(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone in live coverage here at theCUBE, Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS re:inforce 22 security conference for Amazon Web Services. Obviously reinvent the end of the years' the big celebration, "re:Mars" is the new show that we've covered as well. The res are here with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, host with a great guest, Ameesh Divatia, co-founder, and CEO of a company called "Baffle." Ameesh, thanks for joining us on theCUBE today, congratulations. >> Thank you. It's good to be here. >> And we got the custom encrypted socks. >> Yup, limited edition >> 64 bitter 128. >> Base 64 encoding. >> Okay.(chuckles) >> Secret message in there. >> Okay.(chuckles) Secret message.(chuckles) We'll have to put a little meme on the internet, figure it out. Well, thanks for comin' on. You guys are goin' hot right now. You guys a hot startup, but you're in an area that's going to explode, we believe. >> Yeah. >> The SuperCloud is here, we've been covering that on theCUBE that people are building on top of the Amazon Hyperscalers. And without the capex, they're building platforms. The application tsunami has come and still coming, it's not stopping. Modern applications are faster, they're better, and they're driving a lot of change under the covers. >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> And you're seeing structural change happening in real time, in ops, the network. You guys got something going on in the encryption area. >> Yes >> Data. Talk about what you guys do. >> Yeah. So we believe very strongly that the next frontier in security is data. We've had multiple waves in security. The next one is data, because data is really where the threats will persist. If the data shows up in the wrong place, you get into a lot of trouble with compliance. So we believe in protecting the data all the way down at the field, or record level. That's what we do. >> And you guys doing all kinds of encryption, or other things? >> Yes. So we do data transformation, which encompasses three different things. It can be tokenization, which is format preserving. We do real encryption with counter mode, or we can do masked views. So tokenization, encryption, and masking, all with the same platform. >> So pretty wide ranging capabilities with respect to having that kind of safety. >> Yes. Because it all depends on how the data is used down the road. Data is created all the time. Data flows through pipelines all the time. You want to make sure that you protect the data, but don't lose the utility of the data. That's where we provide all that flexibility. >> So Kurt was on stage today on one of the keynotes. He's the VP of the platform at AWS. >> Yes. >> He was talking about encrypts, everything. He said it needs, we need to rethink encryption. Okay, okay, good job. We like that. But then he said, "We have encryption at rest." >> Yes. >> That's kind of been there, done that. >> Yes. >> And, in-flight? >> Yeah. That's been there. >> But what about in-use? >> So that's exactly what we plug. What happens right now is that data at rest is protected because of discs that are already self-encrypting, or you have transparent data encryption that comes native with the database. You have data in-flight that is protected because of SSL. But when the data is actually being processed, it's in the memory of the database or datastore, it is exposed. So the threat is, if the credentials of the database are compromised, as happened back then with Starwood, or if the cloud infrastructure is compromised with some sort of an insider threat like a Capital One, that data is exposed. That's precisely what we solve by making sure that the data is protected as soon as it's created. We use standard encryption algorithms, AES, and we either do format preserving, or true encryption with counter mode. And that data, it doesn't really matter where it ends up, >> Yeah. >> because it's always protected. >> Well, that's awesome. And I think this brings up the point that we want been covering on SiliconAngle in theCUBE, is that there's been structural change that's happened, >> Yes. >> called cloud computing, >> Yes. >> and then hybrid. Okay. Scale, role of data, higher level abstraction of services, developers are in charge, value creations, startups, and big companies. That success is causing now, a new structural change happening now. >> Yes. >> This is one of them. What areas do you see that are happening right now that are structurally changing, that's right in front of us? One is, more cloud native. So the success has become now the problem to solve - >> Yes. >> to get to the next level. >> Yeah. >> What are those, some of those? >> What we see is that instead of security being an afterthought, something that you use as a watchdog, you create ways of monitoring where data is being exposed, or data is being exfiltrated, you want to build security into the data pipeline itself. As soon as data is created, you identify what is sensitive data, and you encrypt it, or tokenize it as it flows into the pipeline using things like Kafka plugins, or what we are very clearly differentiating ourselves with is, proxy architectures so that it's completely transparent. You think you're writing to the datastore, but you're actually writing to the proxy, which in turn encrypts the data before its stored. >> Do you think that's an efficient way to do it, or is the only way to do it? >> It is a much more efficient way of doing it because of the fact that you don't need any app-dev resources. There are many other ways of doing it. In fact, the cloud vendors provide development kits where you can just go do it yourself. So that is actually something that we completely avoid. And what makes it really, really interesting is that once the data is encrypted in the data store, or database, we can do what is known as "Privacy Enhanced Computation." >> Mm. >> So we can actually process that data without decrypting it. >> Yeah. And so proxies then, with cloud computing, can be very fast, not a bottleneck that could be. >> In fact, the cloud makes it so. It's very hard to - >> You believe that? >> do these things in static infrastructure. In the cloud, there's infinite amount of processing available, and there's containerization. >> And you have good network. >> You have very good network, you have load balancers, you have ways of creating redundancy. >> Mm. So the cloud is actually enabling solutions like this. >> And the old way, proxies were seen as an architectural fail, in the old antiquated static web. >> And this is where startups don't have the baggage, right? We didn't have that baggage. (John laughs) We looked at the problem and said, of course we're going to use a proxy because this is the best way to do this in an efficient way. >> Well, you bring up something that's happening right now that I hear a lot of CSOs and CIOs and executives say, CXOs say all the time, "Our", I won't say the word, "Our stuff has gotten complicated." >> Yes. >> So now I have tool sprawl, >> Yeah. >> I have skill gaps, and on the rise, all these new managed services coming at me from the vendors who have never experienced my problem. And their reaction is, they don't get my problem, and they don't have the right solutions, it's more complexity. They solve the complexity by adding more complexity. >> Yes. I think we, again, the proxy approach is a very simple. >> That you're solving that with that approach. >> Exactly. It's very simple. And again, we don't get in the way. That's really the the biggest differentiator. The forcing function really here is compliance, right? Because compliance is forcing these CSOs to actually adopt these solutions. >> All right, so love the compliance angle, love the proxy as an ease of use, take the heavy lifting away, no operational problems, and deviations. Now let's talk about workloads. >> Yeah. >> 'Cause this is where the use is. So you got, or workloads being run large scale, lot a data moving around, computin' as well. What's the challenge there? >> I think it's the volume of the data. Traditional solutions that we're relying on legacy tokenizations, I think would replicate the entire storage because it would create a token wall, for example. You cannot do that at this scale. You have to do something that's a lot more efficient, which is where you have to do it with a cryptography approach. So the workloads are diverse, lots of large files in the workloads as well as structured workloads. What we have is a solution that actually goes across the board. We can do unstructured data with HTTP proxies, we can do structured data with SQL proxies. And that's how we are able to provide a complete solution for the pipeline. >> So, I mean, show about the on-premise versus the cloud workload dynamic right now. Hybrid is a steady state right now. >> Yeah. >> Multi-cloud is a consequence of having multiple vendors, not true multi-cloud but like, okay, they have Azure there, AWS here, I get that. But hybrid really is the steady state. >> Yes. >> Cloud operations. How are the workloads and the analytics the data being managed on-prem, and in the cloud, what's their relationship? What's the trend? What are you seeing happening there? >> I think the biggest trend we see is pipelining, right? The new ETL is streaming. You have these Kafka and Kinesis capabilities that are coming into the picture where data is being ingested all the time. It is not a one time migration. It's a stream. >> Yeah. >> So plugging into that stream is very important from an ingestion perspective. >> So it's not just a watchdog. >> No. >> It's the pipelining. >> It's built in. It's built-in, it's real time, that's where the streaming gets another diverse access to data. >> Exactly. >> Data lakes. You got data lakes, you have pipeline, you got streaming, you mentioned that. So talk about the old school OLTP, the old BI world. I think Power BI's like a $30 billion product. >> Yeah. >> And you got Tableau built on OLTP building cubes. Aren't we just building cubes in a new way, or, >> Well. >> is there any relevance to the old school? >> I think there, there is some relevance and in fact that's again, another place where the proxy architecture really helps, because it doesn't matter when your application was built. You can use Tableau, which nobody has any control over, and still process encrypted data. And so can with Power BI, any Sequel application can be used. And that's actually exactly what we like to. >> So we were, I was talking to your team, I knew you were coming on, and they gave me a sound bite that I'm going to read to the audience and I want to get your reaction to. >> Sure. >> 'Cause I love this. I fell out of my chair when I first read this. "Data is the new oil." In 2010 that was mentioned here on theCUBE, of course. "Data is the new oil, but we have to ensure that it does not become the next asbestos." Okay. That is really clever. So we all know about asbestos. I add to the Dave Vellante, "Lead paint too." Remember lead paint? (Ameesh laughs) You got to scrape it out and repaint the house. Asbestos obviously causes a lot of cancer. You know, joking aside, the point is, it's problematic. >> It's the asset. >> Explain why that sentence is relevant. >> Sure. It's the assets and liabilities argument, right? You have an asset which is data, but thanks to compliance regulations and Gartner says 75% of the world will be subject to privacy regulations by 2023. It's a liability. So if you don't store your data well, if you don't process your data responsibly, you are going to be liable. So while it might be the oil and you're going to get lots of value out of it, be careful about the, the flip side. >> And the point is, there could be the "Grim Reaper" waiting for you if you don't do it right, the consequences that are quantified would be being out of business. >> Yes. But here's something that we just discovered actually from our survey that we did. While 93% of respondents said that they have had lots of compliance related effects on their budgets. 75% actually thought that it makes them better. They can use the security postures as a competitive differentiator. That's very heartening to us. We don't like to sell the fear aspect of this. >> Yeah. We like to sell the fact that you look better compared to your neighbor, if you have better data hygiene, back to the. >> There's the fear of missing out, or as they say, "Keeping up with the Joneses", making sure that your yard looks better than the next one. I get the vanity of that, but you're solving real problems. And this is interesting. And I want to get your thoughts on this. I found, I read that you guys protect more than a 100 billion records across highly regulated industries. Financial services, healthcare, industrial IOT, retail, and government. Is that true? >> Absolutely. Because what we are doing is enabling SaaS vendors to actually allow their customers to control their data. So we've had the SaaS vendor who has been working with us for over three years now. They store confidential data from 30 different banks in the country. >> That's a lot of records. >> That's where the record, and. >> How many customers do you have? >> Well, I think. >> The next round of funding's (Ameesh laughs) probably they're linin' up to put money into you guys. >> Well, again, this is a very important problem, and there are, people's businesses are dependent on this. We're just happy to provide the best tool out there that can do this. >> Okay, so what's your business model behind? I love the success, by the way, I wanted to quote that stat to one verify it. What's the business model service, software? >> The business model is software. We don't want anybody to send us their confidential data. We embed our software into our customers environments. In case of SaaS, we are not even visible, we are completely embedded. We are doing other relationships like that right now. >> And they pay you how? >> They pay us based on the volume of the data that they're protecting. >> Got it. >> That in that case which is a large customers, large enterprise customers. >> Pay as you go. >> It is pay as you go, everything is annual licenses. Although, multi-year licenses are very common because once you adopt the solution, it is very sticky. And then for smaller customers, we do base our pricing also just on databases. >> Got it. >> The number of databases. >> And the technology just reviewed low-code, no-code implementation kind of thing, right? >> It is by definition, no code when it comes to proxy. >> Yeah. >> When it comes to API integration, it could be low code. Yeah, it's all cloud-friendly, cloud-native. >> No disruption to operations. >> Exactly. >> That's the culprit. >> Well, yeah. >> Well somethin' like non-disruptive operations.(laughs) >> No, actually I'll give an example of a migration, right? We can do live migrations. So while the databases are still alive, as you write your. >> Live secure migrations. >> Exactly. You're securing - >> That's the one that manifests. >> your data as it migrates. >> Awright, so how much funding have you guys raised so far? >> We raised 36 and a half, series A, and B now. We raised that late last year. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Who's the venture funders? >> True Ventures is our largest investor, followed by Celesta Capital, National Grid Partners is an investor, and so is Engineering Capital and Clear Vision Ventures. >> And the seed and it was from Engineering? >> Seed was from Engineering. >> Engineering Capital. >> And then True came in very early on. >> Okay. >> Greenspring is also an investor in us, so is Industrial Ventures. >> Well, privacy has a big concern, big application for you guys. Privacy, secure migrations. >> Very much so. So what we are believe very strongly in the security's personal, security is yours and my data. Privacy is what the data collector is responsible for. (John laughs) So the enterprise better be making sure that they've complied with privacy regulations because they don't tell you how to protect the data. They just fine you. >> Well, you're not, you're technically long, six year old start company. Six, seven years old. >> Yeah. >> Roughly. So yeah, startups can go on long like this, still startup, privately held, you're growing, got big records under management there, congratulations. What's next? >> I think scaling the business. We are seeing lots of applications for this particular solution. It's going beyond just regulated industries. Like I said, it's a differentiating factor now. >> Yeah >> So retail, and a lot of other IOT related industrial customers - >> Yeah. >> are also coming. >> Ameesh, talk about the show here. We're at re:inforce, actually we're live here on the ground, the show floor buzzing. What's your takeaway? What's the vibe this year? What if you had to share what your opinion the top story here at the show, what would be the two top things, or three things? >> I think it's two things. First of all, it feels like we are back. (both laugh) It's amazing to see people on the show floor. >> Yeah. >> People coming in and asking questions and getting to see the product. The second thing that I think is very gratifying is, people come in and say, "Oh, I've heard of you guys." So thanks to digital media, and digital marketing. >> They weren't baffled. They want baffled. >> Exactly. >> They use baffled. >> Looks like, our outreach has helped, >> Yeah. >> and has kept the continuity, which is a big deal. >> Yeah, and now you're a CUBE alumni, welcome to the fold. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate you coming on. And we're looking forward to profiling you some day in our startup showcase, and certainly, we'll see you in the Palo Alto studios. Love to have you come in for a deeper dive. >> Sounds great. Looking forward to it. >> Congratulations on all your success, and thanks for coming on theCUBE, here at re:inforce. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay, we're here in, on the ground live coverage, Boston, Massachusetts for AWS re:inforce 22. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, who's in an analyst session, right? He'll be right back with us on the next interview, coming up shortly. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(digital music) >> And we're back live in New York. It's theCUBE. It's not SNL, it's better than SNL. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here with about 10,000 to 12,000 folks. (John chuckles) There is a ton of energy here. There's a ton of interest in what's going on. But one of the things that we know that AWS is really well-known for is its massive ecosystem. And one of its ecosystem partners is joining us. Please welcome Domenic Ravita, the VP of Product Marketing from SingleStore. Dominic, great to have you on the program. >> Well, thank you. Glad to be here. >> It's a nice opening, wasn't it? (Lisa and John laughing) >> I love SNL. Who doesn't? >> Right? I know. So some big news came out today. >> Yes. >> Funding. Good number. Talk to us a little bit about that before we dig in to SingleStore and what you guys are doing with AWS. >> Right, yeah. Thank you. We announced this morning our latest round, 116 million. We're really grateful to our customers and our investors and the partners and employees and making SingleStore a success to go on this journey of, really, to fulfill our mission to unify and simplify modern, real time data. >> So talk to us about SingleStore. Give us the value prop, the key differentiators, 'cause obviously customers have choice. Help us understand where you're nailing it. >> SingleStore is all about, what we like to say, the moments that matter. When you have an analytical question about what's happening in the moment, SingleStore is your best way to solve that cost-effectively. So that is for, in the case of Thorn, where they're helping to protect and save children from online trafficking or in the case of True Digital, which early in the pandemic, was a company in Southeast Asia that used anonymized phone pings to identify real time population density changes and movements across Thailand to have a proactive response. So really real time data in the moment can help to save lives quite literally. But also it does things that are just good commercially that gives you an advantage like what we do with Uber to help real time pricing and things like this. >> It's interesting this data intensity happening right now. We were talking earlier on theCUBE with another guest and we said, "Why is it happening now?" The big data has been around since the dupe days. That was hard to work with, then data lakes kicked in. But we seem to be, in the past year, everyone's now aware like, "Wow, I got a lot of data." Is it the pandemic? Now we're seeing customers understand the consequences. So how do you look at that? Because is it just timing, evolution? Are they now getting it or is the technology better? Is machine learning better? What's the forces driving the massive data growth acceleration in terms of implementing and getting stuff out, done? (chuckles) >> We think it's the confluence of a lot of those things you mentioned there. First of all, we just celebrate the 15-year anniversary of the iPhone, so that is like wallpaper now. It's just faded into our daily lives. We don't even think of that as a separate thing. So there's an expectation that we all have instant information and not just for the consumer interactions, for the business interactions. That permeates everything. I think COVID with the pandemic forced everyone, every business to try to move to digital first and so that put pressure on the digital service economy to mature even faster and to be digital first. That is what drives what we call data intensity. And more generally, the economic phenomenon is the data intensive era. It's a continuous competition and game for customers. In every moment in every location, in every dimension, the more data hat you have, the better value prop you can give. And so SingleStore is uniquely positioned to and focused on solving this problem of data intensity by bringing and unifying data together. >> What's the big customer success story? Can you share any examples that highlight that? What are some cool things that are happening that can illustrate this new, I won't say bit that's been flipped, that's been happening for a while, but can you share some cutting edge customer successes? >> It's happening across a lot of industries. So I would say first in financial services, FinTech. FinTech is always at the leading edge of these kind of technology adaptions for speeds and things like that. So we have a customer named IEX Cloud and they're focused on providing real time financial data as an API. So it's a data product, API-first. They're providing a lot of historical information on instruments and that sort of thing, as well as real time trending information. So they have customers like Seeking Alpha, for instance, who are providing real time updates on massive, massive data sets. They looked at lots of different ways to do this and there's the traditional, transactionals, LTP database and then maybe if you want to scale an API like theirs, you might have a separate end-memory cache and then yet another database for analytics. And so we bring all that together and simplify that and the benefit of simplification, but it's also this unification and lower latency. Another example is GE who basically uses us to bring together lots of financial information to provide quicker close to the end-of-month process across many different systems. >> So we think about special purpose databases, you mentioned one of the customers having those. We were in the keynote this morning where AWS is like, "We have the broadest set of special purpose databases," but you're saying the industry can't afford them anymore. Why and would it make SingleStore unique in terms of what you deliver? >> It goes back to this data intensity, in that the new business models that are coming out now are all about giving you this instant context and that's all data-driven and it's digital and it's also analytical. And so the reason that's you can't afford to do this, otherwise, is data's getting so big. Moving that data gets expensive, 'cause in the cloud you pay for every byte you store, every byte you process, every byte you move. So data movement is a cost in dollars and cents. It's a cost in time. It's also a cost in skill sets. So when you have many different specialized data sets or data-based technologies, you need skilled people to manage those. So that's why we think the industry needs to be simplified and then that's why you're seeing this unification trend across the database industry and other parts of the stack happening. With AWS, I mean, they've been a great partner of ours for years since we launched our first cloud database product and their perspective is a little bit different. They're offering choice of the specialty, 'cause many people build this way. But if you're going after real time data, you need to bring it. They also offer a SingleStore as a service on AWS. We offer it that way. It's in the AWS Marketplace. So it's easily consumable that way. >> Access to real time data is no longer a nice-to-have for any company, it's table stakes. We saw that especially in the last 20 months or so with companies that needed to pivot so quickly. What is it about SingleStore that delivers, that you talked about moments that matter? Talk about the access to real time data. How that's a differentiator as well? >> I think businesses need to be where their customers are and in the moments their customers are interacting. So that is the real time business-driver. As far as technology wise, it's not easy to do this. And you think about what makes a database fast? A major way of what makes it fast is how you store the data. And so since 2014, when we first released this, what Gartner called at the time, hybrid transaction/analytical processing or HTAP, where we brought transactional data and analytical data together. Fast forward five years to 2019, we released this innovation called Universal Storage, which does that in a single unified table type. Why that matters is because, I would say, basically cost efficiency and better speed. Again, because you pay for the storage and you pay for the movement. If you're not duplicating that data, moving it across different stores, you're going to have a better experience. >> One of the things you guys pioneered is unifying workloads. You mentioned some of the things you've done. Others are now doing it. Snowflake, Google and others. What does that mean for you guys? I mean, 'cause are they copying you? Are they trying to meet the functionality? >> I think. >> I mean, unification. I mean, people want to just store things and make it, get all the table stakes, check boxes, compliance, security and just keep coding and keep building. >> We think it's actually great 'cause they're validating what we've been seeing in the market for years. And obviously, they see that it's needed by customers. And so we welcome them to the party in terms of bringing these unified workloads together. >> Is it easy or hard? >> It's a difficult thing. We started this in 2014. And we've now have lots of production workloads on this. So we know where all the production edge cases are and that capability is also a building block towards a broader, expansive set of capabilities that we've moved onto that next phase and tomorrow actually we have an event called, The Real Time Data Revolution, excuse me, where we're announcing what's in that new product of ours. >> Is that a physical event or virtual? >> It's a virtual event. >> So we'll get the URL on the show notes, or if you know, just go to the new site. >> Absolutely. SingleStore Real Time Data Revolution, you'll find it. >> Can you tease us with the top three takeaways from Revolution tomorrow? >> So like I said, what makes a database fast? It's the storage and we completed that functionality three years ago with Universal Storage. What we're now doing for this next phase of the evolution is making enterprise features available and Workspaces is one of the foundational capabilities there. What SingleStore Workspaces does is it allows you to have this isolation of compute between your different workloads. So that's often a concern to new users to SingleStore. How can I combine transactions and analytics together? That seems like something that might be not a good thing. Well, there are multiple ways we've been doing that with resource governance, workload management. Workspaces offers another management capability and it's also flexible in that you can scale those workloads independently, or if you have a multi-tenant application, you can segment your application, your customer tenant workloads by each workspace. Another capability we're releasing is called Wasm, which is W-A-S-M, Web Assembly. This is something that's really growing in the open source community and SingleStore's contributing to that open source scene, CF project with WASI and Wasm. Where it's been mentioned mostly in the last few years has been in the browser as a more efficient way to run code in the browser. We're adapting that technology to allow you to run any language of your choice in the database and why that's important, again, it's for data movement. As data gets large in petabyte sizes, you can't move it in and out of Pandas in Python. >> Great innovation. That's real valuable. >> So we call this Code Engine with Wasm and- >> What do you call it? >> Code Engine Powered by Wasm. >> Wow. Wow. And that's open source? >> We contribute to the Wasm open source community. >> But you guys have a service that you- >> Yes. It's our implementation and our database. But Wasm allows you to have code that's portable, so any sort of runtime, which is... At release- >> You move the code, not the data. >> Exactly. >> With the compute. (chuckles) >> That's right, bring the compute to the data is what we say. >> You mentioned a whole bunch of great customer examples, GE, Uber, Thorn, you talked about IEX Cloud. When you're in customer conversations, are you dealing mostly with customers that are looking to you to help replace an existing database that was struggling from a performance perspective? Or are you working with startups who are looking to build a product on SingleStore? Is it both? >> It is a mix of both. I would say among SaaS scale up companies, their API, for instance, is their product or their SaaS application is their product. So quite literally, we're the data engine and the database powering their scale to be able to sign that next big customer or to at least sleep at night to know that it's not going to crash if they sign that next big costumer. So in those cases, we're mainly replacing a lot of databases like MySQL, Postgre, where they're typically starting, but more and more we're finding, it's free to start with SingleStore. You can run it in production for free. And in our developer community, we see a lot of customers running in that way. We have a really interesting community member who has a Minecraft server analytics that he's building based on that SingleStore free tier. In the enterprise, it's different, because there are many incumbent databases there. So it typically is a case where there is a, maybe a new product offering, they're maybe delivering a FinTech API or a new SaaS digital offering, again, to better participate in this digital service economy and they're looking for a better price performance for that real time experience in the app. That's typically the starting point, but there are replacements of traditional incumbent databases as well. >> How has the customer conversation evolved the last couple of years? As we talked about, one of the things we learned in the pandemic was access to real time data and those moments that matter isn't a nice-to-have anymore for businesses. There was that force march to digital. We saw the survivors, we're seeing the thrivers, but want to get your perspective on that. From the customers, how has the conversation evolved or elevated, escalated within an organization as every company has to be a data company? >> It really depends on their business strategy, how they are adapting or how they have adapted to this new digital first orientation and what does that mean for them in the direct interaction with their customers and partners. Often, what it means is they realize that they need to take advantage of using more data in the customer and partner interaction and when they come to those new ideas for new product introductions, they find that it's complicated and expensive to build in the old way. And if you're going to have these real time interactions, interactive applications, APIs, with all this context, you're going to have to find a better, more cost-effective approach to get that to market faster, but also not to have a big sprawling data-based technology infrastructure. We find that in those situations, we're replacing four or five different database technologies. A specialized database for key value, a specialized database for search- >> Because there's no unification before? Is that one of the reasons? >> I think it's an awareness thing. I think technology awareness takes a little bit of time, that there's a new way to do things. I think the old saying about, "Don't pave cow paths when the car..." You could build a straight road and pave it. You don't have to pave along the cow path. I think that's the natural course of technology adaption and so as more- >> And the- pandemic, too, highlighted a lot of the things, like, "Do we really need that?" (chuckles) "Who's going to service that?" >> That's right. >> So it's an awakening moment there where it's like, "Hey, let's look at what's working." >> That's right. >> Double down on it. >> Absolutely. >> What are you excited about new round of funding? We talked about, obviously, probably investments in key growth areas, but what excites you about being part of SingleStore and being a partner of AWS? >> SingleStore is super exciting. I've been in this industry a long time as an engineer and an engineering leader. At the time, we were MemSQL, came into SingleStore. And just that unification and simplification, the systems that I had built as a system engineer and helped architect did the job. They could get the speed and scale you needed to do track and trace kinds of use cases in real time, but it was a big trade off you had to make in terms of the complexity, the skill sets you needed and the cost and just hard to maintain. What excites me most about SingleStore is that it really feels like the iPhone moment for databases because it's not something you asked for, but once your friend has it and shows it to you, why would you have three different devices in your pocket with a flip phone, a calculator? (Lisa and Domenic chuckles) Remember these days? >> Yes. >> And a Blackberry pager. (all chuckling) You just suddenly- >> Or a computer. That's in there. >> That's right. So you just suddenly started using iPhone and that is sort of the moment. It feels like we're at it in the database market where there's a growing awareness and those announcements you mentioned show that others are seeing the same. >> And your point earlier about the iPhone throwing off a lot of data. So now you have data explosions at levels that unprecedented, we've never seen before and the fact that you want to have that iPhone moment, too, as a database. >> Absolutely. >> Great stuff. >> The other part of your question, what excites us about AWS. AWS has been a great partner since the beginning. I mean, when we first released our database, it was the cloud database. It was on AWS by customer demand. That's where our customers were. That's where they were building other applications. And now we have integrations with other native services like AWS Glue and we're in the Marketplace. We've expanded, that said we are a multi-cloud system. We are available in any cloud of your choice and on premise and in hybrid. So we're multi-cloud, hybrid and SaaS distribution. >> Got it. All right. >> Got it. So the event is tomorrow, Revolution. Where can folks go to register? What time does it start? >> 1:00 PM Eastern and- >> 1:00 PM. Eastern. >> Just Google SingleStore Real Time Data Revolution and you'll find it. Love for everyone to join us. >> All right. We look forward to it. Domenic, thank you so much for joining us, talking about SingleStore, the value prop, the differentiators, the validation that's happening in the market and what you guys are doing with AWS. We appreciate it. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Domenic Ravita and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live from New York at AWS Summit 22. John and I are going to be back after a short break, so come back. (digital pulsing music)

