>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John Forer host of the cube with Dave Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, two sets for three days. We're on three days, we're here breaking down all the action of what's going on around VMware is our 12th year covering VMware's user conference. Formerly known as world. Now explore as it explores new territory, its future multi-cloud vSphere eight and a variety of new next generation cloud. We're here on day three, breaking out. This is day three more, more intimate, much more deeper conversations. And we have coming back on the Q Keith Norby with NetApp, the worldwide product partner solutions executive at NetApp Keith. Great to see you industry to veteran cube alumni. Thanks for coming back. It's >>Good to see you >>Again. Yeah. I wanted to bring you back for a couple reasons. One is I want to talk about the NetApp story and also where that's going with DM VMware as that's evolving and, and is changing and, and with Broadcom and, and the new next generation, but also analyzing kind of the customer impact piece of it. You're like an analyst who've been in the industry for a long time. Been commentating on the cube. VMware's in an interesting spot right now because I, I mean, I love the story. I mean, we can debate the messaging. Some people are very critical of it a little bit too multicloud, not enough cloud native, but I see the waves, right? I get it. Virtualization kicked ass tech names. Now it moves to hybrid cloud. And now this next gen is a, you know, clear cloud native multi-cloud environment. I, I get that. I can see, I can, I can get there, but is it ready? And the timing. Right. And do they have all the peace parts? What's the role of the ecosystem? These are all open questions. >>Yeah. And, and the reality is no one has a single answer. And that's part of the fun of this, is that not just a NetApp, but the rest of the ecosystem and videos here, as an example, who, who is thinking, you know, the Kings of AI are gonna be sitting at a V VMware show and yet it's absolutely relevant. So you have a very complex set of things that emerge, but yet also it's, it's, that's not overcomplicated. There is a set of primary principles that, you know, organizations I think are all looking to get to. And I think the reality is that this is maturing in different spurts. So whether it's ecosystem or it's, you know, operations modes and several other factors that kind of come into it, you know, that's part of the landscape, >>You know, I gotta ask you, you know, you and I are both kind of historians. We always talk about what's happened and happening and gonna happen. You know, it's interesting 12 years covering world and now explore NetApp has always been such a great company. We've been, I've been following that company, you know, since, you know, 1997, you know, days. And, and certainly with the past decade of the cloud or so the moves you guys may have been really good, but NetApp's never really had the kind of positioning in the VMware story going back in the past 12 years. And this keynote, you guys were mentioned in the keynote. Yeah. Has there ever been a time where NetApp was actually mentioned in a keynote at world or now explore? >>Well, you know, when we started this relationship back when I was a partner, I really monetized and took advantage of some of the advantages that NetApp had with VMware back in the early days, we're talking to ESX three days and they were dominant to the point where the rest of, you know, the ecosystem was trying to catch up. And of course, you know, a lot of competition from there, but yeah, it, it, it was great seeing a day, one VMware keynote with NetApp mentioned in the same relevance as AWS and VMware, which is exactly where we've been. You know, one thing that NetApp has done really well is not just being AWS, but be in all the hyperscalers as first party services and having a, a portfolio of other ways that we deal with things like, you know, data governance and cloud data management and cloud cloud backup, and overall dealing with cyber resiliency and, and ransomware protection and list goes on and on. So we've done our job to really make ourself both relevant and easy for people to consume. And it was great to see VMware and AWS come together. And the funny part was that, you know, we had on, on the previous cube session, you have VMware and AWS in between NetApp, all talking about, we have this whole thing running at all three of our booths. And that's fantastic. You >>Know, I, I can say because I actually was there and documented it and actually wrote about it in the early 20 11, 20 12, the then CEO Georgian's and I had an interview. He actually was the first storage company to actually engage with AWS back then. Yeah. I mean, that's a long time ago. That's that's 10 years ago. And then everyone else kind of followed EMC kind of was deer in the headlights at that point. They were poo pooing, AWS. Oh yeah, no, it'll never work either of which will never work. It's just a, a fluke. Yeah. For developers. NetApp was on the Amazon web services partnership train for a long time. >>Yeah. It, it, it's really amazing how early we got on this thing, which you can see the reason why that matters now is because it's not only in first party service, but that's also very robust and scalable. And this is one of the reasons why we think this opens it up. And, you know, as much as you wanna talk about the technology capabilities in, in this offering, the funny part is, is the intro conversation is how much money you save. So it unlocks all the, the use cases that you weren't able to do before. And when you, when you look at use case after use case on these workloads, they were hell held back. The number one conversation we had at this show was partner after partner, organization, after organization that came into our booth and talked to us about, yeah, I've got a bunch of these scenarios that I've been holding back on because I heard whispers about this. Now we're gonna go in >>Unleash those. All right. So what are, what's the top stories for you guys now at NetApp? What's the update it's been a while, since we had a cube update with you guys, what are you guys showing of the show? What's your agenda? What are your talking points? What's the main story? >>Well, for us, it's, it's, it's, it's always, you know, a cloud and on-prem combination of priorities within our partner ecosystem. The way we kind of communicate that out is really through three lenses. You know, one is on the hybrid cloud opportunity, people taking data center and modernizing the data center with the apps and getting the cloud, just like we're delivering here at this VMware world show. Also the AI and modern data analytics opportunity, and then public cloud, because really in a lot of these situations at apps, you know, the, the buyer, the consumer, the people that are interested in transforming are looking at it from different lenses. And these all start with really the customer journeys, the data ops buyer is different than the data center ops buyer. And, and that's exactly who we target this in is, is NetApp. I think, focuses relentlessly on how we reach them. And by the way, not just on storage products, if you look at like our instant cluster acquisition and all these other things, we're trying to be as relevant, we, as we can in data management and you know, whether that's pipelining data management or storing data management, that's >>Where we're there. You know, I, I was talking with David Nicholson, cuz we have, you know, we joked together. I say the holy Trinity, he goes with the devil's triangle. I'm Catholic, gotta know what his, his denomination is, but storage, networking, and compute. Obviously the, the three majors, it never changes. And I think it was interesting now, and I wanna get your reaction to this and what NetApp's doing around it is that if look at the DevOps movement, it's clearly cloud native, but the it ops is not it anymore. It's basically security and data I'm I'm oversimplifying, but DevOps, the developers now do a lot of that. I call it work in, in the CSD pipeline, but the real challenge is data and ops. That's a storage conversation. Compute is beautiful. You got containers, Kubernetes, all kinds of stuff going on with compute, move, compute around, move the data to compute. But storage is where the action is for cyber and data ops. Yeah. And AI. So like storage is back. They never left, but it's, it's transformed to even be more important because the role of hyper-convergence shows that compute and storage go well together. What's your take on this and how is NetApp modernized to, to solve the data ops and take that to the next level and of obviously enable and, and enable in great security and or defense ability. >>Yeah. And that's why no one architecture is gonna solve every problem. That's why, when we look at the data ops buyer, there's adjacencies to the apps buyer, to the other cloud ops buyer. And there's also the fin ops buyer because all of 'em have to work together. What we're, what we're focusing on. Isn't just storing data. But it's also things around how you discover govern data. You know, how you protect data, even things like in the ed workspace, the chip manufacturers, how we use cloud bursting to be able to accelerate performance on chip design. So whether you're translating this for the industry vernacular about how we help say in the financial sector for AI and what we do within Invidia, or it's something translated to this VMware opportunity on AWS, you know, what we've put together is, is something that has as much meaningful relevance for storing data, but also for all the other adjacencies that kind of extend off there. >>Talk about what you're doing with your partner. I saw last night I did, I did a fly by a NetApp event. It was Nvidia insight, which is a partner, an integrator partner. So you got a lot of the frontline on the front lines, you got partners and you got, you know, big solutions with NetApp and now vendors like Nvidia, what are you actually selling? What's what's getting, I guess what's being put together, not selling, I'm obviously selling gear and what, but like solutions, but what's being packaged to the customer. Where does, what does and video fit in? What are you guys? And what's the winning formula. Take us through the highlights. >>Yeah. And so the VMware highlights here are obviously that we're trying to get infrastructure foundations to just not have, be, be trapped in one cloud or anyone OnPrem. So having a little more E elasticity, but if you extend that out, like you, like you mentioned with a partner that's trying to, to go drive AI within Nvidia, you know, NetApp doesn't create any AI deals cuz no one starts an AI journey with storage. They always start it with the, a with the data model. So the data scientists will actually start these things in cloud and they'll bring 'em on prem. Once the data sets get to a, a big enough scenario and then they wanna build it into a multi-cloud over time. And that's where Nvidia has really led the charge. So someone like an insight or other partners could be Kindra or, or Accenture, or even small boutique partners that are in the data analytics space. They'll go drive that. And we provide not just data storage, but are really complimentary infrastructure. In fact, I always say it like on the AI story alone, we have an integration