>>You can put this in a conference. >>Good morning and welcome back to Dallas. Ladies and gentlemen, we are here with the cube Live from, from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how you doing? Exciting. Day two. Feeling good. >>Very exciting. Ready to start off the >>Day. Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >>Having us, >>For having us. I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about ethernet as the fabric for hpc, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. Y'all seem all in on ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >>Yeah. I mean, when you look at ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC and you know, infinite band's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial and their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500. What they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at ethernet, you kinda look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes. That's a perfect fit for ethernet and that space and, and those types of jobs. >>I love that. Pete, you wanna elaborate? Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, you know, one of the biggest things you find with internet for HPC is that, you know, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you know, you've had old technologies like, you know, atm, Sonic, fitty, you know, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as, you know, InfiniBand, omnipath that are out there. Yeah. But basically there's single source at this point. So, you know, what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind ethernet. And you see that also, the fact that ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise is using the cloud data centers that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia, you know, into, you know, into enterprise, into cloud service providers is much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >>So, so what's this, what is, what's the state of the art for ethernet right now? What, you know, what's, what's the leading edge, what's shipping now and what and what's in the near future? You, you were with Broadcom, you guys design this stuff. >>Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. So leading edge right now, I got a couple, you know, Wes stage >>Trough here on the cube. Yeah. >>So this is Tomahawk four. So this is what is in production is shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 tets per second. Okay. Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, infin band, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25 point sixt. So state of the art right now is what we introduced. We announced this in August. This is Tomahawk five. So this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth have, you know, any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, it's actually winds up being a factor of six efficiency. Wow. Cause if you want, I can go into that, but why >>Not? Well, I, what I wanna know, please tell me that in your labs you have a poster on the wall that says T five with, with some like Terminator kind of character. Cause that would be cool if it's not true. Don't just don't say anything. I just want, I can actually shift visual >>It into a terminator. So. >>Well, but so what, what are the, what are the, so this is, this is from a switching perspective. Yeah. When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what, what's, what's the latest in terms of, well, the kns that are, that are going in there, what's, what speed are we talking about today? >>So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. Okay. Moving to a hundred gig pan four. Okay. And we do see a lot of Knicks in the 200 gig ethernet port speed. So that would be, you know, four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon. 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end nodes tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig pan four. Wow. >>Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, >>That is, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I wanna circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen. Where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armand, do you wanna go? >>Yeah, yeah. Well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling it's 50 50 now. So ethernet is at the level of 50%. InfiniBand is at 50%. Right. Interesting. Yeah. And so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, Hey, we want to see, you know, flexibility and choice and hey, let's look at ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we have our switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially mpi. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, Hey, I've been in fbe, but now I want to go ethernet, you know, there's gonna be some learning curves there. And so what we wanna do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running, and they can actually get some value out of the cluster. >>Yeah. Peter, what, talk about that partnership. What, what, what does that look like? Is it, is it, I mean, are you, you working with Dell before the, you know, before the T six comes out? Or you just say, you know, what would be cool, what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >>No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. You know, Dell has been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, you know, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group within Broadcom, we've then gotten, you know, very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, you know, Dell can take it and, you know, deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again in both the hardware and the software. >>So, so I, I'm, I'm just, I'm fascinated by, I I, I always like to know kind like what Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Look, you, you start talking about the largest super supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be 2 million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores, yeah. Ex alop of, of, of, of performance. What are the, what are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the, what are the increments in terms of how many, and I know it, I know it's a depends answer, but, but, but how many nodes can you support in a, in a, in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? What does that increment of scale look like today? >>Yeah, so I think, so this is 51.2 terras per second. What we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig ethernet ports. Okay. So that would be 128, you know, 400 giggi ports connected to, to one chip. Okay. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the Nicks, you can have double that. Okay. So, you know, in a single hop you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >>So, okay, so this T five, that thing right there inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what is, what does that, what's the form factor look like for that, for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have, what does that look >>Like? It tends to be pizza boxes these days. Okay. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towards pizza, pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, you know, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plugged into or interface to these days, what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box, and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the, the line card. >>Okay. >>So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a two R U with 64 OSF P ports. And often each of those OSF p, which is an 800 gig e or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig quarts. Okay. So yeah, in two r u you've got, and this is all air cooled, you know, in two re you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics, and they'll actually deploy a four U just so that way they have the face place density, so they can plug in 128, say qsf P one 12. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you wanna have DAK connectivity combined with, with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >>And, and Armando ethernet isn't, ethernet isn't necessarily ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. Right. I think I have a projector at home that's actually using ethernet physical connections. But what, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center ethernet, or, or is this, you know, RDMA over converged ethernet? What, what are >>We talking about? Yeah, so our rdma, right? So when you look at, you know, running, you know, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on ethernet, if you look at NPI is officially, you know, built to, Hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand, but now what you see with Broadcom and the great work they're doing now, we can make that work on ethernet and get, you know, it's same performance. So that's huge for customers. >>Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a, a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of ethernet in hpc in terms of AI and ml. Where, where do you think we're gonna be next year or 10 years from now? >>You wanna go first or you want me to go first? I can start. >>Yeah. Pete feels ready. >>So I mean, what I see, I mean, ethernet, I mean, is what we've seen is that as far as on the starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. That's >>Impressive. >>Yeah. So nicely >>Done, casual, humble brag there. That was great. That was great. I love that. >>I'm here for you. I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of, of Ethan is like, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory, the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any other networking technology >>More who, >>So, you know, I see that, you know, that trajectory is gonna continue as far as the switches, you know, doubling in bandwidth. I think that, you know, they're evolving protocols. You know, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on rdma, you know, for the supercomputing, the a AIML workloads. But we do see that, you know, as you have, you know, a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the, the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's gonna be doubling a bandwidth over time evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably gonna evolve over time depending on the a AIML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-pack optics. So, you know, right now this chip is all, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. How >>Many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that >>352. >>I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >>Yeah. So we get, so right now, you know, all the thirties, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we have this, actually, we have a version of Hawk four at 25 point sixt that has co-pack optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk five Nice. Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. Wow. Cool. So I see, you know, there's, you know, the bandwidth, there's radis increasing protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's, you know, a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So, you know, a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >>Okay. You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only gonna chase this one. Okay. >>All right. >>So I think of, I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. Yeah. So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that in many optical connections? What's, what's, what's the mapping there? What does that, what does that look like? >>So what we've announced for TAMA five is it would have fr four optics coming out. So you'd actually have, you know, 512 fiber pairs coming out. So you'd have, you know, basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the, the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because >>It's, it's miraculous, essentially. It's, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, a lot of people are gonna be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus versus ethernet. I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running ethernet moving forward as, as hpc, you know, which is sort of just trails slightly behind supercomputing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI ml. What, what are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running ethernet in that environment? Is it, is it connecting, is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What, or what, what are the advantages? >>Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that ethernet has again, is that, you know, the data centers, you know, the networks within enterprises within, you know, clouds right now are run on ethernet. So now if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is, you know, the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology, you know, so I think what, you know, one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your, your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the, the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use ethernet, it's gonna give you the same performance. And actually in some cases we seen better performance than we've seen with omnipath than, you know, better than in InfiniBand. >>That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I wanna make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of ethernet here in hpc? >>Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at train a model, okay, so when you go and train a model in ai, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you wanna utilize, but if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the cpu. And essentially, if you're gonna do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal. The bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage. Maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed you want faster, faster, faster. >>It's all about making it faster and easier. It is for, for the users. I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas Stakes, there's a lot going on with with that making >>Me hungry. >>I know exactly. I'm sitting up here thinking, man, I did not have a big enough breakfast. How do you come up with the name Tomahawk? >>So Tomahawk, I think you just came, came from a list. So we had, we have a tri end product line. Ah, a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kinda like, you know, the bigger and batter missile, so, oh, okay. >>Love this. Yeah, I, well, I >>Mean, so you let your engineers, you get to name it >>Had to ask. It's >>Collaborative. Oh good. I wanna make sure everyone's in sync with it. >>So just so we, it's not the Aquaman tried. Right, >>Right. >>The steak Tomahawk. I >>Think we're, we're good now. Now that we've cleared that up. Now we've cleared >>That up. >>Armando P, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of ethernet N hpc. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to the Cube Live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and Supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering empowering the autonomous enterprise brought to you by Oracle Consulting. Welcome back, everybody to this special digital event coverage. The Cube is looking into the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. Janet George is here. She's group VP Autonomous for Advanced Analytics with machine learning and artificial intelligence at Oracle on she joined by Grant Gibson is VP of growth and strategy. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. I want to start with you because you get strategy in your title start big picture. What is the strategy with Oracle specifically as it relates to autonomous and also consulting? >>Sure. So I think you know, Oracle has a deep legacy of strength and data and over the company's successful history, it's evolved what that is from steps along the way. If you look at the modern enterprise Oracle client, I think there's no denying that we've entered the age of AI, that everyone knows that artificial intelligence and machine learning are key to their success in the business marketplace going forward. And while generally it's acknowledged that it's a transformative technology and people know that they need to take advantage of it. It's the how that's really tricky and that most enterprises, in order to really get an enterprise level, are rely on AI investment. Need to engage in projects of significant scope, and going from realizing there's an opportunity realizing there's a threat to mobilize yourself to capitalize on it is a daunting task. Certainly one that's anybody that's got any sort of legacy of success has built in processes as building systems has built in skill sets, and making that leap to be an autonomous enterprise is challenging for companies to wrap their heads around. So as part of the rebirth of Oracle Consulting, we've developed a practice around how to both manage the technology needs for that transformation as well as the human needs as well as the data science needs. >>So there's about five or six things that I want to follow up with you there, so this is a good conversation. Ever since I've been in the industry, we were talking about a sort of start stop start stopping at the ai Winter, and now it seems to be here. I almost feel like the technology never lived up to its promise you didn't have the horsepower compute power data may be so we're here today. It feels like we are entering a new era. Why is that? And how will the technology perform this time? >>So for AI to perform is very reliant on the data. We entered the age of Ai without having the right data for AI. So you can imagine that we just