>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live Cube Live coverage here in San Francisco, California in the Mosconi North lobby for V Emerald 2019 tapes our 10th year covering with some great guest, three days of wall to wall coverage that an amazing signorina Rob Salmon is the president CEO of Cohee City. Dave Solo, presidency of the Special Olympics Northern California. Thanks for coming on. Thanks to spend the time. Thanks for doing. Set the table. Why we hear what we're talking about. What's the purpose here? I know I wouldn't want to set it up more >> absolutely. I've been involved with Special Olympics for several years now. When former company Netapp Matt Thompson over Adobe called me and said, We got this high tech challenge. Dr. We've never sold it out. We want it. We want to get more companies involved when you help out, and the answer was absolutely and that led to David asking me to be on the board. So I've been involved with David, the team for an awful long time. KOHI City When I joined the company, some of the folks there knew of my involvement is that we'd like to start participating as well, which has led to what we're doing here. Of'em World >> David Talk about Special Olympics Quick mission for sure about the folks that might not given update for sure. >> John Yes, so Special Olympics enriches the lives of children, adults with intellectual disabilities. And so, in our footprint in Northern California, with serve over 23,000 athletes ages eight above and it's it's it's interesting. There's a lot of misconceptions people will say to me That's a great event that you do every four years And they referring the World Games, especially its world games, where athletes from all over the world get a common compete. But locally, through the state programs, hundreds of competitions happen a each and every year. And in Northern California we have, or 400 competitions per year in 14 different sports provides a wonderful ray of opportunities for athletes to demonstrate what what they can do when given the opportunity >> to do so. Talk about the community of aspect of it because I think What's interesting is what's on TV and what's in the mainstream press. It's more reach people that can be known for that. But it's deeper than as you point out. But >> talk about the >> community aspect. Got volunteers, people, individuals involved. Yeah, but the makeup of the network? No, it's an incredible network. >> I think we've really brought in an expanded our reach over the last 10 years. It used to be well known primarily for sports programming. So now we have inclusive education and health programs. We're able to bring together people with and without intellectual disabilities through those mediums. So if I'd resource is to schools an education and they run special Olympics programming during the school day. So educators wanna have us because we're improving school clamp campuses, reducing bowling, enhancing social emotional learning. And so the work that we're doing is so so critical with that community, then the area health. We have inclusive health. So now we got health and medical crypt, uh, professionals that are now providing health screenings for athletes. So some of the younger volunteers that we get that they're wanting to make a career in the medical field they're exposed to our population, right? And so they learn more about their specific health needs. So it's really about changing people's attitudes. And so this community of supporters volunteers, health professionals, education, Really. Our goal is to change people's attitudes fundamentally worldwide about people with intellectual disabilities and really kind of produce inclusive mindsets. We call it really promote understanding. >> If I may. I I really think what David and his team does and folks of sports Special Olympics around the world, they're dying. Changing attitudes are changing lives, lives of the athletes, lives of the people that work with the athletes, lives of the families. If you go to these events and there's something special, there are a lot of fun. And when you get involved and you see it, it definitely touches your heart and you realize we could be doing so much more. We could be doing so much more. >> I'm struck by you. Clearly, there's a passion thread here, and your background is really interesting to me because you're an accomplished student athlete, played football on and then you started a career in nonprofit right away, and now Rob, he was somebody would have hired right. It was like the perfect student athlete. You know, magna cum laude. I want this guy on my team. My hard driving says that How did you get into this? And described the background of that >> know for sure, sewn with nonprofit work. I kind of kind of started out. I was working for Boys and Girls Clubs of America, raising money to go to grad school, to be a history professor of all things. And so I got involved with the Boys and Girls Club with special Olympics. When the opportunity came, what was what was unique about it? It's really about how sports changes people's lives. Growing up, my father left me when I was 10 years old, and so was my coaches. They were the ones that really wasn't for them. I don't know that I would be here today, so they really took an active role in my life. So I've been very passion. I believe sports is a catalyst for social change, changed my life and provide an opportunity for me to be successful. And so that's what I want to help get back to our after. And it's also so. It's interesting is it's also proves that takes a village, you know, in these experiences changes lives. I think this is the big story, and it points to that. The sports is one element of other things. Health care. So you start getting connected in this is where the magic happens. This is the key. Yeah, some of the stories that wherever just phenomenal. I think society focuses on what our athletes can't do and dwells on the disability. We don't do that. So what? We're passionate about showcasing what they can do and having our volunteer, you know, certified train coaches work with our athletes to really help them get to the next level so they could be successful not only on the field, but off the field. So I mean, I got to get involved. Talk about the virtual. You're in Northern California. That's your territory, your area. But people, how they get involved, they wanna be share some no points of touch. Yeah, for sure. So a couple key points to touch would be number one. We have