(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, along with the way that Dell has integrated this technology into its PowerEdge server lines. We're in for an interesting conversation today. Today, I'm joined by Dilip Ramachandran, Senior Director of Marketing at AMD, and Juergen Zimmermann. Juergen is Principal SAP Solutions Performance Benchmarking Engineer at Dell. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Welcome. >> Thank you David, nice to be here. >> Nice to meet you too, welcome to theCUBE. You will officially be CUBE alumni after this. Dilip, let's start with you. What's this all about? Tell us about AMD's recent launch and the importance of it. >> Thanks, David. I'm excited to actually talk to you today, AMD, at our fourth generation EPYC launch last month in November. And as part of that fourth generation EPYC launch, we announced industry-leading performance based on 96 cores, based on Zen 4 architecture. And new interfaces, PCIe Gen 5, as well as DDR5. Incredible amount of memory bandwidth, memory capacity supported, and a whole lot of other features as well. So we announced this product, we launched it in November last month. And we've been closely working with Dell on a number of benchmarks that we'd love to talk to you more about today. >> So just for some context, when was the last release of this scale? So when was the third generation released? How long ago? >> The third generation EPYC was launched in Q1 of 2021. So it was almost 18 to 24 months ago. And since then we've made a tremendous jump, the fourth generation EPYC, in terms of number of cores. So third generation EPYC supported 64 cores, fourth generation EPYC supports 96 cores. And these are new cores, the Zen 4 cores, the fourth generation of Zen cores. So very high performance, new interfaces, and really world-class performance. >> Excellent. Well, we'll go into greater detail in a moment, but let's go to Juergen. Tell us about the testing that you've been involved with to kind of prove out the benefits of this new AMD architecture. >> Yeah, well, the testing is SAP Standard Performance benchmark, the SAP SD two tier. And this is more or less a industry standard benchmark that is used to size your service for the needs of SAP. Actually, SAP customers always ask the vendors about the SAP benchmark and the SAPS values of their service. >> And I should have asked you before, but give us a little bit of your background working with SAP. Have you been doing this for longer than a week? >> Yeah, yeah, definitely, I do this for about 20 years now. Started with Sun Microsystems, and interestingly in the year 2003, 2004, I started working with AMD service on SAP with Linux, and afterwards parted the SAP application to Solaris AMD, also with AMD. So I have a lot of tradition with SAP and AMD benchmarks, and doing this ever since then. >> So give us some more detail on the results of the recent testing, and if you can, tell us why we should care? >> (laughs) Okay, the recent results actually also surprised myself, they were so good. So I initially installed the benchmark kit, and couldn't believe that the server is just getting, or hitting idle by the numbers I saw. So I cranked up the numbers and reached results that are most likely double the last generation, so Zen 3 generation, and that even passed almost all 8-socket systems out there. So if you want to have the same SAP performance, you can just use 2-socket AMD server instead of any four or 8-socket servers out there. And this is a tremendous saving in energy. >> So you just mentioned savings in terms of power consumption, which is a huge consideration. What are the sort of end user results that this delivers in terms of real world performance? How is a human being at the end of a computer going to notice something like this? >> So actually the results are like that you get almost 150,000 users concurrently accessing the system, and get their results back from SAP within one second response time. >> 150,000 users, you said? >> 150,000 users in parallel. >> (laughs) Okay, that's amazing. And I think it's interesting to note that, and I'll probably say this a a couple of times. You just referenced third generation EPYC architecture, and there are a lot of folks out there who are two generations back. Not everyone is religiously updating every 18 months, and so for a fair number of SAP environments, this is an even more dramatic increase. Is that a fair thing to say? >> Yeah, I just looked up yesterday the numbers from generation one of EPYC, and this was at about 28,000 users. So we are five times the performance now, within four years. Yeah, great. >> So Dilip, let's dig a little more into the EPYC architecture, and I'm specifically also curious about... You mentioned PCIe Gen five, or 5.0 and all of the components that plug into that. You mentioned I think faster DDR. Talk about that. Talk about how all of the components work together to make when Dell comes out with a PowerEdge server, to make it so much more powerful. >> Absolutely. So just to spend a little bit more time on this particular benchmark, the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. It's a widely used benchmark in the industry to basically look at how do I get the most performance out of my system for a variety of SAP business suite applications. And we touched upon it earlier, right, we are able to beat a performance of 4-socket and 8-socket servers out there. And you know, it saves energy, it saves cost, better TCO for the data center. So we're really excited to be able to support more users in a single server and meeting all the other dual socket and 4-socket combinations out there. Now, how did we get there, right, is more the important question. So as part of our fourth generation EPYC, we obviously upgraded our CPU core to provide much better single third performance per core. And at the socket level, you know, when you're packing 96 cores, you need to be able to feed these cores, you know, from a memory standpoint. So what we did was we went to 12 channels of memory, and these are DDR5 memory channels. So obviously you get much better bandwidth, higher speed of the memory with DDR5, you know, starting at 4,800 megahertz. And you're also now able to have more channels to be able to send the data from the memory into the CPU subsystem, which is very critical to keep the CPUs busy and active, and get the performance out. So that's on the memory side. On the data side, you know, we do have PCIe Gen five, and any data oriented applications that take data either from the PCIe drives or the network cards that utilize Gen five that are available in the industry today, you can actually really get data into the system through the PCIe I/O, either again, through the disk, or through the net card as well. So those are other ways to actually also feed the CPU subsystem with data to be processed by the CPU complex. So we are, again, very excited to see all of this coming together, and as they say, proof's in the pudding. You know, Juergen talked about it. How over generation after generation we've increased the performance, and now with our fourth generation EPYC, we are absolutely leading world-class performance on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. >> Dilip, I have another question for you, and this may be, it may be a bit of a PowerEdge and beyond question. What are you seeing, or what are you anticipating in terms of end user perception when they go to buy a new server? Obviously server is a very loose term, and they can be configured in a bunch of different ways. But is there a discussion about ROI and TCO that's particularly critical? Because people are going to ask, "Well, wait a minute. If it's more expensive than the last one that I bought, am I getting enough bang for my buck?" Is that going to be part of the conversation, especially around power and cooling and things like that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, every data center decision maker has to ask the question, "Why should I upgrade? Should I stay with legacy hardware, or should I go into the latest and greatest that AMD offers?" And the advantages that the new generation products bring is much better performance at much better energy consumption levels, as well as much better performance per dollar levels. So when you do the upgrade, you are actually getting, you know, savings in terms of performance per dollar, as well as saving in space because you can consolidate your work into fewer servers 'cause you have more cores. As we talked about, you have eight, you know. Typically you might do it on a four or 8-socket server which is really expensive. You can consolidate down to a 2-socket server which is much cheaper. As also for maintenance costs, it's much lower maintenance costs as well. All of this, performance, power, maintenance costs, all of that translate into better TCO, right. So lower all of these, high performance, lower power, and then lower maintenance costs, translate to much better TCO for the end user. And that's an important equation that all customers pay attention to. and you know, we love to work with them and demonstrate those TCO benefits to them. >> Juergen, talk to us more in general about what Dell does from a PowerEdge perspective to make sure that Dell is delivering the best infrastructure possible for SAP. In general, I mean, I assume that this is a big responsibility of yours, is making sure that the stuff runs properly and if not, fixing it. So tell us about that relationship between Dell and a SAP. >> Yeah, for Dell and SAP actually, we're more or less partners with SAP. We have people sitting in SAP's Linux lab, and working in cooperative with SAP, also with Linux partners like SUSE and Red Hat. And we are in constant exchange about what's new in Linux, what's new on our side. And we're all a big family here. >> So when the new architecture comes out and they send it to Juergen, the boys back at the plant as they say, or the factory to use Formula One terms, are are waiting with baited breath to hear what Juergen says about the results. So just kind of kind of recap again, you know, the specific benchmarks that you were running. Tell us about that again. >> Yeah, the specific benchmark is the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. And for SAP, this is the benchmark that needs to be tested, and it shows the performance of the whole system. So in contrast to benchmarks that only check if the CPU is running, very good, this test the whole system up from the network stack, from the storage stack, the memory, subsystem, and the OS running on the CPUs. >> Okay, which makes perfect sense, since Dell is delivering an integrated system and not just CPU technology. You know, on that subject, Dilip, do you have any insights into performance numbers that you're hearing about with Gen four EPYC for other database environments? >> Yeah, we have actually worked together with Dell on a variety of benchmarks, both on the latest fourth generation EPYC processors as well as the preceding one, the third generation EPYC processors. And published a bunch of world records on database, particularly I would say TPC-H, TPCx-V, as well as TPCx-HS and TPCx-IoT. So a number of TPC related benchmarks that really showcase performance for database and related applications. And we've collaborated very closely with Dell on these benchmarks and published a number of them already, and you know, a number of them are world records as well. So again, we're very excited to collaborate with Dell on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark, as well as other benchmarks that are related to database. >> Well, speaking of other benchmarks, here at theCUBE we're going to be talking to actually quite a few people, looking at this fourth generation EPYC launch from a whole bunch of different angles. You two gentlemen have shed light on some really good pieces of that puzzle. I want to thank you for being on theCUBE today. With that, I'd like to thank all of you for joining us here on theCUBE. Stay tuned for continuing CUBE coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, and Dell PowerEdge strategy to leverage it.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We're covering Red Hat Summit 2022. We're going to wrap up now, Dave Vellante, Paul Gillin. We want to introduce you to Stephanie Chan, who's our new correspondent. Stephanie, one of your first events, your very first CUBE event. So welcome. >> Thank you. >> Up from NYC. Smaller event, but intimate. You got a chance to meet some folks last night at some of the after parties. What are your overall impressions? What'd you learn this week? >> So this has been my first in-person event in over two years. And even though, like you said, is on the smaller scale, roughly around 1000 attendees, versus it's usual eight to 10,000 attendees. There's so much energy, and excitement, and openness in these events and sessions. Even before and after the sessions people have been mingling and socializing and hanging out. So, I think a lot of people appreciate these in-person events and are really excited to be here. >> Cool. So, you also sat in some of the keynotes, right? Pretty technical, right? Which is kind of new to sort of your genre, right? I mean, I know you got a financial background but, so what'd you think of the keynotes? What'd you think of the format, the theater in the round? Any impressions of that? >> So, I think there's three things that are really consistent in these Red Hat Summit keynotes. There's always a history lesson. There's always, you know, emphasis in the culture of openness. And, there's also inspirational stories about how people utilize open source. And I found a lot of those examples really compelling and interesting. For instance, people use open source in (indistinct), and even in space. So I really enjoyed, you know, learning about all these different people and stories. What about you guys? What do you think were the big takeaways and the best stories that came out of the keynotes? >> Paul, want to start? >> Clearly the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is a major rollout. They do that only about every three years. So that's a big deal to this audience. I think what they did in the area of security, with rolling out sigstore, which is a major new, I think an important new project that was sort of incubated at Red Hat. And they're trying to put in to create an open source ecosystem around that now. And the alliances. I'm usually not that much on partnerships, but the Accenture and the Microsoft partnerships do seem to be significant to the company. And, finally, the GM partnership which I think was maybe kind of the bombshell that they sort of rushed in at the last minute. But I think has the biggest potential impact on Red Hat and its partner ecosystem that is really going to anchor their edge architecture going forward. So I didn't see it so much on the product front, but the sense of Red Hat spreading its wings, and partnering with more companies, and seeing its itself as really the center of an ecosystem indicates that they are, you know, they're in a very solid position in their business. >> Yeah, and also like the pandemic has really forced us into this new normal, right? So customer demand is changing. There has been the shift to remote. There's always going to be a new normal according to Paul, and open source carries us through that. So how do you guys think Red Hat has helped its portfolio through this new normal and the shift? >> I mean, when you think of Red Hat, you think of Linux. I mean, that's where it all started. You think OpenShift which is the application development platforms. Linux is the OS. OpenShift is the application development platform for Kubernetes. And then of course, Ansible is the automation framework. And I agree with you, ecosystem is really the other piece of this. So, I mean, I think you take those three pieces and extend that into the open source community. There's a lot of innovation that's going around each of those, but ecosystems are the key. We heard from Stefanie Chiras, that fundamental, I mean, you can't do this without those gap fillers and those partnerships. And then another thing that's notable here is, you know, this was, I mean, IBM was just another brand, right? I mean, if anything it was probably a sub-brand, I mean, you didn't hear much about IBM. You certainly had no IBM presence, even though they're right across the street running Think. No Arvind present, no keynote from Arvind, no, you know, Big Blue washing. And so, I think that's a testament to Arvind himself. We heard that from Paul Cormier, he said, hey, this guy's been great, he's left us alone. And he's allowed us to continue innovating. It's good news. IBM has not polluted Red Hat. >> Yes, I think that the Red Hat was, I said at the opening, I think Red Hat is kind of the tail wagging the dog right now. And their position seems very solid in the market. Clearly the market has come to them in terms of their evangelism of open source. They've remained true to their business model. And I think that gives them credibility that, you know, a lot of other open source companies have lacked. They have stuck with the plan for over 20 years now and have really not changed it, and it's paying off. I think they're emerging as a company that you can trust to do business with. >> Now I want to throw in something else here. I thought the conversation with IDC analyst, Jim Mercer, was interesting when he said that they surveyed customers and they wanted to get the security from their platform vendor, versus having to buy these bespoke tools. And it makes a lot of sense to me. I don't think that's going to happen, right? Because you're going to have an identity specialist. You're going to have an endpoint specialist. You're going to have a threat detection specialist. And they're going to be best of breed, you know, Red Hat's never going to be all of those things. What they can do is partner with those companies through APIs, through open source integrations, they can add them in as part of the ecosystem and maybe be the steward of that. Maybe that's the answer. They're never going to be the best at all those different security disciplines. There's no way in the world, Red Hat, that's going to happen. But they could be the integration point. And that would be, that would be a simplifying layer to the equation. >> And I think it's smart. You know, they're not pretending to be an identity in access management or an anti-malware company, or even a zero trust company. They are sticking to their knitting, which is operating system and developers. Evangelizing DevSecOps, which is a good thing. And, that's what they're going to do. You know, you have to admire this company. It has never gotten outside of its swim lane. I think it's understood well really what it wants to be good at. And, you know, in the software business knowing what not to do is more important than knowing what to do. Is companies that fail are usually the ones that get overextended, this company has never overextended itself. >> What else do you want to know? >> And a term that kept popping up was multicloud, or otherwise known as metacloud. We know what the cloud is, but- >> Oh, supercloud, metacloud. >> Supercloud, yeah, here we go. We know what the cloud is but, what does metacloud mean to you guys? And why has it been so popular in these conversations? >> I'm going to boot this to Dave, because he's the expert on this. >> Well, expert or not, but I mean, again, we've coined this term supercloud. And the idea behind the supercloud or what Ashesh called metacloud, I like his name, cause it allows Web 3.0 to come into the equation. But the idea is that instead of building on each individual cloud and have compatibility with that cloud, you build a layer across clouds. So you do the hard work as a platform supplier to hide the underlying primitives and APIs from the end customer, or the end developer, they can then add value on top of that. And that abstraction layer spans on-prem, clouds, across clouds, ultimately out to the edge. And it's new, a new value layer that builds on top of the hyperscale infrastructure, or existing data center infrastructure, or emerging edge infrastructure. And the reason why that is important is because it's so damn complicated, number one. Number two, every company's becoming a software company, a technology company. They're bringing their services through digital transformation to their customers. And you've got to have a cloud to do that. You're not going to build your own data center. That's like Charles Wang says, not Charles Wang. (Paul laughing) Charles Phillips. We were just talking about CA. Charles Phillips. Friends don't let friends build data centers. So that supercloud concept, or what Ashesh calls metacloud, is this new layer that's going to be powered by ecosystems and platform companies. And I think it's real. I think it's- >> And OpenShift, OpenShift is a great, you know, key card for them or leverage for them because it is perhaps the best known Kubernetes platform. And you can see here they're really doubling down on adding features to OpenShift, security features, scalability. And they see it as potentially this metacloud, this supercloud abstraction layer. >> And what we said is, in order to have a supercloud you got to have a superpaz layer and OpenShift is that superpaz layer. >> So you had conversations with a lot of people within the past two days. Some people include companies, from Verizon, Intel, Accenture. Which conversation stood out to you the most? >> Which, I'm sorry. >> Which conversation stood out to you the most? (Paul sighs) >> The conversation with Stu Miniman was pretty interesting because we talked about culture. And really, he has a lot of credibility in that area because he's not a Red Hat. You know, he hasn't been a Red Hat forever, he's fairly new to the company. And got a sense from him that the culture there really is what they say it is. It's a culture of openness and that's, you know, that's as important as technology for a company's success. >> I mean, this was really good content. I mean, there were a lot, I mean Stefanie's awesome. Stefanie Chiras, we're talking about the ecosystem. Chris Wright, you know, digging into some of the CTO stuff. Ashesh, who coined metacloud, I love that. The whole in vehicle operating system conversation was great. The security discussion that we just had. You know, the conversations with Accenture were super thoughtful. Of course, Paul Cormier was a highlight. I think that one's going to be a well viewed interview, for sure. And, you know, I think that the customer conversations are great. Red Hat did a really good job of carrying the keynote conversations, which were abbreviated this year, to theCUBE. >> Right. >> I give 'em a lot of kudos for that. And because, theCUBE, it allows us to double click, go deeper, peel the onion a little bit, you know, all the buzz words, and cliches. But it's true. You get to clarify some of the things you heard, which were, you know, the keynotes were, were scripted, but tight. And so we had some good follow up questions. I thought it was super useful. I know I'm leaving somebody out, but- >> We're also able to interview representatives from Intel and Nvidia, which at a software conference you don't typically do. I mean, there's the assimilation, the combination of hardware and software. It's very clear that, and this came out in the keynote, that Red Hat sees hardware as matter. It matters. It's important again. And it's going to be a source of innovation in the future. That came through clearly. >> Yeah. The hardware matters theme, you know, the old days you would have an operating system and the hardware were intrinsically linked. MVS in the mainframe, VAX, VMS in the digital mini computers. DG had its own operating system. Wang had his own operating system. Prime with Prime OS. You remember these days? >> Oh my God. >> Right? (Paul laughs) And then of course Microsoft. >> And then x86, everything got abstracted. >> Right. >> Everything became x86 and now it's all atomizing again. >> Although WinTel, right? I mean, MS-DOS and Windows were intrinsically linked for many, many years with Intel x86. And it wasn't until, you know, well, and then, you know, Sun Solaris, but it wasn't until Linux kind of blew that apart. And the internet is built on the lamp stack. And of course, Linux is the fundamental foundation for Red Hat. So my point is, that the operating system and the hardware have always been very closely tied together. Whether it's security, or IO, or registries and memory management, everything controlled by the OS are very close to the hardware. And so that's why I think you've got an affinity in Red Hat to hardware. >> But Linux is breaking that bond, don't you think? >> Yes, but it still has to understand the underlying hardware. >> Right. >> You heard today, how taking advantage of Nvidia, and the AI capabilities. You're seeing that with ARM, you're seeing that with Intel. How you can optimize the operating system to take advantage of new generations of CPU, and NPU, and CPU, and PU, XPU, you know, across the board. >> Yep. >> Well, I really enjoyed this conference and it really stressed how important open source is to a lot of different industries. >> Great. Well, thanks for coming on. Paul, thank you. Great co-hosting with you. And thank you. >> Always, Dave. >> For watching theCUBE. We'll be on the road, next week we're at KubeCon in Valencia, Spain. We're at VeeamON. We got a ton of stuff going on. Check out thecube.net. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Wikibon.com. We publish there weekly, our breaking analysis series. Thanks for watching everybody. Dave Vellante, for Paul Gillin, and Stephanie Chan. Thanks to the crew. Shout out, Andrew, Alex, Sonya. Amazing job, Sonya. Steven, thanks you guys for coming out here. Mark, good job corresponding. Go to SiliconANGLE, Mark's written some great stuff. And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. (calm music)

(bright music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Two days of coverage, AWS Summit 2022 in New York city's coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. Events are back. theCUBE is back. Of course, with theCUBE virtual, CUBE hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out, a lot of content this year more than ever. A lot more cloud data, cloud native, modern applications, all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, CUBE alumni, CEO of Observe, Inc. in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data, observability. Jeremy, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Always great to come and talk to you on theCUBE man. It's been a few years. >> Well, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability space, hot area, but also you've been a senior executive. President of Dell, EMC, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Look around, it's cloud meets big data. >> Yeah, the cloud thing I think was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for sort of catching that bus early, We were on the bus early and I think it was only inevitable. Like if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >> So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved. The board level, the founders, the people there, cloud, Amazon, what's going on here? You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, chief of Observe, Inc., which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data, engineering, large scale integrations, data as code, integrating into applications. It's a whole another world developing, like you see with Snowflake, it means Snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's this wave we're on? How would you describe the wave? >> Well, a couple of things. People are, I think, riding more software than ever before. Why? Because they've realized that if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think more applications now than any point, not just ever, but the mid nineties. I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for Windows. Well now they're building for things like, AWS is now the platform. So you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the transactions, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can I understand who my best customers are? What I sell today? If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off? All of that they want to analyze. And the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it? >> In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that, and I want to get your opinion on or reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse, and then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more effort to say, let's go look at the data, 'cause now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once, they're iterating. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting That's a Silicon Valley story. That's like how startups were, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have this data concept that's now part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole new cycle of data being reused and repurposed, then figure it out. >> Yeah, yeah, I'm a big fan of, years ago, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee, at the MIT labs. I spent time with and he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look, he said, I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And this has going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and certainly, research is on the forefront. But I think starting to see that mindset of the MIT research be mainstream in enterprises. They're realizing that, yeah, it is about the data. If I can better understand my data better than competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is how? What technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to allow me to do that? >> So let's talk about Observe, Inc. You're the CEO. Given you've seen the waves before, you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action. What's going on with the company? Give a quick minute to explain Observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status? What's the product status? And what's the customer status? >> Yeah, so we realized, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago. Look, the way people are building applications is different. They're way more functional. They change every day. But in some respects there are a lot more complicated. They're distributed, microservices architectures. And when something goes wrong, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not going to fly because you had so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So that's observability. It's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was, a guy called, like everything in tech, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by, but there's a guy called Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kind of term. And the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for the best part of four years now. It took us three years just to build the product. I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. So yeah, this last year, we did our first year selling. We've got about 40 customers now. We got great investors Sutter Hill Ventures. Mike Speiser who was really the first guy in the Snowflake and the initial investor. We're fortunate enough to have Mike on our board. And part of the Observe story is closely knit with Snowflake because all of that telemetry data, we store in there. >> So I want to pivot to that. Mike Speiser, Snowflake, Jeremy Burton, theCUBE kind of same thinking. This idea of a super cloud or what Snowflake became. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. And now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of Snowflake. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, like as Jerry Chen in Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with Snowflake's. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a Snowflake or an AWS, because again, you got to go where the data is. You need all the data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> What's your take on that? >> Having enough gray hair now. Again, in tech, I think if you want to predict the future, look at the past. And 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a smaller company called Oracle. And an Oracle was the database company and their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms. One, Windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And then that was the ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years, gray hairs, the platform isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, Google cloud. I probably look around if I say that in. >> It's okay. But Hyperscale. >> Yeah. >> CapEx built out. >> That is the new platform. And then Snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and of course my ambition would be, look, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of Snowflake, as they were on top of Oracle, then we'd probably be quite happy. >> So you're building on top of Snowflake? >> We're building on top of Snowflake a hundred percent. And I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that's a risk. >> Are you still on the board? >> Yeah, I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am long on Snowflake. >> It sounds, well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board then you'll know as going on. Okay, seriously, this is a real dynamic. >> Jeremy: It is. >> It's not a one off. >> Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS, it is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like Snowflake and folks like Observe, it's an order magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >> Yeah, and I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you got to be on a platform. >> Yeah and it's quite easy. >> Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >> Well, value migrates up over time. So when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure for service, platform as a service. My old employee EMC, we had Pivotal. Pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to extract a real business, you got to move up, you got to add value, you got to build databases, then you got to build applications. >> It's interesting. Moving from the data center to the cloud was a dream for starters 'cause they didn't have to provision the CapEx. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got Snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >> The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. >> Yeah, it's almost free. >> But as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've got to get into. >> And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm going to get a serious multiple of value in what I'm paying. Most people don't even blink at their AWS bills unless they're like massively huge. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question. But for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >> Yeah, a lot of people ask me like, look, you're building on Snowflake. You're going to be paying their money. How does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. We could build a database as well in Observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as Snowflake. And so we made the call early on that, no, we want to innovate above the database. