(light music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our wonderful studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. Today we're going to be talking about digital transformation, more specifically the tooling that you have to establish or put in place to achieve digital transformation objectives and to do that, we've got Actian corporation here today. Rohit De Souza is the President CEO of Actian. Rohit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter, I'm glad to be here. >> Well, we're happy to have you 'cause this is a really important topic, but before we get into the actual topic, give us the update on what's going on with Actian. >> Perfect, I'm not sure how much you know about Actian or how much you've followed it, but we've assembled over the years a series of assets that range from Data Management to Data Integration and Data Analytics, really targeted at the next generation of hybrid-data management, really helps companies manage the digital transformation. >> Alright, so let's jump into that digital transformation because that's where a lot of the conversation about hybrid starts, so our belief, and I want to test this with you, is that there really is a difference between a business and a digital business. And that difference is the degree to which a digital business treats data as an asset. >> Absolutely. >> And, in fact, we think that digital transformation is the process by which you re-institutionalize work, reorganize everything else to achieve the goals of using data as an asset, does that? >> Absolutely, and it's not just using the data as purely an asset, but it's using, it's leveraging the data that an enterprise has or has access to and the quantitative analysis of this to influence all aspects of that businesses functions or processes, the way it deals with customers, the way it deals with internal processes, and so on. >> You have to be able to capture data better, you have to be able to turn that data into value, and then you have to be able to act on it. Where does Actian fit in that kind of virtuous cycle? >> So Actian fits all along that chain. We've got the data management assets to allow you to manage that data effectively, we've got the integration assets to allow you to move data to the compute, to the compute to the data effectively, and we've got the best high-performing tools to be able to extract insights from that data at scale and do this all on commodity hardware, so you're doing this at a price-performance level that you can match up elsewhere. >> So it sounds like, but sounds really like you're more focused on creating value out of your data. You might be doing some work at the edge. >> Absolutely. >> And you might have some tooling-- >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> So tell us a little bit about how Actian's vision of data warehousing, data analytics, data warehousing, that whole range of capabilities, is different because of what the base tooling is capable of doing. >> Absolutely, the Actian, the premise behind Actian is that we're going to supplement an organization's digital strategy or data management strategy. So, we're not talking about having to replace stuff in mass, but we're talking about being able to supplement these things where necessary and giving organizations the flexibility to run things on premise or in the cloud, in multi-clouds giving them the flexibility to move from one cloud to the other, and so on. Those capabilities, that capability to manage that data, whether it's in relational systems, whether it's object-oriented systems, whether it's edge systems. To be able to extract the information from those edge systems, move that along to your central systems and then run analytics through it is what Actian does really, really well. >> So if I can kind of repeat that back to you, so, the idea here is that we've got data in an analytics function, that is now, has to be much more high-performance than it used to be. >> That's correct. >> So that we can do a faster close with almost operational time instead of queries from the analytics back to the transaction systems, have I got that right? >> Absolutely, so if you go back a ways the whole process was and the transactional systems here that are generating some information. I pull that information out into an enterprise data warehouse. I've got some things that happen with that, some results and analytics that results, that are driven and those are the results. May or may not make their way back into operations. Today, the business is slightly different. In this era of hyper-personalization, it's no use to me to find out that you were on my website last week, and you were looking at these three products, and you did buy this last year. I want to understand that you're here now and I want to understand how best we can make use of your presence on our company's website to sell you something else, to give you the next best offer, to know how you're interacting with us at that point and to change the interaction that we have with you. If that's going to take place, that needs to happen while the transaction systems are currently in operation. And so the notion of this operational data warehouse, is I'm interacting, I'm generating analytics while I've got those transactions in flight. >> I would even say that it sounds like it's not just a transaction systems are operational but the transaction-- >> That's correct. >> Is open. >> That's correct. >> So that you have, so you need a high-performance store data manager that's capable of responding while the transaction's open to shape, guide, and hyper-personalize the characteristics of the transaction. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, so now let's talk about the hybrid part. You mentioned that earlier. Another belief that we have is that we're going to see a lot of data moved up into the cloud but we can increasingly, the cloud is going to move to the data. We're going to see the services associated the cloud be bought down to the data. >> Couldn't agree more and, oh, by the way, this move to the cloud, this is not just a one time move. Most people think movement to the cloud is a one-time affair. I've got my data on premises for the move to the cloud. No, it's going to move from cloud to cloud. I'm going to have the ability, at some point and time, I'm going to want the ability to run this thing on multiple clouds. I'm not going to risk locking myself in to a particular vendor, so this notion of movement of data from premise to the cloud, perhaps from the cloud back to premise. And into cloud, is here to stay. So, the notion of creating the platform or the capability to move this data around, to move my compute to that data when I need to. It's here to stay, it's going to be with us for awhile. >> Well, it's one of the premises of cloud. The whole motion that data has to be made more fungible, you don't want to go to a bank where your money is contingent upon the definition of money by the bank. >> Absolutely. >> Same thing exists in cloud, so we want that degree of openness, a degree of evolveability but it also, and this is what I'm testing with you is, we think increasing the businesses are going to look at the value propositions, what activities are necessary to deliver those value propositions, where those activities are going to be extent or going to be an operation, and what data's going to be necessary to satisfactory and successfully and with high quality perform those. So, it means increasing that the data is going to be, you're going to want to move the data closer to the activity with right performance, manageability, security, everything else in place. >> That's correct. Or move the compute to the data. >> Or move the compute to the date. So is that kind of the vision that Actian has? Because you've got this family of data managers that each can be, start to become associated with certain styles or transactions or, better put, certain styles of compute and work, digital work. >> Absolutely, now, we take that one step further. There are people who do this today, but many of the approaches that people are using are either cost-prohibitive or don't work. What we've done is actually developed a set of approaches that make these approaches accessible. Today, the notion of true operational data warehousing to operation analytics has been available to really the large companies that have invested completely in extracting value from their data assets. We're bringing that value all the way down to enterprises without gigantic IT staffs, without necessarily spending an arm and a leg on some of the bespoke data management systems of yesterday. We're looking at leveraging commodity hardware to really move performance up a notch, taking your traditional hadoop systems, transitioning those from these swamps that they were into really, honest, goodness operational data store, operational data warehouses, so I can actually update and delete and manage these things like I would any ordinary database. And I've done this on commodity hardware which is distributed across the enterprise. >> So, it is the commodity hardware allows us to place the processing wherever we want. >> That's correct. >> And now we can put the manageability of the data and creating value out of the data. >> That's correct. >> Wherever we want. >> Very. >> So that we are not constrained by associating the data with the action wherever it needs to be. >> Absolutely. >> So as you look forward, what types of future do you anticipate for the evolving role of transaction systems, operational data stores, and digital business? >> I see them converging. I see there being a convergence of these... Digital business involves the operational data stores and the transaction systems, I think you're going to see an increasing number of hybrid systems. These systems that are good at doing both transactions and analytics out of the same systems. We've got one such one. Such one where we've embedded a very high-speed Colmar engine into a traditional relational source. That allows us to do very, very rapid reporting off of existing transactional systems but get analytics out of these systems without any additional overhead. >> Do you anticipate that customers, I mean, I do, but do you anticipate that enterprises are increasing to get alook at almost a data control plane? How does that likely to evolve and what role might Actian play in that? >> I think you bring up a very interesting point for the next generation of data management. There will be a data control plane, we aspire to play in that data control plane. It's not one plane yet. I don't think that the architecture of that one control plane that manages all your data assets across the company. >> And there probably never will be. >> Come about very soon but-- >> Nor is there likely to be one control plane for the reasons you said, you don't want to get locked in. >> But Actian does play in that control plane to allow enterprises the ability to then move their data selectively from on premise to the cloud or between the clouds. >> Alright, so, Rohit, you're a CEO, you've been around for a long time, lot of different places. Imagine, put yourself in the seat of another CEO at one of these large companies. What is the message that they need to bring to their senior staff and others in your organization about affecting this core transition with technology to become more data-oriented, data-friendly, and a culture rated to data utilization? >> I think if you're looking at, you more than likely underestimated the value that's locked in the data that's within your enterprise. Either from a view from a customer or competitive view or a view to improving the processes in you organization. If you task your organization with unlocking this, unlocking the value of these data assets, and being able to respond in more real time to some of the customer or the operations requirements, I think that would go a long way. >> And a part (mumbles) of that is if you've undervalued the data, you're under-investing in the tooling to get value out of the data. >> That's correct. >> Rohit De Souza is the president and CEO of Actian Conversation. Once again, Rohit, thanks for being on theCUBE and talking to us about digital transformation and Actian. >> Thank you very much, Peter. >> And once again, I'm Peter Burris and this has been another CUBE Conversation. Thanks very much for listening, until next time. (lightt music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Susic on digital brought to you by Susan. >>Right? Hi. I'm Stew Minuteman. And welcome to the Cube's coverage of Susic on Digital 20. Rather than gathering together in Dublin, we have a larger audience online watching everything digitally, really helping a happy to have on the program. Back to the program. One of our cube alumni. She is fresh off the keynote stage. Melissa DiDonato. She is the CEO of Tuesday. Melissa. So good to see you. Wish it could all be in person. But, you know, thanks for having the Cube in. Ah, >>thank you very much for joining us as well. My third time on the show. I'm really, really pleased to be an important part of our digital experience with Susie. Conditional. So still what? Nice to see you. >>All right. So last time you were on the program, you spoke to Dave. Dave a lot today about how you know you're keeping your employees safe and keeping them productive. The note I heard clearly from you in your keynote presentation is really a sense of optimism. So, like, if you could bring us a little bit inside. You know, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of your customers. What is it even then in these unprecedented Well, I'm giving you that sense of optimism. >>Yeah, there's no denying where we are in the world with Kobe. 19. We have a whole different way of looking at the world. Every business in every industry has been impacted, and not just the working life but our family life. The way we communicate, the way we run our homes, our environments at work is it's been very much integrated now. It's a very different way of adding a whole different level of stress that we didn't have in our business life just a couple of months ago. And I think, as I told Dave, the most important thing for me is number one to make sure that our employees remain self safe and healthy. That's number one, And I think that as we experience negativity across the world of news and social media, etcetera, that my hope is that the community and the Susan family remain optimistic and you know, why do we have the ability to remain optimistic when everyone else is experiencing a lot of doom and gloom. One White House, because you rightly so said, Let me talk about Sousa and how we wouldn't in our community. Our thesis is the power of many. This power of many in a virtual community really drives innovation. We're not like proprietary software and many other tech companies where you have to resign the building to make sure that we maintain and evangelize innovation that you live and deliver to your customers. For us, it's very different. Our community is the basis for innovation. It's the pillar of our community, of our company, our ethos in our value. So it's Susa. This spirit of collaboration and integration is live today more than ever before, with 99% of our employees working from home being engaged a very different way than maybe they're used to. But not so unlike engaging the innovation that we get out of our community. I think you mentioned something