeah, C I >>CSDB two. Yeah, >>yeah, they're the they're the number two security player, uh Microsoft, number one, So and I think the evaluation on the street uh indicate that shows that I feel like Dell tech is a very broad play because not only do they have servers, storage, networking insecurity, but they also have Pcs and devices. So it's a it's a scale and end play with a focus on VM ware solutions, not exclusively of course. Uh And um then you've got Lenovo who is just getting into the as a service game and are gosh, they're doing great in hyper scale, they've got scale there vertically integrated. I don't know if if too many people talk about that, but Lenovo does a lot of their own manufacturing and they actually manufacture Netapp storage solutions as well. So yeah, each of these folks brings a different game to the table. I think with h P e, what you're bringing the table is nimble. When HP and HP split, the number one thing that I said was that ah, h P E is going to have to be so much faster than it offsets the scale that Dell technology has and the HBs credit, although there, I don't think we're getting credit for this in the stock market yet. Um and I know you and I are both industry folks, not financial folks, but I think their biggest thing is speed and the ability to move faster. And that is what I've seen as it relates to the moat, which is a unique uh competitive advantage. Quite frankly, I'm still looking for that day uh in in in what that is. And I think in this industry it's nearly impossible. And I would posit that that any, even the cloud folks, if you say, is there something that AWS can do that as your can't if it put it put its mind to it or G C P. I don't think so. I think it's more of a kind of land and expand and I think for H P E. When it comes to high performance computing and I'm not just talking about government installations, I'm talking about product development, drug development. I think that is a landing place where H P. E already does pretty well can come in and expand its footprint. >>You know, that's really interesting um, observations. So, and I would agree with you. It's kind of like, this is a copycat industry. It's like the west coast offense like the NFL, >>so, >>so the moat comes from, you know, brand execution and your other point about when HP and HP split, that was a game changer because all of a sudden you saw companies like them, you always had a long term relationship with H P E, but or HP, but then they came out of the woodworks and started to explode. And so it really opened up opportunities. So it really is a execution, isn't it? But go ahead please. >>Dave if I had to pick something that I think HP HPV needs to always be ahead in as a service and listen you and I both know announcements don't mean delivery, but there is correlation between if you start four years ahead of somebody that other company is going to have to put just, I mean they're going to have to turn that ship and many of its competitors really big ships to be able to get there. So I think what Antonio needs to do is run like hell, right? Because it, it I think it is in the lead and as a service holistically doesn't mean they're going to be there forever, but they have to stay ahead. They have to add more horizontal solutions. They have to add more vertical solutions. And I believe that at some point it does need to invest in some Capex at somebody like Anna Quinn X play credit card swiper on top of that. And Dave, you have the public, you have the public cloud, you don't have all the availability zones, but you have a public cloud. >>Yeah, that's going to happen. I think you're right on. So we see this notion of cloud expanding. It's no longer just remote set of services. Somewhere out in the cloud. It's like you said, outpost was the sort of signal. Okay, We're coming on prem. Clearly the on prem uh, guys are connecting to the cloud. Multi cloud exists, we know this and then there's the edge but but but that brings me to that sort of vision and everybody's laying out of this this this seamless integration hiding the complexity log into my cloud and then life will be good. But the edge is different. Right? It's not just, you know, retail store or a race track. I mean there's the far edge, there's the Tesla car, there's gonna be compute everywhere and that sort of ties into the data. The data flows, you know the real time influencing at the edge ai new semiconductor models. You you came out of the semiconductor industry, you know it inside and out arm is exploding, dominating in the edge with apple and amazon Alexa and things like that. That's really where the action is. So this is a really interesting cocktail and soup that we have going on. How do >>you say? Well, you know, Dave if the data most data, I think one thing most everybody agrees on is that most of the data will be created on the edge, whether that's a moving edge a car, a smartphone or what I call an edge data center without tile flooring. Like that server that's bolted to the wall of Mcdonald's. When you drive through, you can see it versus the walmart. Every walmart has a raised tile floor. It's the edge to economically and performance wise, it doesn't make any sense to send all that data to the mother ships. Okay. And whether that's unproven data center or the giant public cloud, more efficient way is to do the compute at the closest way possible. But what it does, it does bring up challenges. The first challenge is security. If I wanted to, I could walk in and I could take that server off the Mcdonald's or the Shell gas station wall. So I can't do that in a big data center. Okay, so security, physical security is a challenge. The second is you don't have the people to go in there and fix stuff that are qualified. If you have a networking problem that goes wrong in Mcdonald's, there's nobody there that can help uh they can they can help you fix that. So this notion of autonomy and management and not keeping hyper critical data sitting out there and it becomes it becomes a security issue becomes a management issue. Let me talk about the benefits though. The benefits are lower latency. You want you want answers more quickly when that car is driving down the road And it has a 5GV 2 x communication cameras can't see around corners. But that car communicating ahead, that ran into the stop sign can, through Vita X talked to the car behind it and say, hey, something is going on there, you can't go to, you can't go to the big data center in the sky, let's make that happen, that is to be in near real time and that computer has to happen on the edge. So I think this is a tremendous opportunity and ironically the classic on prem guys, they own this, they own this space aside from smartphones of course, but if you look at compute on a light pole, companies like Intel have built complete architecture is to do that, putting compute into five G base stations, heck, I just, there was an announcement this week of google cloud and its gaming solution putting compute in a carrier edge to give lower latency to deliver a better experience. >>Yeah, so there, of course there is no one edge, it's highly fragmented, but I'm interested in your thoughts on kinda whose stack actually can play at the edge. And I've been sort of poking uh H P E about this. And the one thing that comes back consistently is Aruba, we we could take a room but not only to the, to the near edge, but to the far edge. And and that, do you see that as a competitive advantage? >>Oh gosh, yes. I mean, I would say the best acquisition That hp has made in 10 years has been aruba, it's fantastic and they also managed it in the right way. I mean it was part of HB but it was, it was managed a lot more loosely then, you know, a company that might get sucked into the board and I think that paid off tremendously. They're giving Cisco on the edge a absolute run for their money, their first with new technologies, but it's about the solution. What