(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We're here, virtual again, in real life soon. It's right around the corner, but we've got a great guests here. Cameron Art Managing Director at AT&T for IBM. Cameron manages the AT&T Global Account for IBM. Cameron, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you very much, John. It's great to be here. >> I can almost imagine how complicated and big and large AT&T is with respect to IBM and the history and AT&T is a very large company. What's the relationship with IBM and AT&T over the years? How has that evolved and how do you approach that role as the Managing Director? >> Well, it's been fascinating. As you said, we've got two large complex companies, but also two brand names that are synonymous for innovation, whether it be in compute or technology or communications. But the most fascinating thing is, if you look back at our relationship, and this is two brands that have been around for well over a hundred years, our relationship actually has some fascinating backdrop to it. My favorite is in 1924, AT&T sent a picture of Thomas Watson Sr, over a telephone wire to IBM. And Thomas Watson said, "they sent this over the telephone?" We are United in a community of interest. They want to make it easier for businesses to transact as do I, we need to work together. And since then, there has been a number of advances, that both of us have driven collectively and individually. And it's been a long running and treasured relationship in the IBM company. >> It's such a storied relationship on both sides. I mean, the history is just amazing. They could do a whole history channel segment on both AT&T and IBM. But together it's kind of the better together story. As you pointed out from that example, going back to sending a picture with a phone line, it's like, "Oh, my God, that's Instagram on the internet happening!" But how are they responding to the relationship, now? Obviously with Cloud native exploding with the ability to get more access, and you're seeing a lot more things evolve, more complexities emerging that needs to be abstracted away. You're seeing businesses saying, "Hey, I can do more with less, I can connect more. There's more access." But then also services more potential opportunities and challenges. How are you responding with AT&T? How are they responding to that dynamic with you guys? >> Yeah, I think it's fascinating because, when I originally approached this relationship and I've been doing this for 12 months now, little over 12 months, and when I originally approached it as with anything else, many times you're trying to enter something that is quite special and make it even better. And my approach at least initially with AT&T was very much one of. We're going to provide even better service. We're going to jointly grow together in the market and strengthen each of our businesses. And we're going to work for something broader than ourselves. And I'll get into, a little more, the last point later. But those first two things, from an AT&T response perspective. And I think this is a common perspective among many clients is, "we'll see if your actions follow your words". And so it's been a process we've gone through to understand that I'm a champion for AT&T, inside of IBM. And those interests, that we share individually and collectively, will be represented at the highest levels. And we will mature this relationship into one of, not just kind of supply chain partners, because we're very complimentary to each other, but more ecosystem partners. And my belief in my core, and you see this much with many of the business strategies that are out there, the ecosystem strategy, this sum is greater than the parts. It's not a zero sum game. Is something that's absolutely blooming in the market. >> Yeah, that ecosystem message is one of the things that's resonating and coming clearly out of the IBM Think 2021 this year and in the industry your seeing the success of network effects, ecosystem changes. That is the constant that's happening. Certainly with the pandemic and now coming out of it, people want to have a growth strategy. That's going to be relevant current and impactful. And you, you pointed that out, growth with each other, it's interesting. And you shared some perspective on this just recently with an example of what is underway there. Where are you heading with that? I mean, talk more about this growth with each other, 'cause that really is an ecosystem dynamic. What is underway and where are you heading? >> It's a fascinating ecosystem dynamic and it's something that we've adopted wholeheartedly within AT&T in terms of not only how we work. So, there are very basic examples, examples like, we rather than answering RFPs and responding to requirements, we're co-creating with our clients. We have multiple Cloud Garages going with AT&T where we identify outcomes that we believe could be possible. And then we show and allow the client to experience the outcome of that rather, than a PowerPoint slide. So, there's this kind of base of how do you work with each other, but then much more broadly in the market. It didn't take long for us to realize that, you know, the addressable market, if I were selling AT&T, everything I could ever sell them. And AT&T was selling IBM everything they could ever sell us. The addressable market is, let's say, $10 billion. But the moment at which we pointed ourselves outside to the external market, we realized that that market opportunity expands by a factor of 20 or by a factor of 50. We have the opportunity to create unique value together. And I think that kind of comes from the core of how we work together. >> I'm also intrigued by your comments about working together for a greater purpose. You said you'd address that later. What do you mean by that? I mean, that's little. Is there higher purpose, North star and obviously you mentioned working together in the ecosystem. That kind of seems tactical and strategic as well, but what's this greater purpose? What does that mean? >> Well, my belief, and it's something I learned actually, is I got indoctrinated into the work that AT&T does, the work that IBM does, and how we do it, but we share many common purposes in terms of what we believe on the whole, in terms of progress in society. So for example, equality in the workplace. We hosted a women's day luncheon, actually multiple Women's days luncheons across the United States. Where we had hundreds of female leaders from both IBM and AT&T collaborating together, talking about how tips and tricks, for how they continue to advance in the workplace. Another example is inequality in diversity and inclusion. Both AT&T and IBM have a strong commitment. And if you'll see, IBM just published their diversity data inclusion study where we actually demonstrate, here are the numbers, here's our targets, here's where we want to get. AT&T has exactly that same belief. Finally, in STEM education for educating our future leaders. In science and technology, engineering and math. Both, AT&T and IBM, for our future need those skills showing up in the marketplace. And Corey Anthony, just a quick spot, for any of you at Think, Corey Anthony, who's the Diversity and Development Officer at AT&T is going to give a great presentation on AT&Ts work in STEM for younger generations. So, there are many things that are, I would say, societal on a broader purpose statement, that we share a belief in together. >> That's awesome. And also people want to work on a team that's mission driven, has impact beyond just the profit and loss. I mean, I love capitalism, personally myself. I'm an entrepreneur, but been there done that but we're living in a cultural shift now. We're starting to see remote work. We're starting to see virtual teams, new use cases that have different expectations and experiences in the work place and also at home. So, you know, with mobile, I could be on the side of the soccer fields or, you know, skiing or running or jogging and take a message, pull over, do a chat, jump into an audio chat, listen to a podcast, engage. So we're all tethered now. This is exchanging experiences, and this is going to change the game for how you work together. >> A hundred percent. And by the way, we're all tethered hopefully through AT&T mobile connectivity devices. It was kind of amusing how much that has become a part of our lives and the core value. One of the core value propositions of AT&T is obviously connecting businesses to each other but also consumers through their mobile brand. But also then to entertainment I will say when I was in Augusta at the masters, you know people that have been there know that, you're not allowed to have cell phones. It was amazing just in conversations how often whoever it was I was having a conversation with and myself would say, well, I'd like to look that up, hold on, can I get that statistic? And we realized we're missing a big part of our lives in terms of the communication but those requirements of connecting people in new ways and in their homes or remotely actually only reinforce this shared value proposition of when you have the technology and you have it securely between our company IBM and AT&T we play a massive part in that. And it's something I'm quite proud of. >> Yeah, and you guys have a really interesting position there with the history of, with the relationship. And as you pointed out AT&T has to be on the forefront of cutting edge user experience technology they're bringing, I mean, they are the edge. I mean, they ultimately from base station down to the device, to the person, to the account, you're talking about a real edge. There that's a person's consumer. They got to provide these new services. So I got to ask you, you mentioned at the top of this interview, that your goal is to provide even better service to AT&T pretty big pressure point for IBM. You know, you got to deliver step up and their expectations must be high. Can you take us through perspectives on that kind of even better service when you've got a client that's on the cutting edge of having to deliver new kinds of things like better notifications, smarter devices smarter software, more fault-tolerant highly available services. These are things that, you know there's a lot of pressure take us through that. What's, what's it like? >> There is a lot of pressure but there's a lot of consistency in terms of expectations. And it's something that both of us understand very well. And I would argue that it's probably the reason we work so well together. Both AT&T and IBM for years, namely 50, 100's of years have understood that if we're transacting for business, we're transacting on something that has to get done. So on both sides of the equation not only do we push the edge of what can be done technically or for business, but we also understand the expectations of the business clients that are, it works every time and it works in every way I need it to. So for us, when we work together, I think that healthy balance of part musician, part engineer comes out very, very strongly in both teams. >> Cameron, great insight and great to talk to you. I love to get the perspective on, you know, the kind of challenges and opportunities that you're seizing at IBM with AT&T. Again, the history is amazing. The impact to the industry at both levels. You mentioned Tom Watson Senior, then you got Junior that in that generation just carries forward. You got that vibe back now with hybrid cloud Irvin loves cloud. So, you know, you got a lot of things happening that's really strong over at IBM and the theme this year generally is better together. So, awesome, awesome work. Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. I will tell you, I don't want to miss the opportunity to talk a bit about the future, because from an AT&T and IBM perspective we're doing a load of work around private 5G or 5G in general. This is something that provides an absolutely low latency huge bandwidth with a lot of actually characteristics from a business perspective that are manageable. And it will enable what I believe is a another big wave in the technology and business industry which is new business models. Very similar to that, of the internet originally, it allows with IBM technology and AT&T technology they have something called Multi-Access Edge Computing. These are absolutely blazing, fast 5G boxes that will be in, not only businesses, but universities, sports stadiums, you name it, changing the experience of how people consume technology or the benefits of technology, which I couldn't be more excited about. >> Awesome future ahead, great. Its a big wave certainly a wave we'd never seen before. Cameron, our managing director AT&T at IBM. Great insight, thanks for sharing, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, CUBE coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with all leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello, everyone, this is Dave Vellante and welcome. We're going to do a little preview of ThoughtSpot Beyond, and we're going to look at the intersection of cloud, data, search and analytics. For a decade, we've been collecting all this information and tapping data sources for many, many different places. Now we're at the point where we can very cost-effectively and quickly put data into the hands of many orders of magnitude, more users so the data can inform opinions and ultimately actions. With me is Sudheesh Nair, who's the CEO of ThoughtSpot. Sudheesh, it's always a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely, my pleasure, Dave. Thanks for having me. >> You know it's ironic that we start this decade with so much disruption to our lives. It's forced us to become digital businesses really overnight. I wonder if you could talk about the role of data as it relates to our digital lives? >> I think the idea that data somehow directly impacts our lives sometimes can be farfetched. That is because we don't really talk about it in the right way. Data can be this archaic mountain of things that people don't really connect with. What we should really be talking about is what data does, the byproduct, the end product of data, which is the signal that we get out of the mountain of data, the insight that we derive from it and the action, the bespoke actions that makes our lives possible in this new world that we are all living in. If you really do a good job of talking about what data does for you or the by-product of what the data does for you, I think people will understand that we are incredibly connected, incredibly dependent on the signals that we derive from the data that we are giving out to the world that we are operating in today. >> We had a fire ready and aim because the speed at which we've had to adapt as we've never seen this before. I'm wondering if you could share with us what you're seeing. What kind of challenges this creates for organizations, specifically in terms of being able to leverage their data assets? >> See, I think if you think of the last eight, nine months, sometimes in our industry, it is easy to sort of look at this as an opportunity, more of an opportunistic way of looking at how can I sell more data driven things when the world is sort of falling apart. You walk on a downtown, you see all these restaurants closed, parking lots empty. My sort of less than in the last eight, nine months is to be more outside-in as opposed to inside-out. That is, why are we doing this, is now more important than what we are doing. In that context, my biggest lesson that I've learned is that the thing that stand in the way of delivering value for customers almost always is not technology, not product and not even quality of data. A lot of data people will say it is the data quality that is holding me back from doing. It is lack of courage, lack of vision, lack of ability to sort of empathize with your customers and truly see what can we do to make their lives better, where data driven insights might be a part of it. I really believe that organizations that are differentiating by providing better services where they use data to do that are clearly coming out ahead as we are looking at the end of this global pandemic. >> It's interesting what you're saying about data quality, because I agree with you. I actually think it's access to data because as a business user, I can look at data, ask a couple of questions and say, I can get pretty close to the truth. If you think about organizations generally, but specifically business users, they've been clamoring for more fast style access to data and really the time is now for them to realize this vision. I wonder if you could share with us what's happening in ThoughtSpot business in the past month, 'cause that's what you're all about, is that easy, fast access to data. >> I always talk about the decision making pipeline. I know one end, you have the data that customers are happy to give. However, it's a two way street. They are saying, look, I'll give you my data, in return I want you to do two things. Number one, make sure it is safe and protected. Number two, you are using that data to deliver a bespoke experiences for me, bespoke services for me. That is I'm giving you the data so you will get to know me and treat me as an individual, as a person with the likes and dislikes that are different from someone else's. If you don't do that, you're breaking that contract. When I think of this continuum of data to insight to knowledge to action, action is where the users benefit. I sort of sometimes worry that the chasm that exists between the people who can speak the data, the SQL, the data, warehouse people who have usually the answers and not necessarily have the questions because questions are usually coming from the business users. Our sort of purpose in life as a company in the world has been simple. That is let us break that barrier. Let's move that silos and then unify so that people with questions can get answers. People who know the business can get the answer from the data without any tax on their curiosity. It is easier said than done, but it is a journey. I strongly believe that pushing the ability to inquire and get insights from the data all the way to the front line, where business users interact with their customers, the businesses customers, the consumers, the clients, if you don't do that properly, there is no way to keep up with the velocity of change that the world is throwing at your business. >> So speaking of the data sources, one of the data sources I sometimes look at it, you look at the stock market, it is funny. The last month Pfizer announces they got a very highly successful trial and the stock market goes up 800 points. You sort of look at that and say, that's a data point. I recently released a number of pieces on cloud and its impact. After that you saw up on a cloud stocks, everybody panicked, sell tech. Even though written cloud's not immune to COVID, it's clear from our data that cloud migration has been very much accelerated since the pandemic hit and I don't really see that changing. I wonder if you could talk about the ways in which you see cloud changing, how organizations operate and really what's missing when it comes to getting the most out of their cloud investments, specifically around analytics. >> It is like any other function. Data analytics is not different in what the cloud does for the customers. I used to always talk about the world of computing, the world of technology as a race against commoditization. Imagine that it's a ocean that is warming and there's an iceberg that is floating on it. As the ocean warms the iceberg is melting and if you want to survive, you've got to keep going up the mountain, the iceberg mountain. In this example, the commoditization of technology is the ocean. Anything that you think is unique, anything that you think is proprietary, it's going to get commoditized. The reason why that's happening is because people want to go up the value chain. That's the iceberg, that's the mountain. If you use that metaphor, what you will see here is that people want to go up the value that the data analytics deliver as opposed to how cool or how differentiated the process of delivering value is. Let me explain that. Imagine that you are producing a lot of content, I am pretty sure that you have ways to sort of collect the data on how it is making an impact. That is how many people watched it, how many of them were young versus old versus Salesforce engineering versus marketing versus... You can slice and dice the data. That is where today's data analytics stops. Now, imagine if you can take it to the next level, that is what impact is it having on my consumers? Are they able to get better jobs, for example, because of a technology that you talked about or theCUBE's ability to sort of democratize access, the way sometimes you take complex technology and simplify it. Is that making easier for some execs to catch up with the speed with which technology is changing? In turn, which makes their business model agile. Our thesis is that when we stop data analytics at the noise level, the data level, the insight level, we are only doing half the job. We need to go all the way through that value chain, climb all the way up in that iceberg and think for the customer. What am I doing for the customer? There are recent examples of our banks, largest of large banks, where they had inherent bias when it comes to how they were giving loans to minorities and people of color, or the people who have an accent on the phone, they're actually calling on customer support. These sort of things are not an AI problem or a BI problem, these are human problems. By breaking the barrier between business users and their consumers, where data become an inherent part of deficient making, you can make tangible difference in the world. I think that is what we are trying to do. I know it sounds somewhat naive and utopian, but I do think this is possible if you really approach it outside-in. >> And outside-in thinking is critical. I want to pick up on something you said about kind of moving up the value chain. We've watched over the last decade, sort of the SASification of many industries. You guys recently announced ThoughtSpot Cloud, which was your first SAS offering. Tell us, how's it going? What's the uptake like, the adoption? What are customers telling you about what it's doing for their business? >> Again, this is the same outside-in story. It is relatively new, it's only been a month. The interest is pretty high and we have closed a handful of customers. I don't want to claim victory yet, but the signs have been very positive and it does not surprise me because it aligns with that story that I talked about growing up the value chain. Traditionally, when we deployed