(digital music) >> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The storage business as we know it has changed forever. On-prem storage was once a virtually unlimited and untapped bastion of innovation, VC funding and lucrative exits. Today it's a shadow of its former self and the glory days of storage will not return. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll lay out our premise for what's happening in the storage industry, and share some fresh insights from our ETR partners, and data that supports our thinking. We've had three decades of tectonic shifts in the storage business. From the simplified history of this industry shows us there've been five major waves of innovation spanning five decades. The dominant industry model has evolved from what was first the mainframe centric vertically integrated business, but of course by IBM and it became a disintegrated business that saw between like 70 or 80 Winchester disk drive companies that rose and then fell. They served a booming PC industry in this way it was led by the likes of Seagate. Now Seagate supplied the emergence of an intelligent controller based external disc array business that drove huge margins for functions that while lucrative was far cheaper than captive storage from system vendors, this era of course was led by EMC and NetApp. And then this business was disrupted by a flash and software defined model that was led by Pure Storage and also VMware. Now the future of storage is being defined by cloud and intelligent data management is being led by AWS and a three letter company that we'll just call TBD, otherwise known as Jump Ball Incorporated. Now, let's get into it here, the impact of AWS cannot be overstated now while legacy storage players, they're sick and tired of talking about the cloud, the reality cannot be ignored. The cloud has been the most disruptive force in storage over the past 10 years, and we've reported on the spending impact extensively. But cloud is not the only factor pressuring the on-prem storage business, flash has killed what we call performance by spindles. In other words, the practice of adding more disk drives to keep performance from tanking. So much flash has been injected into the data center that that no longer is required. But now as you drill down into the cloud, AWS has been by far the most significant factor in our view. Lots of people talked about object storage before AWS, but there sure wasn't much spending going on, S3 changed that. AWS is getting much more aggressive about expanding its storage portfolio and its offerings. S3 came out in 2006 and it was the very first AWS service and then Elastic Block Service EBS came out a couple of years later, nobody really paid much attention. Well last fall at storage day, we saw AWS announce a number of services, many fire-related and this year we saw four new announcements of Amazon at re:Invent. We think AWS' storage revenue will surpass 8 billion this year and could be as high as 10 billion. There's not much data out there, but this would mean that AWS' storage biz is larger than that of a NetApp, which means AWS is larger than every traditional storage player with the exception of Dell. Here's a little glimpse of what's coming at the legacy storage business. It's a clip of the vice-president of AWS storage, her name is Mahlon Thompson Bukovec, watch this. Okay now, you may say Dave, what the heck does that have to do with anything? Yeah, I don't know, but as an older white guy, that's been in this business for awhile, I just think it's badass that this woman boxes and runs a business that we think is approaching $10 billion. Now let's take a quick look at the storage announcements AWS made at re:Invent. The company made four announcements this year, let me try to be brief, the first is EBS io2 Block Express Volumes, got to love the names. AWS was claims this is the first storage area network or sand for the cloud and it offers up to 256,000 IOPS and 4,000 megabytes per second throughput and 64 terabytes of capacity. Hey, sounds pretty impressive right, Well let's dig in a little bit okay, first of all, this is not the first sand in the cloud, at least in my view there may be others but Pure Storage announced cloud block store in 2019 at its annual accelerate customer conference and it's pretty comparable here. Maybe not so much in the speeds and feeds, but the concept of better block storage in the cloud with higher availability. Now, as you may also be saying, what's the big deal? The performance come on, we can smoke that we're on-prem vendor We can bury that. Compared to what we do, AWS' announcement is really not that impressive okay, let me give you a point of comparison there's a startup out there called VAST Data. Just there for you and closure with bundled storage and compute can do 400,000 IOPS and 40,000 megabytes per second and that can be scaled, so yeah, I get it. And AWS also announced that io2 two was priced at 20% less than previous generation volumes, which you might say is also no big deal and I would agree 20% is not as aggressive as the average price decline per gigabyte of any storage technology. AWS loves to make a big deal about its price declines, it's essentially following the industry trends but the point is that this feature will be great for a lot of workloads and it's fully integrated with AWS services meaning for example, it will be very convenient for AWS customers to invoke this capability for example Aurora and other AWS databases through its RDS service, just another easy button for developers to push. This is specially important as we see AWS rapidly expanding its machine learning in AI capabilities with SageMaker, it's embedding ML into things like Redshift and driving analytics, so integration is very key for its customers. Now, is Amazon retail going to run its business on io2 volumes? I doubt it. I believe they're running on Oracle and they need much better performance, but this is a mainstream service for the EBS masses to tap. Now, the other notable announcement was EBS Gp3 volumes. This is essentially a service that lets let you programmatically set SLAs for IOPS and throughput independently without needing to add additional storage. Again, you may be saying things like, well atleast I remember when SolidFire let me do this several years ago and gave me more than 3000 IOPS and 125 megabytes per a second performance, but look, this is great for mainstream customers that want more consistent and predictable performance and that want to set some kind of threshold or floor and it's integrated again into the AWS stack. Two other announcements were made, one that automatically tiers data to colder storage tiers and a replication service. On the former, data migrates to tier two after 90 days of inaccess and tier three, after 180 days. AWS remember, they hired a bunch of folks out of EMC years ago and they put them up in the Boston Seaport area, so they've acquired lots of expertise in a lot of different areas I'm not sure if tiering came out of that group but look, this stuff is not rocket science, but it saves customers money. So these are tried and true techniques that AWS is applying but the important thing is it's in the cloud. Now for sure we'd like to see more policy options than say for example, a fixed 90 day or 180 day policy and more importantly we'd like to see intelligent tiering where the machine is smart enough to elevate and promote certain datasets when they're needed for instance, at the end of a quarter for comparison purposes or at the end of the year, but as NFL Hall of Fame Coach Hank Stram would have said, AWS is matriculating the ball down the field. Okay, let's look at some of the data that supports what we're saying here in our premise today. This chart shows spending across the ETR taxonomy. It depicts the net score or spending velocity for different sectors. We've highlighted storage, now don't put too much weight on the January data because the survey was just launched, but you can see storage continues to be a back burner item relative to some other spending priorities. Now as I've reported, CIOs are really focused on cloud, containers, container orchestration, automation, productivity and other key areas like security. Now let's take a look at some of the financial data from the storage crowd. This chart shows data for eight leading names in storage and we put storage in quotes because as we said earlier, the market is shifting and for sure companies like Cohesity and Rubrik, they're not positioning as storage players in fact, that's the last thing they want to do. Rather they're category creators around data management or intelligent data management but their inadjacency to storage, they're partnering with all the primary storage companies and they're in the ETR taxonomy. Okay, so as you can see, we're showing the year over year, quarterly revenue growth for the leading storage companies. NetApp is a big winner, they're growing at a whopping 2%. They beat expectations, but expectations were way down so you can see in the right most column upper right, we've added the ETR net score from October and net score of 10% says that if you ask customers, are you spending more or less with a company, there are 10% of the customers that are essentially spending more than are spending less, get into that a little further later. For comparison, a company like Snowflake, it has a net score approaching 70% Pure Storage used to be that high several years ago or high sixties anyway. So 10% is in the red zone and yet NetApp, is the big winner this quarter. Now Nutanix isn't really again a storage company, but they're an adjacency and they sell storage and like many of these companies, it's transitioning to a subscription pricing model, so that puts pressure on the income statement, that's why they went out and did a deal with Bain, Bain put in $750 million to help Bridge that transition so that's kind of an interesting move. Every company in this chart is moving to an annual recurring revenue model and that as a service approach is going to be the norm by the end of the decade. HPE's doing it with GreenLake, Dell has announced Apex, virtually every company is headed in this direction. Now speaking of HPE, it's Nimble business that has momentum, but other parts of the storage portfolio are quite a bit softer. Dell continues to see pressure on its storage business although VxRail is a bright spot. Everybody's got a bright spot, everybody's got new stuff that's growing much faster than the old stuff, the problem is the old stuff is much much bigger than the new stuff. IBM's mainframe storage cycle, well that's seems to have run its course, they had been growing for the last several quarters that looks like it's over. And so very very cyclical businesses here now as you can see, The data protection data management companies, they are showing spending momentum but they're not public so we don't have revenue data. But you got to wonder with all the money these guys have raised and the red hot IPO and tech markets, why haven't these guys gone public? The answer has to be that they're either not ready or maybe their a numbers weren't where they want them to be, maybe they're not predictable enough, maybe they don't have their operational act together or maybe they need to you get that in order, some combination of those factors is likely. They'll tell you, they'll give other answers if you ask them, but if they had their stuff together they'd be going out right now. Now here's another look at the spending data in terms of net score, which is again spending velocity. The ETR here is measuring the percent of respondents that are adopting new, spending more, spending flat, spending less or retiring the platform. So net score is adoptions, which is the lime green plus the spending more, which is the forest green. Add those two and then subtract spending less, which is the pink and then leaving the platform, which is the bright red, what's left over is net score. So, let's look at the picture here, Cohesity leads all players in the storage taxonomy, the ETR storage taxonomy, again they don't position that way, but that's the way the customers are answering. They've got 55% net score which is really solid and you can see the data in the upper right-hand corner, it's followed by Nutanix. Now they're really not again in the scope of Pure play storage play but speaking of Pure, its net score has come down from its high of 73% in January, 2016. It's not going to climb back up there, but it's going to be interesting to see if Pure net scorecard rebound in a post COVID world. We're also watching what Pure does in terms of unifying file and object and how it's fairing in cloud and what it does with the Portworx acquisition which is really designed to bring forth a new programming model. Now, Dell is doing fine with VxRail, but VSAN is well off its net score highs which we're in the 60% plus range a couple of years ago, VSAN is definitely been a factor from VMware, but again that's come off its highs, HPE with Nimble still has some room to improve, I think it actually will I think that these figures that we're showing here they're are somewhat depressed by the COVID factor, I expect Nimble is going to bounce back in future surveys. Dell and NetApp are the big leaders in terms of presence or market share in the data other than VMware, 'cause VMware has a lot of instances, it's software defined that's why they're so prominent. And with VMware's large share you'd expect them to have net scores that are tepid and you can see a similar pattern with IBM. So Dell, NetApp, tepid net scores as is IBM because of their large market share VMware, kind of a newer entry into the play and so doing pretty well there from a net score standpoint. Now Commvault like Cohesity and Rubrik is really around intelligent data management, trying to go beyond backup into business recovery, data protection, DevOps, bringing that analytics, bringing that to the cloud, we didn't put Veeam in here and we probably should have. They had pre-COVID net scores well in to the thirties and they have a steadily increasing share of the market, so we expect good things from Veeam going forward. They were acquired earlier this year by Insight, capital private equity firm. So big changes there as well, that was their kind of near-term exit maybe more to come. But look, it's all relative, this is a large and mature market that is moving to the cloud and moving to other adjacencies. And the core is still primary storage, that's the main supreme prerequisite and everything else flows from there, data protection, replication, everything else. This chart gives you another view of the competitive landscape, it's that classic XY chart it plots net score in the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal axis, market share remember is a measure of presence in the dataset. Now think about this from the CIO's perspective, they have their on-prem estate, got all this infrastructure and they're putting a brick wall around their core systems. And what do they want out of storage for that class of workload? They want it to perform consistently, they want it to be efficient and they want it to be cost-effective, so what are they going to do? they're going to consolidate, They're going to consolidate the number of vendors, they're going to consolidate the storage, they're going to minimize complexity, yeah, they're going to worry about the blast radius, but there's ways to architect around that. The last thing they want to worry about is managing a zillion storage vendors this business is consolidating, it has been for some time, we've seen the number of independent storage players that are going public as consolidated over the years, and it's going to continue. so on-prem storage arrays are not giving CIOs the innovation and strategic advantage back when things like storage virtualization, space efficient snapshots, data de-duplication and other storage services were worth maybe taking a flyer on a feature product like for example, a 3PAR or even a Data Domain. Now flash gave the CIOs more headroom and better performance and so as I said earlier, they're not just buying spindles to increase performance, so as more and more work gets pushed to the cloud, you're seeing a bunkering in on these large scale mission-critical workloads. As you saw earlier, the legacy storage market is consolidating and has been for a while as I just said, it's essentially becoming a managed decline business where RnD is going to increasingly get squeezed and go to other areas, both from the vendor community and on the buy-side where they're investing on things like cloud, containers and in building new layers in their business and of course the DX, the Digital Transformation. I mentioned VAST Data before, it is a company that's growing and another company that's growing is Infinidat and these guys are traditional storage on-prem models they don't bristle If I say traditional they're nexgen if you will but they don't own a cloud, so they were selling to the data center. Now Infinidat is focused on petabyte scale and as they say, they're growing revenues, they're having success consolidating storage that thing that I just talked about. Ironically, these are two Israeli founder based companies that are growing and you saw earlier, this is a share shift the market is not growing overall the part of that's COVID, but if you exclude cloud, the market is under pressure. Now these two companies that I'm mentioning, they're kind of the exception to the rule here, they're tiny in the grand scheme of things, they're really not going to shift the market and their end game is to get acquired so they can still share, but they're not going to reverse these trends. And every one on this chart, every on-prem player has to have a cloud strategy where they connect into the cloud, where they take advantage of native cloud services and they help extend their respective install bases into the cloud, including having a capability that is physically proximate to the cloud with a colo like an Equinix or some other approach. Now, for example at re:Invent, we saw that AWS has hybrid strategy, we saw that evolving. AWS is trying to bring AWS to the edge and they treat the data center as just another edge note, so outposts and smaller versions of outposts and things like local zones are all part of bringing AWS to the edge. And we saw a few companies Pure, Infinidant, Veeam come to mind that are connecting to outpost. They saw the Qumulo was in there, Clumio, Commvault, WekaIO is also in there and I'm sure I'm missing some so, DM me, email me, yell at me, I'm sorry I forgot you but you get the point. These companies that are selling on-prem are connecting to the cloud, they're forced to connect to the cloud much in the same way as they were forced to join the VMware ecosystem and try to add value, try to keep moving fast. So, that's what's going on here, what's the prognosis for storage in the coming year? Well, where've of all the good times gone? Look, we would never bet against data but the days of selling storage controllers that masks the deficiencies of spinning disc or add embedded hardware functions or easily picking off a legacy install base with flash, well, those days are gone. Repatriation, it ain't happening it's maybe tiny little pockets. CIOs are rationalizing their on-premises portfolios so they can invest in the cloud, AI, machine learning, machine intelligence, automation and they're re-skilling their teams. Low latency high bandwidth workloads with minimal jitter, that's the sweet spot for on-prem it's becoming the mainframe of storage. CIOs are also developing a cloud first strategy yes, the world is hybrid but what does that mean to CIOs? It means you're going to have some work in the cloud and some work on-prem, there's a hybrid We've got both. Everything that can go to the cloud, will go to the cloud, in our opinion and everything that can't or shouldn't won't. Yes, people will make mistakes and they'll "repatriate" but generally that's the trend. And the CIOs they're building an abstraction layer to connect workloads from an observability and manageability standpoint so they can maintain control and manage lock-in risk, they have options. Everything that doesn't go to the cloud will likely have some type of hybridicity to it, the reverse won't likely be the case. For vendors, cloud strategies involve supporting your install basis migration to the cloud, that's where they're going, that's where they want to go, they want your help there's business to be made there so enabling low latency hybrids in accommodating subscription models, well, that's a whole another topic, but that's the trend that we see and you rethink the business that you're in, for instance, data management and developing an edge strategy that recognizes that edge workloads are going to require new architecture and that's more efficient than what we've seen built around general purpose systems, and wow, that's a topic for another day. You're seeing this whole as a service model really reshape the entire cultures in the way in which the on-prem vendors are operating no longer is it selling a box that has dramatically marked up controllers and disc drives, it's really thinking about services that could be invoked in the cloud. Now remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcasts and please subscribe, I'd appreciate that checkout etr.plus for all the survey action. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. A lot of ways to get in touch. You can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. you could DM me @dvellante on Twitter, comment on our LinkedIn posts, I always appreciate that. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everyone stay safe and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Advertiser: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to our ongoing CXO series, Charlie Giancarlo season, chief executive officer of Pure Storage. Charlie, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time. >> Thanks, Dave. And like you said, always a pleasure, thank you. >> Well, I got to start asking you, the last time we talked, you were recovering from COVID. How are you doing? >> Yeah, I'm doing great actually. I seem to have fully recovered. I've been on 17 mile hikes at 10,000 feet. I've been doing a lot of biking, so it looks like other than my wife telling me that maybe I'm not all there, but she did that before COVID. So I'm used to it. >> Well, that's awesome to hear. Well, of course, just yesterday, you guys announced your quarter. I want to start there. You beat expectations, although revenue growth was a little less robust than we're used to from Pure, but you clearly had some activity regarding COVID in the US. International, very strong, but again, we'll talk about this US customers kind of reevaluating was your other key point. I got a lot of takeaways from the call that I want to ask you about. But the big thing was you had set a very confident tone on the Earnings Call. So I kind of want to start there. Well, give us your summary. >> Yeah, no, thank you for that. So first of all, we feel like we're operating really with all of our cylinders going. We have operational discipline. We've been adding to our R&D capabilities. We've hired people this year. and we showed a profit this quarter. So we're operating, I think very well. We've introduced a boatload of new products continuously over the last couple of quarters, including, FlashArray//C, the first and only all-flash product that competes at second Tier disc levels. We introduced our file services on FlashArray//C, which really allows us to go into the general purpose of file market. And we picked up a huge amount of share as you well know in Q1. We believe we're going to pick up significant share in Q2 as well, well above our competitors. So we feel like given everything we can control, we're doing very well. As you said, in Q2, what we saw was Europe, which came out of the crisis for the most part recover very, very nicely. The US, that's still in the crisis. Of course, we're seeing some slowness and especially among what we call the mid tier or the commercial market. They've been hurt very badly by the lockdown in the economy. And they have our sympathies, but we definitely saw some slow down there. >> Yeah, so I want to talk about the market share and maybe unpack some of that data. I mean, you guys gave a cautious outlook. It kind of gave no formal guidance, but you did informally guide flat, so you kind of gave some visibility there. So actually I appreciated it. I think some of the analysts were a little bit concerned there, but I think that's prudent. And they're really the expectations are a function of your expectations around the COVID recovery. I think you mentioned your account almost state by state and very clearly the international where you've seen comebacks have been very, very strong. >> Right, so I think our customers' data continues to grow if anything, growing faster under a lockdown environment and the move to more digital engagement with everyone, their customers, their employees, et cetera. So digital continues to grow, which generally creates more demand. However, of course, as you know, in storage customers generally always have a buffer. And what we saw on Q2 was customers starting to reconsider how they're going to spend their IT budget. And whenever you have a reconsideration, you have a slowdown. And that's what we experienced. And especially in the US where the effects of the pandemic, of the economy have been much more severe than in other parts of the world. >> Yeah, so I want to talk about some data. I often, as you know, like to share some data from our partner ETR every quarter we do the survey. So guys bring up that chart. And what it shows here, let's just set it up for the audience and Charlie for you as well. That this is essentially net score, which is a measure of spending velocity for the major primary guys. So we show Pure at the top in orange, that's just a coincidence guys. And then HPE, NetApp, Dell, and IBM. And you can see the net score, and then I've super imposed there in that table, in the upper left. And you can see Pure Storage is really the only one of these majors in the green. Everybody else is in the red, which is either the lower or high teens. And you can see a little bit of a COVID impact, last quarter, but holding strong at about a 40% net score where everybody else is, as I say, in the mid teens. And so that's a real positive. I point out, this is a forward looking survey. So we're asking people, what are you planning on spending in the second half relative to what you spent in the first half. And again, we see Pure with consistent momentum. I'll add, just if you looked at the past quarter, you guys announced plus 2% growth. IBM was plus 3% growth and we know why, they have the mainframe tailwind. HPE played a little hide, the growth ball. I don't know Charlie, how closely you looked at it, but they said 4% growth sequentially. Now, the last quarter they were down 16%. The same quarter last year, they were flat. So it looks to me like they were down this quarter. So we appreciate when you have clear guidance. >> Their storage, by the way, was down 10% year over year. >> Yeah, okay, great, thank you. I didn't pick up on that. And so, yeah, that seemed like that to me. And then NetApp happens tonight and we get Dell tomorrow. But so you were saying that you gained share, what gives you that confidence? >> Well, several, you mean for Q2? We know we gained Q1, right? We were 15 points above the industry average and maybe about 20 points ahead of our competitors. We saw a similar momentum from our partner. Remember, we're 100% partner fulfilled, right? And so in conversations with our partners, we have a general sense of how we're doing vis-a-vis competitive environments. We also know that our win rates have held very nicely and in quarters, almost every quarter, we're used to about a 20% per annum higher growth rate than our competitors. So when all of our metrics, that is our relative metrics. Things like win rates and so forth continue unabated, we generally expect to have the same outcome. >> Great, and then so let me go through some of the takeaways that I have from the quarter. I'll just run through them and we can go wherever you like. But the COVID snapback obviously is a key indicator. We saw that in international versus the US. >> Charlie: Right. >> New opportunities for growth. I want to talk about that, at some length the FlashArray//C object, the Cohesity pieces and other TAM expansion. The pipeline is very encouraging, but there's some uncertainty leading to your tepid guidance. Very strong, gross margins as usual. The subscription model is growing nicely. I want to hit on that. And the RPO, the remaining performance obligations grew to almost a billion dollars. That's a big number. New logo, solid at 20%. No real change in the competitive, but you called out, you'll see more PowerMax than PowerStore. That was really interesting. You're still hiring pretty aggressively, last quarter. And your technology investments continue. And I'll throw in the seven nines, which I think is another industry first, but where do you want to go there? >> Yeah, well, seven nines is a reliability figure for those of your audience that doesn't know. It relates to how much uptime or availability a product has or in our case, fleet of products. We have tens of thousands of arrays in the field. And last quarter we achieved what's called seven nines, which is the equivalent across the fleet of only three seconds of downtime per array per year. Which is, most other vendors had struggled to stay to five nines. And that's typically without even counting what they call scheduled downtime for upgrades. We don't even count that. We count all downtime of any type. So we're clearly, I think with no doubt, we're the most reliable product on the these days. >> So I want to come back to the