(light music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm really pleased to announce a collaboration with Rob Strechay. He's a guest cube analyst, and we'll be working together to extract the signal from the noise. Rob is a long-time product pro, working at a number of firms including AWS, HP, HPE, NetApp, Snowplow. I did a stint as an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Rob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our Marlboro Studios. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> I'm really excited about working with you. We've known each other for a long time. You've been in the Cube a bunch. You know, you're in between gigs, and I think we can have a lot of fun together. Covering events, covering trends. So. let's get into it. What's happening out there? We're sort of exited the isolation economy. Things were booming. Now, everybody's tapping the brakes. From your standpoint, what are you seeing out there? >> Yeah. I'm seeing that people are really looking how to get more out of their data. How they're bringing things together, how they're looking at the costs of Cloud, and understanding how are they building out their SaaS applications. And understanding that when they go in and actually start to use Cloud, it's not only just using the base services anymore. They're looking at, how do I use these platforms as a service? Some are easier than others, and they're trying to understand, how do I get more value out of that relationship with the Cloud? They're also consolidating the number of Clouds that they have, I would say to try to better optimize their spend, and getting better pricing for that matter. >> Are you seeing people unhook Clouds, or just reduce maybe certain Cloud activities and going maybe instead of 60/40 going 90/10? >> Correct. It's more like the 90/10 type of rule where they're starting to say, Hey I'm not going to get rid of Azure or AWS or Google. I'm going to move a portion of this over that I was using on this one service. Maybe I got a great two-year contract to start with on this platform as a service or a database as a service. I'm going to unhook from that and maybe go with an independent. Maybe with something like a Snowflake or a Databricks on top of another Cloud, so that I can consolidate down. But it also gives them more flexibility as well. >> In our last breaking analysis, Rob, we identified six factors that were reducing Cloud consumption. There were factors and customer tactics. And I want to get your take on this. So, some of the factors really, you got fewer mortgage originations. FinTech, obviously big Cloud user. Crypto, not as much activity there. Lower ad spending means less Cloud. And then one of 'em, which you kind of disagreed with was less, less analytics, you know, fewer... Less frequency of calculations. I'll come back to that. But then optimizing compute using Graviton or AMD instances moving to cheaper storage tiers. That of course makes sense. And then optimize pricing plans. Maybe going from On Demand, you know, to, you know, instead of pay by the drink, buy in volume. Okay. So, first of all, do those make sense to you with the exception? We'll come back and talk about the analytics piece. Is that what you're seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think so. I think that was pretty much dead on with what I'm seeing from customers and the ones that I go out and talk to. A lot of times they're trying to really monetize their, you know, understand how their business utilizes these Clouds. And, where their spend is going in those Clouds. Can they use, you know, lower tiers of storage? Do they really need the best processors? Do they need to be using Intel or can they get away with AMD or Graviton 2 or 3? Or do they need to move in? And, I think when you look at all of these Clouds, they always have pricing curves that are arcs from the newest to the oldest stuff. And you can play games with that. And understanding how you can actually lower your costs by looking at maybe some of the older generation. Maybe your application was written 10 years ago. You don't necessarily have to be on the best, newest processor for that application per se. >> So last, I want to come back to this whole analytics piece. Last June, I think it was June, Dev Ittycheria, who's the-- I call him Dev. Spelled Dev, pronounced Dave. (chuckles softly) Same pronunciation, different spelling. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of Mongo, on the earnings call. He was getting, you know, hit. Things were starting to get a little less visible in terms of, you know, the outlook. And people were pushing him like... Because you're in the Cloud, is it easier to dial down? And he said, because we're the document database, we support transaction applications. We're less discretionary than say, analytics. Well on the Snowflake earnings call, that same month or the month after, they were all over Slootman and Scarpelli. Oh, the Mongo CEO said that they're less discretionary than analytics. And Snowflake was an interesting comment. They basically said, look, we're the Cloud. You can dial it up, you can dial it down, but the area under the curve over a period of time is going to be the same, because they get their customers to commit. What do you say? You disagreed with the notion that people are running their calculations less frequently. Is that because they're trying to do a better job of targeting customers in near real time? What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I think they're moving away from using people and more expensive marketing. Or, they're trying to figure out what's my Google ad spend, what's my Meta ad spend? And what they're trying to do is optimize that spend. So, what is the return on advertising, or the ROAS as they would say. And what they're looking to do is understand, okay, I have to collect these analytics that better understand where are these people coming from? How do they get to my site, to my store, to my whatever? And when they're using it, how do they they better move through that? What you're also seeing is that analytics is not only just for kind of the retail or financial services or things like that, but then they're also, you know, using that to make offers in those categories. When you move back to more, you know, take other companies that are building products and SaaS delivered products. They may actually go and use this analytics for making the product better. And one of the big reasons for that is maybe they're dialing back how many product managers they have. And they're looking to be more data driven about how they actually go and build the product out or enhance the product. So maybe they're, you know, an online video service and they want to understand why people are either using or not using the whiteboard inside the product. And they're collecting a lot of that product analytics in a big way so that they can go through that. And they're doing it in a constant manner. This first party type tracking within applications is growing rapidly by customers. >> So, let's talk about who wins in that. So, obviously the Cloud guys, AWS, Google and Azure. I want to come back and unpack that a little bit. Databricks and Snowflake, we reported on our last breaking analysis, it kind of on a collision course. You know, a couple years ago we were thinking, okay, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks, like perfect sandwich. And then of course they started to become more competitive. My sense is they still, you know, compliment each other in the field, right? But, you know, publicly, they've got bigger aspirations, they get big TAMs that they're going after. But it's interesting, the data shows that-- So, Snowflake was off the charts in terms of spending momentum and our EPR surveys. Our partner down in New York, they kind of came into line. They're both growing in terms of market presence. Databricks couldn't get to IPO. So, we don't have as much, you know, visibility on their financials. You know, Snowflake obviously highly transparent cause they're a public company. And then you got AWS, Google and Azure. And it seems like AWS appears to be more partner friendly. Microsoft, you know, depends on what market you're in. And Google wants to sell BigQuery. >> Yeah. >> So, what are you seeing in the public Cloud from a data platform perspective? >> Yeah. I think that was pretty astute in what you were talking about there, because I think of the three, Google is definitely I think a little bit behind in how they go to market with their partners. Azure's done a fantastic job of partnering with these companies to understand and even though they may have Synapse as their go-to and where they want people to go to do AI and ML. What they're looking at is, Hey, we're going to also be friendly with Snowflake. We're also going to be friendly with a Databricks. And I think that, Amazon has always been there because that's where the market has been for these developers. So, many, like Databricks' and the Snowflake's have gone there first because, you know, Databricks' case, they built out on top of S3 first. And going and using somebody's object layer other than AWS, was not as simple as you would think it would be. Moving between those. >> So, one of the financial meetups I said meetup, but the... It was either the CEO or the CFO. It was either Slootman or Scarpelli talking at, I don't know, Merrill Lynch or one of the other financial conferences said, I think it was probably their Q3 call. Snowflake said 80% of our business goes through Amazon. And he said to this audience, the next day we got a call from Microsoft. Hey, we got to do more. And, we know just from reading the financial statements that Snowflake is getting concessions from Amazon, they're buying in volume, they're renegotiating their contracts. Amazon gets it. You know, lower the price, people buy more. Long term, we're all going to make more money. Microsoft obviously wants to get into that game with Snowflake. They understand the momentum. They said Google, not so much. And I've had customers tell me that they wanted to use Google's AI with Snowflake, but they can't, they got to go to to BigQuery. So, honestly, I haven't like vetted that so. But, I think it's true. But nonetheless, it seems like Google's a little less friendly with the data platform providers. What do you think? >> Yeah, I would say so. I think this is a place that Google looks and wants to own. Is that now, are they doing the right things long term? I mean again, you know, you look at Google Analytics being you know, basically outlawed in five countries in the EU because of GDPR concerns, and compliance and governance of data. And I think people are looking at Google and BigQuery in general and saying, is it the best place for me to go? Is it going to be in the right places where I need it? Still, it's still one of the largest used databases out there just because it underpins a number of the Google services. So you almost get, like you were saying, forced into BigQuery sometimes, if you want to use the tech on top. >> You do strategy. >> Yeah. >> Right? You do strategy, you do messaging. Is it the right call by Google? I mean, it's not a-- I criticize Google sometimes. But, I'm not sure it's the wrong call to say, Hey, this is our ace in the hole. >> Yeah. >> We got to get people into BigQuery. Cause, first of all, BigQuery is a solid product. I mean it's Cloud native and it's, you know, by all, it gets high marks. So, why give the competition an advantage? Let's try to force people essentially into what is we think a great product and it is a great product. The flip side of that is, they're giving up some potential partner TAM and not treating the ecosystem as well as one of their major competitors. What do you do if you're in that position? >> Yeah, I think that that's a fantastic question. And the question I pose back to the companies I've worked with and worked for is, are you really looking to have vendor lock-in as your key differentiator to your service? And I think when you start to look at these companies that are moving away from BigQuery, moving to even, Databricks on top of GCS in Google, they're looking to say, okay, I can go there if I have to evacuate from GCP and go to another Cloud, I can stay on Databricks as a platform, for instance. So I think it's, people are looking at what platform as a service, database as a service they go and use. Because from a strategic perspective, they don't want that vendor locking. >> That's where Supercloud becomes interesting, right? Because, if I can run on Snowflake or Databricks, you know, across Clouds. Even Oracle, you know, they're getting into business with Microsoft. Let's talk about some of the Cloud players. So, the big three have reported. >> Right. >> We saw AWSs Cloud growth decelerated down to 20%, which is I think the lowest growth rate since they started to disclose public numbers. And they said they exited, sorry, they said January they grew at 15%. >> Yeah. >> Year on year. Now, they had some pretty tough compares. But nonetheless, 15%, wow. Azure, kind of mid thirties, and then Google, we had kind of low thirties. But, well behind in terms of size. And Google's losing probably almost $3 billion annually. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing by advocating and investing. What's happening with the Cloud? Is AWS just running into the law, large numbers? Do you think we can actually see a re-acceleration like we have in the past with AWS Cloud? Azure, we predicted is going to be 75% of AWS IAS revenues. You know, we try to estimate IAS. >> Yeah. >> Even though they don't share that with us. That's a huge milestone. You'd think-- There's some people who have, I think, Bob Evans predicted a while ago that Microsoft would surpass AWS in terms of size. You know, what do you think? >> Yeah, I think that Azure's going to keep to-- Keep growing at a pretty good clip. I think that for Azure, they still have really great account control, even though people like to hate Microsoft. The Microsoft sellers that are out there making those companies successful day after day have really done a good job of being in those accounts and helping people. I was recently over in the UK. And the UK market between AWS and Azure is pretty amazing, how much Azure there is. And it's growing within Europe in general. In the states, it's, you know, I think it's growing well. I think it's still growing, probably not as fast as it is outside the U.S. But, you go down to someplace like Australia, it's also Azure. You hear about Azure all the time. >> Why? Is that just because of the Microsoft's software state? It's just so convenient. >> I think it has to do with, you know, and you can go with the reasoning they don't break out, you know, Office 365 and all of that out of their numbers is because they have-- They're in all of these accounts because the office suite is so pervasive in there. So, they always have reasons to go back in and, oh by the way, you're on these old SQL licenses. Let us move you up here and we'll be able to-- We'll support you on the old version, you know, with security and all of these things. And be able to move you forward. So, they have a lot of, I guess you could say, levers to stay in those accounts and be interesting. At least as part of the Cloud estate. I think Amazon, you know, is hitting, you know, the large number. Laws of large numbers. But I think that they're also going through, and I think this was seen in the layoffs that they were making, that they're looking to understand and have profitability in more of those services that they have. You know, over 350 odd services that they have. And you know, as somebody who went there and helped to start yet a new one, while I was there. And finally, it went to beta back in September, you start to look at the fact that, that number of services, people, their own sellers don't even know all of their services. It's impossible to comprehend and sell that many things. So, I think what they're going through is really looking to rationalize a lot of what they're doing from a services perspective going forward. They're looking to focus on more profitable services and bringing those in. Because right now it's built like a layer cake where you have, you know, S3 EBS and EC2 on the bottom of the layer cake. And then maybe you have, you're using IAM, the authorization and authentication in there and you have all these different services. And then they call it EMR on top. And so, EMR has to pay for that entire layer cake just to go and compete against somebody like Mongo or something like that. So, you start to unwind the costs of that. Whereas Azure, went and they build basically ground up services for the most part. And Google kind of falls somewhere in between in how they build their-- They're a sort of layer cake type effect, but not as many layers I guess you could say. >> I feel like, you know, Amazon's trying to be a platform for the ecosystem. Yes, they have their own products and they're going to sell. And that's going to drive their profitability cause they don't have to split the pie. But, they're taking a piece of-- They're spinning the meter, as Ziyas Caravalo likes to say on every time Snowflake or Databricks or Mongo or Atlas is, you know, running on their system. They take a piece of the action. Now, Microsoft does that as well. But, you look at Microsoft and security, head-to-head competitors, for example, with a CrowdStrike or an Okta in identity. Whereas, it seems like at least for now, AWS is a more friendly place for the ecosystem. At the same time, you do a lot of business in Microsoft. >> Yeah. And I think that a lot of companies have always feared that Amazon would just throw, you know, bodies at it. And I think that people have come to the realization that a two pizza team, as Amazon would call it, is eight people. I think that's, you know, two slices per person. I'm a little bit fat, so I don't know if that's enough. But, you start to look at it and go, okay, if they're going to start out with eight engineers, if I'm a startup and they're part of my ecosystem, do I really fear them or should I really embrace them and try to partner closer with them? And I think the smart people and the smart companies are partnering with them because they're realizing, Amazon, unless they can see it to, you know, a hundred million, $500 million market, they're not going to throw eight to 16 people at a problem. I think when, you know, you could say, you could look at the elastic with OpenSearch and what they did there. And the licensing terms and the battle they went through. But they knew that Elastic had a huge market. Also, you had a number of ecosystem companies building on top of now OpenSearch, that are now domain on top of Amazon as well. So, I think Amazon's being pretty strategic in how they're doing it. I think some of the-- It'll be interesting. I think this year is a payout year for the cuts that they're making to some of the services internally to kind of, you know, how do we take the fat off some of those services that-- You know, you look at Alexa. I don't know how much revenue Alexa really generates for them. But it's a means to an end for a number of different other services and partners. >> What do you make of this ChatGPT? I mean, Microsoft obviously is playing that card. You want to, you want ChatGPT in the Cloud, come to Azure. Seems like AWS has to respond. And we know Google is, you know, sharpening its knives to come up with its response. >> Yeah, I mean Google just went and talked about Bard for the first time this week and they're in private preview or I guess they call it beta, but. Right at the moment to select, select AI users, which I have no idea what that means. But that's a very interesting way that they're marketing it out there. But, I think that Amazon will have to respond. I think they'll be more measured than say, what Google's doing with Bard and just throwing it out there to, hey, we're going into beta now. I think they'll look at it and see where do we go and how do we actually integrate this in? Because they do have a lot of components of AI and ML underneath the hood that other services use. And I think that, you know, they've learned from that. And I think that they've already done a good job. Especially for media and entertainment when you start to look at some of the ways that they use it for helping do graphics and helping to do drones. I think part of their buy of iRobot was the fact that iRobot was a big user of RoboMaker, which is using different models to train those robots to go around objects and things like that, so. >> Quick touch on Kubernetes, the whole DevOps World we just covered. The Cloud Native Foundation Security, CNCF. The security conference up in Seattle last week. First time they spun that out kind of like reinforced, you know, AWS spins out, reinforced from reinvent. Amsterdam's coming up soon, the CubeCon. What should we expect? What's hot in Cubeland? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Kubes, you're going to be looking at how OpenShift keeps growing and I think to that respect you get to see the momentum with people like Red Hat. You see others coming up and realizing how OpenShift has gone to market as being, like you were saying, partnering with those Clouds and really making it simple. I think the simplicity and the manageability of Kubernetes is going to be at the forefront. I think a lot of the investment is still going into, how do I bring observability and DevOps and AIOps and MLOps all together. And I think that's going to be a big place where people are going to be looking to see what comes out of CubeCon in Amsterdam. I think it's that manageability ease of use. >> Well Rob, I look forward to working with you on behalf of the whole Cube team. We're going to do more of these and go out to some shows extract the signal from the noise. Really appreciate you coming into our studio. >> Well, thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there, or thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (light music)

(soft music) >> We're in Las Vegas at The Venetian for our continued coverage here of re:Invent '22, AWS's big show going on. Great success off to a wonderful start. We're in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And we're going to talk about public health and the cloud, how those have come together in the great state of North Carolina. Charles Carter is going to help us do that. He's assistant secretary for technology services with the state of North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services. Charles, good to see you. Thanks for joining us here on "theCUBE". >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Yeah, thanks for making the time. So first off, let's talk about what you do on the homefront before what you're doing here and where you're going. But in terms of kind of what your plan has been, what your journey has been from a cloud perspective and how you've implemented that and where you are right now in your journey. >> Sure, so we started. When I got there, we didn't have a cloud footprint at all. There was a- >> Host: Which was how long ago? >> I got there in 2016, so about six years. >> Host: Six, seven years, yeah. >> Yeah, five, six years. So anyways, we started off with our first module within our Medicaid expansion. And that was the first time that we went into the cloud. We worked with AWS to do our encounter processing system. And it was an incredible success. I think the ease of use was really kind of something that people weren't quite ready for. But it was really exciting to see that. And the scalability, to be able to turn that on and cover the entirety of North Carolina was awesome. So once we saw that and get a little taste of it, then we really wanted to start implementing it throughout DHHS. And we marshaled in a cloud-only cloud-first strategy where you had to actually get an exemption not to go to the cloud. And that was a first for our state. So that was really kind of the what launched us. But then COVID hit. And once COVID came in, that took us to a new level. COVID forced us to build technologies that enabled a better treatment, a better care, a better response from our team. And so we were able to stand up platforms in 48 hours. We were able to stand up COVID vaccine management systems in six weeks. And none of that would've been possible without the cloud. >> So forced your hand in a way because all of a sudden you've got this extraordinarily remote workforce, right, and people trying to- And you're doing different tasks that were totally unexpected, right, prior to that. What kind of a shock to the system was that from I get from an IT perspective? >> Yeah, so from a state government perspective, for example, you never hear you have all the money you need and you have to do it quickly. It just doesn't work like that. But this was a rare moment in time where you had this critical need. The entire country and our state population was kind of on edge. How do we move through this? How do we factor our lives into this new integration? What is this virus? Is it spreading in my county, in my city, my zip code? Where is it? And that kind of desperation really kind of focused everybody in on build me technologies that can get me the data that I need to make good healthcare decisions, good clinical decisions. And so that was our challenge. Cloud enabled it because it can scale so quickly. We can set up things, we can exchange data. We can move data around a lot easier. And the security is better from our perspective. So that COVID experience really kind of pushed us, you know, if you will, out the door. And we're never going back because it's just too good. >> Yeah, was that the aha moment then in a way because you had to do so much so fast and before capabilities that maybe you didn't have or maybe hadn't tapped? >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean what was the accelerant there? Was COVID that big, or was it somebody who had to make a decision to say, this is where we're going with this, somebody in your shoes or somebody with whom you work? >> Yeah, no, I mean cloud at the end of the day, we knew that in order to do what we needed to do we couldn't do it on-prem. It wasn't an option. So if we wanted to build these capabilities, if we wanted to bring in technologies that really brought data to our key, our governor, our secretary, to make good decisions on behalf of our residents in North Carolina, then we were going to have to build things quickly. And the only way you can do that is in the cloud. So it was when they came back and said, "We need these things," there's only one answer. That's a good thing about technology. It's pretty binary, so it was either go with what we had, which wasn't adequate, or build to what we knew we could do and pretty short order. And because of that, we were able to actually usher in a huge expansion of cloud footprint within DHHS. And now we've actually been able to implement it in other departments simply because of our expertise. And that's been a huge asset for the state of North Carolina as a whole. >> So what's your measuring stick then for value in terms of identifying benefit? 'Cause it's not really about cost. This is about service, I assume, right? >> Right. >> So, you know, how do you quantify the values and the benefits that you're deriving from this migration over to the cloud? >> So from our perspective, it hits several different areas. I mean, you can start in security. We know that if we're in the cloud the tools that can manage and give us visibility in the cloud are 10 times better than an on-prem environment. And so if we can take a lot of these legacy systems and move them to the cloud, we'll be in a better security posture. So we have that piece of it. The other part of it is the data aspect of it, being able to- We're 33 divisions strong, right? We have a large footprint. We have a lot of siloed data elements. And cloud allows us to start integrating those data sets in a much more usable fashion so that we can see that if Charles Carter's in one area in division, a specific division with DHHS, is he somewhere else? And if he is somewhere else, then how do we provide a better clinical care for that individual? And those are conversations that we can't really have if we don't move to the cloud. So those types of- And of course there's always the OKRs, the actual measurements that you apply to things that we're doing. But at the end of the day, can we get the requirements from our business partners, bring those requirements to bear in technology, and really enable the indoctrination of these requirements throughout our clinical and healthcare kills? >> What about they're always pillars here, right? Governance, huge pillar, security, huge pillar, especially in your world, right? >> Yeah. >> So making that move over to the cloud and still recognizing that these are essentials that you have to have in place, I wouldn't say adjustments, but what kind of, I guess, recognition have you had toward that and making sure that you're still very true to those principles that are vital in the terms of public health? >> It is a great question because our secretary at the time and our governor, Roy Cooper, were very focused on enabling transparency. We had to be very transparent with what we were doing because the residents in North Carolina were just really kind of, "What's going on?" It was a scary time for a lot of us. So transparency was a key element towards our success. And in order to do that, you've got to have proper security. You got to have proper governance. You've got to have proper builds within technology that really enable that kind of visibility. One of the things that we did very early on was we set up a governance structure for our cloud environments so that as we wanted to and stand up an easy-to environment or we wanted to do some sort of work within a cloud or stand up in a different environment, we were able actually to set up a framework for how do you introduce that. Are you doing it correctly? Do you have the proper security on it? Do you have the funding for it? Like all the steps that you need to really kind of build into the scaffolding around a lot of these efforts we had to put in place and pretty quickly to get them going. But once we did that, the acceptance and the adoption of it was just tremendous. I mean, it was a light on for all of our business partners 'cause they understood I can either build on-prem, in which case I won't be able to get what I want in any kind of reasonable time period. Or I can build on cloud. And I can have it in some cases in 48 hours. >> Right, tomorrow. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You know, it was a huge difference. >> So where are you there? I mean, this is just not like a really big old lift and shift and we're all done and this is great. Cloud's taken care of all of our needs. Where are you in terms of the journey that you're undertaking? And then ultimately where do you want to go, like how far? What kind of goals have you set for yourself for the next two, three years down the road? >> Yeah, so this is an exciting part because we have actually- Like I mentioned earlier, we are a cloud-first cloud-only strategy, right? There's no reasons for us to be on-prem. It's just a matter of us kind of sunsetting legacy systems and bringing on cloud performance. We hope to be a 60% of our applications, which we have over 400 applications. So it's pretty large footprint. But we're wanting to migrate all of that to the cloud by 2025. So if we can achieve that, I think we'll be well on our way. And the momentum will carry forward for us to do that. We've actually had to do a reorganization of our whole IT structure. I think this is an important part to maintain that momentum because we've reorganized our staff, reorganized ourselves so that we can focus more on how do you adopt cloud, how do you bring in platforms which are all cloud-based, how do you use data within those systems? And that has allowed us to kind of think differently about our responsibilities, who's accountable for what, and to kind of keep those, that momentum going. So we've got some big projects that are on right now. Some of them are lift and shift, like you mentioned. We have a project with kind of a clumsy, monolithic system. It's called (indistinct). We're trying to migrate that to the cloud. We're in the process of doing that. And it's an excellent demonstration of capability once we pull that off. And then of course any new procurement that we put out there no one's making anything for on-prem anymore. Everyone's making their SaaS products for cloud-based experiences. Or if we're going to build or just use integrators then we'll build that in house. But all of it's based on cloud. >> And you mentioned SaaS. How much of this stuff are you doing on your own? And how much are you doing through managed services? >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, we have over 400 applications. So we had a pretty large footprint, right? >> Big, it's huge, right. >> So we're only who we are, and we can only build so much. So we're kind of taking- We did a application rationalization effort, which kind of identified some threats to our systems. Like maybe they're older things, FoxPro, kind of older languages that we're using. And in some cases we got people who are retiring. And there's not many people who can support that anymore. So how do we take those and migrate them to the cloud, either put them on a Salesforce or ServiceNow or Microsoft Dynamics platform and really kind of upgrade those systems? So we're in the process of kind of analyzing those elements. But yeah, that's kind of the exciting launch, if you will, of kind of taking the existing visibility of our applications and then applying it to what we're capable of with the cloud. >> And if you had advice that you could give to your colleagues who are in public health or just in public, the public sector- And your resources, they're finite. This is kind of what you have to deal with. And yet you have needs, and you're trying to stay current. You've got talent challenges, right? You've got rev or spending challenges. So if you could sit down your colleagues in a room and say, "Okay, this has been our experience. Here's what I would keep an eye out for," what kind of headlights would you beat for them? >> Yeah, so I think the biggest aha that I'd like to share with my contemporaries out there is that you've got a great ability to lower your costs, to excite your own personnel because they want to work on the new stuff. We've actually set up a whole professional development pathway within our organization to start getting people certified on AWS, certified on other platforms, to get them ready to start working in those environments. And so all of that work that we're been doing is coming together and allowing us to maintain the momentum. So what I'd recommend to people is, A, look at your own individual staff. I don't think you need to go outside to find the talent. I think you can train the talent that you have interior. I think you've got to aggressively pursue modernization because modernization enables a lot more. It's less expensive. It enables quicker adoption of business requirements and modern business requirements. And then lastly, focus on your data sharing because what you're going to find in the platforms and in the clouds is that there is a lot more opportunities for data integrations and conjoining disparate data sources. So if you can do those elements, you'll find that your capabilities on the business side are much more, much greater on the other end. >> Don't be scared, right, jump in? (laughing) >> Definitely don't be scared. Don't be, the water's warm. (host laughing) Come on in, you're fine, you're fine. (laughing) >> No little toe dipping in there. You're going to dive into the deep end, let her rip. >> Exactly, just go right in, just go right in. >> Well, it sounds like you've done that with great success. >> I'm very happy with it. >> Congratulations on that. And wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you, Charles. All right, back with more. You are watching theCUBE here in Las Vegas. theCUBE of course the leader, as you know, in tech coverage. (soft music)

>>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Reinvent 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We got a great conversation with Patrick Kauflin, vice president of Go to Market Strategy and specialization at Splunk. We're talking about the open cybersecurity scheme of framework, also known as the O C sf, a joint strategic collaboration between Splunk and aws. It's got a lot of traction momentum. Patrick, thanks for coming on the cube for reinvent coverage. >>John, great to be here. I'm excited for this. >>You know, I love this open source movement and open source and continues to add value, almost sets the standards. You know, we were talking at the CNCF Linux Foundation this past fall about how standards are coming outta open source. Not so much the the classic standards groups, but you start to see the developers voting with their code groups deciding what to adopt de facto standards and security is a real key part of that where data becomes key for resilience. And this has been the top conversation at reinvent and all around the industry, is how to make data a key part of building into cyber resilience. So I wanna get your thoughts about the problem that you see that's emerging that you guys are solving with this group kind of collaboration around the ocs f >>Yeah, well look, John, I I think, I think you, you've already, you've already hit the high notes there. Data is proliferating across the enterprise. The attack surface area is rapidly expanding. The threat landscape is ever changing. You know, we, we just had a, a lot of scares around open SSL before that we had vulnerabilities and, and Confluence and Atlassian, and you go back to log four J and SolarWinds before that and, and challenges with the supply chain. In this year in particular, we've had a, a huge acceleration in, in concerns and threat vectors around operational technology. In our customer base alone, we saw a huge uptake, you know, and double digit percentage of customers that we're concerned about the traditional vectors like, like ransomware, like business email compromise, phishing, but also from insider threat and others. So you've got this, this highly complex environment where data continues to proliferate and flow through new applications, new infrastructure, new services, driving different types of outcomes in the digitally transformed enterprise of today. >>And, and what happens there is, is our customers, particularly in security, are, are left with having to stitch all of this together. And they're trying to get visibility across multiple different services, infrastructure applications across a number of different point solutions that they've bought to help them protect, defend, detect, and respond better. And it's a massive challenge. And you know, when our, when our customers come to us, they are often looking for ways to drive more consolidation across a variety of different solutions. They're looking to drive better outcomes in terms of speed to detection. How do I detect faster? How do I bind the thing that when bang in the night faster? How do I then fix it quickly? And then how do I layer in some automation so hopefully I don't have to do it again? Now, the challenge there that really OCF Ocsf helps to, to solve is to do that effectively, to detect and to respond at the speed at which attackers are demanding. >>Today we have to have normalization of data across this entire landscape of tools, infrastructure, services. We have to have integration to have visibility, and these tools have to work together. But the biggest barrier to that is often data is stored in different structures and in different formats across different solution providers, across different tools that are, that are, that our customers are using. And that that lack of data, normalization, chokes the integration problem. And so, you know, several years ago, a number of very smart people, and this was, this was a initiative s started by Splunk and AWS came together and said, look, we as an industry have to solve this for our customers. We have to start to shoulder this burden for our customers. We can't, we can't make our customers have to be systems integrators. That's not their job. Our job is to help make this easier for them. And so OCS was born and over the last couple of years we've built out this, this collaboration to not just be AWS and Splunk, but over 50 different organizations, cloud service providers, solution providers in the cybersecurity space have come together and said, let's decide on a single unified schema for how we're gonna represent event data in this industry. And I'm very proud to be here today to say that we've launched it and, and I can't wait to see where we go next. >>Yeah, I mean, this is really compelling. I mean, it's so much packed in that, in that statement, I mean, data normalization, you mentioned chokes, this the, the solution and integration as you call it. But really also it's like data's not just stored in silos. It may not even be available, right? So if you don't have availability of data, that's an important point. Number two, you mentioned supply chain, there's physical supply chain that's coming up big time at reinvent this time as well as in open source, the software supply chain. So you now have the perimeter's been dead for multiple years. We've been talking with that for years, everybody knows that. But now combined with the supply chain problem, both physical and software, there's so much more to go on. And so, you know, the leaders in the industry, they're not sitting on their hands. They know this, but they're just overloaded. So, so how do leaders deal with this right now before we get into the ocs f I wanna just get your thoughts on what's the psychology of the, of the business leader who's facing this landscape? >>Yeah, well, I mean unfortunately too many leaders feel like they have to face these trade offs between, you know, how and where they are really focusing cyber resilience investments in the business. And, and often there is a siloed approach across security, IT developer operations or engineering rather than the ability to kind of drive visibility integration and, and connection of outcomes across those different functions. I mean, the truth is the telemetry that, that you get from an application for application performance monitoring or infrastructure monitoring is often incredibly valuable when there's a security incident and vice versa. Some of the security data that, that you may see in a security operation center can be incredibly valuable in trying to investigate a, a performance degradation in an application and understanding where that may come from. And so what we're seeing is this data layer is collapsing faster than the org charts are or the budget line items are in the enterprise. And so at Splunk here, you know, we believe security resilience is, is fundamentally a data problem. And one of the things that we do often is, is actually help connect the dots for our customers and bring our customers together across the silos they may have internally so that they can start to see a holistic picture of what resilience means for their enterprise and how they can drive faster detection outcomes and more automation coverage. >>You know, we recently had an event called Super Cloud, we're going into the next gen kind of a cloud, how data and security are all kind of part of this NextGen application. It's not just us. And we had a panel that was titled The Innovators Dilemma, kind of talk about you some of the challenges. And one of the panelists said, it's not the innovator's dilemma, it's the integrator's dilemma. And you mentioned that earlier, and I think this a key point right now into integration is so critical, not having the data and putting pieces together now open source is becoming a composability market. And I think having things snap together and work well, it's a platform system conversation, not a tool conversation. So I really wanna get into where the OCS f kind of intersects with this area people are working on. It's not just solution architects or cloud cloud native SREs, especially where DevSecOps is. So this that's right, this intersection is critical. How does Ocsf integrate into that integration of the data making that available to make machine learning and automation smarter and more relevant? >>Right, right. Well look, I mean, I I think that's a fantastic question because, you know, we talk about, we use Bud buzzwords like machine learning and, and AI all the time. And you know, I know they're all over the place here at Reinvent and, and the, there's so much promise and hope out there around these technologies and these innovations. However, machine learning AI is only as effective as the data is clean and normalized. And, and we will not realize the promise of these technologies for outcomes in resilience unless we have better ways to normalize data upstream and better ways to integrate that data to the downstream tools where detection and response is happening. And so Ocsf was really about the industry coming together and saying, this is no longer the job of our customers. We are going to create a unified schema that represents the, an event that we will all bite down on. >>Even some of us are competitors, you know, this is, this is that, that no longer matters because at the point, the point is how do we take this burden off of our customers and how do we make the industry safer together? And so 15 initial members came together along with AWS and Splunk to, to start to create that, that initial schema and standardize it. And if you've ever, you know, if you've ever worked with a bunch of technical grumpy security people, it's kind of hard to drive consensus about around just about anything. But, but I, I'm really happy to see how quickly this, this organization has come together, has open sourced the schema, and, and, and just as you said, like I think this, this unlocks the potential for real innovation that's gonna be required to keep up with the bad guys. But right now is getting stymied and held back by the lack of normalization and the lack of integration. >>I've always said Splunk was a, it eats data for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and turns it into insights. And I think you bring up the silo thing. What's interesting is the cross company sharing, I think this hits point on, so I see this as a valuable opportunity for the industry. What's the traction on that? Because, you know, to succeed it does take a village, it takes a community of security practitioners and, and, and architects and developers to kind of coalesce around this defacto movement has been, has been the uptake been good? How's traction? Can you share your thoughts on how this is translating across companies? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, I, I think cybersecurity has a, has a long track record of, of, of standards development. There's been some fantastic standards recently. Things like sticks and taxi for threat intelligence. There's been things like the, you know, the Mir attack framework coming outta mi mir and, and, and the adoption, the traction that we've seen with Attack in particular has been amazing to, to watch how that has kind of roared onto the scene in the last couple of years and has become table stakes for how you do security operations and incident response. And, you know, I think with ocs f we're gonna see something similar here, but, you know, we are in literally the first innings of, of this. So right now, you know, we're architecting this into our, into every part of our sort of backend systems here at Polan. I know our our collaborators at AWS and elsewhere are doing it too. >>And so I think it starts with bringing this standard now that the standard exists on a, you know, in schema format and there, there's, you know, confluence and Jira tickets around it, how do we then sort of build this into the code of, of the, the collaborators that have been leading the way on this? And you know, it's not gonna happen overnight, but I think in the coming quarters you'll start to see this schema be the standard across the leaders in this space. Companies like Splunk and AWS and others who are leading the way. And often that's what helps drive adoption of a standard is if you can get the, the big dogs, so to speak, to, to, to embrace it. And, and, you know, there's no bigger one than aws and I think there's no, no more important one than Splunk in the cybersecurity space. And so as we adopt this, we hope others will follow. And, and like I said, we've got over 50 organizations contributing to it today. And so I think we're off to a running >>Start. You know, it's interesting, choking innovation or having things kind of get, get slowed down has really been a problem. We've seen successes recently over the past few years. Like Kubernetes has really unlocked and accelerated the cloud native worlds of runtime with containers to, to kind of have the consensus of the community to say, Hey, if we just do this, it gets better. I think this is really compelling with the o the ocs F because if people can come together around this and get unified as well as all the other official standards, things can go highly accelerated. So I think, I think it looks really good and I think it's great initiative and I really appreciate your insight on that, on, on your relationship with Amazon. Okay. It's not just a partnership, it's a strategic collaboration. Could you share that relationship dynamic, how to start, how's it going, what's strategic about it? Share to the audience kind of the relationship between Splunk and a on this important OCS ocsf initiative. >>Look, I, I mean I think this, this year marks the, the 10th year anniversary that, that Splunk and AWS have been collaborating in a variety of different ways. I, I think our, our companies have a fantastic and, and long standing relationship and we've, we've partnered on a number of really important projects together that bring value obviously to our individual companies, but also to our shared customers. When I think about some of the most important customers at Splunk that I spend a significant amount of time with, I I I know how many of those are, are AWS customers as well, and I know how important AWS is to them. So I think it's, it's a, it's a collaboration that is rooted in, in a respect for each other's technologies and innovation, but also in a recognition that, that our shared customers want to see us work better together over time. And it's not, it's not two companies that have kind of decided in a back room that they should work together. It's actually our customers that are, that are pushing us. And I think we're, we're both very customer centric organizations and I think that has helped us actually be better collaborators and better partners together because we're, we're working back backwards from our customers >>As security becomes a physical and software approach. We've seen the trend where even Steven Schmidt at Amazon Web Services is, is the cso, he is not the CSO anymore. So, and I asked him why, he says, well, security's also physical stuff too. So, so he's that's right. Whole lens is now expanded. You mentioned supply chain, physical, digital, this is an important inflection point. Can you summarize in your mind why open cybersecurity schema for is important? I know the unification, but beyond that, what, why is this so important? Why should people pay attention to this? >>You know, I, if, if you'll let me be just a little abstract in meta for a second. I think what's, what's really meaningful at the highest level about the O C S F initiative, and that goes beyond, I think, the tactical value it will provide to, to organizations and to customers in terms of making them safer over the coming years and, and decades. I think what's more important than that is it's really the, one of the first times that you've seen the industry come together and say, we got a problem. We need to solve. That, you know, doesn't really have anything to do with, with our own economics. Our customers are, are hurt. And yeah, some of us may be competitors, you know, we got different cloud service providers that are participating in this along with aws. We got different cybersecurity solution providers participating in this along with Splunk. >>But, but folks who've come together and say, we can actually solve this problem if, if we're able to kind of put aside our competitive differences in the markets and approach this from the perspective of what's best for information security as a whole. And, and I think that's what I'm most proud of and, and what I hope we can do more of in other places in this industry, because I think that kind of collaboration from real market leaders can actually change markets. It can change the, the, the trend lines in terms of how we are keeping up with the bad guys. And, and I'd like to see a lot more of >>That. And we're seeing a lot more new kind of things emerging in the cloud next kind of this next generation architecture and outcomes are happening. I think it's interesting, you know, we always talk about sustainability, supply chain sustainability about making the earth a better place. But you're hitting on this, this meta point about businesses are under threat of going under. I mean, we want to keep businesses to businesses to be sustainable, not just, you know, the, the environment. So if a business goes outta business business, which they, their threats here are, can be catastrophic for companies. I mean, there is, there is a community responsibility to protect businesses so they can sustain and and stay Yeah. Stay producing. This is a real key point. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I think, I think one of the things that, you know, we, we, we complain a lot of in, in cyber security about the lack of, of talent, the talent shortage in cyber security. And every year we kinda, we kind of whack ourselves over the head about how hard it is to bring people into this industry. And it's true. But one of the things that I think we forget, John, is, is how important mission is to so many people in what they do for a living and how they work. And I think one of the things that cybersecurity is strongest in information Security General and has been for decades is this sense of mission and people work in this industry be not because it's, it's, it's always the, the, the most lucrative, but because it, it really drives a sense of safety and security in the enterprises and the fabric of the economy that we use every day to go through our lives. And when I think about the spun customers and AWS customers, I think about the, the different products and tools that power my life and, and we need to secure them. And, and sometimes that means coming to work every day at that company and, and doing your job. And sometimes that means working with others better, faster, and stronger to help drive that level of, of, of maturity and security that this industry >>Needs. It's a human, is a human opportunity, human problem and, and challenge. That's a whole nother segment. The role of the talent and the human machines and with scale. Patrick, thanks so much for sharing the information and the insight on the Open cybersecurity schema frame and what it means and why it's important. Thanks for sharing on the Cube, really appreciate it. >>Thanks for having me, John. >>Okay, this is AWS Reinvent 2022 coverage here on the Cube. I'm John Furry, you're the host. Thanks for watching.

