>> It's been great. >> Robert Herjavec. >> I mean, you guys are excited where you are, no? >> Dancing with the Stars, of course. >> His CUBE alumni. (techno music) Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018 brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. (crowd talking) >> And welcome back to our live coverage here in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, here for three days of wall to wall coverage, 8,000 people up from 4,000 last year. Growing Kubernetes and the Cloud Native ecosystem around KubeCon. Next two guests, John Morello, CTO of Twistlock, hot start-up to the news. And Nanda Kumar, who's a Fellow Systems engineer at Verizon's Global Technology Service. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> Congratulations on your news and Kelsey wearing your shirt on theCUBE earlier. (they laugh) >> Thanks for having us. >> So take a minute to explain what you guys do, your story, you guys got to lot of hot things happening. Take a minute to talk about the company's value-- >> Yeah, sure, so we've been around for about four years now or going on four years. We're kind of the first company in this space that's really focused on cloud native cybersecurity. So, the idea is not just to take the existing capabilities that you've had on traditional systems and kind of retrofit them onto this new platform. But really to leverage the way that the cloud native space works, to be able to do security in a different and hopefully a more effective way. Cloud native has this notion of immutability and being able to take the same artifact from development to staging to production. And that enables us to do things in a security fashion that you really haven't been able to do in the past. Like actually be able to enforce security controls at the very beginning of the life cycle of the app. To be able to ensure consistency in your compliance posture all the way through production. And then as we learn things at runtime, to be able to signal that knowledge back to the developer, so they can actually improve the security application in the beginning. We basically have a platform that gives you those capabilities, vulnerability management, compliance, runtime defense, and firewalling across VMs, containers, and serverless across any clouds you have. We're not specific to any one cloud provider-- >> Is like telemetry coming back to the developer in real time? >> Yeah, basically as an example, when you have an application that's deployed, in the old world you as the developer would give the app to an operator, they would deploy it, and maybe weeks later, somebody would scan it, and they'd say you've got these vulnerabilities and then they have to go back and tell somebody to go and fix them. There's a lot of time where you're exposed, there's a lot of cost with that operation. The way that we're able to do it for the vulnerability case is as the developer builds the application, every build they do, Twistlock can scan that and see the vulnerabilities and actually enforce that as a quality gate and say if you've got critical vulnerabilities, you have to fix 'em before you progress. And then as you take that application and move that into test and staging and production, we create this dynamic runtime model that describes basically an implicit allow list of what's normal behaviors. So you don't have to tell us that my web server normally runs in Gen X and listens on port 80, we learn that automatically. We create this reference model where you can understand what's normal and then we automatically prevent anomalies. So unlike that traditional world of security where you had to have a whole bunch of manual rules that try to blacklist every thing that was bad, (John Furrier laughs) we just say, we learn what's good and only allow that. >> It's predictive and prescriptive in one. >> Yeah, exactly. >> What's the role here with Kubernetes, how do you fit into the Kubernetes standardization, momentum? >> For us, we've kind of pre-dated the rise of Kubernetes in some ways, and really supported Kubernetes from the very beginning when the project became popular. Our platform is designed to work as a native cloud native app itself, so when you deploy Twistlock, you run the Twistlock console, our management service and API controller. All that's run just as a cloud native app. You deploy as a replication controller. When you deploy Twistlock defender, our agent effective error, containerized agents to all the nodes where you're writing compute jobs, you run that as a Damon set. So for us, not only do we protect the platform, but we just are a part of the platform. There's nothing abnormal that you have to do. You deploy it and manage it like you would any other Kubernetes application. >> All right, Nanda, let's pull you into the conversation here. >> Sure. Verizon, obviously most people know, explain what your group does, how cloud native fits into what you're doing. >> I'm part of the Global Technology Services organization. Verizon, as you probably know, is a mixed bag of different types of businesses brought together, wireless being the most prominent one that most of you know about it. But we also have other solutions, like our file solutions. And recently with our acquisition of Yahoo, which is gold, and so forth. Verizon is actually on a major transformation journey. Our transformation journey spans around a five year program. We are in year number three of this transformation and cloud native and cloud technology is a very foundational aspect for us as part of this transformation. I was just chatting with John earlier. Opportunity like this doesn't come that often because we are in a perfect intersection of where automation and Verizon is doing a cloud migration and then you have these cloud native technologies that have been made available. Where it's Kubernetes, container, and so forth. So that mesh of the opportunity to migrate. And as you migrate, you're taking advantage of these technologies, and modernizing your application stack is a big win. >> Okay, can you connect for us the intersection of what you were just talking about and 5G, which is you know, really going to be a huge impact on everything happening in telecommunications. >> Yeah, the whole idea about 5G for us is it's not just the next generation of technology. It's all about the human element ability of it. Basically it means we want to make sure that the technology is used to solve real human problems and the technology is capable of doing that. Be it whether it's a life science or be it in transportation and so forth. We really want to make sure that the technology is being used to solve real human problems and to enable the consumption of this technology. We won't take advantage of cloud native services to support it. >> Help boil it down for us because, just in general, you say even domestically, I think it's like 40% of the U.S. population doesn't have access to broadband. Those of us at the conference here understand that wireless isn't always reliable. 5G silver bullet, everybody's going to have infinite bandwidth everywhere, right? >> Absolutely. (Stu laughs) And that's the valued proposition of the technology that it brings to the table. I know the spread of the technology is going to vary depending upon the commercialization of the product, the solution, and so forth. But the reality is in the new world that we live in, it is not just one piece of technology that's going to make it. It's going to be a mesh of the new technologies like 5G with a combination of WiFi and so forth. All of this coming together. It all comes down to fundamentally what are the use cases or what type of solutions are you going to go after and how it's going to make sense. >> How has cloud native in this transformation changed how you guys make investments? Obviously, the security equation's paramount. Central to the that, lot of data. How is the investments and how you guys are building out changed? Obviously you're looking at re-imagining operations, security, et cetera et cetera. How's that going to shape for you guys-- >> One of the things that Nanda and I were talking about earlier that not because of cloud native but it's enabled by cloud native. I think you look at almost all organizations today, and to reuse that phrase that Andreessen quoted about softwaring the world. It really is a true thing. Unlike in the past where IT had been this cost center that most organizations sought to strangle out and reduce as much as possible, I think most, at least modern companies that will be successful in the future, realize that that's part of their competitive advantage. It's not just about providing an app because your competitor has an app, it's about providing a better experience so that you're driving more revenue, having a better relationship, a longer term deeper relationship with that customer. Like we were talking about, in his case, if they build kind of a minimal application or minimal experience for their customers, their customers may choose to go to AT&T or whomever else if they can feel like hey, it's easier for me to work with them. I get better data, I can use my systems more easily. If you have that inflection point where people are having to really invest in building better software, better industry specific software, you need those tools of mass innovation to do that. And that's what cloud native really is. It's about being able to take and innovate and iterate on those innovations much more rapidly than you've been able to do in the past. And so it's really this confluence of those two trends that make this space as big as it is. That's why we have so many people here at KubeCon. >> Oh, you go faster too. The investment in apps, your applications, faster. And your talking about your security solution replaces the old way of hey, is there a problem, we'll patch it. >> It also has to get away from that approach where people took in the past where security was always this friction. It was this impediment, you know, you wanted to deploy something and you had to go through the security review and create all this rules and it was a hassle and slowed things down. If that's your approach to security, you're going to be at a fundamental conflict to this new approach. >> I think you'll be out of business personally, I think that ship has sailed, that's dead. We see the breaches every day, you see on all the dark webs who've been harvesting all that. IoT though is a different kind of animal. How are you guys looking at the IoT equation because that's a good use case for cloud? You can push now compute to the edge, you don't have to move data around. Certainly you guys are in the telecom business, you know what that means, so latency matters. How are you looking at the edge, IoT, and where does security fit into that? >> In terms of IoT, I think as you mentioned, there are going to be use cases where IoT's going to be very critical. There are two paradigms to the concept of the mobile edge compute. One is for the IoT use cases, the other could be even for like AR/VR is a good example. You want the compute to be so fast where you want responses immediately based on the location you are and so forth. So that's a very important foundation that we're working on and making that a reality for our organization to come use it. And of course any solution that we provide, security needs to be baked into it, because that's going to be foundation for how to-- >> Back to your 5G point, that's great back haul too for those devices. That one at least. If they want to send data back or interface with the edge, and power and compute, you need power and connectivity. >> Yep, exactly, very true. >> What's next, I guess? If you look forward, where's this journey going? How does this partnership help solve things? >> I think the key to any successful transformation is you got to take into consideration your current landscape. You certainly can have a broad vision of where the future is and so forth, but if you can't build the bridge between where we are and where we need to go, that's going to be a very challenging space so when you look at the cloud native technologies, we look at making it operational efficiency for us. In terms of how do we do our operations, like the earlier question we talked about, what is changing for us? Our operation's getting better. Our security portion is getting better because we're now shifting more of this to left. Which means as the workloads are being built and so forth. We're taking into consideration how it's going to run, where it's going to run and so forth. So that's going to create the savings and operational efficiency, which then allows us to take that and transform it into how do we focus on more modern technologies and modern solutions and so forth. >> Customer satisfaction. >> And customer satisfaction. >> Those are the top line business for every new model. >> So I got to ask, how is it going with Twistlock? Where's their role in your transformation? It's on the security side? >> Mm-hmm. >> Where do they play into your mix? >> So when we rolled out our solution for our Kubernetes platform, we certainly want to make sure that, to John's earlier point, where we can shift left and really look at security wholistically. And the only way you could do that is you need to capture the essence or integrate security as the project's being built. Because today we do have a security portion, but it's kind of where you have it during the development phase or during operations or doing it on time. You're not able to stitch it together. But with container and Kubernetes, you now have the advantage of really knowing what is end to end. And that is where our partnership with Twistlock has to be able to oversee that and provide that insight on what is running, where it's running, what levels exist, and how do we fix it. >> It kind of makes sense too. We've talked for years, the perimeter is dead. You guys are addressing security upfront at the application level where it's coding. This is working out for you guys well? >> Yep, and that's been a big shift in fact for why they've been successful with this transformation. Because we know have inside steward and everybody in the organization has a line off-site to what's going on, where things are running and so forth. It's been a great partnership. >> John, talk about this dynamic 'cause this is really kind of compelling because we've heard, "Oh, yeah, we're throwing everything "against the wall in security." And everyone always says, "Hey, the perimeter is dead "and you got to start with security in mind from day one." Well, I mean, what is day one? The minute you start coding, right? >> I get your overall point about the perimeter being dead. I would actually rephrase it a bit and say, "The perimeter being dissolved." And I think that's really a more probably accurate way to look at it. What used to be this very tightly defined like, we deploy things in this network or even VPC and it's got this control around it. Whereas a lot of customers today we see choosing an intentional multi-cloud strategy. They want to preserve the ability to have some leverage, not just with Amazon, but with Azure, or with Google, or whomever it may be on-premises. And when you have that model where you've got infrastructure and multiple regions, multiple different providers, you no longer have that very clean separation between what's yours and what's kind of out on the outside. And so one of the things that we really think is important is to be able to bring the perimeter to the application. So the way that we look at protecting the application is around the app itself, regardless of what the underlying compute platform is, the cloud, the region, it's really about protecting the app. You learn how those different microservices normally communicate with each other. You only allow that normal good communication unless you can really constrain a blast radius if you do have some kind of compromise in the future. And the minute you really try to mitigate that compromise is to again find those vulnerabilities as you develop the app, and prevent them in development before they ever get out to production. >> And that's a super smart approach, I love that. I think it's a winner, congratulations. Final question, what's the prediction for multi-cloud in 2019? Since you brought it up, multi-cloud seems to be the hot thing. What's your prediction 2019? It becomes a conversation? It becomes practice? >> I would say at this point, it already is practice in most organizations. And I would say that in 2019, you'll see that become something that's accepted not just as an option but as really the preferred, the better operational model. So you're able to choose technology platforms and operational approaches that are designed to work in a model in which you have multiple providers. Because you have a dependency layer that you can take now with Kubernetes and containers that's universal across those. Theoretically, you could have always taken a VM you put in ager and moved it to AWS, but it was really difficult and painful and hard to do that. If you do that well with Kubernetes, it's really pretty straightforward to deploy an application across multiple providers or multiple regions of the same provider even. And I think you'll see that become a more real thing in 2019 because it gives you as a company, or you as a customer, more leverage to be able to choose the services and negotiate the rates that you want with your provider. >> And if you move security to the app level like you guys are doing, you take away all that extra work around how to send policy and make it dynamic. >> Exactly. Our customers may have one Twistlock environment that manages things in Azure and AWS and GCP and on-premises and that's fine because we care about protecting the app not the interlying infrastructure. >> You agree? >> Absolutely, I think that's going to be the case even from our perspective. You're always going to look for where is the best place around these workloads and in a cost-effective way and secure manner. And as long as you're a single-controlled plane that you can manage it, I think the multi-cloud is going to be the ideal-- >> Make it easier to operate, standard language for developers, lock in security at the front end. >> That's right. >> Good stuff. Guys thanks for coming out. >> Sure. >> Appreciate the insight. Smart commentary here on security, cloud native, Kubernetes, I'll break it down here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us. More day one coverage of three days of live coverage here in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days, cloud storage, immutability, and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on it, has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is, oftentimes, data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats, this is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring, but object storage, historically, was seen as this low-cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard tradeoffs between cost and performance. That has changed, the ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parity with other storage formats, but cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes, my name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose-built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues, first up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi will then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi, and then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss School, let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO and Co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company, David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Great to have you, so look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years, why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder Jeff Flowers and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disk drive was probably 500 gigabytes and now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even 100 terabyte drives coming down the road and, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disk drives is going to run out of steam because, even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new, highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it and they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab, designing and testing this new storage architecture and when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we can sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite. You know, when you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zetabytes or something like that and if you look at that as you know, the potential market size during that data, we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions and so I said, look, this is a great opportunity, if you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on-prem, if you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud, we're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter, and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches, but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes, but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like Veeam, Convo, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups, they're never going to pay a ransom. So, once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well, so that you can't do a full restore from your backups. And that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you, you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know, write once read many, and those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud, and it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff but, you know, the net result is if you store your backups in immutable buckets, in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time, so you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that, once that data is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it, or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty. It's obviously a big deal, I mean, especially for companies with the presence overseas, but what's really is any digital business these days, how should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws and if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in-country, you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, and I've probably forgotten one or two, but the reason we do that is twofold; one is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency, and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos, and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in-country, so, you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in May of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws and we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and think it continues to evolve, we see judgments in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the U.S. and the elimination of third party cookies, what does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things of this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the U.S., Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues so it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world and this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi, where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world and we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia and so forth, you know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base and that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah, it's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David, thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations, what does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud and I think storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth, and it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local, and there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential, you know, the most analysts think that the full, all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range, whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud, like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month and so I think people are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow, that's like a six X more expensive in the clouds, more than six X, all right, thank you, David,-- >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business, you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE, a great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, keep it right there. ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Brenda in sales got an email ♪ ♪ Click here for a trip to Bombay ♪ ♪ It's not even called Bombay anymore ♪ ♪ But you clicked it anyway ♪ ♪ And now our data's been held hostage ♪ ♪ And now we're on sinking ship ♪ ♪ And a hacker's in our system ♪ ♪ Just 'cause Brenda wanted a trip ♪ ♪ She clicked on something stupid ♪ ♪ And our data's out of our control ♪ ♪ Into the hands of a hacker's ♪ ♪ And he's a giant asshole. ♪ ♪ He encrypted it in his basement ♪ ♪ He wants a million bucks for the key ♪ ♪ And I'm pretty sure he's 15 ♪ ♪ And still going through puberty ♪ ♪ I know you didn't mean to do us wrong ♪ ♪ But now I'm dealing with this all week long ♪ ♪ To make you all aware ♪ ♪ Of all this ransomware ♪ ♪ That is why I'm singing you this song ♪ ♪ C'mon ♪ ♪ Take it from me ♪ ♪ The director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince Nairobi ♪ ♪ 'Cuz he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ (gentle music) >> Joining me now is Drew Schlussel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi, hey Drew, good to see you again, thanks for coming back in theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, great to see you. >> All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, Zero Trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword and now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate, what's Wasabi's take on Zero Trust. >> So, absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention, Wasabi's take is Zero Trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places, right, where the bad guys are getting in. And, you know, I think of Zero Trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, it takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are, of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. >> Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and, you know, design and your Zero Trust and you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure, so we're going to talk about that, there's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew, about immutability and air gaps, I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics, how do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? >> So, in terms of air gap and immutability, right, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right, to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data, you need to have a copy stored offsite, and that copy needs to be immutable and we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. >> You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because, sometimes people don't understand, you actually are a cloud, you're not building on other people's public clouds and this storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that, tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. >> Yeah, I appreciate that, so there's definitely some misconception, we are our own cloud storage service, we don't run on top of anybody else, right, it's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard, we interoperate with practically hundreds of applications, primarily in this case, right, we're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage and so we've made it really simple, in many cases, you'll see Wasabi as you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, you know, put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say multifactor authentication, and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. >> I mean, we just heard from David Friend, if I did my math right, he was talking about, you know, 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that, how are you able to achieve such attractive economics? >> Yeah, so, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right, less expensive than the hyperscalers. And you know, we talked about this at Vermont, right? There's some secret sauce there and you know, we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity and the fact is we're also not having to run, you know, a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time, so we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, you know, going to be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right, they see the fact that their data is growing 40, 80% year over year, they know they need to have some place to keep it secure, and, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves, in fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. >> And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What the feature called? Can you double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the term in S3 is Object Lock and what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage, and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape, or form, the application can't change it, the system administration can't change it, Wasabi can't change it, okay, it is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right, in adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors and I named off a few earlier and the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security. Right, when you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right, they can't take away the data and that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. >> And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API, so if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data, beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right, that's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right, point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, you know, for whatever 30, 60, 90 days, and then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you know, you're often running with Wasabi. >> I talked to my open about the allure of object storage historically, you know, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, and we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up, but I forgot to answer something earlier, right, you said that immutability is a feature and I want to make it very clear that it is a feature but it's an API request. Okay, so when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right, is typically something that the other folks charge for, right, and I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge, you want to, you know, pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge, and that's an important thing, because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects, and you want to get a list of those objects, or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data, with Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. >> Excellent, so thank you for that. So, you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? You know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe, a paint a picture for us example, or two? >> Sure, so, again, we just do storage, right, that is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors, whether it's, you know, active archive, backup and recovery, IOT, surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right, those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata, they just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right, so just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right, you literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API, getting started is incredibly easy, right, we offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte, and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right, it's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty, I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're global company, right, so there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world some place that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, as well as your compliance requirements. >> Yeah, we did talk about sovereignty, Drew, this is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of a industry historian, when I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out, and for instance, I know one bought competitor of Carbonite, and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, they couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud in part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems. Like, you know, ransomware, of mutability and recovery, I'll give you the last word, Drew. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right, there's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, you know, but, you know, not all data's hot all the time and by hot, I mean, you know, extremely hot, you know, let's take, you know, real time analytics for, maybe facial recognition, right, that requires sub-millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, right, you want to store that data for a long, long time, and you're going to want to also tap back into it later, so, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like, you know, cold glacial type of tiered storage, yeah, don't believe the hype, you're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a Wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment, you know, what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right, we're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that, I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. >> All right, Drew, thank you for that, definitely we see the momentum, in a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information technology services at The Hotchkiss School, keep it right there. >> Hey, I'm Nate, and we wrote this song about ransomware to educate people, people like Brenda. >> Oh, God, I'm so sorry. We know you are, but Brenda, you're not alone, this hasn't just happened to you. >> No! ♪ Colonial Oil Pipeline had a guy ♪ ♪ who didn't change his password ♪ ♪ That sucks ♪ ♪ His password leaked, the data was breached ♪ ♪ And it cost his company 4 million bucks ♪ ♪ A fake update was sent to people ♪ ♪ Working for the meat company JBS ♪ ♪ That's pretty clever ♪ ♪ Instead of getting new features, they got hacked ♪ ♪ And had to pay the largest crypto ransom ever ♪ ♪ And 20 billion dollars, billion with a b ♪ ♪ Have been paid by companies in healthcare ♪ ♪ If you wonder buy your premium keeps going ♪ ♪ Up, up, up, up, up ♪ ♪ Now you're aware ♪ ♪ And now the hackers they are gettin' cocky ♪ ♪ When they lock your data ♪ ♪ You know, it has gotten so bad ♪ ♪ That they demand all of your money and it gets worse ♪ ♪ They go and the trouble with the Facebook ad ♪ ♪ Next time, something seems too good to be true ♪ ♪ Like a free trip to Asia! ♪ ♪ Just check first and I'll help before you ♪ ♪ Think before you click ♪ ♪ Don't get fooled by this ♪ ♪ Who isn't old enough to drive to school ♪ ♪ Take it from me, the director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince in Nairobi ♪ ♪ Because he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ >> It's a pretty sweet car. ♪ A kid without facial hair, who lives with his mom ♪ ♪ To learn more about this go to wasabi.com ♪ >> Hey, don't do that. ♪ Cause if we had Wasabi's immutability ♪ >> You going to ruin this for me! ♪ This fifteen-year-old wouldn't have on me ♪ (gentle music) >> Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at The Hotchkiss School, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut, hello, Kevin. >> Hello, it's nice to be here, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about The Hotchkiss School and your role. >> Sure, The Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role as the Director of Information Technology Services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >> Yeah, and you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens, what's the unique, you know, or if not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you? >> I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of IT security, IT in general sometimes, so, I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into. >> Because specifically you are potentially spread thin, underfunded, you got students, you got teachers, so there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >> Certainly, because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center, so, data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights and FERPA, some of our students are under 18, so, data privacy laws such as COPPA apply, HIPAA can apply, we have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition so, it's a unique place to be, again, we operate very much like a college would, right, we have all the trappings of a private college in terms of all the operations we do and that's what I love most about working in education is that it's all the industries combined in many ways. >> Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in Drew to the conversation so what are the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your data? >> Well, we take a defense in-depth approach, so we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses, we also keep it simple, you know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching , using multifactor authentication, and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >> Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >> Yeah, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what he's doing, going back to our prior conversation about Zero Trust, right, that defense in-depth approach is beautifully aligned, right, with the Zero Trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right, they need to make sure that the data that they're keeping, evidence, right, is secure and immutable, right, because that's evidence. >> Well, Kevin, paint a picture for us, if you would. So, you were primarily on-prem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and the kind of, I want to get to the before and the after Wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >> Sure, well, I came to The Hotchkiss School about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal, so again, not a lot of funding for IT in general, security, or infrastructure in general, so Nutanix was actually a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hotchkiss and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system that students would use, financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SaaS solutions coming in play, we had also taken some time to do some business continuity, planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue, I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that, so, as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud-based, we didn't really need as much of the on-premise compute and storage as we had, and it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AHV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well and it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small IT shops like ours. >> Yeah, AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor and so you migrated off of VMware avoiding the VTax avoidance, that's a common theme among Nutanix customers and now, did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider Wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >> We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, Wasabi became across our desks and it was such a low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month and then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time, it wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network, you know, some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on the internet that they could be stored as well. So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast, security wise, it has all the features of S3 compliance that works with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily and then there was no egress fees, we can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing as any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs, we need to know what we're going to spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for egress or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously, we need that, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >> So Kevin, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed, were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those concerns as an IT practitioner? >> Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing, there's lots of companies with funny names, I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history, understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from, and really looking into the technology and understanding that the value proposition, the ability to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology in which it lays down data. So, having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for, it may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's not cheap, you know, it's reliable, and that was really our concern. So we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >> Yeah, thank you for that. Drew, explain the whole egress charge, we hear a lot about that, what do people need to know? >> First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, Dave, just like theCUBE, let's be very clear about that, second of all, egress charges, so, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get, every put, every list, everything, okay, it's part of their process, it's part of how they make money, it's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services, we don't do that. And I think, you know, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond what is the list price. In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then, right, their additional cost, the egress costs, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >> So, you used a little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation, so here's what I'm imagining, like I have a lot of stuff, right? And I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly, I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff, that's kind of the same thing here. >> Oh, that's a great metaphor, right? That storage locker, right? You know, can you imagine every time you want to open the door to that storage locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >> No, that would be annoying. >> Or, every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard, you have to pay a door opening fee, right, and then if you want to look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay, and it's ridiculous, it's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker, you've already paid the annual fee, probably, 'cause they gave you a discount on that, so why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what Wasabi does and I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody else. >> Okay, good, that's helpful, it helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin, I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and ransomware protection, for example? >> Yes, cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too, right, this is often the checking the box kind of activity, insurance companies require it, but we want to make it something that people want to do and want to engage with so, even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that, so it wasn't just about protecting our school data, it's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something do in all aspects of your life, especially now that the folks are working hybrid often working from home with equipment from the school, the stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home and so knowing how to protect that is important, so we definitely run those programs in a way that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >> So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until, of course, we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples, is that what you're talking about, about having fun? >> Yeah, I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories, you know, they stop as they run, so they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going, so, you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic, yeah, and that's what I think is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure you know the sender of the email, no, you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not? So, that's where I think the learning comes in. >> Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much, appreciate your time, Kevin, Drew, awesome having you in theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thanks. >> Okay, in a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Announcer: Some things just don't make sense, like showing up a little too early for the big game. >> How early are we? >> Couple months. Popcorn? >> Announcer: On and off season, the Red Sox cover their bases with affordable, best in class cloud storage. >> These are pretty good seats. >> Hey, have you guys seen the line from the bathroom? >> Announcer: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, it just makes sense. >> You don't think they make these in left hand, do you? >> We learned today how a serial entrepreneur, along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data while at the same time, protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple, fast storage, immutability, air gaps, and solid operational processes, let's not forget about that, okay? People and processes are critical and if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign and support of digital transformations. Now, if you want to learn more about immutability and Object Block, click on the Wasabi resource button on this page, or go to wasabi.com/objectblock. Thanks for watching Secure Storage Hot Takes made possible by Wasabi. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, well, see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Que presents HP Discover 2022. Brought to You by HP >>Good morning, everyone. It's the Cube live in Las Vegas. Day two of our coverage of HP Discover 2022 from the Venetian Expo Centre. Lisa Martin and David want a what a day we had yesterday and today. Unbelievable >>for today. Big Big day today, >>Big day Today we've got a lot. We got some big heavy hitters on talking with HP customers. Partners, leadership. We've a couple of guests up with us next. Going to be talking more about the ecosystem. He's welcome. Corey Dire, the chief revenue officer, Digital Realty and Cliff Evans, senior director. H P E Green like partner ecosystem Guys. Great to have you on the >>programme. Thank you. Great to be here. >>Thank you for having us excited to be here >>with. So that's so that's harness that excitement. Cory, talk to us about the partnership. The announcement? What's going on there with Digital Realty and Green like? >>Yeah, we're crazy excited about it. You know, we've got customers dealing with data, gravity and the opportunity around that and how they could make use of it. And then they're thinking through digital transformation. How how you doing? Multi cloud and they need a partnership. To do that in this partnership with Green Leg and digital is perfect solution for them. So I'm crazy excited to be here with Cliff absolute with all of you to talk about it and hopefully build out a great partnership in relationship with HP. >>Talk to us. Sure, you're crazy Excitement >>club? Absolutely no. I think it is absolutely fantastic Partnership. I think the term is coming together as organisations. Bringing the two platforms together isn't it is an amazing thing that we have for customers, customers we know they want. They want a cloud experience. But really, they want to do that without really the DC footprint that had previously. So how did they do that in a way that really works for them in a secure client secure, sustainable way. But with the cloud experience. Really, the combination of the two pieces coming together really makes that happen, and that is what that's exciting. So we >>dig in to the two things that you mentioned Cory digital transformation and multiply. When I go back to the early days of cloud, it was that girl, you know, nobody's going to do anything you know ever again in the data centre. You know Charles Phillips, the the CEO of in four, famously said, Friends don't let friends, Bill Data centres, right? Everything's going in the cloud. So a lot of people predicted, You know, guys like you were going to be in trouble. The exact opposite happened. The market took off. So you mentioned digital transformation of multi cloud. Can we peel the onion on that? What? What is it about those two items? Are there other trends? They're driving your business, >>you know, You tied right on to to where it started. All enterprises started going to the club and then they got to the cloud and there was more that they needed to make that rial. I talk about multi cloud. You're going to use different cloud providers for different opportunities and different applications. And so you have to start thinking about how does this work in a world where you're gonna go to multiple clouds, multiple locations and what it really drove? It is the need for Cole location to make this because you've got a distributed architecture in order to enable all of this and then having to have us help you out with it. And partners like HP. That's part of where it comes from. But if you think through going to the cloud, can you stay there? Is that the full solution? You need to secure sustainable solution for that. One of the opportunities for us around that is that if you're building data centres for yourself on Prem, you don't have all the cloud access we do. We've got more cloud access points than anybody. So that helps in this digital transformation. >>How How much home? I'm sorry, Didn't mean to you how much homogeneity is there are our clients or customers saying, Hey, I kind of want the same experience in the same infrastructure. Same same. Or they saying, Hey, I want to do stuff in Digital Realty that I can't get from, you know, a cloud provider, Oracle Rack. You know, something like that, >>I would tell you that they come to us from all the partners. So we are partner community. We are not going up the stack anywhere on that. We do are we do our part. We're really good at doing the data centres really good at building data. They descended sustainable. Our position in the market is sustainability around it. We were the first to sign up on the science based initiatives for zero kind of carbon neutrality and in the future in 2030. And so yeah, so I think there's the partner aspect that they need help with on it to drive that Yeah. >>And I think from that from the HP Green Lake perspective, I think customers they very much want that that cloud experience. But I want to do on their own terms. The partnership allows that to happen on Gapen simply the cloud experiencing with the green light cloud platform to really go and deliver that genuine cloud experience and then building cloud services. On top of that, they get all the benefits that they would have from a public cloud experience, but done in the way that they would prefer to do it. So it's bringing those pieces together on >>I think the other side of you asked if it was it was the same across the board and ubiquitous. It's very bespoke. Solutions weaken D'oh! Every customer we have has a different footprint. Most from the multinationals. So we think through where their data is, where it needs to be accessed where their customers are, where their employees are, what makes the most sense. And then the partnership we have with HP into a whole lot for making very bespoke solution for that customer and help them be successful. Journey >>s O on. That s o. So what we've done with destroy lt is we have a specific offer around how we go to market with this really going how customers So we call it Green Light with co location. It's all about really positioning on offer to customers that says, Look, we can go and do this with you and do it simply and really make it happen very quickly and efficiently. So the customer ends up with a single contract in a single invoice for Green Lake Cloud Services on the co location piece, all in one single contracts. That just makes it a lot easier in terms of organising on a really big part of that as well is that our involvement is also spans right from the design to the implementation to support. So we do the whole thing to really help organisations golf and do this. So that's the big for me. The big differentiator. So rather than just having Green Lake in Cloud Services, were saying, Look, we can now do the Coehlo piece and they can really take the whole thing to a whole new level in terms of that public cloud experience >>in the sari and that that that invoice comes from HPD or Digital Realty is bundled into that >>correct? Yes, directly through the channel. We can sell that in a number of different ways. Customers get that that single invoice on a big part of that as well, just going a little bit deeper on that. So what we do is we We use a part of the company called Data Centre Technology Services, which are a great kind of consulting organisation with tremendous experience and something like 3000 projects across 40 countries from the very smallest of the very largest of data centre implementation. So all of that really makes the whole thing a lot easier from a customer's perspective in terms of designing, implementing and then supporting. So you pull all of that together. It's fantastic >>and I think it's really changed to add on to that partner in prison. So customers, now we're thinking about it differently and data centres differently, and they see us as a strategic partner along with HP. To go after this used to be space, power and calling. Now it's How much connectivity do you have? What your sustainability profile? What's your security profile? How do you secure this data? Date is the lifeblood of all these companies and you have to have a really secure, sustainable solution for them, >>right? That's absolutely critical for every industry. Talk about the specific value prop at a bespoke co location solution delivers to customers. Maybe you got a favourite customer example that you think really articulates the value of this partnership. >>So I think a combination. So so I think we touched on a lot of it, actually. So there's obviously the data centre aspect itself in terms of with the footprint that realty have across the world, you can pick and choose the data centre in the class of data centre that you want in terms of your Leighton see and connectivity that you want. Then really, it's the green make peace in terms of the flexibility that you get with that really is that value. And as I touched on the Green Lake with Cole Oh, I think for me is from our perspective, I think the biggest piece of value that we provide there to really go make it happen. Yeah, >>there's about 70 applications right now that are part of Green Lake Polo that you can bespoke for what you need to. You can think around your specific solutions that you need, and we've got it all right there with HP Green like and follow for us. And because we have a 290 data centre footprint across 50 markets, it gives us the opportunity really be the data centre provider in the Partner for H P, pretty much anywhere but with connective ity everywhere. >>When you say 70 applications, these the 70 services are you talking about talking >>about? Okay, Category 70 services. There's a lot of stuff. >>Cory, when you talked about sustainability a couple of times, is a really important ingredient of the customer decision. Why is it because they're indirectly paying the power bill or is because that's the right thing to do? And they care. There's increased. People care about it more because you go back a while ago. People way always talked about green it, but it was all lip service. Is that changing or is that there? Is there an economics >>changing in a really big way? Almost every conversation I have with customers is how are you doing Sustainability. So if they're doing an on Prem, that's not their core capabilities. They don't know how to do that. On our end, I mentioned our SP R science based initiatives that we signed up for. But how do we enable that? Enable it for how do we build in designer data centres? How do we actually work them and operate them? And then how do we go after all the green sources of sustainable energy including, I think since 2015, we've issued six billion in green bonds around that same support of it. So yeah, >>and your customer can then I presume, report that on their sustainability report a >>good way to think about it. You no longer have your data centre at its sometimes less efficient way than way are we're really good at building sustainable data centres, and then you can actually get some credits back and forth, >>just from agreement. Perspective. So Green Lake. So there's a specific Forrester Impact report that looks a green lake on how it how it performs from sustainability. Perspective on Greenlee really is giving you their 30% reduction in your energy consumption. So there's a big kind of win there as well, I think. Which is then, >>why? Where does that come from? >>So it Zim part that kind of the avoidance of over provisioning such that you going right size things, Then you have you have you have a certain amount of reserve capacity that you're using them just using the extra consumption piece when you need it. So rather than having everything running at full speed, it really is kind of struggling as to how that work. So you get a combination of effects >>with consulting and the thoughtfulness around this bespoke solution that you have. You end up needing fewer servers, pure technology that drives less power consumption and therefore you get a lot of this same really base it down. You >>talked about the savings you talked about the simplification delivery perspective. Talk about the implementation. What's the time to value that Organisations can glean from this partnership >>superfast So So yeah this This does accelerate the whole process from from initial kind of opportunity if you like and customer inquiry through to actual implementation So previously this would take considerable amount of time in terms of to ing and froing between multiple organisations on Now what we do is coordinate that do it efficiently and effectively So D. C. T s Data Sentinel services team very closely. Just have those connections often do those things incredibly quickly and it does accelerate the whole time >>and they're tied in with our team is well around. Where's the leighton? See where the solutions Because we're really thinking about what is your stack looked like from an HP perspective, but then where you need to deploy it so that you have access to the clouds You have the right proper Leighton see across your environment and you really haven't distributed architecture that works the best for you and your company. >>So this is probably answer those questions Probably both, but I'm asking anyway, I've always been a repatriation sceptic, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. You guys have other data. And maybe this is part of what one of my blind spots question is, is what's driving your business in terms of the EU's case? Is it organisations saying Hey, we want to get out of the data centre business way Don't want to put everything into the cloud but we're going to go on a digital realty and being green leg and we're gonna move into that cola Or is it? People say, You know, while we over rotated into the cloud, you were going to come back. So it's >>both. It's both, >>Yeah, in the empire. The credit. >>I think there are a lot of customers with good intentions on going to the cloud, and then there's some cost with it that maybe they didn't fully factor in it at that time. And now you've got the ability around these bespoke solutions to really right size every bit of this. And when they originally did it, they didn't think through a distributor architecture. They thought my own prim, and then I'm just gonna burst everything that a cloud that's no longer the case, and it's not really the most efficient way to your point about repatriation. They start pulling their storage back in. Well, where do you want your data? Where do you want your storage? You wanted as close as you can to the clouds for that capability and in a solution that's wrapped around it makes it very simple for you. >>I think the repatriation is very real and is increasing, eh? So we're seeing a lot of it in terms of activity and customers really trying to understand the cost that they're incurring now from a public cloud perspective. And how can they do that differently? In fact, with combined offer that we have it, it makes it a lot easier to compare. So, yeah, that really is accelerating because you don't >>see it in the macro numbers. I mean, just to be honest, you see the cloud guys combined growing 35%. And is that because your business is in transition from traditional on prime model, too, and as a service model, and so you've got that imbalance and it gets hidden in >>all that, and I think it's I think it's a new wave of things that are happening. Yeah. I mean, there's a there's a lot of things, obviously, that makes complete sense to me in Public Cloud, but I do think there's been an over rotation towards it, so I think now that realisation and it's going to take time to kind of pick that. But it's absolutely happening. There are a lot of opportunities that we've gotten some very big ones I'd love to talk about. Can't quite talk about them just get but really, where there's big, big savings in terms of what they're paying from a public cloud perspective, Really, what they want is that full management cloud service to go make it happen. So the combination of the data centre piece to Green Lake piece and then some management services, whether they're from ourselves or from party community, from manage service providers that we also work with, that gives them the complete package. >>So I have another premise. A lot of it, of course, is traditionally been focused on internal, and I feel like there's a new era coming. It's talks of the ecosystem. Are you seeing customers not only running there it in digital realty and connecting to the cloud in a hybrid fashion, but also actually building new value and building businesses that are customer facing on that that air monetize herbal. Are you seeing that? Is that happening and having examples, even generic? >>Well, basic from our perspective, our partner community, that's what they do. We have a tonne of enterprise customers, but I'll need to connect and integrate the data that you have doesn't do anything for you, Fitz on its own. And it's not interacting with other data points. And it's not around interacting with other customers, other solutions in one night. So it does help build out a partner community, a solution community for our customers in our data centres and across the >>are their industry patterns emerging. In other words, is that data ecosystems emerging by industry or is a sort of or horizontal? >>There's a mix. So I think there's a lot of lot of financial sector stuff. Yes, certainly. And then certainly manufacturing s O. I think it's interesting that you're getting a bit of a combination, but not a lot of financial sector. >>Of course, the big bags early on that they could build their own cloud. Yeah, now they're probably rethinking that. Yeah, well, maybe >>they're also service providers. When you're that large a za bank on their end. They're doing a lot of work. E. I would also say the other part that a lot of people see as an opportunity is around all the HPC and AI applications as well, in addition to manufacturing distribution. So there's a lot of use cases, a lot of reasons, like us from sort of doing this >>wrap us up with value, perhaps that you're talking Torto Financial Services Organisation or a manufacturing company. What is that 32nd elevator pitch value problem? Why they should go HP Making Digital Realty together. >>So I would say green, like Rico location gives you a single contract. Singling voice, easy to go and design, implement support and go make happen. Sorry, that's very simple way say, very just make it easy >>on. And I would just say thank you on that. It's been great to speak with you guys. And yeah, when you think through that part of it also is a bespoke opportunity to put your data where it needs to be closer to your customers. Closer to the action you were thinking through the rape reiteration of it. A lot of it's being built out there on phones and whatnot. So you've got to think through where your data is and how you managed to >>write and enable every every company in every industry to be a data company. Because that's what, of course, the demanding consumers demanding that demand isn't it is not going to turn down right now. Absolutely. Just thanks so much for David. Very much. Thank you. Together in the ecosystem, there are guests. And Dave l want a I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the key of live from the Venetian Expo Centre in Vegas, Baby. David, I will be back there next guest in a minute.

>>the service experience has dramatically changed over the course of history within enterprise it once a purely break fixed business that put out fires technology services has become a linchpin of customer I. T. Execution strategies where companies carefully select technology partners to anticipate and remediate potential problems before they occur. Moreover, organizations have come to expect a cloud like experience for their entire I. T. Estate spanning on prem cloud cross clouds. And increasingly the edge and technology services are looked upon by customers to provide a layer that helps abstract that underlying complexity of I. T. So they can focus on what they do best welcome to the cubes ongoing virtual coverage of Dell technologies world with me today to talk about the modern services experience are Doug Schmidt, who is the president of Dell Technologies and Services and Alex Barreto. Senior vice president. Dell Technology Services gentlemen welcome to the cube. Great to see you >>Well thank you. Dave big traven us >>really. My pleasure. Doug and I wonder if you could start by just giving us a quick overview of the organization that you lied. What's new with with Dell technology services? >>Well, yeah, so you know, first of all I get the privilege along with my team of leading over 60,000 service professionals and partners and we support customers in over 170 countries and 54 languages. And we can cover the entire technology spectrum from the edge to the core to the cloud. And our expertise in this area is broad and deep as you can imagine. And we help our customers with their transformation with the indian services and this includes consulting, uh deployment, support, managed services, education services as well as asset recovery. So just to name a few, so we use all of this technology and this capability to help our customers with their digital transformation. >>Greatest Alex, what's your wheelhouse? What's your role in in the services, strategy and technology? >>Yeah, I have the great opportunity to drive strategy, operations and technology. We're doing exciting things across all three day. But in particularly the technology space when I think about the intersection of technology and customer experience, a lot of exciting things there, I'm sure we'll talk about today. >>Yeah. Doug I mean if you look at the past 12 months, I mean you certainly saw you know, a real shift to work from home technologies and you guys, you know all about, you know the story well. But one of the things that we've been talking about is the uptick that we're expecting and we're already seeing it in professional services because there is a talent gap, there's a skills shortage and people have to they have to get hybrid right, they have to fund their digital transformation, they need help. So there's been a lot of changes in the market during the past year. What are you hearing from customers? What are their priorities? How are they changing? >>Well yeah you've stated Dave look there's a lot of changes in the market during the last year clearly and what our customers are telling us and where they're changing priorities are are really centered around two things. The first uh is that all of us are helping our customers deliver a better experience to their customers right to end customers that matters. You know in a brand new study we commissioned from Forrester consulting. Actually 56% of I. T. Leaders said that improving customer experience is the top driver for their digital transformation efforts. The second thing that we're hearing and that I'm hearing is that they're asking us to assist in this digital transformation. In that same research that I talked to you about From Forrester, 81 of the Iraqi leaders said that they need to leverage external technology specific expertise to help their internal I. T. Teams be successful. And I think just to deep dive these two items, you know first it's on the first one for the customer experience. It's just crucial for customers to transform their C. X. To be competitive. That's for all of us and you know there's not an industry or a team around that's not going through this whether it's schools uh doing digital learning healthcare and all of the things you know recently I just talked to a doctor via the you know zoom. I mean these are all new experiences, right? Uh government and corporations. It's just it's very remote. It's very seamless. It's very timely and uh look the employee experience is also closely tied to this right to the customer experience. Obviously if your employees aren't able to perform in this environment you can't really deliver the customer experience and they need the right technology and tools to really deliver that. And that's where we at Dell Technologies and Dell Technology Services are really helping our customers. Uh The second area I mentioned was really about getting our customers ready for the future and you know, digital transformation is not a one and done. This is a ongoing journey uh that gets our customers to assist their customers and their team members. And look they're looking for trusted advisor who can you know, specialized in the experience they need uh to guide them through this. And you know, I. T. Is not just back office anymore, as you know, it's really about getting in front of this, breaking down the silos, helping all of the departments not just I. T. Everything with their business needs and really delivering these outcomes that are going to help them with the customer experience and the digital transformation. >>Yeah thank you for that. And and doug I mean the Consumer Ization of I. T. Has been going on for the better part of a decade or or or more the cloud obviously has affected how we think about the experience and pricing and the like and and we're hearing a lot about Apex from Dell tech right now. What's the role of services in apex? >>Well look services has always been a primary interface with our customers and will continue to play a major part of that. And this is really about services and our products and our great solutions and software all coming together to really deliver the best experience for our customers. But specifically speaking about services, look this will be about services helping our customers seamlessly integrate apex offers and leverage the best of our infrastructure management capabilities into end. And I talked a little bit about those at the beginning, but this will be helping the customers deploy apex monitor it operated, optimized support, Decommissioning all those things from the end in life cycle. And look, we'll leverage our advantages in the supply slain as well. And scale Apex globally working with Kevin Brown and the operations team. So it's about bringing all the strength of Dell along with services to deliver apex, you know, services also is going to help accelerate the value of the customers with for example, apex data storage as a service, which I'm sure you're hearing about will manage the infrastructure across the lifecycle and help our customers get the most out of all of this great technology, we're bringing >>so Alex and then dug maybe you can you can chime in but you guys, you talked talked talked about how important customer experiences can you tell us more about what services is doing to specifically enhance that customer experience? Yeah, >>sure. Thank David. And look, you talked about which I thought was great about the notion of services much more than just break fixed. So that customer experience now spans the entire services lifecycle. So when we talk, yes, it's really that entire Cf. So we're doing a couple of things to to really drive customer experience to the next level. In fact three distinct focus areas. The first one is really around artificial intelligence, machine learning and embedding that notion of A I into everything that we do, whether that support deployment services, managed services, consulting services, education services. The entire spectrum of our services offering now carries a I into the services offering. We started with support but now we expanded to the entire entire spectrum that drives efficiency and customers see that and feel that in terms of lower costs, greater speed, it drives value for our customers as well because they're able to generate new and appreciated insights. And second, if you think about the total customer experience, there are times when they do have to interact with us and that interaction now is food and it's a seamless, unified in simple experience that the customers have with us across the entire product set of Dell. So there's pc servers, network storage we provide, we provide a single unified view in a simple view for our customers. And then third, if you think about our services offers, we're modernizing them, talked a little bit about this as well. We're embedding technology into the services offering, make them better and faster. Good example, that is modern provisioning. We launched at the beginning this year. Great market feedback has new features, new capability, leverages our cloud infrastructure to deliver the services. >>You know, Alex, I want to stay on that for a minute because when I when I think about apex to me it's it's it's a cultural transformation that's going on. I mean look, Del is a tech technology company, have been product company and you know, services there to support that, but it's always you've always had to align with product. But now that I almost see the, you know, the product is aligning with the customer service experience and they're coming together like this. So so we talked about the changes and obviously the focus on C. X. Can you tell us more about the specific technologies that services is leveraging to affect that? >>Yeah it's a good question. Often we actually talked about products and services now and services is the product, as you said, they're really coming together and there are a number of things we're doing to drive that technology change both within apex and also outside apex of our regular Capex model. So a couple examples of things were around the data management side as an example using graph technologies to really contextualized data generate insights from that data regardless of how the data is structured, regardless of where the data is stored, represent those values. Were using that inside L. For services, we actually then monetizing that in providing that to our customers. We are consulting services and manage services. You talked about Apex Cloud is and hybrid Cloud is a big big area for us. Big focus here. In fact all the apex offers are actually they'll manage customer operators. So that managed services component is integrated and is a fundamental part of everything our other apex offers that we're putting in place. There are a couple of other areas. We're also excited about two of them to highlight specifically Five G and the Edge and five G. We see phenomenal growth and opportunities around for customers around the new digital transformation that they can do with five G. But enabling that is the carriers behind that infrastructure of five G, which we are supporting with our managed services, developing carrier grade specific managed services capabilities for carriers around the globe. And on the edge side with the growth and phenomenal exponential growth actually of data around the far edge being driven by sensors and greater compute needs and storage needs at the far edge, we're actually providing services for those specific data centers. They're very distributed some of them in urban areas, some of them in non urban ears and there's hundreds of them and they require remote services capabilities which we have that infrastructure today. So we're deploying that in this far edge space, another area that we're excited about five G the edge apex and then our core services capabilities, >>the edges like this, this really infinite technology opportunity. It's so we see the, you know, the data center and you see the cloud and okay, we were largely a remote set of cloud services. You're seeing the cloud come into the on prem, you're seeing on prem come into the cloud. So you've got the hybrid connections here, cross cloud and then even at the edge you've got layers of edge, you think about, you know, the autonomous vehicle, there's so much going on their custom silicon etcetera, it's okay you're not gonna get into the auto business, I don't think at least any time soon. But all that data that's being collected that has to get back to the cloud and much of its not gonna get persisted. A lot of it's gonna stay at the edge of a lot of it's gonna come back to the cloud. Everything is just exploding. You've gotta roll there. It's just these layers and connections that are coming through into this, this kind of ubiquitous matrix. I mean it's like the movie, it's amazing. Very exciting times. And doug. I wonder just going off here Doug. I wonder if we could give you the last word. Maybe I'm looking into the future beyond apex what's next for Dell tech services and your customers? >>Well, first of all, they did a great job on that. It is exciting. Look, and the reason we're putting so much effort into the emerging technologies uh we've talked about is to prepare uh you know assist our customers with this and you and you brought this up as well. Look, the vast amount of customer data uh that they're going to have to contend with is just staggering. 175 0 bytes of data will be created worldwide by 2025 according to D. C. And even more amazing about that is 30% of it is you know, projected to be processed real time. You're talking about that edge, right? And more than you know 50% of the enterprise generated data will be created and processed at that edge according to Gartner. So look it's gonna be exciting. And over the next 5 to 10 years we predict that all devices will be able to communicate anywhere on earth. And you know look these types of support tools to gather intelligence from billions of in point, uh, is going to be fascinating as well. And there will be new ways to consume the this knowledge seamlessly, making the relationship between us and the intelligence even more seamless and natural. You know, an example of that that we're working with right now is augmented reality a R out for our field resources. And, you know, we're seeing the capability, it's going to provide our field engineers and it's, it's pretty amazing gonna buy a better experience for our team members and a better experience for our customers. You know, and customers are going to have to contend with all of these challenges. And so we're modernizing to help them and kind of just summarizing up, you know, look, the value of services is really about shifting to intelligence as a service. And there's three ways uh, that this will really come about. One is our relationship with our customers is evolving from providing technology solutions. You mentioned this in your opening to being fully integrated as a business partner. That's the first one. Second one, we're helping to shape how our customers run their business from processes to resources to the experience they delivered to their end customer. That's number two and number three, it's really about uh measuring our success. Everything we do is about our customers achieving their business targets and their outcomes. And that's why we believe intelligence as a service is the future of services. >>And this is where technology plays such an important role in the services component of that as they set up front is the linchpin. There's an inverse relationship over the course of my career between the customer experience and the technical complexity. The simpler it gets for customers, the more complex it gets at the back end, and you've got to hide that complexity and that's a big part of where technology and services comes in. We're seeing the explosion of data as you said, and and the explosion of processing power is very exciting times, Alex and Doug. Thanks so much for coming to the Cuban, sharing the update on Dell Tech services in the future. I really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you for having us. >>All right, and thank you for watching everybody's day volonte for the Cube and our ongoing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2021. The virtual edition will be right back.