over 20,000 volunteers in our footprints, so we have a tremendous need for volunteers both globally and here locally, with Special Olympics, Northern California number two is from a donor standpoint. So everything that we do for athletes is completely free. And we're able to do that because the support of our community partners, our corporate partners like, Oh, he city, you know, individual supporters foundations were able to do that because of themselves. You know, either someone could go to the global website Special Olympics dot order come to W w dot s, O N C dot or for Northern California. We're always looking for volunteers, donor's community supporters, and we're also looking for board members, particularly from the tech sector. Senior executives in the tech sector. Justin, you stay channel lies for the people involved that also includes the people who volunteered. I'm sure people that want to make a difference whether you're thinking of senior approach, rather urine or your employees who want to give back so tell about the lives changing impact there because this is a corporate angle here that's not doesn't it's not for profit thing. It's a four good thing. >> Oh, this is for a good thing, and the thing I did to that is, and we touched briefly on Boys and Girls Clubs of America. These are all great organizations. I know Patton is key note. This morning, touched on giving back. This is an opportunity. Well, we're all blessed. We should give back. But the whole notion of getting more involved in touching lives I'll start with my two boys. They went to summer games and U C Davis three or four years ago. Now both of her good runners and they had some other kids on the high school team go with them. They were incredibly impressed. They had a lot of fun. A little banter with the athletes. Newsome, Bath, please. Out there there, Let's talk your heart. The gun goes off for the start, and they're already you get the arms up, curing away, and there's others incredibly talented athletes as well. It's so it just opened your eyes of what is possible. You're the one thing I touch on Is self esteem matters for every one of us, whether you have a disability or not, whether you're young or my age, it matters for someone to tell you that you are good. You are really worthy. Your hard work is paying off. You see these athletes when they finish the race or accomplished something that couldn't be more proud going to these events it will want. You will want to get involved. That's what typically happens. >> It sounds like you do coverages gonna be making its way to these events. Actually, wait, are fully got this part in the NHL MLB, NFL Masters golf tournaments. We have to get a pro circuit going on here way. Wonderful. Yeah. Hey, this is a really great cause. Any final thoughts again, back for people who want to get involved in the North California group. What? What can you offer people? No, I think we offer people a tangible way, especially when we think of the tech sector. And we think of the, you know, the employees and the millennials and hands on way for people to come out to our regional competitions and actually engage with our athletes and volunteer and be hands on and actually see where your money goes. You know, see, see that it's something tangible and you're helping provide that venue for athletes to be successful. One of things I didn't mention that we're really proud of. So we have a way of athletes are college students. We have athletes that are full time employees. Married couples, >> Um, >> and then we have a published poet. But last couple months we have an athlete that passed the bar exam who is now going to be a practicing attorney on. So that's really shows that you know, one of the things that you guys are hitting on here, Rob, I know you guys do a lot with your company. You guys even donating one of your tech sessions for a survey that John Troyer's team did around. Check burnout. People get it and even my kids to go to the high school In a lot of high schools like this now, where people get stressed out of the weirdest things, >> This is the kind >> of thing that getting involved in these community events like this really could help everybody. She allowed a little bit, Really. Take a load off, work with people, see the connection, see the impact. It's a burnout tactic option. It's also a way to relieve some stress. Feel >> good about it. >> The employees of Cohee City, when they came to me and said they want to get more evolved, they didn't do it because of me, they did it because they're excited about working with Special Olympics and they're beaming. Means some of the athletes 11 9 with a bunch of athletes going the baseball game tonight, Hamilton tomorrow night, their families as well. We couldn't be more excited, But I agree with you. You look at all the stresses in our lives, and I think this notion of what you do, who you do with how you give back is really, really important. I think that gives back piece, I think more of us allowing employees to do that, helping our children and school understand truly important the value. Um, is this absolutely >> You guys are making a great point because we've both been involved in youth sports all our lives, and it's kind of become twisted where you've got kids needs and parents needs and the parents trying to meet him in the middle, and that's not the way it should be. Your initiatives, I mean, it underscores what it's really all about. Self esteem, having fun, supporting your teammates and the broader community. >> But they stay well and compete and win two that they're in there. See some of those players. I mean, they're >> hard. I've seen some hard core competition, no doubt. But how well do they start? So >> eight years always started eight. And we have an athlete that's 81 that participates in watching. >> So okay, so appropriate. But the reason I miss it because, you know, having studied this allowed it. It's like 12 years old is the crossover point where people start to get crazy. And if you start before then, in other words Oh, this kid is nine. But he's not that good. Who could tell what a nine year old Michael Jordan got cut from his freshman basketball team? So it just goes to show you. So I think that that again, the values that you guys air promoting our worthy thanks >> me feel better about what we're doing. A cohesive it really does. Thank you for doing this. Being able to put two things I'm really passionate about together. Ah, this is pretty special for me. And I think my it around our founder and the rest of the company. And in David and team, they just do a fantastic job. I just wanna make sure we keep building on it. >> Congratulations. Great to get the word out. Congratulations. All your hard work. Awesome Cube coverage live in San Francisco. We back with more after this short break.