I love about what a ruble looks at is it's looking at entertainment solutions inside of a stadium, a information solution inside of an airport as opposed to just pushing the technology forward. And then when you integrate compute with with with Aruba, I think that's where the real magic happens. Most of the data on a permanent basis is actually video data. And a lot of it's for security, uh for surveillance. And quite frankly, people taking videos off, they're off their smartphones and downloaded video. I I just interviewed the chief network officer of T mobile and their number one bit of data is video, video uploaded, video download. But that's where the magic happens when you put that connectivity and the compute together and you can manage it in a, in an orderly and secure fashion. >>Well, I have you we have a ton of time here, but I I don't pick your brain about intel the future of intel. I know you've been following it quite closely, you always have Intel's fighting a forefront war, you got there battling a. M. D. There, battling your arm slash and video. They're they're taking on TSMC now and in foundry and, and I'll add china for the looming threat there. So what's your prognosis for for intel? >>Yeah, I liked bob the previous Ceo and I think he was doing a lot of of the right things, but I really think that customers and investors and even their ecosystem wanted somebody leading the company with a high degree of technical aptitude and Pat coming, I mean, Pat had a great job at VM or, I mean he had a great run there and I think it is a very positive move. I've never seen the energy at Intel. Probably in the last 10 years that I've seen today. I actually got a chance to talk with Pat. I visited Pat uhh last month and and talk to him about pretty much everything and where he wanted to take the company the way you looked at technology, what was important, what's not important. But I think first off in the world of semiconductors, there are no quick fixes. Okay. Intel has a another two years Before we see what the results are. And I think 2023 for them is gonna be a huge year. But even with all this competition though, Dave they still have close to 85% market share in servers and revenue share for client computing around 90%. Okay. So and they built out there networking business, they build out a storage business um with obtain they have the leading Aid as provider with Mobileye. And and listen I was I was one of Intel's biggest, I was into one of Intel's biggest, I was Intel's biggest customer when I was a compact. I was their biggest competitor at A. M. B. So um I'm not obviously not overly pushing or there's just got to wait and see. They're doing the right things. They have the right strategy. They need to execute. One of the most important things That Intel did is extend their alliance with TSMC. So in 2023 we're going to see Intel compute units these tiles they integrate into the larger chips called S. O. C. S. B. Manufactured by TSMC. Not exclusively, but we could see that. So literally we could have AMG three nanometer on TSMC CPU blocks, competing with intel chips with TSMC three nanometer CPU blocks and it's on with regard to video. I mean in video is one of these companies that just keeps going charging, charging hard and I'm actually meeting with Jensen wang this week and Arm Ceo Simon Segers to talk about this opportunity and that's a company that keeps on moving interestingly enough in video. If the Arm deal does go through will be the largest chip license, see CPU licensee and have the largest CPU footprint on on the planet. So here we have A and D. Who's CPU and Gpu and buying an F. P. G. A company called Xilinx, you have Intel, Cpus, Gpus machine learning accelerators and F. P. G. S and then you've got arms slashing video bit with everything as well. We have three massive ecosystems. They're gonna be colliding here and I think it's gonna be great for competition date. Competition is great. You know, when there's not competition in Cpus and Gpus, we know what happens, right. Uh, the B just does not go on and we start to stagnate. And I did, I do feel like the industry on CPU started to stagnate when intel had no competition. So bring it on. This is gonna be great for for enterprises then customers to, and then, oh, by the way, the custom Chip providers, WS has created no less than 15 custom semiconductors started with networking uh, and, and nitro and building out an edge that surrounded the general compute and then it moved to Inferential to for inference trainee um, is about to come out for training Graviton and gravitas to for general purpose CPU and then you've got Apple. So innovation is huge and you know, I love to always make fun of the software is eating the world. I always say yeah but has to run on something. And so I think the combination of semiconductors, software and cloud is just really a magical combination. >>Real quick handicap the video arm acquisition. What what are the odds that that they will be successful? They say it's on track. You've got to 2 to 13 to 1 10 to 1. >>I say 75%. Yes 25%. No China is always the has been the odd odd man out for the last three years. They scuttled the qualcomm NXP deal. You just don't know what china is going to do. I think the Eu with some conditions is gonna let this fly. I think the U. S. Is absolutely going to let this fly. And even though the I. P. Will still stay over in the UK, I think the U. S. Wants to see, wants to see this happen. Japan and Korea. I think we'll allow this china is the odd man out. >>In a word, the future of H. P. E. Is blank >>as a service >>patrick Moorehead. Always a pleasure my friend. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming back in the cube. >>Yeah, Thanks for having me on. I appreciate that. >>Everybody stay tuned for more great coverage from HP discover 21 this is day Volonte for the cube. The leader and enterprise tech coverage. We'll be right back. >>Mm.

>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of H. P. S. Big customer event. Patrick Moorehead is here of moor insights and strategy is the number one analyst in the research analyst. Business. Patrick. Always a pleasure. Great to see you, >>David. Great to see you too. And I know you're you're up there fighting for that number one spot to. It's great to see you and it's great to see you in the meetings that were in. But it's even more fun to be here on the cube. I love to be on the cube and every once in a while you'll even call me a friend of the cube, >>unquestionably my friend and so and I can't wait second half. I mean you're traveling right now. We're headed to Barcelona to mobile World Congress later on this month. So so we're gonna we're gonna see each other face to face this year. 100%. So looking forward to that. So, you know, let's get into it. Um you know, before we get into H. P. E. Let's talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the market. We've got, you know, we we we finally, it feels like the on prem guys are finally getting their cloud act together. Um, it's maybe taken a while, but we're seeing as a service models emerge. I think it's resonating with customers. The clearly not everything is moving to the cloud. There's this hybrid model emerging. Multi cloud is real despite what, you know, >>some some >>cloud players want to say. And then there's this edges like jump ball, what are you seeing in the marketplace? >>Yeah. Davis, as exciting as ever in. Just to put in perspective, I mean, the public cloud has been around for about 10 years and still only 20%. Around 20% of the data in 20% of the applications are there now, albeit very important ones. And I'm certainly not a public cloud denier, I never have been, but there are some missing pieces that need to come together. And you know, even five years ago we were debating dave the hybrid cloud and I feel like when Amazon brought out outposts, the conversation was over right now, what you have is