>>live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the Q covering Nutanix dot next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Okay, Welcome back, everyone. To the Bella Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark. We are kicking off day two of the cubes live coverage of dot Next Nutanix the Nutanix show dot Next I'm your host, Rebecca night sitting alongside stew. Minutemen, of course, Do. The word of the day is delight. And in Copenhagen, Denmark, which is a year after your voted the most happy, the happiest country, the country that coined the term Hugh Ge, which means a sense of well being. What do you think delight It means in the context of this show in particular. >>Yeah, Rebecca. Right yesterday I thought I only knew one word. Ivan tackle. It was, Thank you, of course, but Hugh GE is actually one I I'd read about cause it's interesting. The study of happiness. They actually have an institute here in Denmark on talk about it. As you said, the people are some of the happiest. You say, Wow, it's, you know, often cold and rainy and things like that. But they do look into the study of delight, and it's it's something that I find pretty fascinating. I read a book by Tony Shea, who's the founder and CEO of Zappos talked about. You know, we all talk about where you want to go in career and what you want to do. But you know, how do we actually understand happiness and bringing it to the Tannic Show? Definitely. There is a certain joy from the community here. We've had a lot of talk with some of the practitioners as well as some of Nutanix employees, they want to say customer focused. They wantto, you know, build these experiences as the CEO Dheeraj Pandey said. And therefore, it's not about that that product, because so much in technology it's that new, shiny thing that we understand. Oh, it's never a silver bullet, and there's always the repercussions. And how do I have to reorganize? Things change so fast and technology. But if I could have experienced with the example get used all the time, is you know what would transform when we move to you know, the smartphone revolutionized by the iPhone or so many other things that just pull together, that that simplicity that gets baked in the design, something we've talked about both, You know, in Denmark as well as from the Nutanix discussion s o. So pulling those pieces together kind of a left brain right brain all pulling together. It has been interesting. And yeah, it gives kind of a highlight as to why Copenhagen was a nice place. Definitely. We've enjoyed, you know, being here at the show. >>Absolutely. And I think you're you're you're you're right on or we'll be talking a lot about designed today because delight is one of those again. It's something ineffable quality. You don't know you're being delighted because you're just being delighted. It's just nice at the ease of use. And in Monica Kumar, who we had on the show yesterday, of course, was talking about all all of the elements that go into that, taking 10 clicks and making enemies e swipe, eliminating downtime just a kn easy, intuitive use, which is which is absolutely what goes into delighting customers. We're gonna have a teacher. I'm a Chandran on the show today, talking Maura about designed to, uh, tell me about the energy of the show. We're gonna get into Nutanix a bit more today too. But just what do you think about the energy? Ah, what what you're feeling. >>So there are certain shows that we go to where we know that you have the true believers at the show. Splunk sw dot com is one where they all love the geeky T shirts that they get and people enjoy their service. Now, another one. A lot of the software companies it transformed the way they think. And then then they work. S O. You know, Dave wanted for years would tell me about that community community I know. Well, the VM world community. This reminds me of earlier days in VM World VM wear, you know, is dominant in their space. But, >>you know, >>they're shows. Not exactly. You know, a There are parties and their friends that we get together and one of the best communities in the industry. But, you know, it's a much, much bigger company. When you're 60,000 people and things like that, there's not as much of the kind of smaller, you know, touch and feel. You know, we heard from Monica yesterday. She talked about right when she joined the company. You know, somebody she knew would reached out about an issue that need to be worked out and just seamless, all swarming to solve that issue. Something, you know, I've done it. Some companies I've worked out where you know what teams pulling for. You know, the customer comes first and you get things done. So the customers here definitely are highly engaged, very excited because the experience of using the solution has made their lives easier and transfer help them transform their business. You know, that goal of I t helping toe not only support but be a driver of the business is exciting. >>So So exactly. And this is what we're gonna be talking about today to new tenants. They have this passionate customer base which they will need as they are a maturing company. So not now They're 10. They're hitting their their tween age years. So talk a little bit about what you're seeing about Nutanix trajectory and what it needs to do to to hit those next steps. >>S o. You know, the discussion for the last two years has been the move from removing hardware for something that they sold, which was always it was the software that was important and changes really passed along the hardware to this move to subscription, and along with that, it isn't just the same core a OS Nutanix software and some of the pieces that go with it. But really, they're expanding beyond infrastructure software to some of the application software. So yesterday we had Nikola, who's the CEO of Frame Frame, is desktop as a service S O. That was the type of software that sat on top of Nutanix or on top of the cloud expanding in that market. We're going have Bala on today to talk about ERA its database database absolutely an application that's that on Nutanix. But now they're building some of these applications. It's interesting. Almost 10 years ago, VM where tried to get into the application space they bought an email company they bought a social company on. Really, that didn't pan out well for them. Amazon does not sell many of their. They sell some of their own application, but most of them are an open source solution that is then delivered as opposed to the building applications. On top of a building applications is that the realm of Oracle on Microsoft and IBM have these, so it positions Nutanix in it in a little bit of different space. And how much are they going to have the customers that bought the platform that will build the service's leverage? The service is on top of them versus how many customers will come to them because of that application. Say, Oh, well, you know, database is one of those challenging things. If I could just have a nice, simple solution and maybe that's in the cloud. Or maybe it is on, you know, Nutanix environment in their data center on their server of choice. You know there are some Pastor Newtown is going forward to a much broader tam, but it's much broader competition, too, and you know their sales force and there's go to market their there's partners we're gonna spend a little time talking about, like the systems integrators today s Oh, it is a big, vast sea out there in the I T World. Nutanix has carved out a nice position where they are today, but, you know, opening up a number of areas of adjacent seas that they're going. So as they ride the software wave that they're pushing, it's an interesting one to set them up for the next 10 years. >>Absolutely. So what do you see are the biggest headwinds facing Nutanix right now. But as we've said, they have a passionate customer base. They've on the main stage. This morning we heard about their high net promoter score. We heard about there. They're amazing customer retention s o much repeat business. What do you think, though, Is is sort of the main What should be keeping dear Ege Pandey up at night. >>So one of the biggest challenges is you know, your 5000 person company. How do you keep growing at that pace? How can I hire we heard in Europe? It is a you know what it is a challenging market to hire. You are no longer that small startup that I'm going to get some AIPO bang for Buck. Now I'm a public company, you know, and you know, their stock incentives and things you can do. But Nutanix has a number of areas that they think they have exciting ways for people to be a part of some of these next waves that they're pushing. But that that is a big challenge. There is really cooperative in out there. We've spent much time talking about the ecosystem. They have a decent ecosystem, but their position in the cloud world Is there a player amongst many, many Betty, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of companies out there When if you go to Amazon, reinvent you confined the Nutanix booth. But it's not one of the big players there you go to the Microsoft show, go to the Google shows. They are a small piece of that. And when we asked peerages, How do you position yourself and how do you, you know, get awareness in this environment? So when they had to down quarters, it was definitely marketing and sales, where the areas that they said they could not hire fast enough so they are going to need to invest more and they still aren't profitable. So we're almost three years past the I po. If you look at the transition to software, their revenues have been relatively flat. Their margins have been going up. But the market will not reward them if they can't keep the growth going. And, you know, start getting closer to that full profitability. >>Exactly, exactly. Well, these are all gonna be topics that we're going to dig deeper into today. We've got a great lineup of gas. And then, of course, the final keynote speaker. One of your faves. >>Yeah, Well, Kit Harington. Rebecca, What did you think of Carolina? >>She was fantastic. And I think what was really exciting about the interviewee, er was name Is Hae a friend of yours? Uh was It was how he was really drawing these analogies to Nutanix journey. It's similar to that of a professional athlete, and that is someone who who's getting knocked down and has to get back up against someone who's hit winning a few things, winning some business here, but she still needs >>She made a great point where said right. You know, the day after she was named number one, her father was like, Well, you need to get lower. You need to do this. And she's like, Wait, I'm number one. But you have to keep working or everyone will come after you. And so Nutanix is in a strong position, but absolutely they know that they need to keep working and training and improving listening to their customers to move forward. >>Absolutely, absolutely. So so. I think she had a lot of lessons for for Newtown Road, for the Nutanix community to so stew. I'm excited. For Day two, We're gonna have a lot of great custom, bloody great customers and Nutanix people on the show today to >>looking forward to it. And they had a fun party last night. They had the DJs were bumping. They had nice international food, some art and some interesting people dressed up as >>hedges and food >>and things walking around. So it was a little bit weird, but a lot of fun. >>And they're the happiest country in the world. What can we say? I'm Rebecca Knight. First Amendment, stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of Nutanix dot next.

