>> Well, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. I'm John Walls. We're at Reinvent AWS's big show going on here in Las Vegas at the Venetian. Going to be here all week, so be sure to tune in here to theCUBE as we continue our executive summit sponsored by Accenture today. Joined now by Steve Steuart, who's the worldwide principal on mainframe migration at Go to Market at AWS. Steve, good to see you, sir. >> Nice to meet you. >> Just found out we're neighbors, as a matter of fact, down in northeastern Florida. >> That's right. >> So we'll exchange addresses later, I'm sure. And Joel Rosenberger, who is a global mainframe monetization lead for the Accenture AWS business group. Joel, good to see you. >> Nice to meet you. >> Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. >> Absolutely. >> All right, so what's up with the mainframe? We're kind of kidding about 64 Corvette's versus 22 Teslas and making that old Corvette. Dress it up, take it out for the street ride. Make it nice and fun. But let's just set the stage here first off for our viewers about mainframe and kind of the status in terms of modernization and getting it up to 22 standards. >> Right, I mean, I think the big thing is that, you know modernization for mainframes is different for every customer based on their drivers and where they want to go. You know, at AWS we like to say transform with AWS, augmentation pattern, hybrid pattern, working coexisting or transform too. So move some of those workloads into the cloud. And it's not that, you know mainframes are fantastic machines, but they are in dire need of modernization with their applications. And that's really the driving force and the business needs to make a decision based on their drivers, what's best fit for them. And we're here to help. >> So how, Joel, go ahead. >> Oh, I was going to say, and we're saying that too is basically the mainframe is a great technology platform but it's the processes around that that not kept up. So making changes to the mainframe applications can take a couple years, for the simplest changes. And so when Steve talks about modernizing with or on the mainframe it's really how do we improve those processes? And from our perspective and companies are really struggling with that right now. >> Yeah, and how do you go about this, because the mainframe is so center, right? It is so integral, right? >> Oh it's center. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> Absolutely essential. And yet you're talking about changes being made over a period of time of years. A lot of sensitivity there, right? >> Oh absolutely. >> Lot of complexity there. So how do you start factoring all that in and selling that to somebody that this journey might take you till 2025 to get it done? >> Well it could be a multi-year process. The selling is really the business drivers. You have to, businesses today need to leverage the cloud to be competitive. >> Absolutely. >> Right, that's just a fact. Right? So, how do you transform with modernize in place, or transform over. But it is a transformational change. If you look at the number one drivers is agility. The CEO say, I want this green next week and well we can't get it to you next week. We can get it to you Q2 of next year. Born in the cop companies... >> That's probably not the answer they want to hear. >> No, they don't want hear that. >> That is not the answer they want to hear. >> Our number one issue is that there are CEOs saying that we can't be agile, but mainframes can't be agile, if you develop, adopt DevOps for your mainframe. >> Yep. >> IBM has an offering, we have an offering as well. And so they need to start looking at that. So what are your drivers? Go to market responsiveness, competitive, what are the drivers? And then you make a decision as to where you want to move the workload. >> Joel: Yep. >> Is it hard though, Joel, just because as you know this environment is so dynamic now, right? >> Yep. >> And change is rapid, and I mean like capital R. >> Yep, absolutely. Yep. >> So all of a sudden you set this two/three year trajectory and yet opportunities, solutions, options can vary in year one or year two and all of a sudden this path you had set is going to have to take a left turn instead of a right turn because of a new development. Right? So it's... >> Absolutely, I mean, and that's one of the biggest struggles that people have is with business agility. Exactly what you're saying is the market is changing faster, like Steve said, it might be a year or so before I can deliver that but the market has already changed from that perspective. >> Right. >> And so I think a lot of people are trying to modernize with that. So they're connecting a lot of web properties to mainframes but that causes additional problems. >> Right. >> And those problems are the mainframe now scales unpredictably, because I don't know, how do I predict web traffic and from that perspective, so a lot of people are struggling do I have enough capacity on the mainframe to do that? Cause it's not elastic like the cloud from that perspective. So there's a lot of patterns that have to be reinvented, or already been invented with the cloud and how do we do that with the mainframe now? >> So you could get benefits not waiting three to four years. >> Absolutely. >> You get benefit pretty much immediately by doing augmentation patterns consuming processing on the mainframe, consuming it maybe certain movements, certain workloads, bringing on down quicker. You know, if you're a large estate it'll take you time but you are able to drive that. Part of our assessments is bottom up what you currently have, and what are your business drivers. >> Yep, absolutely. >> What are the big boulder items you need to do and tackle those. And so it's a process that we work together with our customers to start transforming their mainframe. >> Right. >> Yeah I hear about, I'm sorry, go on Joel. >> Yeah, and a key thing on that is a lot of people look at the mainframe is this big monolith. >> John: Right. >> It's basically the this big thing, I don't know what to do with, I don't want to touch because if I touch it I might break it. I don't have people to fix it. And so there's a lot of concern around that, but one of the things like Steve said is how Accenture and AWS work together is figuring out how do I take that monolith, divide it into smaller pieces either through data augmentation, through an analysis, and figure out a roadmap through that application or that monolithic applications and figure out how to move. >> Well that's, how you get an elephant, right? Leverage is one part at a time. >> Exactly, one part at a time. >> It's just one. >> Right, it's just leverage AI, leverage or AI and our platforms and machine learning. All these things are available and you can coexist with that. >> All right, so tell me about technical debt. I read about technical debt and you know, it kind of comes with the territory, >> Right. >> in terms of mainframe. So how do you, first off, you know, how do you define that and then how do you deal with that? How do you make that go away as far as concerns go? >> Well, you know, you have to look at your, for my definition for technical debts is the same thing when my wife says I have to do something in the backyard and I push it, I'll do it next time. Right? So it starts piling up, right? There's a lot of to-dos at the house. >> Absolutely. >> Right, it's the same thing, it's the IT to-dos that you just put off. >> I'll catch up to that some other time. >> Yep. >> And there you are, they keep on... And so next thing you know, you have this, oh my gosh I got all this work I got to do. >> Right. And that's part of the technical debt. And then so you got to look at how does that resolving that meet my needs for the cloud. So leveraging the cloud, if you're under mainframe you have limited solutions for addressing your technical debt. Leveraging the cloud with the mainframe, now you have multiple options for you. to tackle and eliminate your technical debt. So that's one of the benefits of leveraging the cloud for that. >> And I would add on to what Steve said about technical debt. It's exactly that, it's I haven't done that yet, but one of the things that I've seen is there's multiple ways to solve any problem, any programming problem technical problem from that, there's a shortcut way to get it done quickly, >> John: Right. >> that may not be clean and scalable and that. And what happens is, especially on the mainframe over 40 or 50 years, a lot of those shortcuts have been taken. And so it's not even as easy as, it's basically, you think about it, I didn't do it but now my grass is this high, >> John: Right. >> And now I got to do it, type of thing. So it's really about... >> And you can't use a lawnmower >> You can't use a lawnmower so you have to figure out different ways. >> You can't bag it, >> No, no. >> No, no, a whole nother >> Absolutely. >> Right. >> So understanding technical debt and overcoming it is realizing that those shortcuts need to be re-architected, redesigned, modernized, >> All right. >> from that perspective. And you need to take that perspective on. >> So you guys have to be kind of sometimes the bearer of bad news in a way, right? Because they have these, you said monolithic of systems in place that need revised they got to be modernized. >> Yep. >> And they've been kicking that can down the road. We've talked about some big companies for a long time. So they got a lot of baggage on that side and they have to get up to speed. So if, if you were talking to a prospective client, about understanding why it's time to start doing that necessary housekeeping, how do you convince people that this is the time? >> What are your top three absolutely mission critical applications that you have today, right? What is the staff that maintains it? What is the average age of those resources? And what is your succession strategy? >> Joel: Yep. >> It's as simple as that. >> Oh. >> I would add on to that. A lot of times we don't have to convince the customer right now. >> John: Right. >> The customers are coming to us, because what's happened is this whole digital transformation that's happening in the web and all that kind of stuff. Their competitors are already moving off of that. Or have come up with something else. So the business is coming and saying, why can't I move that fast? >> Right. >> And then, like Steve said is those are the reasons why you can't move that fast. So let's address those reasons. >> All right, the born of the cloud company is coming in, but also another driving force that's happening, If you look at a lot of our new customers. Are the digital natives arriving in the C-suites. So the folks that have always known the internet understand the benefits of the cloud, or where there's a new CIO, new CEO. >> Yep. >> And so we're seeing that changing of the guard type scenario. >> Because a lot of those people grew up with a mainframe. >> Right. Right. >> And of the old guard. >> Sure. >> And they're like, well it's worked for the last 30 years, why don't I just keep it working the same way it is. >> And don't we need it to work? >> Yeah >> Right? The way it has been? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Yeah. >> Well, and that's the other key thing, is the core applications. So what has happened with the cloud is over the last you know, 10, 15 years is a lot of the applications that could move moved. Now we're left with the core applications on the mainframe and those are the ones that a multi-billion dollar company, if they get that wrong, they're out business. So there's a lot of scrutiny and a lot of other things. So a lot of the stuff that we're doing now is to help understand that risk and get over that risk. >> And do companies have the expertise in house, to do this? And where do you find it outside? Because it, you know, might not be the sexiest thing to do. >> That's a great question because, you know Steve and I talk about this all the time which is running the mainframe is different than modernizing the mainframe. >> Steve: Right. And so I might have a lot of skills in house to run the mainframe, but how do I figure out to get, to break up that monolith into pieces. >> Steve: Right. How do I figure out, you know, how the best way to put that on AWS? How do I figure that out? You need to leverage people like AWS and Accenture and others to be able to do that. >> This is, there's a psychology to this and more technical, there's more psychological than technical. So you got to find your unicorns. People should have gas in the tank that want to adopt. >> Joel: Yep, absolutely. >> And the ones that don't, then, you know, they're out. You know, nothing like passive aggressive people showing up to help, to really cause havoc. (all laugh) And that's really what you got to kind of focus on. >> Yes. We see that a lot. >> Right. Right. But that's where the managing service comes in too right? >> Absolutely. >> You can get people there. You can, this is a worry they can check the box and move on and get help in that. >> Yeah. AWS, this is an industry first, where you have a managed service within your console to provision tooling to analyze, develop for the mainframe or deploy onto AWS. But the running of it, specific servers that have been you know, optimized for mainframe workloads with your monitoring and security and all those things it's an industry first. I've been in this business 30 years it's fantastic with what I'm seeing over here. >> And do you have any kind of a guess about what share is still out there to be had, in terms of modernizing mainframes, in terms of businesses? I mean, are there still, well, you know it might be hard to put a, to quantify it with a number, but there's still a lot of folks... >> Oh yeah. >> who haven't made that commitment yet. >> Well, they're beginning to, so if you look at, I think, I'm going to throw a number out, I think it's like 80% of the Fortune 100 companies have mainframes. >> Absolutely. >> Is that right? >> So yeah, if you paid your mortgage today, if you used your cell phone today, if you've done any of those things, core stuff is run on mainframe. >> Financial transactions are huge. >> Oh huge, huge, you've got airlines, manufacturing, >> Insurance. >> healthcare. >> John: Right. >> Pretty much everything runs on a mainframe, if you go deep enough in the organization. >> And so that's all, you know people are making those decisions. And what we've done is what I call an earn trust moment. You know, AWS standing up and saying, 'hey we're here to help our customers to move' we're a large organization, we're doing heavy investments in this. We have R&Dand staff, to help our customers transform with or to AWS. >> And we're seeing that resonated in the marketplace. So last year AWS announced the mainframe modernization service Over the last year, we've seen clients, like I said is they're coming to us now. >> Right. >> Saying we want to go mainframe zero, for lack of a better expression. And so we're just seeing a lot of activity. So what AWS did last year has really resonated within the marketplace and changed that dynamic. >> Well, the mainframe ain't dead yet. >> No. >> It isn't. >> It's not going to die. I think there's going to be a different >> Too big, two powerful and too necessary. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah I think we're going to coexist with it and some will leave, so. >> But you still need that same functionality, just somewhere else. >> All right. >> That's right. Well, appreciate the conversation, neighbor. >> Thank you. (all laugh) >> And have a great show. Look forward to seeing you down the road here. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks John, appreciate it. >> Thanks for joining us here. You are watching theCUBE here at Reinvent 22. And theCUBE, as I remind you is the leader in high tech coverage. (soothing music)

(upbeat music) >> You got it, it's theCUBE. We are in Vegas. This is the Cube's live coverage day one of the full event coverage of AWS reInvent '22 from the Venetian Expo Center. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We love being in Vegas, Dave. >> Well, you know, this is where Super Cloud sort of was born. >> It is. >> Last year, just about a year ago. Steve Mullaney, CEO of of Aviatrix, you know, kind of helped us think it through. And we got some fun stories around. It's happening, but... >> It is happening. We're going to be talking about Super Cloud guys. >> I guess I just did the intro, Steve Mullaney >> You did my intro, don't do it again. >> Sorry I stole that from you, yeah. >> Steve Mullaney, joined just once again, one of our alumni. Steve, great to have you back on the program. >> Thanks for having me back. >> Dave: It's happening. >> It is happening. >> Dave: We talked about a year ago. Net Studio was right there. >> That was two years. Was that year ago, that was a year ago. >> Dave: It was last year. >> Yeah, I leaned over >> What's happening? >> so it's happening. It's happening. You know what, the thing I noticed what's happening now is the maturity of the cloud, right? So, if you think about this whole journey to cloud that has been, what, AWS 12 years. But really over the last few years is when enterprises have really kind of joined that journey. And three or four years ago, and this is why I came out of retirement and went to Aviatrix, was they all said, okay, now we're going to do cloud. You fast forward now three, four years from now, all of a sudden those five-year plans of evacuating the data center, they got one year left, two year left, and they're going, oh crap, we don't have five years anymore. We're, now the maturity's starting to say, we're starting to put more apps into the cloud. We're starting to put business critical apps like SAP into the cloud. This is not just like the low-hanging fruit anymore. So what's happening now is the business criticality, the scale, the maturity. And they're all now starting to hit a lot of limits that have been put into the CSPs that you never used to hit when you didn't have business critical and you didn't have that scale. They were always there. The rocks were always there. Just it was, you never hit 'em. People are starting to hit 'em now. So what's happening now is people are realizing, and I'm going to jump the gun, you asked me for my bumper sticker. The bumper sticker for Aviatrix is, "Good enough is no longer good enough." Now it's funny, it came in a keynote today, but what we see from our customers is it's time to upgrade the native constructs of networking and network security to be enterprise-grade now. It's no longer good enough to just use the native constructs because of a lack of visibility, the lack of controls, the lack of troubleshooting capabilities, all these things. "I now need enterprise grade networking." >> Let me ask you a question 'cause you got a good historical perspective on the industry. When you think about when Maritz was running VMWare. He was like any app, he said basically we're building a software mainframe. And they kind of did that, right? But then they, you know, hit the issue with scale, right? And they can't replicate the cloud. Are there things that we can draw from that experience and apply that to the cloud? What's the same, what's different? >> Oh yeah. So, 1992, do you remember what happened in 1992? I do this, weird German software company called SAP >> Yeah, R3. announced a release as R/3. Which was their first three-tier client-server application of SAP. Before that it ran on mainframes, TCP/IP. Remember that Protocol War? Guess what happened post-1992, everybody goes up like this. Infrastructure completely changes. Cisco, EMC, you name it, builds out these PCE client-server architectures. The WAN changes, MPLS, the campus, everything's home running back to that data center running SAP. That was the last 30 years ago. Great transformation of SAP. They've did it again. It's called S/4Hana. And now it's running and people are switching to S/4Hana and they're moving to the cloud. It's just starting. And that is going to alter how you build infrastructure. And so when you have that, being able to troubleshoot in hours versus minutes is a big deal. This is business critical, millions of dollars. This is not fun and games. So again, back to my, what was good enough for the last three or four years for enterprises no longer good enough, now I'm running business critical apps like SAP, and it's going to completely change infrastructure. That's happening in the cloud right now. And that's obviously a significant seismic shift, but what are some of the barriers that customers have been able to eliminate in order to get there? Or is it just good enough isn't good enough anymore? >> Barriers in terms of, well, I mean >> Lisa: The adoption. Yeah well, I mean, I think it's all the things that they go to cloud is, you know, the complexity, really, it's the agility, right? So the barrier that they have to get over is how do I keep the developer happy because the developer went to the cloud in the first place, why? Swipe the credit card because IT wasn't doing their job, 'cause every time I asked them for something, they said no. So I went around 'em. We need that. That's what they have to overcome in the move to the cloud. That is the obstacle is how do I deliver that visibility, that control, the enterprise, great functionality, but yet give the developer what they want. Because the minute I stop giving them that swipe the card operational model, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to go around me again and I can't, and the enterprise can't have that. >> That's a cultural shift. >> That's the main barrier they've got to overcome. >> Let me ask you another question. Is what we think of as mission critical, the definition changing? I mean, you mentioned SAP, obviously that's mission critical for operations, but you're also seeing new applications being developed in the cloud. >> I would say anything that's, I call business critical, same thing, but it's, business critical is internal to me, like SAP, but also anything customer-facing. That's business critical to me. If that app goes down or it has a problem, I'm not collecting revenue. So, you know, back 30 years ago, we didn't have a lot of customer-facing apps, right? It really was just SAP. I mean there wasn't a heck of a lot of cust- There were customer-facing things. But you didn't have all the digitalization that we have now, like the digital economy, where that's where the real explosion has come, is you think about all the customer-facing applications. And now every enterprise is what? A technology, digital company with a customer-facing and you're trying to get closer and closer to who? The consumer. >> Yeah, self-service. >> Self-service, B2C, everybody wants to do that. Get out of the middle man. And those are business critical applications for people. >> So what's needed under the covers to make all this happen? Give us a little double click on where you guys fit. >> You need consistent architecture. Obviously not just for one cloud, but for any cloud. But even within one cloud, forget multicloud, it gets worst with multicloud. You need a consistent architecture, right? That is automated, that is as code. I can't have the human involved. These are all, this is the API generation, you've got to be able to use automation, Terraform. And all the way from the application development platform you know, through Jenkins and all other software, through CICD pipeline and Terraform, when you, when that developer says, I want infrastructure, it has to go build that infrastructure in real time. And then when it says, I don't need it anymore it's got to take it away. And you cannot have a human involved in that process. That's what's completely changed. And that's what's giving the agility. And that's kind of a cloud model, right? Use software. >> Well, okay, so isn't that what serverless does, right? >> That's part of it. Absolutely. >> But I might still want control sometimes over the runtime if I'm running those mission critical applications. Everything in enterprise is a heterogeneous thing. It's like people, people say, well there's going to, the people going to repatriate back to on-prem, they are not repatriating back to on-prem. >> We were just talking about that, I'm like- >> Steve: It's not going to happen, right? >> It's a myth, it's a myth. >> And there's things that maybe shouldn't have ever gone into the cloud, I get that. Look, do people still have mainframes? Of course. There's certain things that you just, doesn't make sense to move to the new generation. There were things, certain applications that are very static, they weren't dynamic. You know what, keeping it on-prem it's, probably makes sense. So some of those things maybe will go back, but they never should have gone. But we are not repatriating ever, you know, that's not going to happen. >> No I agree. I mean, you know, there was an interesting paper by Andreessen, >> Yeah. >> But, I mean- >> Steve: Yeah it was a little self-serving for some company that need more funding, yeah. You look at the numbers. >> Steve: Yeah. >> It tells the story. It's just not happening. >> No. And the reason is, it's that agility, right? And so that's what people, I would say that what you need to do is, and in order to get that agility, you have to have that consistency. You have to have automation, you have to get these people out of the way. You have to use software, right? So it's that you have that swipe the card operational model for the developers. They don't want to hear the word no. >> Lisa: Right. >> What do you think is going to happen with AWS? Because we heard, I don't know if you heard Selipsky's keynote this morning, but you've probably heard the hallway talk. >> Steve: I did, yeah. >> Okay. You did. So, you know, connecting the dots, you know doubling down on all the primitives, that we expected. We kind of expected more of the higher level stuff, which really didn't see much of that, a little bit. >> Steve: Yeah. So, you know, there's a whole thing about, okay, does the cloud get commoditized? Does it not? I think the secret weapon's the ecosystem, right? Because they're able to sell through with guys like you. Make great margins on that. >> Steve: Yeah, well, yeah. >> What are your thoughts though on the future of AWS? >> IAS is going to get commoditized. So this is the fallacy that a lot of the CSPs have, is they thought that they were going to commoditize enterprise. It never happens that way. What's going to happen is infrastructure as a service, the lower level, which is why you see all the CSPs talking about what? Oracle Cloud, industry cloud. >> Well, sure, absolutely, yeah. >> We got to get to the apps, we got to get to SAP, we got to get to all that, because that's not going to get commoditized, right. But all the infrastructural service where AWS is king that is going to get commoditized, absolutely. >> Okay, so, but historically, you know Cisco's still got 60% plus gross margins. EMC always had good margin. How pure is the lone survivor in Flash? They got 70% gross margins. So infrastructure actually has always been a pretty good business. >> Yeah that's true. But it's a hell of a lot easier, particularly with people like Aviatrix and others that are building these common architectural things that create simplicity and abstract the way the complexities of underneath such that we allow your network to run an AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, whatever, exactly the same. So it makes it a hell of a lot easier >> Dave: Super cloud. >> to go move. >> But I want to tap your brain because you have a good perspective of this because servers used to be a great margin business too on-prem and now it's not. It's a low margin business 'cause all the margin went to Intel. >> Yeah. But the cloud guys, you know, AWS in particular, makes a ton of dough on servers, so, or compute. So it's going to be interesting to see over time if that gets com- that's why they're going so hard after silicon. >> I think if they can, I think if you can capture the workload. So AWS and everyone else, as another example, this SAP, they call that a gravity workload. You know what gravity workload is? It's a black hole. It drags everything else with it. If you get SAP or Oracle or a mainframe app, it ain't going anywhere. And then what's going to happen is all your other apps are going to follow it. So that's what they're all going to fight for, is type of app. >> You said something earlier about, forget multicloud, for a moment, but, that idea of the super cloud, this abstraction layer, I mean, is that a real business value for customers other than, oh I got all these clouds, I need 'em to work together. You know, from your perspective from Aviatrix perspective, is it an opportunity for you to build on top of that? Or are you just looking at, look, I'm going to do really good work in AWS, in Azure? Now we're making the same experience. >> I hear this every single day from our customers is they look and they say, good enough isn't good enough. I've now hit the point, I'm hitting route limitations. I'm hitting, I'm doing things manually, and that's fine when I don't have that many applications or I don't have mission critical. The dogs are eating the dog food, we're going into the cloud and they're looking and then saying this is not an operational model for me. I've hit the point where I can't keep doing this, I can't throw bodies at this, I need software. And that's the opportunity for us, is they look and they say, I'm doing it in one cloud, but, and there's zero chance I'm going to be able to figure that out in the two or three other clouds. Every enterprise I talk to says multicloud is inevitable. Whether they're in it now, they all know they're going to go, because it's the business units that demand it. It's not the IT teams that demand it, it's the line of business that says, I like GCP for this reason. >> The driver's functionality that they're getting. >> It's the app teams that say, I have this service and GCP's better at it than AWS. >> Yeah, so it's not so much a cost game or the end all coffee mug, right? >> No, no. >> Google does this better than Microsoft, or better than- >> If you asked an IT person, they would rather not have multicloud. They actually tried to fight it. No, why would you want to support four clouds when you could support one right? That's insane. >> Dave and Lisa: Right. If they didn't have a choice and, and so it, the decision was made without them, and actually they weren't even notified until day before. They said, oh, good news, we're going to GCP tomorrow. Well, why wasn't I notified? Well, we're notifying you now. >> Yeah, you would've said, no. >> Steve: This is cloud bottle, let's go. >> Super cloud again. Did you see the Berkeley paper, sky computing I think they call it? Down at Berkeley, yep Dave Linthicum from Deloitte. He's talking about, I think he calls it meta cloud. It's happening. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's happening. >> No, and because customers, customers want that. They... >> And talk about some customer example or two that you think really articulates the value of why it's happening and the outcomes that it's generating. >> I mean, I was just talking to Lamb Weston last night. So we had a reception, Lamb Weston, huge, frozen potatoes. They serve like, I dunno, some ungodly percentage of all the french fries to all the fast food. It's unbelievable what they do. Do you know, they have special chemicals they put on the french fries. So when you get your DoorDash, they stay crispy longer. They've invented that patented it. But anyway, it's all these businesses you've never heard of and they do all the, and again, they're moving to SAP or they're actually SAP in the cloud, they're one of the first ones. They did it through Accenture. They're pulling it back off from Accenture. They're not happy with the service they're getting. They're going to use us for their networking and network security because they're going to get that visibility and control back. And they're going to repatriate it back from a managed service and bring it back and run it in-house. And the SAP basis engineers want it to happen because they see the visibility and control that the infrastructure guy's going to get because of us, which leads to, all they care about is uptime and performance. That's it. And they're going to say the infrastructure team's going to lead to better uptime and better performance if it's running on Aviatrix. >> And business performance and uptime, business critical >> That is the business. That is the business. >> It is. So what are some of the things next coming down the pike from Aviatrix? Any secret sauce you can share? >> Lot of secrets. So, two secrets. One, the next thing people really want to do, embedded network security into the network. We've kind of talked about this. You're going to be seeing some things from us. Where does network security belong? In the network. Embedded in the fabric of the network, not as this dumb device called the next-gen firewall that you steer traffic to. It has to be into the fabric of what we do, what we call airspace. You're going to see us talk about that. And then the next thing, back to the maturity of the cloud, as they build out the core, guess what they're doing? It's this thing called edge, Dave, right? And guess what they're going to do? It's not about connecting the cloud to the edge to the cloud with dumb things like SD-WAN, right? Or SaaS. It's actually the other way around. Go into the cloud, turn around, look out at the edge and say, how do I extend the cloud out to the edge, and make it look like a VPC. That's what people are doing. Why, 'cause I want the operational model. I want all the things that I can do in the cloud out at the edge. And everyone knows it's been in networking. I've been in networking for 37 years. He who wins the core does what? Wins the edge, 'cause that's what happens. You do it first in the core and then you want one architecture, one common architecture, one consistent way of doing everything. And that's going to go out to the edge and it's going to look like a VPC from an operational model. >> And Amazon's going to support that, no doubt. >> Yeah, I mean every, you know, every, and then it's just how do you want to go do that? And us as the networking and network security provider, we're getting dragged to the edge by our customer. Because you're my networking provider. And that means, end to end. And they're trying to drag us into on-prem too, yeah. >> Lot's going on, you're going to have to come back- >> Because they want one networking vendor. >> But wait, and you say what? >> We will never do like switches and any of the keep Arista, the Cisco, and all that kind of stuff. But we will start sucking in net flow. We will start doing, from an operational perspective, we will integrate a lot of the things that are happening in on-prem into our- >> No halfway house. >> Copilot. >> No halfway house, no two architectures. But you'll take the data in. >> You want one architecture. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right play. >> Amazing stuff. >> And he who wins the core, guess what's more strategic to them? What's more strategic on-prem or cloud? Cloud. >> It flipped three years ago. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So he who wins in the clouds going to win everywhere. >> Got it, We'll keep our eyes on that. >> Steve: Cause and effect. >> Thank you so much for joining us. We've got your bumper sticker already. It's been a great pleasure having you on the program. You got to come back, there's so, we've- >> You posting the bumper sticker somewhere? >> Lisa: It's going to be our Instagram. >> Oh really, okay. >> And an Instagram sto- This is new for you guys. Always coming up with new ideas. >> Raising the bar. >> It is, it is. >> Me advance, I mean, come on. >> I love it. >> All right, for our guest Steve Mullaney and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