else do that's really important. That's productivity. We've moved away as of the first of March and measuring productivity in exchange for measuring the way that we integrate and elaborate and engage with our place. So instead of productivity, we're measuring engagement. Our employees are becoming much more engaged with each other with our customers and our communities. And of course, our partners they're giving back to their community. They're measuring the engagement they're successful means of delivering or how much they can give back to their communities. So we've seen a huge rise and are employees giving back to their communities around them. For example, I met an employee who is donating a very big part of his bonus percentage to a hospital to pay for lunches for frontline health workers near his his home, our nerve of Germany office. They're giving their lunch vouchers and donating that to all of the homeless people around their community. And then we've got employees around Italy, one in particular that's created a virtual classroom for a son school and the community around him. So you know, everyone's really pitching in, I think finally, from a community perspective, we're also sponsoring a numerous amount of hackathons. For example, in Germany, the government has recently held a hackathon for community based solutions to combat code. In 19 our employees participated in engaged with their one day off. We give every employee one day off a year to engage for charitable cause and the results of this hackathon is a better understanding of the data per states about code in 19 across the country. So I think all in all, everything that we're doing is really trying to, you know, utilize the community as we always have, is open source. Open source is developed in a community that often times does not sit together. And now we're trying to really engage with that community as much as possible to keep innovation alive, to keep collaboration alive and not just for the purpose of innovation, but for the purpose of combating the virus and giving hope and first gratitude to this community and across all of our population across the world. I really do believe that in challenging times like today, it's the best way to realize the innovation that we can put together, triggering innovation for good. But also bringing out the best in humanity is it's amazing to see what you know. Thousands and thousands of people in the open source world are giving and delivering and collaborating in which to solve the worlds Problems Cove in 19 but also innovation problems for today and tomorrow >>Yeah, Melissa said some great stories that you have there, you know, we, of course, are huge supporters of communities in general. I've had a great pleasure not only recently but over the last 20 years, watching Linux communities on what's happening in open source. One of the key constituencies, obviously, to your audience, our developers. There are quite a few announcements that I talked about on the keynote stage was wondering if you could help walk through Ah, for our audience. You know, the primary announcements and especially, you know, the impact that it will have on the developer developer community. >>Yeah, that's right. So the developers are entranced, obviously, as part of Susa, where deep open source roots and they're ingrained in our culture. So we just recently focused on a new developer community with content specifically targeted to developer use cases for application platform offering. So over the next couple of months, we're gonna roll out content analytics, open source, Dev >>ops. All >>these things that you are sure loves to micro services, containers, kubernetes edge and and the like. So a lot of innovative technologies as our content. Now what we are offering in the developer community is the SuSE Cloud application platform developer sandbox. We wanted to make it easy for these developers who just spoke of to benefit from the best practices that evolved from the cloud native application delivery that we offer every day. Of course, the customers and now for free to our developers, we want them to be able to easier, easily apply their skills to create applications that can run anywhere, anywhere from on Prem Private Public Cloud and the access is and the developers to get access and hands on experience. That SuSE cloud application platform without having to spend all of their own environment is it is a big test or commitment to the developer community that can explore tests and develop without having any hardware services themselves. It's a really I've signed up myself. Hopefully, you will, too, and join the community and give some feedback and engage in this open source community. For developers, it's really important for everybody. You can find it at developer dot cisco dot com, in addition to the sandbox is I just mentioned you'll also find there are developer forums. It's got getting started guides and other useful examples of how to accelerate the adoption of the cloud application platform and all of the demo tools you can use. It's I can't express the importance enough that we put in place in our developers. Our developer community is a really important part to reach the innovation that we so hoped and live for every day. So we need to provide them the tools to be successful. So I think when you're gonna see Studio is a lot more engagement with our developer community and a lot more integration with them, a collaboration with them. As time goes on, it's a big part of our focus coming in now to 2020 and, of course, the second half of the year. >>So, Melissa, one of the other point that you made in your keynote is that Souza is now, you know, fully independent. It's always been an open source company, a long history there. But what does this one year of independence mean for your customers and that partner ecosystem? >>Yeah, it's a big deal for us, so it's a really big deal. We swung away from micro focus a year ago and mark so just now, Pastor, one year we're now in control of our destiny and the future is very, very bright. I think going forward in the next year, what you can expect from Susan is continued focus and support our customers, of course, the digital transformation efforts that we need to put into helping them go through this transformation. I saw a cartoon, You know, the other day everyone probably saw who's leading your digital transformation. Experts efforts your CEO, your see Iot or Corona virus. And I think we all agree that Corona viruses, but a new effort and focus on the digital transformation of our companies and our customers need to go through. So I think we need to be sure that with this new independence that we focus on that digital transformation effort. Couple that with our open source innovation and no matter where our customers are on their journey, that we give them the enabling tools to get there. We start with simplifying, modernizing and accelerating our customers journey, and you're gonna hear a lot about that in the keynote that I just did, um, simplifying first. So simplifying and optimizing our customer's applications and the data to exist in I T Environment. That's going to help them go on the journey to modernize, modernizing everything about the I T infrastructure as well as their legacy applications, to utilize modernizing, modernized technologies like containers or edge or cloud, or for the like. By simplifying and modernizing, our customers can then begin to accelerate. They can accelerate innovation. They can accelerate growth. They can accelerate delivery of whatever services and applications they want to deliver, for example, capabilities around AI and edge. And they can scale their companies to bring markets product to market faster and even at a lower cost. So I think when you think about Susan our independence, I want our customers to know and understand that our focus will always be to simplify, modernize and accelerate, but also to remain nimble, how our customers, our partners, our community, innovate faster based on customer business requirements and to solve problems of today and tomorrow, not just what we knew before. So we're much more connected with our customers and ever before, and we want to be able to offer them the flexibility that they heard that learned to love it. Enjoy from Susa more some now than ever our customers agenda. Su is our only agenda in a world where everyone wants to be the best at everything. The only thing we want to be number one with is customer satisfaction. We will say number one in the market because we love servicing our customers. We love being maniacally focused on our customers, needs their business problems and creating solutions that are tailored with services that make them more successful. I think you can expect Souza to enter new markets like powering, for example, autonomous vehicles with safety certified legs and other really innovative technologies that were developed every single day in our community with our developers to solve customer business problems. I say to the teams every day, you know, we're big enough for scale, and we're small enough to be nimble and to be flexible to service our customers first. So expecting that from Susa in our independence, but always, of course. >>Yeah, Melissa, you talk about things like ai and Ed and innovation, and you just brought up autonomous vehicles. So, you know, not only is a cool area, but really highlights uh, you know, a lot of these waves coming together. You announced up onstage. Really cool looking company. Electro bit. I noticed there, Green almost matched. Your companies do So. Tell us about this. This is a partnership. Why? It's important. And you know what? What others can learn about it. >>Yeah, sure. So Electra bit. We just partnered with that. Made the announcement today in the keynote there, the leading Internet global international provider of embedded software solutions for automotive. So it's a whole new area for US safety certified Linux is the first for Susan in this industry. I recently met virtually with Alexander coaching the CEO Electra bit to learn more about his company innovation, that we're gonna drive together. We've got a whole session at Susan Con Digital in the platform to talk about what we're doing with safety certified Lennox and what we're doing with Elektra bit. I can't wait to tell you more about, and I've got a 1 to 1 fireside chat with Alex, and I think you're gonna love to learn more about, you know, maybe something else. Wei mentioned in the keynote they may want to know about. And that's the artificial intelligence solution that I specifically talked about launching next quarter. This is I'm super excited about as well. I mean, it's really easy to be excited here, Susan, when you have constant rolling innovation in our community and delivering that to our customers. But this is also an exciting space. The solution that we're launching next quarter is going to benefit both data scientists and I t operations teams by simplifying the integration of key AI building blocks that are going to be required to develop quickly test and then deploy the next generation of intelligence solutions. So keep your eyes open for that to we're gonna have some game changing solutions for Susan and all of our customer promise ai solution next quarter. So two big announcements for us here exclusively. It's music on digital. I can't wait to share all the details Next order with AI, but also with Alex in the fireside chat I had with him during the week. >>Alright, So great, Melissa, A couple of big announcements that you talked about give >>us a >>little bit of a look forward. So, you know, you talked about what? One year of it, and it means what should people be looking at? What goals do you have for the community and the company actually look through the rest of 2020 >>as we look to the rest of 2020. I think, um, it's been a hard year already, and I couldn't have predicted when I took over a CEO of this great company nearly 10 months ago that we'd be having the hard times that we currently have. I can honestly say that there's no place I'd rather be. The fact that we are in the best company in the best industry, with open source at our roots at our heart that will never change but you can expect from us is consistent and constant innovation. You could look for us to be nimble, dependable. You can look for us for growth and there ever were a recession proof company that delivers the best solutions to our customers. I think Susie's in fact, I know it is. We're going to double in size and three years, so we're going to go from just under 1/2 a 1,000,000,000 to a 1,000,000,000 in revenue and what in three years time and we've got the constant trajectory and the means of which to do it. We're really looking from a strategic perspective. The rest of this year. How can we simplify, modernize, accelerate the solutions delivered to our customers to ensure we constantly focus on innovative technologies, keeping open source of value's and ethos to our core? And then also consider how do we ensure a safe, stable quality environment that's building on tools such as optimizing and automating their environment to get the best out of their technology stack? And that's when you should expect to see from some of the rest of this year as we go obviously into 2021. You're gonna want to watch the space to stay tuned for the look at Susa. We're growing like a rocket ship, and we have still intention of going through the crisis and, of course, going into the back half of 2020. But we're accelerating with pace going into 2021. >>Alright, well, Melissa, I'm definitely looking forward to talking to some of your customers, some of your partners in some of your team. So thanks again for joining us, definitely looking forward to catching up with you further down the line. >>I look forward to it. Thank you so much for the time today, and obviously the focus on, Susan. We're super excited to share where we're going, where we've come from and what the journey looks like Ahead. So thanks for the excitement that you're sharing with us throughout this week. Really appreciate you. Thank you. >>Alright. And be sure to stay with us. We've got wall to wall coverage Susic on digital money. Even if we're not at a physical event, we get to do them all remotely digitally. That global digital experience. I'm stew Minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Susic on digital brought to you by Susan. Right? >>Welcome back. I'm Stew Minuteman. And this is the Cube's coverage of Silicon Digital 20. Really excited to be digging into some of the cloud discussions. I've got two guests joining me now, one from across the pond and one from across the country. So joining me is Billy Baldwin. She is the senior director of Global CSP Alliance sales with Lisa. Coming from across the pond and coming from California is Mikhail Fradkov, who is a principal business development at Amazon Web services. Thank you both for joining us. >>Thank you to really, really exciting. >>All right, So, Julie, obviously, you know, we know we're limit Been proliferating the cloud something that almost I think really understand. You know, cloud, you know, big piece of the overall soussa discussion. Um, bring us inside a little bit, You know your role. And of course, the long partnership that business ad with AWS. >>Yeah. So? So my role is working with, you know, the major hyper scale is in the public cloud providers in offering solutions that's driving digital