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and the same is true with something like Amazon, like Snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >> Yeah and what's interesting is that Dave Vellante and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously more on Snowflake. I've been looking at Databricks and the same dynamics happening. The proof is the ecosystem. >> Yeah. >> If you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and Databricks, it's exploding. The shows are selling out. This floor space is booked. That's the old days at VMware. The old days at AWS. >> One and for Snowflake and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing because we build on Snowflake and we pay their money. They don't have to sell to us. And we do a lot of the support. And so the economics work out really, really well if you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >> And then also you get a trajectory of economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of Snowflake, integrations, new products, you're scaling and step function with them. >> Yeah, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. When I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had one petabyte customer. And so at Observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so being able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable. >> Well, Jeremy, great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. We got a couple minutes left, put a plug in for Observe. What do you guys do? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You get in traction. >> Yeah >> Scales around the corner sounds like. Is that where you at? Pre-scale? >> We've got a big announcement coming up in two or three weeks. We've got new funding, which is always great. The product is really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, at which point can you just start hiring salespeople and the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. We've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting enterprise type customers. We're F5 networks. We're POC in right now with Capital One. We've got some interesting news around Capital One coming up. I can't share too much, but it's going to be exciting. And like I said, Sutter Hill continue to stick. >> And I think Capital One's a big Snowflake customer as well, right? >> They were early and one of the things that attracted me to Capital One was they were very, very good with Snowflake early on and they put Snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And today that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >> Capital One, very innovative cloud. Obviously, AWS customer and very innovative. certainly in the CISO and CIO. On another point on where you're at. So you're pre-scale meaning you're about to scale. >> Jeremy: Right. >> So you got POCs. What's that trajectory look like? And you see around the corner, what's going on? What's around the corner that you're going to hit the straight and narrow and gas it fast? >> Yeah, the key thing for us is we got to get the product right. The nice thing about having a guy like Mike Speiser on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions at the board are always about like, is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? 'Cause we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and the revenue will take care of itself. So right now all the attention is on the product. This year, the exciting thing is we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the New Relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of APM tools. You're going to be able to do that within Observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one 'cause we complete the trifecta, the logs. >> What's the secret sauce of observe if you put it into a sentence, what's the secret sauce? >> I think, an amazing founding engineering team, number one. At the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way and we've got great long term investors. And the biggest thing our investors give is, actually it's not just money, it gives us time to get the product right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >> Got it. Final question while I got you here. You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there? You got people doing POCs, Capital One scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Obviously, we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business, restructure. So a lot of happening in cloud. What's the criteria? How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >> Yeah, enterprises, they know they've got to spend money transforming the business. I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but what we were saying five years ago is happening. Everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or take a bet on new technology in order to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that A, have money, B, are prepared to take risks, and it's a race against time to get their offerings in this new digital footprint. >> Final, final question. What's the state of AWS? Where do you see them going next? Obviously, they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0? Or they always say it's day one, but it's maybe more like day 10, but what's next for AWS? Where do they go from here? Obviously, they're doing well and they're getting bigger and bigger. >> Yeah, it's an amazing story. We are on AWS as well. And so I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They have an early leads. And if you look at where, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the late nineties, it was they stopped really caring about developers and the folks who are building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they have an amazing head start. And if they did more, if they do more than that, that's what's going to keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >> They got the Silicon and they got the Stack developing. Jeremy Burton inside theCUBE, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called Observe, Inc. In the middle of all the action and the board of Snowflake as well. Great startup. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> Live from San Francisco's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Stay with us. More coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. (soft music)

>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, two guests joining me next. Matt Morgan is here. Vice-president cloud infrastructure business group at VMware and Steven Jones joins us as well. Director of services at AWS gentlemen. That's great to have you on the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>Glad to see everyone's doing well. Here we are virtual. So we are just around the four year anniversary of VMware cloud on AWS. Can't believe it's been 20 17, 4 years. Matt talked to us about VMware AWS partnership and how it's progressed over that time. >>The partnership has been fantastic and it's evolved. We announced VM-ware cloud on AWS general availability all the way back at VMworld, 2017, we've been releasing new features and capabilities every other week with 16 major platform releases and 300 features as customers have requested. So it's been an incredible co-engineering relationship with AWS. We've also expanded our go to market by announcing a resale program in which AWS can resell VMware cloud on AWS. We did that back in 2019 and in 2020, we've announced that AWS is VMware's preferred public cloud partner for vSphere based workloads. And VMware is AWS's preferred service for vSphere based workloads. >>So as you said, Matt, a tremendous amount of evolution and just a short four year timeframe. Stephen talked to me about the partnership through AWS, this lens. >>Yeah. You bet. Look, I agree with Matt that the partnership has been fantastic and it's just amazing to see how fast four years has gone. I really think that AWS and VMware really are a really good example of how two technology companies can work together for them. The benefit of our mutual customers, um, as Matt indicated, VM-ware is our preferred service for vSphere based workloads. And we're broadly working together as a single team across both engineering and go-to-market functions to help customers drive business value from the, the, the investments they made over the years. And then also as they work to transform their businesses into the future with cloud technology, >>Let's talk about digital transformation. That is a term we've been, we've been talking about that for many years on this program. And at every event we've all been at, right. What we've seen in the last year and a half is a massive acceleration. Now talk to me about how VMware and AWS are helping customers facilitate that digital transformation. >>So our customers see modern it infrastructure as the core pillar of a digital transformation strategy and public cloud has been a digital transformation enabler for organizations. And that's because they have so many benefits when they embraced the public cloud, including the ability to elastically consume infrastructure. That's required the ability to employ a pay as you go financial model and the ability to reduce operational overhead, which helps save both monetary costs, but also provides more flexibility. But the big driver now is the ability to embrace innovative cloud services and those services help accelerate application development, deployment and management VMware cloud on AWS is a prime example of such an offering, which not only provides these benefits, but enhances them with operational consistency working the same way their it architecture works today, giving them familiarity and enterprise robustness that VMware technologies are known for, but being able to maximize the power of the global AWS cloud >>And every year from a customer adoption perspective, that's doubling Steven walked through a couple of customer examples that really highlight the value of VMC on AWS. >>Yeah, I've got a couple here. I think, uh, Kiko Milano is a good one. There a then our Italian company, they sell cosmetics and beauty products through about 900 retail stores in 27 different markets. So quite large, but they found that their on premises data center and outsourcing partner was just too inflexible for the changing needs of their company. And within four months, uh, Kiko actually migrated all of their core workloads to Amazon. Is he too, and particularly surprised how easy it was to migrate over 300 servers to the VMware cloud on AWS offering. And this is, this is key because the actually leveraging the same platform that they were used to, which was BMR. Uh, the Kiko team actually didn't have to perform any testing or modify any other existing applications. They also, they didn't have to actually train their teams again, because again, they were already up-skilled with being able to leverage the BMR technology. >>So again, we think it's the best of both worlds customers like Kiko can come and use VMware cloud on AWS, consolidate their server footprint and also take advantage of, of a hyperscale platform. That's pretty cool. Another customer, uh, SAP global ratings that our company provides a high quality market intelligence in the form of credit ratings, research, and thought leadership to help educate market participants to make better financial decisions who doesn't want to make a better financial decision. Right? So in order to accelerate their business growth and globalization really meet new business capabilities, they knew they needed to move a hundred percent to the cloud and wanted to know how they're actually going to do that. Now they also have an aging data center system outages, which are becoming more frequent, which to them actually concerned that they actually might, um, uh, face in the future, some penalties from the sec. >>So they didn't want to do that. So over the period of about eight months, think about this eight months, they moved to 150 financial apps to AWS leveraging VMware on AWS. Uh, pretty impressive. They reduce technical debt, uh, from legacy systems that were hosted on sun Solaris, Oracle excavator, and a X. And then now actually able to meet the goal demands of their business. The fun part here is they're actually meeting their uptime, uh, needs a hundred percent of the time since it actually moves these workloads to the VMware cloud on AWS. So pretty exciting. See customers link this kind of journey, >>Absolutely impressive journeys. Also short time periods to do a massive change there. It sounds like the familiarity with VMware in the console is a huge facilitator of the speed of migration and folks being able to get up and running. Stephen talked to me about some of the trends that you were seeing in organizations like the customers that you just mentioned. >>Yeah. So there are some emergency transfer store and a lot of customers want to leverage the same cloud operating models, but also in their own data centers. So they can take advantage of agility and innovation of cloud will also meeting requirements that they sometimes have that keep them from adopting cloud. Uh, you can think of workloads that sometimes have low latency requirements, right? Or they need to process large volumes of data locally. Uh, other times customers tell us they really need the flexibility to run data workloads, um, in a particular area that has data sovereignty or residency requirements. So when, as we talk about customers, um, they tell us that not only do they want to minimize their, their need to actually manage and operate infrastructure, um, and focus on business innovation is sometimes need to do this, um, in a, in a data center this close to them, if that makes sense. So they're looking for the best again of both worlds. >>Got it. The best of both worlds and Matt, you have some breaking news to share. What is it? >>So today we're announcing the general availability of VMware cloud on AWS outposts. >>Awesome. Congratulations. Tell me about that. Let's dig into it. >>So for customers looking to extend their AWS centric model to an on-premise location, that data center edge location via more cloud on AWS, outposts delivers the agility and innovation of AWS cloud, but on premises and VMware cloud on AWS outpost is based on VMware cloud, a jointly engineered service. So together we're delivering this service on premises as a service. This gives us the capability to integrate VMware's enterprise class architecture and platform with next generation dedicated Amazon nitro based ECE to bare metal instances. It provides a deeply integrated hybrid cloud operating environment that extends from a customer's data center to these particular services running on premises in the data center, the edge, or to the public cloud and having a unified control plane between all of it. >>A unified control plan is absolutely critical. Uh, Stephen eight, >>We have a detailed plan to offer integrated AWS services, and that capability really enhances the innovation angle for customers as they embraced the modernization of their applications. >>Another great example of how deep the partnership is Steven AWS outpost was announced at reinvent, I think 2019, which was the last time I was at an event in person. So coming up on a couple of years here, when GA talked to me about some of the key use cases that you're seeing, where it really excels. >>Yeah. So Matt, Matt highlighted a number of these, right. And you're right. It was 2019. Uh, we were all together back then and hopefully we can do that, uh, very soon here, um, quickly on apple. So overall, since, since we're talking about outposts, uh, VMware cloud on a post as well. So the thing here and Matt highlighted this is that without posts, we actually live we've leveraged, leveraged literally the same hardware and control plane technology that we leverage in our own data centers so that the customers will come to know and love and expect about the AWS platform and VMC on AWS, uh, uh, is, is, is the exact same thing that we'll be able to get with the Apple's technology. I'll give you a couple of customer examples. I think that that actually speaks to the use cases best. So, um, you remember, I talked a little bit about data locality and residency requirements. >>So first ABI Dhabi bank, uh, is the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates, right? And they were offering corporate investment and personal banking service, and they wanted to deliver a digital banking service, including email and mobile payments, but they had to follow a specific residency and data retention requirements and they had to do it in the UAE. And so what they've done is they've actually leveraged multiple AWS outposts in the UAE to allow them to provide business continuity while also leveraging the same API APIs that they had to come to know about, uh, and love about the AWS services in region, right? Phillips healthcare is another really good example. Um, you can imagine that, uh, what they do every day is, is, uh, very important things like predictive analytics for preventative treatments. And so outposts Phillips has actually taken those and that developed cloud applications, again, deployed on the same infrastructure they were used to within region. Now they can actually do this in clinics at hospitals, and they're in managing that the same tools providing, uh, same end-to-end, um, view and to their own providers, 19 administrators. And so they actually estimate they have over 70,000 servers now distributed across 12,000 locations or 1200 locations. Excuse me. So that's an example of, again, just two use cases that really broadened the reach and the flexibility of customers to run workloads in the cloud, but in a on-premise fashion. Does that make sense? >>Yes, it does. And you mentioned two great stories there. One in financial services, the other one healthcare, two industries that have had to massively pivot in the last 18 months amongst many others, but let's talk a little bit more Steven, about some of the things that you're hearing from some of the early customers of BMC on outpost. What are some of the near term opportunities that you're uncovering? >>Yeah, I've got to say here too, that, uh, customers are VMware customers have been asking us for this for quite some time. I'm sure Matt would agree. Um, so look from, uh, go back to some of the use cases we've discussed low latency compute requirements. So one of our higher education customers today who has migrated workloads to be more cloud on AWS, um, is looking at, uh, extending the same capability to an on-premise experience specifically for, um, uh, school applications that require a low latency, um, uh, integration, um, from a local data processing perspective. Again, one of our VMware on AWS top biopharmaceutical companies, uh, here again in the U S um, is planning to use VMware cloud on AWS outposts for health management applications with patient records that need to be retained locally at the hospital hospital sites. And then finally you can kind of going back to the story around data residency. We have a large telco provider in Europe that is planning to use this particular offering for their applications that need to remain on premises to meet regulatory requirements. So again, you know, we're just super pleased with the amount of interest, not only in VMware cloud on AWS, but also in this new run that we're announcing today. And we're really excited to be able to support the VMware cloud experience really on the AWS Apple's platform for a of these use cases. >>One of the things we've talked about for many years with both VMware and AWS is the dedication to listening to the voice of the customer. Not obviously this is a great example, Steven, as you said, VMware customers have been asking for this for awhile. So while customers have a ton of choice, I want you guys to unpack what the differentiators are of this service. And Matt, if we can start with you to bring you back into the conversation, we'd love to get your, your input on those differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So people have to look at this for the service that's delivered and on the VMware side of the equation, we're delivering the full VMware cloud infrastructure capability. This is delivered as a service as a cloud service on premises. So why is this valuable? Well, it relieves the it burden of infrastructure management and fully maximizes the value of a fully managed cloud service, giving an organization, the capability to unlock the renovation, budgets, and start to invest truly an innovation. This is all about continuous life cycle management, ongoing service monitoring, automated processes to ensure the health and security the infrastructure. And of course, this is backed by expert VMware site recovery and reliability engineers, to ensure that everything works perfectly. We also enable organizations to leverage best in class enterprise grade capabilities that we've talked about in our compute storage and networking for best-in-class resiliency auto-scaling and intrinsic availability. >>So there's no long procurement cycles to set up these environments. And that means it's developer ready right out of the box. We're also deeply integrated with what customers do today. So end to end hybrid cloud usually requires end-to-end hybrid processes. And with this integration into those processes is instant, no reconfiguration, no conversion, no refactoring, no rearchitecture of existing applications using VMware HDX or B motion organizations can move applications to leverage this cloud service instantly. It allows you to use established on premises governance, security, and operational policies, and ensures that that workload portability I mentioned goes both ways. It's bi-directional as customers need to have portability to meet their business requirements. As we mentioned earlier, there's a unified hybrid control plane with a single pane of glass to manage resources across the end-to-end hybrid cloud environment. And we're giving direct access to 200 plus native AWS services. And that enables an organization to truly modernize their applications, starting where they are today. And so that gives you the real capability to deliver a unique service. One that gives you an organization, the ability to migrate without any downtime have fast, fast cost effective capabilities and a low risk to their hybrid cloud strategy. >>Excellent. That's a pretty jam packed list of differentiators there, but one of the things that it really sounds like not from what you said is how much work has gone on to make the transition smooth for customers, give them that flexibility and that portability that they need. Those are marketing terms you and I know are used very frequently, but it really seems like the work that you've done here will be done straight to that. I want to ask you Stephen, that same question from AWS's perspective, what really differentiates the solution. >>It is a good question. I'll just, uh, I'll agree that there has been a ton of work first that is, has gone, gone into actually making this happen. Right. Um, and to, to all the points that Matt made. And I would just add that again. 80 was outpost is built on the same AWS nitro system and infrastructure. The customers have already come to love in the cloud. And so gone really are the days where customers have to worry about procuring and racking and stacking their own gear layer on all the benefits, the map outline from a VMware perspective. And again, we, we really believe the customers are getting the best of both worlds here. Um, with, with specifically with the compute that comes in the outpost rack, um, customers actually get getting kind of built in redundancy and resiliency, hard security, all those things that customers don't know, they need certain things. >>The customers know they need to pay attention to, but also want some help with. And so we've, we, we put a lot of thought and effort into this. Um, but could I just, uh, explain a little bit about the customer experience, um, when a customer orders and AWS outposts rack, right? AWS actually signs up, uh, to do a fully managed experience here. Like we'll bring people in to actually do site assessments. Um, we'll manage the hardware, setup, the installation and the maintenance of that gear over time. Well, VM-ware also manages the, the software defined data center construct as well as, um, the, the single point for, uh, for support questions. And so together, we really thought through how customers is met, but it get an end to end experience from hardware all the way up through application modernization. It's pretty exciting, >>Very deep partnership there. And we're out of time, but I do want to ask you guys, where can customers go, who are interested in learning more about this new service? >>So at VM world, there are a collection of DMR cloud, AWS sessions, including sessions, dedicated to VMware cloud on AWS outpost. We encourage everyone who's attending VMworld to look up those sessions and you'll learn all about the hardware, the service, the capabilities, the procurement, and how to get started. In addition, on vmware.com, we have a web portal for you to gain additional knowledge through a digital consumption. That's vmware.com/vmc-outposts. >>Awesome. Matt, thank you. I'm sure folks will be just drinking up all of this information at the sessions at VMworld 2021. And I hope to see you in person at next year's VM. I'm crossing my fingers. Great to see you guys Format Morgan and Steve Jones. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching the cubes coverage of the em world to 2021.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE I'm in the Palo Alto CUBE Studios here with the quarantine crew, doing the remote interviews during this time of COVID. Of course, we want to check in with all of our great esteemed guests and CUBE alumni. We're here with Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock. Jerry, great to see you, it's been a while. Hope you're sheltering in place, nice camera, nice set up you got there at home, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John. I set up all the cameras are just for you. Everybody needs their quarantine hobbies, and for me, I kind of dust off the audio visual playbook and set this up, just for theCUBE interviews. But it's good to see you. Glad you and the family are healthy and sane as well. >> Yeah, and same to you. Let's just jump into it, obviously, COVID-19 has caused the virtualization trend, virtual everything. You're no stranger to virtualization, and VMware back in the day really changed the game on server virtualization, but the whole world's becoming virtual. And it's very interesting because now people are feeling, but we in the industry have been talking about inside the ropes for a long time, which is, the future is there, it's going to be about interactions online, software, cloud scale, these things just got accelerated, and the disruption, the change of behavior, Zoom fatigue, Webexing, all this stuff that's happening, people are kind of like, "Wow! This is the future." This is a real impact, and it's mainstream, everyone's feeling about business, to personal, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think Satya Nadella at Microsoft had this quote recently that they've seen two decade's worth of digital acceleration and transformation in just two months, and I think what we've seen the past four months, John is all the kind of first order effects of virtualization events, not just infrastructure, but like virtualization meetings and people, telemedicine, telehealth, online education, delivery of food, all those trends are just accelerated. We're buying stuff on eCommerce, and Amazon, and Instacart before hand, that's just accelerated. We're moving towards virtualized events, online education, online healthcare, that's just accelerated. So I think we're seeing the first order effects of changing not only how we work, how we communicate, but how we shop, interact, and socialize, it compress two decades within two, three months. And so I think that's changing both how you and I interact and how we build relationships, also how companies interact with their customers, and how companies interact with employees. and it's been exciting time, because one, when there's disruption, there's opportunity, but two is giving guys like you and me a chance to kind of dust off or try new skills, and you and I are both figuring out how to exist and thrive in this role where we're now interacting in this virtualized world. >> And it's still the same game personal relationships. Content is now data. This is stuff that we've been preaching on theCUBE. You've been on many times talking about, I going to get your thoughts as a venture capitalist, whether you're making bets on the future for investments, you have a 10 year horizon, and roughly speaking average on VC deals, enterprises and customers who are building a cloud and data centers, they got to make new bets or double down on stuff they've been doing, or cancel stuff that they had going on, and refactoring. So I want to to get your thoughts on one, first on the VC side, how have you guys refactored your thinking, your meetings, and your bets? >> Yeah, so I would say, three areas, one is how we operate as a VC firm what's changed? Number two, I'll talk about what we're investing in what's good or bad, and thirdly is like, what I think changes for our portfolio companies and how startups think. So first and foremost obviously, we've gone all virtual too, with shelter-in-place, our entire team is now working remotely, working from home, but we're still open for business and we're looking to find new investments, we are investing aggressively right now, and we're just doing things over Zoom. And so we're either A, doing video calls as a partnership, or doing video calls with startups that we're meeting and founders, but I'll be honest, one thing I've done John, is I've turned off the screen more or less, I've done more phone calls because I find that a video call is great for the first or second meeting, but with a founder or executive you have relationship with, it's just really nice to actually, go on a virtual walk where me and the founder of both put AirPods or take the phone to walk outside and kind of have a conversation, that's a little of a higher bandwidth. So, I think how we're operating has changed a little bit, but to your point, is the same business, connecting with a person one-on-one, reading the market, reading the founder, and making a bet. So that hasn't changed. I think on the stuff we're investing in, like you said, all the trends around cloud and APIs and SaaS, that's accelerated. So all the trends around the new workplace, SaaS companies, collaboration, going cloud that's accelerated faster, so some of our companies like Cato Networks that does software defined, wide area networks plus cloud security that just accelerated there in this market called secure access serves edge. We've seen kind of a nice tailwind from that, more and more data is going to cloud so companies like Rockset, that's a database company that you had on theCUBE, they're going to see a benefit from that because more and more data is now in the cloud. Then finally for the founders we work with, the way to go to market, the way to sell like no one's flying around selling one-on-one anymore, you're not meeting a CSO, or the CIO over steak dinner, or you're not going to a conference anymore. So a lot of our companies are figuring out how to do more online sales, bottoms ups adoption, that could be an API, that could be open source, we're trying to find a couple more of our line of business entry to the company and sell that way, versus go to a conference or for one-on-one meeting. So it's interesting, everything's moved faster, but then this slight curve ball on how you connect with your customer has changed. And so what's the Darwin line, it's not the strongest that survives, but the most adaptable. So we're seeing the companies that founders that are most adaptable right now, they're going to thrive. >> It's interesting, we've always talked about from a tech standpoint with DevOps and cloud-native, integration or horizontally scalable has been that ethos of value creation, you've talked about moats in the past, but now it's more real life, is becoming immersed into software, and so I want to get your thoughts on this, and we have a phrase here in theCUBE team is that, every company will become a media company, that's something that we believe in, and you starting to see that people are doing more Zooms, doing more digital events, you mentioned some of the other things. Can you see any other examples where a company has to become blank? Because media is just one element of the new realities of life, right? You got to broadcast, and you got to share your stories and formats, that's media, is there other areas we're seeing, that things that weren't on the radar before with COVID, where companies have to become something like, every company will be blank? Fill in the blank. >> I would say, it's trite to say one, one, was every company is a data company, people have been saying that for a while, that's more true than ever. Number two, I'll be honest, every company now is a healthcare company, right? Because be it in health insurance for employees, the current pandemic is making the reality of both physical health, and emotional health, and mental health key for employees. And so if that was a top cost factor for hiring employees, this could be even more important going forward that every company is a health care company. And thirdly, like you said, every company becomes media company, I would say every company is also either one or two things, they're a Fintech company, because every company is now going online with their content. They wanting to create a one-to-one commercial relationship with a customer, right? That could be ads, could be transaction, could be selling something, so you're now doing business directly with your customer, so every company is a Fintech company, and I would say every company's now also, like you said, content company, right? It's the media creating, but also the data you're taking, the value you add on top of the data you're creating, and then how you share that back to your customer. So you as an enterprise company or a consumer company, you collect data from users, you're to use that data to improve your product, and this could be a SaaS offering, this could be an application, but then take that data through real time analytics, then make your product better and so because of that, if you're a data company, real time data, like our database company mentioned earlier, Rockset becomes more important. If you're a Fintech company, so all things around payments or commercial banking and relationship with your customer make sense. And if a you're a healthcare company because all your employees are now caring about healthcare, just thinking about how to make communication of healthcare with employees a lot more efficient, and a part of the reason why to work for theCUBE and work for a startup is important, so I think those