(upbeat orchestral music) >> Hello and welcome to this special Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube, here in our Palo Alto studios. We're going to across the pond, across the United States, then the pond to Bill Mew, who is the founder of MEW ERA consulting. We're going to talk privacy. We're going to talk about, you know, the challenges with cloud, cloud scale, and also privacy. With the recent report Facebook behaving like digital gangsters, as the report from The Parliament came out. The huge focus on this big-tech data problem around privacy and user rights. So, Bill, welcome, good to see you. Thanks for coming on camera. I know you're in London area, so you're in the UK, so, great to see you. >> Well, it's really great to join you, and I'm glad the technology's allowing us to chat from this great distance. >> Well, we love to bring the conversations, which are very robust on Twitter, obviously, at @furrier, your @billmew. And all our friends Sarbjeet, Tim Crawford, Stu Minimin. The whole set of Cloud influencers, has been really talking a lot, lately, around digital transformation. You know, it's the classic, you know, cliché, oh digital transformation, blah-blah-blah-blah. It's really about Cloud. It's about Cloud scale, but data. But now, as people start to realize, the scale and some of these immediate benefits of DevOps and agile development. In comes the privacy conversation. In comes the, where's the data? Moving data around is expensive. Managing data and privacy is hugely expensive, and there are consequences. And one of the most obvious news stories, just from the past, you know, 24, 48 hours, is The Parliament report that says Facebook has been acting like digital gangsters. Now this puts it on the main stage. Unpack this for us. >> Well, I come from a Cloud background, and I'm not a sort of rabid privacy campaigner, by any stretch of the imagination. I've been passionate supporter of Cloud and worked with UKCloud, who've been almost unique, being a company that took on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, in the cloud market. And beat them all at their own game. Here, in the UK, we have a procurement framework that the government hosts called, G-Cloud for public sector technology, and UKCloud captured something like 30, 35% of the market with Amazon way down on 12%. So, it was almost a unique instance. I can't think of a single other market anywhere in the world, where these guys are being beaten at their own game. Sort of in the public cloud market, with a very specific niche. And a niche that the cloud focused on, was differentiating themselves around data sovereignty, higher levels of assurance and security, and making sure that the really sensitive government data, be it your tax records, or possibly your criminal record, if you have one, or medical records, or whatever. All this data is kept safe, and it's really, it's been really interesting to see the news recently, and some of the hysteria around privacy. I've seen, as all of us have, the tech revolution of the cloud, and how all this has come to fruition and enabled so much. And now we are seeing the tech backlash, and I think that's at it's full force at the moment. >> One of the trends that we're seeing, and I want to get your thoughts on this, is that, you know, on the one extreme, is users own their own data and you got to see things, like Blockchain, and some interesting progressive solutions around the supply chain of users owning their own data. And then, just the natural trend of Edge Computing, where the data is closest to the, whether it's the people or the devices, you call it the Internet of Things or Edge Computing. It's now becoming part of cloud, and with the global distributed nature of how the cloud is built, the emphasis on regions. So, you see, you know, certain every country has, might have their own characteristics. How is this changing the digital transformation equation? Because, you know, on one hand, you see people saying, look at, you know, you picked the right cloud for the right job. And then the other one saying, no, it should be all vendor procurement decision, not so much a cloud decision. So, there's kind of like two camps going on here. One's saying, let procurement drive the decision. And the other one saying, let the apps or the workloads drive the architecture and cloud decision. Your thoughts on this kind of mega trend of data at the edge, ownership of data, cloud selection. It's kind of a nightmare, kind of confusing. Your thoughts. >> I think, I think we're definitely seeing an acceptance that we're in a multicloud world. I think there are hardly any companies out there that don't have an element of cloud in a number of different places and that. You may have dictated a strategic alignment about one particular cloud vendor, but you're bound to have some legacy stuff, as well. You may well have some SaaS applications. You may have Salesforce or any other things. And, therefore, by almost by default, almost every organization is in some form of a multi-cloud environment, anyway. And they're all ready to accept that as a reality. And as what we've seen is a cloud migration, and people taking various different workloads to the cloud. People have naturally started with the easy stuff. The low-hanging fruit. So, typically, you're taking virtualized workloads to easy the environments like a VMware Cloud or something like that. You're taking new, the sort of Greenfield developments into sort of cloud native environments. And those are the sort of places, where you're really breaking ground with all of this, and this is going to be leaving behind certain legacy applications, which is the sort of, the really difficult stuff that you'll leave till later. And a lot of people have already cracked, much of the easy stuff, the low-hanging fruit, and they're now having to face up to the more difficult