>>Hey there, thank you for joining me. My name is Heather Pick and I head up strategy and portfolio for point next technology services. Um I really appreciate you guys joining me today. So I want to take you through some of the experiential changes that we are launching today in accordance with their compute space that we believe are going to drive the success of our compute platform without our customer environment. I always like to start these presentations with a provocative yet somewhat simple question and today um I want to start with what would you do if you had an hours, more time and every day. Now to be clear, I'm not looking to extend the day to 25 hours so you can cram more stuff into it. I'm really looking at if I gave you an hour's worth of time of stuff that you did today and tomorrow, you don't have to do it anymore. What would you do with that time? Would you take a lunch hour? Would you leave at a reasonable hour on a daily basis from work? Would you spend that hour really thinking about that strategic project that your boss needs you to go do some R. And D on and really forgot where it is. You need to take the company. What would you do with that precious time? And I ask you because here within point, next technology services, we believe that the element of time is one of the most valuable resources that we can give back to our customers, right? And we see that in two spaces, right? So both in time saved and then time well spent. And let me tell you what it is. I mean about this. So when we talk about giving time back to our customers, that's in terms of a rich digital experience that provides automation and Ai and ultimately access to the things that matter to our customers so that they can do the day to day job of managing their technology ecosystem. Yeah. We don't want to undermine the fact that that same digital platform is also leveraged in order to enhance conversations with our customers that we consider time well spent. So answering questions about what would happen if I turn to this feature on what can I expect um if I make this architectural changes and we're seeing both of those questions come our way hard and fast from our customer base. And these two elements are the underpinning of the entire portfolio experience change that we're bringing to market. Yeah. So what do I mean specifically when we talk about time well saved our time safe. So how how are you going to realize this within your day to day? So number one, it's it's knowing our customers, right? We are working with a lot of different personas within our customer base, right? So we might have a purchasing agent, we might have an I. T. Line manager and the ability and the requirement within that digital ecosystem to know that person the moment they walk through the front door, whatever their front door is, whether it's a digital front door, whether it's a phone call, whether it's an email, whether it's reaching out to an HP person that's on site that we have that digital footprint on them to know who they are and what information matters to them second, taking our technology capabilities and all the information and the richness that's within that digital environment and providing them access to the information about their products that's meaningful to them. Sometimes they don't want to talk to us. Sometimes they just want to know how to do a simple field replacement of something or, or when they get into those more complex. Hey, I need more expertise. I really do need to do some scenario planning. How do I get access to those technologists that can help me? And then how do those technologists bring other people to that conversation so that I leave that conversation knowing that have the right answer and the decision that I've made is the right one for my company. So let me take you through an example of what it is I'm talking about. So as you enter into the new digital customer experience or HP Support center, as you've known it, you're going to notice a dearth of information that's available to you. And one of the cornerstones are foundational elements in developing this new experience is really that it's tolerable. Not every customer and not every persona within every customer wants access to all this information. So, customization on this entry point is critical for you. So, whether you are a line manager who wants to understand all of the things that are going on within your environment, whether you're a technologist that wants to understand what is the technical risk within my environment right now, whether that's their product alerts or critical downloads, or again back into that broader view of what's happening with my contracts, what's expiring, how much money am I going to have to spend this year to keep the keep these contracts going? That's all available to you within this digital experience, and again, heavily customizable based on what you want to see. So in terms of asset management, let's get down to the technical aspects associated with it. So, our technologists need access into their environment on a per product or per technology basis. When we talk about compute it gets even more critical for me to know what kind of compute assets I have and again, what are the features and functionality or potential risks within those environments? This allows a rich ecosystem with access to all of that technical knowledge, very prescriptive information about the different products that's that you have running within your environment, access to both a digital ecosystem as well as peers doing similar things. And then finally, a roll up to give you proactive insights to again your entire environment from a technical view so that you can identify and manage risks in aggregate as opposed to on a per asset basis. We believe that these are the two foundational elements of success in giving customers time back and then also providing the foundation for meaningful experiences. So I've taken you through the detail on what we mean by saving you time. I've taken you through a demo of our new digital customer experience. Now let me talk a little bit in depth about what we mean by time, well spent more and more coming from our customers, they're expecting us to deal with the technology issues, you know, of our technology, but more and more. They also want information on the broader implications of technology changes within their environments so things around performance. How do I get more performance from this from this compute platform that I look at? How do I find tune it so that it can be more workload addressable? Um what happens when I toggle this feature to the network impact? So more and more often we're having to have much broader conversations, again, more meaningful conversations with our customer base on the outcomes that they're trying to drive. So as a result, our offerings are changing in order to pivot towards your more workload mindset and that more aggregate view as you'll see reflected in some of our technology tools. I'm going to take you through an interview with one of our technologists um to show you what it is I'm talking about. So joining me is Nation George. He is one of our senior technologists. Within point. Next Technology services Nation, thank you for joining us. How are you doing today? >>Be good, >>awesome. So you see a lot you've been with us, You're dealing with a lot of customers. Tell us what you're seeing on a day to day basis. What questions are you getting for their customers? How are you seeing these interactions change? >>Absolutely. Before I go into the examples, I've haven't seen your technologist in plain X. Global Remote Services. What I do late today is actually solving complex problems. I can give you a few examples. For example, like a couple of days back I was actually on a customer call um they were looking for understanding the benefits of tag versus tunnel network in more in hb synergy when inter operating with one view Cisco ASA and B M R V center and this is in the interoperability space. Another example would be a customer coming in and asking like this is a telecommunication customer who want to know how to integrate their centralist monitoring tool um to retrieve physical encounters from H. B. Products so that they can have their proactive monitoring in place, right. And some of the other common questions what we see from customers are around maintenance which means like they are doing an infrastructure former update and or infrastructure update. They would like to understand how the version compatibility, the known issues specific to their environment or the best practices what they can follow so that the updates complete successfully. You know, these are the type of request, what we are seeing mostly now from the customers. >>Okay, so really diverse, Pretty complex. A lot of moving parts. Um, how do you know, what kind of methodology or how are we doing to ensure consistency across all these interactions in the different customers? >>Absolutely. We have developed a method and a mindset to provide a frictionless experience to the customer. When they come with these questions, you know what it means is actually that when they come with the question, we try to understand their technical problem technical problem from a technology standpoint. Then we try to see how the technical problem impacts the workload and application and how does it impact their business. We get into an understanding of the technical problem. Then we try to understand that. What are the components involved in the solution for example like compute storage, fabric and software. And then try to understand the into anthropology and data flow with the understanding of the technical problem and the solution into interview. Now we are able to understand what the customer is trying to achieve and what the expected outcome of the interaction need to be and now that we know the expertise needed and most of the time we have the expertise needed to take care of the request. In some cases we need to bring additional experts but we will bring the additional experts but all the time we will keep the solution level ownership until the expected outcome is achieved. Once we are able to collaborate, the experts were able to explain to the customer that the actionable steps which they can perform to actually resolve the problem or achieve the expected outcome. You know? This is the type method what we use whenever the customer comes for advice and guidance. >>So what do you think the ultimate benefits are to the customer? And kind of simplified terms? >>Yeah, these are some of the benefits. What I can see, you know one. They can call us to the support line for any help. For example, like they have a question, they need an answer, they need an advice and guidance or they have support issues that one stop shop like they come to our call, they call us and get them the assistant second, it is a solution level ownership. The person who picks up the call and assist will stay on with the solution level ownership until the customers expected outcome is achieved third. Once we follow the method, what I explained earlier, we will always get to foster resolution and always achieves the customers outcomes. Actually see at the end of it. The central focus here is to reach customers outcome and with solution level ownership. >>Great, thank you so much for joining me. This has been really, really insightful. It's always good to be able to talk with our technologists. >>Thank you heather. >>Okay, so you can never come to one of these without some sort of a call to action. So what am I? What am I asks of you? Check out, check care, right, explore the digital customer experience, use those tools and resources that are available into the air. Use it and give us feedback. This is not a capability that we're rolling out, that we're not going to touch. You're going to see iterative value added to it and that's going to be driven primarily by customer feedback and then telemetry that we're getting on how it is. They're using it, so use it and give us that feedback. Get your time back, really, get your time back, take your lunch, um, spend time on the strategic projects. That's what we're here for. This is we think one of our most compelling assets that we can do for our customer base. Thank you for your time.

>> Narrator: From around the Globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, Digital experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. I am Lisa Martin and I got two returning guests from Dell Technologies joining me back on theCUBE today, we've got Doug Schmidtt, President of Dell Technology Services. Doug, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Well, thank you Lisa. Thank you for having Alex and I back again. >> And Alex is here, Alex Barretto, SPP of Planning and Technology for Dell Technologies. Alex, welcome back. >> Thanks Lisa, happy to be here. >> So guys a lot has happened since we last got to sit together about 18 months ago and Dell Technologies World 2019, I think back. >> Thanks you. >> Right, you could think back pre pandemic, when we could actually be not socially distant. Talk to us Doug about what's going on with Dell Technology Services. You gave us a great update then, what's going on now and now you guys have 60,000 services and IT. Folks you're delivering services in 170 countries. Give us an update. >> Well, yeah, so look, it's really about Dell Technology Services enabling our customers to effectively adopt and leverage and sustain their IT investment. It's bottom line, helping our customers get the most out of what they're looking for out of their IT solutions, and making sure we deliver that for them. And as you stated, the size of the organization, I had the privilege of leading that team of 60,000 direct and partners in 170 countries. We provide that service and over 55 languages and really we cover services from the edge to the core. So everything in between, and it's an end to end service, meaning we can help with consulting a deployment managed services, education services, right down to the support side of it. And that really gives us a lot of flexibility to help our customers deliver what they need. And it's really about helping them navigate the digital journey, right? It really is helping them pivot to the new business model we're seeing out there. Especially today, considering as we said last time we were sitting down together. Now we're doing this virtually, everyone's going through this transformation in addition to moving more to the edge and hybrid cloud. So it's as important as ever for services to be there for our customers. And that's what we're doing every single day. >> And we'll unpack a bit more, some of the things that you've been doing since 2020 has started and made all these changes. But Alex, let's go to you for a little bit, services strategy, services technology, what's going on there? >> Yeah, so really responsible for both those areas, right strategy and technology on the strategy side, really believe we're differentiated across three batters, you think about our physical footprint, right? Quite massive, we operate in quite a few countries, as you pointed out. And if you look at a portfolio graph, we have everything from consumer all the way to the large enterprise. So big scale from a portfolio perspective. And then if you look from our digital reach, we have massive digital reach, which is really quite unmatched. And actually, that's where the technology piece really comes to shine. If you think about it? We have 200 million assets in the field today, those assets are generating 22 terabytes of data per day. That's a massive settlement not being able to use our AI engines to generate valuable customer insight. (clears throat) Last year alone, we are able to predict 3.7 million issues before they occurred, and then take proactive action on those issues. And that's just one example. But we're really investing in our software engineering capabilities, building tools that enable our customers to drive their own actual digital transformation. And as Doug alluded to, we do this across the entire services lifecycle. So everything from consulting, to deployment, to support, to manage services. >> Excellent, thanks for that, Alex. So Doug now let's kind of dig into what's been going on in the year of 2020, the year of what's next, a lot of changes and big challenges for customers in every industry, seven months ago, trying to figure out how do we survive in this mode, the massive shift to work from home to remote devices everywhere. Talk to us about how Dell Technologies has responded and helped your customers to survive and get to that thrive state in this crazy time. >> Yeah, well no, you're right. And it was something that happened very, very quickly, obviously to all of us globally. And these events in 2020, really brought us even closer to our customers, we've always listened very closely made sure we were in tune with that. Obviously, when all of this hit, we were there for them and we had to rapidly challenge and change how we delivered our service in this dynamic environment. We were able to do that we have an incredible team that obviously went to in full work remote, you could imagine that with 60,000 folks changing our service offering, so where we may have gone on site for a customer, we then set up a depot. So that we're able to do that safely. We were able to get our PPE equipment out to the field service agents that needed to be in a data center and make sure we were following all the protocols. We leverage our five Integrated Global Command Centers, these are strategic Hubs, we have around the world to really monitor and help and track all of this. So we were able to do that that was that had been digitized years before, so we were able to do all that safely. Really, this was about going in then and helping our customers mitigate the impacts that they may have had help them through that, whether it was through deployments being virtual, getting in the systems that they needed, and just helping them through their critical environments and changes. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers? Because we talked about this massive pivot for everyone, and the breadth of services that you cover from consulting to managed services to education. What were some of the things that were really the highest need that you saw from customers, especially when this first happened? >> Well, when it first happened, it was clearly the working remote, right, and helping everybody do that and doing it virtually making sure that like I talked about making sure they had the systems, making sure connection for okay, did the centers were able to handle all of that, and doing all that in a fashion in a safe way for our team members and our customers, team members, that was first and foremost priority with the safety of everyone. Once we had gotten through that, I'm going to say, look no gauge exact, but I would say starting beginning of summer, maybe May, what we started seeing that is the people really actually pivoting even more into their transformations that they were doing, their digital transformations our customers were, and they were really looking for strategic guidance in on their planning. And so we set up where our consultants were delivering half day accelerator workshops virtually to help them solve their IT challenges that they may have had. We also help them understand what we added in the space of unified workspace as a complete solution that helps them deploy support, manage all of their end user devices, so that they can achieve full productivity in this new environment. And they were asking for IT to be simple. How do we simplify a lot of this? And how do they simplify that via our managed service capabilities. And so we are working through that, again, setting up these virtual workshops, and having them understand what those capabilities were and how we can help them through that. And then look, they were also as you know, financing? Financing options? How can we do this type of service, all these different methods that we were helping with as well. It was really a great in the sense of us stepping up to help our customers and we were there for them. >> And we talked about the digital transformation, guys last year at Dell Technologies world that Dell Technologies was undergoing. Alex, talk to us about, what is going on with that digital transformation that Dell has undergone and how technology services or rather services technology is helping to play a role in that especially the last six, seven months. >> Yeah, it's amazing to your question, we actually do digital transformation every day for our customers. But as you pointed out, we're actually undergoing our own digital transformation. And that's actually quite interesting to see compare and contrast with everything that's happening with our customers. And we're able to actually take some of the insights that we learn in house and expose that to customers. So we actually, if you look at services, we invested quite heavily on software engineering, the number of software engineers that we've had now inside the services business units and all time high. If you look at the number of data scientists and PhDs that we have brought in, again, all time high, it really focused on developing AI engines that we use both internally and externally, driving digital transformation. A couple examples of that, if you look at something called PCI, which is a stands for Proactive Case Intelligence, it actually looks at the entire services journey that a customer has, and we're able to detect and put information in front of agents at the right time, the right information then actually enables them to deliver a better customer experience. We've actually seen through the implementation of PCI, a 10% reduction in the time that we spent engaging with customers and at the same time and improvement in seaside to the tune of approximately 130 basis points. So we're off a productivity improvement which helps us internally as well as obviously benefit for the customers. Another thing we're doing is actually digitizing our entire services processes. That means everything from consulting to the point of support. So we have a digital variant of what processes should look like. And then real time, we're able to actually measure active processes versus what they should be, and when we detect anomalies, we're able to correct those in real time, that again, gives us efficiencies internally, but more importantly, enables us to deliver a better customer experience. >> And that customer experience is critical, not just for Dell Technologies to deliver to its customers, but for your customers to deliver to their customers. You talked about improving the customer experience and some of the impact there, Alex, you think about the last in the year of 2020, how we suddenly went from this expectation that we can order anything on Amazon, and it shows up tomorrow to having things be delayed that we were not anticipating, talk to me about the transformation you guys are on, and we've heard a lot of Dell folks talk about the acceleration in the digital transformation that your customers are undergoing, that if you can walk us through from a strategic vision perspective, you've got the digitization going to the services, we know that a good amount of remote workforce will stay that way, for quite some time, but give us a vision into the year 2021. >> Yeah, let's talk about the future, because to your point look we have AI today, and we plan to continue augmenting and investing in AI, we're going to continue developing software applications to have our customers to drive the transformation. But if you look forward to exciting areas, and let me name three specifically, there are very interesting. The first is as a service, we're actually take in our complete services portfolio and transitioning all of it to be available as a service. That's what customers are looking for a very simple way to consume buy and consume our set of services, and we're doing that transformation and taking everything in transition to be available as a service. Second 5G, and Telco the Telco Transformation is that's going to occur as part of 5G, we're fully embracing that, so that we can have and deliver the set of services in a differentiated way leveraging the power of 5G, and you see that come about when you fast forward 2021, 2020. And then we have cloud services, also something we're very, very interested excited about. So we obviously have our hybrid cloud solution, Doug alluded to this. But on top of that hundred color solutions, we're developing and building a set of cloud services, that's going to enable our customers to be able to consumer solutions in a very simple and easy way, and get the value out that they're looking for again, >> And Doug wrap us up here with the vision overall, from Dell Technologies services, the demand coming in from customers globally, all of the changing demands and this uncertainty in which we're living in what does the future the next year so look like from Dell Technologies services level? >> Well yeah, as we've talked about, like the demand for exceptional customer, and employee experiences through all this is really driving these business model disruptions across the board. And look, we understand customers need to thrive during all this. And it's rapidly evolving and changing. So we're building our portfolio, quickly to stay ahead of that being able to listen to customers and build those services out. So we're doing that. As we mentioned earlier, both Alex and I, we've talked about the disruption we're seeing with 5G, the edge, cloud as a service. And this is driving a massive change in the industry, right. And therefore you have all the services to help our customers manage through that. And it's really about this convergence, we're seeing of capabilities that we provide, the lines between like I call these traditional silos inside support, consulting, managed services, all of that being blurred. Our customers are really looking for an outcome, they're looking for flexibility and some for things to be simple. We're helping them achieve that. And like I talked about earlier, they our customers want outcomes. And they really want to select Dell, for the comprehensive portfolio that we have. That could be everything from PC as a service, storage as a service, right into hybrid cloud. So, look moving forward, we work very closely, obviously integrated with our product teams hand in hand, we see that blurring as well. The product is a service the service is a product. We think Dell Technologies is in an ideal position to pull all this together and we have a clear vision with a world-class team will really help our customers to their transformation and deliver the outcomes they're looking for. >> It's definitely customer influence customer driven the future of Dell Technologies service. One last question done for you, this year's Dell Technologies world not going to be able to get those 14,000 or so folks together, what are some of the things, education wise that folks can learn about the different types of services? which you're offering now, some of the things that have changed since they last engaged with you? >> Well, yeah, actually, that's being discussed as you mentioned, throughout the Dell Technologies World, so it's ingrained, obviously, into our product announcements solution announcements that we're doing as a team. We obviously have everything online and links so that folks can learn more and more customers can learn more about these great solutions and the services we offer, and of course, through there, you can always click to link back to myself and the team and we're more than willing to help anybody at any time. If they have questions or further things they want to learn. >> Terrific, Doug, Alex, thank you so much. It's nice to see you again. I'll be it virtually. Maybe someday soon we'll get to be sitting down on a CUBE desk together again I hope. >> Look forward to eat. >> Thank you. Thank you for Doug Schmidtt and Alex Barretto. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual edition. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit Online. I'm Stu Miniman your host for this segment. Always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this space and of course at AWS Public Sector, broad diversity of backgrounds and areas, everything from government to education and the like, so really happy they were able to bring us Joshua Spence, he is the Chief Technology Officer, from West Virginia in the Office of Technology. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. >> I appreciate the invitation to be here. >> All right so, technology for an entire state, quite a broad mandate, when you talk about that, maybe give our audience a little bit of your background and the role of your organization for West Virginia. >> Yeah, absolutely so in the public sector space, especially at state government, we're involved in a myriad of services for government to the citizens and from a central IT perspective, we're seeking to provide those enterprise services and support structures to keep those costs controlled and efficient and be able to enable these agencies to service the citizens of the state. >> Excellent, maybe just to talk about the role of the state versus more local, from a technology standpoint, how many applications do you manage? How many people do you have? Is everything that you do in the Cloud, or do you also have some data centers? just give us a little thumbnail sketch if you would, of what what's under that umbrella. >> Sure, absolutely I think you'll see at the state level we have... We typically administer a lot of the federal programs that come down through funding, ranging from health and human resources to environmental protection, to public safety you've got, just a broad spectrum of services that are being provided at the state level and so the central office, the Office of Technology, Services approximately 22,000 state employees and their ability to carry out those services to the citizens. And then of course you have like local government, like in State of West Virginia with 55 counties, and then you're following municipalities. The interesting thing though in public sector is from the citizen's perspective, government is government, whether it's local, state or federal. >> Yeah, that's such a good point and right now of course there's a strain on everything. With the global pandemic, services from the public sector are needed more than ever, maybe help us understand a little bit things like work from home and unemployment, I expect, may require a shift and some reaction from your office. So tell us what's been happening in your space the last few months. >> Yeah absolutely, well, the first part you get the work from home piece rate, West Virginia, although the last state to have a confirmed test positive of COVID-19, we were in a little bit of in a position of advantage as we were watching what was happening across the world, across the country and so we didn't hesitate to react in West Virginia and through great leadership here, we shut down the state quickly, we put protections in place to help, show up and prevent the spread of COVID. And to do that though with the government facilities, government services, we had to be able to enable a remote workforce and do so very quickly, at a scale that no one ever anticipated having to do. Coop plans for the most part rejected just picking up from the location you're working at to go work at another centralized location. No one really ever thought, "Well, we wouldn't be able to all congregate to work." So that created our first challenge that we had to respond to. The second challenge was then how do we adjust government services to interface with citizens from a remote perspective and in addition to that a surge of need. And when you look at unemployment all across the country, the demand became exponentially larger than what was ever experienced. The systems were not equipped to take on that type of load. And we had to leverage technology to very quickly adapt to the situation. >> Yeah, I'd love you to drill in a little bit on that technology piece. Obviously you think about certain services, if I had them, just in a data center and I needed it all of a sudden ramp up, do I run into capacity issues? Can I actually get to that environment? How do I scale that up fast? The promise of Cloud always has been well, I should be able to react immediately, I have in theory infinite scale. So what has been your experience, are there certain services that you say, "Oh boy, I'm so glad I have them in the Cloud." and has there been any struggles with being able to react to what you're dealing with. >> Well yeah the struggles have absolutely been there and it's been a combination of not just on-premise infrastructure, but then legacy infrastructure. And that's what we saw when we were dealing with the unemployment surge here in West Virginia, just from a citizen contact perspective, being able to answer the phone calls that were coming in, it was overwhelming and what we found is we unfortunately had a number of phone systems all supporting whether it's the central office or the regional office, they were all disparate, some of which were legacy. We therefore had no visibility on the metrics, we didn't even know how many calls were actually coming in a day. When you compound that the citizen's just trying to find answers, well, they're not going to just call the numbers you provide, they're going to call any numbers. So then they're now also calling other agencies seeking assistance just 'cause they're wanting help and that's understandable. So we needed to make a change, we need to make change very quickly. And that's when we looked to see if a solution in the Cloud might be a better option. And would it enable us to not only correct the situation, get visibility and scale, what could we do so extremely quick because the time to value was what was real important. >> Excellent, so my understanding that you were not using any cloud-based contact center before this hit. >> We were in only... There were some other agencies that had some hosted contact center capabilities, but on a small scale. This was the first large project around a Cloud Contact Center, and needed to run the project from Go Live or decision to go forward on a Friday at one o'clock and to roll over the first call center on the following Monday at 6:00 p.m. was a speed that we had never seen before. >> Oh boy yeah, I think back, I worked in telecom back in the 90s and you talk about a typical deployment you used to measure months and you're talking more like hours for getting something up and running and there's not only the technology, there's the people, the training, all these sorts of things there, so, yeah tell us, how did you come to such a fast decision and deployment? So you walk us through a little bit of that. >> Sure, so we went out to the market and asked several providers to give us their solution proposals and to do so very quickly 'cause we knew we had to move quickly and then when upon evaluation of the options before us, we made our selection and indicate that selection and started working with both the Cloud provider and the integrator, to build out a phased approach deployment of the technology. Phase one was, hey, let's get everybody calling the same 800 number as best as we can. And then where we can't get the 800 number be that focal point, let's forward all other phone numbers to the same call center. Because before we were able to bring the technology and our only solution was to put more people on the phones and we had physical limitations there. So we went after, the Amazon contact center or our integrator a Smartronix and we were able to do so very quickly and get that phase one change in place, which then allowed us to decide what was phase two and what was going to be phase three. >> Josh, you've got some background in cybersecurity, I guess in general, there's been a raised awareness and need for security with the pandemic going on, bad actors are still going in there. I've talked to some when they're rolling out their call centers, they need to worry about... Sounds like you've got everything in your municipality. So might not need to worry about, government per se but, I guess if you could touch on security right now for what's happening in general and anything specific about the contact center that you need to make sure that people working from home were following policy, procedure, not breaking any regulation and guidelines. >> Yeah, absolutely I think the most important piece of the puzzle when you're looking at security is understanding, so it's always a question of risk, right? If you're seeking first and foremost, to put in security with the understanding that now, hey we've put it in we don't have to think about it anymore. That's not the answer 'cause you're not going to stop all risk, right? You have to weigh it and understand which risks you need to address so that's really important piece. The second part that we've looked at in the current situation with the response to COVID is not only do we see threat actors trying to take advantage of the circumstances, right? Because more people are working from home, there are less computers on the hard network, right? They're now either VPN-ing in or they are just simply outside the network and there may be limited visibility that central agency or the central entity has on those devices. So what do you do? We got to extend that protection out to the account and to the devices itself and not worry so much about the boundary, right? 