(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Param Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Param, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Param phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Param, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Param for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Param said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Param I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Param to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Param what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2 this is Dave Vellante. We're here exploring the intersection of data and analytics and the future of cloud. And in this segment, we're going to look at the evolution of cloud, and try to test some of the Supercloud concepts and assumptions with Brian Gracely, is the founder and co-host along with Aaron Delp of the popular Cloudcast program. Amazing series, if you're not already familiar with it. The Cloudcast is one of the best ways to keep up with so many things going on in our industry. Enterprise tech, platform engineering, business models, obviously, cloud developer trends, crypto, Web 3.0. Sorry Brian, I know that's a sore spot, but Brian, thanks for coming >> That's okay. >> on the program, really appreciate it. >> Yeah, great to be with you, Dave. Happy New Year, and great to be back with everybody with SiliconANGLE again this year. >> Yeah, we love having you on. We miss working with you day-to-day, but I want to start with Gracely's theorem, which basically says, I'm going to paraphrase. For the most part, nothing new gets introduced in the enterprise tech business, patterns repeat themselves, maybe get applied in new ways. And you know this industry well, when something comes out that's new, if you take virtualization, for example, been around forever with mainframes, but then VMware applied it, solve a real problem in the client service system. And then it's like, "Okay, this is awesome." We get really excited and then after a while we pushed the architecture, we break things, introduce new things to fix the things that are broken and start adding new features. And oftentimes you do that through acquisitions. So, you know, has the cloud become that sort of thing? And is Supercloud sort of same wine, new bottle, following Gracely's theorem? >> Yeah, I think there's some of both of it. I hate to be the sort of, it depends sort of answer but, I think to a certain extent, you know, obviously Cloud in and of itself was, kind of revolutionary in that, you know, it wasn't that you couldn't rent things in the past, it was just being able to do it at scale, being able to do it with such amazing self-service. And then, you know, kind of proliferation of like, look at how many services I can get from, from one cloud, whether it was Amazon or Azure or Google. And then, you know, we, we slip back into the things that we know, we go, "Oh, well, okay, now I can get computing on demand, but, now it's just computing." Or I can get database on demand and it's, you know, it's got some of the same limitations of, of say, of database, right? It's still, you know, I have to think about IOPS and I have to think about caching, and other stuff. So, I think we do go through that and then we, you know, we have these sort of next paradigms that come along. So, you know, serverless was another one of those where it was like, okay, it seems sort of new. I don't have to, again, it was another level of like, I don't have to think about anything. And I was able to do that because, you know, there was either greater bandwidth available to me, or compute got cheaper. And what's been interesting is not the sort of, that specific thing, serverless in and of itself is just another way of doing compute, but the fact that it now gets applied as, sort of a no-ops model to, you know, again, like how do I provision a database? How do I think about, you know, do I have to think about the location of a service? Does that just get taken care of for me? So I think the Supercloud concept, and I did a thing and, and you and I have talked about it, you know, behind the scenes that maybe the, maybe a better name is Super app for something like Snowflake or other, but I think we're, seeing these these sort of evolutions over and over again of what were the big bottlenecks? How do we, how do we solve those bottlenecks? And I think the big thing here is, it's never, it's very rarely that you can take the old paradigm of what the thing was, the concept was, and apply it to the new model. So, I'll just give you an example. So, you know, something like VMware, which we all know, wildly popular, wildly used, but when we apply like a Supercloud concept of VMware, the concept of VMware has always been around a cluster, right? It's some finite number of servers, you sort of manage it as a cluster. And when you apply that to the cloud and you say, okay, there's, you know, for example, VMware in the cloud, it's still the same concept of a cluster of VMware. But yet when you look at some of these other services that would fit more into the, you know, Supercloud kind of paradigm, whether it's a Snowflake or a MongoDB Atlas or maybe what CloudFlare is doing at the edge, those things get rid of some of those old paradigms. And I think that's where stuff, you start to go, "Oh, okay, this is very different than before." Yes, it's still computing or storage, or data access, but there's a whole nother level of something that we didn't carry forward from the previous days. And that really kind of breaks the paradigm. And so that's the way I think I've started to think about, are these things really brand new? Yes and no, but I think it's when you can see that big, that thing that you didn't leave behind isn't there anymore, you start to get some really interesting new innovation come out of it. >> Yeah. And that's why, you know, lift and shift is okay, when you talk to practitioners, they'll say, "You know, I really didn't change my operating model. And so I just kind of moved it into the cloud. there were some benefits, but it was maybe one zero not three zeros that I was looking for." >> Right. >> You know, we always talk about what's great about cloud, the agility, and all the other wonderful stuff that we know, what's not working in cloud, you know, tie it into multi-cloud, you know, in terms of, you hear people talk about multi-cloud by accident, okay, that's true. >> Yep. >> What's not great about cloud. And then I want to get into, you know, is multi-cloud really a problem or is it just sort of vendor hype? But, but what's not working in cloud? I mean, you mentioned serverless and serverless is kind of narrow, right, for a lot of stateless apps, right? But, what's not great about cloud? >> Well, I think there's a few things that if you ask most people they don't love about cloud. I think, we can argue whether or not sort of this consolidation around a few cloud providers has been a good thing or a bad thing. I think, regardless of that, you know, we are seeing, we are hearing more and more people that say, look, you know, the experience I used to have with cloud when I went to, for example, an Amazon and there was, you know, a dozen services, it was easy to figure out what was going on. It was easy to figure out what my billing looked like. You know, now they've become so widespread, the number of services they have, you know, the number of stories you just hear of people who went, "Oh, I started a service over in US West and I can't find it anymore 'cause it's on a different screen. And I, you know, I just got billed for it." Like, so I think the sprawl of some of the clouds has gotten, has created a user experience that a lot of people are frustrated with. I think that's one thing. And we, you know, we see people like Digital Ocean and we see others who are saying, "Hey, we're going to be that simplified version." So, there's always that yin and yang. I think people are super frustrated at network costs, right? So, you know, and that's kind of at a lot of, at the center of maybe why we do or don't see more of these Supercloud services is just, you know, in the data center as an application owner, I didn't have to think about, well where, where does this go to? Where are my users? Yes, somebody took care of it, but when those things become front and center, that's super frustrating. That's the one area that we've seen absolutely no cost savings, cost reduction. So I think that frustrates people a lot. And then I think the third piece is just, you know, we're, we went from super centralized IT organizations, which, you know, for decades was how it worked. It was part of the reason why the cloud expanded and became a thing, right? Sort of shadow IT and I can't get things done. And then, now what we've seen is sort of this proliferation of little pockets of groups that are your IT, for lack of a better thing, whether they're called platform engineering or SRE or DevOps. But we have this, expansion, explosion if you will, of groups that, if I'm an app dev team, I go, "Hey, you helped me make this stuff run, but then the team next to you has another group and they have another group." And so you see this explosion of, you know, we don't have any standards in the company anymore. And, so sort of self-service has created its own nightmare to a certain extent for a lot of larger companies. >> Yeah. Thank you for that. So, you know, I want, I want to explore this multi-cloud, you know, by accident thing and is a real problem. You hear that a lot from vendors and we've been talking about Supercloud as this unifying layer across cloud. You know, but when you talk to customers, a lot of them are saying, "Yes, we have multiple clouds in our organization, but my group, we have mono cloud, we know the security, edicts, we know how to, you know, deal with the primitives, whether it's, you know, S3 or Azure Blob or whatever it is. And we're very comfortable with this." It's, that's how we're simplifying. So, do you think this is really a problem? Does it have merit that we need that unifying layer across clouds, or is it just too early for that? >> I think, yeah, I think what you, what you've laid out is basically how the world has played out. People have picked a cloud for a specific application or a series of applications. Yeah, and I think if you talk to most companies, they would tell you, you know, holistically, yes, we're multi-cloud, not, maybe not necessarily on, I don't necessarily love the phrase where people say like, well it happened by accident. I think it happened on purpose, but we got to multi-cloud, not in the way that maybe that vendors, you know, perceived, you know, kind of laid out a map for. So it was, it was, well you will lay out this sort of Supercloud framework. We didn't call it that back then, we just called it sort of multi-cloud. Maybe it was Kubernetes or maybe it was whatever. And different groups, because central IT kind of got disbanded or got fragmented. It turned into, go pick the best cloud for your application, for what you need to do for the business. And then, you know, multiple years later it was like, "Oh, hold on, I've got 20% in Google and 50% in AWS and I've got 30% in Azure. And, you know, it's, yeah, it's been evolution. I don't know that it's, I don't know if it's a mistake. I think it's now groups trying to figure out like, should I make sense of it? You know, should I try and standardize and I backwards standardize some stuff? I think that's going to be a hard thing for, for companies to do. 'cause I think they feel okay with where the applications are. They just happen to be in multiple clouds. >> I want to run something by you, and you guys, you and Aaron have talked about this. You know, still depending on who, which keynote you listen to, small percentage of the workloads are actually in cloud. And when you were with us at Wikibon, I think we called it true private cloud, and we looked at things like Nutanix and there were a lot of other examples of companies that were trying to replicate the hyperscale experience on Prem. >> Yeah. >> And, we would evaluate that, you know, beyond virtualization, and so we sort of defined that and, but I think what's, maybe what's more interesting than Supercloud across clouds is if you include that, that on Prem estate, because that's where most of the work is being done, that's where a lot of the proprietary tools have been built, a lot of data, a lot of software. So maybe there's this concept of sending that true private cloud to true hybrid cloud. So I actually think hybrid cloud in some cases is the more interesting use case for so-called Supercloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think there's a couple aspects too. I think, you know, if we were to go back five or six years even, maybe even a little further and look at like what a data center looked like, even if it was just, "Hey we're a data center that runs primarily on VMware. We use some of their automation". Versus what you can, even what you can do in your data center today. The, you know, the games that people have seen through new types of automation through Kubernetes, through get ops, and a number of these things, like they've gotten significantly further along in terms of I can provision stuff really well, I can do multi-tenancy, I can do self-service. Is it, you know, is it still hard? Yeah. Because those things are hard to do, but there's been significant progress there. I don't, you know, I still look for kind of that, that killer application, that sort of, you know, lighthouse use case of, hybrid applications, you know, between data center and between cloud. I think, you know, we see some stuff where, you know, backup is a part of it. So you use the cloud for storage, maybe you use the cloud for certain kinds of resiliency, especially on maybe front end load balancing and stuff. But I think, you know, I think what we get into is, this being hung up on hybrid cloud or multi-cloud as a term and go like, "Look, what are you trying to measure? Are you trying to measure, you know, efficiency of of of IT usage? Are you trying to measure how quickly can I give these business, you know, these application teams that are part of a line of business resources that they need?" I think if we start measuring that way, we would look at, you know, you'd go, "Wow, it used to be weeks and months. Now we got rid of these boards that have to review everything every time I want to do a change management type of thing." We've seen a lot more self-service. I think those are the things we want to measure on. And then to your point of, you know, where does, where do these Supercloud applications fit in? I think there are a bunch of instances where you go, "Look, I have a, you know, global application, I have a thing that has to span multiple regions." That's where the Supercloud concept really comes into play. We used to do it in the data center, right? We'd had all sorts of technologies to help with that, I think you can now start to do it in the cloud. >> You know, one of the other things, trying to understand, your thoughts on this, do you think that you, you again have talked about this, like I'm with you. It's like, how is it that Google's losing, you know, 3 billion dollars a year, whatever. I mean, because when you go back and look at Amazon, when they were at that level of revenue where Google is today, they were making money, you know, and they were actually growing faster, by the way. So it's kind of interesting what's happened with Google. But, the reason I bring that up is, trying to understand if you think the hyperscalers will ever be motivated to create standards across clouds, and that may be a play for Google. I mean, obviously with Kubernetes it was like a Hail Mary and kind of made them relevant. Where would Google be without Kubernetes? But then did it achieve the objectives? We could have that conversation some other time, but do you think the hyperscalers will actually say, "Okay, we're going to lean in and create these standards across clouds." Because customers would love that, I would think, but it would sub-optimize their competitive advantage. What are your thoughts? >> I think, you know, on the surface, I would say they, they probably aren't. I think if you asked 'em the question, they would say, "Well, you know, first and foremost, you know, we do deliver standards, so we deliver a, you know, standard SQL interface or a SQL you know, or a standard Kubernetes API or whatever. So, in that, from that perspective, you know, we're not locking you into, you know, an Amazon specific database, or a Google specific database." You, you can argue about that, but I think to a certain extent, like they've been very good about, "Hey, we're going to adopt the standards that people want." A lot of times the open source standards. I think the problem is, let's say they did come up with a standard for it. I think you still have the problem of the costs of migration and you know, the longer you've, I think their bet is basically the longer you've been in some cloud. And again, the more data you sort of compile there, the data gravity concept, there's just going to be a natural thing that says, okay, the hurdle to get over to say, "Look, we want to move this to another cloud", becomes so cost prohibitive that they don't really have to worry about, you know, oh, I'm going to get into a war of standards. And so far I think they sort of realize like that's the flywheel that the cloud creates. And you know, unless they want to get into a world where they just cut bandwidth costs, like it just kind of won't happen. You know, I think we've even seen, and you know, the one example I'll use, and I forget the name of it off the top of my head, but there's a, there's a Google service. I think it's like BigQuery external or something along those lines, that allows you to say, "Look, you can use BigQuery against like S3 buckets and against other stuff." And so I think the cloud providers have kind of figured out, I'm never going to get the application out of that other guy's cloud or you know, the other cloud. But maybe I'm going to have to figure out some interesting ways to sort of work with it. And, you know, it's a little bit, it's a little janky, but that might be, you know, a moderate step that sort of gets customers where they want to be. >> Yeah. Or you know, it'd be interesting if you ever see AWS for example, running its database in other clouds, you started, even Oracle is doing that with, with with Azure, which is a form of Supercloud. My last question for you is, I want to get you thinking about sort of how the future plays out. You know, think about some of the companies that we've put forth this Supercloud, and by the way, this has been a criticism of the concept. Charles Fitzer, "Everything is Supercloud!" Which if true would defeat the purpose of course. >> Right. >> And so right with the community effort, we really tried to put some guardrails down on the essential characteristics, the deployment models, you know, so for example, running across multiple clouds with a purpose build pass, creating a common experience, metadata intelligence that solves a specific problem. I mean, the example I often use is Snowflake's governed data sharing. But yeah, Snowflake, Databricks, CloudFlare, Cohesity, you know, I just mentioned Oracle and Azure, these and others, they certainly claim to have that common experience across clouds. But my question is, again, I come back to, do customers need this capability? You know, is Mono Cloud the way to solve that problem? What's your, what are your thoughts on how this plays out in the future of, I guess, PAs, apps and cloud? >> Yeah, I think a couple of things. So, from a technology perspective, I think, you know, the companies you name, the services you've named, have sort of proven that the concept is viable and it's viable at a reasonable size, right? These aren't completely niche businesses, right? They're multi-billion dollar businesses. So, I think there's a subset of applications that, you know, maybe a a bigger than a niche set of applications that are going to use these types of things. A lot of what you talked about is very data centric, and that's, that's fine. That's that layer is, figuring that out. I think we'll see messaging types of services, so like Derek Hallison's, Caya Company runs a, sort of a Supercloud for messaging applications. So I think there'll be places where it makes a ton of sense. I think, the thing that I'm not sure about, and because again, we've been now 10 plus years of sort of super low, you know, interest rates in terms of being able to do things, is a lot of these things come out of research that have been done previously. Then they get turned into maybe somewhat of an open source project, and then they can become something. You know, will we see as much investment into the next Snowflake if, you know, the interest rates are three or four times that they used to be, do we, do we see VCs doing it? So that's the part that worries me a little bit, is I think we've seen what's possible. I think, you know, we've seen companies like what those services are. I think I read yesterday Snowflake was saying like, their biggest customers are growing at 30, like 50 or 60%. Like the, value they get out of it is becoming exponential. And it's just a matter of like, will the economics allow the next big thing to happen? Because some of these things are pretty, pretty costly, you know, expensive to get started. So I'm bullish on the idea. I don't know that it becomes, I think it's okay that it's still sort of, you know, niche plus, plus in terms of the size of it. Because, you know, if we think about all of IT it's still, you know, even microservices is a small part of bigger things. But I'm still really bullish on the idea. I like that it's been proven. I'm a little wary, like a lot of people have the economics of, you know, what might slow things down a little bit. But yeah, I, think the future is going to involve Supercloud somewhere, whatever people end up calling it. And you and I discussed that. (laughs) But I don't, I don't think it goes away. I don't think it's, I don't think it's a fad. I think it is something that people see tremendous value and it's just, it's got to be, you know, for what you're trying to do, your application specific thing. >> You're making a great point on the funding of innovation and we're entering a new era of public policy as well. R and D tax credit is now is shifting. >> Yeah. >> You know, you're going to have to capitalize that over five years now. And that's something that goes back to the 1950s and many people would argue that's at least in part what has helped the United States be so, you know, competitive in tech. But Brian, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for participating in the program. Great to see you. >> Thanks Dave, appreciate it. Good luck with the rest of the show. >> Thank you. All right, this is Dave Vellante for John Furrier, the entire Cube community. Stay tuned for more content from Supercloud2.