[Music] the cyber security landscape has changed dramatically over the past 24 to 36 months rapid cloud migration has created a new layer of security defense sure but that doesn't mean csos can relax in many respects it further complicates or at least changes the cso's scope of responsibilities in particular the threat surface has expanded and that creates more seams and csos have to make sure their teams pick up where the hyperscaler clouds leave off application developers have become a critical execution point for cyber assurance shift left is the kind of new buzz phrase for devs but organizations still have to shield right meaning the operational teams must continue to partner with secops to make sure infrastructure is resilient so it's no wonder that an etr's latest survey of nearly 1500 cios and it buyers that business technology executives cite security as their number one priority well ahead of other critical technology initiatives including collaboration software cloud computing and analytics rounding out the top four but budgets are under pressure and csos have to prioritize it's not like they have an open checkbook they have to contend with other key initiatives like those just mentioned to secure the funding and what about zero trust can you go out and buy zero trust or is it a framework a mindset in a series of best practices applied to create a security consciousness throughout the organization can you implement zero trust in other words if a machine or human is not explicitly allowed access then access is denied can you implement that policy without constricting organizational agility the question is what's the most practical way to apply that premise and what role does infrastructure play as the enforcer how does automation play in the equation the fact is that today's approach to cyber resilient type resilience can't be an either or it has to be an and conversation meaning you have to ensure data protection while at the same time advancing the mission of the organization with as little friction as possible and don't even talk to me about the edge that's really going to keep you up at night hello and welcome to the special cube presentation a blueprint for trusted infrastructure made possible by dell technologies in this program we explore the critical role that trusted infrastructure plays in cyber security strategies how organizations should think about the infrastructure side of the cyber security equation and how dell specifically approaches securing infrastructure for your business we'll dig into what it means to transform and evolve toward a modern security infrastructure that's both trusted and agile first up are pete gear and steve kenniston they're both senior cyber security consultants at dell technologies and they're going to talk about the company's philosophy and approach to trusted infrastructure and then we're going to speak to paris our godaddy who's a senior consultant for storage at dell technologies to understand where and how storage plays in this trusted infrastructure world and then finally rob emsley who heads product marketing for data protection and cyber security he's going to take a deeper dive with rob into data protection and explain how it has become a critical component of a comprehensive cyber security strategy okay let's get started pete gear steve kenniston welcome to the cube thanks for coming into the marlboro studios today great to be here dave thanks dave good to see you great to see you guys pete start by talking about the security landscape you heard my little rap up front what are you seeing i thought you wrapped it up really well and you touched on all the key points right technology is ubiquitous today it's everywhere it's no longer confined to a monolithic data center it lives at the edge it lives in front of us it lives in our pockets and smartphones along with that is data and as you said organizations are managing sometimes 10 to 20 times the amount of data that they were just five years ago and along with that cyber crime has become a very profitable uh enterprise in fact it's been more than 10 years since uh the nsa chief actually called cybercrime the biggest transfer of wealth in history that was 10 years ago and we've seen nothing but accelerating cybercrime and really sophistication of how those attacks are are perpetrated and so the new security landscape is really more of an evolution we're finally seeing security catch up with all of the technology adoption all the build out the work from home and work from anywhere that we've seen over the last couple of years we're finally seeing organizations and really it goes beyond the i.t directors it's a board level discussion today security's become a board level discussion so yeah i think that's true as well it's like it used to be the security was okay the sec ops team you're responsible for security now you've got the developers are involved the business lines are involved it's part of onboarding for most companies you know steve this concept of zero trust it was kind of a buzzword before the pandemic and i feel like i've often said it's now become a a mandate but it's it's it's still fuzzy to a lot of people how do you guys think about zero trust what does it mean to you how does it fit yeah i thought again i thought your opening was fantastic in this whole lead into to what is zero trust it had been a buzzword for a long time and now ever since the federal government came out with their implementation or or desire to drive zero trust a lot more people are taking a lot more seriously because i don't think they've seen the government do this but ultimately let's see ultimately it's just like you said right if you don't have trust to those particular devices applications or data you can't get at it the question is and and you phrase it perfectly can you implement that as well as allow the business to be as agile as it needs to be in order to be competitive because we're seeing with your whole notion around devops and the ability to kind of build make deploy build make deploy right they still need that functionality but it also needs to be trusted it needs to be secure and things can't get away from you yeah so it's interesting we attended every uh reinforce since 2019 and the narrative there is hey everything in this in the cloud is great you know and this narrative around oh security is a big problem is you know doesn't help the industry the fact is that the big hyperscalers they're not strapped for talent but csos are they don't have the the capabilities to really apply all these best practices they're they're playing whack-a-mole so they look to companies like yours to take their your r d and bake it into security products and solutions so what are the critical aspects of the so-called dell trusted infrastructure that we should be thinking about yeah well dell trusted infrastructure for us is a way for us to describe uh the the work that we do through design development and even delivery of our it system so dell trusted infrastructure includes our storage it includes our servers our networking our data protection our hyper-converged everything that infrastructure always has been it's just that today customers consume that infrastructure at the edge as a service in a multi-cloud environment i mean i view the cloud as really a way for organizations to become more agile and to become more flexible and also to control costs i don't think organizations move to the cloud or move to a multi-cloud environment to enhance security so i don't see cloud computing as a panacea for security i see it as another attack surface and another uh aspect in front that organizations and and security organizations and departments have to manage it's part of their infrastructure today whether it's in their data center in a cloud or at the edge i mean i think it's a huge point because a lot of people think oh the data's in the cloud i'm good it's like steve we've talked about oh why do i have to back up my data it's in the cloud well you might have to recover it someday so i don't know if you have anything to add to that or any additional thoughts on it no i mean i think i think like what pete was saying when it comes to when it comes to all these new vectors for attack surfaces you know people did choose the cloud in order to be more agile more flexible and all that did was open up to the csos who need to pay attention to now okay where can i possibly be attacked i need to be thinking about is that secure and part of the part of that is dell now also understands and thinks about as we're building solutions is it is it a trusted development life cycle so we have our own trusted development life cycle how many times in the past did you used to hear about vendors saying you got to patch your software because of this we think about what changes to our software and what implementations and what enhancements we deliver can actually cause from a security perspective and make sure we don't give up or or have security become a whole just in order to implement a feature we got to think about those things yeah and as pete alluded to our secure supply chain so all the way through knowing what you're going to get when you actually receive it is going to be secure and not be tampered with becomes vitally important and pete and i were talking earlier when you have tens of thousands of devices that need to be delivered whether it be storage or laptops or pcs or or whatever it is you want to be tr you want to know that that that those devices are can be trusted okay guys maybe pete you could talk about the how dell thinks about it's its framework and its philosophy of cyber security and then specifically what dell's advantages are relative to the competition yeah definitely dave thank you so i we've talked a lot about dell as a technology provider but one thing dell also is is a partner in this larger ecosystem we realize that security whether it's a zero trust paradigm or any other kind of security environment is an ecosystem with a lot of different vendors so we look at three areas uh one is protecting data in systems we know that it starts with and ends with data that helps organizations combat threats across their entire infrastructure and what it means is dell's embedding security features consistently across our portfolios of storage servers networking the second is enhancing cyber resiliency over the last decade a lot of the funding and spending has been in protecting or trying to prevent cyber threats not necessarily in responding to and recovering from threats right we call that resiliency organizations need to build resiliency across their organization so not only can they withstand a threat but they can respond recover and continue with their operations and the third is overcoming security complexity security is hard it's more difficult because of the the things we've talked about about distributed data distributed technology and and attack surfaces everywhere and so we're enabling organizations to scale confidently to continue their business but know that all all the i.t decisions that they're making um have these intrinsic security features and are built and delivered in a consistent security so those are kind of the three pillars maybe we could end on what you guys see as the key differentiators uh that people should know about that that dell brings to the table maybe each of you could take take a shot at that yeah i i think first of all from from a holistic portfolio perspective right the secure supply chain and the secure development life cycle permeate through everything dell does when building things so we build things with security in mind all the way from as pete mentioned from from creation to delivery we want to make sure you have that that secure device or or asset that permeates everything from servers networking storage data protection through hyper converge through everything that to me is really a key asset because that means you can you understand when you receive something it's a trusted piece of your infrastructure i think the other core component to think about and pete mentioned as dell being a partner for um making sure you can deliver these things is that even though those are that's part of our framework these pillars are our framework of how we want to deliver security it's also important to understand that we are partners and that you don't need to rip and replace but as you start to put in new components you can be you can be assured that the components that you're replacing as you're evolving as you're growing as you're moving to the cloud as you're moving to more on-prem type services or whatever that your environment is secure i think those are two key things got it okay pete bring us home yeah i think one of one of the big advantages of dell uh is our scope and our scale right we're a large technology vendor that's been around for decades and we develop and sell almost every piece of technology we also know that organizations are might make different decisions and so we have a large services organization with a lot of experienced services people that can help customers along their security journey depending on uh whatever type of infrastructure or solutions that they're looking at the other thing we do is make it very easy to consume our technology whether that's traditional on-premise in a multi-cloud environment uh or as a service and so the best of breed technology can be consumed in any variety of fashion and know that you're getting that consistent secure infrastructure that dell provides well and dell's forgot the probably top supply chain not only in the tech business but probably any business and so you can actually take take your dog food and then and allow other your champagne sorry allow other people to you know share share best practices with your with your customers all right guys thanks so much for coming thank you appreciate it okay keep it right there after this short break we'll be back to drill into the storage domain you're watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure on the cube the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage be right back you

[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

>>Good afternoon. Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We are live in San Francisco at Moscone west for VMware Explorer, 2022. We're excited to welcome a new cube guest to the program. Steve Bravo joins us the SVP of edge technology at Luman. Great to have you on the program. Thank >>You very much for having me. Appreciate it. Welcome. >>Talk to us a little bit about, we've had several conversations with Luman folks over the last day and a half, but talk to us a little bit about it from your perspective, the VMware relationship with Luman. Okay. >>So it's actually, you know, we have been partners for the last 20 years. Okay. When, when VMware was really cutting its teeth in the, the virtualized space Luman, and one of its, you know, companies that acquired through time was really a, a cutting edge user of VMware technologies. And as, as time has evolved and VMware's technologies have evolved, we have grown with VMware. So much of the software they write is embedded not only within our network, but on our edge platforms and extended out to the, the, the hyperscalers as well as in the client pre. So it's an ever growing partnership and, and one that we're continually innovating and creating better outcomes for, for really the, the enterprise space. >>Talk about those enterprise customers and some of the outcomes that you are helping to deliver. What's the joint value prop that Luman and BM bring to the enterprise. >>So really stronger together, right? If you think about the strengths that Luman has, it's really our, our, our network. We call that our central nervous system, our, our, our platform. Okay. So all of our edge technologies and compute capabilities that we're able to deploy in our edge centers, data centers globally, as well as out to prem, we lay the software technologies that VMware creates not only from a hyper virtualized sense, but also through sassy through security and also out to workspace one. So it's their entire suite, we're able to support it. So with those, we create amazing technology solutions to serve the enterprise, whether it's healthcare, whether it's manufacturing, retail space, the customers are plenty in the use cases are endless. >>You talked about your history and, and at the foundation of what you do this sort of idea of a central nervous system. Yeah. The network, if we wanted to completely geek out, we could just talk about that. Yeah. For an hour. Sure. We could, but we're not going to, we were talking just, you know, before we came live, came on, live about lumens philosophy and how you're taking that foundation, that network, that central nervous system, and you have a philosophy about what you want to achieve with it. And the other things you layer on top of it. Yeah. Tell, tell us about that. Cause I thought was >>Interesting it's so it it's really all about furthering human progress with technology. Okay. We're very lucky that we have the global network that we do, but the workloads, right? The applications that make really life kind of, you know, go round in today's world lives in, in forms and factors of compute that hang off of the network. We're very lucky that we can bring that all together. So over the years, you know, every enterprise has a different need, right? They're trying to solve a problem. We want to help them solve that problem. Right. We bring our technology, our capabilities, our experience, and, and experts to really cater to and, and be that partner that can, that can build the entire stack for them to allow them to be very, very efficient in their place of competition. So >>I wanna hear, I wanna hear a concrete example of that in action. Sure. But, but I think it's interesting, not just from a, what is happening on the outside perspective, but it's also very interesting culturally yes. From a, an organizational perspective when you wake up in the morning and you have that mindset, that that's what your mission is. Sure. That's a lot different than waking up in the morning, thinking I'm going to deploy 50 terabytes of storage. Absolutely. I'm going to install nine ports and yellow cables and blue cables in my switch. That's right. Thinking you're toiling and obscurity. So everybody, everybody illumined then is waking up with this mission in mind. Yes. Which makes the day a lot easier to get through when you're, when you're having to work hard. But give me, give a, gimme a concrete example of that in, in motion. >>Sure. So it's actually, it's, it's about those outcomes and those use cases, right. I, I explain to my kids, sometimes they're like, dad tell me, you know, like tell me what you do. And if you start talking about the cables and the compute, they, their eyes gloss over. But if I say to him, you know, remember when you were sick and it was during COVID and you couldn't go to the doctor. Right. And we were able to pop open the computer and we were able to see a doctor on the screen and they had to stick your tongue out and do all the things you got care. And we were able to deliver that based on our platform, based on our network, we helped healthcare providers, you know, go remote to see patients as COVID was happening and people were going to the hospital. So that's just a real world scenario that we did for a very large network when people were dealing with it, they needed to really expand horizontally horizontally to allow care providers, to operate in different areas. And we were able to hit it outta the park. >>That's a great explanation. Did, did your kids go, wow, dad, that's >>Awesome. Absolutely. Absolutely. But then they're like, anything else, like, is there anything else cool. And talk about sporting stadiums, lighting up, you know, a different venue where they go and they're able to from their, you know, phone order, a soda or a pretzel and, and with the different sensors from an I two, >>Now you're talking >>Yeah. Perspective like dad, you guys did this. Yes. You know, it it's, so it resonates. And those, those use cases, if you think about the building blocks, right. Whether it's the medical scenario or, or a, a smart stadium, the building blocks are very similar. Right. And we're lucky enough that you put those building blocks together in a, in a, in a prescriptive way for a specific outcome. You're able to play with strikes and you're able to get better scale and you're able to move fast because the technology industry we're in is it's. I mean, it's, it's moving at light speeds >>As the edge become grows and grows and expands and becomes more and more amorphous, how have your customer conversations changed as there's more demand for every company to become a data company, to be a security company. Right. How have they kind of elevated up the stack to the C-suite >>We've really had to just pivot to talking about that, that outcome, that, that entity, that, that enterprise is really trying to achieve. You know, if you think about, you know, the, the two examples, another one, it could be very, you know, cost driven. It could be that we need to get to market in a much more rapid fashion at a global level. How can we stamp things out quickly? So you take those outcomes, show them how the technology's going to enable it, and then you can really open the door for the return. Right. Did you get the cost savings? Yes. Did you, did you achieve that time to market for, it could be seasonality, right. Right. People don't have to pay for the full boat anymore. If, if let's say there are an online marketplace and it it's huge around the seasons, right. Around the holiday season, there's gonna be big peaks that they have there. Right. We like to be able to have them burst and, and ebb and flow. So it's all about that outcome. And getting to that, the technology pieces, you just put 'em together to accommodate. >>What, what does your go-to market strategy look like? How do you engage with customers? You know, there are, there are finite number of seats, strategic seats at a customer table. Yeah. Are you typically going in arm and arm with partners and alliances? What does that ecosystem look like? Or do you, do you have a direct sales force that engages customers? Yep. Tell, tell me about the, how the whole thing >>Works. So we have a direct sales force. Okay. And we like to play to our strengths. So we have a great Alliance partners as well. So that arm and arm absolutely happens where we are heavily connected already at C-suites. They're able to walk in and make those types of relationships and outcomes a reality. But we find that we are, we're better with partners playing to their strengths with us. Right. If we come in and show up and we have that complete stack, the software experts as well, our assets, our platform, our network, it's really a one, two punch wrap with our service capabilities at a global level that it's unbeatable. So we show up to the very best of our abilities with our alliances. And then with those more steep relationships where we've been there, where we have the relationships, there's more of a trust factor, but it's all about building trust. And we gotta, we gotta show up appropriately to do that. >>So if it's unbeatable, why do customers choose? Luin what, what's the value prop that you talk to customers about? >>So if you think about a, a COO or CIO or CTO and all of the different things, you need to purchase to make outcomes a reality, whether it's network, whether it's compute, whether it's storage, whether it's software, right? Whether it's people, it becomes very easy. If you have a partner that can do all of that for you and it's their assets, right? So we have those assets. We have those, you know, you know, our, our employees are absolutely our greatest asset. My, in my opinion, at a global level. And then we partner with the biggest software manufacturers, like, like an AWS or a, like a VMware. And we, we loaded into our, our fabric. And now we have literally the entire stack right there. It's a single hand to shake rather than I needed to go to a network provider to go to compute provider storage, security. Like you get that holistic solution approach makes it far easier. And that's a, it's a huge differentiator. And >>You, you, you said AWS. Yeah. You work with all you work with all, all the >>Har hyperscalers. Like if you think about the cloud, the, I'll say the, the big three, right? AWS, Google, and Microsoft, everything is using the cloud and the fact that we can connect to it in dynamic ways and extend that experience all the way out to our edge and on-prem and deliver the same experience again, massive differentiator. >>So from your customer's point of view, you can be agnostic. Yes. So you, you can say, well, Azure for this AWS, for that maybe run VMware in both >>100, >>Both context. Interesting stat that was brought up to Lisa and I yesterday through the VCP P program. Yep. The, the VMware cloud provider program, if you aggregate all of that cloud stuff, that's going on, that becomes the third or fourth largest cloud on earth. Yeah. So a lot of the messaging, a lot of the stuff they're talking about now has to do with that. So you, so for example, you could be involved in deploying that software defined data center stack in a variety of hyperscale class. Yes. Where appropriate for people? >>Yeah. 100%. And whether it's in the hyperscalers or in their own data center, in one of our platforms, the, the, the, the biggest differentiators, it's gonna be the same. Right? You have that partner that can do it for you no matter where the venue is. So that's really the, the coming of hybrid cloud, very agnostic. But I always say, it's the best venue. Right? You have different applications are gonna need different things, build it to suit. And when you do that, okay. And it's, and you're not pushing one way, you're taking the, the requirements you build trust. And when you build trust, you build long lasting relationships with your clients, and that's, that's what it's about. And you then make more great outcomes, a reality, >>Right. That trust is absolutely critical. It's currency really is. Yes. Talk about, you have a, a joint innovation lab with VMware. Talk a little bit about that. What is it all about? How long have you guys been doing it? What exciting things are coming from it? So >>We, we, we launched at about 18 months ago. Some, some, some amazing thinkers, you know, on our team and their team came together and it's really to, to keep pace with the market. Okay. So platforms and software evolve at a, at a, at a certain pace, right. And it's always speeding up, but creating use cases within that lab to solve a common core set of problems for maybe a specific vertical is really what it's intended to do. So when the software's ready to kind of an incubation engine that we're testing these use cases, so we can then go deploy and begin solving immediately when market ready. So it, it, it puts us ahead of the game. It gives us those at bats. So we're very comfortable deploying. And, and I would say, you know, created that muscle memory before you're going live in a, in a client environment. >>And then you can show, see, you know, and seen is believing. So there are multiple just, I'll say different, you know, IOT use cases that we're doing right now, 5g wireless, you know, untethered headsets, things of that nature. You think about some of the VI and, and AI capabilities that are emerging, whether it's digital twin, whether it's literally T sensors with packages, tracking those types of things, the use cases are endless. But the, the cool thing about it is you're testing those building blocks that I kind of keep referring to. And you're expanding the portfolio of use cases that you can solve with them. And when you start to see patterns, you now have use cases that can solve many similar needs and outcomes. So it's a, it's a huge differentiator. We're lucky to have the, the teams, the, the collective teams together, making those outcomes a reality, some of the best technologies I've ever seen. >>So the joint innovation lab formed about 18 months ago during the pandemic. What was the compelling event or was, was that part of it, or was it customer demand that, that caused you guys to go, you know what, let's come together and actually build a joint lab. >>We saw how fast things were moving. We wanted to say, okay, as something's getting ready to roll out, let's start touching it before, before it's market ready. So when it does, we can hit market and begin generating those outcomes immediately. And it, it, it took a little doing, but it came to place very quickly, like mines, right. Thinking the right way, you get a good outcome. >>So if you think about the way that a lot of consolidation has happened, yeah. Over, over recent years, you have large cloud vendors, including VMware. If you, if you accept that definition of their partner program, spanning their software to find data center stack across clouds. And then on the other side of the chasm, you have the organizations that help people take the technology and move it into the realm of outcomes. Yes. Doing actual things with the shiny toys, right. It's one thing to develop the shiny toys. It's another thing to get value out of them. Right. You guys are in that middle space, that critical space. So are the largest global systems integrators in the world. Sure. So how do you, how do you work with, or are you strictly competitive with yeah. The, you know, the, the alphabet soup of, of, yeah. Of global systems integrators, where do you fit into that space? >>So, so again, go back to those, the assets and the capabilities that we have, right? The power users of software, we have a manage and professional services organization, and it's all about, I'll say day zero day one, think of that consultative professional services approach to literally discover, define design, analyze what that outcome is, and then build and deploy. Okay. So migration, you know, transition of workloads, all tee it up for the day, two type capabilities where we are different, those assets that we're building on are hours. Okay. You know, the Accentures, the Deloittes, they're amazing, right. They're also sourcing network, they're sourcing compute, they're sourcing edge. They're sourcing things from other third providers. We are the power users of our capabilities that makes us the best at it. So that integration, we have the, the, the ways to put the, the instructions to put those Legos together better than anybody else. >>Well, so does that mean that you are best targeting at a certain market segment? Where possibly, would you seed some market to the largest of, of global systems integrators at some point? Sure. >>So, so there are certain things that they are amazing at, right. Think about some of the, the, the biggest M applications and things like that. We're power users and power deployers of SAP. That's really, the niche is high up that will go into the app stack, right? Doing the dynamics, doing different types of Oracle suites and things of that nature, let them go there. Right. But enabling applications to live on our platforms and across our networks, we play to our strengths there, leveraging software technologies like VMware, right. And the hyperscalers that's really where I don't wanna say it's their hard boundaries, but again, it's boundaries where we have strength. We will always wanna play to our strengths and be honest, right. If you're honest about your capabilities, you will win the business that you were, that you were great at. And that's what we did. >>Yeah. I, I think there's huge opportunity in that space, frankly. I think not too long ago when asked, I think a lot of people would say, Hmm, it's all gonna be consolidation. There's gonna be five standing over here, five standing over there and they're gonna work together and everyone else is gonna have to go work for those people. What we've seen is organizations like lumen yeah. Taking their historical capabilities and finding that space. Sure. It's really, really interesting to see that >>There's one thing that I'll add too. And the, you know, the, the, the way of the world is automation and orchestration. Okay. When you own the platforms, when you own the technologies that you're able to work with, you're able to evolve those capabilities and it, it, it stays your intellectual property, right. That intellectual property gives you amazing scale too. So that's one of the things that we've been lucky enough to do is we're continually working and involving that suite of orchestration and automation, that layers on top of our platform, right. Our platform for amazing things is it's that automation, orchestration is very key to making it go round. >>Speaking of amazing things, what are some of the things on the horizon for Lumin and VMware? What can customers look forward to in the coming months? >>So yesterday we actually just launched our sassy offering. So that's amazing and great job to the product teams for >>That. I, I, I, I gave one of your colleagues grief yesterday. He didn't appreciate it. I'm sure, but it's considered a party foul to let's, let's remind people what sassy stands for. >>So, so secure a access service edge, basically, all right. Software to find networking. Plus security it's really becomes a dynamic network, right. One that can live, breathe and grow and, and VMware has amazing technology yeah. That we are leveraging that's really the under or the, the overlay network for, for our network. And then we're also even scaling that out too, to, to, to include carbon black security offerings. Okay. As well as workspace one. So those are additional evolutions, some of the, the, the further enhancements with Tansu and Kubernetes. Right, right. In the portfolio as well. So as that capability expands. So, so does, so does the efforts that we have with it. >>Fantastic. Awesome. >>Steve, thank you so much for joining David. Me, I program appreciate talking about lumen. What's going on there, how you're working better together with VMware and the, and the outcomes that you're delivering for customers. We appreciate your time. Thank >>You very much greatly. Appreciate >>It. Our pleasure. Thank you for our guest and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022, Dave. And I will be right back with our next guest. So don't change the channel.