I'd say for me it's called it's really the power of the of the better together you know to me it's nobody's great apart it takes really an ecosystem of players to kind of work together for the customer benefit and the one that we've demonstrated the VMware with NetApp plus VMware has been a powerful one for well well over 17 years and the person they're putting in terms of the joint customers that have a ton of loyalty to both of us and they want us just to work it out so you know whether you're whether your allegiance on one side of the kubernetes community's battle or another or you're on one side of anyone's you know storage choice or another and I think customers want NetApp and VMware to work this out and in como solutions and we've done that and now what we for the second activist to come out will start that tomorrow I mean to me it starts from what the customer would like to do right and what what we're seeing from customers is it's increasingly a multi cloud world right that expands spans private cloud public cloud and Ed you're smiling when I yeah now there's an opportunity yeah but it's a chance for customers right and so if you look at how VMware is trying to help their meso sort of square the circle I think the first piece is this idea of consistent operations right then we have these management tools that you can use to consistently operate those environments whether they're based on a VMware based infrastructure or whether they're based on a native cloud infrastructure right so if you look at our cloud health platform for example it's a great example where that service can help you under get visibility to your cloud spend across different cloud platforms also be store based platforms and can help you reduce that spend over time so that's sort of what we refer to as consistent operations right which can span any any cloud you know my team is responsible for is more in that consistent infrastructure space and that's really all about how do we deliver consistent compute network and storage service that spans on from multiple public clouds an edge so that's really where we're bringing that same VMware cloud foundation stacked all those different environments you know the networking folks and networking was always relegated to being the underlay or the plumbing now what's becoming important is that the application are making their intent aware to the network and the intent is becoming aware as the intern becomes aware we networking people know what to do in the Estevan layer which then shields all the intricacies of what needs to get done in the underlay so to put it in very simple terms the container is what really drives the need and what we're doing is we're building the outcome to satisfy that need now containers are critical because as Pat was saying you know all of the new digital applications are going to be built with containers in mind so the reason we call it client to cloud to containers because the containers can literally be anywhere you know we're talking about them in the private cloud and in the public cloud they could be right next to where the client is because of the edge cloud they could be in the telco network which is the telco cloud so between these four clouds you literally have a network of these containers and the underlying infrastructure that we are doing is to provide that Estevan layer that will get the containers to talk to one another as well as to talk to the clients that are getting access to those application yeah I mean more than McAfee I think you know you you it's sort of you think of the and the the analog analog to cloud Security's data center security where you think of this sort of Amazon Cloud living in an Amazon datacenter and you know how can we protect that you know the data and the egress access into those cloud and you know same technology sort of apply but to your point that you sort of just touched upon its that cloud is not living in isolation right first of all that Amazon Cloud is connected to a whole bunch of you know applications that are still sitting in a data center right so they may not they're potentially not moving the Oracle database today since they're moving some workloads to the cloud right that's what most most companies are hey guess what there's all these endpoints that are connecting they're connecting both the data center and the cloud you're not gonna proxy to the cloud to get to the data center so there is a gateways so to me cloud security can't be an isolated you know sort of technology that companies have to sort of think about now is there is there opportunity to leverage the cloud to manage security better and get visibility in their security environments to do security analytics absolutely so I think to me that's where it's going because security I think has been proven is no longer you know sort of one thing single thing it's just you have to do multiple things every time I go talk to CIA source they tell me they got this technology that I said he made a minute you you have 20 did you cut down any yeah we've cut down a few but you know they just nervous about cutting down too much because if that one piece of software gets Paul so look I mean I think we again we're kind of really evolving our strategic aims you know historically we've looked at how do we really virtual eyes an entire data center right this concept of the software-defined data center really automating all that and driving great speed efficiency increases and now as we've been talking about we're in this world where you kind of STD sees everywhere right on pram and the cloud different public clouds and so how do you really manage across all those and these are the things we've been talking about so the cloud marketplace fits into that whole concept in the sense that now we can get people one place to go to get easy access to both software and solutions from our partners as well as open source solutions and these are things that come from the bitNami acquisition that we recently did so the idea here is that we cannot make it super simple for customers to become aware of the different solutions to draw those consistent operations that exists on top of our