(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Fal.Con 22. I'm Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. This is day one of our coverage. We had the big keynotes this morning. Derek Jeter was one of the keynotes. We have a big Yankee fan here: George Kurtz is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike. George, thanks for coming on The Cube. >> It's great to be here. >> Boston fan, you know, I tweeted out Derek Jeter. He broke my heart many times, but I can't hate on Jeter. You got to have respect for the guy. >> Well, I still remember I was in Japan when Boston was down you know, by three games and came back to win. So I've got my own heartbreak as well. >> It did heal some wounds, but it almost changed the rivalry, you know? I mean, >> Yeah. >> Once, it's kind of neutralized it, you know? It's just not as interesting. I mean, I'm a season ticket holder. I go to all the games and Yankee games are great. A lot of it used to be, you would never walk into Fenway park with, you know pin stripes, when today there's as many Yankee fans as there are... >> I know. >> Boston fans. Anyway, at Fenway, I mean. >> Yeah. >> Why did you start CrowdStrike? >> Biggest thing for me was to really change the game in how people were looking at security. And at my previous company, I think a lot of people were buying security and not getting the outcome that they wanted. Not- I got acquired by a company, not my first company. So, to be clear, and before I started CrowdStrike, I was in the antivirus world, and they were spending a lot of money with antivirus vendors but not getting the outcome I thought they should achieve, which is to stop the breach, not just stop malware. And for me, security should be outcome based not sort of product based. And the biggest thing for us was how could we create the sales force of security that was focused on getting the right outcome: stopping the breach. >> And the premise, I've seen it, the unstoppable breach is a myth. No CSOs don't live by that mantra, but you do. How are you doing on that journey? >> Well I think, look, there's no 100% of anything in security, but what we've done is really created a platform that's focused on identifying and stopping breaches as well as now, extending that out into helping IT identify assets and their hygiene and basically providing more visibility into IT assets. So, we talked about the convergence of that. Maybe we'll get into it, but. >> Dave Vellante: Sure. >> We're doing pretty well. And from our standpoint, we've got a lot of customers, almost 20,000, that rely on us day to day to help stop the breach. >> Well, and when you dig into the CrowdStrike architecture, what's so fascinating is, you know, Dave, we've talked about this: agent bad. Well, not necessarily, if you can have a lightweight agent that can scale and support a number of modules, then you can consolidate all these point tools out there. You talked about in your keynote, your pillars, workloads, which really end points >> Right. >> ID, which we're going to talk about. Identity data and network security. You're not a network security specialist, >> Right. >> But the other three, >> Yes. >> You're knocking down. >> Yeah. >> You guys went deep into that today. Talk about that. >> We did, most folks are going to know us for endpoint and Cloud workload protection and visibility. We did an acquisition almost two years to the day on preempt. And that was our identity play, identity threat protection and detection. And that really turned out to be a smart move, because it's the hottest topic right now. If you look at all the breaches over the last couple years, it's all identity based. Big, big talking points in our keynotes today. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> And then the third area is on data, and data is really the you know, the new currency that people trade in. So how do you identify and protect endpoints and workloads? How do you tie that together with identity, as well as understanding how you connect the dots and the data and where data flows? And that's really been our focus and we continue to deliver on that for customers. >> And you've had a real dogma, I'll call it, about Cloud Native. I've had this conversation with Frank Slootman, "No we're not going to do a halfway house." You, I think, said it really well today. I think it was you who said it. If you've got On-Prem and Cloud, you got two code bases, >> George Kurtz: Right. >> That you got to maintain. >> That's it, yeah. >> And that means you're taking away resources from one or the other. >> That's exactly right. And what a lot of our competitors have done is they started On-Prem as an AV vendor, and then they took what they had and they basically put it in a Cloud instance called a Cloud, which doesn't really scale. And then, you know, where they need to, they basically still keep their On-Prem, and that just diffuses your engineering team. And most of the On-Prem stuff doesn't even have the features of what they're trying to offer from the Cloud. So either you're Cloud Native or you're not. You can't be halfway. >> But it doesn't mean that you can't include and ingest On-Prem data- >> Well, absolutely. >> into your platform, and that's what I think most people just some reason don't seem to understand. >> Well our agents run wherever. They certainly run On-Prem. >> Dave Vellante: Right. Right. >> And they run in the Cloud, they run wherever. But the crowd in the CrowdStrike is the fact that we can crowdsource this threat information at scale into our threat graph, which gives us unique insight, 7 trillion events per week. And you can't do that if you're not Cloud Native. And that crowd gives the, we call, community immunity. We see all kinds of attacks across 176 different countries. That benefit accrues to all of our customers. >> But how do you envision and maintain and preserve a lightweight agent that can support so many modules? As you do more acquisitions and you knock down new areas and bring in new functionality, go after things like operations technology, how is it that you're able to keep that agent lightweight? >> Well, we started as a platform company, meaning that the whole idea was we're going to build a lightweight agent. First iteration had no security capabilities. It was collect data, get it into a common data architecture or threat graph, in one spot. And then once we had the data then we applied AI to it and we created different workflows. So, the first incarnation was get data into the Cloud at scale. And that still holds true today. So if you think about why we can actually have all these different modules without an impact on the performance, it's we collect data one time. It's a threat data, you know? We're not collecting user data, but threat data collection mechanism. Once we have all that data, then we can slice and dice and create other modules. So the new modules never have to even touch the agent 'cause we've already collected the data. >> I'm going to just keep going, Dave, unless you shove your way in. >> No, no, go ahead. No, no, no. I'm waiting to pounce. >> But okay, so, I think, George, but George, I need to ask you about a comment that you made about we're not just shoving it into a data lake. But you are collecting all the data. Can you explain that nuance? >> Yeah. So there's a difference between a collect and forward agent. It means they just collect a bunch of data. They'll probably store it in a lot of space on the endpoint. It's slow and cumbersome, and then they'll forward it up into another data lake. So you have no context going into no context. Our agent is a smart agent, which actually allows us to always track the context of all these processes in what's happening on the endpoint. And it's a mini graph, meaning we keep track of the relationships. And as we ship that contextual information to the Cloud, we never lose that context. And then it goes into the bigger graph database, always with the same level of context. So, we keep the context of each individual workload or endpoint, and then across the Cloud, we have the context of all of those put together. It's massive. And that allows us to create different insights rather than a data lake, which is, you know, you're looking for, you're creating a bigger needle stack looking for needles. >> And I'm envisioning almost an index that is super, super fast. I mean, you're talking about sub, well second kind of near real time responses, correct? >> Absolutely. So a lot of what we do in terms of protection is already pushed down to the endpoint , 'cause it has intelligence and the AI model. And then again, the Cloud is always looking for different anomalies, not only on each individual endpoint or workload, but across the entire spectrum of our customer base. And that's all real time. It continually self-learns from all the data we collect. >> So when, yeah, when you've made these architectural decisions over time, there was a time when saying that you needed to run an agent could be a deal killer somewhere for people who argued against that. >> George Kurtz: Right. >> You've made the right decision there, clearly. Having everything be crowdsourced into Cloud makes perfect sense. Has that, though, posed a challenge from a sovereignty perspective? If you were deploying stuff On-Prem all over the place, you don't need to worry about that. Everything is here >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> in a given country. How do you address the challenges of sovereignty when these agents are sending data into some sort of centralized Cloud space that crosses boundaries? >> Well, yeah, I guess what we would, let me go back to the beginning. So I started company in 2011 and I had to convince people that delivering endpoint security from the Cloud was going to be a good thing. >> Dave Vellante: Right. (chuckles) >> You know, you go into a Swiss bank and a bunch of other places and they're like, you're crazy. Right? >> Dave Nicholson: Right. >> They all became customers afterwards, right? And you have to just look at what they're doing. And the question I would have in the early days is, well, let me ask you are you using Dropbox, Box? Are you using a Microsoft? You know, what are you using? Well, they're all sending data to the Cloud. So good news! You already have a model, you've already approved that, right? So let's talk about our benefit. And you know, you can either have an adversary steal your data or you can send threat data to our Cloud, which by the way is in a lot of sovereign Clouds that are out there. And when you actually break it down to what we're sending to the Cloud, it's threat data, right? It isn't user files and documents and stuff. It's threat data. So, we work through all of that. And the Cloud is bigger than CrowdStrike. So you look at Sales Force, Service Now, Workday, et cetera. That's being used all over the place, Box, Dropbox. We just tagged onto it. Like why shouldn't security be the platform of record, and why shouldn't CrowdStrike be the platform of record and be the pillar of Cloud security? >> Explain your observability strategy, 'cause you acquired Humio for, I mean, I think it was $400 million, which is a song. >> Yeah. >> And then Reposify is the latest acquisition. I see that as an extension, 'cause it gives you visibility. Is that part of your security, of your observability play? Explain where you do play and don't play. >> Sure. Well observability is a big, you know, fluffy word. Where we play is in probably the first two areas of observability, right? There's five, kind of, pillars. We're focused on event collection. Let's get events from the endpoints. Let's get events from really anywhere in the network. And we can do that with Humio is now log scale. And then the second piece is with our agents, let's get an understanding of their, the asset itself. What is the asset? What state is it in? Does it have vulnerabilities? Does it have, you know, is it running out of disc space? Is it have, does it have a performance issue? Those are really the first two, kind of, areas of observability. We're not in application performance, we're in let's collect data from the endpoint and other sources, and let's understand if the thing is working, right? And that's a huge value for customers. And we can do that because we already have a privileged spot on the endpoint with our agent. >> Got it. Question on the TAM. Like I look at your TAMs, your charts, I love it. You know, generally do. Were you taking known data from you know, firms like IDC >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> and saying, okay we're going to play there, now we're made this acquisition. We're new modules, now we're playing there. Awesome. I think you got a big TAM. And I guess that's, that's the point. There's no lack of market for you. >> George Kurtz: Right. >> But I do feel like there's this unknown unquantifiable piece of your TAM. IDC can't see it, 'cause they're kind of looking back >> George Kurtz: Right. >> seein' what the market do last year and we'll forecast it out. It's almost, you got to be a futurist to see it. How do you think about your total available market and the opportunity that's out there? >> Well, it's well in excess of 120 billion and we've actually updated that recently. So it's even beyond that. But if you look at all the modules each module has a discreet TAM and again, for what, you know, what we're focused on is how do you give an outcome to a customer? So a lot of the modules map back into specific TAM and product categories. When you add 'em all up and when you look at, you know, some of the new things that we're coming out with, again, it's well in excess of 120 billion. So that's why we like to say like, you know, we're not an endpoint company. We're really, truly a security platform company that was born in the Cloud. And I think if you see the growth rates, and one of the things that we've talked about, and I think you might have pointed out in prior podcasts, is we're the second fastest company to 2 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, only behind Zoom. And you know I would argue- great company, by the way, a customer- but that was a black Swan event in a pandemic, right? >> Dave Vellante: I'll say! >> Yeah. >> So we are rarefied air when you think about the capabilities that we have and the performance and the TAM that's available to us. >> The other thing I said in my breaking analysis was 'cause you guys aspire to be a generational company. And I think you got a really good shot at being one, but to be a generational company, you have to have an ecosystem. So I'd love you to talk about the ecosystem, but where you want to see it in five years. >> Well, it really is a good point and we are a partner first company. Ecosystem is really important. Cameras probably can't see all the vendors that are here that are our partners, right? It's a big part of this show that we're at. You see a lot of, well, you see some vendors behind us. >> Yep. >> We have to realize in 2022, and I think this is something that we did well and it's my philosophy, is we are not the only game in town. We like to be, and we are, for many companies the security platform on record, but we don't do everything. We talked about network in other areas. We can't do everything. You can't be good and try to do everything. So, for customers today, what they're looking at is best of platform. And in the early days of security, I've been in it over 30 years, it used to be best of breed products, then it was best of suite, now it's best of platform. So what do I mean by that? It means that customers don't want to engineer their own solution. They, like Lego blocks, they want to pull the platforms, and they want to stitch 'em together via API. And they want to say, okay, CrowdStrike works with Okta, works with Zscaler, works with Proofpoint, et cetera. And that's what customers want. So, ecosystem is incredibly important for us. >> Explain that. You mentioned Okta, I had another question for you. I was at Reinforce, and I saw this better together presentation, CrowdStrike and Okta talking about identity. You've got an identity module. Explain to people how you're not competing with Okta. You guys complement each other, there. >> Well, an identity kind of broker, if you will, is basically what Okta does in others, right? So you log in single sign on and you get access. They broker access to all these other applications. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> That's not what we do. What we do is we look at those endpoints and workloads and domain controllers and directory services and we figure out, are there vulnerabilities and are there threats associated with them? And we call that out. The second piece, which is critical, is we prevent lateral movement. So if credentials are stolen we can prevent those credentials from being laundered or used and moved laterally, which is a key part of how breaches happen. We then create a trust score on those endpoints and workloads. And we basically say, okay, do we think the trust on the endpoint and workload is high or low? Do we think the identity, you know, is it George on the endpoint, or not? We give that a score. And we pass that along to Okta or Ping or whoever, and they then use that as part of their calculus in how they broker access to other resources. So it really is better together. >> So your execution has been stellar. This is my competition question. You obviously have competition out there. I think architecturally, you've got some advantages. You have a great relationship with AWS. I don't know what's going on with Google, but Kevin's up on stage. >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> They're now part of Google. >> George Kurtz: We have a great relationship with them. >> Microsoft obviously, a competitor. You obviously do some things in, >> Right. >> in Azure. Are you building the security Cloud? >> We are. We think we are, because when you look at the amount of data that we actually ingest, when you look at companies using us for critical decisions and critical protection, not only on their On-Prem, but also in their Cloud environment, and the knowledge we have, we think it is a security Cloud. You know, you had, you had Salesforce and Workday and ServiceNow and each of them had their respective Clouds. When I started the company, there was no security Cloud. You know, it wasn't any of the companies that you know. It wasn't the firewall companies, wasn't the AV companies. And I think we really defined ourselves as the security Cloud. And the level of knowledge and insights we have in our Cloud, I think, are world class. >> But you know, it's a difference of being those- 'cause you mentioned those other, you know, seminal Clouds. They, like Salesforce, Workday, they're building their own Clouds. Maybe not so much Workday, but certainly Salesforce and ServiceNow built their own >> Yeah. >> Clouds, their own data centers. You're building on top of hyperscalers, correct? >> Well, >> Well you have your own data centers, too. >> We have our own data centers, yeah. So when we first started, we started in AWS as many do, and we have a great relationship there. We continue to build out. We are a huge customer and we also have, you know, with data sovereignty and those sort of things, we've got a lot of our sort of data that sits in our private Cloud. So it's a hybrid approach and we think it's the best of both worlds. >> Okay. And you mean you can manage those costs and it's, how do you make the decision? Is it just sovereignty or is it cost as well? >> Well, there's an operational element. There's cost. There's everything. There's a lot that goes into it. >> Right. >> And at the end of the day we want to make sure that we're using the right technology in the right Clouds to solve the right problem. >> Well, George, congratulations on being back in person. That's got to feel good. >> It feels really good. >> Got a really good audience here. I don't know what the numbers are but there's many thousands here, >> Thousands, yeah. >> at the ARIA. Really appreciate your time. And thanks for having The Cube here. You guys built a great set for us. >> Well, we appreciate all you do. I enjoy your programs. And I think hopefully we've given the audience a good idea of what CrowdStrike's all about, the impact we have and certainly the growth trajectory that we're on. So thank you. >> Fantastic. All right, George Kurtz, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're going to wrap up day one. We'll be back tomorrow, first thing in the morning, live from the ARIA. We'll see you then. (calm music)

>>Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome back to the VMware Explorer. 2022 live from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, here with Dave. Valante good to be sitting next to you, sir. >>Yeah. Yeah. The big set >>And we're very excited to be welcoming buck. One of our esteemed alumni Sanja poin joins us, the CEO and president of cohesive. Nice to see >>You. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Dave. It's great to meet with you all the time and the new sort of setting here, but first >>Time, first time we've been in west, is that right? We've been in north. We've been in south. We've been in Las Vegas, right. But west, >>I mean, it's also good to be back with live shows with absolutely, you know, after sort of the two or three or hiatus. And it was a hard time for the whole world, but I'm kind of driving a little bit of adrenaline just being here with people. So >>You've also got some adrenaline, sorry, Dave. Yeah, you're good because you are new in the role at cohesive. You wrote a great blog that you are identified. The four reasons I came to cohesive. Tell the audience, just give 'em a little bit of a teaser about that. >>Yeah, I think you should all read it. You can Google and, and Google find that article. I talked about the people Mohi is a fantastic founder. You know, he was the, you know, the architect of the Google file system. And you know, one of the senior Google executives was on my board. Bill Corrin said one of the smartest engineers. He was the true father of hyperconverge infrastructure. A lot of the code of Nutanix. He wrote, I consider him really the father of that technology, which brought computer storage. And when he took that same idea of bringing compute to secondary storage, which is really what made the scale out architect unique. And we were at your super cloud event talking about that, Dave. Yeah. Right. So it's a people I really got to respect his smarts, his integrity and the genius, what he is done. I think the customer base, I called a couple of customers. One of them, a fortune 100 customer. I, I can't tell you who it was, but a very important customer. I've known him. He said, I haven't seen tech like this since VMware, 20 years ago, Amazon 10 years ago and now Ko. So that's special league. We're winning very much in the enterprise and that type of segment, the partners, you know, we have HPE, Cisco as investors. Amazon's an investors. So, you know, and then finally the opportunity, I think this whole area of data management and data security now with threats, like ransomware big opportunity. >>Okay. So when you were number two at VMware, you would come on and say, we'd love all our partners and of course, okay. So you know, a little bit about how to work with, with VMware. So, so when you now think about the partnership between cohesive and VMware, what are the things that you're gonna stress to your constituents on the VMware side to convince them that Hey, partnering with cohesive is gonna gonna drive more value for customers, you know, put your thumb on the scale a little bit. You know, you gotta, you gotta unfair advantage somewhat, but you should use it. So what's the narrative gonna be like? >>Yeah, I think listen with VMware and Amazon, that probably their top two partners, Dave, you know, like one of the first calls I made was to Raghu and he knew about this decision before. That's the level of trust I have in him. I even called Michael Dell, you know, before I made the decision, there's a little bit of overlap with Dell, but it's really small compared to the overlap, the potential with Dell hardware that we could compliment. And then I called four CEOs. I was, as I was making this decision, Andy Jassey at Amazon, he was formerly AWS CEO sat Nadela at Microsoft Thomas cor at Google and Arvin Christian, IBM to say, I'm thinking about this making decision. They are many of the mentors and friends to me. So I believe in an ecosystem. And you know, even Chuck Robbins, who the CEO of Cisco is an investor, I texted him and said, Hey, finally, we can be friends. >>It was harder to us to be friends with Cisco, given the overlap of NSX. So I have a big tent towards everybody in our ecosystem with VMware. I think the simple answer is there's no overlap okay. With, with the kind of the primary storage capabilities with VSAN. And by the same thing with Nutanix, we will be friends and, and extend that to be the best data protection solution. But given also what we could do with security, I think this is gonna go a lot further. And then it's all about meet the field. We have common partners. I think, you know, sort of the narrative I talked about in that blog is just like snowflake was replacing Terada and ServiceNow replace remedy and CrowdStrike, replacing Symantec, we're replacing legacy vendors. We are viewed as the modern solution cloud optimized for private and public cloud. We can help you and make VMware and vs a and VCF very relevant to that part of the data management and data security continuum, which I think could end VMware. And by the way, the same thing into the public cloud. So most of the places where we're being successful is clearly withs, but increasingly there's this discussion also about playing into the cloud. So I think both with VMware and Amazon, and of course the other partners in the hyperscaler service, storage, networking place and security, we have some big plans. >>How, how much do you see this? How do you see this multi-cloud narrative that we're hearing here from, from VMware evolving? How much of an opportunity is it? How are customers, you know, we heard about cloud chaos yesterday at the keynote, are customers, do they, do they admit that there's cloud chaos? Some probably do some probably don't how much of an opportunity is that for cohesive, >>It's tremendous opportunity. And I think that's why you need a Switzerland type player in this space to be successful. And you know, and you can't explicitly rule out the fact that the big guys get into this space, but I think it's, if you're gonna back up office 365 or what they call now, Microsoft 365 into AWS or Google workspace into Azure or Salesforce into one of those clouds, you need a Switzerland player. It's gonna be hard. And in many cases, if you're gonna back up data or you protect that data into AWS banks need a second copy of that either on premise or Azure. So it's very hard, even if they have their own native data protection for them to be dual cloud. So I think a multi-cloud story and the fact that there's at least three big vendors of cloud in, in the us, you know, one in China, if include Alibaba creates a Switzerland opportunity for us, that could be fairly big. >>And I think, you know, what we have to do is make sure while we'll be optimized, our preferred cloud is AWS. Our control plane runs there. We can't take an all in AWS stack with the control plane and the data planes at AWS to Walmart. So what I've explained to both Microsoft and AWS is that data plane will need to be multi-cloud. So I can go to an, a Walmart and say, I can back up your data into Azure if you choose to, but the control plane's still gonna be an AWS, same thing with Google. Maybe they have another account. That's very Google centric. So that's how we're gonna believe the, the control plane will be in AWS. We'll optimize it there, but the data plane will be multicloud. >>Yeah. And that's what Mo had explained at Supercloud. You know, and I talked to him, he really helped me hone in on the deployment models. Yes. Where, where, where the cohesive deployment model is instantiating that technology stack into each cloud region and each cloud, which gives you latency advantages and other advantages >>And single code based same platform. >>And then bringing it, tying it together with a unified, you know, interface. That was he, he was, he was key. In fact, I, I wrote about it recently and, and gave him and the other 29 >>Quite a bit in that session, he went deep with you. I >>Mean, with Mohi, when you get a guy who developed a Google file system, you know, who can technically say, okay, this is technically correct or no, Dave, your way off be. So I that's why I had to >>Go. I, I thought you did a great job in that interview because you probed him pretty deep. And I'm glad we could do that together with him next time. Well, maybe do that together here too, but it was really helpful. He's the, he's the, he's the key reason I'm here. >>So you say data management is ripe for disrupt disruption. Talk about that. You talked about this Switzerland effect. That sounds to me like a massive differentiator for cohesive. Why is data management right for disruption and why is cohesive the right partner to do it? >>Yeah, I think, listen, everyone in this sort of data protection backup from years ago have been saying the S Switzerland argument 18 years ago, I was a at Veras an executive there. We used the Switzerland argument, but what's changed is the cloud. And what's changed as a threat vector in security. That's, what's changed. And in that the proposition of a, a Switzerland player has just become more magnified because you didn't have a sales force or Workday service now then, but now you do, you didn't have multi-cloud. You had hardware vendors, you know, Dell, HPE sun at the time. IBM, it's now Lenovo. So that heterogeneity of, of on-premise service, storage, networking, HyperCloud, and, and the apps world has gotten more and more diverse. And I think you really need scale out architectures. Every one of the legacy players were not built with scale out architectures. >>If you take that fundamental notion of bringing compute to storage, you could almost paralyze. Imagine you could paralyze backup recovery and bring so much scale and speed that, and that's what Mo invented. So he took that idea of how he had invented and built Nutanix and applied that to secondary storage. So now everything gets faster and cheaper at scale. And that's a disruptive technology ally. What snowflake did to ator? I mean, the advantage of snowflake is when you took that same concept data, warehousing is not a new concept it's existed from since Ralph Kimball and bill Inman and the people who are fathers of data warehousing, they took that to Webscale. And in that came a disruptive force toter data, right on snowflake. And then of course now data bricks and big query, similar things. So we're doing the same thing. We just have to showcase the customers, which we do. And when large customers see that they're replacing the legacy solutions, I have a lot of respect for legacy solutions, but at some point in time of a solution was invented in 1995 or 2000, 2005. It's right. For change. >>So you use snowflake as an example, Frank SL doesn't like when I say playbook, cuz I says, Dave, I'm a situational CEO, no playbook, but there are patterns here. And one of the things he did is to your point go after, you know, Terra data with a better data warehouse, simplify scale, et cetera. And now he's, he's a constructing a Tam expansion strategy, same way he did at ServiceNow. And I see you guys following a similar pattern. Okay. You get your foot in the door. Let's face it. I mean, a lot of this started with, you know, just straight back. Okay, great. Now it's extending into data management now extending to multi-cloud that's like concentric circles in a Tam expansion strategy. How, how do you, as, as a CEO, that's part of your job is Tam expansion. >>So yeah, I think the way to think about the Tam is, I mean, people say it's 20, 30 billion, but let me tell you how you can piece it apart in size, Dave and Lisa number one, I estimate there's probably about 10 to 20 exabytes of data managed by these legacy players of on-prem stores that they back up to. Okay. So you add them all up in the market shares that they respectively are. And by the way, at the peak, the biggest of these companies got to 2 billion and then shrunk. That was Verto when I was there in 2004, 2 billion, every one of them is small and they stopped growing. You look at the IDC charts. Many of them are shrinking. We are the fastest growing in the last two years, but I estimate there's about 20 exabytes of data that collectively among the legacy players, that's either gonna stay on prem or move to the cloud. Okay. So the opportunity as they replace one of those legacy tools with us is first off to manage that 20 X by cheaper, faster with the Webscale glass offer the cloud guys, we could tip that into the cloud. Okay. >>But you can't stop there. >>Okay. No, we are not doing just backup recovery. We have a platform that can do files. We can do test dev analytics and now security. Okay. That data is potentially at a risk, not so much in the past, but for ransomware, right? How do we classify that? How do we govern that data? How do we run potential? You know, the same way you did antivirus some kind of XDR algorithms on the data to potentially not just catch the recovery process, which is after fact, but maybe the predictive act of before to know, Hey, there's somebody loitering around this data. So if I'm basically managing in the exabytes of data and I can proactively tell you what, this is, one CIO described this very simply to me a few weeks ago that I, and she said, I have 3000 applications, okay. I wanna be prepared for a black Swan event, except it's not a nine 11 planes getting the, the buildings. >>It is an extortion event. And I want to know when that happens, which of my 3000 apps I recover within one hour within one day within one week, no later than one month. Okay. And I don't wanna pay the bad guys at penny. That's what we do. So that's security discussions. We didn't have that discussion in 2004 when I was at another company, because we were talking about flood floods and earthquakes as a disaster recovery. Now you have a lot more security opportunity to be able to describe that. And that's a boardroom discussion. She needs to have that >>Digital risk. O O okay, go ahead please. I >>Was just gonna say, ransomware attack happens every what? One, every 11, 9, 11 seconds. >>And the dollar amount are going up, you know, dollar are going up. Yep. >>And, and when you pay the ransom, you don't always get your data back. So you that's not. >>And listen, there's always an ethical component. Should you do it or not do it? If you, if you don't do it and you're threatened, they may have left an Easter egg there. Listen, I, I feel very fortunate that I've been doing a lot in security, right? I mean, I built the business at, at, at VMware. We got it to over a billion I'm on the board of sneak. I've been doing security and then at SAP ran. So I know a lot about security. So what we do in security and the ecosystem that supports us in security, we will have a very carefully crafted stay tuned. Next three weeks months, you'll see us really rolling out a very kind of disciplined aspect, but we're not gonna pivot this company and become a cyber security company. Some others in our space have done that. I think that's not who we are. We are a data management and a data security company. We're not just a pure security company. We're doing both. And we do it well, intelligently, thoughtfully security is gonna be built into our platform, not voted on. Okay. And there'll be certain security things that we do organically. There's gonna be a lot that we do through partnerships, this >>Security market that's coming to you. You don't have to go claim that you're now a security vendor, right? The market very naturally saying, wow, a comprehensive security strategy has to incorporate a data protection strategy and a recovery, you know, and the things that we've talking about Mount ransomware, I want to ask you, you I've been around a long time, longer than you actually Sanjay. So, but you you've, you've seen a lot. You look, >>Thank you. That's all good. Oh, >>Shucks. So the market, I've never seen a market like this, right? I okay. After the.com crash, we said, and I know you can't talk about IPO. That's not what I'm talking about, but everything was bad after that. Right. 2008, 2000, everything was bad. I've never seen a market. That's half full, half empty, you know, snowflake beats and raises the stock, goes through the roof. Dev if it, if the area announced today, Mongo, DB, beat and Ray, that things getting crushed and, and after market never seen anything like this. It's so fed, driven and, and hard to protect. And, and of course, I know it's a marathon, you know, it's not a sprint, but have you ever seen anything like this? >>Listen, I walk worked through 18 quarters as COO of VMware. You've seen where I've seen public quarters there and you know, was very fortunate. Thanks to the team. I don't think I missed my numbers in 18 quarters except maybe once close. But we, it was, it's tough. Being a public company of the company is tough. I did that also at SAP. So the journey from 10 to 20 billion at SAP, the journey from six to 12 at VMware, that I was able to be fortunate. It's humbling because you, you really, you know, we used to have this, we do the earnings call and then we kind of ask ourselves, what, what do you think the stock price was gonna be a day and a half later? And we'd all take bets as to where this, I think you just basically, as a, as a sea level executive, you try to build a culture of beaten, raise, beaten, raise, beaten, raise, and you wanna set expectations in a way that you're not setting them up for failure. >>And you know, it's you, there's, Dave's a wonderful CEO as is Frank Salman. So it's hard for me to dissect. And sometimes the market are fickle on some small piece of it. But I think also the, when I, I encourage people say, take the long term view. When you take the long term view, you're not bothered about the ups and downs. If you're building a great company over the length of time, now it will be very clear over the arc of many, many quarters that you're business is trouble. If you're starting to see a decay in growth. And like, for example, when you start to see a growth, start to decay significantly by five, 10 percentage points, okay, there's something macro going on at this company. And that's what you won't avoid. But these, you know, ups and downs, my view is like, if you've got both Mongo D and snowflake are fantastic companies, they're CEOs of people I respect. They've actually kind of an, a, you know, advisor to us as a company, you knows moat very well. So we respect him, respect Frank, and you, there have been other quarters where Frank's, you know, the Snowflake's had a down result after that. So you build a long term and they are on the right side of history, snowflake, and both of them in terms of being a modern cloud relevant in the case of MongoDB, open source, two data technology, that's, you know, winning, I, I, we would like to be like them one day >>As, as the new CEO of cohesive, what are you most ask? What are you most anxious about and what are you most excited about? >>I think, listen, you know, you know, everything starts with the employee. You, I always believe I wrote my first memo to all employees. There was an article in Harvard business review called service profit chains that had a seminal impact on my leadership, which is when they studied companies who had been consistently profitable over a long period of time. They found that not just did those companies serve their customers well, but behind happy engaged customers were happy, engaged employees. So I always believe you start with the employee and you ensure that they're engaged, not just recruiting new employees. You know, I put on a tweet today, we're hiring reps and engineers. That's okay. But retaining. So I wanna start with ensuring that everybody, sometimes we have to make some unfortunate decisions with employees. We've, we've got a part company with, but if we can keep the best and brightest retained first, then of course, you know, recruiting machine, I'm trying to recruit the best and brightest to this company, people all over the place. >>I want to get them here. It's been, so I mean, heartwarming to come Tom world and just see people from all walks, kind of giving me hugs. I feel incredibly blessed. And then, you know, after employees, it's customers and partners, I feel like the tech is in really good hands. I don't have to worry about that. Cuz Mo it's in charge. He's got this thing. I can go to bed knowing that he's gonna keep innovating the future. Maybe in some of the companies I've worried about the tech innovation piece, but most doing a great job there. I can kind of leave that in his cap of hands, but employees, customers, partners, that's kind of what I'm focused on. None of them are for me, like a keep up at night, but there are are opportunities, right? And sometimes there's somebody you're trying to salvage to make sure or somebody you're trying to convince to join. >>But you know, customers, I love pursuing customers. I love the win. I hate to lose. So fortune 1000 global, 2000 companies, small companies, big companies, I wanna win every one of them. And it's not, it's not like, I mean, I know all these CEOs in my competitors. I texted him the day I joined and said, listen, I'll compete, honorably, whatever have you, but it's like Kobe and LeBron Kobe's passed away now. So maybe it's Steph Curry. LeBron, whoever your favorite athlete is you put your best on the court and you win. And that's how I am. That's nothing I've known no other gear than to put my best on the court and win, but do it honorably. It should not be the one that you're doing it. Unethically. You're doing it personally. You're not calling people's names. You're competing honorably. And when you win the team celebrates, it's not a victory for me. It's a victory for the team. >>I always think I'm glad that you brought up the employee experience and we're almost out of time, but I always think the employee experience and the customer experience are inextricably linked. This employees have to be empowered. They have to have the data that they need to do their job so that they can deliver to the customer. You can't do one without the other. >>That's so true. I mean, I, it's my belief. And I've talked also on this show and others about servant leadership. You know, one of my favorite poems is Brenda Naor. I went to bed in life. I dreamt that life was joy. I woke up and realized life was service. I acted in service was joy. So when you have a leadership model, which is it's about, I mean, there's lots of layers between me and the individual contributor, but I really care about that sales rep and the engineer. That's the leaf level of the organization. What can I get obstacle outta their way? I love skipping levels of going right. That sales rep let's go and crack this deal. You know? So you have that mindset. Yeah. I mean, you, you empower, you invert the pyramid and you realize the power is at the leaf level of an organization. >>So that's what I'm trying to do. It's a little easier to do it with 2000 people than I dunno, either 20, 20, 2000 people or 35,000 reported me at VMware. And I mean a similar number at SAP, which was even bigger, but you can shape this. Now we are, we're not a startup anymore. We're a midsize company. We'll see. Maybe along the way, there's an IP on the path. We'll wait for that. When it comes, it's a milestone. It's not the destination. So we do that and we are, we, I told people we are gonna build this green company. Cohesive is gonna be a great company like VMware one day, like Amazon. And there's always a day of early beginnings, but we have to work harder. This is kind of like the, you know, eight year old version of your kid, as opposed to the 18 year old version of the kid. And you gotta work a little harder. So I love it. Yeah. >>Good luck. Awesome. Thank you. Best of luck. Congratulations. On the role, it sounds like there's a tremendous amount of adrenaline, a momentum carrying you forward Sanjay. We always appreciate having you. Thank >>You for having in your show. >>Thank you. Our pleasure, Lisa. Thank you for Sanja poin and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022, stick around our next guest. Join us momentarily.

