>>Mhm >>Yes, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm lisa martin excited about this conversation. It's combining my background in life sciences with technology. Please welcome Mike Tarsa Lee, the chief scientific officer at Tetra Science. Mike I'm so excited to talk to you today. >>Thank you lisa and thank you very much to the cube for hosting us. >>Absolutely. So we talk about cloud and data all the time. This is going to be a very interesting conversation especially because we've seen events of the last what are we on 14 months and counting have really accelerated the need for drug discovery and really everyone's kind of focused on that. But I want you to talk with our audience about Tetra science, Who you guys are, what you do and you were founded in 2014. You just raised 80 million in series B but give us an idea of who you are and what you do. >>Got it. Tetro Science, what are we? We are digital plumbers and that may seem funny but really we are taking the world of data and we are trying to resolve it in such a way that people can actually pipe it from the data sources they have in a vendor agnostic way to the data targets in which they need to consume that data. So bringing that metaphor a little bit more to life sciences, let's say that you're a chemist and you have a mass spec and an NMR and some other piece of technology and you need all of those to speak the same language. Right? Generally speaking, all of these are going to be made by different vendors. They're all going to have different control software and they're all going to have slightly different ways of sending their data in. Petro Science takes those all in. We bring them up to the cloud or cloud native solution. We harmonize them, we extract the data first and then we actually put it into what we call our special sauce are intermediate data schema to harmonize it. So you have sort of like a picture and a diagram of what the prototypical mass spec or H P. L. C. Or cell counting data should look like. And then we build pipelines to export that data over to where you need it. So if you need it to live in an L. N. Or a limb system or in a visualization tool like spot fire tableau. We got you covered. So again we're trying to pipe things from left to right from sources to targets and we're trying to do it with scientific context. >>That was an outstanding description. Data plumbers who have secret sauce and never would have thought I would have heard that when I woke up this morning. But I'm going to unpack this more because one of the things that I read in the press release that just went out just a few weeks ago announcing the series B funding, it said that that picture science is pioneering a $300 billion dollar Greenfield data market and operating this is what got my attention without a direct cloud native and open platform competitor. Why is that? >>That's right. If you look at the way pharma data is handled today, even those that long tend to be either on prem solutions with a sort of license model or a distribution into a company and therefore maintenance costs, professional services, etcetera. Or you're looking at somebody who is maybe cloud but their cloud second, you know, they started with their on prem journey and they said we should go and build out some puppies, we should go to the cloud migrate. However, we're cloud first cloud native. So that's one first strong point. And the second is that in terms of data harmonization and in terms of looking at data in a vendor agnostic way, um many companies claim to do it. But the real hard test of this, the metal, what will say is when you can look at this with the Scientific contextual ization we offer. So yes, you can collect the data and put it on a cloud. Okay great. Yes. You may be able to do an extract, transform and load and move it to somewhere else. Okay. But can you actually do that from front to back while retaining all the context of the data while keeping all of the metadata in the right place? With veracity, with G XP readiness, with data fidelity and when it gets over to the other side can somebody say oh yeah that's all the data from all the H. P. L. C. S we control. I got it. I see where it is. I see where to go get it, I see who created it. I see the full data train and validation landscape and I can rebuild that back and I can look back to the old raw source files if I need to. Um I challenge someone to find another direct company that's doing that today. >>You talk about that context and the thing that sort of surprises me is with how incredibly important scientific discovery is and has been for since the beginning of time. Why is why has nobody come out in the last seven years and tried to facilitate this for life sciences organizations. >>Right. I would say that people have tried and I would say that there are definitely strides being made in the open source community, in the data science community and inside pharma and biotech themselves on these sort of build motif, right. If you are inside of a company and you understand your own ontology and processes while you can probably design an application or a workflow using several different tools in order to get that data there. But will it be generally useful to the bioscience community? One thing we pride ourselves on is when we product eyes a connector we call or an integration, we actually do it with a many different companies, generic cases in mind. So we say, OK, you have an h p l C problem over at this top pharma, you have an HPC problem with this biotech and you have another one of the C R. O. Okay. What are the common points between all of those? Can we actually distill that down to a workflow? Everyone's going to need, for example a compliance workflow. So everybody needs compliance. Right. So we can actually look into an empower or a unicorn operation and we can say, okay, did you sign off on that? Did it come through the right way? Was the data corrupted etcetera? That's going to be generically useful to everybody? And that's just one example of something we can do right now for anybody in bio pharma. >>Let's talk about the events of the last 14 months or so mentioned 10 X revenue growth in 2020. Covid really really highlighted the need to accelerate drug discovery and we've seen that. But talk to me about some of the things that Tetra science has seen and done to facilitate that. >>Yeah, this past 14 months. I mean um I will say that the global pandemic has been a challenge for everyone involved ourselves as well. We've basically gone to a full remote workforce. Um We have tried our very best to stay on top of it with remote collaboration tools with vera, with GIT hub with everything. However, I'll say that it's actually been some of the most successful time in our company's history because of that sort of lack of any kind of friction from the physical world. Right? We've really been able to dig down and dig deep on our integrations are connections, our business strategy. And because of that, we've actually been able to deliver a lot of value to customers because, let's be honest, we don't actually have to be on prem from what we're doing since we're not an on prem solution and we're not an original equipment manufacturer, we don't have to say, okay, we're going to go plug the thing in to the H. P. L. C. We don't have to be there to tune the specific wireless protocols or you're a W. S. Protocols, it can all be done remotely. So it's about building good relationships, building trust with our colleagues and clients and making sure we're delivering and over delivering every time. And then people say great um when I elect a Tetra solution, I know what's going right to the cloud, I know I can pick my hosting options, I know you're going to keep delivering more value to me every month. Um Thanks, >>I like that you make it sound simple and that actually you bring up a great point though that the one of the many things that was accelerated this last year Plus is the need to be remote that need to be able to still communicate, collaborate but also the need to establish and really foster those relationships that you have with existing customers and partners as everybody was navigating very, very different challenges. I want to talk now about how you're helping customers unlock the problem that is in every industry data silos and point to point integration where things can talk to each other, Talk to me about how you're helping customers like where do they start with? Touch? Where do you start that? Um kind of journey to unlock data value? >>Sure. Journey to unlock data value. Great question. So first I'll say that customers tend to come to us, it's the oddest thing and we're very lucky and very grateful for this, but they tend to have heard about what we've done with other companies and they come to us they say listen, we've heard about a deployment you've done with novo Nordisk, I can say that for example because you know, it's publicly known. Um so they'll say, you know, we hear about what you've done, we understand that you have deep expertise in chromatography or in bio process. And they'll say here's my really sticky problem. What can you do here? And invariably they're going to lay out a long list of instruments and software for us. Um we've seen lists that go up past 2000 instruments. Um and they'll say, yeah, they'll say here's all the things we need connected, here's four or five different use cases. Um we'll bring you start to finish, we'll give you 20 scientists in the room to talk through them and then we to get somewhere between two and four weeks to think about that problem and come back and say here's how we might solve that. Invariably, all of these problems are going to have a data silos somewhere, there's going to be in Oregon where the preclinical doesn't see the biology or the biology doesn't see the screening etcetera. So we say, all right, give us one scientist from each of those, hence establishing trust, establishing input from everybody. And collaboratively we'll work with, you will set up an architecture diagram, will set up a first version of a prototype connector, will set up all this stuff they need in order to get moving, we'll deliver value upfront before we've ever signed a contract and will say, is this a good way to go for you? And they'll say either no, no, thank you or they'll say yes, let's go forward, let's do a pilot a proof of concept or let's do a full production rollout. And invariably this data silos problem can usually be resolved by again, these generic size connectors are intermediate data schema, which talks and moves things into a common format. Right? And then also by organizationally, since we're already connecting all these groups in this problem statement, they tend to continue working together even when we're no longer front and center, right? They say, oh we set up that thing together. Let's keep thinking about how to make our data more available to one another. >>Interesting. So culturally, within the organization it sounds like Tetra is having significant influences their, you know, the collaboration but also data ownership. Sometimes that becomes a sticky situation where there are owners and they want to read retain that control. Right? You're laughing? You've been through this before. I'd like to understand a little bit more though about the conversation because typically we're talking about tech but we're also talking about science. Are you having these technical conversations with scientists as well as I. T. What is that actual team from the customer perspective look >>like? Oh sure. So the technical conversation and science conversation are going on sometimes in parallel and sometimes in the same threat entirely. Oftentimes the folks who reach out to us first tend to be the scientists. They say I've got a problem, you know and and my research and and I. T. Will probably hear about this later. But let's go. And then we will invariably say well let's bring in your R. And D. I. T. Counterparts because we need them to help solve it right? But yes we are usually having those conversations in parallel at first and then we unite them into one large discussion. And we have varied team members here on the Tetris side we have me from science along with multiple different other PhD holders and pharma lifers in our business who actually can look at the scientific use cases and recommend best practices for that and visualizations. We also have a lot of solutions architects and delivery engineers who can look at it from the how should the platform assemble the solution and how can we carry it through? Um And those two groups are three groups really unite together to provide a unified front and to help the customer through and the customer ends up providing the same thing as we do. So they'll give us on the one call, right? Um a technical expert, a data and QA person and a scientist all in one group and they'll say you guys work together to make sure that our orders best represented here. Um And I think that that's actually a really productive way to do this because we end up finding out things and going deeper into the connector than we would have otherwise. >>It's very collaborative, which is I bet those are such interesting conversations to be a part of it. So it's part of the conversation there helping them understand how to establish a common vision for data across their organization. >>Yes, that that tends to be a sort of further reaching conversation. I'll say in the initial sort of short term conversation, we don't usually say you three scientists or engineers are going to change the fate of the entire orig. That's maybe a little outside of our scope for now. But yes, that first group tends to describe a limited solution. We help to solve that and then go one step past and then they'll nudge somebody else in the Oregon. Say, do you see what Petra did over here? Maybe you could use it over here in your process. And so in that way we sort of get this cultural buy in and then increased collaboration inside a single company. >>Talk to me about some customers that you've worked with it. Especially love to know some of the ones that you've helped in the last year where things have been so incredibly dynamic in the market. But give us an insight into maybe some specific customers that work with you guys. >>Sure. I'd love to I'll speak to the ones that are already on our case studies. You can go anytime detector science dot com and read all of these. But we've worked with Prelude therapeutics for example. We looked at a high throughput screening cascade with them and we were able to take an instrument that was basically unloved in a corner at T. Can liquid handler, hook it up into their Ln. And their screening application and bring in and incorporate data from an external party and do all of that together and merge it so they could actually see out the other side a screening cascade and see their data in minutes as opposed to hours or days. We've also worked as you've seen the press release with novo Nordisk, we worked on automating much of their background for their chromatography fleet. Um and finally we've also worked with several smaller biotechs in looking at sort of in stan shih ation, they say well we've just started we don't have an L. N. We don't have a limbs were about to buy these 50 instruments. Um what can you do with us and we'll actually help them to scope what their initial data storage and harmonization strategy should even be. Um so so we're really man, we're at everywhere from the enterprise where its fleets of thousands of instruments and we're really giving data to a large amount of scientists worldwide, all the way down to the small biotech with 50 people who were helping add value there. >>So big range there in terms of the data conversation, I'm curious has have you seen it change in the last year plus with respect to elevating to the C suite level or the board saying we've got to be able to figure this out because as we saw, you know, the race for the Covid 19 vaccine for example. Time to value and and to discovery is so critical. Is that C suite or board involved in having conversations with you guys? >>It's funny because they are but they are a little later. Um we tend to be a scientist and user driven um solution. So at the beginning we get a power user, an engineer or a R and D I. T. Person in who really has a problem to solve. And as they are going through and developing with us, eventually they're going to need either approval for the time, the resources or the budget and then they'll go up to their VP or their CIA or someone else at the executive level and say, let's start having more of this conversation. Um, as a tandem effort, we are starting to become involved in some thought leadership exercises with some larger firms. And we are looking at the strategic aspect through conferences, through white papers etcetera to speak more directly to that C suite and to say, hey, you know, we could fit your industry for dato motif. And then one other thing you said, time to value. So I'll say that the Tetro science executive team actually looks at that as a tract metric. So we're actually looking at driving that down every single week. >>That's outstanding. That's a hard one to measure, especially in a market that is so dynamic. But that time to value for your customers is critical. Again, covid sort of surfaced a number of things and some silver linings. But that being able to get hands on the day to make sure that you can actually pull insights from it accelerate facilitate drug discovery. That time to value there is absolutely critical. >>Yeah. I'll say if you look at the companies that really, you know, went first and foremost, let's look at Moderna right? Not our customer by the way, but we'll look at Madonna quickly as an example as an example are um, everything they do is automated, right? Everything they do is cloud first. Everything they do is global collaboration networks, you know, with harmonized data etcetera. That is the model we believe Everyone's going to go to in the next 3-5 years. If you look at the fact that Madonna went from sequence to initial vaccine in what, 50, 60 days, that kind of delivery is what the market will become accustomed to. And so we're going to see many more farmers and biotechs move to that cloud first. Distributed model. All data has to go in somewhere centrally. Everyone has to be able to benefit from it. And we are happy to help them get >>Well that's that, you know, setting setting a new record for pace is key there, but it's also one of those silver linings that has come out of this to show that not only was that critical to do, but it can be done. We have the technology, we have the brain power to be able to put those all user would harmonize those together to drive this. So give me a last question. Give me an insight into some of the things that are ahead for Tetra science the rest of this year. >>Oh gosh, so many things. One of the nice parts about having funding in the bank and having a dedicated team is the ability to do more. So first of course our our enterprise pharma and BioPharma clients, there are plenty more use cases, workflows, instruments. We've just about scratch the surface but we're going to keep growing and growing our our integrations and connectors. First of all right we want to be like a netflix for connectors. You know we just want you to come and say look do they have the connector? No well don't worry. They're going to have it in a month or two. Um so that we can be basically the almost the swiss army knife for every single connector you can imagine. Then we're going to be developing a lot more data apps so things that you can use to derive value from your data out. And then again, we're going to be looking at helping to educate everybody. So how is cloud useful? Why go to the system with harmonization? How does this influence your compliance? How can you do bi directional communication? There's lots of ways you can use. Once you have harmonized centralized data, you can do things with it to influence your order and drive times down again from days and weeks, two minutes and seconds. So let's get there. And I think we're going to try doing that over the next year. >>That's awesome. Never a dull moment. And I, you should partner with your marketing folks because we talked about, you talked about data plumbing the secret sauce and becoming the netflix of connectors. These are three gems that you dropped on this this morning mike. This has been awesome. Thank you for sharing with us what teacher science is doing, how you're really helping to fast track a lot of the incredibly important research that we're all really um dependent on and helping to heal the world through data. It's been a pleasure talking with you. >>Haley says I'm a real quickly. It's a team effort. The entire Tetro science team deserves credit for this. I'm just lucky enough to be able to speak to you. So thank you very much for the opportunity. >>And she about cheers to the whole touch of science team. Keep up the great work guys. Uh for mike Roselli, I'm lisa martin. You're watching this cube conversation. >>Mhm.