(gentle music) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, we're back at Cube on Cloud, and with me is Muddu Sudhakar. He's a long time alum of theCube, a technologist and executive, a serial entrepreneur and an investor. Welcome my friend, good to see you. >> Good to see you, Dave. Pleasure to be with you. Happy elections, I guess. >> Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to start, this work from home, pivot's been amazing, and you've seen the enterprise collaboration explode. I wrote a piece a couple months ago, looking at valuations of various companies, right around the snowflake IPO, I want to ask you about that, but I was looking at the valuations of various companies, at Spotify, and Shopify, and of course Zoom was there. And I was looking at just simple revenue multiples, and I said, geez, Zoom actually looks, might look undervalued, which is crazy, right? And of course the stock went up after that, and you see teams, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft doing a great job across the board, we've written about that, you're seeing Webex is exploding, I mean, what do you make of this whole enterprise collaboration play? >> No, I think the look there is a trend here, right? So I think this probably trend started before COVID, but COVID is going to probably accelerate this whole digital transformation, right? People are going to work remotely a lot more, not everybody's going to come back to the offices even after COVID, so I think this whole collaboration through Slack, and Zoom, and Microsoft Teams and Webex, it's going to be the new game now, right? Both the video, audio and chat solutions, that's really going to help people like eyeballs. You're not going to spend time on all four of them, right? It's like everyday from a consumer side, you're going to spend time on your Gmail, Facebook, maybe Twitter, maybe Instagram, so like in the consumer side, on your personal life, you have something on the enterprise. The eyeballs are going to be in these platforms. >> Yeah. Well. >> But we're not going to take everything. >> Well, So you are right, there's a permanence to this, and I got a lot of ground to cover with you. And I always like our conversations mood because you tell it like it is, I'm going to stay on that work from home pivot. You know a lot about security, but you've seen three big trends, like mega trends in security, Endpoint, Identity Access Management, and Cloud Security, you're seeing this in the stock prices of companies like CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Okta- >> Right >> Sailpoint- >> Right, I mean, they exploded, as a result of the pandemic, and I think I'm inferring from your comment that you see that as permanent, but that's a real challenge from a security standpoint. What's the impact of Cloud there? >> No, it isn't impact but look, first is all the services required to be Cloud, right? See, the whole ideas for it to collaborate and do these things. So you cannot be running an application, like you can't be running conference and SharePoint oN-Prem, and try to on a Zoom and MS teams. So that's why, if you look at Microsoft is very clever, they went with Office 365, SharePoint 365, now they have MS Teams, so I think that Cloud is going to drive all these workloads that you have been talking about a lot, right? You and John have been saying this for years now. The eruption of Cloud and SAS services are the vehicle to drive this next-generation collaboration. >> You know what's so cool? So Cloud obviously is the topic, I wonder how you look at the last 10 years of Cloud, and maybe we could project forward, I mean the big three Cloud vendors, they're running it like $20 billion a quarter, and they're growing collectively, 35, 40% clips, so we're really approaching a hundred billion dollars for these three. And you hear stats like only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, so it feels like we're just getting started. How do you look at the impact of Cloud on the market, as you say, the last 10 years, and what do you expect going forward? >> No, I think it's very fascinating, right? So I remember when theCube, you guys are talking about 10 years back, now it's been what? More than 10 years, 15 years, since AWS came out with their first S3 service back in 2006. >> Right. >> Right? so I think look, Cloud is going to accelerate even more further. The areas is going to accelerate is for different reasons. I think now you're seeing the initial days, it's all about startups, initial workloads, Dev test and QA test, now you're talking about real production workloads are moving towards Cloud, right? Initially it was backup, we really didn't care for backup they really put there. Now you're going to have Cloud health primary services, your primary storage will be there, it's not going to be an EMC, It's not going to be a NetApp storage, right? So workloads are going to shift from the business applications, and these business applications, will be running on the Cloud, and I'll make another prediction, make customer service and support. Customer service and support, again, we should be running on the Cloud. You're not want to run the thing on a Dell server, or an IBM server, or an HP server, with your own hosted environment. That model is not because there's no economies of scale. So to your point, what will drive Cloud for the next 10 years, will be economies of scale. Where can you take the cost? How can I save money? If you don't move to the Cloud, you won't save money. So all those workloads are going to go to the Cloud are people who really want to save, like global gradual custom, right? If you stay on the ASP model, a hosted, you're not going to save your costs, your costs will constantly go up from a SaaS perspective. >> So that doesn't bode well for all the On-prem guys, and you hear a lot of the vendors that don't own a Cloud that talk about repatriation, but the numbers don't support that. So what do those guys do? I mean, they're talking multi-Cloud, of course they're talking hybrid, that's IBM's big play, how do you see it? >> I think, look, see there, to me, multi-Cloud makes sense, right? You don't want one vendor that you never want to get, so having Amazon, Microsoft, Google, it gives them a multi-Cloud. Even hybrid Cloud does make sense, right? There'll be some workloads. It's like, we are still running On-prem environment, we still have mainframe, so it's never going to be a hundred percent, but I would say the majority, your question is, can we get to 60, 70, 80% workers in the next 10 years? I think you will. I think by 2025, more than 78% of the Cloud Migration by the next five years, 70% of workload for enterprise will be on the Cloud. The remaining 25, maybe Hybrid, maybe On-prem, but I get panics, really doesn't matter. You have saved and part of your business is running on the Cloud. That's your cost saving, that's where you'll see the economies of scale, and that's where all the growth will happen. >> So square the circle for me, because again, you hear the stat on the IDC stat, IBM Ginni Rometty puts it out there a lot that only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, everything else is On-prem, but it's not a zero sum game, right? I mean the Cloud native stuff is growing like crazy, the On-prem stuff is flat to down, so what's going to happen? When you talk about 70% of the workloads will be in the Cloud, do you see those mission critical apps and moving into the car, I mean the insurance companies going to put their claims apps in the Cloud, or the financial services companies going to put their mission critical workloads in the Cloud, or they just going to develop new stuff that's Cloud native that is sort of interacts with the On-prem. How do you see that playing out? >> Yeah, no, I think absolutely, I think a very good question. So two things will happen. I think if you take an enterprise, right? Most businesses what they'll do is the workloads that they should not be running On-prem, they'll move it up. So obviously things like take, as I said, I use the word SharePoint, right? SharePoint and conference, all the knowledge stuff is still running on people's data centers. There's no reason. I understand, I've seen statistics that 70, 80% of the On-prem for SharePoint will move to SharePoint on the Cloud. So Microsoft is going to make tons of money on that, right? Same thing, databases, right? Whether it's CQL server, whether there is Oracle database, things that you are running as a database, as a Cloud, we move to the Cloud. Whether that is posted in Oracle Cloud, or you're running Oracle or Mongo DB, or Dynamo DB on AWS or SQL server Microsoft, that's going to happen. Then what you're talking about is really the App concept, the applications themselves, the App server. Is the App server is going to run On-prem, how much it's going to laureate outside? There may be a hybrid Cloud, like for example, Kafka. I may use a Purse running on a Kafka as a service, or I may be using Elasticsearch for my indexing on AWS or Google Cloud, but I may be running my App locally. So there'll be some hybrid place, but what I would say is for every application, 75% of your Comprende will be on the Cloud. So think of it like the Dev. So even for the On-prem app, you're not going to be a 100 percent On-prem. The competent, the billing materials will move to the Cloud, your Purse, your storage, because if you put it On-prem, you need to add all this, you need to have all the whole things to buy it and hire the people, so that's what is going to happen. So from a competent perspective, 70% of your bill of materials will move to the Cloud, even for an On-prem application. >> So, Of course, the susification of the industry in the last decade and in my three favorite companies last decade, you've worked for two of them, Tableau, ServiceNow, and Splunk. I want to ask you about those, but I'm interested in the potential disruption there. I mean, you've got these SAS companies, Salesforce of course is another one, but they can't get started in 1999. What do you see happening with those? I mean, we're basically building these sort of large SAS, platforms, now. Do you think that the Cloud native world that developers can come at this from an angle where they can disrupt those companies, or are they too entrenched? I mean, look at service now, I mean, I don't know, $80 billion market capital where they are, they bigger than Workday, I mean, just amazing how much they've grown and you feel like, okay, nothing can stop them, but there's always disruption in this industry, what are your thoughts on that. >> Not very good with, I think there'll be disrupted. So to me actually to your point, ServiceNow is now close to a 100 billion now, 95 billion market coverage, crazy. So from evaluation perspective, so I think the reason they'll be disrupted is that the SAS vendors that you talked about, ServiceNow, and all this plan, most of these services, they're truly not a multi-tenant or what do you call the Cloud Native. And that is the Accenture. So because of that, they will not be able to pass the savings back to the enterprises. So the cost economics, the economics that the Cloud provides because of the multi tenancy ability will not. The second reason there'll be disrupted is AI. So far, we talked about Cloud, but AI is the core. So it's not really Cloud Native, Dave, I look at the AI in a two-piece. AI is going to change, see all the SAS vendors were created 20 years back, if you remember, was an operator typing it, I don't respond administered we'll type a Splunk query. I don't need a human to type a query anymore, system will actually find it, that's what the whole security game has changed, right? So what's going to happen is if you believe in that, that AI, your score will disrupt all the SAS vendors, so one angle SAS is going to have is a Cloud. That's where you make the Cloud will take up because a SAS application will be Cloudified. Being SAS is not Cloud, right? Second thing is SAS will be also, I call it, will be AI-fied. So AI and machine learning will be trying to drive at the core so that I don't need that many licenses. I don't need that many humans. I don't need that many administrators to manage, I call them the tuners. Once you get a driverless car, you don't need a thousand tuners to tune your Tesla, or Google Waymo car. So the same philosophy will happen is your Dev Apps, your administrators, your service management, people that you need for service now, and these products, Zendesk with AI, will tremendously will disrupt. >> So you're saying, okay, so yeah, I was going to ask you, won't the SAS vendors, won't they be able to just put, inject AI into their platforms, and I guess I'm inferring saying, yeah, but a lot of the problems that they're solving, are going to go away because of AI, is that right? And automation and RPA and things of that nature, is that right? >> Yes and no. So I'll tell you what, sorry, you have asked a very good question, let's answer, let me rephrase that question. What you're saying is, "Why can't the existing SAS vendors do the AI?" >> Yes, right. >> Right, >> And there's a reason they can't do it is their pricing model is by number of seats. So I'm not going to come to Dave, and say, come on, come pay me less money. It's the same reason why a board and general lover build an electric car. They're selling 10 million gasoline cars. There's no incentive for me, I'm not going to do any AI, I'm going to put, I'm not going to come to you and say, hey, buy me a hundred less license next year from it. So that is one reason why AI, even though these guys do any AI, it's going to be just so I call it, they're going to, what do you call it, a whitewash, kind of like you put some paint brush on it, trying to show you some AI you did from a marketing dynamics. But at the core, if you really implement the AI with you take the driver out, how are you going to change the pricing model? And being a public company, you got to take a hit on the pricing model and the price, and it's going to have a stocking part. So that, to your earlier question, will somebody disrupt them? The person who is going to disrupt them, will disrupt them on the pricing model. >> Right. So I want to ask you about that, because we saw a Snowflake, and it's IPO, we were able to pour through its S-1, and they have a different pricing model. It's a true Cloud consumption model, Whereas of course, most SAS companies, they're going to lock you in for at least one year term, maybe more, and then, you buy the license, you got to pay X. If you, don't use it, you still got to pay for it. Snowflake's different, actually they have a different problem, that people are using it too much and the sea is driving the CFO crazy because the bill is going up and up and up, but to me, that's the right model, It's just like the Amazon model, if you can justify it, so how do you see the pricing, that consumption model is actually, you're seeing some of the On-prem guys at HPE, Dell, they're doing as a service. They're kind of taking a page out of the last decade SAS model, so I think pricing is a real tricky one, isn't it? >> No, you nailed it, you nailed it. So I think the way in which the Snowflake there, how the disruptors are data warehouse, that disrupted the open source vendors too. Snowflake distributed, imagine the playbook, you disrupted something as the $ 0, right? It's an open source with Cloudera, Hortonworks, Mapper, that whole big data that you want me to, or that market is this, that disrupting data warehouses like Netezza, Teradata, and the charging more money, they're making more money and disrupting at $0, because the pricing models by consumption that you talked about. CMT is going to happen in the service now, Zen Desk, well, 'cause their pricing one is by number of seats. People are going to say, "How are my users are going to ask?" right? If you're an employee help desk, you're back to your original health collaborative. I may be on Slack, I could be on zoom, I'll maybe on MS Teams, I'm going to ask by using usage model on Slack, tools by employees to service now is the pricing model that people want to pay for. The more my employees use it, the more value I get. But I don't want to pay by number of seats, so the vendor, who's going to figure that out, and that's where I look, if you know me, I'm right over as I started, that's what I've tried to push that model look, I love that because that's the core of how you want to change the new game. >> I agree. I say, kill me with that problem, I mean, some people are trying to make it a criticism, but you hit on the point. If you pay more, it's only because you're getting more value out of it. So I wanted to flip the switch here a little bit and take a customer angle. Something that you've been on all sides. And I want to talk a little bit about strategies, you've been a strategist, I guess, once a strategist, always a strategist. How should organizations be thinking about their approach to Cloud, it's cost different for different industries, but, back when the cube started, financial services Cloud was a four-letter word. But of course the age of company is going to matter, but what's the framework for figuring out your Cloud strategy to get to your 70% and really take advantage of the economics? Should I be Mono Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Multi-vendor, what would you advise? >> Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, I actually call it the tech stack. Actually you and John taught me that what was the tech stack, like the lamp stack, I think there is a new Cloud stack needs to come, and that I think the bottomline there should be... First of all, anything with storage should be in the Cloud. I mean, if you want to start, whether you are, financial, doesn't matter, there's no way. I come from cybersecurity side, I've seen it. Your attackers will be more with insiders than being on the Cloud, so storage has to be in the Cloud then come compute, Kubernetes. If you really want to use containers and Kubernetes, it has to be in the public Cloud, leverage that have the computer on their databases. That's where it can be like if your data is so strong, maybe run it On-prem, maybe have it on a hosted model for when it comes to database, but there you have a choice between hybrid Cloud and public Cloud choice. Then on top when it comes to App, the app itself, you can run locally or anywhere, the App and database. Now the areas that you really want to go after to migrate is look at anything that's an enterprise workload that you don't need people to manage it. You want your own team to move up in the career. You don't want thousand people looking at... you don't want to have a, for example, IT administrators to call central people to the people to manage your compute storage. That workload should be more, right? You already saw Sierra moved out to Salesforce. We saw collaboration already moved out. Zoom is not running locally. You already saw SharePoint with knowledge management mode up, right? With a box, drawbacks, you name anything. The next global mode is a SAS workloads, right? I think Workday service running there, but work data will go into the Cloud. I bet at some point Zendesk, ServiceNow, then either they put it on the public Cloud, or they have to create a product and public Cloud. To your point, these public Cloud vendors are at $2 trillion market cap. They're they're bigger than the... I call them nation States. >> Yeah, >> So I'm servicing though. I mean, there's a 2 trillion market gap between Amazon and Azure, I'm not going to compete with them. So I want to take this workload to run it there. So all these vendors, if you see that's where Shandra from Adobe is pushing this right, Adobe, Workday, Anaplan, all the SAS vendors we'll move them into the public Cloud within these vendors. So those workloads need to move out, right? So that all those things will start, then you'll start migrating, but I call your procurement. That's where the RPA comes in. The other thing that we didn't talk about, back to your first question, what is the next 10 years of Cloud will be RPA? That third piece to Cloud is RPA because if you have your systems On-prem, I can't automate them. I have to do a VPN into your house there and then try to automate your systems, or your procurement, et cetera. So all these RPA vendors are still running On-prem, most of them, whether it's UI path automation anywhere. So the Cloud should be where the brain should be. That's what I call them like the octopus analogy, the brain is in the Cloud, the tentacles are everywhere, they should manage it. But if my tentacles have to do a VPN with your house to manage it, I'm always will have failures. So if you look at the why RPA did not have the growth, like the Snowflake, like the Cloud, because they are running it On-prem, most of them still. 80% of the RP revenue is On-prem, running On-prem, that needs to be called clarified. So AI, RPA and the SAS, are the three reasons Cloud will take off. >> Awesome. Thank you for that. Now I want to flip the switch again. You're an investor or a multi-tool player here, but so if you're, let's say you're an ecosystem player, and you're kind of looking at the landscape as you're in an investor, of course you've invested in the Cloud, because the Cloud is where it's at, but you got to be careful as an ecosystem player to pick a spot that both provides growth, but allows you to have a moat as, I mean, that's why I'm really curious to see how Snowflake's going to compete because they're competing with AWS, Microsoft, and Google, unlike, Frank, when he was at service now, he was competing with BMC and with on-prem and he crushed it, but the competitors are much more capable here, but it seems like they've got, maybe they've got a moat with MultiCloud, and that whole data sharing thing, we'll see. But, what about that? Where are the opportunities? Where's that white space? And I know there's a lot of white space, but what's the framework to look at, from an investor standpoint, or even a CEO standpoint, where you want to put place your bets. >> No, very good question, so look, I did something. We talk as an investor in the board with many companies, right? So one thing that says as an investor, if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Docker or a computer, there's no way nobody's going to invest. So that we can motor off, even if you want to do object storage or a block storage, I mean, I've been an investor board member of so many storage companies, there's no way as an industry, I'll write a check for a compute or storage, right? If you want to create a next generation network, like either NetSuite, or restart Juniper, Cisco, there is no way. But if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Viper for remote working environments, where AI is at the core, I'm interested in that, right? So if you look at how the packets are dropped, there's no intelligence in either not switching today. The packets come, I do it. The intelligence is not built into the network with AI level. So if somebody comes with an AI, what good is all this NVD, our GPS, et cetera, if you cannot do wire speed, packet inspection, looking at the content and then route the traffic. If I see if it's a video package, but in UN Boston, there's high interview day of they should be loading our package faster, because you are a premium ISP. That intelligence has not gone there. So you will see, and that will be a bad people will happen in the network, switching, et cetera, right? So that is still an angle. But if you work and it comes to platform services, remember when I was at Pivotal and VMware, all models was my boss, that would, yes, as a platform, service is a game already won by the Cloud guys. >> Right. (indistinct) >> Silicon Valley Investors, I don't think you want to invest in past services, right? I mean, you might come with some lecture edition database to do some updates, there could be some game, let's say we want to do a time series database, or some metrics database, there's always some small angle, but the opportunity to go create a national database there it's very few. So I'm kind of eliminating all the black spaces, right? >> Yeah. >> We have the white spaces that comes in is the SAS level. Now to your point, if I'm Amazon, I'm going to compete with Snowflake, I have Redshift. So this is where at some point, these Cloud platforms, I call them aircraft carriers. They're not going to stay on the aircraft carriers, they're going to own the land as well. So they're going to move up to the SAS space. The question is you want to create a SAS service like CRM. They are not going to create a CRM like service, they may not create a sales force and service now, but if you're going to add a data warehouse, I can very well see Azure, Google, and AWS, going to create something to compute a Snowflake. Why would I not? It's so close to my database and data warehouse, I already have Redshift. So that's going to be nightlights, same reason, If you look at Netflix, you have a Netflix and you have Amazon prime. Netflix runs on Amazon, but you have Amazon prime. So you have the same model, you have Snowflake, and you'll have Redshift. The both will help each other, there'll be a... What do you call it? Coexistence will happen. But if you really want to invest, you want to invest in SAS companies. You do not want to be investing in a compliment players. You don't want to a feature. >> Yeah, that's great, I appreciate that perspective. And I wonder, so obviously Microsoft play in SAS, Google's got G suite. And I wonder if people often ask the Andy Jassy, you're going to move up the stack, you got to be an application, a SAS vendor, and you never say never with Atavist, But I wonder, and we were talking to Jerry Chen about this, years ago on theCube, and his angle was that Amazon will play, but they'll play through developers. They'll enable developers, and they'll participate, they'll take their, lick off the cone. So it's going to be interesting to see how directly Amazon plays, but at some point you got Tam expansion, you got to play in that space. >> Yeah, I'll give you an example of knowing, I got acquired by a couple of times by EMC. So I learned a lot from Joe Tucci and Paul Merage over the years. see Paul and Joe, what they did is to look at how 20 years, and they are very close to Boston in your area, Joe, what games did is they used to sell storage, but you know what he did, he went and bought the Apps to drive them. He bought like Legato, he bought Documentum, he bought Captiva, if you remember how he acquired all these companies as a services, he bought VMware to drive that. So I think the good angle that Microsoft has is, I'm a SAS player, I have dynamics, I have CRM, I have SharePoint, I have Collaboration, I have Office 365, MS Teams for users, and then I have the platform as Azure. So I think if I'm Amazon, (indistinct). I got to own the apps so that I can drive this workforce on my platform. >> Interesting. >> Just going to developers, like I know Jerry Chan, he was my peer a BMF. I don't think just literally to developers and that model works in open source, but the open source game is pretty much gone, and not too many companies made money. >> Well, >> Most companies pretty much gone. >> Yeah, he's right. Red hats not bad idea. But it's very interesting what you're saying there. And so, hey, its why Oracle wants to have Tiktok, running on their platform, right? I mean, it's going to. (laughing) It's going to drive that further integration. I wanted to ask you something, you were talking about, you wouldn't invest in storage or compute, but I wonder, and you mentioned some commentary about GPU's. Of course the videos has been going crazy, but they're now saying, okay, how do we expand our Team, they make the acquisition of arm, et cetera. What about this DPU thing, if you follow that, that data processing unit where they're like hyper dis-aggregation and then they reaggregate, and as an offload and really to drive data centric workloads. Have you looked at that at all? >> I did, I think, and that's a good angle. So I think, look, it's like, it goes through it. I don't know if you remember in your career, we have seen it. I used to get Silicon graphics. I saw the first graphic GPU, right? That time GPU was more graphic processor unit, >> Right, yeah, work stations. >> So then become NPUs at work processing units, right? There was a TCP/IP office offloading, if you remember right, there was like vector processing unit. So I think every once in a while the industry, recreated this separate unit, as a co-processor to the main CPU, because main CPU's inefficient, and it makes sense. And then Google created TPU's and then we have the new world of the media GPU's, now we have DPS all these are good, but what's happening is, all these are driving for machine learning, AI for the training period there. Training period Sometimes it's so long with the workloads, if you can cut down, it makes sense. >> Yeah. >> Because, but the question is, these aren't so specialized in nature. I can't use it for everything. >> Yup. >> I want Ideally, algorithms to be paralyzed, I want the training to be paralyzed, I want so having deep use and GPS are important, I think where I want to see them as more, the algorithm, there should be more investment from the NVIDIA's and these guys, taking the algorithm to be highly paralyzed them. (indistinct) And I think that still has not happened in industry yet. >> All right, so we're pretty much out of time, but what are you doing these days? Where are you spending your time, are you still in Stealth, give us a little glimpse. >> Yeah, no, I'm out of the Stealth, I'm actually the CEO of Aisera now, Aisera, obviously I invested with them, but I'm the CEO of Aisero. It's funded by Menlo ventures, Norwest, True, along with Khosla ventures and Ram Shriram is a big investor. Robin's on the board of Google, so these guys, look, we are going out to the collaboration game. How do you automate customer service and support for employees and then users, right? In this whole game, we talked about the Zoom, Slack and MS Teams, that's what I'm spending time, I want to create next generation service now. >> Fantastic. Muddu, I always love having you on you, pull punches, you tell it like it is, that you're a great visionary technologist. Thanks so much for coming on theCube, and participating in our program. >> Dave, it's always a pleasure speaking to you sir. Thank you. >> Okay. Keep it right there, there's more coming from Cuba and Cloud right after this break. (slow music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante as we watch an historic election unfold before our eyes we look back at the early days of the millennium with the memorable presidential race of 2000 that decade of course was defined by 911 which permanently reshaped our thinking and we exited that decade at the tail end of a massive financial crisis only to enter the 2010s with the hope and the momentum of fiscal stimulus a flat globe job growth and very importantly the ascendancy of the cloud cloud computing unquestionably powered the innovation engine over the last 10 years and the pandemic marks a new era where adoption of cloud data and ai have been accelerated by at least two to three years and that's what's going to shape the future of the technology industry and frankly all businesses and organizations hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of thecube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we're going to update you on our latest cloud market share and dig in to some fresh october survey data from our partners over at etr let me start just with a brief summary of the latest action that's going on in cloud now quite interestingly each of the big three cloud players they showed nearly identical year-on-year growth rates in q3 as they did in q2 now we're going to dig into that in a moment but our data suggests that these three companies combined will account for more than 75 billion dollars in infrastructure as a service and platform as a service revenue in 2020 and they're potentially on track to hit 100 billion in 2021. customer survey data indicates that cio's top two infrastructure priorities remain security and cloud migration now that said as we previously reported the cloud it's not immune to the pandemic the remote worker pivot well it's a positive for cloud hasn't completely eradicated certain headwinds now what i mean here is that because the cloud vendors are now so large they're somewhat exposed to the softness in the overall i.t spending climate and also industries that have been hit hardest by the pandemic now would the cloud growth have been better if the pandemic didn't hit we'll never know for sure but our data suggests no covet has definitely been a benefactor to cloud in our view cloud will remain at the center of technological innovation for the foreseeable future the economics of cloud are becoming so compelling that we think the power of the big cloud companies will only increase this decade now importantly we're talking about the costs of running hyper-distributed systems we're not commenting here on what they charge customers that's a different story we believe the cost structure for the hyperscalers is superior to alternative approaches and we believe this advantage will only accelerate over the next several years we also believe that competition is going to continue to drive competitive pricing and innovation all right let's look at our latest market share numbers for the big three this chart shows our estimates of aws azure and the google cloud platform now viewers of this program know that these are is and pass figures and you also know that aws is the only