>>Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome back to the Cube's day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 live from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, here with Dave. Valante good to be sitting next to you, sir. >>Yeah, the big >>Set and we're very excited to be welcoming back. One of our esteemed alumni Sanja poin joins us, the CEO and president of cohesive. Nice to see >>You. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Dave. It's great to meet with you all the time and the new sort of setting here, but >>First time we've been in west, is that right? We've been in north. We've been in south. We've been in Las Vegas, right. But west >>Nice. Well, I mean, it's also good to be back with live shows with absolutely, you know, after sort of the two or three or high. And it was a hard time for the whole world, but I'm kind of driving a little bit of adrenaline just being here with people. So >>You've also got some adrenaline, sorry, Dave. Yeah, you're good because you are new in the role at cohesive. You wrote a great blog that you are identified. The four reasons I came to cohesive. Tell the audience, just give 'em a little bit of a teaser about that. >>Yeah, I think you should all read it. You can Google and, and Google find that article. I talked about the people Mohi is a fantastic founder. You know, he was the, you know, the architect of the Google file system. And you know, one of the senior Google executives who was on my board, bill Corrin said one of the smartest engineers. He was the true father of hyperconverge infrastructure. A lot of the code of Nutanix. He wrote, I consider him really the father of that technology, which brought computer storage. And when he took that same idea of bringing compute to secondary storage, which is really what made the scale out architect unique. And we were at your super cloud event talking about that, Dave. Yeah. Right. So it's a people I really got to respect his smarts, his integrity and the genius, what he is done. >>I think the customer base, I called a couple of customers. One of them, a fortune 100 customer. I, I can't tell you who it was, but a very important customer. I've known him. He said, I haven't seen tech like this since VMware, 20 years ago, Amazon 10 years ago. And now COER so that's special league. We're winning very much in the enterprise and that type of segment, the partners, you know, we have HPE, Cisco as investors, Amazon's an investors. So, you know, and then finally the opportunity, I think this whole area of data management and data security now with threats, like ransomware big opportunity. >>Sure. Okay. So when you were number two at VMware, you would come on and say, we'd love all our partners and of course, okay. So you know, a little bit about how to work with, with VMware. So, so when you now think about the partnership between cohesive and VMware, what are the things that you're gonna stress to your constituents on the VMware side to convince them that Hey, partnering with cohesive is gonna gonna drive more value for customers, you know, put your thumb on the scale a little bit. You know, you gotta, you gotta unfair advantage somewhat, but you should use it. So what's the narrative gonna be like? >>Yeah. I think listen with VMware and Amazon, that probably their top two partners, Dave, you know, like one of the first calls I made was to Raghu and he knew about this decision before. That's the level of trust I have in him. I even called Michael Dell, you know, before I made the decision, there's a little bit of an overlap with Dell, but it's really small compared to the overlap, the potential with Dell hardware that we could compliment. And then I called four CEOs. I was, as I was making this decision, Andy Jassy at Amazon, he was formerly AWS CEO sat Nadela at Microsoft Thomas cor at Google and Arvin Christian at IBM to say, I'm thinking about this making decision. They are many of the mentors and friends to me. So I believe in an ecosystem. And you know, even Chuck Robbins, who the CEO of Cisco is an investor, I texted him and said, Hey, finally, we can be friends. >>It was harder to us to be friends with Cisco, given the overlap of NEX. So I have a big tent towards everybody in our ecosystem with VMware. I think the simple answer is there's no overlap okay. With, with the kind of the primary storage capabilities with VSAN. And by the same thing with Nutanix, we will be friends and, and extend that to be the best data protection solution. But given also what we could do with security, I think this is gonna go a lot further. And then it's all about meet in the field. We have common partners. I think, you know, sort of the narrative I talked about in that blog is just like snowflake was replacing Terada and ServiceNow replace remedy and CrowdStrike, replacing Symantec, we're replacing legacy vendors. We are viewed as the modern solution cloud optimized for private and public cloud. We can help you and make VMware and VSAN and VCF very relevant to that part of the data management and data security continuum, which I think could enhance VMware. And by the way, the same thing into the public cloud. So most of the places where we're being successful is clearly withs, but increasingly there's this discussion also about playing into the cloud. So I think both with VMware and Amazon, and of course the other partners in the hyperscaler service, storage, networking place and security, we have some big plans. >>How, how much do you see this? How do you see this multi-cloud narrative that we're hearing here from, from VMware evolving? How much of an opportunity is it? How are customers, you know, we heard about cloud chaos yesterday at the keynote, are customers, do they, do they admit that there's cloud chaos? Some probably do some probably don't how much of an opportunity is that for cohesive, >>It's tremendous opportunity. And I think that's why you need a Switzerland type player in this space to be successful. And you know, and you can't explicitly rule out the fact that the big guys get into this space, but I think it's, if you're gonna back up office 365 or what they call now, Microsoft 365 into AWS or Google workspace into Azure or Salesforce into one of those clouds, you need a Switzerland player it's gonna be out. And in many cases, if you're gonna back up data or you protect that data into AWS banks need a second copy of that either on premise or Azure. So it's very hard, even if they have their own native data protection for them to be dual cloud. So I think a multi-cloud story and the fact that there's at least three big vendors of cloud in, in the us, you know, one in China, if include Alibaba creates a Switzerland opportunity for us, that could be fairly big. >>And I think, you know, what we have to do is make sure while we'll be optimized, our preferred cloud is AWS. Our control plane runs there. We can't take an all in AWS stack with the control plane and the data planes at AWS to Walmart. So what I've explained to both Microsoft and AWS is that data plane will need to be multicloud. So I can go to an a Walmart and say, I can back up your data into Azure if you choose to, but the control, plane's still gonna be an AWS, same thing with Google. Maybe they have another account. That's very Google centric. So that's how we're gonna play the, the control plane will be in AWS. We'll optimize it there, but the data plane will be multi-cloud. >>Yeah. And that's what Mo had explained at Supercloud. You know, and I talked to, he really helped me hone in on the deployment models. Yes. Where, where, where the cohesive deployment model is instantiating that technology stack into each cloud region and each cloud, which gives you latency advantages and other advantages >>And single code based same platform, >>And then bringing it, tying it together with a unified, you know, interface. That was he, he was, he was key. In fact, I, I wrote about it recently and, and gave him and the other 20, >>Quite a bit in that session. Yeah. So he went deep with you. I >>Mean, with Mohi, when you get a guy who developed a Google file system, you know, who can technically say, okay, this is technically correct or no, Dave, your way off be so I that's why I had to >>Go. I, I thought you did a great job in that interview because you probed him pretty deep and I'm glad we could do that together with him next time. Well, maybe do that together here too, but it was really helpful. He's the, he's the, he's the key reason I'm here. >>So you say data management is ripe for disrupt disruption. Talk about that. You talked about this Switzerland effect. That sounds to me like a massive differentiator for cohesive. Why is data management right. For disruption and why is cohesive the right partner to do it? >>Yeah, I think, listen, everyone in this sort of data protection backup from years ago have been saying the S Switzerland argument 18 years ago, I was a at Veras an executive there. We used the Switzerland argument, but what's changed is the cloud. And what's changed as a threat vector in security. That's, what's changed. And in that the proposition of a, a Switzerland player has just become more magnified because you didn't have a sales force or Workday service now then, but now you do, you didn't have multi-cloud. You had hardware vendors, you know, Dell, HPE sun at the time. IBM, it's now Lenovo. So that heterogeneity of, of on-premise service, storage, networking, HyperCloud, and, and the apps world has gotten more and more diverse. And I think you really need scale out architectures. Every one of the legacy players were not built with scale out architectures. >>If you take that fundamental notion of bringing compute to storage, you could almost paralyze. Imagine you could paralyze backup recovery and bring so much scale and speed that, and that's what Mo invented. So he took that idea of how he had invented and built Nutanix and applied that to secondary storage. So now everything gets faster and cheaper at scale. And that's a disruptive technology ally. What snowflake did to ator? I mean, the advantage of snowflake is when you took that same concept data, warehousing is not a new concept it's existed from since Ralph Kimble and bill Inman and the people who are fathers of data warehousing, they took that to Webscale. And in that came a disruptive force toter data, right? And snowflake. And then of course now data bricks and big query, similar things. So we're doing the same thing. We just have to showcase the customers, which we do. And when large customers see that they're replacing the legacy solutions, I have a lot of respect for legacy solutions, but at some point in time of a solution was invented in 1995 or 2000, 2005. It's right. For change. >>So you use snowflake as an example, Frank sluman doesn't like when I say playbook, cuz I says, Dave, I'm a situational. See you no playbook, but there are patterns here. And one of the things he did is to your point go after, you know, Terra data with a better data warehouse, simplify scale, et cetera. And now he's, he's a constructing a Tam expansion strategy, same way he did at ServiceNow. And I, you guys following a similar pattern. Okay. You get your foot in the door. Let's face it. I mean, a lot of this started with, you know, just straight back. Okay, great. Now it's extending into data management now extending to multi-cloud that's like concentric circles in a Tam expansion strategy. How, how do as, as a CEO, that's part of your job is Tam expansion. >>So yeah, I think the way to think about the Tam is, I mean, people say it's 20, 30 billion, but let me tell you how you can piece it apart in size, Dave and Lisa number one, I estimate there's probably about 10 to 20 exabytes of data managed by these legacy players of on-prem stores that they back up to. Okay. So you add them all up in the market shares that they respectively are. And by the way, at the peak, the biggest of these companies got to 2 billion and then shrunk. That was Verto when I was there in 2004, 2 billion, every one of them is small and they stopped growing. You look at the IDC charts. Many of them are shrinking. We are the fastest growing in the last two years, but I estimate there's about 20 exabytes of data that collectively among the legacy players, that's either gonna stay on prem or move to the cloud. Okay. So the opportunity as they replace one of those legacy tools with us is first off to manage that 20 X bike cheaper, faster with the Webscale, a glass or for the cloud guys, we could tip that into the cloud. Okay. >>But you can't stop there. >>Okay. No, we are not doing just back recovery. Right. We have a platform that can do files. We can do test dev analytics and now security. Okay. That data is potentially at a risk, not so much in the past, but for ransomware, right? How do we classify that? How do we govern that data? How do we run potential? You know, the same way you did antivirus some kind of XDR algorithms on the data to potentially not just catch the recovery process, which is after fact, but maybe the predictive act of before to know, Hey, there's somebody loitering around this data. So if I'm basically managing in the exabytes of data and I can proactively tell you what, this is, one CIO described this very simply to me a few weeks ago that I, and she said, I have 3000 applications, okay. I wanna be prepared for a black Swan event, except it's not a nine 11 planes hitting the, the buildings. >>It is an extortion event. And I want to know when that happens, which of my 3000 apps I recover within one hour within one day within one week, no lay than one month. Okay. And I don't wanna pay the bad guys of penny. That's what we do. So that's security discussions. We didn't have that discussion in 2004 when I was at another company, because we were talking about flood floods and earthquakes as a disaster recovery. Now you have a lot more security opportunity to be able to describe that. And that's a boardroom discussion. She needs to have that >>Digital risk. O O okay, go ahead please. I >>Was just gonna say, ransomware attack happens every what? One, every 11, 9, 11 seconds. >>And the dollar amount are going up, you know, dollar of what? >>Yep. And, and when you pay the ransom, you don't always get your data back. So you that's >>Not. And listen, there's always an ethical component. Should you do it or not do it? If you, if you don't do it and you're threatened, they may have left an Easter egg there. Listen, I, I feel very fortunate that I've been doing a lot in security, right? I mean, I built the business at, at, at VMware. We got it to over a billion I'm on the board of sneak. I've been doing security and then at SAP ran. So I know a lot about security. So what we do in security and the ecosystem that supports us in security, we will have a very carefully crafted stay tuned. Next three weeks months, you'll see us really rolling out a very kind of disciplined aspect, but we're not gonna pivot this company and become a cyber security company. Some others in our space have done that. I think that's not who we are. We are a data management and a data security company. We're not just a pure security company. We're doing both. And we do it well, intelligently, thoughtfully security is gonna be built into our platform, not bolted on, okay. And there'll be certain security things that we do organically. There's gonna be a lot that we do through partnerships, >>This security market that's coming to you. You don't have to go claim that you're now a security vendor, right? The market very naturally saying, wow, a comprehensive security strategy has to incorporate a data protection strategy and a recovery, you know, and the things we've talking about, Mount ransomware, I want to ask you, you know, I've been around a long time, longer than you actually Sanjay. So, but you you've, you've seen a lot. You look incredibly, >>Thank you. That's all good. Oh, >>Shocks. So the market, I've never seen a market like this, right? I okay. After the.com crash, we said, and I know you can't talk about IPO. That's not what I'm talking about, but everything was bad after that. Right. 2008, 2000, everything was bad. I've never seen a market. That's half full, half empty, you know, snowflake beats and raises the stock, goes through the roof. Dev if it, the area announced today, Mongo, DB, beat and Ray, that things getting crushed. And, and after market never seen anything like this. It's so fed, driven and, and hard to protect. And, and of course, I know it's a marathon, you know, it's not a sprint, but have you ever seen anything like this? >>Listen, I walk worked through 18 quarters as COO of VMware. You seen, I've seen public quarters there and you know, was very fortunate. Thanks to the team. I don't think I missed my numbers in 18 quarters except maybe once close. But we, it was, it's tough. Being a public company. Officer of the company is tough. I did that also at SAP. So the journey from 10 to 20 billion at SAP, the journey from six to 12 at VMware, that I was able to be fortunate. It's humbling because you, you really, you know, we used to have this, we do the earnings call and then we kind of ask ourselves, what, what do you think the stock price was gonna be a day and a half later? And we'd all take bets as to wear this. I think you just basically, as a, as a sea level executive, you try to build a culture of beaten, raise, beaten, raise, beaten, raise, and you wanna set expectations in a way that you're not setting them up for failure. >>And you know, it's you, there's, Dave's a wonderful CEO as is Frank movement. So it's hard for me to dissect. And sometimes the market are fickle on some small piece of it. But I think also the, when I, I encourage people say, take the long term view. When you take the long term view, you're not bothered about the ups and downs. If you're building a great company over the length of time, now it will be very clear over the arc of many, many quarters that you're business is trouble. If you're starting to see a decay in growth. And like, for example, when you start to see a growth, start to decay significantly by five, 10 percentage points, okay, there's something macro going on at this company. And that's what you won't avoid. But these, you know, ups and downs, my view is like, if you've got both Mongo, DIA and snowflake are fantastic companies, they're CEOs of people I respect. They've actually a kind of an, a, you know, advisor to us as a company, you knows mot very well. So we respect him, respect Frank, and you, there have been other quarters where Frank's, you know, the snowflakes had a down result after that. So you build a long term and they are on the right side of history, snowflake, and both of them in terms of being a modern cloud relevant in the case of MongoDB open source to data technology, that's, you know, winning, I, we would like to be like them one day >>As, as the new CEO of cohesive, what are you most, what are you most anxious about? And what are you most excited about? >>I think, listen, you know, you know, everything starts with the employee. You, I always believe I wrote my first memo to all employees. There was an article in Harvard business review called service profit chains that had a seminal impact on my leadership, which is when they studied companies who had been consistently profitable over a long period of time. They found that not just did those companies serve their customers well, but behind happy engaged customers were happy, engaged employees. So I always believe you start with the employee and you ensure that they're engaged, not just recruiting new employees. You know, I put on a tweet today, we're hiring reps and engineers. That's okay. But retaining. So I wanna start with ensuring that everybody, sometimes we have to make some unfortunate decisions with employees. We've, we've got a part company with, but if we can keep the best and brightest retained first, then of course, you know, recruiting machine, I'm trying to recruit the best and brightest to this company, people all over the place. >>I want to get them here. It's been, so I mean, heartwarming to come to world and just see people from all walks, kind of giving me hugs. I feel incredibly blessed. And then, you know, after employees, it's customers and partners, I feel like the tech is in really good hands. I don't have to worry about that. Cuz Mo it's in charge. He's got this thing. I can go to bed knowing that he's gonna keep innovating the future. Maybe in some of the companies, I would worried about the tech innovation piece, but most doing a great job there. I can kind of leave that in his cap of hands, but employees, customers, partners, that's kind of what I'm focused on. None of them are for me, like a keep up at night, but they're are opportunities, right? And sometimes there's somebody you're trying to salvage to make sure or somebody you're trying to convince to join. >>But you know, customers, I love pursuing customers. I love the win. I hate to lose. So fortune 1000 global, 2000 companies, small companies, big companies, I wanna win every one of 'em and it's not, it's not like, I mean, I know all these CEOs in my competitors. I texted him the day I joined and said, listen, I'll compete, honorably, whatever have you, but it's like Kobe and LeBron Kobe's passed away now. So maybe it's step Curry. LeBron, whoever your favorite athlete is you put your best on the court and you win. And that's how I am. That's nothing I've known no other gear than to put my best on the court and win, but do it honorably. It should not be the one that you're doing it. Unethically. You're doing it personally. You're not calling people's names. You're competing honorably. And when you win the team celebrates, it's not a victory for me, it's a victory for the team. >>I always think I'm glad that you brought out the employee experience and we're almost out of time, but I always think the employee experience and the customer experience are inextricably linked. This employees have to be empowered. They have to have the data that they need to do their job so that they can deliver to the customer. You can't do one without the other. >>That's so true. I mean, I, it's my belief. And I've talked also on this show and others about servant leadership. You know, one of my favorite poems is Brenda NA Tago. I went to bed in life. I dreamt that life was joy. I woke up and realized life was service. I acted in service was joy. So when you have a leadership model, which is it's about, I mean, there's lots of layers between me and the individual contributor, but I really care about that sales rep and the engineer. That's the leaf level of the organization. What can I get obstacle outta their way? I love skipping levels and going write that sales rep let's go and crack this deal. You know? So you have that mindset. Yeah. I mean, you, you empower, you invert the pyramid and you realize the power is at the leaf level of an organization. >>So that's what I'm trying to do. It's a little easier to do it with 2000 people than I dunno, either 20, 20, 2000 people or 35,000 reported me at VMware. And I mean a similar number at SAP, which was even bigger, but you can shape this. Now we are, we're not a startup anymore. We're a mid-size company. We'll see. Maybe along the way, there's an IP on the path. We'll wait for that. When it comes, it's a milestone. It's not the destination. So we do that and we are, we, I told people we are gonna build this green company. Cohesive is gonna be a great company like VMware one day, like Amazon. And there's always a day of early beginnings, but we have to work harder. This is kind of like the, you know, eight year old version of your kid, as opposed to the 18 year old version of the kid. And you gotta work a little harder. So I love it. Yeah. >>Good luck. Awesome. Thank you too. Best of luck. Congratulations on the role, it sounds like there's a tremendous amount of adrenaline, a momentum carrying you forward Sanja. We always appreciate having thank >>You for having in your show. >>Thank you. Our pleasure, Lisa. Thank you for Sanjay poin and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022, stick around our next guest. Join us momentarily.

>> Hi everyone, my name is Michael Swan and I'm the global director of business development for HPE Financial Services, and I'm really excited to have the opportunity to speak with you today. In this session, I will provide you with an overview of how we help our customers create investment capacity to help fuel their cloud in digital transformation initiatives. I will then share with you three customer use cases to talk about the types of solutions that we've implemented to help our customers move their businesses forward. Now, it wasn't that long ago that businesses were prioritizing their 2020 digital transformation projects. And executives were telling us that they thought 2020 was going to be a year where they were going to see a significant ramp in their spending on digital transformation projects. Businesses were already starting to plan to make investments in cloud and security and AI and machine learning to help improve their customer experience, help to advance employee productivity, and help them to get an overall better competitive edge. Then of course, we were all hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. And in response to the pandemic, businesses have had to think really hard about how do they enable workforce productivity when they have nearly all of their employee base working from home. They've also had to think about some of the challenges around ensuring connectivity, security, and maintaining a very high degree of customer support and customer experience. And the economic impact of COVID put a lot of pressure on companies to maintain their cash positions and preserve capital. Now Gartner's forecasted that IT spending will increase to about $3.7 trillion in 2021, which is up about a little more than 4% from last year. And investment in cloud-based IT infrastructure in particular is expected to surge to more than 27% this year. So what all this is telling us is that customers are ready to move beyond the pandemic. They're thinking about how can I take my company to the next level? Where are the investments that I need to be making to advance and grow? Now to advance and grow requires investment capacity. Investment capacity is really the lifeblood of any business, and without that, you can't invest in your digital transformation, and you can't invest in the long-term future of your business. So this is where HPE Financial Services can help. We're working with businesses to help create the investment capacity that they need to move their business ahead. And we're doing this in three ways. Firstly, we're creating financial vitality. In the last two years alone, we've injected more than $640 million back into our customers' budgets to help fuel their investments. And we provide a range of investment solutions that help our customers to increase their ability to invest and do so in a way that actually results in better financial outcomes. Secondly, we're able to manage any tech, anytime, anywhere. We are recognized by both IDC and Gartner as a global leader in asset lifecycle supporting the circular economy. And in the last two years alone, we've taken in more than eight million assets into our technology renewal centers with more than 90% of those assets being designated for reuse before recycle. And thirdly, we are your CIFO. With nearly 30 years of IT Asset economic experience in our DNA, we work with you to understand where you want to go, what you need, and to help you put an investment strategy in place to help you get there. Let's now look at some of the solutions that we are delivering to our customers. Now, many of our customers seek to defer or reduce the expense of investing in IT in order to preserve their capital, or to try to do more with their available budgets. So we offer a range of Payment Deferral programs which enable our customers to delay the upfront costs of modernizing their IT. And in response to COVID, in 2020 we introduced the Payment Relief Program which enables customers to keep those critical IT projects moving forward while deferring more than 90% of the cost into the next calendar year. We're also helping customers to create investment capacity by generating cash from assets. And we're doing this based on the value of equipment that they already own. With our Accelerated Migration offer, we're converting existing, client-owned IT into an incremental source of capital, while enabling them to continue to use that equipment for its remaining useful life. And with our Tech Buyback program, we're managing the disposition of older legacy equipment returning value back to our customers and helping them to contribute to their sustainability initiatives. Now in each of our IT investment solutions, we aim to help our customers match their payments with the use of the technology. Our Extended Deployment solution is a phased deployment program that allows our customers to acquire the critical technology that they need today upfront. But we allow them time to get the equipment stood up in place, configured and tested, up and running before they actually have to begin making any payments for that equipment. And then lastly, we help enterprises relieve capacity strain or delivery delays that might be caused by supply chain disruptions or limitations in their capital budget, ar perhaps they're just simply looking to maintain existing legacy systems that are running critical business applications. And we do this by sourcing HPE certified pre-owned equipment that can be used to help maintain existing legacy systems. Now, all of the pre-owned equipment that we make available is available with a warranty, and is also eligible for HPE support services. Now, with that, as an overview, I'd like to transition to a brief video, which highlights how we help customers create investment capacity. (bright music) HPE and HPE Financial Services are meeting customer demands across the IT life cycle, while also contributing to the circular economy. And we're doing this in three ways. First HPE designs solutions and sources components with the aim to maximize reuse before recycle, and to minimize environmental impacts. Second, HPE's GreenLake Cloud services helps customers to acquire and consume only the capacity that they need for the period of time that they need to use it, and have the flexibility to refresh technology in an environmentally friendly way. We are committed to taking back 100% of all technology that is deployed within the HPE GreenLake Services contract. And last, HPE has industry leading experience and capabilities to renew IT assets, keeping them in the circular economy longer, and thus minimizing waste. We are committed to helping each one of our customers contribute to the circular economy, and this is one of the more important reasons why customers choose to partner with HPE. So let's now look at three customer use cases to help explain how we have helped customers create the investment capacity that they needed to move their business ahead. This first example involves an agricultural company based in Turkey. Their objective was to prevent COVID from disrupting their operations. They needed to ensure that they could preserve cash while at the same time, they wanted to continue to move ahead with a critical IT modernization project. They sought creative approaches to do more with their IT budget and to keep the project moving on track. HPE Financial Services made it possible for MAY Tohum to continue modernizing their IT estate while deferring the cost of the project into the following fiscal year, by utilizing our Payment Relief program. As a result, the infrastructure transformation project went forward, they were able to preserve their cash position and most importantly, MAY was able to continue to bring its innovative seed products to market without any disruption. The next customer example involved a large bank in New Zealand. Now, it might come as a surprise to you to think about a bank seeking additional investment capacity. Well banks understand well the importance of maximizing the return on their capital, and they also need to comply with regulations requiring certain capital funding commitments. Therefore banks as a whole comprise one of our largest set of customers. Now this bank in particular sought to transform the management of IT for their business to an as-a-service model. They sought additional investment capacity, and they wanted a single approach to managing their IT infrastructure. HPE Financial Services helped the bank to generate cash from their existing assets and transition them into the new GreenLake Services contract. This solution helped ensure not only that the ongoing business operations would not be disrupted, but it also provided an additional source of capital to help fund the project, and it helped to accelerate their move to an as-a-service model. And the last example I would like to share with you involves a hospital based in Austria. Now like most healthcare facilities around the world, this hospital's operations were severely impacted by COVID in the increased demand for their services. They experienced IT system constraints that were created by increased patient workloads, and sought immediate access to additional computing power to ensure they could continue to deliver critical care to their patients. HPE Financial Services sourced 14 Gen9 C7000 Blades, pre-owned equipment to match the existing systems that they already had in place. And this enabled the hospital to ensure that they could provide uninterrupted operations and critical care to their patients. HPE Financial Services also works closely with partners, whether they be IT solution providers, system integrators, or channel partners to help them create investment capacity for their customers. So now I'd like to share a brief video with a few stories from some of our partners. >> We had a client who needed to roll out a more robust identity and access management solution to support their efforts of enabling their remote workforce. The project wasn't budgeted, but quickly moved to the top of the priority list. And we were able to structure a deal that allowed them to acquire the technology they needed in the timeframe required, while deferring payments over an extended period. >> I think what's really important for the HPE at Tech Data structure shift, it allows us to offer an enterprise class solution as a true partnership, addressing some of their requirements and needs of the enterprise market plus. >> Obviously the customer was very pleased, we were very happy, and it was a way for us to get much closer to that customer, become their trusted advisor, and set us up for the future where we can continue to add value to that customer with HPE. >> Now we do believe that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has a very strong and competitive offering to our customers when it comes to especially asset upcycling services, and also offering certified pre-owned products on the Nordic market. >> We leveraged HPEFS to acquire millions of dollars of hardware to stock up our data center to provide instant on-demand for a virtual desktop environment for remote users for several of our manufacturing and financial clients. (light music) >> As a recap, HPE provides the solutions and services to accelerate your business transformation. With HPE GreenLake, you can deploy any workload as-a-service and achieve cloud-like speed, agility, in the as-a-service model, wherever your apps and your data reside today, whether that be in a co-location facility, or within your own data center. With HPE Pointnext Services, you gain access to more than 15,000 experts, and an ecosystem of partners to help you at every stage of your digital transformation journey. And HPE Financial Services helps you create investment capacity to drive your digital transformation initiatives. We help you overcome financial barriers to your transformation, we help you unlock the value of your entire IT estate, and we are your business and technology partner. Maintaining flexibility and creating financial capacity are key to achieving your digital transformation objectives. I encourage you to reach out to HPE Financial Services to discuss your IT investment strategy and explore ways that we can help you achieve your desired business outcomes. Included here are a few QR codes where you can learn more or even view a virtual tour of one of our technology renewal centers. Thank you again for joining me in this session. I wish you a great rest of the day, and I hope you keep well, bye.