>>Okay, We're now going into the technical deep dive. We're gonna geek out here a little bit. Ben Wa Dodgeville is here. He's co founder of Snowflake and president of products. And also joining us is Christian Kleinerman. Who's the senior vice president of products. Gentlemen, welcome. Good to see you. >>Yeah, you that >>get this year, they Thanks for having us. >>Very welcome. So it been well, we've heard a lot this morning about the data cloud, and it's becoming my view anyway, the linchpin of your strategy. I'm interested in what technical decisions you made early on. That that led you to this point and even enabled the data cloud. >>Yes. So? So I would say that that a crowd was built in tow in three phases. Really? The initial phase, as you call it, was it was really about 20 minutes. One regions Teoh, Data Cloud and and that region. What was important is to make that region infinity, infinity scalable, right. And that's our architectural, which we call the beauty cross to share the architectural er so that you can plug in as many were clues in that region as a Z without any limits. The limit is really the underlying prop Provide the, you know, resource is which you know, Cal provide the region as a really no limits. So So that z you know, region architecture, I think, was really the building block of the snowflake. That a cloud. But it really didn't stop there. The second aspect Waas Well, it was really data sharing. How you know munity internets within the region, how to share data between 10 and off that region between different customers on that was also enabled by architectures Because we discover, you know, compute and storage so compute You know clusters can access any storage within the region. Eso that's based off the data cloud and then really faced three Which is critical is the expansion the global expansion how we made you know, our cloud domestic layers so that we could talk You know the snowflake vision on different clouds on DNA Now we are running in three cloud on top of three cloud providers. We started with the ws and US West. We moved to assure and then uh, Google g c p On how this this crowd region way started with one crowd region as I said in the W S U S West, and then we create we created, you know, many you know, different regions. We have 22 regions today, all over the world and all over the different in the cloud providers. And what's more important is that these regions are not isolated. You know, Snowflake is one single, you know, system for the world where we created this global data mesh which connects every region such that not only there's no flex system as a whole can can be aware of for these regions, But customers can replicate data across regions on and, you know, share. There are, you know, across the planet if need be. So So this is one single, you know, really? I call it the World Wide Web. Off data that, that's, you know, is this vision of the data cloud. And it really started with this building block, which is a cloud region. >>Thank you for that. Ben White Christian. You and I have talked about this. I mean, that notion of a stripping away the complexity and that's kind of what the data cloud does. But if you think about data architectures, historically they really had no domain knowledge. They've really been focused on the technology toe ingest and analyze and prepare And then, you know, push data out to the business and you're really flipping that model, allowing the sort of domain leaders to be first class citizens if you will, uh, because they're the ones that creating data value, and they're worrying less about infrastructure. But I wonder, do you feel like customers air ready for that change? >>I I love the observation. They've that, uh, so much energy goes in in in enterprises, in organizations today, just dealing with infrastructure and dealing with pipes and plumbing and things like that and something that was insightful from from Ben Juan and and our founders from from Day one WAAS. This is a managed service. We want our customers to focus on the data, getting the insights, getting the decisions in time, not just managing pipes and plumbing and patches and upgrades, and and the the other piece that it's it's it's an interesting reality is that there is this belief that the cloud is simplifying this, and all of a sudden there's no problem but actually understanding each of the public cloud providers is a large undertaking, right? Each of them have 100 plus services, uh, sending upgrades and updates on a constant basis. And that just distracts from the time that it takes to go and say, Here's my data. Here's my data model. Here's how it make better decisions. So at the heart of everything we do is we wanna abstract the infrastructure. We don't wanna abstract the nuance of each of the cloud providers. And as you said, have companies focus on This is the domain expertise or the knowledge for my industry. Are all companies ready for it? I think it's a It's a mixed bag. We we talk to customers on a regular basis every way, every week, every day, and some of them are full on. They've sort of burned the bridges and, like I'm going to the cloud, I'm going to embrace a new model. Some others. You can see the complete like, uh, shock and all expressions like What do you mean? I don't have all these knobs. 2 to 3 can turn. Uh, but I think the future is very clear on how do we get companies to be more competitive through data? >>Well, Ben Ben. Well, it's interesting that Christian mentioned to manage service and that used to be in a hosting. Guys run around the lab lab coats and plugging things in. And of course, you're looking at this differently. It's high degrees of automation. But, you know, one of those areas is workload management. And I wonder how you think about workload management and how that changes with the data cloud. >>Yeah, this is a great question. Actually, Workload management used to be a nightmare. You know, traditional systems on it was a nightmare for the B s and they had to spend most a lot of their time, you know, just managing workloads. And why is that is because all these workloads are running on the single, you know, system and a single cluster The compete for resources. So managing workload that always explain it as explain Tetris, right? You had the first to know when to run. This work will make sure that too big workers are not overlapping. You know, maybe it really is pushed at night, you know, And And you have this 90 window which is not, you know, efficient. Of course, for you a TL because you have delays because of that. But but you have no choice, right? You have a speaks and more for resource is and you have to get the best out of this speaks resource is. And and for sure you don't want to eat here with her to impact your dash boarding workload or your reports, you know, impact and with data science and and And this became a true nine man because because everyone wants to be that a driven meaning that all the entire company wants to run new workers on on this system. And these systems are completely overwhelmed. So so, well below management was, and I may have before Snowflake and Snowflake made it really >>easy. The >>reason is it's no flag. We leverage the crowds who dedicates, you know, compute resources to each work. It's in the snowflake terminology. It's called a warehouse virtual warehouse, and each workload can run in its own virtual warehouse, and each virtual warehouse has its own dedicated competition resources. It's on, you know, I opened with and you can really control how much resources which workload gas by sizing this warehouses. You know, I just think the compute resources that they can use When the workload, you know, starts to execute automatically. The warehouse, the compute resources are turned off, but turned on by snowflake is for resuming a warehouse and you can dynamically resized this warehouse. It can be done by the system automatically. You know if if the conference see of the workload increases or it can be done manually by the administrator or, you know, just suggesting, you know, uh, compute power. You know, for each workload and and the best off that model is not only it gives you a very fine grain. Control on resource is that this work can get Not only workloads are not competing and not impacting it in any other workload. But because of that model, you can hand as many workload as you want. And that's really critical because, as I said, you know, everyone in the organization wants to use data to make decisions, So you have more and more work roads running. And then the Patriots game, you know, would have been impossible in in a in a centralized one single computer, cross the system On the flip side. Oh, is that you have to have a zone administrator off the system. You have to to justify that. The workload is worth running for your organization, right? It's so easy in literally in seconds, you can stand up a new warehouse and and start to run your your crazy on that new compute cluster. And of course, you have to justify if the cost of that because there is a cost, right, snowflake charges by seconds off compute So that cost, you know, is it's justified and you have toe. You know, it's so easy now to hire new workflow than you do new things with snowflake that that that you have to to see, you know, and and look at the trade off the cost off course and managing costs. >>So, Christian been while I use the term nightmare, I'm thinking about previous days of workload management. I mean, I talked to a lot of customers that are trying to reduce the elapsed time of going from data insights, and their nightmare is they've got this complicated data lifecycle. Andi, I'm wondering how you guys think about that. That notion of compressing elapsed time toe data value from raw data to insights. >>Yeah, so? So we we obsess or we we think a lot about this time to insight from the moment that an event happens toe the point that it shows up in a dashboard or a report or some decision or action happens based on it. There are three parts that we think on. How do we reduce that life cycle? The first one which ties to our previous conversation is related toe. Where is their muscle memory on processes or ways of doing things that don't actually make us much sense? My favorite example is you say you ask any any organization. Do you run pipelines and ingestion and transformation at two and three in the morning? And the answer is, Oh yeah, we do that. And if you go in and say, Why do you do that? The answer is typically, well, that's when the resource is are available Back to Ben Wallace. Tetris, right? That's that's when it was possible. But then you ask, Would you really want to run it two and three in the morning? If if you could do it sooner, we could do it. Mawr in time, riel time with when the event happened. So first part of it is back to removing the constraints of the infrastructures. How about running transformations and their ingestion when the business best needs it? When it's the lowest time to inside the lowest latency, not one of technology lets you do it. So that's the the the easy one out the door. The second one is instead of just fully optimizing a process, where can you remove steps of the process? This is where all of our data sharing and the snowflake data marketplace come into place. How about if you need to go in and just data from a SAS application vendor or maybe from a commercial data provider and imagine the dream off? You wouldn't have to be running constant iterations and FTP s and cracking C S V files and things like that. What if it's always available in your environment, always up to date, And that, in our mind, is a lot more revolutionary, which is not? Let's take away a process of ingesting and copying data and optimize it. How about not copying in the first place? So that's back to number two on, then back to number three is is what we do day in and day out on making sure our platform delivers the best performance. Make it faster. The combination of those three things has led many of our customers, and and And you'll see it through many of the customer testimonials today that they get insights and decisions and actions way faster, in part by removing steps, in part by doing away with all habits and in part because we deliver exceptional performance. >>Thank you, Christian. Now, Ben Wa is you know, we're big proponents of this idea of the main driven design and data architecture. Er, you know, for example, customers building entire applications and what I like all data products or data services on their data platform. I wonder if you could talk about the types of applications and services that you're seeing >>built >>on top of snowflake. >>Yeah, and And I have to say that this is a critical aspect of snowflake is to create this platform and and really help application to be built on top of this platform. And the more application we have, the better the platform will be. It is like, you know, the the analogies with your iPhone. If your iPhone that no applications, you know it would be useless. It's it's an empty platforms. So So we are really encouraging. You know, applications to be belong to the top of snowflake and from there one actually many applications and many off our customers are building applications on snowflake. We estimated that's about 30% are running already applications on top off our platform. And the reason is is off course because it's it's so easy to get compute resources. There is no limit in scale in our viability, their ability. So all these characteristics are critical for for an application on DWI deliver that you know from day One Now we have improved, you know, our increased the scope off the platform by adding, you know, Java in competition and Snow Park, which which was announced today. That's also you know, it is an enabler. Eso in terms off type of application. It's really, you know, all over and and what I like actually needs to be surprised, right? I don't know what well being on top of snowflake and how it will be the world, but with that are sharing. Also, we are opening the door to a new type of applications which are deliver of the other marketplace. Uh, where, You know, one can get this application died inside the platform, right? The platform is distributing this application, and today there was a presentation on a Christian T notes about, >>you >>know, 20 finds, which, you know, is this machine learning, you know, which is providing toe. You know, any users off snowflake off the application and and machine learning, you know, to find, you know, and apply model on on your data and enrich your data. So data enrichment, I think, will be a huge aspect of snowflake and data enrichment with machine learning would be a big, you know, use case for these applications. Also, how to get there are, you know, inside the platform. You know, a lot of applications led him to do that. Eso machine learning. Uh, that engineering enrichments away. These are application that we run on the platform. >>Great. Hey, we just got a minute or so left in. Earlier today, we ran a video. We saw that you guys announced the startup competition, >>which >>is awesome. Ben, while you're a judge in this competition, what can you tell us about this >>Yeah, >>e you know, for me, we are still a startup. I didn't you know yet, you know, realize that we're not anymore. Startup. I really, you know, you really feel about you know, l things, you know, a new startups, you know, on that. That's very important for Snowflake. We have. We were started yesterday, and we want to have new startups. So So the ends, the idea of this program, the other aspect off that program is also toe help, you know, started to build on top of snowflake and to enrich. You know, this this pain, you know, rich ecosystem that snowflake is or the data cloud off that a cloud is And we want to, you know, add and boost. You know that that excitement for the platform, so So the ants, you know, it's a win win. It's a win, you know, for for new startups. And it's a win, ofcourse for us. Because it will make the platform even better. >>Yeah, And startups, or where innovation happens. So registrations open. I've heard, uh, several, uh, startups have have signed up. You goto snowflake dot com slash startup challenge, and you can learn mawr. That's exciting program. An initiative. So thank you for doing that on behalf of of startups out there and thanks. Ben Wa and Christian. Yeah, I really appreciate you guys coming on Great conversation. >>Thanks for David. >>You're welcome. And when we talk, Thio go to market >>pros. They >>always tell us that one of the key tenets is to stay close to the customer. Well, we want to find out how data helps us. To do that in our next segment. Brings in to chief revenue officers to give us their perspective on how data is helping their customers transform. Business is digitally. Let's watch.