company that provides clean numbers on that sector whereas azure and gcp are estimates that we make based on tidbits of guidance that the companies give us and survey data that we capture and other modeling that we do now as we've said we'll end this year it's about 75 billion in revenue or maybe even a little bit more note that for these three note that we've we've slightly restated some of our earlier estimates for azure to reconcile some differences that we had between constant currency and actual growth we try to keep things in constant currency where possible sorry for that but sometimes that happens azure according to our estimates as we reported last week is now 18 of microsoft's overall revenue number we had it at 19 that last week but when i dug in we made some adjustments so we toned it down a bit aws represents a much smaller percentage of course of amazon's revenues at about 12 percent but it represents 56 percent of amazon's profits gcp on the other hand accounts for less than five percent of google's overall revenue which as we've stated a few weeks ago needs more attention from google but look at the growth rates for these three platforms and the respective size of their is and pass businesses hear all this talk about repatriation i.e that what i mean by that is people go to the cloud but they're unhappy or the bill is too high it's too expensive so then they come back on prem well you just don't see that in the numbers so you gotta be careful when vendor a vendor tries to sell you on that trend i don't buy it except for selective situations now let's bring in some of the etr data and compare the spending momentum for each of the big three you've seen these wheel graphs before they show the breakdown of net score for aws microsoft and google now one note these figures represent these three companies overall within the etr technology taxonomy so for example they don't include amazon's retail business of course but they do include for example microsoft's entire tech portfolio not just the cloud the green portion of the wheel represents increases in spending via new adoptions and increased spending whereas the red sections show decreases via lower spending and defections net score which i've highlighted in the orange is calculated by subtracting the two reds from the two true greens in other words adoptions and increase minus decrease and replacements the takeaway here is these are all pretty strong with aws leading the pack microsoft is exceptionally strong as we pointed out last last week because they're so huge and they still have net scores comparable to aws which is a pure play gcp is a laggard and is showing softness in the data despite a sanguine outlook that we had back in 2019 based on survey data i don't know perhaps google's smaller presence muted their customers ability to take advantage of the platform the thinking there is the customers maybe needed to pivot to the cloud so quickly and aws and azure were the incumbents and that was maybe the most expedient path hence the higher increases in the spend more category but you do see gcp um they had 13 new adoptions which is pretty good so we'll keep looking at that regardless again these are not pure play cloud comparisons but they give a good indication of spending momentum i'd also note that all three show very low defections well each is showing solid increases in new adoptions especially google as i mentioned so that's kind of interesting to see but again google much much smaller you would expect that now i want to turn our attention to one of the hottest areas in cloud which is serverless and this is a pure play comparison so serverless let me start there it's a strange term because it's not really accurate but it's stuck serverless computing is a model where the cloud platform dynamically delivers services as the application requires so so you don't have to configure the compute and the containers for example rather when an application needs resources it goes and gets them and you only pay for when the services are actually invoked and in use so it's really good for workloads that spin up and spin down very frequently it kind of reminds me in concept anyway of the component tree that we saw in the days of soa if you remember that services oriented architecture but now this is cloud it's cloud native it's a whole new world and it's increasingly a popular model and as we'll show in a moment there's a lot of spending momentum in this area but before we do that i want to share some comments made by andy jassy a while back about serverless take a listen it's a good question and you know i really the comment i made was really about um directionally what amazon would do you know in this in the very earliest days of aws jeff used to say a lot if i were starting amazon today i'd have built it on top of aws we didn't have all the capability and all the functionality at that very moment but he knew what was coming and he saw what people were still able to accomplish even with where the services were at that point i think the same thing is true here with lambda which is i think if amazon were starting today it's a given they would build it on the cloud and i think with a lot of the applications that comprise amazon's consumer business we would build those on on our serverless capabilities now now lambda of course jesse referring to lambda that's amazon's serverless offering and if you think about amazon's retail business and take for example the frequent spin up and spin down of resources for something like black monday serverless would be a much more cost effective approach same for a managed data warehouse service for example where you know you don't want to pay for the compute if it's idle the app just calls for the compute when it's needed so it's a very popular model and it's got increased momentum today and you see that in this slide it shows the net score breakdown for serverless for azure aws is lambda which is again is their serverless offering and google cloud functions again you're shipping functions to the application that's why it's called functions look at the net scores azure functions nearly 70 aws at 65 google again lagging and that's a bit of a concern because this is a really really hot space all right let's move on and look at the competitive landscape as we like to do often and update you on that this xy graph is one of our favorites and it shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal market share is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set in the upper right you also see a table that ranks each vendor my net score and it includes the shared n in other words the number of mentions in this sector for each vendor now you can you can see up top in the middle i've selected on the cloud computing category so this represents only the cloud businesses for each of these players there's a little bit of nuance here and that we've selected on microsoft azure there's a category in the etr taxonomy for that and we're comparing that with aws overall so there's there are things in the aws overall number that fit into the other parts of the taxonomy like maybe ai collaboration etc whereas azures and gcp are just the cloud segments so i i know it's a bit strange because aws is all cloud but don't get caught up in the taxonomical nuance the point is it's good to be azure in aws it's shown there when you look at the upper right of the chart here they stand out and they stand alone in cloud leadership google cloud is they have nice elevated levels but they're much much smaller they don't have the presence in the market now look at that hybrid cloud zone emerging we've talked about this sometimes in the past and and i want to call it vmware cloud on aws red hat open shift and vmware cloud itself like vmware cloud foundation and their other cloud services all of these appear to be gaining traction and you can see in the number of occurrences in the upper right that shared end that i talked about we're starting to see real numbers that are meaningful in this space vmware cloud on aws for example has a net score of 53 percent with 116 accounts within that total respondent sample that you see there in the middle left of 1438 that's how many cios and technology buyers responded to the etr survey in october you look at open shift at 45 net score and that's with 82 accounts now openshift is in beta with what looked to be some really strong offerings on aws and you can see for context i've added dell emc's cloud offerings hpe's cloud offerings and the oracle cloud and ibm cloud and also rackspace dell actually pretty strong with a net score of 20 and 185 shared accounts much much higher than dell overall which is kind of in the red zone oracle ibm you see those rackspace you know organizing not killing it rackspace is kind of in the big negative so that's a concern but anyway we'd like for these guys we'd like to see the data match the marketing rhetoric for the the guys that are in the red and look alibaba is starting to to show up in the server there's only 26 shared ends but we thought we'd we'd put it in there those three key points again aws and microsoft keep on trucking google needs to do better hybrid is becoming real and that bodes well for multi-cloud and the legacy on-prem guys they got a lot of work to do they're under a lot of pressure the pivot to cloud has not been easy for them uh and it's still a case where they're i've talked about this a lot they're they're declines in their on-premises offerings they're not being offset by the new stuff the cloud momentum all right i want to close out by sharing some of the conversations and thoughts that we've had in the community around sas and its impact on cloud we really have been focusing on ias and pass of the sas layer obviously up the stack so let me first share that there's a lot of talk around and has been for years about aws they're slowing growth rates and whether or not they'll have to enter the sas market to expand their total available market and i've said consistently while i never say never about aws i don't think so at least not yet this chart plots the big three cloud players note aws is a bigger piece of this pie now that i've turned off the cloud computing filter and i know more nuances but the data wonks will will find you know see this and they'll ask me about it this is all of aws portfolio and again it's only the microsoft azure portfolio so you see it aws now overtakes azure on the x-axis i.e market share now we've plotted some of the major sas vendors and you can see servicenow and salesforce both very large and they have really strong spending momentum and servicenow's you know pushing 100 billion dollars in market value they've surpassed workday quite some time ago workday's got less presence but they've got really really solid net score and i got to say i'm impressed with sap despite some of the earnings challenges that they've been having they're right up there with splunk and tableau splunk has softened in recent surveys and i've i've also plotted in there netsuite and oracle fusion which are just okay and that is i think for now anyway aws is going to position as the best place and the most friendly and highest quality cloud in which to run your sas for example workday runs on aws aws is salesforce's preferred infrastructure platform so my premise here is just like retail companies might want not want to run on aws a number of sas companies that compete with microsoft they might think twice about running on azure so aws would be better off for now trying to attract those sas players and drive their services and sticking to infrastructure and the pass layer snowflake is actually kind of interesting and i've added them for context because their netscore is always kind of a bellwether it's really off the charts and they're an isv running on the cloud they're different from some of the other sas players and the snowflake is a database okay and most of snowflake's business runs on aws and aws competes with snowflake with redshift but aws has the best cloud and drives a lot of business for snowflake and vice versa so it's kind of interesting snow snowflake to redshift and a much smaller example is kind of like netflix to amazon prime video to compete they both thrive so i think aws is going to continue to grow by attracting sas players as the preferred platform and they'll also attract developers and try to disrupt sas players like servicenow which runs on its own cloud i remember years ago david floyer and i said that servicenow was it was awesome but at some point its infrastructure cost structure its infrastructure cost structure is going to be less competitive than those companies that are running on hyperscale clouds certainly the hyperscale clouds themselves and servicenow they have this multi-instance architecture which just can't easily port over to the cloud but it can charge a lot which it does now at some point some sharp developers are going to look at all this and say whoa see that service now i can build this for less and they'll attack servicenow and their seat base license model maybe with the consumption pricing model and a platform that's perhaps or a set of services that are perhaps less expensive you're seeing this to a you know a certain degree with like elastic inside the application performance management space so there's some some things to watch there but there are those who firmly believe that aws will and must enter the sas space directly we talked last week about how beneficial microsoft's application business is for azure and what a flywheel that is but for me i think we're not there yet let's give it some time i think maybe four to five years before aws may even start to think about filling some of the space up the stack now maybe they'll find some unique opportunities to do that for instance at the edge but i think that's way off okay so bottom line it's good to be in tech these days it's even better to be in the cloud and it's best if you're aws and microsoft and i don't see that changing for a while now remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can get in touch with me through email it's david at siliconangle.com feel free to dm me on twitter at d vallante i post on linkedin love your comments there thank you and don't forget to check out etr plus for all the survey action thanks for watching this episode of thecube insights powered by etr this is dave vellante stay safe stay sane and we'll see you next time you

(gentle music) >> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube Conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, we're back at Cube on Cloud, and with me is Muddu Sudhakar. He's a long time alum of theCube, a technologist and executive, a serial entrepreneur and an investor. Welcome my friend, good to see you. >> Good to see you, Dave. Pleasure to be with you. Happy elections, I guess. >> Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to start, this work from home, pivot's been amazing, and you've seen the enterprise collaboration explode. I wrote a piece a couple months ago, looking at valuations of various companies, right around the snowflake IPO, I want to ask you about that, but I was looking at the valuations of various companies, at Spotify, and Shopify, and of course Zoom was there. And I was looking at just simple revenue multiples, and I said, geez, Zoom actually looks, might look undervalued, which is crazy, right? And of course the stock went up after that, and you see teams, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft doing a great job across the board, we've written about that, you're seeing Webex is exploding, I mean, what do you make of this whole enterprise collaboration play? >> No, I think the look there is a trend here, right? So I think this probably trend started before COVID, but COVID is going to probably accelerate this whole digital transformation, right? People are going to work remotely a lot more, not everybody's going to come back to the offices even after COVID, so I think this whole collaboration through Slack, and Zoom, and Microsoft Teams and Webex, it's going to be the new game now, right? Both the video, audio and chat solutions, that's really going to help people like eyeballs. You're not going to spend time on all four of them, right? It's like everyday from a consumer side, you're going to spend time on your Gmail, Facebook, maybe Twitter, maybe Instagram, so like in the consumer side, on your personal life, you have something on the enterprise. The eyeballs are going to be in these platforms. >> Yeah. Well. >> But we're not going to take everything. >> Well, So you are right, there's a permanence to this, and I got a lot of ground to cover with you. And I always like our conversations mood because you tell it like it is, I'm going to stay on that work from home pivot. You know a lot about security, but you've seen three big trends, like mega trends in security, Endpoint, Identity Access Management, and Cloud Security, you're seeing this in the stock prices of companies like CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Okta- >> Right >> Sailpoint- >> Right, I mean, they exploded, as a result of the pandemic, and I think I'm inferring from your comment that you see that as permanent, but that's a real challenge from a security standpoint. What's the impact of Cloud there? >> No, it isn't impact but look, first is all the services required to be Cloud, right? See, the whole ideas for it to collaborate and do these things. So you cannot be running an application, like you can't be running conference and SharePoint oN-Prem, and try to on a Zoom and MS teams. So that's why, if you look at Microsoft is very clever, they went with Office 365, SharePoint 365, now they have MS Teams, so I think that Cloud is going to drive all these workloads that you have been talking about a lot, right? You and John have been saying this for years now. The eruption of Cloud and SAS services are the vehicle to drive this next-generation collaboration. >> You know what's so cool? So Cloud obviously is the topic, I wonder how you look at the last 10 years of Cloud, and maybe we could project forward, I mean the big three Cloud vendors, they're running it like $20 billion a quarter, and they're growing collectively, 35, 40% clips, so we're really approaching a hundred billion dollars for these three. And you hear stats like only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, so it feels like we're just getting started. How do you look at the impact of Cloud on the market, as you say, the last 10 years, and what do you expect going forward? >> No, I think it's very fascinating, right? So I remember when theCube, you guys are talking about 10 years back, now it's been what? More than 10 years, 15 years, since AWS came out with their first S3 service back in 2006. >> Right. >> Right? so I think look, Cloud is going to accelerate even more further. The areas is going to accelerate is for different reasons. I think now you're seeing the initial days, it's all about startups, initial workloads, Dev test and QA test, now you're talking about real production workloads are moving towards Cloud, right? Initially it was backup, we really didn't care for backup they really put there. Now you're going to have Cloud health primary services, your primary storage will be there, it's not going to be an EMC, It's not going to be a ETAP storage, right? So workloads are going to shift from the business applications, and this business App again, will be running on the Cloud, and I'll make another prediction, make customer service and support. Customer service and support, again, we should be running on the Cloud. You're not want to run the thing on a Dell server, or an IBM server, or an HP server, with your own hosted environment. That model is not because there's no economies of scale. So to your point, what will drive Cloud for the next 10 years, will be economies of scale. Where can you take the cost? How can I save money? If you don't move to the Cloud, you won't save money. So all those workloads are going to go to the Cloud are people who really want to save, like global gradual custom, right? If you stay on the ASP model, a hosted, you're not going to save your costs, your costs will constantly go up from a SAS perspective. >> So that doesn't bode well for all the On-prem guys, and you hear a lot of the vendors that don't own a Cloud that talk about repatriation, but the numbers don't support that. So what do those guys do? I mean, they're talking multi-Cloud, of course they're talking hybrid, that's IBM's big play, how do you see it? >> I think, look, see there, to me, multi-Cloud makes sense, right? You don't want one vendor that you never want to get, so having Amazon, Microsoft, Google, it gives them a multi-Cloud. Even hybrid Cloud does make sense, right? There'll be some workloads. It's like, we are still running On-prem environment, we still have mainframe, so it's never going to be a hundred percent, but I would say the majority, your question is, can we get to 60, 70, 80% workers in the next 10 years? I think you will. I think by 2025, more than 78% of the Cloud Migration by the next five years, 70% of workload for enterprise will be on the Cloud. The remaining 25, maybe Hybrid, maybe On-prem, but I get panics, really doesn't matter. You have saved and part of your business is running on the Cloud. That's your cost saving, that's where you'll see the economies of scale, and that's where all the growth will happen. >> So square the circle for me, because again, you hear the stat on the IDC stat, IBM Ginni Rometty puts it out there a lot that only 20% of the workloads are in the public Cloud, everything else is On-prem, but it's not a zero sum game, right? I mean the Cloud native stuff is growing like crazy, the On-prem stuff is flat to down, so what's going to happen? When you talk about 70% of the workloads will be in the Cloud, do you see those mission critical apps and moving into the car, I mean the insurance companies going to put their claims apps in the Cloud, or the financial services companies going to put their mission critical workloads in the Cloud, or they just going to develop new stuff that's Cloud native that is sort of interacts with the On-prem. How do you see that playing out? >> Yeah, no, I think absolutely, I think a very good question. So two things will happen. I think if you take an enterprise, right? Most businesses what they'll do is the workloads that they should not be running On-prem, they'll move it up. So obviously things like take, as I said, I use the word SharePoint, right? SharePoint and conference, all the knowledge stuff is still running on people's data centers. There's no reason. I understand, I've seen statistics that 70, 80% of the On-prem for SharePoint will move to SharePoint on the Cloud. So Microsoft is going to make tons of money on that, right? Same thing, databases, right? Whether it's CQL server, whether there is Oracle database, things that you are running as a database, as a Cloud, we move to the Cloud. Whether that is posted in Oracle Cloud, or you're running Oracle or Mongo DB, or Dynamo DB on AWS or SQL server Microsoft, that's going to happen. Then what you're talking about is really the App concept, the applications themselves, the App server. Is the App server is going to run On-prem, how much it's going to laureate outside? There may be a hybrid Cloud, like for example, Kafka. I may use a Purse running on a Kafka as a service, or I may be using Elasticsearch for my indexing on AWS or Google Cloud, but I may be running my App locally. So there'll be some hybrid place, but what I would say is for every application, 75% of your Comprende will be on the Cloud. So think of it like the Dev. So even for the On-prem app, you're not going to be a 100 percent On-prem. The competent, the billing materials will move to the Cloud, your Purse, your storage, because if you put it On-prem, you need to add all this, you need to have all the whole things to buy it and hire the people, so that's what is going to happen. So from a competent perspective, 70% of your bill of materials will move to the Cloud, even for an On-prem application. >> So, Of course, the susification of the industry in the last decade and in my three favorite companies last decade, you've worked for two of them, Tableau, ServiceNow, and Splunk. I want to ask you about those, but I'm interested in the potential disruption there. I mean, you've got these SAS companies, Salesforce of course is another one, but they can't get started in 1999. What do you see happening with those? I mean, we're basically building these sort of large SAS, platforms, now. Do you think that the Cloud native world that developers can come at this from an angle where they can disrupt those companies, or are they too entrenched? I mean, look at service now, I mean, I don't know, $80 billion market capital where they are, they bigger than Workday, I mean, just amazing how much they've grown and you feel like, okay, nothing can stop them, but there's always disruption in this industry, what are your thoughts on that. >> Not very good with, I think there'll be disrupted. So to me actually to your point, ServiceNow is now close to a 100 billion now, 95 billion market coverage, crazy. So from evaluation perspective, so I think the reason they'll be disrupted is that the SAS vendors that you talked about, ServiceNow, and all this plan, most of these services, they're truly not a multi-tenant or what do you call the Cloud Native. And that is the Accenture. So because of that, they will not be able to pass the savings back to the enterprises. So the cost economics, the economics that the Cloud provides because of the multi tenancy ability will not. The second reason there'll be disrupted is AI. So far, we talked about Cloud, but AI is the core. So it's not really Cloud Native, Dave, I look at the AI in a two-piece. AI is going to change, see all the SAS vendors were created 20 years back, if you remember, was an operator typing it, I don't respond administered we'll type a Splunk query. I don't need a human to type a query anymore, system will actually find it, that's what the whole security game has changed, right? So what's going to happen is if you believe in that, that AI, your score will disrupt all the SAS vendors, so one angle SAS is going to have is a Cloud. That's where you make the Cloud will take up because a SAS application will be Cloudified. Being SAS is not Cloud, right? Second thing is SAS will be also, I call it, will be AI-fied. So AI and machine learning will be trying to drive at the core so that I don't need that many licenses. I don't need that many humans. I don't need that many administrators to manage, I call them the tuners. Once you get a driverless car, you don't need a thousand tuners to tune your Tesla, or Google Waymo car. So the same philosophy will happen is your Dev Apps, your administrators, your service management, people that you need for service now, and these products, Zendesk with AI, will tremendously will disrupt. >> So you're saying, okay, so yeah, I was going to ask you, won't the SAS vendors, won't they be able to just put, inject AI into their platforms, and I guess I'm inferring saying, yeah, but a lot of the problems that they're solving, are going to go away because of AI, is that right? And automation and RPA and things of that nature, is that right? >> Yes and no. So I'll tell you what, sorry, you have asked a very good question, let's answer, let me rephrase that question. What you're saying is, "Why can't the existing SAS vendors do the AI?" >> Yes, right. >> Right, >> And there's a reason they can't do it is their pricing model is by number of seats. So I'm not going to come to Dave, and say, come on, come pay me less money. It's the same reason why a board and general lover build an electric car. They're selling 10 million gasoline cars. There's no incentive for me, I'm not going to do any AI, I'm going to put, I'm not going to come to you and say, hey, buy me a hundred less license next year from it. So that is one reason why AI, even though these guys do any AI, it's going to be just so I call it, they're going to, what do you call it, a whitewash, kind of like you put some paint brush on it, trying to show you some AI you did from a marketing dynamics. But at the core, if you really implement the AI with you take the driver out, how are you going to change the pricing model? And being a public company, you got to take a hit on the pricing model and the price, and it's going to have a stocking part. So that, to your earlier question, will somebody disrupt them? The person who is going to disrupt them, will disrupt them on the pricing model. >> Right. So I want to ask you about that, because we saw a Snowflake, and it's IPO, we were able to pour through its S-1, and they have a different pricing model. It's a true Cloud consumption model, Whereas of course, most SAS companies, they're going to lock you in for at least one year term, maybe more, and then, you buy the license, you got to pay X. If you, don't use it, you still got to pay for it. Snowflake's different, actually they have a different problem, that people are using it too much and the sea is driving the CFO crazy because the bill is going up and up and up, but to me, that's the right model, It's just like the Amazon model, if you can justify it, so how do you see the pricing, that consumption model is actually, you're seeing some of the On-prem guys at HPE, Dell, they're doing as a service. They're kind of taking a page out of the last decade SAS model, so I think pricing is a real tricky one, isn't it? >> No, you nailed it, you nailed it. So I think the way in which the Snowflake there, how the disruptors are data warehouse, that disrupted the open source vendors too. Snowflake distributed, imagine the playbook, you disrupted something as the $ 0, right? It's an open source with Cloudera, Hortonworks, Mapper, that whole big data that you want me to, or that market is this, that disrupting data warehouses like Netezza, Teradata, and the charging more money, they're making more money and disrupting at $0, because the pricing models by consumption that you talked about. CMT is going to happen in the service now, Zen Desk, well, 'cause their pricing one is by number of seats. People are going to say, "How are my users are going to ask?" right? If you're an employee help desk, you're back to your original health collaborative. I may be on Slack, I could be on zoom, I'll maybe on MS Teams, I'm going to ask by using usage model on Slack, tools by employees to service now is the pricing model that people want to pay for. The more my employees use it, the more value I get. But I don't want to pay by number of seats, so the vendor, who's going to figure that out, and that's where I look, if you know me, I'm right over as I started, that's what I've tried to push that model look, I love that because that's the core of how you want to change the new game. >> I agree. I say, kill me with that problem, I mean, some people are trying to make it a criticism, but you hit on the point. If you pay more, it's only because you're getting more value out of it. So I wanted to flip the switch here a little bit and take a customer angle. Something that you've been on all sides. And I want to talk a little bit about strategies, you've been a strategist, I guess, once a strategist, always a strategist. How should organizations be thinking about their approach to Cloud, it's cost different for different industries, but, back when the cube started, financial services Cloud was a four-letter word. But of course the age of company is going to matter, but what's the framework for figuring out your Cloud strategy to get to your 70% and really take advantage of the economics? Should I be Mono Cloud, Multi-Cloud, Multi-vendor, what would you advise? >> Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, I actually call it the tech stack. Actually you and John taught me that what was the tech stack, like the lamp stack, I think there is a new Cloud stack needs to come, and that I think the bottomline there should be... First of all, anything with storage should be in the Cloud. I mean, if you want to start, whether you are, financial, doesn't matter, there's no way. I come from cybersecurity side, I've seen it. Your attackers will be more with insiders than being on the Cloud, so storage has to be in the Cloud and encompass compute whoever it is. If you really want to use containers and Kubernetes, it has to be in the public Cloud, leverage that have the computer on their databases. That's where it can be like if your data is so strong, maybe run it On-prem, maybe have it on a hosted model for when it comes to database, but there you have a choice between hybrid Cloud and public Cloud choice. Then on top when it comes to App, the app itself, you can run locally or anywhere, the App and database. Now the areas that you really want to go after to migrate is look at anything that's an enterprise workload that you don't need people to manage it. You want your own team to move up in the career. You don't want thousand people looking at... you don't want to have a, for example, IT administrators to call central people to the people to manage your compute storage. That workload should be more, right? You already saw Sierra moved out to Salesforce. We saw collaboration already moved out. Zoom is not running locally. You already saw SharePoint with knowledge management mode up, right? With a box, drawbacks, you name anything. The next global mode is a SAS workloads, right? I think Workday service running there, but work data will go into the Cloud. I bet at some point Zendesk, ServiceNow, then either they put it on the public Cloud, or they have to create a product and public Cloud. To your point, these public Cloud vendors are at $2 trillion market cap. They're they're bigger than the... I call them nation States. >> Yeah, >> So I'm servicing though. I mean, there's a 2 trillion market gap between Amazon and Azure, I'm not going to compete with them. So I want to take this workload to run it there. So all these vendors, if you see that's where Shandra from Adobe is pushing this right, Adobe, Workday, Anaplan, all the SAS vendors we'll move them into the public Cloud within these vendors. So those workloads need to move out, right? So that all those things will start, then you'll start migrating, but I call your procurement. That's where the RPA comes in. The other thing that we didn't talk about, back to your first question, what is the next 10 years of Cloud will be RPA? That third piece to Cloud is RPA because if you have your systems On-prem, I can't automate them. I have to do a VPN into your house there and then try to automate your systems, or your procurement, et cetera. So all these RPA vendors are still running On-prem, most of them, whether it's UI path automation anywhere. So the Cloud should be where the brain should be. That's what I call them like the octopus analogy, the brain is in the Cloud, the tentacles are everywhere, they should manage it. But if my tentacles have to do a VPN with your house to manage it, I'm always will have failures. So if you look at the why RPA did not have the growth, like the Snowflake, like the Cloud, because they are running it On-prem, most of them still. 