>> Good afternoon, fellow cloud nerds and welcome back to AWS Reinvent 2022. We are live here from fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by Lisa Martin. So excited to be here Lisa, it's my first reinvent. >> Is it really? >> Yeah. >> I think it's only like my fourth or fifth. >> Only your fourth or fifth. >> Only. >> You're such a pro here. >> There's some serious veterans here in attendance that have been to all 11. >> I love that. >> Yeah. Wow, go them. I know, maybe we'll be at that level sooner. >> One day we will. >> Are you enjoying the show so far? >> Absolutely, it is. I cannot believe how many people are here. We've had 70,000 and we're only seeing what's at the foundation Expo Hall, not at the other hotel. So, I can only imagine. >> I mean, there's a world outside of this. >> Yes, and there's sunlight. There's actual sunlight outside of this room. >> Nobel idea. Well, Lisa, I'm very excited to be sitting here next to you and to welcome our fabulous guests, from TEKsystems, we have Brandon and Srini. Thank you so much for being here. How is the show going for you gentlemen so far? >> It's great. Lot of new insights and the customers are going to love what AWS is releasing in this reinvent. >> There is such a community here, and I love that vibe. It's similar to what we had at Cloud Native con in Detroit. So much collaboration going on. I assume most folks know a lot about TEKsystems who are watching, but just in case they don't, Brandon, give us the pitch. >> You bet. So full stack IT solutions firm, been in business for over 40 years, 80,000 global employees, really specializing in digital transformation, enterprise modernization services. We have partners in One Strategy, which is an an acquisition we made, but a well known premier partner in the Amazon partner ecosystem, as well as One North Interactive, who is our boutique brand, creative and digital strategy firm. So together, we really feel like we can bring full end-to-end solutions for digital and modernization initiatives. >> So, I saw some notes where TEKsystems are saying organizations need experienced AWS partners that are not afraid doing the dirty work of digital transformation, who really can advise and execute. Brandon, talk to us about how TEKsystems and AWS are working together to help customers on that journey which is nebulous of digital transformation. >> So, our real hallmark is the ability to scale. We partner with AWS in a lot of different ways. In fact, we just signed our strategic collaboration agreement. So, we're in the one percenter group in the whole partner network. >> Savanna: That's a pretty casual flex there. >> Not bad. >> I love that, top 1%, that no wonder you're wearing that partner pin so proud today. (speaking indistinctly) >> But we're working all the way on the advisory and working with their pro serve organization and then transforming that into large scale mass migration services, a lot of data modernization that Srini is an absolute expert in. I'm sure he can add some context too, but it's been a great partnership for many years now. >> In the keynote, Adam spent almost 52 minutes on data, right? So, it emphasizes how organizations are ready to take data to cloud and actually make meaningful insights and help their own customers come out of it by making meaningful decisions. So, we are glad to be part of this entire ecosystem. >> I love that you quantified how many minutes. >> I know. >> Talked about it, that was impressive. There's a little bit of data driven thinking going on here. >> I think so. >> Yeah. >> Well, we can't be at an event like this without talking about data for copious amounts of time, 52 minutes, has just used this morning. >> Right, absolutely. >> But every company these days has to be a data company. There's no choice to be successful, to thrive, to survive. I mean, even to thrive and grow, if it's a grocery store or your local gas station or what? You name it, that company has to be a data company. But the challenge of the data volume, the explosion in data is huge for organizations to really try to figure out and sift through what they have, where is all of it? How do we make sense of it? How do we act on it and get insights? That's a big challenge. How is TEKsystems helping customers tackle that challenge? >> Yeah, that's a great question because that's the whole fun of handling data. You need to ensure its meaning is first understood. So, we are not just dumping data into a storage place, but rather assign a meaningful context. In today's announcement, again, the data zone was unveiled to give meaning to data. And I think those are key concrete steps that we take to our customers as well with some good blueprints, methodical ways of approaching data and ultimately gaining business insights. >> And maybe I'll add just something real quick to that. The theme we're seeing and hearing a lot about is data monetization. So, technology companies have figured it out and used techniques to personalize things and get you ads, probably that you don't want half the time. But now all industries are really looking to do that. Looking at ways to open new revenue channels, looking at ways to drive a better customer experience, a better employee experience. We've got a ton of examples of that, Big Oil and Gas leveraging like well and machine data, coming in to be more efficient when they're pumping and moving commodities around. We work a lot in the medium entertainment space and so obviously, getting targeted ads to consumers during the right periods of TV or movies or et cetera. Especially with the advert on Netflix and all your streaming videos. So, it's been really interesting but we really see the future in leveraging data as one of your biggest corporate assets. >> Brilliant. >> So, I'm just curious on the ad thing, just real quick and I'll let you go, Lisa. So, do you still fall victim to falling for the advertising even though you know it's been strategically put there for you to consume in that moment? >> Most of the time. >> I mean, I think we all do. We're all, (indistinct), you're behind the curtain so to speak. >> The Amazon Truck shows up every day at my house, which is great, right? >> Hello again >> Same. >> But I think the power of it is you are giving the customer what they're looking for. >> That's it. >> And you know... >> Exactly. We have that expectation, we want it. >> 100%. >> We know that. >> Agree. >> We don't need to buy it. But technology has made it so easy to transact. That's like when developers started going to the cloud years ago, it was just, it was a swipe. It was so simple. Brandon, talk about the changes in cloud and cloud migration that TEKsystems has seen, particularly in the last couple of years as every company was rushing to go digital because they had to. >> So several years ago, we kind of pushed away that cloud first mentality to the side and we use more of a cloud smart kind of fashion, right? Does everything need to go to the cloud? No. Do applications, data, need to go to the cloud in a way that's modern and takes advantages of what the cloud can provide and all the new services that are being released this week and ongoing. So, the other thing we're seeing is initiatives that have traditionally been in the CTO, CIO organization aren't necessarily all that successful because we're seeing a complete misalignment between business goals and IT achievements, outcomes, et cetera. You can automate things, you can move it to the cloud, but if you didn't solve a core business problem or challenge, what'd you really do? >> Yeah, just to add on that, it's all about putting data and people together. And then how we can actually ensure the workforce is equally brought up to speed on these new technologies. That has been something that we have seen tremendous improvement in the last 24 months where customers are ready to take up new challenges and the end users are ready to learn something new and not just stick onto that status quo mindset. >> Where do you guys factor in to bringing in AWS in the customer's cloud journeys? What is that partnership like? >> We always first look for where the customer is in their cloud journey path and make sure we advise them with the right next steps. And AWS having its services across the spectrum makes it even easier for us to look at what business problem they're solving and then align it according to the process and technology so that at the end of the day, we want end user adoption. We don't want to build a fancy new gadget that no one uses. >> Just because you built it doesn't mean they'll come. And I think that's the classic engineering marketing dilemma as well as balance to healthy tension. I would say between both. You mentioned Srini, you mentioned workforce just a second ago. What sort of trends are you seeing in workforce development? >> Generally speaking, there are a lot of services now that can quantify your code for errors and then make sure that the code that you're pushing into production is well tested. So what we are trying to make sure is a healthy mix of trying to solve a business problem and asking the right questions. Like today, even in the keynote, it was all about how QuickSight, for example, has additional features now that tells why something happened. And that's the kind of mindset we want our end users to adopt. Not just restricting themselves to a reactive analytics, but rather ask the question why, why did it happen? Why did my sales go down? And I think those technologies and mindset shift is happening across the workforce. >> From a workforce development standpoint, we're seeing there's not enough workforce and the core skills of data, DevOps, standard cloud type work. So, we're actually an ATP advanced training partner, one of the few within the AWS network. So, we've developed programs like our Rising Talent Program that are allowing us to bring the workforce up to the skills that are necessary in this new world. So, it's a more build versus buy strategy because we're on talents real, though it may start to wane a little bit as we change the macroeconomic outlook in 2023, but it's still there. And we still believe that building those workforce and investing in your people is the right thing to do. >> It is, and I think there's a strong alignment there with AWS and their focus on that as well. I wanted to ask you, Brandon. >> Brandon: Absolutely. >> One of the things, so our boss, John Furrier, the co CEO of theCUBE, talked with Adam Selipsky just a week or maybe 10 days ago. He always gets an exclusive interview with the CEO of AWS before reinvent, and one of the things that Adam shared with him is that customers, CEOs and CIOs are not coming to Adam, to this head of AWS to talk about technology, they want to talk about transformation. He's talking about... >> The topic this year. >> Moving away from amorphous topic of digital transformation to business transformation. Are you seeing the same thing in your customer? >> 100%, and if you're not starting at the business level, these initiatives are going to fail. We see it all the time. Again, it's about that misalignment and there's no good answer to that. But digital, I think is amorphous to some degree. We play a lot with the One North partnership that I mentioned earlier, really focusing on that strategy element because consumer dollars are shrinking via inflation, via what we're heading into, and we have to create the best experience possible. We have to create an omnichannel experience to get our products or services to market. And if we're not looking at those as our core goals and we're looking at them as IT or technology challenges, we're not looking in the right place. >> Well, and businesses aren't going to be successful if they're looking at it in those siloed organizations. Data has to be democratizing and we've spent same data democratization for so long, but really, we're seeing that it has to be moving out into the lines of business because another thing Adam shared with John Furrier is that he sees and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this, the title of data analysts going away because everybody in different functions and different lines of business within an organization are going to have to be data analysts to some degree, to use data whether it's marketing, ops, sales, finance, are you seeing the same? >> That is true. I mean, at this point, we are all in the connected world, right? Every data point is connected in some form or shape to another data point. >> Savanna: There are many data points, just sitting here, yeah. >> Absolutely, so I think if you are strategizing, data needs to be right in the center of it. And then your business problems need to be addressed with reliable data. >> No, I mean, advertising, supply chain, marketing, they're all interconnected now, and we're looking at ways to bring a lot of that siloed data into one place so we can make use to it. It goes back to that monetization element of our data. >> That's a lot about context and situational awareness. We want what we want, when we want it, even before we knew we needed it then. I think I said that right. But you know, it's always more faster, quicker and then scaling things up. You see a lot of different customers across verticals, you have an absolutely massive team. Give us a sneak peek into 2023. What does the future hold? >> 2023 is again, to today's keynote, I'm bringing it back because it was a keynote filled with vision and limitless possibilities. And that's what we see. Right now, our customers, they are no longer scared to go and take the plunge into the cloud. And as Brandon said, it's all about being smart about those decisions. So, we are very excited that together with the partnership that we recently acquired and the services and the depth, along with the horizontal domain expertise, we can actually help customers make meaningful message out of their data points. And that keeps us really excited for next year. >> Love that, Brandon, what about you? >> I think the obvious one is DevOps and a focus on optimization, financially, security, et cetera, just for the changing times. The other one is, I still think that digital is going to continue to be a big push in 2023, namely making sure that experience is at its best, whether that's employee and combating the war on talent, keeping your people or opening new revenue streams, enhancing existing revenue streams. You got to keep working on that. >> We got to keep the people happy with the machines and the systems that we are building as we all know. But it's very nice, it's been a lot of human-centric focus and a lot of customer obsession here at the show. We know it's a big thing for you all, for Amazon, for pretty much everyone who sat here. Hopefully it is in general. Hopefully there's nobody who doesn't care about their community, we're not talking to them, if that's the case, we have a new challenge on theCUBE for the show, this year as we kind of prepped you for and can call it a bumper sticker, you can call it a 30 second sizzle reel. But this is sort of your Instagram moment, your TikTok, your thought of leadership highlight. What's the most important story coming out of the show? Srini, you've been quoting the keynotes very well, so, I'm going to you first on this one. >> I think overall, it's all about owning the change. In our TEKsystems culture, it's all about striving for excellence through serving others and owning the change. And so it makes me very excited that when we get that kind of keynote resonating the same message that we invite culturally, that's a big win-win for all the companies. >> It's all about the shared vision. A lot of people with similar vision in this room right now, in this room, like it's a room, it's a massive expo center, just to be clear, I'm sure everyone can see in the background. Brandon >> I would say partnership, continuing to enhance our strategic partnership with AWS, continuing to be our customers' partners in transformation. And bringing those two things together here has been a predominance of my time this week. And we'll continue throughout the week, but we're in it together with our customers and with AWS and looking forward to the future. >> Yeah, that's a beautiful note to end on there. Brandon, Srini, thank you both so much for being here with us. Fantastic to learn from your insights and to continue to emphasize on this theme of collaboration. We look forward to the next conversation with you. Thank all of you for tuning in wherever you happen to be hanging out and watching this fabulous live stream or the replay. We are here at AWS Reinvent 2022 in wonderful sunny Las Vegas, Nevada with Lisa Martin. My name is Savannah Peterson, we are theCUBE, the leading source for high tech coverage.

>> 10, nine, eight, (clears throat) four, three. >> Good afternoon, fellow cloud nerds and welcome back to AWS Reinvent 2022. We are live here from fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by Lisa Martin. So excited to be here Lisa, it's my first reinvent. >> Is it really? >> Yeah. >> I think it's only like my fourth or fifth. >> Only your fourth or fifth. >> Only. >> You're such a pro here. >> There's some serious veterans here in attendance that have been to all 11. >> I love that. >> Yeah. Wow, go them. I know, maybe we'll be at that level sooner. >> One day we will. >> Are you enjoying the show so far? >> Absolutely, it is. I cannot believe how many people are here. We've had 70,000 and we're only seeing what's at the foundation Expo Hall, not at the other hotel. So, I can only imagine. >> I mean, there's a world outside of this. >> Yes, and there's sunlight. There's actual sunlight outside of this room. >> Nobel idea. Well, Lisa, I'm very excited to be sitting here next to you and to welcome our fabulous guests, from TEKsystems, we have Brandon and Srini. Thank you so much for being here. How is the show going for you gentlemen so far? >> It's great. Lot of new insights and the customers are going to love what AWS is releasing in this reinvent. >> There is such a community here, and I love that vibe. It's similar to what we had at Cloud Native con in Detroit. So much collaboration going on. I assume most folks know a lot about TEKsystems who are watching, but just in case they don't, Brandon, give us the pitch. >> You bet. So full stack IT solutions firm, been in business for over 40 years, 80,000 global employees, really specializing in digital transformation, enterprise modernization services. We have partners in One Strategy, which is an an acquisition we made, but a well known premier partner in the Amazon partner ecosystem, as well as One North Interactive, who is our boutique brand, creative and digital strategy firm. So together, we really feel like we can bring full end-to-end solutions for digital and modernization initiatives. >> So, I saw some notes where TEKsystems are saying organizations need experienced AWS partners that are not afraid doing the dirty work of digital transformation, who really can advise and execute. Brandon, talk to us about how TEKsystems and AWS are working together to help customers on that journey which is nebulous of digital transformation. >> So, our real hallmark is the ability to scale. We partner with AWS in a lot of different ways. In fact, we just signed our strategic collaboration agreement. So, we're in the one percenter group in the whole partner network. >> Savanna: That's a pretty casual flex there. >> Not bad. >> I love that, top 1%, that no wonder you're wearing that partner pin so proud today. (speaking indistinctly) >> But we're working all the way on the advisory and working with their pro serve organization and then transforming that into large scale mass migration services, a lot of data modernization that Srini is an absolute expert in. I'm sure he can add some context too, but it's been a great partnership for many years now. >> In the keynote, Adam spent almost 52 minutes on data, right? So, it emphasizes how organizations are ready to take data to cloud and actually make meaningful insights and help their own customers come out of it by making meaningful decisions. So, we are glad to be part of this entire ecosystem. >> I love that you quantified how many minutes. >> I know. >> Talked about it, that was impressive. There's a little bit of data driven thinking going on here. >> I think so. >> Yeah. >> Well, we can't be at an event like this without talking about data for copious amounts of time, 52 minutes, has just used this morning. >> Right, absolutely. >> But every company these days has to be a data company. There's no choice to be successful, to thrive, to survive. I mean, even to thrive and grow, if it's a grocery store or your local gas station or what? You name it, that company has to be a data company. But the challenge of the data volume, the explosion in data is huge for organizations to really try to figure out and sift through what they have, where is all of it? How do we make sense of it? How do we act on it and get insights? That's a big challenge. How is TEKsystems helping customers tackle that challenge? >> Yeah, that's a great question because that's the whole fun of handling data. You need to ensure its meaning is first understood. So, we are not just dumping data into a storage place, but rather assign a meaningful context. In today's announcement, again, the data zone was unveiled to give meaning to data. And I think those are key concrete steps that we take to our customers as well with some good blueprints, methodical ways of approaching data and ultimately gaining business insights. >> And maybe I'll add just something real quick to that. The theme we're seeing and hearing a lot about is data monetization. So, technology companies have figured it out and used techniques to personalize things and get you ads, probably that you don't want half the time. But now all industries are really looking to do that. Looking at ways to open new revenue channels, looking at ways to drive a better customer experience, a better employee experience. We've got a ton of examples of that, Big Oil and Gas leveraging like well and machine data, coming in to be more efficient when they're pumping and moving commodities around. We work a lot in the medium entertainment space and so obviously, getting targeted ads to consumers during the right periods of TV or movies or et cetera. Especially with the advert on Netflix and all your streaming videos. So, it's been really interesting but we really see the future in leveraging data as one of your biggest corporate assets. >> Brilliant. >> So, I'm just curious on the ad thing, just real quick and I'll let you go, Lisa. So, do you still fall victim to falling for the advertising even though you know it's been strategically put there for you to consume in that moment? >> Most of the time. >> I mean, I think we all do. We're all, (indistinct), you're behind the curtain so to speak. >> The Amazon Truck shows up every day at my house, which is great, right? >> Hello again >> Same. >> But I think the power of it is you are giving the customer what they're looking for. >> That's it. >> And you know... >> Exactly. We have that expectation, we want it. >> 100%. >> We know that. >> Agree. >> We don't need to buy it. But technology has made it so easy to transact. That's like when developers started going to the cloud years ago, it was just, it was a swipe. It was so simple. Brandon, talk about the changes in cloud and cloud migration that TEKsystems has seen, particularly in the last couple of years as every company was rushing to go digital because they had to. >> So several years ago, we kind of pushed away that cloud first mentality to the side and we use more of a cloud smart kind of fashion, right? Does everything need to go to the cloud? No. Do applications, data, need to go to the cloud in a way that's modern and takes advantages of what the cloud can provide and all the new services that are being released this week and ongoing. So, the other thing we're seeing is initiatives that have traditionally been in the CTO, CIO organization aren't necessarily all that successful because we're seeing a complete misalignment between business goals and IT achievements, outcomes, et cetera. You can automate things, you can move it to the cloud, but if you didn't solve a core business problem or challenge, what'd you really do? >> Yeah, just to add on that, it's all about putting data and people together. And then how we can actually ensure the workforce is equally brought up to speed on these new technologies. That has been something that we have seen tremendous improvement in the last 24 months where customers are ready to take up new challenges and the end users are ready to learn something new and not just stick onto that status quo mindset. >> Where do you guys factor in to bringing in AWS in the customer's cloud journeys? What is that partnership like? >> We always first look for where the customer is in their cloud journey path and make sure we advise them with the right next steps. And AWS having its services across the spectrum makes it even easier for us to look at what business problem they're solving and then align it according to the process and technology so that at the end of the day, we want end user adoption. We don't want to build a fancy new gadget that no one uses. >> Just because you built it doesn't mean they'll come. And I think that's the classic engineering marketing dilemma as well as balance to healthy tension. I would say between both. You mentioned Srini, you mentioned workforce just a second ago. What sort of trends are you seeing in workforce development? >> Generally speaking, there are a lot of services now that can quantify your code for errors and then make sure that the code that you're pushing into production is well tested. So what we are trying to make sure is a healthy mix of trying to solve a business problem and asking the right questions. Like today, even in the keynote, it was all about how QuickSight, for example, has additional features now that tells why something happened. And that's the kind of mindset we want our end users to adopt. Not just restricting themselves to a reactive analytics, but rather ask the question why, why did it happen? Why did my sales go down? And I think those technologies and mindset shift is happening across the workforce. >> From a workforce development standpoint, we're seeing there's not enough workforce and the core skills of data, DevOps, standard cloud type work. So, we're actually an ATP advanced training partner, one of the few within the AWS network. So, we've developed programs like our Rising Talent Program that are allowing us to bring the workforce up to the skills that are necessary in this new world. So, it's a more build versus buy strategy because we're on talents real, though it may start to wane a little bit as we change the macroeconomic outlook in 2023, but it's still there. And we still believe that building those workforce and investing in your people is the right thing to do. >> It is, and I think there's a strong alignment there with AWS and their focus on that as well. I wanted to ask you, Brandon. >> Brandon: Absolutely. >> One of the things, so our boss, John Furrier, the co CEO of theCUBE, talked with Adam Selipsky just a week or maybe 10 days ago. He always gets an exclusive interview with the CEO of AWS before reinvent, and one of the things that Adam shared with him is that customers, CEOs and CIOs are not coming to Adam, to this head of AWS to talk about technology, they want to talk about transformation. He's talking about... >> The topic this year. >> Moving away from amorphous topic of digital transformation to business transformation. Are you seeing the same thing in your customer? >> 100%, and if you're not starting at the business level, these initiatives are going to fail. We see it all the time. Again, it's about that misalignment and there's no good answer to that. But digital, I think is amorphous to some degree. We play a lot with the One North partnership that I mentioned earlier, really focusing on that strategy element because consumer dollars are shrinking via inflation, via what we're heading into, and we have to create the best experience possible. We have to create an omnichannel experience to get our products or services to market. And if we're not looking at those as our core goals and we're looking at them as IT or technology challenges, we're not looking in the right place. >> Well, and businesses aren't going to be successful if they're looking at it in those siloed organizations. Data has to be democratizing and we've spent same data democratization for so long, but really, we're seeing that it has to be moving out into the lines of business because another thing Adam shared with John Furrier is that he sees and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this, the title of data analysts going away because everybody in different functions and different lines of business within an organization are going to have to be data analysts to some degree, to use data whether it's marketing, ops, sales, finance, are you seeing the same? >> That is true. I mean, at this point, we are all in the connected world, right? Every data point is connected in some form or shape to another data point. >> Savanna: There are many data points, just sitting here, yeah. >> Absolutely, so I think if you are strategizing, data needs to be right in the center of it. And then your business problems need to be addressed with reliable data. >> No, I mean, advertising, supply chain, marketing, they're all interconnected now, and we're looking at ways to bring a lot of that siloed data into one place so we can make use to it. It goes back to that monetization element of our data. >> That's a lot about context and situational awareness. We want what we want, when we want it, even before we knew we needed it then. I think I said that right. But you know, it's always more faster, quicker and then scaling things up. You see a lot of different customers across verticals, you have an absolutely massive team. Give us a sneak peek into 2023. What does the future hold? >> 2023 is again, to today's keynote, I'm bringing it back because it was a keynote filled with vision and limitless possibilities. And that's what we see. Right now, our customers, they are no longer scared to go and take the plunge into the cloud. And as Brandon said, it's all about being smart about those decisions. So, we are very excited that together with the partnership that we recently acquired and the services and the depth, along with the horizontal domain expertise, we can actually help customers make meaningful message out of their data points. And that keeps us really excited for next year. >> Love that, Brandon, what about you? >> I think the obvious one is DevOps and a focus on optimization, financially, security, et cetera, just for the changing times. The other one is, I still think that digital is going to continue to be a big push in 2023, namely making sure that experience is at its best, whether that's employee and combating the war on talent, keeping your people or opening new revenue streams, enhancing existing revenue streams. You got to keep working on that. >> We got to keep the people happy with the machines and the systems that we are building as we all know. But it's very nice, it's been a lot of human-centric focus and a lot of customer obsession here at the show. We know it's a big thing for you all, for Amazon, for pretty much everyone who sat here. Hopefully it is in general. Hopefully there's nobody who doesn't care about their community, we're not talking to them, if that's the case, we have a new challenge on theCUBE for the show, this year as we kind of prepped you for and can call it a bumper sticker, you can call it a 30 second sizzle reel. But this is sort of your Instagram moment, your TikTok, your thought of leadership highlight. What's the most important story coming out of the show? Srini, you've been quoting the keynotes very well, so, I'm going to you first on this one. >> I think overall, it's all about owning the change. In our TEKsystems culture, it's all about striving for excellence through serving others and owning the change. And so it makes me very excited that when we get that kind of keynote resonating the same message that we invite culturally, that's a big win-win for all the companies. >> It's all about the shared vision. A lot of people with similar vision in this room right now, in this room, like it's a room, it's a massive expo center, just to be clear, I'm sure everyone can see in the background. Brandon >> I would say partnership, continuing to enhance our strategic partnership with AWS, continuing to be our customers' partners in transformation. And bringing those two things together here has been a predominance of my time this week. And we'll continue throughout the week, but we're in it together with our customers and with AWS and looking forward to the future. >> Yeah, that's a beautiful note to end on there. Brandon, Srini, thank you both so much for being here with us. Fantastic to learn from your insights and to continue to emphasize on this theme of collaboration. We look forward to the next conversation with you. Thank all of you for tuning in wherever you happen to be hanging out and watching this fabulous live stream or the replay. We are here at AWS Reinvent 2022 in wonderful sunny Las Vegas, Nevada with Lisa Martin. My name is Savannah Peterson, we are theCUBE, the leading source for high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon and welcome back to KubeCon. John Furrier and I are live here from theCUBE Studios in Detroit, Michigan. And very excited for an afternoon shock full of content. John, how you holding up day too? >> I'm doing great and got a great content. This episode should be really good. We're going to be talking about modern applications, Red Hat and Konveyor, all the great stuff going on. >> Yes, and it's got a little bit of a community spin, very excited. You know I've been calling out the great Twitter handles of our guests all week and I'm not going to stop now. We have with us Coffee Art Lover, Savitha, and she's joined with Christopher here from Konveyor and Red Hat, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> How you doing and what's the vibe? >> The vibe is good. >> Yeah, pretty good. >> Has anything caught your attention? You guys are KubeCon veterans, we were talking about Valencia and shows prior. Anything sticking out to you this year? >> Yeah, just the amount of people here in this like post-COVID it's just so nice to see this many people get together. 'Cause the last couple of KubeCons that we've had they've been good but they've been much smaller and we haven't seen the same presence that we've had. And I feel like we're just starting to get back to normal what we had going like pre-COVID with KubeCon. >> Go ahead. >> Oh, sorry. And for me it's how everyone's like still respectful of everyone else and that's what sticking out to me. Like you go out of the conference center and you cannot see anyone like most or like respecting anyone's space. But here it's still there, it keeps you safe. So I'm super happy to be here. >> Yeah, I love that. I think that plays to the community. I mean, the CNCF community is really special. All these open source projects are layered. You run community at Red Hat so tell us a little bit more about that. >> So I have been focusing on the Konveyor community site for a while now since Konveyor got accepted into the CNCF Sandbox project. Yeah, it's so exciting and it's like I'm so thrilled and I'm so excited for the project. So it's something that I believe in and I do a lot of (indistinct) stuff and I learned a lot from the community. The community is what keeps me coming back to every KubeCon and keep me contributing. So I'm taking all the good stuff from there and then like trying to incorporate that into the conveyor community world. But not at a scale of like 20,000 or like 30,000 people but at a scale of like hundreds, we are in hundreds and hoping to like expand it to like thousands by next year. Hopefully, yeah. >> Talk about the project, give a quick overview what it is, where it's at now, obviously it's got traction, you got some momentum, I want to hear the customer. But give a quick overview of the project. Why are people excited about it? >> Sure. It is one of the open source of modernization tool sets that's available right now. So that's super exciting. So many people want to contribute to it. And what we basically do is like you see a lot of large companies and they want to like do the migration and the journey and we just want to help them, make their life easier. So we are in this environment which is like surrounded by cars, think of it like lane assist system or like think of it as an additional system, smart system but that's not taking control, like full control. But then it's there to like guide you through your journey safe and in a predictable way and you'll reach your destination point in a much happier, safer and like sooner. So that's what we are doing. I know that's a lot of talk but if you want the technical thing then I'll just say like we are here to help everyone who wants to modernize. Help them by refractoring and replatforming their applications in a safer and predictable way at scale. I think I got everything. What do you think Christopher? >> Yeah. I mean, we've seen a real need in the market to solve this problem as more and more companies are looking to go cloud native. And I feel like in the last 10 years we had this period where a lot of companies were kind of dabbling in the cloud and they're identifying the low hanging fruit for their migrations, or they were starting out with new applications in the cloud. We're just starting to move into a period where now they're trying to bring over legacy applications. Now they're trying to bring over the applications that have been running their business for 10, 20, even 30 years. And we're trying to help them solve the problem of how do we start with that? How do we take a holistic look at our applications and come up with a game plan of how we're going to bring those into being cloud native? >> Oh, yeah, go. >> One other thing I want to get to you mentioned replatforming and refactoring. A lot of discussion on what that means now. Refactoring with the cloud, we see a lot of great examples, people really getting a competitive advantage by refactoring in that case. But re-platforming also has meaning, it seems to be evolving. So guys can you share your your thoughts on what's re-platforming versus refactoring? >> I'll let you go. >> So for re-platforming, there's a few different stages that we can do this in. So we have this term in migration called lift and shift. It's basically taking something as is and just plopping it in and then having certain technologies around it that make it act in a similar way as it was before but in more of a cloud type of way. And this is a good way for people to get their feet wet, to get their applications into the cloud. But a lot of times they're not optimized around it, they're not able to scale, they're not able to have a lot of the cost effective things that go with it as well. So that's like the next step is that that's the refactoring. Where we're actually taking apart this idea, these domains is what we would call it for the business. And then breaking them down into their parts which then leads to things like microservices and things like being able to scale horizontally and proving that is. >> So the benefits of the cloud higher level services. >> Absolutely. >> So you shift to the platform which is cloud, lift and shift or get it over there, and then set it up so it can take advantage and increase the functionality. Is that kind of the difference? >> And one thing that we're seeing too is that these companies are operating this hybrid model. So they've brought some containers over and then they have legacy like virtual machines that they want to bring over into the cloud, but they're not in a position right now where they can re refactor or even- >> In position, it's not even on a table yet. >> So that's where we're also seeing opportunities where we can identify ways that we can actually lift and shift that VM closer at least to the containers. And that's where a lot of my conversations as a cloud success architect are of how do we refactor but also re-platform the most strategic candidate? >> So is Konveyor a good fit for these kinds of opportunities? >> Yes, 100%. It actually asks you like it starts certain phases like assessment phase, then it ask you a bunch of question about your infrastructure, applications and everything to gauge, and then provide you with the right strategy. It's not like one strategy. So it will provide you with the right strategy either re-platform, refracture or like what is best, retire, rehost, whatever, but replatform and refactor are the most that we are focused on right now. Hopefully that we might expand but I'm not sure. >> I think you just brought up a really good point and I was curious about this too 'cause Christopher you mentioned you're working with largely Fortune 50 companies, so some of the largest companies on earth. We're not talking about scale, we are talking about extraordinarily large scale. >> Thousands sometimes of applications. >> And I'm thinking a lot, I'm just sitting here listening to you thinking about the complexity. The complexity of each one of these situations. And I'm sure you've seen some of it before, you've been doing this for a while, and you're mentioning that Konveyor has different sorts of strategies. What's the flow like for that? I mean, just even thinking about it