(upbeat music) >> The cybersecurity landscape has changed dramatically over the past 24 to 36 months. Rapid cloud migration has created a new layer of security defense, sure, but that doesn't mean CISOs can relax. In many respects, it further complicates, or at least changes, the CISO's scope of responsibilities. In particular, the threat surface has expanded. And that creates more seams, and CISOs have to make sure their teams pick up where the hyperscaler clouds leave off. Application developers have become a critical execution point for cyber assurance. "Shift left" is the kind of new buzz phrase for devs, but organizations still have to "shield right," meaning the operational teams must continue to partner with SecOps to make sure infrastructure is resilient. So it's no wonder that in ETR's latest survey of nearly 1500 CIOs and IT buyers, that business technology executives cite security as their number one priority, well ahead of other critical technology initiatives including collaboration software, cloud computing, and analytics rounding out the top four. But budgets are under pressure and CISOs have to prioritize. It's not like they have an open checkbook. They have to contend with other key initiatives like those just mentioned, to secure the funding. And what about zero trust? Can you go out and buy zero trust or is it a framework, a mindset in a series of best practices applied to create a security consciousness throughout the organization? Can you implement zero trust? In other words, if a machine or human is not explicitly allowed access, then access is denied. Can you implement that policy without constricting organizational agility? The question is, what's the most practical way to apply that premise? And what role does infrastructure play as the enforcer? How does automation play in the equation? The fact is, that today's approach to cyber resilience can't be an "either/or," it has to be an "and" conversation. Meaning, you have to ensure data protection while at the same time advancing the mission of the organization with as little friction as possible. And don't even talk to me about the edge. That's really going to keep you up at night. Hello and welcome to this special CUBE presentation, "A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure," made possible by Dell Technologies. In this program, we explore the critical role that trusted infrastructure plays in cybersecurity strategies, how organizations should think about the infrastructure side of the cybersecurity equation, and how Dell specifically approaches securing infrastructure for your business. We'll dig into what it means to transform and evolve toward a modern security infrastructure that's both trusted and agile. First up are Pete Gerr and Steve Kenniston, they're both senior cyber security consultants at Dell Technologies. And they're going to talk about the company's philosophy and approach to trusted infrastructure. And then we're going to speak to Parasar Kodati, who's a senior consultant for storage at Dell Technologies to understand where and how storage plays in this trusted infrastructure world. And then finally, Rob Emsley who heads product marketing for data protection and cyber security. We're going to going to take a deeper dive with Rob into data protection and explain how it has become a critical component of a comprehensive cyber security strategy. Okay, let's get started. Pete Gerr, Steve Kenniston, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming into the Marlborough studios today. >> Great to be here, Dave. Thanks. >> Thanks, Dave. Good to see you. >> Great to see you guys. Pete, start by talking about the security landscape. You heard my little wrap up front. What are you seeing? >> I thought you wrapped it up really well. And you touched on all the key points, right? Technology is ubiquitous today. It's everywhere. It's no longer confined to a monolithic data center. It lives at the edge. It lives in front of us. It lives in our pockets and smartphones. Along with that is data. And as you said, organizations are managing sometimes 10 to 20 times the amount of data that they were just five years ago. And along with that, cyber crime has become a very profitable enterprise. In fact, it's been more than 10 years since the NSA chief actually called cyber crime the biggest transfer of wealth in history. That was 10 years ago. And we've seen nothing but accelerating cyber crime and really sophistication of how those attacks are perpetrated. And so the new security landscape is really more of an evolution. We're finally seeing security catch up with all of the technology adoption, all the build out, the work from home and work from anywhere that we've seen over the last couple of years. We're finally seeing organizations, and really it goes beyond the IT directors, it's a board level discussion today. Security's become a board level discussion. >> Yeah, I think that's true as well. It's like it used to be that security was, "Okay, the SecOps team. You're responsible for security." Now you've got, the developers are involved, the business lines are involved, it's part of onboarding for most companies. You know, Steve, this concept of zero trust. It was kind of a buzzword before the pandemic. And I feel like I've often said it's now become a mandate. But it's still fuzzy to a lot of people. How do you guys think about zero trust? What does it mean to you? How does it fit? >> Yeah. Again, I thought your opening was fantastic. And this whole lead in to, what is zero trust? It had been a buzzword for a long time. And now, ever since the federal government came out with their implementation or desire to drive zero trust, a lot more people are taking it a lot more seriously, 'cause I don't think they've seen the government do this. But ultimately, it's just like you said, right? If you don't have trust to those particular devices, applications, or data, you can't get at it. The question is, and you phrase it perfectly, can you implement that as well as allow the business to be as agile as it needs to be in order to be competitive? 'Cause we're seeing, with your whole notion around DevOps and the ability to kind of build, make, deploy, build, make, deploy, right? They still need that functionality but it also needs to be trusted. It needs to be secure and things can't get away from you. >> Yeah. So it's interesting. I've attended every Reinforce since 2019, and the narrative there is, "Hey, everything in the cloud is great. And this narrative around, 'Oh, security is a big problem.' doesn't help the industry." The fact is that the big hyperscalers, they're not strapped for talent, but CISOs are. They don't have the capabilities to really apply all these best practices. They're playing Whac-A-Mole. So they look to companies like yours, to take your R&D and bake it into security products and solutions. So what are the critical aspects of the so-called Dell Trusted Infrastructure that we should be thinking about? >> Yeah, well, Dell Trusted Infrastructure, for us, is a way for us to describe the the work that we do through design, development, and even delivery of our IT system. So Dell Trusted Infrastructure includes our storage, it includes our servers, our networking, our data protection, our hyper-converged, everything that infrastructure always has been. It's just that today customers consume that infrastructure at the edge, as a service, in a multi-cloud environment. I mean, I view the cloud as really a way for organizations to become more agile and to become more flexible, and also to control costs. I don't think organizations move to the cloud, or move to a multi-cloud environment, to enhance security. So I don't see cloud computing as a panacea for security, I see it as another attack surface. And another aspect in front that organizations and security organizations and departments have to manage. It's part of their infrastructure today, whether it's in their data center, in a cloud, or at the edge. >> I mean, I think that's a huge point. Because a lot of people think, "Oh, my data's in the cloud. I'm good." It's like Steve, we've talked about, "Oh, why do I have to back up my data? It's in the cloud?" Well, you might have to recover it someday. So I don't know if you have anything to add to that or any additional thoughts on it? >> No, I mean, I think like what Pete was saying, when it comes to all these new vectors for attack surfaces, you know, people did choose the cloud in order to be more agile, more flexible. And all that did was open up to the CISOs who need to pay attention to now, okay, "Where can I possibly be attacked? I need to be thinking about is that secure?" And part of that is Dell now also understands and thinks about, as we're building solutions, is it a trusted development life cycle? So we have our own trusted development life cycle. How many times in the past did you used to hear about vendors saying you got to patch your software because of this? We think about what changes to our software and what implementations and what enhancements we deliver can actually cause from a security perspective, and make sure we don't give up or have security become a hole just in order to implement a feature. We got to think about those things. And as Pete alluded to, our secure supply chain. So all the way through, knowing what you're going to get when you actually receive it is going to be secure and not be tampered with, becomes vitally important. And then Pete and I were talking earlier, when you have tens of thousands of devices that need to be delivered, whether it be storage or laptops or PCs, or whatever it is, you want to be know that those devices can be trusted. >> Okay, guys, maybe Pete, you could talk about how Dell thinks about its framework and its philosophy of cyber security, and then specifically what Dell's advantages are relative to the competition. >> Yeah, definitely, Dave. Thank you. So we've talked a lot about Dell as a technology provider. But one thing Dell also is is a partner in this larger ecosystem. We realize that security, whether it's a zero trust paradigm or any other kind of security environment, is an ecosystem with a lot of different vendors. So we look at three areas. One is protecting data in systems. We know that it starts with and ends with data. That helps organizations combat threats across their entire infrastructure. And what it means is Dell's embedding security features consistently across our portfolios of storage, servers, networking. The second is enhancing cyber resiliency. Over the last decade, a lot of the funding and spending has been in protecting or trying to prevent cyber threats, not necessarily in responding to and recovering from threats. We call that resiliency. Organizations need to build resiliency across their organization, so not only can they withstand a threat, but they can respond, recover, and continue with their operations. And the third is overcoming security complexity. Security is hard. It's more difficult because of the things we've talked about, about distributed data, distributed technology, and attack surfaces everywhere. And so we're enabling organizations to scale confidently, to continue their business, but know that all the IT decisions that they're making have these intrinsic security features and are built and delivered in a consistent, secure way. >> So those are kind of the three pillars. Maybe we could end on what you guys see as the key differentiators that people should know about that Dell brings to the table. Maybe each of you could take a shot at that. >> Yeah, I think, first of all, from a holistic portfolio perspective, right? The secure supply chain and the secure development life cycle permeate through everything Dell does when building things. So we build things with security in mind, all the way from, as Pete mentioned, from creation to delivery, we want to make sure you have that secure device or asset. That permeates everything from servers, networking, storage, data protection, through hyperconverged, through everything. That to me is really a key asset. Because that means you understand when you receive something it's a trusted piece of your infrastructure. I think the other core component to think about, and Pete mentioned, as Dell being a partner for making sure you can deliver these things, is that even though that's part of our framework, these pillars are our framework of how we want to deliver security, it's also important to understand that we are partners and that you don't need to rip and replace. But as you start to put in new components, you can be assured that the components that you're replacing as you're evolving, as you're growing, as you're moving to the cloud, as you're moving to more on-prem type services or whatever, that your environment is secure. I think those are two key things. >> Got it. Okay. Pete, bring us home. >> Yeah, I think one of the big advantages of Dell is our scope and our scale, right? We're a large technology vendor that's been around for decades, and we develop and sell almost every piece of technology. We also know that organizations might make different decisions. And so we have a large services organization with a lot of experienced services people that can help customers along their security journey, depending on whatever type of infrastructure or solutions that they're looking at. The other thing we do is make it very easy to consume our technology, whether that's traditional on premise, in a multi-cloud environment, or as a service. And so the best-of-breed technology can be consumed in any variety of fashion, and know that you're getting that consistent, secure infrastructure that Dell provides. >> Well, and Dell's got probably the top supply chain, not only in the tech business, but probably any business. And so you can actually take your dog food, or your champagne, sorry, (laughter) allow other people to share best practices with your customers. All right, guys, thanks so much for coming up. I appreciate it. >> Great. Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Okay, keep it right there. After this short break, we'll be back to drill into the storage domain. You're watching "A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure" on theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Be right back. (upbeat music)

>>We're back in Boston, the Cube's coverage of AWS reinforced 2022. My name is Dave ante. Steve Malanney is here as the CEO of Aviatrix longtime cube alum sort of collaborator on super cloud. Yeah. Uh, which we have an event, uh, August 9th, which you guys are participating in. So, um, thank you for that. And, yep. Welcome to the cube. >>Yeah. Thank you so great to be here as >>Always back in Boston. Yeah. I'd say good show. Not, not like blow me away. We were AWS, um, summit in New York city three weeks ago. I >>Took, heard it took three hours to get in >>Out control. I heard, well, there were some people two I, maybe three <laugh>, but there was, they expected like maybe nine, 10,000, 19,000 showed up. Now it's a free event. Yeah. 19,000 people. >>Oh, I didn't know it >>Was that many. It was unbelievable. I mean, it was packed. Yeah. You know, so it's a little light here and I think it's cuz you know, everybody's down the Cape, >>There are down the Cape, Rhode Island that's after the fourth. The thing is that we were talking about this. The quality of people are pretty good though. Yeah. Right. This is there's no looky lose it's everybody. That's doing stuff in cloud. They're moving in. This is no longer, Hey, what's this thing called cloud. Right. I remember three, four years ago at AWS. You'd get a lot of that, that kind of stuff. Some the summit meetings and things like that. Now it's, we're a full on deployment mode even >>Here in 2019, the conversation was like, so there's this shared responsibility model and we may have to make sure you understand. I mean, nobody's questioning that today. Yeah. It's more really hardcore best practices and you know how to apply tools. Yeah. You know, dos and don't and so it's a much more sophisticated narrative, I think. Yeah. >>Well, I mean, that's one of the things that Aviatrix does is our whole thing is architecturally. I would say, where does network security belong in the network? It shouldn't be a bolt on it. Shouldn't be something that you add on. It should be something that actually gets integrated into the fabric of the network. So you shouldn't be able to point to network security. It's like, can you point to the network? It's everywhere. Point to air it's everywhere. Network security should be integrated in the fabric and that wasn't done. On-prem that way you steered traffic to this thing called a firewall. But in the cloud, that's not the right architectural way. It it's a choke point. Uh, operationally adds tremendous amount of complexity, which is the whole reason we're going to cloud in the first place is for that agility and the ability to operationally swipe the card and get our developers running to put in these choke points is completely the wrong architecture. So conversations we're having with customers is integrate that security into the fabric of the network. And you get rid of all those, all those operational >>Issues. So explain that how you're not a, a checkpoint, but if you funnel everything into one sort of place >>In the, so we are a networking company, uh, it is uh, cloud networking company. So we, we were born in the cloud cloud native. We, we are not some on-prem networking solution that was jammed in the cloud, uh, wrapped >>In stack wrapped >>In, you know, or like that. No, no, no. And looking for wires, right? That's VM series from Palo. It doesn't even know it's in the cloud. Right. It's looking for wires. Um, and of course multicloud, cuz you know, Larry E said now, could you believe that on stage with sat, Nadela talking about multi-cloud now you really know we've crossed over to this is a, this is a thing, whoever would've thought you'd see that. But anyway, so we're networking. We're cloud networking, of course it's multi-cloud networking and we're gonna integrate these intelligent services into the fabric. And one of those is, is networking. So what happens is you should do security everywhere. So the place to do it is at every single point in the network that you can make a decision and you embed it and actually embed it into the network. So it's that when you're making a decision of does that traffic need to go somewhere or not, you're doing a little bit of security everywhere. And so what, it looks like a giant firewall effectively, but it's actually distributed in software through every single point in a network. >>Can I call it a mesh? >>It's kind of a mesh you can think of. Yeah, it's a fabric. >>Okay. It's >>A, it's a fabric that these advanced services, including security are integrated into that fabric. >>So you've been in networking much of >>Your career career, >>37 years. All your career. Right? So yay. Cisco Palo Alto. Nicera probably missing one or two, but so what do you do with all blue coat? Blue coat? What do you do with all that stuff? That's out there that >>Symantics. >>Yes. <laugh> keep going. >>Yeah, I think that's it. That's >>All I got. Okay. So what do you do with all that stuff? That's that's out there, you rip and replace it. You, >>So in the cloud you mean yeah. >>All this infrastructure that's out there. What is that? Well, you >>Don't have it in the right. And so right now what's happening is people, look, you can't change too many things. If you're a human, you know, they always tell you don't change a job, get married and have a kid or something all in the same year. Like they just, just do one of 'em cuz you it's too much. When people move to the cloud, what they do is they tend to take what they do on Preem and they say, look, I'm gonna change one thing. We're gonna go to the cloud, everything else. I'm gonna keep the same. Cuz I don't wanna change three things. So they kind of lift and shift their same mentality. They take their firewalls, their next gen fire. I want them, they take all the things that they currently do. And they say, I'm gonna try to do that in the cloud. >>It's not really the right way to do it. But sometimes for people that are on-prem people, that's the way to get started and I'll screw it up and not screw it up and, and not change too many things. And look, I'm just used to that. And, and then I'll, then I'll go to change things, to be more cloud native, then I'll realize I can get rid of this and get rid of that and do that. But, but that's where people are. The first thing is bring these things over. We help them do that, right? From a networking perspective, I'll make it easier to bring your old security stuff in. But in parallel to that, we start adding things into the fabric and what's gonna happen is eventually we start adding all these things and things that you can't do separately. We start doing anomaly detection. We start doing behavioral analysis. Why? Because the entire network, we are the data plan. We see everything. And so we can start doing things that a standalone device can't do because not all the traffic steered to them. It can only control what's steered to you. And then eventually what's happening is people look at that device. And then they look at us and then they look at the device and they look at us and they go, why do I have both of this? And we go, I don't know. >>You don't need it. >>Well, can I get rid of that other thing? That's a tool. >>Sure. And there's not a trade off. There's not a trade off. You >>Don't have to. No. Now people rid belts and suspenders. Yeah. Cause it's just, who has, who has enough? Who has too much security buddy? They're gonna, they're gonna do belt suspenders. You know anything they can do. But eventually what will happened is they'll look at what we do and they'll go, that's good enough. That happened to me. When I was at Palo Alto networks, we inserted as a firewall. They kept their existing firewall. They had all these other devices and eventually all those went away and you just had a NextGen >>Firewall just through attrition, >>Through Atian. You're like, you're looking, you go, well, that platform is doing all these functions. Same. Thing's gonna happen to us. The platform of networking's gonna do all your network security devices. So any tool or agent or external, you know, device that you have to steer traffic to ISS gonna go away. You're not gonna need it. >>And, and you talking multi-cloud obviously, >>And then don't wanna do the same thing. Whether man Azure, you know the same. >>Yeah. >>Same, same experie architecture, same experience, same set of services. True. Multi-cloud native. Like you, that's what you want. And oh, by the way, skill, gap, skill shortage is a real thing. And it's getting worse. Cause now with the recession, you think you're gonna be able to add more people. Nope. You're gonna have less people. How do I do this? Any multicloud world with security and all this kind of stuff. You have to put the intelligence in the software, not on your people. Right? >>So speaking of recession. Yep. As a CEO of a well funded company, that's got some momentum. How are you approaching it? Do you have like, did you bring in the war time? Conig I mean, you've been through, you know, downturns before. This is you are you >>I'm on war time already. >>Okay. So yeah. Tell me more about how you you're kind of approaching this >>So recession down. So didn't change what we were doing one bit, because I run it that way from the very beginning. So I've been around 30 years, that's >>Told me he he's like me. You know what he said? >>Yeah. Or maybe >>I'm like, I want be D cuz he said, you know, people talk about, you know, only do things that are absolutely necessary during times like this. I always do things that are only, >>That's all I >>Do necessary. Why would you ever do things that aren't necessary? >><laugh> you'd be surprised. Most companies don't. Yeah. Uh, recession's very good for people like snowflake and for us because we run that way anyway. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, I, I constantly make decisions that we have to go and dip there's people that aren't right for the business. I move 'em out. Like I don't wait for some like Sequoia stupid rest in peace. The world's ending fire all your people that has no impact on me because I already operated that way. So we, we kind of operate that way and we are, we are like sat Nadel even came out and kind of said, I don't wanna say cloud is recession proof, but it kind of is, is we are so look, our top customer spends 5 million a year. Nothing. We haven't even started yet. David that's minuscule. We're not macro. We're micro 5 million a year for these big enterprises is nothing right. SA Nadel is now starting to count people who do billion dollar agreements with him billion over a period of number of years. Like that's the, the scale we have not even >>Gun billion dollar >>Agreements. We haven't even under begun to understand the scope of what's happening in the cloud. Right. And so yeah, the recession's happening. I don't know. I guess it's impacting somebody. It's not impacting me. It's actually accelerating things because it's a flight to quality and customers go and say, I can't get gear on on-prem anyway, cuz of the, uh, shortage, you know, the, uh, uh, get chips. Um, and that's not the right thing. So guess what the recession says, I'm gonna stop spending more money there and I'm gonna put it into the cloud. >>All right. So you opened up Pandora's box, man. I wanna ask you about your sort of management philosophy. When you come into a company to take, to go lead a company like that. Yeah. How, what, what's your approach to assess the team? Who do you, who do you decide? How do you decide who to keep on the bus? Who to throw off the bus put in the right seats. So how long does that take you? >>Doesn't take long. When I join, we were 30, 30, 8 people. We're now 525. Um, and my view on everything and I I've never met Frank Lubin, but I guarantee you, he has the same philosophy. You have a one year contract me included next year, the board might come to me and say, you were the right CEO for this year. You're not next year. Ben Horowitz taught me that it's a one year contract. There's no multi-year contract. So everybody in the company, including the CEO has a one year >>Contract. So you would say that to the board. Hey, if you can find somebody better, >>If, and, and you know what, I'll be the first one to pull myself, fire myself and say, we're, we're replacing me with somebody better right now. There isn't anybody better. So it's me. So, okay, next year maybe there's somebody better. Or we hit a certain point where I'm not the right guy. I'll I'll, I'll pull myself out as the CEO, but also internally the same thing just because you're the right guy this year. And we hire people for the, what you need to do this year. We're not gonna, we don't hire, oh, like this is the mistake. A lot of companies make, well, we wanna be a billion dollars in sales. So we're gonna go hire some loser from HPE. Who's worked at a company for a billion dollars. And by the way has no idea how they became a billion dollars, right. In revenue or billions of dollars. >>But we're gonna go hire 'em because they must know more than we do. And what every single time you bring them in what you realize, they're idiots. They have no idea how we got to that. And so you, you don't pre-hire for where you want to be. You hire for where you are that year. And then if it's not right, and then if it's not right, you'd be really nice to them. Have great severance packages, be, be respectful for people and be honest with them. I guarantee you Frank, Salman's not, if you're not just have this conversation with a sales guy before I came into here, very straight conversation, Northeast hockey player mentality. We're straight. If you're not working out or I don't think you're doing things right. You're gonna know. And so it's a one year, it's a one year contract. That's what you do. So you don't have time. You don't the luxury of >>Time. So, so that's probably the hardest part of, of any leadership job is, and people don't like confrontation. They like to put it off, but you don't run away from it. It's >>All in a confrontation, right? That's what relationships have built. Why do war buddies hang out with each other? Cuz they've gone through hell, right? It's in the confrontation. And it's, it's actually with customers too, right? If there's an issue, you don't run from it. You actually bring it up in a very straightforward manner and say, Hey, we got a problem, right? They respect you. You respect them, blah, blah, blah. And then you come out of it and go, you know, you have to fight like, look with your wife. You have to fight. If you don't fight, it's not a relationship you've gotta see in that, in that tension is where the relationship's >>Built. See, I should go home and have a fight tonight. You gotta have a fight with your wife. <laugh> you know, you mentioned Satia and Nadella and Larry Ellison. Interesting point. I wanna come back to that. What Oracle did is actually pretty interesting, do we? For their use case? Yeah. You know, it's not your thing. It's like low latency database across clouds. Yeah. Who would ever thought that? But >>We love it. We love it because it drives multi-cloud it drives. Um, and, and, and I actually think we're gonna have multi-cloud applications that are gonna start happening. Um, right now you don't, you have developers that, that, that kind of will use one cloud. But as we start developing and you call it the super cloud, right. When that starts really happening, the infrastructure's gonna allow that networking and network security is that bottom layer that Aviatrix helps once that gets all handled. The app, people are gonna say, so there's no friction. So maybe I can use autonomous database here. I can use this service from GCP. I can use that service and, and put it all into one app. So where's the app run. It's a multicloud app. Doesn't exist today. >>No, that doesn't happen today. >>It's it's happen. It's gonna happen. >>But that's kind of what the vision was. No, seven, eight years ago of what >>It's >>Gonna, that would be, you know, the original premise of hybrid. Right? Right. Um, I think Chuck Hollis, the guy was at EMC at the time he wrote this piece on, he called it private cloud, but he was really describing hybrid cloud application and running in both places that never happened. But it's starting to, I mean, the infrastructure is getting put in place to enable that, I guess is what you're saying. >>Yep. >>Yeah. >>Cool. And multicloud is, is becoming not just four plus one is a lot of enterprises it's becoming plus one, meaning you're gonna have more and more. And then there won't be infrastructure clouds like AWS and so forth, but it's gonna be industry clouds. Right? You've you've talked about that again, back to super clouds. You're gonna have Goldman Sachs creating clouds and you're gonna have AI companies creating clouds. You're gonna have clouds at the edge, you know, for edge computing and all these things all need to be networked with network security integrated. And you mentioned fact >>Aviatrix you mentioned Ben Horowitz, that's mark Andreesen. All, all companies are software companies. All companies are becoming cloud companies. Yeah. Or, or they're missing missing opportunities or they might get disrupted. >>Yeah. Every single company I talk to now, you know, whether you're Heineken, they don't think of themselves as a beer company anymore. We are the most technologically, you know, advanced brewer in the world. Like they all think they're a technology company. Now, whether you're making trucks, whether you're making sneakers, whether you're making beer, you're now a technology company, every single company in >>The world, we are too, we're we're building a media cloud. You're you know, John's, it's a technology company laying that out and yeah. That's we got developers doing that. That's our, that's our future. Yep. You know? Cool. Hey, thanks for coming on, man. Thank you. Great to see you. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back right after this short break. It keeps coverage. AWS reinforced 20, 22 from Boston. Keep it right there. >>You tired? How many interviewed.