cloud native folks building out hybrid and on prem capabilities, you have the classic on prem folks building out hybrid and as a service capabilities. And I really think it boils down 22 things. I mean it's wanting to have more flexibility and you know, I hate to use it because it sounds like a marketing word, but agility, the ability to spin up things and spin down things in a very quick way. And uh, you know what they've learned. The veterans also know, hey, let's do this in a way that doesn't lock us in too much into a certain vendor. And I've been around for a long time. David and I'm a realist too. Well, you have to lock yourself into something. It just depends on what do you want to lock yourself into, but super exciting. And what H. P. E. When they threw the acts in the sea with Green Lake, I think it was four years ago, I think really started to stir the pot. >>You know, you mentioned the term cloud denial, but you know, and I feel like the narrative from, I like to determine is I think you should use the term veteran. You know, it's very, they're ours is the only industry patrick where legacy is a pejorative, but but but so but the point I want to make is I feel like there's been a lot of sort of fear from the veteran players, but I look at it differently. I wonder what you're taking. I think, I think, I think I calculated that the Capex spending by the big four public clouds including Alibaba last year was $100 billion. That's like a gift to the world. Here, we're going to spend $100 billion like the internet here you go build. And and so I, and I feel like companies like HP are finally saying, yeah, we're gonna build, we're gonna build a layer and we're gonna hide the complexity and we're gonna add value on top. What do you think about that? >>Yeah. So I think it's now, I wish, I wish the on prem folks like HP, you would have done it 10 years ago, but I don't think anybody expected the cloud to be as big as it's become over the last 10 years. I think we saw companies like salesforce with sas taking off, but I think it is the right direction because there are advantages to having workloads on prem and if you add an as a service capability on top of the top of that, and let's say even do a Coehlo or a managed service, it's pretty close to being similar to the public cloud with the exception, that you can't necessarily swipe a credit card for a bespoke workload if you're a developer and it is a little harder to scale out. But that is the next step in the equation day, which is having, having these folks make capital expenditures, make them in a polo facility and then put a layer to swipe a credit card and you literally have the public cloud. >>Yeah. So that's, that's a great point and that's where it's headed, isn't it? Um, so let's, let's talk about the horses on the track. Hp. As you mentioned, I didn't realize it was four years ago. I thought it was, wow, That's amazing. So everybody's followed suit. You see, Dallas announced, Cisco has announced, uh, Lenovo was announced, I think IBM as well. So we, so everybody started following suit there. The reality is, is it's taken some time to get this stuff standardized. What are you seeing from, from HP? They've made some additional announcements, discover what's your take on all this. >>Yeah. So HPD was definitely the rabbit here and they were first in the market. It was good to see, first off some of their, Um, announcements on, on how it's going. And they talked about 4, $28 billion 1200 customers over 900 partners and 95% retention. And I think that's important anybody who's in the lead and remember what Aws used to do with the slide with the amount of customers would just get bigger and bigger and bigger and that's a good way to show momentum. I like the retention part two which is 95%. And I think that that says a lot uh probably the more important announcements that they made is they talked about the G. A. Of some of their solutions on Green Lake and whether it was S. A. P. Hana Ml apps HPC with Francis V. I was Citrus in video but they also brought more of what I would call a vertical layer and I'm sure you've seen the vertical ization of all of these cloud and as a service workloads. But what they're doing with Epic with EMR and looseness, with financial payments and Splunk and intel with data and risk analysis and finally, a full stack for telco five G. One of the biggest secrets and I covered this about five years ago is HPV actually has a full stack that western european carriers use and they're now extending that to five G. And um, so more horizontal uh and and more vertical. That was the one of the big swipes uh that I saw that there was a second though, but maybe we can talk about these. >>Yeah. Okay, Okay. So, so the other piece of that of course is standardization right there there because there was a, there was, there was a lot of customization leading up to this and everybody sort of, everybody always had some kind of financial game they can play and say, hey, there's an adversary as a service model, but this is definitely more of a standardized scalable move that H P E. Is making with what they call Lighthouse, Right? >>Yeah, that's exactly right. And I've talked to some Green Lake customers and they obviously gave it kudos or they wouldn't have HP wouldn't have served them up and they wouldn't have been buying it. But they did say, um, it took, it took a while, took some paperwork to get it going. It's not 100% of push button, but that's partially because hp allows you to customize the hardware. You want a one off network adapter. Hp says yes, right. You want to integrate a different type of storage? They said yes. But with Green Lake Lighthouse, it's more of a, what you see is what you get, which by the way is very much like the public cloud or you go to a public cloud product sheet or order sheet. You're picking from a list and you really don't know everything that's underneath the covers, aside from, let's say the speed of the network, the type of the storage and the amount of the storage you get. You do get to pick between, let's say, an intel processor, Graviton two or an M. D processor. You get to pick your own GPU. But that's pretty much it. And HP Lighthouse, sorry, Green Lake Lighthouse uh, is bringing, I think a simplification to Green Lake that it needs to truly scale beyond, let's say, the white house customers at HP. Yeah, >>Well done. So, you know, and I hear your point about 10 years in, you know, plus and to me this is like a mandate. I mean, this is okay. Good, good job guys about time. But if I had a, you know, sort of look at the big players, like, can we have an oligopoly here in this, in this business? It's HP, Cisco, you got Dell Lenovo, you've got, you know, IBM, they're all doing this and they all have a different little difference, you know, waste of skin of catch. And your point about simplicity, it seems like HP HP is all in Antonio's like, okay, here's what we're going to announce that, you know, while ago, so, and they seem to have done a good job with Wall Street and they get a simple model, you know, Dell's obviously bigger portfolio, much more complicated. IBM is even more complicated than that. I don't know so much about Lenovo and in Cisco of course, has acquired a ton of SAAS companies and sort of they've got a lot of bespoke products that they're trying to put together, so they've got, but they do have SAS models. So each of them is coming at it from a different perspective. How do you think? And so and the other point we got lighthouse, which is sort of Phase one, get product market fit. Phase two now is scale codify standardized and then phase three is the moat build your unique advantage that protects your business. What do you see as HP? Es sort of unique value proposition and moat that they can build longer term. >>That's a great, great question. And let me rattle off kind of what I'm seeing that some of these these players here. So Cisco, ironically, has