>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by Silicon Angle. Hi, I'm stupid, man. And welcome back to the Cube on Cloud. We're talking about developers. And while so many people remember the mean from 2010 of Steve Balmer jumping around on stage development developers and developers, uh, many people know what really important is really important about developers. They probably read the 2013 book called The New King Makers by Stephen O. Grady. And I'm really happy to welcome to the program. Rachel Stevens, who is an industry analyst with Red Monk who was co founded by the aforementioned Stephen O. Grady. Rachel, Great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. >>Well, I've had the opportunity, Thio read some of what you've done. We've interacted on social media. We've got to talk events back when we used to do those in people. And >>I'm so >>glad that you get to come on the program especially. You were the ones I reached out. When we have this developer track, um, if you could just give our audience a little bit about your background. You know, that developer cred that you have Because as I joke, I've got a closet full of hoodies. But, you know, I'm an infrastructure guy by training I've been learning about, you know, containers and serverless and all this stuff for years. But I'm not myself much of developer. I've touched a thing or two in the years. >>Yeah. So happy to be here. Red Monk has been around since 2002 and have kind of been beating that developer drum ever since then, kind of as the company, The founder, Stephen James, notice that the decision making that developers was really a driver for what was actually ending up in the Enterprise. And as even more true, as cloud came onto, the scene is open source exploded, and I think it's become a lot more of a common view now. But in those early days, it was probably a little bit more of a controversial opinion, but I have been with the firm for coming up on five years now. My work is an industry analyst. We kind of help people understand, bottoms up technology, adoption trends, so that that's where I spend my time focusing is what's getting used in the enterprise. Why, what kind of trends are happening? So, yeah, that's where we all come from. That's the history of Red Monk in 30 seconds. >>Awesome. Rachel, you talk about the enterprise and developers For the longest time. I just said there was this huge gap you talk about. Bottoms up. It's like, well, developers use the tools that they want If they don't have to, they don't pay for anything. And the general I t. And the business sides of the house were like, I don't know, We don't know what those people in the corner we're doing, you know, it's important and things like that. But today it feels like that that's closed a bunch. Where are we? In your estimation, you know, our developers do they have a clear seat at the table? The title we have for this is whether the Enterprise Developer is its enterprise development oxymoron. In 2020 and 2021 >>I think enterprise developers have a lot more practical authority than people give them credit for, especially if you're kind of looking at that old view of the world where everything is driven by a buyer decision or kind of this top down purchasing motion. And we've really seen that authority of what is getting used and why change a lot in the last year. In the last decade, even more of people who are able to choose the tools that meet the job bring in tools, regardless of whether they maybe have that official approval through the right channels because of the convenience of trying to get things up and running. We are asking developers to do so much right now and to go faster and thio shifting things left. And so the things that they are responsible for incorporating into the way they are building APS is growing. And so, as we are asking developers to do more and to do more quickly, um, the tools that they need to do those, um, tasks to get these APS built is that the decision making us fall into them? This is what I need. This is what needs to come in, and so we're seeing. Basically, the tools that enterprise is air using are the tools that developers want to be using, and they kind of just find their way into the enterprise. >>Now I want to key off what you were talking about. Just developers were being asked to do Mawr and Mawr. We've seen these pendulum swings in technology. There was a time where it was like, Well, I'll outsource it because that'll be easier and maybe it'll be less expensive. And number one we found it necessarily. It wasn't necessarily cheaper. And number two, I couldn't make changes, and I didn't understand what was happening. So when when I talked to Enterprises today, absolutely. I need to have skills that's internally. I need to be able to respond to things fast, and therefore I need skills that I need people that can build what they have. What what do you see? What are those skill sets that are so important today? Uh, you know, we've talked so many times over the years is to you know, there's there's the skills gap. We don't have enough data scientists. We don't have enough developers way. We don't have any of these things. So what do we have and where things trending? >>Yeah, it's It's one of those things for developers where they both have probably the most full tool set that we've seen in this industry in terms of things that are available to them. But it's also really hard because it also indicates that there is just this fragmentation at every level of the stack. And there's this explosion of choice and decisions that is happening up and down the stack of how are we going to build things? And so it's really tricky to be a developer these days and that you are making a lot of decisions and you are wiring a lot of things together and you have to be able to navigate a lot of things. E think. One of the things that is interesting here is that we have seen the phrase like Full stack developer really carried a lot of panache, maybe earlier this decade and has kind of fallen away. Just because we've realized that it's impossible for anybody to be ableto spanned this whole broad spectrum of all of the things we're asking people to dio. So we're seeing this explosion of choice, which is meaning that there is a little bit more focused and where developers are trying to actually figure out what is my niche. What is it that I'm supposed to focus on. And so it's really just this balancing of act of trying to see this big picture of how to get this all put together and also have this focused area realizing that you have to specialize at some point. >>Rachel is such a great point there. We've actually seen that Cambrian explosion of developer tools that are out there. If you go to the CFCF landscape and look at everything out there or goto any of your public cloud providers, there's no way that anybody even working for those companies no good portion of the tools that are out there so nobody could be a master of everything. How about from a cloud standpoint, you know, there is the discussion of, you know what do I shift? Left What? You know, Can I just say, Okay, this piece of it, it could be a manage service. I don't need to think about it versus what skills that I need to have in house. What is it that's important. And obviously, you know, a zoo analyst. We know it varies greatly across companies, but you know what? What are some of those top things that we need to make sure that enterprises