three things are top of mind for all employees and all employers. I think things could change the next six or nine months, but right now I see those three being front and center. >> It's interesting. I wonder if you can add real estate company to that because if you look at the work from home, it's dynamic. >> Yeah >> I had a friend who was a fellow dad with my son's lacrosse team, he lives in Los Gatos, he's been involved in Google, Tesla, building up their facilities, and he had an interesting guest post on SiliconANGLE, and he was saying, it's not just give them some extra pay for their internet access, companies got to rethink the facilities question, right? Because do you pay rent for your employees? Do you provide the VPN, beyond VPN security, for instance? So again, you start to see these new opportunities or challenges, open up new thinking, this is going to be a wave of opportunity. >> Well, that virtualization between work and home has now been blurred like you said earlier, John and so if you're a technology company that enables remote access or distribute access, like Cato Networks when the portfolio comes and Greylock around our road office, home office, that is now how to right? So I had this conversation with Jason of Austin, askSpoke, one of our companies, there's like a mass of hierarchy for working out, and at the base of the mass of hierarchy is like good internet access, right? That's the how to, you need security, right? Because if you don't have secure access, you can't work, and then you have information management, knowledge management, how to communicate, right? And then collaboration, so, you have now this new hierarchy of what is required you to work in this new world, but also the tools and the technologies, be it secured access service edge like CATO or IT Helpdesk for all employees like askSpoke, both of those things become dial tone for any remote work. Just like videoconferencing, we couldn't do this in the same way, 10, 15 years ago, that's become kind of a must have, and so I think it'd be fascinating how we went from the office world where I gave you a laptop, or a computer, or a desk to this home office world, where maybe you now I have to pay for my fancy camera setup and my VPN. >> Well certainly you're getting good ROI on your setup and sure Greylock will take care of that plenty of dough big, billions of dollars under management. And by the way, must have hire things in our houses, ping and internet access, so we fight for that ping time, I got 12 I'm like what's going on? Who's gaming? We have to get the kids off of Twitch, and whatnot. but in all seriousness, this is what the reality is. So now for the average person out there, there's a lot of discussion around mental health, you mentioned taking it off the video conferencing and going for a walk, or just talking on the phone, this speaks to the humanization aspect of what's going on, mental health, social interaction, we're social creatures, collaboration has to be re-imagined. What's your view on all this? >> I think absolutely, look, humans are social creatures by nature, and I think part of the reason why I had this conversation with my founders early during COVID-19, that it's both a healthcare crisis. It's an economic crisis with all the million and millions of people unemployed, but it's also an emotional crisis because one, we're not connected to family, friends, and loved ones, and we're sheltering home with either ourselves or just a handful of people. And so we're trying to figure out ways to like, recreate social connections, and that's a phone call, it's a video call, it's Zoom dinners, it's Zoom dinners, the Zoom parties, is key. I think, going on socially just in walks is another thing to kind of like, play and experience things together. But my two cents is if you're a startup, right now, it can help connect people work-wise or socially, that's just going to be super critical for the new experience. And I think people are discovering new ways to use technology, so Zoom was never meant to be used the way it is today, I think that's amazing. I think how people think about voice video, and email, and chat are changing as well. So I'll finding new ways to like, play games online with my nieces, or communicate with them. And I think as an employer in these companies, like HR software, and how you like manage, and coach, and lead your employees is going to change as well. And so, you have this world where we're all in one building, and think about how you as a CEO, or as a leader now can actually coach, develop, and enable your employees across the world. >> I want to get your thoughts on cloud, we've had many conversations around cloud computing as to rise of AWS, I remember one it was a big Twitter conversation, I think about last year where what enabled Amazon and I think one of the things that came out of it was virtualization enabled them to have all these different servers. What do you see coming out of this virtualization of our lives with the COVID-19, as people start to figure out beyond the triage of stabilization, and as they get foundationally set up in COVID, coming out of it, companies and people have to have a growth strategy, whether it's life or business, people want to come out of this on the upside, whether it's emotional or with their business, what do you see being enabled? What needs to be in place? What kind of scale? What kind of environment? Because this is where I think the entrepreneurs are really going to sharpen their energy on their creativities looking at the expectations and experience needed coming out of this, it may look completely different than what we were talking about a year ago. What's your thoughts? >> Well, I think individually, people can use this time to prove their skills in different ways. So I think as an employee, as CEO, as a founder, you take the time to like invest in new skills, and that could be, "Hey, how do our community collaborate and manage my team remotely?" So I think CEOs and founders that can understand how to motivate, educate, train their employees in this new world, well, those are skills going forward. So communication has always been a great skill John, for any leader, any founder, it's 10X more important in this new virtualized work role, communication, motivation, and leading people over remote work is going to be a new skill that people have. Managing remote teams, managing fully distributed teams or half distributed, half headquarters, so understanding how to organize and lead your team in this kind of half in the office half out of the office role, that's going to be a challenge as well. So any tools, technology and tips there, but I think in terms of the founders that can now hire employees, find customers, sell customers, and manage a distributed team, those three things in this new world, even post COVID-19, we're not going back to the way we were, so the ability to actually use skills around email, creating content, Slack, Zoom, video chat, online conferences, what was that? "Video Killed the Radio Star", the first MTV Video. So, COVID-19, and Zoom, and video collaboration, what's that do to the old skills or the old founders? And what do they enable? So just like TV replaced radio as a medium, and now this virtualized world is going to replace kind of the medium we had beforehand, so, there'll be new generation of founders and investors coming out of this generation that would be for the next 10, 15 years, and I'm excited to be part of that. >> Yeah, and it's super big opportunity, because you have these kind of medium changes, new protocols get developed, new responsibilities and roles emerge, value creation capture, equations change, right? So you're looking at things like online events, for instance, they don't happen anymore, and even when they do come back they'll probably be hybrid anyway. So you got virtual, hybrid, public it sounds like a cloud play to me, public events, hybrid events, and private events, I guess. >> Yeah, virtual private events, but the same thing holds, just like cloud internet increased the reach, right? So all of a sudden, you can reach a bigger audience than just radio, TV, or the newspaper. Now you have these virtualized events like say private events, public events, hybrid events, you as a company or a media property, like theCUBE can now reach a larger audience, right? It's global, you don't have to be there in person, you're going to have the remote audience as a first class citizen, now more than ever, it's just like the internet replacing newspaper and print, people really care about print and newspaper, but really the reach online is always a magnitude larger than print, so all of a sudden you thought more about the print, so the online audience more than print audience. So now going forward, you're going to think about the virtual audience that's remote versus the physical audience. And so you're going to have to create experiences that are their world class or both properties. So just like the cloud, you think about the big three cloud providers, private cloud, as a technology company, you think about all three venues, all three infrastructures as a first class citizen. It's not going to be all one cloud, it's not all going to be one note, if you will. So it forces everyone to think, not just kind of one path, but multiple paths, so like classic problems a lot of founders think, okay, I'm going to do an enterprise private cloud strategy only or I'm going to do a cloud only SaaS strategy. Now founders of this do both the same time, I got to address the private cloud on premise business at the same time as the cloud business, and not just one cloud, three or four clouds around the world. So it forces founders to be able to do more things at one time and the ability for a company to attack multiple venues or multiple territories at the same time, they'll be successful. And the days where I can just do one cloud or one venue, or one audience, those are gone, and so, folks like yourself, John, and what you've built here at theCUBE with everyone else, they can reach multiple audiences at the same time, that's going to be very powerful. >> And we're going to be marketing and doing a lot more online events, like you said, it's going to be easier to tap into our 7000 plus alumni to get people together to create great content. And again, content value to remote audience is interesting. So that shifts into the conversation that everyone talks about the remote worker. Well, what about the remote customer, the remote prospects? So this is going to change how companies have to be change of behaviors. And it's going to be driven by developers, because it's not like one app can solve it, 'cause you got to integrate, you got to have some integration points. So this is the question, are we moving away from that monolithic SaaS app? Or is it going to be some SaaS apps that need to integrate with others? Will there be an abstraction layer of innovation around? Because at the end of the day, these new workloads and new apps going to be built. If you're going to run an event, if I'm a SAP or a big company, I'm not going to rely or may not want to rely on a vendor. In fact, the CEO of SAP said, 'cause their site crashed for their event, "I'm not going to rely on a third party to run my business event." 'Cause their business model is the event, not just a supplier selection for a SaaS app. So interesting kind of new surge of online activity might tip the scales for the supplier side. >> I think you're right John, I think because now the, just like the IT technology is now your business, you're going to basically do one or two things, one, vet the IT technology provider that much higher or harder. But number two to your point, I think the way you sell and you reach companies is going to be through developers and yes, you're going to have these large monolithic SaaS apps before, but almost every SaaS app now has APIs for integration, and so to your point, is that integration and the ability to have multiple companies work together, and share data, and collaborate, that's going to be more important. And so really at Greylock and myself, I've been investing in developer-led technologies and developer-led adoption, or API, or open source-led adoption, for seven plus years now. And the truth of matter is, that's going to be even more powerful going forward. Nassim Taleb would say that's anti-fragile, right? So having one giant app is fragile, but having a bunch of small apps, or a bunch of APIs, or a bunch of developers using your open source technology, or using your API technology to build an application, that's anti-fragile, because at the end of the day, that's going to be more reliable for your customer than a single point of failure, which can be one giant application. So all the big apps like Salesforce, have now other platforms, right? They have APIs, they have extensibility, they understand that there's a long fat tail of solutions needed to build. And all the new startups are doing open source, or API-led adoption 'cause they understand that the fastest route to create value for the customer, is also the most robust technology stack that a customer can build upon. I think that's super insightful, in fact, that is, I think so compelling, because if you think about it, that's the formula for great investments from a startup standpoint. But now, because of COVID, you said, everything's been pulled forward and accelerated at the same time, there's a collision, not all the enterprises are that strong, they're not that developer-led. So I think, to the point about acceleration, now, the enterprises, and we've seen pockets of this with cybersecurity where they have their own, in-house teams doing a variety of different development. The customers have to be developer-led, because that's where the value is, so they have to have a supplier with the right stack and integration frameworks. Now, the customers who haven't really been developer-led, have to be developer-led, what's your take on that? >> Absolutely true. 20 years ago, the CIO of a company that used to be the monopoly supplier technology for the company, they decided what hardware to use, what servers, what stores to use, what applications to buy. And then all of a sudden, like Amazon came around and said, "Well, look, here's a set of APIs, go build what you want." And so the competition for kind of like the centralized decision making became Amazon. And guess what? CIOs reacted, they got better, they got smarter, and those that embrace kind of like an API developer-led adoption, became the CIOs you wanted to have in the company. So I think, CIOs in this cloud mobile era have adopted that philosophy that, look, my job now as the CIO is to enable my developers, my employees, which really the assets of the company is the people, to have the right tools. So you're asked a bunch of cloud APIs, like Rockset or whatever for data, or here's a bunch of resources, or open source technologies for you to pull. So like I invested in a company recently called Chronosphere, it's an open source technology around metrics and monitoring. So, "Hey, use this open source time series database for monitoring your cloud and build upon that," and they're not going to say, "We're going to pick one large vendor that's monolithic," we're going to say, "Here's an open source tech company or a cloud API, go build upon that." And the companies that are embracing that philosophy of API-led or developer-led, John, they're going to be far ahead the better CIOs, the better companies, because the rate of digital adoption has just gone exponential, so we were on this super fast path already, and with quarantine in COVID, we've accelerated all that digital transformation, so every brick-and-mortar retailer now has to be eCommerce retailer. So they're making a slow digital transformation to go from brick-and-mortar stores to online stores. Now like brick-and-mortar retail is pretty much not happening, and probably won't come back to the same levels for a while, they need to accelerate their move towards digital transformation, right? >> And IT certainly exposes the people who haven't really made those investments, because literally action and the mandate, now take action, make those changes, totally want to dig into this developer-led vision, because I think that's very real. And the new decision is going to be made on what to do. I'm happy to see the DevOps thinking, the agile, speed become the table stakes. So with that, this week, Google is having their nine-week digital event of 200 plus sessions, essentially, an asynchronous event, it's going to be sprinkled out, they've kind of pretty much released the videos, most of them today. Over the next eight, nine weeks, you're going to see a lot of videos. Google, one of the big three got AWS, Azure, Google, what's your assessment of the horses on the track relative to the cloud? >> I've been talking about this for seven, eight, nine years, I first met it, like in the first or second Amazon reinvent and what was the forecast? And we said, well, it's not a winner take all, but right now, it's a winner take most. Amazon's clearly the market share leader, Azure coming up quickly behind the enterprise, Google's a third but they're doing some smart things around technology. Google announced a bunch of things today, which I think are very smart. So for example, they announced BigQuery Omni, which is BigQuery that's in query, their kind of a data warehouse, also query data and private cloud Azure or Amazon. And so strategically, if you're the number three player, you're going to push a multi-cloud agenda with BigQuery Omni, or Google Anthos, which is kind of a multi-cloud platform. And for Google, I think is the right strategy. I also think it's the right strategy for most customers to be multi-cloud, because you can't be dependent upon, a single point of failure in your applications. You can't be dependent on a single cloud as well. So I think multi-cloud is probably the direction we're headed as cloud matures. And I think Google's making a bunch of the right choices around embracing multi-cloud, and today they made that choice with BigQuery Omni, and so I think they're playing catch up but they're playing that game. I think Amazon's clue is still in the lead and still it blows my mind, and it's continuing to impress me what they've done over the past 10 years in terms of improving the cloud offering and the cloud services up and down the stack, and I think the past five, six years, what Azure has done, has been super impressive in terms of, Microsoft embracing, open source embracing, cloud as an ethos against their legacy business of operating systems and servers on premise, they've done a great job of embracing the next generation. But I do think, looking around the corner this new developer-led mindset is going to matter, right? So the cloud tomorrow will be APIs, like Stripe for payments, Twilio for communication. So I see the next evolution not just being VMs and containers, but also a bunch of cloud services around data, security, and privacy. And the cloud vendors can build this next generation of database APIs, or privacy APIs, security APIs, that they're going to be in the catbird seat for the next 10 years of applications are going to be built. >> And it'll be interesting to your developer-led position, our conversation around that, if the developer is going to be leading, is it going to be an abstraction layer across multiple clouds? Or do I have to have my Google developers, and my Amazon developers, and my Azure developers? How do you see that playing out? Because I do believe developer-led is the way, the question is, how do you avoid forking resources, right? So you might want to have an (mumbles) I get that, but if I'm going to go double down on say, a cloud, I'm going to go deep, I'm going to hire developers. >> It's interesting, history suggests you have multiple teams remember, we used to have a Unix team or a Sun team inside companies, right? You had a Windows team, you had a kind of a Solaris and Linux team, and there's a Microsoft team, and a non-Microsoft team, in most companies and they didn't really work well together and they had kind of two groups in most companies. I think that was an okay way to get started, but ultimately, to your point, that was not cost effective at all, it was defeating, you see now you had to like have to rethink it, what was my data backup strategy? Okay, I have a Windows backup strategy, and a Unix Solaris backup strategy. So I think we're not going to make the same mistake again, right? I think what will happen, we'll going to have multiple clouds, Amazon, Google, Azure, and then on premise private cloud, so call it, three, four, or five clouds. And then you're going to have a set of tools that can abstract away, not 100% of the clouds, but I think the best developer tools, the best APIs will be multi-cloud. So I can get 80% or 90% of what I want to be done through this developer-led layer of APIs, be it databases or analytics. And then, 10 to 20% of the code, you can write will be able to take care of what's unique to Amazon, what's unique to Azure, what's unique to Google or what's unique to your own private cloud. But I think we're seeing a layer of technology and that's true to all the startups. With back and true to all the startups I see that lets you get most of the way done with a single platform, seamlessly AI technologies, and that's what customers want, right? They don't want to create modal fiefdoms, they want-- >> They want choice. The want choice, but the reality is they don't always get it. I want to go through a throwback to 2010 when Paul Maritz, head of the VMware our first CUBE gig, he said, there's a hardened top. Okay, the hardened top was, you don't worry about what's underneath the top, we're just going to focus on top of the stack that was classic kind of, the stack would develop and you'd had standardization. You mentioned you had Windows teams and Unix teams, but also you could argue that, back then you had Cisco and Wellfleet vendors, but you didn't have two teams of routers, you had one standard that ran the remote interoperability, and OSPF routing, or whatever you had going on, so you had some standardization, how do you view that? Because you want some standardization to have the interoperability, the SLAs and the security, at the same time you want to have flexibility, kind of above what may be called a hardened top, is there a hardened top in multi-cloud? >> I'd say hard top doesn't exist in same way. I think back in the day, you had proprietary technologies, operating systems and firmware, right? So windows was closed, a lot of the network operating systems were closed source. Now you can't get away with that. So you have open source technologies today and public APIs. And so the pressure of both one, competition, two, public APIs that people can read, copy, adjust, three, open source, and it's just customer demand not to be locked into a hard top anymore, that's largely going to go away. So I think most of the major vendors success will try to kind of more or less lock you in and keep you stuck on their platform, their technology, and that's fine, right? Every successful company should be able to do that. But I think the ability to lock you in through proprietary software or operating systems, that's not going to happen anymore. I see through cloud and open source, what we've seen is kind of interoperability, and flexibility is the default, if you can't meet those needs, customers will go other ways. There'll be proprietary technologies, proprietary extensions along the way, but 60, 70% of what you want is going to be compatible with most technologies and most clouds. If you're not going to offer choice and freedom to our customers, they'll go elsewhere. If you don't offer a flexible solution, John, someone else will, and the customers will choose a more flexible solution. >> I would agree with you. Outside of latency, which is laws of physics, value is the lock in, if you're creating value, that's really what the customers want, they get to capture that value. Well, Jerry, great to have you on. I love the new setup. We're going to have to make this more of it. We can bring you in on the podcast when we get Zooms over the weekend, maybe put a panel together. Let's get Carl Eschenbach some VMware alarms to come on, give the perspective, what's going on. And I thank you for taking the time and great to see that you're healthy and doing well. Thanks. >> Me too. Thanks, john. Anytime, I love to be on theCUBE, so I look forward to my next trip. >> All right, Jerry Chen, great CUBE alumni, our first interview over nine years ago, he brought that up. That was at the second reinvent, boy has the world changed, and it's only going to accelerate even faster. Everything's changing new bets are being made, decisions have to be evolving quickly and faster. If you're not fast, you will be in the pile of dead companies and not making it. So, Jerry Chen breaking it down as venture capitalist for Greylock. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host Stu minimun hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to a special cube conversation here in our Boston area studio the one constant that we know for customers is change and how they manage their data there are applications in this ever-changing world is something that is always interesting to dig into and helping me with this conversation first time guests on the program Joe DeAngelo who is a distinguished engineer and national practice lead of availability solutions with Veritas is here with me Joe thanks so much for joining us it's - thanks for having me yours is great all right so first before we get into it give us a little bit about you know your background what you work on how long you been with Veritas sure so I've been with Veritas for nine years in various different roles I was a product manager when I joined the company since then I joined the field sales technical or technical field sales organization working as an advocate with some of our more strategic customers sort of like the liaison back to the product team before that I was a consultant sort of as a implementing these technologies from Veritas and of course it was a customer - so always had sort of that round out that full full spectrum of experience with love that we can draw on some of your experience as a customer right let's start there if we will now you're working with a lot of customers and the space you're working on the availability solutions I kind of teed it up with we know that there's change happening you know when I talk about customers in their cloud journey it is an ever moving thing it's not a one-way thing there's data centers there's cloud there's edge there's all of these environments and what you know figuring out what application what application goes where and how that's changing over time is there's a real challenge for customers these days is it not it absolutely is and really one of the sort of the foundational tenants of the availability solutions at Veritas is that we give customers the ability to sort of decouple their applications from all of that sort of chaos that's in the in their infrastructure whether it's in the cloud whether it's hyper-converged physical virtual different storage technologies they can run their application where they need to run it when they need to run it and be to know that it'll be performance yeah well we know from Veritas as legacy I remember seeing the billboards and the t-shirts there are no hardware agenda so you understand Veritas has always been a software share company when you look at that kind of wave of you know software-defined storage and the like help us understand you know today here's 2020 we're living in the future you know what that means for you know customers data is customers application what the availability solution in the product lines that you work yeah I mean that's that's a terrific question well what it means is you have a myriad of choices you have to decide on so it's not just the individual application but really the the composition of those apps and the relationships they have with other different other applications you mentioned software-defined storage I mean we cut our teeth on software-defined storage back when that wasn't even a term you know thirty years ago all right I like to think that it's almost in our DNA that you know taking and virtualizing storage is one of the first things we did as a technology today we we've taken that same sort of approach to commoditizing most of the infrastructure so that it doesn't matter what operating system it doesn't matter what storage vendor you use doesn't matter what cloud provider you use our technology gives you the luxury or I like to say breathing room in many cases to make those decisions so that they can align with your business outcomes more effectively all right so Joe the the product we're going to be talking a bit about is info scale for people that aren't familiar you know what is info scale how does it fit in this ever-changing landscape you mentioned you know cloud and operating systems and hypervisors and everything so help us tee up we're in for a scale fits sure thing so info scale is really a moniker if nothing else on top of our storage foundation veritos volume manager Veritas file system veritas cluster server technologies and those have been industry staples for decades right being able to address the needs of the most critical applications and so most stringent and high demanding workloads be at the top financial institutions health care providers etc the the technology itself really addresses resiliency and availability from sort of three areas we'd like to think that you can provide the ability to keep your services online with our with our high availability and disaster recovery solutions but we also wanna make sure that those applications and those data sets that you're using the technology with making sure that they're performing right because an underperforming application is just as detrimental to availability as would be a simply going offline and we also want to give you the ability to migrate workloads and move those applications among different technologies so that's really where the the focus of impost scalable it ok so you know Joe when you have customers that are trying to figure out ok I'm taking an application do I take that from my data center do I move that to the cloud I'm building a new application where do I do that how does in fel scale fit into that discussion and how is the discussion of info scale fit with the infrastructure discussion that they are having yeah absolutely so inevitably what the choice a lot of the customers I have conversations with struggle with just what's the first step to get to the cloud and many of them are locked into a proprietary solution or some technology that doesn't really have an analogue or some sort of equivalency in the cloud with info scale what we allowed them to do is actually replicate that data anywhere they want to go because you said we don't have a hardware agenda it doesn't matter what the storage underneath the covers might be so we can go from physical storage on Prem into the public cloud across any variety of different tiers of storage that exists there and this works at not just the from a data set standpoint but the applications as well so if you've got something as critical as a database a relational database that's Oracle them as a sequel database whatever may be you can very easily replicate those and move those workloads into the public cloud for purposes of migrations or disaster recovery with truth be told of the exact same thing you know migrations just a one-way ticket a dr is a roundtrip ticket but the technology is exactly the same so that's how you're able to achieve those goals ok we talked about application in general you mentioned some specific is there you know you know a compatibility list or you know what sorts of classes of applications how do I know if my application today is something that fits under this certainly so we have a catalogue of agents that we support what we call our bundled agents or agent framework and it it's a list of roughly over 500 different infrastructure components applications and services that we monitor and protect for the purposes of again for disaster recovery and migration capabilities pretty much all the enterprise applications the most prolific workloads that are in the in the industry today so are your databases or middleware to your application servers those are all included but we also have the ability to very easily introduce custom applications so a customer can take and say they may have written something homegrown and it has any number of different components to it if you could tell me how to start it how to stop it how to monitor it we can put it into info skill okay Joe I think we paint a pretty good picture of what info scale is maybe if you have a customer example that might help us understand a little bit about kind of the use cases and commonly why they're using it now that work well I can I have a little bit of an anecdote that I like to tell a story about a customer a state agency that was a big info scale user just happened to be on Windows and we've gotten through a deployment and everything was looking great and they were able to move all of their their their applications in this particular these Windows applications all in it being particularly info scale being replicated and having both high availability as well as disaster recovery and everything was looking great I finished the project on a Friday afternoon and bye-bye Sunday morning I was getting frantic phone calls from the people that I was working with at the time I was actually a consultant and they're asking me what what happened what's going on why what's what's what's the issue here I go I left the customer just fine on Friday there were no issues at all and they said you need to reach out to your team there and see what's going on so we're getting some phone calls that there's some problems like okay so I got on the phone and I spoke to my contact there and he said oh no nothing's wrong with the environment but we might have some issues with who's gonna be maintaining it come Monday morning and I go why it was well I think half the team well pretty much all the team's gonna be calling in rich Monday morning and I go what are you talking about goes the entire IT staff hit the Mega Millions jackpot so the this is the entire staff this was the DBAs the network admins the manager the managers manager all had the Mega Man jackpot so needless to say they weren't too concerned about coming into work on Monday morning but this poor person that was left he was holding the bag he said we already reached out to support your guys are on the call we're confident knowing that you know that that veritas is going to be there to help us through this transitional period because we've got this consistent layer so I used that example because it's a fantastic story but too it addresses the fact that disasters come in many different flavors and many different you know they can produce and manifest in many different ways and your people that to me that that's always your most critical asset and when those suffer that you know this technology