transformation. And this modernization even more so in today's current climate. We're seeing, you know, modernization transformation is being driven out of necessity. The necessity now due to the yeah, the code 19 impact. So I really want to draw on. You know, we've been working with AWS for the last 10 years. We've serviced, you know, thousands of customers between us who are looking at how they innovate on D drive, you know, flexibility and agility into into their, you know, the right and then there accounts. So it's really important that, you know, we look at how we support our customers from a, uh, and integrated support perspective and how we can we can move them forward in the in the digital transformation journey. >>Awesome. So Mikhail and I want to hear what Julie talked about. I think about when I when I look at AWS, you talk about builders when you go to the conference that Amazon told, you know, innovation is absolutely something there. So talk to us a little bit about how you know the Linux community in general, and to save costs more specifically are engaged. And you know a piece of what AWS is doing. >>Sure, So in general, it's a bless. I'm responsible for making sure that our customers are successful as they go through there. Well, its information Jordan you or business transformation. Jordan is so those those are all involved transformations. And, um, it's It's actually an interesting position to be in because you see it first hand on the ground for all the challenges and all the all the interesting problems that customers get the soul and then it's a sexual incredibly exciting that we're having this conversation in the framework of silicon because open source is incredibly important for a glass and stable beta last week understand how important open source is for customer success, and therefore we've been involved in contributing to the projects from from very early on, that justly mix and a VM and Java and kubernetes. So we see we see a lot of a lot of proliferation in the space and then another. Another interest in I guess below that, I would say, is if you think about the open source notion, which is largely around community, so there is this sort of like a juxtaposition off the cathedral and the bazaar, right, and then so the bazaar is the vibrant community off people, commentaries with ideas, and they're they're pursuing them and they innovate. And so something similar we see in the um yes, it the blast community with several 1,000,000 customers day today. They're sold in challenges and bring in lots of lots of requests for innovation, and I >>want to call it puts >>pressure on Amazon to innovate. But it's a lot of inspiration, right? And then, therefore it's It's interesting to see right that because of all the innovation and all those requests, customers get access on Amazon toe. All the features such as same was open source, Right? So you capitalize on this on this innovation, and you're there is well, customers can request, let's say, in financial service industry and then so you get a lot of security features. All the only controls would say, like I saw saw some combines and then some of the most stringent compliance already, like product guys that say the blessed, that stuff. That's one of the examples. >>Yeah, I e starts are Julie. That customer flywheel that you talked about is what we really want. They're so Julie, you want wanted to comment on what he was saying. >>I was just kind of just to kind of reinforce, you know, that whole community in that whole innovation based as well because from an open source perspective, you know that that sense of community is really driving those changes on with the AWS platform. It's got a very rich functionality behind it. You know, it's one of the, you know, the first time platform. So it does have that degree of innovation, you know, from from Day One. And that's just being driven by the by, the by, our customers who are pushing the envelope family in everyone more on. That's where you know the relationship between, you know, Souza on AWS is really, really started to excel. Looking at how we we move into that container space now as well, and help the customers, you know, modernize not only their, you know, the the cloud native that's going straight to cloud. But how do they modernize modernize their legacy applications as well? Um, and how today, you know, take, you know, take their on premise environments on, make them more effective and more efficient, and by using public cloud to be able to do that. >>Yeah. Julia, I'm glad you brought that up, because absolutely, there's opportunity. But there's challenges there. Customers really have. You know, it's either hybrid or multi cloud deployment. You know, container ization. Kubernetes are absolutely enable is there? But I wonder if you could bring us inside. What Susie doing? You have any customer examples of you know how they're really making this change? We know that it's still the majority of applications have not been modernized. They've not going cloud native. They're not ready for these environments. So how are customers working through this ultimate journey? >>Yeah, I mean, it's really, really complex. And I did a presentation on our sales summit talking about, you know, Gardner's five. Ours about you know, what applications can move to the cloud, how easy it is to do that. And I think there is some research done last year with for like, one, um, where the previous year there was a lot of customers said, Yeah, we're moving to fired and it's easy. And then this year, when they rerun the survey, it was No, it's really hard. We need partners. We need to look at how we how we do this. And so you know, every application is going to be able to be moved hours, and it's really Orton that they know the customers have a strategy and look at what they're doing on prem it and then start to identify what is you know, what is cloud friendly? What do they need to do to kind of go forward? You know, Do they need to be, you know, rewrite an application? Do they need to re factor it kind of just be a lift and shift. And so what we're doing with with AWS is, you know, we've been working with partners like both, for example, who built out to retail application platform to be able to migrate those customers quickly into a more cost effective and efficient way of delivering businesses because they will say, you know, even more so in the current scenario there, you know margins are being squeezed. They need to be looked at being ableto deliver higher, you know, return on investment and to share with any of their, you know, in with their spend. So, you know, that's that's one area that we are kind of like, Look, you know, looking at as well. We've had great success with it. Um, we've also got a quick start programs with with AWS that allows, you know, customers you need to migrate quickly and easily. To be able todo to take those applications on their environments on DNA, move them on to the public cloud. So that so that those are two key areas that we're really looking at, you know, driving. Yeah, they're driving forward because it's critical because it is complex. Um, you need to have a Roma. You need to have a strategy about how you do, and you need to identify and include the stakeholders when they move. You know, when you're changing your environment to make sure that you haven't missed anything, >>something that would love to hear your viewpoint on this to you know, when you look at the Amazon ecosystem, you've got a huge AWS marketplace. Obviously, the integrators help customers work through their various environments and how to modernize them. How to move there, you know, what are you seeing in the customer base, for example, you can help share as to how they're moving along. >>Sure. One of the way we have to understand right, a little bit off the context. So all this all this talk about, let's say, cloud migration and innovation, it's not. It's not an abstract sort of exercise, an absolute discipline. It happens for its right if we look. If you look at the innovative companies at a fast moving companies, effectively, they they see on average time to value metrics about 420 times faster. Then let's say what people slow companies, right? And then So that's That was a lot of pressure on companies to actually embrace, embrace this innovation and the digital transformation and engage with customers in the way that they have never done before, such as just technology enable so many things, so many protect right and then this. With any opportunity it comes, Here comes a challenge on then, as Julie pointed out, it's a it's a difficult exercise. Let's let's not mince words here. So and therefore we have to make sure that everybody is a line. Let's say customer goes through this exercise right that that they're trying to change their processes. The leadership sets new goals. The leadership says new objectives. They have to change the culture they have to train people. So that is that it's not just the challenge of the patient right there within the hour, then outside of the company, you want to make sure that effectively, everybody, everybody comes to the table is there's a lot of value and very much alive, and that just that this is where we see, I guess a lot of, um, a lot of opportunity because as as you go through this process, um, you have to, right, you have to have the right stakeholders who have you have to have trained people, right? And then if you look at another statistics that just 86 companies or so they have a first step and the other 86 infrastructure spend this to on premise And the reason for that is companies cannot not hire and train and train faster, right? So therefore, on AWS side, we we invest a lot in training programs and certification programs as well as we have the vibrant community off partners who can step in and help us with challenges such as we have a system off JIA size and the size, so we have with both hands off the size M s P s, whatever we have providers. And then effectively back to what results here is that you have the synergy. Not not only the change going from from the inside company. >>They >>also have the support structure. As Joe talked about Big Start, we have training and then we have programmatic support, right cattle, how to navigate passengers for that. And then as the switch swollen, you mentioned their new processes. This is this is where the power of the cloud comes in and part of the community. So all those challenges they have been sold. So you can take some of the blueprints and apply them as is. And >>you can you can >>pick and choose what? What? Your bias. So, for example, you can go with cloud native tools with Amazon Web services at the very same time you can. You can also pick products. For example, SuSE Cloud application platform, which provides you with this. I wouldn't call it, um it's slightly more opinionated approach how to how to implement your develops practices and agile practices. And then it's still making Iran's on top of Amazon elastic container service. So yeah, and then, as as Jules mentioned. We program, for example, in the work of success with it >>and just touching on that point because, you know, we talk about we're not islands, you know, we have to engage with the partners. You know, we want to make sure the customer success is at the heart of everything that we do. Um, and we have to bring in the right skill sets at the right time, you know, to to make make that journey as easy as possible and as quickly as possible on. So that's the you know that that's the beauty of community. That's the beauty of partners on benders coming together with the customer at the heart off of everything that they do on. You know, I know that's a very strong message that you're going to get from, you know, from Susie Con. But it's from message that we showed with Aws as well, about how do we do the right thing for the customer and how do we, you know, and how do we enable that success? But then to be successful, which will drive Ultimate six, you know, successes as partners as well? >>Excellent, Julie. One of the big things we're themes we heard in the keynote was talking about the developer community's obviously to say in AWS A lot of developers, anything specific for the developers out there That that either. The highlight >>s so obviously we've got the cloud application platform on. We've got the quick starts as well. So for May is you know, you've got a proven a proven platform with real aws that, you know, the infrastructure available there, the ease of which, you know, cloud application platform can sit on top of that of the eks elastic. The services is really, really critical. And, you know, for me, it would be just, you know, just try it, um, on and give us your feedback as well. I think that's really important, because the way that you know, we drive innovation is through that, you know, the cut, the feedback from our customers and people actually using that, you know, the services. I think McHale pointed to the earlier as well. You know, the innovation that they've seen has been driven by, you know, customers actually saying we want this feature. We want this put pressure on from a from a dev ops community is you know there are alternatives out there and you know, you should, you know, to try. You should try. Look at you know, if that suit your needs better. I look at how you can use a trusted partner like AWS and and Susie Teoh to actually meet some of those new needs they're coming aboard. >>And it's also to Julius Point right? Way cannot overemphasize the importance off builders off people who own on this innovation within the company. And be because the biggest thing that companies can do for their success is to enable builders and as as we mentioned before, right? So the process is this challenging the other multiple parties involved, but the very same time to empower people to drive this change, it's almost like instead of directing them like, Oh, um, the space is pretty pretty interesting analogy. So instead of if you want people to know how to build the ship so you do not you do not tell them. Oh, go gather wood and then, like, this is how you hammer things together. You just you just make sure that they yearn for the C. And then ultimately this is This is what drives the innovation. And here we have essentially with with, for example, Susak Capital radical enable people and they they practice the develops, they can practice, schedule and essentially align. This was this fast time to value practices, right? So that that is the tooling. And then you take weeks starts and then you put literally innovation into into those people's hands, for example, it So that's one big start allows you to bring up the whole environment and pretty much like minutes. Well, let's say if you want to go to innovate on the sisters again, you take big start and then well, is that the takes takes a little bit more involved. So maybe, Like like in an hour and 1/2 you have a safe environment, and then you have essentially start innovating there and >>excellent. Well, Mikhail and Julie thank you so much for the updates. You know, love hearing about innovation companies. Absolutely. Building is what differentiates us is the companies that are ready for today's modern era. So thank you so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. >>Thank you, Julia. >>Alright. We'll be back with lots more coverage from SuSE icon Digital 20. I'm stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Susic on digital brought to you by Susan. >>Welcome back. I'm stew minimum in coming to you from our Boston area studio. And this is the Cube's coverage of Silicon Digital 20. Happy to welcome to the program. Two of the keynote president presenters. First of all, we have Dr Mr Giacomo. He is the president of engineering and innovation and joining him, his presenter on the keynote stage, Daniel Nelson, who is the Vice president of Product solutions. Both of you with Souza. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thank you for having us. >>All right, So? So, Dr T let let's start out. You know, innovation, open source. Give us a little bit of the message for our audience that Daniel are talking about on stage. You know how you know we've been watching for decades the growth in the proliferation of open source and communities. So give us the update there, >>Andi. It's not stopping. It's actually growing even more and more and more and more innovations coming from open source. The way we look at it is that our customers that they have their business problems have their business reality. Andi s So we we have to curate and prepare and filter all the open source innovation that they can benefit from because that takes time to understand that. Match your needs and fix your problems. So it's Susa. We've always done that since 27 per sales. So working in the open source projects innovating they are, but with customers in mind. And what is pretty clear in 2020 is that large enterprises, small startups. Everybody's doing software. Everybody's doing, I t. And they all have the same type of needs in a way. They need to simplify their landscape because they've been accumulating investments all the way. Our infrastructure Joseph well, different solutions, different platforms from different bundles. They need to simplify that and modernize and the need to accelerate their business, to stay relevant and competitive in their own industries. And that's what we're focusing on. >>Yeah, it's interesting. I completely agree. When you say simplify thing, you know, Daniel, I I go back in the communities about 20 years, and in those days, you know, we were talking about the operating clinic was helping to, you know, go past the proprietary UNIX platforms. Microsoft, the enemy. And you were talking about, you know, operating system server storage, the application that it was a relatively simple environment and inherited today's, you know, multi cloud ai in your based architecture, you know, applications going through this radical transformation growth, though, give us a little bit of insight as to, you know, the impact this is having on ecosystems. And of course, you know, Susie's now has a broad portfolio that at all >>it's a great question, and I totally get where you're coming from. Like if you look 20 years ago, the landscape is completely different that the technologies were using or you're completely different. The problems were trying to solve with technology are more and more sophisticated, you know, at the same time that you know, there's kind of nothing new under the sun, every company, every technology, you know, every you know, modality goes through. This expansion of capabilities and the collapse around simplification is the capabilities become more more complex, manageable. And so there's this continuous tension between capabilities, ease of use, consume ability. What we see with open source is that that that that's kind of dynamic that still exist, but it's more online of like. Developers want easy to use technologies, but they want the cutting edge. They want the latest things. They want those things within their packets. And then if you look at operations groups or or or people that are trying to consume that technology, they want that technology to be consumable simple. It works well with others. People tend to pick and choose and have one pane of glass field operate within that. And that's where we see this dynamic. And that's kind of what the Susan portfolio was built. It's like, How do we take, you know, the thousands and thousands of developers that are working on these really critical projects, whether it's Linux is like you mentioned or kubernetes or for cloud foundry? And how do we make that then more consumable to the thousands of companies that are trying to do it, who may even be new to open source or may not contribute directly but have all the benefits that are coming to it. And that's where Susan fits and worse. Susan, who's fits historically and where we see us continuing to fit long term, is taking older is Legos. Put it together for companies that want that and then allow them a lot of autonomy and choice and how these technologies are consumed. >>One of the themes that I heard you both talked about in the keynote it was simplifying modernized. Telerate really reminded me of the imperatives of the CIO. You know, there's always run the business they need to help grow the business. And if they have the opportunity, they want to transform the business. I think you know, you said run improve in scale scale. Absolutely. You know, a critical thing that we talk about these days when I think back to the Cloud Foundry summit. You know, on the keynote stage, it was in the old way. If I could do faster, better, cheaper. Ah, you could use two of them today. We know faster, faster, faster is what you want. So >>it was a >>little bit of insight as to who you know, you talked about, you know, cloud foundry and kubernetes application modernization. You know, what are the imperatives that you're hearing from customers? And how are we with all of these tools out there? Hoping, You know, I t not just be responsive to the business, but it actually be a driver for the transformation of the business. >>It's a great question. And so when I talk to customers and Dr T feel free to chime in, you talked. You know, as many or more customers than then Ideo. You know they do have these these what are historically competing imperatives. But what we see with the adoption of some of these technologies that that faster is cheaper, faster is safer, you know, creating more opportunities to grow and to innovate better is the business. It's not risk injection when we change something, it's actually risk mitigation when we get good and changing. And so it's kind of that that that modality of moving from, um, you know, a a simplify model or very kind of like a manufacturing model of software so much more organic, much more permissive, much more being able to learn with an ecosystem style. And so that's how we see companies start to change the way they're adopting the technology. What's interesting about them is that same level of adoption that seemed thought of adoption is also how open source is is developed open source is developed organically is developed with many eyes. Make shallow bots is developed by like, Let me try this and see what happens right and be able to do that in smaller and smaller recommends. Just like we look at red Green deployments or being able to do micro services or binary or any of those things. It's like let's not do one greatly or what we're used to in waterfall, cause that's actually really risk. Let's do many, many, many steps forward and be able to transform an iterative Lee and be able to go faster iterative Lee and make that just part of what the business is good at. And so you're exactly right, like those are the three imperatives of the CIO. What I see with customers is the more that they are aligning those three areas together and not making them separate. But we have to be better at being faster and being transformed. And those are the companies that are really using I t. As a competitive advantage within the rich. >>Yeah, because most of the time they're different starting points. They have a history. They have different business strategy and things they've done in the past, you need to be able to accommodate all of that and the faster micro service, that native developments for sure, for the new APS. But they're also coming from somewhere on diff. You don't take care of that. You get are you can just accelerates if you simplify your existing because otherwise you spend your time making sure that your existing it's still running. So you have to combine all of that together. And, yeah, do you mentioned about funding and communities? And that's really I love those topics because, I mean, everybody knows about humanities. Now. It's picking up in terms of adoption in terms of innovation, technology building ai ml framework on top of it now, what's very interesting as where is that cloud? Foundry was designed for fast software development until native from the beginning, that 12 factor app on several like 45 years ago. Right? What we see now is we can extract the value that cloud foundry brings to speed up and accelerate your stuff by the Romans hikers, and we can combine that very nicely on very smoothly, simple in a simple way, with all the benefits you get from kubernetes and not from one communities from your communities running in your public clouds because you have records. They are. You have services that you want to consume from one public clouds. We have a great silicon fireside chat with open shot from Microsoft Azure actually discussing those topics. You might have also communities clusters at the edge that you want to run in your factory or close to your data and workloads in the field. So those things and then you mentioned that as well, taking care of the I T ops, simplify, modernize and accelerate for the I T ops and also accelerates forward their local themselves. We're benefiting from a combination of open source technologies, and today there's not one open source technology that can do that. You need to bundle, combine them, get our best, make sure that they are. They are integrated, that they are certified to get out of their stable together, that the security aspects, all the technology around them are integrating the services as well. >>Well, I'm really glad you brought up, you know, some of those communities that are out there, you know, we've been saying for a couple of years on the Cube. You know, Kubernetes is getting baked in everywhere. You know, Cisco's got partnerships with all the cloud providers, and you're not fighting them over whether to use a solution that you have versus theirs. I worry a little bit about how do I manage all of those environments. You end up with kubernetes sprawl just like we have with every other technology out there. Help us understand what differentiates Tuesday's, you know, offerings in this space. And how do you fit in with you know, the rest of that very dynamic and defer. >>So let me start with the aspect of combining things together on and Danielle. Maybe you can take the management piece. So the way we are making sure that Sousa, that we don't also just miles into a so this time off tools we have a stack, and we're very happy if people use it. But the reality is that there are customers that they have. Some investments have different needs. They use different technologies from the past. But we want to try different technologies, so you have to make sure that's for communities. Like for any other part of the stack. The I T stock of the stack. Your pieces are model around that you can accommodate different. Different elements are typically at Susa. We support different types off hyper visors. Well, that's focused on one. But we can support KPMG's and I probably this way, all of the of the Nutanix, hyper visor, netapp, hyper visors and everything. Same thing with the OS. There's not only one, we know that people are running, and that's exactly the same. Which humanities? And there's no one, probably that I've seen in our customer base that will just need one vendor for communities because they have a hybrid needs and strategy, and they will benefit from the native communities they found on a ks e ks decay. I remember clouds, you name them Andi have vendors in Europe as well. Doing that so far for us, it's very important that we bring us Sutro. Custom. Males can be combined with what they have, what they want, even if it's from the circle competition. And so this is a cloud. Foundry is running on a case. You can find it on the marketplace of public clouds. It could run on any any any communities. He doesn't have to be sitting on it. But then you end up with a lot of sales, right? How do we deal with that? >>So it's a great question, and I'll actually even broaden that out because it's not like we're only running kubernetes. Yes, we've got lots of clusters. We've got lots of of containers. We've got lots of applications that are moving there, but it's not like all the V M's disappear. It's not like all the beige boxes, like in the data center, like suddenly don't exist. You know, we we we all bring all the sense and decisions in the past word with us wherever we go. And so for us, it's not just that lens of how do we manage the most modern, the most cutting edge? That's definitely a part of it. But how do you do that? Within the context of all the other things you have to do within your business? How do I manage virtual virtual machines? How do I manage bare metal? How do I manage all those? And so for us, it's about creating a presentation layer on top of that where you can look at your clusters. Look at your V EMS. Look at all your deployments and be able to understand what's actually happening with the fire. We don't take a prescriptive approach. We don't say you have to use one technology. You have to use that. What we want to do is to be adaptive to the customer's needs. And so you've got these things here, some of our offerings. You've got some legacy offerings to Let's show you bring those together. Let's show you how you modernize your viewpoints, how you simplify your operational framework and how you end up accelerating what you can do with the staff that you've got in place. >>Yeah, I'm just on the management piece. Is there any recommendation from your team? You know, last year at Microsoft ignite, there was the launch of Azure are on. And, you know, we're starting to see a lot of solutions come out. There are concerns. Is that any of us that live through the multi vendor management days, um, you know, don't have good memories from those. It is a different discussion if we're just talking about kind of managing multiple kubernetes. But how do we learn from the past and you know, What do you recommend for people in this, you know, multi cloud era. >>So my suggestion to customers is you always start with what are your needs? What is strategic problems you're trying to solve, and then choose a vendor that is going to help you solve those strategic problems? So is it going to take a product centric view Isn't gonna tell you use this technology and this technology and this technology, what is going to take the view of, like, this is the problem you're gonna solve? Let me be your advisor within that and choose people that you're going to trust within that, um, that being said, you wanna have relationships with customers that have been there for a while that have done this that have a breath of experience in solving enterprise problems because everything that we're talking about is mostly around the new things. But keep in mind that there are there are nuances about the enterprise. There are things that are that are intrinsically bound within the enterprise that it takes a vendor with a lot of enterprise experience to be able to meet customers where they