80% of the RP revenue is On-prem, running On-prem, that needs to be called clarified. So AI, RPA and the SAS, are the three reasons Cloud will take off. >> Awesome. Thank you for that. Now I want to flip the switch again. You're an investor or a multi-tool player here, but so if you're, let's say you're an ecosystem player, and you're kind of looking at the landscape as you're in an investor, of course you've invested in the Cloud, because the Cloud is where it's at, but you got to be careful as an ecosystem player to pick a spot that both provides growth, but allows you to have a moat as, I mean, that's why I'm really curious to see how Snowflake's going to compete because they're competing with AWS, Microsoft, and Google, unlike, Frank, when he was at service now, he was competing with BMC and with on-prem and he crushed it, but the competitors are much more capable here, but it seems like they've got, maybe they've got a moat with MultiCloud, and that whole data sharing thing, we'll see. But, what about that? Where are the opportunities? Where's that white space? And I know there's a lot of white space, but what's the framework to look at, from an investor standpoint, or even a CEO standpoint, where you want to put place your bets. >> No, very good question, so look, I did something. We talk as an investor in the board with many companies, right? So one thing that says as an investor, if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Docker or a computer, there's no way nobody's going to invest. So that we can motor off, even if you want to do object storage or a block storage, I mean, I've been an investor board member of so many storage companies, there's no way as an industry, I'll write a check for a compute or storage, right? If you want to create a next generation network, like either NetSuite, or restart Juniper, Cisco, there is no way. But if you come back and say, I want to create a next generation Viper for remote working environments, where AI is at the core, I'm interested in that, right? So if you look at how the packets are dropped, there's no intelligence in either not switching today. The packets come, I do it. The intelligence is not built into the network with AI level. So if somebody comes with an AI, what good is all this NVD, our GPS, et cetera, if you cannot do wire speed, packet inspection, looking at the content and then route the traffic. If I see if it's a video package, but in UN Boston, there's high interview day of they should be loading our package faster, because you are a premium ISP. That intelligence has not gone there. So you will see, and that will be a bad people will happen in the network, switching, et cetera, right? So that is still an angle. But if you work and it comes to platform services, remember when I was at Pivotal and VMware, all models was my boss, that would, yes, as a platform, service is a game already won by the Cloud guys. >> Right. (indistinct) >> Silicon Valley Investors, I don't think you want to invest in past services, right? I mean, you might come with some lecture edition database to do some updates, there could be some game, let's say we want to do a time series database, or some metrics database, there's always some small angle, but the opportunity to go create a national database there it's very few. So I'm kind of eliminating all the black spaces, right? >> Yeah. >> We have the white spaces that comes in is the SAS level. Now to your point, if I'm Amazon, I'm going to compete with Snowflake, I have Redshift. So this is where at some point, these Cloud platforms, I call them aircraft carriers. They're not going to stay on the aircraft carriers, they're going to own the land as well. So they're going to move up to the SAS space. The question is you want to create a SAS service like CRM. They are not going to create a CRM like service, they may not create a sales force and service now, but if you're going to add a data warehouse, I can very well see Azure, Google, and AWS, going to create something to compute a Snowflake. Why would I not? It's so close to my database and data warehouse, I already have Redshift. So that's going to be nightlights, same reason, If you look at Netflix, you have a Netflix and you have Amazon prime. Netflix runs on Amazon, but you have Amazon prime. So you have the same model, you have Snowflake, and you'll have Redshift. The both will help each other, there'll be a... What do you call it? Coexistence will happen. But if you really want to invest, you want to invest in SAS companies. You do not want to be investing in a compliment players. You don't want to a feature. >> Yeah, that's great, I appreciate that perspective. And I wonder, so obviously Microsoft play in SAS, Google's got G suite. And I wonder if people often ask the Andy Jassy, you're going to move up the stack, you got to be an application, a SAS vendor, and you never say never with Atavist, But I wonder, and we were talking to Jerry Chen about this, years ago on theCube, and his angle was that Amazon will play, but they'll play through developers. They'll enable developers, and they'll participate, they'll take their, lick off the cone. So it's going to be interesting to see how directly Amazon plays, but at some point you got Tam expansion, you got to play in that space. >> Yeah, I'll give you an example of knowing, I got acquired by a couple of times by EMC. So I learned a lot from Joe Tucci and Paul Merage over the years. see Paul and Joe, what they did is to look at how 20 years, and they are very close to Boston in your area, Joe, what games did is they used to sell storage, but you know what he did, he went and bought the Apps to drive them. He bought like Legato, he bought Documentum, he bought Captiva, if you remember how he acquired all these companies as a services, he bought VMware to drive that. So I think the good angle that Microsoft has is, I'm a SAS player, I have dynamics, I have CRM, I have SharePoint, I have Collaboration, I have Office 365, MS Teams for users, and then I have the platform as Azure. So I think if I'm Amazon, (indistinct). I got to own the apps so that I can drive this workforce on my platform. >> Interesting. >> Just going to developers, like I know Jerry Chan, he was my peer a BMF. I don't think just literally to developers and that model works in open source, but the open source game is pretty much gone, and not too many companies made money. >> Well, >> Most companies pretty much gone. >> Yeah, he's right. Red hats not bad idea. But it's very interesting what you're saying there. And so, hey, its why Oracle wants to have Tiktok, running on their platform, right? I mean, it's going to. (laughing) It's going to drive that further integration. I wanted to ask you something, you were talking about, you wouldn't invest in storage or compute, but I wonder, and you mentioned some commentary about GPU's. Of course the videos has been going crazy, but they're now saying, okay, how do we expand our Team, they make the acquisition of arm, et cetera. What about this DPU thing, if you follow that, that data processing unit where they're like hyper dis-aggregation and then they reaggregate, and as an offload and really to drive data centric workloads. Have you looked at that at all? >> I did, I think, and that's a good angle. So I think, look, it's like, it goes through it. I don't know if you remember in your career, we have seen it. I used to get Silicon graphics. I saw the first graphic GPU, right? That time GPU was more graphic processor unit, >> Right, yeah, work stations. >> So then become NPUs at work processing units, right? There was a TCP/IP office offloading, if you remember right, there was like vector processing unit. So I think every once in a while the industry, recreated this separate unit, as a co-processor to the main CPU, because main CPU's inefficient, and it makes sense. And then Google created TPU's and then we have the new world of the media GPU's, now we have DPS all these are good, but what's happening is, all these are driving for machine learning, AI for the training period there. Training period Sometimes it's so long with the workloads, if you can cut down, it makes sense. >> Yeah. >> Because, but the question is, these aren't so specialized in nature. I can't use it for everything. >> Yup. >> I want Ideally, algorithms to be paralyzed, I want the training to be paralyzed, I want so having deep use and GPS are important, I think where I want to see them as more, the algorithm, there should be more investment from the NVIDIA's and these guys, taking the algorithm to be highly paralyzed them. (indistinct) And I think that still has not happened in industry yet. >> All right, so we're pretty much out of time, but what are you doing these days? Where are you spending your time, are you still in Stealth, give us a little glimpse. >> Yeah, no, I'm out of the Stealth, I'm actually the CEO of Aisera now, Aisera, obviously I invested with them, but I'm the CEO of Aisero. It's funded by Menlo ventures, Norwest, True, along with Khosla ventures and Ram Shriram is a big investor. Robin's on the board of Google, so these guys, look, we are going out to the collaboration game. How do you automate customer service and support for employees and then users, right? In this whole game, we talked about the Zoom, Slack and MS Teams, that's what I'm spending time, I want to create next generation service now. >> Fantastic. Muddu, I always love having you on you, pull punches, you tell it like it is, that you're a great visionary technologist. Thanks so much for coming on theCube, and participating in our program. >> Dave, it's always a pleasure speaking to you sir. Thank you. >> Okay. Keep it right there, there's more coming from Cuba and Cloud right after this break. (slow music)

>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're still on our Palo Alto studios, we're still getting through COVID and we're still doing all of our remotes, all of our interviews via remote and I'm really excited to have a guest we had around a long time ago. I looked it up is 2016, April 2016. She's Coco Brown, the founder and CEO of the Athena Alliance. Coco, it's great to see you. >> It's great to see you as well. We actually formally started in April of 2016. >> I know, I saw, I noticed that on LinkedIn. So we were at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference in Phoenix, I remembers was a really cool conference, met a ton of people, a lot of them have turned out that are on your board. So yeah, and you formally on LinkedIn, it says you started in May. So that was right at the very, very beginning. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So for people that aren't familiar with the at the Athena Alliance give them the quick overview. >> Okay. Well, it's a little different that it was four years ago. So Athena first and foremost is a digital platform. So you literally log in to Athena. And we're a combination of community access to opportunity and learning. And so you can kind of envision it a little bit like a walled garden around the LinkedIn, meets Khan Academy for senior executives, meets Hollywood agency for women trying to get into the boardroom and senior level roles in the c-suite as advisors, et cetera. And then the way that we operate is you can have a self-service experience of Athena, you can have a concierge experience with Athena with real humans in the loop making key connections for you and you can add accelerators where we build brand packages and BIOS and give you executive coaching. So... >> Wow. >> Kind of a... >> You've built out your services portfolio over the last several years. But still the focus >> yes, we have. is boards, right? Still the focus is getting women on public boards, or is that no longer still the focus? >> No, that's a big piece of it for sure. I mean, one of the things that we discovered, that was the very first mission of Athena, was to bring more women into the boardroom. And as we were doing that we discovered that once you get into a senior realm of leadership in general, there's more things that you want to do than just get into the boardroom. Some of it may be wanting to be an investor or an LP in a fund or become a CEO, or certainly join outside boards but also be relevant to your own inside board. And so we started to look at Athena as a more holistic experience for senior leaders who are attempting to make sure that they are the best they can be in this very senior realm of overarching stewardship of business. >> Awesome. and have you seen, so obviously your your focus shifted 'cause you needed to add more services based on the demand from the customers. But have you seen the receptiveness to women board members change over the last four years? How have you seen kind of the marketplace change? >> Yeah, it's changed a lot, I would say. First of all I think laws like the California law and Goldman Sachs coming out saying they won't take companies public unless they have diverse board data. The statements by big entities that people are paying attention to made the boardroom dynamics a conversation around the dinner table in general. So it became more of a common conversation and common interest as opposed to just the interest of a few people who are trying to get in there. And so that's created a lot of momentum as well as sort of thoughtfulness from leaders and from employees and from larger stakeholders to say the diversity at the top business has to mimic the demographics of society as a whole. And that's become a little bit more accepted as opposed to grudgingly sort of taken in. >> Right. So one of the big problems always it's like the VC problem, right? Is the whole matchmaking problem. How do you, how do qualified people find qualified opportunities? And I wonder if you can speak a little bit as to how that process has evolved, how are you really helping because there's always people that are looking for quality candidates, and there's great quality candidates out there that just don't know where to go. How are you helping bridge kind of that kind of basic matchmaking function? >> Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of different ways to go about it. One is certainly to understand and have real connections into the parts of the leadership ecosystem that influences or makes the decision as to who sits around that table. So that would be communities of CEOs, it's communities of existing board directors, it's venture capital firms, its private equity firms, and as you get really entrenched in those organizations and those ecosystems, you become part of that ecosystem and you become what they turn to to say, "Hey, do you know somebody?" Because it still is a "who do yo know" approach at the senior most levels. So that's one way. The other mechanism is really for individuals who are looking for board seats who want to be on boards to actually be thinking about how they proactively navigate their way to the kinds of boards that they would fit to. I like in a very much to the way our children go after the schools that they might want to when it's time for university. You'll figure out who your safeties, your matches, your reaches are, and figure out how you're going to take six degrees of separation and turn them into one through connections. So those are that's another way to go about it. >> You know, it's interesting, I talked to Beth Stewart from True Star, they also help place women on boards. And one of the issues is just the turnover. And I asked that just straight up, are there formal mechanisms to make sure that people who've been doing business from way before there were things like email and the internet eventually get swapped out. And she said, that's actually a big part of the problem is there isn't really a formal way to keep things fresh and to kind of rotate the incumbents out to enable somebody who's new and maybe has a different point of view to come in. So I'm curious when someone is targeting their A-list and B-list and C-lists, how do they factor in kind of the age of the board composition of the existing board, to really look for where there's these opportunities where a spot opens up, 'cause if there's not a spot open up clearly, there's really not much opportunity there. >> Yeah, I mean, you have to look at the whole ecosystem, right? I mean, there's anything from let's say series A, venture backed private companies all the way up to the mega cap companies, right? And there's this continuum. And it's not, there's not one universal answer to what you're talking about. So for example, if you're talking about smaller private companies, you're competing against, not somebody giving up their seat, but whether or not the company feels real motivation to fill that particular independent director seat. So the biggest competition is often that that seat goes unfilled. When you're talking about public companies, the biggest competition is really the fact that as my friend Adam Epstein of the small cap Institute will tell you, that 80% of public companies are actually small cap companies. And they don't have the same kinds of pressures that large caps do to have turnover. But yeah, it takes a big piece of the challenge is really boards having the disposition collectively to see the board as a competitive advantage for the business as a very necessary and productive piece of the business and when they see that then they take more proactive measures to make sure they have a evolving and strong board that does turnover as it needs to. >> Right. So I'm curious when you're talking to the high power women, right, who are in operational roles probably most of the time, how do you help coach them, how should they be thinking, what do they have to do different when they want to kind of add board seats to their portfolio? Very different kind of a role than an operational role, very different kind of concerns and day to day tasks. So, and clearly, you've added a whole bunch of extra things to your portfolio. So how do you help people, what do you tell women who say, "Okay, I've been successful, "I'm like successful executive, "but now I want to do this other thing, "I want to take this next step in my career"? What usually the gaps and what are the things that they need to do to prepare for that? >> Well, I'm going to circle in then land a little bit. Autodesk was actually a really great partner to us back when you and I first met. They had a couple of women at the top of the organization that were part of Athena, specifically because they wanted to join boards. They are on boards now, Lisa Campbell, Amy Bunszel, Debbie Clifford. And what they told us is they were experiencing everything that we were offering in terms of developing them, helping them to position themselves, understand themselves, navigate their way, was that they simply became better leaders as a result of focusing on themselves as that next level up, irrespective of the fact that it took them two to three years to land that seat. They became stronger in their executive role in general and better able to communicate and engage with their own boards. So I think, now I'm landing, the thing that I would say about that is don't wait until you're thinking oh, I want to join a board, to do the work to get yourself into that ecosystem, into that atmosphere and into that mindset, because the sooner you do that as an executive, the better you will be in that atmosphere, the more prepared you will be. And you also have to recognize that it will take time. >> Right. And the how has COVID impacted it, I mean, on one hand, meeting somebody for coffee and having a face to face is a really important part of getting to know someone and a big part of I'm sure, what was the recruitment process, and do you know someone, yeah, let's go meet for a cup of coffee or dinner or whatever. Can't do that anymore, but we can all meet this way, we can all get on virtually and so in some ways, it's probably an enabler, which before you could grab an hour or you didn't have to fly cross-country or somebody didn't have to fly cross-country. So I'm kind of curious in this new reality, which is going to continue for some time. How has that impacted kind of people's ability to discover and get to know and build trust for these very very senior positions. >> HBR just came out with a really great article about the virtual board meeting. I don't know if you saw it but I can send you a link. I think that what I'm learning from board directors in general and leaders in general is that yes, there's things that make it difficult to engage remotely, but there's also a lot of benefit to being able to get comfortable with the virtual world. So it's certainly, particularly with COVID, with racial equity issues, with the uncertain economy, boards are having to meet more often and they're having, some are having weekly stand ups and those are facilitated by getting more and more comfortable with being virtual. And I think they're realizing that you don't have to press flesh, as they say, to actually build intimacy and real connection. And that's been a hold up, but I think as the top leadership gets to understand that and feel that for themselves, it becomes easier for them to adopt it throughout the organization that the virtual world is one we can really embrace, not just for a period of time. >> It's funny we had John Chambers on early on in this whole process, really talking about leadership and leading through transition. And he used the example, I think had been that day or maybe a couple days off from our interview where they had a board meeting, I think they were talking about some hamburger restaurant, and so they just delivered hamburgers to everybody's office and they had the board meeting. But that's really progressive for a board to actually be doing weekly stand ups. That really shows a pretty transformative way to manage the business and kind of what we think is the stodgy old traditional get together now and then, fly and then get some minutes and fly out, that's super progressive. >> Yeah. I mean, I was on three different board meetings this week with a company I'm on the board of in Minnesota. And we haven't seen each other in person in, I guess since January. (woman laughs) >> So final tips for women that want to make this this move, who, they've got some breathing space, they're not homeschooling the kids all day while they're trying to get their job done and trying to save their own business, but have some cycles and the capabilities. What do you tell them, where should they begin, how should they start thinking about, kind of taking on this additional responsibility and really professional growth in their life? >> Well, I mean, I think something very important for all of us to think about with regard to board service and in general as we get into a very senior level point in our careers at a managing and impact portfolio. People get into a senior point and they don't just want to be an executive for one company, they want to have a variety of ways that they're delivering impact, whether it's as an investor or as a board member or as other things as well as being an operator. And I think the misnomer is that people believe that you have to add them up and they, one plus one plus one equals three, and it's just not true. The truth is that when you add a board seat, when you add that other thing that you're doing it makes you better as a leader in general. Every board meeting I have with [Indistinct] gives me more than I bring back to Athena as an example. And so I think we tend to think of not being able to take on one more thing and I say that we all have a little more space than we think we have to take on the things we want to do. >> Right? That's a good message to me. It is often said if you want to get something done, give it to the busiest person in the room. It's more likely to get it done 'cause you got to be efficient and you just have that kind of get it done attitude. >> That's right. >> All right, Coco. Well, thank you for sharing your thoughts. >> Congratulations, so I guess it's your four year anniversary, five year anniversary [Indistinct] about right? >> Yes, four. >> That's terrific. And we look forward to continuing to watch the growth and hopefully checking in face to face at some point in the not too distant future. >> I would like that. >> All right. Thanks a lot Coco. >> Great talking to you. >> Already. >> She's Coco, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. (techno music) Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special Cube Insights, powered by ETR. We've been running these Breaking Analysis Segments and today we're going to talk about some spending data that shows that there's continued interest in hyperconverged infrastructure. So we've been running these segments over the last several weeks with our partner ETR. They've got a database of about 4,500 IT Practitioners and CIOs. They go out quarterly and ask spending intentions. So we've been sharing that, along with our opinions. These are completely independent segments. I want to disclose that a number of the companies that we're talking about today: Nutanix, VMware, Dell EMC, Cisco, HPE. They sponsor theCube, but they have absolutely no input into editorial. They don't affect our opinion in any way, shape or form. So let's get into it. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu is an expert in this field. He's covered the space. Stu, let's look at some of the fundamentals. What do people need to know... Alex, if ya put up the slide, Stu, maybe you could talk to it. >> Yeah. Dave, thanks. I've been watching you have some fun with this. I enjoyed swimming in some of the data here and as you know, Dave, we've been watching since before hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, was a term that everybody talked about. We've been looking at how these hyperscale trends are going to impact the Enterprise. We put out our server SAN research years and years ago, so we know all these companies really well. And despite the latest AI and cloud and everything, the data shows, HCI, the simplification of the data center, building out what we would call True Private Cloud is important today. So right, we wanted to know when you look at the data, first of all, how are the vendors doing? Who are the leaders in this space here? There were a whole number of startups that came in this space. When we first analyzed the market it was companies like Microsoft and VMware that owned the operating system we thought would be hugely important. If you look in the big names this environment: Dell partnered with everyone, of course they bought Dell, bought EMC, which included a stake in VMware. What's that relationship with Nutanix? How is that shaping the market? As well as how is cloud impacting things? Both from a spending standpoint, has cloud sucked away revenue from HCI as that specter has overhung everybody in the IT space? And also, how does HCI fit into multicloud and how does that fit? >> Okay, great. So thanks for that setup, Stu, now let's get into some of the data. Alex, if you bring up the slide, the next slide. This is spending intentions for Nutanix, VMware and some other vendors. I'll go through that. But it's basically showing Nutanix and VMware are fighting it out. You know they're in this internecine battle and in social, and (chuckles) there's a war goin' on, because there's big money to be made here. So for those of you who are familiar with these segments, this is data from Enterprise Technology Research, from their July 2019 Spending Intentions Survey. So they're asking about spending intentions for the second half of 2019. The end of the survey, out of the 4,500 people in the panel, 1,068 responded to this survey. So on the left hand side you see the vendors: Nutanix, VMware with vSAN, Dell EMC with VxRail, specifically. Then SimpliVity, and then Springpath, or Cisco. So what the chart shows is what we call, Net Score. And net score is calculated by taking the red, on the bar, which is, we're going to leave the platform, that's the dark red. The lighter red, which is, we're going to spend less in the second half. The gray, which their spending's going to be flat. The dark green, or the evergreen, which says, we're going to increase spending. And the lime green, which I'm going to add to the platform. You take the green, minus the red, you get net score. Higher the net score, the better. You can see, Nutanix and VMware with vSAN are leading the pack. And then we'll go through that. But then you see, Shared Accounts. That's the number of indications for spending that they received out of those 1068. So Stu, what is this data telling you? >> So first of all, Dave, it confirmed kind of the general market share numbers that we hear out there. The vendors that track that on quarterly. VMware has the most customers, has the largest revenue, and their largest partner for that, of course, is Dell. VMware and Dell go to market, joint product development, joint engineering, joint go to market and it's the biggest piece of vSAN, so that's where we specifically wanted to look at the VxRail. And vSAN and VxRail, doing very well. They're adding new customers; was interesting to me that you saw VxRail kind of ramping up a little more on the, attracting new companies, but also looked to be losing some on the tail end of the dark red. As opposed to vSAN in general, is a little bit more stable. We know how many thousands of customers they have out there, and Vmware's a software story as opposed to VxRail is that full appliance. Nutanix is the second horse in this two-horse race that we're really talking about here, from HCI. There's some discussion in the marketplace after two quarters being down, is Nutanix showing weakness? What's happening there? The most recent quarter announcement was that Nutanix is doing well, seems to... They had a little bit of change as they're going through their move to a software model and sorting things out with sales and marketing in their channel. The data here shows that the second half of the year looks good for Nutanix. So to some of the questions I asked in the first slide, Dave, Nutanix and VMware, of course the clear leaders in this space. SimpliVity, which was of course bought be HP, Springpath which is the hyperflex from Cisco, are far behind those two out there. And it seems that even though Dell and VMware are fighting, very much with Nutanix, that is not heavily dampening Nutanix's from the respondents in this survey. >> Okay, and just a word on the data, so you see 184 shared accounts for Nutanix, 174 for VMware and down the line. Only 42 for SimpliVity and only 18 for Springpath, and Cisco. It's an indication of the size of the install base, obviously the more shared accounts, the more mentions, the larger the install base. Again, they're statistically significant; ETR does a very good job of that. Let's look Stu, at... Oh, actually I want to make another point here. So how are these net scores? Well let's put 'em in context. The hottest net scores we've seen recently are: Snowflake, and UiPath, with 80% plus, net score. Okay, so that's really, they're off the charts, they're growing like crazy. We saw Salesforce with 55%, so, and Workday sort of in there as well. Companies that are growing share. So SAP in the 30% range, and so you see the Dell EMC, VxRail, that's kind of holding serve. It's not like, dramatically gaining share, but they're growing a little bit and then-- >> And I think it's a lot, Dave, it shows to the maturity of this market. HCI is not new, both Nutanix and VMware have thousands of customers, specifically with V's then we're talking VMware. So it was more, when I saw some of your charts, Microsoft has a similar net score. >> Right >> Well liked, good install based, still growing and the like. And brings in the discussion of when we did some cross section of the analysis looking at cloud companies and how does this impact their public cloud spend; is this detracting if this customer's also doing public cloud? And the long and the short of it is VMware and Nutanix are pretty much the same if not actually a little bit better when you talk about a customer that's looking at their overall cloud spend. So to me that really signals that both VMware and Nutanix are doing a good job into how their solution fits into the customer's overall hybrid cloud strategy. >> All right, let's take a look at the next slide, which talks to time series. So this is hyperconverged infrastructure spending intentions again, for the second half of 2019, over time. So the July '19 Survey you can see is the most recent one. We go all the way back to January '17 and you can see Nutanix on the top, VMware or vSAN on the bottom. We just selected those two. We're just repeating the net score and the shared accounts. And you can see these things tend to bounce around a little bit. You can see Nutanix maintains a lead, but the market's startin' to converge. These two companies are coming together. We hear a lot about vSAN doing very well, it's kind of held on. You can see a slight downward pressure in July, in the July survey. It's unclear what that means. That could be an indication of just some uncertainty in the marketplace. Some economic macro concerns. Tariffs, potential headwinds there, so there could be some uncertainty there. But what do you takeaway from this slide, Stu? >> Yeah, first of all right. As you show, Dave, VMware is a bit more steady, Nutanix gone up for bit and come down. Both of them stayed relatively stable. Somewhere between kind of the 45 and 55 lately. A little bit, if you look at the overall trend, Nutanix is down. VMware could surpass them from the net score in the future, if this trend holds. But both of them doing quite well. When you looked at all the other vendors in there, of course the scale is just showing 40-70%, if you put all the others, which are down much lower, you can see once again, that kind of the clear leadership. These two companies, just strong lead. Does not look like there any challengers in this space that are ready to be a clear number three yet, in the market. >> But Nutanix at one point had no competition. >> Yeah. >> Okay, now vSAN comes in and of course-- >> Oh no, absolutely. So no, SimpliVity and Scale Computing, and there were a whole host of startups. There's all the brand new startups in the space. Everything from little companies like Diamante, Pivot3, who was around doing this before it came. So there's always been a lot there, but Nutanix is the one that separated from the pack. The only one in this space that's gone IPO. But VMware's there, Microsoft won that, they rebranded their Azure Stack HCI for what they put in the data center last year. So expect Microsoft partnering with all of the big server manufacturers to push farther into HCI, but really has not directly impacted this market too much, just yet. >> But there's definitely been some pressure on Nutanix from an earning standpoint, the stock's been hit. You've had some executive departures. There's some rumors about acquisition with Google. Your thoughts on-- >> Yeah, definitely. So John Furrier just had Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO of Nutanix, in our Palo Alto studio, leading up to the Copenhagen show for Nutanix that I will be at. Sure. Sunil Potti who was basically the number two at Nutanix, is now