have skill set and the tools in house that they should understand. And what can they push off to their platform of choice? >>Yeah, I think your comment about managed services is really pressing because one of the trends that we're watching closely, it's just this rise of manage services. And it kind of ties back into the concept you had before about like, what an I team. That's they have, like the Nicholas Carr. I t doesn't matter, and we're pushing this all the way. And then we realized, Oh, we've got to bring that all back. Um, but we also realize that we really want as enterprises want to be spending our time doing differentiated work and wiring together, your entire infrastructure isn't necessarily differentiated for a lot of companies. And so it's trying to find this mix of where can I push my abstraction higher or to find a manage service that can do something for me? And we're seeing that happen in all levels of the stack. And so what we're seeing is this rise of composite APS where we're going to say, Okay, I'm gonna pull in back end AP ice from a whole bunch of tools like twilio or stripe or all zero where algo Leah, all of those things are great tools that I can incorporate into my app. And I can have this great user, um, interface that I can use. And then I don't have to worry quite so much about building it all myself. But I am responsible for wiring at all together. So I think it's that wire together set of interest that is happening for developers as the tool set that they are spending a lot of time with. So we see the manage services being important. Um played an important role in how absent composed, and it's the composition of that APs that is happening internally. >>What one of the one of the regular research items that I see a red monk is you know what languages you know. Where are the trends going? There's been relative stability, but then something's changed. You know, I look at the tools that you mentioned Full stack developer. I talked to a full stack developer a couple of years ago, and he's like like like terror form is my life and I love everything and I've used it forever. And that was 18 months, Andi. I kind of laugh because it's like, OK, I managed. I measure a lot of the technology that I used in the decades. Um, not that await. This came out six months ago and it's kind of mature. And of course, you know, C I C d. Come on. If it's six weeks old, it's probably gone through a lot of generations. So what do you see? Do you have any research that you can share as to looking forward? What are the You know what the skill sets we need? How should we be training our force? What do >>we need to >>be looking at in this kind of next decade of cloud? >>Yeah. So when when you spoke about languages, we dio a semi annual review of language usage as a sign on get hub and in discussion as seen on stack overflow, which we fully recognize is not a perfect representation of how these languages are used in the broader world. But those air data sets that we have access to that are relatively large and open eso just before anyone writes me angry letters that that's not the way that we should be doing it, Um, but one of the things that we've seen over time is that there is a lot of relative stability in those top tier languages in terms of how they are used, and there's some movement at the bottom. But the trends we're seeing where the languages are moving is type safety and having a safer language and the communities that are building upon other communities. So things like, um, we're seeing Scotland that is able to kind of piggyback off of being a jvm based language and having that support from Google. Or we're seeing typescript where it can piggyback off of the breath of deployment of JavaScript, things like that. So those things where were combining together multiple trends that developers are interested in the same time combined with an ecosystem that's already rich and full. And so we're seeing that there's definitely still movement in languages that people are interested in, but also, language on its own is probably pretty stable. So, like as you start to make language choices as a developer, that's not where we're seeing a ton of like turnover language frameworks on the other hand, like if you're a JavaScript developer and all of a sudden there's just explosion of frameworks that you need to choose from, that may be a different story, a lot more turnover there and harder to predict. But language trends are a little bit more stable over >>time, changing over time. You know, Boy, I I got to dig into, you know, relatively Recently I went down like the jam stack. Uh, ecosystem. I've been digging into a serverless for a number of years. What's your take on that? There's certain people. I talked to him. They're like, I don't even need to be a code. Or I could be a marketing person. And I can get things done when I talked to some developers there like a citizen developers. They're not developers. Come on, you know, I really need to be able to do this, so I'll give you your choices, toe. You know, serverless and some of these trends to kind of ext fan. You know who can you know? Code and development. >>Yeah. So for both translate jam stack and serve Ellis, One of the things that we see kind of early in the iteration of a technology is that it is definitely not going to be the right tool for every app. And the number of APS that they approach will fit for will grow as the tool develops. And you add more functionality over time and all of these platforms expand the capability, but definitely not the correct tool choice in every case. That said, we do watch both of those areas with extreme interest in terms of what this next generation of APS can look like and probably will look like in a lot of cases. And I think that it is super interesting to think about who gets to build these APs, because I e. I think one of the things that we probably haven't landed on the right language yet is what that what we should call these people because I don't think anyone associates themselves as a low code person. Like if you're someone from marketing and all of a sudden you can build something technical, that's really cool, and you're excited about that. Nobody else on your team could build. You're not walking around saying I am a low code marketing person like that, that that's that's that's demeaning. Like you're like. No, I'm technical. I'm a technical market, or look what I just did. And if you're someone who codes professionally for a living like and you use a low code tool to get something out the door quickly and >>you don't >>wanna demean and said, Oh, that was I did a low code that just like everybody, is just trying to solve problems. And everybody, um, is trying to figure out how to do things in the most effective way possible and making trade offs all the time. And so I don't think that the language of low code really is anything that resonates with any of the actual users of low code tools. And so I think that's something that we as an industry need toe work on finding the correct language because it doesn't feel like we've landed there yet. >>Yeah, Rachel, what? Want to get your take on just careers for developers now to think about in 2020 everyone is distributed. Lots of conversations about where we work. Can we bring the remote? Many of the developers I talked to already were remote. I had the chance that interview that the head of remote. Forget lab. They're over 