ThoughtSpot, we deployed in the customer's VPC, their own cloud or in the data center. The problem is when you are doing that, they are responsible for integrating the data, connecting the data, prepping the data, managing it. There's a lot of work that goes with it. But ThoughtSpot I would ask you, is it possible for us to do as much for the customer with TS Cloud, ThoughtSpot Cloud? That is you just go to ThoughtSpot Cloud and connect to your SAS data warehouse services that you may have, but there's Snowflake or Redshift or in a DBQ, Google BigQuery, or a Microsoft synapse and then get going immediately. To give you an idea, a typical ThoughtSpot deployment used to take around four to five months, now it is taking around 35 minutes. That's what ThoughtSpot Cloud does for our customers. If it happens in 35 minutes, their business of delivering value to their clients is happening that much faster. >> Everything shifts to actually getting insights as opposed to setting stuff up. One of the other things to do that I've been reporting on. I've said in the last decade, we kind of moved from really a product centric world to one that's more platform centric, particularly with cloud and SAS. The latest research that we've been doing shows that ecosystems, we think are going to power the next wave of innovation. I wonder what your view is of that premise and how you're thinking about ecosystems as a lever of growth. >> This word platform is one of the most abused word in our industry because people like to say, don't say product, say solution, and then say, don't say solution use platform. In reality, a platform is useless if people are not standing on. If you're standing on a railway platform, nobody's there, watch the point? The same thing applies to business, our business as to when it comes to platform. A platform is only a real platform if there are other players making money of what you have built. If you build a platform, all it does is a bunch of API. Nobody's consuming, it's not useful. In that context, we have long ways to go, we have really long ways to go. I do think one of sort of... I wouldn't say mistake, but one of the oversights that our sport had was not delivering on the vision of platform. That it is easy to make for others to come together and do commerce on ThoughtSpot. Most importantly, make sure that it is not just easy but when customers come to them, that one plus one is like 10 or 11, as opposed to one plus one equal two. That is something that we have to remedy. At the Beyond Conference, next month on December 9th, you will see us make some interesting announcements around this thing. It is one of my favorite sort of projects because once we do that very well, you will see that it becomes a platform. Think of Stripe, think of Square. These are platforms because it made their customers' lives easier, but at the same time, multiple companies could come together to deliver joint solutions where the sum is much bigger than equals of the parts. That is a vision that ThoughtSpot needs to really deliver on and Beyond will be a stock. >> I mean, the power of many versus the resources of one and this is well understood over time and now we're seeing it really applied to our industry. Sudheesh, a lot of the analytics that we produce today are the result of humans clicking and typing and interacting with systems. That's obviously going to continue to grow, but you think about things like IOT, the build-out of 5G, it brings this whole new dimension of machine to machine communications and tons of new data. Much of the data out there is analog, today, it's being increasingly become digital. How are you thinking about these trends in terms of the impact on your company and your customers? >> I think if anyone asks me, what does ThoughtSpot do for the data analytics world? My answer is very simple. We have introduced a new interface to access structure data that can be used by anybody, search that is driven by AI, that's an AI driven search. That core idea is about scale, but more importantly, rate of change. That's where the new inventions around 5G where the bottlenecks are being removed at IoT and mobile. I mean, we want to put mobile as well. So you have mobile devices, IOT devices, very big pipe, and then cloud on the backend where processing and storing is cheap. Now if you think of that, it is a 12 lane super highway, all the way to the end user, all the way to the end device, to the mothership. When you have that much speed and when you remove everything, you have to think about the asset, the artifacts that you build out of that kind of a data stream. That's where the old way of looking at dashboards will die. It's not a question of if or when it is dying. What we need is now to make sure that at that speed, when the data is changing much faster than ever before, you have new way to deliver insight to the people who can act on it, which is business users. If you think of it, there used to be cases where companies used to make supply chain decisions for the year. Now, supply chain decisions are made monthly because you don't know what next month will look like with COVID. When you have annual decisions become monthly decisions, monthly decisions become weekly decisions, weekly decisions became minute by minute decisions sometimes like placing social media sentiment changes, things like that, there is no way that you can depend on a Monday morning report or a Monday morning meeting, and then send out, here is what you need to do, action items to the front end. Everyone should have the pulse on where the business is, which is where the data is going to help them. However, human experience is so critical. You don't want to remove human experience. That's why as we deliver more and more on 5G and IoT, making the data as it is changing and then delivering those signals that insights directly to business users in the frontline is going to be like the de facto way businesses will operate. I think we are just beginning that journey in terms of what is possible. >> Well, it reminds me of when we were kids, the coaches would tell us, go to where you think the ball is going to be, find opportunities for that open space, not to where it is today. That's the notion of whether it's soccer or basketball, or of course, hockey skate to the puck is obviously a famous term. So how do you stay ahead of that disruption curve in a space like analytics? What are the innovation opportunities that organizations should be tapping today and beyond? >> I was thinking about this a lot myself, which is the important thing is to be ready to unlearn. I know it is a simple thing but it was one of the most difficult things because as you grow up in the organizations, as you become an exec, as you gain more experience, we actually calcify our knowledge. That's a problem, because things are changing. There are new way to do things, new opportunities. Being open to unlearning is going to be more critical than learning new things sometimes. That will require humility. I won't say it's a go learn AI, or go learn a new language or Python or coding. Those things might be necessary, but having that mentality of willing to unlearn and then having the courage to make some difficult decisions. If you do those two things, I think this is an exciting role. And if you're not, you're going to go the wayside of a lot of industries have been going. >> That's great advice. I mean, we saw that a lot coming into the pandemic. There was a lot of complacency around digital and of course there isn't anymore. Sudheesh, thanks so much for joining me in this CUBE Conversation. It's always great to talk to you. >> Thank you for taking the time, I appreciate it. >> My pleasure. Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, will see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

>>Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering my groin insight 2019 brought to you by micron. >>We're back at pier 27 in San Francisco. This is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage and we're covering micron insight 2019 I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost David Floyd and this event is kind of interesting. David, it basically intersperses cube interviews with big tent discussions, thought leadership, we've heard from automotive, healthcare and and 5g discussions and no Han is here. He's the vice president and CTO of the emerging business at Erickson. And you were just on a panel. Welcome to the cube. Thanks. Great to be here. You were talking about five G, we're going to talk about five G. so first of all, talking about the emerging business at Ericsson, >>your whole group, you know, so Ericsson, we, you know, 99 a lot of our business today has done what operators emerging business group, we're sort of looking at the intersection of industry, cloud computing, our traditional mobile network operator customers, and how do we, how do we put those together and look for new either products or business models. And really create something new for customers. >>So we tell him when he's talking about five G, everybody gets all excited. Certainly the technology community is excited about it. There's a whole value chain and an ecosystem that's that's pumping right along. The carriers are adopting and the users are just waiting. So what should we know about? >>So I, you know, I think there's a couple of different things. One is from a consumer perspective, you're definitely looking at faster, you know, better. All of the things we've got from the other GS at older things. You know, today, you know, faster downloads of movies. I think what we're, and I'm, I'm in the tech business, not in the prediction business, you know. So I think what we've learned from previous technologies is we almost don't know what the new applications are. We're trying to make the platform as easy as possible for developers to utilize what the network actually has to offer. So I think that's a big part of what we're trying to do. The other part is enhancing what you have today as a consumer is massive, but also industries is a huge pull on 5g. So we talked about industry four. Dot. Zero and really transforming industries and cutting the cables in production lines, allowing monitoring of systems that never happened before. >>A lot of use cases that can be out there. So a, I have a younger son of 22 and I look at my a bill every month. Yeah, I do have him downloading 10 times more data. It doesn't fill me with uh, duty or just the excise to carriers. I mean while we've seen with every, every end. And of course that was the question how much of a down, yeah, how much low is the price going to be on this baffled breeze you go to invest an awful lot. Absolutely. So I mean we're going to see it tens, 10 orders of magnitude cheaper. So even as it is now with 4g, we're seeing a lot of the unlimited plans coming available and so on. I think we're just going to see more of that. And then the question, actually a big question for five G is what will you pay for? >>You know, if we talk about age compute and low latency, if you're a gamer and I can give you X milliseconds of latency versus you know, a two X milliseconds, how much would you pay for that? So I think what we know at the moment is people will pay for that. We don't know exactly how much, and that's where you need the ecosystem and you need to get stuff out