>> Host: Live from San Diego, California, it's the CUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome back to the CUBE, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, covering day one of Cisco Live from sunny San Diego. We're pleased to welcome back a couple of our alumni. To my right Eric Herzog, CMO of IBM Storage. Eric it's always great to have you. >> Great. >> And you fashion choices on the CUBE. >> Always wear a Hawaiian shirt for the CUBE. >> I know, it's a thing. And we've also got Evaristus Mainsah, General Manager of IBM Cloud Private Ecosystem. Evaristus it's great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you very much, delighted to be here. >> So guys here we are, we're in the dove nut zone. Lots of collaboration, lots of conversations day one of Cisco Live. But this events been around for 30 years. Long time, I think Chuck Robins said this morning what also turned 30 this year is Tetris. Anybody a big fan of Tetris? So, so much progress, so much change. I know you've seen a lot of it. Eric lets start with you. The global economy, what are the impacts it's having on IT? >> Well I'd say the number one thing is everyone is recognized the most valuable asset is data. It's not gold, it's not silver, it's not plutonium and it definitely isn't oil, it's all about data. And whether it be a global Fortune 500, a midsize company or Herzogs Bar & Grill, data is your most valuable asset. So at IBM Storage, what we've done is making sure that our focus is on being data-driven. It's all about solutions, it's not about speeds and feeds. Of course, having done this for 35 years I could have whacked poetically on speeds and feeds. And even if you have some speeds and feeds that Stu may not even remember anymore. That said, it's really about data, it's not about storage speeds and feeds. How really storage is that critical foundation for applications, workloads and use cases. And that's what's most important. >> Yeah, so Eric, when they rolled out on stage this morning that 30 year old box with ribbon cable, yeah, that predated a little bit when I was looking at IT. But, I remember when I started in IT, when we talked about security, the main thing was lock the door of the cabinet that everything was in there, because it was kind of self-contained. Security's gone through a few changes in the last you know 20 25 years though. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that kind of security resiliency. Obviously, something that's impacted the network for a long time, something that IBM sees front and center. >> What I think the big deal is what most people think when they think of security, is I got to buy security software. So I got to call up IBM Security or RSA or the Intel Security Division and buy some security software. And while that's great the reality is as many people have written about, in fact Wikibon SiliconANGLE's written about it. Close to 98% of all enterprises, and I mean big enterprises now are going to get to be broken into. And you've seen this all over the news. So the key thing is once they're inside, storage can help you with a cyber resiliency play. And at IBM Storage whether that be data at rest encryption. Whether that be malware or ransomware protection. We put together a whole set of technology that when the bad guys in the house they can't steal the TV. Because we've locked it down. It's almost as if it was in a safe. Maybe it's almost like the cloak in science fiction where you can't even see the Romulan ship, because it's cloaked. Well guess what, that's what IBM storage can do for your data and it is your most valuable asset. So critical to cyber resiliency. >> So helping customers go from reactive to this expectation breach has happened very very frequently every few seconds to being proactive? >> Yeah, I mean. >> Eventually predictive? >> Well what we do is for example with our Spectrum Protect software. When there's a malware or ransomware attack, what happens is they always go after you're secondary data sets first. I know that sounds weird but they go after your backups, your snapshots and your replicas. 'Cause when they attack your primary data, if they've you can just recover from a backup they can't hold you for $10 million of ransom. So our Spectrum Protect software for example, when it sees anomalous activity in backup data sets, sends an email on a warning out to all the admins and says you have weird activity going on, you might want to check it out and that way you would know. Because secondarity is attacked first in a cyber resiliency strategy. >> You know, the other thing we're seeing a lot is just the scope of what's happening in IT. When you talk about things like scale and you talk about you know edge computing and so much change going on. There's got to be AI in there or machine learning to help us because humans alone can't keep up with what's going on here. Tell us a little bit about that Eric. >> So Big data and AI is like the hot topic right now. Cyber resiliency is important 'cause people obviously have been buying security software for a while. So it's more what we do is really an adjunct to that. In the case of Big data and AI, it's a brand new open field. Everyone is looking for solutions in both of those spaces. We have created a complete set of data infrastructure we've called the AI pipeline. It involves not only physical storage arrays but a whole bunch of software. In fact our Spectrum Discover software which allows you to create metadata catalogs about file and object data is being expanded. And we already publicly said this in the second half To include EMC and Netapp and AWS, not just IBM Storage. So it's a critical thing, you've got to make sure the other thing is when you're using AI. Let's say you're going to use AI to run a factory. If the storage goes down, those robots aren't working. So storage is that critical underlying foundation. A in a Big data network load to be able to have this pipeline to get the data. But if you don't have the resiliency, the performance and the availability of the underlying storage everything shuts down if the storage fails. 'Cause the AI software won't run. So that's how we see fitting in to their both the critical foundation also this AI data pipeline with all of our software. >> So before we get in to this Cisco partnership with Evaristus, it's one more question Eric for you. As Chief Marketing Officer, you talk about the customers all of the time. In that example that you just gave about the criticality of storage for AI where are you having conversations within customer organizations. Is it at the level of the storage girls and guys or has it gone up to lines of business to executives. >> Yeah so, from an AI perspective it runs a gamut. It could be sometimes the storage people. Sometimes the infrastructure people. A lot of times it's actually in the line of business or at the data scientist level. On the Big data side it's a little bit more mature so people know they need to do analytics versus AI. And so when you look at it from that perspective on that side it's often the storage guy but it's also the data scientist as well. So that's who we talk to to get things rolling. And it's not, we don't just talk to the storage admin for either of them, because they're both so new and they have such a big impact on the data scientists and the analytic engine committees inside of those giant enterprises. >> I can imagine eventually maybe question for you. Of that conversation elevating it up to the sweet sweet. Because if you can't access the data, if it can't be protected, what good is it? Right, it's really, to say it's the lifeblood is a silly thing, but we say it all the time. But it's critical, it's table stakes. >> Well one of the things that's interesting is I just got my Fortune 500 magazine at home, that had the Fortune 500 list in it. And there was an interesting article on AI and the enterprise. And they did a survey according to Fortune magazine, 50% of the CIO's that are in the Fortune 500 said they're using AI and Big data of some type. So it's sweeping the world. And it started of course in HPC in the academics. But now it's going into all enterprises of all types. >> Alright so we've talked a few years about the Versastack Partnership. But the last year or so we've really been talking about where Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud fit in to this. We talked a little bit at IBM Think. Evaristus we talked at another show about some of the IBM Cloud Private. Give us the update where we are with customers and how that fits, Eric lets start with you and Evaristus just go into the partnership. >> Sure from a storage version perspective, we've been talking about a Hybrid multi-cloud now for several years. And in fact I did a presentation two years ago at Cisco Live on Hybrid cloud using Versastack. Today I gave one on the data driven enterprise and why hybrid multi-cloud is important to use. So that was the 30 minutes presentation I did today. So I think the key thing is we make sure that we A our Hybrid it's not going to all public or all private. And we can move data seamlessly back and forth. And then also multi-cloud. When you look at enterprise shops, they're not just going to use IBM Cloud. I wish they would I'm an IBM shareholder but they're not. They use IBM, they're going to use ABS, they're going to use Amazon and in many cases they're going to use some smaller cloud provider. So we make sure that we can move data around across any multi-cloud of various different providers to accompany. But also Hybrid cloud as well. >> So the status talk to use about you know from a partnership Cisco IBM Cloud Private perspective, what's going on there Evaristus? >> Well Thank you very much. Well IBM and Cisco have been partners for a long long time. And what we are doing now is given the realities, the fact that those clients have found themselves in a multi-cloud environment, >> Hybrid multi-cloud environment. What we can do to help clients so they can develop they can test, they can manage the applications in a consistent manner, whether they are on prime or in the cloud. And there are a couple of initiatives that we are announcing. One of them is that IBM Cloud Private is going to run on Hyperflex, so Cisco's Hyperflex. As well as hyperflex, hyper-conversed infrastructure. What it means is a client who currently has hyperflex can have IBM Cloud Private on it. Which effectively means they have themselves a Private Cloud environment that also connects to other public cloud environments and allows you to really begin to work within a Hybrid cloud environment the way that most clients need to. The second initiative is that we will have ACI pods or V pods, virtual ACI, running in the IBM public cloud. Which basically means that again, Cisco customers, ACI Network customers who currently use the produce on Prime will be able to use exactly you know the same control pane to manage their deployments and to manage their security preferences on Prime as they do in the cloud. And this again surrounding the Public Cloud is running on bare metal on the IBM Cloud. >> Alright, Evaristus can you bring us inside a little bit the applications you know. Eric talked about you know data we know is so important. Really it's the applications that are driving that. It's where we're seeing the most change in customers, as to how they're moving or building new applications. And in Hyber cloud it's one of the biggest questions for customers is what do they do with that application portfolio? >> Yes so what we're seeing is clearly because you know. Clients have now lots of different Public clouds. They also have Private clouds to deal with them. They have lots of applications that are currently that need to move right. We believe 20% of those applications have moved, the remaining 80% are still on Prime. And so the trend that we are really seeing is applications moving to the cloud. And the two ways of doing it you could do this by simply lifting and shifting on VM, you get the contraction benefit of your stack right. So you can some cost impacts. But the really interesting way that you see lots of clients moving is modernizing the applications. Because the real valued driver with infinite cloud is not so much cost as innovation. And when you convert those applications into Microsoft this is the right and let me run them in containers it gives them plenty of flexibility. And wasting lots of clients that want to use IBM Cloud Private as a platform to enable that modernization journey. >> So as every industry is living in this Hybrid multi-cloud world for many reasons. But it sounds like to me is that the IBM Cisco relationship is deepening as a result to enable these organizations that are in these very amorphous environments. You know as we see the explosion of Edge and Mobile, that's what it sounds like to me. Is that this long standing partnership is getting deeper and maybe a stronger foundation. To help customers not just live in this Hybrid multi-cloud world but be successful so that their businesses gain competitive advantage. They can identify new products and services and revenue streams. >> Yeah, I think multi-cloud and Hybrid cloud actually requires partnerships. Because as Eric said later on of course you like everybody to be on the IBM Cloud and it's a great cloud. But we recognize that many clients who have a variety of different plights to deal with. They have a variety of different infrastructures. And that's why when you look at IBM Cloud Private which is you know our offering that really enables that Hybrid cloud. It is designed to managed that. So It is multi-model, so if you want to run it as a VM you can, you want to run your containers, you can run serverless, you can run them bare metal. But also, it supports a range of different infrastructure. So not only does it run on Z, it runs on power, it runs on Spectrum Storage. We announce running now on Hyperflex. It also runs on other peoples Public clouds. It runs on Azure, it runs on Amazon web services, it runs on Google Cloud platform, it runs on the IBM Cloud. And the intent here is to enable clients to basically manage and work with that infrastructure as if it was one. The way that Stu said in the data center where you locked everything up. Well it's not like that anymore. But the most that we can do is to enable clients to treat all of that infrastructure as one. And that's what sort of aim to do with our platforms. >> Alright, I guess last question I'd like to get both of your comments on. Is your advice for customers, you know, customers have that they have a lot of you know existing things that they have to deal with, that they're looking to modernize. What advice do you give them? Where do you start them you know I guess you know one of the things you're starting where they are. But you know what are some of the first steps and recommendations that you have for customers today? >> We have a process that works really well, which is called the IBM Garage. Which is effectively a way that we used to co-create with our clients to solve the immediate problems. So a client for example, who is looking at app modernization but isn't sure where to start, which app. What we do is we get their teams together with our teams line of business together with IT and our teams and we spend a couple of days in a design thinking workshop to identify a minimum viable product. Which is something that solves a problem not big enough that it will take forever, but big enough to matter. Then we get our teams to work side-by-side, we code it, we test it, we deploy it, we'll run it in the IBM Cloud. We manage it, at like in one week sprints. And then you spend another few days at the end of week four or five to do a see retrospective to see whether it solved the problem as you expected. And if it did, you pick the next piece of work to continue your journey. So before you know, five weeks in, you have your first application modernized. Or you have your first cloud negative ready. >> Now from a storage perspective it's a little bit easier. We supported storage on bare metal. We supported storage in all the virtual environments. KVM, OVM, obviously VM we're in Hyper V. And now, we've been supporting containers for over two years. So we say is leave no data behind. If certain data needs to stay on bare metal, that's fine we can support that. But we can also transparently migrate data back and forth between the various tiers of container-based virtualization-based or the old style bare metal. So from our perspective, we help them move data around where they need it. And if they're still running in a hybridized world in this case, containers, virtual and bare metal that's fine. If they just go containers that's fine. If they just go virtual it's fine. So for us, because of what we've been supporting now for several years, we can help them on that journey. And traverse from any one of those three layers, which is where data sits in today's data centers and cloud environments. >> So overall a lot of collaboration, a lot of customer choice. Gentlemen, Thank you for joining Stu and me the program this afternoon, great to have you back. >> Thank you >> Great, Thank you. Glad to be on the CUBE. >> Oooh our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE, live from day one of our coverage on Cisco Live. Thanks for watching. (energetic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's the cube covering Cisco Live, U.S. 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to sunny San Diego. Lisa Martin with the Cube live at Cisco Live in the U.S. here. I'm here the next three days with Stu Miniman and Dave Volante. Gentlemen, great to see you. >> It is sunny. >> It is very sunny. >> Lisa, big 30th anniversary celebration here at Cisco live. Where were you in 1989, you don't have to answer that. >> But I thought about that this morning, I know exactly where I was. So the 30th year of them doing a customer partner event. Other 30 year anniversary notables this year, Tetris is 30, Seinfeld premiered 30 years ago. That's kind of scary when you remember exactly where you were. So we came from the keynote just a minute ago, not a lot of news here, but Stu, let's start with you. In terms of where Cisco is, you guys were in Cisco Live Barcelona just a few months ago, John and I covered Cisco DevNet about six weeks ago, lots of excitement around these waves of 5G, Wi-Fi 6, Compute architectures, your thoughts on Cisco where are they are today, where they are in their transition to becoming more software services? >> Yeah, so lately say a great place to start you. We've been watching the last two years that we've done theCube at their European and U.S. events, this transformation to become a software company. It's really interesting to see Chuck Robbins bring out this 30 year old box, and he's like, it's ribbon cables and multi-protocol routers and everything, and then most of the keynotes, most of the things that they're discussing, sure they had some boxes out there on display, I saw somebody on Twitter, they let all the cats out of the bag, 'cause they're all, Cat. 9000, Cat 6300, things like that, but it's software driven. The point they want to make is that cloud and software defined networking was going to destroy Cisco, well and here we are five or 10 years into some of these waves, and Cisco's still going strong. they have positioning in a lot of these environments. Cisco still does have a lot of hardware. When I look at how we track Cisco, it is more about the ports in the boxes than it is the software revenue, but they are climbing up the charts there, and they are being more software. They are showing up at all the cloud shows. When we were at Google Next, we talked to Cisco there. At AWS we talked to AppDynamics and many of the software pieces, and here in the DevNet zone, it's all about enabling developers which is at the core of so much of what's happening for that software transformation. So Cisco, making good measurable progress. Still a nice robust mix of hardware and software, and I personally, 30 years, I was actually at the 20 year reunion. I bumped into a friend of mine that we'd done a video with 10 years ago. We're comparing how we both have a little bit less hair than we did there, but amazing to think about the technologies we were looking at 10 years ago. Cloud was so early in some of these spaces, so a lot has changed in 10 years, and Cisco continually matriculating the ball down the field as they would say in the old analogy. >> And in terms of revenue, Dave, I was looking at their Q3 2019 report which was just a few weeks ago, sixth consecutive revenue growth quarter under Chuck Robbins, your thoughts on where they are from a revenue perspective? >> Well, Cisco's been doing very well. the Stock's been crushing it since 2011. After the downturn Cisco came out of the downturn as a stronger company. They're about almost 50 billion dollars in annual revenue. They've got a 250 billion dollar market cap, which as, Stu, you and I were talking about, it's almost a 5X revenue multiple, and that's software-like revenue multiples. Hardware companies don't typically get that. I mean unless you're like a pure storage, and your growing super fast. But so, this is a company with 60, almost 65% gross margins, it's got a 25% operating income. Again, that's like AWS. AWS is an incredibly profitable company. Just to put that into perspective, Oracle which is predominantly a software company even though it has some hardware, has operating margins in the low to mid 30s, and that's an extremely profitable company. Cisco's got a net of 10 billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet, actually more, but it's got some debts if you're talking about the net debt, and it's growing at 5 or 6% a year. For a 50 billion dollar company, that's quite impressive. So I think to answer your question Lisa, they're doin' quite well from a revenue standpoint. Chuck has done a great job with Wall Street. They obviously trust him. The stock's up. It's on a, I