launched into Ai without our data being ready to be training sex for AI. So we started with big data. We started the data that was already historically transformed. Formatted had logical structures, physical structures. This data was sort of trapped in many different tools. And then suddenly Ai comes along and we see Take this data, our historical data we haven't tested to see if this has labels in it. This has learning capability in it. Just trust the data to AI. And that's why we saw the initial wave of ai sort of failing because it was not ready to fully ai ready for the generation of ai if >>you will. And part of I think the leap that clients are finding success with now is getting novel data types and you're moving from zeros and ones of structured data, too. Image language, written language, spoken language You're capturing different data sets in ways that prior tools never could. So the classifications that come out of it, the insights that come out of it, the business process transformation comes out of it is different than what we would have understood under the structure data formats. So I think it's that combination of really being able to push massive amounts of data through a cloud product processes at scale. That is what I think is the combination that takes it to the next plateau, for >>sure. The language that we use today, I feel like it's going to change. And you just started to touch on some of it, sensing our senses and visualization on the the auditory. So it's it's sort of this new experience that customers are seeing a lot of this machine intelligence behind. >>I call it the autonomous and price right, the journey to be the autonomous enterprise, and when you're on this journey to be the autonomous enterprise, you need really the platform that can help you be cloud is that platform which can help you get to the autonomous journey. But the Thomas journey does not end with the cloud. It doesn't end with the Data Lake. These are just infrastructures that are basic necessary necessities for being on that on that autonomous journey. But at the end, it's about how do you train and scale at, um, very large scale training that needs to happen on this platform for AI to be successful. And if you are an autonomous and price, then you have really figured out how to tap into AI and machine learning in a way that nobody else has to derive business value, if you will. So you've got the platform, you've got the data, and now you're actually tapping into the autonomous components ai and machine learning to derive business, intelligence and business value. >>So I want to get into a little bit of Oracle's role. But to do that, I want to talk a little bit more about the industry. So if you think about the way that the industry seems to be restructuring around data, historically, industries had their own stack value chain and if you were in in in the finance industry, you were there for life. >>So when you think about banking, for example, highly regulated industry think about our culture. These are highly regulated industries there. It was very difficult to destruct these industries. But now you look at an Amazon, right? And what does an Amazon or any other tech giants like Apple have? They have incredible amounts of data. They understand how people use for how they want to do banking. And so they've come up with a lot of cash or Amazon pay. And these things are starting to eat into the market. Right? So you would have never thought and Amazon could be a competition to a banking industry just because of regulations. But they're not hindered by the regulations because they're starting at a different level. And so they become an instant threat in an instant destructive to these highly regulated industries. That's what data does, right when you use data as your DNA for your business and you are sort of born in data or you figure out how to be autonomous. If you will capture value from that data in a very significant manner, then you can get into industries that are not traditionally your own industry. It can be like the food industry can be the cloud industry, the book industry, you know, different industries. So you know that that's what I see happening with the tech giants. >>So great, there's a really interesting point that the Gina is making that you mentioned. You started off with a couple of industries that are highly regulated, harder to disrupt, use it got disrupted. Publishing got disrupted. But you've got these regulated businesses. Defense. Automotive actually hasn't been surely disrupted yet. Tesla. Maybe a harbinger. And so you've got this spectrum of disruption. But is anybody safe from disruption? >>I don't think anyone's ever say from it. It's It's changing evolution, right? That you whether it's, you know, swapping horseshoes for cars are TV for movies or Netflix are any sort of evolution of a business. You're I wouldn't coast on any of it. And I think t earlier question around the value that we can help bring the Oracle customers is that you know, we have a rich stack of applications, and I find that the space between the applications, the data that that spans more than one of them is a ripe playground for innovations that where the data already exists inside a company, but it's trapped from both a technology and a business perspective. And that's where I think really any company can take advantage of knowing it's data better and changing itself to take advantage of what's already there. >>Yet powerful people always throw the bromide of the data is the new oil. And we've said no data is far more valuable because you can use it in a lot of different places where you can use once, and it's follow the laws of scarcity data, if you can unlock it. And so a lot of the incumbents they have built a business around whatever factory, our process and people, a lot of the trillion are starting us that become millionaires. You know, I'm