is there really helped address me well Joe I like that example rather than I think going forward rather than saying well what happens if one of your critical staff gets hit by a bus yeah what if your entire support team you know it did happen all right what would you say are some of the kind of misconceptions that but maybe people don't understand if they're that they haven't look closely at in post-game lately yeah great question so I think some of the misconceptions about it is that it's tied to a very specific sort of heritage big iron unix only workloads admittedly we cut our teeth in that space right whether it's going back in the days of the original Sun OS and some of the the big iron systems we gained a lot of traction a lot of you know we earned our stripes in that space but in reality that that space is shrunk tremendously over the last you know 10 or 15 years for a variety of reasons and I think there's still some misconception that that info scale or veritas you know volume management file system only is relevant in that space and truth be told nothing could be further from nothing to be further from the truth because if you go back to what I comment I made earlier about this idea of commoditizing that infrastructure we can help customers transition throughout all those different sort of points of inflection so if going from the big iron to go into the more commodity commoditized you know x86 hardware going from physical to virtual going from virtual to the cloud going from virtual to hyper-converged and even back in some cases we have the capabilities and the wherewithal to be able to help customers do those kinds of transitions yeah I've been in the industry long enough I remember a lot of those UNIX migrations you know whether it going over to Windows whether I'm going over the Linux what would you say are some of the similarities some of the differences from what we did in those environments compared to what's often a cloud discussion today yeah so truth be told is that we we we tend to not reinvent the wheel at Veritas we look and say okay what are some of the really you know tremendously powerful tools and capabilities that we have how do we apply those to new platforms you take the cloud for example one of the things that we've always prided ourselves on is giving customers again that breathing room to make a decision and say I'm gonna move to a new platform so I can literally take a worker that was running on UNIX and I can move it over to Linux well that same model now can be applied where I can take that legacy work load running in Solaris I can move that directly into the public cloud and that's something that turns a lot of heads because I asked a lot of customers I know would it be compelling if I had a means for you to be able to take that legacy Solaris environment or that UNIX workload and I can write it directly into say ec2 in AWS and they're all there it's it's they're incredulous they're thinking no this can't happen there's no way you can do this and I said yes it can because we look at the cloud is another platform and we want to be able to have customers take full advantage of it exploit it but at the same time not be fearful that they won't have a way to move data in and out yeah oh it's Veritas helping with some of the the management pieces when you talk about going through those migrations it's one thing about what platform I live on but how do I manage that environment what skills that do I need yeah how are you working hand-in-hand with your customers on that well the great thing about it is is that there is a there's a sense of parity between what we do on Prem and what you do in the public cloud when you're using info scale because again we consume cloud resources just like they were any other platform so whether you were going from physical to virtual virtual to hyper converts or into the public cloud the same operations the same configurations the same the same scripts the same user interface all the things all of the the the machinery and the tooling that's around those applications can can can be consistent and in many cases that is it is invaluable because a lot of customers while they want to adopt the public cloud they don't want to have to redefine their operational paradigm they want to be able to take those workloads and I want to just be able to scoop them up and say put me in the public cloud I don't want to change everything around it because I don't have the bandwidth to do that to take on a whole new react of texture using the cloud that's that's basically starting your IT from from zero and building only backup and they don't have the time or the money or the resources to make that happen so looking for that consistency looking for that parity between the on-prem the public cloud all right what are some of the features that are most resonating with your customers well I would say first and foremost the the the fact that that our core technology around volume management helps you to virtualize storage all the capabilities you have there the fact that our file system can transition between different different Indians rate going from UNIX to Linux going from from Solaris to Red Hat and so on that gives you that flexibility our Hardware agnostic replication with volume replicator giving you the ability to not only provide dr over any geographic distance but also the ability to migrate between those platforms so being able to take and replicate data that's on a UNIX system today into the public cloud running Linux so that's with volume replicator we also have capabilities that allow you to utilize local storage in the sense that and treat it like it's shared storage some of the challenges with the public cloud are around some of the restrictive storage architectures so you take like a an availability zone inside of AWS all that storage is only available inside of at that particular availability zone if you want to move an application over to the other node you can't share storage between those availability zones we didn't focus Caleb you can and you can basically address some of those gaps or shoot through some of those blind spots yeah how was your team helping your customers keep up with all those changes you know we look at the public cloud there there's always new instances there's new zones there's it's it's a constant reinvention happening and day out yeah absolutely so a couple of things were happening first and foremost we're in the marketplace we have CF T's we've got you know a.m. eyes for that product so that you can further info scale so you can spin those up much more quickly working to get in the same thing for the azure marketplace we integrate with a lot of the automation and orchestration tools that are in the market today the ansible is the Puppets the chef's making sure that what I call the time to value for our technology is as short as possible so that you get out of the business of becoming you know a very tossed admin but focusing more on your on your business and what Veritas can do to help you improve that yeah it's interesting stuff a lot of automation going on in this space you know it's a very different world for your customers you know is is there some that you need to kind of react eight customers as do you know what Veritas is doing today versus what they might yeah there's there's a we're we're not your father's Veritas kind of mentality that we try to promote and I think you you've seen over the last 12 to 18 months that our our messaging our corporate strategy in general has had a tremendous sort of resurgence of info scale being a big part of that because recognize that when you talk about Veritas as a whole with our API strategy of availability protection and insights availability of your services in your data are critical to your success as an enterprise not just from an IT perspective and it's where info scale really plays sort of the the sort of the critical role in achieving that any other what sort of outcomes do you do your customers find once they've rolled these solutions out well I think operationally that there is a significant reduction in the overhead needed to make some of the more complex and and and really challenging operations you know cookie cutter I had a customer just last week you know this might sound like a little bit of you know self-promotion but he said storage foundation is the single greatest software-defined storage technology that's ever been written and because they are able to achieve a migration on a scale that they never would have been able to achieve without without a technology like this and of course I know there's no way to vet that statement but you're just going to if the customer is gonna has said it we will take them on there he did it it was I took pause I'm like wow I was like can I quote you on that he was just like yes you may Joe what else what other features underneath or kind of lesser-known things from info scale do you want to make sure customers know about oh yeah I mean listen there there are so many incredible capabilities that are included with info scale I would say that most important is that you know we can do things like transparently tear storage between on-prem and the public cloud and that can be something as granular as and as an Oracle database or something is you know general-purpose is just a shared you know NFS file system we have intelligent caching mechanisms to accelerate performance of workloads that again address the issues of performance on Prem as well as the public cloud we can help you transition your applications we have a migration wizard framework inside of our dashboard our info scale operations manager that allows you to on you know on the fly establish all of the necessary relationships between the different different clusters to be able to move applications from from from UNIX to the Linux move it from physical to virtual to go from a virtual and a hyper-converged we identify all those pieces and you know I said in an on-demand fashion build all the components for you we have you know a number of different you know what's most common talk about today is ransomware right this idea that how do we insulate our data from the from the threats of ransomware you can do so many different off host snapshot recovery method methodologies with info scale right creating an air gap between your data and secondary data sets that you can recover instantly from but has that enough gap so that that something that would corrupt the primary data set would not infiltrate your secondary copies so I mean there's just so many cool things that it can do it's just the use cases are just pretty you know innumerable yeah so last question Joe is a let's go up level a little bit you talk about you know the application portfolios really changing for a lot of customers lift relational databases we talked about you know virtual and physical and and cloud environments ever changing so when customers think about Veritas how should they when and how should they be thinking about Veritas well especially from from the from an availability standpoint it's really about abstracting your applications from the underlying infrastructure providing a resilient and performant storage layer to achieve really the the goals of your business not just the goals of your IT because at the end of the day we want to make sure that there is a direct line of sight between what you're trying to do is an enterprise what you're trying to do as a business be it a financial service institution healthcare provider doesn't matter what the industry is and that that the investments you make an IT can directly contribute to that and with Veritas we really help customers to make that a reality and we do it tactically with the idea of protecting your applications and ensuring that you have resilient services and we do it strategically by giving a platform to be able to host any number of different applications across all different operating systems and technologies so DeAngelo thank you so much for all the updates really a pleasure all right be sure to check out the cube net for all of the interviews we have go hit the search you can find past interviews we've done with Veritas as well as all the shows that we'll be at at 2020 and beyond I'm Stu minimun and thank you for watching the Q

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering Kubecon and CloudNative Con brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Kubecon CloudNative Con here in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-host is Justin Warren. And one of the things we always love to do is really dig in to some of the customer use cases. And joining us to do that, Andrey Rybka, who's the head of Compute Architecture and the CTO Office at Bloomberg. Andrey, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, so just to set the stage, last year we had your colleague Steven Bauer, came, talked about your company's been using Kubernetes for a number of years. You're a member of the CNCF as one of those end users there and you're even an award winner. So, congratulations on all the process. You've been doing if for years, so all the problems, I'm sure are already solved, so now we just have a big party, right? >> Yes, well I'm mean certainly we are at the stage where things are quite mature and there's a lot of workloads that are running Kubernetes. We run Kubernetes on-premises. Steven has an excellent data sense platform that does machine learning with GPUs and bare metal. We also have a really excellent team that runs basically Platform as a Service, generic Platform as a Service, not GPUs but effectively runs any kind of stateless app or service and that's been extremely successful and, you know there's a lot interest in that. And we also run Kubernetes in Public Cloud. So, a lot of workloads for like Bloomberg.com, actually are backed now by Kubernetes. >> Yeah, so we want to spend a bunch of time talking about the applications, the data, the services, that you've built some PaaS's there. Yes, so step us back for a second if you would, and give us the, What led to Kubernetes? And as you said, you've got your on-premises environment, you've got Public Cloud, where was that when you started and what's the role of Kubernetes and that today? >> Sure, we started back in 2015, evaluating all kinds of sort of container orchestration platforms. It's very clear that developers love containers for its portability and just the ability to have the same environments that runs kind of on-premises or on your laptop and runs on the actual deployment environment, the same thing, right? So, we looked at Mesos, Marathon, Cloud Foundry, even OpenShift before it was Kubernetes. And we, in no specific order continuously evaluate all different options and once we make a decision, we recommend to the engineering team and work in partnership with engineers. So all of those awards and everything, actually I want to say, that this is really a kudos to our engineering team. We just a small part of the puzzle. Now as far as like how we made the Kubernetes selection, it was a bit risky. We started with a pre-alpha version and you know I read the Borg paper, how Google actually did Borg. And when I sort of realized, well they're trying to do the same thing with Kubernetes. It was very clear, this is kind of, you know we're going to build on mature experience, right. So, some what it was risky but also a safe bet because you know there was some good computer science and engineering behind the product. So we started alpha version, they're consumer web groups actually were one of the first deployments of there kind of Kubernetes and they present them at the first Kubecon. It was an excellent talk on how we did Kubernetes and you know we came a long way since then. We've got sort of now, probably about 80 to 100 clusters running and you know, they run full high availability, DR -1. I would say it is one of the most reliable environments that we have, you know. We have frequently, you know infrastructure outages, hypervisors, you know, obviously hardware fails, which is normal, and we rarely see any issues and actually you know no like any major issues whatsoever. So, the things we expected out of Kubernetes, the things like reliability, elastic infrastructure, auto-scaling, the multi-tenancy it all worked out. Higher density of sort of packing the nodes, you know that's another great sort of value add that we expected but now we finally realizing that. >> So, one question I've had from a lot of customers, particularly traditional enterprises who are used to doing things and have a lot of virtual machine infrastructure. They're looking at Kubernetes but they're finding it somewhat opaque, a little bit scary. Talk us through, How did you convince the business that this was the choice that we should make and that we need to change the way that we're developing applications and deploying applications and we want to do this with Kubernetes? How did you convince them that this was going to be okay in the end? >> Yes, yes, that's a really good question. A lot of people were scared and you know they were, is this going to break things or you know is this just a shiny new thing. And there was a lot of education that had to occur. We've shown a lot of POCs now. The way we exposed Kubernetes was not just like raw Kubernetes. We actually wanted to keep it safe, so we sort of stayed away from some, like more alpha type of workloads and moved towards kind of like the more stable things. And so, we exposed it Platform as a Service. So, the developers did not actually get to necessarily like kubectl you know, apply a config and just deploy the app. We actually had a really good sort of offering where we had kind of, almost like Git-flow kind of environment where you have, you know your source control, then you have CICD pipeline and then once it goes through all those check and balances, you deploy your containers. So from that perspective, we actually hid quite a bit of things that made things a bit dangerous or potentially a little bit more complicated. And that's proven to be the right strategy because right now as far as the reliability I would say this is probably one of the most reliable environments that we have. And this is by design, you know. We basically tell the developers, by default you're supposed to run at least two replicas at least two Data Centers by default or two, you know, regions or two availability zones, and you can't change that. There's some people who are asking me like can I just deploy just in one Data Center, I'm like, I'm sorry, no. Like by default its like that. And auto-scaling on so if one Data Center goes and you need DR -1, so if you started with two minimum replicas then it auto-scales to four or whatever that will be set. So, you know, I think we've basically put a prototype of a proof of concept relatively fast. And We've got with the initial Platform as a Service, you know from zero to actual delivery in about three months. A lot of building blocks were there and we just put kind of the pieces of the puzzle together. >> All right, that does echo a lot of the discussion that was at had in the keynote today, even was about looking at making Kubernetes easier to consume, essentially by having all of these sensible defaults like you mentioned. You will have two replicas. It will run in these two different zones. And kind of removing some of that responsibility for those decisions from the developers. >> Andrey: Yes. >> How does that line up with the idea of DevOps which seems to be partly about making the developers a bit more responsible for their service and how it runs in production. It sounds like you've actually taken a lot of that effort away from them by, we've done all this work for you so you don't have to think about that anymore. >> I mean a little bit of background, we have about 5,500 engineers. So, expecting everybody to learn DevOps and Kubernetes is not realistic, right? And most developers really want to write applications and services that add business value, right? Nobody wants to really manage networking at the lower level, you know there's a lot of still complexity in this environment, right? So, you know, as far as DevOps, we've built shared kind of teams that have basically like, think of like centralized SRE teams that build the core platform components. We have a world class kind of software infrastructure group which builds those type of components. On top of the sort of, the technology infrastructure team that caters to the hardware and the virtualization infrastructure built on OpenStack. So you know, there is very much kind of a lot of common services/shared services teams that build that as a platform to developers and that is how we can scale. Because, you know, it's very hard to do that if every team is just sort of duplicating each one of those things. >> So Andrey, let's talk a little bit about your application portfolio. >> Andrey: Sure. >> Bloomberg must have thousands of applications out there. >> Andrey: Yes, yes. >> From what you were describing, is this only for kind of net new applications. If I want to use it I have to build something new, replacing something else or, or can you walk us through kind of what percentage is on this platform today and how is that migration or transition? >> And some is not net new, we actually did port quite a bit of the sort of the classic Bloomberg services that developers expect to the platform. And it's seamless to the developers. So, we've been doing quite a bit of sort of Linux migration meaning from like things like Solaris, AIX, and this platform was built purposefully to help developers to migrate their services. Now, they're not sort of lift and shift type of migrations. You can't just expect the, you know classic C++ shared memory app suddenly like jump and start being in containers, right? So there is some architectural changes, differences that had to be done. The type of applications that we see, you know, they're just sort of microservices oriented. Bloomberg has been around since 1981 and they've been doing service-oriented architecture since like early 90s. So, you know, things were already kind of in services kind of framework and mentality. And before, you know we had service matches, Bloomberg had its own kind of paradigm of service matches. So, all we do is kind of retro-fit the same concepts with new frameworks. And what we did is we brought in sort of like a new mentality of open source first. So, most new systems that we built, we look for kind of what about if you know, we look for open source components that can fit in this particular problem set. So there applications that we have right now, we have quite a bit of data services, data transformation pipelines, machine learning, you know, there's quite a bit of the machine learning as far as like the actual learning part of training, and then there is the inference part that runs quite a bit. We have quite a few of accounting services, like, I mentioned Bloomberg.com, and many sort of things that you would normally think of like accounting delivery services that run on Kubernetes. And I mean, at this point, we certainly try to be a little bit conscious about stateful services, so we don't run as much of databases and things like that. Eventually, we will get there once we prove the reliability and resiliency around the stateful set in Kubernetes. >> Yeah, do you have an estimate internal or goals as to what percentage your applications are on this platform now and a roadmap going forward? >> I mean, it's hard to say but going forward, I see majority of all services migrating to Kubernetes because for us, Kubernetes is become an essentially standardized compute fabric. You know, one thing that we've been missing, you know, a lot of open source projects deliver, you know virtualized infrastructure. But, you know, that's not quite enough, right. You need other sort of concepts to be there and Kubernetes did deliver that for us. And more importantly, it also delivered us kind of a, almost like a multi-cloud strategy, you know, kind of accidentally because, you know none of the cloud providers have any standard APIs of any source, right? Like, so even if use Terraform, that's not necessarily multi-cloud, it's just like you got to write HCO for each cloud provider. In Kubernetes, more or less, that becomes kind of a really solved problem. >> So which, what flavor of Kubernetes are you using? Do you leverage any of the services from the Public Cloud on Kubernetes? >> Yeah, I mean, excellent question. So, you know we want to leverage managed offerings as much as possible because things like patch and the security of you know, CVE's, and things like that, I want somebody to take care of that for me and harden things, and out of the box. So, the key to our multi-cloud strategy is use managed offering but based on open source software. So if you want to deploy services, deploy them on Kubernetes as much as possible. If you want to use databases, use manage database but based on the open source software, like Postgres, or MySQL. And that makes it affordable, right, to an extent, I mean, there's going to be some slight differences, but I do believe that managed is better than if I'm going to go and bootstrap VM's and manage my own control plane and the workers and things like that. >> Yeah, and it is a lot of additional work that I think organizations genuinely did try to roll their own and do everything themselves. There's a lot more understanding since the advent of cloud essentially that actually making someone else do this for what is essentially the undifferentiated heavy lifting. If you can get someone else to do that for you, >> Andrey: Absolutely >> it's a much better experience. Which is actually what you've built with the Kubernetes services for your developers. You are becoming that managed service for your app developers. I think a few enterprise organizations have tried to do that a little bit with centralized IT. They haven't quite got that service mentality there where I'm the product owner and I need to create something which my developers find is valuable to use so that they want to use it. >> This is exactly spot on. When I joined Bloomberg six years ago, one of the things we wanted to do is effectively offer a Public Cloud like services on-premises and now we're there. We actually have a lot of managed offerings whether you want Kafka as a service, queuing as a service, or you know, cache as a service, or even Kubernetes but not necessarily we want to expose Kubernetes as a service, we want to expose Platform as a Service. So, you hit the nail on the head because effectively developers want kind of the same things that they see in the Public Cloud. I want you know, function as a service, I want lambda something like this. Well, that's a type of Platform as a Service. So, you're spot on. >> Yeah, Andrey, last question I have for you. You know, you talked about the maturity of the managed offerings there, something we've seen a lot this year is the companies that, How am I going to manage across, you know, various environments? There we saw, you know, Microsoft with Azure, or VMware with Honzu, what do you think of that? Is that something that interests you or anything else in the ecosystem that you still think needs to mature to help your business? >> Sure, sure, I mean, I think that the use cases they're trying to address are definitely near and dear to my heart. Because we are trying to be multi-cloud. And in order to be truly mature multi-cloud sort of company, we need to have sort of mature kind of multi-cloud control plane. That has kind of the deployment address, ACD pipeline address than it need to address security, not just day one but day two, a load and monitoring and all of you know, if I were just to have three different portals to look at, it is very complicated, you're going to miss things. I want one pane of glass, right. So, what this company is addressing is extremely important and I see a lot of value in it. Now from my point of view, in general, what we prefer if it was an open source project that we could contribute and we could collaborate on, we still want to pay money for the support and what not, we don't want to just be free riders, right? But if it's an open source product and we can be part of it, it's not just read-only open source, that is definitely something that I would be very much interested in participating. And majority of the developers that we have are very happy to participate in open source. I think you seen some of our contributors here. We have some people contributing to Kubeflow. There's many other projects, we have quite a bit of cube projects like the case engineering with powerfulseal. If somebody wants to check it out, we've got some really interesting things. >> Andrey, really appreciate you sharing what you and your engineering teams are doing. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for all the contributions back to the community. >> Yep. >> For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman back with more of our three day wall to wall coverage here at KubeCon CloudNative Con. Thank you for watching theCube. (dramatic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage, our 10th year. We actually call this one the Valley set, over on the other side, it's in the middle of a meadow, and this was in the valley. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost for this segment is, of course, John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And joining us, the quintessential Valley guest that we have, Jerry Chen. Long time participant in the program, climbing up the leaderboard here of theCUBE Times at VMworld. Jerry, thank you so much for joining us. >> Stu, John, thanks for having me back. >> All right, so we knew you back when you worked for VMware. >> Jerry: Right. >> You're now a partner at Greylock. We watched some of your amazing startups, we've had many of them on our program. Just a little bit going on in your world this day, maybe we'll start there. >> Sure, it amazes me, both being at VMworld 10 years since you guys started covering. For me, I joined VMware back in 2003. So I was at the first Vmworld, through every single one of them, and seeing this ecosystem reinvent itself, and juxtapose that with every other conference at Moscone. So Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld, VMworld. And I would say five years ago, no one would have thought Dreamforce itself, or Salesforce as an ecosystem big enough for investors. But yes, now they can invest in startups. All they do is sell to the Salesforce ecosystem. You can always invest in a startup. All they sell to is the VMware ecosystem. And for sure, when, you and I, three of us go to Amazon or an event, that ecosystem just continues to grow exponentially year over year. >> And this some of the highlights of Datadog, we were talking before we came on camera. They always had a big booth, they bet on the AWS ecosystem, not a lot of Datadog here, but monitoring turns into observability, a key component, which basically was a white space. I mean, monitoring was boring. A little sector, but because of the nature of the data security auditing, this has become kind of a killer category. >> I think last week you saw SignalFX get acquired by Splunk, which is another huge enterprise company, and Datadog filed their S-1. No one thought monitoring would be a big enough market to support multiple billion plus companies, and what we've learned is making a bet on just cloud-native companies like Datadog did, purely in the Amazon Ecosystem, was a great bet because they've grown super fast, and that market turned out to be very big. In addition, it could be Splunk, and they could bet on logging for mostly on-premise companies. That turned out to be a large market. So I think five, 10 years ago, no one thought that these markets would be so big and so gigantic. The cloud itself, you can have a multi-billion dollar company like Datadog purely on a cloud-native application and cloud-native companies, if you will. >> You know, it's interesting, you're a VC and the enterprise specialist at Greylock. Consumer used to be all the rage in venture. "Oh, we're going to consumer against Facebook," Facebook breaks democracy, all kinds of problems. Being regulated. But enterprise became really hot with the cloud, and then you have an interesting dynamic. Now a thousand flowers are blooming on the startup side, so yes, there's a lot of action in startups, but the buyers of startups and the IPO markets is where the liquidity happens, which you care about, right? So now you have liquidity options for IPO for fast-growing flit scalers as you guys call it, and then the M and A market are buying the companies. So I got to ask you, with seeing Splunk as a great example, where they own the log market, log files, bring SignalFX in, former VMware guys and Facebook guys, comes in, they add some servability piece to it. Splunk's got more power now because of the acquisition. It's not just token acquisition. This is the market, product market slash M and A market. What's your thoughts on that? Because that's a key exit opportunity, and the numbers are pretty sizable when you think about it. >> I think just going back to the opportunity, the market's so big that you have multiple multi-billion dollar companies, so like Splunk's a huge company, great company. We're investors in a company called Sumo Logic. That's going to also be a successful company, and also a big-- >> John: And filed for IPO. >> And a big company that's OZA, Amazon, and Vmworld. So I think what you have here is each of these markets are monitoring, APM, the log, infrastructure, are turning out to be multi multi-billion, and larger than we anticipated. So I think before, to your analogy in the consumer, we always knew consumer markets had huge TAMs. Like how many billion in people are on Facebook? How many billion people are on Twitter? What we're learning now is the market and the TAM for these enterprise software companies, be it SAAS, be it LOG, be it Metrics, be it security, those TAMs are actually bigger than we thought beforehand as well. >> And the driver of that is what? Cloud, transformation, just replatforming, modernization? The businesses are businesses still. >> I think the move to cloud is accelerate, I think your last line, "businesses are businesses," is what's key. Like every business now is being touched by software. They all got to go cloud so I'm an investor in a company called Blend that does mortgage software. So the entire financial services industry, from mortgages to car loans and consumer lending, that's all going digital. That's all going online. Jobs that were like mortgage brokers are going to be an app on your phone now. So finance, retail, healthcare, construction, so all these markets now are going to the cloud, going digital, so these TAMs are expanding exponentially. >> Yeah, Jerry, want to get your take on the ecosystem. You know, we look at VMware, they built a big ecosystem, the end user computing space, you know. You've coined the term Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, from that environment there was an ecosystem around there. I see VMware at a lot of shows, and they have a good presence there, and there's some overlap between the public cloud space. Like when I go