'cause the boundary now is a lot in all and since it purposes the accounts, but then I think an additional piece of the puzzle right now is to look at how important technology is to your organization, look at the role it's performing in enabling your ability to continue to function remotely (indistinct) the risk associated with those devices becoming compromised or unavailable. So, we see that the most important aspects of our security changes were to extend that protection as best we could to push out education to the users on the changing threats that might be coming their way. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to think if this pandemic had hit 10 years ago, you wouldn't have the capability of this. I'm thinking back to like, well, we could forward numbers to a certain place and do some cascading, but the Cloud Contact Center, absolutely wasn't available. Have you had a chance to think about now that you have this capability, what this means as we progress down the road, do you think you'll be keeping a hybrid model or stay fully Cloud once people are moving back to the offices? >> Well, I definitely think that the near future is a hybrid model and we'll see where it goes from there. There's workloads without a doubt that are better served, putting them in the Cloud, giving you that on demand scalability. I mean, if we look at what a project like this would have required, had we had to procure equipment, install equipment, there was just no time to do that. So having the services, the capability, whether it's microservices or VMS or whatever, all available, just don't need be turned on and configure to be used, it's just there's a lot of power there. And as government seeks to develop digital government, right? How do we transition from providing services where citizens stand in line to doing it online? I think Cloud's going to continue to play a key piece in that. >> Yeah I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to the financial impact of this. So typically you think about, I roll out a project, it's budgeted, we write it off over a certain number of years, Cloud of course by its nature is there's flexibility and I'm paying for what I'm using, but this was something that was unexpected. So how were you... Did you have oversight on this? Was there additional funding put out? How was that financial discussion happening? >> Yeah, so that's a big piece of the puzzle when a government entity like a state is under a state of emergency, the good thing is there's processes and procedures that we leverage regularly to understand how we're going to fund those response activities. And then the Federal Government plays a role also in responding to states of emergency that enable the state and local government to have additional funding to cover during the state of emergency. So that makes things a little easier to start in a sense, I think the bigger challenge is going to be what comes from the following years after COVID, because obviously tax revenues are going to take a hit across the board. And what does that mean to government budgets that then in turn are going to have to be adjusted? So the advantage of Cloud services and other type technology services where they're sold under that OPEX model, do give states flexibility in ways to scale services, scale solutions as needed and give us a little bit more flexibility in adjusting for budget challenges. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch, we know how the speed of adoption in technology, tends to run at a certain pace. The last three months, there are definitely certain technologies that there's been massive acceleration like you've discussed. So, I'm wondering that you've had the modernization, things like the unemployment claims was the immediate requirement that you needed, but have there been other pieces, other use cases and applications that this modernization, leverage of cloud technologies is impacting you today or other things that you see a little bit down the path. >> Yeah, I think it's... We're going to see a modernization of government applications designed to interface directly with the citizen, right? So we're going to want to be able to give the citizen opportunity, whether it's on a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer to interface with government, whether it's communications to inquire about a service, or to get support around a service or to file paperwork around a service. We want to enable that digital interface and so that's going to be a big push, and it's going to be amplified. There was already a look towards that, right? With the smart cities, smart states and some of the initiatives there, but what's happened with COVID basically it's forced the issue of not being able to be physically together, well, how do you do it using technology? So if there was a silver lining in an awful situation that we have with COVID, one might be that, we've been able to stretch our use of technology to better serve the citizens. >> Well, great, really really impressive story. Josh, I want to give you the final word. Just what advice would you give your peers kind of dealing with things in a crisis, and any other advice you'd have in general about managing and leveraging the Cloud? >> I think in a closing comment, I think one of the most important aspects that can be considered is having that translation capability of talking to the business element, the government service component and understand what they're trying to achieve, what their purpose or their mission is and then being able to tie it back to the technology in a way to where all parties, all stakeholders understand their roles and responsibilities, to make that happen. Unfortunately I think what happens too often is on the business side or the non-technical side of the equation, they see the end state, but they don't truly understand their responsibilities to get to the end state. And it's definitely a partnership and the better that partnership's understood at the start, the more successful the project's going to have to get there under budget and on time. >> Well, thank you so much for joining us, best of luck with the project and please stay safe. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage from AWS Public Sector Online. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation! >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. You know, in this COVID-19 pandemic, we've been reaching out to folks that really have good visibility on what's going on out there. Tim Conley is here, he's a principal with the ATS Group, and partner of IBM. Tim, good to see you again man, thanks for comin' on! >> You got it, Dave, how are you today? >> Not too bad, you hangin' in there with all this craziness? How are things where you are? >> Yeah, we sure are, it's like groundhog day everyday, right? >> I know, the family's goin' crazy. They want to get out, and, well summer's comin', so hopefully the pandemic is going to calm down a little bit here, give us a breather. >> I hear that. >> But so, tell us what's goin' on these days with your company, with the ATS Group, what are you seein' in the marketplace? Give us the update. >> Sure, Dave. We've been in business 19 years now as a IBM systems integrator. Doin' a lot of work around storage. There's a lot of shiny new nickels out there these days that we're trying to make sure that we stay ahead of the game on. You know, our customers demand excellence from us, because that's what we've been giving them the last, you know, 19 years. So, they demand that from us, which is actually a great position for us to be in, but you know, with a lot of the new, shiny new nickels out there today, takes a lot of energy to focus on those, make sure we're talkin' to our customer about the right things, at the right times in the marketplace. >> I had Ed Walsh on the other day, and actually a couple times within the last six months, and he shared with us, actually in studio, when we didn't have to be six feet apart, the new announcements, the simplification of the portfolio. Presumably you've seen that. What was your reaction, how do you think the customer will react? >> That's a good question. Like I said, we're always looking to be bleeding edge, that's actually where we got our name from, Advanced Technology Services Group. So, IBM consistently comes out with some really good products and solutions, and we're constantly vetting that in our innovation center, in beta programs and things like that. A couple key things that are working now with us is Hybrid Multicloud. You know, IBM comes out, like I said, with some good solutions. We vet them out, and we're real excited about Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud. We've been using that for probably the last 12, 14 months, so trying to get the word out our customers on what it means, for partners as well, we can have a simple 10 minute conversation with our customers and our partners, kind of describe it at a high-level, and then they can gain interest at that point. It can be a little tricky, but we try to take that trickiness out of it, and let our customers know what's really goin' on, how it works for disaster recovery, for data protection to the cloud. Customers always want to talk about those things, but a lot of them really don't know those specifics, so we literally in 10 to 15 minutes can simply it to them, let 'em know how it works, and what scenarios it might work for them. Again, doing tests, and PoCs, things like that, it's really easy for us to do. One of our big federal customers want to call today at 12 o'clock, going over that implementation. They're pretty excited about tryin' it out, 'cause everybody thinks they want to move some things to the cloud, so Spectrum Virtualize allows us to do that pretty transparently. In fact, we used it ourselves last year, 'cause we took the journey to the cloud for SaaS offering. Took us over a year to do it, let me tell ya, it's not easy. You know, people make it sound like goin' to cloud is a snap, you know, spin up some OS instances, some EBS storage, and away we go. It's not that easy. >> I was just talkin' to a software executive who started his company 37 years ago, we both agreed, that's kind of when I started in this business, we both agreed that it just keeps getting more and more complicated. So, firms like yours are, but okay, so you talk about Hybrid Multicloud, of course IBM has cloud, but IBM itself says, "Hey, we hope people put their data into our cloud, "but we know there's other clouds out there." Well, hence Multicloud. So, what do you see as going on in the marketplace, specifically as it relates to Multicloud? And I wonder if we could weave in the COVID-19. Are you seeing people more receptive to cloud? >> Yeah, I'll tell ya, with COVID-19 we've had some opportunities delayed, because customers don't quite know where the market's going to go for themselves. We actually had one customer go out of business. So, that ultimately delayed a deal forever, right? But overall, things aren't that bad, but we do see customers, you know, lookin' to make some things easier for themselves. They might have been thinking about the cloud, but COVID's kind of brought it to the forefront, and they want to make things easier right away. Maybe you can save some money, right? So, we have a calculator we created for our customers to really go measure things to see what actually would it cost to go to cloud? You know, a lot of customers have no clue what it is. We could do that in five minutes for them, really interesting so, again we'll give them that information that hey, going to cloud might be an opportunity that they didn't think might be existent 'til now. >> So, Spectrum Virtualize, otherwise known you know, for those who have been around for a while like I have as kind of the roots of the SVC, the SAN Volume Controller, and the history of that product is software that enables you to virtualize, not just IBM storage, but anybody's storage, and of course one of the major use cases has been migration. So, in downturns, people want to get more value out of existing system. You know, maybe they come off lease, or maybe they want to elongate the life, and they may not have all the function so they can plug it into an SVC, and they get all the wonderful new bells and whistles, and the capabilities there. I wonder if we could talk about that, and again, what you're seeing just in terms of the current, you know, economic situation, and then specifically as it relates to cloud? >> That's a really a good point. So, you're tying to key things in today, right? Customers are looking to save money, because they don't want their financial outlook is based on COVID-19, so being able to help customers, and you nailed it, right? SVCs, Spectrum Virtualize has been around for, gosh probably 11 or 12 years now, 13 years actually. Right? So, we pride ourselves on bringing that to customers. Showing them how they can virtualize their environments in the storage arena. And we have some gigantic customers in the federal space, commercial space, so we don't just bring out white paper, say, "Eh, well it kind of looks good." Right? We actually have distinct customers, and talk to them about how they can drive their storage efficiencies up with IBM technologies, especially virtualization. And then, you know, reducing their overall cost. That's key, especially now. Customers are constantly looking to reduce their costs and whatnot with their storage, so that's a perfect inroad to that, and then bringin' in the Multicloud part of it, you're just extending Spectrum Virtualize to the cloud. You know, it was in IBM cloud first, it was in AWS back June of last year, and now we're working at IBM on puttin' that out into Azure. You know, so we can bring those savings to customers in the cloud, which they didn't know they could do that before. >> All right Tim, talk a little bit more about Multicloud, because you know, a joke recently, up until recently anyway, that Multicloud is more of a symptom of multi vendor, as opposed to a strategy, but with shadow IT, and sort of rogue systems, and the marketing department, the sales, everybody doing their own cloud, essentially Multicloud has become a strategy that the CIO has been asked to come in, "Hey, we got all these clouds." Clean up the crime scene I call it! What are you seeing today around Multicloud? >> That's a great point, I like that term, I'm going to steal it if you don't mind. Multicloud's customers are very much interested in, we have several customers doing Multicloud, IBM, Amazon, Azure. We actually did a study for an Azure customer, where we actually projected him to go to AWS with substantial cost savings. Some of that had to do with right-sizing their environment, where they weren't right-size in azure today. But I got to tell ya, you know, Cloud's not simple. It's not easy, again I mentioned earlier, we took that journey ourselves, spent a lot of time and energy with some really smart guys on my team to take that journey. So, Multicloud is a really great idea, and should be looked at, but I'm tellin ya' it's not quite that easy to just shift around, but there are definitely things to move to different cloud vendors. Again, if we bring it back to the storage arena, right? Spectrum Virtualize today's in IBM and Amazon, it's not in other clouds, so if you want to go that route, perfect opportunity to go Multicloud. >> Yeah, I mean I think you're makin' a good point. Let's face it, for our audience, we're in the early days of Multicloud. Yes, everybody has multiple clouds, everybody talks about having multiple clouds, but to be able to run applications natively in all these different clouds, whether it's the control plane, the data plane, the transport plane, all these disparate systems, and really be able to take native advantage of the local cloud services. That's not only very complex, it's really not fully baked out here today, but you know, we heard this week at IBM saying a lot of talk about Red Hat, containers, and Open Shift. So, we're starting on that journey, and that's really the promise of Multicloud, to be able to ultimately run applications anywhere, but as you point out, that's a very complex situation today for customers. >> Yeah, that's a good point. So, I totally would follow up with you on that, that's Multicloud, customers are looking at it, and their are some distinct advantages to the different cloud vendors. One could even say on-prem is a form of cloud, right? That's just your private cloud. So, keeping things on-prem for certain scenarios makes sense, be able to tie that back to the big cloud vendors, IBM, Amazon, Azure, right? Tying them together is the direction people are looking to go, and are kind of, some of them are there and have done it, but I'd say some, or more of them are in the infancy stage of that. >> What are you seeing in terms of, just kind of switching topics on you, in terms of things like governments, compliance, a lot of talk about cyber resiliency, especially given the pandemic. What are you seeing there with customers? >> Wow, that's a big topic. It's interesting, data classification, you think it'd be that easy, especially for some of our fed' customers, it's not that easy, right? Tryin' to classify the data, they just don't know, they might know the applications, but they don't know the content of that data. Is it able to be, what is it, section 126? Something like that. Is it able to go to the cloud? So, customers have a struggle on their hands tryin' to do that, right? The technology, groups within the customers, the storage folks, the OS folks, the Apps folks, they're all about the cloud, move things to cloud, but at the end of the day, it's the security folks that need to be able to do that data classification to see can the data even go there? Let alone the application or whatnot. Fairly easy to do that kind of stuff, but the data classification, we see that's the hard part. >> Okay, so you talked about shiny new toys at the beginning of this conversation. You know, IBM, you're tryin' to be a shiny old toy, (Tim laughing) they've been around you know, a century. >> Yeah. >> Why IBM though? What is it about IBM that you choose to partner with them? Give us the good, the bad, and the what you'd like to see improve. >> I would say, we've been a partner for IBM a long time, I used to work for IBM a million years ago. At the end of the day, our customers demand excellence from us, and they demand things to work, right? So, for me to put my company, and my resources into an opportunity for my customers, we can count on IBM. One, we have a great relationship with them, they have fantastic solutions, and then we vet them out. Our customers demand that of us, and I can give real world examples of one customer to another. So again, it's not like a white paper, I read it from vendor XYZ, at the end of the day we're implementing these solutions at our customers. A lot of times we're doing em in our lab first to make sure it works as designed, figure out with the shiny new nickels, you know, what's broken with that nickel? Why's it not so shiny? Or is it really as shiny as it appears to be, right? So, being able to do that stuff in-house is great, but at the end of the day, our customers demand excellence, and you know, we have to be bringing solutions to our customers, and IBM provides quite a few solutions, especially around the storage arena, where we live and breathe, that instant marketplace. So, we have to use great solutions that we can trust, and know work. >> So, my last question is what have you learned in the last, you know, couple of months with this pandemic. Now that we start to hopefully come out of it, at least for a little while, what are you learning? What's been accelerated, or pulled forward, and we're obviously not just goin' to 2019. So, how are you seeing your business, and your customers responding, what's the sort of mindset going forward? >> I'd say two things, so there's the COVID stuff, and then I talk about ransomware, cyber security, that could be another whole topic, right? But at the end of the day, I've been on a lot of webinars, and things of last three, four weeks, five weeks, listenin' to vendors talk about their shiny new nickels, and it's, quite frankly it's a bunch of mumbo jumbo, and that's not the world we live in, 'cause that's not what our customers are asking from us. But a lot of customers are really concerned about cyber security, ransomware. I have two customers locally that got hit with ransomware last fall, and let me tell ya, it's not a pretty scene, and they were not prepared for it, right? So, one of our jobs is to really help our customers understand where their gaps are within their organization, so that if they do get hit by cyber crime, or ransomware, that they can actually survive that, and not actually have to pay for it, then be up and running in a very small amount of time, which is key. Like I said, two customers got hit, just of mine, within 20 miles of our business, and they weren't prepared for it. >> I can't leave it there Tim, what do I got to do, if I'm an organization that's concerned about ransomware, probably every organization, what are the steps that I should take, like immediately? >> I would say a health assessment, and it doesn't have to be from ATS, it could be from anybody that's got the experience, and whatnot. We do health checks for customers consistently, and they don't have to be expensive, they don't have to be like, months. People always think, "A health check, oh my god, it's going to take so much time." It really doesn't. It's a quick health check, and we can look at those key things within your organization to see where you might not be prepared. And I'm talking like not prepared, like if you get ransomware tomorrow, you very well could be out of business. It's not hard to see those kinds of things. And you can make it more detailed if customers want that, right? But I would definitely have customers, if you're interested in that, call us, call any other vendor out there that's doin' those kinds of things. But it's fairly easy for folks like us and other vendors to be able to do those health checks, just take a quick look in your environment, see where your gaps are that you could literally go out of business tomorrow. >> Okay so, first pass is you're lookin' for open chest wounds that you got to close immediately and stop the bleeding, and then what? You start implementing things, you know, best practices, air gap. >> Air gap, you stole the word right out of my mind, air gap, right? You have to start, you know, look and see where, what's the requirements? First of all, make sure you can survive the event, and get back up and running in a reasonable amount of time, right? That one customer I mentioned was probably four or five weeks before they were able to restore all their servers, and they were fortunate that a lot of those were test thing that they could kind of wait a little bit long, but the other one they nearly went out of business, 'cause they just weren't prepared for it, right? So yeah, air gapping is a key thing, right? You know, where I put my data that it can't be touched, right? That's a fairly easy thing to start off with. >> Yeah, and then the whole process of recovery, who's on deck, you know, et cetera, et cetera. How communications occurs, there's technology, and of course as always, there's people in process. Well, Tim, I'll give you the last word, bring us home! >> Bring us home. Hey, but Dave, thanks very much for your time today. This is was a great time talking to you about some key things that we've worked with day in and day out over the last couple months. Again, bringing our solutions to our customers, that they demand that excellence from us. Bringin' IBM solutions that we natively know and love, and trust, because we've done 'em many, many times with other customers. So, pretty excited about what's goin' on in the industry, lookin' at all those shiny new nickels, and see which ones are actually shiny at the end of the day. >> All right, Tim, well listen, thanks for comin' back on theCUBE, it's great to see ya. I hope we get to see each other face to face. Stay safe. >> Sounds good Dave, thanks for your time, thank you. >> All right, you're welcome, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. Go to http://www.siliconangle.com to check out all the news, for thecube.net, where all these videos live, and http://www.wikibon.com, where I publish weekly. We'll see you next time on theCUBE. (relaxing instrumental music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2019 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone, this is the CUBE's live coverage in San Francisco at Moscone Center for IBM Think 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave. Volante Dave it's been in AI, it's been cloud, it's been in data changing the game. We've got two great guests here Murali Nemani, CMO of ScienceLogic, your CEO has been on the CUBE before and Joe Damassa who is the VP of strategy and offerings for hybrid cloud service at IBM. Thanks for joining us. >> Welcome. >> Appreciate it. >> Thank you guys. >> Welcome to CUBE. So day four of four days coverage, yes, you can see the messaging settling the feedback settling, AI clearly front and center, role of data in that and then cloud scale across multiple capabilities. Obviously on premise multi cloud is existing already. Software's changing all this. >> Right. >> And so AI impacting operations is key. So how do you guys work together? What's the relationships in ScienceLogic and IBM? Could you just take a minute to explain that? >> I think I mean, clearly, as you talked about the hybrid nature of what we're dealing with, with the complexity of it, it's all going to be about the data. You know, software is great, but it's about software that collects the data, analyzes the data, and gives you the insights so you can actually automate and create value for our clients. So it's really this marriage, it's a technology but it's a technology that allows us to get access to the data so we can make change, it's all about the data. >> And so a lot of what IBM has been doing is building the analytics engines and Watson it's for them. Our partnership has been really building the data and the data lake and the real time aspects of collecting and preparing that data so that you can really get interesting outcomes out of it. So when you think about predictive models, when you think about the the way that data can be applied to doing things like anomaly detection that ultimately accelerate and automate operations. That's where the relationship really starts taking hold. >> So you guys are specialized in AIops and IT apparatus as that transforms with scale and data which you need machine running, you need a kind of gave it automation. >> Yes. >> And which is the devops use of operations is don't go down, right, up and running, high availability. >> Yeah. >> So on the cloud services side, talk about where the rubber is meeting the road from a customer standpoint, because the cultural shift from IT Service Management, IT operations has been this manual, some software here and there, but it's been a process. Older processes change a little bit, but this is a new game. Talk about how you guys are engaging the customers. >> Well, a part of it I mean, it's interesting when you step back and you stop breathing, you're on exhaust in terms of pushing what you're trying to sell and you listen to your customers what we're hearing is that they all understand the destination. They understand they're moving to the cloud, they understand the value that's going to bring, they're having a hard time getting started. It's how do I start the journey ? I've got all of this estate and traditional IT operations capabilities it's kind of move. How do I modernize it? How do I make it so it's portable across different environments. And so when you step back, you know, we basically said, hey, you need the portability of the platform. So what we're doing with Red Hat, what we're doing with IBM, cloud private, it creates that portable containerizing ability to take our existing workloads and start moving them, right. And then the other thing that the clients need are the services. Who's going to help me advise me on what workloads should move, which one shouldn't, most of the staff fails because you move the wrong things. How do you manage that? How do you build it? And then when you're done, and you've got this hybrid complex environment, how do we actually get insights to it and the data I need to operationalize it? How do I do IT apps, when I don't own everything within the four walls of my data set. >> Now, are you guys going to market together? You guys sell each other products, the relationship with ScienceLogic and IBM is it a partnership, is it a joint development? Can you explain a little bit more on how you guys work together? >> Well, we're one of the largest sort of services provider in the industry. So as we bring, our products, our technologies and our capabilities to market, we bring ScienceLogic into those deals, we use ScienceLogic in our services so that we can actually deliver the value to our clients. So it is sort of a co development, co joint partnership plus also our goal to market. >> So you use that as a tool to do discovery and identify the data that's in and the data that we're talking about is everything I need to know about my IT operations, my applications, the dependencies. Maybe you could describe a little bit more. >> Sure if you think about one of the things that Joe was mentioning is, today, the workloads are shifting, you're going from, let's say management performance monitoring and management platforms that you need to evolve from, to incorporate new technologies like containers and microservices and server-less architectures. That's one area of how did the tool sets fundamentally evolve to support the latest technologies that are being deployed? So think about that. Second is, how do you consolidate those set of tools now you're managing? Because you're adopting cloud based technologies or new capabilities, and so get consolidation there. And the third is, these workloads that are now migrating out of your private cloud or private data center into public clouds, right? And then that workload migration, I think it is Forrester level saying, about 20% of the total workloads are currently in some sort of a public cloud environments. So there's a lot of work to do in terms of getting to that tipping point of where workloads are now truly in a multi cloud hybrid cloud. So as IBM accelerates that