for the data scientists. So when they go pull the data sets in, you can either do that as a manual copy that takes hours sometimes days, or you can do it instantaneously with our integration to their Jupyter notebook. So I say for AI, as an example, NetApp creates time for data scientists. Got >>It. And where's the, the cloud transformation with you guys right now? How is the hybrid working? Obviously you got the public and hybrids, a steady state right now multi-cloud is still a little fantasy in terms of actual multi-cloud that's coming next, but hybrid and cloud, what's the key key configuration for NetApp what's the hot products? >>Well, I think the key is that you can't just be trapped in one location. So we started this whole thing back with data fabric, as you know, and it's built from there up into, into more of the ops layer and some of the technology layers that have to compliment to come with it. In fact, one of the things that we do that isn't always seen as adjacency to us is our spot product on cloud, which allows you to play in the finops space to be able to look at the analyzed spend and sort of optimized environments for a DevOps environment cloud, to be able to give back a big percentage of what you probably misallocate in those operating models. Once you're working with NetApp and allow it to re re redeploy it in the place that you wanna spend it, you know, so it's, it's both the upper and lower stories coming together. >>Yeah. I was on the walking around the hallway yesterday and I was kind of going through the main event last night, overheard people talking about ransomware. I mean, still ransomware is such a big problem. Security's huge. How are you guys doing there? What's the story with security? Obviously ransomware is a big storage aspect and, and backup recovery and whatnot. All that's kind of tied together. How does NetApp enable better security? What's the story >>There? Yeah, it's funny because that's, that's where a lot of the headlines are at this show at every other show is security for us. It's really about cyber resilience. It is one of the key foundational parts of our hybrid cloud offerings. So as we go out to the partners, you mentioned, you know, insight and there's others, you know, CDW ahead here, and the GSI hosting providers, they're all trying to figure out the security opportunity because that is live. So we have a cyber resiliency solution that isn't just our snapshot technologies, but it's also some of the discovery data governance. But also, you know, you gotta work this with ecosystem, as we said, you know, you have all the other ISVs out there that have several solutions, not just the traditional data protection ones, but also the security players. Because if you look at the full perimeter and you look at how you have to secure that and be able to both block remediate and bring back a site, you know, those are complex sets of things that no one person owns. But what we've tried to do is really be as, as meaningful and pervasive and integrated to that package as possible. That's why it's a lead story in the hybrid clouds. >>Can you share for a minute, just give the NetApp commercial plug cuz you guys have continued to stay relevant. What's the story this year for the folks watching that our customers or potential customers, what's the NetApp story for this year? >>Well, the net, the nets right for this year is kind of what I mentioned, which is, you know, we're in this multi-cloud world. So whether you're coming at this from any perspective, we have relevancy for, for the, the on-prem place that you've always enjoyed us, but at the opposite of the spectrum, if you're coming at us from an AWS show or the cloud op the cloud ops buyer, we have a complete portfolio that if you never knew net from the on-prem, you're gonna see us massively relevant in that, in that environment. And you just go to an AWS show or a Microsoft Azure, so, or a Google show, you'll see us there. You'll see exactly why we were relevant there. You'll see them mention why we're relevant there. So our message is really that we have a full portfolio across the hybrid multi-cloud from anyone buyer perspective, to be able to solve those problems, but by the way, do it with partners cuz the partners are the ones that complete all this. None of us on our own, AWS, Microsoft, VMware, NetApp, none of us have the singular solution ourselves. And we can't deliver ourselves. You have to have those partners that have those skills, those competencies. And that's why we, we leverage it that way. >>Great, great stuff. Now I gotta ask you what what's going on in your world with partners. How's it going? What's the vibe what's that just share some insight into what's happening inside the partners? Are they happy with the margins? Are they shifting behavior? What are some of the, the high order bit news items or, or trends going on at the, on the front lines with your partners? >>Well, I think listen, the, the, the challenges pitfalls, the, the objections, the, all the problems that have been there in the past are even more multiplied with today's economy and all the situations we've gone through with COVID. But the reality is what's emerged is an interesting kind of tapestry of a lot of different partner types. So for us, we recognize that across the traditional GSIs, you see these cloud native partners emerging, which is an exciting realm, you know, to look at folks that really built their business in the cloud with no on-prem and being relevant with them, just consulting partners alone. Like the SAP ecosystem has a very condensed set of partners that really drive a lot of the transformation of SAP. And a lot of them don't, you know, don't do product business. So how does someone like NetApp be relevant with them? You gotta put together an offering that says we do X, Y, and Z for SAP. And so it's, it's a combination of these partners across the, the different >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And I, and I, I'm gonna, I wanna get your reaction to something and you probably don't, you don't have to go out, out in the limb and, and put NetApp in a, in a position on official position. But I've been saying on the cube that no matter what happens with VMware's situation with Broadcom, this is not a dying market, right? I mean like you you'd think when someone gets bought out or, or intention bought out, that'd be like this, this dark cloud that would hang over the, the company and this condition is their user conference. So this is a good barometer to get a feel for it. And I gotta tell you, Sunday night here at VMware Explorer, the expo floor was not dead. It was buzzing. It was packed the ecosystem and even the conversations and the positionings, it's all, all growth. So, so I think VMware's in a really interesting spot here with the Broadcom, because no matter what happens that ecosystem's going to settle somewhere. Yeah. It's not going away cuz they have such great customer base. So, you know, assume that broad Tom is gonna do the right thing and they keep most of the jewels they'll keep all the customers. So, but still that wave is coming. Yeah. It's independent of VMware. Yeah. That's the whole point. So what happens next? >>Well, I think, you know, we, >>We, you guys are gonna get mop up in business. Amazon's gonna get some business, Microsoft, HPE, you name it all gonna, >>Yeah. I think, you know, we've, we've been in business with Broadcom for a long time, whether it be the switch business, the chip business, everything in between. And so we've got a very mature relationship with them and we have a great relationship with VMware. It's it's best. It's almost ever been now and together. I think that will all just rationalize and, and settle over time as this kind of goes through both the next Barcelona show and when it comes back here next year, and I think, you know, what you'll see is probably, you know, some of the stuff settle into the new things they announced here at the show and the things that maybe you haven't heard from, but ultimately the, these, these, these solutions that they have to come forward with, you know, have to land on things that go forward. And so today you just saw that with VMware trying to do VMware cloud and AWS, they realized that there was a gap in terms of people adopting and wanting to do a storage expansion without adding compute. So they made a move with us that made total sense. I think you're gonna see more of those things that are very common sense, ways to solve the, the barriers to, you know, modernization, adoption and maturity. That's just gonna be a natural part of the vetting. And I think they'll probably come a lot more. >>It's gonna be very interesting. We interviewed AJ Patel yesterday. He heads up he's SVP G of the modern app side. He's a middleware guy. So you can almost connect the dots kind of where we're going with this. Yeah. So I assume there's a nice middleware layer of developing everybody wins yeah. In this, if done properly. So it's clearly that VMware, no matter what happens at Broadcom from this show, my assessment's all steam all steam ahead. No, one's holding back at this point. >>Yeah. It's funny. The, the most mature partners we talk to have this interesting sort of upper and lower story and the upper story is all about that, that application data and middleware kind of layer. What are you doing there to be relevant about the different issues they run into versus some of the stuff that we've grown up with on the infrastructure side, they wanna make that as, as nascent as possible, like infrastructure's code and all this stuff that the automation platforms do. But you're right. If you don't get up into that application, middleware space, you know, and work on that, on that side of the house, you know, you're not gonna be >>Relevant. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, you know, most people, people take it literally. It doesn't mean middleware. We don't mean middleware. We mean that what middleware was yeah. In the old metaphor just still has to happen. That's where complexity solved. You got hardware, essentially cloud and you got applications, right. So it's all, all kind of the same, but not >>Yeah. In a lot of cases, it could be conceived as even like pipelining, you know, it's it's, you have data and apps going through a transformation from the old style and the old application structures to cloud native apps and a, a much different architecture. The, the whole deal is how you're relevant there. How you solving real problems about simplifying, improving performance, improving securities, you mentioned all those things are relevant and that's where, that's where you have to place >>Your bets. I love that storage is continuing to be at the center of the value proposition. Again, storage compute, networking never goes away. It's just being kind of flexed in new ways just to continue to say, deliver better value. Keith, thanks for coming on the queue. Great to see you for the, see you again, man, day three for coming back on and give us some commentary. Really appreciate it. And congratulations on all the success with the partners and having the cloud story. Right. Thanks. Cheers. Okay. More cube coverage. After this short break day three, Walter Wall coverage. I'm John furier host Dave ante, Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all here covering VMware. We'll be back with more after this short break.