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering micron insight 2018 brought to you by micron welcome back to the San Francisco Bay everybody we saw the Sun rise in the bay this morning of an hour so we're gonna see the Sun set this gorgeous setting here at Pier 27 Nob Hills up there the Golden Gate Bridge over there and of course we have this gorgeous view of the bay you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we're covering micron insight 2018 ai accelerating intelligence a lot of talk on on on memory and storage but a lot more talk around the future of AI so we got a great discussion here on the auto business and how AI is powering that business Jeff Bader is here is the corporate vice president and general manager of the embedded business unit at micron good to see you again Jeff thanks for coming on and Simon and rigor is the vice president BMW and he's also joined by Vijay Nadkarni who was the global head of AI and augmented reality at Visteon which is a supplier to Automobile Manufacturers gentlemen welcome to the cube thanks so much for coming on thank you so you guys had a panel earlier today which was pretty extensive and just a lot of talk about AI how AI will be a platform for interacting with the vehicle the consumer the driver interacting with the vehicle also talked a lot about autonomous vehicles but Simon watch you kick it off your role at BMW let's let's just start there it will do the same for Vijay and then get into it research portion that we do globally in which is represented here in North America and so obviously we're working on autonomous vehicles as well as integrating assistance into the car and basically what we're trying to do is to get use AI as much as possible in all of the behavioral parts of the vehicle that uses have an expectations towards being more personalized and having a personalized experience whereas we have a solid portion of the vehicle is going to be as a deterministic anesthetic as we have it before like all of the safety aspects for example and that is what we're working on here right now Vijay Visteon is a supplier to BMW and other auto manufacturers yes we are a tier 1 supplier so we basically don't make cars but we supply auto manufacturers of which BMW is one and my role is essentially AI technology adversity on and also augmented reality so in AI there are basically two segments that we cater to and one of them is that almost driving which is fully our biggest segment and the second one is infotainment and in that the whole idea is to give the driver a better experience in the car by way of recommendations or productivity improvements and such so that is so my team basically develops the technology and then we centrally integrate that into our products so so not necessarily self-driving it's really more about the experience inside the vehicle that is the and then on the autonomous driving side we of course very much are involved with the autonomous driving technology which is tested with detecting objects are also making the proper maneuvers for the Waker and we're definitely going to talk about that now Jeff you sell to the embedded industry of fooding automobile manufacturers we hear that cars have I forget the number of microprocessors but there's also a lot of memory and storage associate yeah I mean if you follow the chain you have our simon representing the OEMs Vijay represented the Tier one suppliers were supplier to those Tier one suppliers in essence right so so we're providing memory and storage that then goes in to the car in as you said across all of the different sort of control and engine drone and computing units within the car in particular into that infotainment application and increasingly into the a TAS or advanced driver assistance systems that are leading toward autonomous driving so there's a lot of AI or some AI anyway in vehicles today right presumably yeah affected David who did a wonderful job on the panel he was outstanding but he kind of got caught up in having multiple systems like a like an apple carplay your own system I actually have a bit about kind of a BMW have a mini because I'm afraid it's gonna be self-driving cars and I just want to drive a drive on car for this take it away from me though but but you push a button if you want to talk to a Syrian yeah push another button if you want to talk to the mini I mean it's it's gonna use it for different use cases right exactly may I is also about adaption and is also about integrating so AI is is is coming with you with the devices that you have with you anyway right so your might be an Alexa user rather than a Google assistant user and you would have that expectation to be able to ask to chat with your Alexa in your car as well that's why we have them in the vehicle also we have an own voice assistant that we recently launched in Paris Motorshow which augments the experience that you have with your own assistants because it factors in all of the things you can do with the car so you can say there is a solid portion of AI already in the vehicle it's mainly visible in the infotainment section right and of course I remember the first time I'm sure you guys experienced to that the the car braked on my behalf and then kind of freaked me out but then I kind of liked it too and that's another form of machine intelligence well that out well that counts for you that had not that has not necessarily been done by AI because in in in let's say self-driving there is a portion of pretty deterministic rule based behavior and exactly that one like hitting an object at parking you don't need AI to determine to hit the right there is no portion or of AI necessary in order to improve that behavior whereas predicting the best driving strategy for your 20-mile ride on the highway this is where AI is really beneficial in fact I was at a conference last week in Orlando it's the Splunk show and it was a speaker from BMW talking about what you're doing in that regard yeah it's all about the data right learning about it and and in turning data into insights into better behavior yes into better expected behavior from whatever the customer wants so Vijay you were saying before that you actually provide technology for autonomous vehicles all right I got a question for you could it autonomous - could today's state of autonomous vehicles pass a driver's test no no would you let it take one no it depends I mean there are certain companies like way mo for example that do a lot but I still don't think way mo can take a proper driver's test as of today but it is of course trying to get there but what we are essentially doing is taking baby steps first and I think you may be aware of the SAE levels so level 1 level 2 level 3 level 4 SF and a 5 so we and most of the companies in the industry right now are really focusing more on the level 2 through level 4 and a few companies like Google or WAV or other and uber and such are focusing on the level 5 we actually believe that the level 2 through 4 is the market would be ready for that essentially in the shorter term whereas the level 5 will take a little while to get that so everybody Christmas and everyone we're gonna have autonomous because I'm not gonna ask you that question because there's such a spectrum of self-driving but I want to ask you the question differently and I ask each of you when do you think that driving your own car will become the exception rather than than the rule well I'd rather prefer actually to rephrase the question maybe to where not when because we're on a highway setting this question can be answered precisely in roughly two to three years the the functionality will kick in and then it's going to be the renewal of the vehicles so if you answer if you if you ask where then there is an answer within the next five years definitely if we talk about an urban downtown scenario the question when is hard to answer yeah well so my question is more of a social question it is a technology question because I'm not giving up my stick shift high example getting my 17 year old to get his permit was like kicking a bird out of the nest I did drive his permanent driver on staff basically with me right so why but I mean when I was a kid that was freedom 16 years old you racing out and there is a large generational group growing up right now that doesn't necessarily see it as a necessity right so not driving your own car I think car share services right share who bore the so and so forth are absolutely going to solve a large portion of the technology of the transportation challenge for a large portion of the population I think but I agree with the the earlier answers of it's gonna be where you're not driving as opposed to necessarily win and I think we heard today of course the you know talking about I think the number is 40,000 fatalities on the roadways in the u.s. in the u.s. yeah everybody talks about how autonomous vehicles are going to help attack that problem um but it strikes me talk about autonomous cars it why don't we have autonomous carts like in a hospital or even autonomous robots that aren't relying on lines or stripes or beacons you one would think that that would come before in our autonomous vehicle am I missing something are there are there there there systems out there that that I just haven't seen well I don't know if you've ever seen videos of Amazon distribution centers yeah but they're there they're going to school on lines and beacons and they are they're not really autonomous yeah that's fair that's fair yeah so will we see autonomous carts before we see autonomous cars I think it's a question what problem that solves necessarily yeah it's just as easy for them to know where something is yeah you think about microns fabs every one of our fabs is is completely automated as a material handling system that runs up and down around the ceilings handling all the wafers and all the cartridges the wafers moving it from one tool to the next tool to the next tool there's not people anymore carrying that around or even robots on the floor right but it's a guided track system that only can go to certain you know certain places well the last speaker today ii was talking about it I remember when robots couldn't climb stairs and now they can do backflips and you know you think about the list of things that humans can do that computers can't do it let's get smaller and smaller every year so it's kind of scary to think about one hand is that does the does the concept of Byzantine fault-tolerance you guys familiar with that does that does that come into play here you guys know what that's about I don't know what it is exactly so that's a problem and I first read about it with it's the Byzantine general problem if you have nine generals for one Oh attack for one retreat and the ninth sends a message to half to retreat or not and then you don't have the full force of the attack so the concept is if you're in a self-driving boat within the vehicle and within the ecosystem around the city then you're collectively solving the problem so there these are challenging math that need to be worked out and and I'm not saying I'm a skeptic but I just wanted more I read about it the more hurdles we have there's some isolated examples of where AI I think fits really well and is gonna solve problems today but this singularity of vehicle seems to be we have a highly regulated environment obviously public transportation or public roads right are a highly regulated environment so it's like it's different than curating playlists or whatever right this is not so much regulated traffic and legislation isn't there yet so especially and it's it's designed for humans right traffic cars roads are designed for human to use them and so the adoption to they the design of any legislation any public infrastructure would be completely different if we didn't drive as humans but we have it we have machines drive them so why are robots and carts not coming because the infrastructure really is designed for humans and so I think that's what's going to be the ultimate slow down is how fast we as a society that comes up with legislation with acceptance of behavioral aspects that are driven by AI on how fast we adopt it technically I think it can happen faster than yeah yeah it's not a technology problem as much as it is the public policy insurance companies think about one of the eventually you can think of from from let's say even level four capable car on a highway is platooning yeah right instead of having X number of car lengths to the turn fryer you just stack them up and they're all going on in a row that sounds great until Joe Blow with their 20 year old Honda you know starts to pull into that Lane right so you either say this Lane is not allowed for that or you create special infrastructure essentially that isn't designed for humans there is more designed specifically for the for the machine driven car right how big is this market it's it feels like it's enormous I don't know how do you look at the tan we can talk to the memory I can talk the memory storage part of it right but today memory and storage all of memory storage for automotive is about a two and a half billion dollar market that is gonna triple in the next three years and probably beyond that my visibility is not so good maybe yours is better for sure but it then really driven by adoption rate and how fast that starts to penetrate through the car of OAM lines and across the different car in vijay your firm is when were you formed how long you've been around or vistas be around basically since around 2001 okay we were part of relatively old spun out whiskey on that at work right okay so so alright so that's been around forever yeah for this Greenfield for you for your your group right where's the aw this is transitional right so is it is it is it you try not to get disrupted or you trying to be the disrupter or is it just all sort of incremental as a 101 year old company obviously people think about you as being ripe for disruption and I think we do quite well in terms of renewing ourselves coming from aeroplane business to a motorcycle business to garbage and so I think the answer is are we fast enough I'll be fast enough in adoption and on the other hand it's fair to say that BMW with all of its brands is part of a premium thing and so it's not into the mass transportation so everything that's going to be eaten up by something like multi occupancy vehicle mass transportation in a smaller effort right this is probably not going to hurt the premium brand so much as a typical econo type of boxy car exciting time so thanks so much for coming on the cube you got a run appreciate thank you so much okay thanks for watching everybody we are out from San Francisco you've watched the cube micron inside 2018 check out Silicon angle comm for all the published research the cube dotnet as well you'll find these videos will keep on calm for all the research thanks for watching everybody we'll see you next time you