1000 people and they're fully remote. So, you know, remote. Absolutely a thing for developers. But if you talk about careers, it is no longer, you know. Oh, hey, here's my CV. It's I'm on git Hub. You can see the code I've done. We haven't talked about open source yet, so give us your take on kind of developers today. Career paths. Andi. Kind of the the online community there. >>Yeah, this could be a whole own conversation. We'll try to figure out my points. Um, so I think one of the things that we are trying to figure out in terms of balance is how much are we expecting people to have done on the side? It's like a side project Hustle versus doing, exclusively getting your job done and not worrying too much about how many green squares you have on your get hub profile. And I think it's a really emotional and fraught discussion and a lot of quarters because it can be exclusionary for people saying that you you need to be spending your time on the side working on this open source project because there are people who have very different life circumstances, like if you're someone who already has kids or you're doing elder care or you are working another job and trying to transition into becoming a developer, it's a lot to ask. These people toe also have a side hustle. That said, it is probably working on open source, having an understanding of how tools are done. Having this, um, this experience and skills that you can point to and contributions you can point Teoh is probably one of the cleaner ways that you can start to move in the industry and break through to the industry because you can show your skills two other employers you can kind of maybe make your way in is a junior developer because you worked on a project and you make those connections. And so it's really still again. It's one of those balancing act things where there's not a perfect answer because there really is to correct sides of this argument. And both of those things are true. At the same time where it's it's hard to figure out what that early career path maybe looks like, or even advancing in a career path If you're already a developer, it's It's tricky. >>Well, I want to get your take on something to you know, I think back to you know, I go back a decade or two I started working with about 20 years ago. Back in the crazy days were just Colonel Daughter Warg and, you know, patches everywhere and lots of different companies trying to figure out what they would be doing on most of the people contributing to the free software before we're calling it open source. Most of the time, it was their side Hustle was the thing they're doing. What was their passion? Project? I've seen some research in the last year or so that says the majority of people that are contributing to open source are doing it for their day job. Obviously, there's a lot of big companies. There's plenty of small companies. When I goto the Linux Foundation shows. I mean, you've got whole companies that are you know, that that's their whole business. So I want to get your take on, you know, you know, governance, you know, contribution from the individual versus companies. You know, there's a lot of change going on there. The public cloud their impact on what's happening open source. What are you seeing there? And you know what's good? What's bad? What do we need to do better as a community? >>Yeah. E think the governance of open source projects is definitely a live conversation that we're having right now about what does this need to look like? What role do companies need to be having and how things are put together is a contribution or leadership position in the name of the individual or the name of the company. Like all of these air live conversations that are ongoing and a lot of communities e think one of the things that is interesting overall, though, is just watching if you're if you're taking a really zoomed out view of what open source looks like where it was at one point, um, deemed a cancer by one of the vendors in the space, and now it is something that is just absolutely an inherent part of most well tech vendors and and users is an important part of how they are building and using software today, like open source is really an integral tool. And what is happening in the enterprise and what's being built in the enterprise. And so I think that it is a natural thing that this conversation is evolving in terms of what is the enterprises role here and how are we supposed to govern for that? And e don't think that we have landed on all the correct answers yet. But I think that just looking at that long view, it makes sense that this is an area where we are spending some time focusing >>So Rachel without giving away state secrets. We know read Monk, you do lots of consulting out there. What advice do you give to the industry? We said we're making progress. There's good things there. But if we say okay, I wanna at 2030 look back and say, Boy, this is wonderful for developers. You know, everything is going good. What things have we done along the way? Where have we made progress? >>Yeah, I think I think it kind of ties back to the earlier discussion we were having around composite APS and thinking about what that developer experience looks like. I think that right now it is incredibly difficult for developers to be wiring everything together and There's just so much for developers to dio to actually get all of these APs from source to production. So when we talk with our customers, a lot of our time is spent thinking, How can you not only solve this individual piece of the puzzle, but how can you figure out how to fit it into this broader picture of what it is the developers air trying to accomplish? How can you think about where your ATF, It's not on your tool or you your project? Whatever it is that you are working on, how does this fit? Not only in terms of your one unique problem space, but where does this problem space fit in the broader landscape? Because I think that's going to be a really key element of what the developer experience looks like in the next decade. Is trying to help people actually get everything wired together in a coherent way. >>Rachel. No shortage of work to do there really appreciate you joining us. Thrilled to have you finally as a cube. Alumni. Thanks so much for joining. >>Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >>All right. Thank you for joining us. This is the developer content for the cube on cloud, I'm stew minimum, and as always, thank you for watching the Cube.