to this show, and I walk through the expo hall, oh my gosh. Data protection is everywhere, and all of those companies are at a all of the cloud environment, but do you see a transition from, you know, where VMware is in kind of the cloud-native space? Is there a lot of overlap, or what's your thinking on those kind of dynamics? >> I think all above. I think VMware at Vwworld, and like all these tech companies are constantly reinventing themselves and expanding. So you have, as a VC, say it's this company I'm looking at, when it's two individuals, and a dog, and PowerPoint. Is it a feature, is it a product, or is it a company? It's a feature, it's okay. You know, it's probably not worth the investment, but it's worthwhile. It'll get acquired for something. Is it a product? Some companies are just one killer product, right? And you can ride that product for the arc of the company. But then some startups turn out be companies, multi-product companies. And there always have one or two great products, and then you start adding new things as the market evolves, and VMware has done that. And so, as a result of adding server virtualization, desktop virtualization, Cloud Foundry which I helped build, out in the Kubernetes stuff. So they're adding multiple products to their company. I think the great companies can do that. Look at Amazon. They keep launching 10 new products every single month. Microsoft has done a great job reinventing themselves. So I think the great companies can reinvent, but not transform, they just add to what they have, and just to be a multi-product family. >> Stu: All right, so you mentioned Cloud Foundry. >> Yeah. >> Pivotal, of course, is now back in the mothership where it started there. When Cloud Foundry first started it was, "Well, we're not going to take the hypervisor "and put it all of these places." We needed a slightly different footprint. Well, five years later, we're talking about Kubernetes is going to be baked into Vsphere, and Vsphere is going to be a main piece of VMware's cloud-native strategy. Has the market changed or some of those technology pieces, you know, still a challenge? What's your take there? >> You know, it's a great question because I think what we're seeing is there's never ever in technology as you guys know, on platforms, it's a zero-sum game. It's never always going to all mainframe, all client server, all VMs, all microservers, all Serverless, right? And I think we're seeing is it's also never going to be all Amazon, it's never going to be all Google, it's never going to be all Azure, right? I think we talked about early days, it's not a winner take all. It may be, you know, what one-third, two-thirds, or something, 25-40% market share, but it's not going to be all or nothing. And so we're seeing companies now have architectures on multiple clouds, multiple technologies, and so just like 10 years ago, you had a mainframe team, you had a Windows team, you had a Solaris team. Remember Sun and Spark? And a Linux team. Now you have a Google team, and Azure team, an Amazon team, and an on-prem team. And so you just had these different stacks evolve, and I think what's interesting to see is like, we've kind of had this swing of momentum around Docker, Containers, Kubernetes, Serverless, but at the same time you see a bunch of folks realize, okay, what's happening is I'm choosing how much I want to consume. Like an API, a container, or a whole VM, right? And people realizing, yes, maybe consuming the APIs is our right level of consumption, but quite frankly, Stu, John, buying whole VMs also what I want. So you see a bunch of companies say, I'm just going to build better monolithic applications around VMware, I'm going to build better microservices around Docker and Kubernetes, and then we'll use Serverless where I think I need to use Serverless. >> Yeah, that's a good point. One of the things we hear from customers we talk to, and there's two types of enterprise customers, at least in the enterprise infrastructure side, classic CIOs and then CISOs. Two different spectrums. CIOs, old, traditional, multi-vendor means a good thing, no lock in, I know how to deal with that world. CISOs, they want to build their own stacks, manage their own technology, then push APIs out to the suppliers, and rechange the supplier relationship because security is so important they're forced to the cutting edge. So I look at that a kind of canary in the coal mine, and want to get your thought on that, because we're seeing a trend where enterprises are building software. They're saying, hey, you know, I want a stack internally that we're going to do for a variety of different reasons, security or whatever, and that doesn't really blend well for the multi-cloud team approach, because not everyone can have three killer teams building stacks, so you're seeing some people saying, you know, I'm going to pick a cloud here and go all in on certain things, build the stack, and then have a backup cloud there. And then some CIOs say, hey, you know what? I want all the cloud guys in there negotiating their best price maybe, or whatever. >> I think it's great nuance you pointed out. Even just like we had a Windows team and a Linux team, you still had a single database team that ran across both, or storage teams are ran across both. So I think the nuance here is certain parts of the stack should be Azure, Amazon, VMware. Certain parts of the stack should be, I think that the ultimate expression is just an API with service errors. So one of the companies you guys are familiar with, Roxette, it's a search and Serverless analytics company. It's basically an API in the cloud, multi-cloud, to do search and analytics. And just like you had a database team that's independent across all these stacks, for certain parts of the architecture, you're going to want something like Roxette, that's going to be independent of the architecture stacks. And so it's not all isolated, it's not siloed, it's not all horizontal, depending on the part of the stack, you're going to either want a horizontal cross-cloud solution, or a team that's going to go deep on one. >> So it's really a contextual decision based on what the environment looks like, or business. >> And there's certain areas of technology that we know from history that lends themself to either full stacks versus horizontals. Just like I said, there was a storage team and a database team, right? That's Oracle, or something that ran across Windows and Linux and Sun, you're going to see someone like Roxette become this search and Serverless analytics team across multiple cloud stacks. >> This is why the investment is such a great opportunity for the enterprise VCs right now because, I mean, there's so many dimensions of opportunities for companies to grow and become pretty large, and the markets are shifting so the TAM is pretty big. Michael Dell was just on the other side, I interviewed him. He says, you know, he was getting kind of in Dave's grill saying, "Well, the TAM for enterprise is bigger than cloud TAM." I go, "Well that TAM is going to be replatformized, so like that's going away and moving, shifting, so the numbers are big but they're shifting so tons of opportunities. >> It depends if you're a big company like Dell versus a small startup. Oftentimes, this true that the TAM for enterprise is still much larger than cloud, but your point is what's shifting were the dollars growing fast. >> The TAM for horses was huge at one point, and then, you know, cars came along, right? So you know. >> Every startup, what you want to do, you want to attach to a growing budget. You don't want to attach to a flat to shrinking budget. And so right now, if you're a founder, and say, "Okay, where are the budget dollars flowing to?" Everyone's got a kind of a cloud strategy, just like they had a VMware virtualization strategy, so if I'm like a startup G, metrics, or data analytics, I'm going to try to attach to where the dollars are flowing. That's a cloud strategy, that's an AI application strategy, security strategy. >> So let me ask you one question. So if I'm going to start up, this is a hypothetical startup, startups got an opportunity. It's a SaaS-based startup, they say, "You know what? "This is a feature in the market "that's part of a bigger system, "but I'm going to innovate on that." I think that with the markets shifting, that could evolve into a large TAM to your point about Datadog. What's the strategy, from an investment standpoint, that you would take? Would you say go all in on the single product? Do you want to have one or two features? What's the makeup of that approach, because you want to have some maybe defensibility, is it go all in on the one thing and hope that you return into like a Salesforce, then you bolt stuff on, or do you go in and try to do a little platform play underneath? >> It depends where you are in the startup world. We're in lifecycle. Look, startups succeed because they do one thing better, right? And so focus, focus, focus. And you have to have something that's like 10 times faster, 10 times better, 10 times cheaper, or something different. Something the world hasn't seen before. But if you do that one thing well, either A, you're taking budget dollars from incumbents, or B, you're something net new, the world hasn't seen, people will come to you when they see utility. As an investor I like to see that focus, I like to see, you know, some founders you get say, hey, Stu, think bigger. Some founders like John think smaller. Like what's your wedge? What's that initial entry point to the customer you're going to hit? Because once you land that, you get the right to do the next product, the next feature. >> That's the land, adopt, expand, like Xoom did. Or they picked video, >> Correct, voice, et cetera. >> I mean who the hell thought that was going to be a big market? It's a legacy market but they innovated with the cloud. >> Absolutely. I have all these sayings that I try to say like, "You don't get to play the late innings, "if you don't make it out the early innings," right? You know, and so if you want and have this strategy for this large platform, that's great, and every VC wants to see a path there. But they want to see execute from we're going to land, and we're expand. Now, startups fail because either where they land, they picked incorrectly. Like you decided to storm the wrong beach, right? Or it's either to small, or it's too big. The initial landing spot is too big, and they can't hold that ground. And so part of the art of navigating from Point A to Point B, or where I say, Act one, Act two, Act three of a lifecycle is make sure that you land correctly, earn your keep, show a lot of value, win that first battle, if you will, Act one, and then they move to Act two, Act three, and you can see a company like VMware clearly on their second, third act, right? And they've done a nice job of owning one product category, server virtualization, desktop virtualization, now expanding to other adjacent categories, buying companies like Carbon Black, right? In terms of security. So it doesn't happen overnight. I mean, VMware started in 1998. I was there when there was about 200 employees. People forget Amazon's been, gosh 27, 1998, when Bezos started selling books. Now they're selling books, movies, food, groceries, video, right? >> When did you first use AWS? Was it when the EC2 launched? I mean, everyone kicked the tires on that puppy. >> We all kicked the tires. I was at VMware as a Product Manager, I think it was '06 when they launched, right? And we all kind of kicked the tires on it. And it was a classic innoverse dilemna. We saw this thing that you thought was small and a very narrow surface area. Amazon started with an EC2, >> Two building blocks, storage and EC2. >> S-3, right, that's it. And then they said, "Okay, we're going to give a focus, focus on basic compute and basic object storage," and people were like, "What can you do with S-3? "Nothing," right? It's not a Sand, it's an availability. It's going to fail all the time, but people just started innovating and working their way through it. >> All right, so Jerry, when you look at the overall marketscape out there today, it seems like you still feel pretty confident that it's a good time for startups. Would you say that's true? >> Absolutely. >> All right, I want to get your final word here. 10 years in theCUBE at Vmworld, you know, you've known John for a long time. Did you think we'd make it? Any big memories as to what you've seen as we've changed over the years. >> I've plenty, let's go back to, >> John: Okay, now you can embarrass us. >> 10 year anniversary of VMworld. For your first Vmworld 10 years ago, I was like a Product Manager, and John Furrier, I think I met at a Press dinner, and he's like, "Hey, Chen," walking by, "come here, sit down," and they turn the camera on, and we had no idea what was going on, and he just started asking a bunch of random questions. I'm like, sure, I haven't cleared this with marketing or anyone else, but why not? >> John: Hijack interview, we call that. >> Hijack interview, and then it's been amazing to watch the two of you, Dave, John, everybody, grow SiliconANGLE and theCUBE in particular, and to this, the immediate franchise, in terms of both having a presence at all these shows, like Amazon, Oracle World, DreamForce, Vmworld, etc. But also the content you guys have, right? So now you have 10 years of deep content, and embarrassingly enough, 10 years, I guess, of videos of yours truly, which is always painful to watch, like either what I was saying, or you know, what my hair looked like back then. >> Stu: Jerry, you still have hair though, so. (laughing) >> Well, the beautiful thing is that we can look at the reputation trajectory of what people say and what actually happens. You always had good picks, loved the post you did on MOATs. That turned out to be very timeless content, and yeah, sometimes you miss it, we sometimes cringe. >> We miss a bunch. >> I remember starting one time with no headset on. Lot of great memories, Jerry. Great to have you in the community. Thanks for all your contribution. >> I look forward to the next 10 years of theCUBE, so I got to be here for the 20th anniversary, and now if I walk away, come back on right away, do I get another notch on my CUBE attending list so I can go up and catch Hared in the best? >> If you come on the other set, that counts as another interview. >> Perfect, so I got to catch up with Steve and the rest of the guys. >> Steve just lost it to Eric Herzog just a minute ago. We had a ceremony. It was like a walk through the supermarket, the doors thing, and the confetti came down. 11th time so you got to get to 11 now. So 12 is the high water mark. >> Done, we need t-shirts. (laughing) >> Well Jerry, thanks so much for joining us again. For John Furrier, I'm Stu Miniman, and you can go to theCUBE.net, if you search for Jerry Chen, there's over 16 interviews on there. I know I've gone back and watched some of them. Some great discussions we've had over the years. Thanks so much, and stay tuned for lots more coverage here at Vmworld 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam! >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. VeeamON day one of two-day coverage of the Veeam conference, very swaggy hotel. Dave Russell is here. He's the Vice President of NFI Strategy at Veeam. David, good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks so much for coming onto theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. >> You're very welcome. So let's see, you're well over, let's see, a year out, just about a year out of Gartner. Right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> And so okay you've been injected with the Kool-Aid fully, I presume, right? >> There you go, in the green, yes. >> But we're still going to talk a little bit about the magic water, but before we get into that, talk about your first year here. >> Yeah. >> Your impressions. Do they meet, exceed your expectations? >> It exceeded my expectations, but I can honestly say I'm not doing what I thought I was going to be doing here, but it actually turned out to be better. The other thing I will honestly tell you is I'm now on Pacific Coast time at the moment. Arizona, we're too unsophisticated for Daylights Saving, right so I'm either Mountain or Pacific but I'm Pacific now. But by 10 a.m. my time, I pretty much what I thought I was going to do that day is out the window and I'm doing something else and it's fun though. I mean now especially with the investment that we had earlier in the year and the cash reserves we ended last year with, looking at a lot of partnership capabilities, looking at ecosystem activities, certainly involved with customer activity. We're redoing our marketing and how we're focusing our go-to-market so it's a whole variety of things that sort of change hourly. >> So on the, I think we just talked about the M&A side. You've always been a dot connector in your, right? Because you talk to all the vendors, you talk to all the customers and you could see the picture. You have a huge observation space so part of your job on strategy is to try to what? Figure out where the gaps are. >> Yeah. >> And then drive strategy around do we build, do we buy? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah and it really does net down to what you said. It's a build/buy decision. It's an acceleration to market kind of decision and then the hard part is what are you willing to trade off and of course the real answer is as little as humanly possible. But you have to decide, just because you can do it, just 'cause you have the money doesn't necessarily mean you should pull the trigger. So if anything, it's curious because people like myself and a couple of my colleagues, we almost are more discerning. So we look at, okay, the technology, is it really viable? Do our due diligence, right? But then we also look at well, does this fit culturally? Is the integration point really there? Is the customer value really going to be significantly improved and if you cannot answer that very favorably, then keep the money. >> So you worked at IBM for a number of years, you worked at Gartner for a number of years. Now you're back working for a vendor. >> Yeah. >> Compare and contrast those roles. I mean Gartner, you do a lot of writing, you do a lot of traveling, you talk to a zillion people. I'm sure you talk to a lot of people here too, but you're coming at it from a very biased perspective whereas Gartner of course you're unbiased. You're serving the end customer. So talk about the difference in those two roles. >> So I approach it a little uniquely in that I'm biased. I mean I'm paid by a vendor, right? And so there's a certain inherent bias in there, but I go into a customer conversation and say "Maybe you shouldn't be using Veeam for certain things." So I'll give you an example. We have Unix capabilities with Solaris AIX. There are other vendors that do that even better than we do. They have rich application integration. If someone says that's my number one problem, honestly we're not your best choice. Now the reality is most of the world is moving towards more physical and virtual Windows and Linux. So I'll come in, say, a large enterprise and I'll say, "Okay, if you're like most shops," and I'll always undersell it. "Like probably 85% of your workload "is physical virtual Windows Linux." and they always interrupt me and go, "No, no, no, it's 92%." Like, "Okay, well we can help with that 92%." >> Yeah, yeah. >> The other 7%, I'm honestly going to tell you, we're not best of breed. >> Yeah that's a safe balance view that the AIX Solaris piece. >> Series. (Dave laughs) There's certain things. >> Yeah. >> We want to stick to our swim lane. We think it's a pretty wide lane, but there's no reason to come out of it. >> So your role as strategy, talk a little bit about how you're turning that strategy into action and specifics at Veeam. >> Yeah a big part of it has to do with cloud. >> I know that's the word that we've been talking about for a long, long time. So there's the aspirational aspect of Cloud and the operational. The aspirational is I want to be able to move in and out. I want mobility, I want the ability to exit. The operational is I want to be able to do this efficiently, meaning I want to be able to either send data to the cloud, my on-prem backup or I want to be able to protect SAAS-based workloads or infrastructure as a service workload so cloud-native workloads and then over time, I might want to be able to leverage that for something other than availability. So how can you rapidly make the data and only the portion of data that I need available to me when I need it? >> I was taking some notes during the key notes and I was just doing like a little, not really a tag cloud, but I was trying to identify as I heard them and grabbed them, the attributes of cloud data protection. I want to throw some out to you. You tell me. We'll play kind of word association, I guess. So I have fast recovery, API-based, open, simple, transparent, data-oriented, automated, cloud pricing, federated to accomodate the edge. Are these some of the attributes that we should associate with cloud data protection, maybe some of the things that I'm missing. How do you look at the attributes of a company and its products providing cloud data protection? >> Yeah so a big part of it, I actually like the phrase hybrid cloud even better than people say multi-cloud. The reason I like that is because hybrid presumes that you can have on premises as well. So like if it was the Dave and Dave company tomorrow, we'd probably be born in the cloud. Everything would be software as a service. We'd get some public cloud space. Now if we'd been in business for 20 years, we've got investments that we've made and we don't want to get rid of that any sooner than we have to. So hybrid cloud I like, but I think you nailed it in that what do every one of those attributes have in common? It's trying to get your most precious resource to you in a way that you want to consume it with as least amount of friction as possible. We want to reduce the aggravation associated with being able to access that rapidly. >> When you think about the customer conversations that you've had at Veeam and even going back to your Gartner days, I've always felt this notion of not hybrid, I see hybrid and multi-cloud as different. I've always looked at multi-cloud as multi-vendor. >> Yeah. >> Yeah I've got line of business, I've got shadow IT, I've got different IT projects and I've got multiple clouds and it's just, to me it was always less of a strategy than sort of this is where we are and now people need to put together a hybrid strategy. So IT's been asked to come clean up this mess as it always is. What's your take on the hybrid landscape and how we got here but more specifically, customer strategies when you consult with your customers? >> Yeah you're right that there's a lot of departmental buying, there's a lot of, in some cases, it's best of breed so I'm very willing to go look at multiple providers because I didn't sign up to go deploy the third best solution. Everyone wants what they think will be the most appropriate tool for them and rightfully so. So I think that's how we got, to your point, we didn't have a strategy that said I want 10 vendors. We arrived at an implementation choice that resulted in 10 vendors being deployed and then to your point further, then we had to layer on something on top of that. That's really where we come in and simple as it sounds, we really want to promote choice, choice of infrastructure, choice of cloud, choice of hypervisor, choice of operating system. >> So great discussion vector is the best of breed versus sort of integration. >> Yeah. >> And my question is that's been a decades-long. >> Yeah. >> Sort of trade-off that people have made. You see it in the software business, the hardware business and all through the industry. Is the API economy changing that. Can you be both, I mean Veeam, let's agree. Veeam is a best-of-breed provider. While your portfolio's growing, you're a billion-dollar company, you take a company like Dell who's got this ridiculously large portfolio. They can come into a customer and say well even with services or at IBM, we can wrap the big blue blanket around you and integrate everything. With the API economy, does that change the game on that argument of best of breed versus integration and convenience? >> It's a nuanced answer. The answer is a little yes and a little no. >> It depends, right? >> Let me decompose that because that's a cop-out, but the "it depends" aspect is really, APIs are wonderful to create an ecosystem and other integration points. If that's about offering your expandability to do something, that's a positive. If that really means that well because I can't deliver what you need, you got to go and write it yourself, that is a negative. So if the API is leveraging something for even greater value but beyond what the tools are originally designed to do, I think that's net positive, but if you have to exploit the API to just to get the product to work, why did I buy your product when I have to go hire someone to write code to work on your product? That's, you don't want that business. >> Okay so the last Gartner Magic Quadrant that came out was one that you sort of spearheaded back in 2017. It was like this perfect storm of backup analysts leaving Gartner and so there's been a little bit of delay in terms of the new one coming out which is coming our shortly as I understand it, but one of the observations that you can make if you look at the 2016-2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant is that Veeam moved from lower right to upper right which is rare. Can you explain that a little bit? You were saying that it usually goes in a different pattern. Elucidate, please. >> Yeah. Yeah so the magic in the Magic Quadrant is if you could actually jump from one quadrant to straight to leaders and that would be a very atypical progression. Usually it's a backwards Z. You come into the lower left, probably get over to the lower right, fall back, but go up to the upper left and then maybe you get to leaders in the upper right. The magic part in Veeam, the thing that they were able to do is go from visionary lower right to leader upper right. >> Okay and why do you think they were able to do that? I mean there are numerous attributes, but presumably 350,000 I think is the number of customers helped and so you've got a lot of references and proof points, the technology itself, but it's rare. Why do you think Veeam has been able to succeed in that regard? >> I think it's because Veeam has been good about getting answers to the most pressing problems. Again Veeam doesn't do everything. It doesn't support every single operating system, but the vast majority of the concentration of where customer issues are and where customer environments are getting deployed at, we can address very well and actually this weekend, I got here Friday night. So all day Saturday, all day Sunday and yesterday 'til 5 p.m. I took our SE training and so I've deployed Veeam, worked with active directories, all kinds of things for 72 hours basically and it was really that easy to use. In fact, my most difficult thing is I stayed in class until 6:30 at night because I'd never done active directory. I've never been an exchange admin before so I had to kind of come up to speed on those tools a little bit, but once I got that, the product was incredibly powerful, but also very intuitive. So you still have a little bit of that independent analyst DNA in you so I'm going to ask you to try to put that independent hat on. When you think about Veeam's traditional base of SMB, they're very successful there, obviously superglued itself to the virtualization trend. The last couple of years, Veeam has tried to move up-market, develop some relationships with some large players and has had some success there. Is the product well-suited for that larger enterprise and where do you see that going in terms of the up-market progression? >> Yeah so in theory, that's what I'm here to drive, the enterprise word is in my title, but in reality I focus more broadly than that. But if I just think about enterprise, I ran the numbers last week and company inception to date, we've actually derived over $2 billion of software-only revenue from the enterprise market and that's been accelerating. Now in 2017-18 and the first quarter of this year, almost $1 billion. So we're moving and we're moving fast. We had our sales kick off like most companies do. January, go to sales kick off and Ratmir says, "Hey don't chase just the big deals, the $2 million deals. "We've never sold a $2 million "without having a $200,000 deal first." The very next week, we got a $2 million deal on the first paper so he shot low. He should've said five million, but the interesting thing about Veeam and to answer your question, I think we resonate with the kind of challenges a large enterprise has. We allow them to move at their own scale if they want to move in a very large fashion, they can with Veeam. I would honestly tell them move as appropriate for you. As assets age, as you're willing to take on the change in an environment, do so, but I think Veeam is interesting. It's the same piece of software that I installed on my laptop this weekend that can also go to a Fortune 100 company. The same piece of software that manages 50,000 agents, we have at one shop, 50,000 Windows agents. We can do that with same code base and the only thing that's different is we just horizontally scale out how we deploy the capacity and then how we deploy the mover agents. >> I tweeted out this morning, Ratmir was standing in front of a chart with all these features and over the time and that's been part of the hallmark of Veeam is not checkbox features but real substantive features and you've had a consistent progression. Even Ratmir said, we don't have a big long-term roadmap that we share with our customers even internally. Yeah we have a direction and a vision, but very focused, almost like a bit of an Agile development methodology but the point is that, and you see that some companies are really good at this, some companies, not so good at this, but just consistently delivering features that are in-demand, that customers want, listening to their customers and just nailing it and that seems to be the hallmark of Veeam and as they say, some companies just don't have that in their DNA. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I think what it really comes down to is at the end of the day, every developer thinks like a customer and they do that because they spend a lot of time on our Veeam forums and I'll be honest, when I was a mainframe backup developer, I didn't talk to that many customers. I was just writing code and I didn't know how people were actually putting the product to use in production. I didn't always know what feature might be most helpful for them. >> You were guessing. >> I was trying to think of the art of the possible, hopefully an educated guess, but I was really just trying to say what might be good, what might be of resonance versus actually having someone goes on a forum and says Veeam, what I would like you to do is X. That's one of the reasons why we do have, to your point, we don't have a 10-year roadmap where we say this feature is coming in 12 months, this feature is coming in 24 months. It's fluid and in some cases, we actually moved up delivering our physical agent management by a year because we started selling more and more of those and people said I need that feature functionality faster. We're willing to trade-off some of our other feature functionality. So if we can be, as long as we can continue to respond to the market, I think we're well-positioned. >> How does a capability like that surface itself? Obviously by talking to customers, but how does it get into the development pipeline so quickly? >> Yeah well in some cases, we've got a huge amount of not just, our part of R&D. It's the research, it's experimentation, it's incubation of new things. So when we find that sweet intersection point, then we can quickly operationalize that. In other cases, we just have to be nimble. We have to react fast. >> Is it a command and control culture though where somebody says okay this is what we're doing or is it more sort of the team gets together and says oh this really makes sense based on what the customers are telling us, let's go. How does that decision get made? >> Yeah well ultimately it is a command and control in the sense that our co-founder, one of our co-founders runs sales and marketing. Our other co-founders runs R&D and they ultimately get sign-off on their respective areas, but it is collaborative in the sense of we do bring forward, here's what we see in market, here's what see in our customer forums. Here's what our ecosystem of partners are telling us, here's our view of the top five things we ought to go do. >> I was struck by the other slide that Ratmir had. It was the $15 billion slide and it was probably, backup and recover was maybe I don't know seven out of the 15 if I remember, but there were all these other segments. It was sort of analytics and disaster recovery and data management, all new pockets of opportunity. $15 billion today, obviously growing with especially the cloud. How do you see that landscape and how does that affect the way you look at strategy? >> Yeah so I actually put that bubble chart together. >> Oh, I like it. >> The rationale between the bubbles, we have core, we put backup in the middle because that's what we do but also that's how we ingest data and now we can do other things around it. So the reason for those bubbles and they were of varying sizes and the bubbles were sort of in and out of to varying degrees the main backup bubble according to how much intersection we thought as a company we could have with that. Where we thought we could add value, where we thought there was an ecosystem potential. So for example, analytics. We're not going to become the next best analytics company tomorrow, not even years from now. We could partner and we can provide data and we get better access to data to be able to do that. So we'd want to facilitate that. In other cases, maybe we really do want to go own and acquire. >> Well and so to your earlier comments there, I didn't use the term, the phrase land and expand, but that's clearly what you guys are doing starting with the $200,000 sale and growing it to a $2 million sale. So those bubbles are potentially cohort sales. >> Yes. >> That you can sell sort of like bananas in bunches I like to say, right? >> Yeah. And part of that is who do you sell that to. And so if you're able to go and address some of those ancillary bubbles or markets, now you've got a different entree point into the organization. If you're already involved with an organization, now you can offer more value because you can get more out of your data that you've already protected. So it opens up new conversations for us to have. It opens up entirely new buying centers for us too. >> Well how is the role of whom you sell to changing? I mean it was backup admin historically, right or maybe a Veeamware admin. Veeam admin. How is that changing? >> So greatest example I would tell you are events. So we acquired a company last January or a year ago January called N2W Software. So they're predominantly at Amazon re:Invent conferences. You go to Amazon re:Invent and no one's heard of Veeam and if anyone's heard of either of the two companies, it's definitely N2WS and someone's seen it in the marketplace. That demographic tends to be totally different from the demographic if you go to the on-premises data center type of conference where they have heard of Veeam and it's a very different sort of mindset. To your point, they grew up in a very different landscape. Now instead of someone who's well-steeped in server storage and networking and maybe majored in one, possibly two of those things, now you've got a generalist where he or she is probably in their 20s, has a very different point of view of what it should take to get something working and has a very different view of how they want to be sold to, how you can go and reach them. >> So at the cloud show, there might be a development persona. >> Yes. >> That you're selling to. Obviously VMWare, VMWorld, we know what that is. It's IT guys, right, is the predominant and how do you see cloud changing that? Is it cloud architects or sort of cloud leaders? CTOs increasingly? Data Protection becomes more and more important to digital business. So how are you seeing that role change due to cloud? >> So right now we have to basically have more touchpoints. Our typical legacy fan of our customer, our customer base, our product's sweet spot still remains and it's in some cases will pull us into the cloud. In other cases, we have to go talk to someone that's entirely different. But again, that's more of an administrative view. But to your point, going up the stack now, if you go to the not even Vice President of Infrastructure, you go to the CIO, he or she says, "I am tired of thinking about boxes. "I am tired of thinking about where this resides. "I want to think business outcome." So for us that's actually a great conversation because it all comes back to data. That's what we're in the business of doing. We capture, protect and move data. >> So that brings it back to strategy. We got to run, but summarize in your words, just sort of the strategy of Veeam and where you see this whole thing going. >> Yeah I will simplistically say it's more of the same. We want to continue to offer what we think is a best of breed solution for on-prem and increasingly cloud availability, but also we want to offer real customer value in terms of now being able to leverage that data, get more value out of that whether that's DevOps, running analytics against that, security test patch, whatever it may be, we want to be able to give you just the data you need, so have granularity, and offer speed and ease of use to do that. >> So as data becomes more and more important, you're seeing companies go beyond backup, trying to get more out of there, their backup, moving to data protection, data management, not just an insurance policy anymore. Dave Russell, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with Peter Burris as my cohost. We're at VeeamON Live from Miami. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