(upbeat music) >> We're back with Steve McDowell, the Principal Analyst for Data & Storage at Moor Insights and Strategy. Hey Steve, great to have you on. Tell us a little bit about yourself. You've got a really interesting background and kind of a blend of engineering and strategy and what's your research focus? >> Yeah, so my research, my focus area is data and storage and all the things around that, whether it's On-Prem or Cloud or, you know, software as a service. My background, as you said, is a blend, right? I grew up as an engineer. I started off as an OS developer at IBM. I came up through the ranks and shifted over into corporate strategy and product marketing and product management, and I have been doing working as an industry analyst now for about five years at Moor Insights and Strategy. >> Steve, how do you see this playing out in the next three to five years? I mean, cloud got it all started, it's going to snowballing. You know, however you look at it percent of spending on storage that you think is going to land in as a service. How do you see the evolution here? >> IT buyers are looking at as a service and consumption base is, you know, a natural model. It extends the data center, brings all of the flexibility all of the goodness that I get from public cloud, but without all of the downside and uncertainty on cost and security and things like that, right, that also come with the public cloud and it's delivered by technology providers that I trust and that I know, and that I worked with, you know, for, in some cases, decades. So, I don't know that we have hard data on how much adoption there is of the model, but we do know that it's trending up, you know and every infrastructure provider at this point has some flavor of offering in the space. So, it's clearly popular with CIOs and IT practitioners alike. >> So Steve, organizations are at a they're different levels of maturity in their, their transformation journeys, and of course, as a result, they're going to have different storage needs that are aligned with their bottom line business objectives. From an IT buyer perspective, you may have data on this, even if it's anecdotal, where does storage as a service actually fit in and can it be a growth lever? >> It can absolutely be a growth leader. It gives me the flexibility as an IT architect to scale my business over time without worrying about how much money I have to invest in storage hardware. Right? So I, I get kind of, again, that cloud like flexibility in terms of procurement and deployment, but it gives me that control by oftentimes being on site within my premise, and then I manage it like a storage array that I own. So, you know, it's beautiful for for organizations that are scaling and it's equally nice for organizations that just want to manage and control cost over time. So, it's a model that makes a lot of sense and fits and certainly growing in adoption and in popularity. >> How about from a technology vendor perspective? You've worked for in the tech industry for companies? What do you think is going to define the winners and losers in this space? If you running strategy for a storage company, what would you say? >> I think the days of of a storage administrator managing, you know, rate levels and recovering and things of that sort are over, right? What these organizations like Pure delivering but they're offering is simplicity. It's a push button approach to deploying storage to the applications and workloads that need it, right? It becomes storage as a utility. So, it's not just the, you know the consumption based economic model of as a service. It's also the manageability that comes with that or the flexibility of management that comes with that. I can push a button, deploy bites to you know a workload that needs it, and it just becomes very simple, right, for the storage administrator, in a way that, you know kind of old school On-Prem storage can't really deliver. >> You know, I want to, I want to ask you, I mean I've been thinking about this because again, a lot of companies are, are you know, moving, hopping on the as a service bandwagon. I feel like, okay, in and of itself, that's not where the innovation lives. The innovation is going to come from making that singular experience from On-Prem to the clouds across clouds maybe eventually out to the edge. Do you, where do you see the innovation in as a service? >> Well, there's two levels of innovation, right? One, is business model innovation, right? I now have an organizational flexibility to build the infrastructure to support my digital transformation efforts, but on the product side and the offering side, it really is as you said, it's about the integration of experience. Every enterprise today touches a cloud in some way, shape or form. Right, I have data spread, not just in my data center, but at the edge, oftentimes in a public cloud, maybe a private cloud. I don't know where my data is, and it really lands on the storage providers to help me manage that and deliver that manageability experience to to the IT administrators. So, when I look at innovation in this space, you know, it's not just a a storage array and rack that I'm leasing, right, this is not another lease model. It's really fully integrated, you know end to end management of my data and yeah and all of the things around that. >> Yeah, so to your point about a lease model is if you're doing a lease, you know, yeah. You can shift CapEx to OPEX, but you're still committed to you have to over provision, whereas here and I wanted to ask you about that. It's an interesting model, right, because you got to read the fine print. Of course the fine print says you got to commit to some level typically, and then if, you know, if you go over you you charge for what you use and you can scale that back down and that's got to be very attractive for folks. I wonder if you we'll ever see like true cloud like consumption pricing, that has two edges to it, right? You see consumption based pricing in some of the software models and you know yeah, people like it, the, the lines of business maybe because they're paying in by the drink, but then procurement hates it because they don't have predictability. How do you see the pricing models? Do you see that maturing or do you think we're sort of locked in on, on where we're at? >> No, I do see that maturing, right? And when you work with a company like Pure to understand their consumption base and as a service and you know, when you work with a company like Pure to understand their consumption base and as a service offerings, it really is sitting down and understanding where your data needs are going to scale. Right? You buy in at a certain level, you have capacity planning. You can expand if you need to. You can shrink if you need to. So, it really does put more control in the hands of the IT buyer than, well certainly then traditional CapEx based On-Prem, but also more control than you would get, you know working with an Amazon or an Azure. >> Well the next 10 years, it ain't going to be like the last 10 years. Thanks Steve! We'll leave it there for now. Love to have you back. Look at, keep it right there. You don't want to miss this next segment where we dig into the customer angle. You're watching theCube production of At Your Storage Service, brought to you by PureStorage. One more. Okay, thanks Steve! We'll leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back. Keep it right there, At Your Storage Service continues in a moment. You're watching theCube. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Dell tech world 2022. This is the cube alive. My name is Dave Volante. We're here with our wall to wall coverage. This is day two. We actually started last night. Uh, the, the cube after dark John furry is here. Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson. We're gonna talk about apex. The business value of apex flex on demand. Darren fedora is here. He's the senior vice president of Dell financial services, and we're joined by a customer and a partner Jud Barron is R and D infrastructure architect at Silicon labs. And Steve end is the regional VP of copy center comp computer center. I say that like I'm from Boston guys. Welcome to the queue. >>Thank you, >>Darren, take us through what's going on with, with apex, you got custom solutions, you know, people are gonna ask, is this just a financial gimick? What is this? >>No gimmicks, no gimmicks, Dave. So I think when we think about technology, historically customers purchased, they bought and they owned and they may have financed it and paid over time, but it was really an ownership model, especially in infrastructure and apex is about subscription. So think about Dell apex, as you can either buy, or you can subscribe to your technology and under apex subscription, we have options for custom based solutions or an outcome base. And I know today we're gonna talk about flex on demand and, and custom based solutions. So it's a high level pay for what you use when you use it with a high level of choice and flexibility. All >>Right, Steve, I'm gonna ask you to play little >>Co-host all right. I like >>This. Okay. So add some color color commentary, Jud, tell us a little bit about, uh, Silicon labs. I'm really interested in what your requirements were, your challenges and kinda why you landed on, on apex. Sure. >>Uh, Silicon labs is a semiconductor company were headquartered in Austin, 10 Xs, uh, just under a billion dollars a year right now. And, uh, at any ed shop or, uh, that, that people who are doing electronic design automation, that's not just in the semiconductor industry, but we have these HPC farms who are running, you know, millions of jobs a day. And the, a balance that you have to strike when you're doing capacity planning in one of these environments is we have these things called tape outs, and that's where we're finishing a project and there's a much higher volume of jobs that we have to run and you have to decide, do we buy for peak or do we, you know, come under that some amount and say, oh, we're gonna buy 80% of what we think >>As an over, over, over under, right. Do we over buy for peak normally, right, correct. Right >>Hard. One is geo Overy the under buy. It's always a hard decision. >>There's a tradeoff. Right? And, and so the, the challenge there is that you'll end up kind of linking the time and potentially miss a tape out window. And there's costs associated with that because you work with the Foundry and you kind of schedule based off that tape out when you're gonna deliver the photo mask to them. So anyway, the point is we in the past using a traditional like camp X, we're gonna buy a bunch of servers. We, we tend to undershoot whatever our peaks are. Cause we may have a peak every couple of months during, you know, these tape outs. Uh, but you know, sometimes tape outs, slip. And so one slips two months, another one comes in a little bit early and now you have multiple tape outs in the same months. And what was gonna be a, a small, uh, difference in from peak to what you actually purchased ends up being a big peak. And, uh, the thing that was interesting to us about flex on demand is the ability to have a commit rate that, you know, the customer can work with Dell financial services to figure out is that 80% is at 60% whatever. And they give us additional servers that we pay just when we're using them. Now I'm somewhat oversimplifying the process. Um, but we're, we gotta talk about that, >>But, but the point is, if I understand it correctly, that infrastructure was dominoing the, the time to tape out in a negative way, and you you've been able to address that more cost effectively. >>It, it can, it, it has on occasion. And so this, this basically gives us a way to lever to pull, to say, well, we can spend some additional OPEX this month and open up this additional capacity. So it's not like bursting to the cloud. Exactly. Uh, because I mean, you have to have the equipment in your data center already for you to be able to use it. But, um, it's under a traditional acquisition model. It's, it's just not a, a, a thing that was available to us before and looking at leasing or other types of, uh, you know, financing was wasn't really attractive previously, but the flex on demand model, when we first heard about it, we're like, that's very interesting. Tell me more. And we ended up using it in, in Austin, and then we built a whole data center in Asia and did the whole thing on flex on demand and >>Got it. Okay, Steve, uh, talk a little bit about your role what's going on at, at computer center and you know, why apex give us the background? Yeah. >>Um, computer center is a, one of the largest global VAs on the planet, right? Um, we, we have a lot of global and international reach, but at the end of the day, it's about one on one customer of relationships. Um, talking to them, understanding what their challenges are. And we've had a multiyear relationship with Jud. I've known you for a long time. And, and, um, typically that relationship, or initially that relationship was about collaborating, working hand in hand, kind of figure out what the solutions were that best fit their environment to solve their issues they need. And it was typically a procurement, a, a purchase based relationship and, and it worked well for a long time, but it, when Jud posed the challenge to us about kind of more pay as you go, uh, uh, subscription based modeling for, for how he want to do acquire in the future. >>Um, we just, we huddle with the Dell team collectively, um, and, and talked about what we could offer and how we could solve the problem. Uh, apex is a really nice brand today, but this was two and a half years ago, Uhhuh. Okay. So it was a little, we were a little early on on putting it together. I feel good that we were able to, to put that type of solution together for Jud and it's, and it's working today, working wonderful today. And it was good for it's good for the whenever it's good for the customer, the manufacturer and the partner altogether. It's a wonderful solution. >>So you took a little risk, but it worked out and you helped. >>Yeah, that was probably the infancy as we were growing our, as a service, think of this, you know, there's a, a lot of big words out there, Dave, right? As a service utility cloud, it doesn't matter what it is super cloud it's super cloud. It doesn't really matter. Super. This is really Jud was talking about a really important element, which is around flexibility choice. There's uncertainty oftentimes in a, in an environment, but they want to control. They still want have a level of control and leveraging partnerships, being able to deliver flexibility and choice. Don't worry about the words. Don't worry about cloud utility as a service we end up solving the customer need, right? And when we talk about flex on demand, I'll give you a little bit deeper into flex on demand. So when we think about flex on demand, it really is about understanding the customer needs and our capability and Jed reference this, determining what a baseline is. So if you think about your own utility bill, right, you, you go home and even if you're on vacation for a month, I'm sure you went on vacation for a month right. Month at a time. If I ever. >>Yeah, >>I know, but if you leave you your utility bill, even if you don't turn on a light, you still get a utility bill, it's your baseline. So we, we determine a baseline with our customers, with computer center, to understand in your environment, you're gonna use this minimum amount and that becomes your baseline. And that baseline can go as low as 25%. And up to 80% in a environment, it usually is typically in this 70, 80%. And then we determine what is gonna be optimal based on that 25 or above we charge based on the usage on a day to day basis, average by a month. And if you go up one month during your peak, you get charged at that peak. If you then a couple months are lower, then you're gonna pay only for the usage. And so for a customer that's growing has variability or seasonality. >>Um, this is a great model cuz they can still control their environment either within their own domain or um, in a colo. They also have the capability to pick anything within the Dell ISG catalog, any product, configure it to meet their environment, be able to work with a trusted partner like computer center. That it's a solution based on a partner relationship and delivers choice and flexibility on the catalog of anything Dell sells within your control of how you can configure it. So it gives this ability to say, instead of buying and instead of paying a predictable payment, a I E a financing I'm gonna pay for use. Yeah. If I turn on my light switch more or if it's during the summer in Texas where I am the ACS a lot higher. So your utilities go up and if you are a much lower because you're on vacation in Hawaii, maybe you've been in vacation in Hawaii for a month, you're gonna have a much lower and you're gonna hit your baseline. Right. So it gives flexibility choice and it gives the control back to the customer. >>Okay. So the whole ISD portfolio. So you're like the tip of the spear for future apex, right? >>We, we, we absolutely are the tip and that's why, you know, Steve referenced a couple years ago as we were still in our infancy, growing, listening to our customers, listening to our partners, we've evolved to become a more robust program, um, 35 countries today. So we can cover 35 countries over the globe, all ISG you products that are sold with a high level of flexibility and it, and it's Jud and feedback over time that we've continued to evolve this program. Mm-hmm >>So Jud you, if I understood correctly, the business impact to you was gonna better predict predictability. You didn't have to over buy or undery and take all that risk. Is that right? You maybe could quantify. Did you ever quantify that? What can you tell us about the, the business impact? Yeah, >>Sure. So, I mean, traditionally we will, uh, base our capacity demands on, uh, complex calculation that effectively just boils down to number of engineers, like head count, uh, and you know, kind of personas within that. And we figure out, okay, well how many compute do we need? And then we say, okay, well how many tape outs are we doing? And when are those tape outs gonna land? And try to figure out which months are gonna be the hot months and the design teams have to kind of vary their tape out schedules so that they don't pile up all into like July or something. And then there's not enough compute capacity. So with, with something like flex on and where I can turn additional capacity on in our HBC farm, it, you know, we just go in and make some changes to the LSF configuration and say, Hey, you know, now you've got these extra nodes available. >>We don't really have to worry about that as much. Uh, in fact, last year we, we ended up with one month where for us, it was unusual. We had five tape outs, uh, at all land within two weeks of one and a other. And they all finished, which in previous years before we had deployed that that would not have been the outcome things we would've had multiple, uh, tape outs delayed. And you know, that that's a seven figure impact for each one of those commits that we miss with the foundries. So it it's a big deal. >>Yeah. That's real dollars. And >>It is. And you know what else, this, as, as Joe's going through this, we all know their supply chain chain constraints, right? And this solves a lot of supply constraints because Joe, if you would be purchasing today, you'd be buying, you're looking at had, and you're actually having to purchase today where if you go into an apex flex on demand, you don't have that full commitment of having to purchase, but you can get ahead of the supply chain. So you can be looking six months in advance, you can be doing capacity planning and I'm Jed. I'm sure you're doing that leveraging. Like what's my future and not be worried about, I have this huge burden upfront. >>Yeah. And I mean, we have two levers right now. One is we have this extra capacity there. I can, you know, pick up the phone and, and call our Dell rep and say, Hey, I'm gonna modify my commit rate. And so now that's, you know, the new baseline I can use all day every day. Uh, and, and, you know, we still have some burstability and then separately, we can say, we want to expand the contract or, or, or, you know, basically acquire more hardware for additional burst or additional commit. Both of those things are, are options. We only had the, we had to go buy it and we need to know when we have to have it available. So you kind of back into this ordering schedule for, uh, you know, like a traditional CapEx purchase. >>So Steve, obviously Silicon labs is, is leaning again. Are you seeing any other patterns in your customer base, uh, where this is being applied? What can you share >>With us there? Yeah, it's it, I believe this is a fairly horizontal solution. Any customer can really utilize it. I mean, traditionally people would buy for two and three years worth of capacity and slowly consume it over time, but you paid up front. Right. That's how it, that's kind of how it worked. Cause I didn't want to go back to the well year after year after year. Right. So, um, you know, and I, and I think, I think if anything, the, the, the cloud, the hyperscalers has, uh, taught the world, some things taught the industry. Some things, you know, in a, in a perfect world customers like to consume and pay for what they use, you know, and in the increments that they use it as much as possible as closely aligned to that as they could get. And what I see, what I see in this, you know, cuz I, I kind of put solu in my role, I'm putting solutions and customers and bringing those together other right. And, and complimenting that with services of our own. Right. But, but what I see over time that, that almost all the manufacturers and Dells does a wonderful job, but almost all the manufacturers will be delivering technology on a subscription basis. So the more I learn, the more I know, the more I understand about how to deliver those and provide those to customers is better off we are >>Because it aligns with business value. And that's what you're seeing Jud correct. >>Steve made an interesting comment in there. Uh, you know, he was talking about the cloud and for us, there's always pressure to say, Hey, you know, can we burst in the cloud? And for Edda workloads, every time we look at this, it's a data problem. It, it, it's not a computing problem for us. EA workloads tend to generate a lot of data and you know, there's a, there are a lot of tools, uh, you know, there's just a bunch of stuff that you have to have available to run those jobs. And so you have to look at that very carefully. The company that I work for Silicon labs has been around for a long time and we have a lot of development effort. That's been put into automating and simplifying things for our design engineering and trying to, you know, manipulate that and make it to where we can burst just certain jobs out to the cloud efficiently and cost effectively. Hasn't really resonated for us. But the flex on demand thing gave a us the ability to kind of achieve some of that burst ability. I mean, not to the same level of scale of course, but you know, we, we can do that at, you know, our own speed in our own data centers with our own data. And we don't have to worry about trying to, you know, peel an onion and put something new together, make it cloud friendly. It's >>Substantially similar. We gotta go. But to Aaron bring us home. >>Yeah. Hey, I think when we think about Dell, it's about listening to our customers and our partners. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, which we continue to do. We continue to evolve our products and, and apex is around choice and flexibility in delivering to customers an option to pay for what they use. It's a great solution. Appreciate the time guys. >>Great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. All right. Thank you. Good luck. All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave VoLTE for the cube. We've been back with more wall to wall coverage. John furry, you'll be back Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. You're watching the queue >>And.