there. And actually some of the economic impact is fuzzy. But in thinking past, there's no prologue. But if you think about the other GS as they sort of were adopted, what can we learn from those? And how do you think five G will be different in terms of its adoption and economic impact? Let's say if you look at adoption, I mean just a number of contracts. We have the number of deployments we have globally, just off the charts in terms of where we are with 4g Korea launched and a few months ago, just just before the summer, within two months they had a million 5g subscribers with smart phones in their eyes and two months later they added a second million subscribers. >>I mean for a market to go from zero to that in, in that period of time with smartphones, if we go back to 4g, all of that was with dongles and sort of hotspots on routers, you know, so to jump directly to smartphones, huge adoption, it's going to happen fast. Well what do you, what are the sequence, what's the sequence of events that have to occur for adoption to really take off? >> So obviously you need to build out the networks and the operators are doing that are pretty high speed. You need to have the devices ready and all the devices. Now it's not like you have a 5g only device. It's obviously capable of all the four G things. And then it's better when you have 5g. So the devices are going to come and take and fast. So all your new devices, most of the high end devices have 5g capability already in there. >>Um, and then the networks just getting built out more and more. And then of course the application developers actually understanding how can I take advantage of those new capabilities? And then you'll start to see, okay, wow, you know, I didn't, this wasn't possible before. It's not just a faster download. It's really, there's just new experiences happening >> from a development standpoint. How much access do they have to the technology? Do they have to wait until this is all built out? Obviously not, but, but, but what's the status of sort of the devs? So we're, we're trying to, and we're working with a lot of the ecosystem. We have, we call it the D 15 studio in our Santa Clara office. We're bringing developers in there and really trying to understand, because you know, we talk Telekom as well. So we want to expose things. We want to understand, do you know what variable, if we say quality of service, what does that mean for you? You know, how do you translate that? So, and we're working with, you know, the cloud players where to developers live to some extent to bring in that ecosystem and understand how it all plays together. So >>ahead. Yup. Um, so if really, if you're looking at it longterm, obviously it's going to happen, but the experience is as I go around the States, is that you've got all these different four G three GS edges still in a very, very patchy a level of it. Is this going to be different? Is this going to actually go into different places because there's a big investment that has to be made, a lot of things very close together. Yes, yes. That seems to be a recipe for everything being or right in the cities. But as soon as you go outside the urban areas, it's going to be very patchy. How does that compare, for example, with Elon Musk's idea of a doing stuff from the sky? >>Well, everything comes down to economics. So you know, it's, it's obviously you're going to have denser deployments in the cities, then you are in the countryside and so on. One of the big advantages would 5g is am, and not to get too deep into the technical part, but you can use all the spectrum that's available. And spectrum is super important as we get, you know, when we have lower frequency spectrum, you can cover a hundred miles Wade, one base station as you get to the millimeter wave, which is you get super high bandwidth, then you're add hundreds of meters. Yeah. And so obviously one is more suitable for a rural environment, the other is more suitable for. So for an urban environment, so obviously having those working together in one technology allows you to deploy everything and get the benefits in a much broader area than we had for any of the previous. >>There's choice there in terms of how you deploy or, or leverage the spectrum. So you're saying that the higher performance end of the spectrum, it's gonna require a greater density of other components. And absolutely. When people talk about oil, there's going to be a lot more distributed, you know, pieces of the five G network that has to get built out. So who does that? Who's putting those pieces of the value chain in? So different players, obviously the mobile network operators, the 18 Ts and Verizons of the world are doing a lot of the heavy lifting and know what our support to actually put the, the radios and the towers in place. And then there's an edge compute piece as well, which is different players are putting in that. Um, so, so a lot of that infrastructure has been done. I think one thing that we've been pushing quite a lot, all our install base of radios is um, 5g upgradable via software. >>So that means that a lot of the already installed, uh, radios and infrastructure, you're just softer upgrade, you know, an hour later it's now 5g ready. So I think that's a big piece of basin. Back to your question of how quickly and and can reach all those areas, are there any specific commercial blockers that you see, um, that you're thinking through? I am I, I think the, just understanding some of the more challenging when you look at, if you're deploying edge compute and you have to invest billions and really getting that far out to the edge, I think there's some questions still there. Like I said, how much would you pay for 20 milliseconds versus 15 milliseconds. And that might sound like a lot, but that's a lot of extra infrastructure you would need to put out. So I think that's still being worked true. >>And obviously some of that will happen quicker in a downtown San Francisco than it will in a, you know, middle of Nevada plays well and the others that you've mentioned before, it's unclear what new applications are going to emerge here. And so it's almost like build it and they will come and then we'll figure it out and then we'll figure out how to charge for it. Like you say the gamers, how much will they pay for it? Yeah, so those are some of the uncertainties but they'll shake themselves out. So absolutely. I was a pretty smart about doing. What about micron and the role of memory players and storage players? How will this affect them? Eight say a huge opportunity when you ah, yeah, I mean invest no and Bardy hats. >> Yeah, I think it's a, when you look at the number of devices and, okay, what's the device? >>The devices are smartphone. Well the devices now your car, it's every IOT device and down to your toaster and all the crazy stuff people are talking about too. I mean to every industrial application tool that age, computers. So you're distributing now a lot of different compute memory storage across different parts of the network. So I mean they talked earlier in the panel about phones having terabytes of data. You know, it's in, it's just unimaginable. The amount of data storage. Remember you're going to need in a vehicle, you know, they're looking at terabytes per hour of data and then how much of that should they shift off the vehicle? How much did it keep there? So huge opportunity. >> Well, I'd be willing to pay for, um, some memory in my appliances. They tell me when they're going to break. I just got a new dishwasher and I can program it with my, my remote. I don't want to program. I just want to know that on Thanksgiving morning it was that it works. But in a week before it's going to break, I want to know so I can deal with vending and maintenance. That's a big use case. Can't wait until that happens. The last question, so >>I was going to be, I was following up on that last point you were making. Um, uh, so again, this cost of everything, this, this value that you're going to get out of it. Um, it seems to me that, um, that this is gonna take a long time to push out. Um, and, and before it actually down. And people will actually know whether they can pay for this. And then one thing in particular is there's a lot of resistance in, in the, in the States anyway, to all of these devices being put very, very close, you know, to the, to, to it for example, putting all the devices down, download a row for example, that, that, that seems to be very expensive and, and going to get a lot of reaction from consumers is, is that not the case? >>So I actually, we're not seeing it that much. I mean if you look across the globe, um, China obviously is a slightly unique situation. Massive deployments already happening there. Like I said, Southeast Asia, South Korea being among the, you know, the forefront, big deployments already there. And we're seeing big pull from industries already and the operators here in U S are announcing new cities, you know, every month practically. So they are really full on into this. And to some extent it's, it's really just, there's a capacity need to have the spectrum. They need to make the investments and they're, they're doing it as we speak. >>So I think it depends on me. Why was it a meeting the other day in Boston with a lot of city officials and folks that worked for the mayor's office? They're envisioning Boston, you know, for the next 50 years, smart cities and five G was like, if you did a word cloud 5g was that the number one topic? You know, we talked earlier about sports stadiums. You can see that being, you know, use cases going to be these >>hotspots where it's of very, very high >>of the city in this case in Boston's case are they're going to invest, right? And they're gonna think that's going to be a differentiator for cities. >>You have this amazing infrastructure, you know, five G infrastructure that allows you to take advantage of that, be it just from, they talked about traffic congestion and what the city can do and then what the businesses and the consumers can do in that area that that can end up being a differentiator for innovation companies going there and so on. >>Right. All right. We're going to go before they blow us out. No, thanks very much for coming to the queue very much. All right, great. To have you on. I keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break. You're watching the cube live from micron insight 2019 from San Francisco right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live on day one of IBM's inaugural Think 2018 event. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are at Mandalay Bay in Vegas and excited to welcome back to theCUBE a veteran from our very first series eight years ago, Rick Vanover, welcome back. >> Hey, thanks guys, happy to be back, it's been awhile. >> It has been awhile. You're now the director of product strategy at Veeam. So, Veeam, IBM, what's cookin'? >> You know, it's actually a result of a lot of work on the Veeam side, some great momentum that we've had over the years. And it actually works well with IBM because Veeam has transitioned into the enterprise and nobody needs to convince IBM that they're enterprised. So, we kind of earned a seat at the table here and we're really excited about that. It's come across, started as a business relationship and we added some technical capabilities, some integrations as well. Those are all really strong things that have gotten us to this point and this is our second year exhibiting, so, we're happy to be here. >> So Rick, what's happening in the space? I mean, you and I, we follow this stuff pretty closely. We've seen back up and recovery explode. The way in which people are talking about it is changing. You go to VM World and it's the hottest area. You guys have great tailwind, as you say, you're moving up market now with more partnerships like IBM and other enterprise companies. What's your perspective point of view on what's happening in your space? >> Well Dave and Lisa, I hate to drop a buzz word on it, but it's digital transformation. And the simple fact of that is businesses need their data. They need the services in their data center. They need their applications, even if things don't go as expected, simply put. This is historically an area of the data center that's not very interesting, back up and recovery. But we've up-leveled it into something that we call availability. And what I mean by that is, we're able to meet the expectations of organizations today, keep their workloads available, be ready for tomorrow, migrate change, know what's going to happen. There's a lot of threats today, all kinds of things underscored in the fact that the data services today need to be available. I mean, just think of any organization and if you didn't have the data center or you didn't have the cloud services, how effective would that many hundreds of thousands of people be for the company? Probably not very effective today. So, the result is digital transformation. These services are just basically required to be available. And it was really a good timing that we came in with this message, at the time that everybody had some amount of digital transformation, and it's working for us. >> When we did VeeamON last year in New Orleans, great show, and I was explaining to our audience that the ascendancy of Veeam, really it started with VMware admin when you changed from sort of physical servers to virtual servers. You had to change back up, you needed something that was simpler, more efficient, far more cost effective, and spoke the language of virtualization. And Veeam, boom, timed it perfectly. Your product fit very very nicely there. We're kind of venturing a new era. We're well into the cloud era, entering, as you point out, the digital transformation era. So, how has Veeam transformed to meet those customer demands? >> So it's actually interesting you bring that up, Dave, because a lot of people don't realize that oh, I'm drawing a blank on my memory here that if we start from the announcement phase to where we are today, so, just under four years, Veeam has released one, two, three back up products that don't require a virtual machine. >> Right. >> Two of which are for cloud native workloads. Actually, if you include an acquisition, there's a fourth product that we've added to our portfolio for native Amazon backups. But on premises workloads, whether they're Windows or Linux or in the hyperscale public cloud or on different hypervisors, we have options there. And then, we also added last year our first product into the SASS space, so our Microsoft Office 365 backup. These are things that people, I still have to educate to different organizations that these are capabilities that Veeam have in addition to that really strong VMware and Hyper-V story that kind of made us known in that regard. But, we realize that enterprises today have more than just virtual machines. And there's a need for that availability experience wherever they are. So that's one of the driving factors of some of our new product innovations in the form of additional products. Each one of them have their own market, persona, their different buyers, and they appeal in different ways. Telling the SASS story is different than the OnPrem story and that's been a really good thing for us to kind of get buy out across the board. When we've talked enterprises, everyone's kind of shaking their head and that's a good sign. >> Yeah, platform optionality is something that you guys have always done pretty well. You sort of addressed my other question was how are the buyers changing and how is the way that you go to market and converse with those buyers changing? >> Well the buyer persona, no matter which one they are, if they're cloud or the storage person or the traditional backup person, they all have a need for some key things. They want their data available. Everybody wants that, they get that. But they also want simplicity and ease of use. Even in the enterprise space, this is something that nobody's going to actively say no to. In fact, kind of a joke at Veeam is all this time just until late last year, we didn't even have a professional services group. And I hate to say, it was, dare I say, that easy, but we've actually gotten a lot of feedback from partners which is central to our business model that that's something that they want as an upsell option because you can put something in but then those extra increments of performance gains and efficiency, that's where the deep knowledge is going to come into play. So, there's huge opportunity there through our own partners and then we just launched an announcement around some of our IBM partnerships around services as well. >> I want to get to that IBM announcement in a minute, but I'm curious from a customer perspective, you talk to a lot of customers. Digital transformation, you're right, it's a buzz word, but it's also an essential survival of the fittest for any organization. When you talk with customers, some of the pin points around data, I imagine, that we hear are so much data, lots of silos, lots of control that resides within lines of business. How do you, first question, how do you help... Maybe I shouldn't say that. What are some of the trends that you're seeing within organizations as you're trying to help them really maximize the protection and make the data available? Trends that you're seeing, where is security as ransomware is going, psh, through the roof? >> You hit one of my favorite topics. And, you know, the long-term historical definition of IT security is to maintain confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and services. And that's where Veeam comes in on the A part of the, it's called the C-I-A triad. And we think that there's an incredible opportunity for visibility, user education, resiliency, different types of storage can help. In fact, that's a really good one. We integrate with a lot of different IBM storages right now. The Spectrum Virtualize and Storewize Family including really established products in the data center like the SVC. But also, it is 2018 but there's a great use case for tape. Because tape storage like the TS Series from IBM for example, there's nothing more resilient against ransomware than offline storage. And the acquisition costs and the portability just can't be beat. So, we've talked to a lot of customers around preparedness. And what I mean by that is there's this balance of complexity and ease of use and security. And they all kind of have their own factors on where they sit, but I advocate that organizations need to be prepared for this type of thing today. And you can talk to anyone who's gone through it, anybody who's gone through a ransomware situation, they always end it with, "Thank goodness I had backup." Or, "Shame on me, I had to pay the ransom." I just want people to be on the right of that conversation. So, I advocate a lot. We've done a lot at Veeam about that. And our integrations with different storage systems is one of the best ways to be resilient against that type of stuff. We've put a lot of stuff on Veeam.com about that. It's a real threat today for sure. >> So, talk to me a little bit more about that. I mean, what's the prescription for ransomware? I mean, you talk about air gaps. Okay, that's fine. What about analytics? I mean, you as the source of data for backup, you have a lot of data that you can analyze. Where does that fit in to sort of maybe being more anticipatory about whether it's malware, you mentioned security, ransomware? Can you help, how do you help? >> I'll give you two answers, before and after. So on the before, like maybe if a ransomware incident is underway, we actually have this alarm that can detect the possible ransomware activity. It's somewhat prescriptive where you see a high amount of CPU, a high amount of disc rates, those types of sustained behaviors are possibly ransomware. So, we actually can alarm on that on the production side, not so much even on the backup side. But on the backup side, we can address how many different copies of data are where. And more importantly, who's accessing it? That's actually really something to think about. Because many organizations put a lot of security controls on their production data. I don't know if they have the same level of scrutiny on the backup data. So, we have a number of different tools in reporting solutions that can help people with that. I've tweeted a lot of that kind of stuff. But, it's one of those things that I love getting into real specific use cases there. I don't know, I don't know if this group can handle it here today, but, this is something that I have a lot of passion for for sure. >> Okay go on, go ahead, let's do it. >> Okay, yeah, who's accessing what data? Like, if Dave is one of my administrators and so is Lisa, maybe Dave's in charge of databases and Lisa's in charge of email. But what if I come in one day, and I see that Dave was restoring email and not just any old email, but maybe it was the CEO's email and you put it on your desktop, not back into the CEO's inbox. That's an incredible data breach, right? We can report on that type of stuff. So, I can tell you that Dave got into your email, just like that. >> So, I want to ask you about reporting. You know, it's sort of a not often talked about, certainly in the trade press, but it's pretty important. What's the state of reporting? What do you guys do with your products? How about visualization, where does that fit in to the reporting equation? >> Yeah, so that's actually one of the emerging opportunities. We have some existing capabilities, but we get a lot of feedback on that because people want a nice view of where their data is, who's accessing it, how busy is it. I mean, these are very expensive investments in the data center. And answering really specific questions like, why is this development team taking 80% of the production storage groupware? You know, those types of business problems can be solved through capabilities today and I feel that organizations need to look at that more than just a backup in use case. Because, sure, we move the data on behalf of the backup task, but we actually have a broader view. And actually the management products that we have, that's what really makes that come to life. So, the Veeam ONE and the Veeam Management Pack for enterprises and the system center space, those are products that could really give you nice specific heat maps, things like that, answer those types of questions around the resources. But I think it's important that organizations have that visibility because you can't really make your next step as an IT organization without knowing what your current state is. And the details don't go away. The IOPS don't lie, whatever type of buzz word I want