(upbeat intro music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm your host, John Furrier, here in Palo Alto, California. Got a special remote guest coming in. Teresa Carlson, President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport, theCUBE alumni, one of the first, let me go back to 2013, Teresa, former AWS. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh my gosh, almost 10 years. That is unbelievable. It's hard to believe so many years of theCUBE. I love it. >> It's been such a great honor to interview you and follow your career. You've had quite the impressive run, executive level woman in tech. You've done such an amazing job, not only in your career, but also helping other women. So I want to give you props to that before we get started. Thank you. >> Thank you, John. I, it's my, it's been my honor and privilege. >> Let's talk about Flexport. Tell us about your new role there and what it's all about. >> Well, I love it. I'm back working with another Amazonian, Dave Clark, who is our CEO of Flexport, and we are about 3,000 people strong globally in over 90 countries. We actually even have, we're represented in over 160 cities and with local governments and places around the world, which I think is super exciting. We have over 100 network partners and growing, and we are about empowering the global supply chain and trade and doing it in a very disruptive way with the use of platform technology that allows our customers to really have visibility and insight to what's going on. And it's a lot of fun. I'm learning new things, but there's a lot of technology in this as well, so I feel right at home. >> You quite have a knack from mastering growth, technology, and building out companies. So congratulations, and scaling them up too with the systems and processes. So I want to get into that. Let's get into your personal background. Then I want to get into the work you've done and are doing for empowering women in tech. What was your journey about, how did it all start? Like, I know you had a, you know, bumped into it, you went Microsoft, AWS. Take us through your career, how you got into tech, how it all happened. >> Well, I do like to give a shout out, John, to my roots and heritage, which was a speech and language pathologist. So I did start out in healthcare right out of, you know, university. I had an undergraduate and a master's degree. And I do tell everyone now, looking back at my career, I think it was super helpful for me because I learned a lot about human communication, and it has done me very well over the years to really try to understand what environments I'm in and what kind of individuals around the world culturally. So I'm really blessed that I had that opportunity to work in healthcare, and by the way, a shout out to all of our healthcare workers that has helped us get through almost three years of COVID and flu and neurovirus and everything else. So started out there and then kind of almost accidentally got into technology. My first small company I worked for was a company called Keyfile Corporation, which did workflow and document management out of Nashua, New Hampshire. And they were a Microsoft goal partner. And that is actually how I got into big tech world. We ran on exchange, for everybody who knows that term exchange, and we were a large small partner, but large in the world of exchange. And those were the days when you would, the late nineties, you would go and be in the same room with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. And I really fell in love with Microsoft back then. I thought to myself, wow, if I could work for a big tech company, I got to hear Bill on stage about saving, he would talk about saving the world. And guess what my next step was? I actually got a job at Microsoft, took a pay cut and a job downgrade. I tell this story all the time. Took like three downgrades in my role. I had been a SVP and went to a manager, and it's one of the best moves I ever made. And I shared that because I really didn't know the world of big tech, and I had to start from the ground up and relearn it. I did that, I just really loved that job. I was at Microsoft from 2000 to 2010, where I eventually ran all of the U.S. federal government business, which was a multi-billion dollar business. And then I had the great privilege of meeting an amazing man, Andy Jassy, who I thought was just unbelievable in his insights and knowledge and openness to understanding new markets. And we talked about government and how government needed the same great technology as every startup. And that led to me going to work for Andy in 2010 and starting up our worldwide public sector business. And I pinch myself some days because we went from two people, no offices, to the time I left we had over 10,000 people, billions in revenue, and 172 countries and had done really amazing work. I think changing the way public sector and government globally really thought about their use of technology and Cloud computing in general. And that kind of has been my career. You know, I was there till 2020, 21 and then did a small stint at Splunk, a small stint back at Microsoft doing a couple projects for Microsoft with CEO, Satya Nadella, who is also an another amazing CEO and leader. And then Dave called me, and I'm at Flexport, so I couldn't be more honored, John. I've just had such an amazing career working with amazing individuals. >> Yeah, I got to say the Amazon One well-documented, certainly by theCUBE and our coverage. We watched you rise and scale that thing. And like I said at a time, this will when we look back as a historic run because of the build out. I mean as a zero to massive billions at a historic time where government was transforming, I would say Microsoft had a good run there with Fed, but it was already established stuff. Federal business was like, you know, blocking and tackling. The Amazon was pure build out. So I have to ask you, what was your big learnings? Because one, you're a Seattle big tech company kind of entrepreneurial in the sense of you got, here's some working capital seed finance and go build that thing, and you're in DC and you're a woman. What did you learn? >> I learned that you really have to have a lot of grit. You, my mom and dad, these are kind of more southern roots words, but stick with itness, you know. you can't give up and no's not in your vocabulary. I found no is just another way to get to yes. That you have to figure out what are all the questions people are going to ask you. I learned to be very patient, and I think one of the things John, for us was our secret sauce was we said to ourselves, if we're going to do something super transformative and truly disruptive, like Cloud computing, which the government really had not utilized, we had to be patient. We had to answer all their questions, and we could not judge in any way what they were thinking because if we couldn't answer all those questions and prove out the capabilities of Cloud computing, we were not going to accomplish our goals. And I do give so much credit to all my colleagues there from everybody like Steve Schmidt who was there, who's still there, who's the CISO, and Charlie Bell and Peter DeSantis and the entire team there that just really helped build that business out. Without them, you know, we would've just, it was a team effort. And I think that's the thing I loved about it was it was not just sales, it was product, it was development, it was data center operations, it was legal, finance. Everybody really worked as a team and we were on board that we had to make a lot of changes in the government relations team. We had to go into Capitol Hill. We had to talk to them about the changes that were required and really get them to understand why Cloud computing could be such a transformative game changer for the way government operates globally. >> Well, I think the whole world and the tech world can appreciate your work and thank you later because you broke down those walls asking those questions. So great stuff. Now I got to say, you're in kind of a similar role at Flexport. Again, transformative supply chain, not new. Computing wasn't new when before Cloud came. Supply chain, not a new concept, is undergoing radical change and transformation. Online, software supply chain, hardware supply chain, supply chain in general, shipping. This is a big part of our economy and how life is working. Similar kind of thing going on, build out, growth, scale. >> It is, it's very much like that, John, I would say, it's, it's kind of a, the model with freight forwarding and supply chain is fairly, it's not as, there's a lot of technology utilized in this global supply chain world, but it's not integrated. You don't have a common operating picture of what you're doing in your global supply chain. You don't have easy access to the information and visibility. And that's really, you know, I was at a conference last week in LA, and it was, the themes were so similar about transparency, access to data and information, being able to act quickly, drive change, know what was happening. I was like, wow, this sounds familiar. Data, AI, machine learning, visibility, common operating picture. So it is very much the same kind of themes that you heard even with government. I do believe it's an industry that is going through transformation and Flexport has been a group that's come in and said, look, we have this amazing idea, number one to give access to everyone. We want every small business to every large business to every government around the world to be able to trade their goods, think about supply chain logistics in a very different way with information they need and want at their fingertips. So that's kind of thing one, but to apply that technology in a way that's very usable across all systems from an integration perspective. So it's kind of exciting. I used to tell this story years ago, John, and I don't think Michael Dell would mind that I tell this story. One of our first customers when I was at Keyfile Corporation was we did workflow and document management, and Dell was one of our customers. And I remember going out to visit them, and they had runners and they would run around, you know, they would run around the floor and do their orders, right, to get all those computers out the door. And when I think of global trade, in my mind I still see runners, you know, running around and I think that's moved to a very digital, right, world that all this stuff, you don't need people doing this. You have machines doing this now, and you have access to the information, and you know, we still have issues resulting from COVID where we have either an under-abundance or an over-abundance of our supply chain. We still have clogs in our shipping, in the shipping yards around the world. So we, and the ports, so we need to also, we still have some clearing to do. And that's the reason technology is important and will continue to be very important in this world of global trade. >> Yeah, great, great impact for change. I got to ask you about Flexport's inclusion, diversity, and equity programs. What do you got going on there? That's been a big conversation in the industry around keeping a focus on not making one way more than the other, but clearly every company, if they don't have a strong program, will be at a disadvantage. That's well reported by McKinsey and other top consultants, diverse workforces, inclusive, equitable, all perform better. What's Flexport's strategy and how are you guys supporting that in the workplace? >> Well, let me just start by saying really at the core of who I am, since the day I've started understanding that as an individual and a female leader, that I could have an impact. That the words I used, the actions I took, the information that I pulled together and had knowledge of could be meaningful. And I think each and every one of us is responsible to do what we can to make our workplace and the world a more diverse and inclusive place to live and work. And I've always enjoyed kind of the thought that, that I could help empower women around the world in the tech industry. Now I'm hoping to do my little part, John, in that in the supply chain and global trade business. And I would tell you at Flexport we have some amazing women. I'm so excited to get to know all. I've not been there that long yet, but I'm getting to know we have some, we have a very diverse leadership team between men and women at Dave's level. I have some unbelievable women on my team directly that I'm getting to know more, and I'm so impressed with what they're doing. And this is a very, you know, while this industry is different than the world I live in day to day, it's also has a lot of common themes to it. So, you know, for us, we're trying to approach every day by saying, let's make sure both our interviewing cycles, the jobs we feel, how we recruit people, how we put people out there on the platforms, that we have diversity and inclusion and all of that every day. And I can tell you from the top, from Dave and all of our leaders, we just had an offsite and we had a big conversation about this is something. It's a drum beat that we have to think about and live by every day and really check ourselves on a regular basis. But I do think there's so much more room for women in the world to do great things. And one of the, one of the areas, as you know very well, we lost a lot of women during COVID, who just left the workforce again. So we kind of went back unfortunately. So we have to now move forward and make sure that we are giving women the opportunity to have great jobs, have the flexibility they need as they build a family, and have a workplace environment that is trusted for them to come into every day. >> There's now clear visibility, at least in today's world, not withstanding some of the setbacks from COVID, that a young girl can look out in a company and see a path from entry level to the boardroom. That's a big change. A lot than even going back 10, 15, 20 years ago. What's your advice to the folks out there that are paying it forward? You see a lot of executive leaderships have a seat at the table. The board still underrepresented by most numbers, but at least you have now kind of this solidarity at the top, but a lot of people doing a lot more now than I've seen at the next levels down. So now you have this leveled approach. Is that something that you're seeing more of? And credit compare and contrast that to 20 years ago when you were, you know, rising through the ranks? What's different? >> Well, one of the main things, and I honestly do not think about it too much, but there were really no women. There were none. When I showed up in the meetings, I literally, it was me or not me at the table, but at the seat behind the table. The women just weren't in the room, and there were so many more barriers that we had to push through, and