>> Announcer: Live from midtown Manhattan, it's theCUBE covering BigData New York City 2017. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media, and its ecosystem sponsors. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our day one, at Big Data NYC, of three days of wall to wall coverage. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, with my co-hosts Jim Kobielus and Peter Burris. We do this event every year, this is theCUBE's BigData NYC. It's our event that we run in New York City. We have a lot of great content, we have theCUBE going live, we don't go to Strata anymore. We do our own event in conjunction, they have their own event. You can go pay over there and get the booth space, but we do our media event and attract all the influencers, the VIPs, the executives, the entrepreneurs, we've been doing it for five years, we're super excited, and thank our sponsors for allowing us to get here and really appreciate the community for continuing to support theCUBE. We're here to wrap up day one what's going on in New York, certainly we've had a chance to check out the Strata situations, Strata Data, which is Cloudera, and O'Reilly, mainly O'Reilly media, they run that, kind of old school event, guys. Let's kind of discuss the impact of the event in context to the massive growth that's going outside of their event. And their event is a walled garden, you got to pay to get in, they're very strict. They don't really let a lot of people in, but, okay. Outside of that the event it going global, the activity around big data is going global. It's more than Hadoop, we certainly thought about that's old news, but what's the big trend this year? As the horizontally scalable cloud enters the equation. >> I think the big trend, John, is the, and we've talked about in our research, is that we have finally moved away from big data, being associated with a new type of infrastructure. The emergence of AI, deep learning, machine learning, cognitive, all these different names for relatively common things, are an indications that we're starting to move up into people thinking about applications, people thinking about services they can use to get access, or they can get access to build their applications. There's not enough skills. So I think that's probably the biggest thing is that the days of failure being measured by whether or not you can scale your cluster up, are finally behind us. We're using the cloud, other resources, we have enough expertise, the technologies are becoming simpler and more straightforward to do that. And now we're thinking about how we're going to create value out of all of this, which is how we're going to use the data to learn something new about what we're doing in the organization, combine it with advanced software technologies that actually dramatically reduce the amount of work that's necessary to make a decision. >> And the other trend I would say, on top of that, just to kind of put a little cherry on top of that, kind of the business focus which is again, not the speeds and feeds, although under the hood, lot of great innovation going on from deep learning, and there's a ton of stuff. However, the conversation is the business value, how it's transforming work and, but the one thing that nobody's talking about is, this is why I'm not bullish on these one shows, one show meets all kind of thing like O'Reilly Media does, because there's multiple personas in a company now in the ecosystem. There are now a variety of buyers of some products. At least in the old days, you'd go talk to the IT CIO and you're in. Not anymore. You have an analytics person, a Chief Data Officer, you might have an IT person, you might have a cloud person. So you're seeing a completely broader set of potential buyers that are driving the change. We heard Paxata talk about that. And this is a dynamic. >> Yeah, definitely. We see a fair amount of, what I'm sensing about Strata, how it's evolving these big top shows around data, it's evolving around addressing a broader, what we call maker culture. It's more than software developers. It's business analysts, it's the people who build the hardware for the internet of things into which AI and machine learning models are being containerized and embedded. I've, you know, one of the takeaways from today so far, and the keynotes are tomorrow at Strata, but I've been walking the atrium at the Javits Center having some interesting conversations, in addition, of course, to the ones we've been having here at theCUBE. And what I'm notic-- >> John: What are those hallway conversations that you're having? >> Yeah. >> What's going on over there? >> Yeah, what I've, the conversations I've had today have been focused on, the chief trend that I'm starting to sense here is that the productionization of the machine learning development process or pipeline, is super hot. It spans multiple data platforms, of course. You've got a bit of Hadoop in the refinery layer, you've got a bit of in-memory columnar databases, like the Act In discussed at their own, but the more important, not more important, but just as important is that what users are looking at is how can we build these DevOps pipelines for continuous management of releases of machine learning models for productionization, but also for ongoing evaluation and scoring and iteration and redeployment into business applications. You know there's, I had conversations with Mapbar, I had conversations with IBM, I mean, these were atrium conversations about things that they are doing. IBM had an announcement today on the wires and so forth with some relevance to that. And so I'm seeing a fair, I'm hearing, I'm sensing a fair amount of It's The Apps, it's more than just Hadoop. But it's very much the flow of these, these are the core pieces, like AI, core pieces of intellectual property in the most disruptive applications that are being developed these days in all manner, in business and industry in the consumer space. >> So I did not go over to the show floor yet, I've not been over to the Atrium. But, I'll bet you dollars to donuts this is indicative of something that always happens in a complex technology environment. And again, this is something we've thought about particularly talked about here on theCUBE, in fact we talked to Paxata about it a little bit as well. And that is, as an organization gains experience, it starts to specialize. But there's always moments, there' always inflection points in the process of gaining that experience. And by that, or one of the indications of that is that you end up with some people starting to specialize, but not quite sure what they're specializing in yet. And I think that's one of the things that's happening right now is that the skills gap is significant. At the same time that the skills gap is being significant, we're seeing people start to declare their specializations that they don't have skills, necessarily, to perform yet. And the tools aren't catching up. So there's still this tension model, open source, not necessarily focusing on the core problem. Skills looking for tools, and explosion in the number of tools out there, not focused on how you simplify, streamline, and put into operation. How all these things work together. It's going to be an interesting couple of years, but the good news, ultimately, is that we are starting to see for the first time, even on theCUBE interviews today, the emergence of a common language about how we think about the characteristics of the problem. And I think that that heralds a new round of experience and a new round of thinking about what is all the business analysts, the data scientists, the developer, the infrastructure person, business person. >> You know, you bring up that comment, those comments, about the specialists and the skills. We talked, Jim and I talked on the segment this morning about tool shed. We're talking about there are so many tools out there, and everyone loves a good tool, a hammer. But the old expression is if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, that's cliche. But what's happened is there are a plethora of tools, right, and tools are good. Platforms are better. As people start to replatformize everything they could have too many tools. So we asked the C Chief Data Officer, he goes yeah, I try to manage the tool tsunami, but his biggest issue was he buys a hammer, and it turns into a lawnmower. That's a vendor mentality of-- >> What a truck. Well, but that's a classic example of what I'm talking about. >> Or someone's trying to use a hammer to mow the lawn right? Again, so this is what you're getting at. >> Yeah! >> The companies out there are groping for relevance, and that's how you can see the pretenders from the winners. >> Well, a tool, fundamentally, is pedagogical. A tool describes the way work is going to be performed, and that's been a lot of what's been happening over the course of the past few years. Now, businesses that get more experience, they're describing their own way of thinking throughout a problem. And they're still not clear on how to bring the tools together because the tools are being generated, put into the marketplace by an expanding array of folks and companies, and they're now starting to shuffle for position. But I think ultimately, what we're going to see happen over the next year and I think this is an inflection point, going back to this big tent notion, is the idea that ultimately we are going to see greater specialization over the next few years. My guess is that this year will probably, should get better, or should get bigger, I'm not certain it will because it's focused on the problems that we already solved and not moving into the problems that we need to focus on. >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of the problems I have with the O'Reilly show is that they try to throw default leadership out there, and there's some smart people that go to that, but the problem is is that it's too monetization, they try to make too much money from the event when this action's happening. And this is where the tool becomes, the hammer becomes a lawnmower, because what's happening is that the vendor's trying to stay alive. And you mentioned this earlier, to your point, the customers that are buyers of the technology don't want to have something that's not going to be a fit, that's going to be agile from us. They don't want the hammer that they bought to turn into something that they didn't buy it for. And sometimes, teams can't make that leap, skillset-wise, to literally pivot overnight. Especially as a startup. So this is where the selection of the companies makes a big difference. And a lot of the clients, a lot of customers that we're serving on the end user side are reaching the conclusion that the tools themselves, while important, are clearly not where the value is. The value is in how they put them together for their business. And that's something that's going to have to, again, that's a maturation process, roles, responsibilities, the chief data officer, they're going to have a role in that or not, but ultimately, they're going to have to start finding their pipelines, their process for ingestion out to analysis. >> Let me get your reaction, you guys, your reactions to this tape. Because one of the things that I heard today, and I think this validates a bigger trend as we talk about the landscape of the markup from the event to how people are behaving and promoting and building products and companies. The pattern that I'm hearing, we said it multiple times on theCUBE today and one from the guy who's basically reading the script, is, in his interview, explaining 'cause it's so factual, I asked him the straight-up question, how do you deal with suppliers? What's happening is the trend is don't show me sizzle. I want to see the steak. Don't sell me hype, I got too many business things to work on right now, I need to nail down some core things. I got application development, I got security to build out big time, and then I got all those data channels that I need, I don't have time for you to sell me a hammer that might not be a hammer in the future! So I need real results, I need real performance that's going to have a business impact. That is the theme, and that trumps the hype. I see that becoming a huge thing right now. Your