sells the most software of any of those players that you mentioned, uh with the exception of IBM. Um, and yeah, C >>ICSDB two. Yeah, >>yeah, they're the they're the number two security player, uh, Microsoft, number one. So and I think the evaluation on the street uh indicate that shows that I feel like uh Deltek is a is a very broad play because not only do they have servers, storage, networking and security, but they also have Pcs and devices, so it's a it's a scale and end play with a focus on VM ware solutions, not exclusively, of course. Uh And um then you've got Lenovo who is just getting into the as a service game and are gosh, they're doing great in hyper scale, they've got scale there vertically integrated. I don't know if if too many people talk about that, but Lenovo does a lot of their own manufacturing and they actually manufacture Netapp storage solutions as well. So yeah, each of these folks brings a different game to the table, I think with h P E, what your bring to the table is nimble. When HP and HP split, the number one thing that I said was that uh huh H P E is going to have to be so much faster than it offsets the scale that Dell technology has and the HBs credit, although there, I don't think we're getting credit for this in the stock market yet. Um, and I know you and I are both industry folks, not financial folks, but I think their biggest thing is speed and the ability to move faster and that is what I've seen as it relates to the moat, which is a unique uh, competitive advantage. Quite frankly, I'm still looking for that day in, in, in what that is and I think in this industry it's nearly impossible and I would posit that that any, even the cloud folks, if you say, is there something that AWS can do that Azure can't, if it put it put its mind to it or G C P. I don't think so. I think it's more of a kind of land and expand and I think for H P E, when it comes to high performance computing and I'm not just talking about government installations, I'm talking about product development, drug development, I think that is a landing place where H P E already does pretty well can come in and expand its footprint, >>you know, that's really interesting um, observations. So, and I would agree with you, it's kind of like, this is a copycat industry, it's like the west coast offense, like the NFL >>and >>so, so the moat comes from, you know, brand execution and your other point about when HP and HP split, that was a game changer, because all of a sudden you saw companies like them, you always had a long term relationship with H P E but or HP, but then they came out of the woodworks and started to explode. And so it really opened up opportunities. So it really >>is an execution, >>isn't it? But go ahead, please >>Dave if I had to pick something that I think HP HPV needs to always be ahead and as a service and listen, you know, I both know announcements don't mean delivery, but there is correlation between if you start four years ahead of somebody that other company is going to have to put just, I mean they're gonna have to turn that ship and many of its competitors really big ships to be able to get there. So I think what Antonio needs to do is run like hell, right, Because it, it, I think it is in the lead and as a service holistically doesn't mean they're going to be there forever, but they have to stay ahead. They have to add more horizontal solutions. They have to add more vertical solutions. And I believe that at some point it does need to invest in some Capex at somebody like ANna Quinn x play credit card swiper on top of that. And Dave, you have the public, you have the public cloud, you don't have all the availability zones, but you have a public cloud. >>Yeah, that's going to happen. I think you're right on. So we see this notion of cloud expanding. It's no longer just remote set of services. Somewhere out in the cloud. It's as you said, outpost was the sort of signal. Okay, We're coming on prem clearly the on prem, uh, guys are connecting to the cloud. Multi cloud exists, we know this and then there's the edge but but but that brings me to that sort of vision and everybody's laying out of this this this seamless integration hiding the complexity log into my cloud and then life will be good. But the edge is different. Right? It's not just, you know, retail store or a race track. I mean there's the far edge, there's the Tesla car, there's gonna be compute everywhere. And that sort of ties into the data. The data flows, you know the real time influencing at the edge ai new semiconductor models. You you came out of the semiconductor industry, you know it inside and out arm is exploding is dominating in the edge with with with apple and amazon Alexa and things like that. That's really where the action is. So this is a really interesting cocktail and soup that we have going on. How do you >>say? Well, you know, Dave if the data most data, I think one thing most everybody agrees on is that most of the data will be created on the edge. Whether that's a moving edge a car, a smartphone or what I call an edge data center without tile flooring. Like that server that's bolted to the wall of Mcdonald's. When you drive through, you can see it versus the walmart. Every walmart has a raised tile floor. It's the edge to economically and performance wise, it doesn't make any sense to send all that data to the mother ships. Okay. And whether that's unproven data center or the giant public cloud, more efficient way is to do the compute at the closest way possible. But what it does, it does bring up challenges. The first challenge is security. If I wanted to, I could walk in and I could take that server off the Mcdonald's or the Shell gas station wall. So I can't do that in a big data center. Okay, so security, Physical security is a challenge. The second is you don't have the people to go in there and fix stuff that are qualified. If you have a networking problem that goes wrong and Mcdonald's, there's nobody there that can help uh, they can they can help you fix that. So this notion of autonomy and management and not keeping hyper critical data sitting out there and it becomes it becomes a security issue becomes a management issue. Let me talk about the benefits though. The benefits are lower latency. You want you want answers more quickly when that car is driving down the road and it has a five G V two X communication cameras can't see around corners, but that car communicating ahead, that ran into the stop sign, can I through vi to X. Talk to the car behind it and say, hey, something is going on there, you can't go to, you can't go to the big data center in the sky to make that happen, that is to be in near real time and that computer has to happen on the edge. So I think this is a tremendous opportunity and ironically the classic on prem guys, they own this, they own this space aside from smartphones of course, but if you look at compute on a light pole, companies like Intel have built Complete architectures to do that, putting compute into 5G base stations. Heck, I just, there was an announcement this week of google cloud in its gaming solution putting compute in a carrier edge to give lower latency to deliver a better experience. >>Yeah, so there, of course there is no one edge, it's highly fragmented, but I'm interested in your thoughts on kind of who's stack actually can play at the edge. And I've been sort of poking uh H P E about this. And the one thing that comes back consistently is Aruba, we we can take a room but not only to the, to the near edge, but to the far edge. And and that, do you see that as a competitive advantage? >>Oh gosh, yes. I mean, I would say the best acquisition That hp has made in 10 years has been aruba it's fantastic. And they also managed it in the right way. I mean, it was part of HB but it was it was managed a lot more loosely then, you know, a company that might get sucked into the board. And I think that paid off