stuff. But, I think one of the things you would need to be worried about, here, is that it's not just about a focus on applications and workloads. One of the things you find is that typically you may have a few new applications that you're developing. You may sort of have the odd so change, from time to time. But, typically, the number of applications you use, and the nature of those applications, doesn't actually change enormously. What does change, is the data volume. So, whilst, people are overly focused on, well, which applications are we going to be moving and in which order. And not enough companies are actually thinking really seriously about, well what are we going to do with the data? People have budgets that are either stationary or possibly in decline, and they have data volumes that are going through the roof. And the moment we have Edge, and the moment we have 5G, this is going to come home, to really haunt them. And you'd actually need to have a really sensible data strategy to get ahead of this problem, otherwise, you're going to be facing big ingress and egress charges, because getting data in and out of the cloud isn't cheap. And also, you're going to have integration problems. But on top of that, you have the privacy issue, because a large chunk of that data is going to be sort of personally identified, viable data. It's going to be the type of data covered by GDPR and possibly new regulations, or whatever is coming up next in the US. A lot of the data won't be covered this, because it will be data that isn't privacy sensitive. But, if you don't have a really sensible data strategy, first of all, you're not going to be able to deal with the massive growing volumes of data, which are just going to get worse with 5G and Edge, but, also, you're face real problems with privacy, if suddenly people say, I want this removed, or I want that taken down, or something like that. And you go, whoa, where the heck is it? How do I do that? >> Yeah, where's it stored? On what servers is it on? So, Bill, I got to get your thoughts on this. You mentioned migration tool. In the news today, Google acquired cloud migration platform, Alooma, which has only raise 15 million in funding, shows that Google is trying to catch up. Amazon pelts highly their migration tool for moving off Oracle. So, you're seeing migration is a big part of it. So, I want to get your thoughts on the cloud players. You got Google, nipping at the heels of Azure. Azure nipping at the heels of AWS. And, you got IBM and Oracle kind of in the back falling behind. I wanted to get your thoughts on the top three, and then IBM and Oracle. Do they have a shot? And your thoughts about IBM Think was just last week. Lot of conversations around IBM and the cloud with their, with their cloud private solution. Your thoughts. Amazon, Azure? >> Okay. >> Google, and then, >> I think >> IBM and Oracle. >> I'm going to take this in two different ways. First of all I'm going to say, well, here's what we're seeing in a general market level. And, secondly, I'm going to say, well, what have I seen on the ground? On the ground, maybe I'll start with that. I worked in the UK public sector and we've been out there competing and winning a lot of business, and doing really very well. One of the things that we've seen is that having established a lead in this market at a point we're the people everyone are gunning for, which is strange to be ahead of the big hyperscalers in this market. We've found that Amazon, and certainly Azure, are all over our accounts. We almost never see a competition or any sort of competitive bids from companies like Oracle or IBM. They're just not in the market. We don't see them at all. And, certainly for IBM, in the UK, the finance sector and the public sector are meant to be the main markets they're focused on, and we're not seeing them. We just got to worry about how credible they are in those markets. Now if you look at sort of a global scale. >> Hold on, just to interrupt. We lost you for a quick second. Got a little glitch in the screen on the connectivity. But, did you mention Oracle, I mean, Google? What's Google like out there on the ground, anything? >> Okay. From a global perspective, there's obviously AWS, who are way ahead. You've got Azure, who are a very credible second player, and they got a lot of strength. I mean, they got a foot both in the public cloud, but also in the hybrid cloud. I think, you shouldn't overlook the strength of the Geostack offering. And, also, they've got an enormously strong partner ecosystem, with CSPs and MSPs. There they're going to take a lot of their technology forward. So, I think, they're going to be credible across the space. Google are in an interesting position. I think they're investing heavily. They have deep pockets. They are some distance behind. I'm not seeing them in any competitive bids that we're entering into. So, you got to worry about how much traction they're really getting in the market, but they've certainly got very deep pockets, and you shouldn't dismiss them. The likes of Alibaba, who, you know, they may not be present in this market at the moment, but, again, you can't dismiss them. The companies that you possibly might dismiss as serious cloud players, are maybe Oracle, and IBM, 'cause we're not seeing them in any of the shortlists that we're up against. We're not seeing them in the market. We're not seeing them put in the level of investment, the billions of infrastructure investment that you need to have to keep up in this market. And I actually think IBM are in a very strong position. When I said, earlier, we've moved a lot of low-hanging fruit, and then we're now getting onto difficult stuff. IBM have the services business to help the big companies with the complex migrations and the really challenging stuff. But I think that's where IBM is going to play, and I think they have a very