>> Hi, and this is theCUBE on Cloud. I'm Stu Miniman and really excited to welcome to a special Fireside Chat. CUBE Alumni has been on the program so many times. We always love talking to founders. We like talking to deep thinkers and that's why he was one of the early ones that I reached out to when we were working on this event. When we first started conversations, we were looking at how hyperscalers really were taking adoption of the brand new technologies, things like flash, things like software defined networking, and how that would invade the enterprise. That of course has had a huge impact, help create a category called hyperconverged infrastructure and I'm talking about Dheeraj Pandey. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nutanix, taking HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure. So Dheeraj, welcome to the Fireside Chat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, and thank you for the last 10 years that we've grown together, both theCUBE and Nutanix and myself as a leader in the last 10 years. So bringing HCI from hyperconverged to hybrid cloud just reminds me of how the more things change, the more they remain the same. So looking forward to a great discussion here. >> So talk about that early discussion, what the hyperscalers were doing, how can the enterprise take advantage of that? Over time, enterprise has matured and looked a little bit more like the hyperscalers. Hybrid cloud of course is on everyone's lip, as well as we've seen the hyperscalers themselves look more and more like the enterprise. So hybrid and multicloud is where we are today. We think it'll be in the future. But give us a little bit as to how you've seen that progression today and where are we going down the road here? >> Yeah, I think I talked about this during my .NEXT keynote. And the whole idea of, in every recession, we make things smaller. In '91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year 2000 when there was the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards, we moved from Unix servers to Wintel: Windows and Intel, x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lived servers. And that's what we did in 2008/2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There is nothing in the physical world that actually went lives. But we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade, they're going to make it even smaller, not just in space which is size with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. So space and time, we're talking about hourly billing and monthly billing and a one-year term as opposed to really going and committing to five or seven years of hardware and CapEx. So I think as you make things smaller, I mean, and this is true for as consumers, we have short attention spans, things are going fast. The cycle of creative destruction of virtual machines is shrinking as well. So I think in many cases, we know we've gone and created this autonomy, massive sprawl. Like we created a massive sprawl of Intel servers back in '95 and 2005. Then we have to use virtualization to go and consolidate all of it, created beautiful data centers of Intel servers with VMware software. And then we created a massive sprawl of data centers, of consolidated data centers with one click private cloud in the last five years and hopefully in the next five too. But I think we're also now creating a proliferation of clouds. There is a sprawl, massive sprawl of cost centers and such. So we need yet another layer of software for governance to reign in on that chaos, hence the need for a new HCI, hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of watch that progression over time. There was a phenomenal Atlantic article. I think it was from like the 1940s or 1950s where somebody took what was happening post-World War II and projected things out. We're talking really pre the internet, but just the miniaturization and the acceleration, kind of the Moore's law discussion. If you take things out, where it would go. When I talked to Amazon, they said the one thing that we know for sure, I'm talking to Amazon.com is that people will want it faster and cheaper in the future. I don't know which robot or drone or things that they have. But absolutely there are those certain characteristics. So from a leadership standpoint, Dheeraj, talk about these changes? We had the wave of virtualization, the wave of containerization, you talked about functions in serverless. Those are tools. But at the end of the day, it's about the outcomes and how do we take advantage of things? So how as a leader do you make sure that you know where to take the company as these technology waves and changes impact what you're doing? >> Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, we celebrate things in IT a lot, but we don't talk about what does it take? What's the underlying fabric to really use these things successfully and better than others and not just use buzzwords, because new buzzwords will come in the next three years. For example AI and ML has been a great buzzword for the last three, four years. But there's very few companies, probably less than even half a percent who know how to leverage machine learning, even understand the difference between machine learning and AI. And a lot of it comes down to a few principles. There's a culture principles, not the least of which is how you celebrate failure, because now you're doing shorter, smaller things. You've got a more agile, you'll have more velocity. Gone are the days of waterfall where you're doing yearly planning and pre-year releases and such. So as we get into this new world, not everything will be perfect, and you've got to really learn to pick yourself up and recover quickly, heal quickly and such. So that is the fundamental tenet of Silicon Valley. And we got to really go and use this more outside the Valley as well in every company out there. Whether it's East Coast company, the Midwest company that are outside the U.S. I think this idea that you will be vulnerable, more vulnerable as you go and learn to do things faster and shorter. I think product management is a term that we don't fully understand, and this is about the why before the how and the what. We quickly jump to the what: containers and functions and databases, servers, and AI, and ML, they're the what. But how do you really start with the why? You know my fascination for one of my distant mentors, Simon Sinek and how he thinks about most companies just focusing on the what, while very few actually start with why, then the how, then the what itself. And product management has to play a key role in this, which also subsumes design, thinking about simplification and elegance and reducing friction. I think again, very few companies, probably no more than 1% of the companies really understand what it means to start with design and APIs, user experience APIs for developers before you even get to writing any single line of code. So I think to me, that's leadership. When you can stay away from instant gratification of the end result, but start with the why, then the how, then the what. >> Yeah, as we know in the technology space, oftentimes the technology is the easy part. It's helping to drive that change. I think back to the early days when we were talking, it was, hyperconverge, it was a threat to storage. We're going to put you out of a job. And we'd always go and say, "Look, no, no, no. We're not putting you out of a job. We're going to free you up to do the things that you want to do. That security project that's been sitting on the shelf for six months, you can go do that. Helping build new parts of the business. Those things that you can do." It's that shifting a mindset can be so difficult. And Dheeraj, I mean, you look at 2020, everyone has had to shift their mindset for everything. I was spending half my time on the road. I don't miss the hotels. I do miss seeing lots and lots of people in person. So what's your advice for people, how they can stay malleable, be open to some change? What are you seeing out there? What advice do you give there? >> Yeah, I think, as you said, inertia is at the core of most things in our lives, including what we saw in healthcare for the last 20, 30 years. I mean, there was so much regulation. The doctor's community had to move forward, nurses had to move forward. I mean, not just providers, but insurance companies. And finally, all of a sudden, we're talking about telehealth because of the pandemic. We are talking about online learning. I mean the things that higher ed refused to do. I mean if you think about the last 20 years of what had happened with the cost of higher ed, I mean it's 200% growth when the cost of television has gone down by probably 100, 200% with more features. Healthcare, higher ed, education in general, all of a sudden is coming for this deep shock because of the pandemic. And I think it's these kind of black swan moments that really changed the world. And I know it's a cliche to say this. But I feel like we are going to be in a new normal, and we have been forced to this new change of digital. I mean, you and I are sitting and talking over the internet. It's a little awkward right now because there's a little bit of a delay in the way I'm looking at things. But I know it's going to directionally be right. I mean, we will go in a way where it just become seamless over time. So change is the only constant. And I believe that I think what we've seen in the pandemic is just the beginning of what digital will mean going forward. And I think the more people embrace it, the faster we do it. Speed is going to be the name of the game when it comes to survival and thriving in this new age. >> Dheeraj, it's interesting. We do hope, I'm a technologist. I know you're an optimist when it comes to things. So we always look at those silver linings. Like I hope healthcare and education will be able to move forward fast. Higher education costs, inequity out there for access to medicine. It would be wonderful if we could help solve some of that, despite this global pandemic. One of the other results, Dheeraj, we talked about some very shifts in the marketplace, the large tech players really have emerged in winter so far in 2020. I can't help, but watch the stock market. And Apple is bigger than ever, Amazon, Google, all ended up in front of Congress to talk about if they've gotten too big. You've partnered with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They are potentially a threat but also a partner. From your standpoint, have they gotten too much power? Do we have an inequity in the tech world that they are creating the universes that they will just kind of block off and limit innovation? What's your take on big tech? >> Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's always been big something. I mean, if you go back to the '90s, Amazon, not Amazon, IBM was big, and Microsoft was big, and AT&T was big. I mean, there's always been big companies because the consumer effect that they've had as well, I mean. And I think what we're seeing right now is no different. I mean, at the end of the day, the great thing about this country is that there's always disruption happening. And sometimes small is way better and way more competitive than big. Now at the same time, I do look up to the way some of them have organized themselves. Like the way Amazon has organized itself is really unique and creative with general managers and very independent, highly autonomous groups. So some of these organizations will definitely survive and thrive in scale. And yet for others, I think decision-making and staying competitive and staying scrappy will come a lot harder. So to me when I look at these big names and what Congress is talking about and such, I feel like there's no different than 20, 30, 40 years ago. I mean, we talked about Rockefeller and the oil giants back from 100 years ago. And so in many ways, I mean, the more things change, the more they remain the same. All we have to do is we have to walk over to where the customer is. And that's what we've done with the partnerships. Like in Amazon and Azure, we're saying look, we can even use your commits and credits. I mean, that is a very elegant way to go to where the customer is, rather than force them to where we are. And the public cloud is facing this too. They've come to realize in the last two years that they cannot force all of enterprise computing to come to hyperscalers data centers. They'll have to take in these bite-size smaller clouds to where the customer is, where the customer's machines are, where the customers people are, where the customers data is. That's where we also take to disperse the cloud itself. So I think there's going to be a yin yang where we'll try to walk with the customer to where we want them to be, whether it's hyperscaler data center or the notion of hybrid cloud infrastructure. But many a time, we've got to walk over to where they are. I mean, and outside the U.S, I mean, the cloud is such a nuanced word. I mean, we're talking about sovereignty, we're talking about data gravity, we're talking about economics of owning versus renting. This trifecta, the laws of the land, the laws of physics, and the laws of economics will dictate many of these things as well. So I think the big folks are also humble and vulnerable to realize that there's nothing more powerful than market forces. And I think the rest will take care of itself. >> Yeah, my quick commentary on that, Dheeraj, I think most of us look back at AT&T and felt the government got it wrong. The way they broke it up and ended up consolidating back together, it didn't necessarily help consumers. Microsoft on the other hand might've had a little bit too much power and was leveraging that against competition and really squashing innovation. So in general, it's good to see that the politics are looking at that and chore felt. The last time I watched things, they were a little bit more educated than some previous times there, where it was almost embarrassing to watch our representatives fumbling around with technology. So it's always good to question authority, question what they have. And one of the things you've brought up many times is you're open to listening and you're bringing in new ideas. I remember one conversation I had with you is there's that direction that you hold on to, but you will assess and do new data. You've made adjustments in the product portfolio and direction based on your customers, based on the ecosystem. And you've mentioned some of the, bring thoughts that you've brought into the company and you share. So you mentioned black swan that seem to head you brought to one of the European .NEXT shows. It was great to be able to see that author and read through advisors like Condoleezza Rice who you've had at the conferences a couple of times. Where are you getting some of your latest inspiration from, any new authors or podcasts that you'd be recommending to the audience? >> Yeah, I look at adjacencies, obviously Simon has been great. He was .NEXT, talked about the Infinite Game. And we'll talk about the Infinite Game with Nutanix too with respect to also my decision. But Brene Brown was been very close to Nutanix. I was just looking at her latest podcast, and she was sitting with the author of Stretch, Scott Sonnenschein, and it's a fascinating read and a great listen, by the way, I think for worth an hour, talking about scrappiness, and talking about resourcefulness. What does it mean to really be resourceful? And we need that even more so as we go through this recession, as we are sheltered in place. I think it's an adjacency to everything that Brene does. And I was just blown away by just listening to it. I'd a love for others to even have a listen and learn to understand what we can do within our families, with our budgets, with our companies, with our startups. I mean, with CUBE, I mean, what does it mean to be scrappy? And celebrate scrappiness and resourcefulness, more so than AI always need more. I think I just found it fascinating in the last week itself listening through it. >> John Farinacci talk many times that founder, startup, that being able to pull themselves up, be able to drive forward, overcome obstacles. So Dheeraj, do you tee it up? It sounds like is the next step for you. There's a transition under discussion. Bain has made an investment. There's a search for new CEO. Are you saying there's a book club in your future to be able to get things ready? Why don't you explain a little bit, 11 years took the company public, over 6,500 employees public company. So tell us a little bit about that decision-making process and what you expect to see in the future? >> Yeah, it's probably one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to let go, because it's a creation that you followed from scratch, from nothing. And it was a process for me to rethink about what's next for the company and then what's next for me? And me and the company were so tightly coupled that I was like, wow, at some point, this has to be a little bit more like the way Bill Gates did it with Microsoft, and there's going to be buton zone and you will then start to realize that your identity is different from the company's identity. And maybe the company is built for bigger, better things. And maybe you're built for bigger, better things. And how do you really start to first do this decoupling of the identity? And it's really hard. I mean, I'm sure that parents go through this. I mean, our children are still very young. Our eldest is nine going on 10 and our twin girls are six. I know at some point in the next 10 years, eight to 10 years, we'll have to figure out what it means to let go. And I'm already doing this with my son. I tell him you're born free. I mean, the word born free which drives my wife crazy sometimes. I say this to them, it's about independence. And I think the company is also born free to really think about a life outside of me, as well outside of founder. And that was a very important process for me as I was talking to the board for the last six, seven, eight months. And when the Bain deal came in, I thought it was a great time. We ended the fiscal really well, all things considered. We had a good quarter. The transition has been a journey of a lifetime, the business model transition I speak of. Really three years, I mean, I have aged probably 10 years in these last three years. But I think I would not replaced it for anything. Just the experience of learning what it means to change as a public company when you have short-term goals and long-term goals, we need the conviction, knowing what's right, because otherwise we would not have survived this cloud movement, all this idea of actually becoming a subscription company, changing the core of the business in the on-prem world itself. It's a king to change the wings of a plane at 40,000 feet where none of the passengers blink. It's been phenomenal ride last 11 years, but it's also been nonstop monomaniacal. I mean, I use the word marathon for this, and I figured it's a good time to say figure out a way to let go of this, and think of what's bigger better for Nutanix. And going from zero to a billion six in annual billings, and looking at billion six to 3 billion to four to five, I think it'd be great &to look at this from afar. And at the same time, I think there's vulnerability. I mean, I've made the company vulnerable. I've made myself vulnerable. We don't know who the next leader will be. And I think the next three to six months is one of the most important baton zones that I have ever experienced to be a part of. So looking forward to make sure that baton doesn't fall, redefine what good to great looks like, both for the company and for myself. And at the same time, go read more. I mean, I've been passionate about developers in the last 10 years, 11 years. I was a developer myself. This company, Nutanix, was really built by developers for IT. And I'm learning more about the developer as a consumer. How do you think about their experience? Not just the things that we throw at them from open source point of view and from cloud and technologies and AI and ML point of view, but really their lives, having them think about revenue and business and really blurring the lines between architects and product managers and developers. I think it's just an unfathomable problem we've created in IT that I would love to go and read and write more about. >> Yeah, so many important things you said there. I absolutely think that there are certain things everybody of course will think of you for a long time with Nutanix, but there is that separation between the role in the company and the person itself, and really appreciated how much you've always shared along those lines. So last question I have and you hit it up a little bit when you talked about developers. Take off your Nutanix hat for a second here, now what do we need to do to make sure that the next decade is successful in this space, cloud as a general guideline? Yes, we know we have skill gap. We know we need more people, we need more diversity. But there's so much that we need and there's so much opportunity, but what do you see and any advice areas that you think are critical for success in the future? >> Yeah, I mean, you hit up on something that I have had a passion for, probably more late in this world, more so than conspicuous, and and you hit upon it right now, diversity and inclusion. It's an unresolved problem in the developer community: the black developer, the woman developer. The idea of, I mean, we've two girls, they're twins. I'd love for them to embrace computer science and even probably do a PhD. I mean, I was a dropout. I'd love for them to do better than I did. Get, embrace things that are adjacent to biology and computer science. Go solve really hard problems. And we've not done those things. I mean, we've not looked at the community of developers and said, you know, they are the maker. And they work with managers and the maker manager world is two different worlds. How do you make this less friction? And how do you make this more delightful? And how do you think of developers as business, as if they are the folks who run the business? I think there's a lot that's missing there. And again, we throw a lot of jargons at them, and we talk a lot about automation and tools and such. But those are just things. I think the last 10, 11 years of me really just thinking about product and product portfolio and design and the fact that we have so many developers at Nutanix. I think it has been a mind-boggling experience, thinking about the why and the how and the what of the day in the life of, the month in the life of, and thinking about simple things like OKRs. I mean, we are throwing these jargons of OKRs at them: productivity, offshoring, remote work, over the zoom design sessions. It's just full of conflict and friction. So I think there is an amazing opportunity for Nutanix. There's an amazing opportunity for the industry to elevate this where the the woman developer can speak up in this world that's full of so many men. The black developer can speak up. And all of us can really think of this as something that's more structured, more productive, more revenue-driven, more customer in rather than developer out. That's really been some of the things that have been in my head, things that are still unresolved at Nutanix that I'm pretty sure at many of the places out there. That's what thinking and reading and writing about. >> Well, Dheeraj, first of all, thank you so much again for participating here. It's been great having you in theCUBE community, almost since the inception of us doing it back in 2010. Wish you the best of luck in the current transition. And absolutely look forward to talking more in the future. >> Thank you. And again, a big fan of the tremor rate of John, Dave, and you. Always learn so much from you, folks. Looking forward to be a constant student. Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us at theCUBE on Cloud. Lots more coverage here. Be sure to look throughout the site, engage in the chats, and give us your feedback. We're here to help you with the virtual events. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thanks for watching.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Much of the discussion around Intel's current challenges, is focused on manufacturing issues and it's ongoing market share skirmish with AMD. Of course, that's very understandable. But the core issue Intel faces is that it has lost the volume game forever. And in Silicon volume is king. As such incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger faces some difficult decisions. I mean, on the one hand he could take some logical steps to shore up the company's execution, maybe outsource a portion of its manufacturing. Make some incremental changes that would unquestionably please Wall Street and probably drive shareholder value when combined with the usual stock buybacks and dividends. On the other hand, Gelsinger could make much more dramatic moves shedding it's vertically integrated heritage and transforming Intel into a leading designer of chips for the emerging multi-trillion dollar markets that are highly fragmented and generally referred to as the edge. We believe Intel has no choice. It must create a deep partnership in our view with a semiconductor manufacturer with aspirations to manufacture on US soil and focus Intel's resources on design. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this week's Wikibon's Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis will put forth our prognosis for what Intel's future looks like and lay out what we think the company needs to do not only to maintain its relevance but to regain the position it once held as perhaps the most revered company in tech. Let's start by looking at some of the fundamental factors that we've been tracking and that have shaped and are shaping Intel and our thinking around Intel today. First, it's really important to point out that new CEO Gelsinger is walking into a really difficult situation. Intel's ascendancy and its dominance it was created by PC volumes. And its development of an ecosystem that the company created around the x86 instruction set. In semiconductors volume is everything. The player with the highest volumes has the lowest manufacturing costs. And the math around learning curves is very clear and it's compelling. It's based on Wright's law named after Theodore Wright T.P Wright. He was an aeronautical engineer and he discovered that for every cumulative doubling of units manufactured, costs are going to fall by a constant percentage. Now in semiconductor way for manufacturing that cost is roughly around 22% declines. And when you consider the economics of manufacturing a next generation technology, for example going from ten nanometers to seven nanometers this becomes huge. Because the cost of making seven nanometer tech for example is much higher relative to 10 nanometers. But if you can fit more circuits on a chip your wafer costs can drop by 30% or even more. Now this learning curve benefit is why volume is so important. If the time it takes to double volume is elongated then the learning curve benefit they get elongated as well and it become less competitive from a cost standpoint. And that's exactly what is happening to Intel. You see x86 PC volumes, they peaked in 2011 and that marked the beginning of the end of Intel's dominance from manufacturing and cost standpoint. You know, ironically HDD hard disk drive volumes peaked around the same time and you're seeing a similar fundamental shift in that market relative to flash. Now because Intel has a vertically integrated model it's designers are limited by the constraints in the manufacturing process. What used to be Intel's ace in the hole its process manufacturing has become a hindrance, frustrating Intel's chip designers and really seeding advantage to a number of competitors including AMD, ARM and Nvidia. Now, during this time we've seen high profile innovators adapting alternative processors companies like Apple which chose its own design based on ARM for the M1. Tesla is a fascinating case study where Intel was really not in the running. AWS probably Intel's largest customer is developing its own chips. You know through Intel, a little bone at the recent reinvent it announced its use of Intel's Habana chips in a practically the same sentence that talked about how it was developing a similar chip that would provide even better price performance. And just last month it was reported that Microsoft Intel's monopoly partner in the PC era was developing its own ARM-based chips for the surface PCs and for its servers. Intel's Zenith was marked by those peak PC volumes that we talked about. Now to stress this point this chart shows x86 PC volumes over time. That red highlighted area shows the peak years. Now, volumes actually grew in 2020 in part due to COVID which is not really reflected in this chart but the volume game was lost for Intel. When it has been widely reported that in 2005 Steve Jobs approached Intel as it was replacing IBM microprocessors with with Intel processors for the Mac and asked Intel to develop the chip for the iPhone Intel passed and the die was cast. Now to the earlier point, PC markets are actually quite good if you're Dell. Here's some ETR data that shows Dell's laptop net score. Net score is a measure of spending momentum for 2020 and into 2021. Dell's client business has been very good and profitable and frankly, it's been a pleasant surprise. You know, PCs they're doing well. And as you can see in this chart, Dell has momentum. There's approximately 275 million maybe as high as 300 million PC units shipped worldwide in 2020, you know up double digits by some estimates. However, ARM chip units shipped exceeded 20 billion units last year worldwide. And it's not apples to apples. You know, we're comparing x86 based PCs to ARM chips. So this excludes x86 servers, but the way for volume for ARM dwarfs that of x86 probably by a factor of 10 times. Back to Wright's law, how long is it going to take Intel to double wafer volumes? It's not going to happen. And trust me, Pat Gelsinger understands this dynamic probably better than anyone in the world and certainly better than I do. And as you look out to the future, the story for Intel and it's vertically integrated approach it's even tougher. This chart shows Wikibon's 2020 forecast for ARM based compared to x86 based PCs. It also includes some other devices but as you can see what happens by the end of the decade is ARM really starts to eat in to x86. As we've seen with the M1 at Apple, ARM is competing in PCs in much better position for these emerging devices that support things like video and virtual reality systems. And we think even will start to eat into the enterprise. So again, the volume game is over for Intel, period. They're never going to win it back. Well, you might ask what about revenue? Intel still dominates in the data center right? Well, yes. And that is much higher revenue per unit but we still believe that revenue from ARM-based systems are going to surpass that of x86 by the end of the decade. Arm compute revenue is shown in the orange area in this chart with x86 in the blue. This means to us that Intel's last mot is going to be its position in the data center. It has to protect that at all costs. Now the market knows this. It knows something's wrong with Intel. And you can see that is reflected in the valuations of semiconductor companies. This chart compares the trailing 12 month revenue in the market valuations for Intel, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm. And you can see at a trailing 12 month multiple revenue with 3 X compared to about 22 X for Nvidia about 10 X for AMT and Qualcomm, Intel is lagging behind in the street's view. And Intel, as you can see here, it's now considered a cheap stock by many, you know. Here's a graph that shows the performance over the past 12 months compared to the NASDAQ which you can see that major divergence. NASDAQ has been powered part by COVID and all the new tech and the work from home. The stock reacted very well to the appointment of Gelsinger. That's no surprise. The question people are asking is what's next for Intel? How will Pat turn the company's fortunes around? How long is it going to take? What moves can he and should he make? How will they be received by the market? And internally, very importantly, within Intel's culture. These are big chewy questions and people are split on what should be done. I've heard everything from Pat should just clean up the execution issues. It's no.. This is, you know, very workable and not make any major strategic moves all the way to Intel should do a hybrid outsourced model to Intel should aggressively move out of manufacturing. Let me read some things from Barron's and some other media. Intel has fallen behind rivals and the rest of tech Intel is replacing Bob Swan. Investors are cheering the move. Intel would likely turn to Taiwan semiconductor for chips. Here's who benefits most. So let's take a look at some of the opinions that are inside these articles. So, first one I'm going to pull out Intel has indicated a willingness to try new things and investors expect the company to announce a hybrid manufacturing approach in January. Now, if you take a look at that and you quote a CEO Swan, he says, what has changed is that we have much more flexibility in our designs. And with that type of design we have the ability to move things in and move things out. And that gives us a little more flexibility about what we will make and what we might take from the outside. So let's unpack that a little bit. The new Intel, we know is a highly vertically integrated workflow from design to manufacturing production. But to me, the designers are the artists and the flexibility you would think would come from outsourcing manufacturer to give designers more flexibility to take advantage of say seven nanometer or five nanometer process technologies versus having to wait for Intel to catch up. It used to be that Intel's process was the industry's best and it could supercharge a design or even mask certain design challenges so that Intel could maintain its edge but that's no longer the case. Here's a sentiment from an analyst, Daniel Donnelly. Donnelly is at Citi. It says he's confident. Donnelly is confident that Intel's decision to outsource more of its production won't result in the company divesting its entire manufacturing segment. And he cited three reasons. One, it would take roughly three years to bring a chip to market. And two, Intel would have to share IP. And three, it would hurt Intel's profit margins. He said it would negatively impact gross margins by 10 points and would cause a 25% decline in EPS. Now I don't know about this. I would... To that I would say one, Intel needs to reduce its current cycle time, to go from design to production from let's say three to four years where it is today. It's got to get it under you know, at least at two years maybe even less. Second, I would say is what good is intellectual property if it's not helping you win in the market? And three, I think profitability is nuance. So here's another take from a UBS analyst. His name is Timothy Arcuri. And he says, quote, We see but no option but for Intel to aggressively pursue an outsourcing strategy. He wrote that Intel could be 80% outsourced by 2026. And just by going to 50% outsourcing, he said would save the company $4 billion annually in CapEx and 25% would drop to free cashflow. So look, maybe Gelsinger has to sacrifice some gross margin in EPS for the time being. Reduce the cost of goods sold by outsourcing manufacturing lower its CapEx and fund innovation in design with free cash flow. Here's our take, Pat Gelsinger needs to look in the mirror and ask what would Andy Grove do? You know, Grove's quote that only the paranoid survive its famous less well-known are the words that proceeded that quote. Success breeds complacency and complacency breeds failure. Intel in our view is headed on a path to a long drawn out failure if it doesn't act aggressively. It simply can't compete on cost as an integrated manufacturer because it doesn't have the volume. So what will Pat Gelsinger do? You know, we've probably done 30 Cube interviews with Pat and I just don't think he's taking the job to make some incremental changes to Intel to get the stock price back up. Why would that excite Pat Gelsinger? Trends, markets, people, society, he's a dot connector and he loves Intel deeply. And he's a legend at the company. Here's what we strongly believe. We think Intel has to do a deal with TSM or maybe Samsung perhaps some kind of joint venture or other innovative structure that both protects its IP and secures its future. You know, both of these manufacturers would love to have a stronger US presence. In markets where Intel has many manufacturing facilities they may even be willing to take a loss to get this started and deeply partner with Intel for some period of time This would allow Intel to better compete on a cost basis with AMD. It would protect its core data center revenue and allow it to fight the fight in PCs with better cost structures. Maybe even gain some share that could count for, you know another $10 billion to the top line. Intel should focus on reducing its cycle times and unleashing its designers to create new solutions. Let a manufacturing partner who has the learning curve advantages enable Intel designers to innovate and extend ecosystems into new markets. Autonomous vehicles, factory floor use cases, military security, distributed cloud the coming telco explosion with 5G, AI inferencing at the edge. Bite the bullet, give up on yesterday's playbook and reinvent Intel for the next 50 years. That's what we'd like to see. And that's what we think Gelsinger will conclude when he channels his mentor. What do you think? Please comment on my LinkedIn posts. You can DM me at dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. These episodes remember are also available as podcasts for your listening pleasure. Just search Breaking Analysis podcast. Many thanks to my friend and colleague David Floyer who contributed to this episode and that has done great work in the last better part of the last decade and has really thought through some of the cost factors that we talked about today. Also don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action. Thanks for watching this episode of the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Be well. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Hi, and this is theCUBE on Cloud. I'm Stu Miniman and really excited to welcome to a special Fireside Chat. CUBE Alumni has been on the program so many times. We always love talking to founders. We like talking to deep thinkers and that's why he was one of the early ones that I reached out to when we were working on this event. When we first started conversations, we were looking at how hyperscalers really were taking adoption of the brand new technologies, things like flash, things like software defined networking, and how that would invade the enterprise. That of course has had a huge impact, help create a category called hyperconverged infrastructure and I'm talking about Dheeraj Pandey. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nutanix, taking HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure. So Dheeraj, welcome to the Fireside Chat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, and thank you for the last 10 years that we've grown together, both theCUBE and Nutanix and myself as a leader in the last 10 years. So bringing HCI from hyperconverged to hybrid cloud just reminds me of how the more things change, the more they remain the same. So looking forward to a great discussion here. >> So talk about that early discussion, what the hyperscalers were doing, how can the enterprise take advantage of that? Over time, enterprise has matured and looked a little bit more like the hyperscalers. Hybrid cloud of course is on everyone's lip, as well as we've seen the hyperscalers themselves look more and more like the enterprise. So hybrid and multicloud is where we are today. We think it'll be in the future. But give us a little bit as to how you've seen that progression today and where are we going down the road here? >> Yeah, I think I talked about this during my .NEXT keynote. And the whole idea of, in every recession, we make things smaller. In '91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year 2000 when there was the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards, we moved from Unix servers to Wintel: Windows and Intel, x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lived servers. And that's what we did in 2008/2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There is nothing in the physical world that actually went lives. But we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade, they're going to make it even smaller, not just in space which is size with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. So space and time, we're talking about hourly billing and monthly billing and a one-year term as opposed to really going and committing to five or seven years of hardware and CapEx. So I think as you make things smaller, I mean, and this is true for as consumers, we have short retention spans, things are going fast. The cycle of creative destruction of virtual machines is shrinking as well. So I think in many cases, we know we've gone and created this autonomy, massive sprawl. Like we created a massive sprawl of Intel servers back in '95 and 2005. Then we have to use virtualization to go and consolidate all of it, created beautiful data centers of Intel servers with VMware software. And then we created a massive sprawl of data centers, of consolidated data centers with one click private cloud in the last five years and hopefully in the next five too. But I think we're also now creating a proliferation of clouds. There is a sprawl, massive sprawl of cost centers and such. So we need yet another layer of software for governance to reign in on that chaos, hence the need for a new HCI, hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of watch that progression over time. There was a phenomenal Atlantic article. I think it was from like the 1940s or 1950s where somebody took what was happening post-World War II and projected things out. We're talking really pre the internet, but just the miniaturization and the acceleration, kind of the Moore's law discussion. If you take things out, where it would go. When I talked to Amazon, they said the one thing that we know for sure, I'm talking to Amazon.com is that people will want it faster and cheaper in the future. I don't know which robot or drone or things that they have. But absolutely there are those certain characteristics. So from a leadership standpoint, Dheeraj, talk about these changes? We had the wave of virtualization, the wave of containerization, you talked about functions in serverless. Those are tools. But at the end of the day, it's about the outcomes and how do we take advantage of things? So how as a leader do you make sure that you know where to take the company as these technology waves and changes impact what you're doing? >> Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, we celebrate things in IT a lot, but we don't talk about what does it take? What's the underlying fabric to really use these things successfully and better than others and not just use buzzwords, because new buzzwords will come in the next three years. For example AI and ML has been a great buzzword for the last three, four years. But there's very few companies, probably less than even half a percent who know how to leverage machine learning, even understand the difference between machine learning and AI. And a lot of it comes down to a few principles. There's a culture principles, not the least of which is how you celebrate failure, because now you're doing shorter, smaller things. You've got a more agile, you'll have more velocity. Gone are the days of waterfall where you're doing yearly planning and pre-year releases and such. So as we get into this new world, not everything will be perfect, and you've got to really learn to pick yourself up and recover quickly, heal quickly and such. So that is the fundamental tenet of Silicon Valley. And we got to really go and use this more outside the Valley as well in every company out there. Whether it's East Coast company, the Midwest company that are outside the U.S. I think this idea that you will be vulnerable, more vulnerable as you go and learn to do things faster and shorter. I think product management is a term that we don't fully understand, and this is about the why before the how and the what. We quickly jump to the what: containers and functions and databases, servers, and AI, and ML, they're the what. But how do you really start with the why? You know my fascination for one of my distant mentors, Simon Sinek and how he thinks about most companies just focusing on the what, while very few actually start with why, then the how, then the what itself. And product management has to play a key role in this, which also subsumes design, thinking about simplification and elegance and reducing friction. I think again, very few companies, probably no more than 1% of the companies really understand what it means to start with design and APIs, user experience APIs for developers before you even get to writing any single line of code. So I think to me, that's leadership. When you can stay away from instant gratification of the end result, but start with the why, then the how, then the what. >> Yeah, as we know in the technology space, oftentimes the technology is the easy part. It's helping to drive that change. I think back to the early days when we were talking, it was, hyperconverge, it was a threat to storage. We're going to put you out of a job. And we'd always go and say, "Look, no, no, no. We're not putting you out of a job. We're going to free you up to do the things that you want to do. That security project that's been sitting on the shelf for six months, you can go do that. Helping build new parts of the business. Those things that you can do." It's that shifting a mindset can be so difficult. And Dheeraj, I mean, you look at 2020, everyone has had to shift their mindset for everything. I was spending half my time on the road. I don't miss the hotels. I do miss seeing lots and lots of people in person. So what's your advice for people, how they can stay malleable, be open to some change? What are you seeing out there? What advice do you give there? >> Yeah, I think, as you said, inertia is at the core of most things in our lives, including what we saw in healthcare for the last 20, 30 years. I mean, there was so much regulation. The doctor's community had to move forward, nurses had to move forward. I mean, not just providers, but insurance companies. And finally, all of a sudden, we're talking about telehealth because of the pandemic. We are talking about online learning. I mean the things that higher ed refused to do. I mean if you think about the last 20 years of what had happened with the cost of higher ed, I mean it's 200% growth when the cost of television has gone down by probably 100, 200% with more features. Healthcare, higher ed, education in general, all of a sudden is coming for this deep shock because of the pandemic. And I think it's these kind of black swan moments that really changed the world. And I know it's a cliche to say this. But I feel like we are going to be in a new normal, and we have been forced to this new change of digital. I mean, you and I are sitting and talking over the internet. It's a little awkward right now because there's a little bit of a delay in the way I'm looking at things. But I know it's going to directionally be right. I mean, we will go in a way where it just become seamless over time. So change is the only constant. And I believe that I think what we've seen in the pandemic is just the beginning of what digital will mean going forward. And I think the more people embrace it, the faster we do it. Speed is going to be the name of the game when it comes to survival and thriving in this new age. >> Dheeraj, it's interesting. We do hope, I'm a technologist. I know you're an optimist when it comes to things. So we always look at those silver linings. Like I hope healthcare and education will be able to move forward fast. Higher education costs, inequity out there for access to medicine. It would be wonderful if we could help solve some of that, despite this global pandemic. One of the other results, Dheeraj, we talked about some very shifts in the marketplace, the large tech players really have emerged in winter so far in 2020. I can't help, but watch the stock market. And Apple is bigger than ever, Amazon, Google, all ended up in front of Congress to talk about if they've gotten too big. You've partnered with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They are potentially a threat but also a partner. From your standpoint, have they gotten too much power? Do we have an inequity in the tech world that they are creating the universes that they will just kind of block off and limit innovation? What's your take on big tech? >> Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's always been big something. I mean, if you go back to the '90s, Amazon, not Amazon, IBM was big, and Microsoft was big, and AT&T was big. I mean, there's always been big companies because the consumer effect that they've had as well, I mean. And I think what we're seeing right now is no different. I mean, at the end of the day, the great thing about this country is that there's always disruption happening. And sometimes small is way better and way more competitive than big. Now at the same time, I do look up to the way some of them have organized themselves. Like the way Amazon has organized itself is really unique and creative with general managers and very independent, highly autonomous groups. So some of these organizations will definitely survive and thrive in scale. And yet for others, I think decision-making and staying competitive and staying scrappy will come a lot harder. So to me when I look at these big names and what Congress is talking about and such, I feel like there's no different than 20, 30, 40 years ago. I mean, we talked about Rockefeller and the oil giants back from 100 years ago. And so in many ways, I mean, the more things change, the more they remain the same. All we have to do is we have to walk over to where the customer is. And that's what we've done with the partnerships. Like in Amazon and Azure, we're saying look, we can even use your commits and credits. I mean, that is a very elegant way to go to where the customer is, rather than force them to where we are. And the public cloud is facing this too. They've come to realize in the last two years that they cannot force all of enterprise computing to come to hyperscalers data centers. They'll have to take in these bite-size smaller clouds to where the customer is, where the customer's machines are, where the customers people are, where the customers data is. That's where we also take to disperse the cloud itself. So I think there's going to be a yin yang where we'll try to walk with the customer to where we want them to be, whether it's hyperscaler data center or the notion of hybrid cloud infrastructure. But many a time, we've got to walk over to where they are. I mean, and outside the U.S, I mean, the cloud is such a nuanced word. I mean, we're talking about sovereignty, we're talking about data gravity, we're talking about economics of owning versus renting. This trifecta, the laws of the land, the laws of physics, and the laws of economics will dictate many of these things as well. So I think the big folks are also humble and vulnerable to realize that there's nothing more powerful than market forces. And I think the rest will take care of itself. >> Yeah, my quick commentary on that, Dheeraj, I think most of us look back at AT&T and felt the government got it wrong. The way they broke it up and ended up consolidating back together, it didn't necessarily help consumers. Microsoft on the other hand might've had a little bit too much power and was leveraging that against competition and really squashing innovation. So in general, it's good to see that the politics are looking at that and chore felt. The last time I watched things, they were a little bit more educated than some previous times there, where it was almost embarrassing to watch our representatives fumbling around with technology. So it's always good to question authority, question what they have. And one of the things you've brought up many times is you're open to listening and you're bringing in new ideas. I remember one conversation I had with you is there's that direction that you hold on to, but you will assess and do new data. You've made adjustments in the product portfolio and direction based on your customers, based on the ecosystem. And you've mentioned some of the, bring thoughts that you've brought into the company and you share. So you mentioned black swan that seem to head you brought to one of the European .NEXT shows. It was great to be able to see that author and read through advisors like Condoleezza Rice who you've had at the conferences a couple of times. Where are you getting some of your latest inspiration from, any new authors or podcasts that you'd be recommending to the audience? >> Yeah, I look at adjacencies, obviously Simon has been great. He was .NEXT, talked about the Infinite Game. And we'll talk about the Infinite Game with Nutanix too with respect to also my decision. But Brene Brown was been very close to Nutanix. I was just looking at her latest podcast, and she was sitting with the author of Stretch, Scott Sonnenschein, and it's a fascinating read and a great listen, by the way, I think for worth an hour, talking about scrappiness, and talking about resourcefulness. What does it mean to really be resourceful? And we need that even more so as we go through this recession, as we are sheltered in place. I think it's an adjacency to everything that Brene does. And I was just blown away by just listening to it. I'd a love for others to even have a listen and learn to understand what we can do within our families, with our budgets, with our companies, with our startups. I mean, with CUBE, I mean, what does it mean to be scrappy? And celebrate scrappiness and resourcefulness, more so than AI always need more. I think I just found it fascinating in the last week itself listening through it. >> John Farinacci talk many times that founder, startup, that being able to pull themselves up, be able to drive forward, overcome obstacles. So Dheeraj, do you tee it up? It sounds like is the next step for you. There's a transition under discussion. Bain has made an investment. There's a search for new CEO. Are you saying there's a book club in your future to be able to get things ready? Why don't you explain a little bit, 11 years took the company public, over 6,500 employees public company. So tell us a little bit about that decision-making process and what you expect to see in the future? >> Yeah, it's probably one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to let go, because it's a creation that you followed from scratch, from nothing. And it was a process for me to rethink about what's next for the company and then what's next for me? And me and the company were so tightly coupled that I was like, wow, at some point, this has to be a little bit more like the way Bill Gates did it with Microsoft, and there's going to be buton zone and you will then start to realize that your identity is different from the company's identity. And maybe the company is built for bigger, better things. And maybe you're built for bigger, better things. And how do you really start to first do this decoupling of the identity? And it's really hard. I mean, I'm sure that parents go through this. I mean, our children are still very young. Our eldest is nine going on 10 and our twin girls are six. I know at some point in the next 10 years, eight to 10 years, we'll have to figure out what it means to let go. And I'm already doing this with my son. I tell him you're born free. I mean, the word born free which drives my wife crazy sometimes. I say this to them, it's about independence. And I think the company is also born free to really think about a life outside of me, as well outside of founder. And that was a very important process for me as I was talking to the board for the last six, seven, eight months. And when the Bain deal came in, I thought it was a great time. We ended the fiscal really well, all things considered. We had a good quarter. The transition has been a journey of a lifetime, the business model transition I speak of. Really three years, I mean, I have aged probably 10 years in these last three years. But I think I would not replaced it for anything. Just the experience of learning what it means to change as a public company when you have short-term goals and long-term goals, we need the conviction, knowing what's right, because otherwise we would not have survived this cloud movement, all this idea of actually becoming a subscription company, changing the core of the business in the on-prem world itself. It's a king to change the wings of a plane at 40,000 feet where none of the passengers blink. It's been phenomenal ride last 11 years, but it's also been nonstop monomaniacal. I mean, I use the word marathon for this, and I figured it's a good time to say figure out a way to let go of this, and think of what's bigger better for Nutanix. And going from zero to a billion six in annual billings, and looking at billion six to 3 billion to four to five, I think it'd be great &to look at this from afar. And at the same time, I think there's vulnerability. I mean, I've made the company vulnerable. I've made myself vulnerable. We don't know who the next leader will be. And I think the next three to six months is one of the most important baton zones that I have ever experienced to be a part of. So looking forward to make sure that baton doesn't fall, redefine what good to great looks like, both for the company and for myself. And at the same time, go read more. I mean, I've been passionate about developers in the last 10 years, 11 years. I was a developer myself. This company, Nutanix, was really built by developers for IT. And I'm learning more about the developer as a consumer. How do you think about their experience? Not just the things that we throw at them from open source point of view and from cloud and technologies and AI and ML point of view, but really their lives, having them think about revenue and business and really blurring the lines between architects and product managers and developers. I think it's just an unfathomable problem we've created in IT that I would love to go and read and write more about. >> Yeah, so many important things you said there. I absolutely think that there are certain things everybody of course will think of you for a long time with Nutanix, but there is that separation between the role in the company and the person itself, and really appreciated how much you've always shared along those lines. So last question I have and you hit it up a little bit when you talked about developers. Take off your Nutanix hat for a second here, now what do we need to do to make sure that the next decade is successful in this space, cloud as a general guideline? Yes, we know we have skill gap. We know we need more people, we need more diversity. But there's so much that we need and there's so much opportunity, but what do you see and any advice areas that you think are critical for success in the future? >> Yeah, I mean, you hit up on something that I have had a passion for, probably more late in this world, more so than conspicuous, and and you hit upon it right now, diversity and inclusion. It's an unresolved problem in the developer community: the black developer, the woman developer. The idea of, I mean, we've two girls, they're twins. I'd love for them to embrace computer science and even probably do a PhD. I mean, I was a dropout. I'd love for them to do better than I did. Get, embrace things that are adjacent to biology and computer science. Go solve really hard problems. And we've not done those things. I mean, we've not looked at the community of developers and said, you know, they are the maker. And they work with managers and the maker manager world is two different worlds. How do you make this less friction? And how do you make this more delightful? And how do you think of developers as business, as if they are the folks who run the business? I think there's a lot that's missing there. And again, we throw a lot of jargons at them, and we talk a lot about automation and tools and such. But those are just things. I think the last 10, 11 years of me really just thinking about product and product portfolio and design and the fact that we have so many developers at Nutanix. I think it has been a mind-boggling experience, thinking about the why and the how and the what of the day in the life of, the month in the life of, and thinking about simple things like OKRs. I mean, we are throwing these jargons of OKRs at them: productivity, offshoring, remote work, over the zoom design sessions. It's just full of conflict and friction. So I think there is an amazing opportunity for Nutanix. There's an amazing opportunity for the industry to elevate this where the the woman developer can speak up in this world that's full of so many men. The black developer can speak up. And all of us can really think of this as something that's more structured, more productive, more revenue-driven, more customer in rather than developer out. That's really been some of the things that have been in my head, things that are still unresolved at Nutanix that I'm pretty sure at many of the places out there. That's what thinking and reading and writing about. >> Well, Dheeraj, first of all, thank you so much again for participating here. It's been great having you in theCUBE community, almost since the inception of us doing it back in 2010. Wish you the best of luck in the current transition. And absolutely look forward to talking more in the future. >> Thank you. And again, a big fan of the tremor rate of John, Dave, and you. Always learn so much from you, folks. Looking forward to be a constant student. Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us at theCUBE on Cloud. Lots more coverage here. Be sure to look throughout the site, engage in the chats, and give us your feedback. We're here to help you with the virtual events. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thanks for watching.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of an AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to the AI ops virtual forum. Finally, some Artan extended to be talking with rich lane now, senior analyst, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester. Rich. It's great to have you today. >>Thank you for having me. I think it's going to be a really fun conversation to have today. >>It is. We're going to be setting the stage for, with Richard, for the it operations challenges and the need for AI ops. That's kind of our objective here in the next 15 minutes. So rich talk to us about some of the problems that enterprise it operations are facing now in this year, that is 2020 that are going to be continuing into the next year. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we've been on this path for a while, but certainly the last eight months has, uh, has accelerated, uh, this problem and, and brought a lot of things to light that, that people were, you know, they were going through the day to day firefighting as their goal way of life. Uh, it's just not sustainable anymore. You a highly distributed environment or in the need for digital services. And, you know, one of them has been building for a while really is in the digital age, you know, we're providing so many, uh, uh, the, the interactions with customers online. Um, we've, we've added these layers of complexity, um, to applications, to infrastructure, you know, or we're in the, in the cloud or a hybrid or multi-cloud, or do you know you name it using cloud native technologies? We're using legacy stuff. We still have mainframe out there. >>Uh, you know, the, just the, the vast amount of things we have to keep track of now and process and look at the data and signals from, it's just, it's a really untenable for, for humans to do that in silos now, uh, in, in, you know, when you add to that, you know, when companies are so heavily invested in gone on the digital transformation path, and it's accelerated so much in the last, uh, year or so that, you know, we're getting so much of our business in revenue derived from these services that they become core to the business. They're not afterthoughts anymore. It's not just about having a website presence. It's, it's about deriving core business value from the services you're providing to your, through your customers. And a lot of cases, customers you're never going to meet or see at that. So it's even more important to be vigilant. >>And on top of the quality of that service that you're giving them. And then when you think about just the staffing issues we have, there's just not enough bodies to go around it in operations anymore. Um, you know, we're not going to be able to hire, you know, like we did 10 years ago, even. Uh, so that's where we need the systems to be able to bring those operational efficiencies to bear. When we say operational efficiencies, we don't mean, you know, uh, lessening head count because we can't do that. That'd be foolish. What we mean is getting the head count. We have back to burping on and higher level things, you know, working on, uh, technology refreshes and project work that that brings better digital services to customers and get them out of doing these sort of, uh, low, uh, complexity, high volume tasks that they're spending at least 20%, if not more on our third day, each day. So I think that the more we can bring intelligence to bear and automation to take those things out of their hands, the better off we are going forward. >>And I'm sure those workers are wanting to be able to have the time to deliver more value, more strategic value to the organization, to their role. And as you're saying, you know, was the demand for digital services is spiking. It's not going to go down and as consumers, if w if we have another option and we're not satisfied, we're going to go somewhere else. So, so it's really about not just surviving this time right now, it's about how do I become a business that's going to thrive going forward and exceeding expectations that are now just growing and growing. So let's talk about AI ops as a facilitator of collaboration, across business folks, it folks developers, operations, how can it facilitate collaboration, which is even more important these days? >>Yeah. So one of the great things about it is now, you know, years ago, have I gone years, as they say, uh, we would buy a tool to fit each situation. And, you know, someone that worked in network and others who will somebody worked in infrastructure from a, you know, Linux standpoint, have their tool, somebody who's from storage would have their tool. And what we found was we would have an incident, a very high impact incident occur. Everybody would get on the phone, 24 people all be looking at their siloed tool, they're siloed pieces of data. And then we'd still have to try to like link point a to B to C together, you know, just to institutional knowledge. And, uh, there was just ended up being a lot of gaps there because we couldn't understand that a certain thing happening over here was related to an advantage over here. >>Um, now when we bring all that data into one umbrella, one data Lake, whatever we want to call it, a lot of smart analytics to that data, uh, and normalize that data in a way we can contextualize it from, you know, point a to point B all the way through the application infrastructure stack. Now, the conversation changes now, the conversation changes to here is the problem, how are we going to fix it? And we're getting there immediately versus three, four or five hours of, uh, you know, hunting and pecking and looking at things and trying to try to extrapolate what we're seeing across disparate systems. Um, and that's really valuable. And in what that does is now we can change the conversation for measuring things. And in server up time and data center, performance metrics as to how are we performing as a business? How are we overall in, in real time, how are businesses being impacted by service disruption? >>We know how much money losing per minute hour, or what have you, uh, and what that translate lights into brand damage and things along those lines, that people are very interested in that. And, you know, what is the effect of making decisions either brief from a product change side? You know, if we're, we're, we're always changing the mobile apps and we're always changing the website, but do we understand what value that brings us or what negative impact that has? We can measure that now and also sales, marketing, um, they run a campaign here's your, you know, coupon for 12% off today only, uh, what does that drive to us with user engagement? We can measure that now in real time, we don't have to wait for those answers anymore. And I think, you know, having all those data and understanding the cause and effect of things increases, it enhances these feedback loops of we're making decisions as a business, as a whole to make, bring better value to our customers. >>You know, how does that tie into ops and dev initiatives? How does everything that we do if I make a change to the underlying architectures that help move the needle forward, does that hinder things, uh, all these things factor into it. In fact, there into the customer experience, which is what we're trying to do at the end of the day, w w whether operations people like it or not, we are all in the customer experience business now. And we have to realize that and work closer than ever with our business and dev partners to make sure we're delivering the highest level of customer experience we can. >>Uh, customer experience is absolutely critical for a number of reasons. I always kind of think it's inextricably linked with employee experience, but let's talk about long-term value because as organizations and every industry has pivoted multiple times this year and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future, for them to be able to get immediate value that let's, let's not just stop the bleeding, but let's allow them to get a competitive advantage and be really become resilient. What are some of the, uh, applications that AI ops can deliver with respect to long-term value for an organization? >>Yeah, and I think that it's, you know, you touched upon this a very important point that there is a set of short term goals you want to achieve, but they're really going to be looking towards 12, 18 months down the road. What is it going to have done for you? And I think this helps framing out for you what's most important because it'd be different for every enterprise. Um, and it also shows the ROI of doing this because there is some, you know, change is going to be involved with things you're gonna have to do. But when you look at the, the, the longer time horizon of what it brings to your business as a whole, uh it's to me, at least it all seems, it seems like a no brainer to not do it. Um, you know, thinking about the basic things, like, you know, faster remediation of, of, uh, client impacting incidents, or maybe, maybe even predictive of sort of detection of these incidents that will affect clients. >>So now you're getting, you know, at scale, you know, it's very hard to do when you have hundreds of thousands of optics of the management that relate to each other, but now you're having letting the machines and the intelligence layer find out where that problem is. You know, it's not the red thing, it's the yellow thing. Go look at that. Um, it's reducing the amount of finger pointing and what have you like resolved between teams now, everybody's looking at the same data, the same sort of, uh, symptoms and like, Oh yeah, okay. This is telling us, you know, here's the root cause you should investigate this huge, huge thing. Um, and, and it's something we never thought we'd get to where, uh, this, this is where we smart enough to tell us these things, but this, again, this is the power of having all the data under one umbrella >>And the smart analytics. >>Um, and I think really, you know, it's a boat. Uh, if you look at where infrastructure and operations people are today, and especially, you know, eight months, nine months, whatever it is into the pandemic, uh, a lot of them are getting really burnt out with doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. Um, just trying to keep the lights on, you know, we need, we need to extract those things for those people, uh, just because it just makes no sense to do something over and over again, the same remediation step, just we should automate those things. So getting that sort of, uh, you know, drudgery off their hands, if you will, and, and get them into, into all their important things they should be doing, you know, they're really hard to solve problems. That's where the human shine, um, and that's where, you know, having a, you know, really high level engineers, that's what they should be doing, you know, and just being able to do things I >>Think in a much faster, >>In a more efficient manner, when you think about an incident occurring, right. In, in a level, one technician picks that up and he goes and triaged that maybe run some tests. He has a script, >>Uh, or she, uh, and, >>You know, uh, they open a ticket and they enrich the ticket. They call it some log files. They can look up for the servers on it. You're in an hour and a half into an incident before anyone's even looked at it. If we could automate all of that, >>Why wouldn't we, that makes it easier for everyone. Um, >>Yeah. And I really think that's where the future is, is, is, is bringing this intelligent automation to bear, to take, knock down all the little things that consume the really, the most amount of time. When you think about it, if you aggregate it over the course of a quarter or a year, a great deal of your time is spent just doing that minutiae again, why don't we automate that? And we should. So I really think that's, that's where you get to look long-term. I think also the sense of we're going to be able to measure everything in the sense of business KPIs versus just IT-centric KPIs. That's really where we going to get to in the digital age. And I think we waited too long to do that. I think our operations models were all voted. I think, uh, you know, a lot of, a lot of the KPIs we look at today are completely outmoded. They don't really change if you think about it. When we look at the monthly reports over the course of a year, uh, so let's do something different. And now having all this data and the smart analytics, we can do something different. Absolutely. I'm glad >>That you brought up kind of looking at the impact that AI ops can make on, on minutiae and burnout. That's a really huge problem that so many of us are facing in any industry. And we know that there's some amount of this that's going to continue for a while longer. So let's get our let's leverage intelligent automation to your point, because we can to be able to allow our people to not just be more efficient, but to be making a bigger impact. And there's that mental component there that I think is absolutely critical. I do want to ask you what are some of these? So for those folks going, all right, we've got to do this. It makes sense. We see some short-term things that we need. We need short-term value. We need long-term value as you've just walked us through. What are some of the obstacles that you'd say, Hey, be on the lookout for this to wipe it out of the way. >>Yeah. I, I think there's, you know, when you think about the obstacles, I think people don't think about what are big changes for their organization, right? You know, they're, they're going to change process. They're going to change the way teams interact. They're they're going to change a lot of things, but they're all for the better. So what we're traditionally really bad in infrastructure and operations is communication, marketing, a new initiative, right? We don't go out and get our peers agreement to it where the product owner is, you know, and say, okay, this is what it gets you. This is where it changes. People just hear I'm losing something, I'm losing control over something. You're going to get rid of the tools that I have, but I love I've spent years building out perfecting, um, and that's threatening to people and understandably so because people think if I start losing tools, I start losing head count. >>And then, whereas my department at that point, um, but that's not what this is all about. Uh, this, this isn't a replacement for people. This isn't a replacement for teams. This isn't augmentation. This is getting them back to doing the things they should be doing and less of the stuff they shouldn't be doing. And frankly, it's, it's about providing better services. So when in the end, it's counterintuitive to be against it because it's gonna make it operations look better. It's gonna make us show us that we are the thought leaders in delivering digital services that we can, um, constantly be perfecting the way we're doing it. And Oh, by the way, we can help the business be better. Also at the same time. Uh, I think some of the mistakes people really don't make, uh, really do make, uh, is not looking at their processes today, trying to figure out what they're gonna look like tomorrow when we bring in advanced automation and intelligence, uh, but also being prepared for what the future state is, you know, in talking to one company, they were like, yeah, we're so excited for this. >>Uh, we, we got rid of our old 15 year old laundering system and the same day we stepped a new system. Uh, one problem we had though, was we weren't ready for the amount of incidents that had generated on day one. And it wasn't because we did anything wrong or the system was wrong or what have you. It did the right thing actually, almost too. Well, what it did is it uncovered a lot of really small incidents through advanced correlations. We didn't know we had, so there were things lying out there that were always like, huh, that's weird. That system acts strange sometimes, but we can never pin it down. We found all of those things, which is good. It goes, but it kind of made us all kind of sit back and think, and then our readership are these guys doing their job. Right? >>And then we had to go through an evolution of, you know, just explaining we were 15 years behind from a visibility standpoint to our environment, but technologies that we deployed in applications had moved ahead and modernized. So this is like a cautionary tale of falling too far behind from a sort of a monitoring and intelligence and automation standpoint. Um, so I thought that was a really good story for something like, think about as Eagle would deploy these modern systems. But I think if he really, you know, the marketing to people, so they're not threatened, I think thinking about your process and then what's, what's your day one and then look like, and then what's your six and 12 months after that looks like, I think settling all that stuff upfront just sets you up for success. >>All right. Rich, take us home here. Let's summarize. How can clients build a business case for AI ops? What do you recommend? >>Yeah. You know, I actually get that question a lot. It's usually, uh, almost always the number one, uh, question in, in, um, you know, webinars like this and conversations that, that the audience puts in. So I wouldn't be surprised, but if that was true, uh, going forward from this one, um, yeah, people are like, you know, Hey, we're all in. We want to do this. We know this is the way forward, but the guy who writes the checks, the CIO, the VP of ops is like, you know, I I've signed lots of checks over the years for tools wise is different. Um, and when I guide people to do is to sit back and, and start doing some hard math, right. Uh, one of the things that resonates with the leadership is dollars and cents. It's not percentages. So saying, you know, it's, it brings us a 63% reduction and MTTR is not going to resonate. >>Uh, Oh, even though it's a really good number, you know, uh, I think what it is, you have to put it in terms of avoid, if we could avoid that 63%. Right. You know, um, what does that mean for our, our digital services as far as revenue, right. We know that every hour system down, I think, uh, you know, typically in the market, you see is about $500,000 an hour for enterprise. We'll add that up over the course of the year. What are you losing in revenue? Add to that brand damage loss of customers, you know, uh, Forrester puts out a really big, uh, casino, um, uh, customer experience index every year that measures that if you're delivering good Udall services, bad digital services, if you could raise that up, what does that return to you in revenue? And that's a key thing. And then you just look at the, the, uh, hours of lost productivity. >>I call it, I might call it something else, but I think it's a catchy name. Meaning if a core internal system is down say, and you know, you have a customer service desk of a thousand customer service people, and they can't do that look up or fix that problem for clients for an hour. How much money does that lose you? And you multiply it out. You know, average customer service desk person makes X amount an hour times this much time. This many times it happens. Then you start seeing the real, sort of a power of AI ops for this incident avoidance, or at least lowering the impact of these incidents. And people have put out in graphs and spreadsheets and all this, and then I'm doing some research around this actually to, to, to put out something that people can use to say, the project funds itself in six to 12 months, it's paid for itself. And then after that it's returning money to the business. Why would you not do that? And when you start framing the conversation, that way, the little light bulb turn on for the people that sign the checks. For sure. >>That's great advice for folks to be thinking about. I loved how you talked about the 63% reduction in something. I think that's great. What does it impact? How does it impact the revenue for the organization? If we're avoiding costs here, how do we drive up revenue? So having that laser focus on revenue is great advice for folks in any industry, looking to build a business case for AI ops. I think you set the stage for that rich beautifully, and you were right. This was a fun conversation. Thank you for your time. Thank you. And thanks for watching >>From around the globe with digital coverage. >>Welcome back to the Broadcom AI ops, virtual forum, Lisa Martin here talking with Eastman Nasir global product management at Verizon. We spent welcome back. >>Hi. Hello. Uh, what a pleasure. >>So 2020 the year of that needs no explanation, right? The year of massive challenges and wanting to get your take on the challenges that organizations are facing this year as the demand to deliver digital products and services has never been higher. >>Yeah. So I think this is something it's so close to all the far far, right? It's, uh, it's something that's impacted the whole world equally. And I think regardless of which industry you rent, you have been impacted by this in one form or the other, and the ICT industry, the information and communication technology industry, you know, Verizon being really massive player in that whole arena. It has just been sort of struck with this massive consummation we have talked about for a long time, we have talked about these remote surgery capabilities whereby you've got patients in Kenya who are being treated by an expert sitting in London or New York, and also this whole consciousness about, you know, our carbon footprint and being environmentally conscious. This pandemic has taught us all of that and brought us to the forefront of organization priorities, right? The demand. I think that's, that's a very natural consequence of everybody sitting at home. >>And the only thing that can keep things still going is this data communication, right? But I wouldn't just say that that is, what's kind of at the heart of all of this. Just imagine if we are to realize any of these targets of the world is what leadership is setting for themselves. Hey, we have to be carbon neutral by X year as a country, as a geography, et cetera, et cetera. You know, all of these things require you to have this remote working capabilities, this remote interaction, not just between humans, but machine to machine interactions. And this there's a unique value chain, which is now getting created that you've got people who are communicating with other people or communicating with other machines, but the communication is much more. I wouldn't even use the term real time because we've used real time for voice and video, et cetera. >>We're talking low latency, microsecond decision-making that can either cut somebody's, you know, um, our trees or that could actually go and remove the tumor, that kind of stuff. So that has become a reality. Everybody's asking for it, remote learning, being an extremely massive requirement where, you know, we've had to enable these, uh, these virtual classrooms ensuring the type of connectivity, ensuring the type of type of privacy, which is just so, so critical. You can't just have everybody in a go on the internet and access a data source. You have to be concerned about the integrity and security of that data as the foremost. So I think all of these things, yes, we have not been caught off guard. We were pretty forward-looking in our plans and our evolution, but yes, it's fast track the journey that we would probably believe we would have taken in three years. It has brought that down to two quarters where we've had to execute them. >>Right. Massive acceleration. All right. So you articulated the challenges really well. And a lot of the realities that many of our viewers are facing. Let's talk now about motivations, AI ops as a tool, as a catalyst for helping organizations overcome those challenges. >>So yeah. Now on that I said, you can imagine, you know, it requires microsecond decision-making which human being on this planet can do microsecond decision-making on complex network infrastructure, which is impacting end user applications, which have multitudes of effect. You know, in real life, I use the example of a remote surgeon. Just imagine that, you know, even because of you just use your signal on the quality of that communication for that microsecond, it could be the difference between killing somebody in saving somebody's life. And it's not predictable. We talk about autonomous vehicles. Uh, we talk about this transition to electric vehicles, smart motorways, et cetera, et cetera, in federal environment, how is all of that going to work? You have so many different components coming in. You don't just have a network and security anymore. You have software defined networking. That's coming, becoming a part of that. >>You have mobile edge computing that is rented for the technologies. 