to throw out at it, you've got to have this information today to be prepared for your next move. >> VeeamON >> Oh yeah. >> It's coming up in May. >> That is. In May. >> Chicago. >> Mid-May, I'm drawing a blank. It's the week after Mother's Day, I know that, here in the US. And theCUBE will be there. We're excited to have you guys back and we're targeting a great diary of content, a number of industry experts. I'm in charge of the breakouts for that event. I'm targeting 81 breakouts, so a lot of really good information for attendees to choose from. So, I'm really looking forward to that. >> Yeah, so we're excited. This will be our second VeeamON. It's a show with a lot of buzz, great ecosystem. You've got a lot of partners that will be there. As you say, great fun. The VeeamON Party is notorious. >> I heard it's legendary. >> It is. (laughing) >> Are you guys having a party here? >> No, not this week. >> Okay. >> Yeah, the party-- >> That's a first. >> The party will be pretty cool. I've seen the details on it. >> If you've never been to a Veeam party, >> Rick: You haven't been to a party. >> That's true, you haven't been to a party in tech. It's pretty good. >> The partner's are in our DNA. That's one of those things that we as a company everything from selling through the channel, alliance partners like IBM and other established brands, distribution partners, service provider partners that my colleague Matt will talk about here in a second, it's in our DNA for sure. >> Yeah, we're going to talk to Matt about those partnerships coming up next. So, we appreciate it. >> We are. So, we're at IBM Think, their inaugural Think event. We're at four campuses. You're speaking Wednesday-- >> I think so. >> About probably a lot of this stuff. What are some of the things that excite you and Veeam about some of the IBM announcements as we've talked about with them being a core partner? >> Yeah, I was really excited for this year in particular. We're coming off of a huge release last year. Our Update 3, for current release of a Veeam Availability Suite. We dropped an integration for a number of different IBM storages. So, an incredible, incredible use case if you've not heard of it, Veeam's integration for the Spectrum Virtualize and Storewize storage systems. I'd take the backup challenge with this, it can't be beat. It's great stuff. And we also have a huge cloud technology which Matt will talk about here in a second. But, it's a great time to be available with Veeam That's the take away for sure. And that's kind of the central theme of my presentation on Wednesday. Go into some specifics on how you can use it, where it makes sense, and then how it fits into a broader portfolio of availability for organizations today. >> Awesome, Rick, thanks so much for stopping by and coming back to theCUBE after all this time away. We look forward to it and we'll see you at VeeamON. >> Awesome, thanks guys. >> All right, thank you. >> For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. You are watching theCUBE live at the first day of IBM Think 2018. Head on over to theCUBE.net, watch all of the videos that we've done so far and check out Wikibon, see what our analysts are uncovering about all things cloud, machinery, AI, et cetera, et cetera. We will be right back after a short break with our next guest. We'll see you then. (upbeat music)

>> Commentator: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam >> We're back, this is theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. We're here at VeeamON 2017 day two. Bill Philbin is here, Senior Vice President at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And runs the storage business for HPE. Great to see you again my friend. >> Hey Dave, it's always good to see you. >> Really? >> Always look so fantastic. >> Thank you, where's the tie? >> There's no tie. >> I will say, you guys, those of you who didn't see it, Bill nailed the Keynote this morning. It was great, it was funny, self deprecating, and genuine. And essentially you resonated with me, 'cause I got four kids and you were talking about how you call your kids, you either get voicemail, or their voicemails full. >> Bill: That's right. >> You text them, at least your kids text you back. I got to Snapchat my kids to get a hold of them. So you got to get into Snapchat >> They have told me that texting and Facebook is so, you know, 20th century Dad. >> You email 'em, right? >> Yeah. >> You get some important email, you send it to 'em. Like, email? What are you kiddin' me? >> No you know it's not in >> Our lives are challenged, but nonetheless, you got some of your challenges of your own. You're running a big business now at HPE. You guys are making some serious moves in the marketplace. Give us the update on the HPE storage business. >> Yeah, so thanks Dave. >> Every squirrel finds a nut in the forest eventually, so I just had a pretty good day today. But, that was because we have a great story, frankly, to tell. And I think you know, as I was saying before, the storage business is changing. Rather dramatically. Now is it, is it self inflicted? Or is it you know, just a a course correction. I actually believe it's self inflicted in a sense that we've taken many of the capabilities that were previously on high end systems. And we brought 'em to the mid range. We've thinned it, we've de-uped it, we've compressed it, We've got it on SSDs. And so the whole business model, now is different than it was five years ago. Before you sold somebody an appliance, you chocked it full of spinning media. They ran out of IOPS, you sold another appliance, you chocked it full. It was a pretty good business model. That's how I kept Mrs. Philbin in the lifestyle she's grown accustomed, right? Well, now, you don't chock it full of spinning media, you chock it full of SSDs. IOPS are always on guarantee. And then you take all that compaction technology, and that has actually forced a fundamental change, I think, in the storage landscape. That we, including Hewlett Packard have inflicted upon ourselves. I think we take a look at that, and need to take a look at the storage landscape, the number of vendors that are out there. You know, I think that is changing as well, which is, you know, part of the reason why we decided to get into acquiring companies like SimpliVity and Nimble. >> Dave: And you've got a knife fight going on in All-Flash. I got to say, you know, what HPE did with 3PAR surprised me and probably a lot of people. >> Bill: Mhm. >> Most people didn't think you could quote, unquote "bolt on" flash into that architecture. Obviously it wasn't a bolt on, you guys have been very successful. When you talk to your competitors, certainly when you talk to customers they love it. When you talk to competitors they say "yeah, we can compete with company A, B, and C. It's 3PAR that we have trouble with. Because it's simple and it works. >> And some times enduring technologies actually extend beyond, you know, single generations, right? And so, we certainly have heard the story about the new versus the old, and being old maybe this is my perspective. But, you know, enduring technologies actually can transition across architectural and technology boundaries. And that's exactly what we've done, exactly what we've done with 3PAR. >> Now, having said that, you guys have been, I mean you saw 3PAR initially with you know, spinning, and hybrid. Took off, you know, justified the acquisition, made the transition to All-Flash >> Bill: Yeah. >> I've called it many times, 3PAR's the gift that keeps on giving. So how many times can you go to that well, right? So you guys have made some moves here. Not the least of which was Nimble, want to talk about that. And SimpliVity, so. Even though SimpliVity's not under your organization, you have an affinity there. Talk about those two moves and where they fit in the portfolio. >> So let's just start with the 3PAR, just the 3PAR comment just for a quick second. The pure plays versus sort of the, what they call the stayed play. So, it's hard to imagine that 3PAR as a stayed play technology, right? I don't agree with that statement. But that, the reason I don't agree with it is, we're actually going faster than the pure plays in the All-Flash market. We have more revenue than they do, so. I think it's comfortable for people to sort of set one technology off over another but the fact of the matter is, that we're growing faster. The other thing about the market is it generally gravitates toward technologies that are unique in purpose regardless of what they cost. Because the customer demands it. And All-Flash started with guys like Fusion-io and Violin Memory, and all of those guys, right? Eventually what happens though, is customers tire of those additional assets in their data center, right? One more thing they don't want in their data centers, is one more thing in their data center. And that's when the big guys eventually sort of overtake that position. So, I think what you're going to, you're starting to see in the storage landscape is compression at a company level, right? You're seeing the Neutonics and Pures out there. You're seeing then the next tier of companies trying to sort of, you know, make the big break. And the last time a company made a big break in the storage business, that's still independent today. It's a billion dollars of revenue or more, was? >> Dave: NetApp. >> NetApp. Because storage looks like it's easy goin' in but it's not easy when you think about bare metal and databases and transactional systems, and highly available. It's not that easy, and so, that's why a company like a Nimble, who has great technology, Infosite, the CASL file system, great people. To order scale that business, profitably, and have to go to market reach, it needs to align themselves with a company like Hewlett Packard. So, we're really, really excited about Nimble joining the family for sure. That now enables us to sort of take the flash portfolio further across the across the landscape. On SimpliVity, I think the way that you should think about our strategy at Hewlett Packard is it's all about choice. So, you're a customer who wants to sort of, you know, put assets in your data center, and have assets in Microsoft as your cloud we should enable that. If you think Software Defined's the right way to go, we should enable that. You have an appliance customer, we should enable that. If you want to co-locate applications in a simple easy to use interface with storage, we have that, that's SimpliVity. But that choice shouldn't come with operational complexity. So, one of the things that we have to do, and I was talking about this at the Keynote, is we have to somewhat hide ourselves behind the application and make it easier for customers to consume. Because that is what the web offers them. We ought to be able to federate the data, so that you can actually move your data around when your requirements change, or you've got to burst. And the administration ought to be really, really simple. So, our strategy around technologies like SimpliVity, or Nimble, or 3PAR, or you know, MSA, XP, is all around giving customers choice without the operational complexity of having lots of things to manage. >> Bill, I guess I'm trying to, for our audience, try to maybe compare and contrast a little bit >> Yeah. >> Against you know, what was formerly EMC, now Dell EMC, >> Uh-huh. >> Which the