that has changed a lot. I mean globally that has changed a lot in the U.S. You know, if you look at just our U.S. House of Representatives and our U.S. Senate, we now have the increasing number of women. Even at leadership levels, you're seeing that change. You have a lot more women on boards than we ever thought we would ever represent. While we are not there, more female CEOs that I get an opportunity to see and talk to. Women starting companies, they do not see the barriers. And I will share, John, globally in the U.S. one of the things that I still see that we have that many other countries don't have, which I'm very proud of, women in the U.S. have a spirit about them that they just don't see the barriers in the same way. They believe that they can accomplish anything. I have two sons, I don't have daughters. I have nieces, and I'm hoping someday to have granddaughters. But I know that a lot of my friends who have granddaughters today talk about the boldness, the fortitude, that they believe that there's nothing they can't accomplish. And I think that's what what we have to instill in every little girl out there, that they can accomplish anything they want to. The world is theirs, and we need to not just do that in the U.S., but around the world. And it was always the thing that struck me when I did all my travels at AWS and now with Flexport, I'm traveling again quite a bit, is just the differences you see in the cultures around the world. And I remember even in the Middle East, how I started seeing it change. You've heard me talk a lot on this program about the fact in both Saudi and Bahrain, over 60% of the tech workers were females and most of them held the the hardest jobs, the security, the architecture, the engineering. But many of them did not hold leadership roles. And that is what we've got to change too. To your point, the middle, we want it to get bigger, but the top, we need to get bigger. We need to make sure women globally have opportunities to hold the most precious leadership roles and demonstrate their capabilities at the very top. But that's changed. And I would say the biggest difference is when we show up, we're actually evaluated properly for those kind of roles. We have a ways to go. But again, that part is really changing. >> Can you share, Teresa, first of all, that's great work you've done and I wan to give you props of that as well and all the work you do. I know you champion a lot of, you know, causes in in this area. One question that comes up a lot, I would love to get your opinion 'cause I think you can contribute heavily here is mentoring and sponsorship is huge, comes up all the time. What advice would you share to folks out there who were, I won't say apprehensive, but maybe nervous about how to do the networking and sponsorship and mentoring? It's not just mentoring, it's sponsorship too. What's your best practice? What advice would you give for the best way to handle that? >> Well yeah, and for the women out there, I would say on the mentorship side, I still see mentorship. Like, I don't think you can ever stop having mentorship. And I like to look at my mentors in different parts of my life because if you want to be a well-rounded person, you may have parts of your life every day that you think I'm doing a great job here and I definitely would like to do better there. Whether it's your spiritual life, your physical life, your work life, you know, your leisure life. But I mean there's, and there's parts of my leadership world that I still seek advice from as I try to do new things even in this world. And I tried some new things in between roles. I went out and asked the people that I respected the most. So I just would say for sure have different mentorships and don't be afraid to have that diversity. But if you have mentorships, the second important thing is show up with a real agenda and questions. Don't waste people's time. I'm very sensitive today. If you're, if you want a mentor, you show up and you use your time super effectively and be prepared for that. Sponsorship is a very different thing. And I don't believe we actually do that still in companies. We worked, thank goodness for my great HR team. When I was at AWS, we worked on a few sponsorship programs where for diversity in general, where we would nominate individuals in the company that we felt that weren't, that had a lot of opportunity for growth, but they just weren't getting a seat at the table. And we brought 'em to the table. And we actually kind of had a Chatham House rules where when they came into the meetings, they had a sponsor, not a mentor. They had a sponsor that was with them the full 18 months of this program. We would bring 'em into executive meetings. They would read docs, they could ask questions. We wanted them to be able to open up and ask crazy questions without, you know, feeling wow, I just couldn't answer this question in a normal environment or setting. And then we tried to make sure once they got through the program that we found jobs and support and other special projects that they could go do. But they still had that sponsor and that group of individuals that they'd gone through the program with, John, that they could keep going back to. And I remember sitting there and they asked me what I wanted to get out of the program, and I said two things. I want you to leave this program and say to yourself, I would've never had that experience if I hadn't gone through this program. I learned so much in 18 months. It would probably taken me five years to learn. And that it helped them in their career. The second thing I told them is I wanted them to go out and recruit individuals that look like them. I said, we need diversity, and unless you all feel that we are in an inclusive environment sponsoring all types of individuals to be part of this company, we're not going to get the job done. And they said, okay. And you know, but it was really one, it was very much about them. That we took a group of individuals that had high potential and a very diverse with diverse backgrounds, held 'em up, taught 'em things that gave them access. And two, selfishly I said, I want more of you in my business. Please help me. And I think those kind of things are helpful, and you have to be thoughtful about these kind of programs. And to me that's more sponsorship. I still have people reach out to me from years ago, you know, Microsoft saying, you were so good with me, can you give me a reference now? Can you talk to me about what I should be doing? And I try to, I'm not pray 100%, some things pray fall through the cracks, but I always try to make the time to talk to those individuals because for me, I am where I am today because I got some of the best advice from people like Don Byrne and Linda Zecker and Andy Jassy, who were very honest and upfront with me about my career. >> Awesome. Well, you got a passion for empowering women in tech, paying it forward, but you're quite accomplished and that's why we're so glad to have you on the program here. President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport. Obviously storied career and your other jobs, specifically Amazon I think, is historic in my mind. This next chapter looks like it's looking good right now. Final question for you, for the few minutes you have left. Tell us what you're up to at Flexport. What's your goals as President, Chief Commercial Officer? What are you trying to accomplish? Share a little bit, what's on your mind with your current job? >> Well, you kind of said it earlier. I think if I look at my own superpowers, I love customers, I love partners. I get my energy, John, from those interactions. So one is to come in and really help us build even a better world class enterprise global sales and marketing team. Really listen to our customers, think about how we interact with them, build the best executive programs we can, think about new ways that we can offer services to them and create new services. One of my favorite things about my career is I think if you're a business leader, it's your job to come back around and tell your product group and your services org what you're hearing from customers. That's how you can be so much more impactful, that you listen, you learn, and you deliver. So that's one big job. The second job for me, which I am so excited about, is that I have an amazing group called flexport.org under me. And flexport.org is doing amazing things around the world to help those in need. We just announced this new funding program for Tech for Refugees, which brings assistance to millions of people in Ukraine, Pakistan, the horn of Africa, and those who are affected by earthquakes. We just took supplies into Turkey and Syria, and Flexport, recently in fact, just did sent three air shipments to Turkey and Syria for these. And I think we did over a hundred trekking shipments to get earthquake relief. And as you can imagine, it was not easy to get into Syria. But you know, we're very active in the Ukraine, and we are, our goal for flexport.org, John, is to continue to work with our commercial customers and team up with them when they're trying to get supplies in to do that in a very cost effective, easy way, as quickly as we can. So that not-for-profit side of me that I'm so, I'm so happy. And you know, Ryan Peterson, who was our founder, this was his brainchild, and he's really taken this to the next level. So I'm honored to be able to pick that up and look for new ways to have impact around the world. And you know, I've always found that I think if you do things right with a company, you can have a beautiful combination of commercial-ity and giving. And I think Flexport does it in such an amazing and unique way. >> Well, the impact that they have with their system and their technology with logistics and shipping and supply chain is a channel for societal change. And I think that's a huge gift that you have that under your purview. So looking forward to finding out more about flexport.org. I can only imagine all the exciting things around sustainability, and we just had Mobile World Congress for Big Cube Broadcast, 5Gs right around the corner. I'm sure that's going to have a huge impact to your business. >> Well, for sure. And just on gas emissions, that's another thing that we are tracking gas, greenhouse gas emissions. And in fact we've already reduced more than 300,000 tons and supported over 600 organizations doing that. So that's a thing we're also trying to make sure that we're being climate aware and ensuring that we are doing the best job we can at that as well. And that was another thing I was honored to be able to do when we were at AWS, is to really cut out greenhouse gas emissions and really go global with our climate initiatives. >> Well Teresa, it's great to have you on. Security, data, 5G, sustainability, business transformation, AI all coming together to change the game. You're in another hot seat, hot roll, big wave. >> Well, John, it's an honor, and just thank you again for doing this and having women on and really representing us in a big way as we celebrate International Women's Day. >> I really appreciate it, it's super important. And these videos have impact, so we're going to do a lot more. And I appreciate your leadership to the industry and thank you so much for taking the time to contribute to our effort. Thank you, Teresa. >> Thank you. Thanks everybody. >> Teresa Carlson, the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Flexport. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is International Women's Day broadcast. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. As you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications and data workloads resilient on the cloud?" Meaning  how is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep. >> Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - There's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright upbeat music plays) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of MWC '23, my name is Dave Vellante. Just left a meeting with the CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins, to meet with Jeetu Patel, who's our Executive Vice President and General Manager of security and collaboration at Cisco. Good to see you. >> You never leave a meeting with Chuck Robbins to meet with Jeetu Patel. >> Well, I did. >> That's a bad idea. >> Walked right out. I said, hey, I got an interview to do, right? So, and I'm excited about this. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. >> So, I mean you run such an important part of the business. I mean, obviously the collaboration business but also security. So many changes going on in the security market. Maybe we could start there. I mean, there hasn't been a ton of security talk here Jeetu, because I think it's almost assumed. It was 45 minutes into the keynote yesterday before anybody even mentioned security. >> Huh. >> Right? And so, but it's the most important topic in the enterprise IT world. And obviously is important here. So why is it you think that it's not the first topic that people mention. >> You know, it's a complicated subject area and it's intimidating. And actually that's one of the things that the industry screwed up on. Where we need to simplify security so it actually gets to be relatable for every person on the planet. But, if you think about what's happening in security, it's not just important for business it's critical infrastructure that if you had a breach, you know lives are cost now. Because hospitals could go down, your water supply could go down, your electricity could go down. And so it's one of these things that we have to take pretty seriously. And, it's 51% of all breaches happen because of negligence, not because of malicious intent. >> It's that low. Interesting. I always- >> Someone else told me the same thing, that they though it'd be higher, yeah. >> I always say bad user behavior is going to trump good security every time. >> Every single time. >> You can't beat it. But, you know, it's funny- >> Jeetu: Every single time. >> Back, the earlier part of last decade, you could see that security was becoming a board level issue. It became, it was on the agenda every quarter. And, I remember doing some research at the time, and I asked, I was interviewing Robert Gates, former Defense Secretary, and I asked him, yeah, but we're getting attacked but don't we have the best offense? Can't we have the best technology? He said, yeah but we have so much critical infrastructure the risks to United States are higher. So we have to be careful about how we use security as an offensive weapon, you know? And now you're seeing the future of war involves security and what's going on in Ukraine. It's a whole different ballgame. >> It is, and the scales always tip towards the adversary, not towards the defender, because you have to be right every single time. They have to be right once. >> Yeah. And, to the other point, about bad user behavior. It's going now beyond the board level, to it's everybody's responsibility. >> That's right. >> And everybody's sort of aware of it, everybody's been hacked. And, that's where it being such a complicated topic is problematic. >> It is, and it's actually, what got us this far will not get us to where we need to get to if we don't simplify security radically. You know? The experience has to be almost invisible. And what used to be the case was sophistication had to get to a certain level, for efficacy to go up. But now, that sophistication has turned to complexity. And there's an inverse relationship between complexity and efficacy. So the simpler you make security, the more effective it gets. And so I'll give you an example. We have this great kind of innovation we've done around passwordless, right? Everyone hates passwords. You shouldn't have passwords in 2023. But, when you get to passwordless security, not only do you reduce a whole lot of friction for the user, you actually make the system safer. And that's what you need to do, is you have to make it simpler while making it more effective. And, I think that's what the future is going to hold. >> Yeah, and CISOs tell me that they're, you know zero trust before the pandemic was like, yeah, yeah zero trust. And now it's like a mandate. >> Yeah. >> Every CISO you talk to says, yes we're implementing a zero trust architecture. And a big part of that is that, if they can confirm zero trust, they can get to market a lot faster with revenue generating or critical projects. And many projects as we know are being pushed back, >> Yeah. >> you know? 