>>And welcome to this special cube conversation. I'm John for a, your host of the cube. We're here in Palo Alto, California, and I'm here with a very special guest coming down from Seattle remotely into the cube studios is the leader at AWS Amazon web services, the vice president of database analytics and machine learning Swami. Great to see you cube alumni recently taking over the database business at AWS as a leader. Congratulations. And thanks for coming on the cube. >>Hey, my pleasure to be here, John, very excited to talk to you. >>Yeah. We've had many conversations on the cube and also in person and also online around all the major mega trends. You've had your hand in all the action, going back to your days when you were in school learning and, and writing papers. And 10 years ago, Amazon web services launched AWS dynamo, DB, fast, flexible, no SQL database that everyone loves today, which has inspired a generation of what I would call database distributing cloud scale, single digit millisecond performance at scale. And again, the key scale. And again, this is 10 years ago, so it seems like yesterday, but you guys are celebrating and your name was on the original paper with CTO Verner. Vogel's your celebrity. Congratulations. >>Thank you. Not sure about the celebrating part, but I'm very excited. At least I played a hand in building such an amazing technology that has enabled so many amazing customers along the way as well. So >>Trivia on the, on the paper as you were an intern at AWS, so you're getting your PhD. And then since, since rising through the ranks and involved in a lot of products over the years, and then leading the machine learning and AI, which is now changing the game at the industry level, but I got to ask you getting back to the story here. A lot of customers have built amazing things on top of dynamo DB, not to mention lots of other AWS and Amazon tech riding on it. Can you share some of the highlights that came out of the original paper? And so with some examples, because I think this is a point in time, 10 years ago, where you start to, so the KickUp of cloud scale, not just, just for developers and building startups, you're really starting to see the scale rise. >>Yeah, I actually, I mean, as you probably know, based on what he read to explain the Genesis of dynamo DB itself had to explain the Genesis of how Amazon got into building the original dynamo, right? And this was during the time when miner, I joined Ron esteem as an intern and, and Amazon was one of the pioneers in pushing the boundary of scale. And a year over year, our Q4 holiday season tends to be really, really bad for all the right reasons. We all want our holiday shopping done during that time. And you want to be able to scale your website, arters fulfillment centers, all of them at that time. And those are the times around 2005. And the answer is when people think our database, they think of a single database server that actually runs on a box and has a certain characteristics and does a scale and availability and whatnot. >>And it's usually relational. And then when we had a major disruption during Q4 that's when yeah, ask ourselves the question, why are we actually using a relational database for some of these things when they really didn't need the data model complexity of relational database. And normally I would say most companies where to actually ask an intern or a few engineers who are early in the career saying like, what the hell are you suggesting? Just go away. But Amazon being enabling Buddhists to build what they want. And they actually let us start reimagining what a database or our scale could look like. And that led to dynamo. And since she unstained mine, then we migrated from an traditional relational database stair this one for some of the amazon.com services. And then I moved on to actually start building some butts off our storage service and then our managed relational database service, I explicitly remember. >>And one of our customer advisory board, we're just the set off some of our leading customers who actually give us feedback on roadmap. Another son, Don, who's the CEO and chief geek of spunk bargain faker. And him actually looking at the Trinity me, I was starting in the corner and saying like you all, both tomorrow and why do I need to keep shotting my, my sequel database and reshooting assigned scaling. And this is the time when the state of the art in most databases were around. Like, you start sharding your relational database and constantly reshaping. And this is when most websites are starting to experience the kind of scale which we consider a normal month. During those times it was mostly, most companies used to have a single relational database backend and start scaling that way. And that conversation led entirely under duress, unaided read, lot of AWS leaders and myself saying like, Hey, what is a cloud database reimagined without the hampering SQL look like? And that led us to start building dynamo DB, but just a key value database at that time. Now we support document might've too, but that single digit millisecond latency at any scale imagine. So >>I think about that time at that time, 10 years ago, when you were having this conversation and I know the smug mug and I, he said, he's in totally geek and he's, he's good to point that out. You also have Netflix as customers too. I'd like to hear how that's evolved, but, but I think back at the time, if you look back then I got to ask you most people we've talked about this before. No one database rules, a world that's now standard people now don't see one database back then it was a one database kind of mindset back then. Yeah. And then you had that big data movement happening with Hadoop. You had the object store developing. So you're in you're you're circling around that area. What was it like then? I mean, take, take us through that because there was obvious visibility that, Hey, let's just store this. Now you see data lakes and that's all happening. But back then object store was kind of new. Yeah. >>Ah, it's a great question. Now, one of the things I realized early on, especially when I was working with binary, when you're saying amazon.com itself as an example, that the access patterns for various applications and Amazon, but let alone AWS customers tend to be very, very, very, some of them really just needed an object store. Some of them needed a relational database. Some of them really wanted a key value store within a fast latency. Some of them really needed a durable cash. And, but it so happens when you have a giant hammer. You use that for everything looks like a map, which is essentially the story at that time. And so everyone kept using the same database, irrespective of what the problem was because nobody else, I mean, thought about like, what else can we build that is better? So this let us do, literally I remember writing a paper with Bernard internally that is widely used in Amazon explaining what are all the menu of booklets that access. >>And then how do we go about actually solving for each of these things so that they can actually grow and innovate faster. And, and this was led to actually the Genesis of not only building IDs and so forth, but also dynamo and various other non-relational data. There's a still let alone not so storage access patterns and what not. So, and this was one of the big revelations he had just that there is not a single database that is going to meet the customer, needs us. The diversity of workloads in the internet is growing. And this was a key pivotal moment because with cloud now applications can scale very more instantly than before now. Building an application for Superbowl is very easier than before. That means that on, I mean, everybody is pushing the boundaries of what scale means, and they are expecting more from their obligations. That's when you need technologies like dynamo, DB, and that's exactly what dynamo already be set out to do. And since then, we are continuing to innovate on behalf of our customers and the purpose of the database story as well. And this concept has resonated well across the board. If you see that the database industry has also embraced this method, >>It's natural that you obviously evolved into the machine learning side of it because that's data is big part of that. And you see back then you, you bringing up kind of like flashes for me where it's like those, the data conversations back then and the data movement was just beginning. So the idea that you can have diversity in access methods of the kind of databases was a use case driven by the application, not so much database saying, this is how you have to work, that the script was flipped. It it's changed from infrastructure dictating to the applications, what to do. Now, the applications are going to the infrastructure and saying, give me what I want. I want to access something here in an office store, something here in no SQL that became the Genesis of infrastructure as code at a, at a global level. And so your paper kind of set the, the, the wave, the influence for this, no SQL did big data movement. It's created tons of value, maybe a third Mongo might've been influenced by this other people have been influenced. Can you share some stories of how people adopted the concept of dynamo DB and how that's changed in the industry and how has that helped the industry evolve? >>I mean, plus file data. Most share our experience of building and dynamo style data store. Very, it is a non-relational API and showing what are some of the experiences that the Venter in building such an paper and these set out early on itself, that it is should not be just a design paper, but it should be something that we shared our experiences. So even now, when I talked to my friends and colleagues and various other companies, one thing they always tell me is they appreciated the openness with which we were sharing. Some of the examples and learnings that we learned to not optimizing for percentile latencies, and what are some of the scalability challenges, how we solved and some of the techniques around things like sloppy Cora or various other stuff. We invented a lot of towns along the way too, but people really appreciated several of some of our findings and as talking about it. >>And since then I met so many other innovations are happening in the industry and the AWS, but also across the entire academia and industry in this space, the databases I've been going through what I call as a period of Renaissance, where one of the things, if you see our own arc, when Roger and I started on the database, front Disney started over the promo saying like, if you were to build a database where cloud is the new normal, this is again in 2008, we asked ourselves that question and what the belt that led us to start building things like dynamo, DB, RDS star. I know that alone, we reimagined data viruses with Redshift and several, and then several other databases like time stream for time series workloads started running Neptune for graph and whatnot. But at the moment we started actually asking that question and working backwards from customers. Then you will start being able to innovate accordingly. And this has worked really well. Then more than a hundred thousand AWS customers have chosen dynamo DB for mobile gaming tech IOT. Many of these are fast growing businesses, such as ledge, Darryl BNB, red fan, as soon as enterprises like Samsung Toyota, capital one and so far. So these are like really some meaningful clouds, let alone amazon.com. I run this. >>We have an internal customer is always good to have that entire inside customer. You know, I really find this a really profound use case because you're just talking, you know, in Amazonian terms, I'll just translate for the audience working backwards from the customer, which is the customer obsession you guys have. So here's, what's going on off the way I see it. You got dynamo, DB, paper, you and Verner, and the team Paul was a great as a great video on your blog posts that goes into the, to the talk he gave at around that time, which is fun to watch if you look back, but you have a radical enabler here, that's disrupting and changing S3 RDS, Aurora. These are game-changing concepts inside the, the landscape of AWS at the same time, you're working backwards from the customer. So the question I have for you as a leader and as a builder, how did you balance the working backwards from the customer while bringing something brand new and radical at that time to the market? >>Yeah, this is one of the S I mean hardest things to be, as leaders need to balance on. If you see many times, then we actually worked backwards from customers. The literal later translated this, literally do what customers are asking for, which is true nine out of 10 times, but there is one or a 10 times, you got to read between the lines on what they are asking. Because many times customers when are articulate that they need to go fast. If in the right way, they might say, Hey, I wish my heart storage goes faster, but they're not going to tell you they need a car, but you need to know and be able to translate and read between the lines we call it under the bucket of innovate on behalf of customers. And that is exactly the kind of a mantra we had when we were thinking about concepts like dynamo DB, because essentially at that time, almost everybody would, if I asked, they would just say, I wish a relational database could actually be able to scale from not just like a hundred gigabyte to one terabyte are, it can take up to like 2 million transactions, a second and so forth and still be cheap and made in reality as relational databases, the way they were engineered at that time, those are not going to meet the scale needs. >>So this is fair. We hunted read between the lines on what are some of the key Mustang needs from customers and then work backwards and then innovate on behalf of these workloads, be enabled by the sun oh four, which are some of the reasons that led to us launching some of the initial sets on dynamo on a single digit millisecond latency and seamless scale. At that time, databases didn't have the elasticity to go from like 10 requests, a second to like a hundred thousand or 1 million requests a second, and then scaled right back in an hour. So that was not possible. And we kind of enabled that. And that was an, a pretty big game changer that showed the elasticity of the cloud to a database. Well, >>Yeah, I think also just to, not to nerd out on this, but it enables a lot of other kind of cool scaled concepts, like queuing storage. It's all kind of together. This database piece of that you guys are solving. And again, props to you guys on the team. Congratulations. I have to ask, you know, more generally, how has your thinking changed since the paper? I'll see, you've got more experience under your belt. You don't yet have the gray hairs yet, but we'll see those soon come in, but you know, you're, you got a lot more experience. You're running teams, you're launching a lot of products. How has your thinking changed in the industry since the paper what's happening now? What's the big evolution. What are those new things now that are in the innovate on behalf of the customer? What's between the lines now, how do you see this happening? >>I mean, now since wanting dynamo via a victim, I had the opportunity to work on various problems in the big data space. There we've worked on some are fire things that you might be aware of in the analytics all the way from Redshift to quick side, too. Then I moved on to start some of our efforts, having built systems that enabled customer to store process and credit, and then analyze them. One of the realizations, I had this, the in around 2015 or 2016, I kinda had that machine learning was hitting a critical point where now it is ready for being scaled at option. Their cloud has basically enabled limitless compute and limitless storage, which are the factors that are holding back machine learning technology. Then I realized that now we have a unique opportunity to bring machine learning BI to everybody, not just folks with PhD in machine learning. >>And that's when I moved on from database and analytics areas, they started machine learning. We're just a descent area because machine learning is powered by data and then started building capabilities like SageMaker, which is our end to end ML platform to build, train and deploy them on models. And this, what does the leading enterprise platform by several gaggled users and then also a bunch of our AI services since then, I view the reason I'm giving all this historical context is one of the biggest realization I had early on itself. And 2016 as first machine learning is one of the most disruptive technologies. She will then country in our generation. This is right after cloud. I think these still are the most amazing combination that is going to revolutionize how we build applications and how we actually reason about that. Now, the second thing is that at the end of the day, when you look at the ANC and journey, it is not just about one database or one data Varroa. >>So one data lake product, or even 1:00 AM out platform. It is about the end to end journey where a customer is storing their order database. And then they are actually building a data lake that test customer history and order history. And they want to be able to personalize. And for their viewer experience are actually forecast what products to staff in their fulfillment center, but then all these things need to work and to handle. And that view is one of the big things that struck me for the past five years. And I've been on this journey in addition to building this Emma building blocks to connect the dots so that customers can go on this modern end to end data strategy as I call it, right. It goes beyond a single database technology or data technology, but putting now all of these end to end together so that customers don't end up spending six months connecting the dots, which has been the state of the down for the last couple of years. And we are bringing it down to matter of the Sundays. Now >>He's incredible Swami. Thank you so much for spending the time with us here in the, >>Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks again, Sean. Thanks for having me.