talking about data is at the core data company. So So it seems like a big challenge for your incumbent customers. Clients is to put data at the core, be able to break down those silos. How do they do that? >>Grading down silos is really super critical for any business. It was okay to operate in a silo, for example. You would think that Oh, you know, I could just be payroll, inexpensive falls, and it wouldn't matter matter if I get into vendor performance management or purchasing that can operate as asylum. But anymore, we are finding that there are tremendous insights. But in vendor performance management, I expensive for these things are all connected, so you can't afford to have your data sits in silos. So grading down that silo actually gives the business very good performance right insights that they didn't have before. So that's one way to go. But but another phenomena happens When you start to great down the silos, you start to recognize what data you don't have to take your business to the next level. That awareness will not happen when you're working with existing data so that Obama's comes into form. When you great the silos and you start to figure out you need to go after a different set of data to get you to a new product creation. What would that look like? New test insights or new Catholics avoidance that that data is just you have to go through the iteration to be able to figure that out. >>Stakes is what you're saying. So this notion of the autonomous enterprise. I help me here cause I get kind of autonomous and automation coming into I t I t ops. I'm interested in how you see customers taking that beyond the technology organization into the enterprise. >>I think when is a technology problem? The company? Is it a loss? AI has to be a business problem. AI has to inform the business strategy. Ai has been companies the successful companies that have done so. 90% of my investments are going towards state. We know that most of it going towards ai this data out there about this, right? And so we look at what are these? 90 90% of the companies investments where he's going and whose doing this right who's not doing this right? One of the things we're seeing as results is that the companies that are doing it right have brought data into the business strategy. They've changed their business model, right? So it's not like making a better taxi, but coming up with global, right? So it's not like saying Okay, I'm going to have all these. I'm going to be the drug manufacturing company. I'm gonna put drugs out there in the market this is I'm going to do connected help, right? And so how does data serves the business model of being connected? Help rather than being a drug company selling drugs to my customers, right? It's a completely different way of looking at it. And so now you guys informing drug discovery is not helping you just put more drugs to the market. Rather, it's helping you come up with new drugs that would help the process of connected games. There's a >>lot of discussion in the press about, you know, the ethics of a and how far should we take a far. Can we take it from a technology standpoint, Long room there? But how far should we take it? Do you feel as though public policy will take care of that? A lot of that narrative is just kind of journalists looking for, You know, the negative story. Well, that's sort itself out. How much time do you spend with your customers talking about that >>we in Oracle, we're building our data science platform with an explicit feature called Explained Ability. Off the model on how the model came up with the features what features they picked. We can rearrange the features that the model picked. Citing Explain ability is very important for ordinary people. Trust ai because we can't trust even even they decided this contrast right to a large extent. So for us to get to that level where we can really trust what AI is picking in terms of a modern, we need to have explain ability. And I think a lot of the companies right now are starting to make that as part of their platform. >>We're definitely entering a new era the age of of AI of the autonomous enterprise folks. Thanks very much for great segment. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah. Pleasure. Thank you for having us. >>All right. And thank you and keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the Cube's coverage of the rebirth of Oracle consulting right back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

(upbeat music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We here have Dave Nuti, who is the Head of Channels for Open Systems. Open Systems just recently launched their partner network in 2019. Dave, welcome to theCUBE conversation. >> Thank you John, good to be here. >> So, security obviously is the hottest area we've been covering it like a blanket these days. It's only getting better and stronger in terms of number of players and options for customers. But that's also a double-edged sword. There's more options, more for customers. And security problems aren't going away. They're just getting more compounded. It's complicated global marketplace, global scale, regional clouds on-premise, no surface area. We've had these conversations with you guys a lot and it's super important, but opportunity to deliver solutions with channel partners has become a huge thing at Amazon re:Inforce, we had a big conversation what that even looks like. It's a new market opportunity for security players. You guys are forging there. Tell us about your partner's channel, just launched, give us a quick overview. >> Yeah I have a growing smile as you talk about the complexity of the space and how difficult it can be because we're the ones that eliminate that complexity, make it very simple. And for our partners that we've been engaging with, I joined the company just over a year ago and we began laying the groundwork of