TAM discussion because you, I inferred many opportunities for you guys to continue to grow. I mean, it's Flash, it's still about flash. flash is gaining share relative to spinning disk and relative to hybrid, you guys made that point a lot. FlashArray//C, you sound pretty happy with that, again, going after hybrid. And then this notion of bringing file services and object that unify play. kind of the man made great strides years ago with that capability. And then the data protection piece, the recovery with Cohesity, the faster recovery. That's another TAM expansion. So really, I identified four points of potential growth area for you over the next several years. I wonder if you could talk about that? >> Absolutely, we do feel very positive about all these areas. These areas open up a huge amount of the TAM that we didn't play in before. So FlashArray//C for example, as you say, flash was always a primary workload environment for flash 'cause it was very expensive compared to disc. Higher performance, better ecological footprint, denser, faster, cheaper, are more expensive though. So it only went after primary workload, but the vast majority of data storage is secondary workload. Things that don't require the high performance and therefore customers want it less expensive. And of course there were even more bits there. But FlashArray//C now competes very well with low cost disc, which is amazing. And of course it's 10 times lower footprint and 10 times more reliable. So this is the first and literally today only product that has all-flash in that secondary workload market. So just opens up a huge amount for us. And then, yes, I love talking about data protection for the following reason, customers actually don't want to do a backup, right? If you think about it, what they really want is recovery. Backup is what you have to do in order to get recovery. And these backup systems have been very good at backup, but usually can take 24 or 48 or even more hours to be able to recover from a failure. And now with ransomware, you don't want your website to be down for days before it comes back up. You don't want your traders not trading for days. It costs a lot of money. And with what we call rapid recovery and now flash recover, we can have companies come back within an hour or two at most, with a rapid recovery solution. And so the integrated solution that we've put together with Cohesity, allows customers to very quickly get up and running with an anti ransomware solution that allows them to get back up and operating in no time at all. >> Well, was interesting to see you choosing the partner route. I mean, you could have, if you remember EMC in the day. They bought in, data protection and it had actually worked out pretty well for them. You look at a company like NetApp, they've chosen not to vertically integrate with backup. You're choosing the same path. What's the thinking there? Stick to your knitting and partner up and add value where you can? >> Yeah, we have strong partnerships actually with all of the data backup players, Veritas Veeam, with Rubrik and others. In many cases, customers have already made their decision who their backup player is. Also, backup is actually a very relatively fragmented market. There's backup for different types of applications and different vendors have strengths and weaknesses in each one of those. And so our partnership across the backup board is very important to us. We did see however customers wanting an integrated solution, which we have, let's say initiated with Cohesity. But we believe it's the first of what will be multiple pure validated designs. Not all of which will be OEM, but all of which will be available as integrated systems in the market, through our channel partners. And so you can expect to see more of these as we go forward. >> So kind of the PVDs okay. I want to ask you about your subscription model. I mean, it's growing very nicely. Are there nuances there just in terms of understanding the income statement ie, product revenue was down, subscriptions growing. Are you going through that transition and having to sort of educate people on the impact on the income statement? You didn't make a big deal out of that on the Earnings Call and I thought, well, maybe I'm overstating that, but I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic? >> No, no, you're absolutely correct. And there is some of that going on on the earning statement. The bigger part, though, of let's say the lower growth this quarter was due, and the forecast was due to the pandemic. No doubt and especially in the US, especially hard hit in the US. But simultaneously we are going through the transition that many companies have had to go through in the past where a larger proportion over time of our sales are going to be what we call Pure as-a-Service and our unified subscription. So moving to subscription from CapEx. And whenever you do that, it takes a while, even though your sales, as in bookings, can stay in the growth path. The revenue takes a while to catch up as your subscription bookings grow. So there is some of that going on on our P and L as well. >> Yeah, well, it's the nirvana to the extent you can get that model. And of course your RPO is a good indication of you got a nice backlog that's yielding, that's certainty in revenue. >> That's correct. And the RPO is very nice and it reflects the fact that we have multi-year contracts going in with customers who are choosing Pure as-a-Service in Evergreen. And of course, the billing only reflects what we've actually built them for. >> I was struck by your comments regarding your main competitor, which is Dell, Dell EMC. Now, of course, in the early days of Pure, I've always said you guys drove a truck through the old VNX and symmetrics base. You said you're seeing PowerMax more than you're seeing PowerStore. That was interesting and somewhat surprising to me. >> Yeah, well, a standard play of Dell is to offer VMAX because it's less expensive versus our FlashArray. And then when the customer clearly says, well, it's just not performance enough or it just can't do the work that we need, then they'll offer PowerMax at a supposedly a deep discount to be able to compete with a FlashArray. So that's been a favorite tactic of theirs for quite some time. We maintain our win rates against that. PowerStore on the other hand, remember, it's a forklift upgrade with a new product on four different Dell existing products, right? And two things. One, is customers are just reluctant right now to try new things, right? They don't have the time to be able to test them properly. But I also think there's some reluctance even on Dell's part to put those properties up for grabs right now, when customers are more risk adverse. So, we continue, as I said, we are not seeing it as much as we had thought we might going into this. >> Yeah, we'll definitely find out more tomorrow. And I would expect that, to the extent that you're having more and more success in file, you're going to obviously run into NetApp more. >> Yeah, and that's what we're expecting. The file services on FlashArray//C really allow us to start to penetrate the general purpose file market. Clearly not on the very small, and we're not going after the very small market. We're going after the data center file share market on this and the Tier 2 workloads. >> Well, what's the early returns there? I mean, you saw the NetApp did the SolidFire acquisition to shore up NetApp kind of missed flash, and then bought SolidFire but that is obviously a good play. Do you feel like it's a tougher road than perhaps the old EMC install base or what are you seeing early on? >> Well, there's a lot of maturity obviously in files. And it will take us a while to be able to get up to full levels of maturity in files. But what customers love about us is our simplicity. And our file services on FlashArray is just as simple as our block services on FlashArray. And I think what customers are going to find is a very performant product that requires very little maintenance, very little tuning to meet their needs. And I think they're just going to appreciate the fact that it's a true fully capable block product with a fully capable set of file services. And that they'll be able to consolidate more and more of their use cases onto smaller and smaller footprint. So I think that's what they're going to appreciate about what we do. >> That's ironic, outsimplifying NetApp, which of course made its name, taken on guys like ASPEX for those of you remember that or even even the early day. So that's good. And I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about cloud. Thinking on cloud, I know it's early days and I know most of your subscriptions of course are still with on-prem, but you made an interesting announcement last year to accelerate with Cloud Block Store running on AWS. How's the uptake been there? What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, we're seeing a good uptake there. I'd say more of it is in the DevOps environment than in the actual NDR, disaster recovery, more than it is in transition of primary workloads into the cloud. And we're just seeing a bit less of that than one would expect given all the press around it. I don't think it's us. I think customers are just taking a while. They're focusing their new activities in the cloud and much less about transitioning existing environments. But we are seeing work done there. What we are seeing is a huge uptake in what we call our unified subscription, which is a Pure as-a-Service on-prem where we deliver to our customers, basically cloud, the equivalent from their point of view of cloud storage on-prem, where we manage the entire environment plus the unified subscription is that plus Cloud Block Store. So regardless of where our customers want to place their data, either on-prem or in the cloud, it's the same price and the same contract, same interface, same management to them. So we've seen a huge, I mean, literally an incredible spike in uptake in that. >> Great, thank you for that. And then I got to end with, I asked you last time about networking. You have a, a very wide observation space and a lot of expertise in a lot of different areas. So I want to ask you about, we've seen the spate of IPOs this week. Snowflake came , Palantir, UniFi, JFrog, number of others. Very interesting to see that in the Valley, you're in the Valley. Of course you shot in the Valley like everybody else these days, but what do you make of that? Is it kind of everybody trying to get in before the election? Or is it just a really good time? What's your take on that? >> I think a lot of it is getting in before the election, but a lot of stock market movements as you well know, has to do with cash flows more than it has to do with the prospects of individual companies and just given the amount of stimulus that's taking place, not just in US but worldwide. There's a lot of money floating around, which is boiling stock market prices. And so it's a great, an old colleague of mine had a saying, "When Monday's on sale, take it." And that seems to be the case right now, at least as far as the stock market is concerned. And I've stood there for a good time for IPOs. >> Well, the Palantir IPO took a swipe at Silicon Valley broadly, really targeting, I think Facebook and Google. It really doesn't have anything to do with your business, but I mean, I think as an executive in Silicon Valley, you see the innovation and the software development that's going into so many good things. I was struck by that though. I thought it was a little bit of a cheap shot at Silicon Valley. It really was aimed at Google and Facebook because there's so many companies from you guys, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, it'll work on and on and on. They are just doing some great software work. And we're seeing that with COVID, where would we be without Big Tech? >> Well, thank you, Dave. I think the press tends to focus on the consumer companies. And we all have maybe our own individual opinions about the way they operate, but you're correct. I mean, I think the good foundational work that many companies in Silicon Valley are doing to make our lives easier every day, just continues to really impress. >> Well, Charles Giancarlo it's always a pleasure. Thanks so much. You're generous with your time. I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. Again, as you said, always a pleasure to speak with you and look forward to doing it next quarter. >> All right, us as well. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time, we're out. (bright upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everybody and welcome to this week's CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. It is Breaking Analysis, but first I'm coming to you from the floor of Cisco Live in Barcelona, and I want to talk about storage. Storage continues to be soft but there are some bright spots. I've been reporting on this for awhile now and I want to dig in and share with you some of the reasons why, maybe give you some forecasts as to what I think is going to happen in the coming months. And of course, we want to look into some of the ETR spending data, and try to parse through that and understand who's winning, who's losing, who's got the momentum, where are the tailwinds and headwinds. So the first thing I want to show you is let's get right into it. What this slide is showing here is a storage spending snapshot of net score. Now remember, net score in the ETR parlance is an indicator of momentum or spending velocity. Essentially every quarter, what ETR does is they go out to, in this case, 1100 respondents out of the 4500 dataset, and they ask them are you spending more or are you spending less. Essentially they subtract the less from the more and that constitutes net score. It's not that simple but for this purpose, that's what we're showing. Now you can see here on the left hand side, I'm showing all respondents out of 1161. You see the January survey net scores. You've got Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, and Pure, and VMware vSAN are the top five. So Rubrik and Cohesity, very strong, and interesting, Rubrik was very strong last quarter. Cohesity not as strong but really shooting up. It kind of surprised me last quarter, Cohesity being a little low but they were early into the dataset and now they're starting to show what I think is really happening in the marketplace. That's a good indicator. But you can see 75 percent, 72 percent. Nutanix still very strong at 56 percent, driving that hyperconverge piece. You see Pure Storage at 44 percent, down a little bit, talk a little bit more about that in a moment. VMware vSAN, Veeam, et cetera, down the list. The thing about the left hand side and storage in general, you can see the softness. Only about one third of the suppliers are in the green, and that's a problem. If you compare this to security, probably three quarters are in the green. It's a much hotter segment. Now, look on the right hand side. The right hand side is showing what ETR calls GPP, giant, public, and private. You can see there's an N of 403. These are the largest, the very largest public and private companies, private company being a company like Mars Candy. And they say that they are the best indicators of spending momentum in the dataset. So really isolating on some of the large companies. Look what happens here. You can see Rubrik gets even stronger as does Cohesity, they're into the 80 percent range. That's really rarefied air, so very strong. You can see Nutanix drops down. It does better in the smaller companies, it appears. They drop down to 41 percent. Pure gets stronger in the GPP at 68 percent. You can see VMware's vSAN uptick to 45 percent. Nimble gets better, HPE's Nimble, to 54 percent. Dell drops down to 4.8 percent. HPE goes up to 33 percent. HPE was red in the left hand side. You can see Veeam drops, not surprising, Veeam in the biggest companies is not going to be as prevalent. We talked about that in our Breaking Analysis segment after the acquisition of Veeam. You can see NetApp bumps up a little bit but it's still kind of in that red zone. I also want to call your attention to Actifio. They're way down on the bottom in the left hand side, which kind of surprised me. And then I started digging into it because I know Actifio does better in the larger companies. In the right hand side, they pop up to 33 percent. It's only an N of three, but what I'm seeing in the marketplace is Actifio solving some really hard problems in database and copy data management. You're starting to see those results as well. But generally speaking, this picture is not great for storage, with the exception of a few players like Rubrik and Cohesity, Pure, Nutanix. And I'm going to get into that a little bit and try to explain what's going on here. The market's bifurcated. Primary storage has been on the back burner for awhile now, and I've been talking about that. The one exception to that is really been Pure. Little bit for Dell EMC coming back, we'll dig into that a little bit more but Pure has been the stand-out. They're even moderating lately, I'll talk about that some more. Secondary storage is where the market momentum is and you can see that with Rubrik and Cohesity. Again, we'll talk about that some more. Let me dig into the primary side. Cloud, as I've talked about in many Breaking Analysis segments is siphoning off demand from on-prem spend. The second big factor in storage has been there was such an injection of flash into the marketplace, it added headroom. Customers used to buy spindles to get performance, and they don't need to do that so much anymore because so much flash was pushed into the system. The third thing is you're still seeing in primary the consolidation dynamics play out with hyperconverge. So hyperconverge is the software defined bringing together of storage, compute, and networking into a single logical managed unit. That is taking share away from traditional primary storage. You're also seeing tactical NAND pricing be problematic for storage suppliers. You saw that with Pure again this past quarter. NAND pricing comes down, which you'd think would be a good thing from a component standpoint, which it is, but it also lowers prices of the systems. So that hurt Pure's revenue. Their unit volume was pretty good but you're seeing that sort of put pressure on prices, so ASPs are down, average system prices. Let's turn our attention to the secondary market for a moment. Huge injection of venture capital, like a billion dollars, half a billion dollars over the last year, and then another five billion just spent on the acquisition of Veeam. A lot of action going on there. You're seeing big TAM expansions where companies like Rubrik and Cohesity, who have garnered much of that VC spending, are really expanding the notion of data protection from back-up into data management, into analytics, into security, and things of that nature, so a much bigger emphasis on TAM expansion, of course as I talked about the M and A. Let's dig into each of these segments. The chart that I'm showing now really digs into primary storage. You can see here the big players, Pure, Dell EMC, HPE, NetApp, and IBM. And lookit, there's only company in the green, Pure. You can see they're trending down just a little bit from previous quarters but still far and away the company with most spending momentum. Again, here I'm showing net score measure of spending velocity back to the January '18 survey. You can see Dell EMC sort of fell and then is slowly coming back up. NetApp hanging in there, Dell EMC, HP, and NetApp kind of converging, and you can see IBM. IBM announced last quarter about three percent growth. I talked about that actually in September. I predicted that IBM storage would have growth because they synchronized their DS8000 high-end mainframe announcement to the z15, so you saw a little bit of uptick in IBM. Pure, as I said, 15 percent growth. I mean, if you're flat in this market or growing at three percent, you're doing pretty well, you're probably a share gainer. We'll see what happens in February when Dell EMC, HPE, and NetApp announce earnings. We'll update you at that time. So that's what you're seeing now. Same story, Pure outpacing the others, everybody else fighting for share. Let's turn our attention now to secondary storage. What I'm showing here is net score for the secondary storage players. I can't isolate on a drill down for secondary storage, last slide I could do on storage overall, but what I can show is pure plays. What's showing here is Rubrik, Cohesity, Veeam, Commvault, and Veritas. Five pure play, you can argue Veritas isn't a pure play, but I consider it a pure play data protection vendor. Look at Rubrik and Cohesity really shooting up to the right, 75 percent and 72 percent net scores, respectively. You see Veeam hanging in there. This is again, all respondents, the full 1100 dataset. Commvault announced last quarter it beat earnings but it's not growing. You can see some pressure there, and you can see Veritas under some pressure as well. You can see a net score really deep in the red, so that's cause for some concern. We'll keep watching that, maybe dig into some of the larger accounts to see how they're doing there. But you can see clear standouts with Rubrik and Cohesity. I want to look at hyperconverge now. Again, I can't drill into hyperconverge but what I can do is show some of the pure plays. So what this slide shows is the net score for some of the pure play hyperconverge vendors led by Nutanix. The relative newcomer here is vSAN with VMware. You can see Dell EMC, VxRail, and Simplivity. I would say this. A lot of the marketing push that you hear out of Dell and out of VMware says Nutanix is in big trouble, they're dying and so forth. Our data definitely shows something different. The one caution is, you can see Nutanix and larger accounts, not as strong. And you can see both vSAN and Dell EMC stronger in those larger accounts. Maybe that's kind of their bias and their observation space, but it's something that we've got to watch. But you can see the net scores here. Everybody's in the green because overall, this is a strong market. Everybody is winning. It's taking share as I said from primary. We're watching that very closely. Nutanix continues to be strong. Watching very carefully that competitive dynamic and the dynamics within those larger companies which are a bellwether. Now the big question that I want to ask here is can storage reverse the ten-year trend of the big cloud sucking sound that we have heard for the past decade. I've been reporting with data on how cloud generally has hurt that storage spend on-prem. So what I'm showing here in this slide is the net score for the cloud spenders. Many hundreds of cloud spenders in the dataset. What we're showing here is the net score, the spending velocity over the last 10 years for the leaders. You can see Dell EMC, the number one. NetApp, right there in terms of market share, IBM as well. I didn't show HPE because the slide got too busy but they'd be up there as well. So these are the big spenders, big on-prem players and you can see, well, it's up and down. The highs are lower and the lows tend to be lower. You can see on the latest surveys, maybe there's some upticks here in some of the companies. But generally speaking, the trend has been down. That siphoning away of demand from the cloud guys. Can that be reversed, and that's something that we're going to watch, so keeping an eye on that. Let me kind of summarize and I'll make some other comments here. One of the things we're going to watch here is Dell EMC, NetApp, and HPE earnings announcements in February. That's going to be a clear indicator. We'll look for what's happening with overall demand, what the growth trajectory looks like, and very importantly, what NAND pricing looks like. As a corollary to that, we're going to be watching elasticity. I firmly believe as prices go down, that more storage is going to bought. That's always been the case. Flash is still only about 20, 25, 30 percent of the market, about 30 percent of the spending, about 20 percent of the terabytes. But as prices come down, expect people to buy more. That's always been the case. If there's an elasticity of demand, it hasn't shown up in the earning statements, and that's a bit of a concern. But we'll keep an eye on that. We're also going to watch the cloud siphoning demand from on-prem spend. Can the big players and guys like Pure and others, new start-ups maybe, reverse that trend. Multi-cloud, there's an opportunity for these guys. Multi-cloud management, TAM expansion into new areas. Actually delivering services in the cloud. You saw Pure announce block storage in the cloud. So that's kind of interesting that we'll watch. Other players may be getting into the data protection space, but as it relates to the cloud, one of the things I'm watching very closely is the TAM expansion of the cloud players. What do I mean by that. Late last year, Amazon announced a broader set of products or services really in its portfolio. Let's watch for Amazon's moves and other big cloud players into the storage space. I fully expect they're going to want to get a bigger piece of that pie. Remember, much if not most of Amazon's revenue comes from compute. They really haven't awakened to the great storage opportunity that's out there. Why is that important. You saw this play out on-prem. Servers became a really tough market. Intel made all the money. Amazon is a huge customer of Intel, and Intel's getting a big piece of Amazon's EC2 business. That's why you see, in part, Amazon getting into its own chip design. I mean, in the server business, you're talking about low gross margin business. If you're in the 20s or low 30s, you're thrilled. Pure last quarter had 70 plus percent gross margins. It's been a 60 plus percent gross margin business consistently. You're going to see the cloud guys wake up to that and try to grab even more share. It's going to be interesting to see how the traditional on-prem vendors respond to that. Coming into last decade, you saw tons of start-ups but only two companies really reached escape velocity: Nutanix and Pure. At the beginning of the century, you saw Data Domain, Isilon, Compellent, 3PAR all went public. EqualLogic and LeftHand got taken out. There are a bunch of other companies that got acquired. Storage was really a great market. Coming into this decade, mid part of the decade, you had lots of VC opportunity here. You had Fusion and Violin, Intentury went public. They all flamed out. You had a big acquisition with SolidFire, almost a billion dollars, but really Pure and Nutanix were the only ones to make it, so the question is, are you going to see anyone reach escape velocity in the next decade, and where's that going to come from. The likely players today would be Cohesity and Rubrik. Those unicorns would be the opportunity. You could argue Veeam, I guess reached it, but hard to tell because Veeam's a private company. By escape velocity, we're talking large companies who go public, have a big exit in the public market and become transparent so we really know what's going on there. Will it come from a cloud or a cloud native play. We'll see. Are there others that might emerge, like a Nebulon or a Clumio. A company like Infinidat's doing well, will they hit escape velocity and do an IPO and again, become more transparent. That's again something that we're watching, but you're clearly seeing moves up the stack where there's a lot more emphasis in spending on cloud, cloud native. We clearly saw it with hyperconverge consolidation but up the stack towards the apps, really driving digital transformations. People want to spend less on heavy lifting like storage. They're always going to need storage. But is it going to be the same type of market it has been for the last 30 or 40 years, of great investment opportunities. We're starting to see that wane but we'll keep track of it. Thank you for watching this Breaking Analysis, this is CUBE Insights powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back to theCUBE everyone. It is Microsoft Ignite, it is happy hour. There are people walking around with beer and wine and snacks and it is a great time. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Jeramiah Dooley, He is an Azure Advocate at Microsoft. >> Yes, ma'am. Thank you so much. >> Of course. CUBE vetaran, esteemed CUBE veteran coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, I've been doing this for a while and Stu and I've gotten to talk a few times. >> Yes. >> But it's good to be back. >> Well, welcome. So you joined the Microsoft Advocacy Team a little over a year ago and I read a blog post that you wrote, "This is the most interesting period of my career." >> Agreed. >> I'd love to hear you riff on why it is such a gratifying time, what exactly you're doing as an advocate and why it's so interesting. >> Sure. So, I guess we'll start with the last part. My job as a cloud advocate is literally, simply to engage with and help communities who focus on a specific technology and help them build bridges into whatever part of Azure makes sense for them. My job specifically, is that I run a team who's focused on enterprise platforms and tools communities. And for us, that's VMware, that's OpenStack, that's CloudStack, that's any of the communities where the members of it identify themselves by the platform that they operate, not necessarily by the language that they use to write coding in or the applications that they're running. They're worried about the infrastructure portion of it, but usually, from a software standpoint. Part of the reason that it's interesting, is one, it's fun to have an advocacy role where I work as part of the engineering team. My job is simply to be that conduit between customers who say, "It would be really cool to have this," and an engineering team who is desperate for feedback from customers around what do we build and how do we build it. And especially for me, coming from the infrastructure side of things. Before Microsoft, I worked at NetApp. I was part of the SolidFire acquisition. I've worked at infrastructure companies kind of all the way down back into my service provider days. The larger transition of customers, especially enterprise customers, who are moving from one side of that divide to the other really matches up well with what I did from a career standpoint. I came to a company who looked at everything that I knew how to do technically and said we don't really need any of that but we love the context that it gives you for being able to go out and talk to these communities and show them what Azure could do. So it's very interesting to work somewhere where my involvement with the community, my involvement with the technology helps make me a bridge into something that was all new to me. Right, I'm not a developer. I didn't work inside the Azure cloud before I took the role. What I knew was the technology in the communities and Microsoft gave me the opportunity to build the other side of that which is how do we take all of those things and how do we move them into an Azure context. So it's been fantastic. >> Yeah and Jeramiah, we're at an interesting point in this journey we're going on. I think back to you know the virtualization journey and we've reached a certain point where you could virtualize anything and virtualization was growing. But getting from the 20% to the majority was challenging. I feel we're at a similar point and you know for myself, I look at where 20% of the workloads are in the cloud. This movement of data is not going to be a one-time or a one-way journey. There's my data center, there's the public cloud, there's the Edge, there's SAS. My data, my applications are everywhere and I think that's a lot of that hybrid environment. But how do we simplify this environment and make it more consumable for everyone and, tell us a little bit about what are some of the real challenges that you hear in the field and how is Microsoft in the ecosystem helping to solve that? >> It's an interesting parallel. On the 80% virtualization challenge, we had a couple things. One was workloads that we just couldn't and so we were waiting on the business side of things to give us something that we could virtualize. And then there was the law of diminishing returns on the amount of money that it would cost to virtualize them. When we look at the, I'm trying to move workloads from on-premises into the cloud, the transition challenge is similar. The big difference is it's the operational investment that is holding it back. It's not not the law of diminishing returns, it's the law of the sunken cost, right? So we've got customers who have invested decades, literal a decade into the automation and the orchestration and the run books and the what do you do at three o'clock in the morning when things go wrong all in a VMware context or all in an OpenStack context. And those are the things that are more valuable to them, frankly than the vendor who sits underneath it, right? We can change vendors as long as it doesn't impact operations. And so from an Azure standpoint, that's exactly the angle that we want to take if what you need are workloads that live inside a hyper scalar cloud and what you have to have in order to take that first step is don't touch my operations, don't touch my scripting, don't touch my infrastructure's code, don't touch any of the stuff that I've built up as your operational intellectual property over the last however many years. Don't touch any of that and that transition becomes easy. And then once I have a footprint, now I can be real selective about cherry-picking which of these cloud native services make sense and how can I as a customer choose with when my operations team starts to have to take on some of these additional burdens rather than what I feel like the perception is, which is as soon as I get anything from Azure, my entire operations team now has two jobs and everybody has twice the amount of work to do. And then I have to go hire new experts because these work these skills don't translate. And so if we can make it easy to do that initial move without having to change anything and then give customers a very transparent way to decide what cloud services are they going to adopt and how is it that they're going to manage that impact on their operations teams, I think we've got a path that really starts to overcome some of those initial fears. >> But customers are on a continuum, I mean, wouldn't you say just in terms of where they are, in terms of where they are in the technology and then also their mindset and how much they're willing to adopt and change? >> Yep. I think that the group that I'm in, the larger group that I'm in mirrors that. We have four different teams, three teams in addition to mine that sit on that continuum from are we an infrastructure community, that are we a platform community to are we a workload community particularly on the Microsoft side to identify by the workloads that I run, to am I a modern operations community, the SRE principles, the things that we're doing from a culture standpoint to be able to build operations teams that can manage this type of environment. And then finally, are we developers and do we want to really look at the DevOps side of things and how do we tie the developers and their needs back organically in? And I think that customers are on a continuum all the way across but even before they get into that, we went through the virtualization journey and now we're trying to figure out how can I be efficient, how can I take advantage of things that I really don't want to have to build on premises. I would love to have someone else take care of that for me but how can I do that without swamping the humans that have to take care of all the things in the background? >> Yeah, so Jeramiah, we actually had a guest on earlier that said there's companies that would consider themselves a Microsoft shop just like there were people that would say, you know I'm Cisco certified and that is my job. How's Microsoft helping customers move kind of beyond that vendor view to with the language that we hear from Satya Nadella is about business outcomes and the agility and what we all talk about is how the future should be. But you know, it's very difficult inside the enterprise organization to change those roles and rescale and learn up or hire people into that. You've got those four teams maybe. How does Microsoft help people move along this journey? >> I think rule number one is meet customers where they are. It's not our job to dictate how fast customers move or what direction they move in. It's our job to build bridges, maybe lots of bridges and let customers decide which of them make make the most sense. If we can meet customers where they are today and in the case of VMware, that means building a bare-metal environment that we can deploy VMware on to so that customers can take advantage of it without having to change any of their operational stuff. Then, I get to compete on the merits of the services as your offers and I'm happy to do that. Once we have those workloads in a place where you can take advantage of managed database instances or no sequel geographic distribution models that you didn't have the ability to build on your own or even intelligent Edge connected firewalls or application load bouncers. There's so much stuff in there that when we talk to the operations teams, they're like, "I want that and I would like that now", and we just don't have the ability always to push that down into the on premises side of things. So meeting them where they're at and then doing a good job of translating the value, the business value of the services that we offer into the language of that audience. And I really think that's where the advocacy team comes in. It is almost a business value translator where we look at all these things in the Azure marketplace and say here's why this matters to you. Here are the things that you're doing today that we could make go away. Let's work on figuring out what the return on that investment would be to find out if it's a good business deal. >> And the thing about Microsoft is that it has been around for so long that so many of these companies have had decades-long relationships with Microsoft which is not something you could say about all the other cloud providers because they are relatively newer to the scene. >> And good and bad right? I mean on the good side, there's literally not an enterprise that I walk into that there isn't some Microsoft relationship. In many cases, that allows us to be really aggressive and going to customers and saying the licensing on premises that you're trying to move away from has a Microsoft logo on it and the cloud that you're looking to move into has a Microsoft logo on it. Let's figure it out. Sometimes, I mean every, especially large customers, they've got multiple vendors in there, there have always been things that have happened along the way in that relationship but absolutely it's great to be able to look at a customer and know. Even if you're not an Azure customer, I promise your Microsoft customer that gives us some sort of common ground to be able to start that process. >> Yes, so we know that the customer experience is so very important but one of the other experiences is the employee experience. I've got great respect for Microsoft. I've worked with them most of my career but Jeramiah, there's a number of people I know that 10 years ago would never have joined Microsoft but now find themselves working for Microsoft. Give us a little viewpoint as to how kind of the Microsoft of the Satya Nadella era is different from what we might have seen in previous days. >> It's a great point and I know that when I interviewed with Microsoft and went through my loop with some of the people that you're going to have on the show this week. That was my question was would you have seen yourself working for the Microsoft two/five years ago and especially when we're talking about the SRE and the DevOps folks. It's just a categorical no across the board and I think it's from a personal standpoint, the idea that it is new technology that we're looking at, that everything I've done in the last 18 months has been something that I got to learn from the ground up, new content, new technologies, new ways to translate that into customers. I thought that working for a giant company like this would be challenging from a logistical standpoint. What really has been challenging is from a focus standpoint. There is so much to focus on, to learn. I mean even just looking around this place you can get lost wandering through just the hub and the social spaces. My challenge has been less of is this a good place to work or is the culture something that fits and more, what are the... I'm never going to know everything. What are the small number of things that I can focus on and really provide value for? But overall, culture wise, I love the "empower of everyone on the planet" messaging and when you walk onto the floor and you see the tag line, "You can't empower everyone unless you include everyone". It's just really fun to be at a place where you can feel excited about those things and having worked in IT, particularly on the infrastructure side for a long time, that's not always the case. So if you're excited about the type of company that you're going to work for and I have all of these toys to play with and I have so much stuff that I can learn and get involved in and then translate back in to that core enterprise community. No, this has been, not just the most interesting 18 months but we're talking about this is a hard job not to love with the opportunity that we get and then the technology we get to work with. >> That's a great note to end on. Jeramiah Dooley, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Of course, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight with Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(Upbeat Techno Music) >> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE! Covering Nutatnix.Next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.Next. We are here at the Bella Center in Copenhagen. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside of Stu Miniman, the analyst for theCUBE. We have two guests for this segment. We have Manoj Agarwal. He is the SVP of Engineering at Nutanix. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you Rebecca. That's good. >> And Gil Haberman. He is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me. So, our topic today is Xi Clusters. These were announced at Anaheim, at .Next back in Anaheim. Gil, why don't we start with you. Describe the business problems you were hearing from customers and how these Xi Clusters are designed to help solve them. >> Gil: Sure, first thanks for inviting me. I'm a big fan of theCUBE. It's so great to be here. To your question, at Nutanix, we've been working with customers on the vision of Hybrid Cloud for a number of years now. And the different challenges have evolved over time. Initially, there were pockets of public cloud adoption where customers wanted to simply find a way to operate across multiple clouds. But today, the challenges are different. Now, as customers are looking to adopt business critical applications that span private and public, bursting and migrating applications, there's a strong need for consistency across environments. And we gear around consistency around 3 aspects. The first is infrastructure. The second is operations. And the third is the consumption model itself. From an individual perspective, what we keep hearing is that the same VMs and applications must be able to work across environments, without significant replatforming or retooling. From an operation's perspective, cloud engineers truly need a way to utilize the same practices, integrations, in work that they have done on their applications for many years, across multiple clouds. So there's a need to sustain the same practices across these multiple clouds. And finally from a consumption model perspective, there's a need to have a platform that drives the same level of consistency in terms of licensing and software across different environments. And for that, we at Nutanix have to evolve to empower operators to be able to address all of these needs of consistency across private and public. >> Now, I would like to add something to it. You just think about three years ago. The entire world was talking about "Everything is going to be public cloud." And very soon, all these CIOs also realized that it's not going to be just public cloud or just private cloud. It's going to be Hybrid. And we ran a survey with 2,700 IT professionals who participated in the survey, and what we learned mainly 91% of them, they said hybrid is ideal. And the second thing that was not also a surprising thing was 94% of them, they said the app migration or app mobility is going to be the key. And then we look at that option like "How are you going to adopt?" And that was also strikingly similar, like what we see currently maybe 18% or so, that they are into the hybrid world and getting onto close to 41% or so in the next 24 months. >> Yeah, but Manoj, I'm glad you brought that up. When I talk to users, the thing that they're concerned the most about are their applications% and their data. And in IT forever, migrations have been a challenging thing to do and it was usually, you set up a migration and it takes you weeks or months to do it. Today, migrations aren't even going to be even a one time thing. If I'm moving from one cloud to another, if I'm moving from private to public, or even public to private. I need to have some flexibility to what I'm building. How has that informed how you're building your architectural designs? >> That's a great point. In fact, we always feel that architecture matters, and why the fundamental technologies that we are building should help. Two things that I'll say. One is the data replication technologies that we have built and strengthened over time. Plus the second thing is the network. If you get the network right, then you are very slowly there. And we had been reflecting on the data side, you know. 10 years of journey and data replication technologies like we have built. Networking we have been very hard at work on that front also in the last three years or so, with the building of Xi Cloud. We'll see and hear more and more, especially in the context of Xi Cluster. What you see is that we have done the ready integration with AWS ETCs. Thereby first of all all the services that exist in AWS. It's available to the customers with their app, running on XI Clusters without changing anything there. >> This is a competitive market so let's talk about differentiation. How do you see the product as completely different from your rivals and then how are you positioning it to your customers? >> Yeah. I'll go back to again the same thing. Architecture matters. We were not the first ones to go out with a hybrid converse like in 2013. There were a lot of competitive solutions that existed at the time. But we took our time. We wanted to make sure that we do it right. We do provide choice to our customers. That's where we matter. As we are building out solutions, again going back to the four principles. Applications sort of require change. You don't require an IPO presence to change, so when we are building the solution, we are making sure if you want to pay for private cloud, on-prem our service provider. Or you want a public cloud. Any of the big cloud players or this new cloud, that you have a common architecture underneath. You have the same management plain with the prism. You can really orchestrate, and manage the entire infrastructure. You have the flexibility in terms of the networking. Other services that you want to go and use, you have the choice of wahtever platform also. Like something that we don't want you to go and change if you don't need a change. Lastly, I would say, on the business side, we do want to give the smarty cloud world the flexibility for the customers to bring a cloud of their choice and if they want to switch, they should be able to switch with one click also. >> Yeah. Gil, I'm wondering if you can actually explain to our audience one of the challenges here is deploying unbared metal is not something that anybody can just do on the public clouds. For AWS, the first solution was actually VM ware on AWS. They had to develop that but they're now opening that to be able to use. Can you walk us through where we are with the cloud providers and that's I think part of the reason why this isn't yet generally available. Indeed, AWS has been the first to open bare metal and this is really the path for us at Nutanix to make clouds invisible as well. We worked with a number of platforms on Prem and now we want to extend that to public cloud and having an ability to actually access bare metal is the first step in doing so. Beyond that, what we've done is what we believe is the hard work of making things very simple to drive customer delight. And so what we've done is integrate into AWS rather than just running on top of AWS, inside existing accounts and VPCs of customers and the outcome has benefits on both technology and business perspective. From the technology perspective, cloud operators can see all bare metal as well as cloud native services in one place, one inventory. And we believe that this type of topology will provide better performance. And then on the business side, this allows us to do a couple of things. The first, if you are an AWS user like most of our customers, they can use AWS credits for that bare metal infrastructure. At Nutanix, we are now able to evolve our services to provide hybrid licenses, so our licenses would eventually be portable. And so you see how we are gradually building towards this portability across multiple clouds, AWS being the first cloud. >> Yeah, it's great to see Nutanix- We've seen a few other companies moving towards that model because if I'm software and truly agnostic, you should be able to have it across those environments. I believe Solidfire a couple of years ago started doing some of the things; A couple other companies. So the X in AWS sounds like it will be first. We know Google has been the partner of Nutanix for a while. Could you just give us where are we with Google and Azure? Kind of to round out the big three. >> Sure, so we have started to work with AWS and we have announced early access now inviting customers to sign up with us to get access. We are also actively working with Azure to figure out how to together bring better bare metal services and the type of software on top of that. And of course, we believe that other cloud vendors are going to open this up as well and Google Cloud being a close partner of ours is an important part of that strategy as well. >> And we are doing something with Google already as you know. We have integrated the entire stack using their nested vertilization technologies, like running on their vertilization the HB which is nested. Today, we run a lot of our customers prospect they run. The test, our experience the entire solution on Google test prime. We have brought out more than a thousand users every month, that they access it. So it's a journey, like when they have the full bare metal, you can see a lot more but we are very engaged with them. >> I want to talk about the future now and have you looked into your crystal ball a bit, 6, 10, years from now. What do you see- This is such a fast changing environment but how do you see the cloud evolving and then how do you see Nutanix? What role does Nutanix play? >> Last 10 years, it was all about how we bring public cloud into the private cloud, right? Next 5, 10 years when you think about it is all how do we really make it hybrid. The experience that what customers have come to expect in the last 10 years. You can go and pick any kind of platform on which you want to run the same stack. You won't need to worry about it. Something similar that needs to happen and the underlying architecture of technology which will go and drive that is going to be data mobility, same control plane that can go and extend this smarty cloud. This story by the way resonates very very well with the customers because it's not easy to get your IT for support, to get trained on different cloud technologies also because the talent things cost there. And if you can go and teach them one interface and have them run with the choice of infrastructure or the back form or the cloud, that's what we think we can make a huge difference for the customers. >> Yeah, so I want to make sure I understand when talking about your hybrid or multicloud strategy, we've got Xi Clusters help you get in and matches what you have on sight. Have you had a conversation about Kubernetes yet? Where does Carbon which is the Nutanix Kubernetes fit into this overall discussion? Is that just part of the platform that gets baked in and therefore we don't need to talk about it or am I missing a piece? >> That's a great question because the beauty of what we're talking about is that we bring the entire software and the entire platform with us wherever we go. Part of that stack is carbon and calm. We need the ability to have both traditional applications alongside modern applications with Kubernetes. Even hybrid applications that include some front end that might be containerized, maybe back end that is not yet containerized. And all that, everything that we've been doing on-prem, can now be moved into any other public cloud we provide. >> It's part of the compute, right? You got the VMs, now you got the containers. It's part of the backbone. >> So yeah, we've heard from some people say that Kubernetes is just the new containerized compute. We don't need to talk about it and I'm okay with that, because it's just in there. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Excellent. Well Gil and Manoj, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Manoj: Thanks so much for hosting us. >> Gil: Thanks for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of .Next. (Techno outro plays)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and guess who's here now, Dave Hitz, EVP and founder of NetApp, Dave, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you and glad to be here. >> This is a big event, we were in the keynote this morning when we were walking out, standing room only really strong messages delivered by George Kurian, who stopped by for the first time couple hours ago. Great customer story, the futurist was very interesting perspective, 26 years ago, can you envision? >> You know the futurist? >> Where you are? >> Never mind that, I have a very different perspective than him, I think we are entering the golden decade of artificial intelligence. It's smart enough to be super, super cool and it hasn't figured out how to kill us yet, decade. (laughing) >> Lisa: That's good. >> Enjoy your last 10 years. >> Oh no, that's it? >> I, no, no, you asked, you asked that I envision this 26 years ago, oh my god, no, I mean, you know, we were a little start-up and we had these spread sheets that said we would grow to, you know it basically that, what the VC's told us if we could get to 100 million in revenue we can go public, so, naturally our spread sheets showed 200 million (laughs) in revenue, you know or five, six, some where in there and is like, we're so far beyond anything I imagined when we started, and we were doing technical nerdy products for little engineers and little work groups, you know and the idea that that part of the storage market would merge against the heavy duty, high-end enterprise storage market doing databases, and then that would end up colliding with the cloud market and helping, like no we didn't even imagine this stuff that's happening now, I mean it's so far beyond. >> Enabling DreamWorks to make movies, I mean-- >> I love that, you know they do showings, they do previews for their vendors and so I've gotten to take my 11-year-old daughter, she's 11 now, but to see, you know early viewing of some of these movies it's, it's just fun. >> So, Dave, it's always interesting in the industry a lot of time you say like, okay, this architecture is long in the tooth, there's a new generation do things better and everything like that. ONTAP, been around for a long time now.. >> You know, so let me-- >> Seems like it's been reinvigorated with the cloud and everything like that, you know. >> Let me make a comment about that. >> Yeah. >> Cause people do this, oh, ONTAP is so old, isn't that the old generation? So lets talk about old. Mainframes are old, and AS400s are old, and Unix is old, and then there's Windows which is kind of younger, and ONTAP's younger than that, and then there's Windows NT, which was a rewrite of Windows and Clustered ONTAP is younger than that, so like stop with the old, you know I mean iOS is after that, so okay fine we're older than iOS, but it's not an ancient, and then we've revamped it again to go run in the cloud, I mean we first started doing ONTAP running in Azure, sorry I mean Amazon initially, we started that work in 2013 and shipped it in 2014, so like that was yet another refresh so. >> Well, but you bring a point, you've, it is adjusted and moved, it wasn't something that's static. Can you speak a little bit, that cloud, the you know, the rewrite and focus around the cloud and what, that mean internally, I know you've been reinvigorated. >> Ha! >> With everything that's happened for the last few years. >> You know, the cloud everybody's doing it now and everybody's trying to be cloud relevant, we were really struggling early on I will say you know 2013, 2014 we were really trying to get our heads around what to do and a lot of people were stepping back like, no, no, no, let's see if we can slow it down, and, I mean not just outside of NetApp but NetApp as well, and the guy that was the CEO of the time Tom Georgens, and George Kurian was part of the staff then. We, I'm proud of what we did was we said, you know let's really lean in, its either going to happen or it's not going to happen, probably not, based on what we do, and if it does happen we'll be way better off leaning into it early, learning how to make this stuff work, and that's, you know we shipped ONTAP in the cloud in 2014, and it sucked, I mean, and no one body else had anything like it, it was awesome, right, whenever you look at old tech die, the first iPhone sucked too, but it was both great, but it needed so much more work, like the very first rev I remember a story, Joe CaraDonna as a programmer he's like, we tried to get our own IT organization to use it and they told us the security wasn't good enough, so we had to fix the security, like, I mean we've been through so much stuff that's almost five years ago. We've been working on it, and so you do all of this work and then Cloud Volumes is a complete, have you guys had Anthony on? >> Both: Yes. >> Couple hours ago. >> I love how Anthony thinks, so, he's a cloudy guy right from the foundation, he joins the executive staff, whole new perspective on stuff, so Cloud ONTAP, like ONTAP's my baby and we put it in the cloud. I'm proud of that, like you have our forward leaning cloud and Anthony's like, you know, just so you know, that's not nearly good enough, like, that is a very old school infrastructural thing, probably storage infrastructural people will like that they can have their same old OS running in the cloud, but it's not what cloudy people want, cloudy people don't want to run a storage OS in the cloud, cloudy people just want to say, I'd like a volume, please. Here's your volume, Thank you, and by the way, it should be a RESTful API, like God, ONTAP was none of those things and so if you look at the work we're doing now is like, okay, here's a RESTful API, here's the JSON schema, send it to the Azure Resource Manager Like that's cloudy and