>>Hi, everyone. My name is my uncle. My uncle Poor I worked with Geo reminds you in India. We call ourselves Geo Platforms. Now on. We've been recently in the news. You've raised a lot off funding from one of the largest, most of the largest tech companies in the world. And I'm here to talk about Geos Cloud Journey, Onda Mantis Partnership. I've titled it the story often, Underdog becoming the largest telecom company in India within four years, which is really special. And we're, of course, held by the cloud. So quick disclaimer. Right. The content shared here is only for informational purposes. Um, it's only for this event. And if you want to share it outside, especially on social media platforms, we need permission from Geo Platforms limited. Okay, quick intro about myself. I am a VP of engineering a geo. I lead the Cloud Services and Platforms team with NGO Andi. I mean the geo since the beginning, since it started, and I've seen our cloud footprint grow from a handful of their models to now eight large application data centers across three regions in India. And we'll talk about how we went here. All right, Let's give you an introduction on Geo, right? Giorgio is on how we became the largest telecom campaign, India within four years from 0 to 400 million subscribers. And I think there are There are a lot of events that defined Geo and that will give you an understanding off. How do you things and what you did to overcome massive problems in India. So the slide that I want to talkto is this one and, uh, I The headline I've given is, It's the Geo is the fastest growing tech company in the world, which is not a new understatement. It's eggs, actually, quite literally true, because very few companies in the world have grown from zero to 400 million subscribers within four years paying subscribers. And I consider Geo Geos growth in three phases, which I have shown on top. The first phase we'll talk about is how geo grew in the smartphone market in India, right? And what we did to, um to really disrupt the telecom space in India in that market. Then we'll talk about the feature phone phase in India and how Geo grew there in the future for market in India. and then we'll talk about what we're doing now, which we call the Geo Platforms phase. Right. So Geo is a default four g lt. Network. Right. So there's no to geo three g networks that Joe has, Um it's a state of the art four g lt voiceover lt Network and because it was designed fresh right without any two D and three G um, legacy technologies, there were also a lot of challenges Lawn geo when we were starting up. One of the main challenges waas that all the smart phones being sold in India NGOs launching right in 2000 and 16. They did not have the voice or lt chip set embedded in the smartphone because the chips it's far costlier to embed in smartphones and India is a very price and central market. So none of the manufacturers were embedding the four g will teach upset in the smartphones. But geos are on Lee a volte in network, right for the all the network. So we faced a massive problem where we said, Look there no smartphones that can support geo. So how will we grow Geo? So in order to solve that problem, we launched our own brand of smartphones called the Life um, smartphones. And those phones were really high value devices. So there were $50 and for $50 you get you You At that time, you got a four g B storage space. A nice big display for inch display. Dual cameras, Andi. Most importantly, they had volte chip sets embedded in them. Right? And that got us our initial customers the initial for the launch customers when we launched. But more importantly, what that enabled other oh, EMS. What that forced the audience to do is that they also had to launch similar smartphones competing smartphones with voltage upset embedded in the same price range. Right. So within a few months, 3 to 4 months, um, all the other way EMS, all the other smartphone manufacturers, the Samsung's the Micromax is Micromax in India, they all had volte smartphones out in the market, right? And I think that was one key step We took off, launching our own brand of smartphone life that helped us to overcome this problem that no smartphone had. We'll teach upsets in India and then in order. So when when we were launching there were about 13 telecom companies in India. It was a very crowded space on demand. In order to gain a foothold in that market, we really made a few decisions. Ah, phew. Key product announcement that really disrupted this entire industry. Right? So, um, Geo is a default for GLT network itself. All I p network Internet protocol in everything. All data. It's an all data network and everything from voice to data to Internet traffic. Everything goes over this. I'll goes over Internet protocol, and the cost to carry voice on our smartphone network is very low, right? The bandwidth voice consumes is very low in the entire Lt band. Right? So what we did Waas In order to gain a foothold in the market, we made voice completely free, right? He said you will not pay anything for boys and across India, we will not charge any roaming charges across India. Right? So we made voice free completely and we offer the lowest data rates in the world. We could do that because we had the largest capacity or to carry data in India off all the other telecom operators. And these data rates were unheard off in the world, right? So when we launched, we offered a $2 per month or $3 per month plan with unlimited data, you could consume 10 gigabytes of data all day if you wanted to, and some of our subscriber day. Right? So that's the first phase off the overgrowth and smartphones and that really disorders. We hit 100 million subscribers in 170 days, which was very, very fast. And then after the smartphone faith, we found that India still has 500 million feature phones. And in order to grow in that market, we launched our own phone, the geo phone, and we made it free. Right? So if you take if you took a geo subscription and you carried you stayed with us for three years, we would make this phone tree for your refund. The initial deposit that you paid for this phone and this phone had also had quite a few innovations tailored for the Indian market. It had all of our digital services for free, which I will talk about soon. And for example, you could plug in. You could use a cable right on RCR HDMI cable plug into the geo phone and you could watch TV on your big screen TV from the geophones. You didn't need a separate cable subscription toe watch TV, right? So that really helped us grow. And Geo Phone is now the largest selling feature phone in India on it. 100 million feature phones in India now. So now now we're in what I call the geo platforms phase. We're growing of a geo fiber fiber to the home fiber toe the office, um, space. And we've also launched our new commerce initiatives over e commerce initiatives and were steadily building platforms that other companies can leverage other companies can use in the Jeon o'clock. Right? So this is how a small startup not a small start, but a start of nonetheless least 400 million subscribers within four years the fastest growing tech company in the world. Next, Geo also helped a systemic change in India, and this is massive. A lot of startups are building on this India stack, as people call it, and I consider this India stack has made up off three things, and the acronym I use is jam. Trinity, right. So, um, in India, systemic change happened recently because the Indian government made bank accounts free for all one billion Indians. There were no service charges to store money in bank accounts. This is called the Jonathan. The J. GenDyn Bank accounts. The J out off the jam, then India is one of the few countries in the world toe have a digital biometric identity, which can be used to verify anyone online, which is huge. So you can simply go online and say, I am my ankle poor on duh. I verify that this is indeed me who's doing this transaction. This is the A in the jam and the last M stands for Mobil's, which which were held by Geo Mobile Internet in a plus. It is also it is. It also stands for something called the U. P I. The United Unified Payments Interface. This was launched by the Indian government, where you can carry digital transactions for free. You can transfer money from one person to the to another, essentially for free for no fee, right so I can transfer one group, even Indian rupee to my friend without paying any charges. That is huge, right? So you have a country now, which, with a with a billion people who are bank accounts, money in the bank, who you can verify online, right and who can pay online without any problems through their mobile connections held by G right. So suddenly our market, our Internet market, exploded from a few million users to now 506 106 100 million mobile Internet users. So that that I think, was a massive such a systemic change that happened in India. There are some really large hail, um, numbers for this India stack, right? In one month. There were 1.6 billion nuclear transactions in the last month, which is phenomenal. So next What is the impact of geo in India before you started, we were 155th in the world in terms off mobile in terms of broadband data consumption. Right. But after geo, India went from one 55th to the first in the world in terms of broadband data, largely consumed on mobile devices were a mobile first country, right? We have a habit off skipping technology generation, so we skip fixed line broadband and basically consuming Internet on our mobile phones. On average, Geo subscribers consumed 12 gigabytes of data per month, which is one of the highest rates in the world. So Geo has a huge role to play in making India the number one country in terms off broad banded consumption and geo responsible for quite a few industry first in the telecom space and in fact, in the India space, I would say so before Geo. To get a SIM card, you had to fill a form off the physical paper form. It used to go toe Ah, local distributor. And that local distributor is to check the farm that you feel incorrectly for your SIM card and then that used to go to the head office and everything took about 48 hours or so, um, to get your SIM card. And sometimes there were problems there also with a hard biometric authentication. We enable something, uh, India enable something called E K Y C Elektronik. Know your customer? We took a fingerprint scan at our point of Sale Reliance Digital stores, and within 15 minutes we could verify within a few minutes. Within a few seconds we could verify that person is indeed my hunk, right, buying the same car, Elektronik Lee on we activated the SIM card in 15 minutes. That was a massive deal for our growth. Initially right toe onboard 100 million customers. Within our and 70 days. We couldn't have done it without be K. I see that was a massive deal for us and that is huge for any company starting a business or start up in India. We also made voice free, no roaming charges and the lowest data rates in the world. Plus, we gave a full suite of cloud services for free toe all geo customers. For example, we give goTV essentially for free. We give GOTV it'll law for free, which people, when we have a launching, told us that no one would see no one would use because the Indians like watching TV in the living rooms, um, with the family on a big screen television. But when we actually launched, they found that GOTV is one off our most used app. It's like 70,000,080 million monthly active users, and now we've basically been changing culture in India where culture is on demand. You can watch TV on the goal and you can pause it and you can resume whenever you have some free time. So really changed culture in India, India on we help people liver, digital life online. Right, So that was massive. So >>I'm now I'd like to talk about our cloud >>journey on board Animal Minorities Partnership. We've been partners that since 2014 since the beginning. So Geo has been using open stack since 2014 when we started with 14 note luster. I'll be one production environment One right? And that was I call it the first wave off our cloud where we're just understanding open stack, understanding the capabilities, understanding what it could do. Now we're in our second wave. Where were about 4000 bare metal servers in our open stack cloud multiple regions, Um, on that around 100,000 CPU cores, right. So it's a which is one of the bigger clouds in the world, I would say on almost all teams, with Ngor leveraging the cloud and soon I think we're going to hit about 10,000 Bama tools in our cloud, which is massive and just to give you a scale off our network, our in French, our data center footprint. Our network introduction is about 30 network data centers that carry just network traffic across there are there across India and we're about eight application data centers across three regions. Data Center is like a five story building filled with servers. So we're talking really significant scale in India. And we had to do this because when we were launching, there are the government regulation and try it. They've gotten regulatory authority of India, mandates that any telecom company they have to store customer data inside India and none of the other cloud providers were big enough to host our clothes. Right. So we we made all this intellectual for ourselves, and we're still growing next. I love to show you how we grown with together with Moran says we started in 2014 with the fuel deployment pipelines, right? And then we went on to the NK deployment. Pipelines are cloud started growing. We started understanding the clouds and we picked up M C p, which has really been a game changer for us in automation, right on DNA. Now we are in the latest release, ofem CPM CPI $2019 to on open stack queens, which on we've just upgraded all of our clouds or the last few months. Couple of months, 2 to 3 months. So we've done about nine production clouds and there are about 50 internal, um, teams consuming cloud. We call as our tenants, right. We have open stack clouds and we have communities clusters running on top of open stack. There are several production grade will close that run on this cloud. The Geo phone, for example, runs on our cloud private cloud Geo Cloud, which is a backup service like Google Drive and collaboration service. It runs out of a cloud. Geo adds G o g S t, which is a tax filing system for small and medium enterprises, our retail post service. There are all these production services running on our private clouds. We're also empaneled with the government off India to provide cloud services to the government to any State Department that needs cloud services. So we were empaneled by Maiti right in their ego initiative. And our clouds are also Easter. 