'Cause of the macro. But, projects that drive revenue and value they want to accelerate, and a zero trust confirmation allows people to rubber stamp it and go faster. >> And the whole concept of zero trust is least privileged access, right? But what we want to make sure that we get to is continuous assessment of least privileged access, not just a one time at login. >> Dave: 'Cause things change so frequently. >> So, for example, if you happen to be someone that's logged into the system and now you start doing some anomalous behavior that doesn't sound like Dave, we want to be able to intercept, not just do it at the time that you're authenticating Dave to come in. >> So you guys got a good business. I mentioned the macro before. >> Yeah. >> The big theme is consolidating redundant vendors. So a company with a portfolio like Cisco's obviously has an advantage there. You know, you guys had great earnings. Palo Alto is another company that can consolidate. Tom Gillis, great pickup. Guy's amazing, you know? >> Love Tom. >> Great respect. Just had a little webinar session with him, where he was geeking out with the analyst and so- >> Yeah, yeah. >> Learned a lot there. Now you guys have some news, at the event event with Mercedes? >> We do. >> Take us through that, and I want to get your take on hybrid work and what's happening there. But what's going on with Mercedes? >> Yeah so look, it all actually stems from the hybrid work story, which is the future is going to be hybrid, people are going to work in mixed mode. Sometimes you'll be in the office, sometimes at home, sometimes somewhere in the middle. One of the places that people are working more and more from is their cars. And connected cars are getting to be a reality. And in fact, cars sometimes become an extension of your home office. And many a times I have found myself in a parking lot, because I didn't have enough time to get home and I was in a parking lot taking a conference call. And so we've made that section easier, because we have now partnered with Mercedes. And they aren't the first partner, but they're a very important partner where we are going to have Webex available, through the connected car, natively in Mercedes. >> Ah, okay. So I could take a call, I can do it all the time. I find good service, pull over, got to take the meeting. >> Yeah. >> I don't want to be driving. I got to concentrate. >> That's right. >> You know, or sometimes, I'll have the picture on and it's not good. >> That's right. >> Okay, so it'll be through the console, and all through the internet? >> It'll be through the console. And many people ask me like, how's safety going to work over that? Because you don't want to do video calls while you're driving. Exactly right. So when you're driving, the video automatically turns off. And you'll have audio going on, just like a conference call. But the moment you stop and put it in park, you can have video turned on. >> Now, of course the whole hybrid work trend, we, seems like a long time ago but it doesn't, you know? And it's really changed the security dynamic as well, didn't it? >> It has, it has. >> I mean, immediately you had to go protect new endpoints. And those changes, I felt at the time, were permanent. And I think it's still the case, but there's an equilibrium now happening. People as they come back to the office, you see a number of companies are mandating back to work. Maybe the central offices, or the headquarters, were underfunded. So what's going on out there in terms of that balance? >> Well firstly, there's no unanimous consensus on the way that the future is going to be, except that it's going to be hybrid. And the reason I say that is some companies mandate two days a week, some companies mandate five days a week, some companies don't mandate at all. Some companies are completely remote. But whatever way you go, you want to make sure that regardless of where you're working from, people can have an inclusive experience. You know? And, when they have that experience, you want to be able to work from a managed device or an unmanaged device, from a corporate network or from a Starbucks, from on the road or stationary. And whenever you do any of those things, we want to make sure that security is always handled, and you don't have to worry about that. And so the way that we say it is the company that created the VPN, which is Cisco, is the one that's going to kill it. Because what we'll do is we'll make it simple enough so that you don't, you as a user, never have to worry about what connection you're going to use to dial in to what app. You will have one, seamless way to dial into any application, public application, private application, or directly to the internet. >> Yeah, I got a love, hate with my VPN. I mean, it's protecting me, but it's in the way a lot. >> It's going to be simple as ever. >> Do you have kids? >> I do, I have a 12 year old daughter. >> Okay, so not quite high school age yet. She will be shortly. >> No, but she's already, I'm not looking forward to high school days, because she has a very, very strong sense of debate and she wins 90% of the arguments. >> So when my kids were that age, I've got four kids, but the local high school banned Wikipedia, they can't use Wikipedia for research. Many colleges, I presume high schools as well, they're banning Chat GPT, can't use it. Now at the same time, I saw recently on Medium a Wharton school professor said he's mandating Chat GPT to teach his students how to prompt in progressively more sophisticated prompts, because the future is interacting with machines. You know, they say in five years we're all going to be interacting in some way, shape, or form with AI. Maybe we already are. What's the intersection between AI and security? >> So a couple very, very consequential things. So firstly on Chat GPT, the next generation skill is going to be to learn how to go out and have the right questions to ask, which is the prompt revolution that we see going on right now. But if you think about what's happening in security, and there's a few areas which are, firstly 3,500 hundred vendors in this space. On average, most companies have 50 to 70 vendors in security. Not a single vendor owns more than 10% of the market. You take out a couple vendors, no one owns more than 5%. Highly fractured market. That's a problem. Because it's untenable for companies to go out and manage 70 policy engines. And going out and making sure that there's no contention. So as you move forward, one of the things that Chat GPT will be really good for is it's fundamentally going to change user experiences, for how software gets built. Because rather than it being point and click, it's going to be I'm going to provide an instruction and it's going to tell me what to do in natural language. Imagine Dave, when you joined a company if someone said, hey give Dave all the permissions that he needs as a direct report to Chuck. And instantly you would get all of the permissions. And it would actually show up in a screen that says, do you approve? And if you hit approve, you're done. The interfaces of the future will get more natural language kind of dominated. The other area that you'll see is the sophistication of attacks and the surface area of attacks is increasing quite exponentially. And we no longer can handle this with human scale. You have to handle it in machine scale. So detecting breaches, making sure that you can effectively and quickly respond in real time to the breaches, and remediate those breaches, is all going to happen through AI and machine learning. >> So, I agree. I mean, just like Amazon turned the data center into an API, I think we're now going to be interfacing with technology through human language. >> That's right. >> I mean I think it's a really interesting point you're making. Now, from a security standpoint as well, I mean, the state of the art today in my email is be careful, this person's outside your organization. I'm like, yeah I know. So it's a good warning sign, but it's really not automated in any way. So two part question. One is, can AI help? You know, with the phishing, obviously it can, but the bad guys have AI too. >> Yeah. >> And they're probably going to be smarter than I am about using it. >> Yeah, and by the way, Talos is our kind of threat detection and response >> Yes. >> kind of engine. And, they had a great kind of piece that came out recently where they talked about this, where Chat GPT, there is going to be more sophistication of the folks that are the bad actors, the adversaries in using Chat GPT to have more sophisticated phishing attacks. But today it's not something that is fundamentally something that we can't handle just yet. But you still need to do the basic hygiene. That's more important. Over time, what you will see is attacks will get more bespoke. And in order, they'll get more sophisticated. And, you will need to have better mechanisms to know that this was actually not a human being writing that to you, but it was actually a machine pretending to be a human being writing something to you. And that you'll have to be more clever about it. >> Oh interesting. >> And so, you will see attacks get more bespoke and we'll have to get smarter and smarter about it. >> The other thing I wanted to ask you before we close is you're right on. I mean you take the top security vendors and they got a single digit market share. And it's like it's untenable for organizations, just far too many tools. We have a partner at ETR, they do quarterly survey research and one of the things they do is survey emerging technology companies. And when we look at in the security sector just the number of emerging technology companies that are focused on cybersecurity is as many as there are out there already. And so, there's got to be consolidation. Maybe that's through M & A. I mean, what do you think happens? Are company's going to go out of business? There's going to be a lot of M & A? You've seen a lot of companies go private. You know, the big PE companies are sucking up all these security companies and may be ready to spit 'em out and go back public. How do you see the landscape? You guys are obviously an inquisitive company. What are your thoughts on that? >> I think there will be a little bit of everything. But the biggest change that you'll see is a shift that's going to happen with an integrated platform, rather than point solution vendors. So what's going to happen is the market's going to consolidate towards very few, less than a half a dozen, integrated platforms. We believe Cisco is going to be one. Microsoft will be one. There'll be others over there. But these, this platform will essentially be able to provide a unified kind of policy engine across a multitude of different services to protect multiple different entities within the organization. And, what we found is that platform will also be something that'll provide, through APIs, the ability for third parties to be able to get their technology incorporated in, and their telemetry ingested. So we certainly intend to do that. We don't believe, we are not arrogant enough to think that every single new innovation will be built by us. When there's someone else who has built that, we want to make sure that we can ingest that telemetry as well, because the real enemy is not the competitor. The real enemy is the adversary. And we all have to get together, so that we can keep humanity safe. >> Do you think there's been enough collaboration in the industry? I mean- >> Jeetu: Not nearly enough. >> We've seen companies, security companies try to monetize private data before, instead of maybe sharing it with competitors. And so I think the industry can do better there. >> Well I think the industry can do better. And we have this concept called the security poverty line. And the security poverty line is the companies that fall below the security poverty line don't have either the influence or the resources or the know how to keep themselves safe. And when they go unsafe, everyone else that communicates with them also gets that exposure. So it is in our collective interest for all of us to make sure that we come together. And, even if Palo Alto might be a competitor of ours, we want to make sure that we invite them to say, let's make sure that we can actually exchange telemetry between our companies. And we'll continue to do that with as many companies that are out there, because actually that's better for the market, that's better for the world. >> The enemy of the enemy is my friend, kind of thing. >> That's right. >> Now, as it relates to, because you're right. I mean I, I see companies coming up, oh, we do IOT security. I'm like, okay, but what about cloud security? Do you that too? Oh no, that's somebody else. But, so that's another stove pipe. >> That's a huge, huge advantage of coming with someone like Cisco. Because we actually have the entire spectrum, and the broadest portfolio in the industry of anyone else. From the user, to the device, to the network, to the applications, we provide the entire end-to-end story for security, which then has the least amount of cracks that you can actually go out and penetrate through. The biggest challenges that happen in security is you've got way too many policy engines with way too much contention between the policies from these different systems. And eventually there's a collision course. Whereas with us, you've actually got a broad portfolio that operates as one platform. >> We were talking about the cloud guys earlier. You mentioned Microsoft. They're obviously a big competitor in the security space. >> Jeetu: But also a great partner. >> So that's right. To my opinion, the cloud has been awesome as a first line of defense if you will. But the shared responsibility model it's different for each cloud, right? So, do you feel that those guys are working together or will work together to actually improve? 