feels complex for me sitting here right now. >> Yeah, so typically when we're doing a large scale migration that lasts anywhere for like a year or two sometimes with these Fortune 50 companies. >> Some of this legacy stuff has got to be. >> This is usually when they're already at the point where they're ready to move and we're just there to tell them how to move it at that point. So you're right, there's years that have been going on to get to the point that even I'm involved. But from an assessment standpoint, we spend months just looking at applications and assessing them using tools like Konveyor to just figure out, okay, are you ready to go? Do you have the green light or do we have to pull the brakes? And you're right, so much goes into that and it's all strategic. >> Oh my gosh. >> So I guess, a quarter or a third of our time we're not even actually moving applications, we're assessing the applications and cutting up the strategy. >> That's right, there's many pieces to this puzzle. >> Absolutely. >> And I bet there's some even hidden in the corners under the couch that people forgot were even there. >> We learn new things every time too. Every migration we learn new patterns and new difficulties which is what's great about the community aspect. Because we take those and then we add them into the community, into Konveyor and then we can build off of that. So it's like you're sharing when we're doing those migrations or companies are using Konveyor and sharing that knowledge, we're building off what other people have done, we're expanding that. So there's a real advantage to using a tool like Konveyor when it comes to previous experiences. >> So tell me about some of the trends that you're seeing across the board with the folks that you're helping. >> Yeah, so trends wise like I said, I feel like the low hanging fruit has been already done in the last 10 years. We're seeing very critical like mission critical applications that are typically 10, 20 years old that need to get into the the cloud. Because that term data gravity is what's preventing them from moving into the cloud. And it's usually a large older what we would call monolithic application that's preventing them from moving. And trying to identify the ways that we can take that apart and strategically move it into the cloud. And we had a customer survey that went out to a few hundred different people that were using Konveyor. And the feedback we got was about 50% of them are currently migrating like have large migrations going on like this. And then another 30, 40% have that targeted next two years. >> So it's happening. >> It's happening now. This is a problem, this isn't a problem that we're trying to future proof, it is happening now for most corporations. They are focused on finding ways to be cost optimized and especially in the way our market is working in this post-COVID world, it's more critical than ever. And a lot of people are pouring even though they're cutting back expenses, they're still putting focus their IT for these type of migrations. >> What's the persona of people that you're trying to talk to about Konveyor? Who is out there? >> What's the community like? >> What's the community makeup and why should someone join the team? Why should someone come in and work on the project? >> So someone who is interested or trying to start their journey or someone who's already like going through a journey and someone who has went through the journey, right? They have the most experience of like what went wrong and where it could be improved. So we cater to like everyone out there pretty much, right? Because some point of the time right now it's cloud native right now this is a ecosystem. In five years it would be like totally different thing. So the mission of the project is going to be like similar or like probably same, help someone replatform and rehost things into the next generation of whatever that's going to come. So we need everyone. So that is the focus area or like the targeted audience. Right now we have interest from people who are actually actively ongoing the migration and the challenges that they are facing right now. >> So legacy enterprises that up and running, full workloads, multiple productions, hundreds and hundreds of apps, whose boss has said, "We're going to the cloud." And they go, oh boy. How do we do this? Lift and shift, get re-platform? There's a playbook, there's a method. You lift and shift, you get it in there, get the core competency, use some manage service restitch it together, go cloud native. So this is the cloud native roadmap. >> And the beauty of Konveyor is that it also gives you like plans. So like once it assists and analyzed it, it comes up with plans and reports so that you can actually take it to your management and say like, well, let's just target these, these and many application, X number of application in like two weeks. Now let's just do it in waves. So that is some feature that we are looking forward to in conveyor three which is going to be released in the first quarter of 2023. So it's exciting, right? >> It is exciting and it makes a lot of sense. >> It makes everyone happy, it makes the engineers happy. Don't have to be overworked. It also like makes the architects like Chris happy and it also makes- >> Pretty much so. >> As exemplified right here, love that. >> It makes the management happy because they see that there is like progress going on and they can like ramp it up or wrap it down holiday season. Do not touch prediction, right? Do not touch prediction. >> You hear that manager, do not touch production. >> It's also friendships too 'cause people want to be in a tribe that's experiencing the same things over and over again. I think that is really the comradery and the community data sharing. >> Yeah, that's the beauty of community, right? You can be on any number of teams but you are on the same team. Like any number of companies but on the same team. It also like reflected in the keynotes I think yesterday someone mentioned it. Sorry, I cannot recall the name of who mentioned it but it's like different companies, same team, similar goal. We all go through the journey together. >> Water level rises together too. We learn from each other and that's what community is really all about. You can tell folks at home might not be able to feel it but I can. You can tell how community first you both are. Last question for you before we wrap up, is there anything that you wish the world knew about Konveyor that they don't know right now, or more people knew? And if not, your marketing team is nailing it and we'll just give them a high five. >> I think it goes with just what we were talking about. It's not just a tool for individual applications and how to move it, it's how do we see things from a bigger picture? And this is what this tool ultimately is also trying to solve is how do we work together to move hundreds if not thousands of applications? Because it takes a village. >> Quite literally with that volume size. >> My biggest advice to people who are considering this who are in large enterprise or even smaller enterprise. Make sure that you understand this is a team effort. Make sure you're communicating and lessons learned on one team is going to be lessons learned for another team. So share that information. When you're doing migrations make sure that all that knowledge is spread because you're just going to end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again. >> That is a beautiful way to close the show. Savitha, Christopher, thank you so much for being with us. John, always a pleasure. And thank you for tuning into theCUBE live from Detroit. We'll be back with our next interview in just a few. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here of theCUBE. I have three guests now here with me. Please welcome Dave Fafel, chief technology officer at WEI. And welcome back to the program, Terry Richardson, North American channel chief at AMD, and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Gentlemen, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for hopping on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> (indistinct) >> So, Dave, let's start with you, a lot of acronyms here. Talk to us about WEI and its approach to sustainability. >> Yeah, absolutely, sure. So, WEI is a innovative, full service, customer-centric, IT solutions provider. We're experts in business technology improvement, in driving efficiency, helping our customers to optimize their IT environments. That's what we do. And of course, sustainability is really now part of the core function in architecting IT solutions these days. It has to be. I look at sustainability and I hear the word sustainability and I think efficiency. And that's the way that our organization designs solutions for our customers today. >> Talk about the impetus. You mentioned being customer centric you talked about efficiency, all incredibly important to all of us on this Zoom, but Dave, talk about the impetus for WEI to develop and implement this sustainability initiative. Well, I mean, so look, for WEI, it's part of our business model, it's part of our culture. So it's natural that that comes out in the solutions that we design for our customers, but we're trying to solve business problems for our customers, We're not just geeks building something really cool with the latest technology, we're trying to solve real world problems and sustainability addresses real world issues. And so, our customers are looking for us to help them either implement their sustainability programs, or to mature their sustainability programs. And IT has a big responsibility in that. And so, when we're working with them to solve these problems we're really solving that business problem, solving that sustainability, IT initiative that they have. >> And we're going to dig and unpack that in a little bit. John, I want to bring you into the conversation. HPE and AMD have been long partnering on advancing sustainability goals for quite a long time now. Can you talk about how HPE and WEI are partnering? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help support not only the goals that Dave talked about but HPE's sustainability goals? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things in sustainability is partnership is really leadership. No one company can do this by themselves, and customers really need that input and perspective from all of their partners as part of this process. So, for us as HPE, 65% of our carbon footprint, for example, is when our customers use our technology products. So, for us to lower our carbon footprint, it also requires us helping the customer do that. And that's where the power of the AMD and HPE relationship comes together, but we can't give our expertise widely to every customer in the world. And so, we use our channel partners like WEI to not only extend our reach, but they bring that deep knowledge of the customer and all of their operations across technology, even places where HPE does not offer that technology, in the client space, for example, or in the printer space. And so, what it allows us to do is develop better solutions for the customer. WEI has a deep relationship with the customer. They have a deep expertise in local nuances if there's regulations or local constraints. In fact, in many cities in the world, you can't, for example, build new data centers because of power infrastructure constraints. So, that's where we leverage partners like WEI to improve the customer experience and make sure that we give the best solutions to the customer. >> All about improving those customer experiences as demand for technology does nothing but increase. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation now. Speaking of customer centricity, we find that sustainability is very complicated, that a lot of large companies might have the resources to figure it out, but some of the smaller and mid-size companies might not quite have the boots on the street. What should some of the smaller organizations do, Terry, in your perspective to get started where sustainability is concerned? >> Well, I first off, appreciate the opportunity to be here and it's really terrific to have such a strong partnership with both HPE and WEI in order to deliver innovative solutions to customers. I think what AMD brings to the table is a real choice for customers that they haven't had. All of our personnel are really expert in articulating a differentiated value proposition that hits on a little bit what John talked about which is higher performance but with very, very efficient systems. And we've been offering those to the market since 2017 and we continued to get better. And now, there's an absolute opportunity to do more with same amount of servers, or do a workload with far fewer servers, that require far less energy. So, bringing in the AMD resources to assist the efforts of HPE and WEI, I would say, would be a good step for customers. >> Are there any Terry, sticking with you, any recommendations or tools particularly that you've seen really help customers get kicked off well, and strategically? >> Yeah, there actually are a couple that are readily available and I would encourage through WEI, customers take a close look. Two that really come to mind. We have a virtualization TCO tool that helps optimize configurations for virtual environments. And one of our newest tools is one that's focused on bare metal and greenhouse gas emissions TCO. So, really quantifying the impact to customers and expressed in terms that are familiar and help them achieve their sustainability initiatives. >> Excellent, that's great that those resources are available for customers, especially those smaller ones that might need a bit more guidance and handholding. Dave, let's come back to you. Let's now unpack the sustainability initiatives at WEI that you're really leveraging and implementing to meet the demands of customers and their future technology demands. >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a great question, what we're getting to. So, look, we're going to combine, the advancements in technology from an AMD and from an HPE into an architecture that's really usable for a customer. So, 10 years ago, we were all looking at consolidation ratios for virtualization as one driver to a more efficient IT environment. And so, look, we've done this over the last decade, where we've added as many virtual machines to a server as we can get and as many containers to a physical machine as we can get, and now we've got to find other ways to drive efficiency. And so, when we see technology from AMD that's maybe having the socket count from a CPU perspective with a 30 plus percent reduction in power consumption and heat output, that's huge. So, we're architecting these solutions, using that best of breed technology but also implementing technology that was previously consumed more by larger enterprise customers for that small and medium customer base that you mentioned earlier. And that is implementing infrastructure as a service as a way to more efficiently utilize IT resources. So, we'll design the right systems, we'll put them into a consumption model that allows us to dial up and down when we need to, as opposed to having to build oversized environments that consume too much power, that produce too much heat and that aren't really driving toward those sustainability initiatives. So, we want to change not only the technology but also the models of which we consume IT. That's how we're driving that forward with customers today. >> And Dave, another question for you. How are you seeing from a cultural perspective this be adopted and accepted across the customer base? 'Cause change management is challenging but we all know sustainability is a focus of pretty much every business on the planet. >> It is, but fortunately we've got good partners like AMD and HPE, so they make it easy for the channel to implement these things. If you take a look at HPE's GreenLake solutions, for instance. These are tool sets that allow us to go and easily implement that for customers and reduce that change or cost of change for them. In fact, it actually allows them to take the models that they're currently used to and yet still leverage that new consumption model that I just referred to. >> Got it, awesome, thank you. John, let's go back to you. There's a tremendous opportunity here for customers from a sustainability standpoint, across every industry. And I was looking at some data that HPE shared that said for example, 25% of compute in data centers is comatose. First of all, I think the description is brilliant. What are some of the outcomes that customers can expect in working with HPE and AMD and WEI in terms of better leveraging their technology investments today and in the future? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And we do see a tremendous amount of equipment in the average data center that's not doing any useful work. And so, comatose is a great name for that. We also see a tremendous amount of equipment that's being dramatically underutilized as well. So, when the three companies come together and share that expertise with the customer and the customer follows through on that you can expect a whole lot of things. So, you reduce over-provisioning, you have the IT assets in your infrastructure doing useful work for you. The second thing you you tend to see is utilization levels going up. So, where the average utilization level across compute today even in a virtualized or containerized environment is about 30%. You see that almost doubling, for example, in good scenarios where the customer has that equipment doing a tremendous amount of additional work, keeping them from needing to add additional assets to the infrastructure. So, all of that drives cost savings, both CapEx and OPEX, cost savings opportunities. It drives efficiency savings. If you have less equipment being more well utilized and better managed, you tend not to have over temperature situations or equipment that goes down for no explainable reason that then drives staff work to go find out and fix workloads that go down. In fact, many of our customers are measured on service level agreements. They want to keep that infrastructure running all the time to keep their customers happy as well. And finally, one that sometimes is missed is employee satisfaction. Technology companies are having a tough enough time finding and attracting and retaining employees to start with but those employees want to see how what they're doing contributes to purpose. So, as our customers can use these employees to do more productive work, show them how it connects to the purpose of their company and show them how it makes the world a better place at the same time, they can do a better job of holding on to those employees that they so value. >> That's such a great point, John, that you bring up that employee retention but also talent attraction and retention for your customers. Dave, back to you. Are you seeing more and more customers come to WEI, saying, "We have sustainability initiatives. "We can only partner with companies that are also really focused on this because we need to make sure that our employees are satisfied and that we can attract and retain customers." Is that something that you're seeing an increase of? >> Yeah, absolutely. So very often, we're asked to explain how we're implementing sustainability in our business, that the partners that we work with are also doing the same and I'll give you an example of that. So, we've been talking about IT efficiency and good utilization of IT equipment but let's not forget that life cycles of IT equipment result in that equipment leaving a customer site eventually. So, we've got to be responsible in the way that we handle that. And so, this is the area where WEI has put together programs to connect the sustainability aspect of IT recycling, if you will, with the social aspect of corporate social responsibility. And that is, what do we do with this stuff? So, we offer programs to customers where we say, "Hey, look, let's take back some of that IT equipment, there's value in this." It may be that we need to go and recycle this in a responsible way. And we can extract valuable components out of this that result in funds to do something with. Well, what can we do with those funds? Can we put those towards social programs? So, this is where we, again, tie together sustainability and social responsibility. We've been talking about data centers but this also extends to other IT devices. So, if we're pulling back laptops, as an example, from a customer environment, well, those may still have a useful life someplace. Can we bring those to disadvantaged communities and utilize those for educational purposes and other things? Again, this is how WEI connects our customers with these opportunities to enhance their CSR programs. >> Tremendous opportunities there for customers across every industry. Dave, sticking with you for a second. From a differentiation perspective, talk about what the partnership with HPE and AMD delivers WEI from a unique value prop perspective. >> Yeah, so we touched on it a little bit already, and that is, you've got the incredible technology from AMD and from HPE that work seamlessly together but is also focused on driving down the cost of computing. I mean, just the overall efficiency built into design of these solutions makes it easy for an IT consultant like us to build an efficient architecture. But it's not just the technology. It's also the models, or the IT provisioning and consumption models that are important. And again, that's where the relationship between HPE and WEI comes together, because we get to leverage some of these other programs. I mentioned before GreenLake, as an example. This gives us the opportunity to build that infrastructure as service model for our customers who would otherwise maybe go out to a hyperscaler for a similar solution. But as we know, most of our customers even small and medium businesses, can't move everything out to the cloud. They have to use their own data centers. They have to keep data on site and on-prem. So, building that model for them drives efficiency and quite honestly, that's the thing that they're looking for, it's driving cost savings, it's driving efficiency, it's aiding their CSR initiatives. >> Got it. Let's chat now about the strategic versus the tactical. Terry, I would like to get your feedback and then John, yours as well. We talked a little bit about this already but how do you help advise organizations that might be in that tactical mode, approaching sustainability from a tactical mode and really up level that to a strategy that's around sustainable IT? Terry, what are some of the things that you're seeing in the marketplace? Well, at AMD we're fortunate to be passionate about partnerships and sustainability. We're fortunate to work with companies of all shapes and sizes and in different geographies around the world. Some are a little bit more advanced in the way they think about this, but it really is becoming a strategic imperative for companies. And I think certain companies don't know exactly how to proceed. So, the opportunity to educate and open their eyes to the way that you can do both, you can meet your IT goals and objectives, but also do it in a very socially responsible and sustainable way, to me is a win-win. And we welcome the opportunity to just have those conversations. I think some customers are not necessarily understanding how much IT can really contribute to their ability to meet their current and future sustainability goals. And we look forward to having as many conversations as possible 'cause it goes in the category of just the right thing to do. If you can power your IT and do things that are good for the planet and good for all. >> That's a great point. It really is the right thing to do. John, just question, last question for you, is similar to what I asked Terry, but I would like to know where are your customer conversations when it comes to really looking at IT as a big driver of sustainability? Who in the organization really needs to be the spearheads around that initiative? >> Yeah, great question. Often we see customers have one organization that sometimes is a sustainability organization. Sometimes the facility's a real estate organization or sometimes IT is spearheading this and often doing that in isolation. To your point, we really need to think about this as a sustainable IT strategy and get all the right organizations involved together. So, for example, for us, after seeing many customers that didn't know how to develop this strategy, we wrote a workbook called "Six Steps For Implementing A Sustainable IT Strategy." And the steps are things like figure out what your company goals already are that you've made public to your customers then grab the right stakeholders and bring them together. For example, you know you're going to have cost savings, so have the finance team in the room, You know this is going to save utilities, have the real estate team in the room. You know it's going to generate a sustainability benefit, have the sustainability team involved so that they can quantify the benefit in a meaningful manner. Have the communication and marketing teams because when companies implement a sustainable IT strategy they have a great story that they can then tell their customers about how they're doing a better job from an efficiency perspective and from an environmental perspective as well. So, when you bring all of those stakeholders together you can have a much broader and deeper strategy. It becomes a strategic imperative. And when your institutional investors, if you're publicly traded, or your customers come asking about your programs, you're ready to answer those questions in a credible manner. >> Sounds like it really needs to truly be a collaborative effort across the organization. You mentioned John's story and that goes back to employee retention, talent attraction and retention for your companies and your customers as well. We could go off on that but we're almost out of time. So, I want to go back to Dave to take us home here. You walked us through what WEI is doing from a sustainability initiative perspective, the impetus to develop that. What are some of the things that we can expect to see on the horizon from WEI where sustainability is concerned? What are you excited about? >> Well, that's a good question. So, we're excited about how we can continue to deploy those infrastructure as a service models. That's the next step in the direction. How do we automate these things, and then how do we quantify them? So, you've got to build the environment but then you've got to be able to measure it. And that's another area where WEI really adds value to this whole solution set is how are we measuring these things in the long term and developing a program that extends beyond just the implementation of this, but through its entire life cycle and the value of it? Because if you can quantify the value and if you can show what the savings really is and how it's helping customers meet their sustainability goals, well, guess what? They're going to want to implement more of this So, it's good business, and that's what we're excited about, is that next mile of implementation after we developed the initial architecture. >> That measurement is key. It sounds like then it really becomes a flywheel of sustainability. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today talking about from your three perspectives and how you're partnering together to really enable businesses across any industry to develop a sustainable IT strategy that they can implement and then create a flywheel of optimization. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> All right, my pleasure for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment, John and Terry and I are going to be joined by Charles Mulrooney, global presales engineering manager at SHI and John Sahs, global presales technical consultant at SHI. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Sustainability has become one of the hottest topics, not just in enterprise tech, but across all industries. The relentless pace of technology improvement over the decades and orders of magnitude increases in density have created heat, power and cooling problems that are increasingly challenging to remediate. Intense efforts have been implemented over the years around data center design techniques to dissipate heat, use ambient air, liquid cooling and many other approaches that have been brought to bear to get power usage effectiveness, PUE, as close to one as possible. Welcome to Better Together Sustainability, presented by the CUBE and brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD. In this program we'll lay out today's challenges and how leading companies are engineering solutions to the problems just introduced, along with some recommendations, best practices and resources as to how you can initiate or enhance your sustainability journey. First up to help us better understand this important topic are John Fry, senior technologist IT efficiency and sustainability at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Terry Richardson, North America channel chief for AMD. Gents, welcome. >> Great to be here. >> (indistinct). >> John, let's start at the high level here. Why is sustainability such an important topic today? Why now? Why is it such a challenge for customers and, and how are you guys approaching the solutions? >> The topic has been an important topic for a number of years, but what we're seeing across the world is more and more corporations are putting in place climate targets and sustainability goals. And at the same time, boards and CEOs are starting to be asked about the topic as well, making this topic much more important for technology leaders across the globe. At the same time, technology leaders are fighting with space, power and cooling constraints that caused them to rethink their approach to IT. To get a better sense of how wide this challenge is, we did a survey last year and we asked 500 technology leaders across the globe if they were implementing sustainable IT goals and metrics and programs within their infrastructure. Personally, I thought the answer would be about 40% of them had these programs. Actually it turned out to be 96% of them. And so when we asked them why they were implementing these programs and what was the primary driver, what we heard from them was three things. Those of them that were the early adopters and the ones that move were moving the fastest told us they were putting these programs in place to attract and retain institutional investors. If they're a publicly traded company, their investors were already asking their boards, their CEOs, wanting to know what their company was doing to drive efficiency within their technology operations. Those companies in the middle, the ones that were just moving along at the same pace as many other companies around the world, told us they were putting these programs in place to attract and retain their customers. Customers are increasingly asking the companies they do business with about their sustainability aspirations specifically how technology contributes to their carbon emissions and their sustainability goals. And so these customers want to make sure that they can keep their own customers. And finally, a third group, the digital followers, that group of companies that's a little slower adopting programs, more conservative in nature. They said they were implementing these programs to attract and retain employees. In fact, over the last year or so, every customer we've talked to when they describe their pain points and their challenges that we can try to help them meet, has had a difficulty in finding employees. And so what we know is these younger employees coming into the workforce, if you can show them how what they are going to be doing connects to the purpose of their company and connects to making the world a better place, you can attract them easier and you can retain them longer. So a variety of business reasons why companies are looking at these programs, but what we know is when they implement these programs they often reduce over-provisioning. They save money, they have a lower environmental footprint, and again they have an easier time attracting and retaining employees. So for all of these reasons, driving sustainability into your IT operations is a great thing to do. >> Yeah, I never would've expected 96%. And of course, investors, customers and employees. I mean, this is the big three. Terry what's AMD's perspective on this topic? In other words, what do you bring to the table and the partnership? I mean, I know processors, but what's unique about AMD's contribution? >> Yeah. Thanks Dave. And, and John, great to be with you. Appreciate the opportunity and the partnership. You know, we too are very focused on sustainability and enjoy our partnership with HPE very much in this area. You know, since 2017, when AMD introduced its epic processor family, there's been a couple of core design elements in that technology. One has to do with performance. And the second has to do with efficiency. Both are critically important to today's topic of sustainability because increasingly, customers are understanding and measuring performance per watt and fortunately, AMD really excels in this area. So whether we're talking about the larger super computers in the world, or even general purpose servers, customers can fundamentally do more with fewer AMD servers than competitive alternatives. And so, so we, we really bring a technology element on the processor side, CPU and GPU, to play a role in delivering real ability for customers to meet some of their core sustainability goals. And of course, in partnership with HPE, together we have really a compelling story. >> Great. Thank you, Terry. And, and John, wonder if you could talk to the differentiation that you bring from HPE's perspective, the total package. >> Yeah, of course. The first thing as partnership. As Terry mentioned, AMD and HPE have been working together since HPE was founded actually, to drive power efficiency up to meet the demands of our customers. At the same time, as our customers have asked more and more questions around technology sustainability, we've realized that we needed to not only develop a point of view on that from an HPE perspective, but actually write the white papers that give the customer guidance for sustainable IT strategies, for tech refresh cycles, give them some guidance on what are the right questions to ask technology vendors when they're buying technology equipment. So a series of white papers and you might not appreciate why, but this is a topic that you can't go get a college degree in and frankly can't even buy a book on. So for customers to get that knowledge, they want to get it from experienced professionals around the globe. And in fact, in the survey that I mentioned earlier, we asked customers, where's the number one place that you expect to get your sustainable IT information from? And they said, our technology vendors. So for us, it's really about driving that point of view, sharing it with customers, helping customers get better and even pointing out some of the unintended consequences. So a great example, Dave, you mentioned PUE earlier. Many customers have been driving PUE down for a number of years, but often the way that they did that was optimizing the data center building infrastructure. They got PUE pretty low. Now, one of the things that happens and customers need to be aware of this, particularly if they're focused on PUE as their primary metric, is when they optimize their IT stack and make that smaller, PUE actually goes up. And at first they think, well, wait a minute, that metric is going in the wrong direction. But when you remember it's a ratio, if you get that IT stack component smaller, then you're driving efficiency even if PUE goes the wrong direction. So part of the conversation then is you might want to look at PUE internally, but perhaps you've outgrown PUE and now have an opportunity to look at other metrics like carbon emissions per workload, or or power consumption per piece of equipment or rack. So all of this drives back to that upward trajectory that Terry was talking about where customers are really interested in power performance. So as we share those stories with customers, share the expertise how to move along this journey, that really provides great differentiation for HPE and AMD together. >> So that's interesting. So PUE is not necessarily the holy grail metric. There are other metrics that you, you should look at. Number one, and number two the way you interpret PUE is changing for the better. So thank you for that context. I wonder Terry, do, do you have any like proof points or examples that you can share? >> Yeah, so one that immediately comes to mind that was a manifestation of some terrific collaboration between AMD and HPE was their recently announced implementation of the Frontier supercomputer. That was a project that we collaborated on for a long time. And, and where we ended up was turning over to the government a supercomputer that is currently the highest performing in the world, broke the exaFLOP barrier. And probably even more importantly is number one on the Green500 list of the top super computers. And, and together we enjoy favorable rankings in other systems, but that's the one that, that really stands out in terms of at scale implementation to shine really a spotlight on what we can do together. Certainly for other customers doesn't have to be the world's largest super computer. It's not uncommon that we see customers just kind of in general purpose business applications in their data centers to be able to do more with less, you know, meaning, you know, you know a third of the servers oftentimes delivering not only a very strong TCO but the environmental benefit that gets associated with significantly reduced energy that can be expressed in reduction in, in overall CO2 emissions and other, other ways to express the benefit, whether it's, you know the equivalent of, of planting you know, acres of forest or whatever. So we're really proud of the proof points that we have and and look forward to the opportunity to together explain this more fully to customers and partners. >> Right? So John, Terry sort of alluded to this being more broad based. I know HPE has a very strong focus on HPC. Sorry for all the acronyms, but high performance computing. But the, so this is more broad based than just the super computing business, right John? >> Yeah, absolutely. We see these performance benefits for customers and industry standard servers as well. In fact, many customers, that's the primary type of equipment they use and they want better power performance. They either want to as Terry alluded to, use less equipment to do the same amount of work, or if they've run into a space or power or cooling constraint in their data centers, they want to be able to increase workloads in the same footprint. So it allows them to take better use of their data centers. And for some customers even the data center enclosure that they started with they can actually use a much smaller amount of space. In fact, we have some that even move over to co-location facilities as they improve that performance per watt, and can do more work in the smaller space. So it starts an industry standard server, but increasingly we're seeing customers considering liquid cooling solutions and that generally moves them into the high performance compute space as well right now. So those performance improvements exist across that entire spectrum. >> So since you brought up liquid cooling John, I mean can you share any best practices? I mean, like what do you do with all that heated liquid? >> Yeah, it's a great, great question. And we have seen a lot more interest from customers in liquid cooling and there's a variety of things that you can do, but if you're considering liquid cooling the opportunities to think broader than just the IT stack. So if you're going to use a cooling loop anyhow and you're going to generate warm liquid coming off the it equipment as waste, think about what you can do with that. We have a, a government customer here in the United States that designed their high performance computer while they were designing the building it went in. So they're able to use that hot air, hot water, excuse me coming off the IT equipment to heat the entire building. And that provides a great use of that warm water. In many parts of the world, that warm water can either be used on a hot water utility grid or it can even be used on a steam grid if you can get it warm enough. Other places we're aware of customers (indistinct) and greenhouses next to data centers and using both the warm air and the warm water from the data center to heat the greenhouse as well. So we're encouraging customers to take a step back, look at the entire system, look at anything coming out of that system that once was waste and start to think about how can we use that what was waste now as an input to another process. >> Right, that's system thinking and some, some pragmatic examples there. Can, can you each summarize, maybe start Terry, with you AMD's and HPE's respective climate goals that may, Terry then John chime in please. >> Yeah, I'll go first. We actually have four publicly stated goals. The first one is I think very aggressive but we've got a track record of doing something similar in our client business. And, and so kind of goal number one is a 30 X increase in energy efficiency for AMD processors and accelerators powering servers for AI and HPC by 2025. The second is broad based across the corporation is a 50% absolute reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from AMD operations by 2030. And then the third is 100% of AMD manufacturing suppliers will have published greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals by 2025. And we've declared that 80% or greater of our manufacturing suppliers will source renewable energy by 2025. Those are the, those are the four big publicly stated goals and objectives that we have in this area. >> You know what I like about those Terry? A lot of, a lot of these sustainability goals these moonshot goals is like by 2050, it's like, okay. But I, I like the focus on '25 and then of course there's one in there at the end of the decade. All right, John, maybe you could share with us HPE's approach. >> Yeah, absolutely. And we've had almost two decades of emissions reduction goals and our current goals, which we accelerated by 10 years last year, are to be carbon new or excuse me, net zero by 2040. And that's a science based target-approved goal. In fact, one of the first in the world. And we're doing that because we believe that 2050 is too long to wait. And so how we reach that net zero goal by 2040, is by 2030, an interim step is to reduce our scopes one and two, our direct and energy related emissions by 70% from 2020. And that includes sourcing 100% renewable energy across all of our operations. At the same time, the bigger part of our footprint is in our supply chain and when our customers use our products, so we're going to leverage our as a service strategy HPE GreenLake and our energy efficient portfolio of products to reduce our scope three carbon emissions 42% over that 2020 baseline by 2030, and as with AMD as well, we have a goal to have 80% of our suppliers by spend have their own science based targets so that we know that their commitments are scientifically validated. And then the longer step, how we reach net zero by 2040 is by reducing our entire footprint scopes one, two and three by 90% and then balance the rest. >> Yeah. So again, I mean, you know 2030 is only eight years away, a little more. And so if, if, if you have a, a target of 2030 you have to figure out, okay, how are you going to get there? The, if you say, you know, longer, you know in the century you got this balloon payment, you know that you're thinking about. So, so great job, both, both companies and and really making more specific goals that we can quantify you know, year by year. All right, last question, John. Are there any resources that you can share to help customers, you know, get started maybe if they want to get started on their own sustainability strategy or maybe they're part way through and they just want to see how they're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely much of what Terry and I have talked about are available in an executive workbook that we wrote called "Six Steps For Implementing a Sustainable IT Strategy" and that workbook's freely available online and we'll post the URL so that you can get a copy of it. And we really developed that workbook because what we found is, although we had white papers on a variety of these topics, executives said we really need a little bit more specific steps to work through this and implement that sustainable IT strategy. And the reason for that, by the way is that so many of our customers when they start this sustainable IT journey, they take a a variety of tactical steps, but they don't have an overarching strategy that they're really trying to drive. And often they don't do things like bring all the stakeholders they need together. Often they make improvements without measuring their baseline first. So in this workbook, we lead them step by step how to gather the right resources internally, how to make the progress, talk about the progress in a credible way, and then make decisions on where they go next to drive efficiencies. >> Yeah, really that system thinking is, is, is critical. Guys. Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Okay guys, thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it. In a moment, We're going to toss it over to Lisa Martin out of our Palo Alto studio and bring in Dave Faffel, chief technology officer at WEI, along with John and Terry, to talk about what WEI is doing in this space to address sustainability challenges. You're watching Better Together Sustainability brought to you by HPE and AMD in collaboration with the CUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (lilting music)