are. I think you've seen that you know in some of the some of the real growth opportunities with them hyper scaler that they've kind of moved into being more enterprise view of things, kind of moving away from just an individual bill perspective, enterprise problems. You're seeing that more and more. I think vendors and customers need to choose companies that meet them where they are that enable their decisions. Don't prescribe there. >>Okay, go ahead. >>Yes, Sorry. Yeah. I also wanted to add that I would recommend people to look at open source based solutions because that will prevent them to be in a difficult situation, potentially in the three years from now. So there are open source solutions that can do that on book. A viable, sustainable, healthy, open source solutions that are not just one vendor but multi vendor as well, because that leaves those open options open for you in the future as well. So if you need to move for another vendor or if you need to implement with an additional technology, you've made a new investment or you go to a new public clouds. If you based Duke Tracy's on open source, you have a little chance but later left >>I think that's a great point. Dr. T and I would you know, glom onto that by saying customers need to bring a new perspective on how they adjudicate these solutions, like it's really important to look at the health of the open source community. Just because it's open source doesn't mean that there's a secret army of gnomes that, you know in the middle of the night going fixed box, like there needs to be a healthy community around that. And that is not just individual contributors. That is also what are the companies that are invested in this, where they dedicating resources like That's another level. So what level of sophistication that a lot of customers need to bring into their own vendor selection? >>Excellent. Uh, you know, speaking about communities in open source. Want to make sure you have time share a little bit about the AI platform discussed in your >>Yeah, it's very, very interesting. And something I'm super excited about it, Sousa. And it's kind of this this, uh, we're starting to see ai done in these really interesting problems to solve and like, I'll just give you one example is that we're working with um uh, Formula One team around using AI to help them actually manage in car mechanics and actually manage some of the things that they're doing to get super high performance out of their vehicles. And that is such an interesting problem to solve. And it's such a natural artificial intelligence problem that even when you're talking about cars instead of servers or you're talking about race tracks, you know instead of data centers, you still got a lot of the same problems. And so you need an easy to use AI stack. You need it to be high performance. You needed to be real time. You need to be able to decisions made really quickly, easy, the same kinds of problems. But we're starting to see them in all these really interesting wheels in areas, which is one of the coolest things that I've seen in my career. Especially is in terms of I T. Is that I t is really everywhere. It's not. Just grab your sweater and go to the data center because it's 43 degrees in there. You know, it's also getting on the racetrack. It's also go to the airfield. It's also go to the grocery store and look at some of the problems being being being addressed himself there. And that is super fascinating. One of the things that I'm super excited up in our industry in total. >>Alright, well, really good to discussion here, Daniel. Dr B. Thank you so much for sharing everything from your keynote and been a pleasure washing. >>Thank you. >>Alright, Back with lots more coverage from Susan Con Digital 20. I'm stew minimum. And as always, Thank you for watching. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube at Lisa Martin with Steve men and men and we are coming to you alive from combo go 19 please to welcome to the cube, a gent from Microsoft Azure. We've got Ben call principal program manager. Ben, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. So Microsoft combo, what's going on with the partnership? >>They wouldn't have have great storage pond is in data management space. We've been working with Convult for 20 years now in Microsoft and and they've been working with us on Azure for that as long as I can remember not being on that the Azure business for about seven years now. So just a long time in cloud terms like dog ears and it's sort of, they've been doing a huge amount there around getting customer data into the cloud, reducing costs, getting more resiliency and then also letting them do more with the data. So they're a pretty good partner to have and they make it much easy for their customers to to go and leverage cloud. >> So Ben, you know, in my career I've had lots of interactions with the Microsoft storage team. Things have changed a little bit when you're now talking about Azure compared to more, it was the interaction with the operating system or the business suite at had. >>So maybe bring us up to date as those people that might not have followed where kind of the storage positioning inside of Microsoft is now that when we talk about Azure and your title. Yeah, we, we sort of can just, just briefly, we worked very heavily with our own premises brethren, they are actually inside the O team is inside of the Azure engineering old male, which is kind of funny, but we do a load of things there. If he started looking at, firstly on that, that hybrid side, we have things like Azure files. It's a highly resilient as a service SMB NFS file Shafter a hundred terabytes, but that interacts directly with windows server to give you Azure file sync. So there is sort of synergies there as well. What I'm doing personally, my team, we work on scale storage. The big thing we have in there is owl is out blood storage technology, which really is the underpinning technology fault. >>Preapproval storage and Azure, which is an including our SAS offerings, which are hosted on Azure too. So disc is on blood storage of files on blood storage. You look at Xbox live, all these kind of stuff is a customer to us. So we build that out and we were doing work there and that's, that's really, really interesting. And how we do it. And that's not looking at going, we're gonna buy some compute, we're going to buy some storage, we're going to build it out, we're going to run windows or hyper V or maybe VM-ware with hoc with windows running on the VMware, whatever else. This is more a story about we're gonna provide you storage as a service. You didn't get a minimum of like 11 nines at your ability. And and be able to have that scale to petabytes of capacity in one logical namespace and give you multiple gigabytes, double digit gigabytes of throughput to that storage. >>And now we're even that about to multiple protocols. So rest API century. Today we've got Azure stack storage, EU API, she can go and use, but we give you that consistency of the actual backend storage and the objects and the data available via more than just one protocol. You can go and access that via HDFS API. We talk about data lakes all the time. For us, our blood storage is a data Lake. We turn on hierarchal namespace and you can go and access that via other protocols like as I mentioned HDFS as well. So that is a big story about what we want to do. We want to make that data available at crazy scale, have no limits in the end to the capacity or throughput or performance and over any protocol. That's kind of our lawn on the Hill about what we want to get to. >>And we've been talking to the Combolt team about some of the solutions that they are putting in the cloud. The new offering metallic that came out. They said if my customer has Azure storage or storage from that other cloud provider, you could just go ahead and use that. Maybe how familiar and how much I know you've been having about run metallic. >> We were working, we work pretty tightly with the product team over Convolt around this and my team as well around how do we design and how do we make it work the best and we're going to continue working to optimize as they get to beyond initial launch to go, wow, we've got data sets we we can analyze. We knew how to, we wanted out of tune it. Now really we love the solution particularly more because you know the default if you don't select the storage type where you want to go, you will run on Azure. >>So really sort of be cued off to the relationship there. They chose us as a first place we'll go to, but they've also done the choice for customers. So some customers may want to take it to another cloud. That's fine. It's reasonable. I mean we totally understand it's going to be a multicloud world and that's a reality for any large company. Our goal is to make sure we're growing faster than the competitors, not to knock out the competitors altogether because that just won't happen. So they've got that ability to go and, yeah, Hey, we'll use Azure as default because they feel we're offering the best support and the best solution there. But then if they have that customer, same customer wants to turn around and use a competitor of ours, fine as well. And I see people talking about that today where they may want to mitigate risks and say, I'm going to do, I'm doing off office three, six five on a, taken off this three 65 backup. It's cool. You use metallic, it'll take it maybe to a different region in Asia and they're backing up. They still going, well, I'm still all in on Microsoft. They may want to take it to another cloud or even take it back to on premise. So that does happen too because just in case of that moment we can get that data back in a different location. Something >>so metallic talking about that is this new venture is right. It's a Convolt venture and saw that the other day and thought that's interesting. So we dug into it a little bit yesterday and it's like a startup operating within a 20 year old company, which is very interesting. Not just from an incumbent customer perspective, but an incumbent partner perspective. How have you seen over the last few years and particularly bad in the last nine months with big leadership and GTM changes for condo? How has the partnership with Microsoft evolved as a result of those changes? >>Um, it's always been interesting. I guess when you start looking at adventure and everything seems to, things change a little bit. Priorities may change just to be fair, but we've had that tight relationship for a long time and a relationship level and an exec leadership level, nothing's really changed. But in the way they're building this platform, we, we sit down out of my team at the Azure engineering group and we'll sit down and do things like ideations. Like here's where we see gaps in the markets, here's what we believe could happen. And look back in July, we had inspire, which is our partner conference in Las Vegas and we sat down with their OT, our OT in a room, we'll talking about these kinds of things. And this is I think about two months after they may have started the initial development metallic from what I understand, but we're talking about exactly what they're doing with metallic offered as a service in Azure as, Hey, how about we do this? So we think it's really cool. It opens up a new market to convert I think too. I mean they're so strong in the enterprise, but they don't do much in the smaller businesses because with the full feature product, it also has inherent complexibility complexity around it. So by doing metallic, is it click, click, next done thing. They really opening I think new markets to them and also to us as a partner. >>I was going to add, you know, kind of click on that because they developed this very quickly. This is something that I think what student were here yesterday, metallic was kind of conceived, designed, built in about six months. So in terms of like acceleration, that's kind of a new area for Combolt. >>Yeah, and I think, I think they're really embracing the fact about let's release our code in production for, for products which are sort of getting the, getting to the, Hey, the product is at the viable stage now, not minimum viable, viable, let's release in production, let's find out how customers are using it and then let's keep optimizing and doing that constant iteration, taking that dev ops approach to let's get it out there, let's get it launched, and then let's do these small batches of changes based on customer need, based on tele telemetry. We can actually get in. We can't get the telemetry without having customers. So that's how it's going to keep working. So I think this initial product we see today, it's just going to keep evolving and improving as they get more data, as they get more information, more feedback, which is exactly what we want to see. >>Well, what will come to the cloud air or something you've been living in for a number of years. Ben, I'd love to hear you've been meeting with customers, they've been asking you questions, gives us some of the, you know, some of the things that, what's top of mind for some of the customers? What kinds of things did they come into Microsoft, Dawn, and how's that all fit together? >>There's many different conferences of interrelate, many different conversations and there'll be, we'll go from talking about, you know, Python machine learning or AI fits in PowerPoint. >>Yeah. >>It's a things like, you know, when are we gonna do incremental snapshots from the manage disks, get into the weeds on very infrastructure centric stuff. We're seeing range of conversations there. The big thing I think I see, keep seeing people call out and make assumptions of is that they're not going to be relevant because cloud, I don't know cloud yet. I don't know this whole coup cube thing, containers, I don't really understand that as well as I think I need to. And an AI, Oh my gosh, what do we even do there? Cause everyone's throwing the words and terms around. But to be honest, I think would still really evident is cloud is still is tiny fraction of enterprise workloads. So let's be honest, it's growing at a huge rate because it is that small fraction. So again, there's plenty of time for people to learn but they shouldn't go and try. >>And so it's not like you go and learn everything in the technology stack from networking to development to database management to, to running a data set of power and cooling. You learn the things that are applicable to what you're trying to do. And the same thing goes to cloud. Any of these technologies go and look at what you need to build for your business. Take it that step and then go and find out the details and levels you want to know. And as someone who's been on Azure for, like I said, almost seven years, which is crazy long. That was, that was literally like being in a startup instead of Microsoft when I joined and I wasn't sure if I wanted to join a licensing company. It's been very evident to me. I will not say I'm an Azure expert and I've been seven years in the platform. >>There are too many things for for me to be an expert in everything on, and I think people sort of just have to realize that anyone's saying that it's bravado. Nothing else. Oh, people. The goal is Microsoft as a platform provider. Hopefully you've got the software and the solution does make a lot of this easier for the customer, so hopefully they shouldn't need to become a Coobernetti's expert because it's baked into your platform. They