>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are live in the NetApp booth at SAP SAPPHIRE 2018. We are joined by Robert Stumpf, Senior Director of IT, Enterprise Solutions Delivery. Welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, thank you. >> So we're here in the NetApp booth at SAPPHIRE NOW. As they said in the keynote this morning, they're expecting a million people to engage with SAP SAPPHIRE this week. >> Yes. >> Think, I've heard rumblings there's about 20+ thousand people here in attendance. >> Yeah. >> Huge event, huge show, lots of announcements. Let's talk about NetApp and SAP as partners. Specifically in the context of the Next-Gen Data Center, bringing cloud-ready solutions to business application. What are you guys doing there with SAP? >> Sure, I can talk a little bit about that. The NetApp solutions fit into the Next-Generation Data Center in a variety of different ways. We have the All FAS Flash that really is the core of our product base and is really the workhorse of all the hardcore applications, gives you really a strong performance in the storage area. Then we have the Cloud Volumes with when you want to scale out to hyper scaler, and you can use the Cloud Volumes abilities there. And then when you look at our HCI components, it is capable of giving you a lot more of the container-based compute power, so we fit into a variety of different components there. >> So, Robert, we're at SAP. And SAP hasn't been traditionally known as a cloud-aware application. Tell us, from the NetApp perspective, what's changed with SAP over the years that now, you can comfortably talk about SAP as a cloud-aware application? >> So SAP's moving a long way in that direction. You saw it this morning in the keynote that they were talking about the C4, their customer-focused applications. That's really kind of putting a framework on top of all of the customer engagements, and making the customer the center of everything. So they're moving a lot in that direction. We at NetApp have implemented their Hybris platform, their cloud for customer application. We just went live with that last year, so we're on that journey with SAP as well. >> So, as we talk about that, what makes the application, or what make applications in general cloud-aware? >> Okay, when you look at making something cloud-aware, you want to really look at the architecture that you have underneath it. So you'll build something that has a lot more automation in it, a lot more scalable, where you don't have to, the scalability's built into the framework, like you're leveraging. In the case of our NetApp support site, which we just completely re-architected and went live last month, we have built that on what's called a MEAN stack, so that's where the Mongo database and the back-end that's a NoSQL database, and then on top of an Angular node.js, which gives you much more robust framework for you to be able to scale-out your application. So with it being a website, and your volume can go up and down, so you want to be able to scale the application without needing people to get involved in that scaling, so they will just fire up new containers as needed as the volume increases, and it's a lot more robust in architecture. >> So if we look at Hybris and we look at NetApp products and solutions, that framework and architecture. Can you paint a picture for us what NetApp solutions and products are cloud-aware? >> Sure, the cloud-aware applications, really you need to look at the complete stack of the Next-Generation Data Center, which is really embodying the on-prem data center, your hyperscaler cloud data centers, and then a private cloud if you so wish to build one. So the Next-Generation Data Center takes advantage of the All FAS Flash on your on-prem solution, so you've got your performance, high-performance scalability. Then your Cloud Volumes allows you to move your data between your on-prem out to the hyperscaler as you need to, and the HCI component gives you that container-based compute array that allows the applications to scale. Also, you can leverage StorageGRID, which is much more of an object-based data base, which is something that you'll use extensively on cloud-aware applications. >> So, thanks Keith. So one of the things that was announced this morning, you mentioned C/4HANA where Bill McDermott was sort-of expected to announce what SAP was going to be doing that's gonna help differentiate them. They want more share from Salesforce and Oracle. He made kind of some aloof references to that, but one of the things that he talked about was: companies need, in this day and age, speed obviously, but to move away from a 360-degree view of sales automation to an actual 360-degree view of the customer. I'd love to get your insight on NetApp and SAP as partners together. Are you seeing any particular industries leading here? We think of manufacturing, maybe automotive oil and gas, but I'm just wondering from NetApp's perspective, are you seeing any industries that are really leading-edge here in evolving to a Next-Gen Data Center that enables this 360-degree view? >> There's a variety of different industries that are doing that. If you take a look at applications like Netflix and Amazon Prime, those applications are architectured to be scalable and to be much more robust, and they are much more focused on the customer. And because you don't have outages, right? They don't take the system offline when they're doing an upgrade to their capabilities. When was the last time you heard of Netflix going offline for twelve hours to do an upgrade? So, these applications are built much more robustly around that, and that's what one thing that we are looking to do at NetApp with the Hybris implementation that we did with SAP, and we're also upgrading our back office CRM system to their CRM on HANA on-prem, and we're gonna be taking advantage of the Hybris capabilities there to give that full picture of the customer. We'll be heavily engaged with SAP on their C4 journey and making sure that we are a part of that as well. >> So it's great that you brought up Netflix as an example that continues to be operating an environment that has this huge back-end automated with technology. SAP traditionally hasn't been considered a technology that you could upgrade on the fly. I've managed an SAP environment where we can only take twelve hours of downtime a year because mission critical, it's very difficult to get that time. >> Yes. >> How has the NetApp data fabric story played into making that a possibility in your own environment and customers' environments? >> Okay, we leverage a lot of the NetApp storage on our on-prem system. I'm in the exact place, same situation as you were talking about. We have a lot of mission critical customers that are on our support application. I have to give 90-days notice to take the system down for any longer than four hours at a time, so I'm in that very similar situation. So we leverage a lot of the NetApp technologies to make sure that the applications are available when I'm doing the upgrades, and we can do rapid copies of the data that's in there, make sure it's all robust. Our data, failover database, failover systems, are set up that way so that they take advantage of the snapshots that we got from the application, and we're working with SAP. The SAP Hybris application is actually built on top of NetApp storage, and we're working very closely with SAP to re-architect our applications, to