thoughts, reactions, guys-- >> Well I'll start-- >> What's your reaction then? True or false on the trend? Be-- >> Peter: True! >> Get down to business. >> I'll say that much, true, but go ahead. >> I'll say true as well, but let me just add some context. I think a show like O'Reilly Strata is good up to a point, especially to catalyze an industry, a growing industry like big data's own understanding of it, of the value that all these piece parts, Hadoop and Spark and so forth, can add, can provide when deployed in a unit according to some emerging patterns, whatever. But at a certain point where a space like this becomes well-established, it just becomes a pure marketing event. And customers, at a certain point say, you know, I come here for ideas about things that I can do in my environ, my business, that could actually many ways help me to do new things. You know, you can't get that at a marketing-oriented, you can get that, as a user, more at a research-oriented show. When it's an emerging market, like let's say Spark has been, like the Spark Summit was in the beginning, those are kind of like, when industries go through the phase those are sort of in the beginning, sort of research-focused shows where industry, the people who are doing the development of this new architecture, they talk ideas. Now I think in 2017, where we're at now, is what the idea is everybody's trying to get their heads around, they're all around AI, what the heck that is. For a show like an O'Reilly Ready show to have relevance in a market that's in this much ferment of really innovation around AI and deep learning, there needs to be a core research focus that you don't get at this point in the lifecycle of Strata, for example. So that's my take on what's going on. >> So, my take is this. And first of all, I agree with everything you said, so it's not in opposition to anything. Many years ago I had this thought that I think still is very true. And that is the value of industry, the value of infrastructure is inversely correlated with the degree to which anybody knows anything about it. So if I know a lot about my infrastructure, it's not creating a lot of business value. In fact, more often than not, it's not working, which is why people end up knowing more about it. But the problem is, the way that technology has always been sold is as a differentiated, some sort of value-add thing. So you end up with this tension. And this is an application domain, a very, very complex application domain like big data. The tension is, my tool is so great that, and it's differentiating all those other stuff, yeah but it becomes valuable to me if and only if nobody knows it exists. So I think, and one of the reasons why I bring this up, John, is many of the companies that are in the big data space today that are most successful are companies that are positioning themselves as a service. There's a lot of interesting SaaS applications for big data analysis, pipeline management, all the other things you can talk about, that are actually being rendered as a service, and not as a product. So that all you need to know is what the tool does. You don't need to know the tool. And I don't know that that's necessarily going to last, but I think it's very, very interesting that a lot of the more successful companies that we're talking to are themselves mere infrastructure SaaS companies. >> Because-- >> AtScale is interesting, though. They came in as a service. But their service has an interesting value proposition. They can allow you to essentially virtualize the data to play with it, so people can actually sandbox data. And if it gets traction, they can then double-down on it. So to me that's a freebie. To me, I'm a customer, I got to love that kind of environment because you're essentially giving almost a developer-like environment-- >> Peter: Value without necessarily-- >> Yeah, the cost, and the guy gets the signal from the marketplace, his customer, of what data resolves. To me that's a very cool scene. I don't, you saying that's bad, or? >> No, no, I think it's interesting. I think it's-- >> So you're saying service is-- >> So what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is, that the value of infrastructure is inversely proportional to the degree to which anybody knows anything about it. But you've got a bunch of companies who are selling, effectively, infrastructure software, so it's a value-add thing, and that creates a problem. And a lot of other companies not only have the ability to sell something as a service as opposed to a product, they can put the service froward, and people are using the service and getting what they need out of it without knowing anything about the tool. >> I like that. Let me just maybe possibly restate what you just said. When a market goes toward a SaaS go-to-market delivery model for solutions, the user, the buyer's focus is shifted away from what the solution can do, I mean, how it works under the cover. >> Peter: Quote, value-add-- >> To what it can do potentially for you. >> The business, that's right. >> But you're not going to, don't get distracted by the implementation details. You have then as a user become laser-focused on, wow, there's a bunch of things that this can do for me. I don't care how it works, really. You SaaS provider, you worry about that stuff. I can worry now about somehow extracting the value. I'm not distracted. >> This show, or this domain, is one of the domains where SaaS has moved, just as we're thinking about moving up the stack, the SaaS business model is moving down the stack in the big data world. >> All right, so, in summary, the stack is changing. Predictions for the next few days. What are we going to see come out of Strata Data, and our BigData NYC? 'Cause remember, this show was always a big hit, but it's very clear from the data on our dashboards, we're seeing all the social data. Microsoft Ignite is going on, and Microsoft Azure, just in the past few years, has burst on the scene. Cloud is sucking the oxygen out of the big data event. Or is it? >> I doubt it was sucking it out of the event, but you know, theCUBE is in, theCUBE is not at Ignite. Where's theCUBE right now? >> John: BigData NYC. >> No, it's here, but it's also at the Splunk show. >> John: That's true. >> And isn't it interesting-- >> John: We're sucking the data out of two events. >> Did a lot of people coming in, exactly. A lot of people coming-- >> We're live streaming in a streaming data kind of-- >> John just said we suck, there's that record saying that. >> We're sucking all the data. >> So we are-- >> We're sharing data. These videos are data-driven. >> Yeah, absolutely, but the point is, ultimately, is that, is that Splunk is an example of a company that's putting forward a service about how you do this and not necessarily a product focus. And a lot of the folks that are coming on theCUBE here are also going on to theCUBE down in Washington D.C., which is where the Splunk show's at. And so I think one of the things, one of the predictions I'll make, is that we're going to hear over the next couple of days more companies talk about their SaaS trash. >> Yeah, I mean I just think, I agree with you, but I also agree with the comments about the technology coming together. And here's one thing I want to throw on the table. I've gotten the sense a few times about connecting the dots on it, we'll put it out publicly for comment right now. The role that communities will play outside of developer, is going to be astronomical. I think we're seeing signals, certainly open-source communities have been around for a long time. They continue to grow shoulders of giants before them. Even these events like O'Reilly, which are a small community that they rely on is now not the only game in town. We're seeing the notion of a community strategy in things like Blockchain, you're seeing it in business, you're seeing people rolling out their recruitment to say, data scientists. You're seeing a community model developing in business, yes or no? >> Yes, but I would say, I would put it this way, John. That it's always been there. The difference is that we're now getting enough experience with things that have occurred, for example, collaboration, communal, communal collaboration in open-source software that people are now saying, and they've developed a bunch of social networking techniques where they can actually analyze how those communities work together, but now they're saying, hmm, I've figured out how to do an assessment analysis understanding that community. I'm going to see if I can take that same concept and apply it over here to how sales works, or how B-to-B engagement works, or how marketing gets conducted, or how sales and marketing work together. And they're discovering that the same way of thinking is actually very fruitful over there. So I totally agree, 100%. >> So they don't rely on other people's version of a community, they can essentially construct their own. >> They are, they are-- >> John: Or enabling their own. >> That's right, they are bringing that approach to thinking about a community-driven business and they're applying it to a lot of new ways, and that's very exciting. >> As the world gets connected with mobile and internet of things as we're seeing, it's one big online community. We're seeing things, I'm writing a post right now, what you could, what B-to-B markets should learn from the fake news problem. And that is content and infrastructure are now contextually tied together. >> Peter: Totally. >> And related. The payload of the fake news is also related to the gamification of the network effect, hence the targeting, hence the weaponization. >> Hey, we wrote the three Cs, we wrote a piece on the three Cs of strategy a year and a half ago. Content, community, context. And at the end of the day, the most important thing to what you're saying about, is that there is, you know, right now people talk about social networking. Social media, you think Facebook. Facebook is a community with a single context, stay in touch with your friends. >> Connections. >> Connections. But what you're really saying is that for the first time we're now going to see an enormous amount of technology being applied to the fullness of all the communities. We're going to see a lot more communities being created with the software, each driven by what content does, creates value, against the context of how it works, where the community's defined in terms of what do we do? >> Let me focus on the fact that bringing, using community as a framework for understanding how the software world is evolving. The software world is evolving towards, I've said this many times in my work about a resurge, the data scientists or data people, data science skills are the core developers in this new era. Now, what is data science all about at its heart? Machine learning, building, and training machine learning models. And so training machine learning models is everything towards making sure that they are fit for their predicted purpose of classification. Training data, where you get all the training data from to feed all, to train all these models? Where do you get all the human resources to label, to do the labeling of the data sets, and so forth, that you need communities, crowdsourcing and whatnot, and you need sustainable communities that can supply the data and the labeling services, and so forth, to be able to sustain the AI and machine learning revolution. So content, creating data and so forth, really rules in this new era, like-- >> The interest in machine learning is at an all-time high, I guess. >> Jim: Yeah, oh yeah, very much so. >> Got it, I agree. I think the social grab, interest grab, value grab is emerging. I think communities, content, context, communities are relevant. I think a lot of things are going to change, and that the scuttlebutt that I'm hearing in this area now is it's not about the big event anymore. It's about the digital component. I think you're seeing people recognize that, but they still want to do the face-to-face. >> You know what, that's right. That's right, they still want, let's put it this way. That there are, that the whole point of community is we do things together. And there are some things that are still easier to do together if we get together. >> But B-to-B marketing, you just can't say, we're not going to do events when there's a whole machinery behind events. Legion batch marketing, we call it. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in that funnel. You can't just say hey, we're going to do a blog post. >> People still need to connect. >> So it's good, but there's some online tools that are happening, so of course. You wanted to say something? >> Yeah, I just want to say one thing. Face to face validates the source of expertise. I don't really fully trust an expert, I can't in my heart engage with them, 'til I actually meet them and figure out in person whether they really do have the goods, or whether they're repurposing some thinking that they got from elsewhere and they gussy it up. So face, there's no substitute for face-to-face to validate the expertise. The expertise that you value enough to want to engage in your solution, or whatever it might be. >> Awesome, I agree. Online activities, the content, we're streaming the data, theCUBE, this is our annual event in New York City. We've got three days of coverage, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, here, theCUBE in Manhattan, right around the corner from Strata Hadoop, the Javits Center of influencers. We're here with the VIPs, with the entrepreneurs, with the CEOs and all the top analysts from WikiBon and around the community. Be there tomorrow all day, day one wrap up is done. Thanks for watching, see you tomorrow. (rippling music)