so, it was because, you know we did a good job engineering getting it in but we didn't, we didn't have that like the, what does cloud smell like? If you know what I mean, like, the right whiff of cloud. Anyway, so Anthony really brought that and I, and I just feel really good about where we are at now, because, it's like cloud developers, develop this stuff for other cloud developers, it feels like that. >> Well in the last five years it sounds like tremendous amounts of transformation, reinvigoration, NetApp has some bold marketing messaging. We are the data authority, we help customers become data driven, you talk about these three business imperatives, customers have lots of choices that, you know public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, George talked about this morning in his keynote that hybrid and multi-cloud is now de facto. >> You know, someone asked me, I was giving a talk and they asked me, okay so much cloud, how long do you think till NetApp's not shipping hardware? And I was like, no, no, like we don't see that going away anytime soon, if anything we think our success in the cloud, 'cause customers want to do that, will help us gain share on-prem because customers also want to do that, right? George's picture shows, yes there is traditional on-prem IT, enterprise IT, there's private clouds people, HCI, convergence CI, and then there's public cloud. To me the interesting question, is why do people do those different things, the number one driver for public cloud is innovation, like, if you just, like all the catchwords you can think of, if you want to start up a DevOps team to-go program, I would like a new mobile phone app and I want it to take a picture of the person's face, oh look it's a woman, she looks happy, and then you want it to listen to her, to the voice, and like transcribe the voice and then do a sentiment analysis on the words, oh, she looked happy but it's snarky, and then you want to feed that into neural net deep learning engine, and say, what should we try to sell her, like, I guaranteed you, the team working on the public cloud will beat the on-prem team hands down every time. Right, I mean that's, so when you look at people and they go, we want all in on the cloud, or there's got to be 100% cloud. My question is what, what's your, like, don't start with that, what's your problem? If it's derive innovation, for the private cloud, typically that's just all about speed. They're so uniform regular, they're all the same you have extra capacity, you know you got empty rack space, for where the next one goes, someone says, I need some storage, and you say, hey, it's got a self service offer defined API, like, just do it yourself, and then in the enterprise space, the enterprise IT, Unix, Windows, clients, server, like that zone, probably the bulk of your investment, right? That's where you been spending the money historically. Probably still the bulk of most people's investment, but they want to modernize it, they don't want to get rid of it, they don't want to turn it off, it's working, but they'd like it to work better, so flash enable it, just get the performance issues out of the way. By the way, shrinks your footprint in the data center, frees up space, and connected to the cloud. Like not moving it, but just back it up or do DR, or like something cloudy and so to me I look at those three goals are tightly linked to the three styles of infrastructure. Notice, I haven't talked about products yet? The conversations I like to have with customers these days, help me understand what your business challenges are, your trying to move faster, be more innovative, modernize the stuff you have. Okay, like what ratio, now lets talk about how we could do those things together with the Data Fabric and let you build the Data Fabric you need, I mean, our Data Fabric strategy is not to tell customers what to do, it's to help them build the Data Fabric they need for their needs based on, oh, we're all about innovation, all on the cloud, like okay fine. We can do that like, but let's talk about that or is it. Now I'm stuttering. >> You bring up a great point there, Dave. >> I'm excited about this stuff. >> It's really exciting 'cause you know I think back, you know, just a couple of years ago, if you go to the enterprise, oftentimes storage was the boat anchor to prevent me from moving forward. Now we know that data, is absolutely going to be one of the drivers going forward, how do we help those people make that transition? How do you see NetApp driving that transition? So boating, that's an interesting word because I think if you look at cloud compute, it's very easy to move compute into the cloud, right. >> Stu: Yes. >> The thing about compute is it just happens and then its done, like you turn it on, you turn if off. You spin up the VM, you spin down the VM, it's easy. The reason data is a boat anchor is not because its a boat anchor, because data is the hard part, like you fired up the compute to the cloud but usually you're computing some data, well, how did you get the data to the place where the compute is? And then when you're finished a lot of times you created some data, well, how do you keep track of the data you created in the cloud, and is it legal for it to stay in the cloud, and now you want to put the data in a different cloud or put the data in your own data center and like, who's watching all that data? It's not a boat anchor because data sucks, it's a boat anchor actually because its the important thing you want to keep forever, right? I mean, maybe you do or maybe you want to delete it and know for sure it's gone. Like, those, compute doesn't have any of those issues. So, what's my point, whatever is hard, like if this was easy anybody can do it, right? Whatever is hard, you go hire lots and lots of smart people to work on hard problems and then customers are like, whoa, you're solving hard problems, I guess I will pay you after all. Isn't that what business is? >> So the majority of your conversations start with helping customers identify what they've got, where best to spread out their investments, it's not product based its about business outcomes. I'd love to get kind of in the last few minutes here, your perspective on NetApp's own IT and digital, and cultural transformation, how does that help your legacy long time enterprise customers feel an even stronger trust with NetApp? >> I think prior to our cloud work customers for the most part, customers and potential customers, they knew us, you know, it was interesting even as we thought about marketing the new work that we are doing, one of the questions was like, how much should be about the cloud, how much should be about the old stuff, and we've really leaned in almost 100% on telling people our new cloud stories, they're both public and private. And our VP of marketing I think she had a really, Jean English, she had a really good perspective. She basically said look, we've been telling the on-prem storage iron story for 26 years and if there's a customer who's out there waiting to decide who to use I don't think telling them that story again and year 27, is going to be the thing that makes the difference, like, they've decided they're happy with their Hitatchi or they're EM's, whatever it is, but, but they don't know that NetApp can help them in this brave new world. Right, they have no clue that ONTAP is also running on Amazon, I mean, It's like, seriously, I can run ONTAP on Amazon? Yeah like fire it up, it's five bucks an hour, or whatever the number is, it's like that's crazy, you know and so, so and then people go, well, we've had so many conversations where they're trying to get a cloud strategy together, and we talk about all these things and data movement and data management and cloud, and like just all of these tools and they're very excited about where they're trying to go and they said, you know, by the way, I do also have a on-prem storage need. Could you do me a quote for like what I need this week and meanwhile let's do some planning about what I need next year, right, you've got both of them working together, and I think it's that combo that's important. >> Last question, how do you, if only you had more energy and excitement like legitimately about this, but how do you keep some of the NetApp folks that have been here for a long time? How have you helped reinvigorate them to, to really be able to digest the massive impact that you guys are being able to make across industries? >> One of the things I think helps, 'cause there is a... Let me back up a step, you know, Steve Jobs, is such an awesome guy and also in his life he made so many mistakes, and one of the things he did when, when Apple was almost entirely floated on their Apple III business and, was that Apple III, Apple II? And he was doing the Mac, and basically his message to everybody else was, if you're not working on the Mac, you suck, except, by the way, that's the product that's floating the entire business and generating all the products, and I really was conscious of, like that's the wrong way to do it. And when I look in particular of what we're doing we've got new operating systems like E-Series and like SolidFire, the HCI is a whole new thing, and yet ONTAP is still shot through our entire product line. I mean, the Cloud Volumes' the cool, hottest new thing. It's ONTAP under the covers, right, and you look at the HCI it's got the SolidFire block storage built in there as a very scalable model, oh but if you'd like files guess what? We run ONTAP in a VM, it's HCI it runs VM, and so actually if you look at what's going on in there the work that we've done going way back, and yes it's evolved, it's changed, but that same work is actually shot through as technology, no longer the front piece but it's shot through all of it as technology, so it is kind of a unifying characteristic. If you talk about that, I think it helps people get more comfortable both internally but, we have the same, you know, you asked how do you get employees comfortable, a lot of customers have the same problem, you know-- >> Lisa: Right. >> They've spent a lot of investment and learning ONTAP's foibles over the year and Cloud Volume's hides all of that. So, gee, maybe I don't like this, you know what if you need all those features Cloud ONTAP, you can run ONTAP, like some people do want to do that, so, I just feel like the fact that the pieces all fit together, work together, actually gets people comfortable with it. >> Excellent, well Dave thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you for sharing your energy, and your excitement, your passion and all this wisdom and looking at where you guys are 26 years later, we look forward to year 27. >> Great, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we're at NetApp Insight 2018 in Vegas. Stick around Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. From the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we're welcoming back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Jennifer Meyer, Senior Director of Cloud Product Marketing at NetApp. And welcoming to theCUBE Alok Arora, Senior Director of Cloud Data Services and the Product Owner for NetApp Cloud Advisor, which we'll talk about today. So guys, the keynote this morning, one of the things that George Kurian, your CEO, whose going to be on the program I think next with Stu and me, talked about the four pillars of digital transformation, and one of them was hybrid and multi-cloud is now the de facto architecture. Jennifer, from a cloud marketing, product marketing stand point, how is NetApp engaging with your customers, both your install base enterprise customers and engaging with new customer to help them evolve a successful multi-cloud strategy? >> Well what's funny about that is it's not really even up to us, it's up to the customer and where they're at today, meeting them there and then taking them kind of to that destination that's interesting or important for them. And what we know today is that not only are customers in the cloud because they want to be close to innovation, that's one of our big themes, inspiring innovation with the cloud, but they've got their hands in multiple clouds. And studies show that at least 80-81% of customers are doing multi-cloud with two or more public clouds, and I think that's really interesting, you know I think that in some cases it's because their end uses, or their customers, have chosen a cloud that they want to go with and so they're trying to service those needs where they exist, but also maybe they realize that they want to subscribe or consume services in one cloud versus what's available in another cloud, and so it's not our job really to tell them where to go, it's to make sure we've got a consistent seamless amount of services to give these customers to consume, wherever they may be, in whichever public cloud. >> Yeah, well I like what you said, meeting them where they are, cause I think in some ways we're giving customers a little bit of credit that this was actually planned for as to how they got to where they are, you know I'm sure if we took that 81% that say they know they're multi-cloud, if we go with the other 19%, most of them are probably multi-cloud and just don't realize it. >> Jennifer: Absolutely. >> Because just like we had an IT in the old day, I have an application, a business unit, or somebody drives something, and oh my gosh, that's how we ended up with silos, we ended up breaking those things apart. >> Or shadow IT, right? You've got a lot of developers that know exactly what tools they want. >> We had a good discussion with Anthony Lye and Ted Brockway talking about Azure and some unique functionality that NetApp's looking to drive into that partnership with Microsoft. I wonder if we could step back, if you could help us understand kind of the cloud portfolio of NetApp, people that just know NetApp as "Oh it's, that's that filer company that I've probably "got a lot of products from." The multi-cloud has been evolving, for quite a few years now, so I want to help understand the breadth and depth of the offering. >> That's right and I think you know we always think about it almost like a four layer stack, in terms of our strategy and what we're doing to bring more of these innovative data services to our install base to your point, but also our net new buyers, folks that are coming to us through Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, or AWS, and so it really does start with our legacy and our foundation of, in this case, cloud storage, and the data services, or the advanced data management that's built upon those storage protocols. So of course it's NFS, NSMB, but when you think about being able to offer that, and compliment what's available in the public clouds today, because that's why they've chosen to partner with NetApp. On top of that we are delivering advanced services in those public clouds that have never been available before, things like automatic snapshots, or rapid cloning, and backup, and tiering, and I think it's really important because what it does is it extends our customers' experience from On-prem into the public cloud, without having to sacrifice a thing. >> Alok, it's a tough thing that customers are trying to figure out. When I look at it and talk to customers, they've got an application portfolio. What are they modernizing? What are they starting from fresh? And then they've got all the other stuff that they have, how is NetApp helping with what they do? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think that's a great point. So you talked about the offerings that we have with multi-cloud and that creates all the options for future state architecture, I can build there, however, in order to understand how do I get there I need to understand where I am today, right? So we start looking at your current state footprint, we look at our customer's current state footprint. Understand how it is architected. How it is designed, how it is serving up the applications. Because it can be really a tedious job to get started, to get to the cloud and building the roadmap. So what Cloud Advisor does is it leverages active IQ data to get that inside for us and be leveraging data science, machine learning, to give them a guidance as to how they can get there. What should be their migration approach. How should they build a transition strategy. Because a lot of times they would call the consultants to help with the transition strategy, at the end they get a PowerPoint, which is not very actionable. We started this grounds up, we understand their detail you know, how the stuff, the bits and bites, are organized so we start giving them an actionable strategy they can execute upon. So that's really Cloud Advisor geared for accelerating that journey to the cloud that our customers should be taking to. >> How are you guys helping customers to start embracing emerging technologies, IoT devices, we had Ducati on this morning, a MotoGP bike is basically an IoT device, but in terms of, Jennifer you talked about this, and Alok you reinforced it, you are basically co-developing in partnership with your customers, it's about where they, helping them understand where they are, what they can do today. How are some of the services helping them to be able to harness the power of AI, say for example, to work with data authority to use that data for actionable business insight, and outcomes? >> Yeah it's interesting you talk about the IoT, I think NetApp saw that 20 years ago. I mean ASAP is our original IoT, that is what we get billions of data points from our customers. Controllers, millions of controllers worldwide, and we build on that mirror data, and we apply the artificial intelligence in there. We actually start looking at classifying their applications so that, if they have a strategy driven by the application, as you were saying, hey there is a director from a BU, from majority point of view, we want to take these applications in the cloud. How do you figure out what application are? Where does the data live? How does it governed? We figure that out by that IoT data, by that artificial intelligence and also making sure that these applications, no work loads are left behind because applications can be complicated they talk to each other. So when you start thinking about taking one part of the application, you also want to make sure the other parts that make that application whole also go to the cloud. And that is where we're leveraging Artificial Intelligence to cluster these applications and recommending the customer that: "Hey don't make, don't leave these workloads behind "because otherwise you're going to have a failed strategy." So we warn them upfront to make sure they're successful when they start making the executions. >> I think another piece to that too is just the fact that for many years we've had workloads just trapped On-prem. They haven't had a place to go into the public cloud without a ton of refactoring or rearchitecting, right. You'd have to rewrite them for objectory. You'd have to do a lot of manual labor and things just to make it happen. In most cases it hasn't been worth it. And so when you looked at the fact that about 80% of On-prem files where in NFS V3 protocol, there wasn't really a place in the public cloud to match that and so by even just delivering Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud and AWS or Azure NetApp Files which is the version for Azure, we're able to give customers an, a way to free up that trapped set of workloads, put those into the public hub, so that it then can be available to all of those advanced services that live on those public clouds to do things like Big Data Analytics or to do developing, you know, applications and services of their own and for their own benefit. >> You Know. >> Yeah I think that's a great point because >> He's so excited.| >> Sorry. >> Because when you start looking at building your strategy you want to have confidence in your strategy. >> Jennifer: right. >> So, with your protocols and all that discovery. We also not only give you the option that NetApp offers but show you what are the other options you have within Hyperscalers and how would your workload perform with NetApp technology. So you can move with confidence, right. So that's the good part of about Cloud Advisor to make sure you're moving with confidence not just, you know, with a blind spot with you. >> You know one of the transitions we've been watching is really the ascendancy with the developer in DevOps. And I've talked to the SolidFire team for many years, I see them at some of the shows that we've been covering. In the Keynote this morning George Kurian said that Kubernetes and Istio are the multi-Cloud control plane. Jennifer I'm wondering if you can help explain the StackPointCloud acquisition. >> Jennifer: (agrees) >> Some people that might not have the context of about what NetApp and SolidFire, even before the acquisition were doing. You know, we're being like: "Wait I don't understand, you know." >> Sure. >> Kubernetes is something That you know Google and you know, Red Hat and others are doing. >> Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? >> Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? >> And we even learned what the abbreviation for is was. >> Stu: K8s. >> It's like we're all hip. Absolutely. >> Absolutely, just because. >> It's all about concatenate long words together. So it, it's really interesting because when I talked about that four layer strategy, right the third layer. So it's you know cloud storage at the bottom. Then it's the advanced capabilities and data management above that. But the one that's next is orchestration and integration. And there's really a few things that live in there. You know, the, our cloud orchestration sort of technology is really what we got from our Qstack acquisition. Our teams in Iceland and what they've been able to do largely to underpin a lot of what we've seen with cloud volume service today. But certainly right in there is NetApp Kubernetes service, which as you now know, is from our StackPoint intellectual property. And so back on September 18th, when we announced this acquisition it was really to kind of give our developers and our DevOps folks a way to finally start solving for some of that data gravity that I think we've been periled by over the last few years. And what we now know is Kubernetes is the operating system of the clouds, right. It is the clear winner of container orchestration among things so it made a lot of sense to pair that kind of multi-cloud orchestration again given our strategy to be where our customers want to be with some of our cloud orchestration technology from our Qstack acquisition and make sure that with Trident and some of the ways that we're able to deliver finally persistent storage to those containers. I mean this is like a match made in heaven. Right, we're going to give people the way to make sure that they know that containers are a femoral and data is not. So let's help them do kind of all the things that they want to do in the clouds if they want to do them. >> I think I read on line that, was the StackPointCloud acquisition based on after actually NetApp used it internally. >> Jennifer: Yes. >> Tell us a little bit more about that. Because I think the NetApp on that up story is probably something that could be leverage, you're a marketer, as a differentiator when customers have so much choice. >> Well and I feel like it's a story that every vendor should be forced to tell. If you're not willing to use your own IP and technology what is that saying to your customers. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> So it is true and a lot of our developer teams, if you've hear of Jonsi Stefansson and Anthony Lye's team, that is how this sort of came about as we were looking for a way to sort of do it ourselves. And we thought man through all this investigation there's something here. There's something that we shouldn't hold to ourselves and we should share with the rest of the world. And so at one point we need to get those guys on with you as well so they can tell a little bit more about their story. >> So proof is always in the pudding. Can you give uan example of one of your favorite customer stories. We'll start with you Alok. Who have really embraced the clouds, first of all helped you develop the optimal cloud services are now really achieving big business benefits with the cloud services NetApp is developing. >> Yeah so, several of the customers as we talked to you and specially for Cloud Advisor, as we were looking at their journey as they were starting to think about how much money they were spending upfront to figure out a strategy, they had a strategy driven by a data center that was, were the lease was coming up, and so they had to plan to evacuate that data center into the cloud from there they need to figure out what applications they're running there obviously the virtualization also was there, so that had to be configured in the cloud. So we started thinking about in that use case that we need to provide these triggers and strategy points to our customers. At the same time the other shift that we saw was that these guys were not just talking amongst the infrastructure teams, they had to talk to the application owners and they had to have conversations with CFO's to talk about the economics of the clouds. So we made sure that when we build this that give them the tools that enable them to talk to various stakeholders. Give them the application footprint that is running there. Give them the economics. What it is going to cost to run these applications and workloads that they have identify too when they're in the cloud. So give them the data point that they can go and talk to their CFO. So with that really it starts shaping a product that will meet their needs and meet the needs of all of our customers. >> Lisa: Jennifer, favorite customer example. >> Oh, it's easy this week because it's all about WuXi NextCODE and I don't know if you picked up on any of their story cause we've plastered it around our conference this week because we're so proud of, not only what they're doing as a mission which is very impressive in terms of genomics sequencing and the scale at which they're doing it but the fact that they've based their foundation now on NetApp Cloud Volume services is huge. And really what they came to us and said is: "Look, we are trying to sequence all of these genomes "in parallel and our benchmark is really to look at about "a hundred thousand individuals at once." When they were trying to do that on their own, using there own self-managed storage in the cloud, they could never complete it. It would either fail or they would have some sort of a problem where they just couldn't get it to work. And with NetApp Cloud Volume Service they were able to complete in about 45 minutes. And so what their finding is again with this extreme performance, with the ability to scale and most importantly the tie it back to our discussion, it's multi-cloud, they themselves are multi-cloud because of their big pharma and hospitals that they serve. They have customers in every one of those public clouds and so we are able to help them where ever they need us to be. And that's very exciting. >> It's also one of those great examples that everybody understands. Genomic sequencing related to healthcare, you know disease predictions and things like that. So it's a story that resonates well. >> Jennifer: Sure. >> But something that you just said sort of reminded me of one of the four principles that George Kurian talked about this morning. And speed is the new scale. And this sounds like a customer who's achieving that in spades. >> Well it's so fun because I think for a long time we've been really fast On-prem and I think people have just sort of come to expect a certain level of it's good enough in the public cloud and what we're showing them in droves again on AWS GCP or with Azure is that you should expect more. Particularly for high-performance computing workloads or things that you really just, if you're moving your SAP workloads to the cloud and speed is, there is no option it has to be fast. We are showing people now possibilities that they didn't ever dream of before because of this extreme performance through things like Cloud Volumes Service. >> It's really too bad you guys aren't excited about this. (laughs) >> I know how much longer do you have? >> (laughs) Jennifer, Alok, thank you so much for stopping by and having a chat with Stu and me. And talking about how customers are really helping NetApp become a data authority that they need to be to help customers become data driven. We appreciate your time. >> It's our pleasure. >> Have a great time at the rest of the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you both. >> Thank you. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from NetApp Insight 2018, from Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. Stick around Stu and I will be back shortly with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, we are live at NetApp Insight 2018, I'm Lisa Martin and I'm joined by Stu Miniman. Stu and I are going to be here all day. And this is the third annual Insight, with customers and partners and NetAppians and analysts and press. Stu this is the second time theCUBE has been here. We just came from the keynote and the interesting thing that Stu, that you and I both noticed, was at least the first 75 minutes of the keynote that we got to see today, none of the product news was announced. It was really about strategy, #datadriven, how NetApp wants to enable their customers from DreamWorks to oil and gas companies, health care, etc. To use data, develop a data strategy, to move their businesses into the digital age. >> Yeah, Lisa, first of all, great to be working with you again. >> Always. >> And I'm excited, it's second year that we've been at this show, third of the NetApp Insights that we've done. Cause we've done both the U.S. and the European shows. My first time actually coming to a NetApp event. I remember, gosh I'm showing my age, I remember when NetApp started, network storage was becoming a thing. NetApp really rose its ascendancy with file systems and NAS, and FAS was the one operating system to rule them all, really grew into a very sizable business. Company's about $6 billion worth of revenue and I think somewhere about 10,000 employees. Today, NetApp is really the largest independent storage company after Dell took EMC off as an independent now, so it's interesting to watch. George Kurian got on stage and talked about digital transformation. And one of the things I'm really interested in looking at is how is NetApp doing in that transformation? Because, most people when I was talking to some customers at some of the meals and walking the floor and things like that it's, NetApp is my filer company. I buy boxes, sometimes I mine some software and there's some things there, but I'm the guy that runs NetApp Gear, if you will. And that transformation, what is the NetApp of 2019 and beyond? Are they a storage company? Are they a hybrid, multi-cloud software led something something company in the future? Are they a services company? There's a nice ecosystem here, so that's what I'm excited to dig into. George Kurian he in the keynote this morning, laid out the four things that companies need to do for digital transformation. It's something we'll dig into, but yeah, I had to go search NetApp on the news release and be like, oh Cloud Insights, and ONTAP in the Cloud, and HCI and Partnership News and things like that, so there definitely is some news, they just didn't talk about it in the keynote. >> Yeah, it was an interesting keynote for me, and as theCUBE we go to a lot of keynotes, many times a year, and this was an interesting start to it. It's clear from the NetApp messaging on NetApp.com, NetApp Insight, things that are being put out on media that they're really putting cloud at the heart of their strategy. The discussions and the keynote this morning included futurist Gerd Leonhard, who's going to be on the program with us in just a few minutes. Interesting take on data, humanity, the only thing that NetApp talked about was about 75 minutes minutes into they keynote this morning was when Anthony Lye got on, he's going to be on the show later today, talking about the data fabric. And I think some of the messages that NetApp was wanting to get out is that data fabric is transforming from a vision into an architecture kind of foundationally to enable organizations to employ those four principals of digital transformation that George Kurian talked about. Digital transformation requires IT transformation, speed is the new scale, some interesting thoughts and concepts there, more conceptual. I liked the DreamWorks customer, I think she's a great speaker. Kind of talked also about how DreamWorks, everybody knows DreamWorks, "Shrek", "How to Train your Dragon", are becoming more morphing from a customer to an engineering partner. So that was and interesting kind of, I wouldn't even say undertone, but part of the story today. >> You know, Lisa, absolutely. When you look at traditionally, not only NetApp, but all the storage companies, where they sold to. It was the storage budget, and oh how do I manage with the explosion of data, and that growth and what's the performance, the speeds and feeds, the price per terabyte, all that kind of stuff? I thought we could actually take George Kurian's four characteristics and say, how's NetApp doing? First is digital transformation requires IT transformation. >> (Lisa) Right. >> I heard yesterday in some of the sessions they actually had some of NetApp's IT people talk about how they're leveraging and using new technologies. We talked about speed is the new scale, well how fast is NetApp? We have a number of acquisitions. There was the big SolidFire acquisition which is now fully part of the portfolio. They had a Kubernetes company that they bought recently. They've had management companies that they bought. How fast is NetApp keeping up with the pace of what they're doing? Hybrid multi-cloud, I think NetApp first of all was really what you would call software-defined before that was a thing, and they were very early in jumping on this wave of we need to play in the cloud environment. Most of the storage companies really lined up and was like, oh wait, Amazon's the competition, you can't do that, but NetApp was partnering with Amazon for many years, now I'd like to see more proof points as to what customers are doing, how are they doing it differently. But absolutely we're going to have Microsoft Azure on the program with Anthony Lye, this afternoon. I know we're going to be talking about Amazon, we're going to be talking about Kubernetes and Istio, where does NetApp fit into that environment? I've been going to theCUBE Con shows for a couple years, and storage is actually lagging in that space. When you talk about having persistent data, that's not something we're there with. We spent more than a decade trying to fix storage and networking in the virtualized environments, and NetApp played a strong role in helping on the storage piece there. So it would be great to see how they are going to play into the Kubernetes and issue discussion. And the last piece is they said moving from data center to data fabric. >> Right. >> Which is the closest tie to the products as you said. >> (Lisa) Yes, exactly. >> To what they're doing. >> Well, Stu we have a jam-packed schedule today, all day. We're going to be able to unpack a lot of things from NetApp, execs, to their branding folks, to customers, so Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. Again, theCUBE Live from NetApp Insight 2018. We'll be right back. (music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. It's The Cube, covering Commvault Go 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville. You're watching The Cube, and this is Commvault Go. Third year of the show, 2,000 people here. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Keith Townsend, and we're happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests. To my immediate left is Robert Brower, who is the vice president and chief-of-staff, and sitting next to him is Wenceslao Lada, who is the president of Worldwide Alliances, new to Commvault, recently. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right, so when we talk about alliances, partnerships, it's about the ecosystem, and first of all, you guys have an impressive show floor here. I was talking to your CMO on the open here. We go to quite a lot of shows. We love when we're in the center of the energy here. People were clapping, getting excited. You've got partners showing what they're doing. You've got the technology partners. You've got go-to-market partners. So, Robert, maybe we'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about what you look at the ecosystem, and what brings everybody together for a show like this. >> What brings everybody together is the opportunity for us to be able to create joint success for our customers. We have taken an act in the last 18 months to really pivot towards our alliance partners, with the idea that we should approach with humility. When Hewlitt Packard Enterprise, or when Hitachi or when NetApp or when Cisco is transacting with us, we're a part of a much larger transaction, and it's our responsibility to create joint value, understanding that in that eight-figure deal, we may be six or seven figures of that transaction. We want to create value acceleration through attachment for our partners, create value for our customers, but we want to do so with the understanding that we go into this partnership as an enabler for our success, and the customer's success. And that's really been a strong positive for us, and a big pivot in our corporate emotional stack, if you will: how do we work together more collaboratively to create success for our prospects customers, and ultimately, the alliance partner? >> All right, Wens, since I've talked to some of your partners here, one of the big partners, and I was talking to him offline, and he's like, "Look, one of the reasons we partner "deeply with Commvault is they've got good tech. "And that's why big, traditional companies "want to partner together." You're new to this company. >> Wenceslao: Absolutely. >> What brought you in? What was exciting you? Hopefully something was exciting you about bringing you inside. >> It's a great question. I think that the most important thing is that on my past 25 years in the industry, I've been in several companies. This is the first time I joined a company with a product portfolio. It's so robust, so simple to use, and so appealing to the customers that I think, "That's not a problem." We're here to really accelerate our business through our alliance partners, who are go to market, and really address more and more customers in our day-to-day business. >> So, the business is changing. Digital transformation, digital business. How has that affected the alliances? As you guys are starting to have different conversations with a different part of the business, the focus of your existing customers are changing. How has the conversation changed? >> Great question, if I might start? >> Yeah. >> So, when we look at our traditional partners and traditional partnerships with Hitachi as an OEM, Cisco, Hewlitt Packard Enterprise, those are big infrastructure organizations, and those big infrastructure organizations look at the Cloud with a certain degree of anxiety. Two, three years from now, that concept of raised-floor data center and Rax and Rax and servers, and secondary storage may not exist in the same light that it exists today. We can almost certainly say that. So, the great benefit that we can bring to these partners is helping them with that hybrid IT strategy, where we can provide better software, better movement, less cost and infrastructure into the Cloud, and keep people from learning that Cloud is that expensive place to learn, but rather that we can be part of their Cloud-enabling strategy in a manner that helps them feel like they've got confidence to go into the next three to five years and understand that they can create value on the data layer that says, "Today my secondary storage exists in Rax. "Next year, or two years or three years from now, "It may exist in the Cloud, but I've been part of "the data attach and valuation and control-plane creation." That makes them feel like, "Great, I've got "a long-term play with Commvault, with value, "no matter where the storage resides, "in data center, omnicloud, or back to the data center." >> Yeah, and to add to what Robert was saying, I think that this is also, if you are looking at the customer perspectives, they are demanding more. They are demanding nothing less than that the solution is going to optimize the IT resources, or is going to accelerate their outcomes. But even more important is that they want to have an ecosystem of partners, or alliances, that are going to be able to really help them to navigate and to create that journey that they are moving into the vision that they will have in the future. And I think that is where we are really excited, on creating that ecosystem of partners. >> Yeah, one of the things that's interesting when I look at not only technologies parts but the go-to-market is you're starting to help customers move toward that as a service-consumption model. Certain partners, people obviously would know, okay, AWS, that's how they do things. Companies like HPE have been helping customers move that way. >> Right. >> The channel ... I'd be interested to hear your feedback because they are right in the middle of going from boxed or shrink-wrapped software to subscription models. So, maybe you can give us a little color on how that's going from both sides. >> You want me to start? >> Yeah, start. >> Outstanding. Good question. Thank you, Steve. So, in that context, you're absolutely right. That traditional reseller that worked in the raised floor, that's really started to pivot over the last few years into a service-provider given construct. And that was almost that traditional SP role of "I can be your app layer, I can be your "host to storage layer, I can move your data around." And now, it's becoming much more consumption-based. As they look at the models that have been really pioneered by Amazon, really pioneered by the folks with Microsoft and Azure, that I want the outcome. I don't necessarily want to design a whole plan that says, "I've basically taken data center operations "and given them to you." I just want the outcome, and so being able to help our partners with the playbooks that we're creating around as a service, and being able to work inclusively with those partners that want to make that pivot, we can go there. And for those partners that don't want to make that pivot, they can resell us. And for those customers that are coming to us for the first time, but saying, "You know what? "My unique needs case might be "I only can connect to a data center that's "close to Frankfurt because I'm a German financial concern." Great, we've got a partner in that market that runs our playbook, that can help you. So, as a service for Commvault, it is really about helping to facilitate a channel, to be able to move to that next level without having to be the pioneer taking all the arrows. >> And I think ... I'm sorry. Just to add what Robert was saying. It's not only social as a service, but also in a traditional business. If you are considering the cycles that our traditional partners has been using to put all these solutions together, they've been using many of the most expensive resources that they have when doing testing, doing configuration, doing installation and things like that. And what we are doing is helping them from a technology standpoint, bringing those solutions faster to market, so that we'll be able to be much quicker when bringing that to the customers. Also that we'll be able to redeploy those very expensive resources when something more productive, like professional services, that will help more the customer in terms of the adoption of the solution. Many of you are thinking about, as a service, and also being able to expand all these different solutions through all these different branches of the customer. >> Good point. >> So, big announcements around partnerships with HPE, doing a show, the Callus and Commvault integration, great work from a technology perspective. Great example of the power of alliance. But let's talk about, you mentioned, professional services. How important is professional services, or what role does professional services play at the partner level, now that you guys have more tightly integrated with HPE and your other partners on delivering the technology? Talk to us about professional services. >> Outstanding, happy to do so. So, you could look at the different partners and their needs around professional services and construct a go-to-market model with them. Again, it's about value creation that is better together, with that partner. So, as a for instance, with HPE and Green Lake. And what they do with Point Next. They're very doubled down in terms of, "Hey, we'd like to create value around our services "on the Commvault product, integrated with our "different solution stacks." Perfect, not a problem. If you look at NetApp, NetApp said, "You know what, we're not in that service's business. "We've pivoted away from that. "We want to make sure that your solutions "can actually stand the trial test of "can a customer buy this and use this "without having to leverage in a lot of advanced services?" We had a great meeting yesterday with Cisco, who said the same thing. We're in different theaters where we don't necessarily have a services stack. Can we have our customers buy and successfully consume our joint solutions without having to rely on services to be able to do that? And so, to that end, as the partners that we work with say, "I need this stack," or, "I need this capability "or this go-to-market," our product is versatile. Our depth is sufficiently solid that we can provide that for them and align with what their GTM is. That's one of the reasons why, with the NetApp announcement that you've seen, they've come back and said, "We'd love to have you take on the entire portfolio." Because they did that hard test. Can your product sustain without a large court array of services along with it? We could; they said, "Great, we're in." >> Yeah, and also, if you think about, so they start to show the customer. The customer already have installed this. They already are using some of the software. And what those professional services can help is in two sense. One is how they are going to do the immigration for when you are thinking about hybrid IT, how much of the workloads are going entail, how much are going into secondary, and so on and so forth. So, helping the customer in that, you need to move him from one place to the other and execute and operate that. >> All right, you bring on customers having to make change. Wonder if we could unpack a little bit the appliances because that's one thing that from what I hear, and you can validate for me, Commvault, you want to buy the software from Commvault, or you want to buy the software and the hardware, Commvault, you guys are pretty agnostic 'cause you have a lot of partners that can help do that. Well, when you get into the field and you say, "Okay, wait, I started down with one partner, "and I was buying this server platform of choice, "and now I want to make a change," how easy is it? I'm sure the software is pretty much the same, but the devil's always in the details there. So, help us understand first of all big announcement to expand and mature, number of partners and the number of different options that you have, so walk through that a little bit. And then, how do you deal with the field engagement and the various hardware and software models. >> Got it. So if I can just ... I'm going to restate the question a different way to make sure I've got it. So, if we're talking about alliances and appliances, it's one of those questions of if we're both approaching a prospect, how do we establish an appropriate swim lane so that we don't find ourselves in co-opetition with that particular partner? The secret in the sauce, if you will, is create better together. Keith, you said earlier, the store wants integration with catalysts, and the ability for us to be able to create a really strong value proposition with HPE around their value creation, with both an existing customer base and then new customers they want to acquire. That better-together mantra was something that we worked out with them, and we said, "We will integrate more deeply into your technology stack "than other partners to create success for you." With NetApp, we're working on something quite similar with a specialization around where they're go-to-market is because they have a fantastic story on primary storage, as you know. SolidFire's been a great acquisition for them, and they're saying, "Boy, we'd sure like to see "the attach rates on secondary that we have on primary." One of the reasons being that potential flight to Cloud. How can we create a value solution structure with Commvault? And we're doing that now. Can't go into all of the details, but there's something really exciting happening there. With Cisco, we've aligned with both UCS and HyperFlex for some really neat solutions that, again, create better together swim laning, so that as we talk to that customer, and the customer says, "I like an X, and I need to have a Y pivot," maybe it doesn't have services attached to it, maybe it does, we can create that channel that allows us to not have to find ourselves in that co-opetition sort of a scenario with that partner. And that works not just when we're talking about two sets of direct sellers, selling to a named account, but it also works really well in the channel, too, because we've got mutual channel parters that are transacting on our price book and/or Cisco, HPE, NetApp, and creating that degree of swim-laning, it works. It helps to keep the structure so that 90 percent of those transactions have velocity, and the other 10 percent, we work through. >> So, we've talked a lot about the technology, professional services on top of the technology. Let's talk about support. Day two. There's these alliances. They can get complex, especially as you play across so many different partners. What is the day-to-day relationship between the customer and Commvault, when it comes to supporting backup and recovery? >> Got it, do you-- >> You can take it. >> Okay, I can. Great question, and I appreciate that. And I ran the customer support organization for a number of years, so it's near and dear to my heart. That's a very passionate team. They're very invested in customer success. We've structured our relationships with these alliance partners so that we are that first point of entry for that customer experience around our software. And we have a huge amount of versatility within those different storage stacks. The integration with catalyst, as a for instance, was precipitated by a long and involved enablement and training cycle for our support members throughout the world to be able to understand that software-hardware integration and the stack, so that when a customer is calling in and saying, "I've got this thing, where do I go?" It doesn't turn into vendor-vendor pointing. It rather turns into we will own the problem, and we work the solution. I can speak on experience that the support organization has any number of different JSA, Joint Support Agreements, with the vast variety of tier-one and tier-two infrastructure providers. So, we can interact very seamlessly. We own the solution. We own the customer challenge until it's resolved. And we work and solve actually a large number of hardware issues, even though the first call came into Commvault because it is the customer experience that we want to own and make sure it's successful. >> And I think that importance as well, is that we are yes reporting any of the way of how the customer is going to consume our software. So it can be directly from us. It can be through one of our alliance partners. It can be through one of our partners, or it can be also as a service. So, the most important thing, and relevant, is that the customer who's reported, we understand how the infrastructure is used, and we obviously can, as Robert says, basically fix all the different problems at the first call. >> And Robert, thank you so much for joining us-- >> Sure, Keith, thank you. >> Congratulations on the announcement and the expanded partnerships that you have here. All right, Keith and I will be back with lots more coverage here from Commvault Go. Thank you for watching The Cube. >> Robert: Thank you, gentlemen. >> Wenceslao: Thank you. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Justin Warren on day one of VMworld 2018. This is the twentieth anniversary of VMware. Lots of momentum this morning kicking things off. Justin and I are happy to be joined by some folks from NetApp. We have Nancy Hart, the Head of Marketing for Cloud Infrastructure. >> Good afternoon. >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Julie, it's so great to be here. And an alumni, Gabe Chapman. I love your Twitter handle @bacon_is_king. Senior Manager of NetApp HCI. Hey, Gabe. >> Hi, how are you doing? >> Good. Guys, lots of momentum. Pat Gelsinger was probably one of my favorite keynotes cause he's really energetic. He even went full-in with his faux tap this morning. I was impressed. >> Impressive. >> You guys have some news. >> Yes. >> Tell us about what's new with NetApp and VMware today. >> Fantastic, exciting times at NetApp these days. NetApp is really focused on becoming the data authority for hybrid cloud. Part of that is what we're excited to announce today here at VMworld, is a NetApp-verified architecture for VMware private cloud for HCI. What you heard today in Pat's keynote was a lot about connection on-premises private clouds with hyperscalers public clouds. That's what we're doing in our partnership with VMware here and this validated architecture for private clouds. Exciting news for us. In addition, we're also really be thrilled to be announcing new storage nodes for our NetApp HCI product and SolidFire product, as well. Lots going on today. >> Wow, that's really cool. >> Gabe, you've been in the field a lot. What are some of the things that you're hearing? Some of the signage around here is about VMware's making things possible, making momentum possible. What are some of the things that you're seeing in the field in terms of customer's momentum? Leveraging HCI from NetApp to drive new business models, new revenue streams. >> I think one of the things I see commonly is that the hyperconverge as a platform has been around for about six, seven years now. Customers are seeing that some of the first generational approaches have got them to a certain level in terms of addressing simplicity and kind of that turnkey infrastructure stack, but where they would like to go next is more cloud integrated, more scalability, more enterprise class or enterprise scale technology. Therefore, they're kind of looking at the NetApp HCI product and the architecture that we've brought to market, and seeing the potential to not only do things on-premise that they'd normally do in terms of a infrastructure platform but also move in to new services. How do we integrate with existing investments that they've had? How do we become connected into the hybrid cloud model with the hyperscalers themselves and really push towards a all-encompassing cloud infrastructure platform other than just a box. >> Yeah, one of the things I noticed in the keynote today that, I think, relates to that, and I'm interested to hear, Nancy and Gabe, a little bit more about what customers are doing here, because it seems that the idea of it must be all cloud or all on-site, that's gone away now. It's very much hybrid cloud world, multi cloud world, where customers have choice. Are you hearing that from customers? Clearly, there seems to be some demand here because we've seen the change in messaging. >> Absolutely, and I think what you're seeing is customers want the option to take advantage of all the resources. Regardless if those resources are on-premises or in public clouds, and that's what we're doing here at NetApp with our own HCI solution. As the market evolves under our feet, Gabe talked about those first generation vendors weren't quite enough, that our customers are choosing NetApp cause they want more then what they can get from those first generation vendors. What you really want to see is that convergence continues to march on and that there is more to collapse into this stack, particularly that connection up into the public cloud. Customers are definitely looking today, they're making buying decisions today based on that option. >> Right, and clearly, there's lots of customers who have substantial investment already in NetApp so being able to use what've you already got and extend it with a vendor that you're already familiar with and you know how it works. There's a lot of value there. >> We're a trusted vendor. NetApp is a trusted enterprise vendor with the reliability and customers can come to us with confidence and choose NetApp with confidence. >> We were with you guys at SAP just a couple months ago at the beginning of the summer and #datadriven was everywhere, I'm seeing it in Twitter. We often hear many things about data is power, data is currency, data is fuel. Data is all of those things if it can be harnessed and acted upon in real time. How does NetApp HCI, what are some of the differentiators? Obviously, we talked about the trusted partnership, but how does NetApp help customers actually live a data-driven life within their organization? >> I think a lot of times it starts with understanding where your data lives. How you manage it, manipulate it, and secure it. We have things like GPDR that comes (mumbles). All the sudden, everybody's scrambling to come up with a solution or a reference architecture or some way that integrates with it. I think, naturally, NetApp being the product technology company that it's been and it's lived and breathed data all its life. We understand our customer's unique requirements around governance, around security, around mobility, and we've built technologies that don't lock you into any one mode of consumption. If you bought a filer, if you bought an HCI system, if you bought an object store platform, the data fabric piece is the glue that binds and allows data mobility and portability across multiple platforms. Not only from the edge to the core, but also to the cloud and kind of gives you that larger, bigger picture. We believe that as we start to see this transition, especially edge computing, especially as we look at things like NVMe over fabrics and getting in to new levels and also services that we are delivering across the hyperscalers. A cohesive picture and story around where your data lives, how you manage it, and who can access it is empowering customers to make their transition into the multi cloud space. >> Right, clearly that transition, I think, is what people weren't really understanding three or four years ago. It was like enterprises aren't going to be there in one spot. You can't just turn it on in five seconds, these things take time. >> (mumbles) flipped, yeah. >> With our data fabric we're able to cover the entire NetApp portfolio from edge to core to cloud. As you say, enterprises and different departments in those enterprises will make their own transition and go down their own journey of digital transformation in their own time. NetApp can really be that trusted partner for all these enterprises. >> With so much choice comes, I think, inherently a lot of complexity. I thought they