take advantage of the capabilities that NetApp storage brings to the equation. >> So none of this coming into its own in this hybrid cloud model that's been around 26 years, right, long time. But now, it's everything you see. You mentioned Netflix, and I don't know anybody on the planet that would survive if Netflix went down for an hour, let alone twelve. So speed, access to data, but this evolution of NetApp, I'm interested, and you know now again in this hybrid cloud model, you guys made your name from building network attached to storage on-prem data centers, the announcement with Google Platform just last week. Talk to us about some of the evolution from NetApp, from your perspective, from the storage perspective, into really facilitating this hybrid cloud model. >> Sure, we are really at the forefront of that because at the end of the day, it's all about the data. Right, your application can run wherever you want, but wherever your data is is really the key. And that's the framework that we're putting in place is to make your data a lot more mobile. So if you want to keep the data on-premise, then you can keep it on-premise. If you want to move it out next to the hyperscaler, you can burst it out, you can use the Cloud Volumes and migrate the data. So the NetApp picture, the story is really in making your data much more mobile and moving it to the location of choice for any particular workload that you're looking for. >> So, we can't have a discussion in 2018 about data without talking about privacy and security. What's the relationship in ensuring that NetApp and SAP is one, media requirements in GDPR, we have to talk about GDPR, we have to talk about security. How is NetApp securing data and ensuring that in-users' and organizations' data stay private? >> That's a very good question, right? It's definitely a challenge that a lot of companies are struggling with, and the tools that NetApp provides with our storage systems are paramount, security is paramount, and that's something that we're very much focused on in making sure that your data is your data, and the specific components of the data that you want to keep on-premise, which you want to keep as much more secure, then you can keep that on the NetApp All FAS Flash storage systems, and then you protect it as if it's in your own kingdom. But then the data that's a little bit more lax on the security sites, then you can push that out onto the hyperscalers and use the NetApp Cloud Volumes to have it outside of your on-premise. You know, it's like your own firewall. >> So one of the basic things as a ONTAP customer that ONTAP customers depend on and the private data centers, this ability to encrypt data on the fly. Now that we look at, you know we see ONTAP in the cloud, do we get that same basic capability to encrypt data on the fly or encrypt data while it's in transit? How do I know my data is protected from an encryption perspective? >> You get the same capabilities when you're using the on-cloud tools that we provide, so there's no real difference in that, and that's the beauty behind that. You're using the same storage management tools for your Cloud Volumes as you would be for your on-premise systems. >> I want to ask a question on competition. There's a lot of co-opetition that's going on just at SAPPHIRE alone. With what you talked about about how NetApp is leveraging Hybris, you mentioned, to really kind of get towards that model of connecting supply chain with demand, getting that full view of customers, SAP partners with probably all of your competitors. So how is what NetApp is doing internally to digitally transform, how do you see it as giving NetApp that competitive edge against the other guys? >> Okay, the way that we look at our competitive edge at NetApp from an application standpoint is really focusing on keeping our core capabilities very, very vanilla. So in the implementation with Hybris, we were very much focused on not customizing the application. But because at the end of the day, you sell stuff, you build stuff, you manufacture it, and you support it. So those are the core capabilities, and we've kept that very vanilla as much as possible within the implementation. Where we differentiate, that's where we customize. So our application landscape is much more focused on customizing for the differentiating capabilities, and that's the component that's specific to NetApp and how we do business. And that's the way that we go about differentiating ourselves from our competitors. So we use the core capabilities of all the enterprise applications that we have, that we purchase such as Hybris, and then we go build our custom solutions that are differentiated, that really searches our ASUP, AutoSupport system, that gets what's embedded right from day one, that's a custom-built application, it's very proprietary, it's really the keys to the kingdom for our organization. And that's something that's very, very integral as part of the NetApp culture. >> So, let's talk about some lessons learned from that. One of the pain points for many SAP customers is they look at capability like ECC on HANA, really want it, but they've customized their environment too much, so making that switch is extremely difficult for them. What have you learned as a team that says, you know what, the best way to stay in line with SAP and follow that roadmap for mission critical applications that are both stable and differentiating, you should follow these basic policies from a hygiene perspective. >> Sure, we actually went through that last year with our project where we replaced our Sales Force Automation system, and we implemented C4, C4C Hybris. So the key to that is really getting the executive sponsorship bought-in to making sure that you're adhering to the vanilla applications and not customizing it. So we were very fortunate where we had Henri Richard and Bill Miller, our CIO. They were the executive sponsors of the project, and they were adamant that we would not customize the application, and we went through, it took us six months to replace our CRM system for an office CRM system. Very proud of that project. It was an incredible painful journey to go through, but the benefits that we got out of the end of it are phenomenal because we were in that situation where we had an overly-custom SAS application that was running our sales organization that really wasn't meeting the needs of the business. Now we have a much more agile implementation that's on top of SAP's Hybris platform, and we're taking advantage of the new capabilities they introduce, rather than focusing on our own customizations. >> That's a great summary. I think you articulated very well what, one of the themes was from Bill McDermott's keynote this morning, is making things simple, is not an easy thing to do, but it's critical. There are so many-- >> It's totally critical. >> business outcomes that come out of that, not just stream-learning processes, improving sales and marketing and connecting them together, but really affecting revenue, profit, share, et cetera. So Robert, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting with Keith and me today about what you guys are doing with SAP. >> Great, thank you, thank you for your time. >> We want to thank you. You're watching theCUBE: Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP SAPPHIRE 2018, thanks for watching! (light percussive music)