knock on them for many years has been, they've got so many products, they overlap. We've covered for many years how, you know, if I have 3PAR and some of the other HP, HPE storage products, I can move between them, is that the difference issues thing So even though if you have Nimble, plus SimpliVity, plus you know, 3PAR. >> So, three is less than seven. Let's just start with that answer. And maybe it's not seven anymore, you know, I've lost track. Second, I think if you're really talking about provisioning storage and networking compute from an application layer, really what you've doing is you want to have a conversation about the service level underneath that the storage provides. Maybe for certain applications you're okay with thinly provisioned or not thinly provisioned et cetera. So, one answer is, a lot of those capabilities are actually hidden by the application layer. However, we know that the thing that doesn't move all that well is data. And data has gravity. So, being able to move data in addition to moving your compute, is one of the reasons that they differentiation for us over the other guys. >> Dave: But, you know, let me just stay on that for a second Stu. We're all storage guys or quasi-storage guys. >> Bill: He's only a quasi-storage guy? >> He's really a networking guy. >> I worked at a storage company for ten years but, yeah. >> You're a newbie then. >> But if you look at history, it is shown that you actually have to have multiple architectures to increase the size of your TM, and penetrate the marketplace. I mean, NetApp is the exception that proves the rule. I mean, they could only go so far with WAFL. I mean you were there, and you know, And so even now NetApp makes a move for solid fire. Obviously EMC has been very successful with, I think it's 17, so not 7. But it actually works, and so, that dogma of oh we have to have one architecture is never proven to really be a winning strategy. >> And frankly, it is really hard to actually stress an architecture from top to bottom, right? So I don't disagree with the comment you made, but that is effectively, however the same problem with the storage startups today is if they do a single thing, only support virtualized environments, whatever it is, right. Only support VDI. The breath is what customers are looking for. And if you don't have the breath, or you're forced to go get the breath, by adding bolt-ons to try and get the breath. It's just going to make it very, very difficult for them to survive in the new world order. Both acquisitions SimpliVity and Nimble were great for the company. >> Bill, can you tie together for us HPE and Veeam, how those fit together. One of the big themes we've been covering is the extension of Veeam started very, very much virtualized now they're physical they're talking about all the cloud solutions. Expect there's a lot of fit between your strategies. >> There is, for years we've have a very, very strong technical partnership between the Veeam engineering team and the StoreOnce engineering team. I think, you know, that is like the basis of trust, I think is the best way to think about it. We've both sort of got competing road maps on occasion, but at the end of the day it's all about, sort of, what's best for the customer. Number one is technical people, second is we have the same view of the market. And I talked about this, this morning, which is, this highly available, always on sort of environment is the same story that we tell. So the messages are aligned. The third is that it's complimentary, we have our own sort of data protection technology with data protector. We have our own sort of snapshot management capability with RMC. The question is, how do we sort of you know, protect the entire environment. And Veeam is a critical asset in that. It's a great business partnership, great technology partnership. The fact that our folks kind of resell Veeam, has just launched the business forward . >> Well, the move to sell the software business to Micro Focus has just opened up new partnership opportunities for you guys. >> Bill: In regards to that we still have a very, very strong partnership with the software guys. You know there's, the largest connect that we have on a backup product today, is get a protector. So I don't expect that to change. But there are people who prefer, you know, to use Veeam and we have to support that. >> Dave: Yeah, but still I mean, if you got the your colleagues in data protector and you're out aggressively partnering with Veeam and it's part of HPE. Maybe you get an email or, you get a "hey, come on Bill, you know, give me a break here." And now I feel like you know, the gloves are off you can do independent of all that internal stuff, plumbing. It's what's right for the customer. Maybe I'm overstating that. >> Perhaps a bit, because we'll still have equity ownership in the new company. Again with all the sort of connect I have, I think that regardless of where the paychecks come from if you will, we have to have a really strong partnership with them. And it's no different than, you know, we also have a partnership with Symantec, I mean we have other partnerships that customers just have made a preference around. That we're not going to convince them, you know, to do something different. Therefore, we've got to have a strong partnership. >> Dave: Alright, so we're going to be at Discover, theCUBE will be there for, been there many years now. I think this is our seventh Discover. >> You've been there as many years as I have, >> So what are we looking forward to there. >> So I think there's a bunch of announcements, we've highlighted one of them today around the secondary flash array for Nimble. There's some new 3PAR announcements that are certainly coming. The Synergy guys are going to certainly have a thing or two to say, I'm thinking. Based on the strength of that platform, that platform's really starting to take off. And so I think you're going to see that, I think this will probably be really the first Discover where, you know, you'll start to see, and maybe Madrid Discover will be different. But you'll start to see the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We keep focusing on things that we've spin-merged out, but the thing I think we need to focus on is the fact that we're, this is like a Phoenix of a new company, right? Solely focused on enterprise infrastructure and the customer needs. We've rebranded the TS business and PointNext, which is all around transformation and technology services, so. It's almost like we're starting the clock over again. For the HP employees, we're not changing your service levels. But, for almost everything else, we're rebuilding a brand new company. And that is what Meg and the board are doing, it's really exciting. >> Well, it's true the last couple of Discovers there was a distraction with the split, there was a distraction with two spin-merges. But you've now seen the M&A activity focus on areas like storage, areas like converge, type or converge. >> I always tell this story 'cause you guys like my analogies which is, you know, when you've got lots of kids in your family, my family, my oldest I've got lots of pictures of. The middle kid, you know, some pictures of. The third one virtually no pictures of, right? 'Cause you go from man to man defense, to zone defense. Same is true with a CEO. When you've got seven or eight different things to manage, you're focused, it needs to be spread over seven different or eight things. Now, Meg is actually, got fewer children to manage if you roll the analogy out a little bit. We got a lot of her attention, and a lot of focus. And that I think is really, really important. >> Dave: And now all the pictures are digital, they're in the cloud, they're protected. >> Bill: Yeah. >> Bill, great to see you. >> Good to see you guys. >> Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, we'll see you in Vegas. >> Bill: You bet. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech-coverage. This is day one of our continuous coverage of VeeamON, continuous coverage of continuous data protection. Big theme here today. Maria Olson is here, she's the vice president of Global & Strategic Alliances at NetApp. Andy Vandeveld is back, he's the vice president of Global Alliances at Veeam. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Thank you, nice to be here. >> Thank you. >> So, first of all, let's start with Maria. So VeeamON, big show, a lot of action. How's it going? >> You know, the energy here is amazing here. I remember being at VeeamON years before, and what I see here in terms of the number of customers and partners, and starting to see the big growth in the enterprise market. And all the announcements and innovation that they've made today is fantastic. >> There's like a groundswell right? We've been following NetApp for years. You guys have the best snapshot technology in the marketplace, customers love it and very efficient, and have always had an interesting take on data protection. And data fabric obviously is a big theme of NetApp these days, so explain that to us and we can get into how you guys partner. >> Sure absolutely, so most companies think of us as a storage company, but we really have evolved from a storage company to a data management company. We have a full portfolio of products, including all of our All Flash FAS offerings. We did an acquisition, which was our largest acquisition with SolidFire as well. We also have back up to Cloud offerings with our AltaVault offering that backs up to Azure and Amazon. We have StorageGRID Webscale. We have a very full, large portfolio. What all this allows customers to do, and where NetApp is heading is in terms of being able to manage and move the date, regardless of where it's at. So I call this, the gold opportunity. I just came back from SAPPHIRE, you talk to Bill McDermott, he talks about how data's gold. You heard the same thing here with Peter McKay as well. And to me the whole thing, it doesn't matter if the gold's there, you got to be able to manage it, and monetize, and do something with it. And that's what NetApp helps provide. >> So Andy, that sounds very consistent with the strategy that Veeam is putting forth. >> Yes. >> That we heard certainly this morning, and throughout this conference. So what's the partnership? Where do you pick up and NetApp leave off, or vice versa? >> Well, so in the date protection space, it's the ability to manage the data, to make sure that it's getting into a form that can be stored and accessed and available as quickly as possible, is really what we're focusing on. And to do that, we need partners like NetApp, who have the infrastructure assets that we can leverage. Particularly as we move more and more into the enterprise business with enterprise customers. Those customer's are spitting off a lot of data. They need their data to be available as quickly as possible in the case of an outage or some other disruption to their business. And to do that, Veeam needs infrastructure partners that have robust portfolios that can handle that sort of requirement, and that's where the relationship with NetApp comes into play. And it's been very good for us over the years. >> I like this notion of data fabric, has a connotation of fluidity, and it sort of reminds me of the Veeam Waves here a little bit. So explain more Maria, if you will, the data fabric, what