'Cause I don't see that yet. >> Yeah so if you think about, this is where we feel like we have a structural advantage in this, because what does a company like Cisco become in the future? I think as the world goes multicloud and hybrid cloud, what'll end up happening is there needs to be a way, today all the CSPs provide everything from storage to computer network, to security, in their own stack. If we can abstract networking and security above them, so that we can acquire and steer any and all traffic with our service providers and steer it to any of those CSPs, and make sure that the security policy transcends those clouds, you would actually be able to have the public cloud economics without the public cloud lock-in. >> That's what we call super cloud Jeetu. It's securing the super cloud. >> Yeah. >> Hey, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Really appreciate you coming on our editorial program. >> Such a pleasure. >> All right, great to see you again. >> Cheers. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante with David Nicholson and Lisa Martin. We'll be back, right after this short break from MWC '23 live, in the Fira, in Barcelona. (bright music resumes) (music fades out)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Native SecurityCon North America 2023. Obviously, CUBE's coverage with our CUBE Center Report. We're not there on the ground, but we have folks and our CUBE Alumni there. We have entrepreneurs there. Of course, we want to be there in person, but we're remote. We've got Ben Hirschberg, CTO and Co-Founder of Armo, a cloud native security startup, well positioned in this industry. He's there in Seattle. Ben, thank you for coming on and sharing what's going on with theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's great to be here, John. >> So we had written on you guys up on SiliconANGLE. Congratulations on your momentum and traction. But let's first get into what's going on there on the ground? What are some of the key trends? What's the most important story being told there? What is the vibe? What's the most important story right now? >> So I think, I would like to start here with the I think the most important thing was that I think the event is very successful. Usually, the Cloud Native Security Day usually was part of KubeCon in the previous years and now it became its own conference of its own and really kudos to all the organizers who brought this up in, actually in a short time. And it wasn't really clear how many people will turn up, but at the end, we see a really nice turn up and really great talks and keynotes around here. I think that one of the biggest trends, which haven't started like in this conference, but already we're talking for a while is supply chain. Supply chain is security. I think it's, right now, the biggest trend in the talks, in the keynotes. And I think that we start to see companies, big companies, who are adopting themselves into this direction. There is a clear industry need. There is a clear problem and I think that the cloud native security teams are coming up with tooling around it. I think for right now we see more tools than adoption, but the adoption is always following the tooling. And I think it already proves itself. So we have just a very interesting talk this morning about the OpenSSL vulnerability, which was I think around Halloween, which came out and everyone thought that it's going to be a critical issue for the whole cloud native and internet infrastructure and at the end it turned out to be a lesser problem, but the reason why I think it was understood that to be a lesser problem real soon was that because people started to use (indistinct) store software composition information in the environment so security teams could look into, look up in their systems okay, what, where they're using OpenSSL, which version they are using. It became really soon real clear that this version is not adopted by a wide array of software out there so the tech surface is relatively small and I think it already proved itself that the direction if everyone is talking about. >> Yeah, we agree, we're very bullish on this move from the Cloud Native Foundation CNCF that do the security conference. Amazon Web Services has re:Invent. That's their big show, but they also have re:Inforce, the security show, so clearly they work together. I like the decoupling, very cohesive. But you guys have Kubescape of Kubernetes security. Talk about the conversations that are there and that you're hearing around why there's different event what's different around KubeCon and CloudNativeCon than this Cloud Native SecurityCon. It's not called KubeSucSecCon, it's called Cloud Native SecurityCon. What's the difference? Are people confused? Is it clear? What's the difference between the two shows? What are you hearing? >> So I think that, you know, there is a good question. Okay, where is Cloud Native Computing Foundation came from? Obviously everyone knows that it was somewhat coupled with the adoption of Kubernetes. It was a clear understanding in the industry that there are different efforts where the industry needs to come together without looking be very vendor-specific and try to sort out a lot of issues in order to enable adoption and bring great value and I think that the main difference here between KubeCon and the Cloud Native Security Conference is really the focus, and not just on Kubernetes, but the whole ecosystem behind that. The way we are delivering software, the way we are monitoring software, and all where Kubernetes is only just, you know, maybe the biggest clog in the system, but, you know, just one of the others and it gives great overview of what you have in the whole ecosystem. >> Yeah, I think it's a good call. I would add that what I'm hearing too is that security is so critical to the business model of every company. It's so mainstream. The hackers have a great business model. They make money, their costs are lower than the revenue. So the business of hacking in breaches, ransomware all over the place is so successful that they're playing offense, everyone's playing defense, so it's about time we can get focus to really be faster and more nimble and agile on solving some of these security challenges in open source. So I think that to me is a great focus and so I give total props to the CNC. I call it the event operating system. You got the security group over here decoupled from the main kernel, but they work together. Good call and so this brings back up to some of the things that are going on so I have to ask you, as your startup as a CTO, you guys have the Kubescape platform, how do you guys fit into the landscape and what's different from your tools for Kubernetes environments versus what's out there? >> So I think that our journey is really interesting in the solution space because I think that our mode really tries to understand where security can meet the actual adoption because as you just said, somehow we have to sort out together how security is going to be automated and integrated in its best way. So Kubescape project started as a Kubernetes security posture tool. Just, you know, when people are really early in their adoption of Kubernetes systems, they want to understand whether the installation is is secure, whether the basic configurations are look okay, and giving them instant feedback on that, both in live systems and in the CICD, this is where Kubescape came from. We started as an open source project because we are big believers of open source, of the power of open source security, and I can, you know I think maybe this is my first interview when I can say that Kubescape was accepted to be a CNCF Sandbox project so Armo was actually donating the project to the CNCF, I think, which is a huge milestone and a great way to further the adoption of Kubernetes security and from now on we want to see where the users in Armo and Kubescape project want to see where the users are going, their Kubernetes security journey and help them to automatize, help them to to implement security more fast in the way the developers are using it working. >> Okay, if you don't mind, I want to just get clarification. What's the difference between the Armo platform and Kubescape because you have Kubescape Sandbox project and Armo platform. Could you talk about the differences and interaction? >> Sure, Kubescape is an open source project and Armo platform is actually a managed platform which runs Kubescape in the cloud for you because Kubescape is part, it has several parts. One part is, which is running inside the Kubernetes cluster in the CICD processes of the user, and there is another part which we call the backend where the results are stored and can be analyzed further. So Armo platform gives you managed way to run the backend, but I can tell you that backend is also, will be available within a month or two also for everyone to install on their premises as well, because again, we are an open source company and we are, we want to enable users, so the difference is that Armo platform is a managed platform behind Kubescape. >> How does Kubescape differ from closed proprietary sourced solutions? >> So I can tell you that there are closed proprietary solutions which are very good security solutions, but I think that the main difference, if I had to pick beyond the very specific technicalities is the worldview. The way we see that our user is not the CISO. Our user is not necessarily the security team. From our perspective, the user is the DevOps and the developers who are working on the Kubernetes cluster day to day and we want to enable them to improve their security. So actually our approach is more developer-friendly, if I would need to define it very shortly. >> What does this risk calculation score you guys have in Kubscape? That's come up and we cover that in our story. Can you explain to the folks how that fits in? Is it Kubescape is the platform and what's the benefit, what's the purpose? >> So the risk calculation is actually a score we are giving to clusters in order for the users to understand where they are standing in the general population, how they are faring against a perfect hardened cluster. It is based on the number of different tests we are making. And I don't want to go into, you know, the very specifics of the mathematical functions, but in general it takes into account how many functions are failing, security tests are failing inside your cluster. How many nodes you are having, how many workloads are having, and creating this number which enables you to understand where you are standing in the global, in the world. >> What's the customer value that you guys pitching? What's the pitch for the Armo platform? When you go and talk to a customer, are they like, "We need you." Do they come to you? Is it word of mouth? You guys have a strategy? What's the pitch? What's so appealing to the customers? Why are they enthusiastic about you guys? >> So John, I can tell you, maybe it's not so easy to to say the words, but I nearly 20 years in the industry and though I've been always around cyber and the defense industry and I can tell you that I never had this journey where before where I could say that the the customers are coming to us and not we are pitching to customers. Simply because people want to, this is very easy tool, very very easy to use, very understandable and it very helps the engineers to improve security posture. And they're coming to us and they're saying, "Well, awesome, okay, how we can like use it. Do you have a graphical interface?" And we are pointing them to the Armor platform and they are falling in love and coming to us even more and we can tell you that we have a big number of active users behind the platform itself. >> You know, one of the things that comes up every time at KubeCon and Cloud NativeCon when we're there, and we'll be in Amsterdam, so folks watching, you know, we'll see onsite, developer productivity is like the number one thing everyone talks about and security is so important. It's become by default a blocker or anchor or a drag on productivity. This is big, the things that you're mentioning, easy to use, engineering supporting it, developer adoption, you know we've always said on theCUBE, developers will be the de facto standards bodies by their choices 'cause developers make all the decisions. So if I can go faster and I can have security kind of programmed in, I'm not shifting left, it's just I'm just having security kind of in there. That's the dream state. Is that what you guys are trying to do here? Because that's the nirvana, everyone wants to do that. >> Yeah, I think your definition is like perfect because really we had like this, for a very long time we had this world where we decoupled security teams from developers and even for sometimes from engineering at all and I think for multiple reasons, we are more seeing a big convergence. Security teams are becoming part of the engineering and the engineering becoming part of the security and as you're saying, okay, the day-to-day world of developers are becoming very tangled up in the good way with security, so the think about it that today, one of my developers at Armo is creating a pull request. He's already, code is already scanned by security scanners for to test for different security problems. It's already, you know, before he already gets feedback on his first time where he's sharing his code and if there is an issue, he already can solve it and this is just solving issues much faster, much cheaper, and also you asked me about, you know, the wipe in the conference and we know no one can deny the current economic wipe we have and this also relates to security teams and security teams has to be much more efficient. And one of the things that everyone is talking, okay, we need more automation, we need more, better tooling and I think we are really fitting into this. >> Yeah, and I talked to venture capitalists yesterday and today, an angel investor. Best time for startup is right now and again, open source is driving a lot of value. Ben, it's been great to have you on and sharing with us what's going on on the ground there as well as talking about some of the traction you have. Just final question, how old's the company? How much funding do you have? Where you guys located? Put a plug in for the company. You guys looking to hire? Tell us about the company. Were you guys located? How much capital do you have? >> So, okay, the company's here for three years. We've passed a round last March with Tiger and Hyperwise capitals. We are located, most of the company's located today in Israel in Tel Aviv, but we have like great team also in Ukraine and also great guys are in Europe and right now also Craig Box joined us as an open source VP and he's like right now located in New Zealand, so we are a really global team, which I think it's really helps us to strengthen ourselves. >> Yeah, and I think this is the entrepreneurial equation for the future. It's really great to see that global. We heard that in Priyanka Sharma's keynote. It's a global culture, global community. >> Right. >> And so really, really props you guys. Congratulations on Armo and thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing insights and expertise and also what's happening on the ground. Appreciate it, Ben, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay, cheers. Okay, this is CUB coverage here of the Cloud Native SecurityCon in North America 2023. I'm John Furrier for Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We're back with more of wrap up of the event after this short break. (gentle upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Recent conversations with IT decision makers show a stark contrast between exiting 2023 versus the mindset when we were leaving 2022. CIOs are generally funding new initiatives by pushing off or cutting lower priority items, while security efforts are still being funded. Those that enable business initiatives that generate revenue or taking priority over cleaning up legacy technical debt. The bottom line is, for the moment, at least, the mindset is not cut everything, rather, it's put a pause on cleaning up legacy hairballs and fund monetization. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we tap recent discussions from two primary sources, year-end ETR roundtables with IT decision makers, and CUBE conversations with data, cloud, and IT architecture practitioners. The sources of data for this breaking analysis come from the following areas. Eric Bradley's recent ETR year end panel featured a financial services DevOps and SRE manager, a CSO in a large hospitality firm, a director of IT for a big tech company, the head of IT infrastructure for a financial firm, and a CTO for global travel enterprise, and for our upcoming Supercloud2 conference on January 17th, which you can register free by the way, at supercloud.world, we've had CUBE conversations with data and cloud practitioners, specifically, heads of data in retail and financial services, a cloud architect and a biotech firm, the director of cloud and data at a large media firm, and the director of engineering at a financial services company. Now we've curated commentary from these sources and now we share them with you today as anecdotal evidence supporting what we've been reporting on in the marketplace for these last couple of quarters. On this program, we've likened the economy to the slingshot effect when you're driving, when you're cruising along at full speed on the highway, and suddenly you see red brake lights up ahead, so, you tap your own brakes and then you speed up again, and traffic is moving along at full speed, so, you think nothing of it, and then, all of a sudden, the same thing happens. You slow down to a crawl and you start wondering, "What the heck is happening?" And you become a lot more cautious about the rate of acceleration when you start moving again. Well, that's the trend in IT spend right now. Back in June, we reported that despite the macro headwinds, CIOs were still expecting 6% to 7% spending growth for 2022. Now that was down from 8%, which we reported at the beginning of 2022. That was before Ukraine, and Fed tightening, but given those two factors, you know that that seemed pretty robust, but throughout the fall, we began reporting consistently declining expectations where CIOs are now saying Q4 will come in at around 3% growth relative to last year, and they're expecting, or should we say hoping that it pops back up in 2023 to 4% to 5%. The recent ETR panelists, when they heard this, are saying based on their businesses and discussions with their peers, they could see low single digit growth for 2023, so, 1%, 2%, 3%, so, this sort of slingshotting, or sometimes we call it a seesaw economy, has caught everyone off guard. Amazon is a good example of this, and there are others, but Amazon entered the pandemic with around 800,000 employees. It doubled that workforce during the pandemic. Now, right before Thanksgiving in 2022, Amazon announced that it was laying off 10,000 employees, and, Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, just last week announced that number is now going to grow to 18,000. Now look, this is a rounding error at Amazon from a headcount standpoint and their headcount remains far above 2019 levels. Its stock price, however, does not and it's back down to 2019 levels. The point is that visibility is very poor right now and it's reflected in that uncertainty. We've seen a lot of layoffs, obviously, the stock market's choppy, et cetera. Now importantly, not everything is on hold, and this downturn is different from previous tech pullbacks in that the speed at which new initiatives can be rolled out is much greater thanks to the cloud, and if you can show a fast return, you're going to get funding. Organizations are pausing on the cleanup of technical debt, unless it's driving fast business value. They're holding off on modernization projects. Those business enablement initiatives are still getting funded. CIOs are finding the money by consolidating redundant vendors, and they're stealing from other pockets of budget, so, it's not surprising that cybersecurity remains the number one technology priority in 2023. We've been reporting that for quite some time now. It's specifically cloud, cloud native security container and API security. That's where all the action is, because there's still holes to plug from that forced march to digital that occurred during COVID. Cloud migration, kind of showing here on number two on this chart, still a high priority, while optimizing cloud spend is definitely a strategy that organizations are taking to cut costs. It's behind consolidating redundant vendors by a long shot. There's very little evidence that cloud repatriation, i.e., moving workloads back on prem is a major cost cutting trend. The data just doesn't show it. What is a trend is getting more real time with analytics, so, companies can do faster and more accurate customer targeting, and they're really prioritizing that, obviously, in this down economy. Real time, we sometimes lose it, what's real time? Real time, we sometimes define as before you lose the customer. Now in the hiring front, customers tell us they're still having a hard time finding qualified site reliability engineers, SREs, Kubernetes expertise, and deep analytics pros. These job markets remain very tight. Let's stay with security for just a moment. We said many times that, prior to COVID, zero trust was this undefined buzzword, and the joke, of course, is, if you ask three people, "What is zero trust?" You're going to get three different answers, but the truth is that virtually every security company that was resisting taking a position on zero trust in an attempt to avoid... They didn't want to get caught up in the buzzword vortex, but they're now really being forced to go there by CISOs, so, there are some good quotes here on cyber that we want to share that came out of the recent conversations that we cited up front. The first one, "Zero trust is the highest ROI, because it enables business transformation." In other words, if I can have good security, I can move fast, it's not a blocker anymore. Second quote here, "ZTA," zero trust architecture, "Is more than securing the perimeter. It encompasses strong authentication and multiple identity layers. It requires taking a software approach to security instead of a hardware focus." The next one, "I'd love to have a security data lake that I could apply to asset management, vulnerability management, incident management, incident response, and all aspects for my security team. I see huge promise in that space," and the last one, I see NLP, natural language processing, as the foundation for email security, so, instead of searching for IP addresses, you can now read emails at light speed and identify phishing threats, so, look at, this is a small snapshot of the mindset around security, but I'll add, when you talk to the likes of CrowdStrike, and Zscaler, and Okta, and Palo Alto Networks, and many other security firms, they're listening to these narratives around zero trust. I'm confident they're working hard on skating to this puck, if you will. A good example is this idea of a security data lake and using analytics to improve security. We're hearing a lot about that. We're hearing architectures, there's acquisitions in that regard, and so, that's becoming real, and there are many other examples, because data is at the heart of digital business. This is the next area that we want to talk about. It's obvious that data, as a topic, gets a lot of mind share amongst practitioners, but getting data right is still really hard. It's a challenge for most organizations to get ROI and expected return out of data. Most companies still put data at the periphery of their businesses. It's not at the core. Data lives within silos or different business units, different clouds, it's on-prem, and increasingly it's at the edge, and it seems like the problem is getting worse before it gets better, so, here are some instructive comments from our recent conversations. The first one, "We're publishing events onto Kafka, having those events be processed by Dataproc." Dataproc is a Google managed service to run Hadoop, and Spark, and Flank, and Presto, and a bunch of other open source tools. We're putting them into the appropriate storage models within Google, and then normalize the data into BigQuery, and only then can you take advantage of tools like ThoughtSpot, so, here's a company like ThoughtSpot, and they're all about simplifying data, democratizing data, but to get there, you have to go through some pretty complex processes, so, this is a good example. All right, another comment. "In order to use Google's AI tools, we have to put the data into BigQuery. They haven't integrated in the way AWS and Snowflake have with SageMaker. Moving the data is too expensive, time consuming, and risky," so, I'll just say this, sharing data is a killer super cloud use case, and firms like Snowflake are on top of it, but it's still not pretty across clouds, and Google's posture seems to be, "We're going to let our database product competitiveness drive the strategy first, and the ecosystem is going to take a backseat." Now, in a way, I get it, owning the database is critical, and Google doesn't want to capitulate on that front. Look, BigQuery is really good and competitive, but you can't help but roll your eyes when a CEO stands up, and look, I'm not calling out Thomas Kurian, every CEO does this, and talks about how important their customers are, and they'll do whatever is right by the customer, so, look, I'm telling you, I'm rolling my eyes on that. Now let me also comment, AWS has figured this out. They're killing it in database. If you take Redshift for example, it's still growing, as is Aurora, really fast growing services and other data stores, but AWS realizes it can make more money in the long-term partnering with the Snowflakes and Databricks of the world, and other ecosystem vendors versus sub optimizing their relationships with partners and customers in order to sell more of their own homegrown tools. I get it. It's hard not to feature your own product. IBM chose OS/2 over Windows, and tried for years to popularize it. It failed. Lotus, go back way back to Lotus 1, 2, and 3, they refused to run on Windows when it first came out. They were running on DEC VAX. Many of you young people in the United States have never even heard of DEC VAX. IBM wanted to run every everything only in its cloud, the same with Oracle, originally. VMware, as you might recall, tried to build its own cloud, but, eventually, when the market speaks and reveals what seems to be obvious to analysts, years before, the vendors come around, they face reality, and they stop wasting money, fighting a losing battle. "The trend is your friend," as the saying goes. All right, last pull quote on data, "The hardest part is transformations, moving traditional Informatica, Teradata, or Oracle infrastructure to something more modern and real time, and that's why people still run apps in COBOL. In IT, we rarely get rid of stuff, rather we add on another coat of paint until the wood rots out or the roof is going to cave in. All right, the last key finding we want to highlight is going to bring us back to the cloud repatriation myth. Followers of this program know it's a real sore spot with us. We've heard the stories about repatriation, we've read the thoughtful articles from VCs on the subject, we've been whispered to by vendors that you should investigate this trend. It's really happening, but the data simply doesn't support it. Here's the question that was posed to these practitioners. If you had unlimited budget and the economy miraculously flipped, what initiatives would you tackle first? Where would you really lean into? The first answer, "I'd rip out legacy on-prem infrastructure and move to the cloud even faster," so, the thing here is, look, maybe renting infrastructure is more expensive than owning, maybe, but if I can optimize my rental with better utilization, turn off compute, use things like serverless, get on a steeper and higher performance over time, and lower cost Silicon curve with things like Graviton, tap best of breed tools in AI, and other areas that make my business more competitive. Move faster, fail faster, experiment more quickly, and cheaply, what's that worth? Even the most hard-o CFOs understand the business benefits far outweigh the possible added cost per gigabyte, and, again, I stress "possible." Okay, other interesting comments from practitioners. "I'd hire 50 more data engineers and accelerate our real-time data capabilities to better target customers." Real-time is becoming a thing. AI is being injected into data and apps to make faster decisions, perhaps, with less or even no human involvement. That's on the rise. Next quote, "I'd like to focus on resolving the concerns around cloud data compliance," so, again, despite the risks of data being spread out in different clouds, organizations realize cloud is a given, and they want to find ways to make it work better, not move away from it. The same thing in the next one, "I would automate the data analytics pipeline and focus on a safer way to share data across the states without moving it," and, finally, "The way I'm addressing complexity is to standardize on a single cloud." MonoCloud is actually a thing. We're hearing this more and more. Yes, my company has multiple clouds, but in my group, we've standardized on a single cloud to simplify things, and this is a somewhat dangerous trend, because it's creating even more silos and it's an opportunity that needs to be addressed, and that's why we've been talking so much about supercloud is a cross-cloud, unifying, architectural framework, or, perhaps, it's a platform. In fact, that's a question that we will be exploring later this month at Supercloud2 live from our Palo Alto Studios. Is supercloud an architecture or is it a platform? And in this program, we're featuring technologists, analysts, practitioners to explore the intersection between data and cloud and the future of cloud computing, so, you don't want to miss this opportunity. Go to supercloud.world. You can register for free and participate in the event directly. All right, thanks for listening. That's a wrap. I'd like to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages our podcast, Ken Schiffman as well, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they helped get the word out on social media, and in our newsletters, and Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at siliconangle.com. He does some great editing. Thank you, all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you've got to do is search "breaking analysis podcasts." I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com where you can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me, @Dante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. By all means, check out etr.ai. They get the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. We'll be doing our annual predictions post in a few weeks, once the data comes out from the January survey. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everybody, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (upbeat music)

>>From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and E T R. This is breaking analysis with Dave Valante. >>Making technology predictions in 2022 was tricky business, especially if you were projecting the performance of markets or identifying I P O prospects and making binary forecast on data AI and the macro spending climate and other related topics in enterprise tech 2022, of course was characterized by a seesaw economy where central banks were restructuring their balance sheets. The war on Ukraine fueled inflation supply chains were a mess. And the unintended consequences of of forced march to digital and the acceleration still being sorted out. Hello and welcome to this week's weekly on Cube Insights powered by E T R. In this breaking analysis, we continue our annual tradition of transparently grading last year's enterprise tech predictions. And you may or may not agree with our self grading system, but look, we're gonna give you the data and you can draw your own conclusions and tell you what, tell us what you think. >>All right, let's get right to it. So our first prediction was tech spending increases by 8% in 2022. And as we exited 2021 CIOs, they were optimistic about their digital transformation plans. You know, they rushed to make changes to their business and were eager to sharpen their focus and continue to iterate on their digital business models and plug the holes that they, the, in the learnings that they had. And so we predicted that 8% rise in enterprise tech spending, which looked pretty good until Ukraine and the Fed decided that, you know, had to rush and make up for lost time. We kind of nailed the momentum in the energy sector, but we can't give ourselves too much credit for that layup. And as of October, Gartner had it spending growing at just over 5%. I think it was 5.1%. So we're gonna take a C plus on this one and, and move on. >>Our next prediction was basically kind of a slow ground ball. The second base, if I have to be honest, but we felt it was important to highlight that security would remain front and center as the number one priority for organizations in 2022. As is our tradition, you know, we try to up the degree of difficulty by specifically identifying companies that are gonna benefit from these trends. So we highlighted some possible I P O candidates, which of course didn't pan out. S NQ was on our radar. The company had just had to do another raise and they recently took a valuation hit and it was a down round. They raised 196 million. So good chunk of cash, but, but not the i p O that we had predicted Aqua Securities focus on containers and cloud native. That was a trendy call and we thought maybe an M SS P or multiple managed security service providers like Arctic Wolf would I p o, but no way that was happening in the crummy market. >>Nonetheless, we think these types of companies, they're still faring well as the talent shortage in security remains really acute, particularly in the sort of mid-size and small businesses that often don't have a sock Lacework laid off 20% of its workforce in 2022. And CO C e o Dave Hatfield left the company. So that I p o didn't, didn't happen. It was probably too early for Lacework. Anyway, meanwhile you got Netscope, which we've cited as strong in the E T R data as particularly in the emerging technology survey. And then, you know, I lumia holding its own, you know, we never liked that 7 billion price tag that Okta paid for auth zero, but we loved the TAM expansion strategy to target developers beyond sort of Okta's enterprise strength. But we gotta take some points off of the failure thus far of, of Okta to really nail the integration and the go to market model with azero and build, you know, bring that into the, the, the core Okta. >>So the focus on endpoint security that was a winner in 2022 is CrowdStrike led that charge with others holding their own, not the least of which was Palo Alto Networks as it continued to expand beyond its core network security and firewall business, you know, through acquisition. So overall we're gonna give ourselves an A minus for this relatively easy call, but again, we had some specifics associated with it to make it a little tougher. And of course we're watching ve very closely this this coming year in 2023. The vendor consolidation trend. You know, according to a recent Palo Alto network survey with 1300 SecOps pros on average organizations have more than 30 tools to manage security tools. So this is a logical way to optimize cost consolidating vendors and consolidating redundant vendors. The E T R data shows that's clearly a trend that's on the upswing. >>Now moving on, a big theme of 2020 and 2021 of course was remote work and hybrid work and new ways to work and return to work. So we predicted in 2022 that hybrid work models would become the dominant protocol, which clearly is the case. We predicted that about 33% of the workforce would come back to the office in 2022 in September. The E T R data showed that figure was at 29%, but organizations expected that 32% would be in the office, you know, pretty much full-time by year end. That hasn't quite happened, but we were pretty close with the projection, so we're gonna take an A minus on this one. Now, supply chain disruption was another big theme that we felt would carry through 2022. And sure that sounds like another easy one, but as is our tradition, again we try to put some binary metrics around our predictions to put some meat in the bone, so to speak, and and allow us than you to say, okay, did it come true or not? >>So we had some data that we presented last year and supply chain issues impacting hardware spend. We said at the time, you can see this on the left hand side of this chart, the PC laptop demand would remain above pre covid levels, which would reverse a decade of year on year declines, which I think started in around 2011, 2012. Now, while demand is down this year pretty substantially relative to 2021, I D C has worldwide unit shipments for PCs at just over 300 million for 22. If you go back to 2019 and you're looking at around let's say 260 million units shipped globally, you know, roughly, so, you know, pretty good call there. Definitely much higher than pre covid levels. But so what you might be asking why the B, well, we projected that 30% of customers would replace security appliances with cloud-based services and that more than a third would replace their internal data center server and storage hardware with cloud services like 30 and 40% respectively. >>And we don't have explicit survey data on exactly these metrics, but anecdotally we see this happening in earnest. And we do have some data that we're showing here on cloud adoption from ET R'S October survey where the midpoint of workloads running in the cloud is around 34% and forecast, as you can see, to grow steadily over the next three years. So this, well look, this is not, we understand it's not a one-to-one correlation with our prediction, but it's a pretty good bet that we were right, but we gotta take some points off, we think for the lack of unequivocal proof. Cause again, we always strive to make our predictions in ways that can be measured as accurate or not. Is it binary? Did it happen, did it not? Kind of like an O K R and you know, we strive to provide data as proof and in this case it's a bit fuzzy. >>We have to admit that although we're pretty comfortable that the prediction was accurate. And look, when you make an hard forecast, sometimes you gotta pay the price. All right, next, we said in 2022 that the big four cloud players would generate 167 billion in IS and PaaS revenue combining for 38% market growth. And our current forecasts are shown here with a comparison to our January, 2022 figures. So coming into this year now where we are today, so currently we expect 162 billion in total revenue and a 33% growth rate. Still very healthy, but not on our mark. So we think a w s is gonna miss our predictions by about a billion dollars, not, you know, not bad for an 80 billion company. So they're not gonna hit that expectation though of getting really close to a hundred billion run rate. We thought they'd exit the year, you know, closer to, you know, 25 billion a quarter and we don't think they're gonna get there. >>Look, we pretty much nailed Azure even though our prediction W was was correct about g Google Cloud platform surpassing Alibaba, Alibaba, we way overestimated the performance of both of those companies. So we're gonna give ourselves a C plus here and we think, yeah, you might think it's a little bit harsh, we could argue for a B minus to the professor, but the misses on GCP and Alibaba we think warrant a a self penalty on this one. All right, let's move on to our prediction about Supercloud. We said it becomes a thing in 2022 and we think by many accounts it has, despite the naysayers, we're seeing clear evidence that the concept of a layer of value add that sits above and across clouds is taking shape. And on this slide we showed just some of the pickup in the industry. I mean one of the most interesting is CloudFlare, the biggest supercloud antagonist. >>Charles Fitzgerald even predicted that no vendor would ever use the term in their marketing. And that would be proof if that happened that Supercloud was a thing and he said it would never happen. Well CloudFlare has, and they launched their version of Supercloud at their developer week. Chris Miller of the register put out a Supercloud block diagram, something else that Charles Fitzgerald was, it was was pushing us for, which is rightly so, it was a good call on his part. And Chris Miller actually came up with one that's pretty good at David Linthicum also has produced a a a A block diagram, kind of similar, David uses the term metacloud and he uses the term supercloud kind of interchangeably to describe that trend. And so we we're aligned on that front. Brian Gracely has covered the concept on the popular cloud podcast. Berkeley launched the Sky computing initiative. >>You read through that white paper and many of the concepts highlighted in the Supercloud 3.0 community developed definition align with that. Walmart launched a platform with many of the supercloud salient attributes. So did Goldman Sachs, so did Capital One, so did nasdaq. So you know, sorry you can hate the term, but very clearly the evidence is gathering for the super cloud storm. We're gonna take an a plus on this one. Sorry, haters. Alright, let's talk about data mesh in our 21 predictions posts. We said that in the 2020s, 75% of large organizations are gonna re-architect their big data platforms. So kind of a decade long prediction. We don't like to do that always, but sometimes it's warranted. And because it was a longer term prediction, we, at the time in, in coming into 22 when we were evaluating our 21 predictions, we took a grade of incomplete because the sort of decade long or majority of the decade better part of the decade prediction. >>So last year, earlier this year, we said our number seven prediction was data mesh gains momentum in 22. But it's largely confined and narrow data problems with limited scope as you can see here with some of the key bullets. So there's a lot of discussion in the data community about data mesh and while there are an increasing number of examples, JP Morgan Chase, Intuit, H S P C, HelloFresh, and others that are completely rearchitecting parts of their data platform completely rearchitecting entire data platforms is non-trivial. There are organizational challenges, there're data, data ownership, debates, technical considerations, and in particular two of the four fundamental data mesh principles that the, the need for a self-service infrastructure and federated computational governance are challenging. Look, democratizing data and facilitating data sharing creates conflicts with regulatory requirements around data privacy. As such many organizations are being really selective with their data mesh implementations and hence our prediction of narrowing the scope of data mesh initiatives. >>I think that was right on J P M C is a good example of this, where you got a single group within a, within a division narrowly implementing the data mesh architecture. They're using a w s, they're using data lakes, they're using Amazon Glue, creating a catalog and a variety of other techniques to meet their objectives. They kind of automating data quality and it was pretty well thought out and interesting approach and I think it's gonna be made easier by some of the announcements that Amazon made at the recent, you