transition and their core competencies in helping these large enterprises make that transition, you need a common manageable environment, that the common visibility across those workloads. So that's at the heart of what we're pulling, and then the data sets happened to be data sets that are coming either from the application layer, data coming from the log management systems, it could be data coming from a service desk in terms of the kind of CMDB based data sets, and we're building a data lake that ultimately allows you to see across these heterogeneous system. >> It could be service request to get that really touches the business process so you can now start to sort of map the value and how change is going to affect that value, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Yeah. >> I mean, what's interesting about ScienceLogic as a partner, it's the breadth of their platform in terms of the different things they can monitor, the depth, the ability to go into containers, and kind of understand what the applications are doing in them and the scale in terms of the types of devices. So when you think about, the types of devices, we're going to have to manage everything from, sensors in an Internet of Things, environment to routers, to sophisticated servers and applications that can be running anywhere, you need the flexibility of the platform that they have in order to be able to deliver that. >> And I think that's a key point when you talking about containers and Kubernetes, we heard your CEO Jeannie remitting mentioned Kubernetes, onstage like, that's great, good time(mumbles) I know no one like Kubernetes now it's mainstream. >> Yeah. >> So this is showing them what's going on the industry which is the on premise decomposition of on premise with cloud private, you guys have. >> Yes. >> Is giving them the ability to use containers to manage their existing stuff and do that work and then have the extension to cloud, public cloud or whatever public cloud. This gives them more mount modern capabilities. So the question is, this change the game we know that but how has it changed AIOps and what does it mean? So I guess the first question is, what is AIOps? And what is this new on premise with cloud private and full public cloud architecture look like in AIOps 2.0? >> So for me, it's a very simple definition. It's really using algorithmic mechanisms, right? Towards automating operations, right? It's a very simple way, simplistic way of looking at it. But ultimately, the end game is to automate operations because you need to move at the pace of business and machine speed. And if you want to go, move in machine speed, you can have, I mean, you can't throw enough humans at this problems, right? Because of the pace of change, the familiarity of the workloads spinning up and sitting down. We have a bank as a customer who turns up containers for every 90 seconds and then turn them down. Just can't keep that in that real time state of change and being able to understand the topological relationships between the application layer and the underlying infrastructure so that you can truly understand the service health because when an application degrades in performance, the biggest issue is a war room's scenario where everyone's saying, it's not me, it's not me and because everyone's green on their front, but it's now how do you get that connective tissue all the way running-- >> Well it's also not only the change, it's also the velocity of data coming off that exhaust or the changes and services is thrown off tons of data that you need machines now I mean, that's kind of the thing. >> Exactly, yeah. And I would add to that, I think part of the definition of AIOps is evolving. We know where we're coming from is more fit for purpose analytics, right? I have this problem, I'm the collect this data, I'm going to put these automations in place too address it. We need to kind of take it data Model approach that says, how do I ingest all of this data? You know, even at the start, when you're looking at which workloads and you're doing discovery and assessment of workloads, that data should go into a data lake that can be used later when you're actually doing the operations and management of those workloads. So what data do we collect at every stage of the migration and the transformation of it, and including the operational data? And then how do we put a form analytics on it, and then get the true insights? I think we're just scratching the surface of applying to AI, because it's all been very narrow cast, narrow focus, I have this problem, I collect this data, I can automate this server, it needs to move much beyond that to it... >> And services are turning up and on and off so fast as a non deterministic angle here, and you got state, non deterministic, I mean, those are hard technical computer science problems to solve >> Yeah. >> That's you don't just put a processor around say, oh, yeah. >> Well, let's back to the the scalability of the platform, the ability in real time to be monitoring and looking at that data and then doing something right. >> All right now, humans aren't completely removed from the equation, right? And so I'm interested in how the humans are digesting and visualizing all this data, especially at this speed there a visualization component? How does that all evolving? >> Yeah, I think that to me I mean, that's part of the biggest challenges. You humans are a, they have to be the ones that kind of analyze what's coming and say, what does this mean when you haven't already algorithmically built it into your automation technology, right? And then they also don't have to be the one to train, the system is doing to actually do it. So one of the things that were are that struggling with not struggling with, we're experimenting with is, how best to visualize this, right? We do some things now, we've got a hybrid cloud management platform, we're teaming with the product guys, and it's the ability to have four consoles. One from a consumption, how do I consume services from Amazon, IBM Cloud on premise, how do I deploy it? So in a Dev apps model, how do I fulfill that very quickly and operational councils, right, and then cost on asset management so you can actually have at glance say, oh, you know, I've got a big Hadoop cluster which been spun up, I'm paying $100,000 for it and it has zero utilization. So how do you visualize that so you can say oh, I'm need to put a rule in that if somebody's spinning something up on, you know, IBM Cloud and they're not using it, I either shut it down, or I sent messages out, right, for governance in top of it. So it's putting business rules and logic in terms, in addition to visualization to help automate. >> And Jeannie talked about this at our keynote efficiency versus innovation around how to manage and this is where the scale comes in. Because if you know that something's working, you want to to double down on it, you can then, kind of automate that away and then you just move someone, the humans to something else. This is where the AIOps I think it's going to be, I think, going to change the category. I mean, it's a Gartner Magic Quadrant for the IT operations. >> Right. >> AI potentially decimates that, I mean... >> Yeah, there's this argument that you know, you have these nice quadrants or let's say nicely defined market segments. You have the NPMD, the ITSM, the ITOM, you know, you have APM and so what's happening is in this world of AIOps, none of those D marks really fit anymore because you're seeing the convergence of that. And then the other transition that's happening is this movement from, you know, classic ops or Dev and a dev to Ops, Dev Ops and now dev sec Ops, you know, you're trying to get worlds to converge. And so when we talk about the data and being able to build data models, those data models need to converge across those domains. So a lot of the work we do is collect data sets from log management, from service desk and service management, from APM etc, and then build that data model in real time. So you can.... >> It kind of building an Uber or CMDB or I mean, right? (loud laughter) I mean, do most of your clients have a single CMDB? Probably not, right? >> Yeah. So this is sort of a new guidepost, isn't it? >> Yeah, a part of it is. There are these data puddles if you will, all right data exist in a lot of different places How do you bring them together so you can federate different data sources, different catalogs into a common platform because if a user is trying to decide, okay, should I spin this up on, you know, this environment or that one, you want the full catalog of capabilities that are on premise in your CMDB system with the legacy environment out of the catalogs that may exist on Amazon or Azure, etc and you want data across all that. >> It seems that everything's a data problem now. And datas are being embedded into the applications which are then the workflows are defining infrastructure, architecture, or are sole cloud, multi cloud, whatever the resource is, so we had JPMorgan Chase on top data geek on and she was talking about, we have models for the models and IBM has been talking about this concept of reasoning around the data. This is why I always like the cognition kind of angle of cognitive, because that's not just math, math is math, you do math on, you know, supervised machine learning and knowing processes to be efficient, but the cognition and the reasoning really helps get at that data set, right. So can you guys react to that? I mean, is everything a data problem? Is that how you should look at it and how does reasoning fit into all this? >> Well, I mean, that's back to your point about what is the humans role in this, right. So we're moving in a services business from primarily labor base with tools to make them more efficient to the technology doing the work. But the humans have to then say, when the technology get stumped, what does that mean? So should I build a new, how do I train it better? How do I, you know, take my domain expertise? How do I do the deep analytics to tell me all right, how do I solve those problems in the future? So the role changes I think Jenny talks about in terms of new collar workers. I mean, these are data scientists, these are people that understand the dynamics of the inner relationship of the different data, the data models that need to get built and they are guiding in effect the automation. >> I thought your CTO was on theCUBE talking about, Paul was talking about, you know, take the heavy and Rob Thomas was also on, the GM of the data plus AI team. I think he really nailed it. If you guys to take away the heavy lifting of the setup work then the data science who're actually there to do the reasoning or help assist in managing what's going on and putting guard rails around whatever business policy is. >> Today, I mean, we talked to in this about 79 percent I think it's a gardener stat of 79 percent of the data scientists. And these are these PhDs, they're highly valuable, spend their time collecting, preparing, cleansing those data models, right? So, you're now really applying that PhD level knowledge base towards solving a problem, you're just trying to make sense of the data. So one, do you have a holistic and a few? Two, is there a way to automate those things so you can then apply the human aspects towards the things that Joe was talking about. So that's a big part of what we're trying to come together in terms of the market for. >> Well guys thanks for the insight, thanks for coming on, great job. I think we talked for you know, an hour and on cultural shift because you mentioned the sets in here Ops and devs. It's a melting pot and it's a cultural shifts. I think that topic is worth following up on. But I'll let you guys just get a quick plug for you. I know you going to an event coming up and you got some work. You can talk about what you guys are doing. You got an event coming up, what your pitch, give a quick flag. >> Yeah, so we've got our symposium, which is our big user conference. It's in April. It's right in, it's on April 22 to 23rd to the 25th. It's in downtown Washington DC, Cherry Blossom festival season at the Ritz Carlton. And so a lot of that, we'll have theCUBE there as well. >> Yeah of course. >> So, we're looking forward to it. A lot of great energy to be carried over. >> We love going to the District. (laughs loudly) >> What don't we say, you guys are great, great to visit. So give the plugs with a service you're doing. Just give an update on what you guys are up to. >> Yeah, I think I mean, we're also we're investing the technology when we're full on board with the containerization, as we talked about, we're putting together a services portfolio. I think Jenny mentioned that we're taking a whole bunch of capability across IBM Global Technology Services, Global Business Services, and really coalescing into about, you know, 23 offerings to help customers advise on cloud, move to cloud build for cloud and manage on cloud and then you've seen the announcements here about what we're doing around the multi cloud management system. Those four console I talked about how do we help, you know, put a gearbox in place to manage the complexity of the hybrid nature that our customers are dealing with. >> It seems IBM got clear visibility on what's happening with cloud, cloud private, I think a really big announcement. I think it's not talked about in the show and I'll always kind of mentioned the key linchpin but you see cloud, multi cloud, hybrid cloud, you got AI and you got partnerships, ecosystem now its execution time, right? >> Yeah, exactly and, and frankly, that's the challenge, right? So we used to be able to manage it all on the four runs, right? Your SAP instances was in the data center, your servers were in the data center, your middleware is in the data center. Now I got my applications running in Salesforce.com often software as a service. I've got three or four different infrastructures of service providers. But I still have the legacy that I got to deal with. I mean the integration problems are just tremendous. >> Chairman VP of strategy at IBM hybrid cloud and Murali Nemani, CMO ScienceLogic, AI operations, bringing in hybrid clouds to theCUBE bringing all the coverage day four. I'm with Dave Volante, it's all about cloud AI developers all happening here in San Francisco this week. Stay with us from this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're here live at theCUBE in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE with Stu Miniman. It's our third day of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next two guests are from NetApp. Russell Fishman, Director of Product Management, and Keith Barto, Director of Product Management, both directors of product management. One was the former CEO of Immersive, now with NetApp for a few years. Guys, great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us, John. Thank you. >> We saw you guys in Barcelona, obviously. The NetApp story just keeps on getting better. Also, you have core customer base. Cisco's going under transformation. You guys have been transforming ever since I started seeing NetApp arrive on the scene in the 90s. Every year there's always a new innovation. But now, more than ever, you're hearing even Cisco Bellwether in the routing networking business putting up old way network, hey there's a firewall. There's some devices in there. To a completely new, obviously, cloud made in the modern era really things are changing. So what's your reaction to that? Obviously, you guys are a part of that story. You have a relationship with Cisco. What's your reaction to that? And talk about your relationship with Cisco. >> So we obviously have a huge relationship with Cisco. And most folks will know about our FlexPods, I think that's probably the most famous way that we collaborate with these guys. We just came off the back of an amazing year, five straight quarters of double-digit, year-on-year growth, killing in the market. Obviously, we have to brag a little bit, right, come on. >> It's theCUBE, come on! >> It's theCUBE, we gotta be a little bit excited about it. So we're really excited about that, it just really talks to the strength of the relationship, right? So there's a very strong relationship there, and it's been there with FlexPod for eight years, and there's been a lot of transformation, exactly to your point John, a lot of transformation during that time, a lot of focus on the clouds. So one of the questions I always get asked, is why is converged infrastructure still relevant in a cloud-first world? And it is not obvious answer, now clearly our customers think that it is, and so do our partners. But it is not obvious why that is. NetApp has gone through, you talked about transformation, NetApp has gone through this massive transformation, huge focus on clouds, I mean, we have these cloud-first, cloud-native, focus around our data management platforms. We talk about a concept called the data fabric, I don't know if you've heard of the data fabric before. >> Yeah. >> And the data fabric really talks to how, our vision for how enterprises want to manage that new digital currency that is data across all the silos that they want to leverage, right? We've been able to bring some of that goodness into FlexPod, and that's why we're still relevant now. >> Yeah, so Keith, I think back to when converging infrastructure was built as about simplification, we were gonna take all these boxes and put it down to a box and that was the new unit of measurement. Well, Russell was just talking about we've got multi-cloud, when I think of NetApp now, it's always been a software company, but now software in that multi-cloud world, help connect the dots for us, as to management of converged infrastructure into that whole multi-cloud story. >> Yeah, we were very privileged to be acquired by NetApp last March, and my company Immersive, a lot of us came actually out of Cisco. So I was one of the original FlexPod architects from Cisco and had the privilege of helping to build the network, the storage that we brought into FlexPod, and a lot of our customers and our retailers kept on saying, "How do we know we put it together properly? "How are we following the best practices from the CVDs, "from the NVAs, from the TRs?" And so we took those rules and those analytics and we put them into platform, into a SaaS-based platform, and we were able to analyze that, coming from our customers' FlexPods, from within their deployments, from within their multi-data centers, and bring that into our service, run those analytics, prove those best practices, show the deficiencies, get our resellers out there to help our customers, 'cause FlexPod is a meet in the channel play, and we relied heavily on our resellers to make it a success. >> What was the driver for that product? When you started that company and that happened, what was the main motivation behind that? Was it analytics, was it insight, what was some of the things that you guys were building in, was it operational data? >> The real reason was people kept on asking, "How do I know?" Because it's a reference architecture, not a product, "How do I know I did it right?" Because it's really important, we're gonna run our key business applications on this platform, right? My SAP, my Oracle, my Sequel, my SharePoint, my Outlook. I gotta make sure this stuff is really gonna work properly, and it's going to grow in scale with the business. So I need to make sure that those redundant links are there. I need to make sure that when I do VMWare upgrade, or a Microsoft upgrade, that the firmware is alignment with the best practices in the interoperability matrix, so we wanted to make that as easy as possible, so that from a single dashboard, you can see all of those things, you can diagnose it quickly, you can get those email alerts and notifications, and because you end up with disparate operation teams, the server team, the network team, the storage team, the hypervisor team, sometimes they don't always talk effectively with each other, and from one single dashboard, we're now able to show everybody where things are today, and then, one of my favorites, when there is a problem, you call either Services or Support, and you say, "Hey it's not working," and they say, "What did you change?" And you say, "I didn't change anything." We have that historical-- >> Finger pointing kicks in, it was his fault! >> Yeah we have the historical snapshot and trending, so we can go back and look at where things were and do a comparison to where they are today, and it allows us to have a much faster mean time to resolution. >> And what do you guys call that product now within Cisco? What's it... >> It's now called Converged Systems Advisor in NetApp. >> Awesome, so what's next for convergers. Obviously, people, both cloud growth, we're seeing the on-premise, Wikibon has reported, the true private cloud numbers, which basically say there's a lot of on-premise activity going on, that's gonna look like cloud, it's gonna operate like cloud, so they need to have that. There's migration going on, but it's not a lift and shift, to cloud, there's gonna be, obviously, the hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So, cloud folks still buy hardware, too. You gotta still run stuff, networks aren't going away, storage isn't going away, so what's next for the converged infrastructure play with FlexPod? How do you guys manage that roadmap? >> So, we just announced some things coming into, jointly with Cisco, coming into Cisco Live. One of those things we announced was something called Managed Private Cloud on FlexPods, or actually no, FlexPod Managed Private Cloud, sorry, I switch it around. And FlexPod Managed Private Cloud, it really talks to exactly what you're talking about, John, which is... What we find, cloud has fundamentally changed customers' expectations of what they want on-prem. They recognize the need on-prem, we live in a hybrid world. Those of us that've been in the industry long enough, and have a couple of gray hairs, know that there are very few transitions that are really absolute in the business. A lot of people pronounce that it's gonna be this way or that way, and the reality is, it's something in between. And that's fine because cloud is just another tool in the toolbox, and you don't want to hit every nail with the same hammer, you want to find the right tool for the right job. So what we've done is we've taken some of that cloud goodness, which really means not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure, all right. Worrying about the applications, being more application-focused, more business-value-focused, more line-of-business-focused. And being able to deliver that in a way that people can consume it on-premise. So it really feels like a FlexPod delivered like a cloud, but from a management day-to-day perspective, you don't have to do it-- >> So, it's flexible. >> It's flexible-- >> FlexPod. >> But it's done for you, so it's your little piece of cloud, sitting on-prem, and you don't have to manage it or run it day-to-day. >> Let's talk about what you just said about the whole transformation, people say a certain way, basically you're kind of saying, a lot of press, and a lot of analysts say, "Oh, you've got to do this digital transformation." Customers will take a pragmatic approach, but you guys at NetApp have been talking for a long time, I've been following it, non-disruptive operations. >> Yes. >> So what you see in the cloud if people wanna take those first three steps, but they don't want to have to overhaul anything, containers have proved to be great resource there, Kubernetes is showing a great way to have life cycle management on the app side of infrastructure. How does your customers, and Cisco customers, maintain that non-disruptive operational playbook, because Cisco guys are gonna start changing, moving up the stack too-- >> Absolutely. >> Doesn't mean storage is gonna go away, but they don't want to disrupt anything, your thoughts? >> And it doesn't mean any of it goes away, that's the funny thing, we talk about where we want to focus, but it's as much about not having to worry about the things that we had to worry about that are just there in the future, right? So it's kind of like if you went back 200 years, going to get fresh water was a big hassle, now it isn't, it's delivered to you, right? I know it sounds like a crazy analogy, but the reality is is that we shouldn't have to worry about the basics of on-premise, private cloud, it should just be automatic, it should be simple to execute, simple to manage, simple to order, simple to deploy, and then you focus on the value, so that's what we've been really focused on. >> Keith, when I listen to my friends in the networking space management's still a challenge. The punchline is usually, they hear single pane of glass, and they said that's spelled P-A-I-N. >> I've heard that one too. >> Talk a little bit about how your solutions tie into some of the broader tools out there. >> Well, we first looked at the compute layer and said, because of the extensibility of USC Manager and the API integration, we're able to take advantage of that, and be able to pull that data out, and XOS, right? We're able to do that exact same thing, and the background that we had at Cisco, and knowing those products really well, we were able to gather all the specific data we need to look at those best practices. And it's a complex architecture, but it's a very elegant architecture, because of the high availability, it can provide the performance, the non-disruptive operations that you were bringing up, John. We want to make sure that we're able to keep those things in line, so as we bring our next release of CSA out, we're going to be adding Enterprise Fibre Channel, so the new MDS switches, we're gonna be bringing our relationship with VMWare in our engine to be able to ingest the configuration of VMWare in. We're also bringing back our partner-centric reseller portal so when customer is running Converged Systems Advisor, they can share it to their reseller, and the reseller's going to be able to provide managed services, support services, and professional services to expand, to repair, to augment those existing FlexPods in their customers' environments. So we're really excited to be able to bring that solution back to our resellers-- >> What's that going to do, what's the impact of that, because I almost imagine that's going to enable them to want to be tightly integrated but also get data from their customers. What do you guys see as the value for the partners to take advantage of that? >> Well, I just met with a partner at our booth, just a few moments ago, and walked them through the solution they had never seen it before. It takes a reseller a week, or even multiple weeks, depending on the size of the FlexPod, to actually go through the configuration of the servers, the network, the storage, the hypervisors, and correlate that into a deliverable to their customer. We can do that in sub-10 minutes, sub-15 minutes. >> So faster time to the customer value. >> Faster time to customer value, faster time to resolution if there is a problem, and then again, they're running in their key business applications on this platform, we've been doing it for eight years, we want to continue to expand upon the value the FlexPod can offer. >> But I wanted to add just a couple of things to what you were saying. We talked about FlexPod really being a channel play. That's important to us in product management, not so important to our customers. What it really means to our customers is they tend to have a very close relationship with their partners. Their partners are the ones that are really enabling FlexPod for them. What we're doing with Converged Systems Advisor, is we are creating such a close relationship at a technical level, technology level, between the customer and the partner, that the partner's there to help them on a daily basis. Where there is a problem, it's almost like the telematics in your car, right? All the cars now, they're phoning back home, they're telling where there's something wrong, you get this letter or an email, you need a service, you need... This is exactly what we're achieving with the Converged System Advisor-- >> When you call support, what don't you want to hear? What's your model number, what's your serial number, what's your contract ID? Wouldn't it be great if everybody's singing off the same sheet of music? >> Well, you bring a great point there. There was so much discussion, well, converged infrastructure a public lot, those are gonna be really simple, and they're gonna be homogenous, and they're all gonna be great, but yeah, you're smiling and laughing because the reality is you're never gonna find two customers that have the same environment, no matter what you're talking about. >> No. >> So I need the tooling, I need the data and the analytics, to help get through that. I shouldn't have to spend half an hour on level one support. >> And that's all-- >> I shouldn't have to go through multiple forms the same time. >> Yes, and you're right Stu, that's always been, that's always been the mantra for FlexPod since the word dot. We don't get to an 11 billion dollar install base unless you're doing something right, and the word, the reason the word flex is in there, it's a dichotomy, whenever you go into these sorts of discussions, do you make it really fixed, right? Which is almost like, I call it like straight jacket, right. But you know what you get, right? Or do you make it flexible, right? And the flexibility really addresses the business need as opposed to the technology need. So the product guys love it when it's fixed, the customers love it when it's flexible. >> Yeah, you're talking about basically, changes... You want changes to be rolling with the... Technology rolling with the changes. >> Yes. >> Not be stuck in the straight jacket, or we'll also say tailor-made suit, but things change, you wanna... Fashion changes, so this is a real big issue, and talk about support, I think the ideal outcome is not to even call support, with analytics and push notifications and AI, you can almost see what DevNet's doing here, around how developer are getting involved with DevOps and network DevOps. Coders can come in and use the analytics, if tightly integrated in, so that you get the notifications, or they know exactly your environment. Is that, how far along are you guys on that path, because analytics play a big role, you've got the command center there, the Converged Systems Advisor, implies advising, resolution, prescription, what's the vision? >> So Immersive was a Cisco solution partner at the very beginning, so we were a part of this group right behind us, and it was exciting to be a part of that, to attend Cisco Live and be a part of DevNet, and we expanded upon, as you mentioned, the API, integrations of all these platforms, and when cluster data ONTAP came out for NetApp, we did the exact same thing, right? So we get integrated with NetApp, and very easily able to bring all that data in. Now, massaging that data is the hard part, right? Understanding what is noise and what is the real goodness, so you have to find those best practices, look at the hard work that our teams have done around validated designs between Cisco and NetApp, and look at the best practices that come from those particular pieces of hardware. And then once that intelligence is built, correlating that in the cloud service is really where the magic happens. So our teams are back there talking with the network experts the storage experts, the compute networks, the virtualization experts, and so when we have that data, and now you can decision-eer, right? You can start advising your resellers. So we bring up the rules dashboard, and then we do have alerting that we can send to ticketing systems to the remedies, the ServiceNows-- >> It's interesting, I'd love to get the product perspective on this, and across the bigger picture, because the trend we're seeing, certainly on theCUBE, over the past few years, and most recently this year, is the move from device, hardware, to system. So the systems approach really becomes more of a holistic view where, you're looking at the holistic view of multiple things happening. >> Yes. >> It's not just, this is the box, here's where the rack is, command line interface, you guys taking that same approach, can you just add some color on NetApp's vision on looking at holistically, 'cause that's really where software shines. >> No, no, and that's absolutely, so we have a way of seeing FlexPod as a, we call it a converged system, and for that exact reason. So what CSA is able to do is look at anything that happens within that converged system and the context of the overall system, and that really is the key, right? When you understand things in context it means so much more. Just think about when you listen to someone talk, a word taken out of context means nothing, right? So when we listen to that infrastructure, what it tells us is understood in context. And what it will ultimately do, and I think you were kind of hinting at this, John, the vision here is that there will be self-healing infrastructures, self-healing converged systems, just like the cloud, right? So we are continuously monitoring the configuration, the availability, and other aspects of your converged system and we are able to take action to make sure it stays on the rails. >> We saw you guys at the RSA event, you guys had a small little party we went to, and we were riffing, having fun with some of the NetApp folks, and the big trend in cloud is server-less. So the joke was, is this storage-less solution coming? To your point about this, if you think about it, it's just storage somewhere. This is kind of a joke, but it's also kind of nuanced. This is elastic-- >> No, no! It's absolutely true, if you look at NetApp's strategy, if you look at our cloud strategy, we're the first third-party branded services part of the AGI core services, we're not in the marketplace, we're actually part of AGI core. It's NetApp cloud volumes for AGI, and a customer doesn't know what's going on behind the scenes but let's be clear, we're talking about software-defined storage here, right? >> And cloud-ified, too, as well, talk about cloud operations. >> Yeah, still at the end of the day, for us, our intellectual property is not really tied to hardware, we obviously use that as a way to get our intellectual property in the hands of our customers. But we're not tied to a-- >> You guys made a good bet on cloud, I remember talking before Kurian took over, you guys were kicking the tires on Amazon years ago. >> Yes, yes, yes, that's right. >> So it's not like a Johnny-come-lately to the cloud, you guys have been deep in the core. >> Absolutely. >> To end this segment, I wanted to get your thoughts, because you guys are here at Cisco Live, what should the audience understand that couldn't make it out here as the top story at Cisco Live, and what is your role with Cisco here, what's the big story, top line, high-order bit, NetApp, Cisco story. >> So I'll go first, and I'll let my friend here go second. We were really excited coming into Cisco Live, right. We had this pretty big announcement last week, there were a few different aspects to it, but I'll talk about two of them. A new focus between Cisco and NetApp on verticals around FlexPod, and what that really means is that we're focused on very specific verticals, including healthcare, but there'll be others that come down the line. We announced a new solution base on Epic PHR. We announced some lead customers, including the Mercy Technology Services, which is part of the Mercy Hospital group. So that was super exciting, I think what it does is it just demonstrates that our focus is on the outcomes, as opposed to the actual infrastructure, the infrastructure is the way to deliver that. So we're very excited about that at Cisco. The second thing that we announced was, I said, mentioned this Managed Private Cloud, we actually announced it with four of our major joint partners, Dimension Data, ProAct, Microland, and oh my Lord, ePlus, yes of course. That was super exciting as well, and what it does is it captures the imagination, and it's always very fun when you're standing at a booth, and people say, "Oh, I've known FlexPod, "I've seen you guys around." But there's always something new to talk about. >> The relevance is more than ever. >> Absolutely. >> Keith, what wave is NetApp riding right now, if you look at the Cisco action going on, what they're going through, what should people know about the big wave that you guys are taking advantage of right now? >> I think the big wave is absolutely gotta be what we're doing with the hyperscalers. We by far have taken the industry by storm, when you think about what we've done with Microsoft, what we're doing with Google, you know, sorry? >> And Amazon. >> And Amazon, thank you. >> Small companies. >> Yeah, just small hyperscalers, right? It's amazing what we can do with cloud ONTAP, across those vendors, and when we look at what our customers have done with FlexPod, and their relationship with Cisco and NetApp, and our ability to work together to help customers get their data from their core data centers to cloud, back, to their customers, and for us to be able to use analytics the way we do on FlexPod, I think there's a real opportunity-- >> And riding the scale wave too, scaling is huge. Everyone's talking about large-scale, talking about hyperscale as that is the largest scale you can see. >> Well, and our ability to control where the data lives, right? Because you want to be able to hold control of your data, and being able to use familiar tools like what you're already using in your own data center and in your own converged infrastructures, being able to use that ONTAP operating system to be able to control that experience is gonna be very important. >> Guys, thanks for coming in for the NetApp update, great news, great alignment with Cisco. It's a large-scale world, and certainly, the world is changing, storage is gonna be a critical part of it, server, storage, infrastructure, cloud operations on-premise, and in the cloud. TheCUBE, bringing you live coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more day three of three days of coverage here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live, we'll be right back. (electronic music)