wouldn't say a rocket ship, but Cisco is a cashflow machine. Now where do they allocate that capital? Obviously they spend some on R and D and operations. they spent seven and a half billion dollars last year on stock buybacks, and dividends. So that's a big nut, and so Cisco's going to continue, in my opinion, to use it's funds to obviously fund R and D, but also do stock buybacks, dividends, prop up the stock. >> Stu: And acquisitions. >> And acquisitions. Is that a good move? Well, so balancing organic R and D with acquisitions is good. We talked about the Meraki acquisition earlier. Obviously Cisco's done a lot of growth through it's acquisition, but I would say this. Stock buybacks are a good idea when your stock is undervalued. Is Cisco undervalued, I don't know. Everything's up these days, hard to predict, but the concern that I have for companies like Cisco and Oracle, who do a lot of big buybacks is when the market sentiment flips, and shifts toward profit based companies like a Cisco or an Oracle, cashflow based companies, stocks tend to depress, and then the market sentiment shifts. So there might be some better buying opportunities ahead, but companies today who have a lot of cash, they have to do buybacks because they got to keep Wall Street happy. >> So as we look at these big waves of the explosion of 5G, 400 gigabit ethernet, GPUs, AI everywhere, one of the things that Chuck Robbins said this morning was that, and it made me think of the network as this common denominator in this changing architectural world we live in, hybrid multi-cloud. So going from their first show 30 years ago that was called Networker, what are your thoughts, Stu, we'll start with you, about where they're positioned with the network as really this common denominator in changing architectures, and the network that data that traverses it can be gleaned by organizations to extract insights, new value, new business models, where does Cisco sit in your opinion? >> Great question Lisa. So first of all we need to look at where does Cisco play, and where do they win? If you talk about the enterprise, switching and routing, they are dominant in that environment. We're going to be digging into some of the service providers. Service providers is not, Cisco is not nearly as dominant with service providers as they are in the enterprise. Then if you talk in the hyperscale players, they don't do as much gear, and that's where they're looking to have their software in there. Cisco wants to make sure that in this new hybrid multi-cloud world, wherever you live, there's going to be some piece of the stack that Cisco is part of. But there are opportunities for growth, but there are risks. Some of the traditional business, enterprises are not building as many data centers, and they're going to go to hosting providers, and therefore the network that most companies manage, most of what they're managing isn't under their purview. they don't touch it, they don't cable it, they don't put any of that together, and so Cisco needs to be extending who they work with, help with common interfaces across them. An area we spend a lot of time looking at is this multi-cloud management where Cisco is going up against some of their traditional partners. People like VMware and Microsoft used to just be the software pieces that ran on top of Cisco, now they're going for some of that same piece of the market because that is a control point, and Cisco needs to have leverage there, so can they be strong there? So it's interesting some of these waves that we have where Cisco plays, and where they will have a lot of competition. >> So guys, I think as Cisco moves from just a purely data center player to all these other opportunities, and they talk about the bridge to possible, I see it as Cisco's in a position to connect all the world's data sources. When you talk about multi-cloud, Cisco's got an opportunity and a challenge to convince the world that it's networks are higher performance, more cost effective, and more secure than everybody else, and you saw David Goeckeler today put up a slide, and he talked about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 things. He said, automated, secure, agile, cheaper, easier to manage, drives of business outcomes. Now easier to manage, cheaper, automated, those are all cost efficiency sort of plays. So Cisco is in a good position because it's such a huge piece of the market, you know two thirds of the market, and it's been able to maintain that. It doesn't have a monopoly quite, but it's been able to maintain that huge market share for a long time. >> And Dave, if I can, just a comment that number one is Cisco has not been known to have the simplest networks out there, nor in the past it was the best network I could do, I would buy Cisco only. Today, as you've said it many times Dave. Today's multi-cloud is the old multi-vendor. Cisco, sure they would do interops, and they would make sure to test it out, and they follow all the standards, and they drive all of the standards, but in today's world, if Cisco is not the dominant player in the market, will they win in those environments, and you look at something like 5G. Cisco's not the leader in 4G and LTE roll outs. they're working with the telecom providers, but they have a strong position with Meraki on the WiFi, so something like WiFi 6 and their strong connection between the WiFi 6 and the 5G to be able to make sure my indoor and outdoor can now work seamlessly, but there's areas where Cisco's trying to go into that have not necessarily been their stronghold in the past, and at the end of the day, it's frictionless and simplicity is what's driving a lot of these cloudways, and that's not Cisco traditionally. >> Well to that point, you know complexity means cash historically in this business, and so 25% of Cisco's revenue comes from professional services, and 60% from infrastructure, and then the balance is for other stuff. What's the point? The point is that Cisco is transitioning it's business to more of a subscription model. Now they talk about that they had huge growth in the subscriptions business, but they don't really tell you how much of their business is software. It's sort of opaque. You got to kind of dig through that, but it's clearly on a big upswing. So Cisco's got to transition it's business from, you know back in 1989 it was a lot of break/fix right, then it's become a lot more sort of consulting and other professional services. Now it's going more toward an as a service model, and maybe still some of the professional services to, how do I secure my network, how do I architect that, what about cloud, what about multi-cloud, a lot of opportunities there for services value add, but it has to transition. >> Speaking of security, wanted to kind of touch on that for a second, Dave. They just announced the intent to acquire Sentryo SAS, which is a cybersecurity company out of France for industrial control. Their cybersecurity's one of their fastest growing businesses. Is that an opportunity for Cisco to differentiate itself with respect to network security? >> Well, it's imperative. I mean their security business grew 21% last quarter which is what, triple, more than triple the overall company. What they set at around that acquisition, it made total sense to me, is that it used to be you would just invest in protecting the perimeter. That's where all the money went. Now with things like the Edge, and that's part of this acquisition, you've got to really secure the devices, and the applications that are out there, but also I think increasingly the big opportunity is how do we respond? So things like Stealthwatch, and other machine machine intelligence and analytics help organizations that are ultimately, we know they're going to get breached, but the question is how do they respond? >> Yep, excellent. Well guys, I'm looking forward to three days of wall to wall coverage with you, talking with Cisco folks, DevNet folks, customers, partners. It's going to be bright. I think we can guarantee that, but it's going to be good. >> Yeah, we should say that we're here in the DevNet zone, right? So stop by and see us. A lot of action here. there'll be a lot of takeovers, and we'll be coverin' it. >> Yes, the Sails Pavilion which feels just like that. All right guys, going to be a great week. I'm Lisa Martin for Stu Miniman and Dave Volante, you're watching the Cube Live from Cisco Live in sunny San Diego. Stick around, our guests lineup begins in just a minute. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Justin Warren on day one of VMworld 2018. This is the twentieth anniversary of VMware. Lots of momentum this morning kicking things off. Justin and I are happy to be joined by some folks from NetApp. We have Nancy Hart, the Head of Marketing for Cloud Infrastructure. >> Good afternoon. >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Julie, it's so great to be here. And an alumni, Gabe Chapman. I love your Twitter handle @bacon_is_king. Senior Manager of NetApp HCI. Hey, Gabe. >> Hi, how are you doing? >> Good. Guys, lots of momentum. Pat Gelsinger was probably one of my favorite keynotes cause he's really energetic. He even went full-in with his faux tap this morning. I was impressed. >> Impressive. >> You guys have some news. >> Yes. >> Tell us about what's new with NetApp and VMware today. >> Fantastic, exciting times at NetApp these days. NetApp is really focused on becoming the data authority for hybrid cloud. Part of that is what we're excited to announce today here at VMworld, is a NetApp-verified architecture for VMware private cloud for HCI. What you heard today in Pat's keynote was a lot about connection on-premises private clouds with hyperscalers public clouds. That's what we're doing in our partnership with VMware here and this validated architecture for private clouds. Exciting news for us. In addition, we're also really be thrilled to be announcing new storage nodes for our NetApp HCI product and SolidFire product, as well. Lots going on today. >> Wow, that's really cool. >> Gabe, you've been in the field a lot. What are some of the things that you're hearing? Some of the signage around here is about VMware's making things possible, making momentum possible. What are some of the things that you're seeing in the field in terms of customer's momentum? Leveraging HCI from NetApp to drive new business models, new revenue streams. >> I think one of the things I see commonly is that the hyperconverge as a platform has been around for about six, seven years now. Customers are seeing that some of the first generational approaches have got them to a certain level in terms of addressing simplicity and kind of that turnkey infrastructure stack, but where they would like to go next is more cloud integrated, more scalability, more enterprise class or enterprise scale technology. Therefore, they're kind of looking at the NetApp HCI product and the architecture that we've brought to market, and seeing the potential to not only do things on-premise that they'd normally do in terms of a infrastructure platform but also move in to new services. How do we integrate with existing investments that they've had? How do we become connected into the hybrid cloud model with the hyperscalers themselves and really push towards a all-encompassing cloud infrastructure platform other than just a box. >> Yeah, one of the things I noticed in the keynote today that, I think, relates to that, and I'm interested to hear, Nancy and Gabe, a little bit more about what customers are doing here, because it seems that the idea of it must be all cloud or all on-site, that's gone away now. It's very much hybrid cloud world, multi cloud world, where customers have choice. Are you hearing that from customers? Clearly, there seems to be some demand here because we've seen the change in messaging. >> Absolutely, and I think what you're seeing is customers want the option to take advantage of all the resources. Regardless if those resources are on-premises or in public clouds, and that's what we're doing here at NetApp with our own HCI solution. As the market evolves under our feet, Gabe talked about those first generation vendors weren't quite enough, that our customers are choosing NetApp cause they want more then what they can get from those first generation vendors. What you really want to see is that convergence continues to march on and that there is more to collapse into this stack, particularly that connection up into the public cloud. Customers are definitely looking today, they're making buying decisions today based on that option. >> Right, and clearly, there's lots of customers who have substantial investment already in NetApp so being able to use what've you already got and extend it with a vendor that you're already familiar with and you know how it works. There's a lot of value there. >> We're a trusted vendor. NetApp is a trusted enterprise vendor with the reliability and customers can come to us with confidence and choose NetApp with confidence. >> We were with you guys at SAP just a couple months ago at the beginning of the summer and #datadriven was everywhere, I'm seeing it in Twitter. We often hear many things about data is power, data is currency, data is fuel. Data is all of those things if it can be harnessed and acted upon in real time. How does NetApp HCI, what are some of the differentiators? Obviously, we talked about the trusted partnership, but how does NetApp help customers actually live a data-driven life within their organization? >> I think a lot of times it starts with understanding where your data lives. How you manage it, manipulate it, and secure it. We have things like GPDR that comes (mumbles). All the sudden, everybody's scrambling to come up with a solution or a reference architecture or some way that integrates with it. I think, naturally, NetApp being the product technology company that it's been and it's lived and breathed data all its life. We understand our customer's unique requirements around governance, around security, around mobility, and we've built technologies that don't lock you into any one mode of consumption. If you bought a filer, if you bought an HCI system, if you bought an object store platform, the data fabric piece is the glue that binds and allows data mobility and portability across multiple platforms. Not only from the edge to the core, but also to the cloud and kind of gives you that larger, bigger picture. We believe that as we start to see this transition, especially edge computing, especially as we look at things like NVMe over fabrics and getting in to new levels and also services that we are delivering across the hyperscalers. A cohesive picture and story around where your data lives, how you manage it, and who can access it is empowering customers to make their transition into the multi cloud space. >> Right, clearly that transition, I think, is what people weren't really understanding three or four years ago. It was like enterprises aren't going to be there in one spot. You can't just turn it on in five seconds, these things take time. >> (mumbles) flipped, yeah. >> With our data fabric we're able to cover the entire NetApp portfolio from edge to core to cloud. As you say, enterprises and different departments in those enterprises will make their own transition and go down their own journey of digital transformation in their own time. NetApp can really be that trusted partner for all these enterprises. >> With so much choice comes, I think, inherently a lot of complexity. I thought they did a great job this morning in the keynote, Pat Gelsinger and team, of really talking about their announcements, what VMware has done in their history pretty clearly. I can imagine from a customer's perspective, if it's an enterprise organization who doesn't want to get Uber-ized, they probably don't know where to start. Talk to us about sort of the business-level conversations that NetApp has with not just your existing customers who know they can come to NetApp to trust you but also some of those maybe newer businesses or newer enterprise businesses to NetApp. How can they come to you and say help us understand? We probably have, what did they say this morning? The average customer's eight clouds. How do you help them to sort of digest that, embrace it, and be able to maximize it so that their data can be available as soon as they need it? >> What it is is data's at the heart of the enterprise and how people help customers change their world with data, but there has to be a direct business outcome for that. When enterprise customers learn to mine the value of their data they can really build new revenue streams, they can create new touchpoints with their own customers to drive their businesses. For example, one of our early NetApp HCI customers was down in Australia. A company called Consatel, a service provider down in Australia. They were really struggling to set up new businesses and new services to their own customer base. When the conversation, when they worked with NetApp what they were able to do was deploy new services three times faster over their last vendor. Think about what that did for their top line. If this company Consatel could deploy new services, new revenue opportunities three times faster. >> Blowing their competitors out of the water. >> Blowing their competitors out of the water. That's a business-level conversation. This is not a conversation about technology. Yes, under the covers, there's some amazing, fantastic technology, but it has to serve the business. Consatel has now been so successful with NetApp HCI that they now are expanding into brand new geo and geo regions and bringing new services to a whole new set of customers and a whole new customer base working with us. >> That's what I'm hearing in the conversations that I have with customers. I'm interested to hear from yourself and Gabe as to whether you're hearing this across the board. You've got one example here of customers who are concerned more with additional revenues. New revenue streams, new ways of making money top line and not so much about cost savings. That was something that was being, we were concentrating on that maybe three or four years ago. That seems to have been de-emphasized now and people are much more interested in seeking out new ways to use things. New sources of revenue and focusing on top line. Is that something that you're seeing across the board or is that only leading edge companies that are looking at that? >> We see it across the board, I think, with a lot of customers across many different verticals. For instance, Children's Mercy Hospital bought our NetApp HCI product for a virtual desktop implementation and they did so for a lot of reasons. One of them being the traditional TCO/ROI discussion. But also allows them to provide a platform that isn't just a silo of resources because of the unique aspects and differentiation that we have on our platform. We're able to go and do mixed workloads and do consolidation so they're realizing savings and gains across collapsing silos, bringing multiple applications on the same, common infrastructure. The same way they would've gone and swiped their credit card at Amazon. When you do that, you don't care if you're putting a SQL database, an Oracle or what not. They're going to give you the resource that you need. We want to mimic that locally on-prem for customers. Then, also have that integration with cloud services. If we're building a cloud service that runs on Amazon or Google, or if we're integrating with VMware as it runs on AWS or whatever, we want to be able to extend those services from local on-premises environments into the cloud and back based on that. I think that's really where the value is. There's no turnkey public cloud in a hybrid cloud integration piece. It's a journey and you have to analyze all the applications and the way you've done business. NetApp, having been working in the enterprise space as a trusted advisor for such a long time, we understand the customer's