shouldn't have to worry about some of these offerings because it's SAS. Most customers are there. Some things you need to learn between going from exchange to go into Oh three 65 absolutely. There's some nuances and things like that, but once you get over that initial hurdle, it should be a little easier. I think it's right and I think going back to that, sort of going back to bear principles going, what is the highest level of distraction that's viable for your business or that application or this workload has to always be done with everything. If it's like, well, class, not even viable, running on premises, don't, don't need to apologize for not running in cloud. If I as this, what's happening for you because of security, because of application architecture, run it that way. Don't feel the need and the pressure to have to push it that way. I think too many people get caught up in this shiny stuff up here, which is what you know 1% of people are doing versus the other 99% which is still happening in a lot of the areas we work and have challenges in today. >>That's a great point that you bring up because there is all the buzz words, right? AI, machine learning cloud. You've got to be cloud ready. You've got to be data-driven to customer. To your point going, I just need to make sure that what we have set up for our business is going to allow our business one to remain relevant, but to also be able to harness the power of the data that they have to extract new opportunities, new insights, and not get caught up with, shoot, should we be using automation? Should we be using AI? Everybody's talking about it. I liked that you brought up and I find it very respectfully, he said, Hey, I'm not an Azure expert. You'd been there seven, seven dog years like you said. And I think that's what customers probably gained confidence in is hearing the folks like you that they look to for that guidance and that leadership saying, no, I don't know everything to know. But giving them the confidence that their tribe, they're trusting you with that data and also helping look, trusting you to help them make the right decisions for their business. >>Yeah, and that's, we've got to do that. I mean, I as a tech guy, it's like I've, I've loved seeing the changes. When I joined Microsoft, I, I wasn't lying. I was almost there go enough. I really want to join this company. I was going to go join a startup instead and I got asked to one stage in an interview going, why do you want to join Microsoft? We see you've never applied to, I'd never wanted to. A friend told me to come in and it's just been amazing to see those changes and I'm pretty proud on that. So when we talk about those things we're doing, I mean, I think there is no shame going, I'm just going to lift and shift machines because cloud's about flexibility. If you're doing it just on cost, probably doing it for the wrong reason. It's about that flexibility to go and do something. >>Then change within months and slowly make steps to make things better and better as you find a need as you find the ability, whatever it may be. And some of the big things that we focus on right now with customers is we've got a product called Azure advisor. It'll go until people, when one, you don't build things in a resilient manner. Hey, do you know this has not ha because of this and you can do this. It's like, great. We'll also will tell you about security vulnerabilities that maybe should a gateway here for security. Maybe you should do this or this is not patched. But the big thing of that, it also goes and tells you, Hey, you're overspending. You don't need this much. It provisions, you provision like a Ferrari, you need a, you just need a Prius. Go and run a Prius because it's going to do what you need. >>I need a paler list and that's part of that trusted suit. Getting that understanding, and it's counterintuitive, but we're now like, it's coming out of mozzarella too, which is great. But seeing these guys were dropping contracts and licenses and basically, you know, once every three years I may call the customer, Hey, how about renewal? Now, go from that to now being focused on the customer's actual success. I've focused on their growth in Azure as a platform. Our services growth, like utilization not in sales has been a huge change. It scared some people away, but it's brought a lot more people in and and that sort of counterintuitive spend less money thing actually leads in the longterm to people using more. >>Absolutely. That's definitely not the shrink wrap software company of Microsoft that I remember from the 90s yeah. might be similar to, you know, just as to get Convolt to 2019 is not the same combo that many of us know from 15 years ago. A good >>mutual friend of ours, sort of Simon and myself before I took this job, he and I sat down, we're having a beer and discussing the merits, all not Yvette go to things like that. Same with Convolt there. They're changing such such a great deal with, you know, what they're putting in the cloud, what they're doing with the data, where they're trying to achieve with things like for data management across on premises and cloud with microservices applications and stuff going, Hey, this won't work like this anymore. When you now are doing it on premises and with containers, it's pretty good to see. I'm interested to see how they take that even further to their current audience, which is product predominantly. You know the it pro, the data center admin, storage manager. >>It's funny when you talked about just the choice that customers have and those saying, aye, we shouldn't be following the trends because they're the trends. We actually interviewed a couple of hours ago, one of customers that is all on prime healthcare company and said, he's like, I want to make a sticker that says no cloud and proud and it just what there was, we don't normally hear from them. We always talk about cloud, but for a company to sit down and look at what's best for our business, whether it's, you know, FedRAMP certification challenges or HIPAA or GDPR, other compelling requirements to keep it on prem, it was just refreshing to hear this customer say, >>yeah, I mean it's just appropriate for them. You do what's right for you. I, yeah, it's no shame in any of it. It's, I mean you don't, you definitely don't get fans by it by shaming people about not doing something right. And I mean I've, I'm personally very happy to fee fee, you know, see sort of hype around things like blockchain die down a little bit. So it's a slow database and we should use it for this specific case of that shared ledger. You know, things like that where people don't have to know blockchain. Now I have to know IOT. It's like, yeah, and that hype gets people there, but it also causes a lot of anxiety and it's good to see someone actually not be ashamed of it. And they agree the ones when they do take a step and use cloud citizen may be in the business already, they're probably going to do it appropriately because have a reason, not just because we think this would be cool, right? >>Well not. And how much inherit and complexity does that bring in if somebody is really feeling pressured to follow those trends. And maybe that's when you end up with this hodgepodge of technologies that don't work well together. You're spending way more in as as business it folks are consumers, you know, consumers in their personal lives, they expect things to be accessible, visible, but also cost efficient because they have so much choice. >>Yeah, the choice choice is hard. It's just a, just the conversation I was having recently, for example, just we'll take the storage cause of where we are, right? It's like I'm running something on Azure, I'm a, I'm using Souza, I want an NFS Mount point, which is available to me in Fs. Great, perfect. what do I use as like, well you can use any one of these seven options like that, but what's the right choice? And that's the thing about being a platform can be, we give you a lot of choices, but it's still up to you or up to app hotness. It can really help the customers as well to make the most appropriate choice. And, and I, I pushed back really hard in terms of best practices and things. I hate it because again, it's making the assumption this is the best thing to do. >>It's not. It's always about, you know, what are the patterns that have worked for other people? What are the anti-patterns and what's the appropriate path for me to take? And that's actually how we're building our docs now too. So we, we keep, we keep focusing on our Azure technology and we're bringing out some of the biggest things we've done is how we manage our documentation. It's all open sourced, it's all in markdown on get hub. So you can go in and read a document from someone like myself is doing product management going, this is how to use this product and you're actually, this bit's wrong, this bit needs to be like this and you can go in yourself even now, make a change and we can go, Oh yeah and take that committed in and dual this kind of stuff in that way. So we're constantly taking those documents in that way and getting realtime feedback from customers who are using it, not just ourself in an echo chamber. >>So you get this great insight and visibility that you never had before. Well, Ben, thank you, Georgie stew and me on the queue this afternoon. Excited to hear what's coming up next for Azure. Makes appreciate your time. Thank you for steam and event. I, Lisa Martin, you're watching the cue from Convault go 19.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the Q but Lisa Martin with men and men and we are coming to you alive from Conn logo 19 please to welcome to the cube, a gent from Microsoft Azure. We've got Ben Nichol, principal program manager. Ben, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. So Microsoft combo, what's going on with the partnership? >>They wouldn't have have great storage pond is in data management space. We've been working with Convolt for 20 years now in Microsoft and and they've been working with us on Azure for about as long as I can remember not being on that the Azure business RET seven years now. So just a long time in cloud terms like doggies and it sort of, they'd been doing a huge amount of their around getting customer data into the cloud, reducing costs, getting more resiliency and then also letting them do more with the data. So they were a pretty good partner to have and they make it much easy for their customers to to go and leverage cloud. So Ben, you know, in my career I've had lots of interactions with the Microsoft storage team. Things have changed a little bit when you're now talking about Azure compared to, you know, more. >>It was the interaction with the operating system or the business suite had. So maybe bring us up to date as those people that might not have followed. You know, we're kind of the storage positioning inside of Microsoft is now that when we talk about Azure and your title. Yeah, we, we sort of look and just just briefly, we worked very heavily with our on premises brethren. They actually inside the O S team is inside of the Azure engineering old male, which is kind of funny, but we do a lot of things there. If he started looking at, firstly on that hybrid side, we have things like Azure files. It's a highly resilient as a service SMB NFS file share up to a hundred terabytes but that interacts directly with windows server to give you Azure file sync. So there is sort of synergies there as well. When I'm doing personally my team, we work on scale storage. >>The big thing we have in there is Al is out blood storage technology, which really is the underpinning technology, full Priya tool storage and Azure which is including our SAS offerings which are hosted on Azure too. So disc is on blood storage, our files on blood storage, you look at Xbox live, all these kinds of stuff is a customer to us. So we build that out and we, we are doing work there and that's really, really interesting and how we do it and that's not looking at going we're going to buy some compute, we're going to buy some storage, we're going to build it out, we're going to run windows or hyper V or maybe VMware with windows running on the VMware, whatever else. This is more a story about wigging to provide you storage as a service. You didn't get a minimum of like 11 nines at your ability and and be able to have that scale to petabytes of capacity in one logical namespace and give you multiple gigabytes, double digit gigabytes of throughput to that storage. >>And now we're even moving about to model multiple protocols. So rest API century today we've got Azure stack storage, you pay API, she can go and use, but we give me that consistency of the actual back end storage and the objects and the data available via more than just one protocol. You can go and access that via HDFS API. As we talk about data lakes all the time. For us, our blood storage is a data Lake. We turn on hierarchal namespace and you can go and access that via our other protocols like as I mentioned HDFS as well. So that is a big story about what we want to do. We want to make that data available at crazy scale, have no limits in the end to the capacity or throughput or performance and over any protocol. That's kind of our line in the Hill about what we want to get to. >>And we've been talking to vault team about some of the solutions that they are putting in the cloud. The new offering metallic that came out. They said if my customer has Azure storage or storage from that other cloud provider, you could just go ahead and use that. Maybe how familiar and how much, I know you've been having a run metallic. We were working, we were pretty tightly with the product team over Convolt around this and my team as well around how do we design and how do we make it work the best and we're going to continue working to optimize as they get beyond initial launch to go, wow, we've got data sets we can analyze, we know how to, we wanted out of tune it. Now really we love the solution particularly more because the default, if you don't select the storage type where you want to go, you will run on Azure. >>So really sort of be kudos to the relationship there. They chose us as a first place we'll go to, but they've also done the choice for customers. Say some customers may want to take it to another cloud. That's fine. It's reasonable. I mean, we totally understand it's going to be a multi-cloud world and that's a reality for any large company. Our goal is to make sure we're growing faster than the competitors, not to knock out the competitors all together because that just won't happen. So they've got that ability to go and yet, Hey, we'll use Azure as default because they feel that way, offering the best support and the best solution there. But then if they have that customer, same customer wants to turn around and use a competitor, Val's fine as well. And I see people talking about that today where they may want to mitigate risks and say, I'm going to do, I'm doing all of office three, six, five on a taken office, three, six, five backup. It's cool. Use metallic, it'll take it maybe to a different region in Asia and they're backing up and they still going, well I'm still all in on Microsoft. They may want to take it to another cloud or even take it back to on premises. So that does happen too because just in case of that moment we can get that data back in a different location. Something happens. >>So metallic talking about