platform with our partners and then make it really easy for them to consume those as well I think we've really broaden and expanded our reach over the last ten years it used to be we're known primarily for our sports programming so now we have inclusive education and health programs we're being able to bring together people with and without intellectual disabilities through those mediums so we've divided resources to schools and education and they run Special Olympics programming during the school day so educators wanna have us because we're improving school clamp campuses reducing bullying enhancing social-emotional learning and so the work that we're doing is so so critical with that community then the air if health we have inclusive health so now we've got health and medical professionals that are now providing health screenings for our athletes so some of the the younger volunteers that we get that are there wanting to make a career in in the medical field they're exposed to our population right and so they learn more about their specific health needs so it's really about changing people's attitudes and so this community of supporters volunteers health Vettel's education were really our goal is to change people's attitudes fundamentally worldwide about people with intellectual disabilities and really kind of produce inclusive mindsets we call it really promote understanding and so now that the the road map that was shared in terms of what VMware looks to do to integrate containers into the ESXi platform itself right it's you know managing VMs and containers Nextiva that's perfect in terms of not having customers have to pick or choose between which platform and where you're gonna deploy something allow them to say you can deploy on whichever format you want it runs in the same ecosystem and management and then that trickles down to the again your storage layer so we do a lot of object storage within the container ecosystems today a lot of high-performance objects because you know the the the file sizes of instances or applications is much larger than you know a document file that URI might create online so there's a big need around performance in that space along with again management at scale the whole multi cloud hybrid cloud movement what's going on out at the enterprise your perspective on kind of where we are in that shift if you will or that transformation and and what's what's driving it you know what's what's creating all the bang you get that question a lot right people ask me what inning are we in question you know it's a regular you know I would say a couple years ago you know as people said I don't think that I think the national anthem is still being played kind of thing you know and I think the game has probably started you know but but I still were think for very early innings and you know I think I'd actually bring it up to even a higher level and talk about what's happening in terms of how companies are thinking about digital transformation and it would I what I think is happening is it's becoming a board level priority for companies they can't afford to ignore it you know digital is changing the Commun obey suspended of advantage in most industries around the globe and so they're investing in digital transformation and I think they're going to do that frankly independent of whatever macroeconomic climate we operate in and so and I think you know the big driving force probably you know in digital transformation today the cloud and so and what we're seeing is there's a you know it's a particular architecture of choice that's emerging for customers yep and I think you know you hit the nail on the head networking has changed it's no longer about speeds and feeds it's about availability and simplicity and so you know Dell and VMware I think are uniquely positioned to deliver a level of automation where this stuff just works right I don't need to go and configure these magic boxes individually I want to just write you know a line of code where my infrastructure is built into the CI CD pipeline and then when I deploy a workload it just works I don't need an army of people to go figure that out right and and I think that's the power of what we're working together to unleash so that was pretty dramatic moment of truth when we deployed atrium and we started the imaging process and it was finished and to be honest I thought that is broken but it actually was that fast so gave us a tremendous amount of I mean ability to deploy and manage and do the work during the workday instead of working after hours and what we doing for data protection before date really we use variety of different solutions backups just to tape and variety of services that actually backed up are they still do or know we've given that a lot up the floor of all the legacy stuff it got rid of that did you have to change your processes or what was that like Wow info we have to we have to get rid of a lot of process they were focused on backup focus on a time that it took to manage backup with atrium date reom didn't have the backup from the day one this is something that they designed I think a second year and that was very different to see the company that deals with storage creating such an innovative vision for developing old I mean developing a roadmap that was actually coming true with every iteration of the software deployment so the second tier that we provisioned was the snapshot and the snapshots that were incredibly fast that didn't take a lot of space that was you know give us ability to restore almost instantly gave us a huge amount of you know focus on not focusing and on storage anymore well since we're here at vmworld right you know be immoral has about 70 million work I think it's actually bigger than the public cloud I you correct me if I'm wrong right uh yeah I mean the I look I'm premise way bigger than the public cloud I have no question exactly and and and what's happening of course is faster sorry but the line is blurring between you know what's a public cloud what's a you know hybrid cloud multi-cloud edge and so look our opportunity is to really make all that go away for customers and allow them to choose and express our unique value add in whatever form the customer wants to use it so you've seen us align with all the public clouds you know you're seeing us take steps in the edge we're continuing to improve the on-premise systems you know with project dimension now it's the VMware cloud on Dell EMC that we're managing for you and