needs. We've been in the cloud space for a number of years already and we kind of understand that space. We're bridging the gap at the data level and helping to expand that more at the infrastructure level as well and as we branch into new services as time goes on. >> You've got that challenge of every customer being different but there's also trends that are common across the industry and NetApp being the size and having the history that it does, you've seen all of these things before and you know that yes, this is unique to you as a customer, but also we've seen this in other customers. This would be of value to you and you can bring that to those customers. >> Not only that, we have this product called Active IQ and it tends to be a service and support and monitoring application but, like you said, we have a very large customer base and using features and functionalities in AI we're able to use the data that we get from Active IQ as a community wisdom in effect and then make suggestions to those users as well. NetApp does have a very large install base. What can we learn from that install base, how can we help existing customers run their operations better with that community wisdom? >> We've always referred to it as actionable intelligence for your data. We've all played Tetris as a kid, it's playing Tetris with your data, Tetris with your workloads, and making sure that they all line up so that you get all four blocks break at the same time and get the high score. It's really taking and really, truly mining your infrastructure, mining your workloads and your information, and making sure that you're getting the most effective resource utilization that you possibly can. Across not just virtual machine workloads but also data workloads and understanding what you have on the floor versus what you need six months from now to one year from now. That Active IQ platform is really an integral part to really understanding customer's data resource utilization, etc. >> As someone who has played storage Tetris, any help that you can do is very, very welcome. >> I got to bring that back. That's the second reference I've heard to that in the last couple days. One of the things that Pat Gelsinger and team talked about this morning during the general session was superpowers and the need to enable enterprises to be able to harness their superpowers and maximize AI, machine learning, IoT, the edge. How was NetApp and VMware uniquely positioned to help your customers be able to take that actionable intelligence, Gabe, that you mentioned on that data to drive the new business models and revenue streams? >> I think our superpower would be, information is power, so that's our superpower is being data-driven and understanding how we take the customer's data, leverage it to its most effective use, and allocate it and protect it properly. There's a whole bunch of different areas around what we're doing there. Ours would be understanding data, understanding how customers want to use it, and what kind of information they want to extract from it. I'll have to come up with a fancy term for, maybe data thrivers is my superpower. That could be definitely one part of it. >> You could make a logo out of that. >> That sounds pretty good. >> The Thriver. >> The Thriver, I like it. >> We're data thrivers. >> I like it. >> I think so. >> NetApp has been a partner of VMware's for a very long time. You have a large ecosystem of partners, as well. What you guys announced today, talk to us about some of the benefits or really the opportunities that's going to give to NetApp's channel partners. >> There's a lot of opportunity here for our channel partners. As our customers take this journey, they're going to turn to their trusted advisors, their partners, to help them take that journey as well. What we've done here with what we announced with the VMware private cloud for HCI, this is a significant opportunity for our channel partners to work with their customers and take them down that path to be that data thriver. To harness that superpower. New opportunities for all. Customers need someone to help them show the way and channel partners are really the community to do that. >> For those channel partners who are keen to go and do this, how should they engage with you? How should they start talking to NetApp about helping their customers to go down this journey? >> Honestly, we're making the announcement this week. That's the first step is come by our booths. >> It's a thing, yeah. >> If they're here, obviously. We have a very large channel organization. We have outreach, we'll have training, we'll have, the path to hybrid clouds starts with turnKey private cloud and that's kind of what we've done here. We're working on that turnkey private cloud with our partner VMware and NetApp together to kind of facilitate that first step. Then we go out and work with our channel partner organizations to find the customers that want to go down that path. Then they can bring their additional add-on to it. There's a lot of opportunity to go out and really push and help customers make this transition between the two different worlds and obviously we can go to netapp.com and come and take a look. We have plenty of information there, too. >> Just as we wrap up here, I'm curious, Nancy, to get your perspective, from a cloud infrastructure perspective or vision, the announcements that VMware made today. Big news with AWS. Launched that last year. Talked about a lot of expansion going to apache. A lot of work in Australia. >> Yep. >> What does that as well as some other product enhancements they announced today, what does that mean to NetApp? >> I think for NetApp and for our customers, cause really let's stay focused on NetApp's customers, some of the announcements you saw Pat make today provides new options, new opportunities for NetApp's customers globally. As there's these new features, new functionalities to that turnkey solution for private cloud, what you saw is VMware expanding that relationship with AWS just gives new options and new opportunities. >> Hopefully, people can go and maybe by tomorrow get a data thriver pin or sticker. >> Going to have to run out to Kinko's real quick and make some stickers. >> Maybe print it on some bacon. >> Actually, I think we have pretzel necklaces in our booth to go for the beer crawl. >> Oh wow. What time is that? >> Soon, not soon enough. >> Nancy and Gabe, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting with Justin and me. Very exciting to hear NetApp's continued transformation and what you're helping customers achieve. >> Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Justin Warren, I'm Lisa Martin. We're at VMworld, day one, stick around we'll be right back. (electronic tones)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 18. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of DockerCon 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. We are in San Francisco on a spectacularly sunny day. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE some guys from Red Hat. We've got Ben Breard, Senior Technical Products Manager, and Reza Shafii, VP of Platform Services. Guys, thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> It's great. >> So, Reza, you come from the CoreOS acquisition, you've been with Red Hat for about five months, Ben, you've been there about eight years, but I did see online that it's Red Hat's 25th anniversary. You guys have been doing something right for 25 years. >> Open source, that's what we do. (laughs) >> Open source. So talk to us, what's going on at Red Hat, what's new, what's exciting? >> I mean, OpenShift is, I mean, that's the big thing, right? I mean, so, just, this is a humbling time to be in the industry, like with this container wave and to see the industry adoption that we've had with OpenShift and, like, how all the technology in Red Hat's portfolio is just pushing and driving that along, it's, I don't know. It's exciting to me. >> No, it's very exciting. For us I think that cultural compatibility between CoreOS and Red Hat has been just fabulous to see. And then seeing how Red Hat provides a platform to really extend that and enhance that is just great, yeah. >> Culture is key. We talk about culture a lot when, at every event we talk about digital transformation, right? And culture is key to that, so maybe, Reza, give us a little bit of perspective, it's been five months now. How has CoreOS been embraced by the Red Hat guys and how are you now living in harmony? >> Right, well, first of all, CoreOS had, we always believed in open source. We were behind many open source projects in the containerized infrastructure space. And in that space, especially there on Kubernetes, we worked very closely with Red Hat. So, we knew each other really well. So as the teams got together, it was very easy for us to really get together and brainstorm towards what are the possibilities. And that's what we've been working on and, you know, the shovel has been hitting the ground for a while now and we're working on a conversion platform that brings Tectonic's technology to OpenShift. That's been very exciting as well as bringing the container Linux technology together with Red Hat, so. >> Some of those announcements happened at Red Hat summit a few weeks back or a month or so back. Can you talk about have there been any other updates? And also like, okay, maybe go one level deeper, so Tectonic was CoreOS', Kubernetes', I don't know, I don't wanna call it, would you call it a distribution? But a lot of autonomic and automation technologies for the operator built into Tectonic which was part of CoreOS' core DNA, now being brought into, kind of, the Red Hat platforms. So maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the stats, some of the recent developments. >> Yeah, so where we're at, it's kind of a phased implementation of bringing those technologies in, right? And so our next quarterly release, right, is gonna start, that's where, you know, we start bringing in some of the components, right? And then the one after that, you know, it's more on the operator side and then, you know, end of the year is when it's fully converged and so that's the path we're on, yeah. >> In terms of Kubernetes in general, Red Hat made a really early bet on Kubernetes and a big shift, a big pivot for its OpenShift platform. Kind of really embracing, throwing out a lot of the internals and embracing Kubernetes. Here at DockerCon, Kubernetes was a big topic, Docker's doing a lot of integration with Kubernetes, I kind of think that maybe that is, one size doesn't fit all but certainly Kubernetes is becoming accepted a lot more places. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the implications of that, this phenomenon? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, well I think it's, there's a recognition that Kubernetes is now the defacto standard for orchestration, right? I think even if you go back a year ago, that was probably not quite there but now I think that that sense is there, and I think you're right, like, Red Hat embraced that three or four years ago and so did CoreOS and we both had to do a big shift, right? CoreOs was using fleets before that and we made a shift to Kubernetes. That has paid dividends, I think, because now we're really focusing on many of the concerns above and beyond just operating Kubernetes itself. It's what do you do above the stack and how do you operate everything above the stack, and that's where all the operator framework and everything we've been working on comes in. >> Yeah, I mean, it's basically how you get value in a more applied technology and a more application centered way. And so it's just been great to see the whole industry really rally around those standards and API's and everything and, you know, all the cloud platforms, everything, and so it's, you know, it's where the ecosystem is. >> Let's talk about collaboration. When you're talking with customers, you know, we've talked a lot today and at other events too, our enterprises are spending a lot of money, a lot of their IT budgets, on just keeping the lights on on mission-critical applications that they have to have but there's very little budget for innovation. Which is key to an organization being competitive, being relevant and being a leader. What are some of the customer conversations that you guys are having and what are some of the common barriers to container adoption that you're helping, with open to public customers, to eliminate? >> Yeah. >> I can take a shot at it. So, essentially, now on Kubernetes running stateless work goal at Kubernetes, is something that most people can do, right? Once you get to stateful work mode, that starts getting tricky and what we're seeing is that people who have now adopted Kubernetes for a year plus, they're starting to think, how do I run my stateful work on the databases, backend storage, in a, you know, scalable fashion on top of Kubernetes. And that's where we're coming in ans trying to help people, help the community, deliver that, really. Through creation of operators, through creation of reusable business logic that can do that across any Kubernetes department. >> Yip, I was just gonna add on to that, it's, like, as far just keeping the lights on and freeing up resources, right? When you look at all of the path and the deployment models on the net and new stuff, right, we're able to take away a serious amount of, like, operational overhead and just everything to where people can scale and just move way faster, right, and so there's a certain amount of that value that carries over to the traditional stuff, right, and so, you know, I think the biggest thing on the customer side is just, like, a mindset and culture change and getting, getting people to, like, change the way they look at the problem, right? And so, you know, those things and just understanding security, those are the big topics. >> Nice. I was at some Red Hat summit and one of the things that really impressed me there was this promise that, you know, we've all been trying to promise the end customer a time to value that you can actually do things faster, that you actually can innovate, was actually starting to be real in the sense that all of the customer examples were in terms of weeks or months and not years. And the Apple's app and the Apple's multi-cloud and all those other, and, so, can you talk a little about maybe some customers that are doing that or some examples of that, of both time to value and then the fact that a very few number of people were controlling very large infrastructures and I think you were just touching on that in terms of the operators and just all the automation, the day two sort of things. It seems like, I kind of think we've turned a corner in terms of productivity and time to value and real-life, real production workloads. >> Yeah, absolutely, and when you look at, like, where we see adoption, be it the financial sector, or, I mean, it's all over the place, it's really encouraging. And so at summit we had, I don't know, I think, like, 300, or 200 customer talks, it was insane. Going through the use cases and everything. Some of the big ones we're seeing from Amadeus, Optum and it was great. >> I saw an IDC report, I think on the Red Hat website, that showed that customers that adopt OpenShift can see a massive ROI, I wanna say it was, like, over 500% ROI within a 5 year period. >> Well, I think, part of, there's multiple factors to that, right? Part of it comes out of, just the sheer power of containerized infrastructure. Instead of deploying applications on a per compute basis and having to map them to single compute nose, you have the orchestrator that plays that perfect Tetris game with all of your applications. The other part comes a bit out of simplified operations, right? And that's where I think we're just at the beginning of the road. There is plenty more work to do on simplifying operations of Kubernetes and that's what I'm most excited about on this. >> Nice. Let's talk about the future. We are, I don't know, at an inflection point of this container technology, it's becoming more mature, people are in production, multi-cloud is certainly an aspect of what's going on, but I'd love for you to kind of explore a little bit more about some of the tooling. Like, I don't know if you need to get down into the OCI and the runtime level but, you know, what do we see the tooling doing? So, Kubernetes is there, you know, that level is there, but, like, what about, you know, builder and other things like that, like, what other pieces of tooling and automation are being developed to help, again, help developer productivity? >> Yeah, that's a good one, so I'll take a shot. So, it's a couple of things, so Kubernetes itself is plugable on, like, every tier, right, so it's finding that balance of seeing defaults and guidance of what works but then being flexible to work in customer environments so we can lock into, whether we're in, kind of, build strategy pipelines and, you know, whatever works for the customer and their, frankly, different teams, right? Because they all have different levels of maturity and stuff, so that's one thing, is just providing that level of flexibility. And the other thing is, you know, you said multi-cloud, just the way OpenShift provides that, like, common platform across anything, right, it just abstracts away any of the, you know, differences and whatever. >> Yeah, and we're seeing multi-cloud more and more with our customer base. And having a consistent model to deal with every one of them, including your non-prep environment, is becoming a bigger deal. >> In terms of, so on prep, maybe, actually I think it'd be useful. We've been talking about Kubernetes and OpenShift a lot but maybe let's step up a level and say, okay, OpenShift, how do you decide, so OpenShift has Kubernetes in it, but it's much more, it's a services platform built up off of, you know, rail on the bottom all the way up to, kind of, operators now. Can you talk a little bit about what else, what is some of the special sauce of OpenShift? >> Yeah, so, kind of what I was saying earlier about just, like, kind of every layer. So, we start, you know, like you said, rail, right, so the supported bulletproof kernel right up to the runtime, to the, literally the enterprise cube distribution is OpenShift. And then what we bring to it is this, like, amazing developer experience, right? And, like, the secret sauce of where it's going is all of the beauty from the CoreOS side on top of that. So, we've had the developer story, right, so, really, prescriptive onboarding of applications is the power because an empty cluster is useless, right, so you've gotta have that easy path to onboard. And then when we marry that with the day two stuff and all of the, you know, the deployment, and say, operators, everything, I mean, that's the, those pieces coming together is what differentiates it. >> From just up in the air of, kind of, Kubernetes. >> Right. >> Gets you part of the way but there's certainly a lot more. >> Yeah, it doesn't have any of the developer experience, the web console, the admin console, none of that stuff exists, right? >> The way I look at it is that the value add comes from two perspectives, right? One is from the system administrators and the infrastructural owners. That certainly comes to day two operations and how much to simplify that. How do you get a consistent interface across different environments? And how do you do things like accountability? Converging everything on to the same cluster, which is really what Kubernetes does, also changes the focus from a cost perspective, for example. From different application owners to a single owner. How do you make sure that, like, that owner is able to say, well, these are the people that are using it. We have services on top of Kubernetes, in OpenShift, that provide you that capability, for example. Through metering and charge back. Sometimes people call it metering and shame back. (laughing) And