5g enables we're talking augmented reality. We're talking virtual reality. All of these things require that resources and why being carbon conscious. We told them we just want to build a billion data centers on this planet, right? We, we have to make sure that resources are given on demand and the best way of resources can be given on demand and could be most efficient is that the thing is being made at million microsecond and those resources are accordingly being distributed, right? If you're relying on people, sipping their coffees, having teas, talking to somebody else, you know, just being away on holiday. I don't think we're going to be able to handle that one that we have already stepped into. Verizon's 5g has already started businesses on that transformational journey where they're talking about end user experience personalization. >>You're going to have events where people are going to go, and it's going to be three-dimensional experiences that are purely customized for you. How, how does that all happen without this intelligence sitting there and a network with all of these multiple layers? So spectrum, it doesn't just need to be intuitive. Hey, this is my private IP traffic. This is public traffic. You know, it has to not be in two, or this is an application that I have to prioritize over another task to be intuitive to the criticality and the context of those transactions. Again, that's surgeons. So be it's much more important than postman setting and playing a video game. >>I'm glad that you think that that's excellent. Let's go into some specific use cases. What are some of the examples that you gave? Let's kind of dig deeper into some of the, what you think are the lowest hanging fruit for organizations kind of pan industry to go after. >>Excellent. Brian, and I think this, this like different ways to look at the lowest hanging fruit, like for somebody like revising who is a managed services provider, you know, very comprehensive medicines, but we obviously have food timing, much lower potentially for some of our customers who want to go on that journey. Right? So for them to just go and try and harness the power of the foods might be a bit higher hanging, but for somebody like us, the immediate ones would be to reduce the number of alarms that are being generated by these overlay services. You've got your basic network, then you've got your whole software defined networking on top of that, you have your hybrid clouds, you have your edge computing coming on top of that. You know? So all of that means if there's an outage on one device on the network, I want to make this very real for everybody, right? >>It's like device and network does not stop all of those multiple applications or monitoring tools from raising and raising thousands of alarm and everyone, one capacity. If people are attending to those thousands of alarms, it's like you having a police force and there's a burglary in one time and the alarm goes off and 50 bags. How, how are you kind of make the best use of your police force? You're going to go investigate 50 bags or do you want to investigate where the problem is? So it's as real as that, I think that's the first wins where people can save so much cost, which is coming from being wasted and resources running around, trying to figure stuff out immediately. I'm tied this with network and security network and security is something which has you did even the most, you know, I mean single screens in our engineering, well, we took it to have network experts, separate people, security experts, separate people to look for different things, but there are security events that can impact the performance of a network. >>And then just drop the case on the side of et cetera, which could be falsely attributed to the metric. And then if you've got multiple parties, which are then the chapter clear stakeholders, you can imagine the blame game that goes on finding fingers, taking names, not taking responsibility that don't has all this happened. This is the only way to bring it all together to say, okay, this is what takes priority. If there's an event that has happened, what is its correlation to the other downstream systems, devices, components, and these are applications. And then subsequently, you know, like isolating it to the right cost where you can most effectively resolve that problem. Thirdly, I would say on demand, virtualized resource, virtualized resources, the heart and soul, the spirit of status that you can have them on demand. So you can automate the allocation of these resources based on customer's consumption their peaks, their cramps, all of that comes in. >>You see, Hey, typically on a Wednesday, the traffic was up significantly for this particular application, you know, going to this particular data center, you could have this automated system, uh, which is just providing those resources, you know, on demand. And so it is to have a much better commercial engagement with customers and just a much better service assurance model. And then one more thing on top of that, which is very critical is that as I was saying, giving that intelligence to the networks to start having context of the criticality of a transaction, that doesn't make sense to them. You can't have that because for that, you need to have this, you know, monkey their data. You need to have multi-cam system, which are monitoring and controlling different aspects of your overall end user application value chain to be communicating with each other. And, you know, that's the only way to sort of achieve that goal. And that only happens with AI. It's not possible >>So it was when you clearly articulated some obvious, low hanging fruit and use cases that organizations can go after. Let's talk now about some of the considerations, you talked about the importance of a network and AI ops, the approach I assume, needs to be modular support needs to be heterogeneous. Talk to us about some of those key considerations that you would recommend. >>Absolutely. So again, basically starting with the network, because if there's, if the metrics sitting at the middle of all of this is not working, then things can communicate with each other, right? And the cloud doesn't work, nothing metal. That's the hardest part of this, but that's the frequency. When you talk about machine to machine communication or IOT, it's just the biggest transformation of the span of every company is going for IOT now to drive those costs, efficiencies, and had, something's got some experience, the integrity of the topic karma, right? The security, integrity of that. How do you maintain integrity of your data beyond just a secure network components? That is true, right? That's where you're getting to the whole arena blockchain technologies, where you have to use digital signatures or barcodes that machine then, and then an intelligence system is automatically able to validate and verify the integrity of the data and the commands that are being executed by those end-user told them what I need to tell them that. >>So it's IOT machines, right? That is paramount. And if anybody is not keeping that into their equation, that in its own self is any system that is therefore maintaining the integrity of your commands and your hold that sits on those, those machines. Right? Second, you have your network. You need to have any else platform, which is able to restless all the fast network information, et cetera. And coupled with that data integrity piece, because for the management, ultimately they need to have a coherent view of the analytics, et cetera, et cetera. They need to know where the problems are again, right? So let's say if there's a problem with the integrity of the commands that are being executed by the machine, that's a much bigger problem than not being able to communicate with that machine and the best thing, because you'd rather not talk to the machine or have to do anything if it's going to start doing wrong things. >>So I think that's where it is. It's very intuitive. It's not true. You have to have subsequently if you have some kind of faith and let me use that use case self autonomous vehicles. Again, I think we're going to see in the next five years, because he's smart with the rates, et cetera, it won't separate autonomous cars. It's much more efficient, it's much more space, et cetera, et cetera. So within that equation, you're going to have systems which will be specialists in looking at aspects and transactions related to those systems. For example, in autonomous moving vehicles, brakes are much more important than the Vipers, right? So this kind of intelligence, it will be multiple systems who have to sit, N nobody has to, one person has to go in one of these systems. I think these systems should be open source enough that they, if you were able to integrate them, right, if something's sitting in the cloud, you were able to integrate for that with obviously the regard of the security and integrity of your data that has to traverse from one system to the other extremely important. >>So I'm going to borrow that integrity theme for a second, as we go into our last question, and that is this kind of take a macro look at the overall business impact that AI ops can help customers make. I'm thinking of, you know, the integrity of teams aligning business in it, which we probably can't talk about enough. We're helping organizations really effectively measure KPIs that deliver that digital experience that all of us demanding consumers expect. What's the overall impact. What would you say in summary fashion? >>So I think the overall impact is a lot of costs. That's customized and businesses gives the time to the time of enterprises. Defense was inevitable. It's something that for the first time, it will come to life. And it's something that is going to, you know, start driving cost efficiencies and consciousness and awareness within their own business, which is obviously going to have, you know, it domino kind of an effect. So one example being that, you know, you have problem isolation. I talked about network security, this multi-layers architecture, which enables this new world of 5g, um, at the heart of all of it, it has to identify the problem to the source, right? Not be bogged down by 15 different things that are going wrong. What is causing those 15 things to go wrong, right? That speed to isolation in its own sense can make millions and millions of dollars to organizations after we organize it. Next one is obviously overall impacted customer experience. Uh, 5g was given out of your customers, expecting experiences from you, even if you're not expecting to deliver them in 2021, 2022, it would have customers asking for those experience or walking away, if you do not provide those experience. So it's almost like a business can do nothing every year. They don't have to reinvest if they just want to die on the line, businesses want remain relevant. >>Businesses want to adopt the latest and greatest in technology, which enables them to, you know, have that superiority and continue it. So from that perspective that continue it, he will read that they write intelligence systems that tank rationalizing information and making decisions supervised by people, of course were previously making some of those. >>That was a great summary because you're right, you know, with how demanding consumers are. We don't get what we want quickly. We churn, right? We go somewhere else and we could find somebody that can meet those expectations. So it has been thanks for doing a great job of clarifying the impact and the value that AI ops can bring to organizations that sounds really now is we're in this even higher demand for digital products and services, which is not going away. It's probably going to only increase it's table stakes for any organization. Thank you so much for joining me today and giving us your thoughts. >>Pleasure. Thank you. We'll be right back with our next segment. >>Digital applications and services are more critical to a positive customer and employee experience than ever before. But the underlying infrastructure that supports these apps and services has become increasingly complex and expanding use of multiple clouds, mobile and microservices, along with modern and legacy infrastructure can make it difficult to pinpoint the root cause when problems occur, it can be even more difficult to determine the business impact your problems that occur and resolve them efficiently. AI ops from Broadcom can help first by providing 360 degree visibility, whether you have hybrid cloud or a cloud native AI ops from Broadcom provides a clear line of sight, including apt to infrastructure and network visibility across hybrid environments. Second, the solution gives you actionable insights by correlating an aggregating data and applying AI and machine learning to identify root causes and even predict problems before users are impacted. Third AI ops from Broadcom provides intelligent automation that identifies potential solutions when problems occur applied to the best one and learns from the effectiveness to improve response in case the problem occurs. Again, finally, the solution enables organizations to achieve digit with jelly by providing feedback loops across development and operations to allow for continuous improvements and innovation through these four capabilities. AI ops from Broadcom can help you reduce service outages, boost, operational efficiency, and effectiveness and improve customer and employee experience. To learn more about AI ops from Broadcom, go to broadcom.com/ai ops from around the globe. >>It's the cube with digital coverage of AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome back to the AI ops virtual forum, Lisa Martin here with Srinivasan, Roger Rajagopal, the head of product and strategy at Broadcom. Raj, welcome here, Lisa. I'm excited for our conversation. So I wanted to dive right into a term that we hear all the time, operational excellence, right? We hear it everywhere in marketing, et cetera, but why is it so important to organizations as they head into 2021? And tell us how AI ops as a platform can help. >>Yeah. Well, thank you. First off. I wanna, uh, I want to welcome our viewers back and, uh, I'm very excited to, uh, to share, um, uh, more info on this topic. You know, uh, here's what we believe as we work with large organizations, we see all our organizations are poised to get out of the, uh, the pandemic and look for a brood for their own business and helping customers get through this tough time. So fiscal year 2021, we believe is going to be a combination of, uh, you know, resiliency and agility at the, at the same time. So operational excellence is critical because the business has become more digital, right? There are going to be three things that are going to be more sticky. Uh, you know, remote work is going to be more sticky, um, cost savings and efficiency is going to be an imperative for organizations and the continued acceleration of digital transformation of enterprises at scale is going to be in reality. So when you put all these three things together as a, as a team that is, uh, you know, that's working behind the scenes to help the businesses succeed, operational excellence is going to be, make or break for organizations, >>Right with that said, if we kind of strip it down to the key capabilities, what are those key capabilities that companies need to be looking for in an AI ops solution? >>Yeah, you know, so first and foremost, AI ops means many things to many, many folks. So let's take a moment to simply define it. The way we define AI ops is it's a system of intelligence, human augmented system that brings together full visibility across app infra and network elements that brings together disparate data sources and provides actionable intelligence and uniquely offers intelligent automation. Now, the, the analogy many folks draw is the self-driving car. I mean, we are in the world of Teslas, uh, but you know, uh, but self-driving data center is it's too far away, right? Autonomous systems are still far away. However, uh, you know, application of AI ML techniques to help deal with volume velocity, veracity of information, uh, is, is critical. So that's how we look at AI ops and some of the key capabilities that we, uh, that we, uh, that we work with our customers to help them on our own for eight years. >>Right? First one is eyes and ears. What we call full stack observability. If you do not know what is happening in your systems, uh, you know, that that serve up your business services. It's going to be pretty hard to do anything, uh, in terms of responsiveness, right? So from stack observability, the second piece is what we call actionable insights. So when you have disparate data sources, tools, sprawls data coming at you from, uh, you know, uh, from a database systems, it systems customer management systems, ticketing systems. How do you find the needle from the haystack? And how do you respond rapidly from a myriad of problems as CEO of red? The third area is what we call intelligent automation. Well, identifying the problem to act on is important, and then acting on automating that and creating, uh, a recommendation system where, uh, you know, you can be proactive about it is even more important. And finally, all of this focuses on efficiency. What about effectiveness? Effectiveness comes when you create a feedback loop, when what happens in production is related to your support systems and your developers so that they can respond rapidly. So we call that continuous feedback. So these are the four key capabilities that, uh, you know, uh, you should look for in an AI ops system. And that's what we offer as well. >>Russia, there's four key capabilities that businesses need to be looking for. I'm wondering how those help to align business. And it it's, again like operational excellence. It's something that we talk about a lot is the alignment of business. And it a lot more challenging, easier said than done, right. But I want you to explain how can AI ops help with that alignment and align it outputs to business outcomes? >>Yeah. So, you know, one of the things, uh, I'm going to say something that is, uh, that is, uh, that is simple, but, but, but this harder, but alignment is not on systems alignment is with people, right? So when people align, when organizations align, when cultures align, uh, dramatic things can happen. So in the context of AI ops VC, when, when SRE is aligned with the DevOps engineers and information architects and, uh, uh, you know, it operators, uh, you know, they enable organizations to reduce the gap between intent and outcome or output and outcome that said, uh, you know, these personas need mechanisms to help them better align, right. Help them better visualize, see the, you know, what we call single source of truth, right? So there are four key things that I want to call out. When we work with large enterprises, we find that customer journey alignment with the, you know, what we call it systems is critical. >>So how do you understand your business imperatives and your customer journey goals, whether it is car to a purchase or whether it is, uh, you know, bill shock scenarios and Swan alignment on customer journey to your it systems is one area that you can reduce the gap. The second area is how do you create a scenario where your teams can find problems before your customers do right outage scenarios and so on. So that's the second area of alignment. The third area of alignment is how can you measure business impact driven services? Right? There are several services that an organization offers versus an it system. Some services are more critical to the business than others, and these change in a dynamic environment. So how do you, how do you understand that? How do you measure that and how, how do you find the gaps there? So that's the third area of alignment that we, that we help and last but not least there are, there are things like NPS scores and others that, that help us understand alignment, but those are more long-term. But in the, in the context of, uh, you know, operating digitally, uh, you want to use customer experience and business, uh, you know, a single business outcome, uh, as a, as a key alignment factor, and then work with your systems of engagement and systems of interaction, along with your key personas to create that alignment. It's a people process technology challenge. >>So, whereas one of the things that you said there is that it's imperative for the business to find a problem before a customer does, and you talked about outages there, that's always a goal for businesses, right. To prevent those outages, how can AI ops help with that? Yeah, >>So, you know, outages, uh, talk, you know, go to resiliency of a system, right? And they also go to, uh, uh, agility of the same system, you know, if you're a customer and if you're whipping up your mobile app and it takes more than three milliseconds, uh, you know, you're probably losing that customer, right. So outages mean different things, you know, and there's an interesting website called down detector.com that actually tracks all the old pages of publicly available services, whether it's your bank or your, uh, you know, tele telecom service or a mobile service and so on and so forth. In fact, the key question around outages for, from, uh, from, uh, you know, executives are the question of, are you ready? Right? Are you ready to respond to the needs of your customers and your business? Are you ready to rapidly resolve an issue that is impacting customer experience and therefore satisfaction? >>Are you creating a digital trust system where customers can be, you know, um, uh, you know, customers can feel that their information is secure when they transact with you, all of these, getting into the notion of resiliency and outages. Now, you know, one of the things that, uh, that I, I often, uh, you know, work with customers around, you know, would that be find as the radius of impact is important when you deal with outages? What I mean by that is problems occur, right? How do you respond? How quickly do you take two seconds, two minutes, 20 minutes, two hours, 20 hours, right? To resolve the problem that radius of impact is important. That's where, you know, you have to bring a gain people, process technology together to solve that. And the key thing is you need a system of intelligence that can aid your teams, you know, look at the same set of parameters so that you can respond faster. That's the key here. >>We look at digital transformation at scale. Raj, how does AI ops help influence that? >>You know, um, I'm going to take a slightly long-winded way to answer this question. See when it comes to digital transformation at scale, the focus on business purpose and business outcome becomes extremely critical. And then the alignment of that to your digital supply chain, right, are the, are the, are the key factors that differentiate winners in the, in their digital transformation game? Really, what we have seen, uh, with, with winners is they operate very differently. Like for example, uh, you know, Nike matures, its digital business outcomes by shoes per second, right? Uh, Apple by I-phones per minute, Tesla by model threes per month, are you getting this, getting it right? I mean, you want to have a clear business outcome, which is a measure of your business, uh, in effect, I mean, ENC, right? Which, which, uh, um, my daughter use and I use very well. >>Right. Uh, you know, uh, they measure by revenue per hour, right? I mean, so these are key measures. And when you have a key business outcome measure like that, you can everything else, because you know what these measures, uh, you know, uh, for a bank, it may be deposits per month, right now, when you move money from checking account to savings account, or when you do direct deposits, those are, you know, banks need liquidity and so on and so forth. But, you know, the, the key thing is that single business outcome has a Starburst effect inside the it organization that touches a single money moment from checking a call to savings account can touch about 75 disparate systems internally. Right? So those think about it, right? I mean, all, all we're doing is moving money from checking account a savings account. Now that goats into a it production system, there are several applications. >>There is a database, there is, there are infrastructures, there are load balancers that are webs. You know, you know, the web server components, which then touches your, your middleware component, which is a queuing system, right. Which then touches your transactional system. Uh, and, uh, you know, which may be on your main frames, what we call mobile to mainframe scenario, right? And we are not done yet. Then you have a security and regulatory compliance system that you have to touch a fraud prevention system that you have to touch, right? A state department regulation that you may have to meet and on and on and on, right? This is the chat that it operations teams face. And when you have millions of customers transacting, right, suddenly this challenge cannot be managed by human beings alone. So therefore you need a system of intelligence that augments human intelligence and acts as your, you know, your, your eyes and ears in a way to, to point pinpoint where problems are. >>Right. So digital transformation at scale really requires a very well thought out AI ops system, a platform, an open extensible platform that, uh, you know, uh, that is heterogeneous in nature because there's tools, products in organizations. There is a lot of databases in systems. There are millions of, uh, uh, you know, customers and hundreds of partners and vendors, you know, making up that digital supply chain. So, you know, AI ops is at the center of an enabling an organization achieve digital op you know, transformation at scale last but not least. You need continuous feedback loop. Continuous feedback loop is the ability for a production system to inform your dev ops teams, your finance teams, your customer experience teams, your cost modeling teams about what is going on so that they can so that they can reduce the intent, come gap. >>All of this need to come together, what we call BizOps. >>That was a great example of how you talked about the Starburst effect. I actually never thought about it in that way, when you give the banking example, but what you should is the magnitude of systems. The fact that people alone really need help with that, and why intelligent automation and AI ops can be transformative and enable that scale. Raj, it's always a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for joining me today. And we'll be right back with our next segment. Welcome back to the AI ops virtual forum. We've heard from our guests about the value of AI ops and why and how organizations are adopting AI ops platforms. But now let's see AI ops inaction and get a practical view of AI ops to deep Dante. The head of AI ops at Broadcom is now going to take you through a quick demo. >>Hello. So they've gotta head off AI ops and automation here. What I'm going to do today is talk through some of the key capabilities and differentiators of Broadcom's CII ops solution in this solution, which can be delivered on cloud or on-prem. We bring a variety of metric alarm log and applauded data from multiple sources, EPM, NetApps, and infrastructure monitoring tools to provide a single point of observability and control. Let me start where our users mostly stock key enterprises like FSI, telcos retailers, et cetera, do not manage infrastructure or applications without having a business context. At the end of the day, they offer business services governed by SLS service level objectives and SLI service level indicators are service analytics, which can scale to a few thousand services, lets our customers create and monitor the services as per their preference. They can create a hierarchy of services based on their business practice. >>For example, here, the sub services are created based on functional subsistence for certain enterprises. It could be based on location. Users can import these services from their favorite CMDB. What's important to note that not all services are born equal. If you are a modern bank, you may want to prioritize tickets coming from digital banking, for example, and this application lets you rank them as per the KPI of your choice. We can source the availability, not merely from the state of the infrastructure, whether they're running or not. But from the SLS that represent the state of the application, when it comes to triaging issues related to the service, it is important to have a complete view of the topology. The typology can show both east-west elements from mobile to mainframe or not South elements in a network flow. This is particularly relevant for a large enterprise who could be running the systems of engagement on the cloud and system of records on mainframe inside the firewall here, you can see that the issue is related to the mainframe kick server. >>You can expand to see the actual alarm, which is sourced from the mainframe operational intelligence. Similarly, clicking on network will give the hub and spoke view of the network devices, the Cisco switches and routers. I can click on the effected router and see all the details Broadcom's solution stores, the ontological model of the typology in the form of a journal graph where one can not only view the current state of the typology, but the past as well, talking of underlying data sources, the solution uses best of the pre data stores for structured and unstructured data. We have not only leveraged the power of open source, but have actively contributed back to the community. One of the key innovations is evident in our dashboarding framework because we have enhanced the open source Grafana technology to support these diverse data sources here. You can see a single dashboard representing applications to infrastructure, to mainframe again, sourcing a variety of data from these sources. >>When we talk to customers, one of the biggest challenges that they face today is related to alarms because of a proliferation of tools. They are currently drowning in an ocean of hundreds and thousands of alarms. This increases the Elmont support cost to tens of dollars per ticket, and also affects LTO efficiency leading to an average of five to six hours of meantime to resolution here is where we have the state of the art innovation utilizing the power of machine learning and ontology to arrive at the root cause we not only clusterize alarms based on text, but employ the technique of 41st. We look at the topology then at the time window duplicate text based on NLP. And lastly learn from continuous training of the model to deduce what we call situations. This is an example of a situation. As you can see, we provide a time-based evidence of how things unfolded and arrive at a root cause. >>Lastly, the solution provides a three 60 degree closed loop remediation either through a ticketing system or by direct invocation of automation actions instead of firing hard-coded automation runbooks for certain conditions, the tool leverage is machine learning to rank automation actions based on past heuristics. That's why we call it intelligent automation to summarize AI ops from Broadcom helps you achieve operational excellence through full stack observability, coupled with AIML that applies across modern hybrid cloud environments, as well as legacy ones uniquely. It ties these insights with intelligent automation to improve customer experience. Thank you for watching from around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to our final segment today. So we've discussed today. The value that AI ops will bring to organizations in 2021, we'll discuss that through three different perspectives. And so now we want to bring those perspectives together and see if we can get a consensus on where AI ops needs to go for folks to be successful with it in the future. So bringing back some folks Richland is back with us. Senior analysts, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester smartness here is also back in global product management at Verizon and Srinivasan, Reggie Gopaul head of product and strategy at Broadcom guys. Great to have you back. So let's jump in and rich, we're going to, we're going to start with you, but we are going to get all three of you, a chance to answer the questions. So we've talked about why organizations should adopt AI ops, but what happens if they choose not to what challenges would they face? Basically what's the cost of organizations doing nothing >>Good question, because I think in operations for a number of years, we've kind of stand stood, Pat, where we are, where we're afraid change things sometimes, or we just don't think about a tooling as often. The last thing to change because we're spending so much time doing project work and modernization and fighting fires on a daily basis. >>Problem is going to get worse. If we do nothing, >>You know, we're building new architectures like containers and microservices, which means more things to mind and keep running. Um, we're building highly distributed systems. We're moving more and more into this hybrid world, a multi-cloud world, uh, it's become over-complicate and I'll give a short anecdote. I think, eliminate this. Um, when I go to conferences and give speeches, it's all infrastructure operations people. And I say, you know, how many people have three X, five X, you know, uh, things to monitor them. They had, you know, three years ago, two years ago, and everyone's saying how many people have hired more staff in that time period, zero hands go up. That's the gap we have to fill. And we have to fill that through better automation, more intelligent systems. It's the only way we're going to be able to fill back out. >>What's your perspective, uh, if organizations choose not to adopt AI ops. Yeah. So I'll do that. Yeah. So I think it's, I would just relate it to a couple of things that probably everybody >>Tired off lately and everybody can relate to. And this would resonate that we have 5g, which is all set to transform the world. As we know it, I don't have a lot of communication with these smart cities, smart communities, IOT, which is going to make us pivotal to the success of businesses. And as you've seen with this call with, you know, transformation of the world, that there's a, there's a much bigger cost consciousness out there. People are trying to become much more, forward-looking much more sustainable. And I think at the heart of all of this, that the necessity that you have intelligent systems, which are bastardizing more than enough information that previously could've been overlooked because if you don't measure engagement, not going right. People not being on the same page of this using two examples or hundreds of things, you know, that play a part in things, but not coming together in the best possible way. So I think it has an absolute necessity to drive those cost efficiencies rather than, you know, left right and center laying off people who are like 10 Mattel to your business and have a great tribal knowledge of your business. So to speak, you can drive these efficiencies through automating a lot of those tasks that previously were being very manually intensive or resource intensive. And you could allocate those resources towards doing much better things, which let's be very honest going into 20, 21 after what we've seen with 2020, it's going to be mandate treat. >>And so Raj, I saw you shaking your head there when he was mom was sharing his thoughts. What are your thoughts about that sounds like you agree. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, uh, to put things in perspective, right? I mean we're firmly in the digital economy, right? Digital economy, according to the Bureau of economic analysis is 9% of the U S GDP. Just, you know, think about it in, in, in, in, in the context of the GDP, right? It's only ranked lower, slightly lower than manufacturing, which is at 11.3% GDP and slightly about finance and insurance, which is about seven and a half percent GDP. So the digital economy is firmly in our lives, right. And as Huisman was talking about it, you know, software eats the world and digital, operational excellence is critical for customers, uh, to, uh, you know, to, uh, to drive profitability and growth, uh, in the digital economy. >>It's almost, you know, the key is digital at scale. So when, uh, when rich talks about some of the challenges and when Huseman highlights 5g as an example, those are the things that, that, that come to mind. So to me, what is the cost or perils of doing nothing? You know, uh, it's not an option. I think, you know, more often than not, uh, you know, C-level execs are asking head of it and they are key influencers, a single question, are you ready? Are you ready in the context of addressing spikes in networks because of the pandemic scenario, are you ready in the context of automating away toil? Are you ready to respond rapidly to the needs of the digital business? I think AI ops is critical. >>That's a great point. Roger, where does stick with you? So we got kind of consensus there, as you said, wrapping it up. This is basically a, not an option. This is a must to go forward for organizations to be successful. So let's talk about some quick wins, or as you talked about, you know, organizations and sea levels asking, are you ready? What are some quick wins that that organizations can achieve when they're adopting AI? >>You know, um, immediate value. I think I would start with a question. How often do your customers find problems in your digital experience before you do think about that? Right. You know, if you, if you, you know, there's an interesting web, uh, website, um, uh, you know, down detector.com, right? I think, uh, in, in Europe there is an equal amount of that as well. It ha you know, people post their digital services that are down, whether it's a bank that, uh, you know, customers are trying to move money from checking account, the savings account and the digital services are down and so on and so forth. So some and many times customers tend to find problems before it operations teams do. So a quick win is to be proactive and immediate value is visibility. If you do not know what is happening in your complex systems that make up your digital supply chain, it's going to be hard to be responsive. So I would start there >>Visibility this same question over to you from Verizon's perspective, quick wins. >>Yeah. So I think first of all, there's a need to ingest this multi-care spectrum data, which I don't think is humanly possible. You don't have people having expertise, you know, all the seven layers of the OSI model and then across network and security and at the application level. So I think you need systems which are now able to get that data. It shouldn't just be wasted reports that you're paying for on a monthly basis. It's about time that you started making the most of those in the form of identifying what are the efficiencies within your ecosystem. First of all, what are the things, you know, which could be better utilized subsequently you have the >>Opportunity to reduce the noise of a trouble tickets handling. It sounds pretty trivial, but >>An average you can imagine every trouble tickets has the cost in dollars, right? >>So, and there's so many tickets and there's art >>That get created on a network and across an end user application value, >>We're talking thousands, you know, across and end user >>Application value chain could be million in >>A year. So, and so many of those are not really, >>He, you know, a cause of concern because the problem is something. >>So I think that whole triage is an immediate cost saving and the bigger your network, the bigger >>There's a cost of things, whether you're a provider, whether you're, you know, the end customer at the end of the day, not having to deal with problems, which nobody can resolve, which are not meant to be dealt with. There's so many of those situations, right, where service has just been adopted, >>Which is just coordinate quality, et cetera, et cetera. So many reasons. So those are the, >>So there's some of the immediate cost saving them. They are really, really significant. >>Secondly, I would say Raj mentioned something about, you know, the user, >>Your application value chain, and an understanding of that, especially with this hybrid cloud environment, >>Et cetera, et cetera, right? The time it takes to identify a problem in an end user application value chain across the seven layers that I mentioned with the OSI reference model across network and security and the application environment. It's something that >>In its own self has massive cost to business, >>Right? That could be >>No sale transactions that could be obstructed because of this. There could be, and I'm going to use a really interesting example. >>We talk about IOT. The integrity of the IOT machine is exciting. >>Family is pivotal in this new world that we're stepping into. >>You could be running commands, >>Super efficient. He has, everything is being told to the machine really fast with sending yeah. >>Everything there. What if it's hacked? And if that's okay, >>Robotic arm starts to involve the things you don't want it to do. >>So there's so much of that. That becomes a part of this naturally. And I believe, yes, this is not just like from a cost >>standpoint, but anything going wrong with that code base, et cetera, et cetera. These are massive costs to the business in the form of the revenue. They have lost the perception in the market as a result, the fed, >>You know, all that stuff. So >>These are a couple of very immediate problems, but then you also have the whole player virtualized resources where you can automate the allocation, you know, the quantification of an orchestration of those virtualized resources, rather than a person having to, you know, see something and then say, Oh yeah, I need to increase capacity over here, because then it's going to have this particular application. You have systems doing this stuff and to, you know, Roger's point your customer should not be identifying your problems before you, because this digital is where it's all about perception. >>Absolutely. We definitely don't want the customers finding it before. So rich, let's wrap this particular question up with you from that senior analyst perspective, how can companies use make big impact quickly with AI ops? Yeah, >>Yeah, I think, you know, and it was been really summed up some really great use cases there. I think with the, uh, you know, one of the biggest struggles we've always had in operations is isn't, you know, the mean time to resolve. We're pretty good at resolving the things. We just have to find the thing we have to resolve. That's always been the problem and using these advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms now across all machine and application data, our tendency is humans is to look at the console and say, what's flashing red. That must be what we have to fix, but it could be something that's yellow, somewhere else, six services away. And we have made things so complicated. And I think this is what it was when I was saying that we can't get there anymore on our own. We need help to get there in all of this stuff that the outline. >>So, so well builds up to a higher level thing of what is the customer experience about what is the customer journey? And we've struggled for years in the digital world and measuring that a day-to-day thing. We know an online retail. If you're having a bad experience at one retailer, you just want your thing. You're going to go to another retailer, brand loyalty. Isn't one of like it, wasn't a brick and mortal world where you had a department store near you. So you were loyal to that because it was in your neighborhood, um, online that doesn't exist anymore. So we need to be able to understand the customer from that first moment, they touch a digital service all the way from their, their journey through that digital service, the lowest layer, whether it be a database or the network, what have you, and then back to them again, and we're not understanding, is that a good experience? >>We gave them. How does that compare to last week's experience? What should we be doing to improve that next week? Uh, and I think companies are starting and then the pandemic certainly, you know, push this timeline. If you listened to the, the, the CEO of Microsoft, he's like, you know, 10 years of digital transformation written down. And the first several months of this, um, in banks and in financial institutions, I talked to insurance companies, aren't slowing down. They're trying to speed up. In fact, what they've discovered is that they're, you know, obviously when we were on lockdown or what have you, they use of digital servers is spiked very high. What they've learned is they're never going to go back down. They're never going to return to pretend endemic levels. So now they're stuck with this new reality. Well, how do we service those customers and how do we make sure we keep them loyal to our brand? >>Uh, so, you know, they're looking for modernization opportunities. A lot of that that's things have been exposed. And I think Raj touched upon this very early in the conversation is visibility gaps. Now that we're on the outside, looking in at the data center, we know we architect things in a very way. Uh, we better ways of making these correlations across the Sparrow technologies to understand where the problems lies. We can give better services to our customers. And I think that's really what we're going to see a lot of the innovation and the people really clamoring for these new ways of doing things that starting, you know, now, I mean, I've seen it in customers, but I think really the push through the end of this year to next year when, you know, economy and things like that straightened out a little bit more, I think it really, people are gonna take a hard look of where they are and is, you know, AI ops the way forward for them. And I think they'll find it. The answer is yes, for sure. >>So we've, we've come to a consensus that, of what the parallels are of organizations, basically the cost of doing nothing. You guys have given some great advice on where some of those quick wins are. Let's talk about something Raj touched on earlier is organizations, are they really ready for truly automated AI? Raj, I want to start with you readiness factor. What are your thoughts? >>Uh, you know, uh, I think so, you know, we place our, her lives on automated systems all the time, right? In our, in our day-to-day lives, in the, in the digital world. I think, uh, you know, our, uh, at least the customers that I talk to our customers are, uh, are, uh, you know, uh, have a sophisticated systems. Like for example, advanced automation is a reality. If you look at social media, AI and ML and automation are used to automate away, uh, misinformation, right? If you look at financial institutions, AI and ML are used to automate away a fraud, right? So I want to ask our customers why can't we automate await oil in it, operation systems, right? And that's where our customers are. Then the, you know, uh, I'm a glass half full, uh, cleanup person, right? Uh, this pandemic has been harder on many of our customers, but I think what we have learned from our customers is they've Rose to the occasion. >>They've used digital as a key needs, right? At scale. That's what we see with, you know, when, when Huseman and his team talk about, uh, you know, network operational intelligence, right. That's what it means to us. So I think they are ready, the intersection of customer experience it and OT, operational technology is ripe for automation. Uh, and, uh, you know, I, I wanna, I wanna sort of give a shout out to three key personas in this mix. It's about people, right? One is the SRE persona, you know, site, reliability engineer. The other is the information security persona. And the third one is the it operator automation engineer persona. These folks in organizations are building a system of intelligence that can respond rapidly to the needs of their digital business. We at Broadcom, we are in the business of helping them construct a system of intelligence that will create a human augmented solution for them. Right. So when I see, when I interact with large enterprise customers, I think they, they, you know, they, they want to achieve what I would call advanced automation and AI ML solutions. And that's squarely, very I ops is, you know, is going as it, you know, when I talk to rich and what, everything that rich says, you know, that's where it's going and that's what we want to help our customers to. So, which about your perspective of organizations being ready for truly automated AI? >>I think, you know, the conversation has shifted a lot in the last, in, in pre pandemic. Uh, I'd say at the end of last year, we're, you know, two years ago, people I'd go to conferences and people come up and ask me like, this is all smoke and mirrors, right? These systems can't do this because it is such a leap forward for them, for where they are today. Right. We we've sort of, you know, in software and other systems, we iterate and we move forward slowly. So it's not a big shock. And this is for a lot of organizations that big, big leap forward where they're, they're running their operations teams today. Um, but now they've come around and say, you know what? We want to do this. We want all the automations. We want my staff not doing the low complexity, repetitive tasks over and over again. >>Um, you know, and we have a lot of those kinds of legacy systems. We're not going to rebuild. Um, but they need certain care and feeding. So why are we having operations? People do those tasks? Why aren't we automating those out? I think the other piece is, and I'll, I'll, I'll send this out to any of the operations teams that are thinking about going down this path is that you have to understand that the operations models that we're operating under in, in INO and have been for the last 25 years are super outdated and they're fundamentally broken for the digital age. We have to start thinking about different ways of doing things and how do we do that? Well, it's, it's people, organization, people are going to work together differently in an AI ops world, um, for the better. Um, but you know, there's going to be the, the age of the 40 person bridge call thing. >>Troubleshooting is going away. It's going to be three, four, five focused engineers that need to be there for that particular incident. Um, a lot of process mailer process we have in our level, one level, two engineering. What have you running of tickets, gathering of artifacts, uh, during an incident is going to be automated. That's a good thing. We should be doing those, those things by hand anymore. So I'd say that the, to people's like start thinking about what this means to your organization. Start thinking about the great things we can do by automating things away from people, having to do them over and over again. And what that means for them, getting them matched to what they want to be doing is high level engineering tasks. They want to be doing monitorization, working with new tools and technologies. Um, these are all good things that help the organization perform better as a whole great advice and great kind of some of the thoughts that you shared rich for what the audience needs to be on the lookout. For one, I want to go over to you, give me your thoughts on what the audience that should be on the lookout for, or put on your agendas in the next 12 months. >>So there's like a couple of ways to answer that question. One thing would be in the form of, you know, what are some of the things they have to be concerned about in terms of implementing this solution or harnessing its power. The other one could be, you know, what are the perhaps advantages they should look to see? So if I was to talk about the first one, let's say that, what are some of the things I have to watch out for like possible pitfalls that everybody has data, right? So yeah, there's one strategy we say, okay, you've got the data, let's see what we can do with them. But then there's the exact opposite side, which has to be considered when you're doing that analysis. What are the use cases that you're looking to drive? Right. But then use cases you have to understand, are you taking a reactive use case approach? >>Are you taking active use cases, right? Or, yeah, that's a very, very important concentration. Then you have to be very cognizant of where does this data that you have, where does it reside? What are the systems and where does it need to go to in order for this AI function to happen and subsequently if there needs to be any backward communication with all of that data in a process manner. So I think these are some of the very critical points because you can have an AI solution, which is sitting in a customer data center. It could be in a managed services provider data center, like, right, right. It could be in a cloud data center, like an AWS or something, or you could have hybrid views, et cetera, all of that stuff. So you have to be very mindful of where you're going to get the data from is going to go to what are the use cases you're trying to get out to do a bit of backward forward. >>Okay, we've got this data thing and I think it's a journey. Nobody can come in and say, Hey, you've built this fantastic thing. It's like Terminator two. I think it's a journey where we built starting with the network. My personal focus always comes down to the network and with 5g so much, so much more right with 5g, you're talking low latency communication. That's like the true power of 5g, right? It's low latency, it's ultra high bandwidth, but what's the point of that low latency. If then subsequently the actions that need to be taken to prevent any problems in application, IOT applications, remote surgeries, uh, self driving vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. What if that's where people are sitting and sipping their coffees and trying to take action that needs to be in low latency as well. Right? So these are, I think some of the fundamental things that you have to know your data, your use cases, that location, where it needs to be exchanged, what are the parameters around that for extending that data? >>And I think from that point at one word, it's all about realizing, you know, sense of business outcomes. Unless AI comes in as a digital labor that shows you, I have, I have reduced your this amount of time and that's a result of big problems or identified problems for anything. Or I have saved you this much resource in a month, in a year or whatever timeline that people want to see it. So I think those are some of the initial starting points, and then it all starts coming together. But the key is it's not one system that can do everything. You have to have a way where, you know, you can share data once you've caught all of that data into one system. Maybe you can send it to another system at make more, take more advantage, right? That system might be an AI and IOT system, which is just looking at all of your street and make it sure that Hey parents. So it's still off just to be more carbon neutral and all that great stuff, et cetera, et cetera, >>Stuff for the audience to can cigarette rush, take us time from here. What are some of the takeaways that you think the audience really needs to be laser focused on as we move forward into the next year? You know, one thing that, uh, I think a key takeaway is, um, uh, you know, as we embark on 2021, closing the gap between intent and outcome and outputs and outcome will become critical, is critical. Uh, you know, especially for, uh, you know, uh, digital transformation at scale for organizations context in the, you know, for customer experience becomes even more critical as who Swan Huseman was talking, uh, you know, being network network aware network availability is, is a necessary condition, but not sufficient condition anymore. Right? The what, what, what customers have to go towards is going from network availability to network agility with high security, uh, what we call app aware networks, right? How do you differentiate between a trade, a million dollar trade that's happening between, uh, you know, London and New York, uh, uh, versus a YouTube video training that an employee is going through? Worse is a YouTube video that millions of customers are, are >>Watching, right? Three different context, three different customer scenarios, right? That is going to be critical. And last but not least feedback loop, uh, you know, responsiveness is all about feedback loop. You cannot predict everything, but you can respond to things faster. I think these are sort of the three, three things that, uh, that, uh, you know, customers aren't going to have to have to really think about. And that's also where I believe AI ops, by the way, AI ops and I I'm. Yeah. You know, one of the points that was smart and shout out to what he was saying was heterogeneity is key, right? There is no homogeneous tool in the world that can solve problems. So you want an open extensible system of intelligence that, that can harness data from disparate data sources provide that visualization, the actionable insight and the human augmented recommendation systems that are so needed for, uh, you know, it operators to be successful. I think that's where it's going. >>Amazing. You guys just provided so much content context recommendations for the audience. I think we accomplished our goal on this. I'll call it power panel of not only getting to a consensus of what, where AI ops needs to go in the future, but great recommendations for what businesses in any industry need to be on the lookout for rich Huisman Raj, thank you for joining me today. We want to thank you for watching. This was such a rich session. You probably want to watch it again. Thanks for your time. Thanks so much for attending and participating in the AI OBS virtual forum. We really appreciate your time and we hope you really clearly understand the value that AI ops platforms can deliver to many types of organizations. I'm Lisa Martin, and I want to thank our speakers today for joining. We have rich lane from Forrester who's fund here from Verizon and Raj from Broadcom. Thanks everyone. Stay safe..

>>From around the globe with digital coverage brought to you by Broadcom. >>So our final segment today, so we've discussed today, the value that AI ops will bring to organizations in 2021, we'll discuss that through three different perspectives. And so now we want to bring those perspectives together and see if we can get a consensus on where AI ops needs to go for folks to be successful with it in the future. So bringing back some folks Richland is back with us. Senior analysts, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forester with smartness here is also back global product management at Verizon and Srinivasan, Reggie Gopaul head of product and strategy at Broadcom guys. Great to have you back. So let's jump in and Richard, we're going to, we're going to start with you, but we are going to get all three of you, a chance to answer the questions. So rich, we've talked about why organizations should adopt AI ops, but what happens if they choose not to what challenges would they face? Basically what's the cost of organizations doing nothing. >>Yeah. So it's a really good question because I think in operations for a number of reviews, we've kind of stand, uh, stood Pat, where we are, where we're afraid change things sometimes. Or we just don't think about a tooling is often the last thing to change because we're spending so much time doing project work and modernization and fighting fires on a daily basis. Uh, that problem is going to get worse if we do nothing. Um, you know, we're building new architectures like containers and microservices, which means more things to mind and keep running. Um, we're building highly distributed systems where you got moving more and more into this hybrid world, the multicloud world, uh, it's become over-complicate and I'll give a short anecdote. I think, eliminate this. Um, when I go to conferences and give speeches, it's all infrastructure operations people. And I say, you know, how many people have three X, five X, you know, uh, things to monitor them. They had, you know, three years ago, two years ago, and everyone's hand goes up, say how many people have hired more staff in that time period. Zero hands go up. That's the gap we have to fill. And we have to fill that through better automation, more intelligent systems. It's the only way we're going to be able to feel back out. >>What's your perspective, uh, if organizations choose not to adopt AI ops. >>Yeah. >>That's pretty good. So I'll do that. >>Yeah. So I think it said, I say it's related to a couple of things that probably everybody tired off lately and everybody can relate to. And this would resonate that we'd have 5g, which is old set to transform the one that we know it, of communication with these smart cities, smart communities, IOT, which is going to become pivotal to the success of businesses. And as we seen with this, COVID, you know, transformation of the world that there's a, there's a much bigger cost consciousness out there. People are trying to become much more, forward-looking much more sustainable. And I think at the heart of all of this, that the necessity that you have intelligent systems, which are bastardizing more than enough information that previous equipment overlooked, because if you don't measure engagement, not going right. People love being on the same page of this using two examples for hundreds of things that play a part in things not coming together in the best possible way. So I think it has an absolute necessity to grind those cost efficiencies rather than, you know, left right and center laying off people who are like pit Mattel to your business and have a great tribal knowledge of your business. So to speak, you can drive these efficiencies through automating a lot of those tasks that previously were being very manually intensive or resource intensive. And you could allocate those resources towards doing much better things, which let's be very honest going into 20, 21, after what we've seen with 2020, it's going to be mandate >>Shaking your head there when you, his mom was sharing his thoughts. What are your thoughts about this sounds like you agree. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, uh, to put things in perspective, right? I mean, we are firmly in the digital economy, right? Digital economy, according to the Bureau of economic analysis is 9% of the us GDP. Just, you know, think about it in, in, in, in, in the context of the GDP, right? It's only ranked lower, slightly lower than manufacturing, which is at 11.3% GDP and slightly about finance and insurance, which is about seven and a half percent GDP. So G the digital economy is firmly in our lives, right? And so someone was talking about it, you know, software eats the world and digital, operational excellence is critical for customers, uh, to, uh, you know, to, uh, to drive profitability and growth, uh, in the digital economy. >>It's almost, you know, the key is digital at scale. So when, uh, when rich talks about some of the challenges and when newsman highlights 5g, as an example, those are the things that, that, that come to mind. So to me, what is the cost or perils of doing nothing? You know, uh, it's not an option. I think, you know, more often than not, uh, you know, C-level execs are asking their head of it and they are key influencers, a single question, are you ready? Are you ready in the context of addressing spikes in networks because of, uh, the pandemic scenario, are you ready in the context of automating away toil? Are you ready to respond rapidly to the needs of the digital business? I think AI ops is critical. >>That's a great point, Roger, where gonna stick with you. So we got kind of consensus there, as you said, wrapping it up. This is basically a, not an option. This is a must to go forward for organizations to be successful. So let's talk about some quick wins. So as you talked about, you know, organizations and C-levels asking, are you ready? What are some quick wins that that organizations can achieve when they're adopting AI? >>You know, um, immediate value. I think I would start with a question. How often do your customers find problems in your digital experience before you think about that? Right. You know, if you, if you, you know, there's an interesting web, uh, website, um, uh, you know, down detector.com, right? I think, uh, in, in Europe, there is an equal amount of that as well. It ha you know, people post their digital services that are down, whether it's a bank that, uh, you know, customers are trying to move money from checking account, the savings account and the digital services are down and so on and so forth. So some and many times customers tend to find problems before it operation teams do. So. A quick win is to be proactive and immediate value is visibility. If you do not know what is happening in your complex systems that make up your digital supply chain, it's going to be hard to be responsive. So I would start there >>Vice visibility. There's some question over to you from Verizon's perspective, quick wins. >>Yeah. So I think first of all, there's a need to ingest this multi-layered monetize spectrum data, which I don't think is humanly possible. You don't have people having expertise, you know, all seven layers of the OSI model and then across network and security and at the application of it. So I think you need systems which are now able to get that data. It shouldn't just be wasted reports that you're paying for on a monthly basis. It's about time that you started making the most of those in the form of identifying what are the efficiencies within your ecosystem. First of all, what are the things, you know, which could be better utilized subsequently you have the opportunity to reduce the noise of a troubled tickets handle. It sounds pretty trivial, but as an average, you can imagine every shop is tickets has the cost in dollars, right? >>So, and there's so many tickets and there's desserts that get on a network and across an end-user application value chain, we're talking thousands, you know, across and end user application value chain could be million in a year. So, and so many of those are not really, you know, cause of concern because the problem is somewhere else. So I think that whole triage is an immediate cost saving and the bigger your network, the bigger the cost of whether you're a provider, whether you're, you know, the end customer at the end of the day, not having to deal with problems, which nobody can resolve, which are not meant to be dealt with. If so many of those situations, right, where service has just been adopted, which is coordinate quality, et cetera, et cetera. So many reasons. So those are the, those are some of the immediate cost savings. >>They are really, really significant. Secondly, I would say Raj mentioned something about, you know, the end user application value chain and an understanding of that, especially with this hybrid cloud environment, et cetera, et cetera, right? The time it takes to identify a problem in an end-user application value chain across the seven layers that I mentioned with the OSI reference model across network and security and the application environment, it's something that in its own self has a massive cost to business, right? They could be point of sale transactions that could be obstructed because of this. There could be, and I'm going to use a very interesting example. When we talk IOT, the integrity of the IOT machine is extremely pivotal in this new world that we're stepping into. You could be running commands, which are super efficient. He has, everything is being told to the machine really fast. >>We're sending everything there. What if it's hacked? And if that robotic arm starts to involve the things you don't want it to do. So there's so much of that. That becomes a part of this naturally. And I believe, yes, this is not just like from a cost saving standpoint, but anything going wrong with that code base, et cetera, et cetera. These are massive costs to the business in the form of the revenue. They have lost the perception in the market as a result, the fed, you know, all that stuff. So these are a couple of very immediate funds, but then you also have the whole player virtualized resources where you can automate the allocation, you know, the quantification of an orchestration of those virtualized resources, rather than a person having to, you know, see something and then say, Oh yeah, I need to increase capacity over here, because then it's going to have this particular application. You have systems doing this stuff to, you know, Roger's point your customer should not be identifying your problems before you, because this digital where it's all about perception. >>Absolutely. We definitely don't want the customers finding it before. So rich, let's wrap this particular question up with you from that analyst perspective, how can companies use make big impact quickly with AI? >>Yeah, I think, you know, and it has been really summed up some really great use cases there. I think with the, uh, you know, one of the biggest struggles we've always had in operations is isn't, you know, the mean time to resolve. We're pretty good at resolving the things. We just have to find the thing we have to resolve. That's always been the problem and using these advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms now across all machine and application data, our tendency as humans is to look at the console and say, what's flashing red. That must be what we have to fix, but it could be something that's yellow, somewhere else, six services away. And we have made things so complicated. And I think this is what it was. One was saying that we can't get there anymore on our own. We need help to get there in all of this stuff that the outline. >>So, so well builds up to a higher level thing of what is the customer experience about what is the customer journey? And we've struggled for years in the digital world and measuring that a day-to-day thing. We know an online retail. If you're having a bad experience at one retailer, you just want your thing. You're going to go to another retailer, brand loyalty. Isn't one of the light. It wasn't the brick and mortal world where you had a department store near you. So you were loyal to that cause it was in your neighborhood, um, online that doesn't exist anymore. So we need to be able to understand the customer from that first moment, they touch a digital service all the way from their, their journey through that digital service, the lowest layer, whether it be a database or the network, what have you, and then back to them again, and we not understand, is that a good experience? >>We gave them. How does that compare to last week's experience? What should we be doing to improve that next week? And I think companies are starting and then the pandemic, certainly you push this timeline. If you listen to the, the, the CEO of Microsoft, he's like, you know, 10 years of digital transformation written down. And the first several months of this, um, in banks and in financial institutions, I talked to insurance companies, aren't slowing. Now they're trying to speed up. In fact, what they've discovered is that there, obviously when we were on lockdown or what have you, the use of digital services spiked very high. What they've learned is they're never going to go back down. They're never going to return to pretend levels. So now they're stuck with this new reality. Well, how do we service those customers and how do we make sure we keep them loyal to our brand? >>Uh, so, you know, they're looking for modernization opportunities. A lot of that, that things have been exposed. And I think Raj touched upon this very early in the conversation is visibility gaps. Now that we're on the outside, looking in at the data center, we know we architect things in a very specific way. Uh, we better ways of making these correlations across the Sparrow technologies to understand where the problems lies. We can give better services to our customers. And I think that's really what we're going to see a lot of the, the innovation and the people really for these new ways of doing things starting, you know, w now, I mean, I think I've seen it in customers, but I think really the push through the end of this year to next year when, you know, economy and things like that, straighten out a little bit more. I think it really, people are going to take a hard look of where they are is, you know, AI ops the way forward for them. And I think they'll find it. The answer is yes, for sure. >>So we've, we've come to a consensus that, of what the parallels are of organizations, basically the cost of doing nothing. You guys have given some great advice on where some of those quick wins are. Let's talk about something Raj touched on earlier, is organizations, are they really ready for truly automated AI? Raj, I want to start with you readiness factor. What are your thoughts? >>Uh, you know, uh, I think so, you know, we place our, her lives on automated systems all the time, right? In our, in our day-to-day lives, in the, in the digital world. I think, uh, you know, our, uh, at least the customers that I talked to our customers are, uh, are, uh, you know, uh, have a sophisticated systems, like for example, advanced automation is a reality. If you look at social media, AI and ML and automation are used to automate away, uh, misinformation, right? If you look at financial institutions, AI and ML are used to automate away a fraud, right? So I want to ask our customers why can't we automate await oil in it, operation systems, right? And that's where our customers are. Then, you know, uh, I'm a glass half full, uh, clinical person, right? Uh, this pandemic has been harder on many of our customers, but I think what we have learned from our customers is they've Rose to the occasion. >>They've used digital as a key moons, right? At scale. That's what we see with, you know, when, when Huseman and his team talk about, uh, you know, network operational intelligence, right. That's what it means to us. So I think they are ready, the intersection of customer experience it and OT, operational technology is ripe for automation. Uh, and, uh, you know, I, I wanna, I wanna sort of give a shout out to three key personas in, in this mix. It's somewhat right. One is the SRE persona, you know, site, reliability engineer. The other is the information security persona. And the third one is the it operator automation engineer persona. These folks in organizations are building a system of intelligence that can respond rapidly to the needs of their digital business. We at Broadcom, we are in the business of helping them construct a system of intelligence that will create a human augmented solution for them. Right. So when I see, when I interact with large enterprise customers, I think they, they, you know, they, they want to achieve what I would call advanced automation and AI ML solutions. And that's squarely, very I ops is, you know, is going as an it, you know, when I talked to rich and what, everything that rich says, you know, that's where it's going. And that's what we want to help our customers to. >>So rich, talk to us about your perspective of organizations being ready for truly automated AI. >>I think, you know, the conversation has shifted a lot in the last, in, in pre pandemic. Uh, I'd say at the end of last year, we're, you know, two years ago, people I'd go to conferences and people come up and ask me like, this is all smoke and mirrors, right? These systems can't do this because it is such a leap forward for them, for where they are today. Right. We we've sort of, you know, in software and other systems, we iterate and we move forward slowly. So it's not a big shock. And this is for a lot of organizations that big, big leap forward in the way that they're running their operations teams today. Um, but now they've come around and say, you know what? We want to do this. We want all the automations. We want my staff not doing the low complexity, repetitive tasks over and over again. >>Um, you know, and we have a lot of those kinds of legacy systems. We're not going to rebuild. Um, but they need certain care and feeding. So why are we having operations? People do those tasks? Why aren't we automating those out? I think the other piece is, and I'll, I'll, I'll send this out to any of the operations teams that are thinking about going down this path is that you have to understand that the operations models that we're operating under in INO and have been for the last 25 years are super outdated and they're fundamentally broken for the digital age. We have to start thinking about different ways of doing things and how do we do that? Well, it's, it's people, organization, people are going to work together differently in an AI ops world, um, for the better, um, but you know, there's going to be the, the age of the 40 person bridge call thing. >>Troubleshooting is going away. It's going to be three, four, five focused engineers that need to be there for that particular incident. Um, a lot of process mailer process we have for now level one level, two engineering. What have you running of tickets, gathering of artifacts, uh, during an incident is going to be automated. That's a good thing. We shouldn't be doing those, those things by hand anymore. So I'd say that the, to people's like start thinking about what this means to your organization. Start thinking about the great things we can do by automating things away from people, having to do them over and over again. And what that means for them, getting them matched to what they want to be doing is high level engineering tasks. They want to be doing monitorization, working with new tools and technologies. Um, these are all good things that help the organization perform better as a whole >>Great advice and great kind of some of the thoughts that you shared rich for what the audience needs to be on the, for going on. I want to go over to you, give me your thoughts on what the audience should be on the lookout for, or put on your agendas in the next 12 months. >>So there's like a couple of ways to answer that question. One thing would be in the form of, you know, what are some of the things they have to be concerned about in terms of implementing this solution or harnessing its power. The other one could be, you know, what are the perhaps advantages they should look to see? So if I was to talk about the first one, let's say that, what are some of the things you have to watch out for like possible pitfalls that everybody has data, right? So yeah, that's one strategy, we'd say, okay, you've got the data, let's see what we can do with them. But then there's the exact opposite side, which has to be considered when you're doing that analysis that, Hey, what are the use cases that you're looking to drive, right? But then use cases you have to understand, are you taking a reactive use case approach? >>Are you taking quite active use cases, right? Or that that's a very, very important consideration. Then you have to be very cognizant of where does this data that you have vision, it reside, what are the systems and where does it need to go to in order for this AI function to happen and subsequently if there needs to be any, you know, backward communication with all of that data in a process better. So I think these are some of the very critical points because you can have an AI solution, which is sitting in a customer data center. It could be in a managed services provider data center, like, right, right. It could be in a cloud data center, like an AWS or something, or you could have hybrid scenarios, et cetera, all of that stuff. So you have to be very mindful of where you're going to get the data from is going to go to what are the use cases you're trying to, you have to do a bit of backward forward. >>Okay. We've got this data cases and I think it's the judgment. Nobody can come in and say, Hey, you've built this fantastic thing. It's like Terminator two. I think it's a journey where we built starting with the network. My personal focus always comes down to the network and with 5g so much, so much more right with 5g, you're talking low latency communication. That's like the two power of 5g, right? It's low latency, it's ultra high bandwidth, but what's the point of that low latency. If then subsequently the actions that need to be taken to prevent any problems in critical applications, IOT applications, remote surgeries, uh, test driving vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. What if that's where people are sitting and sipping their coffees and trying to take action that needs to be in low latency as well. Right? So these are, I think some of the fundamental things that you have to know your data, your use cases and location, where it needs to be exchanged, what are the parameters around that for extending that data? >>And I think from that point onward, it's all about realizing, you know, in terms of business outcomes, unless AI comes in as a digital labor, that shows you, I have, I have reduced your, this amount of, you know, time, and that's a result of big problems or identified problems for anything. Or I have saved you this much resource right in a month, in a year, or whatever, the timeline that people want to see it. So I think those are some of the initial starting points, and then it all starts coming together. But the key is it's not one system that can do everything. You have to have a way where, you know, you can share data once you've got all of that data into one system, maybe you can send it to another system and make more, take more advantage, right? That system might be an AI and IOT system, which is just looking at all of your streetlights and making sure that Hey, parent switched off just to be more carbon neutral and all that great stuff, et cetera, et cetera >>For the audience, you can take her Raj, take us time from here. What are some of the takeaways that you think the audience really needs to be laser focused on as we move forward into the next year? You know, one thing that, uh, I think a key takeaway is, um, uh, you know, as we embark on 2021, closing the gap between intent and outcome and outputs and outcome will become critical, is critical. Uh, you know, especially for, uh, uh, you know, uh, digital transformation at scale for organizations context in the, you know, for customer experience becomes even more critical as Swan Huseman was talking, uh, you know, being network network aware network availability is, is a necessary condition, but not sufficient condition anymore. Right? The what, what, what customers have to go towards is going from network availability to network agility with high security, uh, what we call app aware networks, right? >>How do you differentiate between a trade, a million dollar trade that's happening between, uh, you know, London and New York, uh, versus a YouTube video training that an employee is going through? Worse is a YouTube video that millions of customers are, are watching, right? Three different context, three different customer scenarios, right? That is going to be critical. And last but not least feedback loop, uh, you know, responsiveness is all about feedback loop. You cannot predict everything, but you can respond to things faster. I think these are sort of the three, uh, three things that, uh, that, uh, you know, customers are going to have to, uh, have to really think about. And that's also where I believe AI ops, by the way, AI ops and I I'm. Yeah. You know, one of the points that was smart, shout out to what he was saying was heterogeneity is key, right? There is no homogeneous tool in the world that can solve problems. So you want an open extensible system of intelligence that, that can harness data from disparate data sources provide that visualization, the actionable insight and the human augmented recommendation systems that are so needed for, uh, you know, it operators to be successful. I think that's where it's going. >>Amazing. You guys just provided so much content context recommendations for the audience. I think we accomplished our goal on this. I'll call it power panel of not only getting to a consensus of what, where AI ops needs to go in the future, but great recommendations for what businesses in any industry need to be on the lookout for rich Huisman Raj, thank you for joining me today. >>Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. >>We want to thank you for watching. This was such a rich session. You probably want to watch it again. Thanks for your time.