transitioning from a direct sales model to a partner only model and you fast forward to where we are today, we've already made that 180 degree turn and are working exclusively through partners throughout North America and executing around the world in that way. What's exciting for the partners is that they have a new supplier in the portfolio in the form of Open Systems that while it is a new name to them, is anything but new in experience and execution. It might arguably be one of the more seasoned suppliers in their entire portfolio they have today and it is opening doors and breaking down barriers to entry in a number of security categories that for years they've been on the outside looking in trying to figure out, how can I participate in these areas and how can I really unify a conversation around value for my customers that I am the trusted advisor to? And those are the exciting networks of hundreds and thousands of trusted advisors out there that we're engaging with today. >> You know, the security space is interesting. It's changing a lot, it's not just the one supplier, multiple suppliers, there are now hundreds and thousands of suppliers of something, the security market. There's a lot of venture capital being funded for startups, you got customers spending money so there's a lot of spend and activity flow and money flow and huge value creation opportunity. Yet customers are also looking at the cloud technologies as a disruptive enabler of how to deal with new things but also they're looking at their supplier relationships right now, they're evaluating you know, who do I want to do business with, they don't want to get another tool, they don't want to new thing. They don't want to get more and more sprawl. You guys have been Open System and been very successful with word of mouth customer growth. The CEO talked about that in the last interview, it's like you guys have been getting a lot of wins. Classic word of mouth, good product offerings. So you have success on the product side. As you go into the channel and enable the people in front of the customers every day to bring a solution to the table, what's the value proposition to the partners? Because they're fighting to be relevant, they want to be in front of the customers. The customers want their partners as well. So the opportunity for the people in front of your customers for the channel is big. What's the value proposition? >> Well establishing trust with the channel is critical. For years they've had solutions that roll into the portfolio that were written in a conference room a year and a half ago and they're only selling off of PowerPoint slides and now you're coming in with Open Systems and you have 20 years of experience accumulated, maturity and automation into a platform that they rarely see that type of door opened up for them. So when they lean in and they really start asking questions about Open Systems, we really check off boxes in a fantastic way for our partners. You talk about vendor sprawl and complexity and it all boils back, you're exactly correct, to the embracing of the cloud and that diversity of application origin, the diversity of the users trying to access those corporate resources, wherever they happen to be hosted and how do I unify a strategy and it's resulted in what is not uncommon having to engage 30, 40, 50, different vendors and then trying to unify that environment, let alone the problem that you can't hire the people to go and do it anyway. There's a negative unemployment issue in IT security categories today. So you know, there's a very, very fortune few that have the ability, the bench, the depth, the resource to do that and then an even fewer number of people who can lead an enterprise down that path and then you turn the corner and where usually there's this tug of war between agility and security. If I'm really agile, it means I'm compromising security. Or if I'm super secure, I'm going to be as slow as a sloth in doing anything. And then you have Open Systems sitting in the middle who says, that's not necessarily the case. You can have world class deployment in an agile platform where all that complexity and service chaining unification is handled for you and that really, that is mind boggling and I'll tell you, it's a whole lot of fun to demonstrate it. >> You know, Dave, we talked a lot of customers and user customers through our media business, CIOs, and now CISOs and they're all kind of working together. They have partners, they have partners they've worked with for many, many years from the old days of buying servers and rack and stacking 'em to software to applications but now the touch points for services are those traditional suppliers, application developers, but security's being bolted in everywhere, so almost all services need security, that's essentially what the main message with cloud is. So that gives the service opportunities for you guys but partners to enable you guys in there. As a partner, if I'm a partner of Open Systems, what do I get? 'Cause I want to make my, I want to keep my customer. I want to deliver security. What do I talk to my customer, what's the pitch that I can give as a partner to customer to ensure that they're going to get what they need from Open Systems? >> What I tell our partners is that we should be the services conversation that you lead with. There are a lot of other options out there and even if you don't mention it by name, if you approach the conversation in an open way with a customer with the mindfulness of the wide net of capabilities and value that you're able to execute on with Open Systems, it gives you your strongest footing. One of the big problems and you mentioned it, is that so often for years these technology conversations have been siloed and isolated and that always creates problems. I talked to a partner who works their way downstream on an SD-WAN conversation and at the very end