>> Narrator: Live from Berlin, Germany It's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017 Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017, here in Berlin, Germany. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Peter Burris. We are joined by Tim Pitcher, he is the Vice President, Next-Generation Data Centre for NetApp. Thanks so much for coming on the program. It's an absolute pleasure, it's a pleasure to be here. So let's start just defining for our viewers the Next-Generation Data Centre, how it's built, how it's founded. Yeah so, if you think about NetApp today we think about our customers really consuming technology in three ways. We've got sort of more, we're modernizing traditional data centers and architectures using data management and flash storage and these sorts of things and this really is our back yard, this is what we've been doing for years and years, been incredibly successful at it. And the big disrupter in many ways is Cloud and so our partnerships with the major hyperscalers are critically important to us as well. But there's a third piece to the jigsaw which is the Next-Generation Data Centre and the way we think about that is that if you imagine that you want to use Cloud services but you want to do a lot of that yourself, you want to take advantage of the sort of simple, scalable, automated nature of Cloud then that's really what we're delivering in the Next-Generation Data Centre for our customers. So the Next-Generation Data Centre is being driven by technology advances, business requirements, the realities of data, what are the practical things that are driving, or indicating, the steps that people should take as they think about new technology and new business practices? I mean, the big driver is really to remove a lot of complexity from their business so if you think about going to the Cloud, you're making a really very simple consumption choice. You're saying I'm going to consume data and services from the public Cloud environment and that drives a similar behavior inside large organizations as well, organizations of all sizes. So they're thinking about how do they build private Cloud, take advantage of both with a hybrid Cloud environment, or they can have multiple public Cloud instances as well. So they're thinking about it all very differently and they're thinking about the most appropriate services that they're trying to deliver or the most appropriate way to deliver that application or that data set, if you will, to their customers. So it's not like everything needs to be in one place, and also critically customers very often want to change that as well so they'll make a decision to put something in a public cloud, it might not be the best fit over time for whatever reason, so they want to bring it back in house and deliver that on their own infrastructure and when they do that they want to take advantage, they like what they've had in the Cloud so they want to put that on premise. So the real drive is they really want simplicity, they're really focused on a much more performant outcome that's focused on simplicity focused on how you scale your business and being able to have truly multi-tenant environments that give you the predictability of your traditional architectures if you will, the architectures you know well and have been using for a long time. You want to be able to do that in a Cloud like environment because you the economics of Cloud but you get the predictability of dedicated environments. So which of the customers that you work with are in fact executing this Next-Generation Data Centre strategy most beautifully in your opinion? Well so, if you think about the strategy that NetApp has for our Next-Gen Data Centre is really based on two companies that they acquired. One is Object Storage platform called StorageGRID Webscale the other one is SolidFire. Which, SolidFire was a young, emerging, hot technology company that was focused on delivering what I've just articulated, simple technologies, simple storage platform operated at scale, completely automated and SolidFire was born out of a service provider, born out of a service provider at the same time as OpenStack so it's kind of unique in that perspective. The company was formed to solve a problem and the problem that Rackspace really were looking to solve was how do they take their managed service clients and move them into the Cloud, what's stopping them doing that? And the answer is obviously customers worry about security and things like that but the key thing that was really stopping them was their concern about performance. So if I'm going to share, put all my stuff in with everybody else's, in a shared environment, how do I know I'm going to get what I'm paying for how do I know that I'm not going to have somebody else's applications consume all the services that are going to be given to me? So as a consequence, this was the thing that prevented people going to the Cloud so this is what the company formed to fix so SolidFire came out of that and that's our background and that's why NetApp acquired us because very different way of looking at things so as a consequence service providers are really at the forefront of how they deliver services to their customers and they leveraged SolidFire and we were very successful as an independent company selling to service providers and have been increasingly successful now that we're part of NetApp. Our very first customer for example is in Jersey and is still a very happy NetApp customer, a company called Calligo and they offer tiered services all on SolidFire, trusted Cloud services in and off-shore kind of environment they're focused on the financial services community and things like that. And now we have also major services providers like 1and1 in Germany, which is one of the largest services providers in Europe, long time NetApp customer and they're a SolidFire customer for their public Cloud services as well for the Cloud that they offer. And in the UK as well, Interoute, major service provider. What I like about them is one, they deal with a massive amount of traffic, they've got a huge network so very traffic intensive, but also they really take advantage of NetApp being, sorry, SolidFire being part of NetApp now so they use the on-tap base products in their manage services which those products are optimized for that kind of environment but for their Cloud environment where they're offering tiered services they use SolidFire so they've got us on both sides of the house if you will and so its a great example of SolidFire being part of NetApp, why that's so powerful, why that's so successful. And companies like Internet Solutions in South Africa is one major service provider in South Africa, big consumer of SolidFire and now is part of NetApp, it's a much better place for them because we've got a big business in South Africa, we're very successful there, so we're part of that team now and they go from strength to strength. So now the next challenge is taking some of the best practices that have emerged from what you've learned from working with these service providers and transferring them to other industries. Yeah so, we're seeing a lot in Fin-tech right now, Farmer is a good market for us, Astrozeneca uses SolidFire so a great example of one of NetApps long-term and major customers that's now consuming products and services from other business units and other offerings that we have across a much broader portfolio so they're very happy customers now. That's part of our global account business. Business Wire in the UAE is another example of a successful business transformation that they're doing as well. We've seen a lot of activity in Dev-ops, these products are perfect for Dev-ops because they're so simple, they don't require management they're completely automated, you're not building those large infrastructures of people to support these environments. And it's much quicker to be able to launch applications because of the simple nature of the technology you can launch applications, new products, new services so your time to market is an awful lot quicker as well. Great, well thanks so much for coming on the show Tim, it's been really fun talking to you. It's been a pleasure, thanks very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris, we will have more from NetApp Insight just after this. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to our live exclusive coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. My co-host Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor. Our next two guests is Dave Hitz, who's the co-founder of NetApp, and Anthony Lye, who's the EVP in Cloud Business Unit Manager. Welcome to theCUBE, and welcome back, good to see you, Dave. >> Thank you. >> I always love, I wrote a post years ago called Keep the Founders Around. I always joke with you on this, but the DNA of a company is super critical, and how the products get positioned even as the evolution, the DNA's critical, great to see you out on the front lines, pressing the flesh with the customers here. >> Keep the founders around, so I have a theory about that, 'cause some people say companies where the founder stays around are more successful, and therefore, I must be awesome. I have a different theory, which is companies that are really successful are a more interesting place for founders to continue to be interested to stay. I think that the causality may be the other way around. >> Don't have 'em as a placated-- >> The founders want to keep staying and playing, you must be doing really cool stuff. >> It's a cultural issue, and this is a big DNA discussion. We go back seven years, we've talked, I've talked with your former CEO, Tom Georgens, about this. Why are you going with Amazon? Everyone's saying that's a bad move, contrarian move. You guys said, hey, the customers are asking for it. Now it's all cloud all the time, data as a fabric. This is now mainstream. Really good tailwinds for NetApp right now, 'cause you got the core base, the shiny new toys not winning the day, but blocking and tackling good technology and the right customer focus. Talk about the cloud impact, Anthony. >> Yeah, just to make a point just on the last comment, I mean, what Dave does I think is you lean into things that are disruptive, and I think very few founders have that ability to sort of. >> Sometimes, I think the biggest value add I can bring to NetApp is to give people permission to let go of the old stuff, and some of it's hard. I'm the guy that wrote WAFL for ONTAP, and so, I'm not saying, I mean, we're still >> That was a big deal. >> We're still shipping a lot of that stuff, and it's awesome, but some people struggle to say what do you mean we're going to sell another storage system? This is always the best one for everything. That's what we've been saying for so long. >> ONTAP everywhere. >> And so, if I can let go, it's like it's my baby, and I still love it, but can we have another kid, too? I think that's a valuable role. >> You've been instrumental in the cloud strategy, and you tell that cloud story first, and it's not what you'd expect. And I think that's what gives NetApp its sort of unique and, I think, its 25 years is you go out, and you could easily talk about all the things that NetApp has done, but you choose to talk about where you think NetApp has to go. >> You do, yeah. >> You know, what was interesting to me about today's general session, 'cause we had so much new stuff, I think you almost can't get your head around it. We had to divide it into categories, and the categories we chose really align with how we see customers working. And so, the first category is a lot of people have and will continue to have for years the traditional style of data center with client servers and Linux, Windows. You rack and design it, like what should the fiber channel be? And it's virtualized, but here's the chunk for Oracle, here's the chunk for Virtual Desktop. >> It's running apps, by the way, running critical apps for the incoming. >> Yeah, of course. All of this stuff, and then, you've got this new style, which is all when you racks and wired to the top HCI, and you know, this whole next generation data center. And then, all the cloud stuff that, you know, it's services running entirely in Amazon. We've got services where we're moving data from one hyperscalar public cloud to a different hyperscalar public cloud with no NetApp hardware involved. I mean, these are entirely cloud-native, cloud-resident services. >> Help me solve, like one, from one region to another region of AWS. So, you're saying that the solution can move from one cloud provider to another. >> We've been doing that for a while. I mean, ONTAP itself, you can buy ONTAP Cloud for AWS, and you can buy it for Azure, and so, you can establish a cluster on one and connect it to a cluster on a different one and let ONTAP snap between the two, move workloads between the two, backup between the two. We've always had that. Now, the orchestrator that we showed today pushes us much, much higher and provides our customers with a true multi-cloud platform, but a multi-cloud platform that really starts to blend compute and storage together. And it's a platform that's built from the ground up on Kubernetes, which is now, I think, the sort of universally accepted container strategy for microservice-based applications. And yes, that platform will allow you to deploy an application package at the same time on any of the big three hyperscales. >> A lot of the pushback that I saw on social media was from the announcement yesterday, where Microsoft Azure NFS. Why are? >> Anthony: You got pushback? >> Yeah, pushback, like why, the object storage is no future in this. It's the best way to do cloud, period. Actually, it was the only way. Can you talk about the importance of NFS in the data fabric? >> Well, can I back up a step? Just to be clear, object storage is awesome. >> Keith: It is. >> And NetApp has an object storage solution, and I'm not going to diss object storage, right. It's great. However, NFS is cool, too, and a lot of people have a whole bunch of apps on-prem, and they've written them already. They run whatever they run. And if it uses NFS and you'd like to have it in the cloud, you don't want step number one is let's rewrite it. >> Keith: Exactly. >> You want step number one is it already works, and I would just like to be working over there so I don't have to mess with physical hardware. >> I know this might be sacrilegious for me to say to be from Silicon Valley and you are, too, but the shiny new toy doesn't win the day, and what we learned from the Hadoop, and we've seen it a little bit OpenStack, but they caught it early before it became a tumor, was the cost of ownership to write stuff from scratch is problematic. There's an issue of, legacy's not a bad thing, look with containers, your point about Kubernetes. So, you have to run these apps. No one wants to