tremendously. They're giving Cisco on the edge a absolute run for their money, their first with new technologies. But it's about the solution. What I love about what a ruble looks at is it's looking at entertainment solutions inside of a stadium, um a information solution inside of an airport as opposed to just pushing the technology forward. And then when you integrate compute with with with Aruba, I think that's where the real magic happens. Most of the data on a permanent basis is actually video data. And a lot of it's for security uh for surveillance. And quite frankly, people taking videos off, they're off their smartphones and downloading video. I I just interviewed the chief network officer of T mobile and their number one bit of data is video, video uploaded, video download. But that's where the magic happens when you put that connectivity and the compute together and you can manage it in a, in an orderly and secure fashion >>while I have you, we have a ton of time here, but I I don't pick your brain about intel, the future of intel. I know you've been following it quite closely, you always have Intel's fighting a forefront war. You got there, battling A. M. D. There, battling your arm slash and video. They're they're taking on TSMC now and in foundry and, and I'll add china for the looming threat there. So what's your prognosis for for intel? >>Yeah, I liked bob the previous Ceo and I think he was doing a lot of of the right things, but I really think that customers and investors and even their ecosystem wanted somebody leading the company with a high degree of technical aptitude and Pat coming, I mean, Pat had a great job at VM or, I mean, he had a great run there and I think it is a very positive move. I've never seen the energy At Intel probably in the last 10 years that I've seen today. I actually got a chance to talk with pat. I visited pat uhh last month and and talk to him about pretty much everything and where he wanted to take the company the way you looked at technology, what was important, what's not important. But I think first off in the world of semiconductors, there are no quick fixes. Okay. Intel has a another two years Before we see what the results are. And I think 2023 for them is gonna be a huge year. But even with all this competition though, Dave they still have close to 85% market share in servers and revenue share for client computing around 90%. Okay. So and they've built out there networking business, they build out a storage business um with with obtain they have the leading Aid as provider with Mobileye. And and listen I was I was one of Intel's biggest, I was into one of Intel's biggest, I was Intel's biggest customer when I was a compact. I was their biggest competitor at AMG. So um I'm not obviously not overly pushing or there's just got to wait and see. They're doing the right things. They have the right strategy. They need to execute. One of the most important things That Intel did is extend their alliance with TSMC. So in 2023 we're going to see Intel compute units these tiles, they integrate into the larger chips called S. O. C S B. Manufactured by TSMC. Not exclusively, but we could see that. So literally we could have AMG three nanometer on TSMC CPU blocks, competing with intel chips with TSMC three nanometer CPU blocks and it's on with regard to video. I mean in video is one of these companies that just keeps going charging, charging hard and I'm actually meeting with Jensen wang this week and Arms Ceo Simon Segers to talk about this opportunity and that's a company that keeps on moving interestingly enough in video. If the arm deal does go through will be the largest chip license, see CPU licensee and have the largest CPU footprint on the planet. So here we have AMG who's CPU and Gpu and buying an F. P. G. A company called Xilinx, you have Intel, Cpus, Gpus machine learning accelerators and F. P. G. S. And then you've got arms slashing video bit with everything as well. We have three massive ecosystems. They're gonna be colliding here and I think it's gonna be great for competition. Date. Competition is great. You know, when there's not competition in CPUs and Gpus, we know what happens right. Uh, the beach just does not go on and we start to stagnate. And I did, I do feel like the industry on CPU started to stagnate when intel had no competition. So bring it on. This is gonna be great for for enterprises then customers to and then, oh, by the way, you have the custom Chip providers. WS has created no less than 15 custom semiconductors started with networking and nitro and building out an edge that surrounded the general computer. And then it moved to Inferential for inference trainee um, is about to come out for training Graviton and Gravitas to for general purpose CPU and then you've got apple. So innovation is huge and I love to always make fun of the software is eating the world. I always say yeah but has to run on something. And so I think the combination of semiconductors software and cloud is just really a magical combination. >>Real quick handicap the video arm acquisition. What what are the odds that that they will be successful? They say it's on track. You got a 2 to 13 to 1 10 to 1. >>I say 75%. Yes 25%. No China is always the has been the odd odd man out for the last three years. They scuttled the Qualcomm NXp deal. You just don't know what china is going to do. I think the EU with some conditions is going to let this fly. I think the U. S. Is absolutely going to let this fly. And even though the I. P. Will still stay over in the UK, I think the U. S. Wants to see wants to see this happen, Japan and Korea I think we'll allow this china is the odd man out. >>In a word, the future of h p. E is blank >>as a service >>patrick Moorehead. Always a pleasure. My friend. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming back in the cube. >>Yeah, Thanks for having me on. I appreciate that. >>Everybody stay tuned for more great coverage from HP discover 21 this is day Volonte for the cube. The leader and enterprise tech coverage. We'll be right back.

>>mhm Yes. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of dr khan 2021 virtual. I'm john Kerry hosted the Q got a great cube segment here. Simon Maple Field C T Oh it's technique. Great company security shifting left great to have you on Simon. Thanks for thanks for stopping by >>absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. >>So you guys were on last year the big partnership with DR Conn remember that interview vividly because it was really the beginning at the beginning but really come to me the mainstream of shifting left as devops. It's not been it's been around for a while. But as a matter of practice as containers have been going super mainstream. Super ballistic in the developer community then you're seeing what's happening. It's containers everywhere. Security Now dev sec apps is the standard. So devops great infrastructure as code. We all know that but now it's def sec ops is standard. This is the real deal. Give us the update on what's going on with sneak. >>Absolutely, yeah. And you know, we're still tireless in our approach of trying to get make sure developers don't just have the visibility of security but are very much empowered in terms of actually fixing issues and secure development is what we're really striving for. So yeah, the update, we're still very, very deep into a partnership with DACA. We have updates on DR desktop which allows developers to scan the containers on the command line, providing developers that really fast feedback as as early as possible. We also have uh, you know, new updates and support for running Docker scan on Lennox. Um, and yeah, you know, we're still there on the Docker hub and providing that security insights um, to, to users who are going to Docker hub to grab their images. >>Well, for the folks watching maybe for the first time, the sneak Docker partnership, we went in great detail last year was