they say, "This looks great, we just have "to get it passed by our security team." And the wind falls out of everybody's sails because that should've been part of the conversation all along or vice versa, starting from a security conversation and now I've got to get the network team to sign off on it. Open Systems really comes with a model that says all those viewpoints need to be in the room at the same time. That's how you execute and that's how you unify an environment so that you're not running into those bottlenecks later on. It's just madness, it needs to be simpler. >> We were talking before we came on camera about what it means to be disruptive and valuable to partners and to customers and you mentioned convergence of capabilities and manage services. What do you mean by that? I get convergence of services, we talk about that all the time from industrial IoT, we've been doing some segments on that to manage services, people get what that means. What do you mean by convergence of services and and manage services with respect to security and Open Systems? >> Absolutely. I mean convergences, we all carry one in our pocket so how many people carry a separate GPS device with a separate digital camera with a separate phone and a separate- Converging technologies just simplifies my environment and often times is a viewpoint of I'm compromising in certain areas that if I break everything out myself I can probably do it better off myself. And in some cases that's absolutely true. When you look at how Open Systems has taken a very diverse set of services and network and security categories and unified it into a single platform, we've taken, if you will, we've taken that stack of boxes and turned it into one by building a main services platform that's delivered as a service but what we've layered on top of it is the ability to manage it for our customers and I talk about modern managed services. It's very different. Before maintainence services was, I'm just too incapable to do something myself so I need somebody else to do it. When I talk to a partner, I like pointing out that I don't try to find somebody too dumb to do the things we do and they have to rely upon us. No, our best customers are very forward-leaning 'cause they realize that the automation that we've accumulated over 20 years that we're 85 to 90% of our detected incidents are handled by AI automation and Machine Learning and that type of monitoring automation that we have at the edge and the engine and the team of 115 level three plus engineers that are executing on our customer's behalf is we're force multiplier for our end customers to an ability that they will never achieve on their own, they'll never build that on their own. Those are the two, I think two of the biggest pillars in disruption are convergence and managed services and they are two enormous check boxes for Open Systems where it's hard to find someone more experienced in that than the team at Open Systems. >> And those are realities that the customers are dealing with but also the other reality on top of that to make it even more complicated and better for you guys and partners is you have more surface area to deal with. So the AI and the automation really play into the hands of, on the delivery side, so if I'm a partner, I'm standing up Open Systems, it's working. >> So you can't just develop that in a conference room. That's something that's accumulated over time, that's what comes with experience. And I usually really lean heavily into our maturity and our experience. We're in 183 countries with customers today. We have a 98% retention rate, a 58 NPS score. When I show the monitoring portals, the visibility tools, the maturity, and what has been developed isn't just Open Systems, you know, stubbornly telling the world what they need and should be doing. It's actually a very aggressive two way conversation with our existing customers and their guidance telling us, this is what we want, what we need to see, what we need to be able to pull and what we need your help in enforcing. I met with a customer in Pacific Northwest and he dropped a line on me that was terrific. He said, "I'm looking for a partner "that can tell us the questions we should be asking "that we haven't and the technologies "we should be evaluating that we haven't looked at yet." And I told him I was going to steal that line and I'm using it here today. Because that is an absolutely brilliant description of exactly the type of customer experience that we expect to deliver from Open Systems to our customers. >> So if I'm rep, I'm a person who's got a portfolio of customers and I want to bring Open Systems to the table, take me through that. I mean, am I asking the questions, what are some of those questions I should be asking, what's my engagement posture look like to my customer? >> That's a great question. I've been to a number of events and sat through kind of advanced training seminars and at the beginning of a seminar, you have somebody on stage saying, talk about security categories. If you talk about security, then you have a pathway to sell anything else on there. And then at the end of the event, all the SD-WAN guys were sitting on the stage saying, "Talk about SD-WAN, it's the glue "that holds everything together and if you can sell SD-WAN, "it'll give you pathway to everything else." And meanwhile I'm in the back of the room smiling just wondering, what if you didn't have to pick? What if you could just have a wide open conversation with your customer around application origins and remote users and how you're unifying security and application performance and routing intelligence for any application origin to any type of user trying to access it, how are you addressing that? And that's really at the core of what Open Systems has developed for its clients is that type of agility and flexibility where you're never trapped and opening up