>> Presenter: theCUBE presents Ignite '22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Hey guys and girls. Welcome back to theCube's live coverage at Palo Alto Ignite '22. We're live at the MGM Grand Hotel in beautiful Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is day one of our coverage. We've been talking with execs from Palo Alto, Partners, but one of our most exciting things is talking with Founders day. We get to do that next. >> The thing is, it's like I wrote this weekend in my breaking analysis. Understanding the problem in cybersecurity is really easy, but figuring out how to fix it ain't so much. >> It definitely isn't. >> So I'm excited to have Nir here. >> Very excited. Nir Zuk joins us, the founder and CTO of Palo Alto Networks. Welcome, Nir. Great to have you on the program. >> Thank you. >> So Palo Alto Networks, you founded it back in 2005. It's hard to believe that's been 18 years, almost. You did something different, which I want to get into. But tell us, what was it back then? Why did you found this company? >> I thought the world needed another cybersecurity company. I thought it's because there were so many cybersecurity vendors in the world, and just didn't make any sense. This industry has evolved in a very weird way, where every time there was a new challenge, rather than existing vendors dealing with a challenge, you had new vendors dealing with it, and I thought I could put a stop to it, and I think I did. >> You did something differently back in 2005, looking at where you are now, the leader, what was different in your mind back then? >> Yeah. When you found a new company, you have really two good options. There's also a bad option, but we'll skip that. You can either disrupt an existing market, or you can create a new market. So first, I decided to disrupt an existing market, go into an existing market first, network security, then cyber security, and change it. Change the way it works. And like I said, the challenges that every problem had a new vendor, and nobody just stepped back and said, "I think I can solve it with the platform." Meaning, I think I can spend some time not solving a specific problem, but building a platform that then can be used to solve many different problems. And that's what I've done, and that's what Palo Alto Networks has done, and that's where we are today. >> So you look back, you call it now, I think you call it a next gen firewall, but nothing in 2005, can it be next gen? Do you know the Silicon Valley Show? Do you know the show Silicon Valley? >> Oh! Yeah. >> Yeah, of course. >> You got to have a box. But it was a different kind of box- >> Actually. >> Explain that. >> Actually, it's exactly the same thing. You got to have a box. So I actually wanted to call it a necessary evil. Marketing wouldn't go for that. >> No. >> And the reason I wanted to call it a necessary evil, because one of the things that we've done in order to platform our cyber security, again, first network security now, also cloud security, and security operations, is to turn it into a SaaS delivered industry. Today every cyber security professional knows that, when they buy cyber security, they buy usually a SaaS delivered service. Back then, people thought I was crazy to think that customers are going to send their data to their vendor in order to process, and they wanted everything on premise and so on, but I said, "No, customers are going to send information to us for processing, because we have much more processing power than they have." And we needed something in the infrastructure to send us the information. So that's why I wanted to call it the necessary evil. We ended up calling it next generation firewall, which was probably a better term. >> Well, even Veritas. Remember Veritas? They had the no hardware agenda. Even they have a box. So it is like you say, you got to have it. >> It's necessary. >> Okay. You did this, you started this on your own cloud, kind of like Salesforce, ServiceNow. >> Correct. >> Similar now- >> Build your own data centers. >> Build your own data center. Okay, I call it a cloud, but no. >> No, it's the same. There's no cloud, it's just someone else's computer. >> According to Larry Ellison, he was actually probably right about that. But over time, you've had this closer partnership with the public clouds. >> Correct. >> What does that bring you and your customers, and how hard was that to navigate? >> It wasn't that hard for us, because we didn't have that many services. Usually it's harder. Of course, we didn't do a lift and shift, which is their own thing to do with the cloud. We rebuild things for the cloud, and the benefits, of course, are time to market, scale, agility, and in some cases also, cost. >> Yeah, some cases. >> In some cases. >> So you have a sort of a hybrid model today. You still run your own data centers, do you not? >> Very few. >> Really? >> There are very, very few things that we have to do on hardware, like simulating malware and things that cannot be done in a virtual machine, which is pretty much the only option you have in the cloud. They provide bare metal, but doesn't serve our needs. I think that we don't view cloud, and your viewers should not be viewing cloud, as a place where they're going to save money. It's a place where they're going to make money. >> I like that. >> You make much more money, because you're more agile. >> And that's why this conversation is all about, your cost of goods sold they're going to be so high, you're going to have to come back to your own data centers. That's not on your mind right now. What's on your mind is advancing the unit, right? >> Look, my own data center would limit me in scale, would limit my agility. If you want to build something new, you don't have all the PaaS services, the platform as a service, services like database, and AI, and so on. I have to build them myself. It takes time. So yeah, it's going to be cheaper, but I'm not going to be delivering the same thing. So my revenues will be much lower. >> Less top line. What can humans do better than machines? You were talking about your keynote... I'm just going to chat a little bit. You were talking about your keynote. Basically, if you guys didn't see the keynote, that AI is going to run every soc within five years, that was a great prediction that you made. >> Correct. >> And they're going to do things that you can't do today, and then in the future, they're going to do things that you can't... Better than you can do. >> And you just have to be comfortable with that. >> So what do you think humans can do today and in the future better than machines? >> Look, humans can always do better than machines. The human mind can do things that machines cannot do. We are conscious, I don't think machines will be conscious. And you can do things... My point was not that machines can do things that humans cannot do. They can just do it better. The things that humans do today, machines can do better, once machines do that, humans will be free to do things that they don't do today, that machines cannot do. >> Like what? >> Like finding the most difficult, most covert attacks, dealing with the most difficult incidents, things that machines just can't do. Just that today, humans are consumed by finding attacks that machines can find, by dealing with incidents that machines can deal with. It's a waste of time. We leave it to the machines and go and focus on the most difficult problems, and then have the machines learn from you, so that next time or a hundred or a thousand times from now, they can do it themselves, and you focus on the even more difficult. >> Yeah, just like after 9/11, they said that we lack the creativity. That's what humans have, that machines don't, at least today. >> Machines don't. Yeah, look, every airplane has two pilots, even though airplanes have been flying themselves for 30 years now, why do you have two pilots, to do the things that machines cannot do? Like land on the Hudson, right? You always need humans to do the things that machines cannot do. But to leave the things that machines can do to the machines, they'll do it better. >> And autonomous vehicles need breaks. (indistinct) >> In your customer conversations, are customers really grappling with that, are they going, "Yeah, you're right?" >> It depends. It's hard for customers to let go of old habits. First, the habit of buying a hundred different solutions from a hundred different vendors, and you know what? Why would I trust one vendor to do everything, put all my eggs in the same basket? They have all kind of slogans as to why not to do that, even though it's been proven again and again that, doing everything in one system with one brain, versus a hundred systems with a hundred brains, work much better. So that's one thing. The second thing is, we always have the same issue that we've had, I think, since the industrial revolution, of what machines are going to take away my job. No, they're just going to make your job better. So I think that some of our customers are also grappling with that, like, "What do I do if the machines take over?" And of course, like we've said, the machines aren't taking over. They're going to do the benign work, you're going to do the interesting work. You should embrace it. >> When I think about your history as a technology pro, from Check Point, a couple of startups, one of the things that always frustrated you, is when when a larger company bought you out, you ended up getting sucked into the bureaucratic vortex. How do you avoid that at Palo Alto Networks? >> So first, you mean when we acquire company? >> Yes. >> The first thing is that, when we acquire companies, we always acquire for integration. Meaning, we don't just buy something and then leave it on the side, and try to sell it here and there. We integrate it into the core of our products. So that's very important, so that the technology lives, thrives and continues to grow as part of our bigger platform. And I think that the second thing that is very important, from past experience what we've learned, is to put the people that we acquire in key positions. Meaning, you don't buy a company and then put the leader of that company five levels below the CEO. You always put them in very senior positions. Almost always, we have the leaders of the companies that we acquire, be two levels below the CEO, so very senior in the company, so they can influence and make changes. >> So two questions related to that. One is, as you grow your team, can you be both integrated? And second part of the question, can you be both integrated and best of breed? Second part of the question is, do you even have to be? >> So I'll answer it in the third way, which is, I don't think you can be best of breed without being integrated in cybersecurity. And the reason is, again, this split brain that I've mentioned twice. When you have different products do a part of cybersecurity and they don't talk to each other, and they don't share a single brain, you always compromise. You start looking for things the wrong way. I can be a little bit technical here, but please. Take the example of, traditionally you would buy an IDS/IPS, separately from your filtering, separately from DNS security. One of the most important things we do in network security is to find combining control connections. Combining control connections where the adversaries controlling something behind your firewall and is now going around your network, is usually the key heel of the attack. That's why attacks like ransomware, that don't have a commanding control connection, are so difficult to deal with, by the way. So commanding control connections are a key seal of the attacks, and there are three different technologies that deal with it. Neural filtering for neural based commanding control, DNS security for DNS based commanding control, and IDS/IPS for general commanding control. If those are three different products, they'll be doing the wrong things. The oral filter will try to find things that it's not really good at, that the IPS really need to find, and the DN... It doesn't work. It works much better when it's one product doing everything. So I think the choice is not between best of breed and integrated. I think the only choice is integrated, because that's the only way to be best of breed. >> And behind that technology is some kind of realtime data store, I'll call it data lake, database. >> Yeah. >> Whatever. >> It's all driven by the same data. All the URLs, all the domain graph. Everything goes to one big data lake. We collect about... I think we collect about, a few petabytes per day. I don't write the exact number of data. It's all going to the same data lake, and all the intelligence is driven by that. >> So you mentioned in a cheeky comment about, why you founded the company, there weren't enough cybersecurity companies. >> Yeah. >> Clearly the term expansion strategy that Palo Alto Networks has done has been very successful. You've been, as you talked about, very focused on integration, not just from the technology perspective, but from the people perspective as well. >> Correct. >> So why are there still so many cybersecurity companies, and what are you thinking Palo Alto Networks can do to change that? >> So first, I think that there are a lot of cybersecurity companies out there, because there's a lot of money going into cybersecurity. If you look at the number of companies that have been really successful, it's a very small percentage of those cybersecurity companies. And also look, we're not going to be responsible for all the innovation in cybersecurity. We need other people to innovate. It's also... Look, always the question is, "Do you buy something or do you build it yourself?" Now we think we're the smartest people in the world. Of course, we can build everything, but it's not always true that we can build everything. Know that we're the smartest people in the world, for sure. You see, when you are a startup, you live and die by the thing that you build. Meaning if it's good, it works. If it's not good, you die. You run out of money, you shut down, and you just lost four years of your life to this, at least. >> At least. >> When you're a large company, yeah, I can go and find a hundred engineers and hire them. And especially nowadays, it becomes easier, as it became easier, and give them money, and have them go and build the same thing that the startup is building, but they're part of a bigger company, and they'll have more coffee breaks, and they'll be less incentive to go and do that, because the company will survive with or without them. So that's why startups can do things much better, sometimes than larger companies. We can do things better than startups, when it comes to being data driven because we have the data, and nobody can compete against the amount of data that we have. So we have a good combination of finding the right startups that have already built something, already proven that it works with some customers, and of course, building a lot of things internally that we cannot do outside. >> I heard you say in one of the, I dunno, dozens of videos I've listened to you talked to. The industry doesn't need or doesn't want another IoT stovepipe. Okay, I agree. So you got on-prem, AWS, Azure, Google, maybe Alibaba, IoT is going to be all over the place. So can you build, I call it the security super cloud, in other words, a consistent experience with the same policies and edicts across all my estates, irrespective of physical location? Is that technically feasible? Is it what you are trying to do? >> Certainly, what we're trying to do with Prisma Cloud, with our cloud security product, it works across all the clouds that you mentioned, and Oracle as well. It's almost entirely possible. >> Almost. >> Almost. Well, the things that... What you do is you normalize the language that the different cloud scale providers use, into one language. This cloud calls it a S3, and so, AWS calls it S3, and (indistinct) calls it GCS, and so on. So you normalize their terminology, and then build policy using a common terminology that your customers have to get used to. Of course, there are things that are different between the different cloud providers that cannot be normalized, and there, it has to be cloud specific. >> In that instance. So is that, in part, your strategy, is to actually build that? >> Of course. >> And does that necessitate running on all the major clouds? >> Of course. It's not just part of our strategy, it's a major part of our strategy. >> Compulsory. >> Look, as a standalone vendor that is not a cloud provider, we have two advantages. The first one is we're security product, security focused. So we can do much better than them when it comes to security. If you are a AWS, GCP, Azure, and so on, you're not going to put your best people on security, you're going to put them on the core business that you have. So we can do much better. Hey, that's interesting. >> Well, that's not how they talk. >> I don't care how they talk. >> Now that's interesting. >> When something is 4% of your business, you're not going to put it... You're not going to put your best people there. It's just, why would you? You put your best people on 96%. >> That's not driving their revenue. >> Look, it's simple. It's not what we- >> With all due respect. With all due respect. >> So I think we do security much better than them, and they become the good enough, and we become the premium. But certainly, the second thing that give us an advantage and the right to be a standalone security provider, is that we're multicloud, private cloud and all the major cloud providers. >> But they also have a different role. I mean, your role is not the security, the Nitro card or the Graviton chip, or is it? >> They are responsible for securing up to the operating system. We secure everything. >> They do a pretty good job of that. >> No, they do, certainly they have to. If they get bridged at that level, it's not just that one customer is going to suffer, the entire customer base. They have to spend a lot of time and money on it, and frankly, that's where they put their best security people. Securing the infrastructure, not building some cloud security feature. >> Absolutely. >> So Palo Alto Networks is, as we wrap here, on track to nearly double its revenues to nearly seven billion in FY '23, just compared to 2020, you were quoted in the press by saying, "We will be the first $100 billion cyber company." What is next for Palo Alto to achieve that? >> Yeah, so it was Nikesh, our CEO and chairman, that was quoted saying that, "We will double to a hundred billion." I don't think he gave it a timeframe, but what it takes is to double the sales, right? We're at 50 billion market cap right now, so we need to double sales. But in reality, you mentioned that we're growing the turn by doing more and more cybersecurity functions, and taking away pieces. Still, we have a relatively small, even though we're the largest cybersecurity vendor in the world, we have a very low market share that shows you how fragmented the market is. I would also like to point out something that is less known. Part of what we do with AI, is really take the part of the cybersecurity industry, which are service oriented, and that's about 50% of the cybersecurity industry services, and turn it into products. I mean, not all of it. But a good portion of what's provided today by people, and tens of billions of dollars are spent on that, can be done with products. And being one of the very, very few vendors that do that, I think we have a huge opportunity at turning those tens of billions of dollars in human services to AI. >> It's always been a good business taking human labor and translating into R and D, vendor R and D. >> Especially- >> It never fails if you do it well. >> Especially in difficult times, difficult economical times like we are probably experiencing right now around the world. We, not we, but we the world. >> Right, right. Well, congratulations. Coming up on the 18th anniversary. Tremendous amount of success. >> Thank you. >> Great vision, clear vision, STEM expansion strategy, really well underway. We are definitely going to continue to keep our eyes. >> Big company, a hundred billion, that's market capital, so that's a big company. You said you didn't want to work for a big company unless you founded it, is that... >> Unless it acts like a small company. >> There's the caveat. We'll keep our eye on that. >> Thank you very much. >> It's such a pleasure having you on. >> Thank you. >> Same here, thank you. >> All right, for our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live emerging and enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone, and welcome back to Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas, baby. This is the Cube live at AWS Reinvent 2022 with tens of thousands of people. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave, we've had some great conversations. This is day one of four days of wall to wall coverage on the cube. We've been talking data. Every company is a data company. Data protection, data resiliency, absolutely table stakes for organizations to, >>And I think ecosystem is the other big theme. And that really came to life last year. You know, we came out of the pandemic and it was like, wow, we are entering a new era. People no longer was the ecosystem worried about it, AWS competing with them. They were more worried about innovating and building on top of AWS and building their own value. And that's really, I think, the theme of the 2020s within the ecosystem. >>And we're gonna be talking about building on top of aws. Two guests join us, two alumni join us. Stephen Manley is here, the CTO of Druva. Welcome back. Jason crat as well is here. CIO and CTO of Summit Carbon Solutions. Guys, great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you. >>Let's start with you giving the audience an understanding of the company. What do you guys do? What do you deliver value for customers? All that good >>Stuff. Yeah, no, for sure. So Summit Carbon is the world's largest carbon capture and sequestration company capturing close to 15 million tons of carbon every year. So it doesn't go into the atmosphere. >>Wow, fantastic. Steven, the, the risk landscape today is crazy, right? There's, there's been massive changes. We've talked about this many times. What are some of the things, you know, ransomware is a, is, I know as you say, this is a, it's not a, if it's gonna happen, it's when it's how frequent, it's what's gonna be the damage. What are some of the challenges and concerns that you're hearing from customers out there today? >>Yeah, you know, it really comes down to three things. And, and everybody is, is terrified of ransomware and justifiably so. So, so the first thing that comes up is, how do I keep up? Because I have so much data in so many places, and the threats are evolving so quickly. I don't have enough money, I don't have enough people, I don't have enough skilled resources to be able to keep up. The second thing, and this ties in with what Dave said, is, is ecosystem. You know, it used to be that your, your backup was siloed, right? They'd sit in the basement and, and you wouldn't see, see them. But now they're saying, I've gotta work with my security team. So rather than hoping the security team stays away from me, how do I integrate with them? How do I tie together? And then the third one, which is on everybody's mind, is when that attack happens, and like you said, it's win and, and the bell rings and they come to me and they say, all right, it's time for you to recover. It's time for, for all this investment we've put in. Am I gonna be ready? Am I going to be able to execute? Because a ransom or recovery is so different than any other recovery they've ever done. So it's those three things that really are top of mind for >>How, so what is the, what are the key differences, if you could summarize? I mean, I >>Know it's so, so the first one is you can't trust the environment you're restoring into. Even with a disaster, it would finish and you'd say, okay, I'm gonna get my data center set up again and I'm gonna get things working. You know, when I try to recover, I don't know if everything's clean yet. I'm trying to recover while I'm still going through incident response. So that's one big difference. A second big difference is I'm not sure if the thing I'm recovering is good, I've gotta scan it. I've gotta make sure what's inside it is, is, is alright. And then the third thing is what we're seeing is the targets are usually not necessarily the crown jewels because those tend to be more protected. And so they're running into this, I need to recover a massive amount of what we might call tier two, tier three apps that I wasn't ready for because I've always been prepared for that tier one disaster. And so, so those three things they go, it's stuff I'm not prepared or covering. It's a flow. I'm not used to having to check things and I'm not sure where I'm gonna recover too when the, when the time comes. >>Yeah, just go ahead. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think for me, the biggest concern is the blind spots of where did I actually back it up or not. You know, what did I get it? Cuz you, we always protect our e r p, we always protect these sort of classes of tiers of systems, but then it's like, oh, that user's email box didn't get it. Oh, that, you know, that one drive didn't get it. You know, or, or, or whatever it is. You know, the infrastructure behind it all. I forgot to back that up. That to me the blind spots are the scariest part of a ransomware attack. >>And, and if you think about it, some of the most high profile attacks, you know, on the, on the colonial pipeline, they didn't go after the core assets. They went after billing. That's right. But billing brought everything down so they're smart enough to say, right, I'm not gonna take the, the castle head on. Is there is they're that. Exactly. >>And so how do you, I get, I mean you can air gap and do things like that in terms of protecting the, the, the data, the corrupt data. How do you protect the corrupt environment? Like that's, that's a really challenging issue. Is >>It? I don't know. I mean, I'll, I'll you can go second here. I think that what's interesting to me about is that's what cloud's for. You can build as many environments as you want. You only pay for what you use, right? And so you have an opportunity to just reconstruct it. That's why things, everything is code matters. That's why having a cloud partner like Druva matters. So you can just go restore wherever you need to in a totally clean environment. >>So the answer is you gotta do it in the cloud. Yeah. What if it's on prem? >>So if it's on prem, what we see people do is, and, and, and this is where testing and, and where cloud can still be an asset, is you can look and say a lot of those assets I'm running in the data center, I could still recover in the cloud. And so you can go through DR testing and you can start to define what's in your on-prem so that you could make it, you know, so you can make it cloud recoverable. Now, a lot of the people that do that then say, well actually why am I even running this on prem anymore in the first place? I should just move this to the cloud now. But, but, but there are people in that interim step. But, but, but it's really important because you, you're gonna need a clean environment to play in. And it's so hard to have a clean environment set up in a data center cuz it basically means I'm not touching this, I'm just paying for something to sit idle. Whereas cloud, I can spin that up, right? Get a, a cloud foundation suite and, and just again, infrastructures code, spin things up, test it, spin it down. It doesn't cost me money on a daily basis. >>Jason, talk a little bit about how you are using Druva. Why Druva and give us a kind of a landscape of your IT environment with Druva. >>Yeah. You know, so when we first started, you know, we did have a competitor solution and, and, and it was only backing up, you know, we were a startup. It was only backing up our email. And so as you pointed out, the ecosystem really matters because we grew out of email pretty quick as a startup. And we had to have real use cases to protect and the legacy product just wouldn't support us. And so our whole direction, or my direction to my team is back it up wherever it is, you know, go get it. And so we needed somebody in the field, literally in the middle of Nebraska or Iowa to have their laptop backed up. We needed our infrastructure, our data center backed up and we needed our, our SaaS solutions backed up. We needed it all. And so we needed a partner like Druva to help us go get it wherever it's at. >>Talk about the value in, with Druva being cloud native. >>Yeah. To us it's a big deal, right? There's all sorts of products you could go by to go just do endpoint laptop protection or just do SAS backups. For us, the value is in learning one tool and mastering it and then taking it to wherever the data is. To me, we see a lot of value for that because we can have one team focus on one product, get good at it, and drive the value. >>That consolidation theme is big right now, you know, the economic headwinds and so forth. What was the catalyst for you? Was it, is that something you started, you know, years ago? Just it's good practice to do that? What's, >>Well, no, I mean luckily I'm in a very good position as a startup to do define it, you know, but I've been in those legacy organizations where we've got a lot of tech debt and then how do you consolidate your portfolio so that you can gain more value, right? Cause you only get one budget a year, right? And so I'm lucky in, in the learnings I've had in other enterprises to deal with this head on right now as we grow, don't add tech debt, put it in right. Today. >>Talk to us a little bit about the SaaS applications that you're backing up. You know, we, we talk a lot with customers, the shared, the shared responsibility model that a lot of customers aren't aware of. Where are you using that competing solution to protect SaaS applications before driven and talk about Yeah. The, the value in that going, the data protection is our responsibility and not the SA vendor. >>No, absolutely. I mean, and it is funny to go to, you know, it's like Office 365 applications and go to our, our CFO and a leadership and be like, no, we really gotta back it up to a third party. And they're like, but why? >>It's >>In the cloud, right? And so there's a lot of instruction I have to provide to my peers and, and, and my users to help them understand why these things matter. And, and, and it works out really well because we can show value really quick when anything happens. And now we get, I mean, even in SharePoint, people will come to us to restore things when they're fully empowered to do it. But my team's faster. And so we can just get it done for them. And so it's an extra from me, it's an extra SLA or never service level I can provide to my internal customers that, that gives them more faith and trust in my organization. >>How, how are the SEC op teams and the data protection teams, the backup teams, how are they coming together? Is is, is data protection backup just morphing into security? Is it more of an adjacency? What's that dynamic like? >>So I'd say right now, and, and I'll be curious to hear Jason's organization, but certainly what we see broadly is, you know, the, the teams are starting to work together, but I wouldn't say they're merging, right? Because, you know, you think of it in a couple of ways. The first is you've got a production environment and that needs to be secured. And then you've got a protection environment. And that protection environment also has to be secured. So the first conversation for a lot of backup teams is, alright, I need to actually work with the security team to make sure that, that my, my my backup environment, it's air gapped, it's encrypted, it's secured. Then I think the, the then I think you start to see people come together, especially as they go through, say, tabletop exercises for ransomware recovery, where it's, alright, where, where can the backup team add value here? >>Because certainly recovery, that's the basics. But as there log information you can provide, are there detection pieces that you can offer? So, so I think, you know, you start to see a partnership, but, but the reality is, you know, the, the two are still separate, right? Because, you know, my job as a a protection resiliency company is I wanna make sure that when you need your data, it's gonna be there for you. And I certainly want to, to to follow best secure practices and I wanna offer value to the security team, but there's a whole lot of the security ecosystem that I want to plug into. I'm not trying to replace them again. I want to be part of that broader ecosystem. >>So how, how do you guys approach it? Yeah, >>That's interesting. Yeah. So in my organization, we, we are one team and, and not to be too cheesy or you know, whatever, but as Amazon would say, security is job one. And so we treat it as if this is it. And so we never push something into production until we are ready. And ready to us means it's got a security package on it, it's backed up, the users have tested it, we are ready to go. It's not that we're ready just be to provide the service or the thing. It's that we are actually ready to productionize this. And so it's ready for production data and that slows us down in some cases. But that's where DevOps and this idea of just merging everything together into a central, how do we get this done together, has worked out really well for us. So, >>So it's really the DevOps team's responsibility. It's not a separate data protection function. >>Nope. Nope. We have specialists of course, right? Yeah, yeah. Because you need the extra level, the CISSPs and those people Yeah, yeah. To really know what they're doing, but they're just part of the team. Yeah. >>Talk about some of the business outcomes that you're achieving with Druva so far. >>Yeah. The business outcomes for me are, you know, I meet my SLAs that's promising. I can communicate that I feel more secure in the cloud and, and all of my workloads because I can restore it. And, and that to me helps everybody in my organization sleep well, sleep better. We are, we transport a lot of the carbon in a pipeline like Colonial. And so to us, we are, we are potential victims of, of a pipe, a non pipeline group, right? Attacking us, but it's carbon, you know, we're trying to get it outta atmosphere. And so by protecting it, no matter where it is, as long as we've got internet access, we can back it up. That provides tons of value to my team because we have hundreds of people in the field working for us every day who collect data and generate it. >>What would you say to a customer who's maybe on the fence looking at different technologies, why dva? >>You know, I think, you know, do the research in my mind, it'll win if you just do the research, right? I mean, there might be vendors that'll buy you nice dinners or whatever, and those are, those are nice things, but the, the reality is you have to protect your data no matter where it is. If it's in a SaaS application, if it's in a cloud provider, if it's infrastructure, wherever it is, you need it. And if you just go look at the facts, there it is, right? And so I, I'd say be objective. Look at the facts, it'll prove itself. >>Look at the data. There you go. Steven Druva recently announced a data resiliency guarantee with a big whopping financial sum. Talk to us a little bit about that, the value in it for your customers and for prospects, >>Right? So, so basically there's, there's really two parts to this guarantee. The first is, you know, across five different SLAs, and I'll talk about those, you know, if we violate those, the customers can get a payout of up to 10 million, right? So again, putting, putting our money where our mouth is in a pretty large amount. But, but for me, the exciting part, and this is, this is where Jason went, is it's about the SLAs, right? You know, one of Drew's goals is to say, look, we do the job for you, we do the service for you so you can offer that service to your company. And so the SLAs aren't just about ransomware, some of them certainly are, you know, that, that you're going to be able to recover your data in the event of a ransomware attack, that your data won't get exfiltrated as part of a ransomware attack. >>But also things like backup success rates, because as much as recovery matters a lot more than backup, you do need a backup if you're gonna be able to get that recovery done. There's also an SLA to say that, you know, if 10 years down the road you need to recover your data, it's still recoverable, right? So, so that kind of durability piece. And then of course the availability of the service because what's the point of a service if it's not there for you when you need it? And so, so having that breadth of coverage, I think really reflects who Druva is, which is we're doing this job for you, right? We want to make this this service available so you can focus on offering other value inside your business. And >>The insurance underwriters, if they threw holy water on >>That, they, they, they were okay with it. The legal people blessed it, you know, it, you know, the CEO signed off on it, the board of directors. So, you know, it, and it, it's all there in print, it's all there on the web. If you wanna look, you know, make sure, one of the things we wanted to be very clear on is that this isn't just a marketing gimmick that we're, we're putting, that we're putting substance behind it because a lot of these were already in our contracts anyway, because as a SAS vendor, you're signing up for service level agreements anyway. >>Yeah. But most of the service level agreements and SaaS vendors are crap. They're like, you know, hey, you know, if something bad happens, you know, we'll, we'll give you a credit, >>Right? >>For, you know, for when you were down. I mean, it's not, you never get into business impact. I mean, even aws, sorry, I mean, it's true. We're a customer. I read define print, I know what I'm signing up for. But, so that's, >>We read it a lot and we will not, we don't really care about the credits at all. We care about is it their force? Is it a partner? We trust, we fight that every day in our SLAs with our vendors >>In the end, right? I mean this, we are the last line of defense. We are the thing that keeps the business up and running. So if your business, you know, can't get to his data and can't operate, me coming to you and saying, Dave, I've got some credits for you after you, you know, after you declare bankruptcy, it'll be great. Yeah, that's not a win. >>It's no value, >>Not helpful. The goal's gotta be, your business is up and running cuz that's when we're both successful. So, so, so, you know, we view this as we're in it together, right? We wanna make sure your business succeeds. Again, it's not about slight of hand, it's not about, you know, just, just putting fine print in the contract. It's about standing up and delivering. Because if you can't do that, why are we here? Right? The number one thing we hear from our customers is Dr. Just works. And that's the thing I think I'm most proud of is Druva just works. >>So, speaking of Juva, just working, if there's a billboard in Santa Clara near the new offices about Druva, what's, what's the bumper sticker? What's the tagline? >>I, I, I think, I think that's it. I think Druva just works. Keeps your data safe. Simple as that. Safe and secure. Druva works to keep your data safe and secure. >>Saved me. >>Yeah. >>Truva just works. Guys, thanks so much for joining. David, me on the program. Great to have you back on the cube. Thank you. Talking about how you're working together, what Druva is doing to really putting, its its best foot forward. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thanks guys. It's great to see you guys. Likewise >>The show for our guests and Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>We're back at Super Computing, 22 in Dallas, winding down the final day here. A big show floor behind me. Lots of excitement out there, wouldn't you say, Dave? Just >>Oh, it's crazy. I mean, any, any time you have NASA presentations going on and, and steampunk iterations of cooling systems that the, you know, it's, it's >>The greatest. I've been to hundreds of trade shows. I don't think I've ever seen NASA exhibiting at one like they are here. Dave Nicholson, my co-host. I'm Paul Gell, in which with us is Satish Ier. He is the vice president of emerging services at Dell Technologies and Satit, thanks for joining us on the cube. >>Thank you. Paul, >>What are emerging services? >>Emerging services are actually the growth areas for Dell. So it's telecom, it's cloud, it's edge. So we, we especially focus on all the growth vectors for, for the companies. >>And, and one of the key areas that comes under your jurisdiction is called apex. Now I'm sure there are people who don't know what Apex is. Can you just give us a quick definition? >>Absolutely. So Apex is actually Dells for a into cloud, and I manage the Apex services business. So this is our way of actually bringing cloud experience to our customers, OnPrem and in color. >>But, but it's not a cloud. I mean, you don't, you don't have a Dell cloud, right? It's, it's of infrastructure as >>A service. It's infrastructure and platform and solutions as a service. Yes, we don't have our own e of a public cloud, but we want to, you know, this is a multi-cloud world, so technically customers want to consume where they want to consume. So this is Dell's way of actually, you know, supporting a multi-cloud strategy for our customers. >>You, you mentioned something just ahead of us going on air. A great way to describe Apex, to contrast Apex with CapEx. There's no c there's no cash up front necessary. Yeah, I thought that was great. Explain that, explain that a little more. Well, >>I mean, you know, one, one of the main things about cloud is the consumption model, right? So customers would like to pay for what they consume, they would like to pay in a subscription. They would like to not prepay CapEx ahead of time. They want that economic option, right? So I think that's one of the key tenets for anything in cloud. So I think it's important for us to recognize that and think Apex is basically a way by which customers pay for what they consume, right? So that's a absolutely a key tenant for how, how we want to design Apex. So it's absolutely right. >>And, and among those services are high performance computing services. Now I was not familiar with that as an offering in the Apex line. What constitutes a high performance computing Apex service? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, this conference is great, like you said, you know, I, there's so many HPC and high performance computing folks here, but one of the things is, you know, fundamentally, if you look at high performance computing ecosystem, it is quite complex, right? And when you call it as an Apex HPC or Apex offering offer, it brings a lot of the cloud economics and cloud, you know, experience to the HPC offer. So fundamentally, it's about our ability for customers to pay for what they consume. It's where Dell takes a lot of the day to day management of the infrastructure on our own so that customers don't need to do the grunge work of managing it, and they can really focus on the actual workload, which actually they run on the CHPC ecosystem. So it, it is, it is high performance computing offer, but instead of them buying the infrastructure, running all of that by themself, we make it super easy for customers to consume and manage it across, you know, proven designs, which Dell always implements across these verticals. >>So what, what makes the high performance computing offering as opposed to, to a rack of powered servers? What do you add in to make it >>Hpc? Ah, that's a great question. So, I mean, you know, so this is a platform, right? So we are not just selling infrastructure by the drink. So we actually are fundamentally, it's based on, you know, we, we, we launch two validated designs, one for life science sales, one for manufacturing. So we actually know how these PPO work together, how they actually are validated design tested solution. And we also, it's a platform. So we actually integrate the softwares on the top. So it's just not the infrastructure. So we actually integrate a cluster manager, we integrate a job scheduler, we integrate a contained orchestration layer. So a lot of these things, customers have to do it by themself, right? If they're buy the infrastructure. So by basically we are actually giving a platform or an ecosystem for our customers to run their workloads. So make it easy for them to actually consume those. >>That's Now is this, is this available on premises for customer? >>Yeah, so we, we, we make it available customers both ways. So we make it available OnPrem for customers who want to, you know, kind of, they want to take that, take that economics. We also make it available in a colo environment if the customers want to actually, you know, extend colo as that OnPrem environment. So we do both. >>What are, what are the requirements for a customer before you roll that equipment in? How do they sort of have to set the groundwork for, >>For Well, I think, you know, fundamentally it starts off with what the actual use case is, right? So, so if you really look at, you know, the two validated designs we talked about, you know, one for, you know, healthcare life sciences, and one other one for manufacturing, they do have fundamentally different requirements in terms of what you need from those infrastructure systems. So, you know, the customers initially figure out, okay, how do they actually require something which is going to require a lot of memory intensive loads, or do they actually require something which has got a lot of compute power. So, you know, it all depends on what they would require in terms of the workloads to be, and then we do havet sizing. So we do have small, medium, large, we have, you know, multiple infrastructure options, CPU core options. Sometimes the customer would also wanna say, you know what, as long as the regular CPUs, I also want some GPU power on top of that. So those are determinations typically a customer makes as part of the ecosystem, right? And so those are things which would, they would talk to us about to say, okay, what is my best option in terms of, you know, kind of workloads I wanna run? And then they can make a determination in terms of how, how they would actually going. >>So this, this is probably a particularly interesting time to be looking at something like HPC via Apex with, with this season of Rolling Thunder from various partners that you have, you know? Yep. We're, we're all expecting that Intel is gonna be rolling out new CPU sets from a powered perspective. You have your 16th generation of PowerEdge servers coming out, P C I E, gen five, and all of the components from partners like Invidia and Broadcom, et cetera, plugging into them. Yep. What, what does that, what does that look like from your, from your perch in terms of talking to customers who maybe, maybe they're doing things traditionally and they're likely to be not, not fif not 15 G, not generation 15 servers. Yeah. But probably more like 14. Yeah, you're offering a pretty huge uplift. Yep. What, what do those conversations look >>Like? I mean, customers, so talking about partners, right? I mean, of course Dell, you know, we, we, we don't bring any solutions to the market without really working with all of our partners, whether that's at the infrastructure level, like you talked about, you know, Intel, amd, Broadcom, right? All the chip vendors, all the way to software layer, right? So we have cluster managers, we have communities orchestrators. So we usually what we do is we bring the best in class, whether it's a software player or a hardware player, right? And we bring it together as a solution. So we do give the customers a choice, and the customers always want to pick what you they know actually is awesome, right? So they that, that we actually do that. And, you know, and one of the main aspects of, especially when you talk about these things, bringing it as a service, right? >>We take a lot of guesswork away from our customer, right? You know, one of the good example of HPC is capacity, right? So customers, these are very, you know, I would say very intensive systems. Very complex systems, right? So customers would like to buy certain amount of capacity, they would like to grow and, you know, come back, right? So give, giving them the flexibility to actually consume more if they want, giving them the buffer and coming down. All of those things are very important as we actually design these things, right? And that takes some, you know, customers are given a choice, but it actually, they don't need to worry about, oh, you know, what happens if I actually have a spike, right? There's already buffer capacity built in. So those are awesome things. When we talk about things as a service, >>When customers are doing their ROI analysis, buying CapEx on-prem versus, versus using Apex, is there a point, is there a crossover point typically at which it's probably a better deal for them to, to go OnPrem? >>Yeah, I mean, it it like specifically talking about hpc, right? I mean, why, you know, we do have a ma no, a lot of customers consume high performance compute and public cloud, right? That's not gonna go away, right? But there are certain reasons why they would look at OnPrem or they would look at, for example, Ola environment, right? One of the main reasons they would like to do that is purely have to do with cost, right? These are pretty expensive systems, right? There is a lot of ingress, egress, there is a lot of data going back and forth, right? Public cloud, you know, it costs money to put data in or actually pull data back, right? And the second one is data residency and security requirements, right? A lot of these things are probably proprietary set of information. We talked about life sciences, there's a lot of research, right? >>Manufacturing, a lot of these things are just, just in time decision making, right? You are on a factory floor, you gotta be able to do that. Now there is a latency requirement. So I mean, I think a lot of things play, you know, plays into this outside of just cost, but data residency requirements, ingress, egress are big things. And when you're talking about mass moments of data you wanna put and pull it back in, they would like to kind of keep it close, keep it local, and you know, get a, get a, get a price >>Point. Nevertheless, I mean, we were just talking to Ian Coley from aws and he was talking about how customers have the need to sort of move workloads back and forth between the cloud and on-prem. That's something that they're addressing without posts. You are very much in the, in the on-prem world. Do you have, or will you have facilities for customers to move workloads back and forth? Yeah, >>I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily say, you know, Dell's cloud strategy is multi-cloud, right? So we basically, so it kind of falls into three, I mean we, some customers, some workloads are suited always for public cloud. It's easier to consume, right? There are, you know, customers also consume on-prem, the customers also consuming Kohler. And we also have like Dell's amazing piece of software like storage software. You know, we make some of these things available for customers to consume a software IP on their public cloud, right? So, you know, so this is our multi-cloud strategy. So we announced a project in Alpine, in Delta fold. So you know, if you look at those, basically customers are saying, I love your Dell IP on this, on this product, on the storage, can you make it available through, in this public environment, whether, you know, it's any of the hyper skill players. So if we do all of that, right? So I think it's, it shows that, you know, it's not always tied to an infrastructure, right? Customers want to consume the best thumb and if we need to be consumed in hyperscale, we can make it available. >>Do you support containers? >>Yeah, we do support containers on hpc. We have, we have two container orchestrators we have to support. We, we, we have aner similarity, we also have a container options to customers. Both options. >>What kind of customers are you signing up for the, for the HPC offerings? Are they university research centers or is it tend to be smaller >>Companies? It, it's, it's, you know, the last three days, this conference has been great. We probably had like, you know, many, many customers talking to us. But HC somewhere in the range of 40, 50 customers, I would probably say lot of interest from educational institutions, universities research, to your point, a lot of interest from manufacturing, factory floor automation. A lot of customers want to do dynamic simulations on factory floor. That is also quite a bit of interest from life sciences pharmacies because you know, like I said, we have two designs, one on life sciences, one on manufacturing, both with different dynamics on the infrastructure. So yeah, quite a, quite a few interest definitely from academics, from life sciences, manufacturing. We also have a lot of financials, big banks, you know, who wants to simulate a lot of the, you know, brokerage, a lot of, lot of financial data because we have some, you know, really optimized hardware we announced in Dell for, especially for financial services. So there's quite a bit of interest from financial services as well. >>That's why that was great. We often think of Dell as, as the organization that democratizes all things in it eventually. And, and, and, and in that context, you know, this is super computing 22 HPC is like the little sibling trailing around, trailing behind the super computing trend. But we definitely have seen this move out of just purely academia into the business world. Dell is clearly a leader in that space. How has Apex overall been doing since you rolled out that strategy, what, two couple? It's been, it's been a couple years now, hasn't it? >>Yeah, it's been less than two years. >>How are, how are, how are mainstream Dell customers embracing Apex versus the traditional, you know, maybe 18 months to three year upgrade cycle CapEx? Yeah, >>I mean I look, I, I think that is absolutely strong momentum for Apex and like we, Paul pointed out earlier, we started with, you know, making the infrastructure and the platforms available to customers to consume as a service, right? We have options for customers, you know, to where Dell can fully manage everything end to end, take a lot of the pain points away, like we talked about because you know, managing a cloud scale, you know, basically environment for the customers, we also have options where customers would say, you know what, I actually have a pretty sophisticated IT organization. I want Dell to manage the infrastructure, but up to this level in the layer up to the guest operating system, I'll take care of the rest, right? So we are seeing customers who are coming to us with various requirements in terms of saying, I can do up to here, but you take all of this pain point away from me or you do everything for me. >>It all depends on the customer. So we do have wide interest. So our, I would say our products and the portfolio set in Apex is expanding and we are also learning, right? We are getting a lot of feedback from customers in terms of what they would like to see on some of these offers. Like the example we just talked about in terms of making some of the software IP available on a public cloud where they'll look at Dell as a software player, right? That's also is absolutely critical. So I think we are giving customers a lot of choices. Our, I would say the choice factor and you know, we are democratizing, like you said, expanding in terms of the customer choices. And I >>Think it's, we're almost outta our time, but I do wanna be sure we get to Dell validated designs, which you've mentioned a couple of times. How specific are the, well, what's the purpose of these designs? How specific are they? >>They, they are, I mean I, you know, so the most of these valid, I mean, again, we look at these industries, right? And we look at understanding exactly how would, I mean we have huge embedded base of customers utilizing HPC across our ecosystem in Dell, right? So a lot of them are CapEx customers. We actually do have an active customer profile. So these validated designs takes into account a lot of customer feedback, lot of partner feedback in terms of how they utilize this. And when you build these solutions, which are kind of end to end and integrated, you need to start anchoring on something, right? And a lot of these things have different characteristics. So these validated design basically prove to us that, you know, it gives a very good jump off point for customers. That's the way I look at it, right? So a lot of them will come to the table with, they don't come to the blank sheet of paper when they say, oh, you know what I'm, this, this is my characteristics of what I want. I think this is a great point for me to start from, right? So I think that that gives that, and plus it's the power of validation, really, right? We test, validate, integrate, so they know it works, right? So all of those are hypercritical. When you talk to, >>And you mentioned healthcare, you, you mentioned manufacturing, other design >>Factoring. We just announced validated design for financial services as well, I think a couple of days ago in the event. So yep, we are expanding all those DVDs so that we, we can, we can give our customers a choice. >>We're out of time. Sat ier. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. At the center of the move to subscription to everything as a service, everything is on a subscription basis. You really are on the leading edge of where, where your industry is going. Thanks for joining us. >>Thank you, Paul. Thank you Dave. >>Paul Gillum with Dave Nicholson here from Supercomputing 22 in Dallas, wrapping up the show this afternoon and stay with us for, they'll be half more soon.