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Dell technologies, world 2022. We're live in Vegas. Very happy to be here. Uh, this is the cubes multi-year coverage. This is year 13 for covering either, you know, EMC world or, uh, Dell world. And now of course, Dell tech world. My name is Dave Volante and I'm here with longtime Cub alum cube guest, Steve Kenon, the storage Alchemist, who's, uh, Beckett, Dell, uh, and his data protection role. And Tony Bryson is the chief information security officer of the town of Gilbert town in Arizona. Most, most towns don't have a CISO, but Tony, we're a thrilled, you're here to tell us that story. How did you become a CISO and how does the town of Gilbert have a CISO? >>Well, thank you for having me here. Uh, believe it or not. The town of Gilbert is actually the fourth largest municipality in Arizona. We serve as 281,000 citizens. So it's a fairly large enterprise. We're a billion dollar enterprise. And it got to the point where the, uh, cybersecurity concerns were at such a point that they elected to bring in their first chief information security officer. And I managed to, uh, be the lucky gentleman that got that particular position. >>That's awesome. And there's a, is there a CIO as well? Are you guys peers? Do you, how what's the reporting structure look like? >>We have a chief technology officer. Okay. I report through his office mm-hmm <affirmative> and then he reports, uh, directly to the town executive. >>So you guys talk a lot, you I'm sure you present a lot to the, to the board or wherever the governance structure is. Yeah, >>We do. I, I do quarterly report outs to the, I report through to the town council. Uh, let them know exactly what our cyber security posture is like, the type of threats that we're facing. As a matter of fact, I have to do one when I return to, uh, Gilbert from this particular conference. So really looking forward to that one, cuz this is an interesting time to be in cyber security. >>So obviously a sea. So Steve is gonna say, cyber's the number one priority, but I would say the CTO is gonna say the, say the same thing I would say the board is gonna say the same thing. I would also say Steve, that, uh, cyber and cyber resilience is probably the number one topic here at the show. When you walk around and you see the cyber demonstrations, the security demonstrations, they're packed, it's kind of your focus. Um, it's a good call. >>Yeah. <laugh> I'm the luckiest guy in storage, right? <laugh> um, yeah, there hasn't I in the last 24 months, I don't think that there's been a, a meeting that I've been to with a customer, no matter who's in the room where, uh, cyber resiliency, cybersecurity hasn't come up. I mean, it is, it is one of the hot topics in last night. I mean, Michael was just here. Uh, Michael Dell was just here last night. He came into the showroom floor, he came back, he took a look at what we were offering for cyber capabilities and was impressed. And, and so, so that's really good. >>Yeah. So I noticed, you know, when I talked to a lot of CIOs in particular, they would tell me that the pre pandemic, their cyber resiliency was very Dr. Focused, right. They really, it really wasn't an organizational resilience. It was a, if there's an oh crap moment, they could get it back in theory. And they sort of rethought that. Do you see you that amongst your peers, Tony? >>I think so. I think that people are quickly starting to understand that you just can't focus on, in, on protecting yourself from something that you think may never happen. The reality is that you're likely to see some type of cyber event, so you better be prepared for it. And you protect yourself against that. So plan for resiliency plan with making sure that you have the right people in place that can take that challenge on, because it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when >>I would imagine. Well, Steve, you and I have talked about this, that, you know, the data protection business used to be, we used to call it backup in recovery and security, which is a whole different animal, but they're really starting to come together. It's kind of an Adjay. I, I know you've got this, uh, Maverick report that, that you want to talk about. What, what is that as a new Gartner research? I, I'm not familiar with it. >>Yeah. So it's some very interesting Gartner research and what I think, and I'd be curious to, Tony's take on, especially after that last question is, you know, a lot of people are, are spending a lot of money to keep the bad actors out. Right. And Gardner's philosophy on this whole, um, it's, it's, you're going to get hacked. So embrace the breach, that's their report. Right. So what they're suggesting is you're spending a lot of money, but, but we're witnessing a lot of attacks still coming in. Are you prepared to recover that when it happens? Right. And so their philosophy is it's time to start thinking about the recovery aspects of, you know, if, if they're gonna get through, how do you handle that? Right. >>Well, so you got announcements this week, big one of the big four, I guess, or big five cyber recovery vault. It's been, you're enhancing that you guys are talking things like, you know, air gaps and so forth. Give us the overview of the news there. >>Yeah. So there's, uh, cyber recovery vault for AWS for the cloud. There is, uh, a lot of stuff we're doing with, uh, cyber recovery vault for, uh, Aw, uh, Azure also, right along with the cyber sense technology, which is the technology that scans the data. Once it comes in from the backup to ensure that it clean and can be recovered and you can feel confident that your recoveries look good, right? So now, now you can do that OnPrem, or you can do it through a colo. You can do it with in the cloud, or you can, uh, ask Dell technologies with our apex business services to help provide cyber recovery services wherever for you at your co at yet OnPrem or for you from the cloud. So it's kind of giving the customer, allowing them to keep that freedom of choice of how they want to operate, but provide them those same recovery capabilities. >>So Tony, give us paint us a picture without giving away too much for the bad guys. How, how you approach this, maybe are you using some of these products? What's your sort of infrastructure look like? >>Yeah. Without giving away the state secrets, um, we are heavily invested in the cyber recovery vault and cyber sense. Uh, it plays heavily in our strategy. We wanna make sure we have a safe Harbor for our data. And that's something that, that the Dell power protect cyber recovery vault provides to us. Uh, we're exceptionally excited about the, the development that's going on, especially with apex. We're looking at that, and that has really captured our imagination. It could be a game changer for us as a town because we're, we're a small organization transitioning to a midsize organization and what apex provides and what the Dell cyber recovery vault provides to us. Putting those two together gives us the elasticity we need as a small organization to expand quickly and deal with our internal data concerns. >>So cyber recovery as a service is what you're interested in. Let me ask you a question. Are you interested in a managed service or are you interested in managing it yourself? >>That's a great question, personally. I would prefer that we went with managed services. I think that from a manager's perspective, you get a bigger bang for the buck going with managed services. You have people that work with that technology all the time. You don't have to ramp people up and develop that expertise in house. You also then have that peace of mind that you have more people that are doing the services and it acts as a force multiplier for you. So from a dollar and cents perspective, it's the way that you want to go. When I start talking to my internal people, of course, there's that, that sense of fear that comes with the unknown and especially outsourcing that type of critical infrastructure, the there's some concern there, but I think that with education, with exposure, to some of the things that we get from the managed service, it makes sense for everybody to go that >>Route and, and you can, I presume sort of POC it and then expand it and then get more comfortable with it and then say, okay, when it's hardened and ready now, this is the, the Def facto standard across the organization. >>I suspect we'll end up in a hybrid environment to begin with where we'll some assets on site, and then we'll have some assets in the cloud. And that's again, where apex will be that, that big linchpin for us and really make it all work. How >>Important are air gaps? >>Oh, they're incredibly, incredibly, uh, needed right now. You cannot have true data of security without having an air gap. A lot of the ransomware that we see moves laterally through your organization. So if you have, uh, all your data backed up in the same data center that your, your backups and your primary data sources are in odds are they're all gonna get owned at the same time. So having that air gap solution in there is critical to having the peace of mind that allows the CISO to sleep at night. >>I always tell my crypto and NFT readers, this doesn't apply to data centers. You gotta air back air, air gap, your crypto, you know, when you're NFT. So how do you guys Steve deal with, with air gap? Can you explain the solutions? >>So in the, in the cyber recovery vault itself, it is driven through, uh, you've got one, uh, power protect, uh, appliance on one, one side in your data center, and then wherever your, your, your vaulted area is, whether it be a colo, whether it be on pre wherever it might be. Uh, we create a connection between between the two that is one directional, right? So we send the data to that vault. We call it the vault and, you know, we replicate a copy of your backup data. Once it lives over there, we make a copy of that data. And then what we do is with the cyber sense technology that Tony was talking about, we scan that data and we validate it against, with a whole cyber sense is built on IML machine learning. We look at a couple hundred different kind of profiles that come through and compare it to the, to the day before as backup and the day before that and understand kind of what's changing. >>And is it changing the right way? Right? Like there might be some reasons it it's supposed to change that way. Right. But things that look anomalous, we send up a warning when we let the people know that, you know, whoever's monitoring, something's going on. You might want to take a look. And then based on that, if there's whatever's happening in the environment, we have the ability to then recover that data back to the, to the original system. You can use the vault as a, as a clean room area, if you want to send people to it, depending on kind of what's going on in, in, in your main data center. So there's a lot of things we do to protect that. Do >>You recommend, like changing the timing of when you take, you know, snapshots or you do the same time every day, it's gotta create different patterns or >>I'll tell you that's, that's one thing to keep the, keep the hackers on their tow, right? It it's tough to do operationally, right? Because you kind that's processes. But, but the reality is if you really are that, uh, concerned about attacks, that makes a lot of sense, >>Tony, what's the CISOs number one challenge today? >>Uh, I, it has to be resilience. It has to be making sure your organization that if or when they get hit, that you're able to pick the pieces back up and get the operation back up as quickly and efficiently as possible. Making sure that the, the mission critical data is immediately, uh, recoverable and be able to be put back into play. >>And, and what's the biggest challenge or best practice in terms of doing that? Obviously the technology, the people, the process >>Right now, I would probably say it's it's people, uh, we're going through the, the, um, a period of, of uncertainty in the marketplace when it comes to trying to find people. So it is difficult to find the right people to do certain things, which is why managed services is so important to an organization of our size and, and what we're trying to do, where we are, are incorporating such big ideas. We need those manager services because we just can't find the bodies that can do some of this work. >>You got an interesting background, you a PhD in psychology, you're an educator, you're a golf pro and you're a CISO. I I've never met anybody like you, Tony <laugh>. So, thanks for coming on, Steve, give you the last word. >>Well, I think I, I think one of the things that Tony said, and I wanted to parlay this a little bit, uh, from that Gartner report, I even talked about people is so critical when it comes to cyber resiliency and that sort of thing. And one of the things I talked about in that embraced the breach report is as you're looking to hire staff for your environment, right, you wanna, you know, a lot of people might shy away from hiring that CSO that got fired because they had a cyber event. Right, right. Oh, maybe they didn't do their job. But the reality is, is those folks, because this is very new. I mean, of course we've been talking about cyber for a couple of years, but, but getting that experience under your belt and understanding what happens in the event. I mean, there are a lot of companies that run things like cyber ranges, resiliency, ranges to put people through the paces of, Hey, this is what have happens when an event happens and are you prepared to respond? I think there's a big set of learning lessons that happens when you go through one of those events and it helps kind of educate the people about what's needed. >>It's a great point. Failure used to mean fire right in this industry. And, and today it's different. The adversary is very well armed and quite capable and motivated that learning even during, even when you fail, can be applied to succeed in the future or not fail, I guess there's no such thing as success in your business. Guys. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks very >>Much. >>All right. And thank you for watching the cubes coverage of Dell tech world 2022. This is Dave Valenti. We'll be back with John furrier, Lisa Martin and David Nicholson. Two days of wall to wall coverage left. Keep it with us.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase Open Cloud Innovations. This is season two of the ongoing series. We're covering exciting start startups in the AWS ecosystem to talk about open source community stuff. I'm your host, Dave Nicholson. And I'm delighted today to have two guests from Weaveworks. Steve George, COO of Weaveworks, and Steve Waterworth, technical marketing engineer from Weaveworks. Welcome, gentlemen, how are you? >> Very well, thanks. >> Very well, thanks very much. >> So, Steve G., what's the relationship with AWS? This is the AWS Startup Showcase. How do Weaveworks and AWS interact? >> Yeah sure. So, AWS is a investor in Weaveworks. And we, actually, collaborate really closely around EKS and some specific EKS tooling. So, in the early days of Kubernetes when AWS was working on EKS, the Elastic Kubernetes Service, we started working on the command line interface for EKS itself. And due to that partnership, we've been working closely with the EKS team for a long period of time, helping them to build the CLI and make sure that users in the community find EKS really easy to use. And so that brought us together with the AWS team, working on GitOps and thinking about how to deploy applications and clusters using this GitOps approach. And we've built that into the EKS CLI, which is an open source tool, is a project on GitHub. So, everybody can get involved with that, use it, contribute to it. We love hearing user feedback about how to help teams take advantage of the elastic nature of Kubernetes as simply and easily as possible. >> Well, it's great to have you. Before we get into the specifics around what Weaveworks is doing in this area that we're about to discuss, let's talk about this concept of GitOps. Some of us may have gotten too deep into a Netflix series, and we didn't realize that we've moved on from the world of DevOps or DevSecOps and the like. Explain where GitOps fits into this evolution. >> Yeah, sure. So, really GitOps is an instantiation, a version of DevOps. And it fits within the idea that, particularly in the Kubernetes world, we have a model in Kubernetes, which tells us exactly what we want to deploy. And so what we're talking about is using Git as a way of recording what we want to be in the runtime environment, and then telling Kubernetes from the configuration that is stored in Git exactly what we want to deploy. So, in a sense, it's very much aligned with DevOps, because we know we want to bring teams together, help them to deploy their applications, their clusters, their environments. And really with GitOps, we have a specific set of tools that we can use. And obviously what's nice about Git is it's a very developer tool, or lots and lots of developers use it, the vast majority. And so what we're trying to do is bring those operational processes into the way that developers work. So, really bringing DevOps to that generation through that specific tooling. >> So Steve G., let's continue down this thread a little bit. Why is it necessary then this sort of added wrinkle? If right now in my organization we have developers, who consider themselves to be DevOps folks, and we give them Amazon gift cards each month. And we say, "Hey, it's a world of serverless, "no code, low code lights out data centers. "Go out and deploy your code. "Everything should be fine." What's the problem with that model, and how does GitOps come in and address that? >> Right. I think there's a couple of things. So, for individual developers, one of the big challenges is that, when you watch development teams, like deploying applications and running them, you watch them switching between all those different tabs, and services, and systems that they're using. So, GitOps has a real advantage to developers, because they're already sat in Git, they're already using their familiar tooling. And so by bringing operations within that developer tooling, you're giving them that familiarity. So, it's one advantage for developers. And then for operations staff, one of the things that it does is it centralizes where all of this configuration is kept. And then you can use things like templating and some other things that we're going to be talking about today to make sure that you automate and go quickly, but you also do that in a way which is reliable, and secure, and stable. So, it's really helping to bring that run fast, but don't break things kind of ethos to how we can deploy and run applications in the cloud. >> So, Steve W., let's start talking about where Weaveworks comes into the picture, and what's your perspective. >> So, yeah, Weaveworks has an engine, a set of software, that enables this to happen. So, think of it as a constant reconciliation engine. So, you've got your declared state, your desired state is declared in Git. So, this is where all your YAML for all your Kubernetes hangs out. And then you have an agent that's running inside Kubernetes, that's the Weaveworks GitOps agent. And it's constantly comparing the desired state in Git with the actual state, which is what's running in Kubernetes. So, then as a developer, you want to make a change, or an operator, you want to make a change. You push a change into Git. The reconciliation loop runs and says, "All right, what we've got in Git does not match "what we've got in Kubernetes. "Therefore, I will create story resource, whatever." But it also works the other way. So, if someone does directly access Kubernetes and make a change, then the next time that reconciliation loop runs, it's automatically reverted back to that single source of truth in Git. So, your Kubernetes cluster, you don't get any configuration drift. It's always configured as you desire it to be configured. And as Steve George has already said, from a developer or engineer point of view, it's easy to use. They're just using Git just as they always have done and continue to do. There's nothing new to learn. No change to working practices. I just push code into Git, magic happens. >> So, Steve W., little deeper dive on that. When we hear Ops, a lot of us start thinking about, specifically in terms of infrastructure, and especially since infrastructure when deployed and left out there, even though it's really idle, you're paying for it. So, anytime there's an Ops component to the discussion, cost and resource management come into play. You mentioned this idea of not letting things drift from a template. What are those templates based on? Are they based on... Is this primarily an infrastructure discussion, or are we talking about the code itself that is outside of the infrastructure discussion? >> It's predominantly around the infrastructure. So, what you're managing in Git, as far as Kubernetes is concerned, is always deployment files, and services, and horizontal pod autoscalers, all those Kubernetes entities. Typically, the source code for your application, be it in Java, Node.js, whatever it is you happen to be writing it in, that's, typically, in a separate repository. You, typically, don't combine the two. So, you've got one set of repository, basically, for building your containers, and your CLI will run off that, and ultimately push a container into a registry somewhere. Then you have a separate repo, which is your config. repo, which declares what version of the containers you're going to run, how many you're going to run, how the services are bound to those containers, et cetera. >> Yeah, that makes sense. Steve G., talk to us about this concept of trusted application delivery with GitOps, and frankly, it's what led to the sort of prior question. When you think about trusted application delivery, where is that intertwinement between what we think of as the application code versus the code that is creating the infrastructure? So, what is trusted application delivery? >> Sure, so, with GitOps, we have the ability to deploy the infrastructure components. And then we also define what the application containers are, that would go to be deployed into that environment. And so, this is a really interesting question, because some teams will associate all of the services that an application needs within an application team. And sometimes teams will deploy sort of horizontal infrastructure, which then all application teams services take advantage of. Either way, you can define that within your configuration, within your GitOps configuration. Now, when you start deploying speed, particularly when you have multiple different teams doing these sorts of deployments, one of the questions that starts to come up will be from the security team, or someone who's thinking about, well, what happens if we make a deployment, which is accidentally incorrect, or if there is a security issue in one of those dependencies, and we need to get a new version deployed as quickly as possible? And so, in the GitOps pipeline, one of the things that we can do is to put in various checkpoints to check that the policy is being followed correctly. So, are we deploying the right number of applications, the right configuration of an application? Does that application follow certain standards that the enterprise has set down? And that's what we talk about when we talk about trusted policy and trusted delivery. Because really what we're thinking about here is enabling the development teams to go as quickly as possible with their new deployments, but protecting them with automated guard rails. So, making sure that they can go fast, but they are not going to do anything which destroys the reliability of the application platform. >> Yeah, you've mentioned reliability and kind of alluded to scalability in the application environment. What about looking at this from the security perspective? There've been some recently, pretty well publicized breaches. Not a lot of senior executives in enterprises understand that a very high percentage of code that their businesses are running on is coming out of the open source community, where developers and maintainers are, to a certain degree, what they would consider to be volunteers. That can be a scary thing. So, talk about why an enterprise struggles today with security, policy, and governance. And I toss this out to Steve W. Or Steve George. Answer appropriately. >> I'll try that in a high level, and Steve W. can give more of the technical detail. I mean, I'll say that when I talk to enterprise customers, there's two areas of concern. One area of concern is that, we're in an environment with DevOps where we started this conversation of trying to help teams to go as quickly as possible. But there's many instances where teams accidentally do things, but, nonetheless, that is a security issue. They deploy something manually into an environment, they forget about it, and that's something which is wrong. So, helping with this kind of policy as code pipeline, ensuring that everything goes through a set of standards could really help teams. And that's why we call it developer guard rails, because this is about helping the development team by providing automation around the outside, that helps them to go faster and relieves them from that mental concern of have they made any mistakes or errors. So, that's one form. And then the other form is the form, where you are going, David, which is really around security dependencies within software, a whole supply chain of concern. And what we can do there, by, again, having a set of standard scanners and policy checking, which ensures that everything is checked before it goes into the environment. That really helps to make sure that there are no security issues in the runtime deployment. Steve W., anything that I missed there? >> Yeah, well, I'll just say, I'll just go a little deeper on the technology bit. So, essentially, we have a library of policies, which get you started. Of course, you can modify those policies, write your own. The library is there just to get you going. So, as a change is made, typically, via, say, a GitHub action, the policy engine then kicks in and checks all those deployment files, all those YAML for Kubernetes, and looks for things that then are outside of policy. And if that's the case, then the action will fail, and that'll show up on the pull request. So, things like, are your containers coming from trusted sources? You're not just pulling in some random container from a public registry. You're actually using a trusted registry. Things like, are containers running as route, or are they running in privileged mode, which, again, it could be a security? But it's not just about security, it can also be about coding standards. Are the containers correctly annotated? Is the deployment correctly annotated? Does it have the annotation fields that we require for our coding standards? And it can also be about reliability. Does the deployment script have the health checks defined? Does it have a suitable replica account? So, a rolling update. We'll actually do a rolling update. You can't do a rolling update with only one replica. So, you can have all these sorts of checks and guards in there. And then finally, there's an admission controller that runs inside Kubernetes. So, if someone does try and squeeze through, and do something a little naughty, and go directly to the cluster, it's not going to happen, 'cause that admission controller is going to say, "Hey, no, that's a policy violation. "I'm not letting that in." So, it really just stops. It stops developers making mistakes. I know, I know, I've done development, and I've deployed things into Kubernetes, and haven't got the conflict quite right, and then it falls flat on its face. And you're sitting there scratching your head. And with the policy checks, then that wouldn't happen. 