the big reveal why Docker and sneak partnership, what is the evolution of that partnership over the year? They speak highly of you guys as a developer partner. Why Doctor? What's the evolution looked like? >>It's a it's a really great question. And I think, you know, when you look at the combination of DACA and sneak well actually let's take let's take each as an individual. Both companies are very, very developer focused. First of all, right, so our goals and will be strife or what we what we tirelessly spend their time doing is creating features and creating, creating an environment in which a developer you can do what they need to do as easily as possible. And that, you know, everyone says they want to be developer friendly, They want to be developer focused. But very few companies can achieve. And you look at a company like doctor, you're a company like sneak it really, really provides that developer with the developer experience that they need to actually get things done. Um, and it's not just about being in a place that a developer exists. It's not enough to do that. You need to provide a developer with that experience. So what we wanted to do was when we saw doctor and extremely developer friendly environment and a developer friendly company, when we saw the opportunity there to partner with Yoko, we wanted to provide our security developer friendliness and developer experience into an already developed a friendly tool. So what the partnership provides is the ease of, you know, deploying code in a container combined with the ease of testing your code for security issues and fixing security issues in your code and your container and pulling it together in one place. Now, one of the things which we as a as a security company um pride ourselves on is actually not necessarily saying we provide security tools. One of what our favorite way of saying is we're a developer tooling company. So we provide tools that are four developers now in doing that. It's important you go to where the developers are and developers on DACA are obviously in places like the Docker hub or the Docker Cli. And so it's important for us to embed that behavior and that ease of use inside Dhaka for us to have that uh that that flow. So the developer doesn't need to leave the Docker Cli developer that doesn't need to leave Docker hub in order to see that data. If you want to go deeper, then there are probably easier ways to find that data perhaps with sneak or on the sneak site or something like that. But the core is to get that insight to get that visibility and to get that remediation, you can see that directly in in the in the Dhaka environment. And so that's what makes the relationship so so powerful. The fact that you combine everything together and you do it at source >>and doing it at the point of code. >>Writing >>code is one of the big things I've always liked about the value proposition is simple shift left. Um So let's just step back for a second. I got to ask you this question because this I wanted to make sure we get this on the table. What are the main challenges uh and needs to, developers have with container security? What are you seeing as the main top uh A few things that they need to have right now for the challenges uh with container security? >>Yeah, it's a it's a very good question. And I think to answer that, I think we need to um we need to think of it in a couple of ways. First of all, you've just got developers security uh in general, across containers. Um And the that in itself is there are different levels at which developers engage with containers. Um In some organizations, you have security teams that are very stringent in terms of what developers can and can't do in other organizations. It's very much the developer that that chooses their environment, chooses their parent image, et cetera. And so there when a developer has many, many choices in which they need to need to decide on, some of those choices will lead to more issues, more risk. And when we look at a cloud native environment, um uh Let's take let's take a node uh image as an example, the number of different uh images tags you can choose from as a developer. It's you know, there are hundreds, probably thousands. That you can actually you can actually choose. What is the developer gonna do? Well, are they going to just copy paste from another doctor file, for example, most likely. What if there are issues in that docker file? They're just gonna copy paste that across mis configurations that exist. Not because the developer is making the wrong decision, but because the developer very often doesn't necessarily know that they need to add a specific directive in. Uh So it's not necessarily what you add in a conflict file, but it's very often what you admit. So there are a couple of things I would say from a developer point of view that are important when we think about cloud security, the first one is just that knowledge that understanding what they need to do, why they need to do it. Secure development doesn't need to be, doesn't mean they need to be deep in security. It means they need to understand how they can develop securely and what what the best decisions that could come from guard rails, from the security team that they provide the development team to offer. But that's the that's an important error of secure development. The second thing and I think one of the most important things is understanding or not understanding necessarily, but having the information to get an act on those things early. So we know the length of time that developers are uh working on a branch or working on um some some code changes that is reducing more and more and more so that we can push to production very, very quickly. Um What we need to do is make sure that as a developer is making their changes, they can make the right decision at the right time and they have the right information at that time. And a lot of this could be getting information from tools, could be getting information from your team where it could be getting information from your production environments and having that information early is extremely important to make. That decision. May be in isolation with your team in an autonomous way or with advice from the security team. But I would say those are the two things having that information that will allow you to make that action, that positive change. Um uh and and yeah, understanding and having that knowledge about how you can develop security. >>All right. So I have a security thing. So I'm a development team and by the way, this whole team's thing is a huge deal. I think we'll get to that. I want to come back to that in a second but just throw this out there. Got containers, got some security, it's out there and you got kubernetes clusters where containers are coming and going. Sometimes containers could have malware in them. Um and and this is, I've heard this out and about how do how that happens off container or off process? How do you know about it? Is that infected by someone else? I mean is it gonna be protected? How does the development team once it's released into the wild, so to speak. Not to be like that, but you get the idea, it's like, okay, I'm concerned off process this containers flying around. What is it How do you track all >>and you know, there's a there's a few things here that are kind of like potential potential areas that, you know, we can trip up when we think about malware that's running um there are certain things that we need to that we need to consider and what we're really looking at here are kind of, what do we have in place in the runtime that can kind of detect these issues are happening? How do we block that? And how do you provide that information back to the developer? The area that I think is, and that is very, very important in order to in order to be able to identify monitor that those environments and then feed that back. So that that that's the kind of thing that