(upbeat music) >> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. And as you know, I've been running a CxO series in this COVID economy. And as we go into the post-isolation world, really want to focus and expand our scope and really look at startups. And of course, we're going to look at startups, let's follow the money. And I want to start with the investor. Mark Roberge is here. He's the managing director at Stage 2 capital. He's a professor at the Harvard Business School, former CRO over at HubSpot. Mark, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, you bet, Dave. Thanks for having me. >> So I love that, you know... looking at your career a little bit, on your LinkedIn and following some of your videos, I love the fact that you did, and now you teach and you're also applying it with Stage 2 Capital. Tell us a little bit more about both of your career and Stage 2. >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of it's a bit serendipitous, especially last 10 years, but I've always had this learn, do, teach framework in my, in mind as I go through the decades of my career, you know, like you're probably like 80% learning in your twenties, early thirties and you know, 20% doing. Then, you know, I think my thirties was like leading the HubSpot sales team, a lot of doing, a little bit of teaching, you know, kind of hopping into different schools, et cetera, and also doing a lot of, some writing. And now like, I'm teaching it. I think investing kind of falls into that too, you know, where you've got this amazing opportunity to meet, the next generation of, of extraordinary entrepreneurs and engage with them. So yeah, that, that has been my career. You know, Dave, I've been a, passionate entrepreneur since 22 and then, the last one I did was HubSpot and that led to just an opportunity to build out one of the first sales teams in a complete inside environment, which opened up the doors for a data driven mindset and all this innovation that led to a book that led to recruitment on HBS's standpoint, to like come and teach that stuff, which was such a humbling honor to pursue. And that led to me a meeting my co-founder, Jay Po, of Stage 2 Capital, who was a customer to essentially start the first VC fund, running back by sales and marketing leaders, which was his vision. But when he proposed it to me, addressed a pretty sizeable void, that I saw, in the entrepreneur ecosystem that I thought could make a substantial impact to the success rate of startups. >> Great, I want to talk a little bit about how you guys compete and what's different there, but you know, I've read some of your work, looked at some of your videos, and we can bring that into the conversation. But I think you've got some real forward-thinking for example, on the, you know, the best path to the upper right. The upper right, being that, that xy-axis on growth and adoption, you know, do you go for hyper-growth or do you go for adoption? How you align sales and marketing, how you compensate salespeople. I think you've got some, some leading-edge thinking on that, that I'd love for you to bring into the conversation, but let's start with Stage 2. I mean, how do you compete with the big guys? What's different about Stage 2 Capital? >> Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, we're a bunch of sales and marketing and execs. I mean, our backing is, a hundred plus CROs, VPs of marketing, CMOs from, from the public companies. I mean, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Oracle, Salesforce, SurveyMonkey, Lyft, Asana, I mean, just pick a unicorn, we probably have some representation from it. So that's, a big part of how we compete, is most of the time, when a rocket ship startup is about to build a sales team, one of our LPs gets a call. And because of that, we get a call, right. And, and so there's, we're just deep in, in helping... So first off, assess the potential and risks of a startup in their current, go to market design, and then really, you know, stepping in, not just with capital, but a lot of know-how in terms of, you know, how to best develop this go-to-market for their particular context. So that's a big part of our differentiation. I don't think we've ever lost a deal that we tried to get into, you know, for that reason, just because we come in at the right stage, that's right for our value prop. I'd say Dave, the biggest, sort of difference, in our investing theme. And this really comes out of like, post HubSpot. In addition to teaching the HBS, I did parachute into a different startup every quarter, for one day, where you can kind of like assess their go-to-market, looking for, like, what is the underlying consistency of those series A businesses that become unicorns versus those that flatline. And if I, you know, I've now written like 50 pages on it, which I, you know, we can, we can highlight to the crew, but the underlying cliffnotes is really, the avoidance of a premature focus on top line revenue growth, and an acute focus early on, on customer attention. And, I think like, for those of you, who run in that early stage venture community these days, and especially in Silicon Valley, there's this like, triple, triple, double, double notion of, like year one, triple revenue, year two, triple revenue, year three, double revenue, year four, double revenue, it's kind of evolved to be like the holy grail of what your objectives should be. And I do think like there is a fraction of companies that are ready for that and a large amount of them that, should they pursue that path, will lead to failure. And, and so, we take a heavy lens toward world-class customer retention as a prerequisite, to any sort of triple, triple, double, double blitzscaling type model. >> So, let me ask you a couple of questions there. So it sounds like your LPs are heavily, not only heavily and financially invested, but also are very active. I mean, is that a, is that a fears thing? How active are the LPs in reality? I mean, they're busy people. They're they're software operators. >> Yeah. >> Do they really get involved in businesses? >> Absolutely. I mean, half of our deals that we did in fund one came from the LPs. So we get half of our funnel, comes from LPs. Okay. So it's always like source-pick-win-support. That's like, what basically a VC does. And our LPs are involved in every piece of that. Any deal that we do, we'll bring in four or five of our LPs to help us with diligence, where they have particular expertise in. So we did an insuretech company in Q4, one of our LPs runs insurance practice at Workday. And this particular play he's selling it to big insurance companies. He was extremely helpful, to understand that domain. Post investment, we always bring in four or five LPs to go deeper than I can on a particular topic. So one of our plays is about to stand up in account based marketing, you know, capability. So we brought in the CMO, a former CMO at Rapid7 and the CMO at Unisys, both of which have, stood in, stood up like, account based marketing practices, much more deeply, than I could. You know of course, we take the time to get to know our LPs and understand both their skills, and experiences as well as their willingness to help, We have Jay Simons, who's the President of Atlassian. He doesn't have like hours every quarter, he's running a $50 billion company, right? So we have Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot, right? He's running a $10 billion company now. So, we just get deal flow from them and maybe like an event once or twice a year, versus I would say like 10 to 20% of our LPs are like that. I would say 60% of them are active operators who are like, "You know what? I just miss the early days, and if I could be active with one or two companies a quarter, I would love that." And I would say like a quarter of them are like semi-retired and they're like, they're choosing between helping our company and being on the boat or the golf course. >> Is this just kind of a new model? Do you see having a different philosophy where you want to have a higher success rate? I mean, of course everybody wants to have a, you know, bat a thousand. >> Yeah. >> But I wonder if you could address that. >> Yeah. I don't think it, I'm not advocating slower growth, but just healthier growth. And it's just like an extra, it's really not different than sort of the blitzscaling oriented San Francisco VC, okay? So, you know, I would say when we were doing startups in the nineties, early 2000s before The Lean Startup, we would have this idea and build it in a room for a year and then sell it in parallel, basically sell it everywhere and Eric Ries and The Lean Startup changed all that. Like he introduced MVPs and pivots and agile development and we quickly moved to, a model of like, yeah, when you have this idea, it's not like... You're really learning, keep the team small, keep the burn low, pivot, pivot, pivot, stay agile and find product-market fit. And once you do that, scale. I would say even like, West Coast blitzscaling oriented VCs, I agree with that. My only take is... We're not being scientifically rigorous, on that transition point. Go ask like 10 VCs or 10 entrepreneurs, what's product-market fit, and you'll get 10 different answers. And you'll get answers like when you have lots of sales, I just, profoundly disagree with that. I think, revenue in sales has very little to do with product-market fit. That's like, that's like message-market fit. Like selling ice to Eskimos. If I can sell ice to Eskimos, it doesn't mean that product-market fit. The Eskimos didn't need the ice. It just means I was good at like pitching, right? You know, other folks talk about like, having a workable product in a big market. It's just too qualitative. Right? So, that's all I'm advocating is, that, I think almost all entrepreneurs and investors agree, there's this incubation, rapid learning stage. And then there's this thing called product-market fit, where we switch to rapid scale. And all I'm advocating is like more scientist science and rigor, to understanding some sequences that need to be checked off. And a little bit more science and rigor on what is the optimal pace of scale. Because when it comes to scale, like pretty much 50 out of 50 times, when I talk to a series A company, they have like 15 employees, two sales reps, they got to like 2 million in revenue. They raise an 8 million-dollar round in series A, and they hired 12 salespeople the next month. You know, and Dave, you and your brother, who runs a large sales team, can really understand how that's going to failure almost all the time. (Dave mumbles) >> Like it's just... >> Yeah it's a killer. >> To be able to like absorb 10 reps in a month, being a 50, it's just like... Who even does all those interviews? Who onboards them? Who manages them? How do we feed them with demand? Like these are some of the things I just think, warrant more data and science to drive the decisions on when and how fast to scale. >> Mark, what is the key indicator then, of product-market fit? Is it adoption? Is it renewal rates? >> Yeah. It's retention in my opinion. Right? So, so the, the very simple framework that I require is you're ready to scale when you have product-market and go to market-fit. And let's be, extremely precise, and rigorous on the definitions. So, product-market fit for me, the best metric is retention. You know, that essentially means someone not only purchased your offering, but experienced your offering. And, after that experience decided to repurchase. Whether they buy more from you or they renew or whatever it is. Now, the problem with it is, in many, like in the world we live inside's, it's like, the retention rate of the customers we acquire this quarter is not evident for a year. Right, and we don't have a year to learn. We don't have a year to wait and see. So what we have to do is come up with a leading indicator to customer retention. And that's something that I just hope we see more entrepreneurs talking about, in their product market fit journey. And more investors asking about, is what is your lead indicator to customer retention? Cause when that gets checked off, then I believe you have product-market fit, okay? So, there's some documentation on some unicorns that have flirted with this. I think Silicon Valley calls it the aha moment. That's great. Just like what. So like Slack, an example, like, the format I like to use for the lead indicator of customer retention is P percent of customers, do E event, in T time, okay? So, it basically boils it down to those three variables, P E T. So if we bring that to life and humanize it, 70% of the customers, we sign up, this is Slack, 70% of the customers who sign up, send 2000 team messages in 30 days, if that happens, we have product-market fit. I like that a lot more, than getting to a million in revenue or like having a workable product in a big market. Dropbox, 85% of customers, share one file in one hour. HubSpot, I know this was the case, 75% of customers, use five or more of the 25 features in the platform, within 60 days. Okay? P percent, do E event, in T time. So, if we can just format that, and look at that through customer cohorts, we often get visibility into, into true product market-fit within weeks, if not like a month or two. And it's scientifically, data-driven in terms of his foundation. >> Love it. And then of course, you can align sales compensation, you know, with that retention. You've talked a lot about that, in some of your work. I want to get into some of the things that stage two is doing. You invest in SaaS companies. If I understand it correctly, it's not necessarily early stage. You're looking for companies that have sort of achieved some degree of revenue and now need help. It needs some operational help and scaling. Is that correct? >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's a little bit broader in size, as any sort of like B2B software, any software company that's scaling through a sales team. I mean, look at our backers and look at my background. That's, that's what we have experience in. So not really any consumer plays. And yeah, I mean, we're not, we have a couple product LPs. We have a couple of CFO type LPs. We have a couple like talent HR LPs, but most of us are go-to-market. So we don't, you know, there's awesome seed funds out there that help people set up their product and engineering team and go from zero to one in terms of the MVP and find product-market fit. Right? We like to come in right after that. So it's usually like between the seed and the A, usually the revenue is between half a million and 1.5 million. And of course we put an extraordinary premium on customer retention, okay? Whereas I think most of our peers put an extraordinary premium on top line revenue growth. We put an extraordinary premium on retention. So if I find a $700,000 business that, you know, has whatever 50, 70 customers, you know, depending on their ticket size, it has like North of 90% local retention. That's super exciting. Even if they're only growing like 60%, it's super exciting. >> What's a typical size of investments. Do you typically take board seats or not? >> Yeah. We typically put in like between like seven hundred K, one and a half million, in the first check and then have, larger amounts for follow on. So on the A and the B. We try not to take board's seats to be honest with you, but instead the board observers. It's a little bit selfish in terms of our funds scale. Like the general counsel from other venture capitalists is of course, like, the board seat is there for proper governance in terms of like, having some control over expenditures and acquisition conversations, et cetera, or decisions. But a lot of people who have had experience with boards know that they're very like easy and time efficient when the company is going well. And there are a ton of work when the company is not going well. And it really hurts the scale, especially on a smaller fund like us. So we do like to have board observers seats, and we go to most of the board meetings so that our voice is heard. But as long as there's another fund in there that, has, world-class track record in terms of, holding proper governance at the board level, we prefer to defer to them on that. >> All right, so the COVID lock down, hit really in earnest in March, of course, we all saw the Sequoia memo, The Black Swan memo. You were, I think it HubSpot, when, you remember the Rest In Peace Good Times memo, came out very sort of negative, put up all over the industry, you know, stop spending. But there was some other good advice in there. I don't mean to sort of, go too hard on that, but, it was generally a negative sentiment. What was your advice to your portfolio companies, when COVID hit, what were you telling them? >> Yeah, I summarized this in our lead a blog article. We kicked off our blog, which is partially related to COVID in April, which has kind of summarize these tips. So yes, you are correct, Dave. I was running sales at HubSpot in '08 when we had last sort of major economic, destabilization. And I was freaking out, you know (laughs briefly) at the time we were still young, like 20, 30 reps and numbers to chase. And... I was, actually, after that year, looking back, we are very fortunate that we had a value prop that was very recession-proof. We were selling to the small business community, who at the time was cutting everything except new ways to generate sales. And we happen to have the answer to that and it happened to work, right? So it showed me that, there's different levels of being recession proof. And we accelerated the raise of our second fund for stage two with the anticipation that there would be a recession, which, you know, in the venture world, some of the best things you could do is close a fund and then go into a recession, because, there's more deals out there. The valuations are lower and it's much easier to understand, nice to have versus must have value props. So, the common theme I saw in talking to my peers who looked back in the '01 crisis, as well as the '08 crisis, a year later was not making a bolder decision to reorient their company in the current times. And usually on the go-to-market, that's two factors, the ICP who you're selling to, ideal customer profile and the CVP, what your message is, what's your customer value prop. And that was really, in addition to just stabilizing cash positions and putting some plans in there. That was the biggest thing we pushed our portfolio on was, almost like going through the exercise, like it's so hard as a human, to have put like nine months into a significant investment leading up to COVID and now the outcome of that investment is no longer relevant. And it's so hard to let that go. You know what I mean? >> Yeah. >> But you have to, you have to. And now it's everything from like, you spent two years learning how to sell to this one persona. And now that persona is like, gyms, retail and travel companies. Like you've got to let that go. (chuckle simultaneously) You know what I mean? Like, and, you know, it's just like... So that's really what we had to push folks on was just, you know, talking to founders and basically saying this weekend, get into a great headspace and like, pretend like you were parachuted into your company as a fresh CEO today. And look around and appreciate the world and what it is. What is this world? What are the buyers talking about? Which markets are hot, which markets are not, look at the assets that you have, look at your product, look at your staff, look at your partners, look at your customer base, and come up with a strategy from the ground up based on that. And forget about everything you've done in the last year. Right? And so, that's really what we pushed hard on. And in some cases, people just like jumped right on it. It was awesome. We had a residential real estate company that within two weeks, stood up a virtual open house module that sold like hotcakes. >> Yeah. >> That was fantastic execution. And we had other folks that we had to have like three meetings with to push them deep enough, to go more boldly. But that, was really the underlying pattern that I saw in past, recessions and something I pushed the portfolio on, is just being very bold on your pivots. >> Right? So I wanted to ask you how your portfolio companies are doing. I'm imagining you saw some looked at this opportunity as a tailwind. >> Yeah. >> You mentioned the virtual, open house, a saw that maybe were exposed, had, revenue exposure to hard-hit industries and others kind of in the middle. How are your portfolio companies doing? >> Yes, strong. I'm trying to figure out, like, of course I'm going to say that, but I'm trying to figure out like how to provide quant, to just demonstrate that. We were fortunate that we had no one, and this was just dumb luck. I mean, we had no one exclusively selling to like travel, or, restaurants or something. That's just bad luck if you were, and we're fortunate that we got a little lucky there, We put a big premium, obviously we had put a big premium on customer retention. And that, we always looked at that through our recession proof lens at all our investments. So I think that helped, but yeah, I mean, we've had, first off, we made one investment post COVID. That was the last investment on our first fund and that particular company, March, April, May, their results were 20% higher than any month in history. Those are the types of deals we're seeing now is like, you literally find some deals that are accelerating since COVID and you really just have to assess if it's permanent or temporary, but that one was exciting. We have a telemedicine company that's just like, really accelerating post COVID, again, luck, you know, in terms of just their alignment with the new world we're living in. And then, jeez! I mean, we've had, I think four term sheets, for markups in our portfolio since March. So I think that's a good sign. You know, we only made 11 investments and four of them, either have verbal or submitted term sheets on markups. So again, I feel like the portfolio is doing quite well, and I'm just trying to provide some quantitative measures. So it doesn't feel like a political answer. (Mark chuckles) >> Well, thank you for that, but now, how have you, or have you changed your sort of your thesis post COVID? Do you feel like your... >> Sure. >> Your approach was sort of geared towards, you know, this... >> Yeah. >> Post COVID environment? But what changes have you made. >> A little bit, like, I think in any bull market, generally speaking, there's just going to be a lot of like triple, triple, double, double blitzscaling, huge focus on top-line revenue growth. And in any down market, there's going to be a lot of focus on customer retention unit economics. Now we've always invested in the latter, so that doesn't change much. There's a couple of things that have changed. Number one, we do look for acceleration post COVID. Now, that obviously we were not, we weren't... That lens didn't exist pre-COVID, So in addition to like great retention, selling through a sales team, around the half million to a million revenue, we want to see acceleration since COVID and we'll do diligence to understand if that's a permanent, or a temporary advantage. I would say like... Markets like San Francisco, I think become more attractive in post COVID. There's just like, San Francisco has some magic happening there's some VC funds that avoid it, cause it's too expensive. There's some VC funds that only invest in San Francisco, because there's magic happening. We've always just been, you know... we have two portfolio companies there that have done well. Like we look at it and if it's too expensive, we have to avoid it. But we do agree that there's magic happening. I did look at a company last week. (chuckles inaudibly) So Dave, there are 300K in revenue, and their last valuation is 300 million. (both chuckle) >> Okay, so why is San Francisco more attractive, Mark? >> Well, I mean and those happened in Boston too. >> We looked at... (Mark speaks inaudibly) >> I thought you were going to tell me the valuations were down. (Dave speaks inaudibly) >> Here's the deal all right, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't and this is one, but in general, I think like they have come down. And honestly, the other thing that's happened is good entrepreneurs that weren't raising are now raising. Okay? So, a market like that I think becomes more attractive. The other thing that I think that happens is your sort of following strategies different. Okay so, there is some statistical evidence that, you know, obviously we're coming out of a bear market, a bullish market in, in both the public and the private equities. And there's been a lot of talk about valuations in the private sector is just outrageous. And so, you know, we're fortunate that we come in at this like post seed, pre-A, where it's not as impacted. It is, but not as or hasn't been, but because there's so many more multibillion-dollar funds that have to deploy 30 to 50 million per investment, there's a lot of heating up that's happened at that stage. Okay? And so pre COVID, we would have taken advantage of that by taking either all or some of our money off the table, in these following growth rounds. You know, as an example, we had a company that we made an investment with around 30 million evaluation and 18 months later, they had a term sheet for 500. So that's a pretty good return in 18 months. And you know, that's an expensive, you know, so that that's like, wow, you know, we probably, even though we're super bullish on the company, we may want to take off a 2X exposition... >> Yeah. >> And take advantage of the secondaries. And the other thing that happens here, as you pointed out, Dave is like, risk is not, it doesn't become de-risk with later rounds. Like these big billion dollar funds come in, they put pressure on very aggressive strategic moves that sometimes kills companies and completely outside of our control. So it's not that we're not bullish on the company, it's just that there's new sets of risks that are outside of the scope of our work. And so, so that that's probably like a less, a lesser opportunity post COVID and we have to think longer term and have more patient capital, as we navigate the next year or so of the economy. >> Yeah, so we've got to wrap, but I want to better understand the relationship between the public markets and you've seen the NASDAQ up, which is just unbelievable when you look at what's happening in main street, and the relationship between the public markets and the private markets, are you saying, they're sort of tracking, but not really identical. I mean, what's the relationship. >> Okay, there's a hundred, there's thousands of people that are better at that than me. Like the kind of like anecdotal thoughts that I, or the anecdotal narrative that I've heard in past recessions and actually saw too, was the private market, when the public market dropped, it took nine months roughly for the private market to correct. Okay, so there was a lag. And so there's, some arguments that, that would happen here, but this is just a weird situation, right? Of like the market, even though we're going through societal crazy uncertainty, turmoil and, and tremendous tragedy, the markets did drop, but they're pretty hot right now, specifically in tech. And so there's a number of schools of thoughts there that like some people claim that tech is like the utilities companies of the eighties, where it's just a necessity and it's always going to be there regardless of the economy. Some people argue that what's happened with COVID and the remote workplace have made, you know, accelerated the adoption of tech, the inevitable adoption, and others could argue that like, you know, the worst is still the come. >> Yeah. And of course, you've got The Fed injecting so much liquidity into the system, low interest rates, Mark, last question. Give me a pro tip for entrepreneurs. (Mark Sighs) >> I would say, like, we've talked a lot about, this methodology with, you know, customer retention, really focusing there, align everything there as opposed to top line revenue growth initially. I think that the extension I do at this point is, do your diligence on your investors, and what their thoughts are on your future growth plans to see if they're aligned. Cause that, that becomes like, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, when they dig into this work, they do want to operate around it. But that becomes that much harder when you have investors that think a different way. So I would just, you know, just always keep in mind that, you know, I know it's so hard to raise money, but you know, do the diligence on your investors to understand, what they'd like to see in the next two years and how it's aligned with your own vision. >> Mark is really great having you on. I'd love to have you back and as this thing progresses, and see how it all shakes out. It really a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thanks, Dave. I appreciate you having me on. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. We'll see you next time. (music plays)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Cuban sites, powered by ET are in this breaking analysis, we want to accomplish three things. First thing I'll do is we'll recap the current spending outlook. Next, we want to share some of the priorities and sentiments and the outlook that we're hearing from leading tech execs that we've been interviewing in the past couple of weeks on the remote cube. And finally, we'll take a look at really what's going on in the market place, a little bit of a look forward and what we expect in the coming weeks and months ahead. Now, as you know, E. T. R was really the first to quantify with real survey data the impact of covert 19 on I t spend. So I just want to review that for a moment. This CTR graphic right here shows that results from more than 1200 CIOs and I T practitioners. That shows that they expect their I t spending how they're they're spending on the change in 2020 now, look at the gray bar shows a very large number of organizations that they're plowing ahead without any change. In overall, I spend about 35% now shown in the green bars before 21% of respondents are actually increase their budgets this year. And the red bars, of course, they show the carnage. Really, 28% of customers are expecting a decrease of more than 10% year on year. Now, as we've reported, the picture would look a lot worse were it not for the work from home infrastructure, offset by E spending on collaboration tools and related networking security. VPN, VD I interest infrastructure, etcetera. Now remember each year launched this survey on March 11th and ran it through early April. So it caught the change in sentiment literally in real time on a daily basis. And that's what I'm showing here in this graphic. What it does is it overlays key events that occurred during that time frame and what E. T. R did was they modeled and rear end the data excluding the responses prior to each event. So, of course, the forecast got progressively worse over time. But as you can see on the Purple Line. There was a little bit of an uptick in sentiment from the stimulus package, and it looked like, you know, there's another. It looks like there's another economic cash injection coming soon. Now, as we've reported, the card forecast calls for around 4% decline in I t spend from 2020. That's down from plus 4% prior to Corona virus. It's ER has now entered its self imposed quiet period for two weeks. But what we're doing here is showing some of the sectors that we're watching closely for big changes. We're gonna drill into these over the next several weeks. Now, of course, is we've reported we're seeing a substantial cut in I t spend across the board. Capex will be down. We would expect sectors like I t consulting and outsourcing to be way, way down as organizations put a lot of projects on the back burner. But there are bright spots is shown here in the green. One that we really haven't highlighted to date is cloud really haven't dug into that and also data center related services around Cloud Cloud, we think, is definitely going to remain strong and these related services to get connect clouds via Coehlo services and really reducing latency across clouds and on Prem, we think will remain strong. Now I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about some of the learnings and takeaways from our conversations with CSOs over the past couple of weeks. One of the great things about the Cube is we get to build relationships with many, many people. Over the past 10 years, I've probably personally interviewed close to 5000 people, so we've reached out to a number of those execs over the last couple of weeks to really try and understand how they're managing through this cove in 19 Crisis. So let me summarize just some of the things that we heard. And then I'll let the execs speak to you directly first, of course, like tech execs, are there half full people perpetual optimist, if you will. It was interesting to hear how many of the people that I spoke with, that they actually had early visibility on this crisis. Why? Because a lot of our operations, we're actually in China and other parts of Asia, so they saw this coming to an extent, and they saw it coming to the U. S. And so you know, there were somewhat ready and you're here. They all had on air of confidence about their long term viability and putting their put their employees ahead of profits. But the same time, once they see that their employees are okay, they want to get them focused and productive. Now what they've also done is they've increased the cadence and the frequency of their communications. Yeah, and most, if not all, are trying to get back with a free no strings attached software and other similar programs. But the bottom line is, they really don't know what's coming. They don't know when this thing will end. They don't know what a recovery really is gonna look like when people are going to feel safe traveling again what the overall economic impact is gonna be. So I think it's best summarized to say they're hoping for the best, but planning for the worst. But let's listen to this highlight clip that we put together of five execs that I talked to along with John Furrier Melissa DiDonato of Susa. Frank Sluman, who had snowflake and he's formerly the chairman and CEO of service. Now Jeremy Burton is the CEO of a company called Observe. He used to be the CMO of Dell and EMC. Before that, brand products Sanjay Poonam as the CEO of VM Ware and ST ST Vossen heads up Cisco's collaboration business. Roll the clip. >>What keeps me up at night now and how I wake up every morning is wondering about the health of my employees, that a couple of employees, one that was quite ill in Italy. We were phoning him and calling and emailing him from his hospital bed. And that's what's really keeping me going. What's inspiring me to leave this incredible company is the people and the culture that they built that I'm honoring and taking forward as part of the open source value system. My first movers, Let's not overreact. Take a deep breath. Let's really examine what we know. Let's not jump to conclusions. Let's not try to project things that were not capable of projecting death hard because, you know, we tend to have sort of levels off certainty about what's gonna happen in the next week in the next month, and so on. All of a sudden that's out of the window creates enormous anxiety with people. So, in other words, you've got a sort of a reset to Okay, what do we know? What can we do? What we control, Um, and and not let our minds sort of, you know, go out of control. So I talk to are people time of maintain a sense of normalcy focused on the work. Stay in the state in the moment. And ah, I don't turn the news feed off. Right, Because the hysteria you get through that through the media really not helpful. Just haven't been through, you know, a couple of recessions where, you know, we all went through 9 11 You know, the world just turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is, you said it very much is a cliche, but you gotta live in the moment. What can I do right now? What can I affect right now? How can I make sure that you know what I'm working on is a value for when we come out the other side. And when you know more code balls come along. I think you'd better reason about that with the best information you have at the time. I always tell people the profits of VM Ware wheat. If you are not well, if your loved ones not well, if you take a picture of that first, we will be fine. You know this to show fast, but if you're healthy, let's turn our attention because we're not going to just sit in a little mini games. We're gonna so, customers, How do we do that? A lot of our customers are adjusting to this pool, and as a result they have to, you know, either order devices, but the laptop screens things were the kinds to allow work for your environment to be as close to productive as they're working today. I do see some, some things coming. Problem right? Do I expect the volumes off collaboration to go down? You know, it's never going to go back to the same level. The world as we know it is going to change forever. We are going to have a post code area, and that's going to be changed for the better. There's a number of employees who have been skeptical, reticent, working from home were suddenly going to say just work from home. Thing is not so bad after all. >>So you can hear from the execs who all either currently or one point of lead large companies in large teams. They're pretty optimistic now. The other thing that's Lukman told me, by the way, is he approves investments in engineering with no qualms because that's the future of the company. But he's much more circumspect with regard to go to market investments because he wants to see a high probability of yield from the sales teams before making investments there. I also want to share some perspectives that I've learned from small early stage companies, and we've all seen the Sequoia Black Swan memo and you might remember there onerous rest in peace, good times the alert that they put out in 2008. It basically they're essentially advising companies to stop spending on non essential items. By the way, another slew of society also somewhat scoffed at this advice, and he told me on the Cube, you should always stop spending money on non essential items. At any rate, I've talked to a number of early stage investors and portfolio companies, and I'll share a little bit of their play Bach playbook that they're using during this crisis, and it might have some value to the cut, cut cut narrative that you're hearing out there. I think the summary for these early stage startups is first focus on those customers that got you to where you are today. In other words, don't lose sight of your core. The second thing is, try to hone your go to market and align it with current conditions. In other words, paint a picture of the ideal customer and the value proposition that you deliver specifically in the context of the current market. The third thing is, they're updating their forecast more frequently and running sensitivity analysis much more often so that they can better predict outcomes. I e. Reset. You're likely best case and worst case models. The third is essentially reset your near term and midterm plans and those goals and re balance your expense portfolio to reflect these new targets. And this is important by the way, to communicate to your investors. When I've seen is those companies with annual recurring revenue there actually in pretty good shape, believe it or not, in almost all cases, I've seen targets lowered. But there are some examples of startups that are actually increasing their outlook. Think, Zoom, even those who is not a startup anymore. But generally I've seen resets of between 5 to 10% downward, which you know what often is in pretty much in line with the board level goals. And I've seen more drastic reductions as well of up to 50% now. So we've heard some pretty good stories from larger tech companies and some of these VC funded startups. Now I want to talk about small business broadly and what we're hearing from small business owners and also the banks that serve them. Look, I'm not going to sugar coat this many small businesses, as you well know, in deep trouble. They're gonna go out of business. They're laying off people on. There are a number of unemployed the aid package that the government's putting forth the small businesses. It's not working its way through the banking system. Not nearly fast enough, despite the Treasury secretaries efforts, The bottom line is banks don't want to make these loans to small businesses. Right now, there's too much that they don't understand. They're making no money on these loans they're being overwhelmed with. Volume will give you some examples. Bank of America, when the small business payroll program first hit signal that would Onley help companies with both ah banking relationship and an existing lending relationship with the bank UPS is another example said it was only gonna directly help companies with over 500 employees. And for small businesses, it was outsourcing that relationship to another firm, which, of course, meant you had to go through a new rectal exam, if you will, with that new firm. In a way, you can't blame the banks. They're being asked to execute on these programs without clear guidance on how they're supposed to enforce guidelines. And what happens if they make a mistake? Is the federal government gonna pull their guaranteed backing? What are those guidelines? They seem to be changing all the time. And what's the banks, liability and authority to enforce them? Why don't I spend time talking about this? Well, nearly half of US employees work for small businesses, and nearly 17 million workers as of this date have filed for unemployment, and I'll say the banks got bailed out in the financial crisis of 2008 and they need to step up, period, and the government needs to help them, all right. The other buzz kill data that I want to bring up is our national debt. Now many have invoked that there's no such thing as a free lunch, including the famous Milton Friedman, the Economist who I'm gonna credit. Others have said it, but I'll give it to him. Why? Because he espoused controlling the money supply and letting the market's fix themselves bailouts. The banks, airlines, Boeing, automakers, etcetera, those air antithetical to his underlying philosophy. Currently, the U. S national debt is $24 trillion. That's $194,000. Protects player Americans. Personal debt is now 20 trillion. Our unfunded liabilities, like Social Security, Medicare, etcetera now stands at a whopping 139 trillion. And that equates to about 422,000 per citizen. Think about this. The average liquid savings for US family is 15 K, and the U. S debt is now 111% of GDP. So we've been applying Kenzie and Economics for a while now. I'm gonna say it seems to have been working. Think about the predictions of inflation after the 8 4000 and nine crisis. They proved to be wrong. But my concern is I don't see how we grow our way out of this debt, and I worry about that. I've worried about this for a long time, but look, we're knee deep into it and it looks like there's no turning back so well, I'll try to keep my rhetoric to a minimum and stay positive here because I think there is light at the end of the tunnel. We're starting to see some some good opportunities emerging here just in terms of flattening the curve and the like. One of the things that pretty positive about is there gonna be some permanent changes from Cove it. It's kind of ironic that this thing hit as we're entering a new decade decade and as I said before, I expect digital transformations to be accelerated because of this crisis and the many companies that have talked digital from the corner office. But I haven't necessarily really walked the walk, I think will now I think is going to be more cloud more subscription less wasted labor, more automation, more work from home unless big physical events, at least in the next couple of years. So that's kind of the new expectation. As always, we're going to continue to report from our studios in Palo Alto and Boston, and we really welcome and appreciate your feedback. Remember, these segments are all available as podcasts, and we're publishing regularly on silicon angle dot com and on wiki bond dot com. Check out ctr dot plus for all the spending action, and you can feel free to comment on my LinkedIn post or DME at development or email me at David Volante Wiki. Sorry, David Vellante is silicon angle dot com. This is Dave Volante for the Cube Insights powered by CTR. Thanks for watching everyone. We'll see you next time. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(energetic funk music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you remote from our Boston-area studio in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and really happy to welcome to the program, actually, from down the road from where I'm sitting, but testing our coast-to-coast live-to-air remote capabilities, of course, everybody is working from home or things like that, Rob Strechay, CUBE alumni and friend of the program. Rob, it's great to see you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me on. Really glad to help you guys out and get on here and talk about what's goin' on, 'cause this remote thing is definitely going to be the wave for the next month or two, at least. >> Yeah, so, Rob, you spend a lot of your time talking to companies about strategic planning and the first thing for you is, in the industry, sometimes we talk about these black swan events, the things that, you know, we had our plans in place, a lot of companies either had their 2020 sales kickoffs or were getting ready for them, and all of a sudden, basically, everything that you were planning for, let's stop and re-evaluate, because coronavirus stuff is hitting, economic conditions globally are being impacted. What's the first thing that you tell people when you're advising when something completely unexpected and far-reaching, that we might not have full information on, hits? >> Yeah, I think there is, it's a great way to target and say, "Okay, where can I trim the fat, "but at the same time, where do I not "want to over-rotate or panic?" And I think that's a big piece of it, is that you don't want to go and panic too much and say, "Hey, we have to throw everything out." I think there's an opportunity, and there's definitely opportunities, but if you're looking at the different verticals that are being hit by this, if you look at things like healthcare, we have HIMSS that's supposed to be going on this week that was canceled, and all of the medical professionals and IT professionals at those hospitals are pretty much on lockdown. So if you're selling into that vertical, maybe then it is time to panic a little bit, or find another vertical, or understand how you go cross-vertical, in a way. So you have to evaluate what's going on, but don't panic, don't over-react to these types of events. >> So, Rob, you've worked with a lot of companies that provide disaster recovery. In the IT space, it's, "How do I deal with a failure?" One of the things that I know a lot of companies look at is when things go wrong, when there is some natural disaster or, like what we're having today, is, "Do I jump in and say, 'Hey, we can offer things'?" You see a lot of the companies that are providing remote services, take your Google, Microsoft, Zooms, are, "Hey, here's a free tier that you're able to use," but how much do you jump on this as a marketer, or how much do you just say, "Hey, we're here for you, "if there's anything we can do to help there," but you don't want to be seen as ambulance chasing or trying to profit off of some widespread disasters? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly it. The ambulance chasing part, you have to use a little common sense when you're going into these, and I think that goes a long way. You don't want to be seen as ambulance chasing, and, for instance, some of the small- to medium-size companies I've been watching in the tech and talking to some of their teams, they're putting out information, saying, "Hey, we're still up." If they're shipping hardware, "Hey, we're "still within our lead times. "We've built out enough capacity prior to this "and we'll be able to ship within 14 days of an order." So, reassuring their customers that they can get the kit out to them. At the same time, they're saying, "Hey, here is "what we're seeing from our customers, "that, if you're having trouble even once we do "ship it, you don't have somebody on site "to take it in, so we can offer services "to help you with that. So, helping them do staff augmentation or do things in a different manner, I see that as not the ambulance chasing aspect of it. I think if you're marketing into it, it's a little tough when you say, "Hey, well, "I'm the best remote desktop thing going, "and everybody can work from home," and trying to say, "And by the way, you have to buy into this "particular tier to get your entire company going." I think, again, you can look at, how do you share, maybe, the pain or share a loss leader going in, and look to build that. If you have confidence in your product, you'll get them on board, and they'll continue to do this, and they'll continue to move forward with it, because, like you said, I don't think anybody was necessarily prepared for a quarantine of an entire country, like Italy, or something of that nature. >> Yeah, the remote work is definitely a very hot topic. That doesn't necessarily mean that today is the day to start the 5,000-person virtual desktop project. >> Exactly. >> Because we know how long these things have a lead time. Rob, I want to ask you, actually, when you talk to customers, you've spent a lot of time in your career talking to customers, one of the buzzwords we've had in the industry is digital transformation. One of the big outcomes of digital transformation is to be able to react and move fast and be more agile. So I just wanted to get your take on what you're hearing from customers, where, of course, it's a spectrum, but what they're doing, and is this something that they should they should put on hold, is it something is going to help them prepare for things that they weren't necessarily thinking about? >> I think it's the latter, right? I think you're really, I would push in on digital transformation at this point in time, because you're not going to know what's going to break until you get into these situations, and I would say that we've seen a couple in the financial industry as we've gone through the volatility in the markets where they've pushed in on digital transformation, or there are some startups that have really pushed in on doing things in a new way from the traditional financial services companies, and they've found out, hey, stuff is breaking, and they're going to pay some fines to the SEC. And some of the traditional ones that have their digital transformation projects, they've bumped into this same exact thing, where they were having outages. So it's not just the new startups, it's some of the older, more established players that are finding out that, hey, you don't know until you get into that war, you don't know until you engage that enemy, per se, as that black swan event, what's going to break. So push in, I would almost double down on it, and say, "Listen, this is going to be "the way that helps us smooth these out. "As we can distribute things out, "we don't have, necessarily, one data center "where everybody has to go to, "and now that entire county is locked down, "or there's the National Guard surrounding it "and you can't get to it." >> Yeah, Rob, I'm wondering if you have any commentary on just the general dispersion of the workforce. You've worked for a variety of sizes of company, you've been a remote worker, you've worked for companies where you're far separated from the headquarters. Any kind of tips or recommendations from your background that you'd have for people and today? >> Yeah, I think, again, for the people who haven't done it before, it is an adjustment. You actually find that you work more hours being at home than you would in a natural, an office. I think that also, how do you keep your sanity when you're really distant from people, and how do you keep that connection and that culture? I definitely think that these solutions, like Teams and Slack and what have you, and Zoom and Webex, have come a long way to help connect people, and I think it's really leveraging those tools around you to have that connection. And I think that we've seen some of the announcements of people about putting out guidelines of, "Hey, here's how we have a remote workforce." And I've seen, actually, more, and it's been a trend out on the West Coast for a little while, where their engineering teams, the dev teams, are very diverse and very disparate because you can't find everybody in the Valley anymore. So how, maybe some of the people are in Washington, maybe they're in Oregon, and California, you have some on the East Coast, or even over in the Ukraine, for instance. Trying to create events to bring everybody together, doing more outreach as an executive to the entire company, becomes critical because sharing of that information is what people want to understand. They want to feel connected back into what's going on at what they perceive as corporate. >> Yeah, so some great commentary there, Rob. Yeah, absolutely, we've seen plenty of the software companies out there that have not only tooling, but best practices on how to do this, as well as, through social media, I've seen a lot of blog posts, things on Twitter and the like, yeah, and some things that you don't think about as much. I'm not regularly a remote worker, but, right, make sure you take time to eat, make sure you've blocked out the hours that you're going to have meals with family. And something I always noticed is, "Oh my gosh, I might spend an entire day "like this on conference calls (Rob laughs) "or sitting and working," as opposed to, if you're in the office, you get up, you walk around, you talk to some people, and it's like, you need to make sure you stretch (laughs) a little bit-- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Because otherwise, you can end up sitting for eight hours, and that's really not good. >> Rob: (laughs) Yeah, definitely need those mental breaks. >> Yeah, all right, Rob, I want to give you the final word. What's, let's kind of put beyond some of the things that are right in front of us right now, give you kind of an open technology space. What's interesting you out in the market here in the early parts of 2020? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot of very interesting things going on with AI, and I think people are finally starting to get past the hype of "AI this, AI that" and trying to look at what the use cases are behind AI, and how that's really going to help reinvent some of the technology that we have used. I kind of always say that everything old is new again. But I think there's going to be some great new tech coming out that will help enable these types of digital transformations, and I see a lot of new companies approaching AI and not just saying, "Hey, I'm an AI company," but, "Here's the use case that I'm really fulfilling." And I think that's showing some of the maturity, I think that's going to help as this artificial intelligence or machine learning really starts to push in and help people become more operationally efficient, so maybe then we can start to realize some more of cloud, and more of this, "Hey, I had this data center, "now I am moving everything to the cloud," versus, "Well, I'm going to move it, "but I'm going to lift and shift, "and I still have the operational legacy." >> Yeah, absolutely. If I can do a little compare and contrast, back in the big-data world, everybody used to always complain that we had the best minds in our business working on how we could optimize people clicking on an ad, (Rob laughs) and when I look at AI, there's a lot of tech for good out there, there's amazing outcomes, there's things that it can really be transformational. All right, Rob, I know that you've been doing a little bit more writing, you're posting on LinkedIn some of your strategy. If people want to learn more and keep an eye on what you're doing, what would you recommend? >> Yeah, I would say go onto my Twitter feed, @RealStrech, and-or go to my LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me there. It's Rob Strechay, you can find me there pretty easily. There's not many Strechays in the world. So feel free to connect with me and view my articles there, and really, this has been a lot of fun. >> All right, well, always good to get two boys from Parsippany, New Jersey, to get together, talk about technology, and share it with the community. Rob, great to catch up with you. >> Thanks, Stu, take care. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, everybody, and thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (energetic funk music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live! From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Frank Artale, the Managing partner at Prime Foray, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE Frank. >> Glad to be here. >> So before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about the energy of this place, you've been to many, many an Ignite, way back before it was even called Ignite. >> Oh yeah! Yes, this is, Ignite is the evolution of something that Microsoft used to call TechEd. So it was like back in, when I was in Microsoft, so even back in the '90s, we had to figure out a way to educate the technical community, and we decided to start this thing, and interestingly enough, the first one ever was here in O\rlando, much smaller venue, I think at The Swan and the Dolphin, but I've been coming to them on and off, you know for the past, 26 years or so. >> So tell us a little bit about what you're doing now at Prime Foray, what is Prime Foray? >> So we're a boutique and advisory consulting company, and we do work with what I call ISVs, so basically someone that makes software, but we engage with folks who are at some point on a journey to cloud, and that means both from a business and technical perspective. Whether they're just getting started, thinking about moving products, that maybe they had it from on premises, onto a cloud platform, or maybe they're well on their way and they're really looking to just like amplify and accelerate that. That's where a team of people that'll have experience from product, business development, sales and marketing, to really get those companies to the place that they want to be, relative to cloud, because as we know, cloud is still the future, and everyone wants to get there. >> All right, so Frank, bring us inside. Without giving away state secrets, dealing with Microsoft today is very different from the company that we grew up with, of Windows and Office. So what's it like working with Microsoft? Give a little bit of you know, where some of the key enablers are. >> Yeah, yeah so in the early days, if you think about it right, Microsoft is always great with evangelizing to an independent software vendor, around building to the platform. So back in the day, so much of the Microsoft actual market cap, was dependent upon the ISVs building to the APIs. And the APIs were the sort of the lock, right, until the ISVs were locked. But there never was a really, let's say a great channel program for someone that was an ISV. The channel programs are largely structured for people that sold stuff. And so what you're really seeing now for the first time, and this is not exclusive to Microsoft, with other cloud partners. But of course since we're at a Microsoft show, we can highlight some of the things that Microsoft is doing here, it really is creating super incentives for ISVs to come to the platform, such that the ISVs feel like they are selling side by side, side by side with Microsoft. There are some great incentives around that, they provide some great access to technology and tools, really great credits to get onto the platform, and so they focus as much on the business, like they always put more on the business now, than on the access to the technology, to the extent that it can work side by side with a company in building their business, well the folks that are the business owners really like that. The tech guys always like bits and bytes wherever they can go. >> So, describe how the partnership works. I mean what is, as you are now holding hands with companies that are going through a digital transformation, and some working closely with Microsoft, some may be just on the fringes of working with Microsoft, describe how the partnership is working. >> Yeah, so well, I would call it, I'd like to say that it's really in someways an evolution of the way Microsoft started working with ISVs, a number of years ago, and so at the core, the way Microsoft thinks about them, thinks about the ISVs is really, you know, an extension of their own product line. Right, so a platform is only as good as the things that, that stand atop it, right? And so, if Azure is a platform, or Business Apps is a platform, or Modern Workplace is a platform, you need applications that sit atop those things. And, one of I think the, one of the key things that Microsoft has done, has really enabled the ISVs to become connected with the Microsoft Sales Organization, without having intermediaries. So when, like in a lot of ways, when you're an ISV and you go work with a larger company that you want to have a partnership with, you have to find somebody that knows somebody that's the Account Manager for some large account. What Microsoft has done is they've automated that, once you've passed through a series of hurdles and certifications, you can actually enter into a program where you're opening leads into Microsoft and you get, and that partner, gets connected with the Microsoft Sales Team on the other side. So whenever I talk to people about things that they're doing, that's what I think the ISVs are most proud of. You'll hear them say things like, well, we are in X amount of accounts together with Microsoft. And, you know we're going, and from a business perspective, why ever enter into a partnership, if you were not going to just, to sell stuff? Again, you can do bits and bytes all day, it's a lot of fun for people like me, but at the end of the day, revenue has to come out the other side. And I think from a partner perspective, they've done a better than good job at that. >> All right. So Frank, when you look back to when you were inside Microsoft, give a little bit about how the roles have been changing as we've gone into this world of cloud and AI. >> Right, how the world has changed? >> And the roles inside of Microsoft, specifically, to, you know, fit the world. >> Right right. So when I was there, you know long ago, obviously it was a much smaller place, and you actually had, you know inside the house, you had product development, and you know, outside the house, you had channel development, and then you had, then you had direct sales, and you also OEM sales which was, which actually is a very very big piece to the puzzle. But, the linkage, right, between sales and channel, wasn't really there back then. And sometimes, like even the role that I had in program management, at times we had to be, we had to be glue for that. I think what, you know, in a sense now with the roles have changed is such a way, that you have, you have people, you know inside the house now that are really responsible for not just ensuring that a partner feels good about what they're doing, but that the partners are actually selling side-by-side with folks in the field. And that would've been, you know, an impossible thing, really impossible thing to do at the time. And so the other thing that's, I think that's really changed, is now that you have, you have an overlay sales organization, called Worldwide Commercial, and also a direct sales organization. So direct sales organization, are people that carry the bag and have quota right on the accounts. But then, you have another organization, that looks after the 500 largest accounts, and there are a lot of specialists in that organization, that by definition work with partners to move both the Microsoft products and the partner's products together in there. And so those are large organizations that plain and simply just didn't exist, and they may have not even made sense at the time, 'cause at the time a lot of what we were doing in the '90s we were still distributed computing, with still really a technical curiosity, and then it became trusted infrastructure. And it's really only in the last few years that cloud computing has moved beyond that, from being a technical curiosity, to trusted infrastructure. And the way it's taken to market, is so much different, because we took finished goods to market, we relied on people to carry boxes of stuff, we relied on people to do inventory. There's no more inventory, I mean it's just there, you turn it on and you go. So I think what you'll see also from again, from where the commerce engines are setup, and the kind of people that are deployed, are really being tooled for that kind of a go to market, which is significantly different. >> So we're really just scratching the surface when it comes to cloud. As you said so many of these companies are only at the beginning of their journeys. What do you think the future holds, in terms of trends in the marketplace and what companies are going to continue to want. And are there any blind spots, that you, as someone who's being at this industry for 36 years, sort of know are there? >> Right, so like today was an interesting one, to see ARC announced. And you know, it shows the natural evolution of the way that we think about a platform. So, if we go back to even like the late 80s right, we had to build servers, right? So you got a network operating system, and there was a set of network adapters, and a set of hardware it worked on, and you had to pay a systems integrator, to go put it all together, and then you kind of hope it worked. Well then we got this stuff call plug-and-play, in the early 90s, and it flattened the playing field, and you can take an operating system like Windows NT the one that I worked on, and as long as it'd adhere to a plug-and-play standard, it generally worked on that platform. But the operating system then grew, to become a collection of services. It was a file server, it was an identity server, eventually, things like transaction processing, networking was always in there. Now if you look at what something like ARC, or any of the services that are available on other clouds, they're really services on which applications are built. So now it's just natural to see that these services like from the cloud vendors, are being taken on to other cloud infrastructures. So today, we are here at Microsoft, you see ARC which is a set of Azure services, which are being made available and useful on other platforms like on-premises, as an example. To me that's no surprise, for Microsoft, they kind of led the way with that, with their IOT technology. How you see Azure services moving onto there. So now, from an opportunity perspective, as someone who's building applications, you can say OK, I can now go look at services that are I know will be available on all clouds. So I have a, let's just say I can, I can snap to that, and now I can go to my customer and also talk about a flexible, you know flexible opportunity about where and why you might want to deploy. So more opportunities around that though, what gets complex, management gets complex, security gets complex, we're sounding like the '90s again right, where whole industries grew up around things like performance and security, you know, and systems management, around that. And so, I think, you know from a, just strictly from an opportunity perspective, you know there'll be companies here that see that, and go take advantage of it to get out in front, and there'll be ones that are already incumbents, and hang on for dear life, saying things have to be different on each cloud, but I think, as you see companies that embrace the notion of sets of services that'll be running across clouds, those are where really the opportunities will be. Just like we saw in the '90s, folks that said hey, I'll run my application on Windows NT, on any piece of hardware, right? They didn't tie themselves to I'll just say like, you know Compaq, or Tandem, folks that don't exist anymore. (Rebecca laughs) Now they've got the folks we have here today. >> All right, so Frank you know you can't get through an interview with theCUBE without getting a question from John Furrier. >> Frank: Okay, is he on? >> So John's been watching, and he wants to know, how's the restaurant scenes doing in Seattle? >> Okay so, the Seattle restaurant scene's second to none. Obviously you need cuisine. Two restaurants that I'm personally involved with, one is downtown Seattle, and a one in, one in Bellevue Washington. Both completely different cuisines, one heavy on steak, one heavy on plants, and we like to say, we're up and to the right on both of those John, so thanks for asking. >> Great, excellent. Frank Artale, always a pleasure having you on. Thanks so much. >> Great, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music)

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Splunk dot com. 19. Brought to you by spunk. >>Okay, welcome back. Everyone's two cubes. Live coverage in Las Vegas. Force plunks dot com This is their annual conference. A 10 year anniversaries. Cubes coverage. For seven years I've been covering this company from Start up the I P O to Grove to now go on to the next level as a leader and security. Our next guest is Scott Ward, principal solutions architect for AWS. Amazon Web service is obsolete, reinvents coming up. I'm sure you're super busy, Scott, but you're here at Splunk dot com there big partner of AWS? Yeah, >>Yeah, definitely. I mean flux. Ah, great partner that we've had a strong relationship was flown for quite a long time. Both sides of the house eight of us and slugger are leaning in thio help add value to our mutual customers, say, even building on that spokesman, a >>longtime customer. And so you guys are really focused on cloud security had your inaugural reinforce event in Boston this year, of which we broadcasted live videos on YouTube, youtube dot com says silken angle interested. But this was really kind of, Ah, watershed moment because it wasn't your classic security show. He was a cloud security. >>Yeah, it was definitely. It was very much focused on just kind of focusing in, and in some ways it actually allowed People who don't normally get to come to a native of this event or focus on security really got deeper into security. Security of us is our top priority, and we want to make sure that our customers really understanding and being able to execute on that and be able to feel confident in what they're doing on running on AWS >>and spunk has become a very successful on. Some people call him the one in the number 1/3 party vendor in security for workload. APS. Elsie Long files it What single FX for Tracing Micro Service's around the corner. A lot of good things there. But as the cloud equation starts to come in, where the operation's need to have security and on premises edge clouds, roll of Amazon and your partner's air super important, you talk about that relationship and how that's evolving. >>Yeah, I don't think you talk about our partners. It's definitely very important, you know, we have, you know, it says lots of different service is on its platform that we allow customers to use. But those partners come in and help fill out the gaps where customers need somebody to be able to provide Maura or Extra, especially look at security so that that shared responsibility model we have, where the top half is the customers responsibility and a lot of flexibility and what they could do. And that means that they can bring in the partners they want, help them to be able to accomplish the things that they wanted to >>tell. What the security hub. Amazon's best security, huh? What's that about? >>Sure, Security Hub is a service that we actually launched out. Reinforce it. Generally available. Then it's focused on really giving customers visibility into high severity security alerts and their compliance status while they're running across. All the eight of US accounts allows them thio, aggregate, prioritize and sort all of this data coming from from multiple data sources, and we talk about those multiple data source. It really is a couple of different areas. Amazon Guard duty and was on inspector names on Macy. Also third party products. If customers using third party security products that can feed into security up to kind of give them that visibility. And then it's also running continuous compliance checks against the customers. AWS account's gonna let them know where they stand when it comes to compliance, where they need to go and correct things with a counter, the resource level. So really, you know, labeling customers to kind of get a lot more visibility and what's going on with US >>environment. We've been covering this and reporting on the story, but Amazon on cloud providers of general Amazon Azure, Google Cloud Platform customers relying more and more on you guys for security. But you have a relationship with slung, say 1/3 party. How did they fit in that a Splunk fit into that security hub model? How's that going? Is just clarified that relationship six. Plunk and Security >>Yes. So when you talk about Splunk in security, if there's actually a couple different angles there, one is Splunk enterprise product. It is a consumer of all the data that is in a customer security have environment so you can feed all that data into the enterprise product. Be able to kind of go ask the questions and take all the data that security provided, as well as all the other data that's unspoken, really be able to get some deep insights and what's going on in your environment. And then on top of that is the Splunk Phantom integration, which I'm really, really excited about. Because spunk is with Fantomas, Long customers actually take action on their security data, so customers have often told us like it's great you're making all this data available to me on I can see it, But what do I actually do with it? What? How am I gonna do something with it? So way advocate a lot for customers to be able to automate what they're doing when it comes to their security findings and get the humans out of the way as much as possible so they can really be adding a lot of value. So security feeds us to phantom and Phantom can run play books that will do as much or as little on that security. Finding data to kind of integrate that finding into the customers operational work flows and collect the right information are hopefully ultimately remediated that security findings so that customers can get some sleep and they can focus on other things that are more important. >>Talk about fancy for a minute, just to kind of change. Usually you mentioned that, obviously, I thought Oliver interview and reinforce. And here recently, he's one of the team's bunked with company. What is wise, faith and so >>popular? I think Phantom is popular because a couple things one. It is allowing customers, too, to resolve, intermediate and address an issue with what works for them and work full that works for them. It's not making them thio clearly fall into a particular box. They can add or remove pieces. The fact that it's it's very python based. It's usually in the security community so that they can probably find Resource is that can actually orchestrate build these playbooks and then then, once the bill playbooks that could reuse those pieces to address other issues or things that are coming up. So I get A allows them to really kind of scale, be able to kind of be able to accomplish these things when it comes to automation and addressing with security alerts as they continue to grow, you know, >>it makes things go faster, frees up people's time for productivity. >>I totally feel that that's That's one of the main reasons that people are looking at this. >>So someone's using Splunk for its own sake. I'm a Splunk customer. Okay, Security hub. Why should I use both? What's sure just clarify that peace >>is a couple of reasons where I would say that somebody would want to use both. One is security. Obvious is the continuous compliance check. So today, security have offers checks based on the Center for Internet Security. Eight of US bench work. So we are continuously running those cheques. There's about 43 rules that we are running. Each of those checks against your AWS accounts or resource is in those accounts until you where you are not in compliance. Get overall score. You could dig into what, what, where you needed to do further there. Security. Look at it's a central integration spot to get stuff into Splunk as well, so you can have guard duty, Macy inspector and third party stuff coming into security help and then you that one stop shop to get all that data into spunk, enterprise or phantom, and then The third thing is the fact that security it gives you that security view across multiple eight of US accounts. You can designate a master account, invite all your other organization accounts to share those findings, and your security team could go into security up and have one view of your overall security landscape. Be able to look at one single piece of glass, but across all of your organizations like those, those are some key value points. I would say that in addition to spunk in a customer might use security. >>Well, Scott's been great insight on thanks for clarifying the Splunk 80 relationship. Let's pretend I'm a customer for a minute. I'm like, Hey, Scott, you're switching Architect. Thanks for the free consulting with you Live on Cube. So I'm a Splunk customer. Log files. I see they got some tracing stuff going cloud native going to the cloud. We're employing Amazon. I'm a buyer customer Splunk And they got a lot of new stuff and seems awesome. Sore identified. 6.0 is out. How do I What do I do? How do I architect my swan give me more headroom? Grow my swung capabilities with same time. Take advantage. All the radios. Goodness. Would you lay that out? >>I would say I would say, You know, I like your spunk. You kind of You know what? You bought spunk for a particular reason. It's there to answer questions. Is there take data and is lying to kind of move forward? I would definitely architectures long to be able to consume as much data as possible. He did. We have lots of different integrations. Consume that. You shouldn't move away from that. So I would definitely use that. I would use security hub for kind of getting that centralization spot for everything related to your eight of us environments that can then be your central spot into a Splunk. You have people that it's really not necessary for them to be in the Splunk. They don't know Splunk security. It might be a good spot for them to actually do some investigations and learn things as well so that they could do their job. And then you really kind of used with deep technology and quarry capability is slowing to kind of do those deeper dives really understanding what's going on in your environment, something you know as a buyer. I think you could use both. And I think there's a there's room for you to kind of take advantage of both and get the best of both worlds. >>It's really exciting with security going on. It's kind of crazy the same time because you have clouds scale. You guys have been led. The market there continue to be leaders in Cloud Cloud scale, Dev ops. Everything else on the roll volume of data is increased so much. You guys just had your inaugural conference reinforced, and I want to get your thoughts on. This is a solution. Architect of someone in the field difference between traditional security chasing the bad guys defending intrusion, detection. All that good stuff. Cloud security because you have all the security shows out. There are s a black hat. Def Con Cloud Security introduces a new element around howto architect solutions. What should people know about the impact of clouds security as they start thinking ballistically around their enterprise, >>right? I think the important thing I think is you know, the things you mentioned. The vulnerability scanning the intrusion detection is all still important in the cloud. I think the key thing that the cloud offers is the fact that you have the ability to now automate and integrate your security teams more tightly with the things that you're doing and you can. Actually, we always talk about the move fast and stay secure. Customers choose eight of us for self service, the elasticity of the price, and you can take advantage of those unless your security can actually keep up with you. So the fact that everything is based on an FBI you could define infrastructure is code. You can actually enforce standards now where they be before you write a line of code in your dad's office Pipeline were actually being able to detect and react to those things all through code and in a consistent way really allows you to be able to look in your security in a different way and take the kind of philosophy and minds that you've always had around security but actually able to do something with it and be able to maybe do the things you've always wanted to do. But I've never had a chance to do so. I think I think security can actually keep up with you and actually help you different. You're different to your business. Even more than maybe it didn't. >>New capabilities are available now with new options. Exactly. Great stuff. Conversations here at dot com for in Vegas Splunk conference. I'll see they're using You guys have reinvent coming up people be their first week of December. You got a music festival to intersect, which is gonna be fun, But I'm not 10 that. Yeah, don't fall over and die from all these. What are you talking about here? What are the key conversations you're having here? Sure. Here at swan dot com, on your booth to customers. What is it? What's the mean? Sure, >>I think the main talking point is and I'm actually presenting it in the breakout theater this afternoon. We're talking about that taking action portion of like, Data's insecurity or data's in eight of us. How do you do something with what are we enable? And how does a partner like Splunk come in? And what is that? Taking action actually looked like to allow you to be able to do things that scale and be able to leverage on take advantage of your precious resource is and use them in the best way possible something. But that's a lot of the conversation that we're having and things that were focused. >>And what do you hope to walk away packs tonight? It's gonna be for people leaving that session. >>I think I think people should should walk away and understand that it is within their reach to be able to actually be able to to kind of have this nirvana of being able to sit to react to security events and not have to have a human engaged in every single thing. It is a crawl, walk, run type approach you're gonna need to figure out. How do I know when I see this one of the things I want to do? How do I automate that? Validate that that's actually true and then implement it and then go back and do the next thing that really like customers to walk away to know that that is possible on that, with a little bit of investment, they can make it happen and that at a certain point it will really have benefits. >>Well, eight of us have been following you guys for eight years of Cuba's will be our ninth year, I think for reinvent been fun to watch Amazon growing. I'm sure they'll be. Thousands of new announcements every year is always away with volume of new stuff. Give a plug for a second on the Amazon partner. Never was your part of your arm and scope of relationships with third party partners how important it is. And what are some of the cool things going on? Sure. So I >>mean the elves on Partner Network we're focused on partnering with, You know, it's really that cell with motion where we're going out and AWS is selling the partners selling. We work with technology providers and solution systems integrators, and we're really focused on just working with them to make sure that the best solution possible is being created four customers so that they could take advantage of the partner solution and the eight of us cloud, and that they're getting some sort of a unique value that they're going to get by using the cloud and that partner solution together to help them be security or or any other sort of area that they feel more confident. That could be more successful in the crowd through a combination of both of us and >>there's a whole team. It's not like a few guys organization, hole or committed. Thio Amazon partners. >>Yes, yes, yes. I mean, you know, I'm one of many solution architects on the part of team way have partner managers. We have market. We have the whole gamut of people that are working globally with our partners to help them really kind of have a great success. And in a great story to tell about >>people throw on foot out there. Amazon doesn't work with partners. Not true. >>We have tens of thousands of partners, and that's my job. I'm working with partners on a daily basis. I would events like this. Someone phone calls I'm providing guidance is very much a core thing that we're focusing on. >>Harder Network has got marketplace. Amazons are really putting. Their resource is behind with mission of helping customs with partners. >>Yes, definitely. And and we do that a lot of our ways way have partners and go through tears way have confidence sees that we actually allow partners to get into, so customers can really go find who's who's the best or who should I be looking at first when I have this particular problem to solve their we've got a security confidence. He may have confidence season really working to help our customers understand. Who are these partners and how can they help that with >>We've been following Terry. Wisest career is an amazing job. No, he's handed the reins over to new new management is gonna chill for awhile. Congratulations on all your success with Amazon and appreciate it. Thanks for Thanks for having me, Scott War Pretty Solutions for AWS Amazon Webster's here inside the Cube at Splunk dot com 10th year of their conference, Our seventh year covering with Cuba, John Kerry will be back with more after this short break.