then from the point of view of developers, you know, there is multiple opinionated ways of simplifying developers life, right? And any given large enterprise has many, many ways of doing that and we wanna just be ready to address all of them and by the way, we have our own opinions and we have built that on top of OpenShift as well. >> So, you guys work a lot with developers. We have about five or six thousand people that are here at this event. I'm curious, when you go to open source events, including your own, are you finding that same mix of developers, IT professionals, enterprise architects and execs? And if so, what is that conversation like at that higher level where there might be, you know, checkbooks and keys to the kingdom and a business saying, hey, we have to iterate quickly. What is, kind of, the mix of conversations that you guys find in these communities? >> Yeah, it's the difference between the strategy, right, versus, like, bits, right? So, the admin, developer, we wanna focus, we wanna get in the weeds, right, and then the higher levels it's all about strategy, direction and enablement and those types of, you know, higher level concepts, right? So, I mean, that's, I don't know, my perspective. >> Are you learning that your conversations and maybe education of developers helps them then go up the chain within their organizations to explain, this is why we need to do this? >> I think there's some of that, right? The other thing I left off the lift though, is the cultural piece, because traditional enterprises, there's something here that they want to glean and take home in the culture space, right? And so that's a, you know, that's the other big one. >> I find that the conversation varies widely, right? So, when you talk to the infrastructure administrators and developers, you gotta be able to talk very technical and explain to them exactly how all this is working. And they're interested in the feature and technology. But when you talk to the CIO's out there, and the CTO's out there, really they're in interested in the outcome. And when you talk about the outcome it's easy just to show just what everybody wants to get to a pure DevOps model, everybody wants to get to a microservices model. This is kind of like going to the gym and seeing the of really fit people and then saying, well, yeah, but how do I get there, right? And this is where I think a company like Red Hat can come in and say, well, we'll work with you to get you there, right? So that's, that's important. >> Well the other one is just the value of being there and talking to your peers in the industry too, right? I mean, yeah, it's us, we're facilitating, but it's peers too, right? >> But you're right, culture, we talked about that, John, a number of times today, how critical culture is to being able to move past inertia. You know, we mentioned when I kicked off the segment that Red Hat is just celebrating its 25th birthday, so I imagine, I know you've been there, Ben, for 8 years, that there's been a lot of change there and a lot of cultural, kind of, mindset shift. Obviously, Reza, coming on in the last 5 months. Give us a little bit of an insight into the Red Hat culture that's helping to drive the agility that you need to also give your customers. >> Yeah, this is something our CEO talks about all the time, right? He wrote a book on it, The Open Organization, and, you know, just, like, lays out clear values of transparency, doing things very visually. We go through these exercises all the time just for changing our slogans and brands and these types of things, and the way where everybody participates and everybody takes ownership in it, right, and is part of it. And so that's one thing, I mean, we've been going through crazy growth. When I joined it was 3,000 people, now it's, like, 12,000 or so. I don't know the exact number but, and so how we scale that culture has been, it's been interesting, but it's been really successful. I mean, it's a big part of it. Open was a really clear message from summit, you know, basically in the cloud, open has won, right? Open innovation, open source, open culture. That's what's driving all the things we see now, I'd say. >> Yes. >> Well guys, thanks so much, Ben and Reza for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with us what's new at Red Hat and what excites you guys and we look forward to having you back on. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Thank you. >> We wanna thank you guys for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with John Troyer, from DockerCon 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. I'm here with my co-host Keith Townsend, and you're watching theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017 here in the heart of the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, 43,000 people in attendance, spread out across many of the facilities here in Vegas, So lots of lines, lots of things going on. Happy to welcome back to the program Andrew Hillier, who is the CTO and co-founder of Densify. Great to see you, how have you been? >> It's good to be back. It's been great, been loving the show. It's a huge show. >> All right, so we're pretty excited, because we've got a double set here at Amazon's show for the first time, it's our fifth year doing the show. There's another show that we interviewed at where we've had a double set for a few years. That, of course, is VMWorld. We've been watching this change, as AWS says, it's from the old guard, you know, that cloud native if you will. Talk to us a little bit about what Densify's doing, how you fit into the ecosystem here? >> Sure, yeah, it's a very different show than I think the one two months ago, also right here, I think. Even this morning at the keynote, they were referring to that as what you've been doing the last 10 years, and this is all very forward looking, much more vision, and what we're finding is that a lot of the challenges of the past are coming right back again. When you start moving to this new operational model, how do you optimize it, how do save money, how do you keep pace with change? So today on the keynote was a very different thing than you would have seen two months ago. It's all about innovation, innovation, innovation, not just new feature, new feature. >> Andrew, I want you to talk about the customers that you talk to, the mindset. Are there VMware customers and AWS customers? How are they approaching things like innovation and strategy? >> Well I think everybody's kinda caught in between, and you know, people talk about hybrid a lot, and what we find is that a lot people's mentality is there's really the cloud, and then all that other stuff, and one is just one that I divest or get rid of and one is really where the mind share is. So even though people might have 10 times as much in VMs as they do in the cloud, they're just thinking about the cloud, that's what they... And then there's a lot of questions about how do I move there, how do I run there, how do I get that bill down, because the bill's are very, very high, you know when you start running there. And there's constantly new services, like saw this morning, that also can help make that bill even higher. So how do you get there in a safe way, safety and efficiency. >> Densify focuses on that cloud optimization piece. We used to talk about VMware when it first started, it was like, oh great, utilization efficiencies, to be able to kind of consolidate, but we had VM sprawl. And now there's cloud sprawl and containers, people are trying to figure out however things. What are some of the key challenges that you see from customers, what are some of the big places that they can really save a lot of money? >> Sure, yeah, you know in the virtual world it's all about what we would call playing Tetris, where you look at the workload patterns, we do a lot of workload pattern analysis, and say, that's busy in the morning, that's busy at night, put them on the same host, it's cheaper, and runs better. And you can you get huge efficiency gains in those environments. As you move to the cloud, it starts to look a bit different, and buying small, medium and large. So we do the same pattern analysis, but say, yeah you're on an M3, you should be on a T2, you're on the wrong thing. And we're seeing around 40% savings on average just by pointing and doing that. So we're seeing massive... You know, it's a different kind of opportunity, but it's equal in magnitude, the savings. We saw one customer last week, was 57% savings by just getting the cloud watch data, analyzing the patterns and saying, you're buying the wrong stuff. Now where this is all going interestingly is that when you start to move to containers, that game of Tetris comes back into play again. It's a much more advanced analytics to say, yeah, how do I combine my workloads to make them fit on the smallest footprint? You know, hence Densify, you know, that's what we do. And we're seeing savings of upwards of 80% when you do that. So there's huge savings with the right analytics. >> So with the analytics, much different conversation as you mentioned than it was a few years ago to now. You wouldn't go to a data center manager and say, you know what, I can really save you on infrastructure costs by optimizing your efficiency. You know what, sunk costs, I don't care that, you know, if I'm oversubscribed, not a big deal. In the cloud, that is a tangible thing. Someone has to pay that op ex bill. But with that said, even with the optimization, that can sometimes go into reverse, especially with all the announcements today. You gotta figure out, you know what, am I optimal in the cloud or can I use some of these older assets in my data center, move workloads back there? Do you guys help with that decision matrix sort of thing, you know what, do I run what's existing in the cloud that's not elastic, back in the data center? >> Yeah you can do that and whatever else, absolutely. People do ask that question. And again it comes down to overcommit. If I can actually take multiple workloads, stack them up, some workloads, that's what's cheaper than others, and it really depends on the workload. So if you're running in the cloud, we can say, those are good where they are, we're working on reports to say that's better off in a Docker container in the cloud. Or as you say, what if I put them back on-prem? You can do that too. Now that's kind of regressive. We don't see a lot of people, they're curious about that number, but we don't see people moving backwards. But in the cloud there's so many different ways you can run the workloads, and there are wildly different cost structures. Again, if you have very peaky workloads that are just busy for a short period of time, to put them in a standard large instance is very expensive. >> So let's talk about that cloud Tetris in the cloud. Because with containers obviously, I can now oversubscribe a bit, 'cause I couldn't do that before. You know if I had a EC2 instance, a M2 large, if I was too big, I'm just too big and I can't oversubscribe that, and I pay for what I use, there's advantages and disadvantages. How does that impact the conversations, the design conversations customers are having over stuff like we heard, EKF this morning, Fargate, and all these container orchestration management tools. How does that complicate the conversation? >> Yeah, it's interesting because you have a workload that's not doing very much, but you can't turn it off, it's doing something, and then peaks once a day, and you put it in a large M4 or whatever, you're gonna pay for the area, you're gonna pay for it all even though you're only doing a little bit of work, right? So that can be very expensive. That same type of workload, if you put it in a container with other ones that have a similar pattern but at different times, they all stack and gravitate nicely. So that's where we see a huge opportunity to run much higher density and lower cost, but the big challenge we're seeing that affects all the technologies that interest us this morning is that from a development group, they don't know how to say what those containers need. >> Right. >> So we're seeing a lot of Kubernetes environments, lot of ECS environments that are running very low utilization, 'cause the developers are asking for two CPUs for each container, and it scales based on the number of CPUs or the amount of memory, the resources, not the utilization. So we're finding it's like history repeating itself. I've got the scale group running on containers, very low utilization, and coming to say, well, wait a minute now, that's all wrong, if you do this and you recommend that our analytics give you a bunch of very prescriptive actions, you're gonna run much higher utilization, your bill goes way down again. So it's the same, you know lack of visibility, lack of analytics to figure out how to optimize that equation. >> Andrew, one of the biggest challenges coming to a show like this is things change so fast. Last year or two, heard a lot of grumbling from customers about oh reserved instances kinda locked me in, it was inflexible, Google was better, wait, Amazon changed what they're doing. This year, a lot of new things on spot instances. The spot market's been around for years, but didn't seem to have a lot of utilization, Amazon was like, no, this is gonna be it, if you don't need to have it now, we're gonna save you 90% if you do that. So you help with that. What are you seeing and hearing from customers and how do they take advantage, and you know, don't get locked into some huge bill? >> Yeah absolutely. Well in general, we find that the pace of change is fantastic for everybody if you know how to figure it out. So what we find in customers is that just keeping track of, you know we have a lot of customers that haven't seen this keynote this morning. They may not be aware of all this stuff yet. So, and even if you are aware, do you know how it impacts you? You know, can I actually leverage that M5, how does that affect me? So that's one of the things that, the strength of us is that we deliver a service, not a product, not a tool. So it's analytics, SAS-hosted analytics, very powerful analytics, with a densification advisor, a human that comes with it. So we're on top of these things. So when new stuff comes out, for example, we're sending a message out to our customers right now saying, we're on it, there's three new instance types came out this morning, we're analyzing your environment to tell you if you can use them. So what we're seeing is a kind a conversion to say that customers, they can't figure it all out anymore. It used to be that in the old world I could buy gear once every three years, I could understand that gear and I could understand my apps. Now you have to pick. Do you want to follow all the news in the cloud or do you want to work on your apps? And what we do is say, work on your business services, your differentiation, we will tell you how it maps to whatever Amazon's selling today, and don't worry about that, and our advisors just do that for you. >> Yeah Andrew I laugh, I think how much of my career was it like, oh well, we're managing that on a spreadsheet and we (mumbles) No no, >> No, not anymore. >> Forget about it. I'm curious. The bare metal instance is one there's been a little bit of buzz. It's what they designed for the VMware on AWS environment and offered it, but it's big honking machine, it's super-expensive, but have to think, if you're working with them, you could probably help customers optimize, get great utilization. What do you see that being used for? Is that something that you think your customers are gonna be interested in? >> Absolutely, I think it goes back to that playing Tetris discussion. So if you take one of these big bare metal nodes and run Docker containers stacked properly, we see that, in one study we did it's 82% cheaper than if you put them in small, medium and large instances. >> Stu: Wow. >> Again, it's because of the shapes and patterns of the workloads, and they can dovetail. So there is a place for these big monstrous machines, like the X1 32 extra large is all of those things. If you use them right, you can save a ton of money cause you get economies of scale. So bare metal is great, it's just another way to host things that for certain apps, certain workloads, makes a lot of sense. For other ones it makes no sense. >> So, we're at a conference full of developers. They don't care about infrastructure, more or less. And the Tetris works well when we're talking about containers, EC2-size instances, even bare metal. What about concepts such as serverless, okay, in which we're just running code? Obviously, we can't make every application based on microservices and it's not practical to take Lambda and build an entire stack. However, there's obviously some opportunity for some really incredible savings if we choose Lambda for certain functions. How do you guys help customers make that determination? >> So I mean, Lambda's very interesting because there is a break even point. So if I'm charged for every hundred milliseconds for what I run, if it doesn't happen very often that's a much better way than running an instance. Now once that gets beyond a certain point, it might be cheaper to actually just run it on an instance. If you have constant workload that's taking up many servers worth of capacity, There's a break even point there where it'll become more expensive to run that, 'cause again, you're paying by the hundred milliseconds by the resources that you're being allocated. So if you can run that workload with other workloads and get economies of scale, it might be cheaper. So it's kind of, if we picture Lambda it's almost like the area under the curve. What work am I doing in my app or my service, and I turn that into how many, and we use benchmarks to normalize everything, so we understand that that running there is the equivalent of that running over here. So that workload would require this many time slices, and cost you this much. And so that's something we're working on, it's not released yet, it's kinda coming, but we see that as being able to analyze the equivalency between different models. You know, that workload, very expensive in Lambda, that other one, perfect candidate. >> Andrew, while you're there, bring us inside a little bit, what it's like to be a partner in the AWS ecosystem? You know, any announcements that surprise you, you guys get some preview on this, how fast can you kind of ramp your team up to take advantage of the umpteen billion new announcements, 1,300 announcements a year? So you know, take us inside how that works for you, and then how you help your customers to take advantage of that. >> Sure, yeah, so I mean we stay pretty plugged in, we are partnered with all the major providers, and we do of course. And a lot of them, in fact Amazon provides the API to get all the latest and greatest stuff, if you're constantly hitting that, you get all the latest stuff anyway. So that pace is just built into what we do. You know, we had a customer said, hey, you guys have really kind of, you know, while we were evaluating your software, you did a lot of things to kind of show up the latest stuff coming out of the plug. Is that just you selling us, and you'll stop? We said, no, that's just the way we operate. That is the new model that everything is just up to date all the time. You know, for customers long term, you are getting new stuff every day, we're sending out the notes. So we try and stay on top, and again the key here is that interpreting what that means for you. To know that there's a new M5 is one thing. To know that it's got a different hypervisor, and you might need to rebuild your AMIs to run on it, is something we can say, okay, we're gonna help you with this and help interpret this delta. And I think it's a very important thing that Amazon has so many priorities of all the breadth and everything else that they're doing. They're not really focused on helping you shake your bill down. They're just not doing that to date. And so I think this fills a very important role in the ecosystem. >> Andrew, want to give you the final word. What are the things that your customers are doing that really helping to transform their businesses, kind of the biggest kind of challenges and opportunities that they're seeing? >> Well I mean I think, clearly I think containers are gonna be a very big part, I know we talked about them a lot already, but I think that's one of the most exciting areas. I think everybody's moving to the cloud or starting to leverage it, and doing it in various ways, but I think everybody's goal, and really Kubernetes is a big part of that, you know we saw different options right there, really centered on Kubernetes, everybody's doing that, and I think that's really gonna be the transformative technology. You can host, you know, born in the cloud microservices, you can host legacy apps in it. You can get through to a really high level of efficiency all in the cloud with that one technology. I think it's a real game changer and just needs to roll through these environments. >> All right, Andrew Hillier, always a pleasure to catch up. Thank you for giving us all the updates on Densify. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> And we're back, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE, happy to welcome to the program, first time guest Christian Pedersen, who's the CEO and founder of Zentura, a service provider based in Denmark. Christian, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so tell us a little bit about what led you to create the company, a little bit about your background, and then we'll get into it. >> My background is from Citrix, I'm a Citrix consultant, back from the ages of the wind frame and all the old stuff, and in 2006 I founded Zentura with a focus on Citrix consulting services and all the stuff around Citrix, and quite fast, we saw the trend in the market to become a service provider so we started up with some of our on prem customers and moved them into a traditional hosting virtualization platform. >> So did you start as hosting? Were there certain Citrix services that you were offering to your customers? Walk us through that kind of progression. >> Our product is something we call Business Cloud. It's a brand of the Citrix platform, and it's a full service platform for our customers. So everything is around Citrix. The connectivity to our platform is Citrix based, yeah. >> Okay, and how big, do you have multiple data centers? How many customers do you have? Give us some of the speeds and feeds. >> We have two data centers and we have roughly 3,000 people connecting into our site on some customers. We're mainly focusing on legal and accounting customers, with special demands for 24/7, yeah. >> Okay, and all of your customers are in Denmark, correct? >> All of our customers are in Denmark. Some of them have branch offices in the U.K., and in Germany, and one in Russia. >> Okay, so why don't you bring us up to speed as to, when did you start looking at Nutanix, what lead you kind of down that path? I'd like to understand a little bit about kind of, the problem statement, the criteria, what lead to that? >> The beginning, as we were Citrix house, then of course we started with SAN server that made really good sense for us because it was a Citrix product. And quite fast, it became really complex. And, the development of our platform was quite fragmented over the years. So we really needed to, I've seen Nutanix at Synergy from the beginning, and I saw on the keynote where Mark Templeton roll in a block of Nutanix. So just doing VDI and I said okay this is VDI and what really was, a huge game-changer for me was when Nutanix introduced AHV because I really liked many of the concepts about putting the whole stack into the cloth so you don't have, you don't rely on external management. You don't rely on that many components. You don't have sequel as a back end. We were evaluating a lot of stuff, a lot of products, how we could simplify our current environment. Because, we had huge issues. >> Yeah so you're Citrix client, were you running Zen before, what was your environment before? >> Our existing environment was a mix. We had eight clusters, some of them on Zen, different versions, because the upgrade part was a pain. It required a lot of downtime, and we only security patched on critical patches. We didn't do major release upgrades because we had so many issues with it. And some years before we introduced Nutanix. We switched to, half of our stack to VMware, because that solved some of our issues. They have a good way of handling and migrating data inside their own platform. But quite fast, the cost became an issue for us because the cost, as a service provider, of course you just pay in bids and you pay per usage but still the cost was just going sky-high. >> Okay, so it was AHV, was that the catalyst to get you to Nutanix then? >> Christian: Exactly. >> It wasn't kind of a hyper-converged, or it definitely wasn't VDI. >> I'm quite old in this field, and I really like the idea of having a say on all things and I was not easy to convince that this was a good idea. It's like in the past when you know, when people are switching from regular computers to a SAN, everybody says, "Oh I want my data on my computer." >> Yeah, trust me, I worked on a lot of the early SAN stuff, rolled that out. >> Exactly. >> And Wikiban, we actually created the term Server SAN which was all of the functionality and things that you loved in a SAN, we're just going to do it on the server, is really what that is. >> Christian: Exactly. >> As opposed to, Nutanix started out, "Oh there's no SAN." And I'm like, No, no no, you're going to scare off all the people that used it. That was also my biggest concern, it really was. But, when Nutanix started with the VMware we did a business case on it and it wasn't feasible because we still have the VMware and licensing costs and also now we have the Nutanix licensing cost and it was not easy to create the business case because the customers, they don't care what we put underneath because they only look on cost. And, if I add something to my stack, then I only add some cost, and maybe I can do something a bit more efficient but that's it. >> Okay so have you swept the floor now, EHV everywhere? Or you know, what's up? >> Yeah, we did a full turn for replacing everything, all legacy. We did, inside our business we did a survey with all our employees, and said okay, instead of doing just a business case bit by bit, you know how you do normally, to compare licensing costs and all that. We said, okay we want everything in this business case, not only products. So all the consultants went out with the, the main issues were all the complexity because it was not easy, we had people on network, we had people on storage, so we always have to ask another one if you want to provision something and the sales guys need to go to the tech guys okay do we have enough storage for this? And what about the IOS, and yeah. There was a lot of issues with this and also working at night on all the change windows and doing all the storage, Tetris moving workloads, because customers were unsatisfied on this platform, we can move it to the new platform. We had so many issues with this. So we actually ended up just, we discussed internally and said, okay if we're going to do this then we are going to do it 100%. It's not just putting Nutanix inside and move something. So internally in the board we discussed and said, okay it's now or never, because this is going to be our window of opportunity to grow and expand. So we discussed and we agreed on a total replace. Everything, network, everything. So we switched all our existing infrastructure and migrated all the legacy workloads onto Nutanix in a four to six month time frame. And we didn't have extract of that time so it was quite manually. >> Yeah, so obviously you're here so it went okay. Take us through, what did you learn, you know, four to six months is not a short period of time, so, you know, looking back, what lessons learned, what would you recommend to your peers to make things even better if, what would you change if you had to go back? >> What I would change that I didn't do it before, because it would have made sense. Actually we had quite new equipment, we just bought a new SAN one year before that. It wasn't even old, that was an issue. But the cost of the existing, even though we had bought it, the cost was getting too high. We were using too many hours on maintaining this and-- >> The best time to do this would have been a year ago, but the second best time is to do it now. Don't push it off for another year. >> Exactly, exactly. And what, yeah, we should have done it before. But I don't think Nutanix was mature for this at the moment. But now, one year before this, I was actually convinced. >> So, AHV, there's, they think they're approaching, about a third of customers are using AHV now. >> Christian: Yeah. >> You said it's mature now, you're happy with it. What more do you want to see out of AHV, where would you like to see them continue to add features and maturity? >> Yeah, as a service provider, of course AHV has some limitations compared to all of the other stacks because the multi-tendency is a big requirement for a service provider. But we're taking it kind of from another approach to it. Because they have all the AVIs, so we can just do it ourselves. We have all the AVIs exposed, right now we're working on a billing model because in our business case it was not only IT, it was also the management and all the accounting and all the other things. If we can optimize those, the whole business case would look even better. So we're working on a model where the system automatically bills the customers and everything sends status reports to customers. So before they get an invoice they know if they want to to change something. Because our solution right now is fully managed. So it's fully managed from our side, because we have some issues with the multi-tendency stuff. >> And what management stack are you using today? Is it in-house or, you know, what are you using? >> What? >> Management stack are you using? >> In-house, yeah. >> Yeah, pretty typical for a service provider. >> It is, yeah. >> Have you looked at some of the management tools from Nutanix or? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm paying a lot of attention, I'm calm. >> Yeah. >> Because it really makes really, really, good sense for us. >> When will, what does it need for you to be able to consider it even further? >> I need to play with it, I need to try it out. I've only seen some sessions. I also saw it last year and I've been following it closely. But from a slide to getting in production, it takes some time and I really need to play with it. It looks really amazing. >> Most service providers spend the time kind of building their stacks though, going from, I've got it, to that is challenging. >> But now we're really moving and we can see how much time we use on a day-to-day basis. I think we cut the time to one-tenth of what we would do before. We had a lot of things-- >> Stu: You're saying for managing? >> Yeah for managing infrastructure and doing changes because if you have a really fragmented solution then you have a lot of people you need to involve because, he knows best about this cluster, and all the differences in this cluster. And that was also one of the biggest pains. And also the Nutanix strategy, this is, as I said to all the employees, this is the final migration we're going to do, ever. Because now, it's rip and replace. And now we can see in the past, we used the senior consultants for expanding clusters and adding new clusters and doing network, doing a lot of stuff. Right now we moved the, down in the chain, so it's the regular support guy. He can put in a note right now and he can do the expand of the cluster. We do it in a regular service window. Now it's not an extraordinary service window, nothing. >> Alright so, Christian, you're so happy with the Nutanix? You're not only a customer, you're also a channel partner? >> Exactly. >> What lead to that? What services were you already offering for there and what lead to you look to move down that path? >> We saw a lot of synergies because we could also, we could extend the enterprises, and use cases. We had Nutanix and if we could sell Nutanix to some of our customers, maybe we could do some replication and DR for our customers as a service. Now Nutanix, of course, is moving to what's the A type, but that's our idea and we already have some customers signed up for disaster recovery as a service, on our AHV platform, and that made really good sense. And also, we did a lot of work in certifying all our employees, and why don't we, we have spare time now, why don't we use our knowledge and sell this product? It makes really good sense. And what I really also like about Nutanix, is there's not a one-size-fit-all. Because everybody needs, somebody can go public and somebody go private, and we have a lot of enterprise Citrix customers, because we have a small part of our company also through Citrix consulting, because that's our background. So we have a lot of potential customers there. >> Yeah, so I've watched over the last five years, there was a real tug back and forth between VMware and their service providers. They tried to, it was, vCloud Air, you're going to be a great partner. Oh wait, we're going to do it ourselves. Wait, we're going to do partner program. Oh wait, now Amazon and a couple of big ones are there. How is Nutanix as a partner for service? You mentioned Xi, is that something they'll partner with you on or is that something they're competitive on? >> And how do you look at that? >> Definitely. >> The main difference between, if you see all the other cloud providers and you see VMware and the other providers, this is one stack, it's still the same. You're not going to have to create a lot of stuff to adopt this. It can be quite easy for us. I see it as a possibility for us to of course sell this. We can be a reseller, we can just have one account and we can provision the customers' VMs in the Cloud. It sets us in a much better position than we were before because if we team up with AHSA or some of the other public cloud providers we are not in control anymore. It's easy to deploy and it's easy to work with if you know how to do it. But it's not that easy. Yeah. >> Well Christian Pedersen, really appreciate you sharing with us everything that you're doing at Zentura and your customers. Love to hear the inside at Denmark and what's happening there. I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .Next 2017 in Nice, France. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music) (engine roaring)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partner. >> I'm Stu Miniman, here with my co-host John Troyer, and you're watching theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017. We're the world-wide leader in live tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program not only a first-time guest but a first-time for the company, Andrew Hillier, who is the CTO and co-founder of Densify, and not only the first time we've had Densify, we didn't even have Serva on so, I'm not sure what the problem was, but appreciate you joining us, and looking forward to learning about you and the company. >> Glad to be here, it's good. >> All right, Andrew, tell us a little bit about, you're a co-founder, so bring us back to the early days, what the idea was, and then there's some rebranding recently so I know that's relevant to the conversation. >> Sure, I'll tell you the story. So, we're all about analytics. I mean, we started off by looking at, with all the data that's available, and saying if you really do the math on it, you can make a lot of very important decisions, and not leave them to opinions or chance. So we built out a very powerful analytics engine, a lot of big customers adopted it, run on-prem, drive huge savings in virtual environments, de-risk. And what we found is that everybody's interested in those outcomes of the analytics, but not necessarily wanting to adopt software products. I mean, it's kind of the basis of all SaaS. So, we went and made a SaaS version of that product that runs, it's like a brain in the cloud, to give the same outcomes, and we've kind of really now taken that to the extreme where it's as a service now. And it's called Densify, we rebranded around that in the June timeframe to really capture the simplicity and the outcome of what we do. Which is to drive down cloud costs, drive down the amount of infrastructure you need on-prem, and make it all work better. >> Yeah, I'm wondering if you could give us just a little, from a macro standpoint, software. And the different consumption models you just walked through a little bit, but what are customers looking for, why has it been challenging before, and do we have it right this time? >> Yeah, well, I mean, from our perspective again, I think we get adopted, and traditionally in the past you would have to deploy the product, you would have to provision servers to run it on, a database server, train people, you know, have maybe a center of excellence around using it, and so that's worked really well. But I think that's, I think the novelty of running software has worn off for most organizations. They want to move on, and we see the cloud being adopted. People just want to get out of the business of running anything, really, and have it all done for them. And so we support on-prem model, and as many serve as on-prem, but really, this new model is where everybody's going because it's just so simple. It means, you can just adopt it and get results right away without reading any manuals or doing anything. >> Andrew, we've been talking about cloud for years now, right? It was almost a joke, it's much more real now. Your customers and the people you talk with, hybrid cloud, multicloud, how many, we have a choice of many different platforms. On-prem is not going away anytime soon, at least, I don't know, I'd love your opinion on that, but your customer base, the people you talk with, what kind of a, how many platforms are they on, what kind of platforms, and how does Densify pull all that together? >> Yeah, it's funny because it's a bit of everything, and that's IT, right? You always have one of everything you've ever had, plus all the new stuff, so, we support, these huge virtual footprints out there, a lot of companies have big VMware environments. But there's definitely a big focus on the cloud. So almost every customer we have is in some form looking, is really they see that as the future, the cloud containers, some mix of on- and off-prem. So I think it's going to be hybrid for quite some time. I don't think you're going to see the on-prem go away, that would just be unrealistic, but again, a lot of energy is being put into the public cloud, and it shows. So you know, one's almost a maintain mode in some cases, one's kind of the invest, we're investing in new technology, that's where a lot of the excitement is. So even our most conservative customers are looking at cloud in some way, and some of our newer customers are 100% cloud, there's no on-prem. >> Andrew, talk to us about the relationship with VMware that you've had and have today, and I guess one of the questions I looked, VMware announced like seven SaaS services, one which was Cost Insight. Does that compete at all against what you are doing? >> Well it's, it's a hugely complicated space with a lot of different, and a lot of the same words used for all the same thing. So we have a very good relationship with VMware. We integrate with all the product line, VRA, vROps, DRS, pDRS, we have integrations with all these things, and it works with that. But I think there's some confusion sometimes around all the people using the same words, like we optimize, or we do this or that. So what we find is that, in the core of what we do, is we analyze workload patterns. And it's like playing a game of Tetris. It's like saying, that workload's busy in the morning, that one's busy at night, we combine them together, we get a lot of efficiency. And nothing in the VMware product line does that. So it really plugs in very nicely with DRS, and again vROps, but there is confusion in the words people use. You might think that that does that, and there's some cost, you know, there's a lot of products that do cloud costs. Every product that starts with the word Cloud does cloud cost, but that's not really where you get this cost-saving, it's really analyze the workloads in the cloud is where you get those cost-savings. >> Yeah, I'm curious, you must have a really good view as to utilization. So I think back, there's a lot of argument as to how much utilization we're actually getting, 'cause VMware in the early days, it was like, oh I'll consolidate servers, I'll get greater utilization. But we still kind of stink at utilization, and I have gear, even cloud today, I've seen lots of companies, right, that I can take huge amount of costs out of what you're doing, so how are customers doing, what are they good at, what do they suck at, and where are some of the things that you're helping really well? >> Well, I mean, you struck a nerve there, because I mean, people are doing a terrible job in the cloud but often it's, a lot of times they throw things up there, and they don't even really look at what they're doing. It's kind of primitive in terms of the data collectioning, and the tooling around that. So a lot of times, these people don't even know what the workload is or what the utilization is. So we see some pretty big opportunity to carve that down. I mean, on-prem, I think people have gotten better. I think when they run our product, they really, it's designed to get at the optimal utilization, and that might be at 90%, it might be 50%, it might be 30 depending on your requirements. And if you have a mission critical environment that is active-active, and redundant, and all these things going on, then maybe your utilization won't be very high, but that's as high as you can make it and meet all your obligations. If in that test environment, you can run it a lot higher. So, there is no one right answer for what the best utilization is, it kind of, it depends on your workloads and what the environment's supposed to be doing, but universally in the cloud, we find it's just terrible. 