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from Washington, D.C., it's the Cube. Covering .conf2017 brought to you by Splunk. >> Well, welcome inside the Walter Washington Convention Center here. We're at Splunk .conf2017, Washington, D.C. the nation's capital rolling out its red carpet. For Splunk, first time ever the show's been here and certainly I know from the 7000 plus who are here, so far it's a big thumbs up. John Walls and Dave Velante, and we're joined as well by Brian Goldfarb, who is the Chief Marketing officer of Splunk. And Brian, good to see you this morning sir. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, I just, Dave and I were talking about the vibe here, it's always so positive right? Anytime you're around a Splunk event. But coming here, Washington, you've got great attendance I mean your take so far on what you're feeling and what you're seeing. >> It's been unbelievable, we're so blessed with customers and users that really love our products. And helping each other and bringing them all together creates an environment that's unlike anything I've ever seen in my entire career, and I've been in this industry for a long time, I've done a lot of shows. There's an electricity, the information sharing, the conversation, and you kind of see it everywhere you go. >> Well I mean you've, came from the biggest of all shows, right? With Sales Force but, whole different vibe here, I mean really intimate. I was saying off camera this is our seventh year with the Cube. And we were following Splunk, pre IPO. >> Brian: Right. >> Now you're a you know, 1.2 plus billion dollar company, so you have to change in a lot of ways, but you're trying to keep that culture of intimacy. How do you do that as a CMO and as an organization? >> I mean ultimately that's the biggest challenge, is when you grow from a show that's 500 people to a show that's over 7000, how do you keep the roots that, about what makes it great? And intimacy is exactly the right word. How do you capture that, how do you make that real? And for us, there's a couple things. You know, one is just information sharing. It's intimate when people are talking to other people about the great use cases and things they've done with our products. Because Splunk lets you do anything, and so, when customer A says, "Oh I used to, I do it this way." And customer B sees that, it's incredible and you see that through the sessions, we talked about this before. Like so much user generated content. The second thing is all these cool kind of off the beaten paths activities. We have a thing called Boss of the Sock, and Boss of the Knock, which are curated games effectively. Big massive multi-player games, where everyone gets in the room, it started yesterday evening at 7:30 pm, it wrapped just after midnight, and you walked in, and people were glued to their screens trying to win, it's capture the flag style. It was unbelievable. And things like that help us keep it intimate. >> Well there's a lot- there's a culture of fun too, I was saying, we were talking about in the open. You know the t-shirts, take the SH out of IT, (chuckles) Me-trics, getting rid of me-trics. I mean really a lot of fun going on people dropping ping-pong balls in the one that they like the best. >> Brian: Yeah! >> So you've maintained that flavor, which is fantastic. So, what do you see as sort of the next wave of Splunk? I mean, what should we as an audience be thinking about and watching for Splunk? >> I mean for me this is the best conf ever. This is our eighth one, it's the biggest one, it's the best one. We've been able to land so many great partners. We have 71 partners here, telling there stories. We have all the different customer sessions, we just completed the keynote, which I think was absolutely fantastic, the office space parody was I think, bring-the-house-down funny. And I think that's the beginning of the future, how do we take, all the wonderful things that we see our customers doing and bring them to light, and bring them to life, in more inspirational and more personal ways? I'll give you one really great example, we talked about GEN, the Global Emancipation Network. And they're working to help, you know, help human trafficking and human slavery as much as they possibly can, which is a very large problem, and we were able to work with them and help them through our Splunk for good efforts, to give them access to software, which has contributed to the work that they're doing. And we're just honored to have been a part of that, and they're here on site and they told their story in the keynote. And I can, there's example after example after example of the good we're doing for the world, in addition to the work we're doing for companies. And I think that's where we're moving forward. How do you keep those things in lock step so you're actually contributing to the betterment of our global society. At the same time making our user's lives better. >> You know I think, an example at least that really struck me when I was listening to the keynotes, we talked about the Boss of the Sock event, you talk about your community, and the spirit you're trying to create, and continue to perpetuate, was that, the winning team was thrown together right at the last minute. And these were people from different parts, different communities, different sectors if you will. And yet they bound together, they came up with a game plan, they win and so now you've created like a sub-culture as part of the greater community, but that seems to be kind of the embodiment of your philosophy is no boundaries, no limits and let's see how big we can make our tribe, if you will. >> I think tribe is another great word, community. You know, it's a skill set, you want a language you can communicate with each other. You learn how to use Splunk, and all of the sudden you have a common language and a common bond. And team "Last Minute," which won Boss of the Knock, you can't beat, you cannot plan for those kinds of things. People came together with a common understanding of how to accomplish a task, formed instantaneous comradery, and then were able to solve difficult problems. And if you bridge that to a conversation about business, we're all trying to solve problems. Technology they say is hard, we all know it's the culture and the people that's the most difficult thing to do and if we can be something that provides technology that helps drive culture change and people change, that's critical in transformation, and that's one of the things, and I've only been at Splunk 10 months, that I've seen we can do with our customers and that's pretty incredible. >> That's a key part of your messaging, I wanted to make an observation, when we followed Splunk early on, during the ascendancy of the so called big data memes, Splunk never really talked about big data you just sort of did it. You know you solve problems. Now big data is sort of passe, actually you guys talk about big data, it's very interesting to me, I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. >> You know, lots of people like to throw buzz words. Industry terminology, we try really hard to avoid really getting into it like digital transformation being one, no don't ever say that. Because it doesn't help anyone. Right, at the end of the day you have to find the problems that our customers have, build solutions to help them solve that, and it turns out when big data was the hype, that wasn't the problem that customers have. But with the explosion in data over the last decade that continues to grow, we are actually now seeing true big data style problems. And that's why in the keynote we talked about scale, and how today's scale and tomorrow's scale is just table stakes, because you have to continue to grow to meet that. And so as the machine data company, really trying to make sure people get value out of this machine data, and turn those, that data into answers and get the insights they need to take action, that's the future. And with big data, because it's no longer buzzy, there's new buzz words we can avoid. >> Dave: It just is. >> It just is, everyone has a ton of data. >> I think the point you're making about digital transformation is interesting. We do over a hundred of these a year and every, the vast majority of digital transformation with no meat on the bone. And to us, a digital business is, is one that leverages it's data. So when you think about the evolution of Splunk, it's all about leveraging data and we're seeing, do you envision a Splunk where Splunk actually becomes that development platform for applications which has been the nirvana of so-called big data for years, it appears that Splunk is becoming just that. >> I think that's part of our long-term strategy, in that, the beginning of that already exists. Splunk base has over 1200 apps that extend the Splunk platform already, and those apps do anything from make it easier to ingest data from different data sources, to visualize data through interesting dash boards, to customized searches. A great example, ransomware, we talked about it in the keynote, super hot topic in the industry. Something that's affecting the world at large and something we want to make sure we're helping people deal with, we launched a new product called Splunk Insights for Ransomware, which is just an app built on top of Splunk, that gives you better dash boarding, better searching and better licensing for customers to get in, pay per user, get started really fast and solve that particular problem. And we see that as really really critical, as we evolve our strategy to address these transformative types of things, and the application ecosystem that comes with them. >> We saw this in the demos, another buzz word of course machine learning, but we saw an application of machine learning to dramatically learning to simplify the number of events I have to look through as a security professional and map those to you know, actual problems that I can solve. Again, another application, practical application of Splunk at play. >> Meat on the bone, you said it. So at the end of the day, this is a user conference, and our users use the product every day, and if we're not giving them real value, they're going to let us know. We put tons of energy into that. >> How about the ecosystem, the message to the ecosystem. What is the message to those guys, what are the sort of swim lanes you guys will develop applications versus their opportunities? >> I think that's emerging, I think we're still learning how to work with our ecosystem. We're so blessed with an amazing ecosystem, a huge community of participants. We talked about the Splunk trust. This core group of 42 people, we inducted 14 new ones today who really embody everything that is so great about our company and our customers and what they do for their constituents. And they are helping us think through you know, where can you build, how do you build and who should build, and getting that real time feedback. And all the partners that are here right, are adding value. And that's our goal, create the platform so that we can solve everyone's machine data challenges at scale so they can provide better answers and ultimately more value to their company. >> So getting a little personal then, you mentioned first show, >> First show. >> You coming into this, so you inherit this seven year machine right? Growing, expanding and so your perspective coming into that, what have you brought, you think or you're seen as an outsider who's now an insider, and maybe leverage the culture that was being created to take us to where we are here this year here in D.C.? >> One of the main reasons I came to Splunk, was my extremely positive impression of the product, and the brand, and the customer community around it. My entire history, at Microsoft and Google, Cloud Platform and Sales Force, was predicated on customers who love the products. You can't create that, right, you earn that through amazing work, and amazing technology. And being able to walk in here at Splunk and already have that, was the gift that really got me excited. And so you talk about coming in, and what you already have I got handed the best thing ever. Hundreds of thousands, millions of users that are excited about our product. And so what I wanted to bring was not a lot of change in the culture, it's more how do you maintain that intimacy, how do you keep the what makes Splunk, Splunk and then do that on a grander scale? And I think if you look at .conf this year, this embodies the vision that I've had with my team and with the company on how to bring .conf, I'm sorry, bring Splunk to life in a massive way. And this is, you know you can see around us, all the activity going on, it's pretty amazing. >> How about the choice of the district? You know, love the venue, love being in D.C. always, of course east-coast guys, your backyard. >> John: It's a home game for me, yeah love that. >> Brian: I'm 20 minutes away, I love it. >> But so obviously a lot of government clients, they you know, don't go to Vegas or can't go to Vegas, it's a strong community here, very advanced. Talk about that choice. >> Yeah, very thoughtful choice. We do a lot of business with the federal government. We do a lot of business with state and local officials. We do a lot of business with education and universities. And so we thought coming to D.C. was the perfect place to really embrace the public sector in America. But also an amazing venue, weather's cooperated for the most part, all the things you would want. And