rewrite code. >> I'm not going to argue if it's a bad thing or not a bad thing, it exists. >> Accurate. >> And we want to help take care of it. >> But rewrite code as a mandate to get this? Nobody, I mean, if it makes total sense, okay you look at it, but it's not. >> I think IDC pegs file-based workloads at more than 24 exabytes with on-prem growing at somewhere around 18% K year and cloud growing at 25%. You know, objects are not the answer to everything, old or new, actually. As an application developer, I like the opportunity to have both, and I think applications will consume both. >> Let me jump into the announcements that were on-stage here, the conversations, a lot of stuff as you mentioned, so the folks should look at the keynote. We've streamed it live, so you can go to SiliconANGLE, or go to NetApps.com, check it out. But a couple things jumped out at me. The ONTAP, was it 9.3? And SolidFire, interesting integration there, shipped, great stuff. The cloud orchestrator, seamless moving data across multiple clouds. Everyone knows me, I've been critical of this. >> And applications. >> This is, I've been looking for someone to actually show me, just multi-cloud is hard, you got latency issues, there's a ton of stuff. But you're not rewriting code to do it. >> Exactly. >> You can do it on-prem, huge deal. And then, the other thing is just a general sentiment of the 18 guys around the channels, the channel partners are energized. They see an opportunity to build a business, sales channel for NetApp, but more importantly, they can come and deliver the customers. Guys, unpack those dynamics. Obviously, the SolidFire thing flashed. >> Can I start with the channel? When I look at how the channel interacts with a lot of customers, they make their money selling stuff, often gear. But if you look at what are they really providing, a lot of them are acting as IT consultants, in some cases with smaller companies as CIOs for hire. And so, it doesn't, people are, oh, well, what do they do if it's cloud? Or what they do if it's on-prem? It's like, the customer still needs that same advice and consulting. >> Your studio has cloud concierge, they have have their own cloud service for their customers. >> And so, I just think that there's a big opportunity for the people who choose to embrace it. Anyone who's telling their customers, whoa whoa whoa, slow down, you don't want to go on the cloud, we'll help you not go on the cloud. Like, I don't think that's a long-term business model anymore. >> Cloud is destinations happening. >> The only thing I would say on the partner side that we've seen is that we now have, I think, credibility in the cloud, so much so that we are signing partners that only work in the cloud. A lot of Amazon partners, a lot Azure partners have come to us and said, hey, you know, we didn't realize you had all of these data services, and we are running customers' infrastructures on the hyperscalars, and we'd like to use your software to make our lives easier, we'd like to use ONTAP Cloud, we'd like to use classing. As well as our traditional partners, there are other partners here at this event that are first timers at Insight. >> Talk about the cloud dynamic because certainly it's a lift, rising tide floats all boats or tailwind, whatever you want to call it, but now, I'm a CEO having a conversation, like, whoa, you got my attention. NetApp on my old trusted NetApp guys, the storage guys, and they're talking data, which music to my ears, 'cause I got all this stuff going on, GPPR. All of a sudden cloud, I didn't know they had a cloud. And you don't get a cloud strategy. You either do cloud or you don't, so this has come up on theCUBE a lot. Talk about the dynamic of how you talk about the damages. I'm like, okay, I know I got to build through the cloud. How does NetApp fit into my strategy? 'Cause I got to cross the bridge to the future, I got business to take care of today, both on-prem, in the three pillars, but I got to have a cloud vision. >> Let me back up a little bit. One of the reasons we think we can help, that we're very well-positioned to help, it's very easy to fire up 1,000 CPUs in the cloud. You want 1,000 CPUs, you fire 'em up, and you unfire 'em up, and everything is easy, until there's any data. What do they want to look at? How do you get it in there? What do they create? How are you going to keep it safe? Do you want to leave it in that cloud or a different cloud, or do you want it on-prem, or all three? And as you soon as you getting yourself into those questions, you go, whoa, that's the hard part of the cloud. The good news is that's exactly what NetApp does. That's the kind of work that NetApp focuses on. And so, the starting point is, look, CPUs, computes, lambdas, container, all that stuff is easy until you get to the data, which lives forever, and you're legally required to do something with it. Now, let's talk about what you're trying to accomplish and where you're going, like that now is. One of my goals these days, how long can we talk without mentioning a product? Because it's not, eventually you're going to have to get to, oh, by the way, we have a backup tool that'll reach into Office 365 and suck it out as objects and put it on your on-prem object storage. >> Well, backup's a whole other story. >> It's AWS or something like that. >> There's no laws in the cloud. >> So eventually, you get to some tool or some product, but you want to talk for a long time about where they're going, what they're trying to solve, what they care about. Often they don't care about a thing you think they should, like aren't you really concerned about budget? No, actually, we're dying, 'cause we can't solve this problem. The budget comes after we solve that. Okay. >> We were talking last week about the, I was calling it the toolshed paradigm, or paradox, and the toolshed paradox is that they're focusing so much on the tools that they have, that they have this bloated tool chest. Some of these are getting, collecting dust. They bought a hammer that they're trying to mow their lawn with. You have problem of too many tools, pun intended. The question is is that, as it kind of distracts from the focus, to your point, data. Data seems to be the killer app in the cloud because now, not just moving data around cloud, developers are using data in real time, so batch in real time is huge. >> How are they enriching the data? >> How is the application developed, because I'm a CIO, I've a lot of things going on, on my plate, I'm ramping up dev ops and more application development, new developers, open source, blah blah blah, security, governance. >> To me, I sort of think a really nice soundbite that I got was, I was an application developer, and my career has always been building applications, and it's always been the applications that own the data. There was an application server, and it executed business logic that read or wrote into a repository. >> A data bank. >> I am at the point where I believe we are in an inflection where now the data will own the application. And what I mean by that is the data has to be fluid and available for many applications to consume it. Some of them will enrich it, some of them will replace pieces of it, and so, architectures have to change. And I think NetApp's incredibly fortunate that we have such a strong data story at a time where the data itself will be the primary asset on a company's balance sheet. >> If you believe that point, which