(techy music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE. We are broadcasting from Informatica World 2018, The Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm Peter Burris, once again, my cohost is Jim Kobielus, Wikibon/SiliconANGLE. And at this segment, we're joined by Matthew Cox, who's the director of Data & Technology Services in McAfee. Welcome to theCUBE, Matthew. >> Thank you very much. Glad to be here. >> So, you're a user, so you're on the practitioner side. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing in McAfee then. >> So, from a technology standpoint, my role, per se, is to create and deliver an end-to-end vision and strategy for data, data platforms and services around those, but always identifying a line to measurable business outcomes. So my goal is to leverage data and bring meaning of data to the business and help them leverage more data-driven decisions, more toward business outcomes and business goals. >> So you're working both with the people who are managing the data or administering the data, but also the consumers of the data, and trying to arbitrate and match. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So, the first part of my career, I was in IT for many years, and then I moved into the business. So for probably the last 10 years, I've been in sales and marketing in various roles, so it gives me kind of a unique perspective in that I've lived their life and, probably more importantly, I understand the language of business, and I think too often, with our IT roles, we get into an IT-speak, and we aren't translating that into the world of the business, and I have been able to do that. So I'm really acting as a liaison, kind of bringing what I've seen of the business to IT, and helping us deliver solutions that drive business outcomes and goals. >> What strategic initiatives are you working on at McAfee that involve data? >> Well, we have a handful. Number one, I would say that our first goal is to build out our hub-and-spoke model with MDM, and really delivering our-- >> Jim: Master data management? >> Our master data management, that's correct. And really delivering our, because at MDM, that is where we define our accounts, our contacts, we build our upward-linking parents and our account hierarchies, and we create that customer master. That's the one lens that we want to see, our customers across all of our ecosystem. So we're finishing out that hub-and-spoke model, which is kind of an industry best practice, but for both realtime and batch-type integrations. But on top of that, MDM is a great platform, and it gives you that, but the end-to-end data flow is another area that we've really put a priority on, and making sure that as we move data throughout the ecosystem, we are looking at the transformations, we are looking at the data quality, we're looking at governance, to make sure that what started on one end of the spectrum look the same, or, appropriately, it was transformed by the time it gets to the other side as well. I'll say data quality three times: Data quality, data quality, data quality. For us, it's really about mastering the domain of data quality, and then looking at other areas of compliance, and the GDPR just being one. There's a number of areas of compliance areas around data, but GDPR's the most relevant one at this time. >> There's compliance, there's data quality, but also, there must be operational analytical insights to be gained from using MDM. Can you describe how McAfee, what kind of insights you're gaining from utilization of that technology in your organization? >> Sure, well, and MDM's a piece part of that, so I can talk how the account hierarchy gives us a full view. Now you've got other products, like data quality, that bolt on, that allow us to filter through and make sure that that data looks correct, and is augmented and appended correctly, but MDM gives us that wonderful foundation of understanding the lens of an account, no matter what landscape or platform we're leveraging. So if I'm looking at reporting, if I'm looking at my CRM system, if I'm looking at my marketing automation platform, I can see Account A consistently. What that allows me to do is not only have analytics built that I can have the same answers, because if I get a different number for Company A at every platform, we've got problem. What I should be seeing, the same information across the landscape, but importantly, it also drives the conversation between the different business units, so I can have marketing talk to sales, talk to operations, about Company A, and they all know who we're talking about. Historically, that's been a problem for a lot of companies because a source system would have Company A a little bit differently, or would have the data around it differently, or see it differently from one spectrum to the next. And we're trying to make that one lens consistent. >> So MDM allows you to have one consistent lens, based on the customer, but McAfee, I'm sure, is also in the midst of finding new ways, sources of data and new ways of using data, like product information, how it's being used, improving products, improving service quality. How is it, how is that hub-and-spoke approach able to accommodate some of the evolving challenges or evolving definitions and needs of data, since so much of that data often is localized to specific activities after they're performed? >> In business, there is a lot of data that happens very specific to that silo. So I have certain data within, say, marketing, that really is only marketing data, so one of the things that we do is we differentiate data. This kind of goes to governance, even saying there's some data as an organization is kind of our treasure that we want to make sure we manage consistently across the landscape of the ecosystem. There's some data that's very specific to a business function, that doesn't need to proliferate around. So we don't necessarily have the type of governance that would necessitate the level of governance that an ecosystem level data attribute would. So MDM provides, in that hub-and-spoke, what's really powerful for that as it relates to that account domain, because you're talking about product. Products is another area we may go look at at some point, adding a product domain into MDM, but today with our customer domain, and kind of our partners as well, it gives us the ability to, with this hub-and-spoke topology, to do realtime and batch, whereas before, it may have been a latency as we moved information around, and things could get either out of sync or there'd be a delay. With that hub-and-spoke, we're able to now have a realtime integration, a realtime interaction, so I can see changes made-- >> At the spoke? >> Peter: At the spoke, right. So the spoke pops back to the hub, hub delivers that back out again, so I can have something happening in marketing, translate that to sales, very quickly, translate that out to service and support, and that gives me the ability to have clarity, consistency, and timeliness across my ecosystem. And the hub-and-spoke helps drive that. >> Tell us about, you just alluded to it, sales and marketing, how is customer data, as an asset that you manage through your MDM environment, how is that driving better engagement with your customers? >> Well, it drives better engagement, first of all, you said an important thing, which is asset. We are very keen on doing data as an asset. I mean, systems come and go, platforms come and go. It's CRM tool today, CRM tool number two tomorrow, but data always is. Some of the things we've done is try to house and put a label on data as an asset, something that needs to be managed, that needs to be maintained, that needs to-- >> Governed. >> have an investment to. Right, governed, because if you don't, then it's going to decline in value over time, just like a physical asset, like a building. If you don't maintain and invest, it deteriorates. It's the same with data. What's really important about getting data from a customer's standpoint is the more we can align quality data, again, looking at that, not all data. Trying to govern all data is very difficult, but there's a treasure of data that helps us make decisions about our customers, but having that data align consistently to a lens of an account that's driven by MDM proliferate across your ecosystem so that everyone knows how to act and react accordingly, regardless of their function, gives us a very powerful process that we can gauge our customers, so that customer experience becomes consistent as well. If I'm talking to someone in sales and they understand me differently, then I'm talking to someone in support, versus talking to someone in marketing or another organization, it creates a differentiating customer experience. So if I can house that customer data, aligned to one lens of the customer, that provides that ubiquity and a consistency from a view in dealing with our customers. >> Talk to us about governance and stewardship with the data. Who owns the customer data? Is it sales, is it marketing, or is there another specified data steward who manages that data? >> Well, there's several different roles that you've going to hit through. Stewardship, we have, within my data technology services organization, we have a stewardship function. So, we steward data, act on data, but there's processes that we put in place, that's you're default process, and that's how we steward data and augment data over time. We do take very specific requests from sales and marketing. More likely, when it comes to an account from marketing, sorry, from sales, whose sales will guide, you know, move this, change this, alter that. So from a domain perspective, one of the things we're working through right now is data domains, and who has, I don't know if you're familiar with racing models, but who is responsible, who is accountable, who is consulted, who just receives an interest or gets information about it. But understanding how those data domains play against data is very, very important. We're working through some of that now, but typically, from a customer data, we align more toward sales, because they have that direct engagement. Part of it, also, is that differentiated view. Who has the most authority, the most knowledge about the top 500, top 1,000, top 2,000 customers is different than the people you had customer 10,000. So you usually have different audiences that play, who helps us govern and steward that data. >> So, one of the tensions that's been in place for years as we tried to codify and capture information about engagement, was who put the data in, what was the level of quality that got in there, and in many respects, the whole CRM thing, took a long time to work, precisely, because what we did is we moved data entry jobs from administrators into sales people, and they rebelled. So as you think about the role that quality plays and how you guide your organization to become active participants in data quality, what types of challenges do you face in communicating with the business, how to do about doing that, and then having your systems reflect what is practical and real in the rest of your organization? >> Well, it's a number of things. First of all, you have to make data relevant. If the data that that these people are entering is not relevant and isn't meaningful to them, the quality isn't going to be there, because they haven't had a purpose or a reason to engage. So, first thing is help make the data be relevant to the people who are you're data creators, right? And that's also to your business leaders. You also want the business leaders coming to you and talking about data, not just systems, and that's one of the things we're working toward as well. But as part of that, though, is giving them tools to ease the process of data-create. If I can go to my CRM tool instead of having to type in a new account, if I can then click on a tool and say, Hey, send to CRM, or add to CRM. So it's really more of a click and action that moves data, so I ensure that I have a good quality source that moves into my data store. That removes that person from being in the middle, and making those typing mistakes, those error mistakes. So it's really about the data-create process and putting a standard there, which is very important, but also then having your cleansing tools and capabilities in your back end, like the MDM or a data stewardship function. >> So by making the activity valuable, you create incentive for them to stay very close to quality consideration? >> Absolutely, because at the end of the day, they use that old term, garbage in, garbage out, and we try to be very clear with them, listen, someday you're going to want to see this data, and you probably should take the time to put quality effort in to begin with. >> Got it, one last quick question. If you think about five years, how is your role going to change? 30 seconds. >> I think the role's going to change in going from an IT-centric view, where I'm looking at tools and systems, to driving business outcomes and addressing business goals, and really, talking to business about how do they leverage data as a meaningful asset to move their business forward, versus just how am I deploying stewardship governance and systems and tools. >> Excellent. Matthew Cox, McAffee, data quality and utilization. >> Absolutely. >> Once again, you're watching theCUBE. We'll be back in a second. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, we're here in New Orleans in the state of Louisiana, and to help Keith Townsend and myself, Stu Miniman, wrap up we're glad to have one more customer. We have the great state of Louisiana here with us, we have Michael Allison, who's the Chief Technology Officer. We also have Derek Williams, who's the Director of Data Center Operations. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so I think we all know what the state of Louisiana is, hopefully most people can find it on a map, it's a nice easy shape to remember from my kids and the like. But, Michael, why don't we start with you? Talk to us first about kind of the purview of your group, your organization, and some of the kind of biggest challenges you've been facing in recent times. Sure, we are part of the Office of Technology Services, which is a consolidated IT organization for the state of Louisiana. We were organized about four years ago. Actually four years ago this July. And that brought in the 16 Federated IT groups into one large organization. And we have the purview of the executive branch, which includes those typical agencies like Children and Family Services, Motor Vehicles, Public Safety, Health and Hospitals, Labor, etc. >> And Derek, you've got the data center operations, so give us a little bit of a scope. We heard how many organizations in there, but what do you all have to get your arms around? >> Sure, so we had, you know, there's often a joke that we make that if they've ever made it we own one of each. So we had a little bit of every type of technology. So what we've really been getting our arms around is trying to standardize technologies, get a standard stack going, an enterprise level thing. And really what we're trying to do is become a service provider to those customers where we have standard lines of service and set enterprise level platforms that we migrate everybody onto. So do you actually have your own data centers? Your own hosting facilities? What's kind of the real estate look like? >> Absolutely, so we have, the state has two primary data centers that we utilize, and then we also use a number of cloud services as well as some third-party providers for offsite services. >> So obviously just like every other state in the union, you guys have plenty of money. >> Always. >> Way too many employees and just no challenges. Let's talk about what are the challenges? You know, coming together, bringing that many organizations together, there's challenges right off the bat. What are some of the challenges as you guys look to provide services to the great people of Louisiana? >> Well as Derek kind of eluded to, technology debt is deep. We have services that are aging at about 40 years old, that are our tier one services. And they were built in silos many, many years ago. So being able to do the application or actualization, being able to identify those services, then when we actually shift to the cultural side, actually bringing 16 different IT organizations into one, having all those individuals now work together instead of apart. And not in silos. That was probably one of the biggest challenges that we had over the last few years is really breaking down those cultural barriers and really coming together as one organization. >> Yeah I totally agree with that. The cultural aspect has been the biggest piece for us. Really getting in there and saying, you know a lot of small and medium size IT shops could get away without necessarily having the proper governance, structures in place, and a lot of people wore a lot of hats. So now we're about 800 strong in the Office of Technology Services, and that means people are very aligned to what they do operationally. And so that's been a big shift and kind of that cultural shift has really been where we've had to focus on to make that align properly to the business needs. >> Mike, what was the reason that led you down the path towards Nutanix? Maybe set us up with a little bit of the problem statement? We heard some of the heterogeneous nature and standardization which seems to fit into a theme we've heard lots of times with Nutanix. But was there a specific use case or what led you towards that path? Well, about four years ago the Department of Health and Hospitals really had a case where they needed to modernize their Medicaid services, eligibility and enrollment. CMS really challenged them to build an infrastructure that was in line with their MIDAS standards. There was modular, COTS, configuration over customization. Federal government no longer wants to build monolithic systems that don't integrate and are just big silos. So what we did was we gravitated to that project. We went to CMS and said, hey why don't we take what you're asking us to build and build it in a way that we can expand throughout the enterprise to not only affect the Department of Health but also Children of Family Services, and be able to expand it to Department of Corrections, etc. That was our use case, and having an anchor tenent with the Department of Health that has a partner with CMS really became the lynch pin in this journey. That was our first real big win. >> Okay how did you hear first about Nutanix? Was there a bake off you went through? >> It was, yes, very similar. It was the RP process took a year or so and we were actually going down the road of procuring some V blocks, and right before the Christmas vacations our Deputy CIO says hey, why don't you go look to see if there's other solutions that are out there? Challenge Derek, myself, and some others to really expand the horizons. Say, if we're going to kind of do this greenfield, what else is out there? And right before he got on his Christmas cruise he dropped that on our lap and about a month later we were going down the Dell Nutanix route. And to be honest it was very contentious, and it actually took a call from Michael Dell who I sent to voicemail twice before I realized who it was, but you know, those are the kind of decisions and the buy in from Dell executives that really allowed us to comfortably make this decision and move forward. >> So technology doesn't exactly move fast in any government because, you know, people process technology and especially in the government, people and process, as you guys have deployed Nutanix throughout your environment, what are some of the wins and what are some of the challenges? >> That's a funny point because we talk about this a lot. The fact that our choice was really between something like VBlock, which was an established player that had been for a long time, and something a little more bleeding edge. And part of the hesitancy to move to something like Nutanix was the idea that hey, we have a lot of restricted data, CJIS, HIPAA, all those kind of things across the board, RS1075 comes into play, and there was hesitancy to move to something new, but one of the things that we said exactly was we are not as agile as private sector. The procurement process, all the things that we have to do, put us a little further out. So it did come into play that when we look at that timeline the stuff that's bleeding edge now, by the time we have it out there in production it's probably going to be mainstream. So we had to hedge our bets a little. And you know, we really had to do our homework. Nutanix was, you know, kind of head and shoulders above a lot of what we looked at, and I had resiliency to it at first, so credit to the Deputy CIO, he made the right call, we came around on it, it's been awesome ever since you know, one of the driving things for us too was getting out there and really looking at the business case and talking to the customers. One of the huge things we kept hearing over and over was the HA aspect of it. You know, we need the high availability, we need the high availability. The other interesting thing that we have from the cost perspective is we are a cost recovery agency now that we're consolidated. So what you use you get charged for, you get a bill every month just like a commercial provider. You know, use this many servers, this much storage, you get that invoice for it. So we needed a way that we could have an environment that's scaled kind of at a linear cost that we could just kind of add these nodes to without having to go buy a new environment and have this huge kind of CAPX expenditure. And so at the end of the day it lived up to the hype and we went with Nutanix and we haven't regretted it, so. >> How are the vendors doing overall, helping you move to that really OP-X model, you said, love to hear what you're doing with cloud overall. Nutanix is talking about it. Dell's obviously talking about that. How are the vendors doing in general? And we'd love to hear specifically Dell Nutanix. >> We've had the luxury of having exceptionally good business partners. The example I'd like to give is, about four months into this project we realized that we were treated Nutanix as a traditional three-tier architecture. We were sending a lot of traffic more south. When we did the analysis we asked the question, a little cattywampus, it was how do we straighten this out? And so we posed a question on a Tuesday about how do we fix this, how do we drive the network back into the fabric? By Thursday we were on a phone call with VMWare. By the following Monday we had two engineers on site with a local partner with NSX Ninja. And we spent the next two months, with about different iterations of how to re-engineer the solution and really look at the full software-defined data center, not just software-defined storage and compute. It is really how do we then evolve this entire solution building upon Nutanix and then layering upon on top of that the VMWare solutions that kind of took us to that next level. >> Yeah and I think the key term in there is business partner. You know, it sounds a little corny to say, but we don't look at them as just vendors anymore. When we choose a technology or direction or an architecture, that is the direction we go for the entire state for that consolidated IT model. So, we don't just need a vendor. We need someone that has a vested interest in seeing us succeed with the technology, and that's what we've gotten out of Nutanix, out of Dell, and they've been willing to, you know, if there's an issue, they put the experts on site, it's not just we'll get some people on a call. They're going to be there next week, we're going to work with you guys and make it work. And it's been absolutely key in making this whole thing go. >> And as a CTO one of the challenges that we have is, as Derek has executed his cloud vision, is how do we take that and use it as an enabler, an accelerant to how we look at our service design, service architecture, how do we cloud optimize this? So as we're talking about CICD and all these little buzzwords that are out there, is how can we use this infrastructure to be that platform that kind of drives that from kind of a grass root, foundation up, whereas sometimes it's more of a pop down approach, we're taking somewhat of an opposite. And now we're in that position where we can now answer the question of now what, what do we do with it now? >> So sounds like you guys are a mixed VMWare, Nutanix hardware, I mean software, Dell hardware shop, foundation you've built the software-defined data center foundation, something that we've looked at for the past 10 years in IT to try and achieve, which is a precursor, or the foundation, to cloud. Nutanix has made a lot of cloud announcements. How does Nutanix's cloud announcements, your partnership with Dell match with what you guys plan when it comes to cloud? >> That's a perfect lead in for us. So you're absolutely right. We have had an active thought in our head that we need to move toward SDDC, software-defined data center is what we wanted to be at. Now that we've achieved it the next step for us is to say hey, whether it's an AWS or whomever, an Azure type thing, they are essentially an SDDC as well. How do we move workloads seamlessly up and down in a secure fashion? So the way we architected things in our SDDC, we have a lot of customers. We can't have lateral movement. So everything's microsegmentation across the board. What we've been pursuing is a way to move VM workloads essentially seamlessly up to the cloud and back down and have those microsegmentation rules follow whether it goes up or back down. That's kind of the zen state for us. It's been an interesting conference for us, because we've seen some competitors to that model. Some of the things Nutanix is rolling out, we're going to have to go back and take a very serious look at on that roadmap to see how it plays out. But, suddenly multicloud, if we can get to that state we don't care what cloud it's in. We don't have to learn separate stacks for different providers. That is a huge gap for us right now. We have highly available environment between two data centers where we run two setups active active that are load balanced. So the piece we're missing now is really an offsite DR that has that complete integration. So the idea that we could see a hurricane out in the golf, and 36, 48 hours away, and know that we might be having some issues. Being able to shift workloads up to the cloud, that's perfect for us. And you know, then cost comes into play. All that kind of stuff that we might have savings, economy of scale, all plays in perfectly for us. So we are super excited about where that's going and some of the technologies coming up are going to be things we're going to be evaluating very carefully over the next year. >> At the end of the day it's all about our constituents. We have to take data, turn it into information that they can consume at the pace that they want to. Whether it be traditional compute in a desktop or mobile or anywhere in between. It was our job to make sure that these services are available and usable when they need it, especially in the time of a disaster or just in day-to-day life. So that's the challenge that we have when delivering services to our citizens and constituents. >> All right, well Mike and Derek, really appreciate you sharing us the journey you've been on, how you're helping the citizens here in the great state of Louisiana. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching our program. It's been a great two days here. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our programming. Thanks Nutanix and the whole crew here, and thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. This is theCUBE live here in Barcelona for Cisco Live Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, with Stu Miniman analyst at Wikibon, covering networking storage and all infrastructure cloud. Stu Miniman, Stu. Our next guest is Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at IBM Storage Systems. Eric, CUBE alumni, he's been on so many times I can't even count. You get the special VIP badge. We're here breaking down all the top stories at Cisco Live in Europe, kicking off 2018. Although it's the European show, not the big show, certainly kicking off the year with a lot of new concepts that aren't necessarily new, but they're innovative. Eric, welcome to theCUBE again. >> Well, thank you. We always love participating in theCUBE. IBM is a strong supporter of theCUBE and all the things you do for us, so thank you very much for having us again. >> A lot of great thought leadership from IBM, really appreciate you guys' support over the years. But now we're in a sea change. IBM had their first quarter of great results, and that will be well-reported on SiliconANGLE, but the sea change is happening. You've been living this generation, you've seen couple cycles in the past. Cisco putting forth a vision of the future, which is pretty right on. They were right on Internet of Things ten years ago, they had it all right, but they're a networking company that's transformed up the stack over the years. Now on the front lines of no perimeter, okay, more security challenges, cloud big whales with no networking and storage. You're in the middle of it. Break it down. Why is Cisco Live so important now than ever before? >> Well, for us it's very important because one, we have a strategic relationship with Cisco, the Storage Division does a product with Cisco called the VersaStack, converged infrastructure, and in fact one of our key constituents for the VersaStack are MSPs and CSPs, which is a key constituent of Cisco, especially with their emphasis on the cloud. Second thing for us is IBM storage has gone heavily cloud. So going heavily cloud with our software, in addition to what we do with our solutions as a foundation for CSPs and MSPs. Just what we've integrated into our software-defined storage for cloud makes Cisco Live an ideal venue for us, and Cisco an ideal partner. >> So I've got to ask you, we've had conversations on theCUBE before, they're all on youtube.com/siliconangle, just search Eric Herzog, you'll find them. But I want to recycle this one point and get your comments and reaction here in Barcelona. You guys have transformed with software at IBM big-time with storage. Okay, you're positioned well for the cloud. What's the most important thing that companies have to do, like IBM and Cisco, to play an innovator role in the cloud game as we have software at the center of the value proposition? >> Well I think the key thing is, when you look at cloud infrastructure, first of all, the cloud's got to run on something. So you need some sort of structural, infrastructure foundation. Servers, networking, and compute. So at IBM and with Cisco, we're positioning ourselves as the ideal rock-solid foundation for the cloud building, if you will. So that's item number one. Item number two, our software in particular can survive, not only on premises, but can bridge and go from on-premise to a public cloud, creating a hybrid infrastructure, and that allows us to also run cloud instantiation. Several of our products are available from IBM Cloud Division, Amazon offers some of the IBM storage software, over three hundred cloud service providers, smaller ones, offer IBM Spectrum Protect as a back-up service. So we've already morphed into storage software, either A, bridging the cloud in a hybrid config, or being used by cloud providers as some of their storage offerings for end-users and businesses. >> Eric, wanted to get to, one of the partnership areas that you've talked about with Cisco is VersaStack. We've talked with you a number of times about converged infrastructure, that partnership, Cisco UCS taking all the virtualization. The buzz in the market, there's a lot of discussion, oh it's hyper-converged, it's cloud. Why is converged infrastructure still relevant today? >> Well, when you look at the analysts that track the numbers, you can see that the overall converged market is growing and hyper-converged is viewed as a subset. When you look at those numbers, this year close to 17 billion US, about 75% of it is still standard converged versus hyper-converged. One of the other differences, it's the right tool for the right job. So customers need to go in eyes open. So when you do a hyper-converged infrastructure, by the way IBM offers a hyper-converged infrastructure currently with Nutanix, so we actually have both, the Nutanix partnership offering hyper-converged and a partnership with Cisco on standard converged. It's really, how do you size the right tool for the right job? And one of the negatives of hyper-converged, very easy to deploy, that's great, but one of the negatives is every time you need more storage, you have to add more server. Every time you need more server, you add more storage. With this traditional converged infrastructure, you can add servers only, or networking only, or storage only. So I think when you're in certain configurations, workloads, and applications, hyper-converged is the right solution, IBM's got a solution. In other situations, particularly as your middle-sized and bigger apps, regular converged is better 'cause you can basically parse and size up or down compute, networking, and the storage independent of each other, whereas in hyper-converged you have to do it at the same time. And that's a negative where you're either over-buying your storage when you don't need it, or you're over-buying your compute when you don't need it. With standard converged, you don't have that issue. You buy what you need when you need it. But I think most big companies, for sure, have certain workloads that are best with hyper-converged, and we've got that, and other workloads that are best with converged, and we have that as well. >> Okay, the other big growth area in storage for the last bunch of years has been flash. IBM's got a strong position in all-flash arrays. What's new there, how are some of the technologies changing? Any impact on the network that we should be really understanding at this show? >> Sure, so couple things. So first of all, we just brought out some very high-density all-flash arrays in Q4. We can put 220 terabytes in two rack U, which is a building block that we use in several different of our all-flash configurations, including our all-flash VersaStack. The other thing we do is we embed software-defined storage on our, software-defined storage actually on our physical all-flash arrays. Most companies don't do that, so they've got an all-flash offering and if they have a software-defined offering it's actually a different piece of software. For us it's the same, so it's easier to deploy, it's easier to train, it's easier to license, it's easier for a reseller to sell if you happen to be using a reseller. And the other thing is it's battle-hardened, because it's not only standalone software, but it's actually on the arrays as well. So from a test infrastructure quality issue, versus other vendors that have certain software that goes on their all-flash array, and then a different set of software for all software-defined. It doesn't make logical sense when you can cover it with one thing. So that's an important difference for us, and a big innovator. I think the last thing you're going to see that does impact networking is the rise of NVMe over fabrics. IBM did a statement of direction last May outlining what we're doing. We did a public demonstration of an InfiniBand fabric at the AI summit in New York in December, and we will be having an announcement around NVMe fabrics on the 20th of February. So stay tuned to hear us then. We'll be launching some more NVMe with fabric infrastructure at that time. >> Eric, I just, people that have been watching, there's been a lot of discussion about NVMe for a number of years, and NVMe over fabric more recently. How big a deal is this for the industry? You've seen many of these waves. Is this transformational or is it, you know, every storage company I talk to is working on this, so how's it going to be differentiated? What should users be looking to be able to, who do they partner with, how do they choose that solution, and when's it going to be ready? >> So first of all, I view it as an evolution, okay. If you take storage in general, arrays, you know we used to do punch cards. I'm old enough I remember using punch cards at the University of California. Then, it all went to tape. And if you look at old Schwarzenegger movies from the 80s, I love Schwarzenegger spy movies, what's there? IBM systems with big IBM tape, and not for back-up, for primary storage. Then in the late-80s, early-90s, IBM and a few other vendors came out with hard drive-based arrays that got hooked up to mainframes and then obviously into minis and to the rise of the LAN. Those have given away to all-flash arrays. From a connectivity perspective, you've had SCSI, you had ultra SCSI, you had ultra fast SCSI, ultra fast wide SCSI. Then you had fiber channel. So now as an infrastructure both in an array, as a connectivity between storage and the CPUs used in an array system, will be NVMe, and then you're going to have NVMe running over fabrics. So I view this as an evolution, right? >> John: What's the driver, performance or flexibility? >> A little bit of both. So from the in-box perspective, inside of an array solution, the major chip manufacturers are putting NVMe to increase the speed from storage going into the CPUs. So that will benefit the performance to the end-user for applications, workloads, and use cases. Then what they've done is Intel has pushed, with all the industry, IBM's a member of the NVMe consortium as well, has pushed using the NVMe protocol over fabrics, which also gives some added performance over fabric networks as well. So you've got it, but again I view this again as evolution, because punch cards, tape was faster, hard drive arrays were faster than tape, then flash arrays are faster, now you're going to have NVMe in the flash array, and also NVMe over fabric with connecting all-flash array. >> So I have to ask you the real question that's on everyone's mind that's out there, because storage is one of those areas that you never see it stopping. There's always venture back start-ups, you see new hot start-ups coming out of the woodwork, and there's been some failures lately and some blame NVMe's innovation to kind of killing some start-ups, I won't name names. But the real issue is the lines that were once blurred are now forming, and there's the wrong side of history and the right side of history. So I've got to ask you, what's going to be the right side of history in the storage architecture that people need to get onto to win in the future? >> So, there's a couple key points. One, all storage infrastructure and storage software needs to interface with cloud infrastructure. Got to be hybrid, if you have a software play like we do, where the software, such as our Spectrum Scale or our Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus, can exist as a cloud service through a service rider, that's where you want to be. You don't want to have just a standard array and that's all you sell. So you want to have an array business, you want to make sure that's highly performant, you want to make sure that's the position, and the infrastructure underneath clouds, which means not only very fast, but also incredibly resilient. And that includes both cloud configs and AI. If you're going to do real-time AI, if you're going to do dark trading on Wall Street using AI instead of human beings, A, if the storage isn't really fast you're going to miss a 10 million dollar, hundred million dollar transaction. Second thing, if it's not resilient and always available, you're really in trouble. And god forbid when they bring AI to healthcare, and I mean AI in the operating room, boy if that storage fails when I'm on the table, wow. That's not going to be good. So those are the things you got to integrate with in the future. AI and cloud, whether it's software-defined in the array space, or if you're like IBM in both markets. >> John: Performance and resilient. >> Performance and resiliency is critical. >> All right, so Eric I have a non-storage question for you. >> Eric: Absolutely. >> So you've got the CMO hat for a division of IBM. You've been CMO of a start-up, you've been in this industry for a while. What's the changing role of the CMO in today's digital world? >> So I think the key thing is digital is a critical method of the overall marketing mix. And everything needs to reinforce everything. So let's take an example. One of the large storage websites and magazines recently announced that IBM is a finalist for four product-of-the-year awards. Two for all-flash arrays and two for software-defined storage. So guess what we've done? We've amplified it over LinkedIn, over IBM Facebook, through our Twitter handle, we leverage that. We use it at trade shows. So digital is A, the first foray, right? People look on your website and look at what you're doing socially before they even decide, should I really call them up, or should I really go to their booth a trade show? >> So discovery and learning is happening online. >> Discovery and learning, but even progression. We just, I just happened to tweet and LinkedIn this morning, Clarinet, a large European cloud MSP and CSP, just selected IBM all-flash arrays, IBM Spectrum Protect, and IBM Spectrum Virtualize for their cloud infrastructure. And obviously their target, they sell to end-users and companies, right? But the key thing is we tweeted it, we linked it in, we're going to use it here at the show, we're going to use it in PR efforts. So digital is a critical element of the marketing mix, it's not a fad. It also can be a lead dog. So if you're going to a trade show, you should tweet about it and link it in, just the way you guys do. We all knew you were coming to this show, we know you're going to IBM Think, we know you're going to VM World and Oracle, all these great shows. How do we find out? We follow you on social media and on the digital market space, so it's critical. >> And video, video a big role in - >> Video is critical. We use your videos all the time, obviously. I always tweet them and link them in once I'm posted. >> Clip and stick is the new buzzword. Clip 'em and stick 'em. Our new clipper tool, you've seen that. >> (laughs) Yes, I have. So it's really critical, though, that, you can, and remember, I'm like one of the oldest guys in the storage business, I'm 60 years old, I've been doing this 32 years, seven start-ups, EMC, IBM twice, Mac store Seagate, so I've done big and small. This is a sea change transformation in marketing. The key thing is you have to make it not stand on its own, integrate everything. PR, analyst relations, digital in everything you do, digital with shows and how you integrate the whole buyer's journey, and put it together. And people are using digital more and more, in fact I saw a survey from a biz school, 75% of people are looking at you digitally before they ever even call you up or call one of your resellers if you use the channel, to talk about your products. That's a sea change. >> You guys do a great job with content marketing, hats off to you guys. All right, final question for you, take a minute to just quickly explain the relationship that IBM has with Cisco and the importance of it, specifically what you guys are doing with them, how you guys go on to market to customers, and what's the impact to the customer. >> So, first of all, we have a very broad relationship with Cisco, Obviously I'm the CMO of the Storage Division, so I focus on storage, but several other divisions of IBM have powerful relationships. The IoT group, the Collaboration group. Cisco's one of our valued partners. We don't have networking products, so our Global Technology Services Division is one of the largest resellers of Cisco in the world, whether it be networking, servers, converge, what-have-you, so it's a strong, powerful relationship. From an end-user perspective, the importance is they know that the two companies are working together hand-in-glove. Sometimes you have two companies where you buy solutions from the A and B, and A and B don't even talk to each other, and yes they both go to the PlugFest or the Compatibility Lab, but they don't really work together, and their technology doesn't work together. IBM and Cisco have gone well beyond that to make sure that we work closely together in all of the divisions, including the storage division, with our Cisco-validated designs. And then lastly, whether it's delivered through the direct sales model or through the valued business partners that IBM and Cisco share, it's critical the end-user know, and the partners know, they're getting something that works together and doesn't just have the works option. It's tightly-honed and finely-integrated, whether it be storage or the IoT Division, the Collaboration Division, Cisco is a heavy proponent of IBM Security Division. >> Product teams work together? >> Yeah, all the product teams work together, trade APIs back and forth, not just doing the, and let's go do a test, compatibility test. Which everybody does that, but we go well beyond that with IBM and Cisco together. >> And it's a key relationship for you guys? >> Key relationship for the Storage Division, as well as for many of the other divisions of IBM, it's a critical relationship with Cisco. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer for the Storage Systems group at IBM. It's theCUBE live coverage in Barcelona, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more from Barcelona Cisco Live Europe after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Walls. Today we are talking to Chhandomay Mandal. He is the Senior Consultant Product Marketing here at Dell EMC, as well as Pat Harkins who is the CTO Informatics and Technology Services at Royal Victoria Health Center. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Glad to be here. >> So, Pat, I want to start with you. Tell us a little bit about Royal Health. >> Sure. Well, Royal Victoria Regional Health Center in Barrie, Ontario. We're about an hour north of Toronto, Ontario. It's a regional health center, variety of services. We provide oncology, cardiac, child and youth mental health, and what we're doing up there is providing a regional role, regional services for Meditech. We're host Meditech for a number of other hospitals in our area, and we're currently looking to expand that, and increase our volume, but also change platforms as well. >> So tell us about some of the biggest challenges that you see. >> Some of the biggest challenges that we're seeing right now is within Ontario, is the actual funding model, of course. Everything's a little bit tighter. But from a technology perspective, is actually staying with technology, with limited budgets and so forth, and staying with the latest, greatest, providing the best service to our customers, our physicians, our clinicians, which in turn is the best patient care. >> Chhandomay, you look at a client like Pat, who has very specific needs in health care. You've got time issues, you've got privacy issues. How do you deal, or what do you see as far as health care IT fitting in to what you're doing and the services you're providing to somebody like Pat, specifically knowing that these are very unique challenges and critically important challenges? >> Sure. We at Dell EMC look at what the problem is holistically. As Pat was mentioning, in the health care IT, one of the challenges we see is providing consistent high performance with low latency so that the clinicians, physicians can access the patient data in a timely way, quickly, they do not spend more time entering the data or accessing the data, rather spending more time with the patients. Then there is another problem that Pat alluded to. For any EHR, electronic health record systems, it is actually a consolidation of many workloads. You have the EHR workload itself, then you have analytics that needs to be run on it. There are other virtualized applications, and then there is distal partualization, because all the physicians now says they need to access the patient data. So effectively, we need to have platforms, and in this particular case, essentially All-Flash platforms that can offer very high performance, consistently low latency, high storage efficiency in terms of reduced footprint so that Pat and other health providers can consume less rack space, less space in the data center, reduced power and cooling, all those things, and at the end of the day, ensuring the copy data that they have between all the databases, those are efficiently managed and kind of like transforming the health care IT business workflow. That's what we at Dell EMC come with our All-Flash portfolio for health providers like Royal Victoria Health. >> So Pat, on your side of the fence then, from your perspective, limited resources, right? You've got to be very, very protective of what you have, and obviously you have your own challenges. How do you balance all that out in today's environment, where speed matters? Efficiency matters now more than ever. >> And that's, efficiency matters big time with our physicians, and what's happening is we look for partners like Dell EMC to help us with that. One thing that was happening in our experience with efficiency and with timely presentation of data, we weren't getting that with our previous vendor. And when we went to Dell EMC we work with them as a partner and said, "How can we improve on that? "What can we look for?" And we looked at Flash as being that solution, not only providing the performance that we were looking for but also providing built-in security that we were looking for, but also providing even more efficiency, so when the physician, the clinicians were getting that data, they get it in a timely manner, and that means that they're actually spending more time with the patient, they're not searching for the data, they're not searching for reports and so forth. >> Are you hearing any feedback from the patients themselves about how things have changed at the health center? >> Well, for me I'm still stuck in the dungeon. I'm in IT, so we're in the basement, right? so I don't necessarily-- >> John: Glad you could get out for the week. (laughing) >> Exactly. You know, we grow mushrooms in that area. So what's happening with, I don't necessarily talk with the patient, but we're getting the positive feedback from our clinicians and physicians who are then, if they're happy, that means they're providing usually, providing better patient care, and so that means the patients are happy. (audio cuts out) >> Is understanding the true, the point of patient health care from the point they're born to the point that their life ends, and what we're understanding is how getting that data and being able to provide that information to clinicians, see trends, be able to treat, be more proactive instead of a reactive in health care. That's the goal, and with technology and the storage and collecting the data and analytics we'll actually be able to provide that in the future. >> Chhandomay, from your perspective here, what is it about XtremIO you think that makes this a good match? And now you've had X2, right, and sorry Pat. >> Pat: No, it's fine. >> You just deployed, what, six months ago, you said? But now you've got an X2 version to consider, perhaps for your next deployment. What's the fit? Why does it work? >> So you mention Dell EMC XtremIO. So the core premise of XtremIO is we will be able to provide high performance, consistently in low latency no matter what workload you are running, no matter how many workloads you are consolidating on the same array. It is the same high-performance, low-latency, and we have in line all the time, data reduction technologies that are all working on in-memory metadata, which essentially boils down to we are doing all those storage operations at the control plane level without touching the data plane where the data actually lives or exists. So that in turn helps us to consolidate a lot of the copies. You mentioned analytics, right? You have your production database for your patient data, then you need to load those data in an ETL system for running the analytics, then you possibly have your instant development copies, copies for back-up. Now with XtremIO, all the copies, we do not store anything that's not unique, through that entire cluster, and all the metadata is stored in memory, so for us we can create copies that do not take any extra space, and you can run your workloads on the copies themselves with the same performance as in production volume and with all those data reduction and all those technologies that all those data services run. So what that in turn makes Pat's life easier is he can reduce the footprint, he can reduce or consolidate all the workloads on the ATA itself, and his application developers can bring the medical applications online much more faster, he can run his analytics and reports faster, being proactive about the care, and in a nutshell, pretty much taking the storage maintenance, storage planning, storage operations out of the picture so that they can innovate and they can spend time innovating in IT, helping patient care, as opposed to doing routine maintenance and planning. >> So it lets him focus on what he wants to do. You're not spending a majority of your time on mundane tasks, you're actually improving your operations. Give me a real-life example if you can. We talk about more efficiency and better speed, these are all good things and great terms to talk about, but in terms of actually improving patient care, or providing enhanced patient care, what does it mean? How does it translate? >> Well, how it translates is in a lot of cases with the physicians and what we've seen already with them, just with them, they're able to, because we actually improve performance, we're actually able to get more data in analytics, as we say, but then we're able to produce those reports and turn it around in a lot of cases, a lot quicker than what we've been able to do before. An example was, once we moved to XtremIO and our decision support team. Used to take 14 hours to run some of the reports that they were getting. They would start 'em at four o'clock in the evening, they would run to six a.m. in the morning, roughly. When we put the XtremIO in and they ran the same reports they started at 4 o'clock. By six p.m. that night they were completed. They actually called me because they thought they had something wrong. (laughing) It's never been that quick. >> John: Boss, this is too good. >> Exactly. >> John: I messed up. >> And so they actually ran the report three times, and they cued the QA against the report to understand that yeah, it is that efficient now. Now that we've turned that around we actually provide that to the clinicians. We're getting better patient care and they're able to get their information and react quicker to it as well. >> Talking about the massive amounts of data that's being generated that now needs to be analyzed in order to optimize performance, how much do your developers know about data, and are you doing more training for them so that they know what they're doing? >> Well, we always provide training. We're always working on that, but the thing is, we are providing more training and we're providing it to the point that they actually have to be able to mine that data. There's so much data, it's how to manage the data, mine the data. Our analysts at RVH is that we look to Meditech, our EHR vendor as well, to help us on that, but at the same time we're looking to, we're increasing our data warehouses, we're increasing our repositories and registries so that when we do have that data, we can get at it. >> I'm wondering too if using this kind of cutting-edge technology has had an impact on your recruitment. Michael Dell in his keynote mentioned how increasingly, employees are saying the kinds of technologies that's being used is having an impact. >> No, absolutely. I know our vendors, our staff are very excited about the technology. Where we were going before, they weren't, not that they weren't happy, but we were always dealing with mundane tasks. We had some issues that were always repetitive issues that we couldn't seem to get through. Now that we've actually upgraded to the Flash storage and moving through that, they're excited. They love the management, the ease of use, they have a lot of great ideas now it's actually, they're becoming innovative in their thoughts because they know they have the performance and the technology in the back end to do the job for them. >> I hate to ask you what's next because you're six months into your deployment, but this is a constantly evolving landscape, constantly improving. Obviously the pressure is at Dell EMC is responding really well, competitive pressures. What is your road map? If you look two, three years down the road in terms of the kinds of improvements you want to get, the kinds of efficiencies that you can get gains in, and then realistically from a budgetary standpoint, how do you balance all that together? >> Budgetary, there's always the constant discussion with our CFO, and so he's been very supportive, but where we see it going is we want to be able to actually, maybe not even necessarily go to the Cloud but become a private Cloud for our partners and be able to provide a lot of these regional services that we couldn't before with the technology that we had, and be able to expand the services. In Ontario we're seeing some budget constraints, as I mentioned. A lot of these smaller sites, the patients, the customers, as we would say are expecting the service, but with technology and the dollars, they might not be able to do it on their budget, but as we bring stuff back into our data center and be able to provide the technology, we've been able to spread that out, not only from storage, compute side, as well as virtualization, VDI desktops and so forth. That's where I see we're going over the next little while. >> How much learning goes on between your colleagues at CTOs at other health centers, and even health centers and hospitals in the states? Do you talk a lot about-- >> You know what? We do talk a lot. We share stories. Some good, some bad, but we try, we all have the same problems, and why re-create the wheel when you could actually learn from other people? So a lot of the CTOs, we do get together, informally and formally, and understand where we're going and then we also reach out through our vendors and through some of our user groups and so forth to the US and to some of our cohort CTOs down there to understand what they're doing, because they look at it from a different lens at times. >> So speaking of a different lens, from the other side of the fence, Chhandomay if you would, where are you see this headed in terms of your assistance in health care IT, what X2 might be able to do? What kinds of realizations do you think are on the horizon here, and what's possible for a health care provider like RVH? >> So all the organizations, if you look across the industry, they are in the digital transformation journey. Health care providers are no exception, and what we are enabling is the IT transformation part, and Dell XtremIO, and with the XtremIO X2 that we just announced, we are enabling that IT transformation for all of our customers, including health care providers like Royal Victoria Health. Now, with X2, specifically, we continue to improve upon the high performance, the unmatched storage efficiencies that we offer, effectively, again, bringing down the cost of hosting different types of workloads, managing it on a single platform with a much lower total cost of ownership for the health care providers like Pat, so that at the end of the day, they will be able to provide better patient and better care for the patients, be it like a doctor or clinician, trying to access the data from their endpoints or the finance or billing department trying to turn over the bills in a much shorter span as opposed to the typically 45 days turnover that we see. So that's where we see not only just XtremIO X2, but Dell EMC, the All-Flash storage portfolio, helping the customers in their digital transformation journey in health care, and with the IT department, going into the IT transformation journey to help with it. >> Chhandomay, Pat, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It was great, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Walls. We will have more from The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World after this. (electronic music)