what we've seen with the program, is we've had more public sector attendance which is great to be able to give them more skills. The work we do with veterans, we talked about giving free training to our service men and women. And veterans service men and women which is super important to us as a company, that was a big honor to be able to do it here in D.C. Kind of a no-brainer for us, and also seeing how the rest of the community has come, it's a lot of west-coast American folks, we have people from 65 countries from all over the world that have all descended here, and it's been really really incredible. So it's been really good for us, and as we think through next venues and future years, I think there's a lot really exciting things to come. But being in D.C. is an honor for the company, and it's been great to see the turnout. >> Hey my last question, several years ago Gartner came up with the stats, said CMO was going to spend more than the CIO on technology. I don't know if that ever came to fruition but it was an interesting prediction. As a CMO, somebody who's obviously using data, for marketing, at a data company, what's the state of that what's your philosophy around data, the intersection of data and marketing? >> Yeah, I've read those Gartner articles too. The Chief Marketing Technology Officer, and you know my background is deeply technical, I was an engineer by training. And our CIO Deckland and I have an incredibly tight relationship, and I actually think that's the future. Marketing is data, and that's the big change that's happening in the marketing landscape. There's old-school marketing, advertising and things like that, that make sense and maybe be to see kind of opportunities. But if you're in a business to business universe, working with larger enterprises and governments like we are at Splunk, there's a new age of marketing that's evolved over the last decade that is predicated with operational data, that helps you make better decisions, invest more, make more personalized engagements. This doesn't have to be throw a big thing and hope someone sees it. I can engage with you and you in a personal and intimate way which aligns incredibly well with our culture and who we want to be. And so I agree it doesn't matter how you calculate the dollars or the spend or the budget, but technology is an enormous driver of modern marketing, and being at a data company makes it incredibly easy. I Splunk everything, we have dash boards, you come by my office and we have a wall of TVs with Splunk dash boards showing our social status, and we're using LinkedIn Elevate, and we see what's coming out of sales force data on sales and pipeline, all the different things so we have this real time, operational dash board that Splunk is giving us from the business side. >> I love that answer, it's not an either or with marketing and IT it's an and. >> It has to be. You just put such a sharp point on that pencil right now as you said with metrics you have all the data you need, continued success, we with you all that. >> Brian: Thank you. >> Good job getting the plane off the ground here today, and happy landing for the rest of the week. >> Brian: Thank you so much, it's an honor to be here. Thank you for joining us for your seventh year, look forward to your eighth. >> Dale: Alright, thanks for having us. >> Absolutely, thanks Brian. Brian Goldfarb, the CMO at Splunk. We're back with more here on the Cube from Washington D.C. at .conf2017, right after this. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCube, covering .Next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back, this is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, and this the wrap of .Next, Nutanix's customer event, #NEXTConf and this is theCube, the leader in the live tech coverage for enterprise technology. Stu, second day. I got to say, Nutanix has always done a good job, innovative venues, they do funky, fun stuff with marketing, we haven't seen the end of it. We have another keynote today, there's a keynote tomorrow morning, big names, Bill McDermott's here, we just saw Peter MacKay, Chad Sakac is here. Who am I missing? >> Stu: Diane Greene >> Diane Gree was up yesterday. >> Y'know, thought leaders, had the CEO of NASDAQ on this morning Dave, y'know really good customers, thought leaders, Nutanix always makes me think a little bit, which I really enjoy. My fourth one of these Dave, usually by the fourth show I've gotten to, it's like I've seen it. Have we made progress, where are we going? >> I thought Sunil Podi's comment was really interesting, he said, "Look, we saw the trends, "we knew that hardware was going down." I mean, they're essentially admitting that they were a hardware oriented company, infrastructure company, we saw what was happening to infrastructure and hyper-converge, and we could just packed it up then, sold the company for a bunch of money, there were rumors floating around, you know they were pre-IPO, they easily could have sold this thing for a billion plus, all could have cashed out and made a buncha dough, and they said, "Y'know what, we're going to do something "different, we're going to go for it." You got to love the ambition, and so many companies today just can't weather that independent storm. I mean, you've seen it over and over and over again. The last billion dollar storage company that remained independent was NetApp, that was 14 years ago, now Nutanix isn't a storage company, but look around here, look at the analysts, a buncha storage guys that have grown up, and it's to me, Stu, it's a representation of what's happening in the marketplace. Storage as we know it is going away, and it always has transformed, y'know it used to be spinning disc drives, then it was subsystems, then it was the SAN, now it's evolving, these guys call it invisible infrastructure, call it whatever you want, but it's moving toward infrastructure as code, which is just a stepping stone to cloud. So your thoughts on the event, the ecosystem, and their position in the marketplace. >> Right, they reach a certain point, they've gone public, can they keep innovating? Look at a number of announcements there, we spent a lot of time talking about the new CloudZi service out there. >> Si? >> Zi. >> Zi, zi, sorry, you got it. (chuckles) >> Pronunciation of some of these, "it's Nutanix, right?" >> Nutonix, Nutanicks, (chuckles) >> They made jokes about the company last year, but this year, that's product, we're talking vision. The ink is still drying on the relationship with Google, doesn't mean they haven't been working for a while, but where this deal goes, interesting to see where it is six months from now, a year from now, because also Google, small player, I mean it wasn't to be honest, I was at the Red Hat Summit and they had a video of Andy Jassy saying, "We've extending AWS with OpenShift." And you're like wow. Red Hat has a position in a lot of clouds, but for Andy Jassy to make an appearance, Amazon, the behemoth in the cloud, that's good. Look, getting Diane Greene here, I said number one, it gives Nutanix credibility, number two it really pokes at VMware a little bit, she's like, "Oh, I did this before." And everybody's like, "Well, she's here now at Nutanix." Nutanix wants to be, that they've compared themselves to both Amazon, I think we hear it was Sunil or Dheeraj in an analyst session said they "want to be like the A Block." Not the V Block that EMC did, but the Amazon Block for the enterprise, or the next VMware, they talked about the new operating system. It's funny, in a lot of my circles, we've been trying to kill the operating system for a while, I need just enough operating system, I want to serverless and containerize all of these things because we need to modernize, and the old general-purpose processor and general-purpose operating system has come and gone, it's seen its day, but Nutanix has a play there. When I look at some of the things going on, we're talking about microsegmentation Dave, we're talking about multi-cloud and some interesting pieces. I like the ecosystem, I like that balance of how do you keep growing and expand where they can go into, leading the customers, but they're delivering today, they've got real products, they've got real growth, sure they have some challenges as to that competitive back and forth, but you asked Chad Sakac if this reminded him of Dell EMC, and kind of that partnership that they had for years, reminded me a little bit of kind of EMC and VMware too, once EMC bought VMware, VMware, the relationship they had, HP, and IBM, and other companies that they needed to treat as good or better than EMC. They're some of those tough relationships, and Dell with Nutanix, their partner, not only do they do Dell XC, but now they're doing like Pivotal on top of it, they can do Hyper-V deployments, Lenovo's another partner, Nutanix is broadening their approach, there's a lot of options out there and a lot of things to dig into, interesting, they keep growing their customers, keep delighting their customers, it reminds me of other shows we go to, Dave, like Amazon re:Invent, customers are super excited, You tell me about the Splunk conference and the ServiceNow conference where those customers are in there, they're excited, and Nutanix is another one of those, that every year you come, there's good solid content, there's a customer base that is growing and exciting and sharing, and that's a fun one to be part of. >> So, I want to ask you about VMware, it's kind of a good reference model. EMC paid out, I don't know, $630 million for VMware, which was the greatest acquisition in enterprise IT history, no question about it in terms of return. A couple questions for you, you were there at the time, you signed the original NDA between EMC and VMware, kind of sniffed em out. Would VMware's ascendancy been as fast and as successful, or even more successful, without EMC? Would VMware have got there on its own? >> I don't think so Dave, because my information that I had, and some of it's piecing together after the fact is VMware was really looking for that company to help them get to the next state. The fundraising was a little bit different back in 2003 than it was later, but rumors were Semantic was going to buy them. Everybody I talked to, you'd know better than me Dave, if Semantic had bought them, they would have integrated into all their pieces, they would have squashed it, the original talent probably would have fled much sooner. EMC didn't really know what they had, I had worked on some of the due diligence for some of the product integration, which took years and years to deliver, and it was mostly we're going to buy them. Diane had a bit of a tense relationship with Joe Tucci kind of from day one, and it was like okay, you're out there in Palo Alto, we're on the other coast, you go and do your thing, and you grow, and by the time EMC had gotten into VMware a little bit more, they were much bigger. So I think as you said, they're one of the great success stories, EMC did best in a lot of its acquisitions where it either let it ran a division and go, or let it kind of sit on its own and just funded it more, so I think that was a-- >> Well, and the story was always that Diane was pissed because she sold out at such a low price, but that's sort of ancient history. The reason I brought that up is I want to try to draw the parallel with Nutanix today, and come back to what you were saying about the A Block. When you look at Amazon, we agree, they have a lead, whether that lead is five years, seven years, four years, probably more like five to seven, but whatever, whatever it is, it's a lead, it's substantive. Beyond the infrastructure, the storage and the compute, they're building out just all kinds of services, I mean just look at their website, whether it's messaging, on and on and on, there's database, there's AI, there's their version of VDI, there's all this big data stuff, with things like Kinesis, and on and on and on, so many services that are much, much larger than the entire Nutanix ecosystem. So the reason for all this background is does Nutanix need a bigger, can Nutanix become it's ambition, which is essentially to be the next VMware, without some kind of white knight? >> So my answer, Dave, is if you look at Nutanix's ambition, one of the challenges for every infrastructure company today, if you think okay, we've talked about True Private Cloud, Dave, what services can I run on that? How can I leverage that? Look at Amazon, y'know a thousand new services coming every year, look at Google, they've got TensorFlow, really cool stuff, they've got those brilliant people coming up with the next stuff, how do I get that in my environment? Well, Nutanix's answer, coming at the show was we're going to partner with Google, we're going to have that partnership, you're going to be able to plug in, and you want to do your analytics and everything, use GCP, they're great at that, we're not, we know that you need to be able to leverage Google services to do that. The Red Hat announcement that I mentioned before, another way how I can take OpenShift and bridge from my data center and my environment and get access to those services. The promise of VMware on Amazon, yeah we're going to have a similar stack that I can go there, but I want to be able to access those VMware servers. Now, could it suck them eventually into all of Amazon and leave VMware behind? Absolutely, it's tough to partner with Amazon. So, the thing I've been looking at at almost every show this year is how are you tying into and working with those public clouds, we talked about it at VMON, Dave, they have