know, reinvent, particularly trying to eliminate ET t l, better connections between Aurora and Redshift and, and, and better data sharing the data clean room. So a lot of that is gonna help. Of course, snowflake has been on this for a while now. Many other companies are facing, you know, limitations as we said here and this slide with their Hadoop data platforms. They need to do new, some new thinking around that to scale. HelloFresh is a really good example of this. Look, the bottom line is that organizations want to get more value from data and having a centralized, highly specialized teams that own the data problem, it's been a barrier and a blocker to success. The data mesh starts with organizational considerations as described in great detail by Ash Nair of Warner Brothers. So take a listen to this clip. >>Yeah, so when people think of Warner Brothers, you always think of like the movie studio, but we're more than that, right? I mean, you think of H B O, you think of t n t, you think of C N N. We have 30 plus brands in our portfolio and each have their own needs. So the, the idea of a data mesh really helps us because what we can do is we can federate access across the company so that, you know, CNN can work at their own pace. You know, when there's election season, they can ingest their own data and they don't have to, you know, bump up against, as an example, HBO if Game of Thrones is going on. >>So it's often the case that data mesh is in the eyes of the implementer. And while a company's implementation may not strictly adhere to Jamma Dani's vision of data mesh, and that's okay, the goal is to use data more effectively. And despite Gartner's attempts to deposition data mesh in favor of the somewhat confusing or frankly far more confusing data fabric concept that they stole from NetApp data mesh is taking hold in organizations globally today. So we're gonna take a B on this one. The prediction is shaping up the way we envision, but as we previously reported, it's gonna take some time. The better part of a decade in our view, new standards have to emerge to make this vision become reality and they'll come in the form of both open and de facto approaches. Okay, our eighth prediction last year focused on the face off between Snowflake and Databricks. >>And we realized this popular topic, and maybe one that's getting a little overplayed, but these are two companies that initially, you know, looked like they were shaping up as partners and they, by the way, they are still partnering in the field. But you go back a couple years ago, the idea of using an AW w s infrastructure, Databricks machine intelligence and applying that on top of Snowflake as a facile data warehouse, still very viable. But both of these companies, they have much larger ambitions. They got big total available markets to chase and large valuations that they have to justify. So what's happening is, as we've previously reported, each of these companies is moving toward the other firm's core domain and they're building out an ecosystem that'll be critical for their future. So as part of that effort, we said each is gonna become aggressive investors and maybe start doing some m and a and they have in various companies. >>And on this chart that we produced last year, we studied some of the companies that were targets and we've added some recent investments of both Snowflake and Databricks. As you can see, they've both, for example, invested in elation snowflake's, put money into Lacework, the Secur security firm, ThoughtSpot, which is trying to democratize data with ai. Collibra is a governance platform and you can see Databricks investments in data transformation with D B T labs, Matillion doing simplified business intelligence hunters. So that's, you know, they're security investment and so forth. So other than our thought that we'd see Databricks I p o last year, this prediction been pretty spot on. So we'll give ourselves an A on that one. Now observability has been a hot topic and we've been covering it for a while with our friends at E T R, particularly Eric Bradley. Our number nine prediction last year was basically that if you're not cloud native and observability, you are gonna be in big trouble. >>So everything guys gotta go cloud native. And that's clearly been the case. Splunk, the big player in the space has been transitioning to the cloud, hasn't always been pretty, as we reported, Datadog real momentum, the elk stack, that's open source model. You got new entrants that we've cited before, like observe, honeycomb, chaos search and others that we've, we've reported on, they're all born in the cloud. So we're gonna take another a on this one, admittedly, yeah, it's a re reasonably easy call, but you gotta have a few of those in the mix. Okay, our last prediction, our number 10 was around events. Something the cube knows a little bit about. We said that a new category of events would emerge as hybrid and that for the most part is happened. So that's gonna be the mainstay is what we said. That pure play virtual events are gonna give way to hi hybrid. >>And the narrative is that virtual only events are, you know, they're good for quick hits, but lousy replacements for in-person events. And you know that said, organizations of all shapes and sizes, they learn how to create better virtual content and support remote audiences during the pandemic. So when we set at pure play is gonna give way to hybrid, we said we, we i we implied or specific or specified that the physical event that v i p experience is going defined. That overall experience and those v i p events would create a little fomo, fear of, of missing out in a virtual component would overlay that serves an audience 10 x the size of the physical. We saw that really two really good examples. Red Hat Summit in Boston, small event, couple thousand people served tens of thousands, you know, online. Second was Google Cloud next v i p event in, in New York City. >>Everything else was, was, was, was virtual. You know, even examples of our prediction of metaverse like immersion have popped up and, and and, and you know, other companies are doing roadshow as we predicted like a lot of companies are doing it. You're seeing that as a major trend where organizations are going with their sales teams out into the regions and doing a little belly to belly action as opposed to the big giant event. That's a definitely a, a trend that we're seeing. So in reviewing this prediction, the grade we gave ourselves is, you know, maybe a bit unfair, it should be, you could argue for a higher grade, but the, but the organization still haven't figured it out. They have hybrid experiences but they generally do a really poor job of leveraging the afterglow and of event of an event. It still tends to be one and done, let's move on to the next event or the next city. >>Let the sales team pick up the pieces if they were paying attention. So because of that, we're only taking a B plus on this one. Okay, so that's the review of last year's predictions. You know, overall if you average out our grade on the 10 predictions that come out to a b plus, I dunno why we can't seem to get that elusive a, but we're gonna keep trying our friends at E T R and we are starting to look at the data for 2023 from the surveys and all the work that we've done on the cube and our, our analysis and we're gonna put together our predictions. We've had literally hundreds of inbounds from PR pros pitching us. We've got this huge thick folder that we've started to review with our yellow highlighter. And our plan is to review it this month, take a look at all the data, get some ideas from the inbounds and then the e t R of January surveys in the field. >>It's probably got a little over a thousand responses right now. You know, they'll get up to, you know, 1400 or so. And once we've digested all that, we're gonna go back and publish our predictions for 2023 sometime in January. So stay tuned for that. All right, we're gonna leave it there for today. You wanna thank Alex Myerson who's on production and he manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well out of our, our Boston studio. I gotta really heartfelt thank you to Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight and their team. They helped get the word out on social and in our newsletters. Rob Ho is our editor in chief over at Silicon Angle who does some great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these podcasts are available or all these episodes are available is podcasts. Wherever you listen, just all you do Search Breaking analysis podcast, really getting some great traction there. Appreciate you guys subscribing. I published each week on wikibon.com, silicon angle.com or you can email me directly at david dot valante silicon angle.com or dm me Dante, or you can comment on my LinkedIn post. And please check out ETR AI for the very best survey data in the enterprise tech business. Some awesome stuff in there. This is Dante for the Cube Insights powered by etr. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis.

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back everyone. Happy afternoon. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Valante of the Cube. We are live at MGM Grand. This is Palo Alto Ignite 22, our second day of coverage. Dave, we've had some amazing conversations, as we always do on the queue, but cybersecurity one of my favorite topics. So interesting to hear what Palo Alto Networks is doing, how it's differentiating itself and how it's ecosystem is >>Growing. Yeah, well one of the things I always, I often use ServiceNow as a reference example. I go back to 2013, had a kind of a tiny ecosystem and then sort of watched it grow. And one of those key signs was when the global system integrators actually began to lean in Accenture, obviously world class, one of the, you know, definitely in the top, you know, they talk about top five QBs, Accenture, you know, top five GSI easily. >>Yep. So, and in fact, Accenture, we've got Rex Stex in here, senior managing director at Accenture Security. You guys have been the GSI partner of the year for Palo Alto Networks for four years in a row, six years plus strong partnership. Give us a little flavor and history of the pan of the Palo Alto partnership with et cetera. >>I think, you know, we started early, right? And I think as they've evolved, we've evolved our partnership with them and as they've gone, you know, to more of a software footprint with, you know, around cloud security and network security and sassy, we've, we've seen a lot of growth and we're super excited about the opportunity that's ahead of us and the meaningful outcomes that we've been providing our clients as it relates to, you know, vendor consolidation, toll consolidation, tech debt reduction. You know, there's a lot of opportunity here to simplify our clients' lives with them. And that's something we're super excited about. >>Simplification, consolidation, been a theme of the last couple of days. Talk about some of the joint accomplishments that you guys have achieved. I know that you developed a lot of offers across all of Palo Alto Network's, GTMs, what are some of the highlights that come to mind? I >>Think one of the things that we're most excited about, you know, that being client specific is what we've been able to do on, on, on the network side with sasi and, and zero trust, network access. You know, as when Covid hit, there was a lot of change that happened with remote workforce and, you know, clients couldn't log in because their VPNs were crashing left and right. And so we were able to, you know, go in and help stand up, you know, this, you know, zero trust network infrastructure and help our clients get back online and get their employees back to work in a productive manner. And then it's evolved with the hybrid work model over time. And so it's, it's been a, that's probably the most gratifying cause there was a real crisis at, at a certain point in time, you know, a couple years ago were >>There Rex, were there unintended consequences of that, you know, rapid, we were forced, you know, the forced march to digital in terms of just multiple tools, plugging holes, and then sort of stepping back, you know, post isolation economy saying, okay, hey, we got through this, but now we need to take a new direction, new >>Strategy. I think that there, there isn't an intended consequence if you look at, most clients have, I saw a number 76, we counted as around 80 different security vendors and tools that they managed because a lot of people went and went after best of breed type capabilities. And, and so what we've seen now is, is the need to, you know, rationalize that, you know, their, their infrastructure and their, and their capability and, and consolidate and reduce that and, and move to, you know, more of what I would call platform providers. Cause if you may have, when you have 80 products, you have 80 integrations, 80 points of failure, and it gets very complex and, you know, there's a lot of finger pointing. And so as we're starting to see clients take a step back and say, Hey, look, if I, you know, spend the time to, you know, I call it modernization, but you know, modernize my security infrastructure and footprint focused around, you know, automation, orchestration, leveraging, you know, true ml and I know there's are buzzwords, but, you know, but you know, using 'em in, in, in the proper fashion, right? >>They, they can, you know, reduce that footprint, save a bunch of money, right? And, and, and drive that cost savings and then help scale their business. Cuz you have all these different vendors and what security is typically in the digital footprint is the slowdown, right? We, we've typically been the bottleneck in the past. And what we're seeing with, with, with what, you know, we've been very focused on is helping our clients scale their security footprints and their infrastructure and, you know, through automation orchestration, I i, I always say some folks do it your mess for less with labor arbitrage and bodies, but they're not enough security people in the world to do this. And so we're very focused on automation and orchestration and driving that into, into the market. >>Yeah. So you don't want to be in the business of, of filling those holes with labor. >>Exactly. You >>Want to actually get paid for outcomes. >>A hundred percent. And everything we've done is we've tried to simplify things not only for, you know, big Accenture, but even for our clients so that, you know, we can be focused on business outcomes, not necessarily technology outcomes. Cuz doing technology for the sake of technology. Is that unintended consequence that you described earlier, >>Speaking of transformation and outcomes I should say, what are you hearing most from CIOs and CISOs in terms of what they need now to be able to transform, to deliver