>> (Narrator) Live, from Boston, Massachusetts it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to Boston everybody, this is Red Hat Summit, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, with my cohost Stu Miniman, and John Hodgson is here, he's the Senior Director of IT Program Management at Optum technology. John good to see ya. >> Good, it's good to be here. >> Fresh off the keynote, we were just talking about the large audience, a very large audience here. And Optum, you described a little bit at the keynote what Optum is with healthcare, sort of technology arm. Which is not super common but not uncommon in your world. But describe Optum and where it fits. >> So in the grand scheme of things within UnitedHealth Group you know, we have the parent company, of course, you know the Health Group, our insurance side, that does insurance, whether it's public sector for large corporations, as well as community and state government type work as UnitedHealthcare. They do all that, and then Optum is our technology side. We do really all the development, both for supporting UHC as our main customer, you know, they're truly our focus, but we also do a lot of commercial development as well for UnitedHealthcare's competitors. So big, big group, as I mentioned in the keynote. Over 10,000 developers in the company, lots of spend, I think in the last year our, just internal IT budget was like $1.2 billion in just IT development capital. So it's huge. >> Dave: Mind-boggling. >> John, you've got that internal Optum Cloud, Can you give us just kind of the breadth and depth, you said 1.2 billion, there. What is that make up, what geographies does that span, how many people support that kind of environment? >> As far as numbers of people supporting it, I think we've got a few hundred in our Enterprise Technology Services Group, that supports Optum Cloud. We started Optum Cloud probably a half a dozen years ago, and it's gone through its different iterations. And part of my job right now is all about Enterprise Cloud adoption and migration. So, we started with our own environment, we call it UCI, United, it was supposed to be Converged Infrastructure, but I call it our Cloud Infrastructure, that's really what it is. And we've continued to enhance that. So over the last few years, I think about 3.5, four years ago, we brought in Red Hat and OpenShift. We're on our third iteration of OpenShift. Very, very stable platform for us now. But we also have Azure Stack in there as well, I think even as Paul and those guys mentioned in the keynote there's a lot of different things that you can kind of pull from each one of the technology providers to help support what we're doing, kind of take the best of breed from each one of them, and use them in each solution. >> Organizations are always complaining that they spend all this money on keeping the lights on, and they're trying to make the shift, and obviously Cloud helps them do that, and things like OpenShift, etc. What's that like in your world? How much of your effort is spent on maintenance and keeping the lights on? Sounds like you got a lot of cool, new development activity. Can you describe that dynamic for us? >> Yeah, we've got a really good support staff. Our group, SSMO, when we build an application, they kind of take it back over and run everything. We've got a fabulous support team in the background. And to that end, and it's on both sides, right? We have our UnitedHealthcare applications that we build that have kind of their own feature set, because of what it's doing internally for us, versus what we do on the OptumInsight side, where it's more commercial in nature. So they have some different needs. Some of the things that we're developing, even for Cloud Scaffolding that I mentioned in the keynote. We're kind of working on both sides of the fence, there, to hit the different technologies that each one of them really need to be successful, but doing it in a way that it doesn't if you're on one side of the fence or the other, it's a capability that everybody will be able to use. So if there's a pattern on one side that you want to be able to use for a UHC application, by all means, go ahead and grab it, take it. And a lot of what we're doing now is even kind of crowdsourcing things, and utilizing the really super intelligent people that we have, over 10,000 developers. And so many of them, we've got a lot of legacy stuff. So there's some old-school guys that are still doing their thing, but we've got a lot of new people. And they want to get their hands on the new fresh stuff, and experience that. So there's really a good vibe going on right now, with how things are changing, all the TDP folks that we're bringing in. A lot of fresh college grads and things. And they love to see the new technologies, whether it's OpenShift or whatever. Lot are really getting into DevOps, trying to make that change in a big organization is difficult, we got a little ways to go with that. But that's kind of next up. >> You're an interesting case study, because you've got a lot of the old and a lot of cool innovation going on. And is it, how do you decide when to go, because DevOps is not always the answer. Sometimes waterfall is okay, you know. So, how do you make that determination, and where do you see that going? >> That's a great question, that's actually part of what my team does. So my specific team is all about Cloud adoption and migration, so our charter is really to work across the enterprise. So whether it's OptumInsight, OptumRx, UnitedHealthcare, we are working with them to evaluate their portfolios of applications to figure out legacy applications that we have that are still strategic. They've got life in them, they've got business benefit. And we want to be able to take advantage of that, but at the same time there's some of these monolithic applications that we look at how can we take that application, decompose it down into microservices and APIs, things like that, to make it available to other applications that maybe are just greenfield, are coming out now, but still need that same technology and information. So that's really what my team is doing right now. So we sit down with those teams and go through an analysis, help them develop a road map. And sometimes that road map is two or three years long. Getting to fully cloud from where they're at right now in some of these legacy applications is a journey. And it costs money, right? There's a lot of budget concerns and things like that that go with it. So that's part of what we helped develop is a business case for each one of those applications that we can help support them going back, and getting the necessary capital to do the cloud migrations and the improvements, and really the modernization of their applications. We started the program a couple of years ago and found that if you want to hang your hat on just going from old physical infrastructure, some of the original VMs that we had. And just moving over to cloud infrastructure, and whether that's UCI, OpenShift, Azure, whatever. If you're going to do your business case on that, you're going to be writing a lot of business cases before you get one approved. It's all about modernizing the applications. So if you fold in the move to new infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, along with the ability to modernize that application, get them doing agile development, getting down the DevOps path, looking at automated testing, automated deployment, zero downtime deployments. All of those things, when you add them up together and say, okay, here's what your real benefit looks like. And you're able to present that back to the business, and show them speed to market, speed to value is a new metric that we have. Getting things out there quickly. We used to do quarterly releases, or even biannual releases. And now we're at monthly, weekly, some of our applications that are more relatively new, Health4Me, if you go to the App Store, that's kind of our big app on the App Store. There's updates on a very frequent basis. >> So that's the operating model, really, that you're talking about, essentially, driving business value. We had a practitioner on a couple weeks ago, and he said, "If you just lift and shift to the cloud, "and you don't change your operating model, "you won't get a dime." >> Stu: You're missing the boat. >> Maybe there's something, some value there, a little faster, but you're talking about serious dollars, if you can change the operating model. And that's what you've found? >> Yeah absolutely, and that's the, it's a shift, and you've got to be able to prove it to the business that's there's benefit there, and sometimes that's hard. Some of these cloud concepts and things are a little nebulous, so-- >> It's hard 'cause it's soft. >> It's soft, right, yeah, I mean, you're putting the business case together, the hard stuff is easy to document, but when you're talking about the soft benefits, and you're trying to explain to them the value that they're going to get out of their team switching from a waterfall development over to agile and DevOps, and automated testing and things like that, where I can say, "Hey listen, "you know your team over here that has been, "you know we took them out of the pocket, "from actually doing their day jobs for the last week, "because they needed to test this new version? "If I can take that out of the mix, "and they don't have to do that anymore, "and they can keep on doing what they're doing "and not get a week behind, what value is that for you?" And all of a sudden they're like, "Oh really? "We don't have to do that anymore?" I'm like, "No, we can create test scripts and stuff. "We can automate your deployment. "We can make it zero downtime. "We have," there's an application that we're working on now that has 19,000 individual desktop deployments. And we're going to automate that, turn it into a software as a service application, host it on OpenShift, and completely knock that out. I mean deployments out to 19,000 people take weeks to get done. We only do a couple thousand a week, because there's obviously going to be issues. So now you've got helpdesk tickets, you've got desktop technicians that are going round, trying to fix things, or dialing in, remoting into somebody's desktop to try to help figure that all out. We can do the whole deployment in a day, and everybody logs in the next day, and they've got the new version. That kind of value in creating real cloud-based applications is what's driving the benefit for us. And they're finally starting to really see that. And as we're doing it, more application product owners are going, "Okay, now we're getting some traction. "We heard what you did over here. "Come talk to us, and let's talk "about building a road map and figuring out what we can do." >> John, one of the questions I got from the community after watching you keynote was, they want to understand how you handle security and enforce compliance in this new cloud development model. (laughs) >> That's beyond me, all I can tell you is that we have one of the most secure clouds out there. Our private cloud is beyond secure. We're working right now to try to get the public hybrid cloud space with both AWS and Azure, and working through contracts and stuff right now. But one of the sticking points is our security has to be absolutely top notch, if we're going to do anything that has HIPAA-related data, PHI, PII, PCI, any of that, it has got to be lock-solid secure. And we have a tremendous team led by Robert Booker, he's absolutely fabulous, I mean we're, our whole goal, security-wise, is don't be the next guy on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. >> You mentioned public cloud, how do you make your decisions as to what application, what data can live in which public cloud? You said you've got Azure Stack, and you've got OpenShift. How do you make those platform decisions? >> Well right now, both OpenShift and Azure Stack are on our internal private cloud. So we're in the process of kind of making that shift to move over towards public and hybrid cloud. So I'm working with folks on our team to help develop some of those processes and determine what's actually going to be allowed. And I think in a lot of cases the PHI and protected data is going to stay internal. And we'll be able to take advantage of hosting certain parts of an application on public cloud while keeping other parts of the data really secure and protected behind our private cloud. >> Red Hat made an announcement this morning with AWS, with OpenShift. >> Sounds like that might be of interest to you, would that impact what your doing? >> Absolutely, yeah, in fact I was talking with Jim and Paul back behind the screen this morning. And we were talking about that and I was like wow that is a game changer. With what we're thinking about doing in the hybrid cloud space, having all of the AWS APIs and services and stuff available to us. Part of the objection that I get from some folks now is knowing that we have this move toward public and hybrid cloud internally, and the limitations of our cloud. We're never going to be, our private Optum Cloud is never going to be AWS or Azure, it's just not. I mean they've spent billions of dollars getting those services and stuff in place. Why would we even bother to compete with that? So we do what we do well, and a big portion of that is security. But we want to be able to expand, and take advantage of the things that they have. So that's, this whole announcement of being able to take advantage of those services natively within OpenShift? If we're able to expose that, even internally, on our own private cloud? That's going to take away a lot of the objections, I think, from even our own folks, who are waiting to do the public hybrid cloud piece. >> When the Affordable Care Act hit, did your volume spike? And as things, there's a tug of war now in Washington, it could change again, does that drive changes in your application development in terms of the volume of requests that come in, and compliance things that you have to adhere to? And if so, does having a platform that's more agile, how does that affect your ability to respond? >> Yeah it does, I mean when we first got into the ACA, there was a number of markets that we got into. And there was definitely a ramp-up in development, new things that we had to do on the exchanges. Stuff like that. I mean we even had groups from Optum that were participating directly with the federal government, because some of their exchanges were having issues, and they needed some help from us. So we had a whole team that was kind of embedded with the federal government, helping them out, just based on our experience doing it. And, yeah, having the flexibility, in our own cloud, to be able to able to spin up environments quickly, shut them down, all that, really it's invaluable. >> So the technology business moves so fast, I mean it wasn't that long ago when people saw the first virtualized servers and went Oh my gosh, this is going to change the world. And now it's like, wow we got to do better, and containers. And so you've gone for this amazing transformation, I mean, I think it was 17 developers to 1,600, which is just mind-boggling. Okay, and that's, and you've got technologies that have helped you do that, but five years down the road there's going to be a what's next. So what is next for you? As you break out your telescope, what do you see? >> God, I don't know, I mean I never would have predicted containers. >> Even though they've been around forever, we-- >> Yeah I mean when we first went to VMs, you know back in the day I was a guy in the server room, racking and stacking servers and running cables, and doing all that, so I've seen it go from one extreme to the next. And going from VMs was a huge switch. Building our own private cloud was amazing to be a part of, and now getting into the container side of things, hybrid cloud, I think for us, really, the next big step for us is the hybrid cloud. So we're in the process of getting that, I assume by the end of this year, early next, we'll be a few steps into the hybrid cloud space. And then beyond that, gosh I don't know. >> So that's really extending the operating model into that hybrid cloud notion, bringing that security that you talked about, and that's, you got a lot of work to do. >> John: That's a big task in itself. >> Let's not go too far beyond that, John. Alright well listen, thanks for coming on theCUBE, it was really a pleasure having you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me guys, appreciate it. >> You're welcome, alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Red Hat Summit in Boston. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Interconnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay for IBM InterConnect 2017 exclusive Cube coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest Dr. Angel Diaz who is the vice president of developer technology. Also you know him from the open source world. Great to see you again. >> Nice to see you. Thanks for spending time with us. >> Thank you. >> Boy, Blockchain, open source, booming, cloud-native, booming, hybrid cloud, brute force but rolling strong. Enterprise strong, if you will, as your CEO Ginni Rometty started talking about yesterday. Give us the update on what's going on with the technology and developers because this is something that you guys, you personally, have been spending a lot of time with. Developer traction, what's the update? >> Well you know if you look at history there's been this democratization of technology. Right, everything from object oriented programming to the internet where we realize if we created open communities you can build more skill, more value, create more innovation. And each one of these layers you create abstractions. You reduce the concept count of what developers need to know to get work done and it's all about getting work done faster. So, you know, we've been systematically around cloud, data, and AI, working really hard to make sure that you have open source communities to support those. Whether it's in things like compute, storage, and network, platform as a service like say Cloud Foundry, what we're doing around the open container initiatives and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to all the things you see in the data space and everywhere else. So it's real exciting and it's real important for developers. >> So two hot trends that we're tracking obviously, one's pretty obvious. That's machine learning in cloud. Really hand and glove together. You see machine learning really powering the AI, hitting IOT all the way up to apps and wearables and what not, autonomous vehicles. Goes on and on. The other one is Kubernetes, and Kubernetes, the rise of Kubernetes has really brought the containers to a whole nother level around multi-cloud. People might not know it, but you are involved in the CNCF formation, which is Kubernetes movement, which was KubeCon, then it became part of the Linux Foundation. So, IBM has had their hand in these two trends pretty heavily. >> Angel: Oh yeah, absolutely. >> Give the perspective, because the Kubernetes one, in particular, we'll come back to the machine learning, but Kubernetes is powering a whole nother abstraction layer around helping containers go to the next level with microservices, where the develop equation has changed. It's not just the person writing code anymore, a person writing code throws off an application that has it's own life in relationship to other services in the community, which also has analytics tied to it. So, you're seeing a changing dynamic on this potential with Kubernetes. How important is Kubernetes, and what is the real impact? >> No, it is important. And what there actually is, there's a couple of, I think, application or architecture trends that are fundamentally changing how we build applications. So one of them I'll call, let's call it Code First. This is where you don't even think about the Kubernetes layer. All you do is you want to write your code and you want to deploy your code, and you want it to run. That's kind of the platform. Something like Cloud Foundry addresses the Code First approach. Then there's the whole event-drive architecture world. Serverless, right? Where it has a particular use case, event-driven, standing, stuff up and down, dealing with many types of inputs, running rules. Then you have, let's say the more transactional type applications. Microservices, right? These three thing, when combined allows you to kind of break the shackles of the monolith of old application architectures, and build things the way that best suit your application model, and then come together in much more coherent way. Specifically in Kubernetes, and that whole container stuff. You think think about it, initially, when, containers have been around a long time, as we all know, and Docker did a great job in making container accessible and easy, right? And we worked really closely with them to create some multisource activities around the base container definitions, the open container initiative in the Linux Foundation. But of course, that wasn't enough. We need to then start to build the management and the orchestration around that. So we teamed up with others and started to kind of build this Kubernetes-based community. You know, Docker just recently brought ContainerD into the CNCF, as well, as another layer. They are within the equation. But by building this, it's almost just Russian doll of capability, right, you know, you're able to go from one paradigm, whether it's a serverless paradigm running containers, or having your microservices become use in serverless or having Code First kick off something, you can have these things work well together. And I think that's the most exciting part of what we're doing at Kubernetes, what we're doing in serverless, and what we're doing, say, in this Code First world. >> So, development's always been kind of an art form. How is that art form evolving and changing as these trends that you're describing-- >> Oh, that's a great, I love that. 'Cause I always think of ourselves as computer science artists. You and I haven't spoken about that. That's awesome. Yeah, because, you know, it is an art form, right? Your screen is your canvas, right, and colors are the services that you can bring in to build, and the API calls, right? And what's great is that your canvas never ends, because you have, say, a cloud infrastructure, which is infinitely scalable or something, right? So, yeah. But the definition of the developer is changing because we're kind of in this next phase of lowering concept count. Remember I told you this lowering of concept count. You know, I love those O'Reilly books. The little cute animals. You know, as a developer today, you don't have to buy as many of those books, because a lot of it is done in the API calls that you've used. You don't write sorting algorithms anymore. Guess what, you don't need to do speech to text algorithms. You don't need to do some analysis algorithms. So the developer is becoming a cognitive developer and a data science developer, in addition to a application developer. And that is the future. And it's really important that folks skill up. Because the demand has increased dramatically in those areas, and the need has increased as well. So it's very exciting. >> So the thing about that, that point about cognitive developer, is that in the API calls, and the reason why we don't buy all those books is, the codes out there are already in open source and machine learning is a great example, if you look at what machine learning is doing. 'Cause now you have machine learning. It used to be an art and a science. You had to be a great computer scientist and understand algorithms, and almost have that artistic view. But now, as more and more machine learning comes out, you can still write custom machine learning, but still build on libraries that are already out there. >> Exactly. So what does that do? That reduces the time it takes to get something done. And it increases the quality of what you're building, right? Because, you know, this subroutine or this library has been used by thousands and thousands of other people, it's probably going to work pretty well for your use case, right? But I can stress the importance of this moment you brought up. The cognitive data application developer coming together. You know, when the Web happened, the development market blew up in orders of magnitude. Because everybody's is sort of learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, you know, J2E, whatever. All the things they needed to build, you know, Web Uize and transactional applications. Two phase commit apps in the back, right? Here we are again, and it's starting to explode with the microservices, et cetera, all the stuff you mentioned, but when you add cognitive and data to the equation, it's just going to be a bigger explosion than the Web days. >> So we were talking with some of the guys from IBM's GBS, the Global Business Services, and the GTS, Global Technology Services, and interesting things coming out. So if you take what you're saying forward, and you open innovation model, you got business model stacks and technology stacks. So process, stacks, you know, business process, and then technology, and they now have to go hand-in-hand. So if you take what you're saying about, you know, open source, open all of this innovation, and add say, Blockchain to it, you now have another developer type. So the cognitive piece is also contributing to what looks like to be a home run with Blockchain going open source, with the ledger. So now you have the process and the stacks coming together. So now, it's almost the Holy Grail. It used to be this, "Hey, those business processor guys, they did stuff, and then the guys coded it out, built stacks. Now they're interdependent a bit. >> Yeah. Well I mean, what's interesting to me about Blockchain, I always think of, at this point about business processes, you know, business processes have always been hard to change, right? You know, once you have partners in your ecosystem, it's hard to change. Things like APIs and all the technology allows it to be much quicker now. But with Blockchain, you don't need a human involved in the decision of who's in your partner network as long as they're trusted, right? I remember when Jerry Cuomo and Chris Ferris, in my team, he's the chairman of the Blockchain, of the hyperledger group, we're talking initially when we kind of brought it to the Linux Foundation. We were talking a lot about transactions, because you know, that was one of the initial use cases. But we always kind of new that there's a lot of other use cases for this, right, in addition to that. I mean, you know, the government of China is using Blockchain to deal with carbon emissions. And they have, essentially, an economy where folks can trade, essentially, carbon units to make sure that as an industry segment, they don't go over, as an example. So you can have people coming in and out of your business process in a much more fluid way. What fascinates me about Blockchain, and it's a great point, is it takes the whole ecosystem to another level because now that they've made Blockchain successful, ecosystem component's huge. That's a community model, that's just like open source. So now you've got the confluence of open source software, now with people in writing just software, and now microservices that interact with other microservices. Not agile within a company, agile within other developers. >> Angel: Right. >> So you have a data piece that ties that together, but you also have the process and potential business model disruption, a Blockchain. So those two things are interesting to me. But it's a community role. In your expert opinion on the community piece, how do you think the community will evolve to this new dynamic? Do you think it's going to take the same straight line growth of open source, do you think there's going to be a different twist to it? You mentioned this new persona is already developing with cognitive. How do you see that happening? >> Yes, I do. There's two, let's say three points. The first on circling the community, what we've been trying to do, architecturally, is build an open innovation platform. So all these elements that make up cloud, data, AI, are open so that people can innovate, skills can grow, anything, grow faster. So the communities are actually working together. So you see lots of intralocks and subcommittees and subgroups within teams, right? Just say this kind of nesting of technology. So I think that's one megatrend that will continue-- >> Integrated communities, basically. >> Integrated communities. They do their own thing. >> Yeah. >> But to your point earlier, they don't reinvent the wheel. If I'm in Cloud Foundry and I need a container model, why am I going to create my own? I'll just use the open compute initiative container model, you know what I'm saying? >> Dave: And the integration point is that collaboration-- >> Is that collaboration, right. And so we've started to see this a lot, and I think that's the next megatrend. The second is, we just look at developers. In all this conversation, we've been talking about the what? All the technology. But the most important thing, even more so than all of this stuff, is the how. How do I actually use the technology? What is the development methodology of how I add scale, build these applications? People call that DevOp, you know, that whole area. We at IBM announced about a year and a half ago, at Gene Kim's summit, he does DevOps, the garage method, and we open sourced it, which is a methodology of how you apply Agile and all the stuff we've learned in open source, to actually using this technology in a productive way at scale. Often times people talk about working in theses little squads and so forth, but once you hire, say you've got 10 people in San Francisco, and you're going to hire one in San Ramon, that person might as well be on Mars. Because if you're not on the team there, you're not in the decision process. Well, that's not reality. Open source is not that way, the world doesn't behave that way. So this is the methodology that we talked about. The how is really important. And then the third thing, is, if you can help developers, interlock communities, teach them about the how to do this effectively, then they want samples to fork and go. Technology journeys, physical code. So what you're start to see a lot of us in open source, and even IBM, is provide starters that show people how to use the technology, add the methodology, and then help them on their journey to get value. >> So at the base level, there's a whole new set of skills that are emerging. You mentioned the O'Reilly books before, it was sort of a sequential learning process, and it seems very nonlinear now, so what do you recommend for people, how do they go about capturing knowledge, where do they start? >> I think there's probably two or three places. The first one is directly in the open source communities. You go to any open source community and there's a plethora of information, but more so, if you hang out in the right places, you know, IRC channels or wherever, people are more than willing to help you. So you can get education for free if you participate and contribute and become a good member of a community. And, in fact, from a career perspective today, that's what developers want. They want that feeling of being part of something. They want the merit badge that you get for being a core committer, the pride that comes with that. And frankly, the marketability of yourself as a developer, so that's probably the first place. The second is, look, at IBM, we spend a huge amount of time trying to help developers be productive, especially in open source, as we started this conversation. So we have a place, developer.ibm.com. You go there and you can get links to all the relevant open source communities in this open innovation platform that I've talked about. You can see the methodologies that I spoke about that is open. And then you could also get these starter code journeys that I spoke about, to help you get started. So that's one place-- >> That's coming out in April, right? >> That's right. >> The journeys. >> Yeah, but you can go now and start looking at that, at developer.ibm.com, and not all of it is IBM content. This is not IBM propaganda here, right? It is-- >> John: Real world examples. >> Real world examples, it's real open source communities that either we've helped, we've shepherded along. And it is a great place, at least, to get your head around the space and then you can subset it, right? >> Yeah. So tell us about, at the last couple of minutes we have, what IBM's doing right now from a technology, and for developers, what are you guys doing to help developers today, give the message from what IBM's doing. What are you guys doing? What's your North Star? What's the vision and some of the things you're doing in the marketplace people can get involved in? You mentioned the garage as one. I'm sure there's others. >> Yeah, I mean look, we are m6anically focused on helping developers get value, get stuff done. That's what they want to do, that's what our clients want to do, and that's what turns us on. You build your art, you talk, you're going back to art, you build your drawing, you want to look at it. You want it to be beautiful. You want others to admire it, right? So if we could help you do that, you'll be better for it, and we will be better for it. >> As long as they don't eat their ear, then they're going to be fine. >> It's subjective, but give value of what they do. So how do they give value? They give value by open technologies and how we've built, essentially, cloud, data, AI, right? So art, arts technology adds value. We get value out of the methodology. We help them do this, it's around DevOps, tooling around it, and then these starters, these on-ramps, right, to getting started. >> I got to ask you my final question, a more personal one, and Dave and I talk about this all the time off camera, being an older guy, computer science guy, you're seeing stuff now that was once a major barrier, whether it's getting access to massive compute, machine learning, libraries, the composability of the building blocks that are out there, to create art, if you will, it's phenomenal. To me, it's just like the most amazing time to be be a computer scientist, or in tech, in general, building stuff. So I'm going to ask you, what are you jazzed up about? Looking back, in today's world, the young guns that are coming onto the scene not knowing that we walked barefoot in the snow to school, back in the old days. This is like, it's a pretty awesome environment right now. Give us personal color on your take on that, the change and the opportunity. >> Yeah, so first of all, when you mentioned older guys, you were referring to yourselves, right? Because this is my first year at IBM. I just graduated, there's nothing old here, guys. >> John: You could still go to, come on (laughs). >> What does that mean? Look you know, there's two things I'm going to say. Two sides of the equation. First of all, the fundamentals of computer science never go away. I still teach, undergrad seminars and so forth, and you have to know the fundamentals of computer science. That does not go away because you can write bad code. No matter what you're doing or how many abstractions you have, there are fundamental principles you need to understand. And that guides you in building better art, okay? Now putting that aside, there is less that you need to know all the time, to get your job done. And what excites me the most, so back when we worked on the Web in the early 90s, and the markup languages, right, and I see some in the audience there, Arno, hey, Arno, who helped author some of the original Web standards with me, and he was with the W3C. The use cases for math, for the Web, was to disseminate physics, that's why Tim did it, right? The use case for XML. I was co-chair of the mathematical markup language. That was a use case for XML. We had no idea that we would be using these same protocols, to power all the apps on your phone. I could not imagine that, okay? If I would have, trust me, I would have done something. We didn't know. So what excites me the most is not being able to imagine what people will be able to create. Because we are so much more advanced than we were there, in terms of levels of abstraction. That's what's, that's the exciting part. >> All right. Dr. Angel Diaz, great to have you on theCUBE. Great inspiration. Great time to be a developer. Great time to be building stuff. IOT, we didn't even get to IOT, I mean, the prospects of what's happening in industrialization, I mean, just pretty amazing. Augmented intelligence, artificial intelligence, machine learning, really the perfect storm for innovation. Obviously, all in the open. >> Angel: Yes. Awesome stuff. Thanks for coming on the theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you guys, appreciate it. >> IBM, making it happen with developers. Always have been. Big open source proponents. And now they got the tools, they got the garages for building. I'm John Furrier, stay with us, there's some great interviews. Be right back with more after this short break. (tech music)