strong role to play there. I just don't seem them as a cloud player. And, maybe we should just be describing them as a services company. >> I want to get your thoughts on, this might be a little bit tangent to the cloud, but it's kind of related, with multi-cloud on the horizon, or actually here, everyone has a lot of different clouds, when you put the connective tissue together for the multi-cloud, you can't help but ignore Cisco and VMware. Both have presence in enterprises. Thoughts around, you know, the network layer, get NSX on VMware, and you got, also, Cisco moving up the stack with their DevNet program, developer program. We're seeing a lot of action going on around the software-defined data center, as it relates to on-premise and multi-cloud. Your thoughts on that market? Can you share any insights there? >> Yeah, I mean, I've come from a company that was hosting possibly the largest VMware Cloud in Europe, and we're very familiar with some of these technologies, and I think VMware has had a very good position in the market. I'm not sure that they are going to be able to sustain that. We're seeing a lot of people who saw the ability to move virtualized workloads to, sort of VMware Cloud environment as a compelling proposition, but that's a one-off shift. And the moment they have the opportunity to go cloud native, they're going to take it off. And I don't see Vm are really holding the control point now, but that you certainly got VMware on all the different platforms, and it's being controlled by the likes of AWS and others, who can sort of assist their customers to get on to whichever environment within their estate that they want. I think Cisco are coming from an interesting position. Where they got some really great security portfolio, and, in fact, we've used a lot of their hardware, but I don't see them actually, again, having a particular control point in the market. >> Talk about, before we get close out here, I want to get your thoughts on what's going on on Twitter. Obviously, you're highly engaging, you're an influencer on Twitter, subject matter expert, great on camera, obviously, here at the Cube remote. What's the sentiment going on around digital transformation? Sarbjeet and the crowd, all talking, Stu Miniman and I, and Dave Vellante and the Cube team, and the whole community has really been chirppin', obviously 'cause IBM Think was last week, around the context of cloud on-premise, digital transformation. What's the general sentiment in the social media channels, that you're hearing. What's the top story? What's the most important story that's being discussed? >> You can't, you can't get away from the whole privacy debacle. I mean, we have seen the tech revolution. We're now seeing the, sort of, tech backlash, where certain companies, who have made big mistakes and many, many mistakes, I mean, Facebook, you can't avoid mentioning them. And, there are others, but Facebook are front and center. I think they have. >> Looks like we lost you little bit there, Bill. Okay, you're back. >> Yup. >> You're back. (Bill speaking faintly) So, the final question, final question for you. So, if Facebook's the digital gangster on social networking, is there a cloud gangster? >> I'm not sure. (John and Bill laugh) I don't want to point any fingers anywhere. (John laughs) I think there are companies that are the particularly muscular in the market and have a particular market position, and you can't avoid looking at Amazon, there. But, I think that there are some, there's going to be an enormous fragmentation and one side, if we're talking typically about a hybrid environment. You're talking about a mixture of public cloud and private cloud on perimeter age and whatever. In the public cloud, it's going to be concentrated down to possibly three players. And, therefore, they're going to have enormous control. Then you look on the other side of the hybrid equation to the private legacy whatever. That's going to be massively fragmented. I mean, I believe it's like IBM, who are going to be doing some of the complex migrations for some of the big organizations, using their massive services army may have a control on some of the big instances, but there's going to be a massively long tail with all sorts of MSPs and CSPs, providing bespoke solutions and value right down the chain. >> Yeah. >> And that's where I think the channel ecosystems come into play. And those companies that are cloud players also have a strong channel ecosystem? That they're going to be the ones that come out at the end of the day. >> I think the ecosystem is right on, great point. Bill, thanks for spending the time joining us here on the Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, here in Palo Alto for a conversation with the influencers, experts around cloud, privacy. This is the big deal. What are you doing with all that data coming in? How's it being managed? How's the value being created? This is the digital transformation challenge. It's the Cube Conversation, in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (upbeat orchestral music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live! Europe 2019 Cube coverage. Three days, we're in day two of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Stu Miniman as well as Dave Vellante's been on interview. Our next guest, Saurav Prasad, Principal Engineer and Technical Marketing at Cisco as part of the Cisco DNA Center Platform. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> So you guys are having a DNA take, and we're in the DevNet zone all week. This has been a real revitalization within Cisco DevNet, Cloud Native, Cisco coming together. The DNA center has been a part of this from day one. >> Yes. >> What is the DNA center these days, what's happening? >> Okay, so, let me take you a bit back in time, right. So, back in October 2017 is when we first launched the Cisco DNA center. Since then we have added a lot more application, work flows in the DNA center. And last year in May or June of last year, 2018, is when we launched the DNA Center Platform. And this protocol, FCS, some time during October of 2018. So, we now have the DNA Center Platform, which essentially is an open platform which lets our developers, our partners, our ISVs build applications on top of DNA Center which will let them talk to the network. And the way they do it is using our APIs, our SDKs, and then we have a lot of other modules, which help them interact with the network via the DNA Center. Now the benefit of this is not really with respect to APIs or SDKs, it's more about we give them a very easy way to talk to the network. Instead of talking to 10,000 network devices, they talk to one DNA Center. So, that's the, you know, idea behind the DNA Center Platform. >> Well why not expand a little bit when we've been talking about platforms in general for many years now, and it's one thing to say you're a platform, but the proof is, who's actually building on it. What can they do on it? So, you've got the platform, FCS, first customer ship, it's available, it's launching. What can you tell us about, you know, real customers, what they're doing, give us a little bit of the spectrum as to what we see out there. >> That's right. So before we FCS'ed our platform in October, we actually relied on early field trials for almost three to four months. And in then in that time we were actually working with our 15 top partners. And this was across the world, right. So they were actually using the platform to build some integrations from their side which was beneficial for them, right, so these are partners like Dimension Data, Accenture, WWT, and I'm just naming a few of them. These are all listed on our DNA center portal, on DevNet. But, then, we were working them and we were actually looking for feedback on whether it was useful and we found that it was really, really useful for them to build some good applications, good work flows, good integrations, and that helps them drive their own business with their customers. >> So, what's the mission of the DNA center? What is the purpose? Why do you guys exist? >> So, the DNA center is built to provide you intent based networking. So instead of you having to go to each and every network device and provision things on the network devices, you now go to the DNA center and say "Here is my intent!" An example for an intent would be, "I want to prioritize Cisco job or traffic". It should be high priority. Now that means there is a lot of network devices that I need to provision quality of service. I need to make sure I have the right cue instructors in place. And guess what, we have so many devices, each one of them might have some different CLIs, different architectures, we now give them one single place where you provide the intent and not worry about the device level details. And I am just giving you one example. There could be a lot more where, for example I'm getting the telemetry back from a network. Each and every device is saying I am having some issues but they might all be the same issue here. What DNA center does is takes all of those issue provides you an insight into what really is happening in the network, so that's our idea of DNA Center. >> Saurav, come on, who doesn't want to use this? Everyone who's gone out and provisioned a device knows how much a hassle it is. I mean think about the manual labor involved. Just going out and doing all of this stuff so it's an action center, basically. You take action, one spot, window into the network policy, whatever it takes. It's driven by, and now applications can come in as well. Am I getting that right. >> That's right. So the greatest work says, again this is what we do with platform is, different partners, different customers, might have some different workflows. So within the DNA center we have decided, here is how the workflow should look like. So if I want to do an upgrade of a network device, here are the steps I might follow. But when you use the API's, you can almost define your own workflows. So this allows you the flexibility of building your own workflows. That's one example. Other is, say for example, I need some feedback from a different system, not the network maybe some other IT system. I need to get some information from them and based on that, I need to configure something on the network. You cannot do that automatically. There has to be an application in between which talks to both of these systems, one of them being the Cisco DNA Center. Now this allows you to do that. If I have the API's, if I have the event framework, I can do all of that. That's the benefit of using these. >> What's the alternative if someone doesn't use the DNA Center 'cause this is a no brainer. You've got, I get the device piece, that's just a nice window. Now the platform allows applications to integrate and be programmable with the network. Why wouldn't someone use this, it's a no brainer. >> If you don't use this, what you do is you go to each of your thousand network devices talk to each one of them and take care of all of the device level details and do it. It's doable, people have been doing it for years now but now we are making it slightly more easier to make it faster. >> Well, it comes to, we have been talking for years the need for scale and if you don't have good automation if you don't have tools to be able to help you there, you're not going to be able to reach the scale that you need for your business, explain why this is important. >> For example, what we are seeing is and we have been talking about digital networks for some time now. What really is a digital network, that's a key point to understand here. What we are seeing is there was a time 10 years back when you had to roll out a new service network admins, network architects had six months