I do, by the way, I think you're 100% right, that changes the paradigm, flips it upside down, but this also creates the conundrum of data governance because I got a policy, I'm going to put the brakes on that because you're freeing the data to be addressable, to be more Alchemist kind of model where I can't control it, but I need to control it because I've got regulations, I've got governance issues. Give me a pause, how do you guys address that? I know you got governance to it, but that's a dynamic, that's a psychology. >> To add on to that, you talk about-- >> How are you going to do that? >> In governance, so there's the policy piece of it, and then, there's the availability piece of it. Just because I can move from an application developer's perspective, just because I can move an application to the cloud, doesn't mean that it will perform like it will when I use in 100 microseconds of latency in my private data center. So, how do I get the policy and the technology governance that combine together in the cloud? >> I think, I'll make two points. I think the obvious answer to the first question is we have the data fabric, and I think NetApp has pioneered its strategy around a set of data services that do certain tasks that can be consumed as applications or as APIs, but then, we've gone one level higher, and now, we orchestrate and connect those things up and provide meaningful solutions. And data has a fantastic, you know, we were talking about a fantastic demo with StorageGRID. I'll let Dave explain that. The second point I would make, though, is what you've got to understand is that the customer that we talk to isn't AT&T, that's just a big building with a logo on it. A customer is the person inside the organization, and we all now know that there is a new customer, and that customer people refer to as the data scientist. And there haven't been data scientists before, but now, every company is hiring data scientists, why? Because the data itself has become the primary asset. Application developers are now serving the data scientists. >> So, dev ops was developers making infrastructure as code with operations. You're essentially describing a new paradigm data ops. >> Anthony: Correct. >> Data as code, 'cause you need to have it programmable. >> And I think that's what most people call meta-data, or they talk now about APIs for everything. And so, I think that's the new norm, I think that there will be very large catalogs of data, surrounded by policy and governance, but expressed essentially as an API and that the data itself can be manipulated in real time or through batch, using a set of RESTful APIs. And I think, Dave, you should share the demo, the StorageGRID guys today. It's just a fantastic data fabric use case. >> Some of my favorite use cases with the data fabric is where you're confused, the line is blurred even. Is it cloud, or is it on-prem, or what is it? And we've been working hard to integrate those things. Here's an example: we showed, and this a made-up use case, but it was an on-prem solid storage grid, so it's a bucket of objects. Did I mention we love objects? It's a bucket of objects and their faces, and the problem was, how do we identify what's going on with these faces? Are they happy, are they sad, are they angry? And you don't want to write your own face recognizer. And Amazon has good face recognition technology, Recognize. And so, the use case that we constructed is here's the bucket, we have integrated our StorageGRID object storage with Amazon Simple Notification Service. And so, any time a new object gets put into the bucket, it notifies Amazon. Amazon can do whatever it want with that information. Hey, here's the bucket, here's the new object added. What we had it do is issue a lambda, connect up the notification to a lambda, have the lambda come back out, grab the data from on-prem, look at it with the face recognizer. Okay, happy, and then go back on-prem and update that meta-data. Is that cloud, or is that on-prem? We used Amazon's lambda, where this is data fabric. >> This is the new development reinvention. This is what I think a renaissance is coming big time because making that happen takes creativity. The barriers to pull that off now are almost down to just knowing what's available. And so, I think a renaissance is coming because that's amazing, but now you got to say, how do you scale that, and this is the channel CXO's at. >> These are what people call microservices, or serverless computing environments, where they're breaking down the basic construct of an application to be a set of consumable services that can be orchestrated around particular data flows. >> And I think a problem with data, how do you discover those microservices? So, having a trusted provider to go and aggregate all of those microservices is a helpful approach. >> Guys, I know we're tight on time, you got to go, and super thankful for your time coming on theCUBE and sharing your insight and color commentary, what's going on. >> Thank you. >> Final question for both of you guys before you split is this. I've been watching NetApp for years, big fan of the company, obviously, Silicon Valley darling. Sometimes takes a lot of heat. "NetApp's dead," and they never die, but you guys are always winning. Reinvention's been a big part of your culture, but that's not about pivoting, it's about building and just adjusting. Secret to the success, how do you guys do it? Advice for others? >> We have repeatedly leaned in to the thing that was going to kill us. So, when VMWare came along, everyone was like, oh, software-defined data center, nobody's going to need data storage services anymore, data management, VMWare will do it all. And we said, you know what, that's not right. It's hard to do the data part, and we're going to go make VMWare better, and if we do that, our customers will pay us money to help them move to VMWare faster. We leaned in on the thing that was going to kill us, and we're doing exactly the same. I mean, everyone's going, oh cloud's going to kill NetApp. >> You built around it rather than let it roll over you. >> Not just built around it, we said we'll make it better. And we did the same thing again with the cloud. Oh, the cloud's going to kill you, and we're like, you know what, let's go figure out how to make Amazon better, make Microsoft better. If we can make them better, I mean, if you solve a hard problem for a customer, some way or another you can figure out how to get paid for that, and I think that's what we've been doing. >> And you get in early, too. The timing is critical. It's not like you're late to the game and saying there's a pony in there somewhere. You look at it, although a little bit maybe applied. >> We first announced that we were working on this cloud stuff three years ago. 2014, we had been started working in 2013, we were there from the ground with Amazon and with Azure running our ONTAP code, and they were changing their environment to fit with us, and we were changing our code to fit with them, and years later when Microsoft says, who are we going to go to to help us manage the enterprise? They came to NetApp because we've been working with them for so long, I love that. >> Guys, I wish you had more time, we're going to get in our studio in Palo Alto. Great conversation, real fire energy going on here from the execs here at NetApp. This is theCUBE, more live coverage in Las Vegas at NetApp Insight 2017 after this short break. (upbeat electronic keyboard music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech-coverage. This is day one of our continuous coverage of VeeamON, continuous coverage of continuous data protection. Big theme here today. Maria Olson is here, she's the vice president of Global & Strategic Alliances at NetApp. Andy Vandeveld is back, he's the vice president of Global Alliances at Veeam. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Thank you, nice to be here. >> Thank you. >> So, first of all, let's start with Maria. So VeeamON, big show, a lot of action. How's it going? >> You know, the energy here is amazing here. I remember being at VeeamON years before, and what I see here in terms of the number of customers and partners, and starting to see the big growth in the enterprise market. And all the announcements and innovation that they've made today is fantastic. >> There's like a groundswell right? We've been following NetApp for years. You guys have the best snapshot technology in the marketplace, customers love it and very efficient, and have always had an interesting take on data protection. And data fabric obviously is a big theme of NetApp these days, so explain that to us and we can get into how you guys partner. >> Sure absolutely, so most companies think of us as a storage company, but we really have evolved from a storage company to a data management company. We have a full portfolio of products, including all of our All Flash FAS offerings. We did an acquisition, which was our largest acquisition with SolidFire as well. We also have back up to Cloud offerings with our AltaVault offering that backs up to Azure and Amazon. We have StorageGRID Webscale. We have a very full, large portfolio. What all this allows customers to do, and where NetApp is heading is in terms of being able to manage and move the date, regardless of where it's at. So I call this, the gold opportunity. I just came back from SAPPHIRE, you talk to Bill McDermott, he talks about how data's gold. You heard the same thing here with Peter McKay as well. And to me the whole thing, it doesn't matter if the gold's there, you got to be able to manage it, and monetize, and do something with it. And that's what NetApp helps provide. >> So Andy, that sounds very consistent with the strategy that Veeam is putting forth. >> Yes. >> That we heard certainly this morning, and throughout this conference. So what's the partnership? Where do you pick up and NetApp leave off, or vice versa? >> Well, so in the date protection space, it's the ability to manage the data, to make sure that it's getting into a form that can be stored and accessed and available as quickly as possible, is really what we're focusing on. And to do that, we need partners like NetApp, who have the infrastructure assets that we can leverage. Particularly as we move more and more into the enterprise business with enterprise customers. Those customer's are spitting off a lot of data. They need their data to be available as quickly as possible in the case of an outage or some other disruption to their business. And to do that, Veeam needs infrastructure partners that have robust portfolios that can handle that sort of requirement, and that's where the relationship with NetApp comes into play. And it's been very good for us over the years. >> I like this notion of data fabric, has a connotation of fluidity, and it sort of reminds me of the Veeam Waves here a little bit. So explain more Maria, if you will, the data fabric, what is that concept, how are customers actually getting value out of it? >> Absolutely, so data fabric was more of a framework, right? We don't have a SKU that you just go buy data fabric. It's really a framework and a portfolio of products, integrated with our ecosystem of partners like Veeam, to be able to manage and move the data. Regardless if it's on PRIM, or where they want to go as part of their digital transformation. So customers are all at different phases in terms of where they want to go, in terms of becoming more of a digitally-oriented business. And we help get them there through the journey, because of the strength that we have on the on premise side, as well as the integrations that we've done with our partner ecosystem, specifically with Veeam and others. So we can help move them in that direction. >> So take that a little bit further, in terms of, so the customer sees this vast portfolio. Andy you were talking before about NetApps infrastructure. It's pretty vast, it's a leader in it's space. What are they asking you guys for? What are they challenging you to do? Specifically in the context of data protection. >> So customers are asking us, number one, make sure that it's simple. And that's one of the big value props that Veeam makes, number one. >> And NetApp over the years. >> And NetApp too. That it's always on and available. That there is no disaster that occurs, that the data is there, that we know where it is, that we can manage it, we can back it up. Those are the big things. The third things customers are asking for, is help us in terms of, how do we digitally transform our business? It's the business outcome that they're looking for. Of which, the products that NetApp and Veeam does, is a subset of that, that helps them on that journey. So they can actually digitally migrate, and become more of a digitally-oriented business, with our offerings helping in the whole backup and recovery and whole data management space. >> Yeah and I would just sort of tag onto that, customer's consumption models are changing. So they're on PRIM, they're in a private Cloud, they're in a public Cloud. The way that they consume is changing, and it's different. And no two look the same. And I think what customers are telling us is, let us decide how we're going to consume. You just be able to accommodate that consumption. And that's really what we've been focusing on. So if it's in an on PRIM environment, great. If it's in a public Cloud, fantastic. If it's some hybrid model, that's great too. We can accommodate that, and that's really what customers are asking us. As well as making sure that we accommodate the various business models that exist. So whether it's purchasing licenses, or some subscription-based models or whatever, they want that flexibility and that's what they're asking us to provide. >> Maria, I'm wondering if you have any joint customers that you're highlighting here at the show, or any specific examples you might be able to walk us through. >> So we have several joint customers, as a matter of fact, you heard Peter McKay talk about 210,000 customers. Of those, 30% are NetApp, so it's a very big area. And now, in terms of some of the announcements they've made, in terms of supporting NaaS, in terms of physical environment. NetApp is the leader in that space, so it's even going to become broader. So you saw today, in terms of Peter McKay talking about the Denver Broncos, that's a big NetApp customer in terms of the solutions that they have there. Also, Telefónica was announced there. Very large service provider. It's another very big NetApp customer. So there's a lot of customers in the enterprise space. Veeam's more known in terms of the s and v space, but when you start to look at the momentum they've had in going up the stack, there's a lot of enterprise customers that we actually are jointly engaging with. >> I would just say that the more that we penetrate the enterprise market and