>>Hi, welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John fur, host of the cube here at our headquarters on the west coast in Palo Alto, California. Got a great news guest here. Matt McGill, Wayne managing director of Madrona venture group is here with me on the big news and drone raising their record 690 million fund and partnering with their innovative founders. Matt, thanks for coming on and, and talking about the news and congratulations on the dry powder. >>Well, Hey, thanks so much, John. Appreciate you having me on the show. >>Well, great news here. Oley validation. We're in a new market. Everyone's talking about the new normal, we're talking about a recession inflation, but yet we've been reporting that this is kind of the first generation that cloud hyperscale economic scale and technical benefits have kind of hit any kind of economic downturn. If you go back to to 2008, our last downturn, the cloud really hasn't hit that tipping point. Now the innovation, as we've been reporting with our startup showcases and looking at the results from the hyperscalers, this funding news is kind of validation that the tech society intersection is working. You guys just get to the news 430 million in the Madrona fund nine and 200. And I think 60 million acceleration fund three, which means you're gonna go stay with your roots with seed early stage and then have some rocket fuel for kind of the accelerated expansion growth side of it. Not like late stage growth, but like scaling growth. This is kind of the news. Is that right? >>That's right. You know, we, we've had a long time strategy over 25 years here in Seattle of being early, early stage. You know, it's like our friends at Amazon like to say is, well, we're there at day one and we wanna help build companies for the long run for over 25 years. We've been doing that in Seattle. And I think one of the things we've realized, I mean, this is, these funds are the largest funds ever raised by a Seattle based venture capital firm and that's notable in and of itself. But we think that's the reason is because Seattle has continued to innovate in areas like consumer internet software cloud, of course, where the cloud capital of the world and increasingly the applications of machine learning. And so with all that combination, we believe there's a ton more companies to be built here in the Pacific Northwest and in Seattle in particular. And then through our acceleration fund where we're investing in companies anywhere in the country, in fact, anywhere in the world, those are the kinds of companies that want to have the Seattle point of view. They don't understand how to work with Amazon and AWS. They don't understand how to work with Microsoft and we have some unique relationships in those places and we think we can help them succeed in doing that. >>You know, it's notable that you guys in particular have been very close with Jeff Bayo Andy Jesse, and the success of ABUS as well as Microsoft. So, you know, Seattle has become cloud city. Everyone kind of knows that from a cloud perspective, obviously Microsoft's roots have been there for a long, long time. You go back, I mean, August capital, early days, funding Microsoft. You remember those days not to date myself, but you know, Microsoft kind of went up there and kind of established it a Amazon there as well. Now you got Google here, you got Facebook in the valley. You guys are now also coming down. This funding comes on the heels of you appointing a new managing director here in Palo Alto. This is now the migration of Madrona coming into the valley. Is that right? Is that what we're seeing? >>Well, I think what we're trying to do is bring the things that we know uniquely from Seattle and the companies here down to Silicon valley. We've got a terrific partner in Karama Hend, Andrew he's somebody that we have worked together with over the years, co-investing in companies. So we knew him really well. It was a bit opportunistic for us, but what we're hearing over and over again is a lot of these companies based in the valley, based in other parts of the country, they don't know really how to best work with the Microsoft and Amazons are understand the services that they offer. And, you know, we have that capability. We have those relationships. We wanna bring that to bear and helping build great companies. >>What is your expectation on the Silicon valley presence here? You can kind of give a hint here kind of a gateway to Seattle, but you got a lot of developers here. We just reported this morning that MEA just open source pie, torch to the Linux foundation again, and Mary material kind of trend we are seeing open source now has become there's no debate anymore has become the software industry. There's no more issue around that. This is real. I >>Think that's right. I mean, you know, once, you know, Satya became CEO, Microsoft, and they started embracing open source, you know, that was gonna be the last big tech holdout. We think open source is very interesting in terms of what it can produce and create in terms of next generation, innovative innovation. It's great to see companies like Facebook like Uber and others that have had a long track record of open source capabilities. But what we're also seeing is you need to build businesses around that, that a lot of enterprises don't wanna buy just the open source and stitch it together themselves. They want somebody to do it with them. And whether that's the way that, you know, companies like MongoDB have built that out over time or that's, you know, or elastic or, you know, companies like opt ML and our portfolio, or even the big cloud, you know, hyperscalers, you know, they are increasingly embracing open source and building finished services, managed services on top of it. So that's a big wave that we've been investing in for a number of years now and are highly confident gonna >>Continue. You know, I've been a big fan of Pacific Northwest for a while. You know, love going up there and talking to the folks at Microsoft and Amazon and AWS, but there's been a big trend in venture capital where a lot of the, the later stage folks, including private equity have come in, you seen tiger global even tiger global alumni, that the Cubs they call them, you know, they're coming down and playing in the early state and the results haven't been that good. You guys have had a track record in your success. Again, a hundred percent of your institutional investors have honed up with you on this two fund strategy of close to 700 million. What's this formula says, why aren't they winning what's is it, they don't have the ecosystem? Is it they're spraying and praying without a lot of discipline? What's the dynamic between the folks like Madrona, the Neas of the world who kind of come in and Sequoia who kind of do it right, right. Come in. And they get it done in the right way. The early stage. I just say the private equity folks, >>You know, I think that early stage venture is a local business. It is a geographically proximate business when you're helping incredible founders, try to really dial in that early founder market fit. This is before you even get to product market fit. And, and so the, the team building that goes on the talking to potential customers, the ITER iterating on business strategy, this is a roll up your sleeves kind of thing. It's not a financial transaction. And so what you're trying to do is have a presence and an understanding, a prepared mind of one of the big themes and the kinds of founders that with, you know, our encouragement and our help can go build lasting companies. Now, when you get to a, a, a later stage, you know, you get to that growth stage. It is generally more of a financial, you know, kind of engineering sort of proposition. And there's some folks that are great at that. What we do is we support these companies all the way through. We reserve enough capital to be with them at the seed stage, the series B stage the, you know, the crossover round before you go public, all of those sorts of things. And we love partnering with some of these other people, but there's a lot of heavy lifting at the early, early stages of a business. And it's, it's not, I think a model that everybody's architected to do >>Well, you know, trust becomes a big factor in all this. You kind of, when you talk about like that, I hear you speaking. It makes me think of like trusted advisor meets money, not so much telling people what to do. You guys have had a good track record and, and being added value, not values from track. And sometimes that values from track is getting in the way of the entrepreneur by, you know, running the certain meetings, driving board meetings and driving the agenda that you see to see that trend where people try too hard and that a force function, the entrepreneur we're living in a world now where everyone's talking to each other, you got, you know, there's no more glass door it's everyone's on Twitter, right? So you can see some move, someone trying to control the supply chain of talent by term sheet, overvaluing them. >>You guys are, have a different strategy. You guys have a network I've noticed that Madrona has attracted them high end talent coming outta Microsoft outta AWS season, season, senior talent. I won't say, you know, senior citizens, but you know, people have done things scaled up businesses, as well as attract young talent. Can you share with our audience that dynamic of the, the seasoned veterans, the systems thinkers, the ones who have been there done that built software, built teams to the new young entrepreneurs coming in, what's the dynamic, like, how do you guys look at at those networks? How do you nurture them? Could you share your, your strategy on how you're gonna pull all this together, going forward? >>You know, we, we think a lot about building the innovation ecosystem, like a phrase around here that you hear a lot is the bigger pie theory. How do we build the bigger pie? If we're focusing on building the bigger pie, there'll be plenty of that pie for Madrona Madrona companies. And in that mindset says, okay, how are we gonna invest in the innovation ecosystem? And then actually to use a term, you know, one of our founders who unfortunately passed away this year, Tom Aber, he had just written a book called flywheel. And I think it embodies this mindset that we have of how do you create that flywheel within a community? And of course, interestingly enough, I think Tom both learned and contributed to that. He was on the board of Amazon for almost 20 years in helping build some of the flywheels at Amazon. >>So that's what we carry forward. And we know that there's a lot of value in experiential learning. And so we've been fortunate to have some folks, you know, that have worked at some of those, you know, kind iconic companies, join us and find that they really love this company building journey. We've also got some terrific younger folks that have, you know, some very fresh perspectives and a lot of, a lot of creativity. And they're bringing that together with our team overall. And you know, what we really are trying to do at the end of the day is find incredible founders who wanna build something lasting, insignificant, and provide our kind of our time, our best ideas, our, our perspective. And of course our capital to help them be >>Successful. I love the ecosystem play. I think that's a human capital game too. I like the way you guys are thinking about that. I do wanna get your reaction, cause I know you're close to Amazon and Microsoft, but mainly Jeff Bezos as well. You mentioned your, your partner who passed away was on the board. A lot of great props on and tributes online. I saw that, I know I didn't know him at all. So I really can't comment, but I did notice that Bezos and, and jazz in particular were complimentary. And recently I just saw Bezos comment on Twitter about the, you know, the Lord of the rings movie. They're putting out the series and he says, you gotta have a team. That's kinda like rebels. I'm paraphrasing, cuz these folks never done a movie like this before. So they're, they're getting good props and reviews in this new world order where entrepreneurs gotta do things different. >>What's the one thing that you think entrepreneurs need to do different to make this next startup journey different and successful because the world is different. There's not a lot of press to relate to Andy Jassey even on stage last week in, in, in LA was kind of, he's not really revealing. He's on his talking points, message, the press aren't out there and big numbers anymore. And you got a lot of different go-to market strategies, omnichannel, social different ways to communicate to customers. Yeah. So product market fit is becomes big. So how do you see this new flywheel emerging for those entrepreneurs have to go out there, roll up their sleeves and make it happen. And what kind of resources do you think they need to be successful? What are you guys advocating? >>Well, you know, what's really interesting about that question is I've heard Jeff say many times that when people ask him, what's gotta be different. He, he reminds them to think about what's not gonna change. And he usually starts to then talk about things like price, convenience, and selection. Customer's never gonna want a higher price, less convenience, smaller selection. And so when you build on some of those principles of, what's not gonna change, it's easier for you to understand what could be changing as it relates to the differences. One of the biggest differences, I don't think any of us have fully figured out yet is what does it mean to be productive in a hybrid work mode? We happen to believe that it's still gonna have a kernel of people that are geographically close, that are part of the founding and building in the early stages of a company. >>And, and it's an and equation that they're going to also have people that are distributed around the country, perhaps around the world that are some of the best talent that they attract to their team. The other thing that I think coming back to what remains the same is being hyper focused on a certain customer and a certain problem that you're passionate about solving. And that's really what we look for when we look for this founder market fit. And it can be a lot of different things from the next generation water bottle to a better way to handle deep learning models and get 'em deployed in the cloud. If you've got that passion and you've got some inkling of the skill of how to build a better solution, that's never gonna go away. That's gonna be enduring, but exactly how you do that as a team in a hybrid world, I think that's gonna be different. >>Yeah. One thing that's not changing is that your investor, makeup's not changing a hundred percent of your existing institutional investors have signed back on with you guys and your oversubscribed, lot of demand. What is your flywheel success formula? Why is Tron is so successful? Can you share some feedback from your investors? What are they saying? Why are they re-upping share some inside baseball or anecdotal praise? >>Well, I think it's very kind to you to frame it that way. I mean, you know, it does for investors come back to performance. You know, these are university endowments and foundations that have a responsibility to, to generate great returns. And we understand that and we're very aligned with that. I think to be specific in the last couple years, they appreciated that we were also not holding onto our, our stocks forever, that we actually made some thoughtful decisions to sell some shares of companies like Smartsheet and snowflake and accolade in others, and actually distribute capital back to them when things were looking really, really good. But I think the thing, other thing that's very important here is that we've created a flywheel with our core strategy being Seattle based and then going out from there to try to find the best founders, build great companies with them, roll up our sleeves in a productive way and help them for the long term, which now leads to multiple generations of people, you know, at those companies. And beyond that we wanna be, you know, partner with and back again. And so you create this flywheel by having success with people in doing it in a respectful. And as you said earlier, a trusted way, >>What's the message for the Silicon valley crowd, obviously bay area, Silicon valley, Palo Alto office, and the center of it. Obviously you got them hybrid workforce hybrid venture model developing what's the goals. What's the message for Silicon valley? >>Well, our message for folks in Silicon valley is the same. It's always been, we we're excited to partner with them largely up here again, cause this is still our home base, but there'll be a, you know, select number of opportunities where we'll get a chance to partner together down in Silicon valley. And we think we bring something different with that deep understanding of cloud computing, that deep understanding of applied machine learning. And of course, some of our unique relationships up here that can be additive to what the they've already done. And some of them are just great partners and have built, you know, help build some really incredible companies over >>The years. Matt, I really appreciate you taking the time for this interview, given them big news. I guess the question on everyone's mind, certainly the entrepreneur's mind is how do I get some of that cash you have and put it into work for my opportunity. One what's the investment thesis can take a minute to put the plug in for the firm. What are you looking to invest in? What's the thesis? What kind of entrepreneurs you're looking for? I know fund one is seed fund nine is seed to, to a and B and the second one is beyond B and beyond for growth. What's the pitch. What's the pitch. >>Yeah. Well you can, you can think of us as you know, any stage from pre-seed to series seed. You know, we'll make a new investment in companies in all of those stages. You know, I think that, you know, the, the core pitch, you know, to us is, you know, your passion for the, for the problem that you're trying to, trying to get solved. And we're of course, very excited about that. And you know, at, at, at the end of the day, you know, if you want somebody that has a distinct point of view on the market that is based up here and can roll up their sleeves and work alongside you. We're, we're, we're the ones that are more than happy to do that. Proven track record of doing that for 25 plus years. And there's so much innovation ahead. There's so many opportunities to disrupt to pioneer, and we're excited to be a part of working with great founders to do that. >>Well, great stuff. We'll see you ATS reinvent coming up shortly and your annual get together. You always have your crew down there and, and team engaging with some of the cloud players as well. And looking forward to seeing how the Palo Alto team expands out. And Matt, thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks very much, John. Appreciate you having me look forward to seeing you at reinvent. >>Okay. Matt, Matt here with Madrona venture group, he's the partner managing partner Madrona group raises 690 million to fund nine and, and, and again, and big funds for accelerated growth fund. Three lot of dry powder. Again, entrepreneurship in technology is scaling. It's not going down. It's continuing to accelerate into this next generation super cloud multi-cloud hybrid cloud world steady state. This is the cubes coverage. I'm John for Silicon angle and host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(bright music) >> "Supermetafragilisticexpialadotious." What's in a name? In an homage to the inimitable Charles Fitzgerald, we've chosen this title for today's session because of all the buzz surrounding "supercloud," a term that we introduced last year to signify a major architectural trend and shift that's occurring in the technology industry. Since that time, we've published numerous videos and articles on the topic, and on August 9th, kicked off "Supercloud22," an open industry event designed to advance the supercloud conversation, gathering input from more than 30 experienced technologists and business leaders in "The Cube" and broader technology community. We're talking about individuals like Benoit Dageville, Kit Colbert, Ali Ghodsi, Mohit Aron, David McJannet, and dozens of other experts. And today, we're pleased to welcome David Linthicum, who's a Chief Strategy Officer of Cloud Services at Deloitte Consulting. David is a technology visionary, a technical CTO. He's an author and a frequently sought after keynote speaker at high profile conferences like "VMware Explore" next week. David Linthicum, welcome back to "The Cube." Good to see you again. >> Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. Okay, so this topic of supercloud, what you call metacloud, has created a lot of interest. VMware calls it cross-cloud services, Snowflake calls it their data cloud, there's a lot of different names, but recently, you published a piece in "InfoWorld" where you said the following. "I really don't care what we call it, "and I really don't care if I put "my own buzzword into the mix. "However, this does not change the fact "that metacloud is perhaps the most important "architectural evolution occurring right now, "and we need to get this right out of the gate. "If we do that, who cares what it's named?" So very cool. And you also mentioned in a recent article that you don't like to put out new terms out in the wild without defining them. So what is a metacloud, or what we call supercloud? What's your definition? >> Yeah, and again, I don't care what people call it. The reality is it's the ability to have a layer of cross-cloud services. It sits above existing public cloud providers. So the idea here is that instead of building different security systems, different governance systems, different operational systems in each specific cloud provider, using whatever native features they provide, we're trying to do that in a cross-cloud way. So in other words, we're pushing out data integration, security, all these other things that we have to take care of as part of deploying a particular cloud provider. And in a multicloud scenario, we're building those in and between the clouds. And so we've been tracking this for about five years. We understood that multicloud is not necessarily about the particular public cloud providers, it's about things that you build in and between the clouds. >> Got it, okay. So I want to come back to that, to the definition, but I want to tie us to the so-called multicloud. You guys did a survey recently. We've said that multicloud was mostly a symptom of multi-vendor, Shadow Cloud, M&A, and only recently has become a strategic imperative. Now, Deloitte published a survey recently entitled "Closing the Cloud Strategy, Technology, Innovation Gap," and I'd like to explore that a little bit. And so in that survey, you showed data. What I liked about it is you went beyond what we all know, right? The old, "Our research shows that on average, "X number of clouds are used at an individual company." I mean, you had that too, but you really went deeper. You identified why companies are using multiple clouds, and you developed different categories of practitioners across 500 survey respondents. But the reasons were very clear for "why multicloud," as this becomes more strategic. Service choice scale, negotiating leverage, improved business resiliency, minimizing lock-in, interoperability of data, et cetera. So my question to you, David, is what's the problem supercloud or metacloud solves, and what's different from multicloud? >> That's a great question. The reality is that if we're... Well, supercloud or metacloud, whatever, is really something that exists above a multicloud, but I kind of view them as the same thing. It's an architectural pattern. We can name it anything. But the reality is that if we're moving to these multicloud environments, we're doing so to leverage best of breed things. In other words, best of breed technology to provide the innovators within the company to take the business to the next level, and we determine that in the survey. And so if we're looking at what a multicloud provides, it's the ability to provide different choices of different services or piece parts that allows us to build anything that we need to do. And so what we found in the survey and what we found in just practice in dealing with our clients is that ultimately, the value of cloud computing is going to be the innovation aspects. In other words, the ability to take the company to the next level from being more innovative and more disruptive in the marketplace that they're in. And the only way to do that, instead of basically leveraging the services of a particular walled garden of a single public cloud provider, is to cast a wider net and get out and leverage all kinds of services to make these happen. So if you think about that, that's basically how multicloud has evolved. In other words, it wasn't planned. They didn't say, "We're going to go do a multicloud." It was different developers and innovators in the company that went off and leveraged these cloud services, sometimes with the consent of IT leadership, sometimes not. And now we have these multitudes of different services that we're leveraging. And so many of these enterprises are going from 1000 to, say, 3000 services under management. That creates a complexity problem. We have a problem of heterogeneity, different platforms, different tools, different services, different AI technology, database technology, things like that. So the metacloud, or the supercloud, or whatever you want to call it, is the ability to deal with that complexity on the complexity's terms. And so instead of building all these various things that we have to do individually in each of the cloud providers, we're trying to do so within a cross-cloud service layer. We're trying to create this layer of technology, which removes us from dealing with the complexity of the underlying multicloud services and makes it manageable. Because right now, I think we're getting to a point of complexity we just can't operate it at the budgetary limits that we are right now. We can't keep the number of skills around, the number of operators around, to keep these things going. We're going to have to get creative in terms of how we manage these things, how we manage a multicloud. And that's where the supercloud, metacloud, whatever they want to call it, comes that. >> Yeah, and as John Furrier likes to say, in IT, we tend to solve complexity with more complexity, and that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about simplifying, and you talked about the abstraction layer, and then it sounds like I'm inferring more. There's value that's added on top of that. And then you also said the hyperscalers are in a walled garden. So I've been asked, why aren't the hyperscalers superclouds? And I've said, essentially, they want to put your data into their cloud and keep it there. Now, that doesn't mean they won't eventually get into that. We've seen examples a little bit, Outposts, Anthos, Azure Arc, but the hyperscalers really aren't building superclouds or metaclouds, at least today, are they? >> No, they're not. And I always have the predictions for every major cloud conference that this is the conference that the hyperscaler is going to figure out some sort of a multicloud across-cloud strategy. In other words, building services that are able to operate across clouds. That really has never happened. It has happened in dribs and drabs, and you just mentioned a few examples of that, but the ability to own the space, to understand that we're not going to be the center of the universe in how people are going to leverage it, is going to be multiple things, including legacy systems and other cloud providers, and even industry clouds that are emerging these days, and SaaS providers, and all these things. So we're going to assist you in dealing with complexity, and we're going to provide the core services of being there. That hasn't happened yet. And they may be worried about conflicting their market, and the messaging is a bit different, even actively pushing back on the concept of multicloud, but the reality is the market's going to take them there. So in other words, if enough of their customers are asking for this and asking that they take the lead in building these cross-cloud technologies, even if they're participating in the stack and not being the stack, it's too compelling of a market that it's not going to drag a lot of the existing public cloud providers there. >> Well, it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, David, because I never say never when it comes to a company like AWS, and we've seen how fast they move. And at the same time, they don't want to be commoditized. There's the layer underneath all this infrastructure, and they got this ecosystem that's adding all this tremendous value. But I want to ask you, what are the essential elements of supercloud, coming back to the definition, if you will, and what's different about metacloud, as you call it, from plain old SaaS or PaaS? What are the key elements there? >> Well, the key elements would be holistic management of all of the IT infrastructure. So even though it's sitting above a multicloud, I view metacloud, supercloud as the ability to also manage your existing legacy systems, your existing security stack, your existing network operations, basically everything that exists under the purview of IT. If you think about it, we're moving our infrastructure into the clouds, and we're probably going to hit a saturation point of about 70%. And really, if the supercloud, metacloud, which is going to be expensive to build for most of the enterprises, it needs to support these things holistically. So it needs to have all the services, that is going to be shareable across the different providers, and also existing legacy systems, and also edge computing, and IoT, and all these very diverse systems that we're building there right now. So if complexity is a core challenge to operate these things at scale and the ability to secure these things at scale, we have to have commonality in terms of security architecture and technology, commonality in terms of our directory services, commonality in terms of network operations, commonality in term of cloud operations, commonality in terms of FinOps. All these things should exist in some holistic cross-cloud layer that sits above all this complexity. And you pointed out something very profound. In other words, that is going to mean that we're hiding a lot of the existing cloud providers in terms of their interfaces and dashboards and things like that that we're dealing with today, their APIs. But the reality is that if we're able to manage these things at scale, the public cloud providers are going to benefit greatly from that. They're going to sell more services because people are going to find they're able to leverage them easier. And so in other words, if we're removing the complexity wall, which many in the industry are calling it right now, then suddenly we're moving from, say, the 25 to 30% migrated in the cloud, which most enterprises are today, to 50, 60, 70%. And we're able to do this at scale, and we're doing it at scale because we're providing some architectural optimization through the supercloud, metacloud layer. >> Okay, thanks for that. David, I just want to tap your CTO brain for a minute. At "Supercloud22," we came up with these three deployment models. Kit Colbert put forth the idea that one model would be your control planes running in one cloud, let's say AWS, but it interacts with and can manage and deploy on other clouds, the Kubernetes Cluster Management System. The second one, Mohit Aron from Cohesity laid out, where you instantiate the stack on different clouds and different cloud regions, and then you create a layer, a common interface across those. And then Snowflake was the third deployment model where it's a single global instance, it's one instantiation, and basically building out their own cloud across these regions. Help us parse through that. Do those seem like reasonable deployment models to you? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a distributed computing trick we've been doing, which is, in essence, an agent of the supercloud that's carrying out some of the cloud native functions on that particular cloud, but is, in essence, a slave to the metacloud, or the supercloud, whatever, that's able to run across the various cloud providers. In other words, when it wants to access a service, it may not go directly to that service. It goes directly to the control plane, and that control plane is responsible... Very much like Kubernetes and Docker works, that control plane is responsible for reaching out and leveraging those native services. I think that that's thinking that's a step in the right direction. I think these things unto themselves, at least initially, are going to be a very complex array of technology. Even though we're trying to remove complexity, the supercloud unto itself, in terms of the ability to build this thing that's able to operate at scale across-cloud, is going to be a collection of many different technologies that are interfacing with the public cloud providers in different ways. And so we can start putting these meta architectures together, and I certainly have written and spoke about this for years, but initially, this is going to be something that may escape the detail or the holistic nature of these meta architectures that people are floating around right now. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on this, because anytime I get a CTO brain, I like to... I'm not an engineer, but I've been around a long time, so I know a lot of buzzwords and have absorbed a lot over the years, but so you take those, the second two models, the Mohit instantiate on each cloud and each cloud region versus the Snowflake approach. I asked Benoit Dageville, "Does that mean if I'm in "an AWS east region and I want to do a query on Azure West, "I can do that without moving data?" And he said, "Yes and no." And the answer was really, "No, we actually take a subset of that data," so there's the latency problem. From those deployment model standpoints, what are the trade-offs that you see in terms of instantiating the stack on each individual cloud versus that single instance? Is there a benefit of the single instance for governance and security and simplicity, but a trade-off on latency, or am I overthinking this? >> Yeah, you hit it on the nose. The reality is that the trade-off is going to be latency and performance. If we get wiggy with the distributed nature, like the distributed data example you just provided, we have to basically separate the queries and communicate with the databases on each instance, and then reassemble the result set that goes back to the people who are recording it. And so we can do caching systems and things like that. But the reality is, if it's distributed system, we're going to have latency and bandwidth issues that are going to be limiting us. And also security issues, because if we're removing lots of information over the open internet, or even private circuits, that those are going to be attack vectors that hackers can leverage. You have to keep that in mind. We're trying to reduce those attack vectors. So it would be, in many instances, and I think we have to think about this, that we're going to keep the data in the same physical region for just that. So in other words, it's going to provide the best performance and also the most simplistic access to dealing with security. And so we're not, in essence, thinking about where the data's going, how it's moving across things, things like that. So the challenge is going to be is when you're dealing with a supercloud or metacloud is, when do you make those decisions? And I think, in many instances, even though we're leveraging multiple databases across multiple regions and multiple public cloud providers, and that's the idea of it, we're still going to localize the data for performance reasons. I mean, I just wrote a blog in "InfoWorld" a couple of months ago and talked about, people who are trying to distribute data across different public cloud providers for different reasons, distribute an application development system, things like that, you can do it. With enough time and money, you can do anything. I think the challenge is going to be operating that thing, and also providing a viable business return based on the application. And so why it may look like a good science experiment, and it's cool unto itself as an architect, the reality is the more pragmatic approach is going to be a leavitt in a single region on a single cloud. >> Very interesting. The other reason I like to talk to companies like Deloitte and experienced people like you is 'cause I can get... You're agnostic, right? I mean, you're technology agnostic, vendor agnostic. So I want to come back with another question, which is, how do you deal with what I call the lowest common denominator problem? What I mean by that is if one cloud has, let's say, a superior service... Let's take an example of Nitro and Graviton. AWS seems to be ahead on that, but let's say some other cloud isn't quite quite there yet, and you're building a supercloud or a metacloud. How do you rationalize that? Does it have to be like a caravan in the army where you slow down so all the slowest trucks can keep up, or are the ways to adjudicate that that are advantageous to hide that deficiency? >> Yeah, and that's a great thing about leveraging a supercloud or a metacloud is we're putting that management in a single layer. So as far as a user or even a developer on those systems, they shouldn't worry about the performance that may come back, because we're dealing with the... You hit the nail on the head with that one. The slowest component is the one that dictates performance. And so we have to have some sort of a performance management layer. We're also making dynamic decisions to move data, to move processing, from one server to the other to try to minimize the amount of latency that's coming from a single component. So the great thing about that is we're putting that volatility into a single domain, and it's making architectural decisions in terms of where something will run and where it's getting its data from, things are stored, things like that, based on the performance feedback that's coming back from the various cloud services that are under management. And so if you're running across clouds, it becomes even more interesting, because ultimately, you're going to make some architectural choices on the fly in terms of where that stuff runs based on the active dynamic performance that that public cloud provider is providing. So in other words, we may find that it automatically shut down a database service, say MySQL, on one cloud instance, and moved it to a MySQL instance on another public cloud provider because there was some sort of a performance issue that it couldn't work around. And by the way, it does so dynamically. Away from you making that decision, it's making that decision on your behalf. Again, this is a matter of abstraction, removing complexity, and dealing with complexity through abstraction and automation, and this is... That would be an example of fixing something with automation, self-healing. >> When you meet with some of the public cloud providers and they talk about on-prem private cloud, the general narrative from the hyperscalers is, "Well, that's not a cloud." Should on-prem be inclusive of supercloud, metacloud? >> Absolutely, I mean, and they're selling private cloud instances with the edge cloud that they're selling. The reality is that we're going to have to keep a certain amount of our infrastructure, including private clouds, on premise. It's something that's shrinking as a market share, and it's going to be tougher and tougher to justify as the public cloud providers become better and better at what they do, but we certainly have edge clouds now, and hyperscalers have examples of that where they run a instance of their public cloud infrastructure on premise on physical hardware and software. And the reality is, too, we have data centers and we have systems that just won't go away for another 20 or 30 years. They're just too sticky. They're uneconomically viable to move into the cloud. That's the core thing. It's not that we can't do it. The fact of the matter is we shouldn't do it, because there's not going to be an economic... There's not going to be an economic incentive of making that happen. So if we're going to create this meta layer or this infrastructure which is going to run across clouds, and everybody agrees on, that's what the supercloud is, we have to include the on-premise systems, including private clouds, including legacy systems. And by the way, include the rising number of IoT systems that are out there, and edge-based systems out there. So we're managing it using the same infrastructure into cloud services. So they have metadata systems and they have specialized services, and service finance and retail and things like doing risk analytics. So it gets them further down that path, but not necessarily giving them a SaaS application where they're forced into all of the business processes. We're giving you piece parts. So we'll give you 1000 different parts that are related to the finance industry. You can assemble anything you need, but the thing is, it's not going to be like building it from scratch. We're going to give you risk analytics, we're giving you the financial analytics, all these things that you can leverage within your applications how you want to leverage them. We'll maintain them. So in other words, you don't have to maintain 'em just like a cloud service. And suddenly, we can build applications in a couple of weeks that used to take a couple of months, in some cases, a couple of years. So that seems to be a large take of it moving forward. So get it up in the supercloud. Those become just other services that are under managed... That are under management on the supercloud, the metacloud. So we're able to take those services, abstract them, assemble them, use them in different applications. And the ability to manage where those services are originated versus where they're consumed is going to be managed by the supercloud layer, which, you're dealing with the governance, the service governance, the security systems, the directory systems, identity access management, things like that. They're going to get you further along down the pike, and that comes back as real value. If I'm able to build something in two weeks that used to take me two months, and I'm able to give my creators in the organization the ability to move faster, that's a real advantage. And suddenly, we are going to be valued by our digital footprint, our ability to do things in a creative and innovative way. And so organizations are able to move that fast, leveraging cloud computing for what it should be leveraged, as a true force multiplier for the business. They're going to win the game. They're going to get the most value. They're going to be around in 20 years, the others won't. >> David Linthicum, always love talking. You have a dangerous combination of business and technology expertise. Let's tease. "VMware Explore" next week, you're giving a keynote, if they're going to be there. Which day are you? >> Tuesday. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. >> All right, that's a big day. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. And David, please do stop by "The Cube." We're in Moscone West. Love to get you on and continue this conversation. I got 100 more questions for you. Really appreciate your time. >> I always love talking to people at "The Cube." Thank you very much. >> All right, and thanks for watching our ongoing coverage of "Supercloud22" on "The Cube," your leader in enterprise tech and emerging tech coverage. (bright music)

>>Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Cubes. Coverage of Mongo db World 2022. This is the first Mongo live mongo DB World. Since 2019, the Cube has covered a number of of mongo shows actually going back to when the company was called Engine. Some of you may recall Margo since then has done an i p o p o in 2017, it's It's been a rocket ship company. It's up. It'll probably do 1.2 billion in revenue this year. It's got a billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet. Uh, despite the tech clash, it's still got a 19 or $20 million valuation growing above 50% a year. Uh, company just had a really strong quarter, and and there seems to be hitting on all cylinders. My name is Dave Volonte. And here to kick it off with me as Sanjeev Mohan, who was the principal at Sanremo. So great to see you. You become a wonderful cube contributor, Former Gartner analyst. Really sharp? No, the database space in the data space generally really well, so thanks for coming back on >>you. You know, it's just amazing how exciting. The entire data space is like they used to say. Companies are All companies are software companies. All companies are data >>companies, >>so data has become the the foundation. >>They say software is eating the world. Data is eating software and a little little quips here. But this is a good size show. Four or 5000 people? I don't really know exactly. You know the numbers, but it's exciting. And of course, a lot of financial services were here at the Javits Centre. Um, let's let's lay down the basics for people of Mongo, DB is a is a document database, but they've been advancing. That's a document database as an alternative to R D. B M s. Explain that, but explain also how Mongo has broadened its capabilities and serving a lot more use cases. >>So that's my forte is like databases technology. But before even I talk about that, I have to say I am blown away by this mongo db world because mongo db uh, in beckons to all of us during the pandemic has really come of age, and it's a billion dollar company. Now we are in this brand new Javits Centre That's been built during the pandemic. And and now the company is holding this event the high 1000 people last year. So I think this company has really grown. And why has it drawn is because its offerings have grown to more developers than just a document database document databases. Revolution revolutionised the whole DBM s space where no sequel came up. Because for a change, you don't need a structured schema. You could start bringing data in this document model scheme, uh, like varying schema. But since then, they've added, uh, things like such. So they have you seen such? They added a geospatial. They had a time series last year, and this year they keep adding more and more so like, for example, they are going to add some column store indexes. So from being a purely transactional, they are now starting to address analytical. And they're starting to address more use cases, like, you know, uh, like what? What was announced this morning at keynote was faceted search. So they're expanding the going deeper and deeper into these other data >>structures. Taking Lucy made a search of first class citizens, but I want to ask you some basic questions about document database. So it's no fixed schemes. You put anything in there? Actually, so more data friendly. They're trying to simplify the use of data. Okay, that's that's pretty clear. >>What are the >>trade offs of a document database? >>So it's not like, you know, one technology has solved every problem. Every technology comes with its own tradeoffs. So in a document, you basically get rid of joining tables with primary foreign keys because you can have a flexible schemer and so and wouldn't sing single document. So it's very easy to write and and search. But when you have a lot of repeated elements and you start getting more and more complex, your document size can start expanding quite a bit because you're trying to club everything into a single space. So So that is where the complexity goes >>up. So what does that mean for for practitioner, it means they have to think about what? How they how they are ultimately gonna structure, how they're going to query so they can get the best performances that right. So they're gonna put some time in up front in order to make it pay back at the tail end, but clearly it's it's working. But is that the correct way of thinking about >>100% in, uh, the sequel world? You didn't care about the sequel. Analytical queries You just cared about how your data model was structured and then sequel would would basically such any model. But in the new sequel world, you have to know your patterns before you. You invest into the database so it's changed that equation where you come in knowing what you are signing up. >>So a couple of questions, if I can kind of Colombo questions so to Margo talks about how it's really supporting mission critical applications and at the same time, my understanding is the architecture of mongo specifically, or a document database in general. But specifically, you've got a a primary, uh, database, and you and that is the sort of the master, if you will, right and then you can create secondaries. But so help me square the circle between mission critical and really maybe a more of a focus on, say, consistency versus availability. Do customers have to sort of think about and design in that availability? How do they do that? How a Mongol customers handling that. >>So I have to say, uh, my experience of mongo db was was that the whole company, the whole ethos was developed a friendly. So, to be honest, I don't think Mongo DB was as much focused on high availability, disaster, recovery, even security. To some extent, they were more focused on developer productivity. >>And you've experienced >>simplicity. Make it simple, make the developers productive as fast as you can. What has really, uh, was an inflexion point for Mongo DB was the launch of Atlas because the atlas they were able to introduce all of these management features and hide it abstracted from the end users. So now they've got, you know, like 2014 is when Atlas came out and it was in four regions. But today they're in 100 regions, so they keep expanding, then every hyper scale cloud provider, and they've abstracted that whole managed. >>So Atlas, of course, is the managed database as a service in the cloud. And so it's those clouds, cloud infrastructure and cloud tooling that has allowed them to go after those high available application. My other question is when you talk about adding search, geospatial time series There are a lot of specialised databases that take time series persons. You have time series specialists that go deep into time series can accompany like Mongo with an all in one strategy. Uh, how close can they get to that functionality? Do they have to be? You know, it's kind of a classic Microsoft, you know, maybe not perfect, but good enough. I mean, can they compete with those other areas? Uh, with those other specialists? And what happens to those specialists if the answer is yes. What's your take on that? If that question >>makes sense So David, this is not a mongo db only issue This is this is an issue with, you know, anytime serious database, any graph database Should I put a graph database or should I put a multifunctional database multidimensional database? And and I really think there is no right or wrong answer. It just really comes down to your use case. If you have an extremely let's, uh, complex graph, you know, then maybe you should go with best of breed purpose built database. But more and more, we're starting to see that organisations are looking to simplify their environment by going in for maybe a unified database that has multiple data structures. Yeah, well, >>it's certainly it's interesting when you hear Mongo speak. They don't They don't call out Oracle specifically, but when they talk about legacy r d m r d B m s that don't scale and are complex and are expensive, they're talking about Oracle first. And of course, there are others. Um, And then when they talk about, uh, bespoke databases the horses for courses, databases that they show a picture of that that's like the poster child for Amazon. Of course, they don't call out Amazon. They're a great partner of Amazon's. But those are really the sort of two areas that mangoes going after, Um, now Oracle. Of course, we'll talk about their converged strategy, and they're taking a similar approach. But so help us understand the difference. There is just because they're sort of or close traditional r d B M s, and they have all the drawbacks associated with that. But by the way, there are some benefits as well. So how do you see that all playing >>out? So you know it. Really, uh, it's coming down to the the origins of these databases. Uh, I think they're converging to a point where they are offering similar services. And if you look at some of the benchmark numbers or you talk to users, I from a business point of view, I I don't think there's too much of a difference. Uh, technology writes. The difference is that Mongo DB started in the document space. They were more interested in availability rather than consistency. Oracle started in the relation database with focus on financial services, so asset compliance is what they're based on. And since then they've been adding other pieces, so so they differ from where they started. Oracle has been in the industry for some since 19 seventies, so they have that maturity. But then they have that legacy, >>you know, I love. Recently, Oracle announced the mongo db uh, kpi. So basically saying why? Why leave Oracle when you can just, you know, do the market? So that, to me, is a sign that Mongo DB is doing well because the Oracle calls you out, whether your workday or snowflake or mongo. You know, whoever that's a sign to me that you've got momentum and you're stealing share in that marketplace, and clearly Mongo is they're growing at 50 plus percent per year. So thinking about the early I mentioned 10 gen Early on, I remember that one of the first conferences I went to mongo conferences. It was just It was all developers. A lot of developers here as well. But they have really, since 2014, expanded the capabilities you talk about, Atlas, you talked about all these other you know, types of databases that they've added. If it seems like Mongo is becoming a platform company, uh, what are your thoughts on that in terms of them sort of up levelling the message there now, a billion dollar plus company. What's the next? You know, wave for Mongo. >>So, uh, Oracle announced mongo db a p i s a W s has document d. B has cost most db so they all have a p. I compatible a p. I s not the source code because, you know, mongo DB has its own SPL licence, so they have written their own layer on top. But at the end of the day, you know, if you if you these companies have to keep innovating to catch up with Mongo DB because we can announce a brand new capability, then all these other players have to catch up. So other cloud providers have 80% or so of capabilities, but they'll never have 100% of what Mongo DB has. So people who are diehard Mongo DB fans they prefer to stay on mongo db. They are now able to write more applications like you know, mongo DB bought realm, which is their front end. Uh, like, you know, like, if you're on social media kind of thing, you can build your applications and sink it with Atlas. So So mongo DB is now at a point where they are adding more capabilities that more like developers like, You know, five G is coming. Autonomous cars are coming, so now they can address Iot kind of use cases. So that's why it's becoming such a juggle, not because it's becoming a platform rather than a single document database. >>So atlases, the near the midterm future. Today it's about 60% of revenues, but they have what we call self serve, which is really the traditional on premise stuff. They're connecting those worlds. You're bringing up the point that. Of course, they go across clouds. You also bring up the point that they've got edge plays. We're gonna talk to Verizon later on today. And they're they've got, uh, edge edge activity going on with developers. I I call it Super Cloud. Right, This layer that floats above. Now, of course, a lot of the super Cloud concert says we're gonna hide the underlying complexity. But for developers, they wanna they might want to tap those primitives, so presumably will let them do that. But But that hybrid that what we call Super Cloud that is a new wave of innovation, is it not? And do you? Do you agree with that? And do you see that as a real opportunity from Mongo in terms of penetrating a new tan? >>Yes. So I see this is a new opportunity. In fact, one of the reasons mongo DB has grown so quickly is because they are addressing more markets than they had three pandemic. Um, Also, there are all gradations of users. Some users want full control. They want an eye as kind of, uh, someone passed. And some businesses are like, you know, we don't care. We don't want to deal with the database. So today we heard, uh, mongo db. Several went gear. So now they have surveillance capability, their past. But if you if you're more into communities, they have communities. Operator. So they're addressing the full stack of different types of developers different workloads, different geographical regions. So that that's why the market is expected. >>We're seeing abstraction layers, you know, throughout the started a physical virtual containers surveillance and eventually SuperClubs Sanjeev. Great analysis. Thanks so much for taking your time to come with the cube. Alright, Keep it right there. But right back, right after this short break. This is Dave Volonte from the Javits Centre. Mongo db World 2022. Thank you. >>Mm.

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

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VEEMON 2022. We're here at the Aria in Las Vegas. Dave Vellante with David Nicholson, my co-host for the week, two days at wall to wall coverage. Jason Buffington is here, JBuff, who does some amazing work for VEEAM, former Analyst from the Enterprise Strategy Group. So he's got a real appreciation for independence data, and we're going to dig into some data. You guys, I got to say, Jason, first of all, welcome back to theCUBE. It's great to see you again. >> Yeah, two and a half years, thanks for having me back. >> Yeah, that's right. (Jason laughs) Seems like a blur. >> No doubt. >> But so here's the thing as analysts, you can appreciate this, the trend is your friend, right? and everybody just inundates you with now, ransomware. It's the trend. So you get everybody's talking about the ransomware, cyber resiliency, immutability, air gaps, et cetera. Okay, great. Technology's there, it's kind of like the NFL, everybody kind of does the same thing. >> There's a lot of wonderful buzzwords in that sentence. >> Absolutely, but what you guys have done that's different is you brought in some big time thought leadership, with data and survey work which of course as an analyst we love, but you drive strategies off of this. So you got to, I'll set it up. You got a new study out that's pivoted off of February study of 3,600 organizations, and then you follow that up with a thousand organizations that actually got hit with ransomware. So tell us more about the study and the work that you've done there. >> Yeah, I got to say I have the best job ever. So I spent seven years as an analyst. And when I decided I didn't want to be an analyst anymore, I called VEEAM and said, I'd like to get in the fight and they let me in. But they let me do independent research on their behalf. So it's kind of like being an in-house counsel. I'm an in-house analyst. And for the beginning of this year, in February, we published a report called the Data Protection Trends Report. And it was over 3000 responses, right? 28 countries around the world looking at digital transformation, the effects of COVID, where are they are on BAS and DRS. But one of the new areas we wanted to look at was how pervasive is ransomware? How does that align with BCDR overall? So some of those just big thought questions that everyone's trying to solve for. And out of that, we said, "Wow, this is really worth double clicking." And so today, actually about an hour ago we published the Ransomware Trends Report and it's a thousand organizations all of which have all been survived. They all had a ransomware attack. One of the things I think I'm most proud of for VEEAM in this particular project, we use an independent research firm. So no one knows it's VEEAM that's asking the questions. We don't have any access to the respondents along the way. I wish we did, right? >> Yeah, I bet >> Go sell 'em back up software. But of the thousands 200 were CISOs, 400 were security professionals which we don't normally interact with, 200 backup admins, 200 IT ops, and the idea was, "Okay, you've all been through a really bad day. Tell us from your four different views, how did that go? What did you solve for? What did you learn? What are you moving forward with?" And so, yeah, some great learnings all around helping us understand how do we deliver solutions that meet their needs? >> I mean, there's just not enough time here to cover all this data. And I think I like about it is, like you said, it's a blind survey. You used an independent third party whom I know they're really good. And you guys are really honest about it. It's like, it was funny that the analyst called today for the analyst meeting when Danny was saying if 54% and Dave Russell was like, it's 52%, actually ended up being 53%. (Jason laughs) So, whereas many companies would say 75%. So anyway, what were some of the more striking findings of that study? Let's get into it a little bit. >> So a couple of the ones that were really startling for me, on average about one in four organizations say they have not been hit. But since we know that ransomware has a gestation for around 200 days from first intrusions, so when you have that attack, 25% may be wrong. That's 25% in best case. Another 16% said they only got hit once in the last year. And that means 60%, right on the money got hit more than once per year. And so when you think about it's like that school bully Once they take your lunch money once and they want lunch money, again, they just come right back again. Did you fix this hole? Did you fix that hole? Cool, payday. And so that was really, really scary. Once they get in, on average organizations said 47% of their production data was encrypted. Think about that. So, and we tested for, hey, was it in the, maybe it's just in the ROBO. So on the edge where the tech isn't as good, or maybe it's in the cloud because it's in a broad attack surface. Whatever it is, turns out, doesn't matter. >> So this isn't just nibbling around the edges. >> No. >> This is going straight to the heart of the enterprise. >> 47% of production data, regardless of where it's stored, data center ROBO or cloud, on average was encrypted. But what I thought was really interesting was when you look at the four personas, the security professional and the backup admin. The person responsible for prevention or mediation, they saw a much higher rate of infection than the CSOs and the IT pros, which I think the meta point there is the closer you are to the problem. the worst this is. 47% is bad. it's worse than that. As you get closer to it. >> The other thing that struck me is that a large proportion of, I think it was a third of the companies that paid ransom. >> Oh yeah. >> Weren't able to recover it. Maybe got the keys and it didn't work or maybe they never got the keys. >> That's crazy too. And I think one thing that a lot of folks, you watch the movies and stuff and you think, "Oh, I'm going to pay the Bitcoin. I'm going to get this magic incantation key and all of a sudden it's like it never happened. That is not how this works. And so yeah. So the question actually was did you pay and did it work right? And so 52%, just at half of organization said, yes. I paid and I was able to recover it. A third of folks, 27%. So a third of those that paid, they paid they cut the check, they did the ransom, whatever, and they still couldn't get back. Almost even money by the way. So 24% paid, but could not get back. 19% did not pay, but recovered from backup. VEEAM's whole job for all of 2022 and 23 needs to be invert that number and help the other 81% say, "No, I didn't pay I just recovered." >> Well, in just a huge number of cases they attacked the backup Corpus. >> Yes. >> I mean, that's was... >> 94% >> 94%? >> 94% of the time, one of the first intrusions is to attempt to get rid of the backup repository. And in two thirds of all cases the back repository is impacted. And so when I describe this, I talk about it this way. The ransomware thief, they're selling a product. They're selling your survivability as a product. And how do you increase the likelihood that you will buy what they're selling? Get rid of the life preserver. Get rid of their only other option 'cause then they got nothing left. So yeah, two thirds, the backup password goes away. That's why VEEAM is so important around cloud and disk and tape, immutable at every level. How we do what we do. >> So what's the answer here. We hear things like immutability. We hear terms like air gap. We heard, which we don't hear often, is orchestrated recovery and automated recovery. I wonder if you could get, I want to come back to... So, okay. So you're differentiating with some thought leadership, that's nice. >> Yep. >> Okay, good. Thank you. The industry thanks you for that free service. But how about product and practices? How does VEEAM differentiate in that regard? >> Sure. Now full disclosure. So when you download that report, for every five or six pages of research, the marketing department is allowed to put in one paragraph. It says, this is our answer. They call the VEEAM perspective. That's their rebuttal. To five pages of research, they get one paragraph, 250 word count and you're done. And so there is actually a commercial... >> We're here to buy here in. (chuckles) >> To the back of that. It's how we pay for the research. >> Everybody sells an onset. (laughs) >> All right. So let's talk about the tech that actually matters though, because there actually are some good insights there. Certainly the first one is immutability. So if you don't have a survivable repository you have no options. And so we provide air gaping, whether you are cloud based. So your favorite hyper-scale or one of the tens of thousands of cloud service providers that offer VEEAM products. So you can have, immutability at the cloud layer. You can certainly have immutability at the object layer on-prem or disk. We're happy to use all your favorite DDoS and then tape. It is hard to get more air-gaped and take the tape out drive, stick it on a shelf or stick it in a white van and have it shipped down the street. So, and the fact that we aren't dependent on any architecture, means choose your favorite cloud, choose your favorite disc, choose your favorite tape and we'll make all of 'em usable and defendable. So that's super key Number one. Super key number two there's three. >> So Platform agnostic essentially. >> Yeah. >> Cloud platform agenda, >> Any cloud, any physical, we work happily with everybody. Just here for your data. So, now you know you have at least a repository, which is not affectable. The next thing is you need to know, do you actually have recoverable data? And that's two different questions. >> How do you know? Right, I mean... >> You don't. So one of my colleagues, Chris Hoff, talks about how you can have this Nalgene bottle that makes sure that no water spills. Do you know that that's water? Is it vodka? Is it poison? You don't know. You just know that nothing's spilling out of it. That's an immutable repository. Then you got to know, can you actually restore the data? And so automating test restores every night, not just did the backup log work. Only 16% actually test their backups. That breaks my heart. That means 84% got it wrong. >> And that's because it just don't have the resource or sometimes testing is dangerous. >> It can be dangerous. It can also just be hard. I mean, how do you spend something up without breaking what's already live. So several years ago, VEEAM created the sandbox is what we call a data lab. And so we create a whole framework for you with a proxy that goes in you can stand up whatever you want. You can, if file exists, you can ping it, you can ODBC SQL, you can map the exchange. I mean, you can, did it actually come up. >> You can actually run water through the recovery pipes. >> Yes. >> And tweak it so that it actually works. >> Exactly. So that's the second thing. And only 16% of organizations do. >> Wow. >> And then the third thing is orchestration. So there's a lot of complexity that happens when you recover one workload. There is a stupid amount of complexity happens when you try cover a whole site or old system, or I don't know, 47% of your infrastructure. And so what can you do to orchestrate that to remediate that time? Those are the three things we found. >> So, and that orchestration piece, a number of customers that were in the survey were trying to recover manually. Which is a formula for failure. A number of, I think the largest percentage were scripts which I want you to explain why scripts are problematic. And then there was a portion that was actually doing it right. Maybe it was bigger, maybe it was a quarter that was doing orchestrated recovery. But talk about why scripts are not the right approach. >> So there were two numbers in there. So there was 16% test the ability to recover, 25% use orchestration as part of the recovery process. And so the problem where it is, is that okay, if I'm doing it manually, think about, okay, I've stood back up these databases. Now I have to reconnect the apps. Now I have to re IP. I mean, there's lots of stuff to stand up any given application. Scripts says, "Hey, I'm going to write those steps down." But we all know that, that IT and infrastructure is a living breathing thing. And so those scripts are good for about the day after you put the application in, and after that they start to gather dust pretty quick. The thing about orchestration is, if you only have a script, it's as frequently as you run the script that's all you know. But if you do a workflow, have it run the workflow every night, every week, every month. Test it the same way. That's why that's such a key to success. And for us that's VEEAM disaster recovery orchestra tour. That's a product that orchestrates all the stuff that VEEAM users know and love about our backend recovery engine. >> So imagine you're, you are an Excel user, you're using macros. And I got to go in here, click on that, doing this, sort of watching you and it repeats that, but then something changes. New data or new compliance issue, whatever... >> That got renamed directly. >> So you're going to have to go in and manually change that. How do you, what's the technology behind automated orchestration? What's the magic there? >> The magic is a product that we call orchestrator. And so it actually takes all of those steps and you actually define each step along the way. You define the IP addresses. You define the paths. You define where it's going to go. And then it runs the job in test mode every night, every week, whatever. And so if there's a problem with any step along the way, it gives you the report. Fix those things before you need it. That's the power of orchestrator. >> So what are you guys doing with this study? What can we expect? >> So the report came out today. In a couple weeks, we'll release regional versions of the same data. The reason that we survey at scale is because we want to know what's different in a PJ versus the Americas versus Europe and all those different personas. So we'll be releasing regional versions of the data along the way. And then we'll enable road shows and events and all the other stuff that happens and our partners get it so they can use it for consulting, et cetera. >> So you saw differences in persona. In terms of their perception, the closer you were to the problem, the more obvious it was, did you have enough end to discern its pearly? I know that's why you're due the drill downs but did you sense any preliminary data you can share on regions as West getting hit harder or? >> So attack rate's actually pretty consistent. Especially because so many criminals now use ransomware as a service. I mean, you're standing it up and you're spreading wide and you're seeing what hits. Where we actually saw pretty distinct geographic problems is the cloud is not of as available in all segments. Expertise around preventative measures and remediation is not available in all segments, in all regions. And so really geographic split and segment split and the lack of expertise in some of the more advanced technologies you want to use, that's really where things break down. Common attack plane, uncommon disadvantage in recovery. >> Great stuff. I want to dig in more. I probably have a few more questions if you don't mind, I can email you or give you a call. It's Jason Buffington. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of VEEAMON 2022. We're here in person in Las Vegas, huge hybrid audience. Keep it right there, be right back. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Dell tech world 2022. My name is Dave Volante and I'm here in our cube studios in Massachusetts getting ready for the first in person DT w since 2019, you know, Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor and former Oracle ex once set on the cube friends, don't let friends build data centers anymore. It's just not the best use of capital for most companies, unless you happen to be in the data center business like Sexter organizations wanna make hybrid connections to the cloud. They need a partner that knows how to build and manage world class data centers that are both efficient and resilient. And in this segment, we're gonna talk about the importance of hybrid strategies for organizations, how they're approaching hybrid and why a partner strategy is important to support the next decade of digital transformation initiatives. And with me are Randy Roland. Who's the COO of six Tara and Holland Barry, who is the field CTO for the company. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>Good to meet her. Thanks for having us. >>Hey, Randy, as a relatively new player, unlike a lot of data center operators, Cera, you're not shackled by decades of technical debt. Tell us more about the company. >>Yeah. So as you, uh, already discussed Ceras a data center company, and we're one of the few that can provide colocation globally. And so that allows our customers to scale, uh, across the globe, as our business scales, we operate in 28 markets. We have over 60 data centers and we continue to add more dots to the map based on customer demand. And the primary way we differentiate is that we've built a true global data center platform. And what do I mean by that is that we have a combination of 2300 customers, uh, enterprises, technology, service providers, government agencies, we're a leader in interconnection. Uh, we have a commitment to carry neutrality and to provide low latency access to all the different cloud platforms. And we've made major investments in developing our own technology in house. And this will come out. As we talk about hybrid cloud is to make our data centers easier to consume. Uh, we live in a cloud first world, and so we've got to be able to be responsive and be able to deliver capacity on demand and to allow our customer members to dynamically connect to each other so they can start to consume these valuable services. And so that's really what we're doing at Cera. >>You know, Randy, just a follow up is because when the cloud first came out, everybody said, oh, companies like, like yours, Dana data center operations are toast. And the exact opposite happened. It was like this rising tide lifted all boats. The, the business is, is booming. It's, uh, it's actually quite room, isn't it? >>Yeah, actually it's a good point. We actually lean into, uh, cloud consumption. I think, uh, if you remember, the cloud operates in four walls. And so when a company, um, actually starts to deploy and leverage more, they need a place to land their digital infrastructure hub, where they can make connections to all the different cloud solutions they're gonna consume. And they're using their own internal resources at the same time. And so the more that we adopt cloud, um, and lean into cloud, the more likely our customer gonna choose us. And back to your opening comment about, uh, the, the quote from the Oracle executive in, in my career, I've been in the data center business for a long time and it, it's definitely a generational thing. We have newer generation of it leaders when they think about their internal data center, their actual internal data center is ours. They're thinking about their own four walls sitting on their own property like they did historically. And so, uh, they view internal data centers as the contracts they have, uh, with six companies like six. >>Excellent. All right, Holland, let's bring you into the conversation. What are you seeing with, with hybrid cloud strategies? You, why are companies choosing hybrid? Give us some color there. >>Yeah, I think, you know, we, as a company sit in an interesting confluence of some workload movements, if you will. Um, so I think there's been, in some cases, an overcorrection in the public cloud, people thought that a cloud first strategy meant that you have to throw everything up in a public cloud. Uh, especially over the last couple years when we had, you know, the surprise of a large remote workforce. And as you mentioned at the top of the call, Dave, we also have folks with the shrinking appetite to own and operate their data centers, right? So the hybrid approach is a, um, a selective methodology to really look at the applications, uh, look at the strengths of each one of those venues, where you can run your applications and workloads, and really choosing the one that uses the strengths. And there's several, uh, drivers behind that. Uh, some of them are cost. Some of them are performance. Some of them might have to do a security or data sovereignty. Um, so you can really match those requirements and those business outcomes that you're looking to achieve, uh, and align them with that platform. That's that's best suited to serve it. >>So you mentioned a few of 'em, but I wanna sort of stay on that for a minute. Is it, is it, you know, egress cost, everybody talks about that, you know, latency proximity to the cloud. I mean, I think there's a lot of times, I think the ideal situation is you put your high performance, you know, transaction low latency stuff in one of your data centers. And, you know, a lot of the data is, is in the cloud that you might need access to. But is there other innovation, you know, talk a little bit more about the drivers that you're seeing with customers? >>Absolutely. We, I think, um, as it relates to data gravity and the potential relation to egress charges, that is a huge, uh, consideration, cuz there's a cost and a performance component to that. If you decide you want to take that data and move somewhere else, if it's in the public cloud, you're gonna pay some, uh, pretty large egres fees, but there's certainly other drivers, um, performance being another big one. Uh, if I've got a, a data lake or, or a big data analytics platform or maybe an AI platform that needs to live close to the data. Um, and especially if those workloads that are associated with crunching, the data are kind of high steady state, maybe even mission critical workloads that is certainly a workload profile. That's better suited to run within our four walls. You can have those CPU or GPU comput nodes sitting right next to those large data sets, operating with each other at land speed. Um, so in terms of the drivers behind, uh, making a, a venue change, if you will, I think cost is one of the biggest ones that we see and, and maybe performance and security following close after. >>So, so how are customers approaching hybrid? Can you paint a picture of kinda what that connection looks like and how, how they, you know, land on their strategies? >>Yeah, absolutely. So they're doing, uh, what I like to call a workload appropriateness, uh, exercise. And as they think about recalibrating where those workloads live, exactly what I said before, they're looking at the strengths of the platform and, uh, lining up those application profiles to live in, in the appropriate place. We have a unique advantage, uh, because of our interconnection profile and our adjacency to public cloud platforms, where if people want to have application tiers that may be sent on both sides of the fence, if you will, uh, we have super, super low latency connections. You can connect, you know, layer two, uh, maybe out to AWS, um, and, you know, have your VPC on one side, have, uh, you know, dedicated single tenant environments on our side and have those applications interact with each other. And then in a super low latency fashion, >>Hey, lemme just ask a follow up question on that. Because I remember the Y2K days, there was a, a lot of activity, a lot of spending and then CIOs wanted to look at their portfolio and, and rationalize that portfolio. When you talk about workload appropriateness, are you seeing a similar application rationalization exercise going on or is it just a Hey can spending, >>Uh, absolutely. We're seeing rationalization and I think what's happening is folks are getting a little more savvy about forecasting, the growth of their application, uh, the growth of the data associated with it, what the cost may be associated with needing to move them around to different venues. Um, and so we're, we're definitely seeing people look at those numbers and make decisions about workload placement based on that analytics and, and kind of knowledge of what it means down the road and also where the data might need to live locally too. We're seeing people, uh, being a little more cognizant geographically around data where it lives and how that relates to where the computer associated with that data is. >>Yeah. Hey Randy, can you tell us a little bit more from a business perspective about the Dell partnership? How did that come about, you know, who does, what, what are the swim lanes overlaps? Maybe you can help us understand that. >>Yeah, so we're very excited about, uh, our Dell partnership, as you can imagine, with as many customers and many data centers, as we've got deployed, we have Dell, uh, located it in a large percentage of our customer environments. And so it's just natural that we work together to figure out how we can continue to meet, uh, our customer's needs. And so the core idea that I'm excited about around Dell is that Dell has an excellent technology platform in all fronts, they've got great compute and storage and all types of software solutions. And what we want to do is help them make their platform more on demand. And so what do I mean by that? If you think about the historical, uh, time, it takes to deploy a traditional colo environment from the time you spec the cage, do you ship the equipment, you install the network, you rack and stack the equipment, unload the cloud stack. >>It takes weeks to months to deploy. And so what we're doing is working very closely with Dell to look at our existing customers and new prospects that are interested in their platform and how can we pre-provision that capacity in, in the data center make it so it's already plugged into the data center already is powered up. It's connected to the network and a customer can purchase it on demand. And so the idea behind this is how can we give our customers all the benefits of Kolo, which is what, uh, Holland was talking about a minute ago, but deliver that platform at the speed of cloud. And that's really the essence of the partnership we have with Dell. Uh, we think it could be explosive. Uh, we think there's a lot of opportunity, not only, uh, for us, but also for Dell as they continue to retain their customers and their customers go through tech refresh cycles, if they can have on demand technology that they're already familiar with, they can get the benefits that you get from co-location at the speed of cloud. And that that's what our, the, the basis of our, our relationship. >>Yeah. Thank you. So Holland, I mean, Randy was saying one of the pillars of Dell tech world this year is the whole as a service thrust. And, you know, essentially what it is, my, my viewpoint is Dell's building out its own cloud. That's, you know, it's, it's its aspiration I think, is to connect on-prem to, through hybrid, to public clouds across clouds, out to the edge extract that all that complexity and you guys would be a key part of that from a, from a CTO's perspective, that's a different mindset. I mean, it changes the way we manage, think about procure, you know, spend, uh, um, and, and maybe that even the technical configurations of, of how we deliver and consume it, you give us some thoughts on that. >>Absolutely. Look, I think what we're doing is we're laying the foundation for a truly hybrid experience. Um, Randy mentioned, uh, us going through great lengths with our technology partners like Dell and make the data center consumable in an automated fashion. And so as we increasingly move into technologies like containers and using coordinators managers like Kubernetes, we really now have the ability to make a true hybrid experience. And if you think about the experience of deploying, you know, in a data center, whether it's your own or a co like ours, that was, you know, a 60 to 90 day conversation to, to get that infrastructure spun up. And so now if you can consume public cloud resources, just like we've been used to doing where you can swipe a card and get access to infrastructure in a matter of minutes or hours have the same experience with us, we've kind of closed that last mile of infrastructure delivery. And the other neat thing about this is, uh, if you have a cloud first mandate, if some of those workloads are running a ter data center, uh, we check all those same boxes, right? Uh, we, we have infrastructure that sits off X. We have a global platform. Uh, we have, you know, highly automated environment. So you can really now start extracting yourself a little bit from the infrastructure and start focusing on the important stuff, which the applications that sit on top. >>So from a security standpoint, you have a similar, you know, the cloud guys talk about the shared responsibility model. Is that a similar model that, that you guys have? Can you describe that? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's very analogous to this shared responsibility model and, and public cloud. We give a little bit more control to our customers, like things like, you know, dictate maintenance windows. Um, we give a little bit more control in terms of access to the infrastructure. Uh, it's one of the reasons that organizations like running infrastructure with us is because we can hand off control to these certain things that the lower levels of the infrastructure stack versus that higher level of abstraction that happens with public cloud. >>And what, what kind of skills are you after, uh, these days? Is it people that can squeeze, you know, more power and, you know, more efficient cooling, uh, is it infrastructure management? You mentioned Kubernetes before. What, what matters to a company like yours from a skill standpoint? >>Yeah. And to terms of our staff, it is at the lower, uh, levels of the stack, if you will. So maybe going, you know, up to, uh, layer two or three, if we think about the OSI model. So certainly power engineering, cooling engineering, the stuff that physically runs our, our data center, that's our meat and potatoes. That's important to us, but as you consider our digital platform, um, certainly the networking, uh, know how knowledge of the entire stack, knowing how things are architected, understanding how cloud works, how understanding how cloud connectivity works. These are all super, super important skill sets. So we span the spectrum a bit. Um, but it's less on the upper ends of it, you know, kind of going up to layer seven, >>Although I'd imagine that data center automation is obviously a big part of your, your IP, right. Is that something that you have guys bring to the table? Yes. >>Yeah, it's actually one of our key innovations is around how we've architected our software platform, how we do our automation, uh, how we run our network. Uh, we we've, uh, built a, a super, super innovative SDN fabric that powers all of our Metro regions that enables the delivery, the infrastructure that hangs off of it. Um, so yeah, a huge percentage of our I P is around that software innovation and, uh, networking automation. >>Great. Randy, I wonder if you could close it out for us. Uh, I'd love your thoughts on where you'd like to see the Dell partnership go and any other, you know, information you'd like to leave the audience with. >>Yeah. I think you've asked a couple questions about the perspective from a CTO and the way that we want to build our solutions is if you are a CTO or if you're a cloud architect, what we are trying to build is a set of Legos to allow you to assemble your ultimate hybrid it solution to use a combination of traditional colocation, where you have equipment that you own, that you manage on demand, bare metal from great partnerships, like where we have with Dell, that can augment what you have in colo have access to a rich ecosystem of technology providers that sit in the same data center markets so that you can start to, to actually augment your it architecture with a lot of our, um, uh, solution providers that sit within our, our, our markets access to cloud OnRamp. So you get low latency access to public cloud to start to leverage some of the technologies they have, and also have the ability to switch, right? If you start with one cloud cloud provider, and at some point you find something more cost efficient, or a little bit more architecturally, uh, built that we can, uh, uh, facilitate that switch. And then also to have connectivity to all the different network carriers that we have. And so, and, and also to do it globally, right? And so our mission is to give the CTO and the cloud architect, the ultimate Legos, uh, to build their custom solution, it's highly, um, cost effective and meets all the technology requirements. >>Yeah. Hedging that risk and having exit strategies, I think is huge. Every, every customer needs to think about that, uh, before they, they dive into the cloud. Okay, guys, we gotta leave it there. Thanks so much for coming in the cube. Great discussion. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us. >>And thank you for watching our ongoing coverage of Dell technologies, world 2022, the in-person live version where we insert great deep dive interviews like this one that focus on key customer topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube.

(upbeat music) >> Once a staid and boring business dominated by IBM, Oracle, and at the time newcomer Microsoft, along with a handful of wannabes, the database business has exploded in the past decade and has become a staple of financial excellence, customer experience, analytic advantage, competitive strategy, growth initiatives, visualizations, not to mention compliance, security, privacy and dozens of other important use cases and initiatives. And on the vendor's side of the house, we've seen the rapid ascendancy of cloud databases. Most notably from Snowflake, whose massive raises leading up to its IPO in late 2020 sparked a spate of interest and VC investment in the separation of compute and storage and all that elastic resource stuff in the cloud. The company joined AWS, Azure and Google to popularize cloud databases, which have become a linchpin of competitive strategies for technology suppliers. And if I get you to put your data in my database and in my cloud, and I keep innovating, I'm going to build a moat and achieve a hugely attractive lifetime customer value in a really amazing marginal economics dynamic that is going to fund my future. And I'll be able to sell other adjacent services, not just compute and storage, but machine learning and inference and training and all kinds of stuff, dozens of lucrative cloud offerings. Meanwhile, the database leader, Oracle has invested massive amounts of money to maintain its lead. It's building on its position as the king of mission critical workloads and making typical Oracle like claims against the competition. Most were recently just yesterday with another announcement around MySQL HeatWave. An extension of MySQL that is compatible with on-premises MySQLs and is setting new standards in price performance. We're seeing a dramatic divergence in strategies across the database spectrum. On the far left, we see Amazon with more than a dozen database offerings each with its own API and primitives. AWS is taking a right tool for the right job approach, often building on open source platforms and creating services that it offers to customers to solve very specific problems for developers. And on the other side of the line, we see Oracle, which is taking the Swiss Army Knife approach, converging database functionality, enabling analytic and transactional workloads to run in the same data store, eliminating the need to ETL, at the same time adding capabilities into its platform like automation and machine learning. Welcome to this database Power Panel. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm so excited to bring together some of the most respected industry analyst in the community. Today we're going to assess what's happening in the market. We're going to dig into the competitive landscape and explore the future of database and database platforms and decode what it means to customers. Let me take a moment to welcome our guest analyst today. Matt Kimball is a vice president and principal analysts at Moor Insights and Strategy, Matt. He knows products, he knows industry, he's got real world IT expertise, and he's got all the angles 25 plus years of experience in all kinds of great background. Matt, welcome. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Holgar Mueller, friend of theCUBE, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research in depth knowledge on applications, application development, knows developers. He's worked at SAP and Oracle. And then Bob Evans is Chief Content Officer and co-founder of the Acceleration Economy, founder and principle of Cloud Wars. Covers all kinds of industry topics and great insights. He's got awesome videos, these three minute hits. If you haven't seen 'em, checking them out, knows cloud companies, his Cloud Wars minutes are fantastic. And then of course, Marc Staimer is the founder of Dragon Slayer Research. A frequent contributor and guest analyst at Wikibon. He's got a wide ranging knowledge across IT products, knows technology really well, can go deep. And then of course, Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Director Research Director at Futurum Research, great all around product trends knowledge. Can take, you know, technical dives and really understands competitive angles, knows Redshift, Snowflake, and many others. Gents, thanks so much for taking the time to join us in theCube today. It's great to have you on, good to see you. >> Good to be here, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, let's start with an around the horn and briefly, if each of you would describe, you know, anything I missed in your areas of expertise and then you answer the following question, how would you describe the state of the database, state of platform market today? Matt Kimball, please start. >> Oh, I hate going first, but that it's okay. How would I describe the world today? I would just in one sentence, I would say, I'm glad I'm not in IT anymore, right? So, you know, it is a complex and dangerous world out there. And I don't envy IT folks I'd have to support, you know, these modernization and transformation efforts that are going on within the enterprise. It used to be, you mentioned it, Dave, you would argue about IBM versus Oracle versus this newcomer in the database space called Microsoft. And don't forget Sybase back in the day, but you know, now it's not just, which SQL vendor am I going to go with? It's all of these different, divergent data types that have to be taken, they have to be merged together, synthesized. And somehow I have to do that cleanly and use this to drive strategic decisions for my business. That is not easy. So, you know, you have to look at it from the perspective of the business user. It's great for them because as a DevOps person, or as an analyst, I have so much flexibility and I have this thing called the cloud now where I can go get services immediately. As an IT person or a DBA, I am calling up prevention hotlines 24 hours a day, because I don't know how I'm going to be able to support the business. And as an Oracle or as an Oracle or a Microsoft or some of the cloud providers and cloud databases out there, I'm licking my chops because, you know, my market is expanding and expanding every day. >> Great, thank you for that, Matt. Holgar, how do you see the world these days? You always have a good perspective on things, share with us. >> Well, I think it's the best time to be in IT, I'm not sure what Matt is talking about. (laughing) It's easier than ever, right? The direction is going to cloud. Kubernetes has won, Google has the best AI for now, right? So things are easier than ever before. You made commitments for five plus years on hardware, networking and so on premise, and I got gray hair about worrying it was the wrong decision. No, just kidding. But you kind of both sides, just to be controversial, make it interesting, right. So yeah, no, I think the interesting thing specifically with databases, right? We have this big suite versus best of breed, right? Obviously innovation, like you mentioned with Snowflake and others happening in the cloud, the cloud vendors server, where to save of their databases. And then we have one of the few survivors of the old guard as Evans likes to call them is Oracle who's doing well, both their traditional database. And now, which is really interesting, remarkable from that because Oracle it was always the power of one, have one database, add more to it, make it what I call the universal database. And now this new HeatWave offering is coming and MySQL open source side. So they're getting the second (indistinct) right? So it's interesting that older players, traditional players who still are in the market are diversifying their offerings. Something we don't see so much from the traditional tools from Oracle on the Microsoft side or the IBM side these days. >> Great, thank you Holgar. Bob Evans, you've covered this business for a while. You've worked at, you know, a number of different outlets and companies and you cover the competition, how do you see things? >> Dave, you know, the other angle to look at this from is from the customer side, right? You got now CEOs who are any sort of business across all sorts of industries, and they understand that their future success is going to be dependent on their ability to become a digital company, to understand data, to use it the right way. So as you outline Dave, I think in your intro there, it is a fantastic time to be in the database business. And I think we've got a lot of new buyers and influencers coming in. They don't know all this history about IBM and Microsoft and Oracle and you know, whoever else. So I think they're going to take a long, hard look, Dave, at some of these results and who is able to help these companies not serve up the best technology, but who's going to be able to help their business move into the digital future. So it's a fascinating time now from every perspective. >> Great points, Bob. I mean, digital transformation has gone from buzzword to imperative. Mr. Staimer, how do you see things? >> I see things a little bit differently than my peers here in that I see the database market being segmented. There's all the different kinds of databases that people are looking at for different kinds of data, and then there is databases in the cloud. And so database as cloud service, I view very differently than databases because the traditional way of implementing a database is changing and it's changing rapidly. So one of the premises that you stated earlier on was that you viewed Oracle as a database company. I don't view Oracle as a database company anymore. I view Oracle as a cloud company that happens to have a significant expertise and specialty in databases, and they still sell database software in the traditional way, but ultimately they're a cloud company. So database cloud services from my point of view is a very distinct market from databases. >> Okay, well, you gave us some good meat on the bone to talk about that. Last but not least-- >> Dave did Marc, just say Oracle's a cloud company? >> Yeah. (laughing) Take away the database, it would be interesting to have that discussion, but let's let Ron jump in here. Ron, give us your take. >> That's a great segue. I think it's truly the era of the cloud database, that's something that's rising. And the key trends that come with it include for example, elastic scaling. That is the ability to scale on demand, to right size workloads according to customer requirements. And also I think it's going to increase the prioritization for high availability. That is the player who can provide the highest availability is going to have, I think, a great deal of success in this emerging market. And also I anticipate that there will be more consolidation across platforms in order to enable cost savings for customers, and that's something that's always going to be important. And I think we'll see more of that over the horizon. And then finally security, security will be more important than ever. We've seen a spike (indistinct), we certainly have seen geopolitical originated cybersecurity concerns. And as a result, I see database security becoming all the more important. >> Great, thank you. Okay, let me share some data with you guys. I'm going to throw this at you and see what you think. We have this awesome data partner called Enterprise Technology Research, ETR. They do these quarterly surveys and each period with dozens of industry segments, they track clients spending, customer spending. And this is the database, data warehouse sector okay so it's taxonomy, so it's not perfect, but it's a big kind of chunk. They essentially ask customers within a category and buy a specific vendor, you're spending more or less on the platform? And then they subtract the lesses from the mores and they derive a metric called net score. It's like NPS, it's a measure of spending velocity. It's more complicated and granular than that, but that's the basis and that's the vertical axis. The horizontal axis is what they call market share, it's not like IDC market share, it's just pervasiveness in the data set. And so there are a couple of things that stand out here and that we can use as reference point. The first is the momentum of Snowflake. They've been off the charts for many, many, for over two years now, anything above that dotted red line, that 40%, is considered by ETR to be highly elevated and Snowflake's even way above that. And I think it's probably not sustainable. We're going to see in the next April survey, next month from those guys, when it comes out. And then you see AWS and Microsoft, they're really pervasive on the horizontal axis and highly elevated, Google falls behind them. And then you got a number of well funded players. You got Cockroach Labs, Mongo, Redis, MariaDB, which of course is a fork on MySQL started almost as protest at Oracle when they acquired Sun and they got MySQL and you can see the number of others. Now Oracle who's the leading database player, despite what Marc Staimer says, we know, (laughs) and they're a cloud player (laughing) who happens to be a leading database player. They dominate in the mission critical space, we know that they're the king of that sector, but you can see here that they're kind of legacy, right? They've been around a long time, they get a big install base. So they don't have the spending momentum on the vertical axis. Now remember this is, just really this doesn't capture spending levels, so that understates Oracle but nonetheless. So it's not a complete picture like SAP for instance is not in here, no Hana. I think people are actually buying it, but it doesn't show up here, (laughs) but it does give an indication of momentum and presence. So Bob Evans, I'm going to start with you. You've commented on many of these companies, you know, what does this data tell you? >> Yeah, you know, Dave, I think all these compilations of things like that are interesting, and that folks at ETR do some good work, but I think as you said, it's a snapshot sort of a two-dimensional thing of a rapidly changing, three dimensional world. You know, the incidents at which some of these companies are mentioned versus the volume that happens. I think it's, you know, with Oracle and I'm not going to declare my religious affiliation, either as cloud company or database company, you know, they're all of those things and more, and I think some of our old language of how we classify companies is just not relevant anymore. But I want to ask too something in here, the autonomous database from Oracle, nobody else has done that. So either Oracle is crazy, they've tried out a technology that nobody other than them is interested in, or they're onto something that nobody else can match. So to me, Dave, within Oracle, trying to identify how they're doing there, I would watch autonomous database growth too, because right, it's either going to be a big plan and it breaks through, or it's going to be caught behind. And the Snowflake phenomenon as you mentioned, that is a rare, rare bird who comes up and can grow 100% at a billion dollar revenue level like that. So now they've had a chance to come in, scare the crap out of everybody, rock the market with something totally new, the data cloud. Will the bigger companies be able to catch up and offer a compelling alternative, or is Snowflake going to continue to be this outlier. It's a fascinating time. >> Really, interesting points there. Holgar, I want to ask you, I mean, I've talked to certainly I'm sure you guys have too, the founders of Snowflake that came out of Oracle and they actually, they don't apologize. They say, "Hey, we not going to do all that complicated stuff that Oracle does, we were trying to keep it real simple." But at the same time, you know, they don't do sophisticated workload management. They don't do complex joints. They're kind of relying on the ecosystems. So when you look at the data like this and the various momentums, and we talked about the diverging strategies, what does this say to you? >> Well, it is a great point. And I think Snowflake is an example how the cloud can turbo charge a well understood concept in this case, the data warehouse, right? You move that and you find steroids and you see like for some players who've been big in data warehouse, like Sentara Data, as an example, here in San Diego, what could have been for them right in that part. The interesting thing, the problem though is the cloud hides a lot of complexity too, which you can scale really well as you attract lots of customers to go there. And you don't have to build things like what Bob said, right? One of the fascinating things, right, nobody's answering Oracle on the autonomous database. I don't think is that they cannot, they just have different priorities or the database is not such a priority. I would dare to say that it's for IBM and Microsoft right now at the moment. And the cloud vendors, you just hide that right through scripts and through scale because you support thousands of customers and you can deal with a little more complexity, right? It's not against them. Whereas if you have to run it yourself, very different story, right? You want to have the autonomous parts, you want to have the powerful tools to do things. >> Thank you. And so Matt, I want to go to you, you've set up front, you know, it's just complicated if you're in IT, it's a complicated situation and you've been on the customer side. And if you're a buyer, it's obviously, it's like Holgar said, "Cloud's supposed to make this stuff easier, but the simpler it gets the more complicated gets." So where do you place your bets? Or I guess more importantly, how do you decide where to place your bets? >> Yeah, it's a good question. And to what Bob and Holgar said, you know, the around autonomous database, I think, you know, part of, as I, you know, play kind of armchair psychologist, if you will, corporate psychologists, I look at what Oracle is doing and, you know, databases where they've made their mark and it's kind of, that's their strong position, right? So it makes sense if you're making an entry into this cloud and you really want to kind of build momentum, you go with what you're good at, right? So that's kind of the strength of Oracle. Let's put a lot of focus on that. They do a lot more than database, don't get me wrong, but you know, I'm going to short my strength and then kind of pivot from there. With regards to, you know, what IT looks at and what I would look at you know as an IT director or somebody who is, you know, trying to consume services from these different cloud providers. First and foremost, I go with what I know, right? Let's not forget IT is a conservative group. And when we look at, you know, all the different permutations of database types out there, SQL, NoSQL, all the different types of NoSQL, those are largely being deployed by business users that are looking for agility or businesses that are looking for agility. You know, the reason why MongoDB is so popular is because of DevOps, right? It's a great platform to develop on and that's where it kind of gained its traction. But as an IT person, I want to go with what I know, where my muscle memory is, and that's my first position. And so as I evaluate different cloud service providers and cloud databases, I look for, you know, what I know and what I've invested in and where my muscle memory is. Is there enough there and do I have enough belief that that company or that service is going to be able to take me to, you know, where I see my organization in five years from a data management perspective, from a business perspective, are they going to be there? And if they are, then I'm a little bit more willing to make that investment, but it is, you know, if I'm kind of going in this blind or if I'm cloud native, you know, that's where the Snowflakes of the world become very attractive to me. >> Thank you. So Marc, I asked Andy Jackson in theCube one time, you have all these, you know, data stores and different APIs and primitives and you know, very granular, what's the strategy there? And he said, "Hey, that allows us as the market changes, it allows us to be more flexible. If we start building abstractions layers, it's harder for us." I think also it was not a good time to market advantage, but let me ask you, I described earlier on that spectrum from AWS to Oracle. We just saw yesterday, Oracle announced, I think the third major enhancement in like 15 months to MySQL HeatWave, what do you make of that announcement? How do you think it impacts the competitive landscape, particularly as it relates to, you know, converging transaction and analytics, eliminating ELT, I know you have some thoughts on this. >> So let me back up for a second and defend my cloud statement about Oracle for a moment. (laughing) AWS did a great job in developing the cloud market in general and everything in the cloud market. I mean, I give them lots of kudos on that. And a lot of what they did is they took open source software and they rent it to people who use their cloud. So I give 'em lots of credit, they dominate the market. Oracle was late to the cloud market. In fact, they actually poo-pooed it initially, if you look at some of Larry Ellison's statements, they said, "Oh, it's never going to take off." And then they did 180 turn, and they said, "Oh, we're going to embrace the cloud." And they really have, but when you're late to a market, you've got to be compelling. And this ties into the announcement yesterday, but let's deal with this compelling. To be compelling from a user point of view, you got to be twice as fast, offer twice as much functionality, at half the cost. That's generally what compelling is that you're going to capture market share from the leaders who established the market. It's very difficult to capture market share in a new market for yourself. And you're right. I mean, Bob was correct on this and Holgar and Matt in which you look at Oracle, and they did a great job of leveraging their database to move into this market, give 'em lots of kudos for that too. But yesterday they announced, as you said, the third innovation release and the pace is just amazing of what they're doing on these releases on HeatWave that ties together initially MySQL with an integrated builtin analytics engine, so a data warehouse built in. And then they added automation with autopilot, and now they've added machine learning to it, and it's all in the same service. It's not something you can buy and put on your premise unless you buy their cloud customers stuff. But generally it's a cloud offering, so it's compellingly better as far as the integration. You don't buy multiple services, you buy one and it's lower cost than any of the other services, but more importantly, it's faster, which again, give 'em credit for, they have more integration of a product. They can tie things together in a way that nobody else does. There's no additional services, ETL services like Glue and AWS. So from that perspective, they're getting better performance, fewer services, lower cost. Hmm, they're aiming at the compelling side again. So from a customer point of view it's compelling. Matt, you wanted to say something there. >> Yeah, I want to kind of, on what you just said there Marc, and this is something I've found really interesting, you know. The traditional way that you look at software and, you know, purchasing software and IT is, you look at either best of breed solutions and you have to work on the backend to integrate them all and make them all work well. And generally, you know, the big hit against the, you know, we have one integrated offering is that, you lose capability or you lose depth of features, right. And to what you were saying, you know, that's the thing I found interesting about what Oracle is doing is they're building in depth as they kind of, you know, build that service. It's not like you're losing a lot of capabilities, because you're going to one integrated service versus having to use A versus B versus C, and I love that idea. >> You're right. Yeah, not only you're not losing, but you're gaining functionality that you can't get by integrating a lot of these. I mean, I can take Snowflake and integrate it in with machine learning, but I also have to integrate in with a transactional database. So I've got to have connectors between all of this, which means I'm adding time. And what it comes down to at the end of the day is expertise, effort, time, and cost. And so what I see the difference from the Oracle announcements is they're aiming at reducing all of that by increasing performance as well. Correct me if I'm wrong on that but that's what I saw at the announcement yesterday. >> You know, Marc, one thing though Marc, it's funny you say that because I started out saying, you know, I'm glad I'm not 19 anymore. And the reason is because of exactly what you said, it's almost like there's a pseudo level of witchcraft that's required to support the modern data environment right in the enterprise. And I need simpler faster, better. That's what I need, you know, I am no longer wearing pocket protectors. I have turned from, you know, break, fix kind of person, to you know, business consultant. And I need that point and click simplicity, but I can't sacrifice, you know, a depth of features of functionality on the backend as I play that consultancy role. >> So, Ron, I want to bring in Ron, you know, it's funny. So Matt, you mentioned Mongo, I often and say, if Oracle mentions you, you're on the map. We saw them yesterday Ron, (laughing) they hammered RedShifts auto ML, they took swipes at Snowflake, a little bit of BigQuery. What were your thoughts on that? Do you agree with what these guys are saying in terms of HeatWaves capabilities? >> Yes, Dave, I think that's an excellent question. And fundamentally I do agree. And the question is why, and I think it's important to know that all of the Oracle data is backed by the fact that they're using benchmarks. For example, all of the ML and all of the TPC benchmarks, including all the scripts, all the configs and all the detail are posted on GitHub. So anybody can look at these results and they're fully transparent and replicate themselves. If you don't agree with this data, then by all means challenge it. And we have not really seen that in all of the new updates in HeatWave over the last 15 months. And as a result, when it comes to these, you know, fundamentals in looking at the competitive landscape, which I think gives validity to outcomes such as Oracle being able to deliver 4.8 times better price performance than Redshift. As well as for example, 14.4 better price performance than Snowflake, and also 12.9 better price performance than BigQuery. And so that is, you know, looking at the quantitative side of things. But again, I think, you know, to Marc's point and to Matt's point, there are also qualitative aspects that clearly differentiate the Oracle proposition, from my perspective. For example now the MySQL HeatWave ML capabilities are native, they're built in, and they also support things such as completion criteria. And as a result, that enables them to show that hey, when you're using Redshift ML for example, you're having to also use their SageMaker tool and it's running on a meter. And so, you know, nobody really wants to be running on a meter when, you know, executing these incredibly complex tasks. And likewise, when it comes to Snowflake, they have to use a third party capability. They don't have the built in, it's not native. So the user, to the point that he's having to spend more time and it increases complexity to use auto ML capabilities across the Snowflake platform. And also, I think it also applies to other important features such as data sampling, for example, with the HeatWave ML, it's intelligent sampling that's being implemented. Whereas in contrast, we're seeing Redshift using random sampling. And again, Snowflake, you're having to use a third party library in order to achieve the same capabilities. So I think the differentiation is crystal clear. I think it definitely is refreshing. It's showing that this is where true value can be assigned. And if you don't agree with it, by all means challenge the data. >> Yeah, I want to come to the benchmarks in a minute. By the way, you know, the gentleman who's the Oracle's architect, he did a great job on the call yesterday explaining what you have to do. I thought that was quite impressive. But Bob, I know you follow the financials pretty closely and on the earnings call earlier this month, Ellison said that, "We're going to see HeatWave on AWS." And the skeptic in me said, oh, they must not be getting people to come to OCI. And then they, you remember this chart they showed yesterday that showed the growth of HeatWave on OCI. But of course there was no data on there, it was just sort of, you know, lines up and to the right. So what do you guys think of that? (Marc laughs) Does it signal Bob, desperation by Oracle that they can't get traction on OCI, or is it just really a smart tame expansion move? What do you think? >> Yeah, Dave, that's a great question. You know, along the way there, and you know, just inside of that was something that said Ellison said on earnings call that spoke to a different sort of philosophy or mindset, almost Marc, where he said, "We're going to make this multicloud," right? With a lot of