to provision that. Nowadays they don't have that. >> Six hours >> They probably have six hours, that's right. In order for you to do all of that so fast, you really cannot go into each device and talk about it. You have to abstract some of that and that's what the DNA Center provides and using our API's we are now adding a new level on top of it, which really makes it much more easier for you to scale. Again, not just scale, also integrate with other IDSM systems, other IBM systems, other reporting systems. So this is all happening automatically, instead of you having to manually touch each of these systems. >> Talk about the plug and play process. How does that fit in with DNA Center, compatible, not compatible? >> So plug and play is an application or workflow within DNA Cneter. When I look at plug and play, every network device in Cisco has a plug and play agent running. I'm going to get into a bit of a technical detail here, but they have a plug and play agent running and so when this device comes up, say for day zero onboarding, you open up the box, take out the device power it up, the agent fires up. What it looks for is the plug and play server. The Cisco DNA center is the Plug and Play server. So now I am allowing you to onboard new devices. You could roll out a new site with 25 network devices, 100 network devices in a matter of minutes. >> So all of the configuration gets pushed down from the DNA Center? >> Exactly! So you build your own profile in DNA Center and attach the templates or the configurations. You say here is a serial number and when this device comes in, I push in all the configuration, I provision a new software image on it, so your device or your site is up and running. >> Great for campus, great for remote sites. >> Exactly, so you really don't have to send a network admin on every remote site to do that. >> Will it take policy so if I set policy up in the DNA Center, will it automatically take that down through? >> Yes, yes, yeah. Once a device is onboarded, it gets added to the Cisco DNA Center and once I do that, now I can throw in policies any kind of provisions. >> I don't mean to get in the weeds, sorry Stu, go ahead. >> What's great about a platform, you've talked about some of the partners. My understanding, not just some of the integrated partners like WWT that you mentioned but even some of the technology partners like IBM have services that plug into this environment. We've seen in platforms, where you can, one of the other dimensions is the customers and what are they asking for and how are there feedback there. Is there anything in the DNA Center platform that if one customer is asking for something that more customers are going to get value of that. I think back to the day of Salesforce. When Salesforce gets something, we add a new feature and that's something that can roll out, we can learn from all the customers, you get that fly wheel of development in a platform. >> What we are doing here is we are actually working very closely with Cisco DevNet on that. They have a partner ecosystem exchange. What's happening is a lot of this channeled partners technology partners, ISV's, when they build something they go into the ecosystem exchange and they can post it there. So its not just useful for them, there are other partners, other customers that can use it. They have a data repository of all the core, sample core and again, not everybody shares it to the extent what we would like because there's a lot of intellectual property which they have built and they might want to monetize on it but that is the whole idea behind the ecosystem exchange where I am allowing partners to share what they have built and this could be used by others. >> Saurav, talk about the success, what's the uptake? It must be well received, obviously we see a lot of action her in the DevNet zone. Give us some color commentary on what the momentum has been, who's using it, how? >> From our side, I'm from the business unit which is actually building this product. The way we judge whether this product is getting traction is what is the amount of feature requests I am getting? So, we are getting a ton of feature requests with respect to new API's that we want to expose. With respect to new documentation that we have to build. I mean, what we don't want is we release a product and we got no feedback. >> So what's the fee for requests? Backlog big or what's going on? >> Oh yeah, so for example when we launched we had a limited set of API's available. Now since then, with every release, now we have a release almost every month, where we are adding newer API's and newer functionality, we are actually adding more and more API's and again there is much more to add but that's the process and-- >> Just keep jamming and taking it in, backlog it, get it out there, iterating quickly? >> Exactly, and again, the one point to add here is we are not really just exposing an API, we are exposing an intent API so it's got slightly different. So instead of, say for example, I want to provision a wireless network, that is probably a 10 step process even within the DNA Center. What we want to give you is a single API which will do all of that and all of that heavy lifting will be done by the Cisco DNA Center platform. So, we will internally call the 10 separate API's. So for a developer who is building this, he or she may not be a network expert, they might not be an expert into how the network works so all they have to do is call one single API and all of the details or all the heavy lifting will be done by the platform, so they don't really have to worry about some of those details. >> So this is where the automation will get done on behalf of the customer. They'll come in, deploy DNA Center understand what's going on and that's where they do all of their work. Figure out what to do, get it done there. What's been the biggest use case so far? >> So, a