20,000 certified 20,000 Colin one certified for software processes on 27,001 and said 27,017 slash 18 certified for security processes. Our clouds are also P our data centers Alsop a 942 be certified. So significant effort and investment have gone toe These data centers next. So this is where I think we've really valued the partnership with Morantes. Morantes has has trained us on using the concepts of get offs and in fries cold, right, an automated deployments and the tool change that come with the M C P Morantes product. Right? So, um, one of the key things that has happened from a couple of years ago to today is that the deployment time to deploy a new 100 north production cloud has decreased for us from about 55 days to do it in 2015 to now, we're down to about five days to deploy a cloud after the bear metals a racked and stacked. And the network is also the physical network is also configured, right? So after that, our automated pipelines can deploy 100 0 clock in five days flight, which is a massive deal for someone for a company that there's adding bear metals to their infrastructure so fast, right? It helps us utilize our investment, our assets really well. By the time it takes to deploy a cloud control plane for us is about 19 hours. It takes us two hours to deploy a compu track and it takes us three hours to deploy a storage rack. Right? And we really leverage the re class model off M C. P. We've configured re class model to suit almost every type of cloud that we have, right, and we've kept it fairly generous. It can be, um, Taylor to deploy any type of cloud, any type of story, nor any type of compute north. Andi. It just helps us automate our deployments by putting every configuration everything that we have in to get into using infra introduction at school, right plus M. C. P also comes with pipelines that help us run automated tests, automated validation pipelines on our cloud. We also have tempest pipelines running every few hours every three hours. If I recall correctly which run integration test on our clouds to make sure the clouds are running properly right, that that is also automated. The re class model and the pipelines helpers automate day to operations and changes as well. There are very few seventh now, compared toa a few years ago. It very rare. It's actually the exception and that may be because off mainly some user letter as opposed to a cloud problem. We also have contributed auto healing, Prometheus and Manager, and we integrate parameters and manager with our even driven automation framework. Currently, we're using Stack Storm, but you could use anyone or any event driven automation framework out there so that it indicates really well. So it helps us step away from constantly monitoring our cloud control control planes and clothes. So this has been very fruitful for us and it has actually apps killed our engineers also to use these best in class practices like get off like in France cord. So just to give you a flavor on what stacks our internal teams are running on these clouds, Um, we have a multi data center open stack cloud, and on >>top of that, >>teams use automation tools like terra form to create the environments. They also create their own Cuba these clusters and you'll see you'll see in the next slide also that we have our own community that the service platform that we built on top of open stack to give developers development teams NGO um, easy to create an easy to destroy Cuban. It is environment and sometimes leverage the Murano application catalog to deploy using heats templates to deploy their own stacks. Geo is largely a micro services driven, Um um company. So all of our applications are micro services, multiple micro services talking to each other, and the leverage develops. Two sets, like danceable Prometheus, Stack stone from for Otto Healing and driven, not commission. Big Data's tax are already there Kafka, Patches, Park Cassandra and other other tools as well. We're also now using service meshes. Almost everything now uses service mesh, sometimes use link. Erred sometimes are experimenting. This is Theo. So So this is where we are and we have multiple clients with NGO, so our products and services are available on Android IOS, our own Geo phone, Windows Macs, Web, Mobile Web based off them. So any client you can use our services and there's no lock in. It's always often with geo, so our sources have to be really good to compete in the open Internet. And last but not least, I think I love toe talk to you about our container journey. So a couple of years ago, almost every team started experimenting with containers and communities and they were demand for as a platform team. They were demanding community that the service from us a manage service. Right? So we built for us, it was much more comfortable, much more easier toe build on top of open stack with cloud FBI s as opposed to doing this on bare metal. So we built a fully managed community that a service which was, ah, self service portal, where you could click a button and get a community cluster deployed in your own tenant on Do the >>things that we did are quite interesting. We also handle some geo specific use cases. So we have because it was a >>manage service. We deployed the city notes in our own management tenant, right? We didn't give access to the customer to the city. Notes. We deployed the master control plane notes in the tenant's tenant and our customers tenant, but we didn't give them access to the Masters. We didn't give them the ssh key the workers that the our customers had full access to. And because people in Genova learning and experimenting, we gave them full admin rights to communities customers as well. So that way that really helped on board communities with NGO. And now we have, like 15 different teams running multiple communities clusters on top, off our open stack clouds. We even handle the fact that there are non profiting. I people separate non profiting I peoples and separate production 49 p pools NGO. So you could create these clusters in whatever environment that non prod environment with more open access or a prod environment with more limited access. So we had to handle these geo specific cases as well in this communities as a service. So on the whole, I think open stack because of the isolation it provides. I think it made a lot of sense for us to do communities our service on top off open stack. We even did it on bare metal, but that not many people use the Cuban, indeed a service environmental, because it is just so much easier to work with. Cloud FBI STO provision much of machines and covering these clusters. That's it from me. I think I've said a mouthful, and now I love for you toe. I'd love to have your questions. If you want to reach out to me. My email is mine dot capulet r l dot com. I'm also you can also message me on Twitter at my uncouple. So thank you. And it was a pleasure talking to you, Andre. Let let me hear your questions.

>>live from San Diego, California It's the Q covering Koopa and Cloud Native Cot brought to you by Red Cloud. Native Computing Pounding and its ecosystem >>Welcome back. This is the cubes. Fourth year of coverage at Q. Khan Cloud, Native Con. We're here in San Diego. It's 2019. I'm stewed. Minutemen, my host for this afternoon is Justin Warren and happy to welcome to guests from the newly minted platinum member of the CNC F Net Up. Sitting to my right is that Baldwin, who is the director of Cloud Native and Communities Engineering and sitting to his right is Rob Bhaskar, who's the product product strategy for Kubernetes. And it's also a board member on the CME CF, thank you both for joining us. Thank you. All right, s O, you know, maybe start with you. You know, uh, you know, companies that No, I've got plenty of history with net up there. What I've been hearing from that up last few years is you know, the Corvette has always been software, and it is a multi cloud world. I've been hearing this message before. Kind of the cloud native Trinity's piece was going, Of course, there's been some acquisitions and met up continuing to go through its transformations if you will s o help us understand kind of net ops positioning in this ecosystem >>in communities. Yes. Okay, so what we're doing is we're building a product that large manage cloud native workloads on top of community. So we've solved the infrastructure problem. And that's kind of the old problem. We're bored to death. Talking about that problem, but we try to do is try to provide a single painting class to manage on premise. Workloads and off permits were close. So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to say it's now more about the AP taxonomy in communities. And then what type of tooling do you build to manage that that application and communities and says what we're building right now? That's where we're headed with hybrid. >>There's a piece of it, though, that does draw from the historical strength of map, Of course. So we're building way have, essentially already in marketing capability that allows you to deploy communities an agnostic way, using pure, open unmodified kubernetes on all of the major public clouds, but also on trump. But over time and some of this is already evident. You'll see it married to the storage and data management capabilities that we draw from the historical NetApp and that we're starting to deploy into those public clouds >>with the idea that you should be able to take a project. So project being the name space, new space, having a certain application in it. So you have multiple deployments. I should be able to protect that name space or that project. I feel to move that and the data goes with it. So they were very data where that's what we're trying to do with our. Our software is, you know, make it very data. Where have that aligned with APS inside of communities, >>So maybe step back for a second. What? One of the one of things we've heard a few times at this show before and was talking about the keynote this morning is it is project over company when it comes to the C N C F Project Project over company. So it's about the ecosystem. The C in C F tries not to be opinionated, so it's okay for multiple projects to fitness face not moving up to a platinum a sponsor level. You know, participant here, Ned. It's got lots of history's in participating and driving standards, helping move where the industry's going. Where doesn't it up? See its position in, you know, the participating in the foundation and participating in this ecosystem? >>Yeah, So great question, actually. Love it. It's for my favorite topic. So I think the way we look at it is oftentimes, project to the extent they become ubiquitous, define a standard a de facto standard, so not necessarily ratified by some standards body. And so we're very interested in making sure that in a scenario where you would employ the standard from a technology integration perspective, our capabilities can can operate as an implementation behind the standard. So you get the distinguishing qualities of our capabilities. Our products in our service is Visa VI or in the context of the standard. We're not trying to take you down a walled garden path in a proprietary, uh, journey, if you will weigh, would rather actually compel you to work with us on the basis of the value, not necessarily operating off a proprietary set of interface. Kubernetes broadly perceive it as a defacto standard at this point, there's still some work to be done on running out the edges a lot of underway this week. It's definitely the case that there's a new appeal to making this more off herbal by pardon the expression mere mortals way. Think we can offer Cem, Cem, Cem help in that respect as well? >>Yeah, for us, its usability, right? I mean, that's the reason I started stacking. Cloud was that there was usability problem with kubernetes. I had a usability problem. That's what we're trying. That's how I'm looking at the landscape. And I look at kind of all the projects inside the C N c f. And I look at my role is our role is to How do we tie these together? How do we make these? So they're very, very usable to the users. How were engaging with the community is to try to like a line like this, basically pure upstream projects, and create a usability layer on top of that. But we're not gonna we don't want ever say we're gonna fork into these projects what we're gonna contribute back into these. >>That's