(techno music intro) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of SuperComputing Conference 2022. We are here at day three covering the amazing events that are occurring here. I'm Dave Nicholson, with my co-host Paul Gillin. How's it goin', Paul? >> Fine, Dave. Winding down here, but still plenty of action. >> Interesting stuff. We got a full day of coverage, and we're having really, really interesting conversations. We sort of wrapped things up at Supercomputing 22 here in Dallas. I've got two very special guests with me, Scott from Intel and David from Dell, to talk about yeah supercomputing, but guess what? We've got some really cool stuff coming up after this whole thing wraps. So not all of the holiday gifts have been unwrapped yet, kids. Welcome gentlemen. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, let's start with you, David. First of all, explain the relationship in general between Dell and Intel. >> Sure, so obviously Intel's been an outstanding partner. We built some great solutions over the years. I think the market reflects that. Our customers tell us that. The feedback's strong. The products you see out here this week at Supercompute, you know, put that on display for everybody to see. And then as we think about AI in machine learning, there's so many different directions we need to go to help our customers deliver AI outcomes. Right, so we recognize that AI has kind of spread outside of just the confines of everything we've seen here this week. And now we've got really accessible AI use cases that we can explain to friends and family. We can talk about going into retail environments and how AI is being used to track inventory, to monitor traffic, et cetera. But really what that means to us as a bunch of hardware folks is we have to deliver the right platforms and the right designs for a variety of environments, both inside and outside the data center. And so if you look at our portfolio, we have some great products here this week, but we also have other platforms, like the XR4000, our shortest rack server ever that's designed to go into Edge environments, but is also built for those Edge AI use cases that supports GPUs. It supports AI on the CPU as well. And so there's a lot of really compelling platforms that we're starting to talk about, have already been talking about, and it's going to really enable our customers to deliver AI in a variety of ways. >> You mentioned AI on the CPU. Maybe this is a question for Scott. What does that mean, AI on the CPU? >> Well, as David was talking about, we're just seeing this explosion of different use cases. And some of those on the Edge, some of them in the Cloud, some of them on Prem. But within those individual deployments, there's often different ways that you can do AI, whether that's training or inference. And what we're seeing is a lot of times the memory locality matters quite a bit. You don't want to have to pay necessarily a cost going across the PCI express bus, especially with some of our newer products like the CPU Max series, where you can have a huge about of high bandwidth memory just sitting right on the CPU. Things that traditionally would have been accelerator only, can now live on a CPU, and that includes both on the inference side. We're seeing some really great things with images, where you might have a giant medical image that you need to be able to do extremely high resolution inference on or even text, where you might have a huge corpus of extremely sparse text that you need to be able to randomly sample very efficiently. >> So how are these needs influencing the evolution of Intel CPU architectures? >> So, we're talking to our customers. We're talking to our partners. This presents both an opportunity, but also a challenge with all of these different places that you can put these great products, as well as applications. And so we're very thoughtfully trying to go to the market, see where their needs are, and then meet those needs. This industry obviously has a lot of great players in it, and it's no longer the case that if you build it, they will come. So what we're doing is we're finding where are those choke points, how can we have that biggest difference? Sometimes there's generational leaps, and I know David can speak to this, can be huge from one system to the next just because everything's accelerated on the software side, the hardware side, and the platforms themselves. >> That's right, and we're really excited about that leap. If you take what Scott just described, we've been writing white papers, our team with Scott's team, we've been talking about those types of use cases using doing large image analysis and leveraging system memory, leveraging the CPU to do that, we've been talking about that for several generations now. Right, going back to Cascade Lake, going back to what we would call 14th generation power Edge. And so now as we prepare and continue to unveil, kind of we're in launch season, right, you and I were talking about how we're in launch season. As we continue to unveil and launch more products, the performance improvements are just going to be outstanding and we'll continue that evolution that Scott described. >> Yeah, I'd like to applaud Dell just for a moment for its restraint. Because I know you could've come in and taken all of the space in the convention center to show everything that you do. >> Would have loved to. >> In the HPC space. Now, worst kept secrets on earth at this point. Vying for number one place is the fact that there is a new Mission Impossible movie coming. And there's also new stuff coming from Intel. I know, I think allegedly we're getting close. What can you share with us on that front? And I appreciate it if you can't share a ton of specifics, but where are we going? David just alluded to it. >> Yeah, as David talked about, we've been working on some of these things for many years. And it's just, this momentum is continuing to build, both in respect to some of our hardware investments. We've unveiled some things both here, both on the CPU side and the accelerator side, but also on the software side. OneAPI is gathering more and more traction and the ecosystem is continuing to blossom. Some of our AI and HPC workloads, and the combination thereof, are becoming more and more viable, as well as displacing traditional approaches to some of these problems. And it's this type of thing where it's not linear. It all builds on itself. And we've seen some of these investments that we've made for a better half of a decade starting to bear fruit, but that's, it's not just a one time thing. It's just going to continue to roll out, and we're going to be seeing more and more of this. >> So I want to follow up on something that you mentioned. I don't know if you've ever heard that the Charlie Brown saying that sometimes the most discouraging thing can be to have immense potential. Because between Dell and Intel, you offer so many different versions of things from a fit for function perspective. As a practical matter, how do you work with customers, and maybe this is a question for you, David. How do you work with customers to figure out what the right fit is? >> I'll give you a great example. Just this week, customer conversations, and we can put it in terms of kilowatts to rack, right. How many kilowatts are you delivering at a rack level inside your data center? I've had an answer anywhere from five all the way up to 90. There's some that have been a bit higher that probably don't want to talk about those cases, kind of customers we're meeting with very privately. But the range is really, really large, right, and there's a variety of environments. Customers might be ready for liquid today. They may not be ready for it. They may want to maximize air cooling. Those are the conversations, and then of course it all maps back to the workloads they wish to enable. AI is an extremely overloaded term. We don't have enough time to talk about all the different things that tuck under that umbrella, but the workloads and the outcomes they wish to enable, we have the right solutions. And then we take it a step further by considering where they are today, where they need to go. And I just love that five to 90 example of not every customer has an identical cookie cutter environment, so we've got to have the right platforms, the right solutions, for the right workloads, for the right environments. >> So, I like to dive in on this power issue, to give people who are watching an idea. Because we say five kilowatts, 90 kilowatts, people are like, oh wow, hmm, what does that mean? 90 kilowatts is more than 100 horse power if you want to translate it over. It's a massive amount of power, so if you think of EV terms. You know, five kilowatts is about a hairdryer's around a kilowatt, 1,000 watts, right. But the point is, 90 kilowatts in a rack, that's insane. That's absolutely insane. The heat that that generates has got to be insane, and so it's important. >> Several houses in the size of a closet. >> Exactly, exactly. Yeah, in a rack I explain to people, you know, it's like a refrigerator. But, so in the arena of thermals, I mean is that something during the development of next gen architectures, is that something that's been taken into consideration? Or is it just a race to die size? >> Well, you definitely have to take thermals into account, as well as just the power of consumption themselves. I mean, people are looking at their total cost of ownership. They're looking at sustainability. And at the end of the day, they need to solve a problem. There's many paths up that mountain, and it's about choosing that right path. We've talked about this before, having extremely thoughtful partners, we're just not going to common-torily try every single solution. We're going to try to find the ones that fit that right mold for that customer. And we're seeing more and more people, excuse me, care about this, more and more people wanting to say, how do I do this in the most sustainable way? How do I do this in the most reliable way, given maybe different fluctuations in their power consumption or their power pricing? We're developing more software tools and obviously partnering with great partners to make sure we do this in the most thoughtful way possible. >> Intel put a lot of, made a big investment by buying Habana Labs for its acceleration technology. They're based in Israel. You're based on the west coast. How are you coordinating with them? How will the Habana technology work its way into more mainstream Intel products? And how would Dell integrate those into your servers? >> Good question. I guess I can kick this off. So Habana is part of the Intel family now. They've been integrated in. It's been a great journey with them, as some of their products have launched on AWS, and they've had some very good wins on MLPerf and things like that. I think it's about finding the right tool for the job, right. Not every problem is a nail, so you need more than just a hammer. And so we have the Xeon series, which is incredibly flexible, can do so many different things. It's what we've come to know and love. On the other end of the spectrum, we obviously have some of these more deep learning focused accelerators. And if that's your problem, then you can solve that problem in incredibly efficient ways. The accelerators themselves are somewhere in the middle, so you get that kind of Goldilocks zone of flexibility and power. And depending on your use case, depending on what you know your workloads are going to be day in and day out, one of these solutions might work better for you. A combination might work better for you. Hybrid compute starts to become really interesting. Maybe you have something that you need 24/7, but then you only need a burst to certain things. There's a lot of different options out there. >> The portfolio approach. >> Exactly. >> And then what I love about the work that Scott's team is doing, customers have told us this week in our meetings, they do not want to spend developer's time porting code from one stack to the next. They want that flexibility of choice. Everyone does. We want it in our lives, in our every day lives. They need that flexibility of choice, but they also, there's an opportunity cost when their developers have to choose to port some code over from one stack to another or spend time improving algorithms and doing things that actually generate, you know, meaningful outcomes for their business or their research. And so if they are, you know, desperately searching I would say for that solution and for help in that area, and that's what we're working to enable soon. >> And this is what I love about oneAPI, our software stack, it's open first, heterogeneous first. You can take SYCL code, it can run on competitor's hardware. It can run on Intel hardware. It's one of these things that you have to believe long term, the future is open. Wall gardens, the walls eventually crumble. And we're just trying to continue to invest in that ecosystem to make sure that the in-developer at the end of the day really gets what they need to do, which is solving their business problem, not tinkering with our drivers. >> Yeah, I actually saw an interesting announcement that I hadn't been tracking. I hadn't been tracking this area. Chiplets, and the idea of an open standard where competitors of Intel from a silicone perspective can have their chips integrated via a universal standard. And basically you had the top three silicone vendors saying, yeah, absolutely, let's work together. Cats and dogs. >> Exactly, but at the end of the day, it's whatever menagerie solves the problem. >> Right, right, exactly. And of course Dell can solve it from any angle. >> Yeah, we need strong partners to build the platforms to actually do it. At the end of the day, silicone without software is just sand. Sand with silicone is poorly written prose. But without an actual platform to put it on, it's nothing, it's a box that sits in the corner. >> David, you mentioned that 90% of power age servers now support GPUs. So how is this high-performing, the growth of high performance computing, the demand, influencing the evolution of your server architecture? >> Great question, a couple of ways. You know, I would say 90% of our platforms support GPUs. 100% of our platforms support AI use cases. And it goes back to the CPU compute stack. As we look at how we deliver different form factors for customers, we go back to that range, I said that power range this week of how do we enable the right air coolant solutions? How do we deliver the right liquid cooling solutions, so that wherever the customer is in their environment, and whatever footprint they have, we're ready to meet it? That's something you'll see as we go into kind of the second half of launch season and continue rolling out products. You're going to see some very compelling solutions, not just in air cooling, but liquid cooling as well. >> You want to be more specific? >> We can't unveil everything at Supercompute. We have a lot of great stuff coming up here in the next few months, so. >> It's kind of like being at a great restaurant when they offer you dessert, and you're like yeah, dessert would be great, but I just can't take anymore. >> It's a multi course meal. >> At this point. Well, as we wrap, I've got one more question for each of you. Same question for each of you. When you think about high performance computing, super computing, all of the things that you're doing in your partnership, driving artificial intelligence, at that tip of the spear, what kind of insights are you looking forward to us being able to gain from this technology? In other words, what cool thing, what do you think is cool out there from an AI perspective? What problem do you think we can solve in the near future? What problems would you like to solve? What gets you out of bed in the morning? Cause it's not the little, it's not the bits and the bobs and the speeds and the feats, it's what we're going to do with them, so what do you think, David? >> I'll give you an example. And I think, I saw some of my colleagues talk about this earlier in the week, but for me what we could do in the past two years to unable our customers in a quarantine pandemic environment, we were delivering platforms and solutions to help them do their jobs, help them carry on in their lives. And that's just one example, and if I were to map that forward, it's about enabling that human progress. And it's, you know, you ask a 20 year version of me 20 years ago, you know, if you could imagine some of these things, I don't know what kind of answer you would get. And so mapping forward next decade, next two decades, I can go back to that example of hey, we did great things in the past couple of years to enable our customers. Just imagine what we're going to be able to do going forward to enable that human progress. You know, there's great use cases, there's great image analysis. We talked about some. The images that Scott was referring to had to do with taking CAT scan images and being able to scan them for tumors and other things in the healthcare industry. That is stuff that feels good when you get out of bed in the morning, to know that you're enabling that type of progress. >> Scott, quick thoughts? >> Yeah, and I'll echo that. It's not one specific use case, but it's really this wave front of all of these use cases, from the very micro of developing the next drug to finding the next battery technology, all the way up to the macro of trying to have an impact on climate change or even the origins of the universe itself. All of these fields are seeing these massive gains, both from the software, the hardware, the platforms that we're bringing to bear to these problems. And at the end of the day, humanity is going to be fundamentally transformed by the computation that we're launching and working on today. >> Fantastic, fantastic. Thank you, gentlemen. You heard it hear first, Intel and Dell just committed to solving the secrets of the universe by New Years Eve 2023. >> Well, next Supercompute, let's give us a little time. >> The next Supercompute Convention. >> Yeah, next year. >> Yeah, SC 2023, we'll come back and see what problems have been solved. You heard it hear first on theCube, folks. By SC 23, Dell and Intel are going to reveal the secrets of the universe. From here, at SC 22, I'd like to thank you for joining our conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, with my co-host Paul Gillin. Stay tuned to theCube's coverage of Supercomputing Conference 22. We'll be back after a short break. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Fal.Con 22. I'm Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. This is day one of our coverage. We had the big keynotes this morning. Derek Jeter was one of the keynotes. We have a big Yankee fan here: George Kurtz is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike. George, thanks for coming on The Cube. >> It's great to be here. >> Boston fan, you know, I tweeted out Derek Jeter. He broke my heart many times, but I can't hate on Jeter. You got to have respect for the guy. >> Well, I still remember I was in Japan when Boston was down you know, by three games and came back to win. So I've got my own heartbreak as well. >> It did heal some wounds, but it almost changed the rivalry, you know? I mean, >> Yeah. >> Once, it's kind of neutralized it, you know? It's just not as interesting. I mean, I'm a season ticket holder. I go to all the games and Yankee games are great. A lot of it used to be, you would never walk into Fenway park with, you know pin stripes, when today there's as many Yankee fans as there are... >> I know. >> Boston fans. Anyway, at Fenway, I mean. >> Yeah. >> Why did you start CrowdStrike? >> Biggest thing for me was to really change the game in how people were looking at security. And at my previous company, I think a lot of people were buying security and not getting the outcome that they wanted. Not- I got acquired by a company, not my first company. So, to be clear, and before I started CrowdStrike, I was in the antivirus world, and they were spending a lot of money with antivirus vendors but not getting the outcome I thought they should achieve, which is to stop the breach, not just stop malware. And for me, security should be outcome based not sort of product based. And the biggest thing for us was how could we create the sales force of security that was focused on getting the right outcome: stopping the breach. >> And the premise, I've seen it, the unstoppable breach is a myth. No CSOs don't live by that mantra, but you do. How are you doing on that journey? >> Well I think, look, there's no 100% of anything in security, but what we've done is really created a platform that's focused on identifying and stopping breaches as well as now, extending that out into helping IT identify assets and their hygiene and basically providing more visibility into IT assets. So, we talked about the convergence of that. Maybe we'll get into it, but. >> Dave Vellante: Sure. >> We're doing pretty well. And from our standpoint, we've got a lot of customers, almost 20,000, that rely on us day to day to help stop the breach. >> Well, and when you dig into the CrowdStrike architecture, what's so fascinating is, you know, Dave, we've talked about this: agent bad. Well, not necessarily, if you can have a lightweight agent that can scale and support a number of modules, then you can consolidate all these point tools out there. You talked about in your keynote, your pillars, workloads, which really end points >> Right. >> ID, which we're going to talk about. Identity data and network security. You're not a network security specialist, >> Right. >> But the other three, >> Yes. >> You're knocking down. >> Yeah. >> You guys went deep into that today. Talk about that. >> We did, most folks are going to know us for endpoint and Cloud workload protection and visibility. We did an acquisition almost two years to the day on preempt. And that was our identity play, identity threat protection and detection. And that really turned out to be a smart move, because it's the hottest topic right now. If you look at all the breaches over the last couple years, it's all identity based. Big, big talking points in our keynotes today. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> And then the third area is on data, and data is really the you know, the new currency that people trade in. So how do you identify and protect endpoints and workloads? How do you tie that together with identity, as well as understanding how you connect the dots and the data and where data flows? And that's really been our focus and we continue to deliver on that for customers. >> And you've had a real dogma, I'll call it, about Cloud Native. I've had this conversation with Frank Slootman, "No we're not going to do a halfway house." You, I think, said it really well today. I think it was you who said it. If you've got On-Prem and Cloud, you got two code bases, >> George Kurtz: Right. >> That you got to maintain. >> That's it, yeah. >> And that means you're taking away resources from one or the other. >> That's exactly right. And what a lot of our competitors have done is they started On-Prem as an AV vendor, and then they took what they had and they basically put it in a Cloud instance called a Cloud, which doesn't really scale. And then, you know, where they need to, they basically still keep their On-Prem, and that just diffuses your engineering team. And most of the On-Prem stuff doesn't even have the features of what they're trying to offer from the Cloud. So either you're Cloud Native or you're not. You can't be halfway. >> But it doesn't mean that you can't include and ingest On-Prem data- >> Well, absolutely. >> into your platform, and that's what I think most people just some reason don't seem to understand. >> Well our agents run wherever. They certainly run On-Prem. >> Dave Vellante: Right. Right. >> And they run in the Cloud, they run wherever. But the crowd in the CrowdStrike is the fact that we can crowdsource this threat information at scale into our threat graph, which gives us unique insight, 7 trillion events per week. And you can't do that if you're not Cloud Native. And that crowd gives the, we call, community immunity. We see all kinds of attacks across 176 different countries. That benefit accrues to all of our customers. >> But how do you envision and maintain and preserve a lightweight agent that can support so many modules? As you do more acquisitions and you knock down new areas and bring in new functionality, go after things like operations technology, how is it that you're able to keep that agent lightweight? >> Well, we started as a platform company, meaning that the whole idea was we're going to build a lightweight agent. First iteration had no security capabilities. It was collect data, get it into a common data architecture or threat graph, in one spot. And then once we had the data then we applied AI to it and we created different workflows. So, the first incarnation was get data into the Cloud at scale. And that still holds true today. So if you think about why we can actually have all these different modules without an impact on the performance, it's we collect data one time. It's a threat data, you know? We're not collecting user data, but threat data collection mechanism. Once we have all that data, then we can slice and dice and create other modules. So the new modules never have to even touch the agent 'cause we've already collected the data. >> I'm going to just keep going, Dave, unless you shove your way in. >> No, no, go ahead. No, no, no. I'm waiting to pounce. >> But okay, so, I think, George, but George, I need to ask you about a comment that you made about we're not just shoving it into a data lake. But you are collecting all the data. Can you explain that nuance? >> Yeah. So there's a difference between a collect and forward agent. It means they just collect a bunch of data. They'll probably store it in a lot of space on the endpoint. It's slow and cumbersome, and then they'll forward it up into another data lake. So you have no context going into no context. Our agent is a smart agent, which actually allows us to always track the context of all these processes in what's happening on the endpoint. And it's a mini graph, meaning we keep track of the relationships. And as we ship that contextual information to the Cloud, we never lose that context. And then it goes into the bigger graph database, always with the same level of context. So, we keep the context of each individual workload or endpoint, and then across the Cloud, we have the context of all of those put together. It's massive. And that allows us to create different insights rather than a data lake, which is, you know, you're looking for, you're creating a bigger needle stack looking for needles. >> And I'm envisioning almost an index that is super, super fast. I mean, you're talking about sub, well second kind of near real time responses, correct? >> Absolutely. So a lot of what we do in terms of protection is already pushed down to the endpoint , 'cause it has intelligence and the AI model. And then again, the Cloud is always looking for different anomalies, not only on each individual endpoint or workload, but across the entire spectrum of our customer base. And that's all real time. It continually self-learns from all the data we collect. >> So when, yeah, when you've made these architectural decisions over time, there was a time when saying that you needed to run an agent could be a deal killer somewhere for people who argued against that. >> George Kurtz: Right. >> You've made the right decision there, clearly. Having everything be crowdsourced into Cloud makes perfect sense. Has that, though, posed a challenge from a sovereignty perspective? If you were deploying stuff On-Prem all over the place, you don't need to worry about that. Everything is here >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> in a given country. How do you address the challenges of sovereignty when these agents are sending data into some sort of centralized Cloud space that crosses boundaries? >> Well, yeah, I guess what we would, let me go back to the beginning. So I started company in 2011 and I had to convince people that delivering endpoint security from the Cloud was going to be a good thing. >> Dave Vellante: Right. (chuckles) >> You know, you go into a Swiss bank and a bunch of other places and they're like, you're crazy. Right? >> Dave Nicholson: Right. >> They all became customers afterwards, right? And you have to just look at what they're doing. And the question I would have in the early days is, well, let me ask you are you using Dropbox, Box? Are you using a Microsoft? You know, what are you using? Well, they're all sending data to the Cloud. So good news! You already have a model, you've already approved that, right? So let's talk about our benefit. And you know, you can either have an adversary steal your data or you can send threat data to our Cloud, which by the way is in a lot of sovereign Clouds that are out there. And when you actually break it down to what we're sending to the Cloud, it's threat data, right? It isn't user files and documents and stuff. It's threat data. So, we work through all of that. And the Cloud is bigger than CrowdStrike. So you look at Sales Force, Service Now, Workday, et cetera. That's being used all over the place, Box, Dropbox. We just tagged onto it. Like why shouldn't security be the platform of record, and why shouldn't CrowdStrike be the platform of record and be the pillar of Cloud security? >> Explain your observability strategy, 'cause you acquired Humio for, I mean, I think it was $400 million, which is a song. >> Yeah. >> And then Reposify is the latest acquisition. I see that as an extension, 'cause it gives you visibility. Is that part of your security, of your observability play? Explain where you do play and don't play. >> Sure. Well observability is a big, you know, fluffy word. Where we play is in probably the first two areas of observability, right? There's five, kind of, pillars. We're focused on event collection. Let's get events from the endpoints. Let's get events from really anywhere in the network. And we can do that with Humio is now log scale. And then the second piece is with our agents, let's get an understanding of their, the asset itself. What is the asset? What state is it in? Does it have vulnerabilities? Does it have, you know, is it running out of disc space? Is it have, does it have a performance issue? Those are really the first two, kind of, areas of observability. We're not in application performance, we're in let's collect data from the endpoint and other sources, and let's understand if the thing is working, right? And that's a huge value for customers. And we can do that because we already have a privileged spot on the endpoint with our agent. >> Got it. Question on the TAM. Like I look at your TAMs, your charts, I love it. You know, generally do. Were you taking known data from you know, firms like IDC >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> and saying, okay we're going to play there, now we're made this acquisition. We're new modules, now we're playing there. Awesome. I think you got a big TAM. And I guess that's, that's the point. There's no lack of market for you. >> George Kurtz: Right. >> But I do feel like there's this unknown unquantifiable piece of your TAM. IDC can't see it, 'cause they're kind of looking back >> George Kurtz: Right. >> seein' what the market do last year and we'll forecast it out. It's almost, you got to be a futurist to see it. How do you think about your total available market and the opportunity that's out there? >> Well, it's well in excess of 120 billion and we've actually updated that recently. So it's even beyond that. But if you look at all the modules each module has a discreet TAM and again, for what, you know, what we're focused on is how do you give an outcome to a customer? So a lot of the modules map back into specific TAM and product categories. When you add 'em all up and when you look at, you know, some of the new things that we're coming out with, again, it's well in excess of 120 billion. So that's why we like to say like, you know, we're not an endpoint company. We're really, truly a security platform company that was born in the Cloud. And I think if you see the growth rates, and one of the things that we've talked about, and I think you might have pointed out in prior podcasts, is we're the second fastest company to 2 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, only behind Zoom. And you know I would argue- great company, by the way, a customer- but that was a black Swan event in a pandemic, right? >> Dave Vellante: I'll say! >> Yeah. >> So we are rarefied air when you think about the capabilities that we have and the performance and the TAM that's available to us. >> The other thing I said in my breaking analysis was 'cause you guys aspire to be a generational company. And I think you got a really good shot at being one, but to be a generational company, you have to have an ecosystem. So I'd love you to talk about the ecosystem, but where you want to see it in five years. >> Well, it really is a good point and we are a partner first company. Ecosystem is really important. Cameras probably can't see all the vendors that are here that are our partners, right? It's a big part of this show that we're at. You see a lot of, well, you see some vendors behind us. >> Yep. >> We have to realize in 2022, and I think this is something that we did well and it's my philosophy, is we are not the only game in town. We like to be, and we are, for many companies the security platform on record, but we don't do everything. We talked about network in other areas. We can't do everything. You can't be good and try to do everything. So, for customers today, what they're looking at is best of platform. And in the early days of security, I've been in it over 30 years, it used to be best of breed products, then it was best of suite, now it's best of platform. So what do I mean by that? It means that customers don't want to engineer their own solution. They, like Lego blocks, they want to pull the platforms, and they want to stitch 'em together via API. And they want to say, okay, CrowdStrike works with Okta, works with Zscaler, works with Proofpoint, et cetera. And that's what customers want. So, ecosystem is incredibly important for us. >> Explain that. You mentioned Okta, I had another question for you. I was at Reinforce, and I saw this better together presentation, CrowdStrike and Okta talking about identity. You've got an identity module. Explain to people how you're not competing with Okta. You guys complement each other, there. >> Well, an identity kind of broker, if you will, is basically what Okta does in others, right? So you log in single sign on and you get access. They broker access to all these other applications. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> That's not what we do. What we do is we look at those endpoints and workloads and domain controllers and directory services and we figure out, are there vulnerabilities and are there threats associated with them? And we call that out. The second piece, which is critical, is we prevent lateral movement. So if credentials are stolen we can prevent those credentials from being laundered or used and moved laterally, which is a key part of how breaches happen. We then create a trust score on those endpoints and workloads. And we basically say, okay, do we think the trust on the endpoint and workload is high or low? Do we think the identity, you know, is it George on the endpoint, or not? We give that a score. And we pass that along to Okta or Ping or whoever, and they then use that as part of their calculus in how they broker access to other resources. So it really is better together. >> So your execution has been stellar. This is my competition question. You obviously have competition out there. I think architecturally, you've got some advantages. You have a great relationship with AWS. I don't know what's going on with Google, but Kevin's up on stage. >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> They're now part of Google. >> George Kurtz: We have a great relationship with them. >> Microsoft obviously, a competitor. You obviously do some things in, >> Right. >> in Azure. Are you building the security Cloud? >> We are. We think we are, because when you look at the amount of data that we actually ingest, when you look at companies using us for critical decisions and critical protection, not only on their On-Prem, but also in their Cloud environment, and the knowledge we have, we think it is a security Cloud. You know, you had, you had Salesforce and Workday and ServiceNow and each of them had their respective Clouds. When I started the company, there was no security Cloud. You know, it wasn't any of the companies that you know. It wasn't the firewall companies, wasn't the AV companies. And I think we really defined ourselves as the security Cloud. And the level of knowledge and insights we have in our Cloud, I think, are world class. >> But you know, it's a difference of being those- 'cause you mentioned those other, you know, seminal Clouds. They, like Salesforce, Workday, they're building their own Clouds. Maybe not so much Workday, but certainly Salesforce and ServiceNow built their own >> Yeah. >> Clouds, their own data centers. You're building on top of hyperscalers, correct? >> Well, >> Well you have your own data centers, too. >> We have our own data centers, yeah. So when we first started, we started in AWS as many do, and we have a great relationship there. We continue to build out. We are a huge customer and we also have, you know, with data sovereignty and those sort of things, we've got a lot of our sort of data that sits in our private Cloud. So it's a hybrid approach and we think it's the best of both worlds. >> Okay. And you mean you can manage those costs and it's, how do you make the decision? Is it just sovereignty or is it cost as well? >> Well, there's an operational element. There's cost. There's everything. There's a lot that goes into it. >> Right. >> And at the end of the day we want to make sure that we're using the right technology in the right Clouds to solve the right problem. >> Well, George, congratulations on being back in person. That's got to feel good. >> It feels really good. >> Got a really good audience here. I don't know what the numbers are but there's many thousands here, >> Thousands, yeah. >> at the ARIA. Really appreciate your time. And thanks for having The Cube here. You guys built a great set for us. >> Well, we appreciate all you do. I enjoy your programs. And I think hopefully we've given the audience a good idea of what CrowdStrike's all about, the impact we have and certainly the growth trajectory that we're on. So thank you. >> Fantastic. All right, George Kurtz, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're going to wrap up day one. We'll be back tomorrow, first thing in the morning, live from the ARIA. We'll see you then. (calm music)

[Music] we're here with steve melanie the president and ceo of aviatrix steve john and i started this whole super cloud narrative as a way to describe that something different is happening specifically within the aws ecosystem but more broadly across the cloud landscape at re invent last year you and i spoke on the cube and you said one of your investors guy named nick sterile said to you at the show it's happening steve welcome to the cube what's happening what did nick mean by that yeah we were we were just getting ready to go on and i leaned over and he looked at me and he whispered in my ear and said it's happening he said it just like that and and you're right it was it was kind of funny and we talked about that and what he means is enterprises you know this is why i went to aviatrix three and a half years ago is the the the flip switch for enterprises and they said now we mean it we've been talking about cloud for 12 years or 15 years now we mean it we are digitally transforming we are the movement to cloud is going to make that happen and oh by the way of course it's multi-cloud because enterprises put workloads where they run best where they have the best security the best performance the best cost and the business is driving this transformation and they decide that i'm going to use that azure and another business unit decides i'm using google and another one says i'm using aws and so of course it's going to be multi-cloud and i think we're going to start seeing actual multi-cloud applications once that infrastructure and you know you call it the super cloud once that starts getting built developers are going to go wait a minute so i can pick this feature from google and and that service from azure and that service from aws easily without any hesitation once that happens they're going to start really developing today there aren't multi-cloud applications but but but the what's happening is the enterprise embracing public cloud they're using multiple clouds many of them call it four plus one right they're four different public clouds plus what they have on prem that to me is what's happening i am now re-architecting my enterprise infrastructure from applications all the way down to the network and i am embracing uh uh public clouds in that in that process so i mean you nailed us so many things in there i mean digitally transforming to me this is the digital transformation it's leveraging embracing the capex from the hyperscalers now you know people in the industry we're not trying to do what gartner does and create a new category per se but we do use super cloud as a metaphor so i don't expect necessarily vendors to use it or not but but i and i get that but when you talk about multi-cloud what specifically is new in other words what you touched on some of this stuff what constitutes a modern multi-cloud or what we would call a super cloud you know network architecture what are the salient attributes yeah i would say today so two years ago there was no such thing even as multiple clouds it was aws let's be clear everything was aws and for people to even back then two three years ago to even envision that there would be anything else other than aws people couldn't even envision now people kind of go yeah that was done we now see that we're going to use multiple clouds we're going to use azure we're going to use gcp and we're going to use this and we'll guess we're going to use oracle and even ollie cloud we're going to use five or four or five different public clouds what's but that would be i think of as multiple clouds but from an i.t perspective they need to be able to support all those clouds in these shared services and what they're going to do i actually think we're starting and you may have hit on something in the super cloud or i know you've talked about metacloud that that's got bad connotations for facebook i know everybody's like no please not another meta thing but there is that concept of this abstracted layer above you know writing we call it you know altitude you know aviatrix everything's you know riding above the clouds right that that that common abstracted layer this application infrastructure that runs the application that rides above all the different public clouds and i think once we do that you know dave what's going to happen is i think really what's going to happen is you're going to start seeing these these multi-cloud applications which to my knowledge really doesn't exist today i i think that might be the next phase and in order for that to happen you have to have all of the infrastructure be multi-cloud meaning not just networking and network security from from from aviation but you need snowflake you need hashtag you need datadog you need all the new horsemen of the new multi-cloud which isn't the old guys right this is all new people aviatrix dashie snowflake datadonk you name it that are going to be able to deliver all this multi-cloud cross-cloud wherever you want to talk about it such that application development and deployment can happen seamlessly and frictionlessly across multi-cloud once that happens the entire stack then you're going to start seeing and that to me starts enabling this what you guys call you know the super cloud the meta cloud the whatever cloud but that then rides above all the individual clouds that that's going to start getting a whole new realm of application development in my mind so we've got some work to do to basic do some basic blocking and tackling then the application developers can really build on top of that so so some of the skeptics on on this topic would ask how do you envision this changing networking versus it just being a bolt-on to existing fossilized network infrastructure in other words yeah how do we get from point a where we are today to point b you know so-called networking so we can actually build those uh super cloud applications yeah so you know what it is it's interesting because it goes back to my background at nasira and what we used to talk about then it isn't about managing complexity it's about creating simplicity it's very different and when you put the intelligence into the software right this is what computer science is all about we're turning networking into computer science when you create an abstraction layer we are not just an overlay day we dave we actually integrate in with the native services of the cloud we are not managing the complexity of these multi-clouds we are using it you know controlling the native constructs adding our own intelligence to this and then creating what is basically simplification for the people above it so we're simplifying things not just managing the complexity that's how you get the agility for cloud that's how you get to be able to do this because if all you are is a veneer on top of complexity you're just hiding complexity you're not creating simplicity and what happens is it actually probably gets more complex because if all you're doing is hiding the bad stuff you're not getting rid of it i love that i love that we're doing that at the networking and network security layer you're going to see snowflake and datadog and other people do it at their layers you know i reminds of a conversation i had with cause the one of the founders of pure storage who they're all about simplicity this idea of of creating simplicity versus like you said just creating you know a way to handle the complexity compare you know pure storage with the sort of old legacy emc storage devices and that's what you had you had you you had emc managing the complexity at pure storage disrupting by creating simplicity so what are the challenges of creating that simplicity and delivering that seamless experience that continuous experience across cloud is it engineering is it mindset is it culture is it technology what is it well i mean look at look you see the recession that we're we're hitting you see there is a significant problem that we have in the general it industry right now and it's called skills gap skills shortage it's two problems we don't have enough people and we don't have enough people that know cloud and the reason is everybody on the same tuesday three and a half years ago all said now i mean i'm moving the cloud we're a technology company we don't make sneakers anymore we don't make beer we're a technology company and we're going to digitally transform and we're going to move the cloud guess what three years ago there were probably seven people that understood cloud now everyone on the same tuesday morning all decides to try to hire those same seven people there's just not enough people around so you're going to need software and you're going to have to put the intelligence into the software because you're not going to be able to a hire those people and b even if you hire them you can't keep them as soon as they learn cloud guess what happens dave they're off they're on to the next job at the next highest bidder so how are you going to handle that you have to have software that intelligent software that is going to simplify things for you we have people managing massive multi-cloud network and network security people with two people on-prem they got hundreds right you it's not about taking that complex model that it had on-prem and jam it into the cloud you don't have the people to do it and you're not going to get the people to do it you know i want to ask you yeah so i want to ask you about the go to market challenges because we our industry gets a bad rap for for selling we're really good at selling and then but but actually delivering what we sell sometimes we fall down there so so i love tom sweet as cfo of of dell he talks about the the say do ratio uh how that's actually got to be low but you know but you know what i mean uh the math the fraction guy right so but do do what you say you're going to do are there specific go to market challenges related to this type of cross cloud selling where you can set you have to set the customer's expectations because what you're describing is not going to happen overnight it's a journey but how do you handle that go to market challenge in terms of setting those customer expectations and actually delivering what you say you can sell and selling enough to actually have a successful business um so i think everything's outside in so so i think the the what really is exciting to me about this cloud computing model that with the transformation that we're going through is it is business-led and it is led by the ceo and it is led by the business units they run the business it is all about agility is about enabling my developers and it's all about driving the business market share revenue all these kind of things you know the last transformation of mainframe to on to pc client server was led by technologists