it's on demand its consumption and it's consumed just like a public cloud I spend about 50 percent of my time talking to these customers so we learn a lot and here are the four big challenges they're facing first is the explosion of data data is just growing so fast Gartner estimates they'll be a hundred and seventy-five zettabytes of data in 2025 if you cram that into iphone so you take two point six trillion iPhones and go to the Sun and back right it's an enormous amount of data second they're worried about ransomware it's not a question of if you'll be attacked it's when you'll be attacked look at what's happening in Texas right now with the 22 municipalities dealing with that what you want in that case is a resilient infrastructure you want to be the ripples to restore from a really good backup copy of data third they want the hybrid multi cloud world just like Pat Gelson juror has been talking about that's what customers want but they want to be able to protect their data wherever it is make it highly available and get insights in their data wherever it's located and then finally they're dealing with this massive growth in government regulations around the world because of this concern about privacy I was in Australia a few weeks ago and one of our customers she was telling me that she deals with 27 different regulatory environments another customer was saying that California Privacy Act will be the death of him and he's based in st. Louis right so our strategy is focused on taking away the complexity and helping the largest companies in the world deal with these challenges and that's why we introduced the enterprise data services platform and that's why we're here at VMworld talking kubernetes the technology enabler I mean tcp/ip was that in the old networking days it enabled a lot of shifts in the industry you were far that way yeah kubernetes that disruptive enabler yeah I really see it as one of those key transition points in the industry and as I sort of joked if my name was Scott and we were 20 years ago I'd be banging the table calling it Java and Java defined enterprise software development for two decades by the way Scott's my neighbor he's down the hill so I looked down on mr. McNeely I always liked but you know the you know it changed how people did enterprise software development for the last two decades and kubernetes has that same kind of transformative effect but maybe even more important it's not just development but also operations and I think that's what we're uniquely bring together with project Pacific really being able to bridge those two worlds together so you know and if we deliver on this you know I think it is you know that X decade or two will be the center of innovation for us how we bridge those two roles together and really give developers what they need and make it operator friendly out-of-the-box across the history to the future this is pretty powerful yes so this conference is is I think a refreshing return to form so VMware is as you say this is an operators conference and VMware is for operators it's not for devs there was a period there where cloud was scary and and it was all this cloud native stuff and VMware tried to appeal to this new market and I guess tried to dress up and as something that it really wasn't and it didn't pull it off and we didn't it didn't feel right and now VMware has decided that well no actually this is what VMware is about and no one can be more VMware than VMware so it's returning to being its best self and I think against software they know software they know software so the the addition of putting project hands are in and having kubernetes in there and and it's it's to operate the software so it's it's going to be in there and apps will run on it and they want to have kubernetes baked into vSphere so that now yeah we'll have new app new apps and yeah there might be sass ups for the people who are consuming them but they've got to run somewhere and now we could run them on vmware whether it's on site at the edge could be in the cloud your vmware on AWS steve emotions [Music] you

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversation here from our Boston area studio. Welcome back to the program from ClearSky Data, Ellen Rubin the CEO and Laz Vekiarides who is the CTO. Laz and Ellen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Us too, nice to be back. >> Hi, thanks for having us. >> All right, so, always good to talk to a local company, we talked about technology, I was actually in the Seaport district earlier, recently, and you know there's a lot happening in this space, as we know, it doesn't all happen, in Seattle for the cloud, Silicon Valley for all the VCs, so Ellen I've been speaking with your company since its early days-- >> Stealth mode, yeah. >> Stealth mode. First time I met you in person was at the Amazon reinvent shows, so still one of the focal points of the cloud and everything that happening there. But give us the update, you've got some new fundings, some new partnerships, tell us what's happening with ClearSky. >> Absolutely, I'm really happy to be back. So yeah, we've been, last night been building this company together, we started in 2013 with the, you know, sitting in a room with a white board but the company has really been actively funded and kind of building customers and our service offering since 2014. And we've just seen a tremendous amount of growth especially in the last year. So we're excited to be able to share that we are raising a 20 million funding round, and it includes some new investors, strategic investors as well as some of our existing investors from General Catalyst and Highland and Polaris. So it's very important for us but it's also great for our customers because it gives us a chance now to be in more places and have more people on our team to really grow and add to the support the operation of what we're doing. So that's kind of part A. And we're really looking forward to doing that. We've added a head of our sales organization, our chief revenue officer, Roger Cummings, and so we've really kind of filled out our team and our growing as a company overall. So that's kind of part A. >> So yeah congratulations on the numbers. The other piece, I think back to the first discussions we had when you talked about living in lots of environments and how do you help customers, there was somebody that you're partnering with now that I believe came up in that first discussion because they've got one of the largest