one concern that I have heard from. Customers were speaking with some of them yesterday. One of the concerns I had was that when you add that manageability onto the base kubernetes layer, that often very spenders become rather opinionated about which way we think this is a good way to do that. And when you're trying to maintain that compatibility across the ecosystem. So some customers saying, Well, I actually don't want to have to be too closely welded to anyone. Vendor was part of the benefit of Kubernetes. I can move my workloads around. So how do you navigate What? What is the right level of opinion? Tohave and which part should actually just be part of a common sense >>should be along the lines of best practices is how we do it. So like, Let's take a number policy, for example, like applying a sane default network policy to every name space defying a saying default pod security policy. You know, building a cluster in the best practices fashion with security turned on hardening done where you would have done this already as a user. So we're not looking you in any way there, so that's we're not trying. I'm not trying to carry any type of opinion in the product we're trying to do is urbanize your experience across all of this ecosystem so that you don't ever have to think about time now building a cluster on top of Amazon. So I gotta worry about how do I manage this on Amazon? I don't want you to think about those providers anymore, right? And then on top of those on top of that infrastructure, I wanna have a way that you're thinking about managing the applications on those environments in the exact same way. So I'm scaling protecting an application on premise in the identical way I'm doing it in the cloud. >>So if it's the same everywhere, what's the value that you're providing? That means that I should choose your option than something else. >>So wait, do have This is where we have controllers and live inside of the clusters that manage this stuff for the user's so you could rebuild what we're doing, But you would have to roll it all by hands, but you could, you know, we don't stand in the way of your operations either. So, like if we go down, you don't go down that idea, but we do have controllers we have. We're using charities. And so, like our management technology, our controllers are just watching for workload to come into the environment. And then we show that in the interface. But you could just walk away as well if you wanted to. >>There's also a constellation of other service is that we're building around this experience, you know, they do draw again from some of the storage and management capabilities. So staple sets your traditional workloads that want to interact with or transact data against a block or a shared file system. We're providing capabilities for sophisticated qualities of persistence that can be can exist in all of those same public clouds. But moreover, over time, we're gonna be in on premises. Well, we're gonna be able to actually move migrate, place, cash her policy. Your put your persistent data with your workload as you move migrate scale burst would repatriate whatever the model is as you move across in between clouds. >>Okay, How how far down that pathway do you think we are? Because 11 criticism of proven it is is that a lot of the tooling that were used to from more traditional ways of operating this kind of infrastructure isn't really there yet. Hence into the question about we actually need to make this easy to use. How far down that pathway away? >>Why would argue that tooling that I've built has already solved some of those problems. So I think we're pretty far down. The people ride down the path. Now what we haven't done is open sourced. You know all my tools, right? To make it easier on everybody else. >>Get up, Scott. Strong partnerships across the cloud platforms. I had a chance to interview George at the Google Cloud event. New partner of the year. I believe some of the stuff help us understand how you know something about the team building. Interact with the public cloud. You look at anthems and azure Arkin. Of course, Amazon has many different ways. You can do your container and management piece there, you know, to talk a little bit of that relationship and how both with those partners and then across those partners, you know, work. >>Yeah, it's a wow. So how much time we have? So so there's certainly a lot of facets to to that, But drawing from the Google experience. We just announced the general availability of cloud volumes on top. So the ability to stand up and manage your own on top instance and Google's cloud. Likewise, we've announced the general availability of the cloud volume service, which gives you manage put fun as a service experience of shared file system on demand. Google, I believe, is either today or yesterday in London. I guess maybe I'll blame that on the time zone covers, not knowing what what day it was. But the point is that's now generally available. Some of those capabilities are going to be able to be connected to our ability from an ks to deploy, uh on demand kubernetes cluster and deploy applications from a market marketplace experience in a common way, not just with Google, but has your with Amazon. And so, you know, frankly, the story doesn't differ a little bit from one cloud to the next, but the the Endeavour is to provide common capabilities across all of them. It's also the case that we do have people that are very opinionated about I want to live only in the Google or that Microsoft of the Amazon, because we're trying to deliver a rich experience for those folks as well, even if you don't value the agnostic multi cloud expert. >>Yeah and Matt, You know, I'm sure you have a viewpoint on this, but you know, it's that skill set that that's really challenging. And I was at the Microsoft show and you've got people you know. It's not just about dot net, there's all that. They're they're embracing and opened all of these environment. But people tend to have the environment that you used to and for multi cloud to be a reality, it needs to be a little bit easier for me to go between them, but it's still we're still we're making progress. But there's work to do. Yeah, s so I just, you know, you know, I know you're building tools and everything, but what what more do we didn't need to do? What were some of the areas that you know you're hopeful for about a >>year before I need to go for the supreme? It's down. It's coming down to the data side like I need to be able to say that on when I turn on data service is inside of kubernetes. I need be able to have that work would go anywhere, right? And because it is a developer. So I have I'm running a production. I'm running an Amazon. But maybe I'm doing test locally on my bare metal environments. Right? I need I want to be able to maybe sink down some of my data. I'm working with a production down to my test environment. That stuff's missing. There's no one doing that right now, and that's where we're headed. That's the path that's where we're headed. >>Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up, actually, because one of the things that I feel like I heard a little bit last year, but it is violated more this year is we're talking a little bit more to the application to the application developer because, you know, communities is a piece of the infrastructure, But it's about the Colonel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the colonel there. So, you know, how do we make sure you know, we're standing between what the APP developer needs and still making sure that, you know, infrastructure is taken care of because storage and networking they're still hard. >>It is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm approaching. I'm thinking more along the lines of I'm trying to work about app developers personally than infrastructure This point on for me, you know, like so I have I give you a cluster in three minutes, right? So I don't really have to worry about that problem, you know, way also put Theo on top of the clusters. So it's like we're trying to create this whole narrative that you can manage that environment on day one day, two versions. But and that's for like, an I T manager, right? And society instead of our product. How I'm addressing this is you have personas and so you have this concept. You have an I T manager. They do these things that could set limits for the developer who's building the applications or the service's and pushing those up into the environment. They need to have a sense of freedom, right? And said on that side of the house, you know, I'm trying not to break them out of their tooling. So, like wait part of our product ties in to get s o. We have CD, you know? So you just get push, get commit to a branch and weaken target multiple clusters, Right? But no point to the developer, actually, drafty animal or anything. We make way basically create the container for you. Read the deployment, bring it online. And I feel like there's these lines and that I t guys need to be able to say I need to create the guard rails for the Debs. I don't want to make it seem like I'm creating guardrails for the deaths caused the deaths. Don't like that. That's how I'm balancing it. >>Okay, Because that has always been the tension and that there's a lot of talk about Dev ops, but you don't talkto application developers, and they don't wanna have anything to do with infrastructure. They just want a program to an A p I and get things done. They would like this infrastructure to be seamless. Yeah, >>and what we did, like also what I'm giving them is like service dashboards. Because as a developer, you know, because now you're in charge of your cue, eh? You're writing your tests you're pushing. If your c I is going to ct you on your service in production, right? And so we're delivering dashboards as well for service Is that the developers are running, so they dig in and say, Oh, here's an issue or here's where the issue is probably gonna be at I'm gonna go fix this. Yeah, and we're trying to create that type of like scenario for developer and for an I T manager, >>slightly different angle on it, by understanding that question correctly is part of the complexity of infrastructure is something we're also turned Friday deterministic sort of easy button capability, for perhaps you're familiar with them. That's nice. And a C I product, which we we kind of expand that as hybrid cloud infrastructure. If the intention is to make it a simple private cloud capability and indeed are not, a community service operates directly off of it. It's a big part of actually how we deliver Cloud Service is from it. The point is, is that if you're that application developer, if you want the effective and CASS on prom thing, Endeavor with are not a PhD. I product is to give you that sort of easy button extremes because you didn't really want to be a storage admin network at you didn't want to get into the be mired in the details of infra. So So you know, that's obviously work in progress. But we think we're definitely headed down the right direction >>for him. >>Yeah, it just seemed that a lot of enterprises wanna have the cloud like experience, but they want to be able to bring it home that we're seeing a lot more. Yeah. >>So this is like, this turn cheon from this turnkey cloud on premise and played with think has weaken like the same auto scaling. So take so take the dynamic nature of opportunities. Right. So I have a base cluster size of four worker notes, right? But my work, let's gonna maybe maybe need to have more notes. So my out of scale is gonna increase the size my cluster and decrease the size right Pretty much everybody only do that in the public cloud. I could do that in public and on premise now and so that's That's what we're trying to deliver. And that's nickel stuff. I think >>that there's a lot of advantages thio enterprises operating in that way because I have I people that here I can I can go and buy them, hire them and say way, need you to operate this gear and you, you've already done elsewhere. You can do it in cloud. You can do it on side. I could know run my operations the same across no matter where my applications leave, Which saves me a lot of money on training costs on development costs on generally makes for a much more smooth and seamless experience. So, Rob, if you could just love >>your takeaway on, you know, kind of net up participation here at the event and what you want people to take away off from the show this year. >>So it's certainly the case that we're doing a lot of great work. We, like people toe become aware of it. Not up, of course, is not. I think we talked about this and perhaps other context, not strictly a storage and data management company. Only way do draw from the strength of that as we're providing full stack capabilities in a way that are interconnected with public cloud things like are not a Cuban. Any service is really the foundational glue in many ways how we deliver the application run time, but over time will build a consolation of data centric capabilities around that as well. >>I would just love to get your viewpoint Is someone that you know built a company in this ecosystem. There's so many start ups here. Give us kind of that founder viewpoint of being in. They're so sort of ecosystem of the >>ecosystem. So this is how I came into the ecosystem at the beginning. I would have to say that it does feel different. Att This point, I'm gonna speak as Matt, not as now. And so my my thinking has always been It feels a lot like kind of your really your big fan of that rock