it wasn't led by the business and it was it was really hard to tie that to the business so then so this is great because we can look at the initiatives you can look at the the the initiatives of the ceo in your company and now as an i.t person you can tie to that and they're going to have two or three or four initiatives and you can actually map it to that so that's where we start is let's look at what the c your ceo cares about he cares about this he cares about that he cares about driving revenue he cares about agility of getting new applications out to the market sooner to get more revenue there's this and oh by the way transfer made transforming your infrastructure to the cloud is the number one thing so it's all about agility so guess what you need to be able to respond to that immediately because tomorrow the business is going to go to you and say great news dave we're moving to gcp wait what no one told me about that well we're telling you now and uh you need to be ready tomorrow and if you're sitting there and you're tied to the low-level constructs and all you know is aws well i don't have those people and even if i have even if i could hire them i'm not allowed to because i can't hire anybody how am i going to respond to the business and the needs of the business now all of a sudden i'm in the way as the infrastructure team of the ceo's goals because we decided we need to we need to get the ai capabilities of gcp and we're moving to gcp or i just did a big deal with gcp and uh miraculously they said i need to run on gcp right i did a big deal with google right guess what comes along with that oh you're moving to gcp great the business says we're moving to gcp and the i.t guys are sitting there going well no one told me well sorry so it's all about agility it's all about that and the and and complexity is the killer to agility this is all about business they're going to come to you and say we just acquired a company we need to integrate them oh but they got they use the same ip address range as we do there's overlapping ips and oh by the way they're in a different cloud how do i do that no one cares the business doesn't care they're like me they're very impatient get it done or we'll find someone who will yeah so you've got to get ahead of that and so when we in terms of when we talk to customers that's what we do this isn't just about defenses this is about making you get promoted making you do good for your company such that you can respond to that and maybe even enable the company to go do that like we're going to enable people to do true multi-cloud applications because the infrastructure has to come first right you you put the foundation in your big skyscraper like the crew behind me and the plumbing before you start building the floors right so infrastructure comes first then comes then comes the applications yeah so you know again some people call it super cloud like us multi-cloud 2.0 but the the real mega trend that i see steve and i'd love you to bottom line this and bring us home is you know andreessen's all companies are software companies it's like version 2.0 of that and the applications that are going to be built on that top this tie into the digital transformations it was goldman it's jpmc it's walmart it's capital one b of a oracle's acquisition of cerner is going to be really interesting to see these super clouds form within industries bringing their data their tooling and their specific software expertise built on top of that hyperscale infrastructure and infrastructure for companies like yours so bottom line is stephen steve what's the future of cloud how do you see it the future is n plus one so two years ago people had one plus one i had what i had on prem and then what i had in aws they today if you talk to an enterprise they'll have what they call four plus one right which is four public clouds plus what i have on prem it's going to n plus one right and what's going to happen is exactly what you said you're going to have industry clouds you're going to the the multi-cloud aspect of it is going to end it's not going to go from four to one some people think oh it's not going to be four it's going down to one or two bs it's going to end it's going to a lot as they start extending to the edge and they start integrating out to the to the branch offices it's not going to be about that branch offer so that edge iot or edge computing or data centers or campus connecting into the cloud it's going to be the other way around the cloud is going to extend to those areas and you're going to have ai clouds you know whether it's you know ultra beauty who's a customer of ours who's starting to roll out ar and vr out to their retail stores to show you know makeup and this and the other thing these are new applications transformations are always driven by new applications that don't exist this isn't about lift and shift of the existing applications the 10x tam in this market is going to becomes all the new things that's where the explosion is going to happen and you're going to see end level those those branch offices are going to look like clouds and they're going to need to be stitched together and treated like one infrastructure so it's going to go from four plus one to n plus one and that's what you're gonna want as an enterprise i'm gonna want n clouds so we're gonna see an explosion it's not going to be four it's going to be end now at the end underneath all of that will be leveraging and effectively commoditizing the existing csps yeah and but you're going to have an explosion of people commoditizing them and just like the goldmans and the industry clubs are going to do they're going to build their own eye as well right no way no way it's that's what's going to happen it's going to be a 10x on what we saw last decade with sas it's all going to happen around clouds and supercloud steve malini thanks so much for coming back in the cube and helping us sort of formulate this thinking i mean it really started with with with you and myself and john and nick and really trying to think this through and watching this unfold before our eyes so great to have you back thank you yeah it's fun thanks for having me are you welcome but keep it right there for more action from super cloud 22 be right back [Music] you

(soft music) >> Welcome back everyone, is Supercloud 22 live in the Palo Alto office. Our stage performance we're streaming virtually it's our pilot event, our inaugural event, Supercloud 22. I'm John fury, with my coach Dave Vellante. Got a featured Keynote conversation with Kit Colbert. Who's the CTO of VMware, got to delay it all out. Break it down, Kit, great to see you. Thanks for joining us for Supercloud 22 our inaugural event. >> Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So we had great distinguished panels coming up through. We heard Victoria earlier to the Keynote. There's a shift happening. The shift has happened that's called cloud. You just published a white paper that kind of brings out these new challenges around the complexity of how companies want to run their business. >> Yep. >> It's not born in the cloud, it's cloud everywhere. Seems to be the theme. What's your take on Supercloud? what's the roadmap for multicloud? >> Yeah, well, the reason that we got interested in this was just talking to our customers and the reality is everybody is using multiple clouds today, multiple public clouds, they got things on-prem, they got stuff at the edge. And so their applications are essentially distributed everywhere. And the challenges they start running into there is that there's just a lot of heterogeneity there. There's like different APIs, different capabilities, inconsistencies, incompatibility, in terms of workload, placement, data, migration, security, as we just heard about, et cetera. And so I think everyone's struggling with trying to figure out how do I drive consistency across all that diversity and what sort of consistency do I want? And one of the things that became really interesting in our conversations with customers is that there is no one size fits all that different folks are in different places. And the types of consistency that they want to prioritize will be different based on their individual business requirements. And so this started forming a picture for us saying, okay, what we need are a set of capabilities of multi-cloud cross cloud services that deliver that consistency across all the different environments where applications may be running. And that is what formed the early thinking and sort of the paper that we wrote on it, as well as some of the work and that I think eventually leads to this vision of Supercloud, right? 'Cause I think you guys have the right idea, which is, hey, how does all this stuff come together? And what does that bigger picture look like? And so I think between the sort of the native services that are there individually for each cloud that offer great value by the way, and people definitely should be taking advantage of in addition to another set of services, which are multi-cloud that go across clouds and provide that consistency, looking at that together. That's my picture where super cloud is. >> So the paper's called, the era of multi-cloud services arrive, VMware executive outlook for IT, leaders and decision makers, I'm sure you can get on your website. >> Yep. >> And in there, you talked about, well, first of all, I think you would agree that multicloud has fundamentally been a symptom of multi-vendor or M&A, I mean, you talked about that in the paper, right? >> Yeah. >> It was never really a strategy. It was just like, hey, we woke up in the 2020s and here we are with multiple clouds, right? >> Yeah, it was one of those situations where most folks that we talked to didn't plan to be multi-cloud now that's changed a little bit in the past year or two. >> Sure. >> But certainly in the earlier days of cloud, people would go all in saying, hey, I'm going to go all in on one, one of the major hyperscalers and go for it there. And that's great and offers a lot of advantages, right? There is internal consistency there. There's usually pretty good integration between their services so on and so forth. The problem though that you start facing is that to your point, acquisitions, you acquire companies using a different cloud. Okay, now I got two different clouds or sometimes you have the phenomenon of shadow IT, still happening where some random line of business is going to go off and use a different cloud for whatever reason. The other thing that we've seen is that over time that you may have standardized on one, but then over time technology changes, another cloud makes major advancements in the state of the art, or let's say in machine learning and you say, hey, I want to go to this other cloud for that. So what we start to see is that people now are choosing public clouds based on best of breed service capabilities, and that they're going to make those decisions that fairly fine grained manner, right? Sometimes down to the team, the line of business, et cetera. And so this is where customers and companies find themselves. Now it's like, oh boy, now have all these clouds. And what's happened is that they kind of dealt with it in an ad hoc manner. They would spin up individual operations teams, security teams, et cetera, that specialized in each of the clouds. They had knowledge about how to do that. But now people found that, okay, I'm duplicating all this. There's not really consistency in my approach here. Is there a better way? And I think this is, again, the advent of a lot of the thinking of multi-cloud services and Supercloud. >> And I think one of the things too, in listening to you talk is that the old model used to be, solve complexity with more complexity. Okay, and customers don't want that from what we're observing. And what you're saying is they've seen the benefits of DevOps, DevSecOps. So they know the value. >> Yep. >> 'Cause they've been on, say one native cloud. Now they say, okay, I'm on premise and we heard from Victoria said, there's a lot of private cloud going on, but essentially makes that another cloud, out by default as well. So hybrid is multicloud. >> Hybrid is a subset, yeah. Hybrid is like, we kind of had this evolution of thinking, right? Where you kind of had all the sort of different locations. And then I think hybrid was attempt to say, okay, let's try to connect one location or a set of locations on premises with a public cloud and have some level of consistency there. But really what we look at here with multicloud or Supercloud is that that's really a generalization of that. And we're not talking about one or two locations on prem in one cloud. We're talking about everything now. And moreover, I think hybrid cloud tended to focus a lot on sort of core infrastructure and management. This looks across the board, we're talking about security, we're talking about application development, talking about end user experience. Things like Zero Trust. We're talking about infrastructure, data. So it goes much, much broader, I think than when we talked about hybrid cloud a few years ago. >> So in your paper you've essentially, Kit, laid out an early framework. >> Yep. >> Let's call it for what we call Supercloud, what you call cross cloud services. So what do you see as the technical enablers that are, the salient aspects of again multi-cloud or Supercloud? >> Yep. Well, so for me it comes down to, so, okay, taking a step back. So we have this problem, right? Where you have a lot of diversity across different clouds and customers are looking for some levels of consistency. But as I said, rarely do I see two customers that want exactly the same types of consistency. And so what we're trying to do is step back. And first of all, establish a taxonomy and by that I mean, one of the different types of consistency that you might want. And so there's things around infrastructure consistency, security consistency, software supply chain security is probably the top of mind one that I hear from customers. Application and application services of things like databases, messaging streaming services, AIML services, et cetera, and user capabilities and then of course, data as well. And so in the paper we say, okay, here's these kind of five areas of consistency. And that's the first piece, the second one then turns more to an architectural question of what exactly is a multi-cloud service. What does that mean for a cloud service to be multi-cloud and what are the properties there? So essentially we said, okay, we see three different types of those. There's one where that service could run on a single cloud, but could support multiple clouds. So think about for instance, a service that does cost analysis. Now it may have maybe executing on AWS let's say, but it could do cost analysis for Azure or Google or AWS or anybody, right? So that's the first type. The second type is a bit more advanced where now you're saying, I can actually instantiate that same service into multiple clouds. And we see that oftentimes with things like databases that have a lot of performance latency, et cetera, requirements, and that you can't be accessing that database remotely, that doesn't, from a different cloud, that's going to be too slow. You have it on the same cloud that you're in. And so again, you see various vendors out there, implementing that, where that database can be instantiated wherever you'd like. And then the third one would be going even further. And this is where we really get into some of the much more difficult use cases where customers want a workload to be on prem. And sometimes, especially for those that are very regulatory compliant, they may need even in an air gap or disconnected environment. So there, can you take that same service, but now run it without your operators, being able to manage it 24/7. So those are the three categories. So are a single cloud supporting, single cloud instance supporting multiple clouds, multi-cloud instance, multi-cloud instance disconnected. >> So you're abstracting you as the the R&D arm you're abstracting that complexity. How do you handle this problem where you've got one cloud maybe has a better service than the other clouds? Do you have to devolve to the lowest common denominator or? How do you mask that? >> Well, so that's a really good question and we've debated it and there's been a lot of thought on it. Our current point of view is that we really want to leave it, up to the company themselves to make that decision. Again, cause we see different use cases. So for instance, I talk to customers in the defense sector and they are like, hey, if a foreign adversary is attacking one of these public cloud that we're in, we got to be able to evacuate our applications from there, sometimes in minutes, right? In order to maintain our operational capabilities. And so there, there does need to be at least common denominator approach just because of that requirement. I see other folks, you look at the financial banking industries they're also regulated. I think for them, it's oftentimes 90 days to get out of the cloud, so they can do a little bit of re-architecture. You got times rolled the sleeves and change some things. So maybe it's not quite as strict. Whereas other companies say, you know what? I want to take advantage of these best of breed services native to the clouds. So we don't try to prescribe a certain approach there, but we say, you got to align it with what your business requirements are. >> How about the APIs layer? So one of the things we've said is that we felt like a super pass was a requirement of the Supercloud because it's a purpose built pass that helps you with that objective, whatever that is. And you say in the paper for developers each cloud provider has unique infrastructure interfaces and APIs that add work and slow the pace of their releases for operators. Each additional cloud increases the complexity of their architecture, fragmenting security, performance optimization and cost management. So are you building a super pass? What's your philosophy? Victoria said, we want to have our cake, we want to eat at two and we want to lose weight. So how do you do that? >> Yeah, so I think it's, so first things first, what the paper is trying to present in the end is really sort of an architectural point of view on how to approach this, right? And then, yeah, we at VMware, we've got a lot of solutions, towards some of those things, but we also realize we can't do everything ourselves, right? The space is too large. So it's very much a partner strategy there. Now that being said, on things like on the past side, we are doing a lot for instance around Tanzu, which is our modern apps portfolio products. And the focus there really is to, yes, provide some of that consistency across different clouds, enabling customers to take advantage of either cross cloud paths type services or cloud native or native cloud services, I should say. And so we really give customers that choice. And I think that's for us where it's at, because again, we don't see it as a one size fits for all. >> So there's your cake at edit to too. So you're saying the developer experience can be identical across clouds. >> Yep. >> Unless the developers don't want it to be. >> Yeah, and maybe the team makes that decision. Look there's a lot of reasons why you may want to make that or may not. The reality is that these native cloud services do add a lot of value and oftentimes are very easy to consume, to get started with, to get going. And so trade off you got to think about, and I don't think there's a right answer. >> So Kit, I got to ask on you. You said you can't do it alone. >> Yeah. >> VMware, I know for a fact, you guys have been working on this for many, many years. >> Yep. >> (indistinct) remember, I interviewed him in 2016 when he did the deal with AWS with Andy Jassy that really moved the needle. Things got really great from there with VMware. So would you be open to a consortium to oversee cause you guys have a lot of investment in this as a company, but I also don't hear you trying to do the lock in thing. So yeah, would you guys be open to a consortium to kind of try to figure out what these buildings blocks look like? Or is it a bag of Legos what people want? >> Absolutely, and you know what we offer in the paper is really just a starting point. It's pretty simple, we're trying to define a few basic of the taxonomy and some outlines sketches if you will, of what that architectural picture might look like. But it's very much that like just a starting point, and this is not something we can do alone. This is something that we really need the entire industry to rally around. Cause again, I think what's important here are standards. >> Yeah. >> That there's got to be, this sort of decomposition of functionality, breakdown in the different, sort of logical layers of functionality. What do those APIs or interfaces look like? How do we ensure interoperability? Because we do want people to be able to get the best of breed, to be able to bring together different vendor solutions to enable that. >> And I was watching, it was had a Silicon a day just last week, talking about their advances in Silicon. What's you guys position on that because you're seeing the (indistinct) as players, almost getting more niche and more better at the hardware matters more, Silicon speed, latency GPUs, So that seems to me be an enabler opportunity for the ecosystem to innovate at the past and SAS relationship. Where do you guys see? Where are you guys strong and where do you need work to do on? If you had to say there was some white space at VMware like say, hey, we own this area. We we're solid here. Here's some white spaces that VMware could use some help with. >> Yeah, well I think the infrastructure space, you just mentioned is clearly one that we've been focused on for a long time. We're expanding into the modern app space, expanding into security. We've been strong and end user for a while. So a lot of the different multi-cloud capabilities we've actually been to your point developing for a while. And I think that's exactly, again, what went into this like what we started noticing was all of our different product teams were reacting to the same thing and we weren't necessarily talking about it together yet. >> Like what? >> Well, this whole challenge of multiple clouds of dealing with that heterogeneity of wanting choice and flexibility into where to place a workload or where to place a virtual desktop or whatever it might be. And so each of the teams was responding individually to that customer feedback. And so I think what we recognized was like, hey, let's up level this, and what's the bigger picture. And what's the sort of common architecture across all of it, right? So I think that's what the really interesting aspect here was is that this is very much driven by what we're hearing directly from customers. >> You kind of implied just recently that the paper was pretty straightforward, pretty basic, early days, but it's well thought out. And one of the things you talked about was the type of multi-cloud services. >> Yep. >> You had data plan and user services, security infrastructure, which is your wheelhouse and application services. >> Yep. >> And you sort of went to detail defining those where is management and all that. So these are the ones you're going after. What about management? What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, so it's a really good question we debated this for a long time. Does management actually get a separate sort of layer that we could add a six one perhaps, or is it sort of baked in to the different ones? And we kind of went with the ladder where it sort of baked in there's infrastructure management, there's modern app management, there's management and users. It's kind of management for each security obviously. So we see a lot of different management plans, control plans across each of those different layers. Now does there need to be a separate one that has its own layer? Arguably yes, I mean, I think there are good arguments for that, and this is exactly why we put this out there though, is to like get people to read it, people to give give us feedback. And going back to the consortium idea, let's come together as a group of practitioners across the industry to really figure out an industry viewpoint on this. >> So what are the trade offs there? So what would be the benefit of having that separate layer? I presume it's simpler to do it the way you've done it, but what would be the benefit of having a separate. >> Yeah, I think it was probably more about simplicity to start with, like you could imagine like 20 different layers. and maybe that's where it's going to go, but also I think it's how do you define the layer? And for us it was more around sort of some of these functional aspects as an infrastructure versus application level versus end user and management is more of a commonality across those. But again, I could see our arguments be made. >> Logical place to start. >> Yeah. >> The other thing you said in here multi-cloud application services can route request for a particular service such as a database and deploy the service on the correct individual cloud, using the most appropriate technology for the use case, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yep. >> That to me, sounds like a metadata problem. And so can you talk about how you you've approach that? You mentioned AWS RDS, great examples as your sequel on Oracle Database, et cetera, et cetera and multiple endpoint. How do you approach that? >> Yeah, well, I think there's a bunch of different approaches there. And so again, so the idea is that, and I know there's been reference to sort of like the operating system for Supercloud. What does that look like, right? But I think it totally, we don't actually use that term, but I do like the concept of an operating system. 