considerations around new and emerging threats and capabilities that you should be looking at where if it's not the time for you today, we've still already designed it in for you, so when you're ready it's there for you. >> Now the real question on the rep's mind, while he's asking those basic questions. How do I make money from this? Which is essentially, money making certainly is a great channel formula. It's indirect sales for you guys but also you have to have a couple table stakes. One, it's got to be a product that can be sold. The delivery has to be elegant enough where there's margin for the partner. And benefit the customer. So the money making is certainly the big part of not only trust as the supplier to the channel, but also as an engine of innovation and wealth creation. What's your pitch there, how am I making money? >> Well as a managed services model, that's always the beauty is you get to configure to the requirement of the individual customer so no one's force fed capability they don't need or an over subscription for what they might need in a year so just in case they want to, we're able to right size and deliver the capability that's specifically configured to the individual customer level but then also show them that they have a pathway to capability laid out for them and integrated and modern, we never go end of life, we never get shelved, this is something that is living, breathing, you're never buying boxes, again and service chaining and handling the complexity so we make that very simple for our partners in categories around security and SOC and manage services, and SIM, and CASB, these are things that they hear about but they don't know how to address them with their customers. And now Open Systems makes that very simple because we fully integrated the capabilities around those categories and many more into the same service-- >> So one of the psychology, I was just reading from that as a rep, if I was a rep I would be like, oh, I don't have to overplay my hand. I can get an engagement with my customer, they can get a feel for the service, grow into it because it's a managed service and go from there, it's not a big ask. >> Right. >> It's instant alignment. >> Yeah, often times what we do is a timing issue. Somebody just bought boxes in one category so fine, we'll coexist with that. We sit in parallel and in framework with current investments and subscriptions that happen to be in place but we give them a pathway that allows them to integrate it into fully unified and I like to really point this out is that, we don't go to a customer and say, "What do you need? "We'll build it for you." It's, what do you need? We've already built it, we just want to know how we configure it for you to match up to what your requirements are and maybe suggest some areas that should be a part of that consideration as well based upon 20 plus years of doing this with customers that we already have under our belt. >> Yeah, it gives them confidence that the operating model of say cloud, it's been around, it's proven and now you have a model there. Final question for you Dave is okay, my fear might be, are you going to be around tomorrow 'cause people want to know, are you going to be there for the long haul? What's your answer to that? >> We're a 30 year old security company founded out of Zurich and started in 1990 and transitioned as a service in 1999 and have grown on the backs, we're customer funded. So this is as battle-tested and bulletproof as anything that they may have in their portfolio and it shows extremely well in front of a customer. I spend more time talking to partners saying be the first one in the door to talk about Open Systems with your customer, don't let somebody else do it. Or certainly use the mindfulness of the net of capabilities of Open Systems and don't go in narrow-viewed because if somebody comes in behind you with our conversation, I don't think you're going to like what happens. >> One more question just jumped in my head, you reminded me of, we were talking before we came on camera around how channels are great leverage, great win-win, but we're in a modern area of computing, delivery of services, cloud has certainly shown that, whole nother wave coming behind it, security obviously the biggest challenge. You've been in the channel business for awhile, what's your take on what's happening in the channel business because it is changing, there's opportunities there, what's your take? >> Yeah, this is the second company I've had the opportunity to introduce into the channel and this one is a lot of fun, I'll say that. But the channel's traditionally thought of in more of a telecom space and for many of our partners, that's where they've been literally for decades in some cases is selling technology but is selling connectivity rather, networks, but what has happened is that technology has found its way into the network layer and because of cloud and SaaS app origins and remote users from coffee shops or theCUBE or our customer site accessing those applications, it's created a massive set of diversity in requirements on the IT team at the enterprise and how do you accommodate for all that? How do you keep up with it and maintain it? And now these things transition from these Capex buying boxes and maintenance agreements and rotating those out and that model is constantly being assaulted in the same way that we've seen so many services that we have come to our house. Nobody digs a well for water anymore, I've got a water company. Or makes their own electric power plant in the backyard, I've got the electric company. >> Everything's as a service. >> Absolutely. >> Dave Nuti, head of channels at Open Systems. Thanks for sharing the insight on your partner congratulations. Thanks for coming in. >> Pleasure, thank you. >> I'm John Furrier here at CUBE conversation in Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)