did a great job this morning in the keynote, Pat Gelsinger and team, of really talking about their announcements, what VMware has done in their history pretty clearly. I can imagine from a customer's perspective, if it's an enterprise organization who doesn't want to get Uber-ized, they probably don't know where to start. Talk to us about sort of the business-level conversations that NetApp has with not just your existing customers who know they can come to NetApp to trust you but also some of those maybe newer businesses or newer enterprise businesses to NetApp. How can they come to you and say help us understand? We probably have, what did they say this morning? The average customer's eight clouds. How do you help them to sort of digest that, embrace it, and be able to maximize it so that their data can be available as soon as they need it? >> What it is is data's at the heart of the enterprise and how people help customers change their world with data, but there has to be a direct business outcome for that. When enterprise customers learn to mine the value of their data they can really build new revenue streams, they can create new touchpoints with their own customers to drive their businesses. For example, one of our early NetApp HCI customers was down in Australia. A company called Consatel, a service provider down in Australia. They were really struggling to set up new businesses and new services to their own customer base. When the conversation, when they worked with NetApp what they were able to do was deploy new services three times faster over their last vendor. Think about what that did for their top line. If this company Consatel could deploy new services, new revenue opportunities three times faster. >> Blowing their competitors out of the water. >> Blowing their competitors out of the water. That's a business-level conversation. This is not a conversation about technology. Yes, under the covers, there's some amazing, fantastic technology, but it has to serve the business. Consatel has now been so successful with NetApp HCI that they now are expanding into brand new geo and geo regions and bringing new services to a whole new set of customers and a whole new customer base working with us. >> That's what I'm hearing in the conversations that I have with customers. I'm interested to hear from yourself and Gabe as to whether you're hearing this across the board. You've got one example here of customers who are concerned more with additional revenues. New revenue streams, new ways of making money top line and not so much about cost savings. That was something that was being, we were concentrating on that maybe three or four years ago. That seems to have been de-emphasized now and people are much more interested in seeking out new ways to use things. New sources of revenue and focusing on top line. Is that something that you're seeing across the board or is that only leading edge companies that are looking at that? >> We see it across the board, I think, with a lot of customers across many different verticals. For instance, Children's Mercy Hospital bought our NetApp HCI product for a virtual desktop implementation and they did so for a lot of reasons. One of them being the traditional TCO/ROI discussion. But also allows them to provide a platform that isn't just a silo of resources because of the unique aspects and differentiation that we have on our platform. We're able to go and do mixed workloads and do consolidation so they're realizing savings and gains across collapsing silos, bringing multiple applications on the same, common infrastructure. The same way they would've gone and swiped their credit card at Amazon. When you do that, you don't care if you're putting a SQL database, an Oracle or what not. They're going to give you the resource that you need. We want to mimic that locally on-prem for customers. Then, also have that integration with cloud services. If we're building a cloud service that runs on Amazon or Google, or if we're integrating with VMware as it runs on AWS or whatever, we want to be able to extend those services from local on-premises environments into the cloud and back based on that. I think that's really where the value is. There's no turnkey public cloud in a hybrid cloud integration piece. It's a journey and you have to analyze all the applications and the way you've done business. NetApp, having been working in the enterprise space as a trusted advisor for such a long time, we understand the customer's needs. We've been in the cloud space for a number of years already and we kind of understand that space. We're bridging the gap at the data level and helping to expand that more at the infrastructure level as well and as we branch into new services as time goes on. >> You've got that challenge of every customer being different but there's also trends that are common across the industry and NetApp being the size and having the history that it does, you've seen all of these things before and you know that yes, this is unique to you as a customer, but also we've seen this in other customers. This would be of value to you and you can bring that to those customers. >> Not only that, we have this product called Active IQ and it tends to be a service and support and monitoring application but, like you said, we have a very large customer base and using features and functionalities in AI we're able to use the data that we get from Active IQ as a community wisdom in effect and then make suggestions to those users as well. NetApp does have a very large install base. What can we learn from that install base, how can we help existing customers run their operations better with that community wisdom? >> We've always referred to it as actionable intelligence for your data. We've all played Tetris as a kid, it's playing Tetris with your data, Tetris with your workloads, and making sure that they all line up so that you get all four blocks break at the same time and get the high score. It's really taking and really, truly mining your infrastructure, mining your workloads and your information, and making sure that you're getting the most effective resource utilization that you possibly can. Across not just virtual machine workloads but also data workloads and understanding what you have on the floor versus what you need six months from now to one year from now. That Active IQ platform is really an integral part to really understanding customer's data resource utilization, etc. >> As someone who has played storage Tetris, any help that you can do is very, very welcome. >> I got to bring that back. That's the second reference I've heard to that in the last couple days. One of the things that Pat Gelsinger and team talked about this morning during the general session was superpowers and the need to enable enterprises to be able to harness their superpowers and maximize AI, machine learning, IoT, the edge. How was NetApp and VMware uniquely positioned to help your customers be able to take that actionable intelligence, Gabe, that you mentioned on that data to drive the new business models and revenue streams? >> I think our superpower would be, information is power, so that's our superpower is being data-driven and understanding how we take the customer's data, leverage it to its most effective use, and allocate it and protect it properly. There's a whole bunch of different areas around what we're doing there. Ours would be understanding data, understanding how customers want to use it, and what kind of information they want to extract from it. I'll have to come up with a fancy term for, maybe data thrivers is my superpower. That could be definitely one part of it. >> You could make a logo out of that. >> That sounds pretty good. >> The Thriver. >> The Thriver, I like it. >> We're data thrivers. >> I like it. >> I think so. >> NetApp has been a partner of VMware's for a very long time. You have a large ecosystem of partners, as well. What you guys announced today, talk to us about some of the benefits or really the opportunities that's going to give to NetApp's channel partners. >> There's a lot of opportunity here for our channel partners. As our customers take this journey, they're going to turn to their trusted advisors, their partners, to help them take that journey as well. What we've done here with what we announced with the VMware private cloud for HCI, this is a significant opportunity for our channel partners to work with their customers and take them down that path to be that data thriver. To harness that superpower. New opportunities for all. Customers need someone to help them show the way and channel partners are really the community to do that. >> For those channel partners who are keen to go and do this, how should they engage with you? How should they start talking to NetApp about helping their customers to go down this journey? >> Honestly, we're making the announcement this week. That's the first step is come by our booths. >> It's a thing, yeah. >> If they're here, obviously. We have a very large channel organization. We have outreach, we'll have training, we'll have, the path to hybrid clouds starts with turnKey private cloud and that's kind of what we've done here. We're working on that turnkey private cloud with our partner VMware and NetApp together to kind of facilitate that first step. Then we go out and work with our channel partner organizations to find the customers that want to go down that path. Then they can bring their additional add-on to it. There's a lot of opportunity to go out and really push and help customers make this transition between the two different worlds and obviously we can go to netapp.com and come and take a look. We have plenty of information there, too. >> Just as we wrap up here, I'm curious, Nancy, to get your perspective, from a cloud infrastructure perspective or vision, the announcements that VMware made today. Big news with AWS. Launched that last year. Talked about a lot of expansion going to apache. A lot of work in Australia. >> Yep. >> What does that as well as some other product enhancements they announced today, what does that mean to NetApp? >> I think for NetApp and for our customers, cause really let's stay focused on NetApp's customers, some of the announcements you saw Pat make today provides new options, new opportunities for NetApp's customers globally. As there's these new features, new functionalities to that turnkey solution for private cloud, what you saw is VMware expanding that relationship with AWS just gives new options and new opportunities. >> Hopefully, people can go and maybe by tomorrow get a data thriver pin or sticker. >> Going to have to run out to Kinko's real quick and make some stickers. >> Maybe print it on some bacon. >> Actually, I think we have pretzel necklaces in our booth to go for the beer crawl. >> Oh wow. What time is that? >> Soon, not soon enough. >> Nancy and Gabe, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting with Justin and me. Very exciting to hear NetApp's continued transformation and what you're helping customers achieve. >> Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Justin Warren, I'm Lisa Martin. We're at VMworld, day one, stick around we'll be right back. (electronic tones)

>> From Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we are in Orlando Florida, at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018 in the NetApp booth. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE from SAP the SVP of global technology partners Joe Zarb. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. >> I am so happy to be here. Thank you for having me, excited to share with you all the great things that are going on here at SAPPHIRE and with SAP. >> This event is huge. Bill McDermott was saying this morning in his keynote that it's the biggest SAPPHIRE that you guys have ever done, and one of the numbers, he gave a lot of numbers this morning, I always geek out on numbers, >> Right. (laughs) >> He said you guys are expecting about a million people to engage with SAP related to SAPPHIRE. That's incredible. >> It's incredible, it's incredible. A million people, think about the global reach a company with 70% of the world's commerce transactions going through our systems, people want to know what's next? What's coming out next from an innovation point of view, what are our leaders saying? What are our partners saying about where the future is and it really speaks to the whole concept of digitizing business processes. Every company wants to be a startup and I think what you're seeing here is a lot of that excitement that SAP, we just consider ourselves a very big startup with a broad reach. So, I think Bill was able to capture that excitement, convey that excitement and I think the ecosystem is reflecting that. >> A 46 year old startup nonetheless, right? >> Yeah, right exactly. >> So as the leader of the technology partners, talk to us about how those technology partners have been fundamental in SAP's transformation. >> Totally fundamental, particularly as SAP starts to transform into really a platform company. The platform provides a level of abstraction that customers can leverage to simplify their infrastructure and their access to applications, and it also creates extensibility and it's all about the partner ecosystem. So one of the biggest agenda items that we have in terms of that is really the whole hyper-converged infrastructure play, and it's really going to be something that is going to help customers innovate, drive down costs and drive up ROI. There's very few plays that are a triple whammy and this is one of them. So the partner ecosystem to us that spans our global service providers, our technology partners which are both hardware and software partners, but we also have data syndication partners, and we have other partners in the management consultant fields, et cetera. They all contribute to expanding and enhancing our digital platform and our applications. >> So, one of the areas I like to challenge infrastructure companies on, NetApp is a data-driven infrastructure company, and when you're talking to enterprise, application-centric people, infrastructure's one of these things that's an afterthought. >> Right. >> But HCI is really changing the game. NetApp's SolidFire Division along with some of their now compute innovations to form this new HCI story. Can you provide some color? What's the significance of having an HCI based infrastructure for your SAP deployment? >> Yes, that's a great question. First let me back up and I completely agree with you, when you talk to most customers, their eyes glaze over when you start talking about storage, what have you, but when you start talking about the sophisticated customers that are driving innovation and trying to transform their business, there's really three technical elements that they're very focused on. One is connectivity. They're trying to connect to all kinds of devices, business processes, and aspects of their business that haven't been connected. They're connecting because they want to retrieve signals from areas in the field and areas of customers and products they've never collected before, as they connect these signals, they're creating tremendous storages of data. And so, until you get over that, realize the enormity of that problem and the scope of "How do you now take this data "and turn it into a collection "of perishable insights that you can act on?" Until you've reached that level of sophistication, you don't understand why a company like NetApp is critical to your entire digital infrastructure and story. And that whole hyper-converged area is really the ability to promise, it's a promise to the customer that their workload can scale essentially infinitely on premise, in the cloud, cloud to cloud, back to on premise. And so at SAP, as an application provider, we look at applications that are going to run at the edge, at the core and on premise, and in the cloud. HCI helps us deliver that vision at the application tier but you have to have the platform and the infrastructure there. And NetApp is a great partner to help us fulfill that vision as well as other partners, but they're very key. >> So you have your business applications, you have SAP HANA from a database and memory database capability. Now we're talking about the Leonardo stack. You have this, what's becoming a platform, and as a platform provider, you look towards your ecosystem to extend the capability of the platform, to create more value. Where are you seeing the value generated in the partnership with NetApp? >> That's a great question, so all of our partners have the ability to one, reinforce the dominance in those markets we choose to serve and those applications we choose to deliver. However the real value of the ecosystem and a company like NetApp, is when they take us out of our comfort zone, and by taking us out of our comfort zone, they're taking us to roll your own applications, custom applications, or third party non-SAP applications where they're storing and managing the data yet making it accessible to Leonardo for machine learning, to create block chain scenarios where we can create trusted relationships, leveraging data that may not be SAP data, and also in the whole internet of things. Connecting to sensors and using that data from sensors in ways that really have nothing to do with SAP's core applications per se, but may have benefits to the customer in ways that really needs to be co-innovated. So our partners are a critical player to put us outside of our comfort zone, force us to grow, force us to learn, force us to expand, and NetApp has proven to be one of those partners that can deal with a myriad of data types from a myriad of applications that force us to stretch into voice recognition, to force us into data mining and data analytics and the like. >> So as we talk about pushing out of your comfort zone, SAP has been extremely steady in being able to provide a mixture between hardware partners, whether it's appliance model for deployment of HANA to a partnerships with first level support through partners such as NetApp. Talk through where you guys are at in the partnership, specifically with a technology that's killer, that Bill talked about which is SAP HANA on HCI. Are we going to see HANA on HCI in the near future? Customers are really interested in it and it seems like a slam dunk. >> It seems like a no brainer, right? >> Yeah, like no brainer, yeah. >> And it is, it is a no brainer. We're going to see HANA on HCI, not because SAP wants HANA on HCI, it's because our customers want HANA on HCI, and we're slaves to our customers. So where we are right now is we know that we are a trusted supplier and provider to our customers and they know that the SAP brand stands for integrity and all of the -ilities that go with running a large complex enterprise, reliability, serviceability, maintainability et cetera. So we're actually working very closely with all of our HCI partners to go through a rather arduous certification process. Through that certification process it's a commitment that we're asking them to make and they're asking us to make for the long term. I don't like the word certification, I prefer new product introduction, because what we're asking them to do is build their products, tune it to our products, we're going to do the same and we're going to continuously innovate and continuously introduce new products. So the word, the former word, is certification. All I can say is, we don't like to pre-release or announce anything so watch this space, but I am so excited to be a tech head. >> What are some of the, if we look at a retailer, for example, who has to work with, say it's an apparel manufacturer and they've got a designer they've got to work with, textiles, all these different sources of information and it might take a year from a design to go from concept to actual product that they can sell. So you mentioned and I really like that you talked about insights as perishable, it was something about actionalbe insights, but for a company like an apparel company who has such a long cycle from concept to delivery, how will HCI facilitate them being able to link and sync, what Bill McDermott said this morning is, synchronize the supply chain with the demand chain? >> Right, yes, that whole value chain, value proposition. So, the beautiful thing is, all of those companies have a track record and a history of data. A lot of that data is right now in NetApp. So there's a lot of learnings and knowledge that haven't been mined and pooled out of that data that exists today. HCI is going to enable a couple of things. One is when you look at a distributed supply chain, we have probably the industry's leading distributed supply chain solution, track and trace capabilities, to be able to follow that product throughout it's life cycle. As we capture that data with HCI infrastructure, we're going to be able to analyze and transform those business processes, candidly, in ways that we haven't thought of yet. The beauty of HCI is, when you talk about retailers you're often times dealing with companies that have wire thin margins, so they want to be able to create products quickly, get them to market quickly and do it within the cost constraints. HCI is one of those rare platform and enabling technologies that delivers on that. It's going to allow you to rightsize your workload in the cloud or on premise or on the right size servers et cetera. And it's going to allow you to scale up as needed and manage a more efficient yet effective infrastructure. So I see HCI playing a role not only in retailers, but really across all industries. It's one of those really beautiful horizontal technologies that adds immediate value to those people that have reached that maturity curve. >> So as we talk about these advanced applications, can't help but get into topics such as ILT, edge in general, applications as we look at SAP as a platform company, applications SAP may not build directly but have to integrate with. How do you see HCI and your global partners figuring into those advanced applications and the infrastructure around that? >> Yeah so that's a great question, thank you. If you really look at those new emerging applications that are edge, core and cloud, lots of moving parts. Lots of moving parts gives you the opportunity to rightsize the workload and the processing at the edge or at the core at the cloud, but it also creates a tremendous amount of complexity. So to really create a breakthrough, you have to radically simplify and standardize the processes that manage that core, cloud, edge relationship. If you can create that environment, then people can deploy, manage, monitor, maintain these environments much more effectively with a lower skillset, right? So there's not that hurdle. I kind of think of it as today's IT infrastructure is kind of like a manual car and as you get bigger IT it becomes an 18-wheeler, it's a little hard to, unwieldy. You've got to be really good at driving in reverse and stuff like that. When you add HCI you're not necessarily going to an autonomous car but you've definitely got an automatic transmission, you probably could do a couple of things pretty well automatically right? And that allows a whole new class of drivers to get in the car. And so I think that's what HCI is going to do, as the architectures and the deployment methods get more complex, it's going to keep it manageable and within a skill base and price point that people can live with. >> I like that analogy, I think that's very simple to follow speaking of simplicity. I wanted to ask you about when you guys are going to market with partners. Bill McDermott has been very vocal, as we talked about when we kicked off this segment, about wanting to be one of the top ten most valuable brands. Among the likes of Apple, Coca-Cola, Mercedes Benz, Google, who sell products that we can touch and wear and feel and see. With technology like SAP and even, say, what you're doing with NetApp on hyper-converged, what's the conversation like when you're talking about products that people may not even know are under the hood? How do you ignite a customer to be excited? What are some of those exciting customer examples that you see that really show how this technology from SAP and your partners can change a company, change an industry, change a life? >> Right. That's a great question and it's really the essence of a brand right? So first I would encourage all of your viewers, go play Bill's keynote from SAPPHIRE today, I mean, I think he was totally evangelical and I think he painted the picture so. From my perspective the brand, so first all of those brands that you mentioned, right, Apple and Google, these are all loyal SAP customers. They're also SAP partners so we're punching with the heavyweights. We're at, I think, number 17 in brand equity and we're working our way up. I think our focus isn't so much touching and feeling our products. I think it's more about trust, making a promise and a commitment to the market and that market validating that commitment and statement with money. Basically buying our products, deploying our products, and basing their business on our products. And so, when I think of SAP becoming that brand as more and more companies continue to rely on us, trust in us and as we become a more integrated economy and society, they're going to realize Apple is going to be able to trust Google because they're using SAP and they know there's integrity of the data and their processing. Google's going to be able to trust their suppliers, like NetApp and HP and et cetera because they're using SAP as well. So there's this, basically this movement of trust and brand identity that will be validated by our customers. We create the message, the customers create the brand. So I think that's our approach. >> Like trust is the new currency. >> It is, it really is, particularly in the data-based, data-oriented society and economy. >> My good friend Tom, on Twitter said that the future is data, the future isn't databases. So, I thought it was a brilliant quote, so shout out to Tom. So as we look at that, the future is data and not databases, and you guys have rolled out an established database in HANA, but how do you refocus, not on the actual technology but on the data itself as it relates to, you know NetApp has started to market themselves as a data-driven company. What's the relationship between the infrastructure, the database, the application and the actual data? >> So, good question, it's a long answer, so let me try to net out a couple of key areas there. So if you kind of look at data, data plays a point of origination where you're going to enter data and capture the transactions of the business. It's also the source of innovation. After capturing all that data there are these perishable insights and there are these anomalies and signals that are trapped in there that you're going to pull out. So when you look at the infrastructure itself, our belief is that consumers and the consumer experience with technology has created a very real time society. We chat in real time, we post images in real time, we message in real time and we believe that level of performance is what enterprises are going to demand. Batches going away. People, they don't want to hear, "Oh no it takes hours "to sift though a petabyte of data." They don't want to hear it. So they want to move to, they want their answers now, and so that's what we've really focused on is that whole real time experience, and we believe that data, like you said data, it is going to be both the source of insight, it's going to be the system of record and then it's really going to be the basis of the next generation products and services. So if you look at all the companies that people are trying to copy and mirror, they're giving away their software products and they're monetizing the insights that they glean from that data, right? So Facebook makes their money off of advertising that is based on your likes and preferences and shares, et cetera, like that. So their business isn't software, it's how do I monetize that data, that behavior that is trapped in that data, how do I surface those behaviors? So we think that's very core to us. We have a group within SAP that works with our partners and customers to help them build data-driven business models, data-driven business products and data-driven solutions and NetApp is core to all that. I think once you get and start to deal with the order of magnitude of data that we're talking about here, you have to move to an HCI and you have to move to a trusted player like that. >> The Facebook example as we wrap things up, you kind of just alluded to one of the things that I've heard some of your execs saying, including your CMO, Alicia Tillman, where, our customers don't care about the technology, they care about their customers and you kind of just articulated that really well. That that's what you need to be able to enable is what Facebook is delivering, what Apple is delivering, or what Google is delivering. So thanks so much Joe, for stopping by and sharing what you guys are doing with partners to really kind of fundamentally change the direction that SAP is going in. >> Thanks, it's great to be here and thanks for having me. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAPPHIRE 2018, thanks for watching. (digital music)