their other cloud stuff, if you wanted to use any of Oracle's cloud software, you had to use Oracle's infrastructure, OCI, there was no other way out of it. But this one, but I thought it was a classic Ellison line. He said, "Well, we're making this available on AWS. We're making this available, you know, on Snowflake because we're going after those users. And once they see what can be done here." So he's looking at it, I guess you could say, it's a concession to customers because they want multi-cloud. The other way to look at it, it's a hunting expedition and it's one of those uniquely I think Oracle ways. He said up front, right, he doesn't say, "Well, there's a big market, there's a lot for everybody, we just want on our slice." Said, "No, we are going after Amazon, we're going after Redshift, we're going after Aurora. We're going after these users of Snowflake and so on." And I think it's really fairly refreshing these days to hear somebody say that, because now if I'm a buyer, I can look at that and say, you know, to Marc's point, "Do they measure up, do they crack that threshold ceiling? Or is this just going to be more pain than a few dollars savings is worth?" But you look at those numbers that Ron pointed out and that we all saw in that chart. I've never seen Dave, anything like that. In a substantive market, a new player coming in here, and being able to establish differences that are four, seven, eight, 10, 12 times better than competition. And as new buyers look at that, they're going to say, "What the hell are we doing paying, you know, five times more to get a poor result? What's going on here?" So I think this is going to rattle people and force a harder, closer look at what these alternatives are. >> I wonder if the guy, thank you. Let's just skip ahead of the benchmarks guys, bring up the next slide, let's skip ahead a little bit here, which talks to the benchmarks and the benchmarking if we can. You know, David Floyer, the sort of semiretired, you know, Wikibon analyst said, "Dave, this is going to force Amazon and others, Snowflake," he said, "To rethink actually how they architect databases." And this is kind of a compilation of some of the data that they shared. They went after Redshift mostly, (laughs) but also, you know, as I say, Snowflake, BigQuery. And, like I said, you can always tell which companies are doing well, 'cause Oracle will come after you, but they're on the radar here. (laughing) Holgar should we take this stuff seriously? I mean, or is it, you know, a grain salt? What are your thoughts here? >> I think you have to take it seriously. I mean, that's a great question, great point on that. Because like Ron said, "If there's a flaw in a benchmark, we know this database traditionally, right?" If anybody came up that, everybody will be, "Oh, you put the wrong benchmark, it wasn't audited right, let us do it again," and so on. We don't see this happening, right? So kudos to Oracle to be aggressive, differentiated, and seem to having impeccable benchmarks. But what we really see, I think in my view is that the classic and we can talk about this in 100 years, right? Is the suite versus best of breed, right? And the key question of the suite, because the suite's always slower, right? No matter at which level of the stack, you have the suite, then the best of breed that will come up with something new, use a cloud, put the data warehouse on steroids and so on. The important thing is that you have to assess as a buyer what is the speed of my suite vendor. And that's what you guys mentioned before as well, right? Marc said that and so on, "Like, this is a third release in one year of the HeatWave team, right?" So everybody in the database open source Marc, and there's so many MySQL spinoffs to certain point is put on shine on the speed of (indistinct) team, putting out fundamental changes. And the beauty of that is right, is so inherent to the Oracle value proposition. Larry's vision of building the IBM of the 21st century, right from the Silicon, from the chip all the way across the seven stacks to the click of the user. And that what makes the database what Rob was saying, "Tied to the OCI infrastructure," because designed for that, it runs uniquely better for that, that's why we see the cross connect to Microsoft. HeatWave so it's different, right? Because HeatWave runs on cheap hardware, right? Which is the breadth and butter 886 scale of any cloud provider, right? So Oracle probably needs it to scale OCI in a different category, not the expensive side, but also allow us to do what we said before, the multicloud capability, which ultimately CIOs really want, because data gravity is real, you want to operate where that is. If you have a fast, innovative offering, which gives you more functionality and the R and D speed is really impressive for the space, puts away bad results, then it's a good bet to look at. >> Yeah, so you're saying, that we versus best of breed. I just want to sort of play back then Marc a comment. That suite versus best of breed, there's always been that trade off. If I understand you Holgar you're saying that somehow Oracle has magically cut through that trade off and they're giving you the best of both. >> It's the developing velocity, right? The provision of important features, which matter to buyers of the suite vendor, eclipses the best of breed vendor, then the best of breed vendor is in the hell of a potential job. >> Yeah, go ahead Marc. >> Yeah and I want to add on what Holgar just said there. I mean the worst job in the data center is data movement, moving the data sucks. I don't care who you are, nobody likes it. You never get any kudos for doing it well, and you always get the ah craps, when things go wrong. So it's in- >> In the data center Marc all the time across data centers, across cloud. That's where the bleeding comes. >> It's right, you get beat up all the time. So nobody likes to move data, ever. So what you're looking at with what they announce with HeatWave and what I love about HeatWave is it doesn't matter when you started with it, you get all the additional features they announce it's part of the service, all the time. But they don't have to move any of the data. You want to analyze the data that's in your transactional, MySQL database, it's there. You want to do machine learning models, it's there, there's no data movement. The data movement is the key thing, and they just eliminate that, in so many ways. And the other thing I wanted to talk about is on the benchmarks. As great as those benchmarks are, they're really conservative 'cause they're underestimating the cost of that data movement. The ETLs, the other services, everything's left out. It's just comparing HeatWave, MySQL cloud service with HeatWave versus Redshift, not Redshift and Aurora and Glue, Redshift and Redshift ML and SageMaker, it's just Redshift. >> Yeah, so what you're saying is what Oracle's doing is saying, "Okay, we're going to run MySQL HeatWave benchmarks on analytics against Redshift, and then we're going to run 'em in transaction against Aurora." >> Right. >> But if you really had to look at what you would have to do with the ETL, you'd have to buy two different data stores and all the infrastructure around that, and that goes away so. >> Due to the nature of the competition, they're running narrow best of breed benchmarks. There is no suite level benchmark (Dave laughs) because they created something new. >> Well that's you're the earlier point they're beating best of breed with a suite. So that's, I guess to Floyer's earlier point, "That's going to shake things up." But I want to come back to Bob Evans, 'cause I want to tap your Cloud Wars mojo before we wrap. And line up the horses, you got AWS, you got Microsoft, Google and Oracle. Now they all own their own cloud. Snowflake, Mongo, Couchbase, Redis, Cockroach by the way they're all doing very well. They run in the cloud as do many others. I think you guys all saw the Andreessen, you know, commentary from Sarah Wang and company, to talk about the cost of goods sold impact of cloud. So owning your own cloud has to be an advantage because other guys like Snowflake have to pay cloud vendors and negotiate down versus having the whole enchilada, Safra Catz's dream. Bob, how do you think this is going to impact the market long term? >> Well, Dave, that's a great question about, you know, how this is all going to play out. If I could mention three things, one, Frank Slootman has done a fantastic job with Snowflake. Really good company before he got there, but since he's been there, the growth mindset, the discipline, the rigor and the phenomenon of what Snowflake has done has forced all these bigger companies to really accelerate what they're doing. And again, it's an example of how this intense competition makes all the different cloud vendors better and it provides enormous value to customers. Second thing I wanted to mention here was look at the Adam Selipsky effect at AWS, took over in the middle of May, and in Q2, Q3, Q4, AWS's growth rate accelerated. And in each of those three quotas, they grew faster than Microsoft's cloud, which has not happened in two or three years, so they're closing the gap on Microsoft. The third thing, Dave, in this, you know, incredibly intense competitive nature here, look at Larry Ellison, right? He's got his, you know, the product that for the last two or three years, he said, "It's going to help determine the future of the company, autonomous database." You would think he's the last person in the world who's going to bring in, you know, in some ways another database to think about there, but he has put, you know, his whole effort and energy behind this. The investments Oracle's made, he's riding this horse really hard. So it's not just a technology achievement, but it's also an investment priority for Oracle going forward. And I think it's going to form a lot of how they position themselves to this new breed of buyer with a new type of need and expectations from IT. So I just think the next two or three years are going to be fantastic for people who are lucky enough to get to do the sorts of things that we do. >> You know, it's a great point you made about AWS. Back in 2018 Q3, they were doing about 7.4 billion a quarter and they were growing in the mid forties. They dropped down to like 29% Q4, 2020, I'm looking at the data now. They popped back up last quarter, last reported quarter to 40%, that is 17.8 billion, so they more doubled and they accelerated their growth rate. (laughs) So maybe that pretends, people are concerned about Snowflake right now decelerating growth. You know, maybe that's going to be different. By the way, I think Snowflake has a different strategy, the whole data cloud thing, data sharing. They're not trying to necessarily take Oracle head on, which is going to make this next 10 years, really interesting. All right, we got to go, last question. 30 seconds or less, what can we expect from the future of data platforms? Matt, please start. >> I have to go first again? You're killing me, Dave. (laughing) In the next few years, I think you're going to see the major players continue to meet customers where they are, right. Every organization, every environment is, you know, kind of, we use these words bespoke in Snowflake, pardon the pun, but Snowflakes, right. But you know, they're all opinionated and unique and what's great as an IT person is, you know, there is a service for me regardless of where I am on my journey, in my data management journey. I think you're going to continue to see with regards specifically to Oracle, I think you're going to see the company continue along this path of being all things to all people, if you will, or all organizations without sacrificing, you know, kind of richness of features and sacrificing who they are, right. Look, they are the data kings, right? I mean, they've been a database leader for an awful long time. I don't see that going away any time soon and I love the innovative spirit they've brought in with HeatWave. >> All right, great thank you. Okay, 30 seconds, Holgar go. >> Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing that we see is really that trend to autonomous as Oracle calls or self-driving software, right? So the database will have to do more things than just store the data and support the DVA. It will have to show it can wide insights, the whole upside, it will be able to show to one machine learning. We haven't really talked about that. How in just exciting what kind of use case we can get of machine learning running real time on data as it changes, right? So, which is part of the E5 announcement, right? So we'll see more of that self-driving nature in the database space. And because you said we can promote it, right. Check out my report about HeatWave latest release where I post in oracle.com. >> Great, thank you for that. And Bob Evans, please. You're great at quick hits, hit us. >> Dave, thanks. I really enjoyed getting to hear everybody's opinion here today and I think what's going to happen too. I think there's a new generation of buyers, a new set of CXO influencers in here. And I think what Oracle's done with this, MySQL HeatWave, those benchmarks that Ron talked about so eloquently here that is going to become something that forces other companies, not just try to get incrementally better. I think we're going to see a massive new wave of innovation to try to play catch up. So I really take my hat off to Oracle's achievement from going to, push everybody to be better. >> Excellent. Marc Staimer, what do you say? >> Sure, I'm going to leverage off of something Matt said earlier, "Those companies that are going to develop faster, cheaper, simpler products that are going to solve customer problems, IT problems are the ones that are going to succeed, or the ones who are going to grow. The one who are just focused on the technology are going to fall by the wayside." So those who can solve more problems, do it more elegantly and do it for less money are going to do great. So Oracle's going down that path today, Snowflake's going down that path. They're trying to do more integration with third party, but as a result, aiming at that simpler, faster, cheaper mentality is where you're going to continue to see this market go. >> Amen brother Marc. >> Thank you, Ron Westfall, we'll give you the last word, bring us home. >> Well, thank you. And I'm loving it. I see a wave of innovation across the entire cloud database ecosystem and Oracle is fueling it. We are seeing it, with the native integration of auto ML capabilities, elastic scaling, lower entry price points, et cetera. And this is just going to be great news for buyers, but also developers and increased use of open APIs. And so I think that is really the key takeaways. Just we're going to see a lot of great innovation on the horizon here. >> Guys, fantastic insights, one of the best power panel as I've ever done. Love to have you back. Thanks so much for coming on today. >> Great job, Dave, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCube and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>>Alteryx is a company with a long history that goes all the way back to the late 1990s. Now the one consistent theme over 20 plus years has been that Ultrix has always been a data company early in the big data and Hadoop cycle. It saw the need to combine and prep different data types so that organizations could analyze data and take action Altrix and similar companies played a critical role in helping companies become data-driven. The problem was the decade of big data, brought a lot of complexities and required immense skills just to get the technology to work as advertised this in turn limited, the pace of adoption and the number of companies that could really lean in and take advantage of the cloud began to change all that and set the foundation for today's theme to Zuora of digital transformation. We hear that phrase a ton digital transformation. >>People used to think it was a buzzword, but of course we learned from the pandemic that if you're not a digital business, you're out of business and a key tenant of digital transformation is democratizing data, meaning enabling, not just hypo hyper specialized experts, but anyone business users to put data to work. Now back to Ultrix, the company has embarked on a major transformation of its own. Over the past couple of years, brought in new management, they've changed the way in which it engaged with customers with the new subscription model and it's topgraded its talent pool. 2021 was even more significant because of two acquisitions that Altrix made hyper Ana and trifecta. Why are these acquisitions important? Well, traditionally Altryx sold to business analysts that were part of the data pipeline. These were fairly technical people who had certain skills and were trained in things like writing Python code with hyper Ana Altryx has added a new persona, the business user, anyone in the business who wanted to gain insights from data and, or let's say use AI without having to be a deep technical expert. >>And then Trifacta a company started in the early days of big data by cube alum, Joe Hellerstein and his colleagues at Berkeley. They knocked down the data engineering persona, and this gives Altryx a complimentary extension into it where things like governance and security are paramount. So as we enter 2022, the post isolation economy is here and we do so with a digital foundation built on the confluence of cloud native technologies, data democratization and machine intelligence or AI, if you prefer. And Altryx is entering that new era with an expanded portfolio, new go-to market vectors, a recurring revenue business model, and a brand new outlook on how to solve customer problems and scale a company. My name is Dave Vellante with the cube and I'll be your host today. And the next hour, we're going to explore the opportunities in this new data market. And we have three segments where we dig into these trends and themes. First we'll talk to Jay Henderson, vice president of product management at Ultrix about cloud acceleration and simplifying complex data operations. Then we'll bring in Suresh Vetol who's the chief product officer at Altrix and Adam Wilson, the CEO of Trifacta, which of course is now part of Altrix. And finally, we'll hear about how Altryx is partnering with snowflake and the ecosystem and how they're integrating with data platforms like snowflake and what this means for customers. And we may have a few surprises sprinkled in as well into the conversation let's get started. >>We're kicking off the program with our first segment. Jay Henderson is the vice president of product management Altryx and we're going to talk about the trends and data, where we came from, how we got here, where we're going. We get some launch news. Well, Jay, welcome to the cube. >>Great to be here, really excited to share some of the things we're working on. >>Yeah. Thank you. So look, you have a deep product background, product management, product marketing, you've done strategy work. You've been around software and data, your entire career, and we're seeing the collision of software data cloud machine intelligence. Let's start with the customer and maybe we can work back from there. So if you're an analytics or data executive in an organization, w J what's your north star, where are you trying to take your company from a data and analytics point of view? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, look, I think all organizations are really struggling to get insights out of their data. I think one of the things that we see is you've got digital exhaust, creating large volumes of data storage is really cheap, so it doesn't cost them much to keep it. And that results in a situation where the organization's, you know, drowning in data, but somehow still starving for insights. And so I think, uh, you know, when I talk to customers, they're really excited to figure out how they can put analytics in the hands of every single person in their organization, and really start to democratize the analytics, um, and, you know, let the, the business users and the whole organization get value out of all that data they have. >>And we're going to dig into that throughout this program data, I like to say is plentiful insights, not always so much. Tell us about your launch today, Jay, and thinking about the trends that you just highlighted, the direction that your customers want to go and the problems that you're solving, what role does the cloud play in? What is what you're launching? How does that fit in? >>Yeah, we're, we're really excited today. We're launching the Altryx analytics cloud. That's really a portfolio of cloud-based solutions that have all been built from the ground up to be cloud native, um, and to take advantage of things like based access. So that it's really easy to give anyone access, including folks on a Mac. Um, it, you know, it also lets you take advantage of elastic compute so that you can do, you know, in database processing and cloud native, um, solutions that are gonna scale to solve the most complex problems. So we've got a portfolio of solutions, things like designer cloud, which is our flagship designer product in a browser and on the cloud, but we've got ultra to machine learning, which helps up-skill regular old analysts with advanced machine learning capabilities. We've got auto insights, which brings a business users into the fold and automatically unearths insights using AI and machine learning. And we've got our latest edition, which is Trifacta that helps data engineers do data pipelining and really, um, you know, create a lot of the underlying data sets that are used in some of this, uh, downstream analytics. >>Let's dig into some of those roles if we could a little bit, I mean, you've traditionally Altryx has served the business analysts and that's what designer cloud is fit for, I believe. And you've explained, you know, kind of the scope, sorry, you've expanded that scope into the, to the business user with hyper Anna. And we're in a moment we're going to talk to Adam Wilson and Suresh, uh, about Trifacta and that recent acquisition takes you, as you said, into the data engineering space in it. But in thinking about the business analyst role, what's unique about designer cloud cloud, and how does it help these individuals? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, really, I go back to some of the feedback we've had from our customers, which is, um, you know, they oftentimes have dozens or hundreds of seats of our designer desktop product, you know, really, as they look to take the next step, they're trying to figure out how do I give access to that? Those types of analytics to thousands of people within the organization and designer cloud is, is really great for that. You've got the browser-based interface. So if folks are on a Mac, they can really easily just pop, open the browser and get access to all of those, uh, prep and blend capabilities to a lot of the analysis we're doing. Um, it's a great way to scale up access to the analytics and then start to put it in the hands of really anyone in the organization, not just those highly skilled power users. >>Okay, great. So now then you add in the hyper Anna acquisition. So now you're targeting the business user Trifacta comes into the mix that deeper it angle that we talked about, how does this all fit together? How should we be thinking about the new Altryx portfolio? >>Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty exciting. Um, you know, when you think about democratizing analytics and providing access to all these different groups of people, um, you've not been able to do it through one platform before. Um, you know, it's not going to be one interface that meets the, of all these different groups within the organization. You really do need purpose built specialized capabilities for each group. And finally, today with the announcement of the alternates analytics cloud, we brought together all of those different capabilities, all of those different interfaces into a single in the end application. So really finally delivering on the promise of providing analytics to all, >>How much of this you've been able to share with your customers and maybe your partners. I mean, I know OD is fairly new, but if you've been able to get any feedback from them, what are they saying about it? >>Uh, I mean, it's, it's pretty amazing. Um, we ran a early access, limited availability program that led us put a lot of this technology in the hands of over 600 customers, um, over the last few months. So we have gotten a lot of feedback. I tell you, um, it's been overwhelmingly positive. I think organizations are really excited to unlock the insights that have been hidden in all this data. They've got, they're excited to be able to use analytics in every decision that they're making so that the decisions they have or more informed and produce better business outcomes. Um, and, and this idea that they're going to move from, you know, dozens to hundreds or thousands of people who have access to these kinds of capabilities, I think has been a really exciting thing that is going to accelerate the transformation that these customers are on. >>Yeah, those are good. Good, good numbers for, for preview mode. Let's, let's talk a little bit about vision. So it's democratizing data is the ultimate goal, which frankly has been elusive for most organizations over time. How's your cloud going to address the challenges of putting data to work across the entire enterprise? >>Yeah, I mean, I tend to think about the future and some of the investments we're making in our products and our roadmap across four big themes, you know, in the, and these are really kind of enduring themes that you're going to see us making investments in over the next few years, the first is having cloud centricity. You know, the data gravity has been moving to the cloud. We need to be able to provide access, to be able to ingest and manipulate that data, to be able to write back to it, to provide cloud solution. So the first one is really around cloud centricity. The second is around big data fluency. Once you have all of the data, you need to be able to manipulate it in a performant manner. So having the elastic cloud infrastructure and in database processing is so important, the third is around making AI a strategic advantage. >>So, uh, you know, getting everyone involved and accessing AI and machine learning to unlock those insights, getting it out of the hands of the small group of data scientists, putting it in the hands of analysts and business users. Um, and then the fourth thing is really providing access across the entire organization. You know, it and data engineers, uh, as well as business owners and analysts. So, um, cloud centricity, big data fluency, um, AI is a strategic advantage and, uh, personas across the organization are really the four big themes you're going to see us, uh, working on over the next few months and, uh, coming coming year. >>That's good. Thank you for that. So, so on a related question, how do you see the data organizations evolving? I mean, traditionally you've had, you know, monolithic organizations, uh, very specialized or I might even say hyper specialized roles and, and your, your mission of course is the customer. You, you, you, you and your customers, they want to democratize the data. And so it seems logical that domain leaders are going to take more responsibility for data, life cycles, data ownerships, low code becomes more important. And perhaps this kind of challenges, the historically highly centralized and really specialized roles that I just talked about. How do you see that evolving and, and, and what role will Altryx play? >>Yeah. Um, you know, I think we'll see sort of a more federated systems start to emerge. Those centralized groups are going to continue to exist. Um, but they're going to start to empower, you know, in a much more de-centralized way, the people who are closer to the business problems and have better business understanding. I think that's going to let the centralized highly skilled teams work on, uh, problems that are of higher value to the organization. The kinds of problems where one or 2% lift in the model results in millions of dollars a day for the business. And then by pushing some of the analytics out to, uh, closer to the edge and closer to the business, you'll be able to apply those analytics in every single decision. So I think you're going to see, you know, both the decentralized and centralized models start to work in harmony and a little bit more about almost a federated sort of a way. And I think, you know, the exciting thing for us at Altryx is, you know, we want to facilitate that. We want to give analytic capabilities and solutions to both groups and types of people. We want to help them collaborate better, um, and drive business outcomes with the analytics they're using. >>Yeah. I mean, I think my take on another one, if you could comment is to me, the technology should be an operational detail and it has been the, the, the dog that wags the tail, or maybe the other way around, you mentioned digital exhaust before. I mean, essentially it's digital exhaust coming out of operationals systems that then somehow, eventually end up in the hand of the domain users. And I wonder if increasingly we're going to see those domain users, users, those, those line of business experts get more access. That's your goal. And then even go beyond analytics, start to build data products that could be monetized, and that maybe it's going to take a decade to play out, but that is sort of a new era of data. Do you see it that way? >>Absolutely. We're actually making big investments in our products and capabilities to be able to create analytic applications and to enable somebody who's an analyst or business user to create an application on top of the data and analytics layers that they have, um, really to help democratize the analytics, to help prepackage some of the analytics that can drive more insights. So I think that's definitely a trend we're going to see more. >>Yeah. And to your point, if you can federate the governance and automate that, then that can happen. I mean, that's a key part of it, obviously. So, all right, Jay, we have to leave it there up next. We take a deep dive into the Altryx recent acquisition of Trifacta with Adam Wilson who led Trifacta for more than seven years. It's the recipe. Tyler is the chief product officer at Altryx to explain the rationale behind the acquisition and how it's going to impact customers. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage. >>It's go time, get ready to accelerate your data analytics journey with a unified cloud native platform. That's accessible for everyone on the go from home to office and everywhere in between effortless analytics to help you go from ideas to outcomes and no time. It's your time to shine. It's Altryx analytics cloud time. >>Okay. We're here with. Who's the chief product officer at Altryx and Adam Wilson, the CEO of Trifacta. Now of course, part of Altryx just closed this quarter. Gentlemen. Welcome. >>Great to be here. >>Okay. So let me start with you. In my opening remarks, I talked about Altrix is traditional position serving business analysts and how the hyper Anna acquisition brought you deeper into the business user space. What does Trifacta bring to your portfolio? Why'd you buy the company? >>Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the question. Um, you know, we see, uh, we see a massive opportunity of helping, um, brands, um, democratize the use of analytics across their business. Um, every knowledge worker, every individual in the company should have access to analytics. It's no longer optional, um, as they navigate their businesses with that in mind, you know, we know designer and are the products that Altrix has been selling the past decade or so do a really great job, um, addressing the business analysts, uh, with, um, hyper Rana now kind of renamed, um, Altrix auto. We even speak with the business owner and the line of business owner. Who's looking for insights that aren't real in traditional dashboards and so on. Um, but we see this opportunity of really helping the data engineering teams and it organizations, um, to also make better use of analytics. Um, and that's where the drive factor comes in for us. Um, drive factor has the best data engineering cloud in the planet. Um, they have an established track record of working across multiple cloud platforms and helping data engineers, um, do better data pipelining and work better with, uh, this massive kind of cloud transformation that's happening in every business. Um, and so fact made so much sense for us. >>Yeah. Thank you for that. I mean, you, look, you could have built it yourself would have taken, you know, who knows how long, you know, but, uh, so definitely a great time to market move, Adam. I wonder if we could dig into Trifacta some more, I mean, I remember interviewing Joe Hellerstein in the early days. You've talked about this as well, uh, on the cube coming at the problem of taking data from raw refined to an experience point of view. And Joe in the early days, talked about flipping the model and starting with data visualization, something Jeff, her was expert at. So maybe explain how we got here. We used to have this cumbersome process of ETL and you may be in some others changed that model with ELL and then T explain how Trifacta really changed the data engineering game. >>Yeah, that's exactly right. Uh, David, it's been a really interesting journey for us because I think the original hypothesis coming out of the campus research, uh, at Berkeley and Stanford that really birth Trifacta was, you know, why is it that the people who know the data best can't do the work? You know, why is this become the exclusive purview of the highly technical? And, you know, can we rethink this and make this a user experience, problem powered by machine learning that will take some of the more complicated things that people want to do with data and really help to automate those. So, so a broader set of, of users can, um, can really see for themselves and help themselves. And, and I think that, um, there was a lot of pent up frustration out there because people have been told for, you know, for a decade now to be more data-driven and then the whole time they're saying, well, then give me the data, you know, in the shape that I could use it with the right level of quality and I'm happy to be, but don't tell me to be more data-driven and then, and, and not empower me, um, to, to get in there and to actually start to work with the data in meaningful ways. >>And so, um, that was really, you know, what, you know, the origin story of the company and I think is, as we, um, saw over the course of the last 5, 6, 7 years that, um, you know, uh, real, uh, excitement to embrace this idea of, of trying to think about data engineering differently, trying to democratize the, the ETL process and to also leverage all these exciting new, uh, engines and platforms that are out there that allow for processing, you know, ever more diverse data sets, ever larger data sets and new and interesting ways. And that's where a lot of the push-down or the ELT approaches that, you know, I think it could really won the day. Um, and that, and that for us was a hallmark of the solution from the very beginning. >>Yeah, this is a huge point that you're making is, is first of all, there's a large business, it's probably about a hundred billion dollar Tam. Uh, and the, the point you're making, because we've looked, we've contextualized most of our operational systems, but the big data pipeline is hasn't gotten there. But, and maybe we could talk about that a little bit because democratizing data is Nirvana, but it's been historically very difficult. You've got a number of companies it's very fragmented and they're all trying to attack their little piece of the problem to achieve an outcome, but it's been hard. And so what's going to be different about Altryx as you bring these puzzle pieces together, how is this going to impact your customers who would like to take that one? >>Yeah, maybe, maybe I'll take a crack at it. And Adam will, um, add on, um, you know, there hasn't been a single platform for analytics, automation in the enterprise, right? People have relied on, uh, different products, um, to solve kind of, uh, smaller problems, um, across this analytics, automation, data transformation domain. Um, and, um, I think uniquely Alcon's has that opportunity. Uh, we've got 7,000 plus customers who rely on analytics for, um, data management, for analytics, for AI and ML, uh, for transformations, uh, for reporting and visualization for automated insights and so on. Um, and so by bringing drive factor, we have the opportunity to scale this even further and solve for more use cases, expand the scenarios where it's applied and so multiple personas. Um, and we just talked about the data engineers. They are really a growing stakeholder in this transformation of data and analytics. >>Yeah, good. Maybe we can stay on this for a minute cause you, you you're right. You bring it together. Now at least three personas the business analyst, the end user slash business user. And now the data engineer, which is really out of an it role in a lot of companies, and you've used this term, the data engineering cloud, what is that? How is it going to integrate in with, or support these other personas? And, and how's it going to integrate into the broader ecosystem of clouds and cloud data warehouses or any other data stores? >>Yeah, no, that's great. Uh, yeah, I think for us, we really looked at this and said, you know, we want to build an open and interactive cloud platform for data engineers, you know, to collaboratively profile pipeline, um, and prepare data for analysis. And that really meant collaborating with the analysts that were in the line of business. And so this is why a big reason why this combination is so magic because ultimately if we can get the data engineers that are creating the data products together with the analysts that are in the line of business that are driving a lot of the decision making and allow for that, what I would describe as collaborative curation of the data together, so that you're starting to see, um, uh, you know, increasing returns to scale as this, uh, as this rolls out. I just think that is an incredibly powerful combination and, and frankly, something that the market is not crack the code on yet. And so, um, I think when we, when I sat down with Suresh and with mark and the team at Ultrix, that was really part of the, the, the big idea, the big vision that was painted and got us really energized about the acquisition and about the potential of the combination. >>And you're really, you're obviously writing the cloud and the cloud native wave. Um, and, but specifically we're seeing, you know, I almost don't even want to call it a data warehouse anyway, because when you look at what's, for instance, Snowflake's doing, of course their marketing is around the data cloud, but I actually think there's real justification for that because it's not like the traditional data warehouse, right. It's, it's simplified get there fast, don't necessarily have to go through the central organization to share data. Uh, and, and, and, but it's really all about simplification, right? Isn't that really what the democratization comes down to. >>Yeah. It's simplification and collaboration. Right. I don't want to, I want to kind of just what Adam said resonates with me deeply. Um, analytics is one of those, um, massive disciplines inside an enterprise that's really had the weakest of tools. Um, and we just have interfaces to collaborate with, and I think truly this was all drinks and a superpower was helping the analysts get more out of their data, get more out of the analytics, like imagine a world where these people are collaborating and sharing insights in real time and sharing workflows and getting access to new data sources, um, understanding data models better, I think, um, uh, curating those insights. I boring Adam's phrase again. Um, I think that creates a real value inside the organization because frankly in scaling analytics and democratizing analytics and data, we're still in such early phases of this journey. >>So how should we think about designer cloud, which is from Altrix it's really been the on-prem and the server desktop offering. And of course Trifacta is with cloud cloud data warehouses. Right. Uh, how, how should we think about those two products? Yeah, >>I think, I think you should think about them. And, uh, um, as, as very complimentary right designer cloud really shares a lot of DNA and heritage with, uh, designer desktop, um, the low code tooling and that interface, uh, the really appeals to the business analysts, um, and gets a lot of the things that they do well, we've also built it with interoperability in mind, right. So if you started building your workflows in designer desktop, you want to share that with design and cloud, we want to make it super easy for you to do that. Um, and I think over time now we're only a week into, um, this Alliance with, um, with, um, Trifacta, um, I think we have to get deeper inside to think about what does the data engineer really need? What's the business analysts really need and how to design a cloud, and Trifacta really support both of those requirements, uh, while kind of continue to build on the trifecta on the amazing Trifacta cloud platform. >>You know, >>I think we're just going to say, I think that's one of the things that, um, you know, creates a lot of, uh, opportunity as we go