Microsoft up on stage, they have partnerships with the public cloud-- >> David: HPE was up there. >> But the public cloud players, if you're not allowing your customers and the infrastructure that you're building to find ways to leverage and access those public cloud services, which not only are they spending $10 billion a year for each one of the big guys on infrastructure to get all around the globe, but it's all of those new services ahead, moving up the stack. To stitch together that in your own environment is going to be really challenging, how many different software pieces, how do I license it? How do I get it on, as opposed to oh, I'm in the public cloud, it's a checkbox, okay I want to access that, and I consume it as I need it, that consumption model needs to change, so I think Nutanix understands that's directionally where they want to go, I look at the Calm software that they launched and say hey, you want to use TensorFlow? Oh, it's just a choice here, absolutely, go. Where is it and how do I use it? Well, some of these details need to be worked out, as Detu said, "it's not like it's one click for every application, any cloud, anywhere." But that's directionally where they're going to make it easy, so all that cool analytic stuff that we cover a lot on theCube, a lot of that is now happening in the cloud, and I should be able to access it whether I'm in my private cloud or public cloud, and it's just going to be consumption model, whether I have certain characteristics that make it that I'm going to want to have that infrastructure for whether that's governance or locality, we talked to Scholastic yesterday, and they said, "Well when you've got manufacturing "in books, I need things close "to where they're coming off the production line, "otherwise there's things that I'm doing "in the public cloud." So that's there we see, when I talk to companies like I do here, at the Vienna show last year, when I talk to Christian Reilly with Citrix, who had been at Bechtel for many years, there's reasons why things need to live close to what's happening, y'know we've talked a lot about Edge, and therefore public cloud doesn't win it all, I know we had one guest on this week that said, "Right, depending on what industry you're is, "is it a 30/70 mix or a 70/30 mix?" There's a lot of nuance to sort this out, and this is long game, Dave, there's this change of the way we do things is a journey, and Nutanix has positioned themselves to continue to grow, continue to expand, some good ambition to expand on, like the five vectors of support that they have, so I've liked what I've heard this week. >> So in thinking about what we're talking about VMware, the imperative for virtualization was so high in the early 2000's because we were coming out of the dot com bust, IT was out of favor, VMware was really the only game in town, there really wasn't a strong alternative, had by far the best product, Microsoft Hyper-V was sort of in-concept, and KVM and others were just really not there, so there really was no choice, it appealed to 100% of the IT shops, I mean essentially. So I wonder though, today, is the imperative for multi-cloud the same? The fundamental is yes, everybody has multiple clouds. But this industry has lived in stovepipes forever, and has figured out how to manage stovepipes, it manages them by fencing things off. So I wonder is the imperative as high, you could maybe make an argument that it's higher, but I'm still not quite getting it yet, as it was in the early 2000's, where the aspirin of virtualization to soothe the pain of do more with less was such an obvious and game changing paradigm shift. I don't see it as much here, I see people still trying to figure out okay, what is our cloud strategy? Number one, number two is the competition seems to be much more wide open, it's unclear at this time that any one company has a fast-track to multi-cloud. >> I think you've got some really good points there, Dave. A thing that I've pointed out a few times is that one of the things that bothered me from the early days with VMware is from an application standpoint, it tended to freeze my application. I didn't have a reason to kind of move forward and modernize my application. Back in 2002 it was like oh, I'm running Windows NT with a really old application, my operating system going to end of life, well maybe it's time to uplift. Oh wait, there's this great virtualization stuff, my hardware's going end of life too. No, shove it in a VM, let's keep it for another five years. Oh my god, that application sucked then, it's going to suck even more in five years, and workforce productivity was way down. So, the vision for Nutanix is they're going to be a platform that are going to be able to help you modernize your environment and how do we get beyond, is it virtualization, is it containerization, is it a lot of the cloud-native pieces, how does that fit in? Starting to hear a little bit more of it, a critique I'd have on HCI about two years ago was it was the same applications that were in my VMware SAN, not VSAN, but my just traditional storage area network was what was running on Nutanix. We're starting to see more interesting applications going on there, and look, Nutanix has a bullseye on them, there are all the HCI direct replacements, there is the threat of the cloud, and I haven't heard as many SAAS applications living on Nutanix as I do when we talk to all flash-array companies, Dave, every single on of them can roll out, here's all these SAAS deployments on our environment, just scalable environments that build that for the future. I haven't heard it as much from Nutanix. >> So VMware was aspirin , Nutanix originally started as aspirin, and now they're pivoting to vitamin. Who are they up against? Who do you like? Who are the horses on the track? Let's analyze the race and then wrap. >> Yeah, so when Nutanix got into this business, it was well, they're helping VMware environments, it was 100% VMware when they first started that relationship with VMware was really tough, they've lowered that too, they've now got what, 28% is running HV, they've got a little bit on Hyper-V, but they've still got about 60% of their customers are VMware. So VMware, y'know, huge challenge, VSAN has more customers than anyone in the hyper-convergent infrastructure space, easy, number of customers, but virtualization admin has taken that. Microsoft, huge potential threat, Azure Stack's coming this year, it's been coming, it's been coming, it's really close there, all the server guys are lining up. Microsoft's a huge player, Microsoft owns applications, they're pulling applications into their SAAS offerings, they're pulling applications into Azure, when they launch Azure Stack, even if the 1.0, if you looked at it on paper and say Nutanix is better, well, Microsoft's a huge threat to both VMware, which uses a lot of Microsoft apps, as well as Nutanix. So those are the two biggest threats, then of course, there's just the general trend of push to SAAS and push to public cloud where Nutanix is starting to play in the multi-cloud, as we talked about, and COM and the DR cloud services are good, but can Nutanix continue to stay ahead of their customers? They're ahead of the vast majority of enterprises, but can they convince them to come on board to them, rather than some of these big guys? Nutanix is a public company now, they're doing great, but yeah, it's a big TAM that they're going after, but that means they're going to have a tax from every side of the market. >> I see HCI as one where you got a leader, and that leader can make some good money. I don't see multi-cloud as a winner-take-all market because I think IBM's going to have its play in multi-cloud, HPE has its play in multi-cloud, Dell EMC is going to have its play in multi-cloud. You got guys coming out of different places like ServiceNow, who's got an IT operations management practice, builds business big, hundreds of millions of dollars of business there, coming at multi-cloud, so a lot of different competitors that are going to be going for it, and some of them with very large service organizations that I think are going to get there fair share, so I would predict, Stu, that this is going to continue to be, multi-cloud is going to be a multi-stovepipe cloud for a long, long time. Now, if Nutanix can come in and solve that control plane problem, and demonstrate substantial business value, and deliver competitive advantage, y'know that might change the game. It's difficult at this point in 2017 to see that Nutanix, over those other guys that I just mentioned, has an advantage, clear advantage, maybe from a product standpoint, maybe. But from a resource standpoint, a distribution channel, services organization, ecosystem, all those other things, they seem to me to be counterbalancing. Alright, I'll give you last thought. >> Yeah, so it's great to see Nutanix, they're aiming high, they're expanding into a couple of areas, and they keep listening, so I hope they keep listening to their customers, expand their partnerships, SAAS customers would be really interesting, service provider is something that they've gotten into little bit, but plenty more opportunity for them to go there. Dave, personally for me, to it have been a company I've watched since the earliest days, it's been a pleasure to watch, y'know I think back, right, VMware you said, I think it was a hundred person company when I first started talking to them and Diane Greene, and I look at where VMware went. I've been tracking VMware for now five years, and reminds me a lot of some of those trends, for a 20 person company, I said to hear almost 3000 boggles the mind, I've been to their headquarters a bunch. So it's been fun to watch the Newton army, and they've been loving watching it from our angles. >> Well and these events are very good events, and so there's a lot of passion here, and that's a great fundamental for this company. So I'm a fan, I think it may be undervalued, I think it very well may be undervalued. >> Wall Street definitely doesn't understand this stuff. >> Alright Stu, great working with you this year, (chuckles) this month, this quarter, this month, certainly this show, so great job. I really appreciate it >> Stu: Thanks, Dave. >> There's a big crew behind what Stu and I, and John Ferrier, and Jeff Frick, and others do here. Here today with us Ava, Patrick, Alex, Jay, you guys have had an awesome spring. Brendan is somewhere, I guess Brendan is doing the keynote right now. So, fantastic job, as always, Kristen Nicole and her team, writing up the articles. Jay Johanson back at the controls, Bert with the crowd shots. Everybody, really appreciate all your support, thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you, we got a little break, I think, in the action, cause it's July Fourth, well it's Canada year, or Canada week-- >> Canada Day and Independence Day next week. >> And Independence Day in the United States, and then we'll be at Infor Inforum, second week of July, I'll be there with Rebecca Knight and the crew, so watch for that, check out SiliconAngle.com for all the news, Wikibon.com for all the research, and theCube.net to find all these videos, Youtube.com/SiliconAngle, it's everywhere, if you can't find it, you're not on Twitter, you're not on social. Thanks for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, we're out. (lo-fi synthesizer music)

>> Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube Covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage, I'm Rebecca Knight your host, here with Stu Miniman. Our guest now is Andrius Benokraitis, he is the Principle Product Manager at Ansible Red Hat Network Automation, thanks so much Andrius. >> Thanks for having me I appreciate it. >> This is your first time on the program. >> Andrius: First time. >> We're nice, >> Really nervous, so, okay. we don't bite. >> Start a little bit with your new to the company relatively >> Andrius: Relatively. >> networking guy by background, can you give us a little bit about your background. >> Sure, I mean, I actually started at Red Hat in 2003. And then did about four five jobs there for about 11 years. And then jumped, went to a startup named Cumulus Networks for about two years. Great crew, and then, now I'm at Ansible, been there since about December, so working on the Network Automation Use Case for Ansible. >> Alright, so networking, has a little bit of coverage here, I remember, you know, something like the Open Daylight stuff and I have, actually there are a couple of Red Hatters that I interviewed at one show ended up forming a company that got bought by Dockers, so you know, there's definitely networking people, but maybe give us a broad view of where networking fits into this stuff that you're working on specifically. >> Yeah, sure thing. I think it's interesting to point out that as everything started in the compute side, and everything started to get disaggregated, the networking side has come along for the ride per se. It's been a little bit behind. When we talk about networking a lot of people just think automatically that's the end. And we're actually trying to think a little bit lower level, so layer one, layer two, layer three, so switching, routing, firewalls, load balancers, all those things are still required in the data center. And when people started using Ansible, it started five years ago on the compute side, a lot of the people started saying, I need to run the whole rec, and I'm not a CCIE, and I don't really know what to do there but I've been thrown in to do something, I'm a cloud admin, the new title right. I have to run the network, so what do I