global foot print on the planet that I'm aware of. >> Indeed, so yeah, also today we're announcing our partnership with Equinex and we've actually been working, we've been talking with Equinex since we were in stealth mode and we've been working with them over the past several years already in a couple of locations. And we can talk in a lot of detail about sort of where the great alignment fit is, but the news for us is that we're now gonna be able to really expand the reach of our service across the rest of the United States. So we're gonna triple the number of locations, and we're gonna be basically anywhere our customers need us to be, as you know we are a metro-based service so it's very important from a latency and access that we be in more locations. And we see it as basically a great jumping off for filling out the initial vision of being across United States and now it's starting to expand that side. >> Yes that's great. Laz, let's pull you in here. If you look at the data piece of it, we understand that latency is clearly important. That's the conversation we've had back in the storage world for a long time. Data has gravity, it's tough to move it, and having some locality is super important. So what are your, for people who aren't as familiar with the company, just give us the thumbnail, architecturally, and tell us what you've been seeing update wise, from a technology standpoint. >> Sure, so, our technology is really metro-based network, so we deliver caching services on the edge to make all of the resources, specifically the data management resources that are far away appear as if they're nearby. Now one of the problem is, as you know with the cloud, is that they are only in certain locations. So unless your nation is in Virginia or you happen to be in the Pacific Northwest, you have a latency problem. And so as a result, some certain types of applications aren't gonna work well. What we've built is really an edge-based data management network. We provide high performance file and block services. To systems at the edge that leverage the cloud for their back ends. And so as a result, you get all of the economics of the cloud and the flexibility that you get with those type of services. But you get the experience of enterprise class functionality and capability's and it's nearby. So you don't miss any of the things that you are kind of used to. >> All right, Laz I want you to help explain something, when you say edge, what does that mean to you and your customers because there are server providers edges, there are kind of the IO key end devices edges, there are some things in between there, so what specifically are you helping with? >> So this is true it's actually really interesting. So we have a very specific definition of edge, we call it the data center edge. And hence our alignment with Equinix, they are in this metro facilities when you look at our architecture we're either putting an edge appliance either in an Equinix facility or in a customer's facility and then tethering that into the Equinix facility. So that last hundred or so miles around an Equinix facility is our edge and that is gonna be our definition now. That could change over time, just like everything else in the cloud changes, because we basically have built software that can run in any type of Linux environment with some monocom activity but in our current market push, our edge is really the data center edge. >> Okay, Ellen I love that that really fit in into the discussions I've been having a lot over the last year or so. People talk about hybrid cloud when they talk about multicloud. It's, they're using lots of SAS, they're usually using more than one public cloud provider and then they have their own resources, and their data center often times has a rack in Equinix and leveraging things like direct connect from Amazon, the equivalent for Google and Microsoft, or expanding those definitions. Bring us inside what are you hearing from customers. I love to hear what you can share about specific customers or in general what's the need that they have and where you fit in into all of it. >> Yeah, no, you're totally on point for what we see everyday which is we deal with medium and large enterprises. So our customers are in health care, they're in financial services, they're in legal services and also in managed service providers now as a newer market for us. So we have customers that include companies like Partners HealthCare, Mass General Hospital, Nuance Communications. We've just added Unitas Global as a managed service provider. Special Olympics is a customer and some regional hedge firms and law services, like Miles and Stockbridge. So what you can kind of see is that we have this really nice set of experiences that are not just what is Facebook doing or what is Stage3 doing but we kind of have a broad range of what CIO and heads of IT are really struggling with. And it's exactly what you're saying which is the edge to a customer very much depends on how they're thinking about where their application are gonna run, and our philosophy is don't worry about it, we've got you covered, your data is gonna be high performance, low latency, you're totally protected and you can access it from wherever you need to. But for a lot of customers honestly we've seen everything. I won't embarrass anybody specifically but there are still some kind of scary, old data centers out there. There are server closets that are acting as data centers. People still have things in their buildings. And then you've got everything to like world class, Equinix, Colo, that is in Ashburn, or whatever. And then people are obviously trying to adapt multiple shades and flavors of public clouds. And I was just out at a customer's yesterday where the CIO was talking to us about the fact that they have grown through a tremendous amount of acquisition. So they've got one of everything. And then the cloud for them was a bunch of people did a bunch of things in Amazon five years ago. Then they decided to standardize on Azure. They don't really know why they standardize on Azure. And they realized that that was not actually answer for all their problems and then they started to think about how Google might actually be a much better fit because of some of the analytics works they're trying to do, and by the way they've got data centers all over the world. That is a very typical scenario that we see everyday and for the customers hedging their bets and not being locked into anything is really, really