lot of use cases. Like, we have a partner who is actually building a mobile app so we have a DNA Center which is sitting on prem in their own data center, they can go and look at the browser, open up the Cisco DNA Center console and look at the various workflows or see what's happening in the network. They might see there is a router which has crashed. Or an application which is having some application performance issue but what we want to see, is also, send us even send remotely and now their network admins could be walking in a grocery store, for example and the mobile, that alert shows up. Guess what, that is application is having an issue lets do the debugging so we will provide you all of that details within our API's, which can then show up in the application externally. >> So DNA Center platform has a takeover going on in the DevNet zone. We see classrooms, we've seen labs, give us a little bit of the flavor of the solutions for the next hour as well as at the show in general. >> In general here at the Cisco DevNet zone, we have a Cisco DNA Center takeover going on right now. We have workshops, we have sandbox labs, we have learning labs. You can go to any one of them and try it out. That is not only for this hour, that is there for throughout the show, but for this hour, we have a tech talk going on from one of our distinguished sales engineers Adam Rattford, he is talking all about DNA Center Platform in deep dive, showing live examples. We have some demo systems up and running here where you can actually see how we are able to generate events, how we are able to send events to external systems, so all of that is going on. Plus, we have all of our experts. A lot of our experts from the engineering team are here on the show right now on the show floor so if there are any questions around DNA Center Platform they will be more than willing to help. >> The brain trust is here. >> My understanding, I mean, when I have talked to people the DevNet group has labs running all the time. And that's what's great, I have talked to customers that say, I need to be able to play with this and here's something that's online, it's in the cloud I just do with it whenever so. >> Just to add to that, of course for our customers, our partners, our developers who want to try this out, they are more than welcome to come and join us in the Cisco DevNet zone here. Even if you are not at Cisco live, these sandbox lives are live online and we have I think around five or six of them and we are adding more to it. You can go anytime, try our API's on that sandbox. You don't really need to have your own environment. Now of course when you go production with it you will but just for trying out or building some applications, you can do it on the sandbox. >> Saurav, thanks so much for taking the time sharing some technical insight, went a little bit deep on the plug and play but appreciate your time coming on theCUBE, thanks for coming on and congratulations. DNA Center, the Cisco DNA Center Platform, the official name, really an oasis, a place to go in and configure the networks no brainer as far as I am concerned, check it out. theCUBE's bringing you the DNA of the show here, which is all the action, coverage, I'm John Furrier, Stu Minimin. Stay with us more here live in Barcelona and we will be back after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCube covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Minimin joined by Keith Townsend, and we're here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program Binny Gill, who's the CTO of cloud services at Nutanix, and welcome a first time guest, a long time watcher, first-time caller, Vijay Rayapati, who's the general manager of Nutanix Beam a brand new service at NEXT, came from the Minjar acquisition. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Vijay what, so for those that don't know, bring us back a little bit, you know, Minjar tells a little bit about the company, how many people and then we'll get into the integration and the launch. >> Yeah, so we started Minjar in 2012, late 2012, primarily focused on building our public cloud optimization service, so our flagship product is Bot Metric, which is one of the which is one of the high straighter interview solution in the (mumbles) marketplace. We are primarily based in Bangalo, and focused on helping customers as they're moving to this public, our journey, how can you help them deliver governance across their consumption, from a cost perspective. And compliance from a security perspective. That's what we were focused on, and we joined Nutanix last quarter. I'm really excited to be here, I look forward to continue building on it. >> Alright, Binny maybe you can help us connect the dots, so, look at Zai, look at the services that Nutanix is building, usually it starts with your infrastructure. >> Yep. >> And that's not where Minjar came from so, help us connect the dots as to how, what led to the acquisition, how it expands the portfolio, and what's your first SAS product? >> Yeah, I mean if you look at what we are talking about as our true north, what we're doing is we're building a hybrid cloud. We started with building a private cloud, and customers asking us, hey solve the public cloud problem for us, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. And most of the enterprises today are dispersed. So when we talk about enterprise cloud what we mean is dispersed cloud including IOT devices, you'll see some of that in the demo this evening. So the first question that comes to mind is okay, how am I going to manage all my dispersed cloud entities? And not all of them are owned by Nutanix. So when we looked at Minjar and the capabilities, it was right on target, they're helping customers, consume the cloud and solve the two problems that they have that they lose sleep on, one is do I have control on cost? And the other