>> From theCube studios in Paloalto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this special Cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio, and theCube is really mostly about people, about network, and so we're going to have a focus in, we're going to talk about some technology, we're also going to talk a little bit about careers. I want to welcome to the program, I've got two first-time guests on the program. First, Mark Zbikowski. Probably butchered that badly, Mark, sorry, technical advisor, and Blue Gaston. Uh, Gaston. Boy, I'm doing horrible with names here. Software engineer, you're both with Polyverse. But, you know, my last name's Miniman, it has been butchered a million times. But Mark, and Blue, thank you so much for joining us. >> You're welcome. Our pleasure. >> Yes. >> All right. So one of you I've read a lot about online and the other one is Mark, go to the Wikipedia page, stuff like that. So we'll get to that too. So, Blue, maybe start with you, give us a little bit about your background. >> Yeah, so I work at Polyverse now, a cybersecurity startup. But actually I got my undergraduate degree in Philosophy, and from there, kind of just like, what am I going to do with a philosophy degree? And it just weirdly was like a natural transition. I was like, oh, computer science. And kind of the logical, like the technical version of philosophy. So got my master's in philosophy and now, or not philosophy, in computer science, and now have been working at Polyverse. I started as an intern and they hired me on, I think after a month, they were like, no, we want you full-time. So that was cool and I've loved it. So I'm starting off my story, that's kind of where my kick-off point is. >> Awesome. So, and Mark, first of all, you have to give us the connection between yourself and Blue, and a little bit surprising that she waited so long to go into the computer business. >> Uh, okay, I'm her stepfather. It's not surprising that she, you know, wanted to go into computer science. She's got lots of aptitude for it. She was just on a career path and an education path that was primarily logic, analysis, which is basically what we do in computer science. >> All right. So Mark, if you could just give our audience a little bit of a thumbnail sketch as to your background in the tech industry, and it's a storied one. >> Uh, okay. I was, I think, employee number 55 at Microsoft, when I started back in 1981. The first task that they gave me was to work on something that ended up becoming MS-DOS. I worked on MS-DOS for a long time, about five and a half years, worked on a number of other operating systems at Microsoft, ending up with being one of the initial development managers and architects for Windows. I was responsible for all file storage. And I was there for about 26 years. >> Yeah, you know, interesting, you know, when you look on the Wikipedia page, you were the third employee that reached the 25-year milestone. Some guy, Bill Gates, and Steve Balmer, were the first two to reach that milestone. So, you know, quite impressive. I think back, back when I learned computers, it was programming, and you know, today it's coding, and things are quite different there. But, Mark, you were also, you're noted as one of the early hackers there, so what does that mean to you, how have you seen that's been changing? Polyverse is in the cybersecurity realm, so would love your kind of viewpoint on just hacking in general. >> Oh, the early days, well my hacking started pretty much when I was in eighth or ninth grade back in Detroit. We had access to an academic operating system called MTS by way of Wayne State University. I grew up in, just in the suburbs of Detroit. And we had access to it, and for me Excuse me. Hacking at the time was all about trying to understand and learn stuff that was arcane and hidden and mysterious. Figuring out how, for example, password encryption algorithms worked, figuring out how operating systems worked, because at the time, there were very few organized textbooks about how to construct operating systems. Even though operating systems had been around for 20 years. So my early, earliest stuff was in basically, finding holes in security at MTS, and that's how I started, in what they would say "hacking", but it was very innocent, it was very, let's see what we can do! As opposed to, let's extract information, let's go and ransom people's data for bitcoin, which is, you know, I think, a wrong direction to go. >> Yeah. I'm curious your thoughts as the decades have progressed, you know, hacking today, what's your take on, you know, there's the white hats and the black hats, and everything in between. >> Uh, it's kind of an arms race. (laughs) Everything that the white hats will throw up, the black hats will eventually attack to some degree. Social engineering is sort of the ultimate way that people have been getting around, you know, software protections. I think it's unfortunate that there is such a financial reward to the black hat side of things, as counter to one's ethics. I think there's a lot of slippery slopes involved, in terms of, you know, boy, these companies shouldn't be making money, so I deserve my bit. I think that it's much better that, you know, people should come at this from an intellectual, you know, exploration standpoint, rather than an exploitative. But that's the nature of the world. >> Yeah, well, Blue, maybe we can help connect the dots towards what you both do at Polyverse. You mentioned you started as an intern, and I loved the article that talked about this. Well, you know, you're going to be an intern. Can you fix the internet for us? And you did some things to help, you know, help stop some of that malicious hacking. >> Yeah, I, that was crazy. I was very intimidated when I heard that, you're going to be fixing the internet. What I've been working at the company, which is different from our flagship product, but kind of in the same vein, is to stop malicious php javascript code execution. So that's what they came in, that's how they prefaced that problem to me. It was, you're going to go fix the internet. Um, and it was crazy. It was really cool and surprisingly, a lot of philosophy that goes into the way we look at our problem-solving at Polyverse, and how we tackle problems, but of course, I have my Jedi master Mark over here, and I was constantly, "What do you think about this? Isn't this crazy? "Like, look at how Polyverse is attacking this." And I think finally I broke him down, and I was like, come join. Come jump in, and you be the foresight, and you tell us what we're going to do in a year or two. And I convinced him, and now, he's, he's with us too. >> Excellent. So, Mark, tell us a little bit about, you know, more about Polyverse, your role there. In the industry there's a lot of talk about, you know, lots of money obviously gets spent on cybersecurity, but it's still a major challenge in the industry. So what's your role there and how's Polyverse helping to attack that? >> Well, my title is Technology Advisor, and I'm one of a small collection of people who have pretty wide-ranging expertise across operating systems, networks, compilers, languages, development tools, all of that. And our goal is, you know, my role, as well the other Jedi masters, is to take a look at what Polyverse is doing at present, try to figure out where we need to go, try to figure out what the next set of challenges are, use our broad experience and knowledge of the computing milieu, and try to figure out what are the tough issues we need to face? We make some progress on those tough issues, and then turn everything over for the mainline Polyverse development staff to bring it to reality. We're not like researchers, we're much more into the product planning side of things, but product planning in, I hate to use this word, but in a visionary sense. (Blue laughs) >> Yeah, no, it's-- >> We look for the vision. We're not visionaries. We look for the vision. >> You're a visionary, Mark. Admit it. >> Excellent. Well, I do love the, you know, Jedi analogy there. When you look at, I'm curious to your thoughts, both of you, you know, some of the real challenges and opportunities facing the cybersecurity industry. It's a large financial industry company, they'll spend a billion dollars and, you know, does that make them secure? Well, at least they've done what they can and they're