live from London England it's the cube covering dot next conference Europe 2018 brought to you by Nutanix hi and welcome back on with you pissed car and I'm Stu Mittleman and welcome to the CTO segment at Nutanix next 2018 welcome back to the program to my right is Vinnie Gill who's the CTO of cloud services and to his right is Rajeev Murray ani not very honest I mean you know the CTO of cloud platforms a gentleman thanks so much for joining us again thanks dude for having us being back all right rajiv and Binny mechanics it's been kind of busy since last time we've chatted AOS got really a file system rewrite there's been some M&A integration going on as well as organic activity so you know I love talking the CTO is just if you can bring us inside a little bit you know what's been happening what your team's been working on some of the hard challenges I mean things like page be nested hypervisor on top of DCP you know these are some hard challenge getting ready for nvme over fabric you know so some real you know massive things that happen underneath the cover as well as some new products so didn't want to start with you it's tough yeah you know what I'm keeping you to your team busy oh the teams have been quite busy especially you know once you have you know more than 10,000 customers and a product that's earning a lot of revenue coming in and at the same time you have to change the dark surfer preparing for the next generation so it's a lot of work I mean if you're starting from scratch it's much easier whether you know we've had a lot of experience bringing in new capabilities making it transparent to the customer one-click upgrade is really important for us so learning from the past we have been able to rewrite the engine the storage in a way that customers wouldn't notice but it's gonna run just faster you know kudos to the team that they've pulled it off and it goes across the board when we are acquiring new companies that come into the fold of the Nutanix family the whole idea is to make it look seamless to the customer because that's one thing that you know customers know us for like hey is the willit have neutronic simplicity so a lot of learnings we have created some thumb rules to guide people coming in and those are working fine for us and there's you know a method to the madness over here there is in the end one vision that we want to provide a true hybrid cloud experience to our users do that we feel you're the first start by building the best private cloud you can't have hybrid without private and to do that we need to have an infrastructure that actually works for private cloud so we start with HCI as an initial platform we build on top of that with private cloud features and not just still a networking compute and storage like in the past but more platform services like era and carbon and so on and then once we have that we can then layer on the new hybrid cloud services so even though it looks like getting a lot of things it's all guided by that one region so tell me you know that hybrid that hybrid cloud vision you know where doesn't lead us doesn't lead us to you know the public cloud in the end does it lead us to a new 10x cloud where where does that help customers go towards well the way I look at it is that it doesn't lead to any one place it leads to multiple clouds there'll be private clouds of the edge clouds distributed clouds big central public clouds the important thing is can you move applications and data between between flowers and analogy I use is you know 20 years ago if you if you were writing applications to Solaris you were pretty much locked into Sun if you go by writing applications for hp-ux you were pretty much locked into into HP once Linux came along and made it possible to write applications for any x86 everywhere got independence from from from underlying hardware and the same thing will happen with cloud today you have to write applications for Amazon for GCP for Asha who can build an operating system that actually commoditize is all that that makes it possible for you to run on any cloud with the same set of applications so that kind of sounds to me like you're you know doing V motion and H a India res but then you know for a new generation of technologies well not be motion across clouds is of course the goal it is the goal but it's not just enough to move the applications around data around you have to move the management plan has to be the same so the lot more to it than just simply copying by it's across maybe you want to add to it yeah I mean basically adding to what Rajeev said if you ask where will hybrid cloud lead I think it leads to a dispersed cloud you know some of it was also mentioned by readers in the keynote which is you know this big monolithic cloud concept has to atomize into much smaller pieces and distributed and that's what's going to happen but you start with solving it at the hybrid and at least solve it for two and from two you go to many and that's what's really exciting yeah it's a really good point then I want you to help expand on that a little I I think back to companies that don't portfolios and you look at it and say okay well I product a B and C and boy I I don't know how to use those together because they for an inner basis and how do I work them together today you know I think micro-services architecture I think about api's pulling everything together what are those guiding principles that you give internally to teams to make sure that I can use the pieces that I want they work all together they work with you know there's really broad ecosystem you have and all these multi cloud environments so you know as much effort we put in building architecture for the product design I mean we have to put the same amount in terms of how is it going to be consumed by the customer in just having a long portfolio is no longer what customers are looking for looking for simplicity so to your point one of the things we are really careful about is especially when we are acquiring technology in organically is how do you make sure identity and billing is it's the same right that's the most important thing so you don't have to login once in this product once natural basic stuff but if you get it you know right it's just delightful the other thing is about experience developer experience and user experiences these are the two other out of the four factors user experiences around like do I have to learn this again like if you look at companies like Apple I mean if I've used the Mac use they try to make it very similar such that even a two-year-old can figure out how to use it and we would like to say that if you have been an IT industry for two years you should be able to use any Nutanix product and developer experience is around api's we have a standard that we have Jade version three intent full api is and that is creating a standardization across you saw a little bit of the opening the demo today there you know I went through calm and epoch and flow and prison throw all from one pane of glass it didn't look like four different products in fact why not mentioned there were four different products it probably wouldn't have been obvious that they were and that's important to us keeping that experience seamless is very important and that comes at a cost I mean it's we could have released it as soon as we acquired some of these things and punted it on to the customer to figure out how these pieces come together but we know our customers have a higher expectation from us so we take the time and from from that perspective you know as a as a user you know I'm used to working with different types of clouds public private I wrote anything in between and the amount of interfaces I have to touch to get you know something working to get a series of products to to align to do what I wanted to do that's becoming such a difficult task that you know having a single interface or having a familiar interface would actually help in that so maybe you can talk a little while use that UI to go into the public clamor into the hybrid cloud as well to make you know that experience easier as well talk about a couple of things one whenever there's a proliferation of technologies and you're trying to glue it together I mean single pane of glass is one thing that people talk about I think that's not the most important thing I mean obviously it's a requirement it's a necessary condition not a sufficient one to make it sufficient you also have to bring in opinion into the design and the opinion is where we are taking some decisions for the customer where you know the customer would care about learning about those things and that's where no tonics will come in and through our best practices we put our opinion in the design of the product so that the number of decision points where the customer is minimize and that's how you basically start consuming this diversity out there at the end of the day for the business the only two things matter that business logic and business data infrastructure is sitting in the middle lights it's like a necessary evil so you know if we can hide it and make it seamless you know customers really happy about it can you talk about that the feedback loop you have with customers things are changing very fast you know it's hard for anybody to keep up you know this week even you know hoot anacs has a lot of announcements that I'm sure will take people all the time to there how do you get the feedback loop to customers to make sure your your they're getting what they need from to understand your products and your understanding where they are in their journey and you know mature the product line yeah I mean we have a whole bunch of channels we have we just had a customer advisory board yesterday you know invite customers and have a really deep intimate conversation and frank conversation you know what's working for you what's not working we have our engineering team on slack channels and whatsapp channels with our customers especially the customers who are really you know they complain about a product and they have opinions amenity so we just try to short-circuit this thing and then it's all about empathy so getting a team note here the customers just absolutely retrieve I definitely want your pin but just feedback actually I talked to a few customers and they said I don't know how Nutanix does it but for a company their size I feel like I get personal attention in touch points so congratulations it's good the stuff you saw today is a direct result of the feedback the grouping of products into core essentials and enterprise kind of also reflects the customer journey a lot of customers start with us for with the core once they get used to that get their sense as far as build a true private cloud and only then they started looking at multi cloud so right products for the right customer it's something that we are taking very very seriously at this point so I want to dive into that you know right product right customer so one of the announcements you made is carbon had kubernetes as as a manager platform so what customers do you do you service with that product how do you go into customers like that and how do you help them kubernetes is one of the most fastest growing technologies in the IT space that we have seen in the in the recent years and a lot of our customers I would say especially this year we have seen they have developers using containers and they are at a point where they're trying to decide how can I put it in production a production has a many requirements their carbon is being used by our customers who are trying to see how they'll put containers into production and what we are doing with carbon is we providing native kubernetes api Zsasz is there an open source but we're solving the heart problems of upgrades scale out high availability troubleshooting these mundane things that you know usually people don't want to do and that's where we come in and help so I've seen customers use our storage volumes for even databases containerized to stateless things it's all across the board but still early years I mean for this kind of ecosystem but it's headed into you know it's going to be the future you know one of the things I found really interesting to watch is over the last two decades we've talked about intelligence and automation in infrastructure but really things are happening fast now when you talk about you know whether a I or ml there's really things that are creating some intelligence that it's not like oh I created some script and it does something but you know it's working well I know there's a number of places that that fits into your portfolio maybe maybe prism X play it would seem to get some good resonance and cheers from the audience because maybe they've all played with you know the you know if TTT so start from there and how do you think about the AI in ml space yeah so we we look at you know computing evolving from manual mostly manual in the past to more automated but really you want to get to this autonomous computing that that sort of talked about so you know think of it as you know causes to be really difficult to drive in the past it used to require knowing how the carburetors work and cleaning them out once in a while to the point where maybe 15 years ago pretty much didn't know anything about the internals of a car but you could drive it was reliable it would work which is probably where we are today in IT but the real goal is to get as an autonomous computing the self-driving cars at Tesla Google now where you don't even have to be paying attention at the car will just drive itself yeah I have TTT and the x-play stuff that we have as a step in that direction it's obviously very early but it's the beginning of a journey where you can then start taking feedback loops learning what works modeling that out and extending capabilities on your own and that is something we'll be looking at over the next few years and you know it's something where I don't think it's it's not cute and that's why it needs to be done it's actually required you know if you look at Moore's law it applies to machines so every year you will have double the number of course and you know the same dollar can buy more if you look at humans that's not true I mean ever here then you're only getting more expensive in fact lower for customers here say talent is scarce so just by that definition you see machines are growing and the people who manage the machines are shrinking or you know static so you have to put in a layer of the machine which is smart in the in the between in between of the human and the large form of machines and that if you don't do it there is no data center so it's inevitable and you'll see this happen more and more so that kind of sounds like you're you know positioning your portfolio in a way that you enable the IT of people to not care about infrastructure as much anymore but help you know the their employer their customer do other stuff so how does your portfolio relate to the freeing up of time for those employees for those jobs personnel people some of it is just goes back to the poor design principle I would go to them basic you know how do we how do we start as a company we're looking at storage and they were dual controller a and B a ties B is running but guess what I'm worried that B will also die is the same age so I have to run to fix a run to fix a is my weekend and the night wasted if I had n one dies fine of it's a capacity problem so that goes to the core like how do we design things that are scale out and web scale we talked about so everything that we do including now prism central scale out I have to rush to go fix things hardware will always fail right and that's you know it permeates in the entire organization in terms of how we design things and then on top of that you can add automation and machine intelligence and all that but fundamentally it goes to engineering when you talk about we talked about earlier in the discussion kind of the rewrite that went on for emerging applications and emerging technologies I guess what's exciting you these days you know the industry of the Hall containers you know we looked at you know Flash technology containerization you know I looked at Nutanix when it first came out as was you know some of these waves coming together hyper scale and software-defined and flash all kind of with a perfect storm for the original generation what what are what are those next waves coming together that that you think will you know have a massive impact on the industry a lot of innovation going on on every layer of the stack I mean if we start with the hardware it's been coming for a while but it's almost here now the whole concept of having persistent memory essentially dims blocks having memory that can persist across reboots and we byte addressable so this is a big difference for the storage market right we've always had block addressable story let's become flight addressable paradigms of computing will change and Wharton's will change how we write programs will change so there's a whole big wave coming and getting prepared for that was very important for you yeah and if I control into that a little bit cuz you know what I thought about you know before it was I had you know like like pull of storage and my full of compute and I had my networking and well you know what your solution is I just have a pool of infrastructure but I need specific data in specific places and latency is really important you know Amazon just announced do you know a new compute instance with hundred gigabit networking for you know the same type of application we're talking about Hana and persistent memory and the like so do we not think of it as a pool anymore it's a here you know metadata and data are gonna get more localized so how should we think of your infrastructure going forward you should think of it as a fool we should worry about making it all all work well and that's that that is essentially our job if we can succeed at that then you would never have to think about it as well this particular you know storage is allocated with this particular application at this current time it's up to us to make that happen as applications are running from your direction you feel you know absolutely another thing that's happening in IT in the in the space of compute is the upper limit of this pool is being hidden right so for example in the old days those discs then there was a virtual disc but it had a capacity and you would format it when you look at s3 doesn't have a capacity you don't format it that's what's and that's more to application design when you don't think about the capacity of the pool that you're using that's the direction where we need to go and hide all this right Amina so just-in-time purchase of the next hardware that you need to get but the developer does not see the upper limit well retrieving Binnie thank you so much for sharing all that this Congrats on all the progress and look forward to what were you gonna bring on down lives down the road thanks to you for you piss car I'm Stu minimun lot more coverage here and Nutanix dot next London 2018 thanks for watching

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World 2018, brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin Live at Boomi World 2018 at The Encore in Las Vegas. Been here all day, had a lot of great chats. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time a couple of gents from Hathority Implementation Partner of Dell Boomi, Philip Bernick, PhD, Principal, and Human-Centered Technologist, aka Technology Wonk. >> I go by both. >> It does say on your card, I think that's fantastic. And Vishwan Annam, MBA and principal technology architect at Hathority. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yes, thank you. >> Thank you for having us Lisa. >> So Hathority has been an implementation partner with Dell Boomi for several years now, congratulations yesterday on winning the Innovation Partner of the Year. Philip, you had an opportunity to talk yesterday at the partner summit with CTO Michael Morton, talk to us a little bit about that and about this Innovation Partner of the Year award, that's a big title. >> It is, and we're really excited to be able to do really interesting things with Boomi. It's more than just an integration platform, it really let's us do a lot of things with devices. IOT is coming to the mainstream because now we have infrastructure that will support it. It's a lot of data, it needs a big, fat pipe. We need gigabit networks in order to move it all around, to get it to the people who need to make decisions or to get it to systems who are making decisions for us, the Dell Boomi atom let's us do that and we've got it running on little tiny devices like Raspberry Pies and we can put it on other Edge devices and routers so we've done some micro services for cities that are interested in improving their smartness. >> Excellent. >> So yeah, we're excited. >> Vishwam, tell us about, for those of our viewers who haven't heard of Hathority, tell us a little bit about what you guys do, who you are, where you're located. >> Sure, so we're a data integration company so we work with Dell Boomi in automating a lot of the data integration practices, so a lot of our customers, they're in all across the world and they're serving their different (mumbles). Just as there's airlines and the healthcare and smart cities, and some are like, you know, the gaming industry. So what we are doing is we are automating all of their work flows and connecting all of their systems in one place so that's where we are liberating. We're based in the greater Phoenix area so, and our employees are, some are here in the U.S., some are India, some are in U.K., so based on what the customers needs are like in Dell Boomi our, our consultants would work there so we are 35 in strength so far, our company. >> So about three or four years you've been in business, Dell Boomi, a number of things that came out this morning, I was up to hear numbers and statistics during the general session and Chris McNabb, CEO, talked about their adding five new customers every single day, they also were, I was reading this over the weekend, fifth year in a row strong leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for iPads, but they've come out today and said we are redefining the I in iPads. This is more than integration, it's more than integrating applications, you got to integrate data, news sources, existing sources, you got to integrate people and processings and trading networks with this new reimagination of the I to the intelligence. Philip, I'm curious, what does that signify to you about your partnership with Dell Boomi and what opportunities are you excited that this is going to open up for you? >> Well it says to me that they're excited about the same kinds of things that we're excited about so one of the things that we demonstrated, we have customers who are interested in lots of different technologies, yesterday they talked about three years ago IOT was the eyeroll, right, don't get a headache. This year it's Blockchain. But one of the demos we brought to Boomi World is a demo where we actually use Dell Boomi to integrate with Hyperledger, a Blockchain application, and on top of that we used Flow to produce the front end and so we can integrate across a variety of platforms and now we integrated into the Blockchain and our customers want these kinds of things. The Blockchain is interesting because it's immutable, it's auditable, and it's validated by all of the participants in a particular set of nodes in the Blockchain so, you know, it's an exciting technology. It's exciting because, not because of the tokenization, things like Bitcoin, but because it's a database that you can share, a ledger that we can share. >> Because one of the challenges that a lot of our customers run into is managing the data integrity when somebody sends the data, how reliable it is and whether there, is there any place in the middle that somebody's monitoring the data so those are the challenges that Blockchain would solve in guaranteeing the data delivery and the quality of it so those are kind of I that he was mentioning, you know, as part of integration, innovation and more of a, you know, new parts and transformation. >> We're really transforming. >> The data transformation in the digital world these days. >> So Blockchain, I often hear companies that might be integration companies that talk a lot about Blockchain and I kind of sit back and go I don't understand what your story is there. Talk to us about, cause it's a, you know, crypto Blockchain, huge buzzwords, talk to us exactly about what you guys do and what Dell Boomi is doing, I think they announced support for hyperledger fabric as well as Ethereum but-- >> Right. >> Help unpack that myth around Blockchain and what integrations role is in it. >> A lot of the confusion around Blockchain comes from things like Bitcoin so the interesting thing around Bitcoin is it was the first Blockchain and it's built around this idea of a token, the Bitcoin, right? And so what this ledger is keeping track of are these Bitcoin, but you can keep track of any sort of data on a Blockchain. You can contribute data of any sort to a, not the Bitcoin Blockchain, but Ethereum, for example, we can include software, we can include other sorts of data, you can include a healthcare record that is your healthcare record that you share only with individuals with whom you share part of your private key, right, but you own it and it's yours and it's always yours and you control it. But it's validated by all of the people who are participating in producing that Blockchain so it's decentralized but it's imutable and it's auditable so it guarantees integrity because unless all of the participants agree that a transaction took place, it didn't. So we ensure data integrity through the Blockchain. That's the interesting thing about it, for us. >> That's a major part of integration companies, because a lot of the technologies that we hear, Solaris is one of the messaging queuing systems that they presentate, so they're guaranteeing the delivery at the same time relabel messaging transmissions, streaming the data, and it's faster, reliable, and managing the full data usage. >> Here's a great use case, today is voting day. Many polling places no longer have paper ballots, so you cast your vote but you have no way to actually see the vote that you cast. If it were on a Blockchain, you could inspect your vote, but no body else could know how you voted. You could insure the fact your vote was entered into the Blockchain and count it in the way that you wanted it to be. >> That's a great example and relatable, so thanks for sharing that. So guys, Dell Boomi has, I think they said this morning, Chris McNabb, over 350 partners, you guys are one of them. They have a broad ecosystem. Embedded partners, implementation, GSIs. Talk to us about your partnership and how, as Boomi says, we want to be the transformation partner, and it is all about transformation, right? Especially in an enterprise that wasn't born in the cloud. It can't survive without, as the customer expectation drives, I want to be able to buy something from your physical store, maybe a partner store, online, Amazon, Zappos, whatnot and I expect as a customer to have a seamless experience. That's hard to do for a company that's maybe 20, 30 years old to transform. I'm thinking of omni-channel retailers as the example. How is your integration, pun intended, will Dell Boomi really helping customers transform their digital, IT, security, workforce, what goes through with that opportunity to transform? >> You know, the relationship between Dell Boomi and it's partners is really synergistic. I mean they provide a lot of support. There's really excellent training, there's excellent communication. There's marketing support, we share on projects in a variety of ways, we do jump starts. So we help teach people how to use Boomi in addition to helping Boomi folks teaching us how to use the new tools. There's a great community for providing feedback, for getting resources if there's something that we need to do that we don't know how to do. There's a huge community that shares, we all share connectors, right? We're building integration and a connector doesn't exist and we create a new connector, not the configuration of the connector itself, we share it. So that collaborative approach to doing business is really important to us and it reflects our companies ethos as we hope is also reflects Dell Boomi's ethos. >> We've been working in Boomi since 2012, so over the years like even though we were certified partners since 2015, we have been contributing to various channels, like the support or, like, the community channel, and contributing to the release planning as well, because we are the first line of defense from the customers, we know what the customers are expecting. So say they got Salesforce to implement it. So we as a system integrator, we come in and see what are the data points for the Salesforce. And say like user data, they want to build their contacts in there or any activities or sales data. So there are multiple systems that are feeding into Salesforce in this case. So we are the ones who are contributing to Dell Boomi. Okay, these are the features that we could consider. So because Salesforce a-walled in, just like Boomi, they launched a different watch list as well So as in Boomi, there is a different connector for Salesforce and Service Cloud and multiple layers in that so those are the unique cases that we are contributing to Dell, and obviously there, I mean, they take the feedback so from the partners like us where they see it as they work towards delivering with this. So one use case that we are working with some of out customers who have innovated, we have been asking Dell to build it, like, you know, and they were able to deliver it. There are, like, they want some reporting of it, so you transmit the data to one system to other, and they wanted to see okay how the data system was the source and the system was the destination and how this data was transmitted. So Boomi gave the real time visibility into those. So those are some kind of partnering opportunities like all the way from customer to the product so we are happy to be in the middle and contributing our part of it. >> That's one of the things that I've heard a lot today is that Boomi is listening, one of the great examples of that on stage this morning was Chris McNabb talking about the Dell Boomi employee onboarding solution. They actually did an internal survey earlier this year and found, whoa, this is really not an optimal process, and in implementing an onboarding solution to make that more streamline, to obviously, you know, you hire someone who's brilliant, you want to be able to get them up and running and innovating as fast as possible. I like they shared the feedback they got from their own employees and created a solution that they're now being able to deliver to the market. >> And there was another piece to that that was really interesting which is that they utilized their partner network in order to build solution, right? They didn't build all of it in house. >> You're right, they did talk about that. >> They reach out and partners, they work with partners in a variety of ways and we really, really appreciate that. >> Yeah, that listening, that synergy that you've both talked about was really apparent. So when we look at certain business initiatives, like onboarding or customer 360 or e-commerce, any favorite joint customer example that you've helped to integrate that has approached one of those daunting business initiatives, and worked with Hathority, and you're laughing, to really transform. >> They're all like that. >> Really interesting, yeah. Do you want to talk about it here? >> Give me one of your favorite examples. >> Share, well, share. >> Okay, so with some of our customers, and especially with some of our enterprise scale, so there are a lot of systems that are at stake for them because, you know, they want to have the digital transformation journey so the major one Dell Boomi contributes to is