'Cause you would try and put something in that has a slightly iffy configuration, and it would spit it straight back out at you. >> So, obviously you have some sort of policy engine that you're you're relying on. But what is the user experience like? I mean, is this a screen that is reminiscent of the matrix with non-readable characters streaming down that only another machine can understand? What does this look like to the operator? >> Yeah, sure, so, we have a console, a web console, where developers and operators can use a set of predefined policies. And so that's the starting point. And we have a set of recommendations there and policies that you can just attach to your deployments. So, set of recommendations about different AWS resources, deployment types, EKS deployment types, different sets of standards that your enterprise might be following along with. So, that's one way of doing it. And then you can take those policies and start customizing them to your needs. And by using GitOps, what we're aiming for here is to bring both the application configuration, the environment configuration. We talked about this earlier, all of this being within Git. We're adding these policies within Git as well. So, for advanced users, they'll have everything that they need together in a single unit of change, your application, your definitions of how you want to run this application service, and the policies that you want it to follow, all together in Git. And then when there is some sort of policy violation on the other end of the pipeline, people can see where this policy is being violated, how it was violated. And then for a set of those, we try and automate by showing a pull request for the user about how they can fix this policy violation. So, try and make it as simple as possible. Because in many of these sorts of violations, if you're a busy developer, there'll be minor configuration details going against the configuration, and you just want to fix those really quickly. >> So Steve W., is that what the Mega Leaks policy engine is? >> Yes, that's the Mega Leaks policy engine. So, yes, it's a SaaS-based service that holds the actual policy engine and your library of policies. So, when your GitHub action runs, it goes and essentially makes a call across with the configuration and does the check and spits out any violation errors, if there are any. >> So, folks in this community really like to try things before they deploy them. Is there an opportunity for people to get a demo of this, get their hands on it? what's the best way to do that? >> The best way to do it is have a play with it. As an engineer, I just love getting my hands dirty with these sorts of things. So, yeah, you can go to the Mega Leaks website and get a 30-day free trial. You can spin yourself up a little, test cluster, and have a play. >> So, what's coming next? We had DevOps, and then DevSecOps, and now GitOps. What's next? Are we going to go back to all infrastructure on premises all the time, back to waterfall? Back to waterfall, "Hot Tub Time Machine?" What's the prediction? >> Well, I think the thing that you set out right at the start, actually, is the prediction. The difference between infrastructure and applications is steadily going away, as we try and be more dynamic in the way that we deploy. And for us with GitOps, I think we're... When we talk about operations, there's a lots of depth to what we mean about operations. So, I think there's lots of areas to explore how to bring operations into developer tooling with GitOps. So, that's, I think, certainly where Weaveworks will be focusing. >> Well, as an old infrastructure guy myself, I see this as vindication. Because infrastructure still matters, kids. And we need sophisticated ways to make sure that the proper infrastructure is applied. People are shocked to learn that even serverless application environments involve servers. So, I tell my 14-year-old son this regularly, he doesn't believe it, but it is what it is. Steve W., any final thoughts on this whole move towards GitOps and, specifically, the Weaveworks secret sauce and superpower. >> Yeah. It's all about (indistinct)... It's all about going as quickly as possible, but without tripping up. Being able to run fast, but without tripping over your shoe laces, which you forgot to tie up. And that's what the automation brings. It allows you to go quickly, does lots of things for you, and yeah, we try and stop you shooting yourself in the foot as you're going. >> Well, it's been fantastic talking to both of you today. For the audience's sake, I'm in California, and we have a gentleman in France, and a gentlemen in the UK. It's just the wonders of modern technology never cease. Thanks, again, Steve Waterworth, Steve George from Weaveworks. Thanks for coming on theCUBE for the AWS Startup Showcase. And to the rest of us, keep it right here for more action on theCUBE, your leader in tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome everyone. I'm Dave Nicholson with the cube. This is a special Q conversation. That is part of the AWS startup showcase. Season two. Got a very interesting conversation on deck with Steve Francis who joins us from Instaclustr. Steve is the chief revenue officer and executive vice president for go-to-market operations for Insta cluster. Steve, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you, Dave. Good to be here. >>It looks like you're on a, uh, you're you're you're coming to us from an exotic locale. Or do you just like to have a nautical theme in your office? >>No, I'm actually on my boat. I have lots of kids at home and, uh, it can be very noisy. So, uh, we call this our apartment in the city and sometimes when we need a quiet place, this, this does nicely >>Well, fantastic. Well, let's, let's talk about Instaclustr. Um, first give us, give us a primmer on Instaclustr and, uh, and what you guys do. And then let's double click on that and go into some of the details. >>Sure. So in sip cluster, we offer a SAS platform for data layer, open source technologies. And what those technologies have in common is they scale massively. We re curate technologies that are capable of massive scale. So people use them to solve big problems typically. And so in addition to SAS offerings for those open source projects where people can provision themselves clusters in minutes, um, we also offer support for all of the technologies that we offer on our SAS platform. We offer our customer support contracts as well. And then we have a consulting team, a global consulting team who are expert in all of those open source projects that can help with implementations that can help with design health checks, uh, you name it. So most of what they do is kind of short term expert engagements, but we've also done longer-term projects with them as well. >>So your business model is to be a SAS provider as opposed to an alternative, which would be to, uh, provide what's referred to as, uh, open core software. Is that, is that right? >>Yeah, that's exactly right. So you, so when, when our customers have an interest in using community open source, we're the right partner for them. And so, you know, really what that means is if they, whether it's our SAS platform, if, if they want the flexibility to say, we want to take that workload off of your SAS platform, maybe at some point operated ourselves because we're not throwing a bunch of PROPRICER proprietary stuff in there. They have the flexibility to do that. So they always have an exit ramp without being locked in and with our support customers, of course, it's very easy. What we support is both the open source project. And if there's a gap in that open source project, what we'll do is rather than create a proprietary piece of software to close the gap, we'll source something from the community and we'll support that. Or if it, or if something does not exist in the community, in many cases, we'll write it ourselves and open source it and then, and then support it. >>Yeah, it's interesting. Uh, supposedly Henry Ford made a comment once that if you ask customers what they want, they'll tell you they want a faster horse, uh, but he was inventing the automobile and some people have, have likened open core to sort of the faster mechanical horse version of open source where you're essentially substituting an old school legacy vendor for a new school vendor. That's wrapping their own proprietary stuff around a delicious core of open source, but it sort of diminishes the value proposition of open source. It sounds like that's, that's the philosophy that you have adopted at this point. That's >>I love that story. I haven't heard that before. One that I like, uh, you know, matching metaphor for metaphor, uh, is, uh, the, um, is the Luddites, right? You know, the Luddites didn't want to lose their weaving jobs. And so they would smash weeding looms and, um, you know, to, to protect their reading jobs. And I think it's the same thing with the open core model they're protecting, uh, you know, they're creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about open, open sourcing. Oh, it isn't secure. And, you know, the, those, those arguments have been used for 15 years or 20 years. And, you know, maybe 15 years ago there were some truth to it. But when you look at who is using open source community open source now for huge projects, you know, if you just do a search for Apache coffee users and go to the Apache Apache website, you know, it's kind of the who's who in big business, and these are people using community open source. And so, um, a lot of the fear and uncertainty and doubt is still used, and it's just, you know, it's just kind of hanging on to a business model that isn't really it's for the benefit of the, of the vendor and not the benefit of the customer. >>Well, so I can imagine being a customer and realizing several years into an open core journey that I basically painted myself into a similar corner that I was in before. Um, and so I can see where that, you know, that can be something that is a realization that, that creeps up over time from a customer perspective, but from your business model perspective, um, if I'm understanding correctly, your, when you scale, you're scaling the ability to, um, take over operations for our customer, uh, that, that some level, I'm sure you've got automation involved in this. Uh, but at some level you've got to scale in terms of really smart people, um, has that limited your ability to scale. So first talk about what have the results been. You guys we've been covering you since 2018. What have your results been over time and has that sort of limited that that limit to your scalability, uh, been an issue at all. >>It's hard to find people, uh, it's hard, it's hard for our customers to find people and it's hard for us to find people. So we have an advantage for two reasons. Number one, we have a really good process for hiring people, hiring graduates, recent computer science graduates typically, and then getting them trained up and productive on our platform and within a pretty short timeframe of three or four months. And, um, you know, so we we've, we've, uh, we have a really well-proven process to do that. And then the other thing that you've already alluded to is automation, right? There's a ton of automation built into our platform. So we have a big cost advantage over our customers. So, you know, our, our customers, you know, if they want to go hire a seasoned, you know, Kafka person or PostGrest personal work, a person, these people are incredibly expensive in the market, but for us, we can get those people for relatively less expensive. And then with the automation that we have built into our platform to do all the operational tasks and handle all the operational burdens on those different open source projects, it's a lot of it's automated. And so, uh, you know, where one of our experts can use, you know, the number of workloads that they can operate is usually, you know, many times more than what someone could do without all of the operational capability or all the automated capabilities that we have. >>So what has your, what is your plan for scaling the business look like into the future? Is it a additional investment in those core operators? Uh, are you looking at, uh, uh, expansion, geographically acquisition? What, what can you share with us? >>We've done some acquisition. We added a Postgres capability. We recently added a last, further Alaska search capability and really buttressed our capabilities there. I think we'll do more of that. And, um, we, we will continue to add technologies that we find interesting and, and federal model, usually what we look for technologies that are pretty popular. They're used to solve big problems and they're complicated to manage, right? If something's easy to manage, people are less likely to perceive our value to be that great. So we look for things that, um, you know, are we kind of take the biggest areas, gnarliest, um, open-source projects for people to manage, and we handle the heavy lifting. >>Well, can you give me an example of something like that? You don't have to, you don't have to share a customer name if you don't, if it's not appropriate, but give us a, give us an example of, of Instaclustr inaction pretend I'm the customer. And, uh, and, uh, you know, you mentioned elastic search. Let's say that, let's say that that is absolutely something that's involved. And I have a choice between some open, open core solution and throwing my people at it to manage it, uh, and, and, and operate at the data layer, uh, versus what you would do. What does that interaction look like? How do, how does the process, >>Um, so one thing that we hear from elastic search customers a lot is, uh, their customers, some of them are unhappy. And what they'll tell us is look, when we get an operational problem with Alaska search, we go to Alaska search. And the answer we get from them is we gotta buy, you know, you gotta buy more stuff, you got to add more nodes, and they're in the business of, uh, you know, that's, that's our business. And, uh, you know, they do have a SAS offering, but, um, you know, they're, they're also in the business of selling software. And so when those customers, those same customers come to us, our answer is often, well, Hey, we can help you optimize your environment. And, you know, a lot of times when we onboard people into our platform, they'll achieve cost savings because maybe they weren't on the cloud. Maybe they weren't completely optimized there. And, um, you know, we want to make sure that they get a good operational experience and that's how we felt lock customers in, right. We don't lock them in with code. We make sure that they have a positive experience that we take a lot of that operational stuff off their hands. And so there's just a good natural alignment between what we want to provide that customer and what they ultimately want to consume. Uh, you know, that, that alignment I think is, is uniquely high within our business. >>Well, so how, how have things changed just in the last several years? Obviously, I mean, you know, the, the pandemic has, has affected everything in, in one way or another, but, but in terms of things that live at the data layer being important, um, I mean, just in the last three or four years, the talk of various messaging interfaces and databases has shifted to a degree. Um, what do you see on the horizon? What's, what's, what's, what's getting buzz that maybe didn't get buzz a year ago. What, what, what are you looking for as well? If you're out looking for people with skill sets right now, what are those skill sets you're hiring to? >>I don't hire engineers, right. I run the go to market organization. I hire marketers, salespeople, consultants, but, uh, so it's probably different. I'm maybe not the best person to ask from an engineering standpoint, but, uh, your question about the data layer, um, and how, you know, that's evolving trends that we see it's becoming increasingly strategic. You know, every, there's a couple of buzzwords out there that, you know, for years now, people have been talking about, um, modernization, digital transformation, stuff like that, but, you know, there's, there's a lot to it like digital, you know, every business kind of needs to become a digital business. And as that happens, the amount of data that's produced is, is just as mushrooming, right. You know, the amount of data on the planet doubles about every two years. And so for a lot of applications for a lot of enterprise mission-critical applications, data is the most expensive layer of the application. >>You know, much more expensive than delivering a front end, much more expensive than delivering a military when you just, when you factor in storage, um, uh, just the kind of moving data in and out, you know, data transfer fees, the cost of engineering resources that it's, it's incredibly expensive. So data layers are becoming strategic because organizations are looking at it and realizing, you know, the amount that they're spending on this is eye-popping. And so that's why it's becoming strategic. It's on the radar, just due to the, uh, the size of bills that organizations are looking at. Um, and we could drive those bills down. You know, our value proposition is really simpler. It's a better, faster, cheaper, and we eliminate the license fees. We can, you know, we are operational experts, so we can get people architected in the cloud more efficiently, and probably about a third of the time we save our customers cloud fees. Um, so it's, you know, it's a pretty simple model that some of those things that are strategically more, or are there, sorry, traditionally more tactical or becoming strategic, just because of the scope and scale of them. >>We, uh, we're having this conversation as part of the AWS startup showcase, which basically means that AWS said, Hey, Silicon angle, have your cube guys go talk to these people because we think they're cool. So, um, so why, why, why do they think you're cool? Are you a wholly owned subsidiary of AWS? Did you, did you and your family, uh, uh, exceed the 300 order, uh, Amazon threshold last year? Y what's your relationship with Amazon? >>I bought an elf on the shelf from, I don't know, I don't know why. Um, you know, we're, we're growing fast and we're, we're growing north of 50% last year in 21 and closer to 60%. Um, you know, we certainly, I think, uh, when our customers sign up for our services, you know, Amazon gets more workloads. That's, that's probably a positive thing for Amazon. Um, we're certainly not, you know, there's much, much, much bigger vendors and partners than us that they have, but, uh, but you know, they're, I think they're aware that there's, there's some, some of the smaller vendors like us will grow up to be, you know, the, you know, the bigger vendors of tomorrow. Um, but they've kind of, they've been a great partner. You know, we, we support multiple, we do support multiple clouds, and Amazon's cool with that. You know, we support GCP, we support Azure and kind of give our customers the choice of what clouds they want to run on. Uh, most of our customers do run an Amazon that seems to be sort of a defacto standard, but, um, they haven't been a great partner, >>But, but AWS, it's not a dependency. Uh, if you're, if you're working within the cluster, it doesn't mean that you must be in AWS. >>Nope. We can support customers. Uh, that's a great question. So we can support customers and multiple clouds, and we even support them on prem, right? If they, if organizations that have their own data center, we actually have an on-premise managed service offering. And if that's not a fit, we even have, um, we can offer support contracts, like if they want to do it themselves and do a lot of the heavy lifting and just need sort of a red phone for emergency situations. Uh, we offer 24 by 7, 365 support with 20 minutes service levels for urgent issues. >>So your chief revenue officer, that means that you write the code that runs operations in your system. I'm not smiling, but I'm at, but I'm, but I am actually joking. So that's what the dry sense of humor. Uh, but, but, but seriously, let's talk about the business end of this, right? We have, uh, we have a lot of folks who, uh, who tuned into the queue because of the technology aspect of it, but let's talk about your, your growth trajectory over time. Um, uh, this isn't a drill down. I'm not asking for your, your pipeline, Steve, but, uh, but, but, you know, give us an idea of what that trajectory has looked like. Um, what's going on. >>Yeah. I mean the most recent year, you know, we're, we're getting, uh, to be, um, I, I don't know what I'm permitted to share expect, but I, you know, we've, we've had a lot of growth, you know, if we've won a couple, a couple of hundred percent, our revenue has in the amount of time that I've been here, which is three years, and we're the point now, or pretty good size. Uh, and that gives us, uh, it's cool. It's exciting. You know, we're, we're noticing in the market is people who traded two years ago. People, no one knew who we were. And now we're beginning to talk to some partners, some resellers, some customers, and they will say things like, oh yeah, we've heard of you. We didn't know what you did, but we've heard of you. And, you know, that's, that's fun. That's a great place to be. Uh, you know, it becomes a little bit self-sustaining at that point. And, um, we, you know, we are about to launch, I, it's not a secret because this isn't public preview. So I think >>Was there, I noticed the pause where you're like, can I say this or not? Go ahead and say, go ahead and say, >>Really we, uh, I was trying to think, wait, am I revealing anything here? I shouldn't. But, uh, we did just go public preview, uh, probably a month ago with a project called Aiden's, uh, cadence workflow. Uh, you can actually, um, go to the Instaclustr website and look up cadence. Um, it's run their homepage, or you can, if you want to go to the open source project itself, you can go to cadence, workflow.io. Uh, this is a project that's trending pretty highly on Google. It's got a lot of important movers in the technology business that are using it and having a lot of success with it. Uh, and we're going to be first to market globally with a SAS offering for cadence, port flop. And, um, it's an incredibly exciting project. And it's exciting for us to specifically, because it's a little different, right? It's not, it's a middle tier project that is targeted at developers to increase developer productivity and developer velocity. >>Um, you joked about my being a CRO writing code, but I actually used to be a coder long time ago. I was not very good at it, but what I did enough of it to remember that a lot of what I did as a coder was right. Plumbing code, you know, rather than writing that code that makes the business application function a huge amount of my time as a developer was spent writing, you know, just the plumbing code to make things work and to make it secure and to make a transactional and just all that, you know, kind of nitty gritty code that you gotta do in a nutshell, cadence makes writing that code way easier. So especially for distributed applications that have workflow like capabilities requirements, uh, it's a massive productivity and PR increaser. So it's cool. Exciting for us is now we can, rather than just target data operators, we can actually target developers and engage, not just at the data layer, but kind of at that middle tier as well, and begin to, uh, identify and, um, uh, synergies between the different services that we have and, and our customers will obviously benefit from that. >>So that's a big part of our growth strategy. >>Yeah. So more, more on from a business perspective and a go to market perspective. Um, what is your, what is your go to market strategy or, uh, do you have, do you have a channel strategy? Are you working with partners? >>He is pretty nascent. You know, our go to market strategy for the most part has been, you know, we, uh, pay the Google gods and, and lots of people come to our website and say, they want to talk to us. You know, we talked to them and we get them signed up with, uh, uh, on our, our, our SAS platform or with a support contract or with our consulting team. Um, we also do outbound, you know, we do, we have an inside sales team that does outbound prospecting and we have, um, and we also have some self-service. We have some, some self service customers as well that just, you know, anyone can go to our website, swipe a credit card, sign up for one of our SAS offering and begin, literally get fired up in minutes and PR and using the platform. Uh, so, you know, it's a bit of a mix of high touch, low touch, I think are, you know, we have tons of big logos. >>We know lots and lots of our customers are household name, really big organizations solving big problems. And, um, that's kind of where the bulk of our businesses. And so I think we've been a little more focused there and go to market than we have sort of a know startup selling to startups and the people that just from super developer focused, wanting low touch. So, but I think we need to do better at that part of the market. And we are investing some resources there so that, you know, we're not so lopsided at the high end of the market. We want kind of a, more of a balanced approach because, you know, some of those, some of those, um, younger companies are going to grow up to be big massively successful companies. We've had that, you know, door dash is a tough class, has been a customer of ours for years, and they were not nearly, you know, we, there were a prepayment, there were custom bars, pre pandemic, and we all know what happened to them, uh, during the pandemic. And so, you know, we know there's other door dashes out there. >>Yeah. Yeah. Uh, uh, final question, geography, uh, you guys global. I, uh, I know you're in north America, but, um, what, what, what does that look like for you? Where are you at? >>We're super global. So, you know, in my go-to-market organization, we have sellers in, um, uh, AsiaPac and Europe, you know, multiple in Asia, multiple in Europe, uh, you know, lots of lots in the, in the states, uh, same with marketing, uh, same with engineering, same with our tech ops delivery team. We have most of them, uh, in Australia, which is where we were founded. Uh, but we also have a pretty good sized team, uh, out of Boston and, um, kind of a nascent team, uh, in India as well, to help to tell it, to help them out. So yeah, very much global and, um, you know, getting close to 300 employees, um, you know, when I started, I think we're about 85 to 90, >>That's it, that's an exciting growth trajectory. And, uh, I'm just going to assume, because it just feels awesome to assume it that since you're on a boat and since you were founded in Australia, that that's how you go back and forth to, uh, to visit the most. >>Yeah. Yeah. It takes a while. It takes a while. >>So with that, Steve, I want to say a smooth sailing and, uh, and, uh, thanks for joining us here on the cube. I'm Dave Nicholson. Uh, this has been part of the AWS startup showcase my conversation with Steve Francis of Instaclustr again. Thanks Steve. Stay tuned. >>Thanks very much to you, >>Your source for hybrid tech coverage.