pushing enough pieces. But, you know, fundamentally, we understand that this is such a huge issue. >> I think-- >> Blue? >> Well, (laughs) I can try to answer. I think Polyverse recognizes that as well. So we're trying to create new solutions, that instead of just being compliant and checking the boxes, we're actually trying to create systems and products that will stop attacks from actually working. Rather than being reactive and being responsive, we're trying to build these systems out where the attacks just don't work as they're currently designed. And I think we, you know, and to do so in an easy-to-deploy, time-saving kind of way is definitely our goal. Rather than the status quo and, you know, we're fighting inertia, we're trying to, to change that narrative in a really meaningful way. >> Thanks, Blue. Mark, do you have some comments you can add to that? >> Once we started taking individual computers and hooking them up to the internet, where they can communicate fairly freely with each other, and by intent communicate fairly freely with each other, by design, by intent, all of a sudden that opened us to just a wide range of malicious behavior, from being DoS'd, to leaking passwords, et cetera. There are, there's layers and layers that one can do to mitigate these problems. From IT operational manuals to buzz-testing your API, to best practices, it's a, there's a long list. And every bit, every piece of it is important. You need to secure your passwords before you can do anything else. You need to make sure that there's a firewall in your system be fore you go and start, before you even start thinking about doing things like, like what's goin on with what we're doing at Polyverse. It's a, like I said, there's a wide range of tools that people need, that people use, that people spend money on today. Polyverse has got a very unique perspective on how to go and extend this. We, it's a, it's very pragmatic, you know, the realization is that these attackers are going to keep attacking, and they're going to exploit certain features that, despite everyone's best intentions, aren't covered, and we have found a rather unique and novel way to prevent people from doing it. Is it going to solve everything? No. There's still, there's all these other early layers that need to be taken care of first, before the more sophisticated tools that, for example, that Polyverse has or that other companies have. >> Great. Well, Blue, you talked a little bit about it, but, you know, love your, what you've found, you know, working together as a family dynamic here. You know, specifically. >> Um, (laughs) I think it's really cool. What's the best, I'll say this, is when, I always like asking Mark his opinion, because why wouldn't I? The brain that guy has, and just the experience, he can add so much. Every once in a while, I'll go, and I'll say, you know, oh, this is what I'm working on, and here's what I'm kind of thinking, and he'll say, oh, yeah, well what about this? And I'll actually get to explain something to him. And I got to tell you, that feels really good. Is when I get to say, oh, well, actually it looks like this, and this was my plan, and he's like, oh yeah, definitely. And I get that validation, which is really cool. And I can, you know, drive to his house and bug him whenever I want to. I know where he lives, so if I'm really stuck, or just want to bounce ideas off of him, it's really cool. It's really cool, and I, you know, strong-armed, not strong-armed, I enticed him to come and join Polyverse just by the cool things that we're doing, and I think that's cool too. To now be able to work on something together. >> Yeah, and Mark, sounds like you're learning some things from Blue. Give us your side of that relationship. >> Well, it's a great relationship. Blue, um, Blue never hesitates to challenge. (Blue laughs) >> Blue: Okay. And that, I'm saying that in a very positive sense. Um, you know, she'll come up, every so often I'll get a text from her that says, "Help!" >> Oh my god! (laughing) >> Yes. Sorry. At least I'm not showing it. (laughs) But it's great. And we get together and we talk about stuff, and she says, you know, here's the problem I'm facing, and I'll ask her about it and she gets to go and teach me about what her problem is. I'm a big fan of teaching. I think one of the frustrations that Blue has is I almost never give her the answer when she asks a question. (laughs) >> Not even when I was in school, >> Yeah, not even when you were in school. I was always asking the questions and leading her to the answer rather than just giving it to her. >> Or saying, well why don't we sit down and I'll teach you how to implement knowledge. Just like, oh my god. What are you doing? >> Yeah. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of teaching and learning by way of teaching. One of the things I do is I'm an affiliate with the University of Washington, and I teach every year one quarter of their Operating Systems class. And I love teaching, I love seeing the light go on. But every year, when I'm teaching a class that I know pretty well, I learn something new. By a question the student asks, or by reading a paper that I'm asking the students to read, I learn something new just about every year. And so having Blue teach me is a way that I get to learn, but I think in the process Blue also gets to learn as well. You know, in the process of teaching me. >> Yeah, well, that's such a great point. All right, want to give you both the final word on what's exciting you, what draws you to working in the cybersecurity industry. >> Um, I'll start. (laughs) So when I started at Polyverse, I actually got to, as an intern, own my own product. And in, I think, less than a month now, we're actually officially releasing that product, polyscripting. Officially, like Marketing is coming up with materials for it, and that was right out of school is when I started on this project, so it's kind of like a big deal for me. You know, I've owned the project, I'd say like 90% of it, over the last year or two, and now I get to see it come into fruition. So that's really exciting to me. Um, you know, that's exciting. So I'm excited about that, I'm excited about what Polyverse is doing in general. So, yeah. >> And Mark? >> Yeah. It's great working in a startup, it's great working with a bunch of very, very bright, energetic people. For me, contributing to that environment is extremely valuable. Helping Polyverse out, they're, you know, cybersecurity is problem. Trying to come up with good, effective solutions that are really pragmatic in terms of, you know, we're not going to solve every problem, but here's a great little space that we're going to solve all the problems in. That's, there's a huge appeal to that for me. >> Well, Mark and Blue, thank you so much for joining. Appreciate you sharing some of the personal as well as the professional journeys that you've both been on. Thanks so much. >> Yeah, thank you >> Yeah, you're welcome. >> All right. Thank you for watching theCube. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. (soothing music)