is do I have control on security compliance? So that's a good capability to have and with Vijay's teams help, we're going to expand it to all the clouds including Nutanix and beyond and provide it to all the customers. >> So today, where is the service, how do I consume it? Help me understand that. >> So this is the first SAS service that Nutanix has launched and it can be consumed from beam.nutanix.com. And we intend to continue on the service in future as a SAS offering, for customers. Both Nutanix customer and non-Nutanix customers. What we have today is we support Amazon cloud, and Azure, and we're working on bringing integration for Nutanix and then we'll bring support for other cloud providers as well. >> So, I'm sorry, just how many customers did you have running on the Bot Metric service in the past? >> We had a couple of hundred customers using Bot Metric, we track close to about a billion dollar plus in public cloud consumption through Bot Metric before it became Nutanix. >> So Vijay, help us understand the larger industry and this larger space. It's been relatively acrotic space for some time, there's been a lot of solutions that helped with cloud security, performance monitoring, et cetera. What was the unique gap or value opportunity you saw at Bot Metric? >> Yeah I mean there are two unique things that we found when we work with these public cloud customers. The challenges are, (mumbles) which are providing this ability, right? But there weren't many tools providing ability to remediate those things that you detect. Essentially form day one, when built Bot Metric platform, we built it like an action-oriented platform. So we not only get visibility, you could essentially automate those issues, either for an optimization or for control. To an automation agent, so there is a lot of invisible automation in Nutanix Beam, versus just being this beautiful UI, which can give you a lot of insights and reports. And that's a big differentiator, that's one of the reasons why a lot of customers when they write reviews of the product, they say man I really love it because it not only tells me what I need to do, I don't need to go and do those hundred things as an engineer, and I can rather click to fix of deploy an automation that can go an do these things, right? >> And one of the other things that was very interesting in what Beam does is, it also can predict what the cost is going to be at the end of the month, instead of being surprised by the end of the month bill, you know how it is today, and how the system is predicting it, and that gives you more control on making sure that if there's an over-expenditure that's going to happen, you can take actions today. >> So what type of automation and adjustments can be made on my behalf? >> Yeah, I think pretty much anything that a cloud ops, or devops engineer do, what we don't do is we don't do any provisioning or orchestration, right? Even as a Bot Metric, we never did that. What we were focused on is, how can we solve operational issues on a day-to-day basis? Whether they're related to cost, or they're related to compliance, or they're related to automation. So it can detect things, you can do custom scaling from Beam, you can do resizing of things, you can clean up unused resources, you can go and run custom audits using Python on Beam. So there are lot of things that day two or a day three on a continuous basis as a cloud ops or a devops engineer that you need to do. That's what we deliver as a invisible automation, or we call it event automation. And so when events happen, how can we automate those things, or right ones use, multiple times. >> Binny, can you walk us through, what kind of Nutanix stamp has been put on the product leading to the Beam, maybe give us a little bit of your philosophy as to how the software acquisitions, what they have to go through before they become real Nutanix products. >> First of all, any acquisition, we want to make sure that the team is a great team. People are the most important. From a technology perspective, they need to be solving the pinpoints of the customers. Now when we integrate any service into our cloud platform, we focus on three things, one is identity. So when a customer logs in to our Zai cloud services, or logs in on PRAM, they should be able to use a single sign-on across all the services. Second thing is billing, we're going to make sure that how we bill the customer, it's not like separate bills that come and they have to put them together, it has to be single billing. Also in terms of how you spend, we're working on programs where you can buy some Nutanix currency coins, and then you can use it either in the private cloud or in the public cloud, but the decision could be a late binding decision. And finally, it's about making sure that the one-click simplicity that we keep talking about and delivering is there. And we've been lucky that with the Beam product, a lot of it is already there, that's why it's already giad. But we make sure that it goes through the same rigor of making sure that the user experience is awesome. >> So let's talk about that time to integration I'll call it. The ability for you guys to take Beam or Bot Metric at that time, a completely separate product from COM, Zai, and then you take that, turn it into Beam, a SAS product, which isn't your first SAS product, How do you keep that consistent view across the entire Nutanix portfolio experience, so that administrators are not leaving one tool to go into another one, which a SAS offering is very different than what you guys have offered in Apetex. >> So we're working on that, both on premises view and in the cloud view. So as you might have noticed when we came up with Zai, we said it's like cloud services. And DR is the first service. 