can be that can be fixed. Another aspect is, is the static issues and the static issues whether that's in your os in your OS packages, for example, that could be key binaries that exist in your in your in your docker container out the box as well or of course in your application, these are again, areas that are extremely important to detect and they can be detected very very early. So some things, you know, if it's malware in a package that has been identified as malware then absolutely. That can be that can be tracked very very early. Sometimes these things need to be detected a little bit later as well. But yeah, different tools for different for different environments and wear sneak is really focused. Is this static analysis as early as possible. >>Great, great insight there. Thanks for sharing that certainly. Certainly important. And you know, some companies classes are locked down and all of sudden incomes, you know, some some malware from a container, people worried about that. So I want to bring that up. Uh The other thing I want to ask you is this idea of end to end security um and this is a team formation thing we're seeing where modern teams have essentially visibility of their workload and to end. So this is a huge topic. And then by the way it might integrate their their app might integrate with other processes to that's great for containers as well and observe ability and microservices. So this is the trend. What's in it for the developer? If I work with sneak and docker, what benefits do I get if I want to go down that road of having these teams began to end, but I want the security built in. >>Mhm. Yeah, really, really important. And I think what's what's most important there is if we don't look end to end, there are component views and there are applications. If we don't look into end, we could have our development team fixing things that realistically aren't in production anyway or aren't the key risks that are potentially hurting us in our production environment. So it's important to have that end to end of you so that we have the right insights and can prioritize what we need to identify and look at early. Um, so I think, I think that visibility into end is extremely important. If we think about who, who is re fixing uh certain issues, again, this is gonna depend from dog to walk, but what we're seeing more and more is this becoming a developer lead initiative to not just find or be given that information, but ultimately fixed. They're getting more and more responsible for DR files for for I see for for their application code as well. So one of the areas which we've looked into as well is identifying and actually running in cuba Netease workloads to identify where the most important areas that a developer needs to look at and this is all about prioritization. So, you know, if the developer has just a component view and they have 100 different images, 100 different kubernetes conflicts, you know, et cetera. Where do they prioritize, where do they spend their time? They shouldn't consider everything equal. So this identification of where the workloads are running and what um is causing you the most risk as a business and as an organization, that is the data. That can be directly fed back into your, your your vulnerability data and then you can prioritize based on the kubernetes workloads that are in your production and that can be fed directly into the results in the dashboards. That's neat. Can provide you as well. So that end to end story really provides the context you need in order to not just develop securely, but act and action issues in a proper way. >>That's a great point. Context matters here because making it easy to do the right thing as early as possible, the right time is totally an efficiency productivity gain, you see in that that's clearly what people want. It's a great formula, success, reduce the time it takes to do something, reduced the steps and make it easy. Right, come on, that's a that's a formula. Okay, so I gotta bring that to the next level. When I ask you specifically around automation, this is one the hot topic and def sec ops, automation is part of it. You got scale, you got speed, you've got a I machine learning, you go out of all these new things. Microservices, how do you guys fit into the automation story? >>It's a great question. And you know, one of the recent reports that we that we did based on a survey data this year called the state of a state of cloud, native applications security. We we asked the question how automated our people in their in their deployment pipelines and we found some really strong correlations between value from a security point of view um in terms of in terms of having that automation in it, if I can take you through a couple of them and then I'll address that question about how we can be automated in that. So what we found is a really strong correlation as you would expect with security testing in ci in your source code repositories and all the way through the deployment ci and source code were the two of the most most well tested areas across the pipeline. However the most automated teams were twice as likely to test in I. D. S. And testing your CLS in local development. And now those are areas that are really hard to automate if at all because it's developers running running their cli developers running and testing in their I. D. So the having a full automation and full uh proper testing throughout the sclc actually encourages and and makes developers test more in their development environment. I'm not saying there's causation there but there's definite correlation. A couple of other things that this pushes is um Much much more likely to test daily or continuously being automated as you would expect because it's part of the bills as part of your monitoring. But crucially uh 73% of our respondents were able to fix a critical issue in less than a week as opposed to just over 30% of people that were not automated, so almost double people are More likely to fix within a week. 36% of people who are automated can fix a critical security issue in less than a day as opposed to 8% of people who aren't automated. So really strong data that correlates being automated with being able to react now. If you look at something like Sneak what if our um goals of obviously being developer friendly developer first and being able to integrate where developers are and throughout the pipeline we want to test everywhere and often. Okay, so we start as far left as we can um integrating into, you know, CLS integrating into Docker hub, integrating into into doctors can so at the command line you type in doctors can you get sneak embedded in DHAKA desktop to provide you those results so as early as possible, you get that data then all the way through to to uh get reposed providing that testing and automatically testing and importing results from there as well as as well as other repositories, container repositories, being at a poor from there and test then going into ci being able to run container tests in C I to make sure we're not regressing and to choose what we want to do their whether we break, whether we continue with with raising an issue or something like that, and then continuing beyond that into production. So we can monitor tests and automatically send pull requests, etcetera. As and when new issues or new fixes occur. So it's about integrating at every single stage, but providing some kind of action. So, for example, in our ui we provide the ability to say this is the base level you should be or could be at, it will reduce your number of vulnerabilities by X and as a result you're going to be that much more secure that action ability across the pipeline. >>That's a great, great data dump, that's a masterclass right there on automation. Thanks for sharing that sign. I appreciate it. I gotta ask you the next question that comes to my mind because I think this is kind of the dots connect for the customer