>> live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering E M C. World 2015. Brought to you by E. M. C Brocade and D. C. >> You're watching E m C World Live here on the Q. Looking Angles Flagship program. We go out to the event they start the season noise. I'm John Kerry of my coast Dude. Minutemen. Our next guest is a cube. Alumni have been on a cute many times before and back again. 2011 John Thompson is the CEO of Virtual Instruments and also the chairman of a company called Microsoft. Um, welcome back to the cubes. Nice to be about Great to see you in the A M World week didn't interview on Virtual Instruments with CEO, and we were really riffing on this whole idea of data instrumentation. And we it was really free Internet of things. So give us the update. What's going on with virtue Instruments here? I see Microsoft has a conference going on ignite. Even though you're chairman. The board. You're also the CEO of Virgin Instruments and you're gonna do some business here. What's going on? What business are you doing? Well, this is an important conference for virtual instruments. DMC is one of our strongest go to market partners, and candidly, many of their customers are virtual instruments customers. And so it's an opportunity for me to be here to spend time with our partners and our customers in one venue. Our business is doing quite well. We just had a very, very strong March quarter, which is always a little bit of a down quarter for most tech companies. But we were up 27 28% year over year for the calendar. Q. One so we feel pretty good about that. This is the most important quarter of the year, though, which is always the case in Texas. So we're hoping that we can knock the ball out of the park again this quarter. We launched our virtual wisdom for platform in the spring of last year, and it is gaining tremendous traction, certainly in the U. S. And around the globe. It is all about health utilization in performance of the infrastructure, and we've defined a model where you can look at an application inside that infrastructure, monitor its performance and its availability, and that idea is so critical in a world where everything will someday live in the cloud and will you will want to assure a level of performance and, quite frankly, a level of responsiveness to customers as they come on says it's a reset to share the folks out. This is not a new concept for you guys. We talked about this years ago. It's not like you woke up one boys. Hey, things is trendy. This data center in fermentation takes us quickly back. Where did it come from? Was an itch to scratch. What original product as you have and how does that morph into today's crazy, data driven world, where dash boring riel time is actually competitive advantage and now table stakes? Well, if you were to go back to the genesis of virtual instruments, we started as a small technology investment inside a larger company called Venice are that was trying to solve the inevitable performance problem in the fibre channel world. And as the market crashed in 7 4008 the team at Venice or had to decide, how are we gonna clean up our portfolio? And the result waas. They sold off the assets? Were we, in fact, created virtual instruments. So a small group of investors, led by Jim Davidson from Silver Lake and Michael Marks from Riverwood, helped to fund the original investment and virtual instruments. We've been at it now for about seven years. We have clearly evolved the product quite a bit since then, and we've captured a number of very, very strong venture capital investment so long away as we made the choice. That said, we need the shift from being a fiber channel company to be in an infrastructure performance management company because the inevitable movement to the cloud will drive an opportunity for us. Yeah, and you're a senior executive private equity. I mean, this is pretty much a big bet. There's a lot of money involved with private equity. So it wasn't like you're, like, throw in the Silicon Valley startup together. It was really like, Okay, there's big money behind it. Well, you guys, did you see it turning out this way? What? What was learning that have been magnified from that trajectory? Well, I think in the early days we thought the path was a little different than what we've actually followed. We thought the path waas that the fibre channel World was so big and it needed better visibility. This would in fact give the world better visibility in the fibre channel space. What we have observed, however, is that the entire infrastructure has become Maur and more opaque, and therefore you need to not just drive visibility in the storage layer, but across the entire converge staff. And so the platform that we have evolved is all about supporting this converged platform not just fibre Channel, but filed a storage not just VM where, but all virtualized server environments. And we believe that's, ah, multibillion dollar market. And that's why we were able to attract both private equity initially and venture capital later as we built out of product. It's interesting. You see some of these ideas come a come around full circle. I'm curious. Just in industry trend. Your your opinion on Veritas, you know, being spun out. It's it's It's both sad for me personally, but I think it speaks to how difficult the cultural integration might have been between the two companies. While I really had a vision back in the old four or five days of security and backup coming together, I think It was a really, really difficult thing to make happen in the context of what has evolved at Samantha, so the fact that they've chosen to spend it out, it's perhaps a little disappointing for me personally, but not a surprise. So what is your vision of security today? My understanding, You advise, even sit on the board of ah Lumia company. We've way we've talked to the company really, what's happening in security. So if you think about how security has evolved once upon a time, it was about protecting the device candidly and a cloud based world. It's going to be more about protecting the workloads as they move around. And that's one of the elements of what a lumia does, in fact, provide. Furthermore, I have believed for a very, very long time that as time goes on, security will have to get closer and closer to that which is deemed to be most critical. In other words, you can't protect all of the data. You can't protect all of the instances that air on the Web, but you can identify those that are most critical and therefore need a level of protection beyond what the standard would be. And so my belief is that companies like a Loom EO and others that will evolve will get closer to the workload, and we'll get closer to the data that's most critical. And so data classification and things of that nature will become much, much more important than they have. You're an investor in aluminum. You on the board are okay, so you're on the board of director and investor. We covered their launch. Great company. The cracking is low slides, as as Alan Cohen would say, they phenomenal funding round gone from stealth two years and now the big $100,000,000 really funding round massive guerrilla marketing. Still going on at the air say, was kind of clever. The perimeter lists cloud is a factor. And what tech enabled? Do you see the key thing? Alan Cohen described it as 1000 foot shoulds soldiers protecting assets because there's no more perimeter that no front door any more. What is the technology driver for that? Well, the whole idea behind the loom Eo, is to have a what I would call a portable policy enforcement engine that can move as the workload moves around the cloud. So policy management, security policy management has been a very, very difficult task for most large enterprises. So if I can define security