working for Thomas Kurian, TK, over at Google Cloud. My indication from what I hear, he is not over there to help broker a deal. Sunil had a great run at Nutanix, there was a clean break there, but there is a mostly new executive team at Nutanix. Now a couple of years past the IPO and the team at Nutanix, they have their platform. The have a bunch of SaaS offerings that they're doing there. Do they have a relationship with Google? Absolutely! They had Diane Greene at one of their events a couple of years ago. They did joint engineering. But I actually saw that engineering effort cool off a little bit in the last year or so since the new regime came on in Google Cloud. So does Nutanix have a lot of Enterprise accounts and know how to work with the Enterprise and could that be a boon to Google? Absolutely! But the personnel of a Nutanix executive over at Google, and Brian Stevens who's the CTO of Google Cloud being on the Board of Nutanix? I do not think that that is telegraphing that an acquisition is going to happen. It could. We see lots of big acquisitions. Nine or 10 billion dollars from Nutanix could be interesting for Nutanix and help them get in a lot of places and help Google. But Dave, I goin' on record say, I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think Cisco is going to buy Nutanix. Infrastructure's not the real push for Chuck Robbins and that team. And at the Google Cloud event, Dave, that we were at, we saw Sanjay Poonen from VMware up on stage touting how deeply VMware was going to partner. So both VMware and Nutanix are partnering with all of the clouds. VMware of course has a very deep relationship with VMware. They're going deeper with Google, they are even partnering with the old enemy of Microsoft, so I would give VMware definitely has a deeper and more public relationship with all the public cloud providers but Nutanix is also partnering and expanding their portfolio to give themselves good growth beyond just the core HCI market. >> HP's another one. So Nutanix and HPE are workin' together. Kind of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Nutanix was not at VMworld this year; they're kind of booted out. So they belly up to HP. >> Yeah, HP loves having, they have their, "As a service offerings," and Nutanix is one of those as well as Nutanix can sell the HP. So as the, right, the Dell relationship is likely going to die down over time, as Michael Dell on the team, want to sell more Dell hardware with VMware software. HPE is another... And they also partner with Lenovo on the Nutanix side. >> All right, Stu, bring it home. What are the key takeaways on this cube Insights. >> Okay, so HCI, who is a two-horse race right now. There are interesting companies to look at beyond the two, but if you want to understand who the leaders are in the space it is: VMware, especially with their VxRail and Nutanix, are the two leaders in that space. Really looking and understanding how they're expanding into multicloud and hybrid cloud solutions. VMware very much with their VCF offering, which packages vSAN to go into the VMware cloud offerings. And Nutanix with an interesting strategy, both with how they really spread some of their services like what they're doing with Xi Cloud, as well as some SaaS offerings, which some of them really have a disconnect. Not in a bad way, but just are not tied directly to the hardware. What the infrastructure companies have tried to do for years. Both of them, VMware's done tons of acquisitions. Nutanix has done quite a few acquisitions too. >> So your second point here, what's the impact of Dell VMware versus the Nutanix battle? You say not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. I mean there's clearly some evidence that those two markets are comin' together, that VMware's pressuring Nutanix. But why do you say, yet? What do you expect? I mean is it the OEM deal with Dell? >> It's the OAM relationship. There is huge pipeline of Dell hardware with Nutanix software and they're at loggerheads. So absolutely, the Dell family: Dell, EMC and VMware are doing all they can to dial that down. So they put pressure on the channel. And even some of the most loyal Nutanix channel partners that work with Dell, have had pressure to do more and more VxRail. So I expect it to have impact, but just as, Dave, I'll dial back the clock. You probably remember when EMC had a relationship with HP and HP killed the OEM of EMC storage. EMC stormed back and got a lot of those accounts. Same thing happened when EMC and Dell broke up a couple of years before the acquisition. So Nutanix is storming to go with HPE as one of their server partners, and (mumbles). So can Nutanix keep their growth and momentum going as Dell is no longer their biggest partner? >> Well, they're fighting a two-front war. They've got one with Dell VMware and they're also fighting the war with the public cloud guys, even though they're partnering with the public cloud guys. All right, they're sort of taking that cloud model but of course it's on prim. So you say how this public cloud affects HCI spending; not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. Can I infer from that that you do expect there to be pressure on that second front? >> Yeah, so as I've talked about before Dave, when we look at VMware and VMware gives the VMware cloud in AWS. Some say, "Great, that gives me a nice path to be able to use public cloud. But maybe I don't need some of this VMware licensing and software in there." The question for Nutanix is very similar. What services do they have? How do they become more sticky in customer environments? And absolutely, they're driving a roadmap for that in working with their customers. >> Well the thing about Nutanix is that customer's really happy. The customer's really like Nutanix. They like the simplicity. I've talked to a number of Nutanix customers that are very happy in that regard. And they have a leading product in that regard. But they're aiming at the multicloud space and can they play there? >> And Dave, you make a really good point. The killer use case, what did HCI deliver? It delivered simplicity. Today, if you talk about public cloud in general or even hybrid or multicloud, (chuckles) simplicity is not how you would describe this. So can the customers, the companies that did HCI, so, VMware, Nutanix, HPE and Cisco, they're all fighting for that hybrid and multicloud environment. And if they can help deliver simplicity of management, simplicity of leveraging my data, they can be successful in that space. >> Okay, so you're sort of positive on the multicloud, their position in multicloud. Even though they're not one of the big five. >> Yeah, and the good news for a Nutanix is that they're growing off of a much smaller base then say VMware, when you say they have five or 600,000 customers. Hey, how big of an impact will public cloud have on them? >> All right, so we don't pick stocks. We're not making recommendations. (laughs) But, do you feel like it's overdone, that it's undervalued? Independent of the macro. Do you feel like the pressure on Nutanix is warranted, or do you feel like it's got legs? >> So I feel Wall Street tends to over adjust when they go through things. When I talk to my friends on the Wall Street stuff. Definitely Nutanix took more of a beating probably then they should have. But they had two quarters that weren't great. And some of that was the management changes, they blamed that they couldn't hire sales and marketing fast enough. Something we'd asked, if you're a company in the Valley and you've gone from a few hundred people to a few thousand people. How do you keep adding good quality people? That's challenging. So yes, I think we've actually seen Dave, in the last week, or so Nutanix has been one of the fastest growing stocks in the tech market. So they're adjusting some. So I still think Nutanix has plenty of room for growth. The question is, what's their path to say, two billion dollars? Or is it an exit for 9-10 billion dollars down the road? >> All right, Stu, some great stuff. Thank you for that analysis. And thank you for watching this episode of theCube Insights, powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante, for Stu Miniman, we'll see ya next time. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California, theCUBE Studios, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, we're here with Reinhardt Quelle who's the principle engineer, Cloud Platforms and solutions Group at Cisco. Reinhardt, thanks for coming in, good to see you. >> Reinhardt: Thanks for having me. >> So, technical conversation around Cloud is something that we love having. We've seen the evolution over the past decade, Cloud 1.0, compute, storage, greenfield, cloud opportunities, great SaaS applications being built, you've built apps for over a decade, SaaS apps. >> That's right, I've been delivering applications, both to data centers and then of course, later into Cloud for a number of years. >> So you got some scar tissue. You have some successes, you've had some struggles, probably with on-prem, but the world's changed a lot and again, we've been covering this a couple years now. We saw public Cloud, all the benefits, no questions, great, you can lift and ship stuff up there, no problem, but the complexity's still there and now the trend is everything's shifting back to on-prem with Cloud. So now the hybrid model has been validated, Amazon Outpost, Anthos in Google, Azure Stack from Microsoft, clearly this mold, all the cloud vendors are telegraphing, they are doing it, this is a reality, this has been validated. >> Yeah, I think that's no surprise to those of us who've been deploying for a number of years. We've always had data centers where we're running our applications in data centers, and yes we started taking that into the Cloud, but there was always components of our infrastructure that continued to run on-prem, whether for historical reasons, for data gravity reasons, policy reasons, any number of reasons, but what we did learn was how to operate our applications differently and so for the last number of years, we've been moving a lot of the advantages of that Cloud back to on-prem. >> So I want to get your thoughts as principle engineer and look at the overall Cisco holistic portfolio of products because Cisco is a standard in the enterprise, every big company has Cisco gear at some level form of another. You've been dealing with networking for years, but now that networking becomes so much more acute issue because you still got to move packets around, another abstraction layer does networking, security, networking, all tie in to the growth area that is now this next generation of Cloud, Cloud 2.0, intelligent edge, data center on-prem, what's the Cisco story? Why Cisco, why now? What's the story? >> Well the amusing thing, of course, is the Cloud doesn't exist without networking. The very first thing when you set up an Amazon-- a compute in Amazon, you set up a virtual private network and you start deploying into that network, so it's always been true that networking is at the core of Cloud. And so the complexity that we're seeing over time is that the workloads are everywhere. The workloads aren't just in my data center and I'm not paying attention to data center networking or just cloud networking, it's connecting them together, securing them, making sure that they're fast and well managed. And so it's always been true that networking's at the core of this and as the edges get blurry, as we move workloads from one place to the other, all of the things that Cisco does are on managed networks, programmable networks, secure networks, all become even more important. >> And everything's amplified, too, in terms of its purpose. You're seeing automation is a big trend that's impacting the infrastructure and app developers. You've deployed SaaS apps within Cisco for over a decade, you've seen your share of successes and its issues but now as the data becomes critical, you got security perimeter issues are gone, and you got Surface here with industrial in IOT it's only getting more complex. So the complexity never went, but it's still complex these are the same problems. What's changed, what's the-- what's going on? >> Well so one of the things that's changed is that we've-- and this is something we can credit the Cloud providers for doing it is we've learned to treat our infrastructure in a different way. I mean the way we deploy and manage everything including networks compute, even applications. Operating the cloud demanded that we automate those things. Demanded the way, when you're managing now, fleets of thousands or tens of thousands of machines at scale in the cloud and when your call provider won't promise you that any machine won't go away at any moment you get good at replacing machines. And now we take those same tools, concepts, ways of operating that we did on the cloud and we apply them on print. Yeah, so a big part of what Cisco has been doing across our entire portfolio is ensuring that every piece of it from networking storage security is programmable and drivable through automation. >> You and I were talking before we came on camera and I wrote this down a phrase you like to use is, referring to Cisco, why Cisco is, We bring cloud innovation on-prem, what do you mean by that? >> Well really it's taking these new way of doing things, these new opportunities. Yeah, when we talk about-- we've had some funny conversations with our security guys, for example, we're historically in security we would have some policy, we would deploy applications against that policy once every six months or twelve months we would audit against that. Well one example of bringing the cloud innovation on-prem is the way you deploy that software, or deploy a new policy is via software. So auditing that is checking your code before you commit it, this says what it's going to do. Running reporting on the things that you've deployed so that you can see. So its taking these advantages of automation, and observability, and things like code review that are just normal practice in software development and apply them to infrastructure. And so, again, what Cisco is doing is making sure that all of our infrastructure can be-- can be programmed in that way, providing tools that allow us to program the things like Network Services Orchestrator or CloudCenter Suite that allow us to deploy applications or networks or whatever else as software entities . >> How about the reality of the person who's been innovating in the cloud and their reaction when they come back on prem they go, okay I've been doing this in the cloud and I turn around and I see all this. Is this the cloud innovation dynamic that you're referring to? Is it the realization that I had some innovation in the cloud, agility, automation and then trying to figure it out, or applying it, or both what's the reality when someone goes wow, I'm on-prem now, what's that innovation layer? >> Well there's several realities, depending on who you are and where you're coming from. One of my first roles at Cisco was, I was working on the Webex operation team and that-- the way we ran that operations was typical of the time it was built. And we did an acquisition that to accompany-- of a company that had been operating in Amazon and when they saw the way we that had to deploy and manage their application and infrastructure they were horrified. It's like, what do you mean I can't deploy a server in five minutes, what do you mean I can't manage the workflow in this way? So for them it was a shock and horror that they didn't have this infrastructure and that's when we deployed our first private cloud and Webex was to support that style of deployment. The flip side of that is the people who are operating those existing data centers with those existing workflows, their world changed, I mean they had to learn new ways of doing things, they had to learn new ways of managing their infrastructure, coding skills were a requirement not something that a few guys did, scripting in the background. So it was like, there's a lot of change to the people and to the way we did things but really it's a matter of bringing those, you know, bringing the cloud, bringing software development to operations, bringing software programmable to, hard programmability, to hardware. >> Yeah, I mean that's a great point. We cover that a lot on theCube, but I think one of the things you pointed out is the realization that, okay, great, new way of doing things, innovation. But as you kind of pointed out, there's a double edged sword there. The command and control of the network, which has been an old style tactic which doesn't go away, you still need to have control of certain things and on-premise, you certainly can control it on-premise, on cloud you think you control it through software, but this is the deep dive on tech conversation I want to have with you because we're talking about app deployment, Kubernetes management and the reality, I have my own gear on-site, as well as I'm maybe serverless into the cloud, this is the new reality. That you have to manage the controls. Take us through the-- those layers. App deployment, Kubernetes, and the reality of managing infrastructure on a future basis. >> Sure so, it's-- when we think about the application deployment it's very easy to kind of think about it in terms of the layers, and the programmable layers that you provide and I'll just touch--we won't go into detail on the products, but ultimately, today for an application-- someone deploying an application increasing that means push an application into Kubernetes, in other words I'm going to package my application's container, I'm going to hand it to Kubernetes through Kubernetes API and I'm going to expect Kubernetes to do the deployment and management of that. Okay, so that just makes the problem for the guy one layer below you, where's Kubernetes come from? It's like who deploys and manages Kubernetes? And so there's a number of different solutions and the public cloud you can use, you know, AKS, or Google's Kubernetes service, or Amazon's, any of these, but on-prem, where's it come from, who's going to manage it for you, who's going to create that? So Cisco's container platform is a product to deploy and manage Kubernetes to offload that from the developer, I mean, from the operations guy or the platform manager. Of course, that deployer of Kubernetes expects programmable infrastructure, how are you going to be able to deploy a VM or manage hardware that runs below that? >> Back to your innovation message. It's the innovation they want >> Well ultimately the guy wants the simple push the button and get the application deployed, that means someone has to get this layer deployed and well to get that layered deployed, what's there? So we continue to support virtualization managers, whether VMWare or our own cVim, Cisco Virtual Infrastructure Manager. All of these products its like, how do I manage this pool of hardware to provide that next layer of service? So, but in every case the programmability of the infrastructure or as far down as you can go becomes paramount, so, you know, when the guy racks a piece of hardware in the data center he doesn't want to think about how does this read card need to get configured, right? He just wants to rack it, plug it in, and then turn it over to software as quickly as possible. >> And that's the cloud innovation on-prem that you're referring to, that's making it cloud-like operations for Agility Automation, provisioning. >> Consistency, reliability, observability, give you an example of that, I mean when we, when we were talking originally when we were starting these cloud deployments and we had this conversation with Infosac about which application lives in which zone and how do you manage that? And we were like, well the zoning processes that's used in the past don't apply anymore. The way we manage that thing is with security groups, and the security groups are created this way. Here's the software, here's the software. When I'm talking software, I'm talking about configuration and scripts in this case, Ansible, Chef, Puppet whatever, that generate those security groups that generate those rules and it's like, it changes the way the security guy interacts with your team. It's no longer, file a ticket to review your app and app deployment and have a new ticket to do a deployment, it's something that they can do in real time. We're talking about moving these processes left, you know, moving that audit to the system all the way back into the software development stage and then giving the tools to verify that afterwards. And their eyes literally popped open, it was like, you mean at any moment at any time I can say show groups and see what the security posture is right now. And it's like, yes! An that's what sold them on letting us behave in this new way, was the ability to audit in realtime. >> Yeah, and this is a major advantage. This brings up the question that comes us all the time, and I want to get your thoughts on this because this shapes into the overall cloud architecture, cloud portfolio, and in this case with Cisco products is workload portability. It used to be, oh the one way trip to the cloud, not anymore, it's not a one way trip to the cloud, it's now bi-directionally on-premise, been validated by LPOST, Anthos, and Azure Stack, this is going to be an operating model to your point about the cloud innovation now workload portability, I think that's been validated so I think we recognize, the industry recognizes that it's not just public cloud everywhere, it's hybrid. This has been validated. You agree. >> Absolutely we-- there were many things that we never did move to the cloud, never would move to the cloud. Whether it's for policy reasons, or the quantity of data that we had, or systems that weren't available on the cloud, for example DevTest Labs, that have soundproof rooms, it's all audio equipment. We sell phones, we have to test those phones, those aren't ever going to be on the cloud, they're going to be in their soundproof rooms so we can test the audio pairing. There's stuff like that that always lives unrolled. There's a myriad of-- >> Compliance resources also requires-- >> Compliance things, whether its a FedRAMP compliance, this data has to be in this country, well US in that case, European privacy things. It could be-- I was talking to one bank a number of years ago now that worked-- we're deploying, we're talking about deploying Kubernetes from, it's like what applications are you deploying? Why do they need to be here, well, they're building-- they've got a mobile first application they want to use all the latest and greatest ways to build and deploy that application. But the data that that application is accessing is in the mainframe. It hasn't moved in ten years, twenty years, it's not going to move anytime soon. So you put the application next to the data that it needs. An IoT, it might be control devices, or video devices, or any number of things that's like, I think there's a trend overall, it's less about workload portability for a lot of people or being able to move workloads, it's saying, where's the best place for this particular workload to run, and so then provide the appropriate infrastructure to run that workload. And that's where we get back to saying, wait a minute I want to use containerization, I want to use orchestration systems, I want to use all these modern tools for doing this, but still put the workload where it needs to be. >> That is a profound statement, I want to just quickly unpack that a little bit because that really is the heart of the issue, cloud innovation. The workloads are going to be defining the requirements it needs, whether it's cloud selection or where it resides on-prem with what resources underneath it. That's not saying a company has to decide that because of that workload that the entire company has to use that 'cause the choices now because of the levels or granularity that cloud brings, the applications can get almost custom built or-- well not custom built but a specific hardware and compute to serve their needs. So if its a-- you're soul sourcing a set of resources for the workload. That's not saying that the infrastructure has to be that for everything, it's just the whole single cloud versus multi cloud dynamic. >> Yeah I mean, in fact, one of the things we're seeing more and more in our customers is, like, they don't have one cloud, they have multiple clouds, for multiple purposes. On-prem there's not one big private cloud that runs everything, there's lots of Kubernetes clusters and one of the things that a product like CCP does is allow you to deploy and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters for multiple purposes. Multiple problem domains, multiple political domains, financial domains, who's paying for this thing? Well, it's easy if you just buy the servers that are appropriate to your department and you run it. You still get to take advantage of all the way you deploy and package and run these applications, which is just hands down better than we ever did before. And that's some of the innovation we have. Now once you start doing this, once you start deploying these applications in multiple places, in multiple-- well, where are your security borders, where are your perimeters, how do you secure any of this, how do you connect all this stuff? How do you visualize all this stuff? And so, as you look at our products from, you know, we talked a little bit about the infrastructure pieces of that, you know the, Kubernetes deploying to an infrastructure manager, deploying ultimately to hardware, every layer of that. You know, UCS and CVIM and CCP, all of those layers are there and programmable. Okay, now we're deploying workloads, now I've got to connect the things together, how do I monitor it, how do I-- and so that's why you see products like Stealthwatch Cloud, and AppD, and the other applications to do monitoring and security across a now fully distributed application. >> You know, sometimes it's hard for me as a cube host to kind of get the story out about certain trends, especially when big players like Cisco, a lot of people know that I'm pretty bullish on Cisco, I've been very vocal about the Cisco opportunity with respect to cloud and critical, by the way in some areas and I think I would probably advise certain things to be certain ways. But one of the things, I think, is a great opportunity that you guys have, and you're kind of getting at, I want to just get your reaction and thoughts on this, is that what you're talking about here is an environment that's going to be constantly dynamic. That's constantly changing. And being complex is not going away, abstracting away the complexity is the game. But Cisco has always been successful in multi environments, different environments because networking has always been about diversity of networks. Campus this, and SD-- so it's not a new concept for Cisco to deal with this concept of multiple environments. Do you agree with that? What's your reaction to that? How would you answer that? Is that something you think Cisco's dominating in? Is that reason why Cisco is serving all these choices? What's your thoughts on that? >> I would have to say that overall the integrating lots of disparate things. Connecting lots of disparate things is in Cisco's DNA, I mean from our original routers and switches at the very beginning it was always multiple things connected to each other often multi-vendor working across standards and across standard things. When we talk about Kubernetes we're not talking about the Cisco Kubernetes we're talking about Kubernetes, the real thing, the actual Kubernetes, we're talking about-- and we're talking about ceiling, we're talking about openstack a standard, we're talking about-- so across all these boards connecting and integrating disparate things, is kind of what Cisco does. >> And so if you're deploying applications you've done that and certainly your customers are, they're never going to have one general purpose situations that's going to be scenarios, right? And certain things will be guiding principles, some will be governors that will then dictate things that might not be classic cloud native. Can you talk about that and give some examples why that's important and the reality of the statement. >> Yeah so, just use one example of an application, Webex teams our enterprise chat application, for example, that is your classic microservices modern cloud native application. There are three ways of deploying applications in that platform that are appropriate for the three different things. We got the services themselves, the media bridges, or the switching engines that runs these containers in a container orchestration fabric. There's the VM base things that are things like media bridges that don't run in containers very well, not because of the problem with the containers, but because of the overlay networks the containers bring with it and the way you route data to those. And we got physical machines. Now when we're actually running certain things on physical machines and so all of these exist in any kind of, even a brand new modern application so even within a single product family there's not one true way of doing things, what's the appropriate way to deploy this application. What's the right deployment target for this thing and how do I connect these things. >> You measure InfoSec so politics might be a driver that have nothing to do with technology, could be a human capital, resource issue, it could be something scalable. >> And the politics or even or can be even these temporal things, it's like, look I can spend, you know, three weeks trying to convince an InfoSec to do things in a particular way or it can just deploy somewhere where it makes them happy and move on, move on to the next problem and then later when they catch up with the way we're doing things, we may move it later. The other thing about timing on all this is the story is changing constantly when we deployed that application, we did not use Docker containers. And everybody says, why aren't you using Docker? Because Docker didn't exist three years ago! It's like the decisions we were making at that time are changing ever more rapidly. And the reality for our enterprise customers is that you don't just forklift one and then replace it with another one, you tend to manage them all in parallel even as you're making transitions, you know, eventually you kind of get rid of the old stuff, maybe, the mainframe still exists >> Mhmm. >> But in general for most of our enterprise customers it's not and or it's not on-prem or on the cloud, it's not containers or visible machines, its and, I'm running all of the above. >> And to your point about the docker not being around when you guys were doing that, that's going to be a concept that's going to be applied down the road, hey that wasn't around when we set the architecture, so as an enterprise, your customers that you talk to, what is the guiding principle? What is the preferred architecture? Again, a lot of choices you guys are trying to make your portfolio fit the bill. What are some of the decisions they have to make? So, to future-proof because they don't want to foreclose an opportunity and or create technical debt for that matter. Why would they do that? So they kind of have to be holistic in their thinking. >> Yeah, future proof is always-- is a funny concept because the reality is, that the... The way you do things will change. You didn't make something that was future proof, you built an environment that allowed you to do this way and that way. So if you take a look at the way we deployed, for example, our infrastructure in general we start with the UCS substrate, we can run Oracle on bare-metal on those things when we need to. We can run virtualization on top of that, and run a layer of vms on top of that. We can run containers, now I've got choices. Common substrate, common way of managing those things but at least three different ways of deploying on those. So ultimately we're looking for standard practices that enables me to have to do the and to where I can run things side by side and can connect things, I can secure things over the top but run all of the above. And it's really a matter of building things that have kind of clean our connectural layers where one thing consumes the other and then be able to mix and match and plug them together Lego style as it were. >> This a great chat, and really reminds me of the conversations that we'll be having here in theCube. We've been doing a series with engineering leaders and you know, you mentioned foreclose in the future, future proofing which is kind of a buzz word. The conversation happening in the technical circles is about technical debt and I think, you know, I've always seen that enterprise you know, cost of ownership, you know, and the shark fin, the iceberg and what you don't see. Certainly that's been a paradigm that's been known but now you're getting into this notion of not just so much future proofing, it's really the balance of technical debt because you know something new is coming. This is a modern concept that takes costs of ownership and future proofing and kind of puts it to reality because you're essentially taking on some sort of technical debting from point A to point B, but you don't want to take on too much that you can't pay it back if new technology comes in. So this is what's been going on in some of the you know, top customers that we've been talking to. A new management concept, this is kind of a modern new management discipline. Your thoughts and reaction to that? >> So there's at least two different vectors that talk about on it. So, one of the things is, how do I take these older applications, these older ways of managing things and incrementally improve them. Because we can actually make it-- it is easier today to deploy a process running on a machine than it ever was before. Five years ago I would have a ticket, some guy would go and then install software manually, today we don't do that, we use configuration management, puppet and chefs, ansible, etc. We improve the way I do those things incrementally rather than just forklift them. I'm not rewriting these applications and saying okay, we're going to make these into cloud native applications and microservices and bla, bla, bla and replatform them. No I incrementally improve the way I operate that thing. Even if its just deploying the hardware more consistently underneath or improving this layer. So I incrementally reduce my debt by applying, again, deploying some of these new cloud... Cloud innovations, they're grown out of the cloud to the existing ways of doing things. But the other point I'll make on a lot of this, is that, certainly for our team, and for a lot of the customers I talk about we don't just arbitrarily go and replatform things, right? It's like if the thing is working, let it continue to work. Don't deploy the new thing alongside it. You know, we're more concerned about delivering new features, new capabilities, new things. And we do that, and we concentrate our efforts and our engineering efforts on that and not constantly rewriting the past. >> A container can certainly help you there too. >> Absolutely. Containers are beautiful tool for that, for encapsulating dependencies around a thing. And so you'll find in many cases we have applications that are not ready to deploy to run in Kubernetes with a schedule that's going to move it around but I can still take advantage of the container packaging and run it on a physical box with a normal Linux operating system and containerize it. So it's usually valuable. >> Reinhardt, I want to get your thoughts on one last talking track, that is relevant to something that we've been covering. Stu Miniman, co-host of theCube with me on many of these events around networking, we both love networking, both networking nerds. Always joke about how networking is where you go to find out about the state of the industry is. Look at what's going on with the network. Because network ultimately tells the truth. Movin' things around, security people go to the network. You start to see, everything's revolving around the network now, more than ever. I mean, still, it's been that way forever. But you made a comment before we went on camera you said, just adding another layer of networking. If you think about what you just said, the networking paradigm is just kind of slowly moving to another layer. So networking is happening, it's just happening differently. So as the dev ops innovations in the cloud happens it's really a network innovation. 