connecting all of the system, giving them their visibility so with, not only the point to point integrations, they also pull the real time integrations capability. So we're like, with this case, where the customer go into retail store and say they want to do something at the point of sale transaction, they want to purchase something, so there and you have the credit card transaction. I mean, those need to encrypt, I mean, we cannot wait for 10 minutes to get the data so that's where, you know, like Dell Boomi is scalable and it's robust in the sense that their response time is pretty quick. So it's on a real time basis. So a lot of these cases like, you know, with the Boomi that we are able to deliver it. You know, on the the integration side, APA side, and now with the EMB hedge, which is a master data hub, a new product from them within the last two years. We have been working with our customers implementing a master data hub as well as ManyWho, which is a Dell Boomi Flow which is amazing. Some of our customers, you know, with the APAs, like can you see the data? But with the Flow, you can visualize, these are the exact UI that you are seeing. How your data is getting in on the back end and then you can throw it out so, because these enterprise customers, especially on the business side if they're working with something, so they want to try it out, but you know, they don't want to learn, you know, programming to do that so that's when, like, Flow will, is already helping, we are already seeing the value of it with our customers. >> We've heard a little bit about that today as well, Flow and terms of the automation, but also how that will enable customers, there was a cute little video on their website that I saw recently which showed an example of Flow. Somebody bangs their car into a tree, gets out, and takes a photograph of the incident, uploads it to their insurance carrier app who then actually initiates the entire claim into process, and that's was to me a clear example of you have to go where the data is. Michael Dell says frequently there's a big boom at the edge, but if I'm in that scenario as a customer, I want to know, I don't care what's on the back end, I want to be able to get this initiated quickly and I thought that was a nice, kind of, example of how they're able to abstract that so that the customer experience can be superior than the competition. >> Absolutely, so that's where Boomi has something called run time engine, which is scalable, like you could install, like, you know, a smaller device like Raspberry Pie which is like, you know, just a mini computer. Or you you could install on the big switchboard itself, so this is a scalable so earlier, as Michael Dell was mentioning, the edge of computing. So you could install on a Gateway, which sits on the-- >> On a tree >> On a tree. (laughs) So you don't have to send all the data to cloud for processing so it's an amazing leap into the next distribution computing because, as you mentioned, the fast, the fastness of response time, you know. We don't have to wait for the cloud to respond so all the combinations and real time navigation's are happening within the Edge network itself so, we are all on the same, we have implemented the same solution so, which was one of the reason why we're the winner of Innovation Partner of the Year award. >> Well congratulations again for that gentlemen. Thank you so much for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> And sharing with our viewers a little bit about Hathority and what you guys are, how you really symbiotically innovating with Dell Boomi. Philip, Vishwam, thanks so much for your time today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you, thank you for having us. >> My pleasure, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin live from Boomi World 2018 in Las Vegas. Stick around, I'll be back with John Frayer and our next guest after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> From the Regency Center in San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Serverlessconf San Francisco 2018 brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Serverlessconf 2018 here in San Francisco at the Regency ballroom. I'm happy to welcome back to the program Simon Wardley, who's a researcher with the Leading Edge Forum, I spoke with you last year at Serverless in New York City, and thanks for joining me again here in San Francisco. >> Absolute pleasure, nice to be back. >> Alright, so many things have changed, Simon, we talked off camera and we're not going into it, your wardrobe stays consistent >> Always. >> But, you know, technology tends to change pretty fast these days. >> Mhmm. >> You do a lot of predictions and I'm curious starting out when you think about timelines and predictions, how do you deal with the pace of change, and put things out, I have my CTOs, like well, if I put a 10 year forecast down there, I can be off on some of the twists and curves, and kind of hit closer to the mark. Give us some of your thoughts as to how you look out and think about things when we know it's changing really fast. >> Okay, okay, so there are a number of different comments in there, one about how do you do predictions, one about the speed of change, okay? So I'm going to start off with the fact that one of the things I use is maps. And maps are based on a couple of characteristics. Any map needs an anchor, in the case of the maps of business that I do, that's the user, and often the business, and often regulators. You also need movement and position in a map. So position's relative to the anchor, so a geographical map, if you've got a compass then this piece is north, south, east or west of that. In the sort of maps that I do, it's the value chain which gives you position relative to the user or the business at the top. Movement, in a geographical map you have consistency of movement, so if I go, I don't know, north from England I end up in Scotland, so you have the same thing with a business map, but that evolution is described, sorry, that movement is described by evolution. So what you have is the genesis of novel and new activities custom-build examples, products and rental services, commodity and utility services, and that's driven by supply and demand competition. Now, that evolution axis, in order to create it, you have to abolish time. So one of the problems when you look at a map is there is no easy use of time in a map. You can have a general direction and then you have to use weak signals to get an idea of when something is likely to happen. So for example if I take nuts and bolts, they took 2,000 years to go from genesis to commodity, electricity was 1,400 years from genesis to commodity, utility, computing 80 years. So, there are weak signals that you can use to identify roughly when something is going to transition, particularly between stages like product to a commodity. Product-product substitution very unpredictable, genesis of novel acts, you can usually say when stuff might appear, but not what is going to appear because in that space it's actually what we call the uncharted, the unexplored space. So, one of the problems is time is an extremely difficult thing to predict without the use of weak signals. The second thing is the pace of change. Because what happens is components evolve, and when we see them shift from product to more commodity and utility, we often see a big change in the value chains that that impacts. And you can get multiple components evolving, and they overlap, and so we feel that the pace is very very fast, despite the fact that it actually takes about 30 to 50 years to go from genesis to the point of industrialization, becoming a commodity, and then about 10 to 15 years for that to actually happen. So if you look at something like machine learning, we can start with it back in the '70s, 3D printing 1968, the Battelle Institute, all of this stuff, virtual reality back in the 1960s as well. So the problem is, one, time's very difficult. The only way to effectively manage time is to use weak signals, it's probability. The second thing is the pace of change is confusing because what we're seeing is overlapping points of industrialization like for example cloud, and what's going here with Serverless. That doesn't actually imply that things are rapidly changing because you've actually got this overlapping pattern. Does that make sense? >> Yes, it does actually. >> Perfect. >> Because you think, we have in hindsight we always think that things happen a lot faster but-- >> Yeah. >> it's funny, infrastructure space when I talk to some of the people that I came up with, they were like oh yeah, come on, we did this in mainframe decades ago. and now we're trying again, we're trying again. Things like-- >> Containers, for example, you've got LXE before that, and we had Solaris Zones before that, so it's all sort of like, interconnected together. >> Okay, so tie this into Serverless for us. >> Okay. >> You were a rather big proponent of Platform as a Service, is this a continuation of us trying to get that abstraction of the application or is it something else? What is the map we are on, and, you know, help us connect things like PaaS and Serverless and that space. >> So back in 2005, the company I ran, we mapped out our value chain, and we realized that compute was shifting from product to utility. Now that had a number of impacts. A, that shift from product to utility tends to be exponential, people have inertia due to past practice, you see a co-evolution of practice, around the changing characteristic. It's normally to do with something called MTTR, mean time to recovery changes. And so you see rapid efficiency, rapid speed of development, being able to build new sources, new areas of value. So that happened with infrastructure, and we also knew it was going to happen with platform, which is why we built something called Zymkey, which was a code execution environment, totally stateless, event-driven, utility billing, and billing to the function, and that was basically a shift of the code execution platform from a product, lamp.net stack, to a much more utility form. Now we were way too early, way too early, because the educational barriers to get people into this idea of building with functions, functional program, much more declarative environment, was really different, I mean when Amazon launched EC2 in 2006, that was a big enough shock for everybody else, and now of course, now we're in 2014, Lambda represents that shift, and the timing's much much better. Now the impact of the shift is not only efficiency and speed of development of new things, and being able to explore new sources of value, but also a change of practice, and in the past, change of practice created DevOps, this is likely to create a new type of practice. For us, we've also got inertia to change because of pre-existing systems and governance and ways of working, sunk capital, physical capital, social capital. So it's all perfectly normal. So in terms of being able to predict and far-predict these types of future, well for me, actually, Lambda's my past, because that's where we were. It's just the timing was wrong, and so when it came out, it was like for me, it was like, this is really powerful stuff and the timing is much, and we're seeing it here, it's now really starting to grow. >> Alright, you've poked a little bit at some of the container discussions going on in the industry, you know, I look at the ecosystem here, and of course AWS is the big player, but there's lots of other Serverless out there. There's discussion of Multicloud. >> Yeah. >> How does things like Kubernetes, and there was this new term canative, or cane-native project, that was just announced, and we're all, don't expect that you've dug in too deeply, but, if you look at containers and Kubernetes, and Serverless, do these combine, intersect, fight? How do you see this playing out? >> So when I look at the map, you know, you've got the code execution layer, the framework which has now become more of a utility, and that's what we call platform. The problem is, is people will application to containers, and therefore describe their environments as application-container platforms, and the platform term became really messy, basically meant everything, okay. But if we break it down into code execution, this is what we call frameworks, this is becoming utility, this is where things like Lambda is, underneath that, are all these components like operating systems, and containers, and container management, Kubernetes type systems. So if you now look at the value chain, the focus is on building applications, and those applications need functions, and then lower down the stack are all these other components. And that will tend to become less visible over time. It's a bit like your toaster. I mean, your toaster contains nuts and bolts and all sorts of things, do you care? Have you ever noticed? Have you ever broken one open and had a look? >> Only if something's not working right. >> (laughs) Only if something, maybe, a lot of people these days wouldn't even go that far, they'd just go and buy themselves a new toaster. The point is, what happens is, as layers industrialize, the lower-order systems become much less visible. So, containers, I'm a big fan of containers. I know Solomon and the stuff in Docker, and I take the view that they are an important but invisible subsystem, and the same with container management and things like containers. The focus has got to be on the code execution. Now when you talk about canative, I've go to say I was really excited with Google Next last week, with their announcements like functions going GA, I thought that was really good. >> We've been hoping that it would have happened last year. >> Yeah exactly, I wanted this before, but I'm really pleased they've got functions coming out GA. There was some really interesting stuff around SDO, and there was the GRPC stuff which is, sort of, I think a hidden gem. In terms of the canative stuff, really interesting stuff there in terms of demos, not something I've played with, I'm sort of waiting for them to come out with canative as a service, rather than, you know, having to build your own. I think there was a lot of good and interesting stuff. The only criticism I would have was the emphasis wasn't so much on basically, serverless code execution building, it was too much focused on the lower end systems, but the announcements are good. Have I played with canative? No, I've just gone along and seen it. >> So Simon, the last question I have for you is, we spoke a year ago today, what are you excited about that's matured? What are you still looking for in this space, to really make the kind of vision you've been seeing for a while become reality, and allow serverless to dominate? >> So, when you get a shift from, say, product to utility, you get this co-evolution of practice, this practice is always novel and new. It starts to emerge, and gets better over time. The area that I think we're going to see that practice is the combining of finance and development, and so when you're running your application, and your application consists of many different functions, it's being able to look at the capital flow through your application, because that gives you hints on things like what should I refactor? Refactoring's never really had financial value. By exposing the cost per function and looking at capital flow, it's suddenly does. So, what I'm really interested in is the new management practices, the new tooling around observing capital flow, monitoring, managing capital flow, refactoring around that space and building new business models. And so there's a couple of companies here with a couple of interesting tools, it's not quite there yet, but it's emerging. >> Well, Simon Wardley, really appreciate you. >> Oh, it's a delight! >> Mapping out the space a little bit, to understand where things have been going. >> Absolute pleasure! >> And thank you so much, for watching as always, theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, The OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. It's Victoria Day, but we're working. So for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Happy to welcome back to the program, we've got Tim Burke who's the Vice President of Infrastructure and Cloud Engineering with Red Hat, and fresh off the keynote stage we have Mark McLoughlin who's the Senior Director of Engineering for OpenStack, also with Red Hat. Gentleman, thank you so much for joining us. >> Our pleasure, thank you. >> Thank you. All right, so Mark, I'll start with you. Keynote stage, you had a good discussion about, we were talking about open source, talking about community, is the themes that we heard at Red Hat Summit last weekend and again here at OpenStack. It's a nice couple of years in a row we've had the back-to-back of those two shows, so give us a little bit encapsulation of that message. >> Sure, I mean the key message of the keynote, really, was talking about the overlapping missions between the OpenStack and Kubernetes and really kind of showing how they come together for our customers and for users generally in terms of tackling that kind of broad, open infrastructure challenge of trying to give businesses the opportunity to be free from the infrastructure providers in terms of being able to switch between infrastructure providers and also OpenStack in terms of its role offering kind of on-premise infrastructure as an alternative to the public cloud. >> Yeah, Tim, I want to get your viewpoint on some things. It's interesting, we talk about we're at the OpenStack show but we're talking about containers, we're talking about edge computing. I think about one of the other foundations, The Linux Foundation does way more than Linux these days. They're doing all the cloud native things. Reminds me a lot of Red Hat themselves, broad spectrum of products. Sometimes it can almost get a little bit overwhelming for most people to say, "Oh my god, "there's so many projects, there's so many products. "How do you help me get to where I need to go "and where I need to go tomorrow?" What are you hearing from customers? How do you manage that? >> I think a lot of this mirrors Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and back when we started it was the day of the Unix wars, right? And in the early days of Linux it was this big challenge of getting your graphics drivers and putting all these pieces together, right? And now today it's more about broader infrastructure orchestration. And you see Mark Collier, for example, from The OpenStack Foundation started today showing a list of 30 different components that you have to piece together. And really, I think that that's what Red Hat focuses on, is two things. It's one, is where do we want to take the technology tomorrow through our open source fund, ranging from Linux to OpenStack and Ceph Filesystems, for example. But it's not just that. It's how do you get these pieces to work together? And I think that that's something that hasn't traditionally been the strength of the open source community because they may stick into these silos of operation. And I think that Red Hat's focus and strength right now is to do what we did for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the OpenStack space by pulling all of these pieces together in a consumable and supported manner. >> Yeah, it's funny you mention getting graphics cards in. Come on, with the Queen's announcement we now have the virtual GPU support, so it feels like, but you know what, we've come so far yet. We're doing some of the same things over again. What are you hearing that's just massively different about kind of the state of open source today? And we just had one of your customers on talking about their digital transformation. >> I think what's really changed over the years in open source is I think it started out, honestly, as a clone. It was like can we compete with the likes of Solaris, right? And so it was, I'd call it catch up for innovation. Now you look at open source. It's not catching up, it's leading all the innovation today whether it's all the major public clouds are based on open source technologies. When we started open source was unproven and many customers were skeptical of consuming it. Now you're seeing customers, governments, all sorts of different businesses demanding open source because they want choice, they don't want to be locked into any one vendor, and they want to be able to work collaboratively to harness the power. And I think that collective collaborative model has really pretty proven its effectiveness. >> Mark, I wanted to talk a little bit about OpenStack itself. I think last year at OpenStack Summit there was a lot of talk. People seemed to be a little bit confused or at least there was a lot of interesting architectural conversations, containers on top, containers on the bottom, what sits on the bare metal. This year both at Red Hat Summit and here and even in the industry at large I think a lot of that conversation has clarified. There's the (laughs) application layer and there's an infrastructure layer which does very hard things that the application layer does not have to worry about. How are you looking at OpenStack as a citizen of the industry and of the Stack connections with other open source and taking care of that infrastructure piece in 2018, right, which is, we're pretty far from where we started. >> No, great points. To highlight those architectural discussions and really trying to figure out the kind of layering there obviously kind of approach OpenStack as kind of the best tool for managing your infrastructure, getting your infrastructure under control, making it scalable, making it automatable, and then building an application platform on top of that. I may have confused the architectural discussion a little bit this morning with the keynote because what we actually showed in the keynote was on the rack on stage we had an OpenStack cloud running on bare metal and then we would end deploying Kubernetes. Our open shift distribution, we were deploying that also on bare metal alongside OpenStack. Whereas I think often people would assume if you're going to do Kubernetes on OpenStack you're going to do it in virtual machines that are managed by OpenStack. But we were actually showing how you can use OpenStack to manage the bare metal, that you're actually running Kubernetes directly on the bare metal but that there's still integration between Kubernetes and OpenStack when they're side by side. So maybe confused the architectural discussion a little bit more but I think it's really trying to highlight that that assumption of running Kubernetes inside virtual machines isn't necessary. >> You used one of my favorite tools in your keynote. You used Venn diagrams because it is not a thing over here and a thing over here. There's overlap and there's decisions that you'll make, and lots of customers want a platform that will guide them down that path. And they also, oh wait, but I have this custom thing that I need to do. What's the biggest problem we have in IT, is it's not standardized and nothing ever gets thrown away. It's like I want to run my docker image on a z/VM in a mainframe. Oh, Walmart does that, but they also have an OpenStack deployment. So (laughs) you hear all of these discussions out there where it's like wait, is this, you know, (laughs) is this the main thing? Is this modified? What sits on what and where? So it's and, it seems to be, and there's a lot of choices. >> Absolutely, and I think one of the really, you know, one of the really interesting things when you're working in this space is you realize that customers are making really long-term strategic decisions appear. The example I used today was BBVA, and they realized that they needed to kind of keep up with a fast-changing market and they needed an internal platform to allow them to do that. And this is about them making a long-term decision about how they were going to build that platform into the, it's a really kind of long-term and basing their business on that and its future. So that's, it's kind of humbling in terms of having that responsibility of making that work. >> Yeah, Tim, maybe we can get your comments on the ecosystem. We sure have watched three years ago when we were here HP had a big army coming in here as to they doing their distribution. Well, HP's a hardware, HPE, I should say as they are now (laughs) is a hardware partner. Red Hat works across all of the traditional infrastructure companies. This ecosystem changed. Red Hat has a broad ecosystem. What are you seeing out there? What do you get from the partners that they're asking, and how does that play? >> Yeah, I think this really, again, mirrors our approach to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And so if you look at all the different dimensions of compute, network, and storage, we have ecosystem partners in all of those. So we have the likes for storage, we have NetApp, EMC, IBM, many others. We have backup vendors like Trilio in on that. On the network front we have Cisco, Juniper, many others. We have ecosystem partners of all the major hardware OEMs. We have ecosystem partners in Innovee and Telco, all those spaces. So I think what really is the main driver of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the ecosystem. It's not really the kernel anymore. It's like how do you run a consistent platform across multiple footprints? And that's what Red Hat is trying to provide because today I see there is a risk of vendor lock, and just like back in the day it was mainframe, right? Try to get everything from the lowest layer to the top layer on one platform. Many of the public cloud vendors are trying to be that one-stop shop, almost analogous to the mainframe. And what we're trying to do just like we did before for his ecosystem is to provide through leveraging the power of open source a platform that people can run, a hybrid platform that they can accelerate their business not only on all the different public clouds but also on-premise as well. >> It's interesting, last week of course big announcement with Red Hat is Microsoft's up on stage. It was like cats and dogs living together. Year before, Amazon you had a big announcement with. With Kubernetes and so many of these different tools, yes, there's that vertical integration but most of the companies understand that they're going to be in a customer environment and other people are. There's no longer, it's oh, IBM of 50 years ago where I'm going to be full in on that chop. >> Right, and I see Kubernetes is also, it's a huge open source project. So this is the difference between upstream and productization. It's what Red Hat does, is we do our maintenance, our support, our hardening, creation of this ecosystem, long life cycle support. The same thing's going to happen in Kubernetes where it's you don't just grab it upstream and run with whatever happens to be in it. And I think that there's a lot of companies that are claiming that just that Kubernetes is ubiquitous. And it's like the community innovation is ubiquitous and we're all in for advancing that. But it's really, if you're going to bet your business you want something that's productized and hardened by a contributor that you can trust. >> Well Tim, I want to connect that back with some of the other stuff that we've talked about on stage today. RHEL, super solid, history of engineering. The lower levels of your Stack need to be solid because you depend (laughs) on them. We talked a little bit about, on stage, about upgrades and things like that and how people are moving forward, the release schedule. I don't know, Mark, how are you approaching both upgrades and automation with Ansible? But other, OpenStack has other components too. How are you approaching that in the OpenStack day two to day 1000 scenario? >> Well absolutely, great question because today we've just announced our upcoming Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 release, and that's our long life cycle release. So our last long life cycle release was version 10, and we've had a couple of shorter life versions in between. But when it comes to the upstream community what's supported in terms of upgrade is between those individual versions. When we came out with version 13, with this long life version, we have to support seamless upgrades between 10 and 13 in place without disrupting workloads that are running in your environment and make it completely smooth and seamless. And we're doing that with a feature called fast forward upgrades which is completely automated with Ansible. So that's been a big part of our focus with our engineering investment for open-- >> Ansible came up a couple of times on stage both with Zuul and also with the fast forward upgrades and it might have slipped in there a couple more times. It seems like Ansible is a big part of even this community. >> No, we're very happy with Ansible and it's a really powerful tool when it comes to automation. Got an amazing community around us. Kind of real, it's been a kind of an organic growth and we've been really happy with the team since they've joined Red Hat. It's a great foundation for everything we're doing. >> And Ansible's not just a foundation with an OpenStack. It's, for example, we have Ceph integration in with Ansible. We have OpenShift is how we deploy it using Ansible. It's how we're using NREL to what we call System Roles to be able to make it easier to upgrade from one to the other. So by combining a single technology it's making it easier for us to put together an integrated portfolio. >> Great, Tim, when people leave this show what are some of the key messages you want to make sure that they've heard from Red Hat as part of this community? >> I would say that it's Red Hat is bringing an integrated portfolio Stack because it's not just about components. It's really about how can you build, develop, and deploy applications rapidly and what's the most enterprise-ready dynamic environment that enables you to do that, and that's what we think that the power of Red Hat through its credibility in the open source community to bring all of those pieces of the Stack together from top to bottom. >> Stu: All right, and Mark, we'll give you the final word. >> Yeah, I'd actually reach for what we're reinforcing a lot on this summit. We're talking about innovate, empower, and accelerate, and that's really about these businesses that are our customers who are dealing with the challenge of trying to keep up with a rapidly changing market. And they need to innovate more. They need to move faster, need to accelerate. But they also need to empower their own application developers to do that innovation, to really kind of keep pace with the market. >> All right, well Tim Burke, Mark McLoughlin, thanks so much for all of the updates here. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with much more coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music) (slow tones playing)