policies for every server of where workloads can go to and from on that server and make sure that nothing violates that policy, hence I enforce it routinely. Oh, I can change. The dynamic of House security gets delivered in a cloud based world because no workload is gonna run in any single place on a cloud world. That workload is gonna move to where there is capacity to handle. I gotta ask you because we have a lot of people out there that follow tech business test tech athletes that you are. But also, you're a senior executive who has a lot of experience, and we could be presenting to Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School. I want to get your kind of business mind out to the audience. And that is, is that as an executive who's seen the big, big companies, the big battleships, the big aircraft carriers, from the IBM days to the M in a world of the nineties and the transformation of the Internet now in a complete shift, an inflection point with things like a Loom, Eo and Cloud and and Virtual instruments and the new Microsoft and the Silicon Angles and the crowd shots out there, What do you advise managers out there to operate from a management perspective. I mean, there's a classic business school numbers quarter on the challenges of going public, managing enormous dynamic technology change. So every theater is kind of exploding the technology theater, the business theater, the social theater as an executive. How would you advise someone as a CEO are rising growing startup how they should stitch themselves together? If you can draw in from previous experiences? Or is there a pattern recognition you can share? Well, it's It's never simply about the numbers, while the numbers air always important and the numbers will always be the underpinning of evaluation or whatever. In reality, it's about having a team that is able to rally around a leader with vision that says, Here's how we're gonna change the world. Here's how we're going to make an impact as this industry goes through, the natural inflection points that it always does. And if you look at what has occurred in this industry about every 8 to 10 years, something significant changes. And so a company that may have missed an opportunity six or eight years ago has another shot at it six or eight years later because of the inflection points that we go through. So it's important for the leader of a company toe. Believe that I can change the world based upon the industry that I'm a part of and have a compelling point of view about what changing the world means for that company and that team. And if you could get the team together around that idea, what about cloud and big data and mobile thes dynamics that you would? If someone just wants a roadmap for navigation or what decked me to go after, What would you say? What do you say? You know, get it all in the cloud or go poke at a duel are indeed new, agile management. Things were happening like, Well, I think it starts with what are the court confidence is that you have as a team or company, so you can't say g I'm gonna go and do cloud and oh, by the way, I have no confidence in the management infrastructure for large enterprises or I'm gonna go do mobile and I really have no experience in the mobile space whatsoever. So core competencies matter and leveraging the core strengths of the company matters now. Oftentimes, what companies will do its supplement their core strengths through M, and we'll go out and acquire something and bolted on the hard part of M and A, which is what we were referencing early around. Veritas is Can you integrate it? Can you really make it work after you bought it? Buying it is the easy part. Generating it and making it work is the really, really tough part. And arguably we didn't do is good a job as I would have liked with Samantha. And so basically you're saying is if you as an executive, you want to look at the winds of change for hand, get the sails up, if you will, to confuse the metaphor and get into that slipstream so you can actually drive and you can't. Being an amateur, you gotta actually have some competency. You have a leverage point. Look, one of the great things about this industry is it doesn't take some brilliant business leader to create a new idea. I mean, no one ever would have viewed Zucker Bird as a business leader or some of the young, really, really powerful CEO built phenomenal, phenomenal companies in this industry. But they had an idea, and they were able to create a team around that idea and go change the world. And that's what's so powerful about this industry that I've had the pleasure to be a part of for 40 some years. Yes. Speaking about CEOs that changed the industry, John Chambers announced that he's stepping aside from the CEO role this morning. So you know when you look back, you know John was one of the four horsemen of the Internet era and 20 years there. Chuck Robbins is coming in. He's been there since C. I think 97. What do you think of that move? And you know what's happening with Cisco in leadership for the big companies? Well, John's a really, really good friend, and I admire him for all of what he's done and Cisco and I wish him well as he makes this transition. Interestingly enough, the transition is to executive chairman, with the new CEO stepping in so What that says is that John plans that have a little more involvement, perhaps in what goes on in the company. Then I do it. Microsoft. My title is not executive chairman of Microsoft. Thank goodness I wouldn't want it to. But it also speaks to the fact that John spend the CEO. It just goes since 1995 like that. So he has an enormous amount of knowledge and insight about the company industry, its customers, partners, culture, all of those culture. And so all of those things will be valuable and important to the new CEO. And I think him stepping into that role is trying to leverage that. Cenedella came in and made his voice heard really instantly. And Microsoft has been a great company to watch, you know, since Auntie's came on board, you know, just Cisco need to make some bold moves or are they pretty stable where they are is kind of the dominant? That's a better question for John and CEO. I think what is clear is that all all companies, at some point after find a way to redefine and Sasha's role at Microsoft. He has redefined Microsoft as a cloud first mobile first, and that's all about recognizing. Were acts are gonna run on what devices and what kind of service is. And that redefinition, I think, is important for any industry leader, regardless of how long you just brought us to the tagline of this show, M C World is redefined. So any comments, How's the emcee doing it? Redefining themselves, I think the emcees a terrific company. Joe's a longtime friend of mine. I mean, I know Joe forever on. It's been amazing to see how it's gone from being a storage company to this federation of companies that have capabilities that are so broad and so diverse. I hope they don't get pushed to do something that isn't in the best interest of customers, but maybe enamored by some investors. The angel of the activist pressure. Yeah, that's always and that that's unfortunate, but I think they have a nice balance now. They have a huge installed base and this competitive pressure so they gotta push that. But I have to. I have to ask, is that? You know, I was getting some tweets earlier about Microsoft, and I know you, you know, you're only chairman of the