is that concept, how are customers actually getting value out of it? >> Absolutely, so data fabric was more of a framework, right? We don't have a SKU that you just go buy data fabric. It's really a framework and a portfolio of products, integrated with our ecosystem of partners like Veeam, to be able to manage and move the data. Regardless if it's on PRIM, or where they want to go as part of their digital transformation. So customers are all at different phases in terms of where they want to go, in terms of becoming more of a digitally-oriented business. And we help get them there through the journey, because of the strength that we have on the on premise side, as well as the integrations that we've done with our partner ecosystem, specifically with Veeam and others. So we can help move them in that direction. >> So take that a little bit further, in terms of, so the customer sees this vast portfolio. Andy you were talking before about NetApps infrastructure. It's pretty vast, it's a leader in it's space. What are they asking you guys for? What are they challenging you to do? Specifically in the context of data protection. >> So customers are asking us, number one, make sure that it's simple. And that's one of the big value props that Veeam makes, number one. >> And NetApp over the years. >> And NetApp too. That it's always on and available. That there is no disaster that occurs, that the data is there, that we know where it is, that we can manage it, we can back it up. Those are the big things. The third things customers are asking for, is help us in terms of, how do we digitally transform our business? It's the business outcome that they're looking for. Of which, the products that NetApp and Veeam does, is a subset of that, that helps them on that journey. So they can actually digitally migrate, and become more of a digitally-oriented business, with our offerings helping in the whole backup and recovery and whole data management space. >> Yeah and I would just sort of tag onto that, customer's consumption models are changing. So they're on PRIM, they're in a private Cloud, they're in a public Cloud. The way that they consume is changing, and it's different. And no two look the same. And I think what customers are telling us is, let us decide how we're going to consume. You just be able to accommodate that consumption. And that's really what we've been focusing on. So if it's in an on PRIM environment, great. If it's in a public Cloud, fantastic. If it's some hybrid model, that's great too. We can accommodate that, and that's really what customers are asking us. As well as making sure that we accommodate the various business models that exist. So whether it's purchasing licenses, or some subscription-based models or whatever, they want that flexibility and that's what they're asking us to provide. >> Maria, I'm wondering if you have any joint customers that you're highlighting here at the show, or any specific examples you might be able to walk us through. >> So we have several joint customers, as a matter of fact, you heard Peter McKay talk about 210,000 customers. Of those, 30% are NetApp, so it's a very big area. And now, in terms of some of the announcements they've made, in terms of supporting NaaS, in terms of physical environment. NetApp is the leader in that space, so it's even going to become broader. So you saw today, in terms of Peter McKay talking about the Denver Broncos, that's a big NetApp customer in terms of the solutions that they have there. Also, Telefónica was announced there. Very large service provider. It's another very big NetApp customer. So there's a lot of customers in the enterprise space. Veeam's more known in terms of the s and v space, but when you start to look at the momentum they've had in going up the stack, there's a lot of enterprise customers that we actually are jointly engaging with. >> I would just say that the more that we penetrate the enterprise market and the service provider market, the more that we're going to need partnerships like we have with NetApp. To become stronger, because they're the trusted advisors, the ones that the customers are listening to. It's easier for us just to ride on their coattails into these opportunities than to try to create these relationships all ourselves. That's what makes this such a great partnership for us. >> The Cloud service customer channel base has come up a couple times today. But we haven't really explored some of the fundamental assumptions behind it. And what I want to ask you guys is, everybody sees the ascendancy of Amazon. Very impressive, amazing growth. Yet at the same time, your respective Cloud service provider businesses are also growing very rapidly. >> Maria: Very much. >> So you've got the disruption to the traditional legacy enterprise business we all have covered that very well. But there's not much been discussed about what's going to happen within the Cloud business. There's maybe some camp that says, okay everything's going to go to Amazon and I think many people believe that. But what's happening within the Cloud service provider base? It seems to be quite fragmented, which is a good thing for you guys. It seems to be local in nature, very specialized services, and ability to compete with Amazon and Azure, because they're not competing necessarily with scale volume, they're competing in other ways. So I wonder if you could help us unpack that a little bit. As to what's happening in your respective bases there. >> Yeah, so we're seeing a lot of momentum in the service provider space. So we've sold a lot of storage and data management over to what the large new service providers of the world. The IBM SoftLayers, the Azures, Google Cloud Platform. All of them as well as the existing ones, the AT&Ts and the Verizons and Telefónicas of the world. And so we continue to see a fragmentation there. You kind of have the new world service providers, and the old world service providers. And they're all trying to figure out the business model, so they can make sure that they're all going to be there over the next 20, 25 years to see how this whole game evolves. But we have a big footprint in both of those camps. And as a matter of fact, one of the things I love about the relationship between NetApp an Veeam, is we're companies that are embracing Cloud. We're not fighting Cloud, we're really trying to embrace it. So we have multiple offerings in terms of NetApp across our storage and date management, across all the new emerging Cloud players, and the existing one. And Veeam also has pretty deep relationships. They just announced today in offerings with AWS, and with Microsoft Azure as well. >> Dave: Anything you'd add Andy? >> Yeah, I think you're right about the market being a little bit more fragmented. There are smaller, more specialized Cloud providers. And there's a set of customers that want that. So I think it kind of gets back to the point that I was making earlier, which is the consumption models are changing. And who they consume from, in terms of Cloud, is not 100% consistent, and so we need to be able to deliver the technology that can accommodate whatever that decision is that the customer makes. >> From a partnership perspective, how does something like this start? And what do you, I mean obviously you say, let's go to market together. That's a logical starting point, but then there's maybe some other integration that has to take place. What do you guys sort of set out to accomplish? What are the milestones, the metrics, that you try to, how do you measure success on a partnership like this? How do you know when it's going to work, and is working? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Number one, you first have to have alignment in terms of what solutions you're going to go out there and build. And I think part of the secret of the success of the relationship, if you think back in terms of, NetApp made a big bet in virtualized environments. In doing big differentiated offerings with VMware. Even though their owned by EMC. And we we're extremely successful, 50,000 joint customers. You look at Veeam, they made a big bet with VMware, so our installed basis and the co-nih-va-tion and development that we've done already there, is already paid off there in spades. So number one, you got to have the co-nih-va-tion and the solution that you're building. The second thing is an aligned go-to-market, in terms of what is our go-to-market plan, how are we doing that through the channel? Is it a comprehensive program? What does that look like? And then it comes down to people at the end of the day, and the culture. Do the companies have really good cultures and people that really want to go at, and execute those plans? >> Yeah, and we have strong alignment at the executive levels as well, which helps. Because you need to have that sort of strategic vision, you're looking out 18 months, 24 months. Are we in alignment? And I think that helps. I would say another strong metric for Veeam is our Net Promoter Score, we're 73, it's off the charts, it's fantastic. That doesn't happen if you're not delivering the right solutions with the right set of partners. And to us, that's just another metric of, how successful are these partnerships? Particularly the one that we have with NetApp. >> And actually, I looked at NetApps Net Promoter Score, and we're 64, so we're way up there as well. So that's another area that we're very aligned as well. >> You know NPS is interesting. If you're, you're not really a one-product company, but you're smaller, and so it's easier to have a high NPS when you're smaller. Now, of course you've got on-tap. >> I wanted to be on that graph up there on the key note. >> That's pretty good. (group laughing) I was at ServiceNow last week, and they have a very happy customer base, and they were touting their, I think 53 NPS. And that's, so 60's for a company the size of NetApp. And you guys, like you say, off the charts. So that's impressive, go ahead Stu. >> Yeah just the last piece you talked about, some of the announcements that were made that impact, including in v 10, there's going to be NaaS. We look forward, anything that we should be looking to measure success of the partnerships, and anything that your companies are working on together that you can speak to. >> Well I think at the end of the day, it's customers and revenue. Ensuring that that continues to grow. Veeam's on fire, they've got 210,000 customers, they're growing at 450-- >> 245,000 at the end of-- >> 45, and every day they're adding 200 customers a day. >> Peter corrected me. (group laughing) >> Right, yeah exactly, so I really think we measure it by customers and revenue, in terms of how we're driving. And then new solution areas, like I said, with Cloud we're very aligned in both companies, embracing Cloud. Big opportunity to go after some of these service provider areas. >> Yeah, I think we're going to continue to focus on delivering joint solutions. That's really kind of, if I had to put my finger on one thing, watch this space. It's joint solutions we want to put out to the marketplace that are going to benefit our customers. >> All right, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you. >> All right, thank you. >> Thank you. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back, rockin' New Orleans with theCube VeeamON 2017. (upbeat techno music) (keyboard typing)