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. (techno music) >> Hello and welcome back. this is the exclusive coverage from theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-host. We're here in New York City for special on the ground coverage. We go out where all the action is. It's happening here in New York City for Blockchain Week, New York, #BlockchainWeekNY Of course, Consensus 2018 and a variety of other events, happening all over the place. We got D-Central having a big boat event here, tons of events from Hollywood. We got New York money, we got Hollywood money, we got nerd money, it's money everywhere, and of course great deals are happening, and I'm here with two friends who have done a deal. Al Burgio is a CEO of DigitalBits co-founder, and Nithin who's the partner at Arcadia Crypto Ventures. You guys we've, you know, we're like family now, and you're hiding secrets from me. You did a deal. Al, what's going on here? Some news. >> Yeah, well first John, thanks for having us. We always love coming on the show, and really enjoy spending time with you and so forth. We, you know previous conversations that we've had, we were not out there fundraising. But really had the opportunity to meet a lot of great people Nithin and his firm being definitely one of them. And as a result of that, really building this, say, following, these relationships within the venture community, more specifically the crypto venture community. When we were ready to actually go out and do, let's say a first round, for us it happened very quickly, and it was a result of being able to leverage those relationships that we had. For me, it was kind of remarkable to see that support come and happen so quickly. Normally venture, it's just a process. Many many months. >> John: Long road. >> Then a month to close. >> John: Kiss all the frogs. >> Yeah, here it's like, you know, people can do due diligence on the fly, You have an opportunity with events like this. >> John: They're smart. >> They're smart, and and there's an opportunity to really foster these relationships in this really tight-knit community. And, you know, Nithin and his firm being obviously one of those. And so when we were ready to go out and do our first round, it happened quickly, and I'd like to think that in a lot of ways, it happened amongst friends. >> Well, you're being humble. We've been covering you, you've been on theCUBE earlier, when you just started the idea, so it's fun to watch you have this idea come to fruition, but you're in a, you're hitting a TAM a Total Available Market that's pretty large. And that's one of the secrets, to have a TAM. Aggressive bold move, we'll how it turns out for you, but you know, you got to have the moonshot, you're going after the loyalty market, which is completely run by the syndicate, what do you want to call it, the mafia of loyalty. >> Yeah, well, I would say that in some cases, those that are supporting us see that as really just one use case. Because we built this general-purpose blockchain, one of the use cases and one of the first use cases that were out there to support, happens to be the loyalty space. >> John: Big. And it's massive, highly fragmented but massive market, and we can solve a lot of liquidity issues with our technology. But then it goes beyond that. So it's a big market at the start, and then that can scale even greater from there. and I think that's part of what, I mean obviously, I'm not going to speak for Nithin. >> Nithin, let me weigh in here, pass the mic over. Nithin talk about the deal, why these guys? I know you met 'em, you like Al, and the feedback I've heard from other folks is he's a classic entrepreneur and that obviously, the entrepreneur gets the deal, but obviously you don't just give money 'cause you like someone. What about this deal is it that you guys like? You guys been there early, you got some great people on your team, what about this deal is it that you like? >> Sure, for us, Al met pretty much most of, almost all the criteria that we had, okay. That we had when we go, the thesis before we go fund someone. We don't get so many deals like that. Usually we get you know, they made 50% of the criteria, we might still put money because you can't get the 100%. So one thing, Al as a founder, he's experienced, he has done it multiple times before, he sold companies. Tech guy, which is very key for us. A tech project is very key. Okay, second thing, he's built the whole thing. It's not like he's raising the money to go and build it. He built it, now he's raising money to go for go to market strategies, which makes sense. He's shown it, and we tested it out. So like, we were completely blown away. He has a team behind 'im. He's built a team on every side, on the marketing side, on PR, events. And the idea, this is a general blockchain, but he's addressing a very specific issue. It is a real problem. Loyalty points, or rewards points, or gift points. Or whatever you call them. It is segmented, it's fragmented, and this is a chance. And there might be many people who are trying to solve this problem, but I think Al has the greatest possibility, or probability, of becoming the winner. >> You and I have talked on theCUBE before, both of you guys are CUBE alumni, I know you both, so I'll ask you, 'cause I'll just remind everyone, we've talked about token economics. One of the things that's coming up here at the Consensus 2018 event in New York, onstage certainly, and some fireworks in one of the sessions, is like if you're not decentralized, why the hell are you doing a decentralized model? So one of the criterias is, the fit for the business model, has to fit the notion of a decentralized world, with the ability of tokens becoming an integral part. What about this deal makes that happen? Obviously, fragmentation, is that still decentralized? So, how are you sorting through the nuances of saying, okay, is it decentralized the market for him, and this deal? Or does it fit? >> See no, decentralize is one thing okay, in here, more than decentralized, I would say there was the platform, so that all the companies can come in, use this common platform, release it, and as a user you're getting a chance to atomically swap it if you don't like something. Most of the reward points or loyalty points go waste. Maybe the companies want it to go waste, I don't know if that is. >> It's a natural burn at equilibrium going on anyway right? Perfect fit! >> So that is the only, that was the only doubt that we had. Would companies want this, because do they want their customers' loyalty points going waste rather than swapping it for something else? That was the only question that we had. Well, that's a question that will get answered in the market. But otherwise we hadn't seen something like this before. >> What's your take of the show so far? We saw each other in the hallway as we were getting set up for theCUBE, for two days of coverage, in New York, for Blockchain Week, New York, what's your take? Obviously pretty packed. >> Oh my god, it's so packed, and it's great, the show is going on. It is bringing a lot of money in, it's bringing all the investors in a new money, old money, traditional money, nerd money as you said. >> It smells like money! >> Everybody's coming in. See the beauty about those things coming in is, you're going to get a lot of people from other fields that are going to come into this field to solve problems. 'Cause earlier, if there is no money coming in, you're going to have very smart people, or very intelligent people stick with physics or whichever was their field. Now, they're going to look into the space because they're getting paid. See that brings more people who are intelligent, and who can solve problems. That is very key for me. >> Al, I want to ask you as an entrepreneur, one things you usually have to struggle with, as any entrepreneur, is navigating the 3-D chess you got to play, whether it's competitive strategy, market movement, certainly the market's moving and shifting very quickly, but you've got growth, big tailwind for you. What's your takeaway? Because now you have new things coming on. Every every day it seems like a new shoe is dropping. SEC's firing a warning on utility tokens, security tokens are still coming, are now coming online, but that looks very promising, and then ecosystems become super important. You guys just announced news this morning around the ecosystem. >> Yeah, tomorrow we have some. We had some news today, but we have more tomorrow. >> John: Well talk about the news. >> Yeah, so we have a multi-tiered go to market strategy. Obviously in the loyalty space, again I want to emphasize, it's just one use case, but it's a massive one. You have brands, the enterprise. And many of those those enterprises or brands may operate their loyalty program internally, in terms of like back offices systems, in some cases they're outsourcing the app to a SAS provider, some application provider, that's kind of hidden in the background. But let's just say like Hilton. I use Hilton, it's the location for the event, but Hilton, you have this user experience using this app, but maybe that technology, the SAS application that's powering that, is actually not Hilton technology. And so let's just say, there's 30 million people in the Hilton program and there may be 30 million of them on the Marriott, coexisting on some SAS application. And so that's another important category for us. SAS providers and so forth, supporting that industry. And then last but not least, today, whether enterprise or SAS company, many cases not touching their own hardware, right? They're using the cloud. >> So they're outsourcing the backend. >> Yeah, and so you have managed cloud providers. >> So what does it mean for the market? I don't understand, I'm not following you. >> Well, I guess what I'm saying is that there needs to be a common standard, across enterprise application provider, in global cloud community, cloud is the new hardware. >> True. So horizontally scaling loyalties as we were (mumbles). >> Exactly, so we have, we're basically securing partnerships on all three levels, to make sure that, if you want to use new technology, you want to ensure that it's widely supported, across a variety of partners you may want to work with if you're an enterprise. Whether, a software company, cloud company, and so forth. You want to be able to ensure that it can back up the truck. So we've basically signed partnerships at all of these tiers. You're going to see news in the morning. It's late here on a Monday evening. So tomorrow 9:00 a.m, major cloud company, one of the major cloud companies, and there's more to follow, making an announcement that they've joined our ecosystem partner program, and supporting this open source technology in a number of different ways. Which we're really excited about. >> You see ecosystem as a strategic move for you. >> Absolutely, this is, for us, this is, it's all about helping the consumer, but it's not about one consumer at a time for us. It's very much an enterprise play. It's one enterprise at a time. And with each enterprise we basically add to the ecosystem millions if not tens of millions of consumers instantly. >> Nithin I want to ask you a question, because what he just brought up is interesting to me as well. As a new thing, it's not new, but it's new to the crypto world, new to the analog world, that's not in the tech field. Tech business, we all know about global system integrators, we know about ecosystems, we know the value of developer programs, and community, all those things, check, check, check. But now those things are coming to new markets. People have never seen an ecosystem play before. So it's kind of, not new, it's new for some people, it's a competitive advantage opportunity. >> True, it is. See the whole thing is so new, that you can't even define it at this point. It's very hard to define. It's like, see, as an example I would say, none of us thought that when the iPhone came, there would be a 60 billion dollar taxi sharing economy that comes out of it, right? Same thing. Blockchain comes, we just don't know. And it's very hard to predict. >> New brands are going to emerge, I mean if you look at every major inflection point, I point to a couple that I think are relevant, TCP/IP was created, internetworking. >> Yep. >> That essentially went after proprietary networks, like IBM, Digital, Stacks, but it didn't replace, it wasn't a new functionality, it was interoperability. >> Yes. >> The web, HTTP, created a whole new functionality. >> Yep. >> Out of that emerged new brands. >> Yeah. >> So I think this wave's coming is a, new brands are going to emerge. >> Here, what's the brand, I don't know what's going to emerge. There it was interoperability. >> John: Well, new players. >> It's here, it's more, the collaboration. The collaboration is so huge, it's the scale is so huge, in the sense you can collaborate across the world. You're cutting those borders, there are no borders that can hold you. Even though interoperability happened in internet, There were the Googles, and the Facebook, that still had those borders. >> Well, don't put it, Cisco came out of that, 3Com, and those generations, but the hyper-scalers came out of the web. >> Yep. >> So I'm saying, well I'm saying, I want to get your reaction to, is I think that is such a small scale relative to blockchain and crypto because it's global, it's every industry, it's not just tech it's just like everything. So there's got to be new brands. Startups going to come out of the woodwork, that's my point. >> It's not yet time for the brands to come in. See that's the whole thing. So let's put it this way, the internet was there from 1978, if you really look at it, ARPANET or DARPA, those things were there. Email was there, but it was by 1997, or by the time we all came to know Google it was 2001. There is that gap between the brand forming, because it has to permeate first, more people have to use it, like what is the user-- >> Everything was was a bubble, but everything happened. I got food delivered to my house today, right? It happened, people were saying that's a crazy idea. >> It's now it's going on, right. So it's the timing and they know the time for it to permeate so here, how many people are using Bitcoin, and to do what? Most of them are just speculating right? There's very few real use case of remittance or speculative trading, that's what's happening. See that's what I said. The other use cases, it has to permeate. And that comes with more user adoption. And the user adoption initially is going to come from the speculation. >> I think it's a good sign, honestly I think it's a tell sign, because I remember when the web was new, I was in coming out right and growing in the industry. People were poo poo, oh that's just for kids. The big company's said, we wouldn't, who the hell is going to use the World Wide Web? Enter the search engines. >> I remember that like it was yesterday. I forget that I'm not a kid anymore, and I had the opportunity to be an entrepreneur during that era. One of the things I want to add is that, we had, I think what Nithin is really pointing out, it started with the infrastructure, you had network engineers and ISPs, you know, and email. But what was the enterprise application here? What was that consumer application, and that followed right? So it started infrastructure, then it evolved. Once we saw these applications, enterprises started to go crazy. Whether it was the Ubers of the world surfacing, or enterprises reinventing themselves, that's kind of the next wave. >> Well, this is why I think you're a good opportunity. 'Cause I remember licking stamps and sending out envelopes to get people to come to a seminar, held at a hotel. That's how you did it in the old world. The web replaced that with direct response. >> But there's some, there's something else-- >> The mainframe ran faster than the web. You're replacing an old loyalty, that's like licking the stamps. It's not about comparing what you're doing to something else. >> There's also something that helps, that we're not acknowledging, that really helped take internet from 1.0 to 2.0, it's Linux. You know I remember websites were insanely expensive. It was Windows servers, it was Sun Solaris, all of this crazy, expensive, server systems, that you needed to have, so the barrier of entry was extremely high. Then Linux came along, and you still needed to have your own data center space, and so still high, but the licensing fees kind of went away. >> And now with containers and Kubernetes-- >> Exactly. >> I made a bet I was going to get Kubernetes in a crypto show. >> Anybody from a bedroom could start a company, right? You could do it with your pajamas still on. >> John: Well orchestration's easier. >> Absolutely. So this has started, this really, revolution. Now you have blockchain and you start to introduce enterprise-grade blockchain technologies, it's the next wave, you know, it's not VoIP, it's value over IP. >> Okay, I'm going to ask both you guys a final question, to end this segment here at the block event. I know you guys want to get back, and I'm taking you anyway from the schmoozing and networking and the fun out there, deejay. Predictions, next year this time, what are we going to be? What's the we're going to look like? What's going to evolve? I mean we had a conversation with Richard, who partnered with you guys at Arcadia Crypto Partners, saying the trading things interesting, the liquidity has changed. What's your take? I want you guys both to take a minute to make a prediction. Next year, what's different, who's out, who's in, what's happening, is it growing? >> So I, you know, I would say this, surprisingly, CTOs, I love CTOs, but many CTOs, I would say that well above 50% of CTOs, still can't spell blockchain. Really, and what I mean by that, really understand the transformational power what this is, in terms of how this is really web 3.0. This is going to change so many industries, create so much value for consumers, help businesses and so forth, and we're going to cross that 50% mark. >> Next year. >> With CTOs-- >> 50% of what? Be clear on-- >> Basically, we're going, in terms of the net, that blockchain's going to capture, and really enterprises and not just enterprises, service providers and so forth-- >> 50% of the mind share or 50% of the projects? >> Yeah no, I'm talking it's, people aren't going to be saying, oh, blockchain, isn't that Bitcoin? They're going to really understand, and they're going to understand that impact. And over the course of the next 12 months, we're going to see that. And it starts, obviously in many cases, with the CIO, CTO of many companies. There are definitely a lot of CIOs and CTOs on the forefront of innovation that get it, but what I'm saying is that more than 50% don't. >> So you're saying-- They're very busy in doing what they're doing today, and it hasn't hit them yet. >> To recap, you're saying by next year, 50% of CTOs or CTO equivalents, will have a clear understanding of what blockchain is-- >> Absolutely. >> And what it can do. >> Absolutely. >> Nithin, your prediction, next year, this time, what's different, what's new, what's the prediction? >> So, one of the key things that I think is going to happen is there's going to be a lot more training, and knowledge that's going to spread out, so that a lot more people understand, what blockchain is and what bitcoin is. Even now, as Al said, he was telling about CTOs, if the CTOs are, that's the state, that they can't spell blockchain, imagine where the real common man is. You've got people like Jamie Dimon coming on TV and saying he doesn't like Bitcoin, but he likes blockchain. I'm like, what the heck is he saying? That he likes a database? >> He was selling it short 100% (chuckles) >> Yeah, he likes a database. And then you have Warren Buffett coming over there-- >> Rat poison. >> And then this is rat poison. And like my question is, does any of his funds buy gold? Do they buy gold? He was telling that this is only worth as much as the next buy buying at a higher price. >> What's Warren Buffett's best tech investment? >> I don't know, I think he bought Apple, he started buying Apple now, right? When it's reached a thousand bucks? Or it reached a trillion dollars or close to that, or 750 billion? >> The Apple buy was 2006. If you were there, then you were good. >> Yeah, but-- >> So, your prediction? >> Market wise I don't know, what's going to happen? I'm expecting this, the crypto, the utility token, or the crypto market, to be at least a six trillion dollar business. But it'll happen next year? Definitely not. But I've been proven wrong, like I was expecting it to happen by 2025, but then it went to 750 billion by December. Well, it's not too far. >> You did get the prediction right, in the Bahamas at POLYCON18, about the drop around the tax consequences of the-- >> Right. >> People slinging trades around, not knowing the tax consequences. >> Right, right. We don't know because, who knows? Because what is going on over there, is IRS is still saying it's a property. That's what the last (slurs) is. SEC is saying it is all equity, and the CFTC was saying it's commodity. So what tax do I pay? >> Okay, lightning round question, 'cause I want to, one more popped in my head. The global landscape, from an investor standpoint, the US, we know what's going on in the US, accredited, SEC is throwing, firing across, bullets across the bow of the boats, kind of holding people in line. What percentage of US big investors will be overseas by next year? >> Percentage of-- >> Having, meaning having deals being done, proxy deals being down outside the US, what percentage? >> It's still going to be low though. That is going to be low, because that, I don't think the US investor, means the large scale of those investors-- >> You don't think the big funds will co-locate outside the US? >> There will be some, but not enough. >> Put a number, a percentage. >> Percentage-wise I think it's still going to be less than 10%. >> Al, your prediction? >> In terms of investment? >> Investment, investors saying hey, I got money here, I want to put it out there. >> Outside of the United States? >> Share money, not move their whole fund, but do deals from a vehicle. >> Do deals outside. I think I agree with Nithin. >> Throwing darts at the board here. >> No, I'm going to clarify. There's definitely massive investment happening overseas. In some respects probably bigger than the United States. So that's not going away. If anything that's going to grow. But your question is, in terms of US entities, making abroad investments, overseas investments, versus just domestic? I think that trend doesn't necessarily change. You have the venture community, there are certain bigger venture funds that can have global operations 'cause at the end of the day, they need to have global operations, to be able to do that, and most venture funds aren't that massive, they don't have that infrastructure. So they're going to focus on their own backyard. So I don't necessarily think blockchain changes the venture mindset. It's just easier for them logistically to do due diligence on their own backyard and invest in those. >> Guys, always a pleasure. Great to see you. You guys are like friends with entourage here, great to get the update here at Blockchain Week. We get to Silicon Valley week, we'll connect up again. I'm John Furrier, here in New York, theCUBE's continuing coverage of crypto, decentralized applications, and blockchain of course, we're all over it. You'll see us all over, all of the web, all the shows. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special presentation of the Cube here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program, Mike Apigian. Mike's senior director of education services at Dell EMC. Mike, great to talk to you. >> Thanks, Stu, thanks for having me. >> Alright, so, actually a topic I love talking about. We're talking about jobs, talking about careers, and what is the role of kind of the vendor and their whole ecosystem there. But before we get into it, give our audience, since it's your first time on the program, a little bit about your background and what you do at Dell EMC. >> Yeah, sure, well actually I've been a long time EMC employee, started out almost 20 years ago and over my career been, I had the opportunity to really focus on a number of different products in technologies and then a couple years back had the opportunity to join our education services team. And been pretty exciting since then, focused on the also very changing industry of learning. >> Yeah, something that there's definitely, nobody asked a question whether or not there's change going on in the industry. One of the big things I've asked over the last year is how do you keep up with it all? And the answer is there's no way you can keep up with it all but talk about careers, you talk about jobs, when you're talking to partners and end users, what are some of the biggest concerns they have and especially how do things like skillsets and training fit into it? >> Yeah, sure, I mean, it's two fold really. It's part of it's the technology and how the technology industry's changing so fast and to your point, needing to keep up with that, which is blistering. So that's definitely a big challenge we look to address. And then the other part of it is just time, time in the day and the ability to get out of work to train and that's actually driven a big shift in the industry to different ways of learning, different types of learning experiences that don't require someone to be in a physical classroom all the time. >> Yeah, I have to imagine that that's the case. Tell us, what's the state of certification these days? You know, there's always debates in the industry, it's like ah, have I just had the same certification for the last 20 years and I just kind of go through the rote or what am I learning on the job? How are my certifications changing? You mention kind of remote versus there. What's the industry look like these days? >> Yeah, there is a big focus, as there always has been, around certifications on specific technologies and vendor's products and obviously at Dell EMC, we have a big focus there. We have a portfolio of certifications to meet that need but what we see in the market and hear loud and clear from our customers is that with all the change going on and the change driving, IT professionals need to be skilled, knowledgeable, proficient in much more than specific products and technologies. It's really the connection across multiple domains, infrastructure, applications, and security. Which is really the interesting part of it and opportunity for us. >> Yeah, Mike, I want to get your viewpoint on this. You've been with the company for over 20 years. 20 years ago, EMC was a storage company, 100% the focus of the company. Now, what does the certifications, the education services, what is the focus and why does the Dell family of companies have a right to kind of be a major partner for users in doing those certifications in the education? >> We feel there's no one in a better position to really help build that knowledge and validate those skillsets based upon first and foremost, Dell EMC's breadth of infrastructure and the capabilities there and with certifications really broadening across that infrastructure, looking at it more holistically. And then, when you think about the family of Dell Technologies and bring in VMware and Virtustream and Pivotal and RSA, very much adjacent technologies and broader solutions that really tie into what we envision and what we see and hear from our customers as defining and requiring the skillsets of the future. >> Okay, so, don't want to disregard storage skillsets, still critically important? >> Mike: Sure, absolutely. >> The thing we've talked about when virtualization rolled out, when cloud rolls out, somebody needs to understand how stuff works underneath there but what are, give us a landscape of what the certifications look like today and you've got some news that you're going to tell us about what's new today also. >> Yeah, I mean, the state of current state today is as I mentioned, very product centric, maybe a combination of products and moving forward now we're excited to have more transformational certifications which span those different domains. So for example, as organizations begin to or continue to modernize their data centers, implement integrated systems, convert systems, it requires a different skillset to manage and support that infrastructure that's now being deployed and leveraged in a different way, just as one example. >> Yeah, so, one of the values of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure is simplicity so the certification's shorter? Tell us what is involved in, you said across multiple domains, but bring us inside a little bit as to what's involved here. >> Certainly, so there's definitely a simplicity aspect to it, absolutely. Contrasted to deep expertise and server storage network, that dynamic with the converged and hyper-converged infrastructure is actually administrator that may not need to have as much depth in any of those areas but they need to have breadth across all of them, right? Also, skillsets, knowledge, and experience around different cloud and operating models to really round out the skillsets required there. >> Okay, who are these certifications targeted at? What kind of stage in their careers? What kind of path is there? Help us understand a little bit the journeys that people are on with their jobs and careers and certifications. >> Sure, so the new certifications that we have, it really spans quite a range. We have associate level certifications, think of that as very foundational in concepts. Which aren't even anchored specifically on Dell EMC products but more concepts around converged infrastructure, cloud, hyper-cloud environments and concepts. For something like that at that associate level, it could be a technical person, a technical profession, it could be a business professional, it could be someone coming out of a university or even while they're in the university that's focused in building some knowledge and some skillset to enter the IT industry. So for that, there's a pretty broad spectrum and then as you go up the levels or tiers within our certification program, as you'd expect, more advanced, higher levels of knowledge and as you get up to the highest tiers in the program, it's really not just grounded on knowledge but actually real world experience. And in some cases, the experience required may be five years of the right experience or in some cases with our new Enterprise Architect Certification, it's at minimum 15 years of experience. >> Yeah, how do you balance, the jokes always like okay, I'd like somebody with 20 years of virtualization experience and only the mainframe people can stand up. Or it's I'd like 15 years of container experience and once again, there's probably two people that were working on Solaris 15 years ago for that but it wasn't in Linux until less than that. How do you balance that and how does that fit in kind of IT with business and those various skillsets? >> Great question, because you're right on about the technologies. There's the role itself in that example, architecting enterprise-wide solutions, where there's extent and many years of experience required but when it comes down to a technology perspective, obviously the shelf life on many of those is not quite that long. So it is a balance there. What I'd also say is that what these certifications help validate and what we see required in the market today is not just that technical focus but very much so the business focus, the business acumen and the ability to engage with the business, understand business requirements, the corporate strategy, if you will, where they're going. And really translate or convert that into enterprise architecture and enterprise architecture that's very different than the past that more sets the stage for an organization to be successful moving forward. >> Yeah, so, if I hear you right, it's really a pairing of the technology and the business and making sure that there's good partnership there. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> Okay, you mentioned kind of skillset in the market, what are some of the big gaps? What are customers coming and saying, "Hey, I've got people with skills "but I need to retrain them." Where's the place where you see the biggest opportunity today that some of these new certifications are helping? >> A couple that come top to mind, first one is security, a hot topic everywhere. And a critical step in that, in implementing security, is making sure the infrastructure's secure. We hear that over and over again. And what we see is that a very product oriented approach in IT to securing products or parts of the infrastructure so one of the new certifications where we're excited to have brought to market is infrastructure security. And it's looking across the spectrum, across all Dell EMC infrastructure, as well as connections to VMware and other vendors and it's really focused on taking a security first approach and implementing the right security controls in the infrastructure to meet an organization's security policy and requirements. >> Something we've heard loud and clear for the last couple of years, security is not one person's job, it's everyone's job. And it is no longer kind of the firewall and perimeter, it now needs to be pervasive and it goes all the way up to the board of directors inside the company. So it sounds like you're pulling together pieces from across the Dell family of companies there to help it. >> Correct. >> Okay, so security, you know, super hot. What else from the announcement do you want to make sure people understand? Some of the new pieces that are helping on these transformations? >> You know, I think another area that is definitely worth a shout out is the deployment of multi-cloud environments. And Dell EMC infrastructure, private cloud, connectivity and integration with different public cloud providers. That's what our large customers around the globe are doing. And if you think about that, the high degree of automation, and connectivity to those different cloud providers, the skillset that is required is very different than the past. Knowledge of workloads, moving, migrating workloads, it's definitely a big gap that we now address. >> And Mike, that's one of the biggest problems we've seen is the operating environment for that multi-cloud world is challenging for customers. There is no single pane of glass and if I'm a Dell customer working with like Azure and Azure Stack, I've got one thing. If I'm then a VMware customer and I'm looking at VM with Amazon, that can be very different. And customers are stuck in the middle. How do you, from an education standpoint, live in that multi-cloud world? What do you do, where do you say, "Oh hey, I've got an associate program here "but you might want to take the AWS associate program here," and terminology and multi-cloud environments? >> Yeah, so the certification is, it's called the Multi-Cloud Administrator Expert Certification and there's a path to get there, there's actually multiple paths to get there and it really focuses and anchors around Dell EMC infrastructure and VMware vRealize Suite and the automation capabilities there. Now, the certification isn't just validating the knowledge, it's actually also the real world of experience of managing that environment and it extends to public clouds as part of that certification. It's validating that individuals have the experience and have actually working environments where they're actually integrating into those different public cloud providers. So that could be, of course, both Dell EMC and VMware cloud partner providers, but also into other popular cloud providers like Virtustream, Microsoft Azure, AWS, and so on. So, we're not certifying them on those third party cloud providers but our certification validates an individual's experience and their proficiency working with those environments. It's part of a larger solution. >> So, Mike, you're back ground from the EMC side, maybe speak to a little a bit the portfolio, you mentioned Virtustream, VMware of course has very rigorous types of certifications there. How do those play across the various solutions? >> Yeah, there's a lot of great synergies there. So as I mentioned, our certification validate into some of those areas but an additional opportunity for the individuals who are looking to get certified, for example it's called co-badging. So for individuals who have a specific Dell EMC certification like that Multi-Cloud Expert, as well as a, in this case, a VMware certification, their VCP, not only do they get to proudly wear those two badges but there's a third co-badge which really distinguishes that person as having a broader set of experience across that even bigger solution. >> Okay, last thing I want to touch on, Mike, is planning for the future. Talk a little bit about the roll out of some of these new certifications and how does this prep customers not just for the needs of today but where they need to go in their career for the next five years? >> Yeah, sure, so what we're validating in these certifications is absolutely relevant to a lot of our customers that we see that are transforming at a rapid pace. But what I like to say is that transformation's a journey, the masses of organizations are in motion, they're obviously at all different stages, but really what we're focused on validating is the future skills needed. And we see a big, a lot of pent up demand actually for that today. So, what we, for example, our master level certification, to your question about kind of what's next, where it's going, that is an extremely rigorous certification, not one that is achieved via an online proctored exam. It's actually conducted by a board review. So candidates submit applications, and depending upon the application, it's accepted or not, those that are accepted actually will have the opportunity to present in front of a board. And it's something that we'll run quarterly, our first one at Dell Technologies World just coming up in a couple months. And we'll run them quarterly after that and for those who pass the board review and have the extensive amount of experience and meet the requirements achieve that master level Enterprise Architect Certification in that case. >> Okay, great, well we're looking forward to being, we're going to have the Cube at Dell Technologies World. It was actually the first event we ever did, was EMC World back in 2010 so it'll be, I can't believe our ninth year doing the Cube there. Lots of coverage. Mike, I just want to give you the final word. You know, we were talking offline a bit, we've got friends in the industry, lots of things have changed, first level, what do you give people that have been in tech for a while, what advice do you give them? >> I'd say like any rule, even outside of tech but I think mostly in tech, is keeping up with the pace of things. That right there is a full time job, as you know, and as our customers know and coming from the learning industry and education services it's a passion of mine and something I get really, really excited about. >> Mike Apigian, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the update, we look forward to hearing the results from the board of reviews at Dell Technologies World and beyond and be sure to check out thecube.net for coverage of Dell Technologies World. Lots of other shows in 2018 and beyond. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you so much for watching the Cube. (upbeat music)