(bright music) >> Welcome back to AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE. And we're here with Steve Mullaney, who is the president and CEO of Aviatrix. Steve, I got to tell ya, great to see you man. >> We started the whole pandemic, last show we did was with you guys. >> Steve: Don't say we started, we didn't start it. (steve chuckles) >> Right, we kicked it off (all cross talking) >> It's going to be great. >> Our virtual coverage, that hybrid coverage that we did, how ironic? >> Steve: Yeah, was as the world was shutting down. >> So, great to see you face to face. >> Steve: Great to see you too. >> Wow, so you're two years in? >> Steve: Two and a half years yeah. >> Started, the company was standing start $2 billion valuation, raised a bunch of dough. >> Steve: Yeah. >> That's good, you got to feel good about that. >> We were 38 people, two and a half years ago, we're now 400. We had a couple million in ARR, we're now going to be over a 100 million next year, next calendar year, so significant growth. We just raised $200 million, three months ago at a $2 billion valuation. Now have 550 customers, 54 of them are fortune 500, when I started two and a half years ago, we didn't have any fortune 500s, we had probably about a 100 customers. So, massive growth, big growth (indistinct). >> Awesome, I got to ask you, I love to ask CEO's, entrepreneurs, how did you know when to scale? >> You just know it, when you see it. (indistinct) Yeah, there's no formula, you just know it and what you look for is that point where you say, okay, we've now proven the model and until you do that you minimize things and we actually just went through this. We had 12 sales teams, four months ago, we now have 50. 50, five zero and it's that step function as a company, you don't want to linearly grow 'cause you want to hold until you say, it's happening. And then once you say it's happening, okay, the dogs are eating the dog food, this is good then you flip the other way, and then you say, let's grow as fast as we possibly can and that's kind of the mode we're in right now. >> Okay, You've... >> You just know it when you see it. >> Other piece of that is how fast do you scale? And now you're sort of doing that step function as your going. >> Steve: We are going as fast as we possibly can. >> Wow, that's awesome, congratulations and I know you've got to long way to go. So okay, let's talk about the big trends that you're seeing that Aviatrix has taken advantage of, maybe explain a little bit about what you guys do. >> Yeah. So we are, what I like to call Multi- Cloud Native Networking and Network Security. So, if you think of... >> David: What is multicloud native? You got to explain that. >> I got to to explain that. Here's what's happened, it's happening and what I mean by it's happening is, enterprises at two and a half years ago, this is why I joined Aviatrix, all decided for the first time, we mean it now, we are going into Cloud 'cause before that they were just mouthing it. And they said, "We're going into the Cloud." And oh by the way, I knew two and a half years ago of course it was going to be multicloud, 'cause enterprises run workloads where they run best. That's what they do, it's sometimes it's AWS, sometimes it's ads or sometimes it's Google, it's of course going to be multicloud. And so from an enterprise perspective, they love the DevOps, they love the simplicity, the automation, the infrastructure is code, the Terraform, that Cloud operational model, because this is a business transformation, moving to Cloud is not a technology transformation it's the business. It's the CEO saying we are digitizing we have an existential threat to the survival of our company, I want to grow a market share, I want to be more competitive, we're doing this, stop laying across the tracks technology people, will run you over, we're doing this. And so when they do that as an enterprise, I'm BNY Mellon, I'm United Airlines, you name it, your favorite enterprise. I need the visibility and control from a networking and network security perspective like I used to have on-prem. Now I'm not going to do it in the horrible complex operational model the Cisco 1994 data center, do not bring that crap into my wonderful Cloud, so that ain't happening but, all I get from the Native constructs, I don't get enough of that visibility and control, it's a little bit of a black box, I don't get that. So where do I get the best of the Cloud from an operational model, but yet with the visibility and control that I need, that I used to have on-prem from networking network security, that's Aviatrix. And that's where people find us and so from a networking and network security, so that's why I call it multicloud Native because what we do is, create a layer basically an abstraction layer above all the different Clouds, we create one architecture for networking and network security with advanced services not basic services that run on AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, Ali Cloud, Top Secret Clouds, GovClouds, you name it. And now the customer has one architecture, which is what enterprises want, I want one network, I want one network security architecture, not AWS Native, Azure Native, Google Native. >> David: Right. >> We leverage those native constructs, abstract it, and then provide a single common architecture with demand services, irrespective of what Cloud you're on. >> Dave, I've been saying this for a couple of years now, that Cloud Native... >> Does that make sense Dave? >> Absolutely. >> That abstraction layer, right? And I said, "The guys who do this, who figure this out are going to make a lot of dough." >> Yeah. >> Snowflakes obviously doing it. >> Yeah. >> You guys are doing it, it's the future. >> Yeah. >> And it's really an obvious construct when you look back at the world of call it Legacy IT for a moment... >> Steve: Yeah. >> Because did we have different networks to hookup different things in a data center? >> No, one network. >> One network of course. I don't care if the physical stack comes from Dell, HP or IBM. >> Steve: That's right, I want an attraction layer above that, yeah. >> Exactly. >> So the other thing that happens is, everybody and you'll understand this from being at Oracle, everybody wants to forget about the network. Network security, it's down in the bowels, it's like plumbing, electricity, it's just, it has to be there but people want to forget about it and so you see Datadog, you see Snowflake, you see HashiCorp going IPO in early December. Guess what? That next layer underneath that, I call it the horsemen of the multicloud infrastructure is networking and network security, that's going to be Aviatrix. >> Well, you guys make some announcements recently in that space, every company is a security company but you're really deep into it. >> Well, that's the interesting thing about it. So I said multicloud Native Networking and Network Security, it's integrated, so guess where network security is going to be done in the Cloud? In the network. >> David: Network. >> Yeah in the network. >> What a strange concept but guess what on-prem it's not, you deflect traffic to this thing called a firewall. Well, why was that? I was at Synoptics, I was at Cisco 'cause we didn't care about network security, so that's why firewall companies existed. >> Dave: Right. >> It should be integrated into the infrastructure. So now in the Cloud, your security posture is way worse than it was on-prem. You're connected to the internet by default so guess what? You want your network to do network security, so we announced two things in security; one, we're now a security competency partner for AWS, they do not give that out lightly. We were networks competency four years ago, we're now network security competency. One of the few that are both, they don't do that, that took us nine months of working with them to get there. And they only do that for the people that really are delivering value. And then what we just announced what we call, 'ThreatIQ with ThreatGuard.' So again, built into the network because we are the network, we understand the traffic, we're the control plane and the data plane, we see all traffic. We integrate into the network, we subscribe to threat databases, public databases, where we see what are the malicious IPS. If we have any traffic anywhere in your overall, and this is multicloud, not just AWS, every single Cloud, if we see that malicious traffic going some into IP guess what? It's probably BIT Mining, Bitcoin, crypto mining, it's probably some sort of data ex filtration. It could be some tour thing that you're connected to, whatever it is, you should not have traffic going. And so we do two things we alert and we show you where that all is and then with ThreatGuard, we actually will do a firewall rule right at that gateway, at that point that it's going out and immediately gone. >> You'll take the action. >> We'll take the action. >> Okay. >> And so every single customer, Dave and David, that we've shown this new capability to, it lights up like a Christmas tree. >> Yeah al bet. Okay, but now you've made some controversial statements... >> Steve: Which time? >> Okay, so you said Cisco, I think VMware... >> Dave: He's writing them down. >> I know but I can back it up. >> I think you said the risk, Cisco, VMware and Arista, they're not even in the Cloud conversation now. Arista, Jayshree Ullal is a business hero of mine, so I don't want to... >> Steve: Yeah, mine too. >> I don't want to interrogate her, she's awesome. >> Steve: Yeah. >> But what do you mean by that? Because can't Cisco come at this from their networking perspective and security and bring that in? What do you mean by they're not in the Cloud conversation? >> They're not in the conversation. >> David: Okay, defend that. >> And the reason is they were about four years ago. So when you're four years ago, you're moving into the Cloud, what's the first thing you do? I'm going to grab my CSR and I'm going to try to jam it in the Cloud. Guess what? The CSR doesn't even know it's in the Cloud, it's looking for ports, right? And so what happens is the operational model is horrendous, so all the Cloud people, it just is like oil and water, so they go, oh, that was horrendous. So no one's doing that, so what happens in the Cloud is they realize the number one thing is the Cloud operational model. I need that simplicity, I have to be a single Terraform provider, infrastructure is code. Where do I put my box with my wires? That's what the on-prem hardware people think. >> David: The selling ports your saying? >> The selling boxes. >> David: Yeah. >> And so they'll say, "Oh, we got us software version of it, it runs as a VM, it has no idea it's in the Cloud." It is not Cloud Native, I call that Cloud naive, they don't understand so then the model doesn't work. And so then they say, "Okay, I'm not going to do that." Then the only other thing they can do, is they look at the Cloud providers themselves and they say, "All right, I'm going to use Native constructs, what do you got?" And what happens basically is the Cloud providers say, "Well, we do everything and anything you'll ever need and networking and network security." And the customers, "Oh my God, it's fantastic." Then they try to use it and what they realize is you get very basic level services, and you get no visibility and control because they're a black box, you don't get to go in. How about troubleshooting, Packet Captures, simple things? How about security controls, performance traffic engineering, performance controls, visibility nothing, right? And so then they go, "Oh shit, I'm an enterprise, I'm not just some DevOps Danny three years ago, who was just spinning up workloads and didn't care about security." No, that was the Cloud three years ago. This is now United, BNY, Nike. This is like elite of elite. So when my VC was here, he said, "It's happening." That's what he meant, it's happening. Meaning enterprises, the dogs are eating the dog food and they need visibility and control, they cannot get it from the Cloud providers. >> It's happening in early days Dave. >> So Steve, we're going to stipulate that you can't jam this stuff into Cloud, but those dinosaurs are real and they're there. Explain how you... >> Steve: Well you called them dinosaurs not me but they're roaming the earth and they're going to run out of food pretty soon. (all laughing) The comet hit the earth. >> Hey, they're going to go down fighting. (all laughing) >> But the dinosaurs didn't all die the day after the comet hit the earth... >> Steve: That's right. >> They took awhile. >> Steve: They took a while. >> So, how are you going to saddle them up? That's the question because you're... >> Steve: It's over there walking dead, I don't need to do anything. >> Is it the captain Kirk to con, let them die. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Because you're in the Cloud, you're multicloud... >> Steve: Yeah. >> That's great, but 80% of my IT still on-prem and I still have Cisco switches. Isn't that just not your market or? >> When IBM and DEC did we have to do anything with IBM and DEC in the 90s, early 90s, when we created BC client server, IP architectures? No, they weren't in the conversation. >> David: Yeah. >> So, we dint compete with them, just like whatever they do on-prem, keep doing it, I wish you the best. >> But you need to integrate with them and play with them. >> Steve: No. >> Not at all? >> No, no we integrate, here is the thing that's going to happen, so to the on-prem people, it's all point of reference. They look at Cloud as off-prem, I'm going to take my operational model on-prem and I'm going to push it into the Cloud. And if I push it into multiple Clouds, they're going to call that multicloud, see we are multicloud. You're pushing your operational model into the Cloud. What's happening is Cloud has won, it won two and a half years ago with every enterprise. It's like a rock in the water. And what's going to happen is that operational model is moving out to the edge, it's moving to the branch, it's moving to the data center and it's moving into edge computing. That's what's happening... >> So outpost, so I put an outpost in my data center... >> Outpost looks like... >> Is that Aviatrix? >> Absolutely, we're going to get dragged with that... >> Dave: Okay, alright. >> Because we're the networking and network security provider, and as the company pushes out, that operational model is going to move out, not the existing on-prem OT, IT branch office then pushing in. And so, what's happening is you're coming at it from the wrong perspective. And this wave is just going to push over and so I'm just following behind this wave of AWS and Azure and Google. >> Here's the thing, you can do this and you don't have a bunch of legacy deductible debt... >> Steve: Yeah. >> So you can be Cloud Native, multicloud native, I think you called it? >> Steve: Yeah, yeah. >> I love it, you're building castles on the sand. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Jerry Chen's thing. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Now, the thing is, today's executives, they're not as naive as Ken Olsen, UNIX as, "Snake oil," who would need a PC, so they're not in denial. >> They're probably not in denial, yeah. >> Right, and so they have some resources, so the problem is they can't move as fast as you can. So, you're going to do really well. >> Steve: Yeah. >> I think they'll eventually get there Steve, but you're going to be, I don't know how many, four or five years ahead, that's a nice lead. >> That's a bet I'll take any day. >> David: Then what you don't think they'll ever get there? >> No, 10 years. (steve laughing) >> Okay, but they're not going out of business. >> No, I didn't say that. >> I know you didn't. >> What they're doing, I wish them all the best. >> Because a lot of their customers move... >> I don't compete with them. >> Yeah. We were out of time. >> Yeah. >> What did you mean by AWS is like Sandals? You mean like cool like Sandals? >> Steve: Oh, no, no, no. I don't want to... >> You mean like the vacation place? >> Have you ever been to Sandals? >> I never done it. What do you mean by that? >> There coming, there coming. Which version of sandals (indistinct)? (people cross talking) >> This is for an enterprise by the way, and look, Sandals is great for a lot of people but if you're a Cloud provider, you have to provide the common set of services for the masses because you need to make money. And oh, by the way, when you go to Sandals, go try it, like get a bottle of wine, they say, "We got red wine or white wine?" "Oh, great, what kind of red wine?" "No, red wine and it's in a box." And they hope that you won't know the difference. The problem is some people in enterprises want Four Seasons, so they want to be able to swipe the card and get a good bottle of wine. And so that's the thing with the Cloud, but the Cloud can't offer up a 200 bottle of wine to everybody. My mom loves box wine, so give her box wine. Where ISBs like us come in, is great but complimentary to the Cloud provider for that person who wants that nice bottle of wine because if AWS had to provide all this level of functionality for everybody, their instant sizes would be too big, >> Too much cost for that. (people cross talking) You're right on. And as long as you can innovate fast and stay ahead of that and keep adding value... >> Well, here's the thing, they're not going to do it for multicloud either though. >> David: I wouldn't trust them to do it with multicloud. >> No. >> David: I wouldn't. >> No enterprise would and I don't think they would ever do it anyway. >> That makes sense. Steve, we've got to go man. You're awesome, love to have you on theCUBE, come back anytime. >> Awesome, thank you. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech coverage. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBES studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the 2021 AWS global public sector partner awards. I'm your host Natalie Erlich. Today we're going to highlight the most valuable valuable Amazon connect appointment. And we are now joined by Steve Careful, adult social care expert PA consulting group and Graham Allen, the director of adults health and care at Hampshire county council. Welcome gentlemen to today's session. >> Thank you Natalie >> I love you Natalie. >> Well by now we are really familiar the call to shelter in place and how it especially affected the most vulnerable of people. Give us some experience or some insight on your experience with that, especially in light of some of the technology that was deployed. Let's start with you, Graham. >> Yeah, Thank you. So just by way of context, Hampshire county council is one of the largest areas of local government in England. So we have a population of 1.4 million people. And when a lockdown was imposed by the national government of England in the 23rd of March 2020. Shortly thereafter the evidence in terms of vulnerabilities around COVID-19 strongly identified that people with a range of clinical conditions were most vulnerable and needed to shield and self issolate. And for the size of our population, we quickly were advised that roughly some 30,000 people in the initial carts because of political vulnerabilities needed to sheild and receive a variety of support shortly after that through the summer of 2020 that number increased some 50,000. And then by January of this year that number further increased based on the scientific and medical evidence to 83,000 people in total. So that represented a huge challenge for us in terms of offering support, being able to make sure that not only practical tasks related to obtaining shopping food and so on and so forth, but also medications but also the real risks of self isolation. Many of the people that we were needing to support when here the two known to us as a social care provider. They were being advised through clinical medical evidence needs and many of those people lived alone. So the real risk of self isolation not seeing anyone potentially for an extended period of time and the risks of their wellbeing was something very significant to us. So we needed very rapidly to develop a solution in terms of making contact, being able to offer that support. >> Yeah and I'd love it now to get your take Steve on how PA consulting group helped deliver on that call on that need. >> True so we have an existing relationship with Graham and the council, we've been working together for number of years, delivering care technology solutions to service users around the county. We were obviously aware there was a major issue as COVID and lockdown began. So we sat down with Graham and his colleagues to ask what we could do to help. We used our relationship with AWS and our knowledge of the connect platform to suggest a mechanism for making outbound calls really at scale. And that was the beginning of the process. We were very quickly in a position where we were able to actually get that service running live. In fact, we had a working prototype within four days and a live service in seven days. And from that point on of those many thousands of people that Graham's alluded to, we were calling up to two and a half thousand a day to ask them did they need any help? Were they okay? If they did need help, If they responded yes, to those, to that question we were then able to put them through to a conventional call handler in our call center where a conversation could take place about what their needs were. And as Graham said, in many cases that was people who couldn't get out to get food shopping, people who were running short of clinical medical supplies, people who needed actually some interesting things pet care came up quite often people who couldn't leave the house home and look after their dog, they just needed some help locally. So we had to integrate with local voluntary services to get those those kinds of results and support delivered to them across the whole of Hampshire and ultimately throughout the whole of the COVID experience. So coming right up until March of this year. >> Right well, as the COVID pandemic progressed and, you know evolved in different stages, you know, with variants and a variety of different issues that came up over the last year or so, you know how did the technology develop how did the relationship develop and, you know tell us about that process that you had with each other. >> So the base service remained very consistent that different points in the year, when there were different issues that may be needed to be communicated to to the service users we were calling we would change and update the script. We would improve the logistics of the service make it simpler for colleagues in the council to get the data into the system, to make the calls. And basically we did that through a constant series of meetings checkpoint, staying in touch and really treating this as a very collaborative exercise. So I don't think for all of us COVID was a constant stream of surprises. Nobody could really predict what was going to happen in a week or a month. So we just have to all stay on our toes keep in touch and be flexible. And I think that's where our preferred way of working and that of AWS and the Hampshire team we were working with we really were able to do something that was special and I'm very fleet of foot and responsive to needs. >> Right and I'd also love to get Graham's insight on this as well. What of results have you seen, you know do you have any statistics on the impact that it made on people? Did you receive any qualitative feedback from the people that use the service? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. We did. And one of the things we were very conscious of from day one was using a system which may have been unfamiliar to people when the first instance in terms of receiving calls, the fact that we were able to use human voice within the call technology, I think really, really assisted. We also did a huge amount of work within a Hampshire county council. Clearly in terms of the work we do day in, day out we're well-known to our local population. We have a huge range of different responsibilities ranging from maintenance of the roads through to the provision of local services, like libraries and so on and so forth, and also social care support. So we were able to use all of that to cover last. And Steve has said through working very collaboratively together with a trusted brand Hampshire county council working with new technology. And the feedback that we received was both very much data-driven in real time, in terms of successful calls and also those going through to call handlers and then the outcomes being delivered through those call handlers to live services out and about around the county but also that qualitative impact that we had. So across Hampshire county council we have some 76 elected members believe me they were very active. They were very interested in the work that we were doing in supporting our most vulnerable residents. And they were receiving literally dozens of phone calls as a thank you by way of congratulating. But as I say, thanking us and our partners PA at district council partners and also the voluntary community sector in terms of the very real support that was being offered to residents. So we had a very fully resolved picture of precisely what was happening literally minute by minute on a live dashboard. In terms of outgoing calls calls going through the call handlers and then successful call completion in terms of the outcomes that were being delivered on the ground around the County of Hampshire. So a phenomenally successful approach well appreciated and well, I think applauded by all those receiving calls. >> Terrific insight. Well, Steve, I'd love to hear from you more about the technology and how you put the focus on the patient on the person really made it more people focused and you know, obviously that's so critical in such a time of need. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right, Natalie. We, I think what we were able to do because I myself and my immediate team have worked with Hampshire and other local authorities on the social care side for so long. We understood the need to be very person focused. I think sometimes with technology, it comes in with it with a particular way of operating that isn't necessarily sensitive to the audience. And we knew we had to get this right from day one. So Graham's already mentioned the use of human voice invoicing the bulk call. that was very, very important. We selected a voice actress who had a very reassuring clear tone recognizing that many of the individuals we were calling would have been would have been older people maybe a little hard of hearing. We needed to have the volume in the call simple things like this were very important. One of the of the debates I remember having very early on was the choice as to whether the response that somebody would give to the question, do you need this? Or that could be by pressing a digital on the phone. We understood that again, because potentially of frailty maybe a little lack of dexterity amongst some of the people we'd be calling that might be a bit awkward for them to take the phone away from their face and find the button and press the button in time. So we pursued the idea of an oral response. So if you want this say, yes if you don't want it to say no and those kinds of small choices around how the technology was deployed I think made a really big difference in terms of of acceptance and adoption and success in the way the service run. >> Terrific. Well Graham I'd like to shift it to you. Could you give us some insight on the lessons that you learned as a result of this pandemic and also trying to move quickly to help people in your community? >> Yeah, I think the lessons in some of the lessons that we've, again learned through our response to the pandemic, are lessons that to a degree have traveled with us over a number of years in terms of the way that we've used technology over a period, working with PA, which is be outcome focused. It's sometimes very easy to get caught up in a brilliant new piece of technology. But as Steve has just said, if it's not meeting the need if we're not thinking about that human perspective and thinking about the humanity and the outcomes that we're seeking to deliver then to some degree it's going to fail And this might certainly did not fail in any way shape or form because of the thoughtfulness that was brought forward. I think what we learned from it is how we can apply that as we go forward to the kinds of work that we do. So, as I've already said we've got a large population, 1.4 million people. We are moving from some really quite traditional ways of responding to that population, accelerated through our response to COVID through using AI technologies. Thinking about how we embed that more generally would a service offer not only in terms of supporting people with social care needs but that interface between ourselves and colleagues within the health sector, the NHS to make sure that we're thinking about outcomes and becoming much more intuitive in terms of how we can engage with our population. It's also, I think about thinking across wider sectors in terms of meeting people's needs. One of the, I think probably unrealized things pre COVID was the using virtual platforms of various kinds of actually increased engagement with people. We always thought in very traditional ways in order to properly support our population we must go out and meet them face to face. What COVID has taught us is actually for many people the virtual world connecting online, having a variety of different technologies made available to support them in their daily living is something that they've absolutely welcomed and actually feel much safer through being able to do the access is much more instant. You're not waiting for somebody to call. You're able to engage with a trusted partner, you know face-to-face over a virtual platform and get an answer more or less then and there. So I think there's a whole range of opportunities that we've learned, some of which we're already embedding into our usual practice. If I can describe anything over the last 15 months as usual but we're taking it forward and we hope to expand upon that at scale and at pace. >> Yeah, that's a really excellent point about the rise of hybrid care, both in the virtual and physical world. What can we expect to see now, moving forward like to shift over to our other guests, you know, what do you see next for technology as a result of the pandemic? >> Well, there's certainly been an uptake in the extent to which people are comfortable using these technologies. And again, if you think about the kind of target group that Graham and his colleagues in the social care world are dealing with these are often older people people with perhaps mobility issues, people with access issues when it comes to getting into their GP or getting into hospital services. The ability for those services to go out to them and interact with them in a much more immediate way in a way that isn't as intrusive. It isn't as time consuming. It doesn't involve leaving the house and finding a ways on public transport to get to see a person who you're going to see for five minutes in a unfamiliar building. I think that that in a sense COVID has accelerated the acceptance that that's actually pretty good for some people. It won't suit everybody and it doesn't work in every context, but I think where it's really worked well and works is a great example of that. Is in triaging and prioritizing. Ultimately the kinds of resources Graham's talked about the people need to access the GPs and the nurses and the care professionals are in short supply. Demand will outstrip will outstrip supply. therefore being able to triage and prioritize in that first interaction, using a technology ruse enables you to ensure you're focusing your efforts on those who've got the most urgent or the greatest need. So it's a kind of win all around. I think there's definitely been a sea change and it's hard to see hard to see people going back just as the debate about, will everybody eventually go back to offices, having spent a working at home? You know, I think the answer is invariably going to be no, some will but many won't. And it's the same with technology. Some will continue to interact through a technology channel. They won't go back to the face-to-face option that they had previously. >> Terrific. Well, thank you both very much. Steve Careful PA consulting group and Graham Allen Hampshire county council really appreciate your, your insights on how this important technology helped people who were suffering in the midst of the pandemic. Thank you. >> Steve: You're welcome. >> Graham: Thank you. >> Well, that's all for this session. Thank you so much for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2021-Virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2021-Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host here on theCUBE. We've got Steve Gordon, Director of Product Management, Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. Steve, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hey John, thanks for having me on, it's great to be back. >> So soon we'll be in real life, I think North America show, this is for the Europe Virtual, I think the North American one might be in person. It's not yet official. We'll hear, but we'll find out, but looking good so far. But thanks for all your collaboration. You guys have been a big part of the CNCF we've been covering on theCUBE, as you know, since the beginning. But, I wanted to get into the Edge conversation that's been going on. And first I want to just get this out there. You guys are sponsoring Edge Day here at KubeCon. I want you to bring that together for us, because this is a big part of what Red Hat's talking about and frankly customers. The Edge is the most explosive growth area. It's got the most complexity, it's crazy. It's got data, it's got everything at the Edge. Everything's happening. How important is Kubernetes to Edge Computing? >> Yeah, it's certainly interesting to be here talking about it now, and having kind of a dedicated Kubernetes Edge Day. I was thinking back earlier, I think it was one of the last in-person KubeCon events I think, if not the last, the San Diego event where there was already kind of a cresting of interest in Edge and kind of topics on the agenda around Edge. And it's just great to see that momentum has continued up to where we are today. And really more and more people not only talking about using Kubernetes for Edge, but actually getting in there and doing it. And I think, when we look at why people are doing that, they're really leaning into some of the things that they saw as strengths of Kubernetes in general, that they're now able to apply to edge computing use cases in terms of what they can actually do in terms of having a common interface to this very powerful platform that you can take to a growing multitude of footprints, be they your public cloud providers, where a lot of people may have started their Kubernetes journey or their own data center, to these edge locations where they're increasingly trying to do processing closer to where they're collecting data, basically. >> You know, when you think about Edge and all the evolution with Cloud Native, what's interesting is Kubernetes is enabling a lot of value. I'd like to get your thoughts. What are you hearing from customers around use cases? I mean, you are doing product management, you've got to document all the features, the wishlist. You have the keys to the kingdom on what's going on over at Red Hat. You know, we're seeing just the amazing connectivity between businesses with hybrid cloud. It's a game changer. Haven't seen this kind of change at this level since the late '80s, early '90s in terms of inflection point impact. This is huge. What are you hearing? >> I think it's really interesting that you use the word connectivity there because one of the first edge computing use cases that I've really been closely involved with and working a lot on, which then grows into the others, is around telecommunications and 5G networking. And the reason we're working with service providers on that adoption of Kubernetes as they build 5G basically as a cloud native platform from the ground up, is they're really leveraging what they've seen with Kubernetes elsewhere and taking that to deliver this connectivity, which is going to be crucial for other use cases. If you think about people whether they're trying to do automotive edge cases, where they're increasingly putting more sensors on the car to make smarter decisions, but also things around the infotainment system using more and more data there as well. If you think about factory edge, all of these use cases build on connectivity as one of the core fundamental things they need. So that's why we've been really zoomed in there with the service providers and our partners, trying to deliver a 5G networking capabilities as fast as we can and the throughput and latency benefits that come with that. >> If you don't mind me asking, I got to just go one step deeper if you don't mind. You mentioned some of these use cases, the connectivity. You know, IoT was the big buzz word, okay IoT. It's an Edge, it's Operational Technology, or it's a dumb endpoint or a node on the network has connectivity. It's got power. It's a purpose built device. It's operating, it's getting surveillance data, whatever the hell it's doing, right. It's got Edge. Now you're bringing in more intelligent, which is an IT kind of thing, state, databases, caching. Is the database too slow? Is it too fast? So again, it brings up more complexity. Can you just talk about how you view that? Because this is what I'm hearing, what do you think? >> Yeah, I agree. I think there's a real spectrum, when we talk about edge computing, both in terms of the footprints and the locations, and the various constraints that each of those imply. And sometimes those strengths can be, as you're talking about as a specially designed board which has a very specific chip on it, has very specific memory and storage constraints or it can be a literal physical constraint in terms of I only have this much space in this location to actually put something, or that space is subject to excess heat or other considerations environmentally. And I think when we look at what we're trying to provide, not just with Kubernetes but also with Linux, is a variety of solutions that can help people no matter where they are along that spectrum of the smallest devices where maybe Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or REL for Edge is suitable to those use cases where maybe there's a little more flexibility in terms of, what are the workloads I might want to run on that in the future? Or how do I want to grow that environment potentially in the future as well? If I want to add nodes, then all of a sudden, the capability that nannies brings can be a more flexible building base for them to start with. >> So with all of these use cases and the changing dynamics and the power dynamics between Operational Technology in IT, which we're kind of riffing on, what should developers take away from that when they're considering their development, whether they just want an app, be app developers, programming the infrastructure or they're tinkering with the underlying, some database work, or if they're under the hood kind of full dev ops? What should developers take into consideration for all these new use cases? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things is that we're trying to minimize the impact to the developer as much as we can. Now of course, with an edge computing use case where you may be designing your application specifically for that board or device, then that's a more challenging proposition. But there's also the case increasingly where that intelligence already exists in the application somewhere, whether it's in the data center or in the cloud, and they're just trying to move it closer to that endpoint, where the actual data is collected. And that's where I think there's a really powerful story in terms of being able to use Kubernetes and OpenShift as that interface that the application developer interacts with but can use that same interface, whether they're running in the cloud maybe for development purposes, but also when they take it to production and it's running somewhere else. >> I got to ask you the AI impact because every conversation I have or everyone I interview that's an expert as a practitioner is usually something along the lines of chief architect of cloud and AI. You're seeing a lot of cloud, SRE, cloud-scale architects meeting and also running the AI piece, especially in industries. So AI as a certain component seems to be resonating from a functional persona standpoint. People who are doing these transformations tend to have cloud and AI responsibility. Is that a fluke or is that just the pattern that's real? >> No, I think that's very real. And I think when you look at AI and machine learning and how it works, it's very data centric in terms of what is the data I'm collecting, sending back to the mothership, maybe in terms of actually training my model. But when I actually go to processing something, I want to make that as close as I can to the actual data collection, so that I can minimize what I'm trying to send back. Particularly, people may not be as cognizant of it, but even today, many times we're talking about sites where that connectivity is actually fairly limited in some of these edge use cases still today. So what you're actually putting over the pipe is something you're still trying to minimize, while trying to advance your business and improve your agility, by making these decisions closer to the edge. >> What's the advantage for Red Hat? Talk about the benefits. What are you guys bringing to the table? Obviously, hybrid cloud is the new shift. Everyone's agreed to that. I mean, pretty much the consensus is public clouds, great, been there, done that. It's out there pumping out as a resource, but now enterprise is goading us to keep stuff on premises, especially when you talk about factories or whatever, on premises, things that they might need, stuff on premise. So it's clear hybrid is happening. Everyone's in agreement. What does Red Hat bring to the table? What's in it for the customer? >> Yeah, I think I would say hybrid is really an evolving at the moment in terms of, I think, Hybrid has kind of gone through this transition where, first of all, it was maybe moving from my data center to public cloud and I'm managing most of those through that transition, and maybe I'm (indistinct) public clouds. And now we're seeing this transition where it's almost that some of that processing is moving back out again closer to the use case of the data. And that's where we really see as an extension of our existing hybrid cloud story, which is simply to say that we're trying to provide a consistent experience and interface for any footprint, any location, basically. And that's where OpenShift is a really powerful platform for doing this. But also, it's got Kubernetes at the heart of it. but it's also worth considering when we look at Kubernetes, is there's this entire Cloud Native ecosystem around it. And that's an increasingly crucial part of why people are making these decisions as well. It's not just Kubernetes itself, but all of those other projects both directly in the CNCF ecosystem itself, but also in that broader CNCF landscape of projects which people can leverage, and even if they don't leverage them today, know they have options out there for when they need to change in the future if they have a new need for their application. >> Yeah, Steve, I totally agree with you. And I want to just get your thoughts on this because I was kind of riffing with Brian Gracely who works at Red Hat on your team. And he was saying that, you know, we were talking about KubeCon + CloudNativeCon as the name of the conference. He's a little bit more CloudNativeCon this year than KubeCon, inferring, implying, and saying that, okay so what about Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes? Now it's like, whoa, CloudNative is starting to come to the table, which shows the enablement of Kubernetes. That was our point. The point was, okay, if Kubernetes does its job as creating a lever, some leverage to create value and that's being rendered in CloudNative, and that enterprise is, not the hardcore hyperscalers and/or the early adopters, I call it classic enterprise, are coming in. They're contributing to open source as participants, and they're harvesting the value in creating CloudNative. What's your reaction to that? And can you share your perspective on there's more CloudNative going on than ever before? >> Yeah, I certainly think, you know, we've always thought from the beginning of OpenShift that it was about more than just Linux and Kubernetes and even the container technologies that came before them from the point of view of, to really build a fully operational and useful platform, you need more than just those pieces. That's something that's been core to what we've been trying to build from the beginning. But it's also what you see in the community is people making those decisions as well, as you know, what are these pieces I need, whether it's fairly fundamental infrastructure concerns like logging and monitoring, or whether it's things like trying to enable different applications on top using projects like KubeVert for virtualization, Istio for service mesh and so on. You know, those are all considerations that people have been making gradually. I think what you're seeing now is there's a growing concern in some of these areas within that broad CNCF landscape in terms of, okay, what is the right option for each of these things that I need to build the platform? And certainly, we see our role is to guide customers to those solutions, but it's also great to see that consensus emerging in the communities that we care about, like the CNCF. >> Great stuff. Steve, I got to ask you a final question here. As you guys innovate in the open, I know your roadmaps are all out there in the open. And I got to ask you, product managing is about making decisions about what you what you work on. I know there's a lot of debates. Red Hat has a culture of innovation and engineering, so there's heated arguments, but you guys align at the end of the day. That's kind of the culture. What's top of mind, if someone asks you, "Hey, Steve, bottom line, I'm a Red Hat customer. I'm going full throttle as a hybrid. We're investing. You guys have the cloud platforms, what's in it for me? What's the bottom line?" What do you say? >> Yeah, I think the big thing for us is, you know, I talked about that this is extending the hybrid cloud to the edge. And we're certainly very conscious that we've done a great job at addressing a number of footprints that are core to the way people have done computing today. And now as we move to the edge, that there's a real challenge to go and address more of those footprints. And that's, whether it's delivering OpenShift on a single node of itself, but also working with cloud providers on their edge solutions, as they move further out from the cloud as well. So I think that's really core to the mission is continuing to enable those footprints so that we can be true to that mission of delivering a platform that is consistent across any footprint at any location. And certainly that's core to me. I think the other big trend that we're tracking and really continuing to work on, you know, you talked about AI machine learning, the other other space we really see kind of continuing to develop and certainly relevant in the work with the telecommunications companies I do but also increasingly in the accelerator space where there's really a lot of new and very interesting things happening with hardware and silicon, whether it be kind of FPGAs, EA6, and even the data processing units, lots of things happening in that space that I think are very interesting and going to be key to the next three to five years. >> Yeah, and software needs to run on hardware. Love your tagline there. It sounds like a nice marketing slogan. Any workload, any footprint, any location. (laughs) Hey, DevSecOps, you got to scale it up. So good job. Thank you very much for coming on. Steve Gordon, Director of Product Management, Clout Platforms, Red Hat, Steve, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John, really appreciate it. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2021 Europe Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host from theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (serene music)

(upbeat music) >> When I was a young analyst at IDC I remember sitting in a packed boardroom, listening to this new company called Teradata introduce a machine, that was specially designed to make databases run much faster at far less cost. At the time, the most advanced disc drive in the world was 2.5 gigabytes and it costs more than a $100,000. It was the size of a giant refrigerator. There was not a single data center in the US that housed the terabyte of data, underscoring this young startups, Moxie, with a name like Teradata. Fast forward nearly 40 years and the company is still going strong. It has a robust tech stack that has been matured and hardened over the decade, over the decades with capabilities around things like referential integrity, sophisticated workload management and support for complex joins, and many other factors. Recently, the company's financial performance has been in the news, with an earnings and revenue beat, in a large part attributed to its cloud business model. The stock roughly doubled in a few days as surprised investors took notice. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation, my name is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Steve McMillan, who's the CEO of Teradata, to give us the updates, Steve welcome. >> Hey Dave, it's great to be here, thanks for having me. >> Okay, so you're very welcome. So what's happening with Teradata? What's behind the recent surprise and the momentum that you're seeing? >> Look, Dave, I think over the last 12 to 18 months, we've just been continuously improving our cloud capabilities and the performance of our cloud business. I took over as CEO of Teradata in June of last year, and it's been my pleasure to really focus the company on a cloud-first agenda. And what that's really mean is that, we've built a great leadership team with some key new appointments, a new chief product officer, a new chief strategy officer, and most recently our new chief revenue officer, to really build up our cloud credentials and capability. We've also done things like completely invert our R&D spend. So we spend nearly $300 billion on research and development every year, but previously our focus have been only 30% of our spend was in cloud, we'll flipped that around to have 70% of our investment in cloud, and 30% on-prem, enabling us to do things like go general availability of Teradata in Google Cloud in Q3 of last year. And roles of these investments in moving that investment envelope has really enabled us to put forward Teradata as a very relevant modern cloud platform for our customers. And that's enabled us to win in the cloud fairly significantly. And we always knew that at some point, we would declare to the street what cloud revenues were, but we wanted to make sure that they were a substantial and relevant, and we felt that at over $100 million dollars of ARR and with an outlook to double that this year, that those were the kind of metrics that were going to get the market and our customers' attention in terms of us being modern and relevant. >> I got a lot of questions based on that. Thank you for that upfront. But so let me ask you, so you took over as CEO less than 90 days into a global pandemic. And so, how much did that affect your thinking around cloud-first? Did you come in, before that knowing this was the direction you're going to take the company, was that accelerated, can you comment? >> Look, I think, taking over at Teradata, you pointed out in the introduction, a 40-year heritage event at essentially inventing the enterprise data warehouse marketplace. I knew I was taking over a company with a fantastic heritage and a fantastic culture, a set of people that are absolutely focused on and are incredibly proud of Teradata's technology it's capability and how Teradata helps transform how businesses work and people lives through data. What I saw is, we had to really focus on what the market and our customers were looking for, and that meant we emphasizing the importance of cloud and saved the company. So it was really a lot about focus, and then about developing the culture of the company to be able to execute. In terms of the pandemic, I think the pandemic has act as an accelerant to digital transformation, as organizations want to use data to help optimize how they operate, makes sure they're operating effectively and efficiently. One of the customer examples that we had in our last quarter, was an airline in the US investing in Teradata technology to do just that, as clearly a distressed industry, but they see how the power of data can optimize their supply chain to enable them to work more effectively and more efficiently. >> Great, I want to get into some of those customer examples, but I want to stick on cloud-first for a minute. So it sounds like cloud-first is a mindset but then leads to sort of investment priorities. And there are some pretty prominent companies that had a switch from a sort of on-prem to a cloud-first mentality, Microsoft is the most obvious, but there are others. But what really does cloud-first mean for your customers? >> Well, what it means is, we really think about the future digital strategy of our customers, and clearly all of our customers want to embrace cloud. It's also about data gravity, where is data moving to? And we see the data gravity of many companies, we focus on the top 10,000 companies in the world where they're operating at that level of scale, Teradata can really give them the right kind of solution that meets their business requirements. But as that data gravity is moving towards the cloud, it really means that we have to be in front of that, and we have to have the technology in place to capture that data as it moves to the cloud. And so the vision from a product perspective in terms of cloud-first, is to be the leader from a connected multi-cloud data platform perspective. And I that each component of that product description is really important, connected in terms of being able to access data either in native object store or in loads of different data sources, multi cloud in terms of being available across all of the cloud platforms, but for our existing customers extending and reaching into their on-prem capabilities, and from a data platform, thinking about it in terms of the services that Teradata has been known for, in terms of enterprise data warehousing but also real data analytics capabilities that we built into our core SQL engine. So super excited about the future of Teradata in this cloud first world. >> Yes, the definition of cloud, by the way of course it is evolving as we all know. And I spent a fair amount of my time trying to squint through earnings statements, and figure out okay, what's exactly in there? So, $100 million in ARRs, that's that's a pretty big number. I mean, for a lot of companies, that's like they're getting ready for an IPO if they're doing that kind of ARR. So what is in that cloud number? I presume there's a hybrid, a component of that, but can you help us understand what's that definition? >> Yeah, we were very careful with that because we wanted to be assured that we're talking to you all about cloud and being true cloud. So that is just revenues of our vantage product running in AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. It doesn't include any private cloud or hybrid cloud environment. So we wanted to be really specific about, that's a success and the hyper scaler environment and the public cloud environment. Thanks for asking that question, that's great. >> Thank you for the answer, and that's really important. There's just so much cloud washing going on, and so it's good to hear that you're making that clean, what you call the true cloud number, I would agree. That's a great way to look at it. And of course, there's a lot of evolution going on in cloud and on-prem, and from a hybrid standpoint out to the edge, so is your cloud strategy to be compatible with the cloud native AWS, Azure, Google maybe Alibaba someday. But is your strategy also to try to cross connect those clouds in some way which is a kind of metadata challenge. Maybe you could talk about that. >> Yeah, that's exactly that when I use the term, connected multi-cloud data platform, that's exactly the point. We see companies want to have a data fabric that spans across, either from on-premise and from on-prem, but they want to span across those public cloud environments. Our perspective as the companies seem to crave, how to use compute transparently across multi-cloud environments, our perspective is, we want to give that same ability to essentially federate data across a multi-cloud environment. Because the CIO is, I talked to the too, and I'm sure you do too, Dave, they want optionality in terms of cloud provider. They don't want to be locked in to an AWS or an Azure or Google, they want to be able to keep a competitive environment, competitive sourcing environment, be able to use the right services from the right cloud provider. So from a Teradata perspective, one of the other key things about our cloud focus is, we're starting to think about Teradata vantage as much more of a platform rather than a product. And so, you know, we've got 17 integrations in the product to native cloud services and Amazon alone, about 13 in Azure and 12 in Google Cloud, where we utilize and enable our customers to use those native cloud services, in the way that their dev ops teams have become very accustomed to. And I think that level of integration that our R&D spend has enabled recently, has really positioned then our customers minds the ability for Teradata to be modern in terms of that dev ops, and for Teradata to be at the core of their data architecture. And then from a pervade and a fabric perspective, we've really invested in what we called our query grid technology to really be able to federate queries out across multiple cloud environments. And we've put a commercial model in place that we charge per query. So we don't charge per megabyte of storage, that we charge for successful query execution. And our thesis says, if we open the Teradata platform to as many data sources as possible, our customers are going to want to query that data, connect it together, and get unique valuable insights that they can't get anywhere else other than using a solution like Teradata. So we were super excited about that. >> I'm excited too, that it's kind of the Holy grail, because the other thing CIO is telling me Steve is like, look, we've spent a decade in our developers, they got the cloud native thing. They know how to optimize for AWS or Google or Azure, we got that. What we need, is we need to enable the businesses, so if you can abstract away that complexity, that's innovation that they want, 'cause they want to go faster. And this notion of a federated query, I think what I'm hearing is, you're building out the knowledge to wherever the query should be serviced, whether it's remote, or local, on AWS or Azure or Google, or on-prem, you're going to be able to service that query in the most efficient manner. Is that's kind of the vision here? >> That's the vision, that's exactly it. It is a connected, we enable a connected data fabric, a multi-cloud for our biggest customers who are always going to have an on-prem capability. They can reach back into their on-prem system from the data, the storage on-prem, in terms of the data that travels across for that is only though for the query. So you don't need to duplicate queries, you don't need to duplicate data in lots of different places. But not only that, to your point, that this is all about business outcome and use cases. And the 40 years of experience that Teradata has, in terms of helping customers know how to use data to solve business problems, they get that in the cloud with the Teradata that they know, and so that whole, if they want to migrate from on-prem to in the cloud, if they wanted federate, we can give that range of options, layer on top our industry and use case experience to deliver a fantastic overall cloud migration experience to our customer set. >> I like the pricing model too, because essentially, you're charging for value. I mean, I think you look, we've gone through decades and for the past decade, a lot of SAS companies have done really well but it's kind of a one-way street. And the charge per query really is a sort of, to me anyway, a gain share, the customers win, you win, as long as you deliver a good product, they'll stay loyal to you. >> That's right. I think our customers are saying that pricing model relates directly to business value. And the total cost of ownership of the Teradata technology, is as much more efficient and effective, it gives a much better TCO, especially with enterprise skill, either data volumes, data complexity or query complexity or query concurrency. And there's entrust, and I'll reflect back to your opening remarks, right? And not very many people use this. We were born on-prem, but what we're finding in the cloud is that it's given us a better advantage, because we are used to squeezing every bit of performance out of the storage and compute and the Teradata system. So, and our poor SQL engine or workload management and query optimization means that we don't run away with the consumption of compute and storage. What we find from a native cloud pervade that are solutions as to solve these really enterprise skill challenges, they spin up more compute or spin up more storage. And it's an exponential increase in terms of the total cost of ownership, whereas we believe we give a much more predictable cost profile and performance profile, utilizing the technologies that we honed on-prem. >> Yeah, that's an important point. I mean, Teradata is by design, it's architected to be a perfectly tuned system. I mean, and so back in the day, where it was $100, 000 for 2.5 gigabytes, you had better architected it that way. And so the prevailing way to solve these problems today, there's not a lot of ways to skin a cat, but just throwing resources at it as it is the only way. And that as you pointed out, can get a little bit out of control, it makes the CFO's nervous. On the earnings score, you referenced two customer situations where you beat out snowflake for the deal. I wonder if you could add some color and elaborate on that. >> Yeah, we've been working with a number of customers that kind of kicked the tires on cloud native solutions, and we're delighted to see some of them coming by, recommitted to Teradata. And I think there's really a couple of reasons for that. One is the challenge of migration. I guess I think snowflake mentioned that in the earnings call yesterday about the challenge of migrating enterprise workload, from a Teradata perspective, because what you get in the cloud is exactly the same as what you've got on-prem. We can lift and shift, and then we can look to modernize once it's in the cloud. So it's dramatically different approach. So there's no interruption to the business users, so it's less risk, less costs, quicker time to value from a migration perspective. So one of those wins with an e-commerce company in the US, was because the new CTO came in and said, "Those 70 engineers, they'd been working on for the last 12 months." And it was about to try and migrate Teradata workload to a cloud native solution. And he said, "Why don't we just use Teradata in the cloud?" Which was a logical question and we were delighted to help them with that answer. And then the other example really was about, the projected cost of running in the cloud, and how expensive it was going to be once that organization had scaled up to the level of queries and execution that their enterprise was going to be generating, and also from the growth trajectory that they were anticipating, just from a tool cost of ownership perspective Teradata made a lot of sense. And that probably would surprise quite a lot of people over there who have always considered Teradata as being reassuringly expensive. But what we're really demonstrating now is when we think about it in terms of query execution and as customers try alternative solutions to execute the kind of queries the enterprise skill that Teradata does every day, we are actually a really good price performance player. >> Yeah, I don't think anybody would ever question your database chops. I mean, I think people were trying to understand it and I my myself was trying to understand, okay, what happens to the on-prem business? And you're sort of connected the dots there for me. So my question is, what are your on-prem customers? What's their motivation for moving to the cloud? Are they actually leaning in, or are they kind of many of them putting a brick wall around their on-prem, and sort of carving out a cloud agenda? How do you see that evolving? >> Look, I think, and I'm talking about existing customers rather than winning new customers here. But our existing customers are going to continue growing their on-prem environments. You know, if you look at the market analysis it says, between one and 4% growth per annum for the existing on-prem traditional technologies. So, and we expect Teradata to more than gain our share in terms of that one to 4% market share grows every year, but really the growth, the 30% plus growth, in terms of year on year data growth in the cloud, is really driven by that DevOps approach, one to utilize first party cloud services to augment the technology development that's going on inside organizations, also as data starts moving into a SaaS environments, being able to do the analytics of that data that's already in a cloud environment and a cloud environment starts to make a lot of sense. So we are investing in connectors to the sales force, the service now, so that you can have access to that data from Teradata. So we think that hybrid approach, in many of the biggest companies in the world is going to continue to make a lot of sense, but the big growth, and I think is going to be in those cloud environments. >> So as I model, my mental model around Teradata is really holding serve and that on-prem business, low single digit growth, keep that stable, and then you're growing very very rapidly in the ARR model, the cloud business. And then at some point you've got, let's Teradata, 1.8 billion in revenue, somewhere around there. So you've got ways to go before that cloud business is as large as the on-prem business, obviously, but that's the opportunity. And we've seen a number of companies transition through that very successfully. You're obviously communicating to the street, they liked the story. This seems to be some upside people are, you know, the investors are saying, "Well this is an undervalued company you don't have- >> Yeah, no, absolutely. And I would say is, we look at our current ARR, we know that we're going to have a stable base of on-prem ARR for the foreseeable future. But, the ability to migrate some of that ARR to cloud is low hanging fruit in terms of growing our cloudy ARR. But then what we've seen is, once we migrate an on-prem customer to the cloud, it kind of unlocks the Teradata environment for that customer, because, remember we usually run all of the mission critical production workloads, and so that system is like tied tightly down, you don't, if you're the CFO, you don't want the marketing team like disrupting your month end running. But when you're in the cloud, to run those ad hoc queries or ad hoc analytics capabilities, then we can spin up and we can elastically grow more compute, more storage, so that workload can be satisfied, both still predicting those mission critical workloads and the core SQL engine. And so we're seeing the expansion once we move some of those workloads to the cloud and some of those customers to the cloud as being really, really significant. So expanding the ARR that the did have on-prem, when it lands in the cloud, as we've seen more than 50% expansion rates. >> I mean, I see the future. You used the term, I think data fabric, I see the future is data warehouse, data warehouse, data lake or whatever repository you want. Those are just nodes in my mind within that fabric. And you mentioned marketing, if I'm in the marketing department, I want my own data. I have the context, I know what I need, I don't want to be subservient to some complex data pipeline and data scientists to get permission. I just want to... I want to go for it and create data products. And so, my last question is sort of, there's my sort of simple vision. How do you see the future? >> Look, I think I'll give an example of telcos who are increasingly trying to move to be techcos. And how orchestration of data across multiple silos in an enterprise can create significant enterprise value. So if you imagine the IOT use case 5G deployment strategy, you've got all of these 4G handsets, so you just know, telco is wanting to know where all of that usage data is, so that they can mane that usage data into customer usage patterns to then influence their capital allocation strategy as they build out 5G networks. So it takes data from the consumer level and puts it into a corporate planning process, on the really backend of the company. And so we believe with our connected multi-cloud data platform and our outstanding and data warehousing analytics, we can get those kind of most complex use cases, the lever to our customers really successfully. >> Hey Steve, great story, it's clear to me you've got your priorities straight. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story there. >> Dave, it's been an absolute pleasure, I hope to do it again. >> All right, you got it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)