>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco. It's the CUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the CUBE. We're here in San Francisco live, wrapping up our third day of coverage at Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier. Great event and here, our special guest appearance as our closing analyst. I've been here all week with John Troyer. He had to leave early to get down to San Jose. John Troyer is the co-founder of TechReckoning, which is an advisory and community development firm and in his place we have Keith Norbie who's the Senior Manager at NetApp, doing business development, DevOps pro, former solidifier, really at the heart of the NetApp that's transforming. Here as my guest analyst, welcome, welcome to the CUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Thanks for coming in and sharing your knowledge. And to wrap up the show, really a lot going on. And I know you've been super busy. You had an appreciation of that last night with NetApp. You had customers there. But I really wanted you to come on and help me wrap up the show because you're also at the kernel of DevOps, right, where DevOps and storage, we were talking last night about the role of storage, but that's just an indication of what's going on across the board of all resources. Invisible infrastructure is the new normal and that is what people want. They want it to be invisible but they want that highly performant, they want it scalable. So roles are changing, industries are changing, application development is changing. Everything is changing with cloud scale at an unprecedented level and Red Hat is at the center of it with the kernel Linux operating system. It's all about the OS. >> Yeah. >> That's my takeaway from the show. What's your takeaway, what's your analysis here of Red Hat Summit? >> Well first off, you know, 7,000 people is a heck of a lot of growth. In some of the birthplaces of VM world, we have the new birthplace of open being real, and Red Hat's been the really the true company that's taken open and done something with it. >> What's the big, most important story for you here this week? What jumps out at you that jumps off the page and says, wow, that's happening, this is real, obviously open source, going to a whole 'nother level, the cat's been out of the bag for awhile on that, but really, it's just about the exponential growth of open source, Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin talks about this all the time, so okay, that's not to me the most important, so that's just reality. >> Yeah. >> But what jumped off the page for you here? >> I think they said it best in one of the keynotes where they went from this being a concept of cheap to a concept of being functional or capable. So it's the c-to-c transition of cheap to capable and it is about trying to unlock the capabilities of what this show delivers, not just on Red Hat's platform but across the ecosystem. And as you see that play out in any one technology sector, you know, we've been talking DevOps which I think has been a phenomenal study in and of itself saying you know, we've gone from a lot of thought leadership a lot of, if you go to DevOps Enterprise Days, they'll talk a lot about culture and operational things to now seeing a maturation in the industry to actually have, you know, some very specific capabilities and customer (mumbles) models. >> I think the thing that jumped out, for me, Keith, I want to get your reaction to it, is that DevOps ethos, which has been around for awhile, not a lot, you know, a couple years, eight years maybe, since cloud really native really kicked in. But the ethos of open source, the ethos of DevOps, infrastructure as code is not just for software development anymore because as the things that are catalyzing around digital transformation, with Kubernetes becoming a defacto standard, with the role of containers, with server-less and all this infrastructure being programmable, the application market is about to go through a massive Renaissance, and you're seeing those changes rendered in the workplace. So the DevOps and open source ethos is going everywhere. It's not just development, it's marketing, it's how people manage their businesses and work force structure. You're seeing blockchain and decentralized applications on the horizon. This new wave is not just about DevOps for infrastructure as code, it's the world as code, it's business as code, it's everything as code so if you're doing anything with a waterfall, it's probably outdated. >> Yeah, everything has its different pace and its cadence in different industries and that's the hard thing to predict for everybody. Everybody that's coming here from different walks and enterprises of life is trying to figure out how to do this. And that permeates out into, you know, vehicles and IoT edge devices, back to the core part of the data centers and the cloud and you've got to have answers for really the three parts of that equation in different modes and ultimately equal a business equation, a business transformation. >> What did you learn here? I'll just tell you my learning, something that wasn't obvious that I learned that's validated in my mind and they didn't talk about it much on stage in Red Hat. Maybe they do off the record, maybe it's confidential information, maybe it's not. But my observation is that the Red Hat opportunity is really global. And the global growth of Red Hat, outside the United States and Europe is really where the action is. You look at Asia and third-world countries with mobile penetration. The global growth for Red Hat and Linux is astronomical. To me, that clearly came through, when I squint through the puzzle pieces and say, okay, where's the growth coming from? Certainly containers, Linux containers is going to be bigger than Rel, so that's going to be a check on the financial results. That's good growth. But it's really outside the United States. I'm like, wow, this is really not just a North America phenomenon. >> Yeah, and really, demand is demand. And at NetApp we see this in APAC almost more so than a lot of the other parts of the world. The pace of innovation and the demand for innovation you know, just kind of finds its way naturally into this market. You know, this whole community and open source approach you know, sort of incubates a lot more innovation and then the pace of the innovation, in my opinion, just by natural fellowship of these people. And the companies trying to innovate in the segment with these things. >> So what did you learn this week? What was something that you learned this week that you didn't know before or you had a hunch or you validated it here? What is something that's unique that you could share that you've learned or validated or have an epiphany? Share some color commentary on the show. >> Yeah, I think there's a little bit of industry maturation, where this technology isn't just like a Linux thing and a thing for infrastructure people trying to do, you know, paths or container automation or something technical. But it's equating out to industry solutions like NFE and Telco is a great example, you know, where all of us want to get to a 5G phone, and the problem is, is that they've got to build a completely reprogrammable, almost completed automated edge cloud type of network. And you can't do that with appliances, so they have to completely reprogram and build a new global scale of autonomy on a platform and it's awesome how like complex and how much technology is there and what it really comes down to is us having a faster phone. (laughter) It's amazing how you have all that, and it equals something so simple that my 14-year old daughter, you know, can have a new obsession with how fast the new phone is. >> I mean, (mumbles) digital transformation in all aspects, IoT edge, you mentioned that, good stuff. I got to ask you, while you're here, about NetApp, obviously, SolidFire, a great acquisition from NetApp, some transformation going on within NetApp. What's going on there? You guys got a good vibe going on right now, some good team recruiting. You guys recruit some great people, as well as the SolidFire folks. What's going on in NetApp? >> Well, yeah, I was part of the SolidFire team and that was a great group of people to really see the birth of the next generation data center through that lens of the SolidFire team. As we've come to NetApp now, we've really seen that be able to be incubated into the family of NetApp, really into three core missions, you know, modernizing data centers, you know, with an all flash approach to the ONTAP and FAS solutions, taking the SolidFire assets and really transforming that to the next level in the form of an HCI solution, you know, which is really to deliver simplicity for various consumption of economics and agility of operations within an organization. And then, you know, having that technology also show up in the marketplace at Amazon and Azure. And this week we announced Google. So it's been fun to see, not just the SolidFire thing come to life in its own mission, but how that starts to federate in this data fabric, you know, across three different missions. And then when it really gets exciting, to me, is how it applies into things that help people transform their business, like we talked DevOps and unlocking that and some of the config automation with Ansible, unlocking it some of the things with open shift that we're doing with Trident in the container automation across three of our platforms. And then seeing how this also comes to life with other factors with code and RD factory management or CIC piplup Jenkins. It's about tying this entire floor together in ways that makes it easy for people to mature and just get more agile. >> And it's a new growth for the ecosystem. We're seeing, you know, some companies that try to get big venture-backed financing, trying to monetize something that's hard to do if you're not Linux. I mean, Linux's a free product. It's all about Linux and the operating system. So, Linux is the enabler. >> Absolutely. >> To all of this and whoever can configure it in a way that's horizontally scalable, asynchronous and with microservices architecture wins the cloud game, 'cause the cloud game is just now creating clear visibility. The role that open source plays, being open I mean, look at the role that Hypervisor closed and proprietary, harder to innovate in a silo. If you're open, innovation's collective, collective intelligence. >> And I thought that one of the keynote demos, on Day One, Tuesday morning, to me, was one of the more powerful ones, where they showed a VM environment being transformed into container automation. Like literally a SQL environment being on into a container-based environment from previously being in a VM environment. And traditional IT doesn't have to do a whole lot of heavy lifting there. You know, people want that ability, kind of inch into it and then transform at their own time scale. >> Yeah, I think the big takeaway from me here in the show to kind of wrap things up is Red Hat has an opportunity to leapfrog the competition in way that's not a lone wolf kind of approach. It's like they're doing it with a collective of the whole. The second thing that jumps out at me, I think this is really game-changing for the business side of it is that because they're open with Linux and the way the ecosystem's evolving around cloud, the business issues that enterprises face, in my opinion, is really about, how do I bring in the new capability, okay of cloud, cloud scale and all asynchronous new infrastructure and applications without killing the old? And containers and Kubernetes and Openshift allow companies to slow roll the lifecycle or let workloads either live and just hang around or kind of move out on their own timetable, so you get the benefits of lift and shift with containers without killing the existing old ways while bringing in new innovation. This, to me, is an absolute game changer. I think it's going to accelerate the adoption to cloud. And it's a win-win. >> Absolutely. Transform agility. >> Cool, well Keith, thanks for coming on. Any final thoughts from yourself here on the show observations, anecdotes, stories? >> You know, sometimes less is more and this show has, you know, in a lot of ways both gotten more complex, but I would argue also much more simple and clear about directional paths that organizations can take. And that is working backwards from cloud what cloud is teaching the rest of us is that both, you know, functions more so than technology, and agility in terms of the ability to consume at the pace of the business. Those two things are the ways to take all this complexity and simplify it down into a couple of core statements. >> Someone asked me last night, what I thought about the current situation in the industry and I want to get your response to this, and get your reaction. I said, if a company is not making tweaks to their business, they're probably not positioned for success, meaning, with all the new things that have developed just in the past 12 to 18 months, if they're not tweaking something in some material, meaningful way, not like, not completely replatformizing or changing a business model. A tweak, whether it's to their marketing, or their tech or whatever, then they're probably stuck. And what I mean by that is that new things have happened in the past 18 months that are moving the needle on what the future holds. And to me, that's a tell sign when someone says is someone doing well? I just look at 'em. Well, they were kind of just doing the same thing they did 18 months ago. They really, they're talking a game, but they're not changing anything. So if they're not changing anything, it's probably broken. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, it was best said in terms if you look at the the Fortune 100 right now and contrast that with, you know, 10 or 15 years ago and it's a different landscape. And projecting that out another even five years, the rate of acceleration on this is a brutal scale. And so any company that's not thinking through transformation, you know. My kids are the future consumers. You know, they grew up as digital natives. You know, we're all migrants and they just automatically assume all these things are going to be there for them in their rhetoric, in their rationale. And the current companies of today have got to figure that out, you know, and if they don't start now, you know, they might be out of business in five years. >> If you're standing still, you get rolled over. That's my opinion. CUBE coverage here, of course, wrapping up our show here at Red Hat Summit 2018. We've been in the open all week here in the middle of the floor at Moscone West in San Francisco, live for the past three days. All the footage on Silicon Angle.com as to articles from our reporting, the CUBE.net is where all the videos will live and check out wikibon.com for all the research. Keith, thanks for being our guest analyst in the wrap up, 'ppreciate it and congratulations on all your success at as Business Development Exec at NetApp and the SolidFire stuff. Great you coming on. DevOps culture going mainstream. Software's powering the world. This is the programmable world we live in powered by Linux. Of course, the CUBE's there, covering it. Thanks for watching. Red Hat 2018, we'll see you next show.

>> Narrator: Live from Berlin, Germany It's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017 Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017, here in Berlin, Germany. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Peter Burris. We are joined by Tim Pitcher, he is the Vice President, Next-Generation Data Centre for NetApp. Thanks so much for coming on the program. It's an absolute pleasure, it's a pleasure to be here. So let's start just defining for our viewers the Next-Generation Data Centre, how it's built, how it's founded. Yeah so, if you think about NetApp today we think about our customers really consuming technology in three ways. We've got sort of more, we're modernizing traditional data centers and architectures using data management and flash storage and these sorts of things and this really is our back yard, this is what we've been doing for years and years, been incredibly successful at it. And the big disrupter in many ways is Cloud and so our partnerships with the major hyperscalers are critically important to us as well. But there's a third piece to the jigsaw which is the Next-Generation Data Centre and the way we think about that is that if you imagine that you want to use Cloud services but you want to do a lot of that yourself, you want to take advantage of the sort of simple, scalable, automated nature of Cloud then that's really what we're delivering in the Next-Generation Data Centre for our customers. So the Next-Generation Data Centre is being driven by technology advances, business requirements, the realities of data, what are the practical things that are driving, or indicating, the steps that people should take as they think about new technology and new business practices? I mean, the big driver is really to remove a lot of complexity from their business so if you think about going to the Cloud, you're making a really very simple consumption choice. You're saying I'm going to consume data and services from the public Cloud environment and that drives a similar behavior inside large organizations as well, organizations of all sizes. So they're thinking about how do they build private Cloud, take advantage of both with a hybrid Cloud environment, or they can have multiple public Cloud instances as well. So they're thinking about it all very differently and they're thinking about the most appropriate services that they're trying to deliver or the most appropriate way to deliver that application or that data set, if you will, to their customers. So it's not like everything needs to be in one place, and also critically customers very often want to change that as well so they'll make a decision to put something in a public cloud, it might not be the best fit over time for whatever reason, so they want to bring it back in house and deliver that on their own infrastructure and when they do that they want to take advantage, they like what they've had in the Cloud so they want to put that on premise. So the real drive is they really want simplicity, they're really focused on a much more performant outcome that's focused on simplicity focused on how you scale your business and being able to have truly multi-tenant environments that give you the predictability of your traditional architectures if you will, the architectures you know well and have been using for a long time. You want to be able to do that in a Cloud like environment because you the economics of Cloud but you get the predictability of dedicated environments. So which of the customers that you work with are in fact executing this Next-Generation Data Centre strategy most beautifully in your opinion? Well so, if you think about the strategy that NetApp has for our Next-Gen Data Centre is really based on two companies that they acquired. One is Object Storage platform called StorageGRID Webscale the other one is SolidFire. Which, SolidFire was a young, emerging, hot technology company that was focused on delivering what I've just articulated, simple technologies, simple storage platform operated at scale, completely automated and SolidFire was born out of a service provider, born out of a service provider at the same time as OpenStack so it's kind of unique in that perspective. The company was formed to solve a problem and the problem that Rackspace really were looking to solve was how do they take their managed service clients and move them into the Cloud, what's stopping them doing that? And the answer is obviously customers worry about security and things like that but the key thing that was really stopping them was their concern about performance. So if I'm going to share, put all my stuff in with everybody else's, in a shared environment, how do I know I'm going to get what I'm paying for how do I know that I'm not going to have somebody else's applications consume all the services that are going to be given to me? So as a consequence, this was the thing that prevented people going to the Cloud so this is what the company formed to fix so SolidFire came out of that and that's our background and that's why NetApp acquired us because very different way of looking at things so as a consequence service providers are really at the forefront of how they deliver services to their customers and they leveraged SolidFire and we were very successful as an independent company selling to service providers and have been increasingly successful now that we're part of NetApp. Our very first customer for example is in Jersey and is still a very happy NetApp customer, a company called Calligo and they offer tiered services all on SolidFire, trusted Cloud services in and off-shore kind of environment they're focused on the financial services community and things like that. And now we have also major services providers like 1and1 in Germany, which is one of the largest services providers in Europe, long time NetApp customer and they're a SolidFire customer for their public Cloud services as well for the Cloud that they offer. And in the UK as well, Interoute, major service provider. What I like about them is one, they deal with a massive amount of traffic, they've got a huge network so very traffic intensive, but also they really take advantage of NetApp being, sorry, SolidFire being part of NetApp now so they use the on-tap base products in their manage services which those products are optimized for that kind of environment but for their Cloud environment where they're offering tiered services they use SolidFire so they've got us on both sides of the house if you will and so its a great example of SolidFire being part of NetApp, why that's so powerful, why that's so successful. And companies like Internet Solutions in South Africa is one major service provider in South Africa, big consumer of SolidFire and now is part of NetApp, it's a much better place for them because we've got a big business in South Africa, we're very successful there, so we're part of that team now and they go from strength to strength. So now the next challenge is taking some of the best practices that have emerged from what you've learned from working with these service providers and transferring them to other industries. Yeah so, we're seeing a lot in Fin-tech right now, Farmer is a good market for us, Astrozeneca uses SolidFire so a great example of one of NetApps long-term and major customers that's now consuming products and services from other business units and other offerings that we have across a much broader portfolio so they're very happy customers now. That's part of our global account business. Business Wire in the UAE is another example of a successful business transformation that they're doing as well. We've seen a lot of activity in Dev-ops, these products are perfect for Dev-ops because they're so simple, they don't require management they're completely automated, you're not building those large infrastructures of people to support these environments. And it's much quicker to be able to launch applications because of the simple nature of the technology you can launch applications, new products, new services so your time to market is an awful lot quicker as well. Great, well thanks so much for coming on the show Tim, it's been really fun talking to you. It's been a pleasure, thanks very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight just after this. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApps. >> Welcome back everyone, we are live in Las Vegas this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program where we go out to events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Keith Townsend. We're here at NetApp Insight 2017 here at the Mandalay Bay with two great guests, a senior executive, senior NetApp folks, are going to share some insight on what's going on. We have Mark Bregman is the Senior Vice President and CTO thanks for coming on. John Woodall VP of Engineering at Integrated Archive Systems. The first partner of NetApp going back in the day. Welcome to theCUBE thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So we've seen that movie before, you know every cycle of innovation there's always opportunities. Interesting now we're in a cycle where you can see some new waves out there coming in. And we think we're surfing on some waves now, but the tsunami's coming. Everything from blockchain down to just cloud growth like crazy. You guys have done extremely well. You've seen them before, these transitions. People are busy right now, your customers are super busy. They've got app development going on, DevOps, they've got security unbuckling from IT becoming critical, data governance. What should they know about in this transition that they may miss or they should pay attention to. >> Well, I would say that the thing that is probably the most profound is we've gone through a couple of big transitions, as you mentioned, in the industry as a whole. 20, 30 years ago we would talk to customers and they'd start with infrastructure and they'd talk about servers and storage. 10, 15 years ago they start with applications and they'd talk about their ERP or whatever software. That would decide then the infrastructure. Today they're starting with data and companies are realizing that data is the thing that's going to transform their business. And then based on that data, what software am I going to use and then talk about infrastructure. So the conversation's kind of turned around completely from where it was 20 years ago. >> John, you've been a partner, I see the partner landscape certainly changing. You seeing resellers and VAR's and I think, does the word VAB even exist, value added business? They're actually building their own tech because there's opportunities to be a service provider. Almost like a telco, who would have thought? >> It's crazy, it's crazy. I think I think from our perspective as a longtime partner, we've been successful with NetApp through transitions. We were talking before about the resiliency of NetApp in going through transitions. They've done it again, the keynote today filled with a lot of, what I call, mic-drop moments of yet another level of innovation. But you're right things have flipped almost 180 degrees in the discussion that starting with data, starting with a business outcome, as part of the discussion. It's not about what can I sell, it's about in solving the problem, do I accelerate the pace of my business. Do I open up new ways to monetize in my business. Do I drive efficiencies in my business that translate to the bottom line. As a reseller and as a partner, we have to transition with that because the discussion changes, the skill sets change and it becomes much more of a services play on the front-end and to help through and then becomes managed services, as you know, and that. >> Mark I want to ask your a question. We were joking with the product marketing team on the cloud earlier that you know the slogan should be, I don't know NetApp could do that. It just keeps happening, oh, I didn't know they did that. While that's kind of a history NetApp, but I want to ask something specific. We see it's a success out there in the cloud, you look no further than Amazon Web Services. Now Microsoft's kind of catching up to the rear, Google's there's some other people are trying to kind of get in there. But Amazon's the winner when it comes to the number of announcements you see an event and I'm sure at Reinvent coming up is going to be a tsunami of their bigger announcements, more services so it's a plethora. And so that's an indicator of success. And also the new differentiator, at scale, as you got to keep iterating, you guys have a slew of announcements, so running engineering and being the CEO. What's going on at NetApp? What's the conversation like, you have all these roadmaps, is it just all this innovation, is it part of the plan and just give us some insight into how this all works. >> Well, I think for a long time, maybe for the first 20 years of the company, we were almost like a one product company. The innovations were all in that lane. They were all, you know, make this a better product, make ONTAP better and customers love that because they were growing with us. What's happened is it's kind of exploded in multiple dimensions. So we continue to innovate in our core. But at same time we're having to say, how can we use this capability in a completely different way, in the cloud? How can we help customers manage their data, no matter where it is, not just on our ONTAP systems. We made the acquisition of a little over a year ago, a year and a half ago, of SolidFire, to get into an area of a different approach to managing storage. And it's not sometimes people get it confused and they go that's how you got into flash. Frankly, we're already doing flash units and have flash in all of our product lines. The real reason we did that was to get into this more programmatic, scale out, API driven model of administration of storage. And we're having to do that in so many dimensions. so as we expand those dimensions, Of course we have to expand our innovation. We have to innovate at the given rate in each of threads. >> The old joke in Silicon Valley is you know get lucky once and you get rich. And it's hard, you know, the sophomore jinx whatever you want to call it, repeated successes is a sign of success and certainly as a partner you want to, you don't want to one trick pony at all. Now, I got to ask you, given the NetApp history of those successes, the data fabric is very good positioning I like that position because it's got a lot around it's super important, you think data is the new wave it's going to come bigger than cloud in terms of its impact. What from NetApp, for the customers that are watching and especially new customers, as you take new territory down with data, what is it about the NetApp portfolio, or the architecture the DNA that makes you guys relevant in this data fabric equation? Because you can't just get there overnight because of diseconomies of scale. What is it about NetApp that makes them super relevant? Couple things, one thing, what's the one thing? >> Well, I think I think it becomes back to I think you even said the term, DNA. It's what is it about NetApp, why are we one that's been around for 25 years and continue to make it through these transitions. And I think it's because, first of all, we