'Cause a lot of things you just talk about there, these are things operating systems. Do you got to have a scheduler? And so you look across many different clouds and you got to figure out, okay, where do I actually want in this case, let's say a database instance to go and be provisioned. And then really it's up to, I think the vendor or in this case, the multi-cloud service creator to define how they want to want to do that. They could leverage the native cloud services or they could build their own technology. Which a lot of the vendors are doing. And so the point though, is that really you get this night from a end user standpoint, it goes back to your complexity, simplicity question, you get the simplicity of a single API that the implementation you don't really need to deal with. 'Cause you're like, I'm getting a service and I need the database and has certain properties and I want it here versus there versus wherever. But it's up to that multi-cloud service to figure out a lot of those implementation specifics. >> So are you the Supercloud OS? >> I think it is VMware's goal to become the Supercloud OS for sure. But like any good operating system, as we said, like it's all about applications, right? So you have a platform point of view, but you got to partner widely. >> And you got to get the hardware relationship. >> Yes. >> The Silicon chips. >> Yep. >> Right. >> Yeah, and actually that was a good point. I want to go back to that one. 'Cause you mentioned that earlier, the innovation that we're seeing, things like arm processors and like graviton and a lot of these things happening. And so I think that's another really interesting area where you're seeing tremendous innovation there in the public cloud. One of the challenges though for public cloud is actually at scale and that it takes longer to release newer hardware at that scale. So in some cases, if you want bleeding edge stuff, you can't go with public cloud 'cause it's just not there yet, right? So that's again, another interesting thing where you... >> Well, some will say that they launch 5,000 new services, every year at AWS. >> No, but I'm talking, >> They have some bleeding edge stuff. >> Well, no, no, no, sorry, sorry, let me clarify, let me clarify. I'm not talking about the software, I'm talking about the hardware side. >> Okay, got it, okay. >> Like the Silicon? >> Yeah, like the latest and greatest GPU, FBGA. >> Why can't they? >> 'Cause cause they do like tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands of them. >> Oh just because it's just so many. >> It's a scale. Yeah, that's the point, right? >> Right. >> And it's fundamental to the model in terms of how big they are. And so that's why we do see some customers who need, who have very specialized hardware requirements, need to do it in the private cloud, right on prem or possibly a colo. >> Or edge. >> Or edge. >> Edge is a great example of... >> But we often see, again, people like the latest bleeding edge GPUs, whatever they are, even something a bit more experimental that they're going to go on on prem for that. >> Yeah. >> And so look, do not want to disparage the public cloud, please don't take that away. It's just an artifact when it gets to heart, like software they can scale and they do (indistinct). >> Well it's context of the OS conversation, OS has to right to hardware and enable applications. >> Where I was getting caught up in that is Kit, is they're all developing their own Silicon and they're developing it, most of it's arm based and they're developing at a much, much faster cycle. They can go from design to tape out much faster than Intel historically has. And you're seeing it. >> Intel just posted along. >> Yeah, I think if you look at the overall system, you're absolutely right. >> Yeah, but it's the deployment because of the scale 'cause at one availability zone and another and another region and that's. >> Well, yeah, but so counter point to what I just said would be, hey, like they have very well controlled environments, very well controled system. So they don't need to support a million different configuration settings or whatever they've got theirs that they use, right? So from a system standpoint and so forth. Yeah, I agree that there's a lot they can do there. I was speaking specifically, to different types of hardware accelerators being a bit of a (indistinct). >> If it's not in the 5,000 services that they offer, you can't get it, whereas on-prem you can say, I want that, here it is. >> I'm not saying that on-prem is necessarily fundamentally better in any way. I'm just saying for this particular area >> It's use case driven. >> It is use, and that's the whole point of all this, right? Like and I know a lot of people in their heads associate VMware with on-prem, but we are not dogmatic at all. And you know, as you guys know, but many people may not like we partner with all the public cloud hyperscalers. And so our point of view is very much, much more nuance saying, look, we're happy to run workloads wherever you want to. In fact, that's what we hear from customers. They want to run them everywhere, but it's about finding the right tool for the right job. And that's what really what this multi-cloud approach. >> Yeah, and I think the structural change of the virtualization hypervisor this new shift to V2 Supercloud, this something happening fundamentally that's use case driven, it's not about dogma, whatever. I mean, cloud's great. But native clouds have the pros and cons. >> And I would say that Supercloud, prerequisite for Supercloud has got to be running in a public cloud. But I'd say it also has to be inclusive of on-prem data. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And you're not going to just move all that data into prem, maybe in the fullness of time, but I don't personally believe that, but you look at what Goldman Sachs has done with AWS they've got their on-prem data and they're connecting to the AWS cloud. >> Yep. >> What Walmart's doing with Azure and that's going to happen in a lot of different industries. >> Yeah. >> Well I think security will drive that too. We had that conversation because no one wants to increase the surface area. Number one, they want complexity to be reduced and they want economic benefits. That's the super cloud kind of (indistinct). >> It's a security but it's also differentiatable advantage that you actually have on prem that you don't necessarily. >> Right, well, we're going to debate this now, Kit, thank you for coming on and giving that Keynote, we're going to have a panel to debate and discuss the blockers that enablers to Supercloud. And there are some enablers and potentially blockers. >> Yep, absolutely. >> So we'll get, into that, okay, up next, the panel to discuss, blockers and enablers are Supercloud after this quick break. (soft music)

(lively music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage in San Francisco for VMware Explorer 22 formerly VMworld, Dave 12 years we've been covering VMware's annual conference. Going next level explores bigger theme, Multi-cloud another inflection point for VMware. And again at the center of it is the partners Zia Yusuf is here senior vice president strategic ecosystem and industry solutions. You're the, you're, you got the keys to the kingdom for VMware, welcome to theCube. >> It's a pleasure, I mean, you guys are a legend here. This is my first time here. So, it's a pleasure and excited to chat with you. >> Well, great to have you, every single year, since 2010 we've always had great commentary and discussion and sometimes contentious discussion around the role of partners. Visa V, VMware's value proposition, VMware dominant and the enterprise data center, everyone knows that. Dominant and hybrid was first there, everyone knows that. Now going to the next level, the customer stay, they stay with VMware, they don't really leave. They still got a great loyal base but now the enterprise is going NextGen cloud native. The partners are energized with the conversations we're hearing is huge. There's changes of roles is clarity on value proposition. Monetization is hoppin'. It's great stuff, what's going on? You're new, but you have a view of this before. Take us through your what's going on in the partner network, what's the state of the union? >> Yeah, I think, thanks for the question. I think maybe just step back a second right, the word partners is a big word. It covers all kinds of things. VMware has had a rich history of partnerships you know, mostly technology related partnerships. So much of our products depend on other partners, OEM partners, and so on. We've also had a rich history of our channel. So, as you look at different channel partners as you look at going through different parts of the segment SMB and so on, in a cloud context, based on what's happening we needed to take an integrated ecosystem approach. That's the word I use, right. And for me it's, it's a little bit like a spider's web. Like no single strand in the web is that strong but when you put it together thoughtfully in a very deliberate way. That's what an integrated ecosystem strategy. And so we've got our VCP partners, longstanding history that machine continues. We've got our channel partners and OEM partners that machinery continues obviously Dell strategic partner, significant business. The parts of the puzzle that I've been focusing on is five other different pieces. So first of course, is our hyper scale partnerships long history with AWS, very successful history. We have GCVE with GCP. We announced, I think three, four months ago that GCP was joining our VMware cloud universal and a big announcement yesterday about Microsoft doing the same. And hopefully we extend that. So, as we work with this hyper scaler six or seven of these partners, it's a, as you can imagine kind of a multidimensional chess game, if you will a little bit competitive mostly cooperative and stuff, right. The GSI is very exciting piece of it. The essentials that Deloitte, Deloitte announced a new business unit on VMware, ACL did the same. That energy level has really gone up. You see it at the show here as well. We recognize that these significant SI's play a huge role in the decision making process with customers. And we want to enable them to build significant VMware businesses. It's a different game from that perspective. Last thing I'm point out is, industry and verticals. Right I mean, this is not being necessarily an area because of the layer of the stack we've been in. Obviously Telco is an end to end business unit for us. We have products, we have a go to market on Telco, public sector to some degree because you need all these three letter agencies and the security and compliance. But as you look at financial services as you look at retail, as you look at healthcare we need to be aware of the workload we need especially on modern apps, especially on the edge. So we kind of doubling down on some of our vertical capabilities. So, all of those things are connected as well, right. The SI to the hyper scale partners in a vertical context. >> What's the biggest change that you've seen? Because we've observed some partners are leaning out as they change their business. And VMware has got new partners coming in, leaning in. So you got mentioned, Dave mentioned Telco and you got new use cases with edge and multi-cloud so you know, some people kind of maybe age out or change their strategy, some double down the core partner network, and then new ones come in. What's been the biggest change, if you can look at that holistically? >> Yeah, it's a great question, right? Because it's so multidimensional and there is no such thing as a GSI global system because they build products. Sometimes they act as a reseller, they're a solution provider. Also they provide services. So as their business model changes, we have to adjust how we engage with them. We can't put them in nice clean buckets. And that's what I'm doing with my colleagues here is how do we really enable them? And one of the things, I mean, I've done this type of stuff, I was at SAP for many years. We need to figure out how do we make them successful? Not just, this is what VMware wants you to do. We need to understand their business model and how do we fit into that? 'Cause if they grow, then we grow with that. And that is honestly a little, it's a subtle point, but it's a little bit of a nuanced. >> Yeah, it's very nuanced, but you have to nail that. You got to overlay. >> 100% >> The strategy where the enablement is technically or product wise, economics and conflict. (John laughing) >> And profitably, if they're profitably is important to us it's not just their growth. >> So Zia, I want to test the premise on you, something, John and I have been working on this notion of super cloud. And we did an event earlier this month, but one of the aspects that's kind of nuance and futuristic is if I'm a, let's say a financial services company and I'm going through a digital transformation I would be looking strategically at what, say Amazon did taking it's internal IT and then pointing at the world. I would say, I have data. I have tools, I have software, I have expertise that's really unique and could be value add. And I would be thinking, how do I monetize that, create my own cloud. And I'm actually just going to throw it into a public cloud to do that. I've got mainframes running, I've got Oracle stuff on Prem. I'm not going to shift that stuff into the cloud and maybe some of it, but I've got transaction systems and proprietary data. And a lot of it is running on VMware and I've got cloud stuff too. I would be looking at, okay, how do I build my own cloud and put my data, my tooling, my software in front of a new ecosystem, my own ecosystem that I can you know monetize. Are you seeing- >> Without spending the CapEx. >> Yeah, without having to build data centers? Right, exactly. I want to take advantage of the gift that the hyper scalers are given. Are you seeing any activity bubbling up in that regard? >> It's a really, it's a really interesting question. And I think the terminology that we've used around cloud smart kind of goes into that. So let me take what you said. >> Okay please, yeah. >> And frame it in a slightly different way. You can standardize on public clouds and everybody's using the same thing. You're using the same services, and so on. Theoretically that could lose some of your differentiation. Right, I mean, especially for financial services companies that have built so much of their you know, trading test down to the milli, milli, millisecond and how do they do that, and so on. So, I think you have something there right. So, as they look at their technology and software strategy, yes there's cost reduction aspects of it. There's refactoring aspects of it that hygiene that needs to be done as Rughu talked about from this cloud chaos to cloud smart, if you will but then how do you differentiate on the business processes? How do you differentiate that then down into the workloads? And I think that's where to use an old term. It takes a village, right, you've got the system integrator that's providing this stuff. You've got other strategy firms like the BCGs and McKinseys of the world that have huge influence now. Then you've got technology players that are coming into that. And I think the cloud smart approach is to do exactly what you're saying. It's not just the refactoring, it's not just movement to the cloud. How do you retain your competitive edge from the processes the models, the thinking that you've built up over many years. So, I don't know if it's super cloud or what that means, but that at the end of the day, this is about business processes. At the end of the day, this is about having a competitive edge in the market and I think you could do it. >> It's industry cloud, right? >> It's, that's a good way to put it. >> Yeah. >> I think Industry cloud is a good way. >> Why is there security cloud, Why isn't there an insurance cloud? Why's there a FinTech cloud? So I mean if you look at Goldman Sachs capital one. >> Right. >> There, CapEx is handled by AWS. Snowflake built their entire business on AWS. Didn't spend the dime on CapEx. Well, they spent a lot of operating expense for that CapEx and the fees, but still they became successful. And then the rest is history. So, I think people are seeing this idea of I'll ride that back on the CapEx of the hyper scalers and then use the tooling from the partner network and what's available. To then, cobble together in an architectural engineered way, distributed computing way, a new way to do things. Okay, so if you believe that, which we do, then you say, oh, it's on the balance sheet. So, what we've been hearing from companies is like, "Hey it's going to be on the balance sheet", I better have an income statement impact on the top line. So, you start to see behavior change at the customers not IT powering the business and the back office and terminals and some app. >> Crosscutting. >> It's like, no, no, no this is a digital business. So, the integration of balance sheet income statement on the economics is driving a lot of the behavior at the customers. So we see customers thinking this way and it's like we've never seen this level of business model refactoring as well as partner vendor selection, product technology mix at the same time. >> And VMware. >> At this level. >> Need the connective tissue between the hyper scalers in the ecosystem and actually provide those cross cloud connections. >> Yeah. >> You know, to the extent there's a business case there, that's what we're trying to of squint through. Is it going to be hybrid with on-prem in one cloud or is there an advantage of going cross clouds beyond just avoiding lock in you know, to take advantage of global infrastructure? >> So and then the next question is the Tam then bigger which means the partners are better? >> Yeah right. >> Participate in that. >> Yeah, I think, and we look at economics of this, right? I mean, there's a huge emphasis on cost, right. Cost, and I completely get that. I think, as I've talked to customers both now that I'm here but before advising a range of companies the innovation process, the time to impact is equally important all right as you compete. There's no point in just getting your cost down. If you're then getting beaten up in the market and you're not able to differentiate with new digital services. And this is where call it super cloud, call it industry cloud. We need to connect up to the business processes and the business impact and not just in my view the cost infrastructure piece of it. >> Yeah. And that we can't do on our own, we're not an apps company. So we're, you're not SAP, we're not Oracle, but we need to work with those players to make sure that their workloads are optimized in the right cloud in the right configuration. And that is a job to be done as opposed to just let's take it to town. >> And there's clearly a technology business case, especially if we're working with companies like VMware who's going to help me you know, simplify. >> Right. >> My move to the multi-cloud but there's also a business and economic impact in that. Even if it's not, if it could be simple as if I partner with Microsoft I'm going to do more business right if I'm one of these industry clouds. So I see that as another potential tailwind, it's really, it's like when Dreesen says all your companies are software companies, to me all companies are cloud companies, now increasingly. >> Look the difference between cloud and apps and then stuff, I mean like. >> Yeah, it's all. >> It's like you know there's used to be infrastructure and then apps company and so on. We need to deliver with our ecosystem partners and integrated solution and solution with a big S not just the technology solution but the broader, I mean look at the change management. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We talked about culture, I mean, if you don't get that piece right and the change management piece. >> Everything, yeah. >> You know the rest of it is history. >> Well and it's got to be delivered as a service, >> It has to be. >> Which is huge implications as to how you deal with change management. >> And this goes back to my kind of first comment is I really try and think of this by architecting the ecosystem. I don't like the word alliances. Right I mean, let's say kind of a one to one relationship. You know, let's do an agreement, let's go have dinner, but architecting the ecosystem the spiders web, who are the different players how can we compliment each other? And if it, Deloitte and a Microsoft want to do amazing business together related to VMware technology I want to encourage that. And so those third party Connections. >> You guys your contextualizing the ecosystem, basically. And I think from a customers standpoint that's a benefit to them, in my opinion in fact, Dave, remember at our supercloud.world event URL supercloud.world is the plug for the site. They can check it out. One of the comments from the cloudarati panel was we had a title this session called the innovators dilemma you know question mark you know . >> Best book ever written. >> Yeah, yeah. And so the, one of the panels said, it shouldn't be, we should change it to the integrators dilemma because what's happening is that integration is now standard table stakes and, but integrating the right things now matters, right? So, integration for integration sake isn't necessarily the end game anymore. >> And this is where. >> And this kind of where you're getting at with the spider's web is that integrating properly is a solution mindset. >> And look, I'm integrating also, you know have to bring in data from that perspective. Right, at the end of the day data being the new oil, if you will, the integration allows that data to flow to the right place at the right time to make the right decision. Now, we are not doing all of those pieces but we are certainly enabling that. And as you especially start looking at what we can do on the edge and what we can do in a retail store and a factory and so on those kinds of things come together. >> Okay, Zia take some time. We got a couple minutes left, only two minutes left, I want you to get some commentary directly to the audience around what specifically you're doubling down on. That's new that you're investing in on the partner network or your partner strategy. What is a steady state that's being nurtured and farmed or whatever word you want to use, but here's our core thing. Here's the area of improvement we're going to be in you know, cranking the handle on take us through that. >> Sure. >> I know you got OAM, got telco, got new things going on. >> Yeah so, maybe a couple of things right. >> lay it all out. >> First of all it has to be linked to VMware strategy. So as we transition on this journey to subscription saas ARR, we need to bring our ecosystem along to do that. That has business model implications that has implications on how we engage with them, how we define success how we value things. So that's an important journey. Secondly, is we need to do a better job of enabling our partners. Right, I mean, we have our partner connected. We do a pretty good job on the channel side. We need to do a better job on the GSIs is really understanding their business model, how they're engaging with their customers and provide them the technology the support, the financial resources, so that they can be successful. That's very important. Third is, to connect the dots on the ecosystem, right? I mean it's a, I've spent a lot of time in this event as well in joint meetings between system integrators and hyper scalers with our technology colleagues on Intel or NetApp or AMD. And these are companies that we have a rich history with. We're trying to connect, because that's how customers look at it. So, connecting the dots between the ecosystem super important to us, and then look, there's a change management journey within VMware. We also need to understand how we can engage with partners in a more productive, effective way. How do we scale this up? I believe, I think our leadership in Raghu and Sumit we are not going to succeed unless we have a profitable, engaged, passionate ecosystem around. >> Yeah I mean, they got to make money. They got to. >> Exactly. >> Be successful, have successful customers, their end customers your customers. Well, all good, question of where you're investing the most right now. If you had to put a kind of the pie chart together, I mean some of it's steady state like it's a machine, some of it's new like Telco for instance I mean here's. >> I think again, rich history on the channel side, we continue to invest there. Very valuable to go do that. I think some of these newer areas around the system integrators, especially the large ones, the Whipple's the HCLs, Deloittes essentials of the world, very important. The hyper scaler relationships directly leads into ARR. You saw the VMC cloud Universal will continue. >> We have Google on great props from Google. >> Yeah, We love it you guys. >> Yeah, and so look, I think we are not multi-cloud unless we go do this. Right I mean, Raghuram made a joke about this. We were single cloud and now we're multi-cloud, we want our customers to be able to procure these integrated solutions through VMware and our hyper scaler partners will continue to do that's when multi-cloud really become. And so the GTM motion, the discounting the commission structure all of that machinery is an important radio for me. >> Zia thank you so much for coming on theCube. I know you've been super busy. You got to go out and hit all the partners say hello, compressing you know, got to hit the pavement, say hello to everyone. >> It's been fantastic, the partners have too many, too many parties and so. (Interviewers laughing) But that's a fun part of my job, but appreciate your time. >> You got good stamina. >> Thanks Zia. >> So you got to have that in this game. Not about the faint of heart here at VMware. Zia thank you for coming on. >> Of course. >> This is the cube coverage, back after lunch. After the short break day two of three days of live coverage here in Moscone West on the street floor level of the event I'm John Furrier with Dave Alante. We'll be right back. (lively music)