do. I don't know anything about networking, I'm just trying to be good enough, well, I know Ansible, so why don't I just treat switches like servers, and just treat them like, like what I know, they just have a lot more interfaces, but they just treat it that way. So a lot of the expertise came from the ground up with the opensource model and said this is the new use case. >> Well, Jay Rivers, the founder of Cumulus, it's like networking will just be a Linux operating model, you know, extended to the network, which is always like, hey, sounds like a company like Red Hat should be doing that kind of stuff. >> Exactly, it's interesting to see a Bash prompt in the networking right, it's familiar to a lot of people, in the devop space, absolutely. >> So it's a very rapidly changing time, as we know, in this digital computing age, the theme of this conference is the power of the individual, celebrating that individual, the developer, empowering the developers to take risks, be able to fail, make changes, modify. You're not a developer, but you manage developers, you lead developers, how do you work on creating that context, that Jim Whitehurst talked about today. >> I think it starts with, the true empowerment, you have the majority of the networking platforms are still proprietary and walled off, walled off gardens, they're black boxes you can't really do much with them, but you still have the ability to SSH into them, you have familiar terms and concepts from the server side in the networking side. So as long as you have SSH in the box and you know your CLI commands to make changes, you can utilize that in part of Ansible to generate larger abstractions to use the play books in order to build out your data center, with the terms and the Lexicon of YAML, the language of Ansible, things that you already know and utilizing that and going further. >> Can you speak to us a little bit about customers, you know, what's holding them back, how are you guys moving them forward to the more agile development space? >> Our customers are mostly brownfield, they're trying to extend what they already have. They have all their gear, they have everything they have that they need but they're trying to do things better. >> I don't find greenfield customers when it comes to the network side of the house, I mean we've all got what I have and we knew that IT's always additive, so, I mean that's got to be a challenge. >> It's a huge challenge. >> Something you can help with right? >> It's a huge challenge, and I think from the network operators and network engineers, a lot of them are saying, again, they're looking at their friends on the compute side, and they can spin up VMs and provision hardware instantaneously, but why does it have to take four to six weeks to provision a VLAN or get a VLAN added to a network switch? That sounds ridiculous, so a lot of the network engineers and operators are saying, well I think I can be as agile as you, so we can actually work together, using a common framework, common language with Ansible, and we can get things done, and we can get all of this stuff I hate doing, and we don't have to do that anymore, we can worry about more important things in our network, like designing the next big thing, if you want to do BGP, design your BGP infrastructure, you want to move from a layer two to a layer three or an SDN solution. >> I love that you talk about everybody, kind of the software wave and breaking down silos, network and storage people are like, oh my God, you're taking my job away. >> Exactly, completely, no, we're not taking your job. We are augmenting what you already have. We're giving you more tools in your tool belt to do better at your job, and that's truly it, we don't have to, people can be smarter so, if you want to add a VLAN, that can be a code snippet created by the sys admin, it can be in Git, and then the network engineer can say, oh yeah, that looks good, and then I just say, submit. What we see today with some of the customers is, yeah, I want to automate, I really want to automate, and you say, great, let's automate. But then you start getting, you peel back the onion, and you start seeing that, well, how are you managing your inventory, how are you managing your endpoints. And they're like, I have a spreadsheet? And you're like, as a networking guy I guess you, (excited clamoring) >> Networking is scary for a lot, >> It's super scary, yeah. >> So how, do you break that down? >> You do what you can, you do it in small pieces, we're not trying to change the world, we're not trying to say, you're going to go 100% devops in the network. Start small, start with something, like again, you really hate doing, if you want to change, something really low risk, things you really hate doing, just start small, low risk things. And then you can propagate that, and as you start getting confidence, and you start getting the knowledge, and the teams, and every one starts, everyone has to be bought in by the way. This is not something you just go in and say, go do it. You have to have everyone on board, the entire organization, it can't be bottom up, it can't be top down, everyone has to be on board. >> And Andrius, when I talk to people in the networking space, risk is the number one thing they're worried about. They buy on risk, they build on risk, and the problem we have with the networks, they're too many things that are manual. So if I'm typing in some you know, 16 digit hexadecimal code >> From notepad, manually you're copying and pasting >> from like a spreadsheet. Copying and pasting, or gosh, so things like that, the room for error is too high. So there's the things that we need to be able to automate, so that we don't have somebody that's tired or just, wait, was that a one or an L or an I. I don't know, so we understand that it actually should be able to reduce risk, increase security, all the things that the business is telling you. >> All these network vendors have virtual instances. You can do all your testing and deployment, all your testing and your infrastructure, and you can do everything in Jenkins and have all your networking switches, virtually, you can have your whole data center in a virtual environment if you want. So if you talk about lower risk, instead of just copying and pasting, and oh was that a slash 24 or a slash 16, oops, I mean that looked right, but it was wrong, but did it go through test, it probably didn't. And then someone's going to get paged at three in the morning, and a router's down, an edge router's down and your toast. So enabling the full devops cycle of continuous integration. So bringing in the same concepts that you have on the compute side, testing, changes, in a full cycle, and then doing that. >> You talked about the importance of buy in and also the difficulties of getting buy in. How much of that is an impediment to the innovation process, but one of the things we've been talking about, is can big companies innovate? What are the challenges that you see, and how do you overcome them? >> That is the number one, that is the biggest issue right now in the network space, is getting buy in. Whether it's someone who has done it on their own, someone can just install Ansible and do something, and then deploy a switch, but if they leave the company and there's no remediation, if it's not in the MOP, if it's not in the Method of Procedure, no one knows about it. So it has to be part of your, you want to keep all the things you have, all the good things you have today with your checks and balances in the networking, and the CIOs and the people at the top have to understand, you can keep all that stuff, but you have to buy in to the automation framework, and everyone has to be onboard to understand how it fits in in order to go from where you are today to where you want to be. >> At the show here what's exciting your customers? You know, give us a little bit of a viewpoint for people that are checking out your stuff, what to expect. >> Well I think the one thing is they're not used to seeing, they think it's black magic, they think it's just magic. They're like, I can use the same things for everything? I say, yeah, you can. The development processes, the innovation in the community, you know for example, if you want to assist, go ACI Module, it's in GitHub, it's in Cisco's GitHub, you can just go ahead and do that. Now we're trying, starting to migrate those things into core. So the more that we get innovation in the community, and that we have the vendors and the partners driving it, and you're seeing that today, you know, we have F5 here we have Cisco, we have Juniper we have Avi, all those people, you know, they have certified platforms with Ansible, Ansible Core, which is going to be integrated with Ansible Tower, we have full buy in from them. They want to meet with us and say how can we do better. How can we innovate with you to drive the nexgen data centers with our products. >> You talked about yourself as a boomerang employee, what is the value in that, and are you seeing a lot of colleagues who are bouncing around and then coming back from ... >> Absolutely, I think pre acquisition Ansible, the vast majority of the people, I believe were ex-Red Hatters that went to Ansible. So what's really nice to come back home and understand the people that left, that came back to understand already what the, >> And people feel that way, it's a coming home? >> Yeah, it's a coming home, it really is. They understand, you know, they came back, they understood the values of opensource and the culture, again, I started Red Hat in 2003, I see the great things, I see new people getting hired and I see the same things I saw back then, 2003, 2004, with all the great things that people are doing, and the culture. You know, Jim's done a great job at keeping the culture how it is, even way back then when there was only 400 people when I started. >> Andrius, extend that culture, I think about the network community and opensource and you know, you talk about, there's risk there, and you know, you think about, I grew up with kind of enterprise, infrastructure mentality, it's like, don't touch it, don't play with it. We always joked, I got every thing there, really don't walk by it and definitely, you know, some zip tie or duct tape's going to come apart. Are we getting better, is networking embracing this? >> Yes, for sure. I think the nice thing is you start seeing these communities pop up. You're starting to see network operators and engineers, they've been historically, if they don't know the answer, they won't go find it. They kind of may be shy, shy to ask for help, per se. >> If it wasn't on their certification, >> Exactly. >> They weren't going to do it. >> If it wasn't there I'm not going to go, we're bringing them into, so we have, whether there's slack instance, there are networking communities, networking automation, communities, just for network automation. And there's one, there's an Ansible channel, on the network decode, select channel, has almost 800 people on it. So they're coming and now they have a place, they have a safe place to ask questions. They don't have to kind of guess or say, you know what, I'm not going to do that. And know they have a safe place for network engineers, for network engineers to get into the net devop space. >> Another one of the sort of sub themes of this summit is people's data strategy, and customers and vendors, how they're dealing with the massive amounts of data that they're customers are generating. What is your data strategy, and how are you using data? >> So there's two aspects here. So the data can be the actual playbooks themselves, the actual, the golden master images, so you can pull configs from switches, and you can store them and you can use them for continuous compliance. You can say, you know, a rogue engineer might make a change, you know, configuration drift happens. But you need to be able to make those comparisons to the other versions. So we're utilizing things like Git, so you're data strategy can be in the cloud, it can be similar on your side, you can do Stash locally. For part of the operations piece, you can use that. A second piece is, log aggregation is a big piece of the Ansible. So when you actually want to make sure that a change happens, that it's been successful, and that you want to ensure continuous compliance, all that data has to go somewhere, right? So you can utilize Ansible Tower as an aggregator, you can go off using the integrations like Splunk and some other log aggregation connectors with Ansible Tower to help utilize your data strategy with the partners that are really the driving, the people that know data and data structures, so we can use them. >> And one of the other issues is the building the confidence to make decisions with all the data, are you working on that too with your team? >> Yes, we are working with that, and that's part of the larger tower organization, so it goes beyond networking. So, whatever networking gets, everyone else gets. When we started developing Ansible Core and the community and Ansible Tower in-house, we think about networking and we think about Windows, that's a huge opportunity there, you know, we're talking about AWS in the cloud. So cloud instances, these are all endpoints that Ansible can manage, and it's not just networking, so we have to make sure that all of the pieces, all of the endpoints can be managed directly. Everyone benefits from that. >> Andrius thank you so much for your time we appreciate it. >> Thanks again for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, thank you very much for joining us. We'll be back after this.