that is this new venture is right. It's a Combolt venture and saw that the other day and thought that's interesting. So we dug into it a little bit yesterday and it's like a startup operating within a 20 year old company, which is very interesting. Not just from an incumbent customer perspective, but an incumbent partner perspective. How have you seen over the last few years and particularly bad in the last nine months with big leadership and GTM changes for combo? How has the partnership with Microsoft evolved as a result of those changes? >>Um, it's always been interesting. I guess when you start looking at adventure and everything, since things change a little bit, priorities may change just to be fair, but we've had that tight relationship for a long time. At a relationship level and an exec leadership level, nothing's really changed. But in the way they're building this platform, we sit down out of my team, out of the Azure engineering group and we'll sit down and do things like ideations, like here's where we see gaps in the markets, here's what we believe could happen. And look back in July, we had inspire, which is our partner conference in Las Vegas. When we sat down with their OT, our OT in a room, we'll talking about these kinds of things and this is I think about two months after they may have started the initial development metallic from what I understand, but we will talking about exactly what they're doing with metallic offered as a service in Azure is, Hey, how bout we do this? So we think it's really cool. It opens up a new market to Convolt I think too. I mean they're so strong in the enterprise, but they don't do much in smaller businesses because with a full feature product, it also has inherent complexibility complexity around it. So by doing metallic, is it click, click, next done thing. They're really opening, I think, new markets to them and also to us as a partner. >>I was going to ask, you know, kind of click on that because they developed this very quickly. This is something that I think what student were here yesterday, metallic was kind of conceived design built in about six months. So in terms of like acceleration, that's kind of a new area for Combalt. >>Yeah, and I think, I think they're really embracing the fact about um, let's release our code in production for products, which are sort of getting, getting to the, Hey that product is at the viable stage now, not minimum viable, viable, let's release in production, let's find out how customers are using Atlin, let's keep optimizing and doing that constant iteration, taking that dev ops approach to let's get it out there, let's get it launched. And then let's do these small batches of changes based on customer need, based on tele telemetry. We can actually get in. We can't get the telemetry without having customers. So that's how it's going to keep working. So I think this initial product we see today, it's just going to keep evolving and improving as they get more data, as they get more information, more feedback. Which is exactly what we want to see. >>Well, what will come to the cloud air or something you've been living in for a number of years. Ben, I'd love to hear you've been meeting with customers. They've been asking you questions, gives us some of the, you know, some of the things that, what's top of mind for some of the customers? What kinds of things did they come into Microsoft, Dawn, and how's that all fit together? >>There's many different conferences of interrelate, many different conversations and they'll, we will go from talking about, you know, Python machine learning or AI PowerPoint. >>Yeah. >>It's a things like, you know, when are we going to do incremental snapshots from a manage disks? Get into the weeds on very infrastructure century staff. We're seeing range of conversations there. The big thing I think I see, keep seeing people call out and make assumptions of is that they're not going to be relevant because cloud, I don't know cloud yet. I don't know this whole coup cube thing. Containers. I don't, I don't really understand that as well as I think I need to. And an AI, Oh my gosh, what do I even do there? Because everyone's throwing the words and terms around. But to be honest, I think what's still really evident is cloud is still is tiny fraction of enterprise workloads. Let's be honest, it's growing at a huge rate because it is that small fraction. So again, there's plenty of time for people to learn, but they shouldn't go and try and slip. >>It's not like you're going to learn everything in a technology stack, from networking to development to database management to, to running a data set of power and cooling. You learn the things that are applicable to what you're trying to do. And the same thing goes to cloud. Any of these technologies, go and look at what you need to build for your business. Take it to that step and then go and find out the details and levels you want to know. And as someone who's been on Azure for like a cinema seven years, which is crazy long. That was a, that was literally like being in a startup instead of Microsoft when I joined and I wasn't sure if I wanted to join a licensing company. It's been very evident to me. I will not say I'm an Azure expert and I've been seven years in the platform. >>There are too many things throughout my for me to be an expert in everything on and I think people sort of just have to realize that anyone saying that it's bravado, nothing else. The goal is Microsoft as a platform provider. Hopefully you've got the software and the solution to make a lot of this easier for the customer, so hopefully they shouldn't need to become a Kubernetes expert because it's baked into your platform. They shouldn't have to worry about some of these offerings because it's SAS. Most customers are there some things you need to learn between going from, you know, exchange to go into oath bricks, these five. Absolutely. There are some nuances and things like that, but once you get over that initial hurdle, it should be a little easier. I think it's right and I think going back to that, sort of going back to bare principles going, what is the highest level of distraction that's viable for your business or that application or this workload has to always be done with everything. >>If it's like, well, class, not even viable, run it on premises. Don't, don't need to apologize for not running in cloud. If I as is what's happening for you because of security, because of application architecture, run it that way. Don't feel the need and the pressure to have to push it that way. I think too many people get caught up in the shiny stuff up here, which is what you know 1% of people are doing versus the other 99% which is still happening in a lot of the areas we work and have challenges in today. >>That's a great point that you bring up because there is all the buzz words, right? AI, machine learning cloud. You've got to be cloud ready. You've gotta be data-driven to customer, to your point going, I just need to make sure that what we have set up for our business is going to allow our business one to remain relevant, but to also be able to harness the power of the data that they have to extract new opportunities, new insights, and not get caught up with, shoot, should we be using automation? Should we be using AI? Everybody's talking about it. I liked that you brought up and I find it very respectfully, he said, Hey, I'm not an Azure expert. You'd been there seven, seven dog years like you said. And I think that's what customers probably gained confidence in is hearing the folks like you that they look to for that guidance and that leadership saying, no, I don't know everything. To know that giving them the confidence that they're true, they're trusting you with that data and also helping trusting you to help them make the right decisions for their business. >>Yeah. And that that's, we've got to do that. I mean, I, as a tech guy, it's like I've, I've loved seeing the changes. When I joined Microsoft, I, I wasn't lying. I was almost there go inf I really want to join this company. I was going to go join a startup instead. And I got asked to one stage in an interview going, why do you want to join Microsoft? We see you've never applied to that. I never wanted to, a friend told me to come in and it's just been amazing to see those changes and I'm pretty proud on that. Um, so when we talk about, you know, those, the things we're doing, I mean I think there is no shame going, I'm just going to lift and shift machines because cloud is about flexibility. If you're doing it just on cost, probably doing it for the wrong reason, it's about that flexibility to go and do something. >>Then change within months of slowly make steps to make things better and better as you find a need as you find the ability, whatever it may be. And some of the big things that we focus on right now with customers is we've got a product called Azure advisor. It'll go until people want one. You know, you don't build things in a resilient manner. Hey, do you know this is not ha because of this and you can do this. It's like great. Also will tell you about security vulnerabilities that maybe she had a gateway here for security. Maybe you should do this or this is not patched. But the big thing is that it also goes and tells you, Hey, you're overspending. You don't need this much. It provisions, you provision like a Ferrari, you need a, you just need a Prius, go and run a Prius because it's going to do what you need and need to pay a lot less. >>And that's part of that trust. Getting that understanding. And it's counterintuitive that we're now like it's coming out of my team a lot too, which is great. But seeing these guys were dropping contracts and licenses and basically, you know, once every three years I may call the customer, Hey, how bout a renewal now go from that to now being focused on the customer's actual success and focused on their growth in Azure as a platform of our vast services growth like utilization not in sales has been a huge change. It scared some people away but it's brought a lot more people in and and that sort of counterintuitive spin less money thing actually leads in the longterm to people using more. >>Absolutely. That's definitely not the shrink wrap software company of Microsoft that I remember from the 90s yeah, very might be similar to you know, just as volt to 2019 is not the same combo, but many of us know from with 15 >>years and a good mutual friend of ours, sort of Simon and myself before I took this job, he and I sat down, we're having a beer and discussing the merits, all the not evacuate and things like that. Same with. They are changing such, such a great deal with, you know, what they're putting in the cloud, what they're doing with the data, where they're trying to achieve with things like Hedvig for data management across on premises and cloud with microservices applications and stuff going, Hey, this won't work like this anymore. When you now are doing an on premises and we containers, it's pretty good to see. I'm interested to see how they take that even further to their current audience, which is product predominantly, you know, the it pro, the data center admin, storage manager. >>It's funny when you talked about, um, just the choice that customers have and those saying I, we shouldn't be following the trends because they're the trends. We actually interviewed a couple of hours ago, one of Combolt's customers that is all on prime healthcare company and said, he's like, I want to make a secret that says no cloud and proud and it just, what that was, we don't normally hear from them. We always talk about cloud, but for a company to sit down and look at what's best for our business, whether it's, you know, FedRAMP certification challenges or HIPAA or GDPR or other compelling requirements to keep it on prem, it was just refreshing to hear this customer say, >>yeah, I mean it's, it's appropriate for the do what's right for you. I, yeah, it's no shame in any of them. It's, I mean, you don't, you definitely don't get fans by, by shaming people and not doing something right. And I mean, I, I'm personally very happy with the feet, you know, see sort of hype around things like blockchain died down a little bit. So it's a slow database unless you're using for the specific case of that shared ledger, you know, things like that where people don't have to know blockchain. Now I have to know IOT. It's like, yeah. And that hype gets people there, but it also causes a lot of anxiety and it's good to see someone actually not be ashamed of and like, and they grade the ones when they do take a step and use cloud citizen may be in the business already. They're probably going to do it appropriately because have a reason, not just because we think this would be cool. >>Well not and how much inherent and complexity does that bring in if somebody is really feeling pressured to follow those trends and maybe that's when you end up with this hodgepodge of technologies that don't work well together, you're spending way more in as as business it folks are consumers, you know, consumers in their personal lives, they expect things to be accessible, visible, but also cost efficient because they have so much choice. >>Yeah, the choice choice is hard. It's just a, just the conversation is having recently, for example, just we'll take the storage cause of where we are, right? It's like I'm running something on Azure. I'm a, I'm using Souza. I want an office Mount point, which is available to me in Fs. Great. Perfect. what do I use? It's like, well you use any one of these seven options, like what's the right choice? And that's the thing about being a platform company. We give you a lot of choices but it's still up to you or up to harness. It can really help the customers as well to make the most appropriate choice. And I pushed back really hard on terms like best practices and things. I hate it because again, it's making the assumption this is the best thing to do. It's not. It's always about, you know, what are the patterns that have worked for other people, what are the anti-patterns and the appropriate path for me to take. >>And that's actually how we're building our docs now too. So we keep, we keep focusing at our Azure technology and we're bringing out some of the biggest things we've done is how we manage our documentation. It's all open sourced. It's all in markdown on get hub. So you can go and read a document from someone like myself is doing product management going, this is how to use this product and you're actually this bits wrong. This bit needs to be like this, and you can go in yourself, even now, make a change and we can go, Oh yeah, and take that committed in and do all this kind of stuff in that way. So we're constantly taking those documents in that way, in getting real time feedback from customers who are using it, not just ourself and an echo chamber. >>So you get this great insight and visibility that you never had before. Well, Ben, thank you, Georgie stew and me on the Q this afternoon. Excited to hear what's coming up next for Azure. May appreciate your time. Thank you for streaming event. I, Lisa Martin, you're watching the cue from convo. Go 19.