important to them, because the application keep evolving and new things are getting in some ways built for the cloud, but sometimes the edge actually is still critical, right? In terms of where the actual physical source systems are. >> Yeah, so, I would say the elephant in the room is that kind of how do I get my arms around this multi cloud environment and there's not one company that's gonna solve all of these issues. I've had everything-- >> And even if they did, would you really put everything in one cloud? Probably you wouldn't? >> Right, but it's the, okay, I've got all of these clouds out there and all of these things, I have licensing issues I have to worry about, I have identity management I have to worry about, there's the overall management of it. And it seems primarily it's the networking piece that you're helping with, maybe explain a little bit more, Laz it probably comes to you as to that elephant there, it's ClearSky data, we solve your networking challenge for multicloud and it's more than just that. >> Right, so, it's sometimes embarrassingly I actually started my career in the networking space and so a lot-- >> It's okay, I did, too, it's a training. >> So when Ellen and I started talking about what we wanted to do, we were really focused on networking. Maybe I had enough of storage. And so a lot of what we discovered was that the network is an extremely sort of undersold part of the overall cloud strategy of any company. If you really want to go to the cloud this is really about moving huge amount of data back and forth from these locations. And so we've built a very, very high performance one-hub network from our pops right to all of the various regions of the public clouds. So what this basically means for our customers is that they don't have to worry about the internet, they don't have to worry about the security that they need to set up in order to get into the cloud, and the amount of throughput that we can get through is really astonishing. So we've really built a system that can maximize this network pipes. So even our smallest customers can move in excess of 20 terabytes a day back and forward from the cloud. So this becomes a really really interesting solution if you have a lot of source system or you have a lot of data to move. We can outrun that Amazon truck. >> So I want you to, I think back five years ago, I heard Equinix, some of the other large data centers, they were like, "Oh we're just gonna give you "a cloud market place and there'll be all these services "and if you need to access something, we'll just be able to "throw a 10 gig wire between somebody's connections." It sounded really good but it sounds like you're helping fill a gap. Maybe explain what that is. >> Well so most of the networking pieces are actually very expensive, very complicated to set up, first of all. So you also have port charges and all sorts of high availability issues that you need to resolve with each one of the clouds. Additionally, although they are sort of on demand, you're not using all those bandwidths all the time and you don't know when you're gonna need it. What we've done on the network is to make it possible for you to utilize 40 gigabytes of throughput, our 40 gigabytes of throughput, into the clouds pretty much whenever you need it. So for example, latency from Boston to Amazon niche, for us 11 milliseconds. For most people if they don't have direct connect at some exuberant price they're gonna end up experiencing in the hundreds of milliseconds if they're going over the internet. So that and the bandwidth guarantee is you think you have a one gigabyte internet connection but that's not really what all the elements along your path are gonna provide you. So there's a lot of variability and we make that all go away we make the management go away, the security issues go away, and so it's totally seamless. You just need to connect into our network with our edge, it's as if the cloud really isn't there. And if you need to access your resources in the cloud, we can bring your data to EC2 and you can connect instances to it. So the whole process of moving things back and forth is so seamless and transparent, you don't just manage it. It's all sort of a byproduct of the architecture. >> I was just gonna add, Equinix invested early and bet early on becoming a cloud hub. This idea of having a cloud exchange and a lot of the other services that are plugged in, is a tremendous value to customers. But what we do see is that there is still a lot of customers out there and I'm sure this will persist for a while where there's still even yet further distributed last mile issues, and customers are moving into Equinix and Colocation sites for all the benefits that they bring and we take full advantage of that and help drive that from our side. But we also see that there are things that are just not moving and need to stay put and it's either because of legacy reasons, compliance reasons, they don't want to invest to re-platform things. There are a lot of reasons that are out there and because we both come from the enterprise infrastructure world, that does not scare us. So we understand that what you have to do is you have to meet the customers where they live, right? And you have to make it easy and accessible and as Laz has described in kind of a turn key situation where however your application wants to run and be best situated, we're gonna make sure that your data is available to you. >> Yeah you bring out some great points there. A line I used many times recently is there was the promise that cloud was going to be simple and cheap and it turned out to be neither of those. What do you see some of the biggest challenges, Ellen, we start with you maybe, what are your customers facing, what do you excited about that's actually made progress the last few years, and what do we still need to do as an industry as a whole? >> Well I always have to say this and of course it makes me just feel completely so old but I've been in the clouds since 2008, right? My last company's cloud switch was kind of that early, okay, there's a thing it's called the cloud, it happens to be Amazon but there'll be other clouds too. So you have to say fast-forwarding 10 years, a lot of really good progress has been made and it is for sure the case that now when you talk to enterprise customers and to the CIOs they're in the cloud, they've adopted the cloud, the cloud is in their mental picture of where things are gonna be, they've accepted the