'Cause they rush things into the cloud without having all the maturity around it to figure out how to optimize it. >> Right, Andrew, does that mean then the common mistake is under-utilization? Are people just running a lot of instances without actually knowing what's running in them, or how it's costing them? >> Yep, there's underutilized, there's deadwood for starters. So there's, and that's kind of a different problem. It's not that they don't know what they're doing, somebody forgot them, so there's no process around that, there's no ITSM pros that can turn these things off, so we find a lot of that. And there's this stuff that's not utilized very well at all that you could just be running better, 'cause somebody setting's extra large, and they never revisited it. The other, last thing that we do, we find this quite a lot lately, is we call modernization. So, you look okay, but you're on an old instance. There's a newer one that's a lot cheaper. You know, you're on an R3, you could be on an R4 on Amazon, and so we find a ton of those. And it's because people deployed an app six months ago, a year ago, and it looked great, it still looks great, but they don't have the ability to analyze and use benchmarks to say I have a new instance that's as powerful as that one, that's cheaper. You need the benchmarks. >> That's something that really doesn't happen when you have hardware, right? It's not like the server vendor calls you up and says, I have a new version I can swap out if you just tell me. >> Yeah, I mean, in the cloud I give the analogy to a cell phone company. It's like, they don't phone you and tell you that they have a new plan that'll be cheaper for you. You've got to kind of do that on your own. And so we do that for customers, it's one of the things that we do, and we kind of do it for you. So, we just tell you that, just make this move, it's got a lateral move to a new instance, and save a ton of money, and customers are just, they're too busy to become experts, and read the news every morning to figure out if new instances come up, it's just too much, right? >> But wait, they haven't seen these 17 announcements that Amazon had today that might have affected them? Does your tool make the change, recommend the change, how does that kind of workflow work? >> Yeah, it depends on the platform, how it works, but we have a very high degree of automation that we enable, and there's a few reasons. One is that the analysis is so precise, that when it says do this, you can just do that. So, for example, on-prem, if we say move the VM, we know it's not supposed to go with those other ones for PCI compliance. We know that that won't drive up the over-commit, so there's, you know, our equation, there's a lot of terms. That means it's very precise. So that means when we say to do something, you can just do it, and that means you drive a very high automation as a result. >> What kind of granularity? Is this happening minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour, or day-by-day, or? >> Well, there's two levels of granularity. There's predictive and there's real time. So one of the main things we do is that we will kind of gather all the workload history, and kind of learn the patterns of that, and to come up with a strategic plan saying for tomorrow, do this, but the VM in these places. And then, leave DRS turned on, it'll do its thing, but it won't do very much, because we've anticipated all the workflow patters. So a lot of times, we will do the kind of daily optimization and DRS and vROps can do their things all day long. They just don't do as much. But we also have real-time, so if we see something getting hot, we will do a hot add on it, we can do that as well. So we kind of have the combination of both predictive and reactive at the same time. >> Okay, um. How do you handle kind of your pricing of the solution? I've heard some offerings out there that it's like, oh, we're going to save you millions, and we're just going to take a fraction of that, rather that, or are you more traditional licensing, how does that all work? >> It's funny, the gainshare we found on that is very hard to structure. It sounds great until you finally make the contracts for it. What we do is for on-prem, we do it by target, and that's a physical-virtual system, and that's worked really well. That's the way a lot of our customers go there. And in the cloud, that doesn't work, because an instance could be anything from a tiny docker container to a giant X1, so it's as a percentage of spending. That's kind of what a lot of vendors kind of sat along in the cloud world. But we kind of don't make it infinitely variable. We know people want, they want the predictability, so we kind of say, you're in this band, it's just going to cost this and you can do whatever you want. >> And what, did you have any kind of standard rule of thumb as to you know, if you're, have X kind of spend in the cloud we'll usually save you X percentage, or, and wait, if you save them a lot more, doesn't that mean you're pushing them down into a lower tier, and so, you know, how does that get sorted out? >> It's a great question, that's the hazard of it it. It is, I mean, it doesn't hold us back from wanting to optimize, so, what we find is if you just take, for example, right-sizing the cloud. If you say you're under-utilized, we can make you smaller in the same class, a lot of people would say, 15% you might save. We find that the ability to go between instance classes, so again, you're memory optimized and you're computer optimized, or vice versa, we found is 35 to 40%, pretty reliably in our customers. So it's a pretty, more than pays for the product, many times over, it's pretty compelling. And it's pretty easy to get to. And in fact, next month's bill, which is the biggest thing, you know, on-prem is some cost. You can optimize it a lot, but until the next refresh, may not realize the gains. But in the cloud, next month's bill will actually be smaller. So we find it's a lot of urgency to do it in the cloud. >> Um, I'm curious, what have you seen from customers these days between their on-premises environment and the public cloud? One thing that struck me for years is, you know, if I bought gear and I'm not getting the results, the utilization out of it, you know, that kind of got a lot of attention. When I go see the public cloud, there's plenty of customers like, oh, what do you know, I was overspending 3x more than I expected, haha, I guess I'll fix it later. And I was like, wait, if you were buying hardware, you would have fired somebody, and, like, beat up your sales rep and things like that, but public cloud seems to be less mature in that standpoint? Are you seeing that changing, or what are you seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think there is a realization, that kind of sticker shock for these people where it is kind of three times more than they thought it would be, but your point is also not really anybody whose problem that is, a lot of times. So we do see that becoming someone's problem. The cloud architects kind of seek out more roles that are financial optimization in the cloud, so people do care. I think that's a very positive thing. I think when a lot of dev ops groups start using Amazon for the first time, it's a bit of a Wild West, and they get agility, but nobody's really looking over their shoulder. I think that's starting to change pretty quickly. >> Yeah, I wonder. One of the problems I've heard, I've talked to plenty of customers that are like, I have to dedicate an engineer to pricing when it comes to the cloud. Do you solve that, do they still need to kind of have like a dedicated person, or part of a person, or is that part of the value that you offer? >> Well, and that's a good question. It depends on the customer's size, I think. So we see really small organizations, and again, the beauty of our new offering is that you, we can, you know, we can go to really small companies or really huge companies. We have customers with a hundred thousand systems, and some with 500. And the smaller ones, they may not have a big team, so they may not have those roles. So some of our smallest ones, we're just that role for them. They don't have a person that's dedicated to that kind of thing, they just wait for our advisors to try and make, 'cause we actually have a human advisor that's part of our service that gives you advice or insight into what's happening. So, for the small ones, that can be that person. For larger companies like the big banks that are customers of ours, we kind of become one of the team. So you probably still have people with lots of expertise, but maybe you don't need to rely on it so much, maybe you can not have it at all, but it's more like we're someone that makes their life easier. So they can go on and focus on what they should be doing, which is not looking at the cloud pricing every morning. >> Nice, I see that more and more, right, that you need, it's a service you're delivering, right? And it's not just bits and bytes, that's customer success, and you have people there that can help. This stuff is crazy complicated, especially if you are, say, a VMware admin just getting into Amazon. The pricing, like we just said right, the pricing is very complicated. So, can you talk a little bit about from the admin standpoint, the vRealize integration and some things like that, or is this, there's an admin-facing piece and then I suppose then there's a cost-facing piece, or? >> Yeah, I think there's several ways it can be used. You can use us almost like middleware and the admin doesn't necessarily need to interact. We, some of our customers, we run as an engine that just sits there, it's getting data, analyzing it and making changes. But, you're still using VRA for blueprints and VRO, and that kind of comes through us, but it's kind of behind the scenes. So it's a nice use case, because it just adds value without making anybody's life more difficult. We do have consols that are very powerful, so if you're a capacity manager or a data scientist, or a cloud architect you can actually start logging in and seeing workload curves and stuff. So we have some use cases where we are, our interface is used quite heavily, and some where it kind of sits behind the scenes. And so for administrators, again, it tends to make your life better without making it worse. You know, they're really busy as well, and they don't, they save time to look at that, so. >> If you have a big investment in vRealize, right? That's great, it just sits behind the scenes. Tools you already know. >> Exactly, we just pull data from it, and we push the rest back. We pull the rules from DRS, we push new rules down the DRS, it's all very clean, and so it just makes it all better without overlapping, and again, it makes your environment calmer. So, what we see in a lot of environments is you'll be able to fit a lot more work into it, and you don't have the vMotion activity during business hours. So we're starting to measure that in our customers, because volatility's an important thing. Like if vMotion at noon, at the peak of your app being busy, it's not good, right? So, we actually cause that to go away. >> Andrew, how much of your business is on-premises, and virtualized environment, versus cloud and any kind of line up as to where you spend the most time on the cloud? >> Well, I think for, I mean, we have lot of customers that are mostly VMware. I think a good portion of them are looking at cloud in some way. Some of our newer customers are 100% in the cloud, so that's kind of more because it's a newer offering, and Densify's quite new, I think that's a smaller number right now. But as far as what we're chasing down, it's big. It's very large portion of it. So I think it's really where we see where things are going. Again, it's, we usually do both, but the cloud stuff really captures our imagination. That's what they want to be doing. >> Yeah, any commentary on the VMware on AWS, you know, stuff that we've heard so far? >> Well I mean, I think it's cool, it's great. It's another option. What I like about is that what we find is when we analyze, there's technologies that over-commit and ones that don't. So I could take a workload and put it in the VMware environment and over-commit it, and the patterns match up, and get efficiency. If I put it in Amazon in like a large instance, I might be wasting my money 'cause I'm not using the whole instance, so. And I can't run a hypervisor in one of those. What we found is that for certain transactional applications it's much better to stack them together. For like batch workloads, it's better to run them in, rent a large for an hour. So I think it's a great offering, because for certain workloads it is quite efficient. For other workloads, it's not. And we have, you know, we're showing you here today, the ability to analyze and compare the two, saying if you took that app and put it in the new VMware on Amazon versus standard small, medium, and large, what's the cost difference? It's a cool analysis, 'cause it's different for each app, right? >> If I saw right, there are free trials available on your site. Is there anybody that ever comes up, tries your stuff, and then doesn't have something that saves them money? >> No, we have a very good success when you try it because it's a, partly because it's so easy. It's just, it's 15 minutes, you pull down a connector for VMware and you plug it into vCenter or vROps, and the data goes up and then we just do it all for you. And it'll always find something you didn't know or some savings, or some hidden risks in there. Usually a lot of savings, hardware savings or software savings. We will optimize the software licensing. And in the cloud it uncovers all kinds of stuff. We see all kinds of crazy stuff, utilization's very low, so it's a, yeah. >> I've run across people that do this similar sorts of thing, at least at a high level on the virtualized side and on the cloud side. I'm not sure that I've seen anybody that does it at both, is that one of your differentiators, how do you line up, what's the competitive landscape look like? >> Yeah, doing both is a big part. I think on each individual, we also do it much deeper. So like I said, in the virtual environments our ability to play Tetris with the workloads, there's nothing else really like it. We put a lot of R and D on that, and in the cloud there's a lot of focus on the cost. But not necessarily digging deeper into what's the cause of that cost? Or your Kubernetes environment, the utilization of those nodes, it requires deeper analytics than a lot of vendors actually have, so. >> Do you give any advice as to them saying I'm trying to decide if I want to do it on-premises or in the cloud, do you give any guidance that way? >> I don't think there's any standard answer. We don't try and take sides, like, the data talks. And it's not, in my opinion, it's not an area for opinion, it's just that numbers will tell you what's best for your app and everybody's different. >> You were talking certain, you know, I've got this batch application, oh well heck, I can run this in, you know, some extra large thing in the cloud, and therefore it would cost me this versus standing up some server farm. >> Yeah, and what we find is that the only real trick is that, absolutely, if you have something that's live for 12 hours and then off for a week, renting an instance for 12 hours is the way to go. But the other consideration, it goes back to one of your earlier questions, is multicloud, and how many providers do you want? 'Cause we'll analyze the environment and that app might be cheaper in Azure and that one might be cheaper in Google, but you're not going to put each app in each, so you're going to choose one or two and kind of send them all there. So, the analytics understand that as well. They're saying, well, you're not going to spread this stuff everywhere, we're going to find the best overall answer for your portfolio of workloads. And that's an important thing. >> Okay, so last question for ya. The virtualization admins out there, is there anything that they're still doing kind of very wrong that would make their environment more efficient? >> Well I think, I mean, it's funny that we still see an awful lot of spreadsheets out there. It's funny when people try and do the numbers, like to figure out where to put a new app. And they'll still kind of figure that out in a very rudimentary way, when again, science will tell you that. So you can make that happen automatically. So, there's still certain things people are doing manually that don't need to be done manually anymore, and it maybe it's their comfort zone. Maybe sometimes maybe it's other groups. But I think, again, our focus is saying that's great, let's take your policies and your rules, we'll just embed them, encode them, codify them, and then you can move on to better things than updating a spreadsheet or generating reports to send to your team every, you know, like, it's, we have very powerful reporting, so you can just make that happen automatically to people. And so, it's getting out of those kind of tasks that people have done for years and moving up the value chain and saying, now I'm going to focus on cloud, or on VSAN, or whatever it is people want to be doing next. >> All right, Andrew Hillier, appreciate you giving us all the updates on your company, and look forward to hearing more in the future. John Troyer and I will be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (cheerful music)