'cause security pivots off the network data used applications, instrumentations, on the network data, everything's around networks. >> It's intrinsically tied. In the past we had a machine, a physical machine had a network interface, singular, and a network identity an address. VMs, multiple network interfaces, multiple on every VM. Kubernetes, an IP address per application, right? And it's like the networking space is exploding as we move up. And yes, we now have a network connectivity and management problem that's over of magnitudes more complicated than it was before because now, individual workloads have IP addresses. And by the way I'm deploying workloads in multiples. I don't run a single application, I run a pool of applications, each one has an address. And so yeah networking is-- continues to be intrinsic and it just moves up. >> And it's fascinating too, you know, we always speculate about looking for that new technology, the new protocol, something new, the shiny new toy. But if you think about it, all the science and intellectual property has been built already. It's usually a combination of a couple different things. In network theory, in network management, the concepts are still around. It's being applied differently now. >> Or sliced into smaller, you know, smaller, the bites are smaller that you're dealing with, right? Everything has an IP address, we got thousands of IP addresses now that we're managing. Having IP address management problems, we have other things to manage now. >> The game is still the same. >> The game is still the same, it's still TCP IP networking. >> So final question, bottom line, why Cisco and the cloud networking as it comes together? As this stuff starts to modernize, hybrid is certainly reality hardcore, as people are doing today. Multi cloud is also another reality right around the corner. Why Cisco? Why Cisco's products and portfolios for the cloud? >> Well fundamentally, as we said earlier, the cloud has a networking problem. Networking underpins everything that we do. The networking, from physical networking the compute has to run on something. So networking, compute, orchestration systems for all of that, security that overlays all of that. I think Cisco uniquely has all of the components that it takes to build a modern infrastructure stack, and in fact deploy applications to that. I think, the breath of knowledge and capabilities Cisco has across those is unique. And then, also, I would say, Cisco's experience. We have many-- several of the world's largest SaaS applications in the Cisco family. Things like umbrella, DNS security, or Webex, web conferencing, we also have deep expertise in running applications and that's within the Cisco domain of expertise. >> Certainly in good position, I really I'm really bull-ish on what you guys can do. I think the network is where the trust is, it's where the data is, that's where the action is, and I think that's the cloud 2.0 equation. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for the insight. Reinhardt Quelle, principle engineer, Cloud Platforms of Cisco here sharing his insight on this Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the saas. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to the special CUBE conversation on secondary storage and data protection, which is one of the hottest topics in the business right now. Cloud, multi-cloud, bringing the Cloud experience to wherever your data lives and protecting that data driven by digital transformation. We're gonna talk about that with Patrick Osborne, the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at HPE, good friend and CUBE alum. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> So let's start with some of those trends that I mentioned. I think, let's start with digital transformation. It's a big buzzword in the industry but it's real. I travel around, I talk to customers all the time, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. And digital means data, data needs to be protected in new ways now, and so when we trickle down into your world, data protection, what are you seeing in terms of the impact of digital and digital transformation on data protection? >> Absolutely, great question. So the winds of change in secondary storage are blowing pretty hard right now. I think there's a couple different things that are driving that conversation. A, the specialization of people with specific backup teams, right, that's moving away, right. You're moving away from general storage administration and specialized teams to people focusing a lot of those resources now on Cloud Ops team, DevOps team, application development. So they want that activity of data protection to be automated and invisible. Like you said before, in terms of being able to re-use that data, the old days of essentially having a primary dataset and then pushing it off to some type of secondary storage which just sits there over time, is not something that customers want anymore. >> Right. >> They wanna be able to use that data, they wanna be able to generate copies of that, do test and dev, gain insight from that, being able to move that to the Cloud, for example, to be able to burst out there or do it for DR activities. So I think there's a lot of things that are happening when it comes to data that are certainly changing the requirements and expectations around secondary storage. >> So the piece I want to bring to the conversation is Cloud and I saw a stat recently that the average company, the average enterprise has, like, eight clouds, and I was thinking, sheesh, small company like ours has eight clouds, so I mean, the average enterprise must have 80 clouds when you start throwing in all the sass. >> Yeah. >> So Cloud and specifically, multi-cloud, you guys, HPEs, always been known for open platform, whatever the customer wants to do, we'll do it. So multi-cloud becomes really important. And let's expand the definition of Cloud to include private cloud on PRM, what we call True Private Cloud in the Wikibon world, but whether it's Azure, AWS, Google, dot, dot, dot, what are you guys seeing in terms of the pressure from customers to support multi... They don't want a silo, a data protection silo for each cloud, right? >> Absolutely. So they don't want silos in general, right? So I think a couple of key things that you brought up, private cloud is very interesting for customers. Whether they're gonna go on PRM or off PRM, they absolutely want to have the experience on PRM. So what we're providing customers is the ability, through APIs and seamless integration into their existing application frameworks, the ability to move data from point A to point B to point C, which could be primary all-flash, secondary systems, cloud targets, but have that be able to be automated full API set and provide a lot of those capabilities, those user stories around data protection and re-use, directly to the developers, right, and the database admins and whoever's doing this news or DevOps area. The second piece is that, like you said, everyone's gonna have multiple clouds, and what we want to do is we want to be able to give customers an intelligent experience around that. We don't necessarily need to own all the infrastructure, right, but we need to be able to facilitate and provide the visibility of where that data's gonna land, and over time, with our capabilities that we have around InfoSight, we wanna be able to do that predictably, make recommendations, have that whole population of customers learn from each other and provide some expert analysis for our customers as to where to place workloads. >> These trends, Patrick, they're all interrelated, so they're not distinct and before we get into the hard news, I wanna kinda double down on another piece of this. So you got data, you got digital, which is data, you've got new pressures on data protection, you've got the cloud-scale, a lot of diversity. We haven't even talked about the edge. That's another, sort of, piece of it. But people wanna get more out of their data protection investment. They're kinda sick of just spending on insurance. They'd like to get more value out of it. You've mentioned DevOps before. >> Yep. >> Better access to that data, certainly compliance. Things like GDPR have heightened awareness of things that you can do with the data, not just for backup, and not even just for compliance, but actually getting value out of the data. Your thoughts on that trend? >> Yeah, so from what we see for our customers, they absolutely wanna reuse data, right? So we have a ton of solutions for our customers around very low latency, high performance optimized flash storage in 3PAR and Nimble, different capabilities there, and then being able to take that data and move it off to a hybrid flash array, for example, and then do workloads on that, is something that we're doing today with our customers, natively as well as partnering with some of our ISV ecosystem. And then sort of a couple new use cases that are coming is that I want to be able to have data providence. So I wanna share some of my data, keep that in a colo but be able to apply compute resources, whether those are VMs, whether they are functions, lambda functions, on that data. So we wanna bring the compute to the data, and that's another use case that we're enabling for our customers, and then ultimately using the Cloud as a very, very low-cost, scalable and elastic tier storage for archive and retention. >> One of the things we've been talking about in theCUBE community is you hear that Bromite data is the new oil, and somebody in the community was saying, you know what? It's actually more valuable than oil. When I have oil, I can put it in my house or I can put it my car. But data, the unique attribute of data is I can use it over and over and over again. And again, that puts more pressure on data protection. All right, let's get into some of the hard news here. You've got kind of a four-pack of news that we wanna talk about. Let's start with StoreOnce. It's a platform that you guys announced several years ago. You've been evolving it regularly. What's the StoreOnce news? >> Yes, so in the secondary storage world, we've seen the movement from PBBA, so Purpose-Built Backup Appliances, either morphing into very intelligent software that runs on commodity hardware, or an integrated appliance approach, right? So you've got a integrated DR appliance that seamlessly integrates into your environment. So what we've been doing with StoreOnce, this is our 4th generation system and it's got a lot of great attributes. It has a system, right. It's available in a rote form factor at different capacities. It's also available as a software-defined version so you can run that on PRM, you can run it off PRM. It scales up to multiple petabytes in a software-only version. So we've got a couple different use cases for it, but what I think is one of the key things is that we're providing a very integrated experience for customers who are 3PAR Nimble customers. So it allows you to essentially federate your primary all-flash storage with secondary. And then we actually provide a number of use cases to go out to the Cloud as well. Very easy to use, geared towards the application admin, very integrative. >> So it's bigger, better, faster, and you've got this integration, a confederation as you called it, across different platforms. What's the key technical enabler there? >> Yeah, so we have a really extensible platform for software that we call Recovery Manager Central. Essentially, it provides a number of different use cases and user stories around copy data management. So it's gonna allow you to take application integrated snapshots. It's gonna allow you to do that either in the application framework, so if you're a DVA and you do Arman, you could do it in there, or if you have your own custom applications, you can write to the API. So it allows you to do snapshots, full clones, it'll allow you to do DR, so one box to another similar system, it'll allow you to go from primary to secondary, it'll allow you to archive out to the Cloud, and then all of that in reverse, right? So you can pull all of that data back and it'll give you visibility across all those assets. So, the past where you, as a customer, did all this on your own, right, bought on horizontal lines? We're giving a customer, based on a set of outcomes and applications, a complete vertically-oriented solution. >> Okay, so that's the, really, second piece of hard news. >> Yeah. >> Recovery Manager Central, RMC, 6.0, right-- >> Yeah. >> Is the release that we're on? And that's copy data management essentially-- >> Absolutely. >> Is what you're talking about. It's your catalog, right, so your tech underneath that, and you're applying that now across the portfolio, right? >> Absolutely. So, we're extending that from... We've had, for the past year, that ability to do the copy data management directly from 3PAR. We're extending that to provide that for Nimble. Right, so for Nimble customers that want to use all-flash, they want to use hybrid flash arrays from Nimble, you can go to secondary storage in StoreOnce and then out to the Cloud. >> Okay, and that's what 6.0 enables-- >> Yeah, exactly. >> That Nimble piece and then out to the Cloud. Okay, third piece of news is an ecosystem announcement with Commvault. Take us through that. >> Yeah, so we understand at HPE, given the fact that we're very, very focused on hybrid Cloud and we have a lot of customers that have been our customers for a long time, none of these opportunities are greenfield, right, at the end of the day. So your customers are, they have to integrate with existing solutions, and in a lot of cases, they have some partners for data protection. So one of the things that we've done with this ecosystem is made very public our APIs and how to integrate our systems. So we're storage people, we are data management folks, we do big data, we also do infrastructure. So we know how to manage the infrastructure, move data very seamlessly between primary, secondary, and the Cloud. And what we do is, we open up those APIs in those use cases to all of our partners and our customers. So, in that, we're announcing a number of integrations with Commvault, so they're gonna be integrating with our de-duplication and compression framework, as well as being able to program to what we call Cloud Bank, right? So, we'll be able to, in effect, integrate with Commvault with our primary storage, be able to do rapid recovery from StoreOnce in a number of backup use cases, and then being able to go out to the cloud, all managed through customers' Commvault interface. >> All right, so if I hear you correctly, you've just gotta double click on the Commvault integration. It's not just a go-to-market setup. It's deeper engineering and integration that you guys are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, great. And then, of course the fourth piece is around, so your bases are loaded here, the fourth piece is around the Cloud economics, Cloud pricing model. Your GreenLake model, the utility pricing has gotten a lot of traction. When we're at HPE Discover, customers talking about it, you guys have been leaders there. Talk about GreenLake and how that model fits into this. >> Yeah, so, in the technology talk track we talk about, essentially, how to make this simple and how to make it scalable. At the end of the day, on the buying pattern side, customers expect elasticity, right? So, what we're providing for our customers is when they want to do either a specific integration or implementation of one of those components from a technology perspective, we can provide that. If they're doing a complete re-architecture and want to understand how I can essentially use secondary storage better and I wanna take advantage of all that data that I have sitting in there, I can provide that whole experience to customers as a service, right? So, the primary storage, your secondary storage, the Cloud capacity, even some of the ISV partner software that we provide, I can take that as an entire, vetted solution, with reference architectures and the expertise to implement, and I can give that to a customer in an OpEx as a service elastic purchasing model. And that is very unique for HPE and that's what we've gone to market with GreenLake, and we're gonna be providing more solutions like that, but in this case, we're announcing the fact that you can buy that whole experience, backup as a service, data protection as a service, through GreenLake from HPE. >> So how does that work, Patrick, practically speaking? A customer will, what, commit to some level of capacity, let's say, as an example, and then HPE will put in some extra headroom if, in fact, that's needed, you maybe sit down with the customer and do some kind of capacity planning, or how does that actually work, practically speaking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work with customers on the architecture, right, up front. So we have a set of vetted architectures. We try to avoid snowflakes, right, at the end of the day. We want to talk to customers around outcomes. So if a customer is trying to reach outcome XYZ, we come with a recommendation on how to do that. And what we can do is, we don't have very high up-front commitments and it's very elastic in the way that we approach the purchasing experience. So we're able to fit those modules in. And then we've made some number of acquisitions over the last couple years, right? So, on the advisory side, we have Cloud Technology Partners. We come in and talk about how do you do a hybrid cloud backup as a service, right? So we can advise customers on how to do that and build that into the experience. We acquired CloudCruiser, right? So we have the billing and the monitoring and everything that gets very, very granular on how you use that service, and that goes into how we bill customers on a per-metric usage format. And so we're able to package all of that up and we have, this is a kind of a little-known fact, very, very high NPS score for HPE financial services. Right, so the combination of our point next services, advisory, financial services, really puts a lot of meat behind GreenLake as a really good customer experience around elasticity. >> Okay, now all this stuff is gonna be available calendar Q4 of 2018, correct? >> Correct. >> Okay, so if you've seen videos like this before, we like to talk about what it is, how it works, and then we like to bring it home with the business impact. So thinking about these four announcements, and you can drill deeper on any one that you like, but I'd like to start, at least, holistically, what's the business impact of all of this? Obviously, you've got Cloud, we talked about some of the trends up front, but what are you guys telling customers is the real ROI? >> So, I think the big ROI is it moves secondary storage from a TCO conversation to an ROI conversation. Right, so instead of selling customers a solution where you're gonna have data that sits there waiting for something to happen, I'm giving customers a solution that's consumed as a service to be able to mine and utilize that secondary data, right? Whether it's for simple tasks like patch verification, application rollouts, things like that, and actually lowering the cost of your primary storage in doing that, which is usually pretty expensive from a storage perspective. I'm also helping customers save time, right? By providing these integrated experiences from primary to secondary to Cloud and making that automatic, I do help customers save quite a bit in OpEx from an operator perspective. And they can take those resources and move them on to higher impact projects like DevOps, CloudOps, things of that nature. That's a big impact from a customer perspective. >> So there's a CapEx to OpEx move for those customers that want to take advantage of GreenLake. [Patrick] Yep. >> So certain CFOs will like that story. But I think the other piece that, to me anyway, is most important is, especially in this world of digital transformation, I know it's a buzzword, but it's real. When you go to talk to people, they don't wanna do the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, the day-to-day infrastructure management. A lot of mid-size customers, they just don't have the resources to do it anymore. >> Correct. >> And they're under such pressure to digitize, every company wants to become a software company. Benioff talks about that, Satya Nadella talks about that, Antonio talks about digital transformation. And so it's on CEOs' minds. They don't want to be paying people for these mundane tasks. They really wannna shift them to these digital transformation initiatives and drive more business value. >> Absolutely. So you said it best, right, we wanna drive the customer experience to focusing on high-value things that'll enable their digital transformation. So, as a vision, what we're gonna keep on providing, and you've seen that with InfoSight on Nimble, InfoSight for 3PAR, and our vision around AI for the data center, these tasks around data protection, they're repeatable tasks, how to protect data, how to move data, how to mine that data. So if we can provide recommendations and some predictive analytics and experiences to the customers around this, and essentially abstract that and just have the customers focus on defining their SLA, and we're worried about delivering that SLA, then that's a huge win for us and our customers. And that's our vision, that's what we're gonna be providing them. >> Yeah, automation is the key. You've got some tools in the toolkit to help do that and it's just gonna escalate from here. It feels like we're on the early part of the S-curve and it's just gonna really spike. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Patrick. Hey, thanks for coming in and taking us through this news, and congratulations on getting this stuff done and we'll be watching the marketplace. Thank you. >> Great. Kudos to the team, great announcement, and we look forward to working with you guys again. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante on theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering, Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for Red Hat Summit 2018, I'm John Furrier, my co-host John Troyer. Next guest is CUBE alumni, been on so many times. I can't remember. I think you're a VIP CUBE alumni, Doug Balog, general manager, IBM Storage Client Success and IBM's partners executive leading the Red Hat relationship. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> It's always great to be on it again. I think that's a new category you just invented, a VIP alumni, as to something. >> On theCUBE.net site we actually have badges for CUBE VIPs that says VIP. Great to see you. Again, we have a little history. Your role at IBM, you've been there for a lot of time. You've seen their history. Power's been your wheelhouse, you built that from scratch. An open community with the Power Systems at IBM, but you launched OpenPOWER, an open consortium, very much open source model. And you know that's very successful, congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> Now your role with Red Hat, you're the lead executive. You're the guy to call with any problems, or anything, opportunities. What's going on? Give us the update. >> Yeah, so I think it was mentioned by Matt on stage today where we're actually celebrating 20 years of partnering together with Red Hat. I think a lot of folks take pause at that not realizing how far back this relationship goes. Hate to say I was there in 1998 when we struck this agreement. I think at that time a lot of folks inside IBM were scratching their heads saying, who's Red Hat, and what is Linux, and why are we doing this? At the end of the day, we have had a longstanding belief in open collaboration, drives innovation, drives value to clients. That was the fundamental reason we jumped in when it was just an operating system discussion back in the early 2000s. We brought that across at that time. Our Intel server base, then our mainframe, and then in 2013 our Power platform. We brought our software along as well back then too. Running on that operating system. Then it became a virtualization discussion and brought Rev onto the platforms, our software supported that. Now here with some exciting announcements today around the partnership around cloud with a common container strategy. Which I think for enterprise clients will help build a larger ecosystem, give clients choice of how they want to bring that value to clients. So it's been a long, deep relationship and one that I think the two companies are more aligned than not in many ways. >> And you guys are humble, I'll say. And you guys were a catalyst moment. Linux, the Linux coming together at that time became an industry standard literally overnight, because the industry rallied around it. You guys supported it with a big contribution and since then. But that was back in the day, that was when it was tier two citizen in the world. Now open source is tier one, it's powering everything you see and open source software and storage and networking, software-defined data center, now CloudScale, this is a big deal. >> It's a big deal. >> For the world. Now, the cloud story's interesting to me. So you got the Red Hat powering a lot of the enterprise. Hybrid cloud's number one thing on the agenda, multi-cloud's kind of being discussed, but that's with the end in mind. Hybrid cloud is a number one work area, which essentially cloudifying, creating cloud operations for the enterprise. How is this partnership with Red Hat impact IBM's customers and what's in it for the Red Hat customers? >> I think as, and I know you just had Arvin on here a moment ago. It was literally just about six months ago, that Arvin and I and Paul Cormier and Jim Whitehurst sat down and said, you know what, I think the next big thing for us to partner around is containers. There is so much advantage for speed of software deployment, this hybrid cloud structure you talked about and the fact that, listen, I think we're much more mature in the industry talking about cloud. There were moments a year or two ago where the answer was everything's going to the public cloud, on-prem's dead. I think it's a much more mature conversation now in terms of the role of hybrid. Which means clients are still going to have plenty of their data. Especially if they're a regulated industry. That data's going to stay on-prem, but that still doesn't mean there are parts of their infrastructure, parts of their applications that they're going to want to run on a public cloud, like the IBM cloud. So that ability to have a common container approach, a common container management structure, like IBM cloud private, with OpenShift as the partner, I think it brings tremendous freedom of choice to clients, so where they run what with a common development platform. >> It's interesting, the definition's changed, and we're always squinting through the noise, but the bottom line is if everything's cloudified if you will, using that word, on-prem and public cloud doesn't really make a difference where you locate it because it's cloud operations and Wikibon had the True Private Cloud rapport which basically stated that True Private Cloud is essentially on-premise activity, just operating in a cloud framework meaning same code bases, more operational dashboard. Especially cloud operations not traditional IT. So I think there is the distinction, so it's still on-prem. >> Still on-prem. >> But now you've got the edge of the network as well. Software Base2, so you've got IoT Edge, public cloud, hybrid, all coming together. >> You know we used to, when the world was just on-prem for the most part, we used to talk about different architectures being fit for purpose. What's the right workload to run what kind of applications. I was just up with a large financial institution in your neck of the woods on Friday and we were having this fit for purpose conversation around the cloud based on what kind of workload it is, how sensitive is the data, is it redacted of your and my names and social security numbers, right? All that stuff that's important. Where should that cloud workload run? What cloud should it run in? Or should it run on-prem or across both? So listen, a lot of what's old is always new, but of course it keeps evolving here now to this world of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud as you said. >> What's going on with customers at IBM? Tell us what's happening in your world. Obviously the industry's replatforming as the entire business. It's not just companies. It's an entire infrastructure's changing. You call it cloud infrastructure, data insfrastructure, AI, you're doing the Power stuff being successful. It's a global rearchitecture. >> That's right. >> This is not a one company. >> No. >> This is a complete standard. >> Everybody's transforming and I don't think there's ever an end to transformation. I think transformation is a train ride you decide to get on and you better get on, and you're going to stay on it once you get on. There's milestones along the way that demonstrate progress. But there's no resting anymore in terms of being comfortable in today's world. So transformation is going on forever. In the systems business we're constantly transforming. We brought out a new mainframe last year, we call it the z14. And now recently kind of a sum of our little skinny Zs, the ZR1s. Which are really designed for the modern data center because they fit in a standard, an industry standard rack. So we're bringing that robust security to not only our traditional Z clients, but to brand new Z clients, running Linux by the way. >> Arvin nailed it in his description and then I think this is true. You've got TCP/IP, HTTP, these are seminal moments and now you've got this glue layer with containers and say Kubernetes. This is going to change how software's being built and software being run, and how businesses will be running. So that's an industry wide dynamic shift over. At the infrastructure level. Instrumentation, and all the software behind it. Okay, that's happening. We're agreeing with that and totally agree with that. Now the impact to the customer. What do they have to do? Because they have to now adapt to this new world. Which means they got to put the legacy in. Plugging into the legacy they have to have microservices. So what does that software-defined infrastructure look like for the customer? You've seen the systems side through storage. What does software-defined mean in this new architecture? >> It certainly, part of the objective of ICP, IBM Cloud Private, was to create that on-prem cloud experience. Because again, so many clients were looking for not just having their traditional IT, which they're going to continue to have, but continue to modernize. But also move to a new environment that was much more self-service, all the things and the benefits of the public cloud, but still being careful around their data in many ways, and their core applications. So they're transforming and modernizing from legacy IT to on-prem IT, and then branching out with the fit for purpose discussion to the multi-cloud, to the hybrid cloud world. >> I love that that in the fit for purpose you can it that in so many parts of the stack. We, I think open source, one of its characteristics is it develops in public. And 20 years ago the question was, not is it fit for purpose, but when is Linux going to be ready? When's it going to be ready? Is it going to be ready? I think that answer is pretty clear now, and I think the same thing has been going through with containers and with Kubernetes. On theCUBE you're tracking Kubernetes, the growth of Kubernetes. Is this a real moment where IBM says, okay now, Kubernetes and OpenShift is now ready for the enterprise? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. If I think about kind of big moments in IT that provide a ubiquitous access to developers, you had, we talked about Linux as an operating environment, once all the platforms, the different architectures ran Linux, the ability for application portability while still bringing out the value of the platform, became very much true. Java, from an application programming model was another one. If you wrote in Java, you had the ability then to move that Java workload around without recompilation in many cases, to different architectures getting the value out of where you chose. Containers are the next one. So now we're containerizing workload. And again you have sort of freedom of choice of where you run it. And if you run it in this cloud or that cloud. Or this system or that system. You get different values out of it. >> And we're not just containerizing microservices. Now we're talking about containerizing WebSphere. >> WebSphere and databases and message queuing, and kind of that robust runtime that somebody in the audience joked, gosh I haven't seen those queues in a long time. Not that they haven't been there, they've always been there. But again, this is back to how do you take what you have from a legacy IT and modernize it for this cloud era? Much more than cloud washing. This is really transforming the IT. >> It preserves the adjustment. The bottom line, if I'm a CIO or I'm an executive looking at this market, I say okay, I've got a purchase decision I've made in the past, and I have a stall base of stuff and my choice used to be I've got to replace that, hire new people, move everything over, to now your approach is a little bit different. Great, just containerize it. And then when you're ready, you deal with it on its lifecycle. So you don't really have, so it's an ROI thing and it's also preservation of preexisting conditions. >> Now the other big, of course, client transformation going on is there's not a single client on the planet who's not trying to figure out artificial intelligence and what it means to their business to bring more insights around their clients into their workflows. So that's why in addition to Watson and all the work we do around Watson, of course in our cloud, we've gone down to the system level with our Power platform and really optimized Power9 with flash storage attached to it as the best combination of a platform for this AI era. In fact, I was sharing just before we went live here, is actually a big announce day for our systems business too. We're announcing new models of our AI platform, what we call the AC922 now with six GPUs with our partnership with NVIDIA. We've got new Linux systems, kind of the fall on with Power9, that I started back, they're much better by the way, that I started back in 2013. So here we are at the Linux Summit, we've got a common cloud partnership being announced at the same time we're announcing all the way down to the metal, systems and chips that are optimized to run the Linux and open source platforms. >> The thing that I like about those environments, the level of granularity is getting down to the point where you can have your applications or down to the level, to a service level, and manage it on that based on PowerAI would be a great example of what people can tap into. >> It actually it connects it all together, right? I mean PowerAI, which again, new content there. We've just announced PowerAI on Power9 and on Red Hat for the first time. Back to new news here at the Summit. It'll be containerized later this year. So now you've got PowerAI in a container on IBM Cloud Private, running on OpenShift optimized for Power9. Starts to make your brain hurt a little bit. But that's closer to the level of the thoughtfulness of our strategy and how all the pieces work together from the software and the applications down to the systems and the chip. >> You guys do a good job keeping in the open, too. I really like how that went with Power, certainly great stuff. PowerAI for the folks watching, check it out it's from IBM. Interesting product. I think it's got a lot of capability. Your perspective as an industry participant. You've seen many waves. What's this wave like in your opinion? There's so much going on with this new infrastructure. How do you talk about it when someone says hey Doug, what's going on? All this stuff. You've got blockchain over here. You've got this going on over there. >> I think that, at least from a systems perspective, the way think about it, myself and my peers think about it is, we've gone through so many generations where it was more manufacturing process driven innovation. How do you pack more on a chip? How do you pack more on a chip? How do you pack more on a chip? And it was kind of all about that. We're now in an era where homogeneity is no longer going to cut it. You're going to really need a number of GPUs, a number of processors, different kind of architectures, to fit the kind of workload that's coming so fast at us these days. You really don't have time to step back and say, let me replumb my old data center with that next one chip. It's going to be a diversity of infrastructure. >> Its hard to provision. You need it available immediately. >> So this wave we're in really is about bringing that diversity, that heterogeneity back into the data center, and bringing that value though, back in a simplified deployment way, 'cause heterogeneity means complexity in some ways. And that's where the layering of software packages like PowerAI, like software-defined storage, like ICP and OpenShift with our partnership with Red Hat kind of help bring that diversity and bring it back to a common level of application development. That's kind of the end goal. Common application development, the platform brings out the value. The app doesn't have to worry about it, but you've got that diversity of choice underneath. >> Great, Doug, great stuff. Great to have you on theCUBE. Just to end the segment, briefly summarize for people watching, what's this relationship with Red Hat all about? Obviously you have history, but what's the value? Talk about it right now. What's the impact to the customer watching? The relationship that's announced today with the private cloud initiative with Red Hat. >> I think if we summarize the relationship without getting into the technology, it really is about bringing innovation to enterprise clients. At the end of the day that's what Red Hat's focused on, that's what we're focused on, and that's what we're focused on together. They have great minds in the industry, we have great minds in the industry. The power of those minds coming together to create some of the innovation that we just talked about here in this segment, I mean it's mind blowing for what it means to enterprise clients to help them propel themselves forward and transform. That's what it means. >> These are the kind of partnerships we're going to see now that people are rallying behind Kubernetes and containers and this new software-defined infrastructure that's going on. We expect more of it. Right? We'll see more? >> Absolutely, software-defined is the name of the game these days. Not that there isn't value in the systems by the way. It's got to run someplace. >> They're under the hood. >> They're under the hood. >> Programmable. >> And they're differentiated for sure. >> Yeah infrastructure as code, you still need servers to run this stuff on. >> It does matter. It does matter a lot. >> Doug, great to see you. >> Good to see you as always, John. John, good to see you. >> Absolutely. >> theCUBE bringing all the action here, here in San Francisco. Live coverage, I'm John Furrier, John Troyer, day one, we'll be right back with more after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, here in Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, founder and CEO of a start-up, solo.io, Idit Levine. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> All right, so one of the things we were talking in the open. Lauren Cooney, who you know, and I were talking about, well, you know, Cloud Foundry. We've been talking about digital transformation. The enterprise for years, but there's always these new technologies. It was, you know, Kubernetes came this wave, now server-less is the wave, and you know, Amazon's kind of overarching, you know, discussion in the market place. That's why I'm glad to bring you in because your company, a startup, plays across a number of these, you know, emerging spaces in the Cloud Foundry space. So, give our audience a little bit about your background and what led to the foundation of solo.io. >> Yeah, thanks. So I was in start-up all my life. I worked in DynamicOps, we got acquired by VMWare, so vRealize, if you remember. And then I moved to another start-up, got inquired by Verizon, so cloud switch, who was moving back in the day from micro, from on prem to off prem. And then I moved to Dell EMC, to the city office and that was great because what I was doing was basically started the dojo of Cloud Foundry. So, me and Ryan Gallagher, if you know him, and Patrick Dennis, we are the three who started it and we basically co-located with the Cloud Foundry team and we worked very, very closely with them. And what we did, what I was doing a lot was bringing in innovation so we created some opensource projects like Key Unique if you heard about it about UniCare, you know, building and running UniCare. We worked with a lot of the ecosystem and the reason we started Solo is because I felt, I really feel, I really felt that the EMC is a great place but that it sometimes slow you down because of the big organization and I felt that we can do much faster outside. So that's why we opened, we started Solo, and all the purpose with Solo is basically playing two tracks. One of them is we really, really want people to use our product, so we want to target the people who has the problem, which is the enterprise. So that's where we're really, really targeting to help them move to what we really master which is the opensource community, so all the innovation. So, that's exactly what we're doing, basically helping them to take their monolithic application, move them to microservices and to Serverless, but by using very, very unique and innovative technology like Envoy and a lot of others. >> Okay, so we hear a lot of times it's you know, of course, companies, they need to move faster. They need to go through this transformation. It's the API economy. And that's, I think, where Gloo fits in there. So Gloo is spelled G-L-O-O, >> Right. >> What's a function gateway? How does this help with, kind of, you know, is it API Sprawl these days? Or, you know, all these various services. You know, how is this the glue that brings everything together? >> So as I said, we're working in two ecosystems, right? The first one is the enterprise. So the main use case that we are trying to solve as I said is the movement. We wanted to make sure that people will be able to take the monolithic and at least extend them to microservices like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, and to Serverless, and also in the free time to kind of like move it. So that was kind of like our purpose. But we needed some technology for that, and we looked outside and discovered that the first thing that we needed is probably a very good API gateway. But it need to route on the function level, and it need to discover the function, and a lot of technology that just wasn't exist back then. So what we did was basically build one, which is Gloo. That's the first thing that we needed because we had no choice. There wasn't anything that actually we seriously, and trust me, and looking very well of all the opensource project, there's nothing like what we built out there, in terms of the quality of the technology and what we're capable of doing. So that's why we built it. We didn't plan to make it a product, but that was the purpose. And the second thing. Now we're building more stuff, and we need maybe to extend to service-match, or function-match, like we call it. Again, not because we want to. Because we have no choice. Right? So this is not a core product, but it's really, we're building is about, we're targeting everything that's related to this use case and we're trying to move. >> Okay, so Google and Microsoft in their keynotes talked about an API gateway, opensource project, I hear service-match, I'm thinking about ISDL. How does Gloo fit-- >> So as I said, there's a beautiful, we are not competing because as I said, at the beginning, my purpose, look, I will look at the situation. That's how somebody can use it. But they're just not moving fast enough for us as a startup. So we had to actually create it. Now, when we created it, we created it specifically to our use case, right? We needed the function, that we knew that our purpose was to take all that, those ecosystems of monolithic, microservices, and Serverless, and look and see, what is the smallest unit of compute that's common between them, and cut everything to it, and that's the function. So basically, what we're doing, we're taking all these ecosystems, cut everything to function, and then reassemble a movement between them. That's something that they just didn't give us, so we had to build it. But the beauty of it is because we are, you know, we are really innovative and that's what we know how to do, we decided to leverage the opensource, so for instance is build on Envoy, right, because it is the best proxy that exists today. And we extended it, because we needed some functionalities, so we created a lot of filter, right? Because it was very important to us to make Envoy basically have this functionality. So we are not competing with none of them, because mainly, that's not what we're doing. We're just focusing on the use case. But theoretically, if you're looking at API gateway, I will say hands down we're probably the best that exists out there, which is, that's not what we started with. >> Yeah, it's really smart, coming, you know, no small startup's going to be, oh, well, we're going to, you know, in Silicon Valley maybe they think they're going to take down the giants and break the world and competing is everything, but I like you actually spent some time working in the EMC CTO office, and there are certain things we will always look at. And it's like, there's this gap. Here's what we have today, and here's absolutely where we know where the market is going. >> Right. >> So, you know, the analogy I hear today is like, well, customers they've got their applications. They need to modernize them. So it's been the last year or so, there's been this discussion of lift and shift. It made people cringe. I said, you know, I've lifted the virtualization way. One of the biggest challenges where, was I took this old application which, to be frank, stunk, and I kept it alive for years longer, even though the server was no longer supported, the OS was no longer supported, but I could just virtualize it and that was great. I want to get to 12-factor, microservice architecture, even Serverless might be the foundation that I'd like to build this. I cannot lift and shift to get Serverless. There is no path from old to there. So it sounds like you're >> What we're doing. Trying to attack some of that there, am I getting that right? >> Yes, I mean, basically, I will give you an example of a customer that we have, right? So, they came, their monolithic application, right? And they really want it to move. And you know, it's really hard to maintain this, so they said, you know what, we really want it to move to Serverless. That's the engineering part, right? They're saying, we want it to move to engineering. They came to the boss and they said, well, what we want to do is to take it, rewrite it, and put it as a greenfield, right? Basically as a Serverless. So the boss said, no problem, go, evaluate how much time it will take, and then come back to me. So they went and they did it, and they basically came with nine months. So the boss said, okay, so, no. And the reason is because nine months means a year, and also, I didn't get any feature on this year. Right? They will fire me. So what we're doing is we're saying, take this monolithic application, it's working, don't touch it, extend it. First of all, extend, on the new functionality, going to the Serverless and to microservices, and we're supporting everything, and it's brand new. I mean, I can start telling you what is the platform that we support. It's almost everything. And then, the second thing is that, on your spare time, start breaking it. Now, there's no magic. I know people are saying there's an algorithm. That's never going to work. Trust me, and I did a lot of software in my life. You can't guess this stuff. You actually need to rewrite them. But on your spare time, when you're available, and on the way, you know, on your pace of learning. And I feel that that's what we're giving. We're basically giving them the freedom to do that on their spare time, and we're giving a lot of other tools, like for instance, debug. So we create, we opensource a project called Squash, that basically be able to attach debuggers to microservices, to Serverless, and to monolithic, in different language, different everything, and jump between them. So you basically can create what I call library up, and jump cross that. So I feel that what we're targeting is basically make this movement easy, with any technology that we can put out there. >> Yeah. The whole application modernization is a real challenge. If I look at, you know, in this space, Pivotal's acquisition of Pivotal Labs was to help them. A lot of services, things that we're looking at, Pivotal going public. How much of their business is actually services, how much of it is you know, subscription and software? How much are you, is this just tooling you're building, or are you helping customers get through some of the services that maybe it's time for you to talk, how many people do you have on your team? Like, I look at the website, I see like five people, so. >> Yeah, that's actually what we are. So I mean, specifically, we are five. We are startup. We got actually really well funded from True Ventures, great, great investors. And what was important to me, was not to do a lot of mistakes of the other startups doing, which is basically scale too fast, right? I wanted first to putting a product out there, I want to see what's going on. And today, because we opensource, because we all can use Amazon and so on, we don't need a lot of money to actually create the additional projects. So that's what we did. Specifically, I can tell I'm getting a lot of resumes and right now, I'm actually pushing them back, because it's really, really important to me to scale on the right side. Now we're starting to have customers, we will have to scale, right? So that's that. In terms of how much, so that's enough. We are five and as I said, it's good, but we are not in the services. Actually people they're doing an amazing job. We don't want to touch that. What we do want to make sure is that they're giving the tools to do them themselves and they will hire probably people to do the services. >> Are you able to share how much funding, you said True Ventures is one of the funding? >> So we got 2.5 from True Ventures, and then we got 500 from Haystack and another 250 from Wave Ventures, capital. >> Okay, and five people. You're hiring too. What are you looking for? >> Yeah, so we're definitely going to hire more. We need a full stack engineer, we need a system engineer. Right now it's very flat architecture. A lot of really, really good people. I mean, my engineers are people who was in the Israeli Army as lackers, you know, very, very technical. People who are, walk with me in EMC, and so on. Very, very good people. And our purpose is to grow as system engineers a little bit, UI, and we also need some help to scale. >> And you're located here in Boston, correct? >> I am, I am. I have one engineer in Seattle, but all the rest are here. >> Okay, and the products itself, you know, opensource, and the things that are available, so-- >> For now, so we started as an open, we did put it as an opensource project. This is the platform I feel should be opensource. But there will be features that we will not opensource. A lot of more things that makes sense for the enterprise, we will not opensource. But yeah, right now, everything is opensource, and we wanted to share for the community. >> Okay, and from the customers you're talking to, what's their biggest challenge, you know, things like Serverless, you know, are they getting their arms around it, especially, you know, out here in the east coast, as opposed to, you know, some of the startups in the like? >> So actually, people in the enterprise, I mean, I think I nailed the use case, because you know, I went, I'm talking a lot in conference, QCon is one of the conference that I really, really liked and talked a lot, and when I talk there to the people, everybody has this problem, which I have a monolithic, how do you move them? Most of them trying to move to container right now. That's where it is. But the beauty of how we built Gloo, and that was totally on purpose, is the fact that, and I actually have a diagram showing it, today those enterprise that are only using monolithic. I don't know, like Bank of America, I think is only monolithic. Then if you're looking, there's people only using microservices, probably Google and others. And then there is companies like iRobot for instance. So it's going all the way to Serverless. That's all there, right? Bam, which is amazing. But, and there is companies that's sharing it, right? That means they're microservices and Serverless, so monolithic, and then. And EMC for instance, they have like Serverless, microservices and monolithic. What we're trying to do is basically, the beauty of what we build, is basically a platform on top of an envoy. So we can actually create the customized offer for you that will be only what you need. And what we will help you is to basically glue, this is what the name, glue your environment, so it will give you one experience that you can manage it or you can mix and match, you can do whatever you want, and it's really, really clean. So when I'm talking to customers today, mainly where they are is like monolithic to microservices, but they love this use case. I mean, I didn't meet a customer yet that I show him the demo of how we're taking a spring boot application and move it, and he said that they don't want it to proceed. So it's good. >> Wow. Fascinating stuff. I really appreciate you sharing. Definitely, we hear from customers all the time. It's moving from the old to the new, it's I need to live in both of those worlds, and they can't split those teams, it can't be islands, I need to pull this together. It's definitely through a multi-cloud, and seems like it's happening in the development environment too. So, Idit Levine, solo, congratulations on where you've gone. Look forward to catching up much more in the future. We're back with lots more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry summit in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound, brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (upbeat samba music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to our exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound Global Conference, where everyone from around the world is coming here. And the Blockchain cryptocurrency, a decentralized application market, changing the game, the future of work, future of government, the future of the world happening. The biggest wave in the tech generation we've seen in centuries. And I'm here in Puerto Rico at the Vanderbilt Hotel. Our next guest, Anthony Delgado, the CEO of Disrupt. We're got some real innovative projects around bringing his work and his vision to Puerto Rico. Anthony, thanks for spending the time. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, talk about your project. Tell me a bit about your project. For instance, you learn how to code. What's goin' on with that? You're doing it in New Jersey, in Newark schools there. Just take me in to explain what you're working on. >> Absolutely. So, back in January, I met a gentleman. His name was David, and he's from Puerto Rico, and he's lived in Puerto Rico for the last eight years, and he runs a tourism company. And when the hurricane happened, his for-profit company transformed into a non-profit. And the same trucks that he used to do tours, he start doing humanitarian work. And I met him at an app release party for a client of mine, and he looked me in my face and says, "Anthony, I'm doing to best work of my life." And I was like, "oh my God! "I'm not doing the best work of my life!" And so, we go to a diner, and I had the worst tuna fish sandwich that I've ever had in my life, but the best conversation. And we start brainstorming about how can we transform and help the people of Puerto Rico? So, the first problem is energy. Close to 50 percent of the island still does not have energy. In the capital, in the beautiful place we are now, power has been restored, but there are many cities that are still forgotten. So, me as the tech guy, I'm like, hey, we can do solar panels. Like, there's tons of sunshine in Puerto Rico, right? So, solar energy. And then the next thing he brought to my attention was that the entire economy is actually based on tourism. So, now, with the hurricane and all those things that are in the media, not only did people lose their jobs, ah, not only did people lose their homes, but they lost their job as well. So, we start brainstorming. We're like, okay, well, let's create a coding school to teach the digital skills that are needed, to the people in Puerto Rico. So, we're goin' back and forth, and he said, "Okay, that's a great idea, "but how are these kids going to pay for this school?" So, the concept that we've come up with is to combine education with vacation, and basically encourage people who are paying to go to school in New York City and encourage them to come to Puerto Rico, experience this beautiful island, learn how to code in the a.m. and have an amazing vacation in the p.m. And that's what we're building. So, we're building the Caribbean Institute of Technology, where we combine education with a vacation. >> So, Institute of Technology. We were talking before we came on camera that you were at the Institute of Technology, a school my two brothers went to. Great engineering school, renowned for it's program. You're doing work there there as well, so you're taking your mission of what you're doing there in New Jersey and bringing it to Puerto Rico. Sounds like you were really impacted by that conversation. As you're here in Puerto Rico, what's your assessment? Good call? Are you happy, and what's on your to-do list as you're down here? So, it's beautiful. I mean, I was here two weeks ago, and now I'm back for this global currency conference. I really feel like there's an unlimited amount of opportunity here in the island. It's the strongest internet, there's huge tax incentives if you start a new business here, and it's really a blank canvas. You know, the hurricane was a horrible atrocity that happened, but now we have this blank canvas to create a vision for Puerto Rico. So, we created a foundation. It's called Vision for PR. And the question that we're asking ourselves is: What would we do if we were creating a new city in America today? What would it look like? It would have solar energy. The power lines would be below ground instead of above ground, right? You know, the economy would be based on the digital economy and not tourism, right? So, we look at countries like Bali, we look at countries like India. We look at countries where they have this huge influx of currency that's getting generated from overseas. So, we really want to be part of the driving force that has Puerto Rico being the Hong Kong of the Caribbean. >> And it really is a clean sheet of paper, because certainly the hurricane puts a real awakening to the needs here. And now that you look at the infrastructure and how it needs to be revamped, this is an opportunity to lay down some fat pipes, high-speed internet, loop Blockchain, the Blockchain.edu chain project that they've got goin' on, http://educhain.io is interesting. The young people, they want more. I mean, that's my vibe here, I'd sense. Yet the old guard, they're scared. They want to preserve their culture, yet there's this huge incentive to move beyond tourism. This is an opportunity for Puerto Rico to be sovereign nation at a level that could go significantly higher-level than they are now. So, that's all great. What do you do? I mean, it seems like Brock Pierce is laying down his vision: come here, bring your cash, bring your community, do good. How is the playbook evolving? Because that's a question people want to know How do I come to Puerto Rico, do it right, not offend the culture, enable them, come together? What's your experience with the playbook? >> Absolutely. So, you know, technology and access to the internet, it democratizes the world. You know, now you're on a level playing field. If you have four G connectivity, and you're on an island, you can compete globally and be a part of the global economy. So, really the opportunity here - [Interviewer] Are you going to start a company here? >> Yeah, so we are starting the Caribbean Institute here in Puerto Rico. And um, yes, so we had this-- >> As a separate corporation? >> Separate corporation. So, we have a non-profit that runs in New Jersey called Newark Kids Code, where we teach kids to code, and we really want to take that model and teach people to code here in Puerto Rico as well. So we started a corporation, it's the Caribbean Institute of Technology-- [Interviewer] Is it going to be a virtual school? Is it going to put up a facility? >> No, no, it's in person. It's in person, so, we have the architect right now working on the renderings. I'd love to share those with you as well. >> Well, certainly, we'll publish them on our blog. But so you're going to put an actual location here. So this is your notion of having people take a vacation and work here. >> Yeah, so that's all well and good, but, like you mentioned, how does that help the people from Puerto Rico? So, what we've created is a scholarship program. So, for every single person from the United States or overseas that comes here to take our coding school, we sponsor someone from the island. >> It's like a fellowship. >> Yes. (Interviewer laughs) >> Alright, so what else are you working on? I see Disrupt is your company. Tell us a bit about you and what you do, and what's goin' on with Disrupt. >> Absolutely! So, Disrupt is a media agency based in New York City. And we focus on creating innovative products that change the world. So, we work with clients who have innovative products that are making a big impact. One of the products that we're working on is called True Connect. It's AI for sales people. And basically it syncs with your Google calendar and it gives you recommendations on ways to connect with your clients. So, it gives you a news feed of news stories, but it's not stories that you're personally interested in, it's stories that your clients would be interested in, so you have topics of conversation. >> It's kind of like a reversed Linked In. >> Yes. (Interviewer laughs) A reversed Linked In, absolutely. >> You also do some really important projects that matter to peoples' lives. Talk about the project that you're working on for the autism kids, that's really interesting. Take a moment to explain that. >> Absolutely. So, another one of our clients is Debbie Stone. She has a non-profit called Pop Earth. And it's basically a free school for kids with autism. So, based on that she's starting a IOT company called the Popu Lace. It's an IOT device, it's about the size of a quarter, and it has GPS, 4G connectivity, and it hooks into a student's shoelaces. There's a huge problem with kids with autism, if they wander off from school, they can get hit by a car, and they don't have the communication skills to get found again. So this device puts a geofence around their school-- >> Alzheimer's, there's a zillion use cases. So, geofencing a location, like Snapchat ads they do, but this is for a good reason, safety and impact to people's lives. >> Absolutely. >> Caregivers, too, they matter. >> Yeah, caregivers, people who go mountain climbing, hiking, all of these other use cases. Primarily focusing on children during the beginning, but yes, Alzeimer's, and hikers, and tons of uses for this. >> Great stuff. Congratulations, Anthony, great to have this conversation with you, really inspired. Good luck with the Puerto Rico opportunity, the Caribbean Institute of Technologies. Will it be on the Caribbean, Bahamas? We were just there for Poly Con. Other islands, start at Puerto Rico... >> Absolutely. So, we're actually open-sourcing the floor plan for the building that we're building. So, the building that we're building has solar energy. It's a green building. And we're open-sourcing that floor plan so that anyone in the Caribbeans, South America, anywhere in the world can adopt this model. >> It's the wee work for paying it forward. >> Absolutely. >> Well done, Anthony. Anthony Delgado, CEO of Disrupt, doing amazing work here, paying it forward, contributing here with the Caribbean Institute of Technology. I'm John Ferrier, in Puerto Rico for our on-the ground coverage of Blockchain Unbound. Be back with more. Thanks for watching. >> Thank you for having me.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE's Ecosystem Partner. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain. We are live at Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder SiliconANGLE. My co-host Stu Miniman, analyst at WikiBon.com. Our next two guests is Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director Data Center Solutions at Cisco and Lee Howard, Chief Technologist, Global Industry Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. Great partnership here to talk about the tech involved in the partnership. Obviously, in the industry, it's pretty well known that NetApp's doing really well with Cisco. Congratulations. You guys have been enabling great partner dynamics lately, but all the action's been on the intersection between a raise, better, faster, cheaper storage, but also enabling software defined stuff, value. What's the check involved in the partnership? Why is it going so well? Lee, can you start? >> I think offering choice out there is the best thing that we can do. You've got data fabric from a NetApp perspective is that super interconnected highway and as many on ramps as we can build for folks to get on that highway. The more successful you're going to be able to see. I mean, the IDC numbers speak for themselves, prolific, double digit growth. I think we were at 56% last quarter, listed together on there. That's how tight this partnership's been. Leveraging that combined portfolio has given us a very competitive offering out there in the industry. >> Siva, I want to get your thoughts because actually Cisco, we've been... Stu and I love talking about networking, in Cisco in particular because the old days, provision the network and good stuff happens. Apps get built. Things get done. But with the Cloud, you see the shift where you've got DevOps culture, you got cloud-native happening. The real enabling technologies have to be beyond the network, so you guys have been successful with a variety of other things. What's the key things that's making you guys key partners in the ecosystem? What are you guys truly enabling? Is it network programmability? What's the secret sauce from Cisco's standpoint? >> If you look at the way Data Center has evolved in the last decade or so, the way customers are consuming technology is much more at a platform level. They want things simplified. They want to, as you just said, the innovation that's happening in the above layer, in terms of the software's tech and use cases, is just tremendous. They really want the platform to become simple and that's what Cloud did to you anyways. That level of simplification, that level of optimization, but still a best of breed, it is what got us together. We have continued to build world class platforms that started one way, started mainly looking at virtualization in those place over time. In the last four or five years or so, the amount of innovations we have brought on top of a FlexPod, which is a joined solution together, has been right at the cutting edge of where technology is going and where applications are landing. That, in a very large way, has become the key for the success between the two of us. >> We had talked Brandon on here earlier and he validated our thesis and WikiBon actually had a report that came out last year, in the middle of the year, called "True Private Cloud." It was the only research analyst firm that actually got this one right, in my opinion, which validated by you guys is that... Certainly any (mumbles) would argue that everything is moving to the Cloud, tomorrow. Certainly there's some cloud migration and some stuff in the Public Cloud, no problem. But what WikiBon did is they looked at the true Private Cloud numbers, meaning that the action where the spend is and where the buyers are doing the most work both refreshing and retooling is on premises. Because they're actually changing the operating model on premises now as a way, as a way, as a sequence, to hybrid and then maybe full Multi-Cloud or full Public Cloud, whatever they want to do. So that being said, Lee, what does that mean? Because certainly, I understand what a Cloud operating model is, but I'm talking about storage and networking. >> Yeah. >> What does that look like? Is that a full transformation? How long is that going to take? Your thoughts? Comment on that. >> We're seeing, you saw on the key note this morning them referencing brand new titles and new personnel, new human capital that's coming in. I think that is, both you're enabling and your barring the factor to changing how you're consuming resources on site. Cloud architects as they're coming in to prominence enterprise architects. I think we're getting to a point where there's enough of a intuition to the software that's enabling those consumption trends to shift, that it's now a way for not just those that have the inside information, but it's something that's consumable for the masses. I think 2018, you guys hit on DevOps, highly versatile model going forward and I think Multi-Cloud is going to be the right answer. >> John: The roles are changing. >> Roles are changing and we have been seeking to be that technology provider that regardless of where you're at in that journey, you're able to leverage our portfolio to be able to do it. >> John: Does the product change? >> The product, the tenets behind the product, not so much but I think the way that it's being leveraged does end up changing. >> Siva, your thoughts on this. >> You know, if you start to think about the earlier generation of Cloud, it was mainly seen as a capacity argumentation, mainly on the IS. It really started people to think that everything is moving to Cloud, but if you look at the innovation that happens in the Cloud, the Cloud in itself is a massive ecosystem and people want to go do that. So there is a huge reason why the cloud is successful, but that's not necessarily just taking everything on. That's not the trend. What you really see is customers now starting to reach that level of maturity to say hey, there is a tremendous value in what I can do and on-prim, the data gravity and the latency and those things. >> So you agree with the "True Private Cloud" report, the on-prim action is where? >> We continue to see that from our customers, you see it as option and things like that. We absolutely see that is real as well. >> Let's go back to the data center for a second because some people look at it, and it's like oh, well CI's been happening now for gosh, almost a decade now. HCI has a lot of buzz out there. We want to hear what you're hearing from customers because first of all, what we see is there's still the majority of people, still building their own. They're taking the pieces. FlexPod is a little bit different than say hyper-converged from a single skew, but you've still got to build your own CI. Big partnership >> Absolutely. >> There's a huge revenue. HCI has both Cisco and NetApp have pieces there. Where are the customers today? Why is CI still a meaningful part of the discussion today? >> I think it all comes down to scale and how you want to be able to interface. What do you want your data center to be like today? How are you staffed and proficient at implementing a solution and where do you want that data center to go tomorrow? I think CI and HCI absolutely have a place together in the data center, but as we see RFPs fundamentally shift to reflect the new way that infrastructure's being consumed, a cookie cutter approach that you get with a lot of HCIs isn't always going to be the answer. You want to have that full modularity, that full flexibility. It's in the title, it's FlexPod. You want to be able to have that versatility to address not just the initial scoping project but with Flash and able data centers, assets are staying on the books longer and longer. Those depreciation schedules are getting stretched out. Having the versatility, not just to live in today's operating environment, but the operating environment of tomorrow, I think is what's really driving that main stay of CI. >> Siva, we heard in the key notes this morning a lot of discussion about Multi-Cloud and management. Talk about Cisco and NetApp. How do you view those together? Where do you go to market together, co-engineer, things like that? >> Absolutely. If you guys look at what we did in the FlexPod, we created what we would fundamentally call or say code platform for data center. That was the biggest success. We had a lot of work loads and news cases. But in the last two to three years, what we have both done, because individually we have portfolio products that allow a Cloud journey. Cisco is a big proponent of Multi-Cloud and the journey to Cloud and proving customer the right platform so they can pick and choose when to go to Cloud and how to go to Cloud. There are similar assets from NetApp. What we have done is we have built FlexPod solutions that builds on top of on that leverage, is the Cloud Center products, NetApp's data fabric, some of their technology that's call location within the equinox and so on and so forth. What that has allowed is FlexPod as a platform has blossomed as the Cloud has grown because we now offer the choice. That also brought more customers to realize while these guys really provide me the journey to Cloud model. That is more new solution that we are building that continues to drive that mindset from both companies. >> Stu: Lee, you want to build on that? >> Yeah, providing that operational excellence to where you're able to come in and leverage these assets, not just day zero but through the entire lifespan of that asset and that's the... Quality of life improvements is a big thing from NetApp and Cisco's perspective as we're coming together and we're planning what the future state is going to look like. It's not just hey, this is the specific drive capacity you're putting in, that's yesterday's infrastructure. Tomorrow is all about what quality of life, how much time can we give back to those end users out there? >> So I have a question for you guys both. Lee, we'll start with you. You got the storage compute and switching cause you're leaders in those areas, what's next? What's driving the partnership? You talk about how you present the partnership with Cisco to customers. What's in it for me? What's new? What's fresh? What's the deal? >> The conversation we have out there a lot of times there's perception issues that we are the old guard of technology. FlexPod's been around seven going on eight years and they say what's fresh out there? Well, we're so much more than just the infrastructure piece. It's a combined portfolio. Cisco recently announced their partnership with Google Cloud. We have our NFS Native on Azure going forward. Leveraging those better together stories and each other's Rolodex to be able to come in and truly engineer next generation solutions, that's what's getting people excited. How are you going to set me up for success tomorrow, not just how are we going to be successful today on today's technology? >> Siva, how are you guys successful with that? How do you talk about the relationship because they have a unique capabilities, been around the block for awhile in the storage business? Look at the history of NetApp. Very interesting, very engineering oriented, very customer focused. >> Lee: 25 years. >> What's your position in this? >> I think you have two companies who have a tremendous technology focus in building, but what keeps this partnership going together is easily our customers. We are not young anymore in the partnership. We have over $10 billion of install based customers. We have over 8,000 customers. Just keeping up with those customers and providing them the journey however they want to go, it absolutely becomes our, it's our prerogative to make these customers successful in wherever they want to go next. That's a big driver for how we look at innovation. We continue to provide the capabilities that allows our customers to continue their journey and at the same time, we bring our innovation to make this platform successful. >> So I'm going to put you on the spot here, both of you guys. I know Stu's got a question. I got a couple minutes left. Kubernetes has put a line in the sand and separates the two worlds of developers. App developers, really just looking as a fabric of resource, they're creative, doing cool things. Then you've got the network storage software engineering going on under the hood, it's like a car. You're now an engine. You got to work together. What are you guys doing specifically to make that work, make the engine really powerful? >> In the context of Kubernetes, we are-- >> Under the hood. What's under the hood? Kubernetes is the line there, but you got to sit with that app. You got to make the engine powerful. You guys are working together. What's the sound like for the customers? Why NetApp and Cisco together? >> If you look back at our containerization, micro services that journey, we certainly again, same logic, same model. We are building an ecosystem there. We are developing joint solution that optimizes how Kubernetes and Cisco and Google have made several announcements on how we are bringing innovation and infrastructure automation level, network scale level, that allows a massively scalable container environment of Kubernetes environment to be deployed on top of a Cisco infrastructure. NetApp's innovation around Kubernetes, around building the plug-ins for how the plug-ins interact with the storage subsystem that allows us to say if you are deploying a Kubernetes environment, if you are deploying the best of breed, you certainly need the platform that understands and scales with that. >> All right, Lee. Your differentiation for that power engine under the hood with Cisco. >> It's infrastructure is code. That's what we are together and I don't think that across the competitive landscape that they are, everybody else is really embracing it in such a fashion. It's speaking the language that these developers are wanting to do and we're marrying that up with the core tenets that made us an IT powerhouse together. >> It was the developer angle John- >> All right. (laughs) >> We've been doing so many of these together. Absolutely where we wanted to go. >> Stu and I get the-- Infrastructure is code. The great shows. We do the cloud-native, got Kubernetes, we do under the hood. This is a big journey for customers. There's a lot of fud out there and they want to know one thing. Who's going to be around in the future? Having the partnerships is really key. You guys have been very successful. I'll give you guys the final word. Each of you share what customers should expect from the relationship. Siva, we'll start with you. >> I think continued greatness, continued commitment to making customers successful with the innovation that keeps them worry much more about the above the layer, the application, the business critical elements and make the infrastructure as simple and as versatile as possible is absolutely our commitment. >> I'd boil it down to the human capital out there, the human element and that is bringing conviction to your decisions. We've both been here multiple decades together in our partnership. FlexPod's coming up on a decade. It's conviction and knowing that you can rely on the lifeblood of your business being secure with us together. >> Well, congratulations. Certainly, the developers are going to be testing the hardware under the hood and we got a DevOps culture developing all on-prim and in the Cloud hybrid. It's going to be an interesting couple years. Interesting times we live in. Lee Howard, Chief Technologist with NetApp and Siva Sivakumar, Senior Director Data Center Solutions. Here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman. Live from Barcelona. Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More live coverage from theCUBE after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube! Covering VMWorld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. Live in Las Vegas we are here in the VMware Village, VM Village. We're kicking off day two or ending day two wrap up here. It's the Cube, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante with our wrap up guests Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com and Stu Miniman co-host of the Cube and analyst of Wikibon. Guys, great day two in the books. Another day tomorrow, another wall-to-wall coverage. Events tonight tonight stacked up, last night great hallway conversation. We covered that on our intro this morning. Day two was about Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger conversation. A lot of announcements with Google crashing the party, and a one-on-one exclusive with Sam Ramjay who's VP at Product Management, head of Developer Platforms. Not just Google Cloud, they're brinhing all the developers to bear. Peter this telegraphs your point about Google not to be taken lightly. >> Oh yeah well look. We talked about this earlier, and there are some very real thing that have yet to happen. Just contrast this. Three years or two years ago, if you talked to the Google enterprise group and you said to them, well you have some really great opportunities. What are you going to do with them? They'd say, whatever the consumer guys give us, we'll repackage. And now if you see what Google is doing, they're actually going out and creating new partnerships, creating new technology. They're actually acting like a real enterprise company. It's a transformation that's happening very fast. My guess is there's an enormous amount of stuff that's going underneath the covers at the new Google campus. But it's interesting to see that company become a really enterprise player before our eyes, and it's going to be a consequential player. >> Stu and Dave I want to get your reaction to something, because we saw an observation this morning Peter, I think you started out by saying the whole world's upside down, a whole new way to engage the enterprise. You mentioned VMware transforming as a company, similar to what IBM did many years ago. But we saw Michael Dell here, we heard Sanjay Poonen the COO come on, talking about how they're collaborating. He even made reference to Vmware almost merging with-- Kind of hinting to that where there would be showing up at their show working together closely. A new kind of relationship is building on how to be competitive, yet Google and Microsoft have to kind of catch up. And the question on the table is is there dis-economies of scale in that? Can Google get the enterprise IQ to truly understand the digital transformation and bring that developer communication and that operational scale of Google, and can Microsoft bring that enterprise knowledge of Office, Windows, et cetera to the cloud, at the speed of the disruption, at the same time change how they engage? Stu. >> Yeah, so John it's pretty typical we talk about how when some of these technologies started, it's like oh wait no, they're not ready, don't look at them. Public cloud you know was a dirty word at VMware a couple of years ago. Now we're embracing it. I'm sure you talked about Michael Dell. He's a big partner of Microsoft's. They're going to be doing Azure Stack. The Amazon dynamic is amazing. John last year we said to Pat Kelsner, hey Pat you want to come on the Cube at Reinvent? He's like, oh, you're inviting me? Well we had Sanjen Poonen on at that show. I've mentioned it, I was at the AWS Summit in New York City. VMware was a partner presenting there. People are interested to look at it. How this bakes out. There was you know an interesting thing. A tweet went out from Kelsey Hightower. A lot of people in the open source community was like, you know one technology killing the other, and we always said, you know, VM's going to kill Bare Metal and containers will kill that, and server-less will kill that. And it's a joke of course, because nothing ever dies in IT, it's all additive. >> Man: The Hotel California. >> It's you know, we'll talk to IBM and talk about their Z customers that are running mainframe. Oh and you can run Linux and containers on that too. So IT is a complex world. We're all going to have to kind of live in this space. Heck, so many of our guests that we have on this program, we're interviewing them at the second or third or more company that they've been at. So it's the ebbs and flows of the people and the technology, and it's fun to document. >> Well the question is, is it a zero sum game? I've talked to a number of service providers, some of the 4,400. I haven't talked to the 4,400, but a handful. And they're frankly not happy about the AWS deal. Because they're all trying to compete against AWS, and they're just saying, their narrative is, oh, it's a big straw that's just going to suck everything out. But the question is, is it a zero sum game, or-- I mean datacenters booming, enterprise is booming. Is this one of those boom years that everybody benefits? >> Just note on that. VMware got out of VCloud Air. That actually made those 4,400 happier, because now VMware is no longer a threat as well as a partner-- >> However! >> The Amazon stuff and the Google stuff is bringing back-- >> Yeah they never liked VCloud Air, and yes getting out is a good thing. And then next day, boom. >> To me, the other part of the answer is, does a knowledge of the enterprise and how the legacy and traditional applications matter? And the reality is to Stu's point, since you can check in but you can never leave, that at the end of the day, it's going to matter. Your knowledge of how transaction processing works is going to matter. Your knowledge of how Z series handles storage or handles data is going to matter, in the enterprise. And so the reality is, it's not a zero sum game, there's going to be a lot of, because of the complexity, there's going to be an enormous premium place in experience. How you package that experience, how you present it, there's going to be a lot of niches in this marketplace. A lot of ways of getting to that scale. But there's no question that's what most important is getting there fast and early. >> And the big three, obviously Amazon Microsoft Google, all bring something different to the table. And the question is, what view of the cloud do they bring? VMware taps out of the cloud game with VCloud Air, has an arms dealer-like approach Dave. We talk a lot about being an arms dealer. You know Sanjay was teasing out like, you can have these native clouds, not cloud native. Native cloud players, one two and three, sucking the straw at the top of the power law. But then VMware could service an entire set of new clouds. I call maybe second tier or secondary native clouds, where hey someone's got-- Jeff Rick and I were talking about a drone farming cloud. With drones that have applications for farms. >> There's going to be specialization. >> That speaks to a new set of service providers. And the question is, is the cloud service provider market about to explode? What do you think? >> Explode? >> Meaning great, grow, big. Does that long tail fatten out the neck and the torso? >> Yeah. Because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, where you are located matters. Your ability to bring together classes of services is going to matter, and being able to enfranchise and federate all those things is going to matter. And if it is truly cloud, if it's a common cloud experience, the cost to customer of getting into that is going to be relatively low. And so what you're really testing is, is the cost of getting into a specialized cloud going to be more or less than the cost of going with a general cloud and start adding things? And there's going to be a lot of opportunity to serve particular classes of companies by different characteristics. Let me draw an analogy for you. That we talk about-- I'm going to get political for a second. But we talk about partisanship in the US, right? And many years ago people said, oh, the internet is going to democratize everything, and it's going to be this wonderful-- Well that really happened is the internet made it possible for media companies to enfranchise audiences independent of geography. And now we've got highly specialized media sources that are all retaining to a particular audience. Why wouldn't we expect, since software is effectively media, why wouldn't we expect to see the same exact economics and dynamic happen for some of these specialized audiences? >> John: Make software great again! That's my motto. (laughing) >> To that point, service has always been a highly fragmented and highly specialized market. Cloud is services, and I would expect yes, to answer your question, that you're going to see a lot more service providers explode. But they better have a differentiation strategy relative to AWS. >> So the Tam conversation around that is cool, but what's really happening here that was getting a lot of traction, and we talked about this earlier about the two private cloud report. I asked Sanjay Poonen and then I talked to Sam Ramjay at Google who heads up the development platform in Project Management. You know to your quote this morning, a lot of IT's been driving costs out of business, now we're putting revenue on their agenda. He goes, really? And I asked him, what's your metric for success at Google? And he started to think about it and went back to the business value of technology. So I know this is a research area for you. I want to give you a chance to describe, what's the cutting edge metric around the business value of technology? Because in the cloud, magic quadrants don't matter, okay? The scoreboards are changing. At the end of the day it's what value does technology contribute to business that drives top line revenue? Yeah cost containment I get that, but revenue. >> Well so the traditional way of thinking about ROI or business returns or business value is you say I'm going to say for a given application, for ERP, which is the numerator, which is the benefit, so that's why I classify it. Now I'm going to look at the denominator. Which of the different configurations of technologies make that given set of systems have the highest return? And it all becomes a cost question. So really where this goes is that increasingly what businesses are looking at are saying, my customers are demanding digital engagement. My partners are demanding digital engagement. I'm going to use my data differently. I'm going to turn products into services, I'm going to do all these different things with data. That's where the revenue side comes into play. Now can you argue that it all comes back to costs and automation? Yeah, there's things you can do. But at the end of the day the question is, what does your customer see? Does your customer see a better service or a better capability? A different approach of doing things? That is the non-standard numerator in the equation, and that's where IT is, with the business, is increasingly focusing it's attention. And so increasingly what's happening is we're looking at a common denominator, you know Amazon's pricing and Google's pricing and all these other guys' pricing is going to moderate to a set of common metrics, and that means now we can start talking about the numerator, and how doing the numerator differently is going to be the differential. >> Okay so let's take that and take it to Stu and Dave. I did a comment on, we heard this race to the bottom, race to zero, that's not happening. Your True Private Cloud report shows that the SaaS business and True Private Cloud just by itself is bigger than-- >> And we never believed that. We've never bought into that. >> And you know, it's funny, in some of the analyst sessions you get to talk to some of the customers and talking to some of my peers here, something we hear from a lot of companies, not all of them, but cost isn't number one on the list. Usually it's a agility, it's entering the business, it's being able to move faster. Cost and price of course does matter eventually, but you know it's that being able to react faster, that agility that needs to go there. And I mean there's all of these new technologies that are going to line up. Heck, we're spending all of this time talking about public and private cloud, and edge computing is just going to completely change that landscape even more, as we go forward. >> Look, and the other thing is, Amazon sets a pretty high price umbrella. I've never bought into the race to the bottom, I've always said Amazon's going to be more profitable than everybody. They're an infrastructure company with 30% operating margins which is like a software company! I mean that's basically VMware's operating margin. Maybe VMware's a little higher. And of course Amazon has a much higher capital cost. But there's a big price umbrella that Amazon has created. That's an awesome opportunity. I'm interested in what you guys think about the recent momentum behind VMware. The last two years we've seen a total change, right? Two years ago it was kind of negative, negative growth. And now it's tailwinds, positive momentum. Is this a product cycle, is it you know expanded ELAs? Kind of a one time thing? Or do we think this is a sustainable trend? I mean I've said I think the stock is undervalue. Am I right, is this sustainable? >> I think you're right. To me my observation is, I'll let you guys comment on it, but my observation is VMware was stuck in the middle of an identity crisis between the virtualization op side and trying to do cloud. And you nailed it on the earlier intro segment where you said that there's no cap X there, they've got better margins because of it. And by making a decision on not doing cloud and becoming much more of an arms dealer, you can move the ops into the dev, right? And that's been a big stuck in the mud point from VMware. They've got great ops, great enterprise, but they just weren't nailing the developer side. And that became a problem. Now you have clarity on the wave. Cloud IOT just pointed out, now it's very clear what's going on, and everyone knows where the game is. Then the shift is going to come to, and it's whether Kubernetes announcement with Google today didn't get them a lot of applause in my opinion, Stu I'd love to get your reaction. I don't think this audience can connect the dots yet on that long play of the orchestration. So they're still stuck in I got my house to clean up, I don't want to get the fluff and the head room and the future vision. I got problems to deal with on my upside. Yeah I want to do dev and I want to do dev ops, but shit I got to take care of business! >> Yeah so to Dave's question, VMware had reached a certain point, they'd kind of saturated the market for server virtualization. They made a number of number of bets. Some of them panned out. Airwatch, great acquisition. NICERA, phenomenal acquisition. NSX, we've talked extensively about that. Push towards the developer community? Well, I think they've understood now. Pivotal's going to handle that. We'll shove that over here. There's not a developer track at this show anymore. The cloud piece, they fumbled it, a few times, and now they've kind of understood it. Kind of a natural progression. They've made some moves. The ELA is something I think they've sorted out. Their license agreement, how have the partnerships with customers. We've talked extensively about some of the pricing. >> Some of the deck chairs, the mulligan on Virtustream. Carry on, please. >> So right, it's where they fit, where they partner. The relationship with the ecosystem. And a thing, what drove VMware to where they are, is those partnerships and the technology partnerships as well as the channel partnerships. Some of those things I hear, Kubernetes AWS, VMware on AWS, their partners are like, it's scary. I don't know if I make any money. Is this now VMware and Amazon just go to the bank and they cut me out of the whole thing? Some of these are interesting, right. Most people aren't ready for the container, they're definitely not ready. Kubernetes, they hear about it, but it's pretty early. >> Peter your reaction, 'cause this really points to what Stu's saying. I believe what's saying to be true, because I agree. They did their homework, they were listening. They weren't sticking their heads in the sand at your transformation point. >> So if you're a CIO and you're looking at a whole bunch of change, my business' stance towards digital and technology is changing, my relationships with the business are changing. I now foresee that I'm going to have to reorganize my IT organization to take advantage of things like hyper converge and whatnot. So I'm looking at an enormous transformation. In comes VMware and the first thing out of their mouth is, we really don't know what we're doing. We're throwing a bunch of spaghetti against a wall. Would help you sustain these assets until we figure this all out? The CIO's going to say thank you very much, where's Microsoft? So what's happened is VMware decided to get serious and stable. They decided to make some bets, and a lot of the best that we're making right now we're seeing at the show are probably not going to pan out. But that's okay, because it starts-- >> John: But the big ones are, maybe. >> We think so, we think so. We think anesthetics as well. Stu listed them, we don't have to go over them again. But what we are seeing is-- And Michael Dell and Pat and all the executives over and over. >> They're paying attention. >> Open with an opinion. It's very clear that businesses like the VMware opinion. I think Stu and I and all of us probably agree that they could probably go further with that opinion, they could probably lay out an even better vision of what the cloud experience is going to be as they foresee it and as they're going to engineer to it. But it's very very clear that customers today are saying, I've got all this installed, I'm willing to continue to invest in caretaking all this VMware stuff because they have done a better job of laying out what my options are, whereas a few years ago the options were all over the map, which means they had no options. >> They were groping for something. Okay we've got to wrap it up. I wanted to go around the horn on the final piece. We're going to go out tonight, we're going to party. We're going to socialize, stay up all night long, talking to people getting the data. Not all night, we'll be in bed by 11. (laughs) I'll be in bed by 11, I hope, I hope. Great conversations last night, lot of hallway conversations. Lot of good chatter. So around the horn, most compelling thing that you heard, not in a session, in the hallway, through conversations and interactions. Peter we'll start with you. >> Most compelling thing that I heard is, is there's some new stuff coming in the Google universe. That is going to potentially have a pretty significant impact ultimately on how enterprises look at Google. I found out some interesting stuff there. The most compelling thing just very simply on the VMware side of things was the probably coming out of some of the conversations we had with Chad this morning Dave. And the idea that increasingly you're going to look at these platforms. Platform wars are on the horizon. Where it's going to go back to what we were looking at many years ago in certain respects. But you know written much larger. But the increasingly the way people are going to evaluate the quality of a platform is not intrinsic to the platform, but how well it binds to other platforms. That's probably the most important statement that I heard on the floor today over what's happening. >> John: Stu. >> Continue on kind of Peter's theme. We're starting to see really you know, it's gelling. Some of this multi-cloud messaging, been really teasing out with a lot of people. Once again when I get to talk to the practitioners, as to what applications are they building, where do things go, how are they moving around, and you know VMware is a trusted partner, one they've really turned to for a lot of this. And the customers at least are optimistic about what they're hearing. I've heard a bunch of them are really excited for the VMware and AWS more than I expected to hear, and you know it'll be interesting to see. It's been interesting, we've kind of been saying Microsoft maybe there. When we go to Dell EMC World they're talking a lot about Microsoft. Microsoft Ignite's coming up, there will be a huge push. We've said for years, who has the best hybrid strategy? It's got to be Microsoft, hands down. >> Although we haven't mentioned Oracle. Oracle is still not out of this. >> Yeah, absolutely. I always say follow the applications, follow the data. Oracle, Microsoft, huge application portfolio. >> You know I haven't heard one person talk about Microsoft or Oracle here, not one. Dave? >> I want to chime in. >> I've spent the last 24 hours, I've talked to a number of customers. And I will tell you, they're strugglin' to move fast. And that's I think good news for VMware and Dell EMC, because you know all the vision that's put forth, and all this cloud native stuff, and they're really having a hard time digesting a lot of this stuff. You've been saying it for a while, hybrid cloud is BS, nobody's doing hybrid cloud, as it's sort of been defined in early days. Like federated apps, nobody's even thinking about it, not even close. Yeah multi-cloud because I'm getting inundated with all these clouds. So they're really having a hard time moving. So I think that's a good trend. >> Dave, I heard a great line in this. VMware is moving at the speed of the CIO. >> Yeah, it's true. >> That's a great line. >> That's a kind of double-edged comment, but you know absolutely. You want to stay at least up with most of your customers. >> I will say, I said hybrid cloud is BS. I did say it mainly because it's not ready for prime time in my opinion, but. >> Stu: Is it a way station, John? >> Yeah it's a halfway house or it's a way station, whatever you want to call it. >> It's a cul-de-sac! (laughing) >> Sanjay used that line today. Okay my final observation is more of kind of an epiphany from me that kind of wasn't really blind spot but it was an awakening. The customers I've been talking to are really struggling with the merging of multiple stacks. Hardware and software. In new use cases that have been untested and undocumented, and that's causing to the speed of the CIO conversation of, wait a minute we can't just deploy some of this stuff at scale until we do our homework. We've got to get the hardware stacks and the software stacks working together. We've heard it a lot, that's been the number one hallway conversation. That means there's a lot more work to do on that front. Well guys-- >> But it's a working together part. It's that how they bind together. >> It's these new use cases of working together. This is not a software vendor and a hardware vendor, it's all going to be a data vendor at the end of the day! And we'll see who can bring the stacks together. Okay Pat Gelsigner, we had Michael Del, Sanjay Poonen. Great day guys, great stuff. Let's go hit the hallway, go hit some of these parties and get more data for you guys. Thanks for watching the Cube, live in Las Vegas. Wrap of day two here. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Peter Burris and Stu Miniman. This is the Cube, thanks for watching.