>>Hey everyone. It's the cube live at VMware Explorer, 2022. We're at Mascone center and lovely, beautiful San Francisco. Dave Volante is with me, Lisa Martin. Beautiful weather here today. >>It is beautiful. I couldn't have missed this one because you know, the orange and the pure and VA right. Are history together. I had a, I had a switch sets. You >>Did. You were gonna have FOMO without a guest. Who's back. One of our longtime alumni V Stewart, VP of global technology alliances partners at pure storage one. It's great to have you back on the program, seeing you in 3d >>It's. It's so great to be here and we get a guest interviewer. So this >>Is >>Fantastic. Fly by. Fantastic. >>So talk to us, what's going on at pure. It's been a while since we had a chance to talk, >>Right. Well, well, besides the fact that it's great to see in person and to be back at a conference and see all of our customers, partners and prospects, you know, pure storage has just been on a tear just for your audience. Many, those who don't follow pure, right? We finished our last year with our Q4 being 41% year over year growth. And in the year, just under 2.2 billion, and then we come outta the gates this year, close our Q1 at 50% year over year, quarter quarterly growth. Have you ever seen a storage company or an infrastructure partner at 2 billion grow at that rate? >>Well, the thing was, was striking was that the acceleration of growth, because, you know, I mean, COVID, there were supply chain issues and you know, you saw that. And then, and we've seen this before at cloud companies, we see actually AWS as accelerated growth. So this is my premise here is you guys are actually becoming a cloud-like company building on top of, of infrastructure going from on-prem to cloud. But we're gonna talk about that. >>This is very much that super cloud premise. Well, >>It is. And, and, but I think it's it's one of the characteristics is you can actually, it, you know, we used to see companies, they go, they'd come out of escape velocity, and then they'd they'd growth would slow. I used to be at IDC. We'd see it. We'd see it. Okay. Down then it'd be single digits. You guys are seeing the opposite. >>It's it's not just our bookings. And by the way, I would be remiss if I didn't remind your audience that our second quarter earnings call is tomorrow. So we'll see how this philosophy and momentum keeps going. See, right. But besides the growth, right? All the external metrics around our business are increasing as well. So our net promoter score increased right at 85.2. We are the gold standard, not just in storage in infrastructure period. Like there's no one close to us, >>85. I mean, that's like, that's a, like apple, >>It's higher than apple than apple. It's apple higher than Tesla. It's higher than AWS shopping. And if you look in like our review of our products, flash rate is the leader in the gardener magic quadrant for, for storage array. It's been there for eight years. Port works is the leader in the GIGO OME radar for native Kubernetes storage three years in a row. Like just, it's great to be at a company that's hitting on all cylinders. You know, particularly at a time that's just got so much change going on in our >>Industry. Yeah. Tremendous amount of change. Talk about the, the VMware partnership from a momentum of velocity perspective what's going on there. And some of the things that you're accelerating. >>Absolutely. So VMware is, is the, the oldest or the longest tenured technology partner that we've had. I'm about to start my 10th year at pure storage. It feels like it was yesterday. When I joined, they were a, an Alliance partner before I joined. And so not to make that about me, but that's just like we built some of the key aspects around our first product, the flash array with VMware workloads in mind. And so we are a, a co-development partner. We've worked with them on a number of projects over years of, of late things that are top of mind is like the evolution of vials, the NV support for NVMe over fabric storage, more recently SRM support for automating Dr. With Viv a deployments, you know, and, and, and then our work around VMware ex extends to not just with VMware, they're really the catalyst for a lot of three way partnerships. So partnerships into our investments in data protection partners. Well, you gotta support V ADP for backing up the VMware space, our partnership within Nvidia, well, you gotta support NVA. I, so they can accelerate bringing those technologies into the enterprise. And so it's it, it's not just a, a, a, you know, unilateral partnership. It's a bidirectional piece because for a lot of customers, VMware's kind of like a touchpoint for managing the infrastructure. >>So how is that changing? Because you you've mentioned, you know, all the, the, the previous days, it was like, okay, let's get, make storage work. Let's do the integration. Let's do the hard work. It was kind of a race for the engineering teams to get there. All the storage companies would compete. And it was actually really good for the industry. Yeah, yeah. Right. Because it, it went from, you know, really complex, to much, much simpler. And now with the port works acquisition, it brings you closer to the whole DevOps scene. And you're seeing now VMware it's with its multi-cloud initiatives, really focusing on, you know, the applications and that, and that layer. So how does that dynamic evolve in terms of the partnership and, and where the focus is? >>So there's always in the last decade or so, right. There's always been some amount of overlap or competing with your partnerships, right. Something in their portfolios they're expanding maybe, or you expand you encroach on them. I think, I think two parts to how I would want to answer your question. The retrospective look V VMware is our number one ISV from a, a partner that we, we turn transactions with. The booking's growth that I shared with you, you could almost say is a direct reflection of how we're growing within that, that VMware marketplace. We are bringing a platform that I think customers feel services their workloads well today and gives them the flexibility of what might come in their cloud tomorrow. So you look at programs like our evergreen one subscription model, where you can deploy a consumption based subscription model. So very cloud-like only pay for what you use on-prem and turn that dial as you need to dial it into a, a cloud or, or multiple clouds. >>That's just one example. Looking forward, look, port works is probably the platform that VMware should have bought because when you look at today's story, right, when kit Culbert shared a, a cross cloud services, right, it was, it was the modern version of what VMware used to say, which was, here's a software defined data center. We're gonna standardize all your dissimilar hardware, another saying software defined management to standardize all your dissimilar clouds. We do that for Kubernetes. We talk about accelerating customers' adoption of Kubernetes by, by allowing developers, just to turn on an enable features, be its security, backup high availability, but we don't do it mono in a, you know, in a, in a homogeneous environment, we allow customers to do it heterogeneously so I can deploy VMware Tansu and connect it to Amazon EKS. I can switch one of those over to red head OpenShift, non disruptively, if I need to. >>Right? So as customers are going on this journey, particularly the enterprise customers, and they're not sure where they're going, we're giving them a platform that standardizes where they want to go. On-prem in the cloud and anywhere in between. And what's really interesting is our latest feature within the port works portfolio is called port works data services, and allows customers to deploy databases on demand. Like, install it, download the binaries. You have a cus there, you got a database, you got a database. You want Cassandra, you want Mongo, right? Yeah. You know, and, and for a lot of enterprise customers, who've kind of not, not know where to don't know where to start with port works. We found that to be a great place where they're like, I have this need side of my infrastructure. You can help me reduce cost time. Right. And deliver databases to teams. And that's how they kick off their Tansu journey. For example. >>It's interesting. So port works was the enabler you mentioned maybe VMware should above. Of course they had to get the value out of, out of pivotal. >>Understood. >>So, okay. Okay. So that, so how subsequent to the port works acquisition, how has it changed the way that you guys think about storage and how your customers are actually deploying and managing storage? >>Sure. So you touched base earlier on what was really great about the cloud and VMware was this evolution of simplifying storage technologies, usually operational functions, right? Making things simpler, more API driven, right. So they could be automated. I think what we're seeing customers do to today is first off, there's a tremendous rise in everyone wanting to do every customer, not every customer, a large portion of the customer bases, wanting to acquire technology on as OPEX. And it, I think it's really driven by like eliminate technical debt. I sign a short term agreement, our short, our shortest commitment's nine months. If we don't deliver around what we say, you walk away from us in nine months. Like you, you couldn't do that historically. Furthermore, I think customers are looking for the flexibility for our subscriptions, you know, more from between on-prem and cloud, as I shared earlier, is, is been a, a, a big driver in that space. >>And, and lastly, I would, would probably touch on our environmental and sustainability efforts. You saw this morning, Ragu in the keynote touch on what was it? Zero carbon consumption initiative, or ZCI my apologies to the veer folks. If I missed VO, you know, we've had, we've had sustainability into our products since day one. I don't know if you saw our inaugural ESG report that came out about 60 days ago, but the bottom line is, is, is our portfolio reduces the, the power directly consumed by storage race by up to 80%. And another aspect to look at is that 97% of all of the products that we sold in the last six years are still in the market today. They're not being put into, you know, into, to recycle bins and whatnot, pure storage's goal by the end of this decade is to further drive the efficiency of our platforms by another 66%. And so, you know, it's an ambitious goal, but we believe it's >>Important. Yeah. I was at HQ earlier this month, so I actually did see it. So, >>Yeah. And where is sustainability from a differentiation perspective, but also from a customer requirements perspective, I'm talking to a lot of customers that are putting that requirement when they're doing RFPs and whatnot on the vendors. >>I think we would like to all, and this is a free form VO comment here. So my apologies, but I think we'd all like to, to believe that we can reduce the energy consumption in the planet through these efforts. And in some ways maybe we can, what I fear in the technology space that I think we've all and, and many of your viewers have seen is there's always more tomorrow, right? There's more apps, more vendors, more offerings, more, more, more data to store. And so I think it's really just an imperative is you've gotta continue to be able to provide more services or store more data in this in yesterday's footprint tomorrow. A and part of the way they get to is through a sustainability effort, whether it's in chip design, you know, storage technologies, et cetera. And, and unfortunately it's, it's, it's something that organizations need to adopt today. And, and we've had a number of wins where customers have said, I thought I had to evacuate this data center. Your technology comes in and now it buys me more years of time in this in infrastructure. And so it can be very strategic to a lot of vendors who think their only option is like data center evacuation. >>So I don't want to, I, I don't wanna set you up, but I do want to have the super cloud conversation. And so let's go, and you, can you, you been around a long time, your, your technical, or you're more technical than I am, so we can at least sort of try to figure it out together when I first saw you guys. I think Lisa, so you and I were at, was it, when did you announce a block storage for AWS? The, was that 2019 >>Cloud block store? I believe block four years >>Ago. Okay. So 20 18, 20 18, 20 18. Okay. So we were there at, at accelerate at accelerate and I said, oh, that's interesting. So basically if I, if I go back there, it was, it was a hybrid model. You, you connecting your on-prem, you were, you were using, I think, priority E C two, you know, infrastructure to get high performance and connecting the two. And it was a singular experience yeah. Between on-prem and AWS in a pure customer saw pure. Right. Okay. So that was the first time I started to think about Supercloud. I mean, I think thought about it in different forms years ago, but that was the first actual instantiation. So my, my I'm interested in how that's evolved, how it's evolving, how it's going across clouds. Can you talk just conceptually about how that architecture is, is morphing? >>Sure. I just to set the expectations appropriately, right? We've got, we've got a lot of engineering work that that's going on right now. There's a bunch of stuff that I would love to share with you that I feel is right around the corner. And so hopefully we'll get across the line where we're at today, where we're at today. So the connective DNA of, of flash array, OnPrem cloud block store in the cloud, we can set up for, for, you know, what we call active. Dr. So, so again, customers are looking at these arrays is a, is a, is a pair that allows workloads to be put into the, put into the cloud or, or transferred between the cloud. That's kind of like your basic building, you know, blocking tackling 1 0 1. Like what do I do for Dr. Example, right? Or, or gimme an easy button to, to evacuate a data center where we've seen a, a lot of growth is around cloud block store and cloud block store really was released as like a software version of our hardware, Ray on-prem and it's been, and, and it hasn't been making the news, but it's been continually evolving. >>And so today the way you would look at cloud block store is, is really bringing enterprise data services to like EBS for, for AWS customers or to like, you know, is Azure premium disc for Azure users. And what do I mean by enterprise data services? It's, it's the, the, the way that large scale applications are managed, on-prem not just their performance and their avail availability considerations. How do I stage the, the development team, the sandbox team before they patch? You know, what's my cyber protection, not just data protection, how, how am I protected from a cyber hack? We bring all those capabilities to those storage platforms. And the, the best result is because of our data reduction technologies, which was critical in reducing the cost of flash 10 years ago, reduces the cost of the cloud by 50% or more and pays for the, for pays more than pays for our software of cloud block store to enable these enterprise data services, to give all these rapid capabilities like instant database, clones, instant, you know, recovery from cyber tech, things of that nature. >>Do customers. We heard today that cloud chaos are, are customers saying so, okay, you can run an Azure, you can run an AWS fine. Are customers saying, Hey, we want to connect those islands. Are you hearing that from customers or is it still sort of still too early? >>I think it's still too early. It doesn't mean we don't have customers who are very much in let's buy, let me buy some software that will monitor the price of my cloud. And I might move stuff around, but there's also a cost to moving, right? The, the egress charges can add up, particularly if you're at scale. So I don't know how much I seen. And even through the cloud days, how much I saw the, the notion of workloads moving, like kind of in the early days, like VMO, we thought there might be like a, is there gonna be a fall of the moon computing, you know, surge here, like, you know, have your workload run where power costs are lower. We didn't really see that coming to fruition. So I think there is a, is a desire for customers to have standardization because they gain the benefits of that from an operational perspective. Right. Whether they put that in motion to move workloads back and forth. I think >>So let's say, let's say to be determined, let let's say they let's say they don't move them because your point you knows too expensive, but, but, but, but you just, I think touched on it is they do want some kind of standard in terms of the workflow. Yep. You you're saying you're, you're starting to see demand >>Standard operating practices. Okay. >>Yeah. SOPs. And if they're, if they're big into pure, why wouldn't they want that? If assuming they have, you know, multiple clouds, which a lot of customers do. >>I, I, I I'll assure with you one thing that the going back to like basic primitives and I touched it touched on it a minute ago with data reduction. You have customers look at their, their storage bills in the cloud and say, we're gonna reduce that by half or more. You have a conversation >>Because they can bring your stack yeah. Into the cloud. And it's got more maturity than what you'd find from a cloud company, cloud >>Vendor. Yeah. Just data. Reduction's not part of block storage today in the cloud. So we've got an advantage there that we, we bring to bear. Yeah. >>So here we are at, at VMware Explorer, the first one of this name, and I love the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe. Doesn't that sound like a Marvel movie. I feel like there should be superheroes walking around here. At some point >>We got Mr. Fantastic. Right here. We do >>Gone for, I dunno it >>Is. But a lot of, a lot of news this morning in the keynote, you were in the keynote, what are some of the things that you're hearing from VMware and what excites you about this continued evolution of the partnership with pure >>Yeah. Great point. So I, I think I touched on the, the two things that really caught my attention. Obviously, you know, we've got a lot of investment in V realize it was now kind of rebranded as ay, that, you know, I think we're really eager to see if we can help drive that consumption a bit higher, cuz we believe that plays into our favor as a vendor. We've we've we have over a hundred templates for the area platform right now to, you know, automation templates, whether it's, you know, levels set your platform, you know, automatically move workloads, deploy on demand. Like just so, so again, I think the focus there is very exciting for us, obviously when they've got a new release, like vSphere eight, that's gonna drive a lot of channel behaviors. So we've gotta get our, you know, we're a hundred percent channel company. And so we've gotta go get our channel ready because with about half of the updates of vSphere is, is hardware refresh. And so, you know, we've gotta be, be prepared for that. So, you know, some of the excitements about just being how to find more points in the market to do more business together. >>All right. Exciting cover the grounds. Right. I mean, so, okay. You guys announce earnings tomorrow, so we can't obviously quiet period, but of course you're not gonna divulge that anyway. So we'll be looking for that. What other catalysts are out there that we should be paying attention to? You know, we got, we got reinvent coming up in yep. In November, you guys are obviously gonna be there in, in a big way. Accelerate was back this year. How was accelerate >>Accelerate in was in Los Angeles this year? Mm. We had great weather. It was a phenomenal venue, great event, great partner event to kick it off. We happened to, to share the facility with the president and a bunch of international delegates. So that did make for a little bit of some logistic securities. >>It was like the summit of the Americas. I, I believe I'm recalling that correctly, but it was fantastic. Right. You, you get, you get to bring the customers out. You get to put a bunch of the engineers on display for the products that we're building. You know, one of the high, you know, two of the highlights there were, we, we announced our new flash blade S so, you know, higher, more performant, more scalable version of our, our scale and object and file platform with that. We also announced the, the next generation of our a I R I, which is our AI ready, AI ready infrastructure within video. So think of it like converged infrastructure for AI workloads. We're seeing tremendous growth in that unstructured space. And so, you know, we obviously pure was funded around block storage, a lot around virtual machines. The data growth is in unstructured, right? >>We're just seeing, we're seeing, you know, just tons of machine learning, you know, opportunities, a lot of opportunities, whether we're looking at health, life sciences, genome sequencing, medical imaging, we're seeing a lot of, of velocity in the federal space. You know, things, I can't talk about a lot of velocity in the automotive space. And so just, you know, from a completeness of platform, you know, flat flash blade is, is really addressing a need really kind of changing the market from NAS as like tier two storage or object is tier three to like both as a tier one performance candidate. And now you see applications that are supporting running on top of object, right? All your analytics platforms are on an object today, Absolut. So it's a, it's a whole new world. >>Awesome. And Pierce also what I see on the website, a tech Fest going on, you guys are gonna be in Seoul, Mexico city in Singapore in the next week alone. So customers get the chance to be able to in person talk with those execs once again. >>Yeah. We've been doing the accelerate tech tech fests, sorry about that around the globe. And if one of those align with your schedule, or you can free your schedule to join us, I would encourage you. The whole list of events dates are on pure storage.com. >>I'm looking at it right now. Vaon thank you so much for joining Dave and me. I got to sit between two dapper dudes, great conversation about what's going on at pure pure with VMware better together and the, and the CATA, the cat catalysis that's going on on both sides. I think that's an actual word I should. Now I have a degree biology for Vaughn Stewart and Dave Valante I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 22. We'll be right back with our next guest. So keep it here.