bands, right? And you go to a local club way all get to know each other at that local club. There's, like maybe 500 of us or 1000 of us. And then that band gets signed a Warner Brothers and goes to the top it. Now there's 20,000 people or 12,000 people. That's how it feels to me right now, I think. But what I like about it is that just shows the power of the community is now at a point where is drawing in like cities now, not just a small collection of a tribe of people, right? And I think that's a very powerful thing with this community. And like all the where they called the kubernetes summits that they're doing way, didn't have any of those back when we first got going. I mean, it was tough to fill the room, you know, Now, now we can fill the room and it's amazing. And what I like seeing is is people moving past the problem with kubernetes itself and moving into, like, what other problems can I solve on top of kubernetes, you know? So you're starting to see that all these really exciting startups doing really need things, you know, and I really likes it like this vendor hall I really like, you know, because you get to see all the new guys. But there's a lot of stuff going on, and I'm excited to see where the community goes in the next five years. But it's we've gone from 0 to 60 insanely because you guys were at the original coupon. I think, Well, >>it's our fourth year doing the Cube at this show, but absolutely we've watched the early days, You know, I'm not supposed to mention open stack of this show, but we remember talking T o J j. And some of the early people there and wait interviewed Chris McCloskey back into Google days, right? So, yeah, we've been fortunate to be on here, really? Day zero here and definitely great energy. So much. Congrats. So much on the progress. Really appreciate the updates, Everything going. As you said, right, we've reached a certain estate and just adding more value on top of this whole >>environment. We're now like we're in, like, Junior high now. Right on were in grade school for a few years. >>All right, Matt. Rob, Thank you so much for the update. Hopefully not an awkward dance tonight for the junior people. For Justin Warren. I'm stupid and back with more coverage here from Q Khan Cloud native 2019. Diego, Thank you for watching Cute

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation welcome to the cube studios for another cube conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving business outcomes with technology I'm your host Peter Burris every Enterprise that is trying to do digital transformation finds themselves facing two challenges one their digital assets themselves are a source of value and to other assets that are sources of value are becoming increasingly digitized and that creates a lot of challenges a lot of security concerns that bad agents out in the internet are exploiting and requires a programmatic fundamental response to try to ensure that the digital assets or digitized assets aren't mucked with by bad guys so to have that conversation we're here with Tony Jian Domenico Tony's a senior security strategist and a researcher and the CTI lead at Ford NIT Tony welcome back to the cube hey Pete it's great to be here man so as you get to see you yeah well we've been doing this for a couple of years now Tony and so let's get just kick it off what's new so what's new should we start talking about a little bit about the index here what we saw with the overall threat landscape sure well cool so you know y'all like you know like we always do we always like to start off with an overall threat landscape at least they give an overview of what that index looks like and it really consists of malware botnets application exploits and what we looked at over the quarter there was a lot of volatility throughout the quarter but at the end of the day it ended up only 1% higher than the quarter before now some of that volatility really is being driven by what we've talked about a lot of times Peter and a lot of these other episodes is that swarm like activity whenever an actual vulnerability is successfully exploited by an adversary everybody swarms in on that vulnerability and our fertig are labs you see that really like super spike up a great example of that would be in the last year in December think PHP which is an application that's a framework to rapidly develop web apps they had a vulnerability that if you successfully exploited it it would give you remote the remote access or I'm sorry remote code execution and they were exploiting that and we definitely seen a huge uptick now that wasn't the only one for the quarter but that and along with some of the other ones it's really what's kind of driving on volume so the index has been around for a few quarters now and it's a phenomenal way for folks out there to observe how overall trends are evolving but as you said one of the key things that's being discovered is that or you're discovering as you do this research is this notion of swarming it seems as though there ought to be a couple of reasons why that's the case Tony it's it's we've talked about this in the past there's folks who want to get a little bit more creative in creating bad stuff and there's other folks who just want to keep the cost low and just leverage what's out there which approach are the bad guys tend to using more and or is there an approach one of the other approach is more targeted to one or another kind of attack well it's funny you usually see the folks in the cyber crime ecosystem that are really focusing on you know identifying them not so much where they're doing more sort of targeted attacks it's more of a you know pray and spray you know type of thing and you see a lot of that you know anytime they can hire you can get a life of cybercrime right in the leverage some of these common you know you know services you have code reuse you know which is out there so you have that sort of like group there right and then you have more of the you know more of the you know hands-on sort of keyboard the more you know targeted attacks that are really focused on specific you know victims so you have those you know those two groups I say now with that though there kind of is a commonality there where there's this concept and it's nothing new we've been talking about this for years in the cybersecurity industry it's living off the land right where once a victim is on the actual machine itself they start leveraging some of the tools that are already available there and usually these tools their administration tools to be able to minister the actual network but these tools can also be used in the farías ways from example here would be you know PowerShell they you know a lot of admins use PowerShell for efficiencies on the network but that also can be used in the forest ways and the bad guys are using that and then this past quarter you know we did see a lot of PowerShell activity now you know Peter having said that though I think as a whole with the security community we're getting better at being able to identify these types of PowerShell attacks one we got better technology on the endpoint and I think to Microsoft is in a better job of being able to provide us more hardening capabilities for PowerShell like being able to restrict access to PowerShell as well as giving us better logging capability to be able to identify that malicious activity so we are getting better and the bad guys know this so I think what we can probably look for in the future is them leveraging either a different interface or different language because all they really need to do is interface with that dotnet framework which is part of a Windows system and they can start doing the same exact things they were doing with PowerShell and we're seeing that it in the open-source community now things like Silent Trinity open source tool that allows you to do those same things so for C an open source pretty much guarantee we're gonna see it out there in the wild here soon so we've got a group of bad actors that are using this living off the land approach to leverage technology that's out there and we've still got kind of the big guys having to worry about being targeted because you know that's how you make a lot of money if you're successful but it certainly does sound is that a general business practice for a lot of these guys is to leverage common infrastructure and that this common infrastructure is increasingly becoming you know better understood have I got that right no I you know Peter you're spot-on here what we did we did some exploratory research in this last quarter and what we found out is with the exploits within that quarter or or or the axe will come threats sixty percent of those threats are using the same infrastructure what I mean by infrastructure you know I I mean things like you know infrastructure to download malware maybe to redirect you to some other site and then downloads malware and that makes a lot of sense Peter you know why because in this cybercrime ecosystem if you didn't realize this it's a vicious competitive market everybody is trying to sell their wares and they want to make sure that their service is the best it's better than someone else's and they want to make sure that it's stable so they find these you know community you know infrastructures that are tried-and-true you know some of them are from you know bulletproof hosting so you know services you know things of that nature so you see a lot of the folks in a cybercrime ecosystem using them now on the flip side though you definitely see some of the thread actors that are more sort of you know more the advanced threat actors maybe what they want to do is hide a little bit so they'll hide in that larger community to be able to possibly be able to bypass that that attribution back to them because they don't want to be sort of labeled with oh hey this particular thread actor always uses this infrastructure so if they can blend in a lot harder to find them so they can use what is available but at the same time differentiate themselves in this bad actor ecosystem to take on even more challenging the potentially lucrative exploits now tell me if we know something about this common infrastructure as you said sixty percent of these attacks are using this common infrastructure that suggests we can bring a common set of analysis frameworks to bear as we consider who these actors are and what their practices are have I got that right yeah yeah absolutely if you can align your PlayBook defenses with the offensive actual playbook that the threat actors are using they're better off you're gonna be right because then you can be able to combat them a lot better and as a matter of fact I mean we've kind of introduced this sort of concept in conjunction with our our partnership with the cyber threat Alliance we're actually producing these thread actor play books you know and what we're doing is the idea behind this is if we can identify the malicious activity the threat actors are actually doing to complete their cyber mission expose some of them tactics those techniques those procedures we could possibly disrupt some of that malicious activity and you know this past this past quarter here we focused on a group you know Peter called the the silence group and they're really focused on identifying and stealing financial data they're looking at banks banking infrastructure and ATM machines and you'll get a kick out of this with the ATM machines they're doing something called jackpot II where they if they can find the axle software behind the ATM machine find that ATM process they can inject a malicious DLL into that process giving them total control over the ATM machine and now they can dispense money at will and they can have these money mules on the other side receive that actual money so you know we have a lot of different campaigns in play books that we've identified on our website and that once we understand that we align that with our security fabric and ensure that our customers are protected against that particular playbook Tony I'm not happy to hear that so this is this is my distressed face that I use during these types of interviews but it's if if we're able to look at how bad guy play books are operating then we ought to be able to say and what are those fundamentals that a shop should be using the security professionals should be using that are just you know so basic and so consistent and it seems that are you guys have identified three to do a better job of taking a fabric approach that starts to weave together all assets into a more common security framework to to do a better job of micro and macro segmentation so that you can identify where problems are and then finally increase your overall use of automation with AI and m/l how is this translating into your working with customers as they try to look at these playbooks and apply their own playbooks for how they set up their response regimes yeah so I mean I think overall I mean I think you can hit it on the head computer you kind of nailed down really those some it was kind of fundamental sort of concepts here now you can identify and you can document as many playbooks as you want but if you're not able to quickly respond when you identify those actual playbooks you know that's really half the battle I mean if you need to be able to identify you know one not only when the threat actors in your environment but then also you need to be able to quickly you know take action and like you were saying with that fabric if we can have that actual fabric being able to talk to the other controls within