board executive chairman. But you were involved in a very historic where you were on the executive search committee for the CEO replacement for Steve Balmer, of which they chose sake. Nutella Cube alumni We interviewed at the XL Partners Innovation Summit in Stanford that that's about culture. That's about transitions, about inflection points. And Sister used to mention Cisco. Not similar situation. But Microsoft is the legend company. I think the computer industry like an apple. Microsoft was their big part of the computer revolution. Big seismic changing. You were right there. Just share some color on what that whole experience like for you personally. And if you can share any insights to the audience, I know it's a sense might be sensitive topic. But what's that like? And, you know, the outcomes. Looking good. As he says, he's doing great. What? What can you share? Well, I think it would be fair to say that it was a more consuming process than I ever thought it would be. I went from being a new board member of Microsoft in the spring of 2012 to be in the lead independent director in the fall of 2012 to leading the search starting in the summer of 2013. I mean, I never could have imagine my involvement there changing that dramatically, Nor would I have imagined that searching for a CEO of a company would consume 80% of my time when I was also running a company. So for a period of about six months, it's like athlete right there. I had two full time jobs where I was on the phone all day, every day, trying to get something done for the eye and on the phone all day, every day, trying to get something done for Microsoft as well. It was, I would also have to say and incredibly incredibly exhilarating experience. I talked to some phenomenal leaders from around the world way had hard, long look anywhere we wanted at any CEO or candidate that we wanted, and we settled on someone who was a Tech athlete. We believe that the company was at a really, really important inflection point where over the course of the next 12 to 24 months, we're gonna have to make some really, really important technology decisions that would set the course from Microsoft for many, many years to come. And so, while there was much speculation in the press about this person or that person, and what a great business leader, that person waas What we, as a board concluded, was that what our company needed at that moment in time was a true technology visionary who could drive the strategy of the company because it had assets. I mean, they had a whole search thing that they quote missed on paper. But they had, like you said, they could come back at it again with being the subtle art of assets. Here, Cloud was built out. Everything was kind of like in place for that tech athlete on. And I think soccer has done an amazing job. I'm quite proud of them. I'm happy toe say I have some small part in that, but I'm or happy for the way he has executed in the job. I mean, he steps into the job with a level of humility but confidence that is so important for the CEO of a company of that size, and to maintain that cultural DNA because you have one of most competitive companies on the planet. A question to the point where they had to be almost broken up by the DOJ from the Bill Gates kind of DNA and bomber to continued, be competitive, live in this new era. Really tough challenge. Well, he's he's a bright guy. He, as I said, has great humility and has the respect of the team. And it's been interesting to see the internal shift behavior and attitude with a guy who I jokingly say he has two ears and one mouth and he uses them proportionately. And that's a very important lesson for someone trying to transform a company. You must listen more than you talk, and I think he does a great job. We try to do that. The Cuban we talk all day long way do interviews, but I gotta ask you back to virtual instruments. Okay, gets a good business going on with the emcee Goto partner about the anywhere in the federation of a partner with you as well, say, Is it all Federation? It's mostly through E M. C. And while the em wears of small V I customer, we don't do much with them on the go to market side on the go to market side. We rely more heavily, if you will. On AMC, that partnership has evolved. I mean, from the early days it was viewed as G. We're not sure who you are and what you do and whether or not you're competitive with us today, we have very, very common go to market processes around the globe. I'd love to see them stronger. I just left to cheese office in San GI Joe. We could doom. Or but when it's when it's all said and gone, this is one of the strongest go to market partners we have that's also shared the folks out there what they might not know about insurance, that you could share their hearing this now for the first time and working on the radar future of your business, your division product, extensive bility. Future of Internet of everything. Future Internet of things, whatever you want to put on a big data and the data center now, and the migration of cloud is all here. So at our core, we believe that every large enterprise will inevitably have some, if not all, of their work in the class. So the question is, how do you help them manage that inevitable migration to the cloud by de risking the migration and ensuring appropriate infrastructure performance management. Once you arrive there, we focus on the largest enterprises in the world. So unlike many tech startups, that will start with a midsize or small company and work their way up well, the largest banks in the universe, the largest insurance companies in the universe, the largest of every sector in the universe is a customer of the eye or will be someday. And that notion of solving very, very complex problems is something that our team has great pride in our ability to do that I want to get philosophical with you. You can for second kind of sit back and, you know, have a glass of wine and kind of talk to the younger generation out there with all your history on experience. How great of an opportunity for the young entrepreneurs and CEOs out there right now. Given the the confluence of the shift and inflection points, can you compare this to an error? We on the Cubes say It's like the PC revolution bundled in with the clients, terrorists and the Internet. All kind of at once do you agree? And would you say it? Guys, you have an amazing opportunity. Well, I think example of just how crazy it is. I I was driving to the airport this morning, and what I thought would be our long drive took two hours. Because there's so many people on the road in the Valley going to work. There's just so much going on in Silicon Valley right now. It is amazing. And for anyone who has a really, really great idea, the thing that's equally amazing is there's lots of capital out there to support those ideas. And so I would encourage any young entrepreneur who has a thought socialize your thought, Get it out so people can learn about it and then go get money to support and back that though. There's lots of money out there for good ideas. Lots of money. \ewelry officially taking the time coming out. Your busy schedule. CEO Virtual Instruments, chairman of Microsoft Here inside the Cube tech athletes is a big deal. You are one of the great great. Always have a conversation with you, sharing your thanks so much. Just the Cuban. Be right back with more insights and the signal from the noise at this short break