is okay. I love this kind of hyper focus on containers and security. You guys are all over it, shift left as far as possible, be there all the time, test, test, test all through the life cycle of the code. Well, the one thing that is popping up as a huge growth areas, obviously hybrid cloud devops across both environments and the edge, whether it's five G industrial or intelligent edge, you're gonna have kubernetes clusters at the edge now. So you've got containers. The relationship to kubernetes and then ultimately cloud native work clothes at, say, the edge, which has data has containers. So there's a lot of stuff going on all over the place. What's your, what's your comment there for customer says, Hey, you know, I got, this is my architecture that's happening to me now. I'm building it out. We're comfortable with kubernetes put in containers everywhere, even on the edge how to sneak fit into that story. >>Yeah, really, really great question. And I think, you know, a lot of what we're doing right now is looking at a developer platform. So we care about, we care about everything that a developer can check in. Okay, so we care about get, we care about the repositories, we care about the artifact. So um, if you look at the expansion of our platform today, we've gone from code that people uh, third party libraries that people test. We added containers. We've also added infrastructure as code. So Cuban eighties conflicts, Terror form scripts and things like that. We're we're able to look at everything that the developer touches from their code with sneak code all the way through to your to your container. And I see, so I think, you know, as we see more and more of this pushing out into the edge, cuba Nitties conflict that that, you know, controls a lot of that. So much of this is now going to be or not going to be, but so much of the environment that we need to look at is in the configurations or the MIS configurations in that in those deployment scripts, um, these are some of the areas which which we care a lot about in terms of trying to identify those vulnerabilities, those miS configurations that exist within within those scripts. So I can see yeah more and more of this and there's a potential shift like that across to the edge. I think it's actually really exciting to be able to see, to be able to see those uh, those pushing across. I don't necessarily see any other, any, you know, different security threats or the threat landscape changing as a result of that. Um there could be differences in terms of configurations, in terms of miS configurations that that that could increase as a result, but, you know, a lot of this and it just needs to be dealt with in the appropriate way through tooling through, through education of of of of how that's done. >>Well, obviously threat vectors are all gonna look devops like there's no perimeter. So they're everywhere right? Looking at I think like a hacker to be being there. Great stuff. Quick question on the future relationship with DR. Obviously you're betting a lot here on that container relationship, a good place to start. A lot of benefits there. They have dependencies, they're going to have implications. People love them, they love to use them, helps old run with the new and helps the new run better. Certainly with kubernetes, everything gets better together. What's the future with the DACA relationship? Take us through how you see it. >>So yeah, I mean it's been an absolute blast the doctor and you know, even from looking at some of the internal internal chats, it's been it's been truly wonderful to see the, the way in which both the doctor and sneak from everything from an engineering point of view from a marketing, from a product team. It's been a pleasure to, it's been a pleasure to see that relationship grow and flourish. And, and I think there's two things, first of all, I think it's great that as companies, we, we both worked very, very well together. I think as as as users um seeing, you know, doctor and and and sneak work so so seamlessly and integrated a couple of things. I would love to see. Um, I think what we're gonna see more and more and this is one of the areas that I think, um you know, looking at the way sneak is going to be viewing security in general. We see a lot of components scanning a lot, a lot of people looking at a components can and seeing vulnerabilities in your components. Can I think what we need to, to to look more upon is consolidating a lot of the a lot of the data which we have in and around different scans. What I would love to see is perhaps, you know, if you're running something through doctors can how can you how can you view that data through through sneak perhaps how can we get that closer integration through the data that we that we see. So I would love to see a lot more of that occur, you know, within that relationship and these are kind of like, you know, we're getting to that at that stage where we see integration, it just various levels. So we have the integration where we have we are embedded but how can we make that better for say a sneak user who also comes to the sneak pages and wants to see that data through sneak. So I would love to see at that level uh more there where as I mentioned, we have we have some some additional support as well. So you can run doctors can from from Lenox as well. So I can see more and more of that support rolling out but but yeah, in terms of the future, that's where I would love to see us uh to grow more >>and I'll see in the landscape side on the industry side, um, security is going beyond the multiple control planes out there. Kubernetes surveillance service matches, etcetera, continues to be the horizontally scalable cloud world. I mean, and you got you mentioned the edge. So a lot more complexity to rein in and make easier. >>Yeah, I mean there's a lot more complexity, you know, from a security point of view, the technology is the ability to move quickly and react fast in production actually help security a lot because you know, being able to spin a container and make changes and and bring a container down. These things just weren't possible, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Pre that it's like it was it's insanely hard compared trying to trying to do that compared to just re spinning a container up. However, the issue I see from a security point of view, the concerns I see is more around a culture and an education point of view of we've got all this great tech and it's it's awesome but we need to do it correctly. So making sure that as you mentioned with making the right decision, what we want to make sure is that right decision is also the easy decision and the clear decision. So we just need to make sure that as we as we go down this journey and we're going down it fast and it's not gonna, I don't see it slowing down, we're going fast down that journey. How do we make, how do we prepare ourselves for that? We're already seeing, you know, miss configurations left, right and center in the news, I am roles as three buckets, etcetera. These are they're they're simpler fixes than we than we believe, right? We just need to identify them and and make those changes as needed. So we just need to make sure that that is in place as we go forward. But it's exciting times for sure. >>It's really exciting. And you got the scanning and right at the point of coding automation to help take that basic mis configuration, take that off the table. Not a lot of manual work, but ultimately get to that cloud scale cool stuff. >>Simon, thank you >>for coming on the cube dr khan coverage. Really appreciate your time. Drop some nice commentary there. Really appreciate it. Thank you. >>My pleasure. Thank you very much. >>Simon Maple Field C T. O. A sneak hot startup. Big partner with Docker Security, actually built in deVOPS, is now dead. Say cops. This is dr khan cube 2021 virtual coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. Mm.