that fabric and take some action they're better off you're gonna be because you can align your defenses there and that's a great would you gotta make sure that all the controls within that fabric are all communicating together they're working together they're sharing information and they're responding together sure enough yeah are you starting to advise customers I'm curious you advising customers that even as they increase the capabilities of their fabric and how they handle their architectures from a micro macro segmentation and increase their use of automation or are there things that they can do from a practice standpoint just to ensure that their responses are appropriate fast and accurate yeah sure sure I mean I think a lot of the actual fabric once you actually build that fabric there's certain you know playbook responses that you can program into that fabric and I'll also even go I know we talked about you know fundamentals but I'll even dive a little bit lower here and you know you have that fabric but you also have to make sure you understand all the assets you have in your in you know your environment because that that information and that knowledge helps you with that macro and micro segmentation because when you can isolate you know different areas if there is a certain area that gets infected you can quickly turn the knobs to isolate that particular threat and that specific you know area or that's a specific segmented area and that is really gonna allow you to fight through the attack give you more time and ultimately reduce the impact of that particular breach so Tony we got the summer months coming up that means more vacations which is you jest less activity but then we got summer interns coming in which you know may involve additional clicking on things that shouldn't be clicked on any ideas what what should security pros be thinking about in the summer months what's the trend show well I think we're gonna continue to see that you know I I think the same type of threats that we've seen in the first quarter but I would say you know there may be a slight sort of drop-off right we got kind of kids that are gonna be out on vacation so you know schools may not see as much activity you got you know folks gonna be taking vacations and at the end of the day most of these exploits are client-side exploits which means you know a lot of times you need somebody to do something on the actual computer either you know clicking that link or clicking the attachment and if they're not there to do that they'll just sit there and you'll see less activity over time so we might see a little reduction in volume but I still think we'll see very similar types of you know threats in the coming months so good time good time are a good opportunity for security pros to double down on putting in place new architecture practices and response regime so that when stuff kicks up in the fall they're that much more prepared da Tony G on Domenico fort Ned great once again thanks very much for being on the cube hey you know Peter it's always a pleasure being here man hope to see you again soon you will and once again I'm Peter Burroughs until next time [Music]

>> From Phoenix, Arizona, theCUBE. At Catalyst Conference, here's your host Jeff Frick. (soft music) >> Hey Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. About 400 people. The fourth year of the conference. Really getting together, talking about women in tech issues. Something in the water, here in Phoenix. We were here two years ago at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing, also just down the road. So we're happy to be here and really get a feel. And bring to you some of the leaders here, that are making things happen. We're really excited by our next guest, Coco Brown, the founder and CEO of the Alena Alliance, or Athena Alliance, excuse me, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So the Athena Alliance, what's it all about? >> Well so the Athena Alliance is an organization of executive women who've achieved great success in their careers. And they have vision collectively of women operating at their highest level of impact. And within the context of a business leadership realm, that highest level really is the boardroom. And so our mission is to help women obtain board seats and be successful in the role. >> So there's a lot of conversations about board. It seems to be kind of the new hot button topic about inequality. There's certainly ton of conversations about inequality and pay highlighted recently by the women's national soccer team, which got a lot of buzz. And I think everyone knows that conversation that's been going on for a while. But the boardroom conversation is kind of new. It's kind of bubbling up. Or at least that's my sense of it, that barely have cracked the surface in terms of historical numbers in getting women representation on boards. >> Yeah. >> Why does that continue to be a problem? Is it a pipeline issue? Is it a match making issue? Is it a networking issue? Is it just, I just don't know? What is the issue? >> It's not a pipeline issue. And so what's happened in this discussion is there were some, sort of, pretty notable examples of situations where women raised their hands and said, hey where are the women on these boards. And the response was, well where are the women? Which kind of created this energy around the topic a lot more strongly more recently. Which is to say, there are a lot of qualified women out there who would be great board directors. And yet the positions of board director are gate kept by largely men. This is just the circumstance. Men are the ones who back companies. They're their VCs, they're the founders, they're the CEOs. And within their networks, they don't have a lot of women. Executive women. Likewise, executive women tend to seek each other out too. So we're not in each other's realms. So a lot of the conversation has been around raising awareness to the issue. There's been great tracking of exactly where is the issue. And how are we making progress. And then there's been a lot of great organizations that have been helping women get ready for board positions, training them. And thirdly, there's a lot of great organizations out there who are, essentially, identifying qualified women, and cataloging them, putting them in data bases and saying, hey no excuses, here they are. But the key missing element and my feeling as to why the problem continues to persist, part of it is just time. It's just going to take time. But part of it is also, really networking, what you said. It is about networking. It is that the women who want these positions and who are qualified for these positions need to know the men who are looking for board directors. And when you actually connect, make those two connections happen, you get incredible success. And we're seeing it already. >> Or as the age old advice, it's not who you know, but who knows you. >> Yes! >> It used to always be the other way around. But it's really who knows you. And we live in such a time of personal branding and external communication via LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, medium, however you choose to externalize your professional position. And it kind of gets intermingled with your personal position. There really is not much excuse, at least, to make the attempt, to get yourself out there. >> Exactly, it's why. So there's 16 of the speakers here at this conference, are Athena Alliance women. And part of the reason we're here, we're here because this is such a noble and important and fantastic event for us to participate in. The other reason we're here is because this is apart of our way of getting known too, right. Of becoming more visible. Of making our brand, personal brand known. So this is one of those key things about who knows you that we should and need to be doing. >> So how many Athena foundation women are in executive boards now? >> So Athena Alliance is relatively new. So we're just getting started. About 50% of, 47% of the women associated with Athena Alliance are already on boards. >> That's pretty good, 47%. >> Yes, largely those are non-profit boards. >> Okay. >> They also are on a fair number of advisory boards. And they're now looking for the private boards and corporate boards and they're looking for public boards as well. >> And do you see that as kind of a logical stepping stone between an advisory board, a non-profit board, potentially a private company board, a VC company and then to a larger public entity. Is that kind of? >> Yeah I see it two ways. On the one hand, it's stepping stones and on the other, we have a variety of careers. So let's take me for example. I ran and was an owner of a privately held company. We reached about 50 million dollars in revenue before I sold my ownership, moved on. I'm qualified for a certain kind of a board. I'm qualified for a private board of a certain type of growth, sort of trajectory or stage. Others like Yvonne, who you spoke with, she's qualified for public boards of a different size. So some of it is what we're qualified for and what we can really contribute to and some of it is stepping stones. So for example, advisory boards are a great stepping stone. You get absolutely zero board credit for being on an advisory board, 'cause it doesn't have fiduciary responsibilities. >> No fiduciary responsibility. >> Right. But it's incredible network experience. It's a great way to get to know CEOs, to get to know VCs, to make yourself known as a candidate for other aspects of that company. >> Where do you see the natural networking opportunities? 'Cause clearly there's networks that exist around where you went to school. There's networks around, increasingly alumni groups, within companies, especially a big company like an Intel or an HP, where you got these huge alumni groups, 'cause they've been around for so long. Where are some of the other natural alumni groups that then cross over that are going to allow rubbing of shoulders with the old school guy board members with some of these women that are trying to break through? >> Yeah it's interesting. I think that is a really good opportunity space because I do see that mostly, the networking pods, if you will, are within school alumni groups, or corporate alumni groups, or organizations that women belong to. But that are largely then just women organizations. Or maybe some industry organizations. And industry boards are a great way to make that connection point. But I don't think that women do have opportunities of overlap with men in those organizations and those networking communities. So the way it has to happen is, I think we have to make it happen. So it's almost like, creating mixers. We need some mixers, right? Male VCs mixed with Athena Alliance women. Let's get together. We actually have an event coming up like that. Where you can have some men and women in the same room. They get to get a sense of each other. Those you do start seeing more of that going on and it's kind of essential. >> 'Cause you really need that right? I mean, they are networks. And everything going on today is all about networks, whether it's IOT or social media or whatever. It's networks and they're all naturally bound by something but how do you get that overlap from one network to the other when there's not enough overlap to really make the activity that you're seeking. Of course, there's always CUBE alumni, which is a terrific network. So we'll use that as a founding point. >> Absolutely. Well and Dan Scholnick, who is a general partner with Trinity, he's on a number of boards. He's speaking at an event for the Athena Alliance on a panel coming up. And he's got board openings in the variety of boards that he's on. Those are the kinds of connections. Make opportunities for Dan to be in the same room as a number of these great women. I think we just have to create it. >> It's interesting, interesting. 'Cause it is all about the connection, right. You got to know people and you got to put the word out. Nobody ever got a board seat sending out a resume. I don't know. How many come from executive head hunters? I never got a job from executive head hunters. It's really more about who you know. >> And executive recruiters only actually fill about one to two percent of board seats. It's only the top companies with the deepest pockets or the greatest pressure that can do that. >> Okay so what are your priorities for the next six months, nine months, what are your top things your guys are working on at the Alliance? >> So we're relatively new, so big, big priority for us is funding. We're also scaling. So scaling is one of the important things. In other words, scaling our relationships with those VCs, with CEOs, and starting to create great linkages through these networking events. >> All right, well Coco, thank you for taking a few minutes. >> Thank you. >> Absolutely and good luck with the Alliance. It sounds like you guys are on your way. We see increasingly, we did a show at SAP in conjunction with MAKERS and they got a great movie about some of the women who just broke down barriers in advertising, fashion, finance, tech, et cetera. Meg Whitman, among many women highlighted there. And it's tough to break down that door. When the first one gets through, hopefully they leave a little space for somebody else to scooch in behind them. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Absolutely. All right, Jeff Frick here with Coco Brown. We are the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, Phoenix, Arizona. You're watching theCUBE. See you next time. (soft music)