'Cause when you log into Zai, you're logging into all of the cloud services. And then the menu of services will show up, and Beam is one, DR is one, and more will come in, so we wanted to be taught through that. On premises, if you'll notice in our history, we had Prism Central, and then we announced Com Support, and it's baked into Prism, it's not a separate tool. We took one and a half years to make sure that it does not look like a schizophrenic set of products. When we announced Flow, if you look at other vendors like VMware, they have separate NSX manager, and SS controllers, in our case, it's the same Prism Central, once you upgrade, you get that feature. So that's in our discipline, and anything we do, we take the time and make sure it's going to be a single experience for the customer. We're doing the same thing so, Vijay's team this quite rapid and agile and doing stuff, they've integrated with our single identity system, integrating with a single billing system. So that has happened rapidly with this case. >> I think we focus a lot, at least at Nutanix, when I joined, there is a lot of emphasis on experience. How do we make sure we deliver consistent experience for the user from an identity perspective, from a service use perspective, as well as from a support perspective, right? I know it's a common support, it's a common identity, and it's a common billing, and you already touched upon it as we are innovating on a lot of the services, you know, there is a lot of thinking going on, saying you know, how do we bring a common experience, unified experience that is seamless, rather than having different endpoints, people need to go on and try to remember these things. I think we will continue to work on, you know, innovate on that front. But experience is one thing that Nutanix is very good at, you know, if you go onto social media and look at, you know a lot of people are saying, oh man, we really like what we saw from a user experience perspective of the product. And we already took a lot of those design concepts, you know, Nutanix has, in terms of the UI and UX. The Beam that you see today is completely consistent with that 3.0 design philosophy, internally for our products. So the customer has same kind of, experience. Of course it's a SAS service, as Binny said, we are trying to bring lot of this SAS services and Zai cloud services so the user can consume it, just like they consume a GCP or an azure, or AWS, right? And of the day, you have EC to RDS. There is a common frame that brings all this together. >> One additional thing that we're doing, which has not been done before is, providing these services in a hybrid mode. Right, so some of these services like COM, and infrastructure as a service capability, we've announced ARA, how do we provide it in hybrid cloud world where you can run the service on PRAM, you can migrate, adapt it, depends on the service. So the service should also be available in the cloud. And those are some of the hard problems that we are working on, but we believe that we have the tools and the experience to make that happen. >> So, Vijay, just one that was announced, you got some cool new T-shirts you're going to show us. What should we be looking for from the roadmap there? And yeah, show that T-shirt off. (laughter) >> There are two primary things that we are very focused on. One is, how can we bring in lot more intelligence, not just from insights and actions. How can we help customers make those choices of moving the workload, because if you see there're a lot of components that Nutanix is building. Even today we announced Cloud Extract, which is kind of a one-click mobility, not just from cloud to Nutanix, it is going to support from Nutanix to other clouds as well. Because there is a strong cultural belief within the company, that we need to have, give customers the freedom of choice. And deliver a good service, that I prize, so that they feel feel confident about what they're doing, and what we deliver to them. So in that context, one is obviously, bringing multiple clouds. Currently we support Amazon and Azure, but we will bring GCP support, and we will launch, Nutanix, we will launch, other providers as well, we won't start just with them. And the next thing is, how do we make this experience a lot more seamless? And we'll also integrate with COM and a couple of other products that we have as we accline. So that customers can get visibility of cost by workloads by apps, they don't need to come to Beam to consume them. >> So Binny one last question. This is critically important as you bring out your first SAS offering. Billing and procurement, what is the average experience for the Nutanix customer who hadn't- The infrastructure team didn't whip out a credit card and buy a NX system, what is the experience for setting up billing with your SAS services? >> Right, so a lot of it is not giad yet, but if you look at some of the demos that we have done for Zai cloud services, including DIA, It's, the customer can provide a credit card, and consume it as they're used to with the public cloud. But we also have programs where they can buy some credits, Nutanix coins up front, and use them both on PRAM, and in the cloud. So these things are in the works, and we are listening to our customers. One size does not fit all and we know that in the enterprise. But we'll have multiple options for them. >> Excellent, sounds just like, I've listened to my children saying, I get the coins to do fortnite, and things like that that the millennials will be good. They buy some credits, buy it here, buy it there, use it up. Binny and Vijay, thanks so much for joining us. Congrats on the launch of the product we look forward to keeping an eye on it as that grows and the portfolio grows. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thank you for having me. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Minimin, back with lots more programming here at Nutanix.next 2018, thanks for watchin' theCube. (futuristic music)