forward, because ultimately, you know, Trifacta took a platform, uh, first mentality to everything that we built. So thinking about openness and extensibility and, um, and how over time people could build things on top of factor that are a variety of analytic tool chain, or analytic applications. And so, uh, when you think about, um, Ultrix now starting to, uh, to move some of its capabilities or to provide additional capabilities, uh, in the cloud, um, you know, Trifacta becomes a platform that can accelerate, you know, all of that work and create, uh, uh, a cohesive set of, of cloud-based services that, um, share a common platform. And that maintains independence because both companies, um, have been, uh, you know, fiercely independent, uh, and, and really giving people choice. >>Um, so making sure that whether you're, uh, you know, picking one cloud platform and other, whether you're running things on the desktop, uh, whether you're running in hybrid environments, that, um, no matter what your decision, um, you're always in a position to be able to get out your data. You're always in a position to be able to cleanse transform shape structure, that data, and ultimately to deliver, uh, the analytics that you need. And so I think in that sense, um, uh, you know, this, this again is another reason why the combination, you know, fits so well together, giving people, um, the choice. Um, and as they, as they think about their analytics strategy and their platform strategy going forward, >>Yeah. I make a chuckle, but one of the reasons I always liked Altrix is cause you kinda did the little end run on it. It can be a blocker sometimes, but that created problems, right? Because the organization said, wow, this big data stuff has taken off, but we need security. We need governance. And it's interesting because you've got, you know, ETL has been complex, whereas the visualization tools, they really, you know, really weren't great at governance and security. It took some time there. So that's not, not their heritage. You're bringing those worlds together. And I'm interested, you guys just had your sales kickoff, you know, what was their reaction like? Uh, maybe Suresh, you could start off and maybe Adam, you could bring us home. >>Um, thanks for asking about our sales kickoff. So we met for the first time and you've got a two years, right. For, as, as it is for many of us, um, in person, uh, um, which I think was a, was a real breakthrough as Qualtrics has been on its transformation journey. Uh, we added a Trifacta to, um, the, the potty such as the tour, um, and getting all of our sales teams and product organizations, um, to meet in person in one location. I thought that was very powerful for other the company. Uh, but then I tell you, um, um, the reception for Trifacta was beyond anything I could have imagined. Uh, we were working out him and I will, when he's so hot on, on the deal and the core hypotheses and so on. And then you step back and you're going to share the vision with the field organization, and it blows you away, the energy that it creates among our sellers out of partners. >>And I'm sure Madam will and his team were mocked, um, every single day, uh, with questions and opportunities to bring them in. But Adam, maybe you should share. Yeah, no, it was, uh, it was through the roof. I mean, uh, uh, the, uh, the amount of energy, the, uh, certainly how welcoming everybody was, uh, uh, you know, just, I think the story makes so much sense together. I think culturally, the company is, are very aligned. Um, and, uh, it was a real, uh, real capstone moment, uh, to be able to complete the acquisition and to, and to close and announced, you know, at the kickoff event. And, um, I think, you know, for us, when we really thought about it, you know, when we ended, the story that we told was just, you have this opportunity to really cater to what the end users care about, which is a lot about interactivity and self-service, and at the same time. >>And that's, and that's a lot of the goodness that, um, that Altryx is, has brought, you know, through, you know, you know, years and years of, of building a very vibrant community of, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of users. And on the other side, you know, Trifacta bringing in this data engineering focus, that's really about, uh, the governance things that you mentioned and the openness, um, that, that it cares deeply about. And all of a sudden, now you have a chance to put that together into a complete story where the data engineering cloud and analytics, automation, you know, coming together. And, um, and I just think, you know, the lights went on, um, you know, for people instantaneously and, you know, this is a story that, um, that I think the market is really hungry for. And certainly the reception we got from, uh, from the broader team at kickoff was, uh, was a great indication. >>Well, I think the story hangs together really well, you know, one of the better ones I've seen in, in this space, um, and, and you guys coming off a really, really strong quarter. So congratulations on that jets. We have to leave it there. I really appreciate your time today. Yeah. Take a look at this short video. And when we come back, we're going to dig into the ecosystem and the integration into cloud data warehouses and how leading organizations are creating modern data teams and accelerating their digital businesses. You're watching the cube you're leader in enterprise tech coverage. >>This is your data housed neatly insecurely in the snowflake data cloud. And all of it has potential the potential to solve complex business problems, deliver personalized financial offerings, protect supply chains from disruption, cut costs, forecast, grow and innovate. All you need to do is put your data in the hands of the right people and give it an opportunity. Luckily for you. That's the easy part because snowflake works with Alteryx and Alteryx turns data into breakthroughs with just a click. Your organization can automate analytics with drag and drop building blocks, easily access snowflake data with both sequel and no SQL options, share insights, powered by Alteryx data science and push processing to snowflake for lightning, fast performance, you get answers you can put to work in your teams, get repeatable processes they can share in that's exciting because not only is your data no longer sitting around in silos, it's also mobilized for the next opportunity. Turn your data into a breakthrough Alteryx and snowflake >>Okay. We're back here in the queue, focusing on the business promise of the cloud democratizing data, making it accessible and enabling everyone to get value from analytics, insights, and data. We're now moving into the eco systems segment the power of many versus the resources of one. And we're pleased to welcome. Barb Hills camp was the senior vice president partners and alliances at Ultrix and a special guest Terek do week head of technology alliances at snowflake folks. Welcome. Good to see you. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. Good to see >>Dave. Great to see you guys. So cloud migration, it's one of the hottest topics. It's the top one of the top initiatives of senior technology leaders. We have survey data with our partner ETR it's number two behind security, and just ahead of analytics. So we're hovering around all the hot topics here. Barb, what are you seeing with respect to customer, you know, cloud migration momentum, and how does the Ultrix partner strategy fit? >>Yeah, sure. Partners are central company's strategy. They always have been. We recognize that our partners have deep customer relationships. And when you connect that with their domain expertise, they're really helping customers on their cloud and business transformation journey. We've been helping customers achieve their desired outcomes with our partner community for quite some time. And our partner base has been growing an average of 30% year over year, that partner community and strategy now addresses several kinds of partners, spanning solution providers to global SIS and technology partners, such as snowflake and together, we help our customers realize the business promise of their journey to the cloud. Snowflake provides a scalable storage system altereds provides the business user friendly front end. So for example, it departments depend on snowflake to consolidate data across systems into one data cloud with Altryx business users can easily unlock that data in snowflake solving real business outcomes. Our GSI and solution provider partners are instrumental in providing that end to end benefit of a modern analytic stack in the cloud providing platform, guidance, deployment, support, and other professional services. >>Great. Let's get a little bit more into the relationship between Altrix and S in snowflake, the partnership, maybe a little bit about the history, you know, what are the critical aspects that we should really focus on? Barb? Maybe you could start an Interra kindly way in as well. >>Yeah, so the relationship started in 2020 and all shirts made a big bag deep with snowflake co-innovating and optimizing cloud use cases together. We are supporting customers who are looking for that modern analytic stack to replace an old one or to implement their first analytic strategy. And our joint customers want to self-serve with data-driven analytics, leveraging all the benefits of the cloud, scalability, accessibility, governance, and optimizing their costs. Um, Altrix proudly achieved. Snowflake's highest elite tier in their partner program last year. And to do that, we completed a rigorous third party testing process, which also helped us make some recommended improvements to our joint stack. We wanted customers to have confidence. They would benefit from high quality and performance in their investment with us then to help customers get the most value out of the destroyed solution. We developed two great assets. One is the officer starter kit for snowflake, and we coauthored a joint best practices guide. >>The starter kit contains documentation, business workflows, and videos, helping customers to get going more easily with an altered since snowflake solution. And the best practices guide is more of a technical document, bringing together experiences and guidance on how Altryx and snowflake can be deployed together. Internally. We also built a full enablement catalog resources, right? We wanted to provide our account executives more about the value of the snowflake relationship. How do we engage and some best practices. And now we have hundreds of joint customers such as Juniper and Sainsbury who are actively using our joint solution, solving big business problems much faster. >>Cool. Kara, can you give us your perspective on the partnership? >>Yeah, definitely. Dave, so as Barb mentioned, we've got this standing very successful partnership going back years with hundreds of happy joint customers. And when I look at the beginning, Altrix has helped pioneer the concept of self-service analytics, especially with use cases that we worked on with for, for data prep for BI users like Tableau and as Altryx has evolved to now becoming from data prep to now becoming a full end to end data science platform. It's really opened up a lot more opportunities for our partnership. Altryx has invested heavily over the last two years in areas of deep integration for customers to fully be able to expand their investment, both technologies. And those investments include things like in database pushed down, right? So customers can, can leverage that elastic platform, that being the snowflake data cloud, uh, with Alteryx orchestrating the end to end machine learning workflows Alteryx also invested heavily in snow park, a feature we released last year around this concept of data programmability. So all users were regardless of their business analysts, regardless of their data, scientists can use their tools of choice in order to consume and get at data. And now with Altryx cloud, we think it's going to open up even more opportunities. It's going to be a big year for the partnership. >>Yeah. So, you know, Terike, we we've covered snowflake pretty extensively and you initially solve what I used to call the, I still call the snake swallowing the basketball problem and cloud data warehouse changed all that because you had virtually infinite resources, but so that's obviously one of the problems that you guys solved early on, but what are some of the common challenges or patterns or trends that you see with snowflake customers and where does Altryx come in? >>Sure. Dave there's there's handful, um, that I can come up with today, the big challenges or trends for us, and Altrix really helps us across all of them. Um, there are three particular ones I'm going to talk about the first one being self-service analytics. If we think about it, every organization is trying to democratize data. Every organization wants to empower all their users, business users, um, you know, the, the technology users, but the business users, right? I think every organization has realized that if everyone has access to data and everyone can do something with data, it's going to make them competitively, give them a competitive advantage with Altrix is something we share that vision of putting that power in the hands of everyday users, regardless of the skillsets. So, um, with self-service analytics, with Ultrix designer they've they started out with self-service analytics as the forefront, and we're just scratching the surface. >>I think there was an analyst, um, report that shows that less than 20% of organizations are truly getting self-service analytics to their end users. Now, with Altryx going to Ultrix cloud, we think that's going to be a huge opportunity for us. Um, and then that opens up the second challenge, which is machine learning and AI, every organization is trying to get predictive analytics into every application that they have in order to be competitive in order to be competitive. Um, and with Altryx creating this platform so they can cater to both the everyday business user, the quote unquote, citizen data scientists, and making a code friendly for data scientists to be able to get at their notebooks and all the different tools that they want to use. Um, they fully integrated in our snow park platform, which I talked about before, so that now we get an end to end solution caring to all, all lines of business. >>And then finally this concept of data marketplaces, right? We, we created snowflake from the ground up to be able to solve the data sharing problem, the big data problem, the data sharing problem. And Altryx um, if we look at mobilizing your data, getting access to third-party datasets, to enrich with your own data sets, to enrich with, um, with your suppliers and with your partners, data sets, that's what all customers are trying to do in order to get a more comprehensive 360 view, um, within their, their data applications. And so with Altryx alterations, we're working on third-party data sets and marketplaces for quite some time. Now we're working on how do we integrate what Altrix is providing with the snowflake data marketplace so that we can enrich these workflows, these great, great workflows that Altrix writing provides. Now we can add third party data into that workflow. So that opens up a ton of opportunities, Dave. So those are three I see, uh, easily that we're going to be able to solve a lot of customer challenges with. >>So thank you for that. Terrick so let's stay on cloud a little bit. I mean, Altrix is undergoing a major transformation, big focus on the cloud. How does this cloud launch impact the partnership Terike from snowflakes perspective and then Barb, maybe, please add some color. >>Yeah, sure. Dave snowflake started as a cloud data platform. We saw our founders really saw the challenges that customers are having with becoming data-driven. And the biggest challenge was the complexity of having imagine infrastructure to even be able to do it, to get applications off the ground. And so we created something to be cloud-native. We created to be a SAS managed service. So now that that Altrix is moving to the same model, right? A cloud platform, a SAS managed service, we're just, we're just removing more of the friction. So we're going to be able to start to package these end to end solutions that are SAS based that are fully managed. So customers can, can go faster and they don't have to worry about all of the underlying complexities of, of, of stitching things together. Right? So, um, so that's, what's exciting from my viewpoint >>And I'll follow up. So as you said, we're investing heavily in the cloud a year ago, we had two pre desktop products, and today we have four cloud products with cloud. We can provide our users with more flexibility. We want to make it easier for the users to leverage their snowflake data in the Alteryx platform, whether they're using our beloved on-premise solution or the new cloud products were committed to that continued investment in the cloud, enabling our joint partner solutions to meet customer requirements, wherever they store their data. And we're working with snowflake, we're doing just that. So as customers look for a modern analytic stack, they expect that data to be easily accessible, right within a fast, secure and scalable platform. And the launch of our cloud strategy is a huge leap forward in making Altrix more widely accessible to all users in all types of roles, our GSI and our solution provider partners have asked for these cloud capabilities at scale, and they're excited to better support our customers, cloud and analytic >>Are. How about you go to market strategy? How would you describe your joint go to market strategy with snowflake? >>Sure. It's simple. We've got to work backwards from our customer's challenges, right? Driving transformation to solve problems, gain efficiencies, or help them save money. So whether it's with snowflake or other GSI, other partner types, we've outlined a joint journey together from recruit solution development, activation enablement, and then strengthening our go to market strategies to optimize our results together. We launched an updated partner program and within that framework, we've created new benefits for our partners around opportunity registration, new role based enablement and training, basically extending everything we do internally for our own go-to-market teams to our partners. We're offering partner, marketing resources and funding to reach new customers together. And as a matter of fact, we recently launched a fantastic video with snowflake. I love this video that very simply describes the path to insights starting with your snowflake data. Right? We do joint customer webinars. We're working on joint hands-on labs and have a wonderful landing page with a lot of assets for our customers. Once we have an interested customer, we engage our respective account managers, collaborating through discovery questions, proof of concepts really showcasing the desired outcome. And when you combine that with our partners technology or domain expertise, it's quite powerful, >>Dark. How do you see it? You'll go to market strategy. >>Yeah. Dave we've. Um, so we initially started selling, we initially sold snowflake as technology, right? Uh, looking at positioning the diff the architectural differentiators and the scale and concurrency. And we noticed as we got up into the larger enterprise customers, we're starting to see how do they solve their business problems using the technology, as well as them coming to us and saying, look, we want to also know how do you, how do you continue to map back to the specific prescriptive business problems we're having? And so we shifted to an industry focus last year, and this is an area where Altrix has been mature for probably since their inception selling to the line of business, right? Having prescriptive use cases that are particular to an industry like financial services, like retail, like healthcare and life sciences. And so, um, Barb talked about these, these starter kits where it's prescriptive, you've got a demo and, um, a way that customers can get off the ground and running, right? >>Cause we want to be able to shrink that time to market, the time to value that customers can watch these applications. And we want to be able to, to tell them specifically how we can map back to their business initiatives. So I see a huge opportunity to align on these industry solutions. As BARR mentioned, we're already doing that where we've released a few around financial services working in healthcare and retail as well. So that is going to be a way for us to allow customers to go even faster and start to map two lines of business with Alteryx. >>Great. Thanks Derek. Bob, what can we expect if we're observing this relationship? What should we look for in the coming year? >>A lot specifically with snowflake, we'll continue to invest in the partnership. Uh, we're co innovators in this journey, including snow park extensibility efforts, which Derek will tell you more about shortly. We're also launching these great news strategic solution blueprints, and extending that at no charge to our partners with snowflake, we're already collaborating with their retail and CPG team for industry blueprints. We're working with their data marketplace team to highlight solutions, working with that data in their marketplace. More broadly, as I mentioned, we're relaunching the ultra partner program designed to really better support the unique partner types in our global ecosystem, introducing new benefits so that with every partner, achievement or investment with ultra score, providing our partners with earlier access to benefits, um, I could talk about our program for 30 minutes. I know we don't have time. The key message here Alteryx is investing in our partner community across the business, recognizing the incredible value that they bring to our customers every day. >>Tarik will give you the last word. What should we be looking for from, >>Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Dave. As BARR mentioned, Altrix has been the forefront of innovating with us. They've been integrating into, uh, making sure again, that customers get the full investment out of snowflake things like in database push down that I talked about before that extensibility is really what we're excited about. Um, the ability for Ultrix to plug into this extensibility framework that we call snow park and to be able to extend out, um, ways that the end users can consume snowflake through, through sequel, which has traditionally been the way that you consume snowflake as well as Java and Scala, not Python. So we're excited about those, those capabilities. And then we're also excited about the ability to plug into the data marketplace to provide third party data sets, right there probably day sets in, in financial services, third party, data sets and retail. So now customers can build their data applications from end to end using ultrasound snowflake when the comprehensive 360 view of their customers, of their partners, of even their employees. Right? I think it's exciting to see what we're going to be able to do together with these upcoming innovations. Great >>Barb Tara, thanks so much for coming on the program, got to leave it right there in a moment, I'll be back with some closing thoughts in a summary, don't go away. >>1200 hours of wind tunnel testing, 30 million race simulations, 2.4 second pit stops make that 2.3. The sector times out the wazoo, whites are much of this velocity's pressures, temperatures, 80,000 components generating 11.8 billion data points and one analytics platform to make sense of it all. When McLaren needs to turn complex data into insights, they turn to Altryx Qualtrics analytics, automation, >>Okay, let's summarize and wrap up the session. We can pretty much agree the data is plentiful, but organizations continue to struggle to get maximum value out of their data investments. The ROI has been elusive. There are many reasons for that complexity data, trust silos, lack of talent and the like, but the opportunity to transform data operations and drive tangible value is immense collaboration across various roles. And disciplines is part of the answer as is democratizing data. This means putting data in the hands of those domain experts that are closest to the customer and really understand where the opportunity exists and how to best address them. We heard from Jay Henderson that we have all this data exhaust and cheap storage. It allows us to keep it for a long time. It's true, but as he pointed out that doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Data is spewing out from our operational systems, but much of it lacks business context for the data teams chartered with analyzing that data. >>So we heard about the trend toward low code development and federating data access. The reason this is important is because the business lines have the context and the more responsibility they take for data, the more quickly and effectively organizations are going to be able to put data to work. We also talked about the harmonization between centralized teams and enabling decentralized data flows. I mean, after all data by its very nature is distributed. And importantly, as we heard from Adam Wilson and Suresh Vittol to support this model, you have to have strong governance and service the needs of it and engineering teams. And that's where the trifecta acquisition fits into the equation. Finally, we heard about a key partnership between Altrix and snowflake and how the migration to cloud data warehouses is evolving into a global data cloud. This enables data sharing across teams and ecosystems and vertical markets at massive scale all while maintaining the governance required to protect the organizations and individuals alike. >>This is a new and emerging business model that is very exciting and points the way to the next generation of data innovation in the coming decade. We're decentralized domain teams get more facile access to data. Self-service take more responsibility for quality value and data innovation. While at the same time, the governance security and privacy edicts of an organization are centralized in programmatically enforced throughout an enterprise and an external ecosystem. This is Dave Volante. All these videos are available on demand@theqm.net altrix.com. Thanks for watching accelerating automated analytics in the cloud made possible by Altryx. And thanks for watching the queue, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. We'll see you next time.

>>Welcome back to the cubes. Continuous live coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 live from Las Vegas. It's I'm Lisa Martin. And it's so great to say that we are doing with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners. One of the most important hybrid tech events of the year. We've two sets over a hundred guests to remote studios, lots going on. I've got an alumni back with me and a new guest. Please. Welcome back. Sabina. Jo said the GM of technology partners at AWS and Neil Fowler joins her is the GM of micro-focus AMC. And you're going to tell me what AMC stands for >>Application modernization and >>Connectivity. I love it. Awesome guys. It's great. It's great to see you again in person. Thank you for having us. It's great to have the buzz. I know it's gonna be a little bit hard to hear, but great to have. AWS has done a phenomenal job of getting everyone in here safely. I want to give them kudos to that. So being to talk to me with, it's been a while since I've seen you in person, but talk to me about your current role at AWS. What's going on? >>Yeah, so I'm the general manager for technology partnerships globally out of the Americas. We also help partners out of EMEA and APAC grow in the Americas. And one of the great examples of a successful partnership is micro-focus with their solutions across application modernization security, database services, mainframes. >>And so from your perspective, through your lens, how do you think they're performing as a partner? Yes. >>So, um, first of all, kudos to Neil and the entire micro-focus team. They have done a great job leaning in with a cloud first strategy with SAS solutions on AWS and these solutions help customers across application modernization, application, delivery, security, cyber resiliency, database services, and also it performance management. And we've been working with them now for a few years. And in fact, today we have actually 400 customer wins together regulations and then also eight digit annual recurring revenue. They have six active listings in marketplace and all of this is really helping customers move their workloads and modernize their workloads into AWS. >>We've seen that such an acceleration nail in the digital transformation cloud adoption. The pandemic has really been a forcing function for that. There are some silver linings, but talk to me about some of the things that you've seen at micro-focus the last 20 months or so. And how have you helped those 400 customers, you know, getting to that big ARR, how are you helping them with that acceleration? >>Well, I think as you're saying that there's lots of changes in the last 12 to 18 months, some of it brought on by the pandemic and the change in business in business to having to respond, deliver solutions more quickly to the market, as well as remote working. So optimizing and the economic environment of costs, but being there to be more dynamic, it really has caused businesses to have to do something different than just to be able to survive and serve their customers better. That was a >>Big thing that we saw in the very beginning. It was not survival mode. And then of course it wasn't too long when we started seeing those survivors really start to thrive. And you started seeing who were going to be the winners of tomorrow. Cause the thing is every company, these days is a data company. If it's not, it's going to be passed up by competitor, that's right there in the rear view mirror. >>For sure. And so we've got, you know, organizations, so running mainframes, you know, older applications, legacy applications, modernization, where are most industries in terms of adopting that, the mindset, first of all, that they need to change? Well, I think across the whole industry, I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's retail. I mean, if you think about airlines with when the, when the pandemic hit business went down to, unless they've got that elastic nature of flashy to respond to it, but everyone had to bring in new services, new offerings very quickly. So the ability to be able to innovate in their environments and bring more solutions to their customers in a really fast way, you know, they couldn't just sit there and work with what they had. They had to move forward just to be able to stay in the business, but also be able to reduce the costs out of what they're trying to do. So running and transforming at the same time. >>Absolutely. And so how can organizations integrate existing core applications with new technologies to really be able to thrive in today's dynamic market? >>We look at modernization overall. We think of it in sort of three different ways with application process and infrastructure. So with a move to cloud, that's the infrastructure modernization they've immediately got far more access to more scalable dynamic elastic, compute resources, as well as all the technology platforms they have around. And then if you look at the application size and that's where the Microfocus platform comes in, we can help customers actually move those applications forward in terms of making them available through API APIs, maybe as a journey to microservices and cloud native. But once that core business logic and that data is available, it can be integrated into artificial intelligence machine learning and actually rained out the whole solution. So the final part of that from the process modernization, if you, as they're developing these applications with new tools, new ranges, in terms of where they can deploy on the AWS platform, they can automate the build deployment and operations so that all those existing applications and they were running on to contemporary platform with full access to the technologies that were available. >>That's fantastic and so necessary for businesses in any industry. So can you talk about some of the different business units of micro-focus? Are there any ones in particular that you want to call out? >>Yeah, so we work with them across all of their business units, but some of them that come to my mind is of course, Neil and team are doing a great job with application modernization and connectivity, really helping customers modernize the applications. And as customers are modernizing the applications, their cyber resiliency business unit is helping customers secure those applications. And then they also have their it operations management bridge product listed in marketplace. And then just since September are verdict a business unit launch Vertica accelerator on AWS. So I think they have a very holistic story to help customers >>On AWS. Talk to me a little bit, Neil, about cyber resiliency. We have seen such a dramatic change in cybersecurity in the threat landscape the last 20 months. I think I saw a stat recently that ransomware was up almost 11 X in the first half of 2021. Every, every day that companies had had a company, that data is gotta be secure. It's no longer a nice to have. That is a core requirement. How are you helping customers achieve that cyber? >>Well, the thing is, I mean, as you say, across the whole spectrum from cyber, from, from the identity access management through data encryption, through data protection, it's not, it's not a nice to actually say it's not a nice to have Kate take capability. You really have to have an integrated solution to be able to manage access control it, and also generating the events in terms of being able to, if anyone tries to get into the systems and log it because, you know, before, by the time you've discovered something it's too late, so you really need a combined solution for multi-factor authentication to really take it to that next level. >>Absolutely. Right. Once you've detected it, it's too late. And I mean, with ransomware as a service, cyber criminals are getting so much more sophisticated and also more brazen. There's so much money in it that the security front is, is I think even more interesting now than it's ever been. Talk to me about some joint customers and how you've helped them together with AWS with micro-focus achieve some of those key outcomes that you were talking about earlier. Well, I think >>Obviously with AWS as a platform has quite over a technology solutions going in, what we often find with our customers is a lots of, um, they're coming from an existing on-prem solution. So they need that hybrid model. So as part of taking that forward, been able to have that integrated solution that allows them to work both on-prem and as part of the cloud, most of it all being hooked up now, even that from even down to the, uh, as they're developing the applications now to do static code analysis, to help those applications be more secure with things like 40 pound demand, as well as integrating internet security platform for multifactor. So I think as you know, it's a combination of Brunel to bridge between all the different technologies, but have one single view of mail to protect the whole real estate, multiple layers for both external and internal threat. So that's, that's the other thing you also need to take into and can be able to protect all, all layers multi-layered approach. >>Absolutely. But you're right. The internal threats is something that we don't talk about as much, but that is obviously a substantial problem for organizations and most, if not any industries to be, to talk to me a little bit about, let's kind of get into the, the responsibilities that you have a little bit more in there. You've got responsibility for multiple solutions segments at AWS. You told me before we went live, you have 50 meetings this week. My goodness. And since day one, it taught all good. It's fun, fun. It is. Talk to me about AWS approach to partnering. What does it look like? What are some of the things that you think are really critical components? Yeah. >>So as you may have heard, we always start with the, at Amazon and AWS, we start with the customer. We work backwards when we are relaunching our products, our programs or services, you really go and ask the customers, what do you want us to develop? Where do you want us to focus the resources? It takes a lot of discipline to do that, but it's something that where we really want to walk the talk and we use the same approach with our partners when we started to work with micro-focus, we really kind of want to make sure that what we are working on together is what customers want, because we firmly believe that once you lay that foundation of that solution, you can scale your business a lot more quicker. Your story is a lot more simple and the customers are going to find a lot of value in what you are doing together. So it's really all about the customer for us. It is >>Absolutely critical, right? That's the whole point that the whole reason that we're here now, talk to me a little bit about maybe some cultural alignment with AWS, that customer first customer obsession. It sounds like at Microfocus, very similar. >>Absolutely. I mean, the way that we always think about how we're building our products, it's all around customer centric innovation. So that aspect of trying to make sure that we can solve what the business, understanding what the customers are trying to do to then help develop, to deliver solutions that meet that and that combination of a, the way that we look at it from that infrastructure modernization and the range of technologies that are available and that relentless focus on making customer successful is so key. But we have to make sure that that collaboration works together to make sure that the solutions align and we're helping customers get there together >>In your customer conversations. I imagine they've changed quite a bit during the pandemic with so many things being escalated to the C-suite to the board. How have your, how important is that cultural alignment between AWS and Microfocus from your customer's perspective? Is it something that comes up fairly often? Well, >>It's, it's a, I think it, when you actually get a mismatching culture, it's more obvious. So don't think that necessarily people are looking for it to say, I need organizations, but if you're not thinking the same way, you're not behaving the same way and actually partnering. I think that partnering part of it is really important because you're both working together to come up with that desired outcome. So I think it's more, more obvious when it isn't a good match as opposed to what it looking for that particular site. But I think that's a really key aspect in the sense of working together to help that customer be successful. >>Right? That's a great point that you bring up, but it's probably more obvious when it isn't working than when it's beautifully aligned, falling into place and really focused on that customer. So what are some of the things that attendees can, can feel and see and learn at the micro-focus booth at this year's reinvent nail, >>As well as obviously the key Roundup application modernization, where we're looking at the mainframe modernization on the site, we've got the full range of the Microsoft booth in terms of cyber resilience, as well as our, uh, item, my top, uh, it operations management or ADM portfolios. So we've got a lot of technologies which we can learn about in the booth interactive as well as all by experts to understand how we can do all these things and work together as part of the AWS platform to be able to deliver those solutions. >>Excellent. I'm sure there will be plethora of, of knowledge shared at the booth there. Last question, Neil, for you, talk to me about the vision going forward with the partnership. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to as we end 2021 and go into hopefully what is a better year, 2022? >>You know, one of the key things, you know, especially range, no one might, my passionate areas is helping our customers really look in terms of building the platform of the future. We can help solve their customer the problems today, but we're really trying to create that innovation platform to going through. So again, that combination of the technologies that we can bring to help our customers and the breadth and the investment that AWS continue making in the platform, those two combinations really helps us help our customers, not just solve today's problems, who really move into the forward to be the platform for innovation for the next decade. >>And that's really critical that that future ready state that is so undefined most of the time, I mean, none of us saw the pandemic coming, all right. That was a complete shock, but to be able to partner together, to help your customers really set up the foundation to be innovative as things happen that we can't even predict is really critical. So congratulations on your 400 customer wins your eight digit ARR. That's fantastic. Yes, we thank you so much for joining us on the queue, talking about the Microfocus AWS partnership and all of the successes that you guys have had. Great job. And I hope that you have cough drops and a lot of water this week. Sabina. I hope you do too guys. Thanks for joining me. Pleasure for my is I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.