fact that they have developer groups are already in the cloud and have been for a very long time and it's part of their portfolio now, to make sure it's protected and highly available and compliant. So I think that is progress. The best thing that ever happened was, I don't have to convince people the cloud is more secure than what they're doing on Prem, because everybody kinda knows that, so that's good news. We don't have to have that conversation 20 times again et cetera. But what I do see that's surprising to me is that still some of the fundamental problems are still problems. Getting my data into the cloud. You think, c'mon we've got lots of solutions, tools, and toolkits and stuff like that. But it's still a very major problem. Networking of course still being a key issue for customers. I don't want to rollout a bunch of new lines, I don't want to have to hire a snowmobile, I don't want to- you know, rebuild everything form scratch. So that is still I think shows up more than I would have guessed. Right now what we see is there's a lot of focus on operational things, in terms of how to optimize what turned out to be the high cost of the cloud. Every one of our customers knows if that pull data back from the cloud that's not good. So they've learned that, they've found that out and they were kind of a little surprised the first time the bill came in and it was really high. So this idea of having tools that allow optimization of using the cloud more cost-effectively and figuring out which cloud is going to be more cost-effective based on the access patterns. There's more awareness of it but there's still a lot of struggling with that. >> Laz, would love your comments on that. >> Well there are, the whole notion of cost-optimization is deeply embedded in our technology. Every time we have a conversation with a customer the first thing they ask, they ask about egress fees, is it really just the same price no matter how much I use it? And they think about all these different, like things about IOPS for example. Because the cloud providers have sort of indoctrinated the market to think about what their IOPS needs are. In order to get them to the appropriate price point. So there's a lot of optimization there, that I still don't think that the customers really got. How many people really understand how many IOPS a particular application really needs? And how many should I buy and if I buy the wrong number oh my god everything is messed up. So the ability to solve those types of problems for people. In a way that it becomes a non-issue is still. Certainly we're doing it for storage but there are all sorts of issues just like that for compute, there are all sorts of issues like that for networking as well. So anyone who's trying to build an application on top of this platform really needs to think about those things. Thankfully our customers don't have to worry about a whole slew of things because we've actually arbitrized out all of the unusual aspects of terrace of network providers versus cloud providers, access fees and transaction fees et cetera. Anyone whose doing this need to think about this in a very analytical way, which I don't think IT has been used to up until now. They overbuy as you know, and they continue to overbuy and as long as there's no complaints about performance, and there's no complaints about excesses in cost everything is fine. That's not how the cloud works. I think we're getting to the point now where any serious move to the cloud now is going to require a lot more thinking and a lot more analysis. There's still a mentality that the cloud is cheaper, and then when people try it, they quickly realize "Oh my god look at this bill." And it's forever, it's not like you can just shut everything off. It's every month. It's not just like you spent forty thousand dollars in a month and you can shut it off. So it's a difficult problem and I don't think IT's prepared, in general. >> I think one of the things we've seen at ClearSky over the last several years is the willingness that customers have to use the cloud for data protection. I think when we started it was sort of, you know, everything's going to the cloud, the whole thing. Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead, right? I think a lot of what people are actually doing is archival back-up DR, those are comfortable, state of the industry is sort of there should be a connection between the, wherever the Prem is for the customer and then out to the cloud for things that are longer tail kinds of things. The problem is, what if you have to pull the data back? So these are thing we think about everyday. >> Right, Ellen want to give me the final word, 20 million dollar phrase, the partnership with Equinex that's going to increase availability. What's this mean to your customers and to the company ClearSky as we look forward. >> Well I think one of the things that's true about the fact that we are a network centric kind of company is that the power of the network is in how many access points you have. So what this means is that customers who are national, and then global will have more opportunity now to be able to access things with ClearSky. And to grow and expand with us, which is great. We've seen tremendous expansion business this year. Really like a huge percentage has already expanded at least once if not multiple times with us. And that begs a lot of questions, well that's great you're here with us in this metro how do we get across the rest of our locations. So I think that's very valuable and also obviously from our side making sure we can handle the care and support that our customers are expecting. We're fully managed 24 by 7. So the bar is high, right? This is not the, here's a toolkit in the cloud go figure it out, this is we take care of everything we're SLAU and that's it. And obviously the customer wants to see that scale. >> Well Ellen and Laz, congratulations on all the progress you've made and always great to catch up with you on all the updates. >> Great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> Alright and thank you so much for watching and be sure to check out The Cube .net for all of our coverage including. We're at all the cloud shows. Huge show at Amazon Reinvent at the end of November be sure to tune into that and everything else. Feel free to reach out if you've got questions for our team or teams that you'd like us to cover other events we should be at. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the CUBE.