the service provider market, the more that we're going to need partnerships like we have with NetApp. To become stronger, because they're the trusted advisors, the ones that the customers are listening to. It's easier for us just to ride on their coattails into these opportunities than to try to create these relationships all ourselves. That's what makes this such a great partnership for us. >> The Cloud service customer channel base has come up a couple times today. But we haven't really explored some of the fundamental assumptions behind it. And what I want to ask you guys is, everybody sees the ascendancy of Amazon. Very impressive, amazing growth. Yet at the same time, your respective Cloud service provider businesses are also growing very rapidly. >> Maria: Very much. >> So you've got the disruption to the traditional legacy enterprise business we all have covered that very well. But there's not much been discussed about what's going to happen within the Cloud business. There's maybe some camp that says, okay everything's going to go to Amazon and I think many people believe that. But what's happening within the Cloud service provider base? It seems to be quite fragmented, which is a good thing for you guys. It seems to be local in nature, very specialized services, and ability to compete with Amazon and Azure, because they're not competing necessarily with scale volume, they're competing in other ways. So I wonder if you could help us unpack that a little bit. As to what's happening in your respective bases there. >> Yeah, so we're seeing a lot of momentum in the service provider space. So we've sold a lot of storage and data management over to what the large new service providers of the world. The IBM SoftLayers, the Azures, Google Cloud Platform. All of them as well as the existing ones, the AT&Ts and the Verizons and Telefónicas of the world. And so we continue to see a fragmentation there. You kind of have the new world service providers, and the old world service providers. And they're all trying to figure out the business model, so they can make sure that they're all going to be there over the next 20, 25 years to see how this whole game evolves. But we have a big footprint in both of those camps. And as a matter of fact, one of the things I love about the relationship between NetApp an Veeam, is we're companies that are embracing Cloud. We're not fighting Cloud, we're really trying to embrace it. So we have multiple offerings in terms of NetApp across our storage and date management, across all the new emerging Cloud players, and the existing one. And Veeam also has pretty deep relationships. They just announced today in offerings with AWS, and with Microsoft Azure as well. >> Dave: Anything you'd add Andy? >> Yeah, I think you're right about the market being a little bit more fragmented. There are smaller, more specialized Cloud providers. And there's a set of customers that want that. So I think it kind of gets back to the point that I was making earlier, which is the consumption models are changing. And who they consume from, in terms of Cloud, is not 100% consistent, and so we need to be able to deliver the technology that can accommodate whatever that decision is that the customer makes. >> From a partnership perspective, how does something like this start? And what do you, I mean obviously you say, let's go to market together. That's a logical starting point, but then there's maybe some other integration that has to take place. What do you guys sort of set out to accomplish? What are the milestones, the metrics, that you try to, how do you measure success on a partnership like this? How do you know when it's going to work, and is working? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Number one, you first have to have alignment in terms of what solutions you're going to go out there and build. And I think part of the secret of the success of the relationship, if you think back in terms of, NetApp made a big bet in virtualized environments. In doing big differentiated offerings with VMware. Even though their owned by EMC. And we we're extremely successful, 50,000 joint customers. You look at Veeam, they made a big bet with VMware, so our installed basis and the co-nih-va-tion and development that we've done already there, is already paid off there in spades. So number one, you got to have the co-nih-va-tion and the solution that you're building. The second thing is an aligned go-to-market, in terms of what is our go-to-market plan, how are we doing that through the channel? Is it a comprehensive program? What does that look like? And then it comes down to people at the end of the day, and the culture. Do the companies have really good cultures and people that really want to go at, and execute those plans? >> Yeah, and we have strong alignment at the executive levels as well, which helps. Because you need to have that sort of strategic vision, you're looking out 18 months, 24 months. Are we in alignment? And I think that helps. I would say another strong metric for Veeam is our Net Promoter Score, we're 73, it's off the charts, it's fantastic. That doesn't happen if you're not delivering the right solutions with the right set of partners. And to us, that's just another metric of, how successful are these partnerships? Particularly the one that we have with NetApp. >> And actually, I looked at NetApps Net Promoter Score, and we're 64, so we're way up there as well. So that's another area that we're very aligned as well. >> You know NPS is interesting. If you're, you're not really a one-product company, but you're smaller, and so it's easier to have a high NPS when you're smaller. Now, of course you've got on-tap. >> I wanted to be on that graph up there on the key note. >> That's pretty good. (group laughing) I was at ServiceNow last week, and they have a very happy customer base, and they were touting their, I think 53 NPS. And that's, so 60's for a company the size of NetApp. And you guys, like you say, off the charts. So that's impressive, go ahead Stu. >> Yeah just the last piece you talked about, some of the announcements that were made that impact, including in v 10, there's going to be NaaS. We look forward, anything that we should be looking to measure success of the partnerships, and anything that your companies are working on together that you can speak to. >> Well I think at the end of the day, it's customers and revenue. Ensuring that that continues to grow. Veeam's on fire, they've got 210,000 customers, they're growing at 450-- >> 245,000 at the end of-- >> 45, and every day they're adding 200 customers a day. >> Peter corrected me. (group laughing) >> Right, yeah exactly, so I really think we measure it by customers and revenue, in terms of how we're driving. And then new solution areas, like I said, with Cloud we're very aligned in both companies, embracing Cloud. Big opportunity to go after some of these service provider areas. >> Yeah, I think we're going to continue to focus on delivering joint solutions. That's really kind of, if I had to put my finger on one thing, watch this space. It's joint solutions we want to put out to the marketplace that are going to benefit our customers. >> All right, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you. >> All right, thank you. >> Thank you. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back, rockin' New Orleans with theCube VeeamON 2017. (upbeat techno music) (keyboard typing)