don't rest on our laurels, we're not caught up in the innovator's dilemma of continuing to just refine what we already have. We'll do that, but we also recognize that there are emerging new customer needs. And our basic intellectual capital can be applied in different ways. So when I talk to our engineers, they don't talk about I build controllers that go into arrays that manage data. They realize that deeper down there's a kind of intellectual capital could go into a piece of software in the cloud. And there's a customer problem that we can go solve. So I think it's about being motivated by solving those customer data problems. >> So culture, some culture. >> It's culture. >> What are the products now, so you have a data, storage, storage stores data. So you don't need rocket science to figure out that you're storing data. >> I'll give you an example, there a lot of competitors in the flash storage business that have come into the market and basically gave up on us because we were late coming to that market. But we came in the market, we accelerated, we passed them, why is that? Partly, we built a good product at the flash storage layer. But more importantly we leveraged all of the storage management which we'd already built over 20 years. And so now we're suddenly out there with a very rock solid flash engine but it's supported by all the other capabilities which make it valuable to our customers. So it's not just, hey, here's a new tool, it's here's a new solution to your problem. And I think that's a big part of our DNA. And our technology side is we've been in data management for 20 years, we just never talked about it that way. >> So John, we had Dave Hitz on earlier, and he said that one of the keys to keeping away from the innovators dilemma has been that NetApp has leaned into the thing that will kill us. I tweeted that out, that's an awesome pull, that they've leaned into the things. As a partner though, that can be a bit scary. Technology is especially enterprise tech is a very stable thing. NetApp has been with ONTAP a very traditional partner even with fads and bringing those innovations to flash. How's that ride been for you guys over the past 25 years. >> It has been consistent, it has been a great partnership, and it continues to be a great partnership because as I look out and hone my portfolio of offerings and partnerships, NetApp stays very high in, that not just because we have a great run rate business, but because NetApp, in their innovation allows me to continue to solve problems with an existing partner, which makes us more efficient. Now, having said that we talked about you mentioned data fabric. That's a completely different discussion from a storage company. At first you think okay, I'm replicating data, I have a transport layer, that's fine. But what are you doing beyond that? I think you begin to see a new NetApp emerging as software defined. An organizing principle in my mind of the data fabric is it gives the customer freedom and flexibility that just buying storage doesn't give you. It gives them the flexibility to deploy in the cloud, next to the cloud, on-prem, as a virtual instance, as an AMI in the cloud, et cetera. So it allows the customer to place data and workloads where and when and how they want that makes sense for their business, not NetApp's business, or my business and so in that we're starting to see now with Anthony Lye's demo today of Cloud Orchestrator. >> Which, by the way, isn't shipping yet, but it's multi-cloud. >> Multi-cloud? >> It's multi-cloud instance. >> Yeah, that right there, and its applications, it's provisioning VM's, it's provisioning. >> If you guys get that to the market fast, it will be the first multi, True multi, orbiting call it real multi-cloud There's a lot of fake multi-cloud out there but that would be a real use case. >> And that's a completely different discussion so you know to kind of plagiarize, you can teach an old storage dog a new trick. So they transformed to meet the emerging needs of a new market, we are have to transform with them. So there's a bit of bumpiness that we're all going to experience as we learn that and do that. >> John, I just want to drill-down on that, I want to get also your both perspectives. What you're really teasing out with the Cloud Orchestrator demo in my mind, the impact of that demo significance is you guys as a storage company, now a data company, are enabling opportunities with the data. That's clearly what's happening, obviously, no debate there. But the impact is to developers. Now the developer dynamic is as these devops guys come in, there's new, there's re-skilling going on. So the biggest challenge of multi-cloud is each cloud has its own way to pipeline data or do things with data. So making that easy, I don't want to have to hire guys to program for each cloud. >> Mark: And they're hard to find. >> It's incredible, it's too hard. Abstracting that away is going to be a boon for the developer market. That's a new market, that's a different thing than NetApp. >> It's a very different market than we've been in before. >> So what are you doing? What's the plan, just continue to enable developers? >> Well, the comment you made earlier, about lean in to the thing that's going to kill you is exactly right, I wouldn't have said it quite like that but I'm not Dave Hitz. So we definitely, when we see a challenge we lean into it. And and that does two things, it's a little bit like, I don't know was it TaeKwonDo where you use the other competitors energy? >> I think it's judo. >> Think it's judo, use the other energy, the power the other opponent to win. And that's kind of what we're doing. I think when you do that it means we have to transform and our partners do, and you're a partner that's been with us long time, you've been through a lot of transitions. >> Yes we have. >> Well judo move is about leverage, and that's about having installed, you guys have that leverage with your customers. >> And the customers are moving as well, so we could try to keep them, hold them back. Or we can move with them and actually accelerate them to where they're going to our benefit, and to our partners benefit and I think that's what Dave was referring to. Well, Mark and John love to have you guys on, love to do a follow-up segment in Palo Alto, our offices are really across the yard from each other, certainly if you guys are in Sunnyvale This is a super important conversation. I'll give you guys the last word, impact to customers for NetApp with the new capabilities with data center innovation modernization, next gen data center, on-premise, true private cloud and power a horse in the cloud with data. All that working together in some cases end to end or in pieces whatever the customers is. What does it mean to the customer this new. >> I'll steal a line from our marketing teams and what it really means is it's going to enable customers to change the world with data. Transform their business, create new opportunities. >> It's a new wave in the economy. It's going to be disruptive and tumultuous for some. We have an opportunity to go into a customer and to help them find new ways, with their data, because the two key assets of company now is people and then data. So the people are there taking their data, allowing them to find new opportunities to go to market faster. NetApp's in a unique position. >> It reminds me of value creation, I mean a lot of stuff with blockchain you see the indicators, almost the Web1.0 again. You see in the new shift in architecture happening upside down it's almost reverse. >> The developer model's right. I mean you talk about Amazon, I think from 2008 until 2014 or 15 they introduced about three thousand new services on their platform. I don't see an average IT organization doing that. >> I think that rates gone up now. >> It's on an exponential growth there. >> I think we're starting to see the swim lanes, if you will, I'm calling them native clouds because they're so native. But they're also powering a new ecosystem and part of it, I wish we had more time to talk about the partner equation. There a lot of musical chairs going on in the partner ecosystem. You've been with NetApp from the beginning, congratulations. Congratulations on all the success on the platform and the product innovation. It's theCUBE bringing you the innovation and the data through our data fabric called theCUBE. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. >> Announcer: Coming off barrier breakers, status quo smashers, world.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to our live exclusive coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. My co-host Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor. Our next two guests is Dave Hitz, who's the co-founder of NetApp, and Anthony Lye, who's the EVP in Cloud Business Unit Manager. Welcome to theCUBE, and welcome back, good to see you, Dave. >> Thank you. >> I always love, I wrote a post years ago called Keep the Founders Around. I always joke with you on this, but the DNA of a company is super critical, and how the products get positioned even as the evolution, the DNA's critical, great to see you out on the front lines, pressing the flesh with the customers here. >> Keep the founders around, so I have a theory about that, 'cause some people say companies where the founder stays around are more successful, and therefore, I must be awesome. I have a different theory, which is companies that are really successful are a more interesting place for founders to continue to be interested to stay. I think that the causality may be the other way around. >> Don't have 'em as a placated-- >> The founders want to keep staying and playing, you must be doing really cool stuff. >> It's a cultural issue, and this is a big DNA discussion. We go back seven years, we've talked, I've talked with your former CEO, Tom Georgens, about this. Why are you going with Amazon? Everyone's saying that's a bad move, contrarian move. You guys said, hey, the customers are asking for it. Now it's all cloud all the time, data as a fabric. This is now mainstream. Really good tailwinds for NetApp right now, 'cause you got the core base, the shiny new toys not winning the day, but blocking and tackling good technology and the right customer focus. Talk about the cloud impact, Anthony. >> Yeah, just to make a point just on the last comment, I mean, what Dave does I think is you lean into things that are disruptive, and I think very few founders have that ability to sort of. >> Sometimes, I think the biggest value add I can bring to NetApp is to give people permission to let go of the old stuff, and some of it's hard. I'm the guy that wrote WAFL for ONTAP, and so, I'm not saying, I mean, we're still >> That was a big deal. >> We're still shipping a lot of that stuff, and it's awesome, but some people struggle to say what do you mean we're going to sell another storage system? This is always the best one for everything. That's what we've been saying for so long. >> ONTAP everywhere. >> And so, if I can let go, it's like it's my baby, and I still love it, but can we have another kid, too? I think that's a valuable role. >> You've been instrumental in the cloud strategy, and you tell that cloud story first, and it's not what you'd expect. And I think that's what gives NetApp its sort of unique and, I think, its 25 years is you go out, and you could easily talk about all the things that NetApp has done, but you choose to talk about where you think NetApp has to go. >> You do, yeah. >> You know, what was interesting to me about today's general session, 'cause we had so much new stuff, I think you almost can't get your head around it. We had to divide it into categories, and the categories we chose really align with how we see customers working. And so, the first category is a lot of people have and will continue to have for years the traditional style of data center with client servers and Linux, Windows. You rack and design it, like what should the fiber channel be? And it's virtualized, but here's the chunk for Oracle, here's the chunk for Virtual Desktop. >> It's running apps, by the way, running critical apps for the incoming. >> Yeah, of course. All of this stuff, and then, you've got this new style, which is all when you racks and wired to the top HCI, and you know, this whole next generation data center. And then, all the cloud stuff that, you know, it's services running entirely in Amazon. We've got services where we're moving data from one hyperscalar public cloud to a different hyperscalar public cloud with no NetApp hardware involved. I mean, these are entirely cloud-native, cloud-resident services. >> Help me solve, like one, from one region to another region of AWS. So, you're saying that the solution can move from one cloud provider to another. >> We've been doing that for a while. I mean, ONTAP itself, you can buy ONTAP Cloud for AWS, and you can buy it for Azure, and so, you can establish a cluster on one and connect it to a cluster on a different one and let ONTAP snap between the two, move workloads between the two, backup between the two. We've always had that. Now, the orchestrator that we showed today pushes us much, much higher and provides our customers with a true multi-cloud platform, but a multi-cloud platform that really starts to blend compute and storage together. And it's a platform that's built from the ground up on Kubernetes, which is now, I think, the sort of universally accepted container strategy for microservice-based applications. And yes, that platform will allow you to deploy an application package at the same time on any of the big three hyperscales. >> A lot of the pushback that I saw on social media was from the announcement yesterday, where Microsoft Azure NFS. Why are? >> Anthony: You got pushback? >> Yeah, pushback, like why, the object storage is no future in this. It's the best way to do cloud, period. Actually, it was the only way. Can you talk about the importance of NFS in the data fabric? >> Well, can I back up a step? Just to be clear, object storage is awesome. >> Keith: It is. >> And NetApp has an object storage solution, and I'm not going to diss object storage, right. It's great. However, NFS is cool, too, and a lot of people have a whole bunch of apps on-prem, and they've written them already. They run whatever they run. And if it uses NFS and you'd like to have it in the cloud, you don't want step number one is let's rewrite it. >> Keith: Exactly. >> You want step number one is it already works, and I would just like to be working over there so I don't have to mess with physical hardware. >> I know this might be sacrilegious for me to say to be from Silicon Valley and you are, too, but the shiny new toy doesn't win the day, and what we learned from the Hadoop, and we've seen it a little bit OpenStack, but they caught it early before it became a tumor, was the cost of ownership to write stuff from scratch is problematic. There's an issue of, legacy's not a bad thing, look with containers, your point about Kubernetes. So, you have to run these apps. No one wants to rewrite code. >> I'm not going to argue if it's a bad thing or not a bad thing, it exists. >> Accurate. >> And we want to help take care of it. >> But rewrite code as a mandate to get this? Nobody, I mean, if it makes total sense, okay you look at it, but it's not. >> I think IDC pegs file-based workloads at more than 24 exabytes with on-prem growing at somewhere around 18% K year and cloud growing at 25%. You know, objects are not the answer to everything, old or new, actually. As an application developer, I like the opportunity to have both, and I think applications will consume both. >> Let me jump into the announcements that were on-stage here, the conversations, a lot of stuff as you mentioned, so the folks should look at the keynote. We've streamed it live, so you can go to SiliconANGLE, or go to NetApps.com, check it out. But a couple things jumped out at me. The ONTAP, was it 9.3? And SolidFire, interesting integration there, shipped, great stuff. The cloud orchestrator, seamless moving data across multiple clouds. Everyone knows me, I've been critical of this. >> And applications. >> This is, I've been looking for someone to actually show me, just multi-cloud is hard, you got latency issues, there's a ton of stuff. But you're not rewriting code to do it. >> Exactly. >> You can do it on-prem, huge deal. And then, the other thing is just a general sentiment of the 18 guys around the channels, the channel partners are energized. They see an opportunity to build a business, sales channel for NetApp, but more importantly, they can come and deliver the customers. Guys, unpack those dynamics. Obviously, the SolidFire thing flashed. >> Can I start with the channel? When I look at how the channel interacts with a lot of customers, they make their money selling stuff, often gear. But if you look at what are they really providing, a lot of them are acting as IT consultants, in some cases with smaller companies as CIOs for hire. And so, it doesn't, people are, oh, well, what do they do if it's cloud? Or what they do if it's on-prem? It's like, the customer still needs that same advice and consulting. >> Your studio has cloud concierge, they have have their own cloud service for their customers. >> And so, I just think that there's a big opportunity for the people who choose to embrace it. Anyone who's telling their customers, whoa whoa whoa, slow down, you don't want to go on the cloud, we'll help you not go on the cloud. Like, I don't think that's a long-term business model anymore. >> Cloud is destinations happening. >> The only thing I would say on the partner side that we've seen is that we now have, I think, credibility in the cloud, so much so that we are signing partners that only work in the cloud. A lot of Amazon partners, a lot Azure partners have come to us and said, hey, you know, we didn't realize you had all of these data services, and we are running customers' infrastructures on the hyperscalars, and we'd like to use your software to make our lives easier, we'd like to use ONTAP Cloud, we'd like to use classing. As well as our traditional partners, there are other partners here at this event that are first timers at Insight. >> Talk about the cloud dynamic because certainly it's a lift, rising tide floats all boats or tailwind, whatever you want to call it, but now, I'm a CEO having a conversation, like, whoa, you got my attention. NetApp on my old trusted NetApp guys, the storage guys, and they're talking data, which music to my ears, 'cause I got all this stuff going on, GPPR. All of a sudden cloud, I didn't know they had a cloud. And you don't get a cloud strategy. You either do cloud or you don't, so this has come up on theCUBE a lot. Talk about the dynamic of how you talk about the damages. I'm like, okay, I know I got to build through the cloud. How does NetApp fit into my strategy? 'Cause I got to cross the bridge to the future, I got business to take care of today, both on-prem, in the three pillars, but I got to have a cloud vision. >> Let me back up a little bit. One of the reasons we think we can help, that we're very well-positioned to help, it's very easy to fire up 1,000 CPUs in the cloud. You want 1,000 CPUs, you fire 'em up, and you unfire 'em up, and everything is easy, until there's any data. What do they want to look at? How do you get it in there? What do they create? How are you going to keep it safe? Do you want to leave it in that cloud or a different cloud, or do you want it on-prem, or all three? And as you soon as you getting yourself into those questions, you go, whoa, that's the hard part of the cloud. The good news is that's exactly what NetApp does. That's the kind of work that NetApp focuses on. And so, the starting point is, look, CPUs, computes, lambdas, container, all that stuff is easy until you get to the data, which lives forever, and you're legally required to do something with it. Now, let's talk about what you're trying to accomplish and where you're going, like that now is. One of my goals these days, how long can we talk without mentioning a product? Because it's not, eventually you're going to have to get to, oh, by the way, we have a backup tool that'll reach into Office 365 and suck it out as objects and put it on your on-prem object storage. >> Well, backup's a whole other story. >> It's AWS or something like that. >> There's no laws in the cloud. >> So eventually, you get to some tool or some product, but you want to talk for a long time about where they're going, what they're trying to solve, what they care about. Often they don't care about a thing you think they should, like aren't you really concerned about budget? No, actually, we're dying, 'cause we can't solve this problem. The budget comes after we solve that. Okay. >> We were talking last week about the, I was calling it the toolshed paradigm, or paradox, and the toolshed paradox is that they're focusing so much on the tools that they have, that they have this bloated tool chest. Some of these are getting, collecting dust. They bought a hammer that they're trying to mow their lawn with. You have problem of too many tools, pun intended. The question is is that, as it kind of distracts from the focus, to your point, data. Data seems to be the killer app in the cloud because now, not just moving data around cloud, developers are using data in real time, so batch in real time is huge. >> How are they enriching the data? >> How is the application developed, because I'm a CIO, I've a lot of things going on, on my plate, I'm ramping up dev ops and more application development, new developers, open source, blah blah blah, security, governance. >> To me, I sort of think a really nice soundbite that I got was, I was an application developer, and my career has always been building applications, and it's always been the applications that own the data. There was an application server, and it executed business logic that read or wrote into a repository. >> A data bank. >> I am at the point where I believe we are in an inflection where now the data will own the application. And what I mean by that is the data has to be fluid and available for many applications to consume it. Some of them will enrich it, some of them will replace pieces of it, and so, architectures have to change. And I think NetApp's incredibly fortunate that we have such a strong data story at a time where the data itself will be the primary asset on a company's balance sheet. >> If you believe that point, which I do, by the way, I think you're 100% right, that changes the paradigm, flips it upside down, but this also creates the conundrum of data governance because I got a policy, I'm going to put the brakes on that because you're freeing the data to be addressable, to be more Alchemist kind of model where I can't control it, but I need to control it because I've got regulations, I've got governance issues. Give me a pause, how do you guys address that? I know you got governance to it, but that's a dynamic, that's a psychology. >> To add on to that, you talk about-- >> How are you going to do that? >> In governance, so there's the policy piece of it, and then, there's the availability piece of it. Just because I can move from an application developer's perspective, just because I can move an application to the cloud, doesn't mean that it will perform like it will when I use in 100 microseconds of latency in my private data center. So, how do I get the policy and the technology governance that combine together in the cloud? >> I think, I'll make two points. I think the obvious answer to the first question is we have the data fabric, and I think NetApp has pioneered its strategy around a set of data services that do certain tasks that can be consumed as applications or as APIs, but then, we've gone one level higher, and now, we orchestrate and connect those things up and provide meaningful solutions. And data has a fantastic, you know, we were talking about a fantastic demo with StorageGRID. I'll let Dave explain that. The second point I would make, though, is what you've got to understand is that the customer that we talk to isn't AT&T, that's just a big building with a logo on it. A customer is the person inside the organization, and we all now know that there is a new customer, and that customer people refer to as the data scientist. And there haven't been data scientists before, but now, every company is hiring data scientists, why? Because the data itself has become the primary asset. Application developers are now serving the data scientists. >> So, dev ops was developers making infrastructure as code with operations. You're essentially describing a new paradigm data ops. >> Anthony: Correct. >> Data as code, 'cause you need to have it programmable. >> And I think that's what most people call meta-data, or they talk now about APIs for everything. And so, I think that's the new norm, I think that there will be very large catalogs of data, surrounded by policy and governance, but expressed essentially as an API and that the data itself can be manipulated in real time or through batch, using a set of RESTful APIs. And I think, Dave, you should share the demo, the StorageGRID guys today. It's just a fantastic data fabric use case. >> Some of my favorite use cases with the data fabric is where you're confused, the line is blurred even. Is it cloud, or is it on-prem, or what is it? And we've been working hard to integrate those things. Here's an example: we showed, and this a made-up use case, but it was an on-prem solid storage grid, so it's a bucket of objects. Did I mention we love objects? It's a bucket of objects and their faces, and the problem was, how do we identify what's going on with these faces? Are they happy, are they sad, are they angry? And you don't want to write your own face recognizer. And Amazon has good face recognition technology, Recognize. And so, the use case that we constructed is here's the bucket, we have integrated our StorageGRID object storage with Amazon Simple Notification Service. And so, any time a new object gets put into the bucket, it notifies Amazon. Amazon can do whatever it want with that information. Hey, here's the bucket, here's the new object added. What we had it do is issue a lambda, connect up the notification to a lambda, have the lambda come back out, grab the data from on-prem, look at it with the face recognizer. Okay, happy, and then go back on-prem and update that meta-data. Is that cloud, or is that on-prem? We used Amazon's lambda, where this is data fabric. >> This is the new development reinvention. This is what I think a renaissance is coming big time because making that happen takes creativity. The barriers to pull that off now are almost down to just knowing what's available. And so, I think a renaissance is coming because that's amazing, but now you got to say, how do you scale that, and this is the channel CXO's at. >> These are what people call microservices, or serverless computing environments, where they're breaking down the basic construct of an application to be a set of consumable services that can be orchestrated around particular data flows. >> And I think a problem with data, how do you discover those microservices? So, having a trusted provider to go and aggregate all of those microservices is a helpful approach. >> Guys, I know we're tight on time, you got to go, and super thankful for your time coming on theCUBE and sharing your insight and color commentary, what's going on. >> Thank you. >> Final question for both of you guys before you split is this. I've been watching NetApp for years, big fan of the company, obviously, Silicon Valley darling. Sometimes takes a lot of heat. "NetApp's dead," and they never die, but you guys are always winning. Reinvention's been a big part of your culture, but that's not about pivoting, it's about building and just adjusting. Secret to the success, how do you guys do it? Advice for others? >> We have repeatedly leaned in to the thing that was going to kill us. So, when VMWare came along, everyone was like, oh, software-defined data center, nobody's going to need data storage services anymore, data management, VMWare will do it all. And we said, you know what, that's not right. It's hard to do the data part, and we're going to go make VMWare better, and if we do that, our customers will pay us money to help them move to VMWare faster. We leaned in on the thing that was going to kill us, and we're doing exactly the same. I mean, everyone's going, oh cloud's going to kill NetApp. >> You built around it rather than let it roll over you. >> Not just built around it, we said we'll make it better. And we did the same thing again with the cloud. Oh, the cloud's going to kill you, and we're like, you know what, let's go figure out how to make Amazon better, make Microsoft better. If we can make them better, I mean, if you solve a hard problem for a customer, some way or another you can figure out how to get paid for that, and I think that's what we've been doing. >> And you get in early, too. The timing is critical. It's not like you're late to the game and saying there's a pony in there somewhere. You look at it, although a little bit maybe applied. >> We first announced that we were working on this cloud stuff three years ago. 2014, we had been started working in 2013, we were there from the ground with Amazon and with Azure running our ONTAP code, and they were changing their environment to fit with us, and we were changing our code to fit with them, and years later when Microsoft says, who are we going to go to to help us manage the enterprise? They came to NetApp because we've been working with them for so long, I love that. >> Guys, I wish you had more time, we're going to get in our studio in Palo Alto. Great conversation, real fire energy going on here from the execs here at NetApp. This is theCUBE, more live coverage in Las Vegas at NetApp Insight 2017 after this short break. (upbeat electronic keyboard music)