>>live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Q covering I f s World Conference 2019. Brought to you by I >>f. S, I say, What a minute. I didn't cash it. Everybody welcome to I f s World 2019. You watching the Cube? The leader in live tech coverage on day Volante with my co host, Paul Galen. Marty Martin is here. She is the president of the service management division of I F s and C e o of work wave. Marty, good to see you. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm so excited. >>A lot of action going on. You guys. Service management, Field Service management particular. You guys had an acquisition today. We're gonna talk about Let's start with your role you came in and 2017 with the >>pretty acting. Actually, >>2018 finalized the acquisition. I think they announce it in 2017. So tell us about how you came in and where you're at today with >>Certainly. So work wave the company. I lied. Join the effects family in 2017. Darren Ruess, who joined I f s in April 2018 recruited me into form a global business unit around service in August of 2018 and the reason why we did this is service isn't only a part of our economies all over the world, but it's a super great growth area that almost every business can go after in in progress both revenue and margins. So we had a lot of great software products, and we really wanted to improve our go to market around this. >>So why, why all of a sudden today, this talk about service management? Why's it becoming so hard? I mean, everybody's always been focused on customer service, but why this service management generally and field service management while the buzz. >>So first off, you've had the evolution of a number of line of business applications and service certainly has been a part of maintenance organizations or break fix where you're going out in repairing thing. What we're realizing now when you talk about service ization, how o E EMS air building what's called aftermarket revenue? There is literally $100 billion of revenue that you can get from that you look, we had Melissa did a nano from Souza. If you think about open source software, they make money from sirve ties, ing, open source software and the products. You look at apple how they're doing APs. So people are starting to realize that service is an engine for brand loyalty, customer experience, not just a cost center. How it used to be, what the >>customers do. Ah, companies do wrong with service one of the areas where they tend to have the greatest inefficiencies where you can help him. >>So first off, I'd say that often in the C suite, unless they're pure place service companies. They don't understand how transformative service is and how important it is to their brand. Many times now, if you have digital enablement of a new customer, the first time they see a face of your brand might be your service technician. So getting the awareness of the C suite is Step one, because we want to start talking about outcomes that grow revenue and profits and getting them to invest in service. So you know, many times will say, Oh, I want to do a C. R M project. I want to do an E r P project. That's certainly things were good at it. Here I a fest, but we can coach them through how you take the market opportunity for your company and service enabled by our technology and transform. Tomorrow I'll be with Accenture, one of our many great partners, and we're talking about adapting the business, the service transformation, sometimes digitally, sometimes with workflow transformation. But that opportunity and service is huge and almost never. There's no company I know of that's taking 100% of their service market share. That's the difference, especially in slower growth. Asset manufacturing are more mature verticals. >>So I was here last night walking the floor, and I went to the extent you Booth, you know, anytime you see, except you're in a show like this. Okay, Censure. You think Large company Global. I was actually quite impressed a little bit surprised to see you know, their presence here because they they go where the money is, right? And so my specific question is, think, except you think big companies. But you guys obviously focused on what range of companies smaller midsize company. So what's the landscape? Looked like? What's the difference is between sort of smaller and larger companies, >>so that's a great question. I'll take it in part So if you think about a neck censure definitely they looked a large. I also have had meetings with the Lloyd McKinsey Cap gem and I dxc etcetera Also tcs Tech Mahindra which a little bit or more telco focused. So if you think about at the very large and you have telco utilities, large manufacturing O e ems that our customers and definitely the customers I'm pursuing Maur with this focus But we also with work with go down to the S and B We had panels also of, for example, female owners of franchises and also males as well that are creating new service businesses and they're starting maybe with one truck in out providing service. So the fact that we can handle not only the breath and depth of complex service needs, but through work wave we also can encourage the small service businesses to reach their full potential is fantastic. And you know that makes me excited every day. And part of why I focused on service specifically is you are delighting customers. You are the face of a brand and you're making a difference. It's not something that s 02 is esoteric. This is about really value that we're delivering, >>always interested in the dynamics of serving the SNB market >>because one of >>these small companies don't really have that. Maybe family owned there found her own. They don't really put a lot of value on technology. How >>do you >>get in the door? How do you convince them that automating the service function is actually worth the investment? >>Well, first off, I'd say that even the big companies are struggling to go paperless. Okay, so, you know, I think some of the challenges we see survive, if you will, big to small, especially when you look globally in different countries. What have you. But the approach we take in the S and B is that we want to be a software as a service provider, and we were to really handle everything they need in their business. So everything from how they grow leads how they have c r m type functionality. How, then they're delivering service, how they're cross selling service, how they're billing service. So at the at the S M B level, we're putting that kind of all in one technology and there's really not that much integration or I T Service is around that right. We want it to be easy and fast, etcetera, as you go more into the mid market and then definitely into the enterprise. Then you start getting more complexity. You get more I t service's integrations, more configurable ity, sometimes even some customized software. So there is a definitely a difference in the complexity. But the fundamentals of what a service business needs really isn't that much different to your >>customers that you mentioned customize and you guys were SAS space. That's one of the text that we'd like to sort of explore a little bit. A lot >>of >>times SAS companies want to avoid, you know, custom mods. But at the same time, you guys are trying to offer a choice. So help us square that circle. How do you What's the conversation like with customers in terms of how you advise them, You guys obviously do a lot of deep functionality, you know? How do you sort of advise them whether or not to go heavily custom or try to go out of the box? >>Certainly. So in the true, I'd say the small business of a medium you start getting some crossover, but in the small business, Absolutely avoid customization because you won't be able to stay evergreen. It's going to be too hard to maintain. You don't have the subject matter experts, et cetera, so that's really a truce. Ask that from a community. A product engagement. We need to be driving the partnership with the customers that they can use a software out of the box in ways that matter to them. As you start getting into the mid market and especially the enterprise, then it becomes more of a choice, right? How much money do you have to spend? How robust is your organization and set trek? And in general, I advise customers if they care about evergreen software, et cetera. If they care about ease of upgrades, don't customize that Being said, we recognize sometimes in the field with your brand experience Custom mobile. You may need to customize a little bit, so it's Ah, say, a chicken and an egg. You have to weigh the benefits of the costs, and that's what we work through with our >>customers. Specifically morning. What's the upgrade cycle like? There's a customer having the choice Thio upgrade at a particular time, Or do they have a window? >>So it varies primarily, there's a few exceptions, but in general, with the work way, Family of products is true SAS. So it's almost like you're Apple Phone. We pushed the upgrade and you have to take it. Okay, And that's the true SAS model at I. F. S. And this is something Darren talked about in his keynote. We pride ourselves on offering choice. So even though we do have regular release cycles, we encourage customers to upgrade regularly. They have the choice on when they take upgrades and also how they deploy. We have some markets with things like data, privacy and what have you that they may, for that reason or for other reasons, go on premise even still today. So we give them the choice on how they upgrade as well as where they host. >>I'm fascinated by your product line. You have products for pest control. H V. A. C. Plumbing cleaning service is long and landscape. How different are these industries really in terms of their their automation needs? >>Well, I'll tell you one of the personal factors that Darren wanted to make sure I was comfortable with was multitasking. And that definitely is the case, because an I f s, we serve five key industries. So if you think about manufacturing utilities, telco service providers and Andy Okay, that's more at the enterprise level. If you think then when you go toe work wave. Those verticals that you mentioned are all the ones we service at work wave, and they are different. So you know what? Work wave. It's primarily service industries where you're going into ah, home and a little bit The commercial aspect and I effects were also doing more some heavy industries, some very large asset base, things like that. So I like to think about it as a product I service consumer based service. And then you can also differentiate across verticals with what are called high value assets versus, you know, Mork consumer size assets. >>So what >>are >>the one of the key technology enablers that are driving service management today? I mean, obviously, cloud, we talked about sas a lot of push on you X and customer experience, but what other key ones? >>So all the three that you mentioned mobile is huge. You know, Pete and even today, like I run. I work mainly from my phone, and that's really what people want. They want efficient work flows that are configurable on mobile, tied to the customer, the asset, the business. And that's an area that we're continuing to make investment. We also try to prioritize how we bring in the new technology trends into service. Because every technology trend that you see has applicable ity and service supply chain and how you run spare parts specially globally, you can see applications for Blockchain augmented emerged Reality how you can connect the field tech with an expert resource or remote resource to the consumer. That is obvious, right? So you talked about the enabling technologies like Cloud, how we're thinking about data platforms and Data's the currency. Of all of that, we need to d'oh. His service is really about a an execution engine, right? Because to deliver a customer experience that makes people come back to your brand. To purchase Maur, you need great service, so any time somebody talks about customer experience, but they don't talk about service. I want to say you're really naive because you can just get the customer. You have to delight the customer. >>Uh, the, uh, there's a lot of interesting technology going on now in the area. Fleet Management making fleets more efficient How does that figure into the service is? You offer. >>So Fleet management is an important part, and it's one that you have a very tangible return on investment when you deploy route management route optimization, fleet management. So you have the aspects that are very tangible, relate to how do you get the person or the truck where it needs to be when it needs to be okay, and that's pretty well understood. Then how do you get the most efficient schedule that minimizes miles driven gas, used et cetera? And then, of course, you also are thinking about health and safety. There's some cool things now that you can partner that if you have these fleet technologies installed in a way that is integrated in your service business, you can actually get lower insurance premiums, right? So it's not just the conventional use. Cases were starting to think in this kind of gig economy, how you can also be thinking about bringing in Maura what's called a contingent workforce. So if you have surge capacity in a certain period or you want to just do more third party service, probably your appliances. You know they're not the employees, if you will, of a g e or a world polar and LG right there Probably a contingent workforce. And that's a model that's also evolving. But to do Fleet Management across say, contractors, not just employees is an area that were thinking more and more led by some of the uber ization, if you will, of the of the marketplace >>right up against the clock, Marty. But to last questions You made an acquisition today, Vashti Uh, yeah, uh, I thought of it as a tuck in acquisitions, although Darren essentially sort of said, it's gonna make you the leader now in service management. Um And then I want to understand how you guys differentiate from some of the big whales. >>So, you know, overall, we're on track to be about 700 revenue this year in service management. We're working to get to 200 million, right? So this year will probably be around maybe 1/5 50 ish per se. Don't quote me on that check with our coms team, but the point being is that we have the ability to use these tuck in acquisitions and service to accelerate our lead, not just from a revenue perspective, which is what we were just talking about. But from a product perspective, you might have followed Salesforce acquiring Click. That means we are the only independent. Aye, aye. Optimization engine that is field tested. Battle ready. So that's great. This s t a is how we consolidate our dominance and complex service. So what darren was speaking to is not on Lee the service management segment of our revenue and how we continue to accelerate over the oracles in the S a. P s and the service maxes et cetera of the world. But how we take what we're already dominant in and really put the hammer down. Honesty is part of that. >>Your differentiation then if I infers, is focus. Um, you're you're deep customer customs agent deep >>domain expertise. Yeah, So really, when you think about a i optimization, which drives a ton of business value and the ability to handle the complex service cases that then drive business outcomes and outcomes based service models, we are number one and s dea tucks into that, even though it is very strategic on how we position ourselves with leadership and service. >>All right, Challenger becomes number one, Marty. Thanks very much. All right, Keep it right, everybody. Dave A lot with Paul Galen. You're watching the Cube from Boston Mass. I f s world 2019 right back.