the business outcomes so that they can become secure data companies regardless of industry? Yep. >>I think the, the biggest thing we're seeing right now is the need to, you know, leverage true automation and orchestration. We have to break the headcount model. There's not enough security professionals in the world to do, you know, to solve the world's problems. In order to scale that, you know, it's one of the reasons we're, you know, partnering with Palo Alto is because of, you know, the capabilities and the investments they've made in innovation to help drive that automation and orchestration through, you know, numerous capabilities from stock transformation to to to sassy cloud security, et cetera. But our clients need scale. They need to be able to go fast and net pace and they need to, they need to do it with confidence securely. And that, that's one of the big focuses. But the other focus is, is we're starting to see a need to, you know, vendor consolidation in the market. You've seen the acquisitions, I'm sure you've talked to people in over the last couple days. You know, there's, there's a, a tremendous amount of consolidation going around. And what our clients, you know, are asking for is, Hey, I need to reduce the number of vendors I interact with. I need to simplify my infrastructure, I need to focus on automation and, and orchestration from that perspective, >>What's happening with multi-cloud? What are you hearing from from customers? You know, we hear a lot of the, the, the conversations about, oh it's, you know, it's, and I agree by the way, multi-cloud is kind of a symptom of multi-vendor, you know, Chuck Whittens thing about multi-cloud by default versus design, you know, it's good, good line and I think rings true, but, but what a customer's telling you in terms of the real challenges generally and then specifically around security. >>I think it's, you know, each cloud service product has their own security capabilities and security models and, and, and being able to train the people to be able to manage those different models. I think that's where, you know, tools like, you know, Prisma Cloud for instance come in and help clients be able to manage the security and compliance of those infrastructures in, in a way to do that. And then to be able to manage applications security consistently, right? It's not just the cloud itself, but it's actually the applications that may, you know, cross, you know, be for, for resiliency but you know, be in, you know, multi-cloud, you know, multiple clouds and being able to make sure you have consistent security across those. And I think, you know, one of the things that it's permeated is, is just the, with data and identity and, and you know, cloud infrastructure and tolerance management, it's been a big problem cuz it's like the wild, wild west. I always look, when I look at identity and the cloud and how it's done, it, it looks like 1995 identity. It's, it's, it's ridiculously backwards. And so, you know, we've seen things like, you know, keem that have come into play to help manage those relationships and, and simplify it across multiple clouds consistently, if that makes sense. >>Yep. >>You, you mentioned Prisma Cloud most recently Accenture and Palo Alto developed the Secure Cloud Express. Correct. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that is and what outcomes is it gonna enable? Yeah, >>So great question and we're pretty excited about this cuz what we did with that was we manage cloud, you know, our cloud environments for numerous customers. So we've developed hundreds of policies that, you know, we implemented in Prisma Cloud to manage, you know, multiple clients, our internal infrastructure. And what we did was we said, well, most of our clients have to build those from scratch. So what we said is we will come in, in the best of week of time and come in and, and do a data-driven exercise to show our clients, you know, where where they sit from a, from a security perspective as it relates leveraging Prisma cloud and, and those policies that we've created. And what, what that has led to is another step, which is where we're focused on auto remediation. So, you know, when you, when you get, when you get the findings, then what do you do with them, right? If you have hundreds or thousands in some cases we've had clients with 1100 findings and they just sit there and they go, whoa, you know, so to speak. And so what we've done is we try to take those highest, most frequent findings and build securities code to auto remediate those for clients so they can choose to implement that and work down those, you know, findings very quickly, which helps, you know, drive more value out of, out of their prisma cloud >>Purchases. Accenture obviously has deep industry expertise around the globe. What are you seeing in terms of industries actually? So as they digitize not just their IT transformation but a business transformation, there are starting to see companies, financial services in particular bring their business to their cloud, sify their business. And specifically I'm interested in what's happening at the edge with operations technology. We just talked about healthcare and and medical devices. What's happening there? How connected or disconnected is that to the rest of the estate, the multi-cloud on-prem, et cetera? I >>Mean, I think OT is, is fairly disconnected, right? Sure. From, from that perspective, obviously, but I, I, I think what we're starting to see is an uptick, you know, on, I think secure edge and Sassy will come to OT cause it's a better way. Because what happens is if someone, you know, gets into the network, they can traverse it, right? And if they can apply those zero trust principles to ot, which is you're talking to people that have been, you know, wearing hard hats Yeah. And engineers, that's a big shift for them. And so, but I think that you'll start to see that play more prevalence, you know, with the industries like, you know, financial services, we're seeing a huge uptick in cloud adoption, right? They were, they were slow to do it, but now they're, they're going at pace and faster than most, right? Yeah, sure. And I think, you know, healthcare is a, is another big one where we've seen a lot of migration and a lot of need for multi-cloud. Cuz you know, some, they may be running their analytics on, you know, Google and, and their workloads on Azure, right? Or aws. And so you're starting to see a lot of people leveraging the best of what each cloud provider does well >>From that. And, and just an aside on that Palo Alto survey, we saw construction was one of the hardest hit industries. Yeah. Which I, I was like, what? And then of course it's because they're not really focused on security. They're focused on building stuff. No, >>It's really interesting. We're working with a large builder, I can't say the name, but one of the things that they're looking to do is, you know, they're moving to the cloud and they're building the capability to manage some of the, you know, largest skyscrapers in the world, but also manage the OT sensors and also do selling that creating another business, not only just managing those buildings, but managing other people's buildings for them and ha and selling security as a service for that because they built that capability around their devices and, and, and switches, hvac, et cetera. Do, >>Do you think that because I mean, you know, the operations technology, they're engineers and they're hardcore, like, don't touch my stuff. Exactly. And so do you feel like as, I mean I know that business has kind of done a reach around everything, you know, be becoming connected, but do you feel like they're gonna be more on top of it then, then, then sort of the, the broad commercial market has been? Or is it gonna be wild West all over again? >>My hope is that, you know, us as gsi, you know, my fellow GSIs, that we will help our clients make the better decisions this time around and, and not go to the wild, wild west. And you know, we see a lot of it in manufacturing, you know, if you saw, you know, with the, you know, the invasion Ukraine, you know, one of the big groups that was hit was manufacturing, right? There was factory shut down all over the world, you know, and, and so, you know, and that is an OT environment, but I, you know, what we've seen is them are, you know, those clients take more serious steps to protect those environments cuz they're on, you know, windows 10 servers running, you know, large machines. So we're starting to see a lot more care and feeding in into those environments as well. >>Can I ask you a question about the conversations that you're having? That survey that Dave mentioned, it's was released yesterday. There's a board behind us, what's next in cyber? That was the survey and amazing data that came from it. Like 96% of organizations have been hit by at least one attack in the last year. They were surprised that the number was that high, but we know that no industry, no company is safe. But one of the things that the survey found that, that surprised me was that we always say, oh, security is a board level conversation. We know that to some degree. But what they found was lack of alignment between the board and the executive level. In your Accenture's relationships, I know you guys have deep relationships across organizations and their boards. Can you help bring the board together with the executives and, and really not just talk about cybersecurity, but really develop a cybersecurity transformation strategy that actually delivers resilience? >>Yeah, no ab absolutely. And we've, we, we actually took a step back and, and reorganized our business this last year. And one of those areas that we focused on was within strategy and the C-suite agenda, right? And we actually published looking at gia, it was either the CEO handbook, I think it's what we called it, but they helped them and board be able to, you know, drive more meaningful conversations that relates to risk and and whatnot. And so we're very focused on that right now. And it's, we need to up-level our conversations within the organization. Cause even the buyers in these large, you know, two years ago was mainly the cso, now we're dealing with the cio, CTOs, cfo because these are, you know, meaningful business conversations, right? That are driving business outcomes and security needs to be a business enabler, not, not a a, a bottleneck >>Is the chief data officer starting to emerge as, as we see, you know, Nikesh said yesterday in his keynote and we talked about it with him when he was here, security is a data problem. >>Yep. It is. It's a huge data problem. And we're starting to, you know, I think we've talked a lot about zero trust, but zero trust data is, is a, is a significant problem, right? Because that you talk about the wild, wild west is we see clients that have people that have in, you know, they, they have access to, you know, what we call dev development environment data, right? But then you find out that they can hop four levels over into production data and this been exposed to, you know, the wrong people, you know, not focused on that least privileged aspect. I think data's a real problem, you know, per na kesha's statement in the cloud. It's something that really needs to be addressed. And I think we're starting to see a lot of innovation around that area. Cuz what typical data security has always been, I have all these problems, it creates, I call it noise, right? I got thousands of findings and then just, you know, need just sit there and they go, what do I do? Right? It's too much. And so I think there, there's gonna be more intelligence around that and more, you know, what I call auto remediation, right? Being able to remediate those findings quickly from from that >>Perspective. I've been watching this board behind us. Yeah. It's this what's next in cyber. And people come in and they write, it's just been growing, you know, all week and somebody just wrote sock transformation. Yeah. We were just sort of talking about earlier what, what, in your estimation, what percent of organizations that you target. I understand that you're not going after the, you know, mom and pop organizations, but what percent of that, you know, fat middle and the tip of the pyramid, that a euro, that's your sweet spot. What percent of those organizations don't have a sock? >>I mean, most every organization has a sock. You know, I talked to, you know, CISOs of large financial service organization, they said, do we even need a sock anymore? It could be a virtual sock so to speak, but I think, you know, am was SOC transformation. I think we could potentially head to something like that. But you know, but what's really been strange is there's been, you know, what we call soar, right? Security, you know, orchestration, automation, whatever. And what another, >>Another acronym, their >>Acronym that I security that I might brain is >>Hold apologize. >>But you know, they've, people have never really driven the value out of it because they build these automation playbooks and, and for one company to do it and build 20 of 'em or 30 of 'em to ha it doesn't pay off in the long run. And what we're starting to see is people, you know, bring to the table more crowdsource these capabilities so that they can scale those sock transformations. Cause it's really about, you know, orchestration and automation. That's where, you know, nirvana comes in because it's not about people with headsets on looking at, you know, 20 screens. It's not helpful, right? The humans, we make mistakes. And so if we can automate as much of that as possible, get rid of the false positives, leverage AI and and ML to do that. And I think we're starting to see, you know, what I would call more advanced AI and ml. I think in the early days in security, AI and ML was very nascent and, and, and now you're starting to see, you know, more powerful concepts come in better learning, better outcomes out of that. >>Well, it was a lot of modeling in the cloud still is, but it's increasingly going toward real time inference and that's, you know, game changing. >>Agreed. >>Last question for you. What's are some of the things that are next on the plate for Accenture and Palo Networks? What's next up? >>I think, you know, we're very focused on, on Sassy right now in, in the market. And I think we think that is, you know, I think both of us think that's the next big wave, right? Because I think what we learned out of, you know, these last two and a half, three years is that these concepts work, but they can actually scale out to drive significant cost savings. I mean, if you look at Accenture, you know, we don't have a a network backbone anymore. We're pure cloud wan, right? We're leveraging the internet for that. And I think that and what we're trying to do with Palo Alto and driving, you know, cloud WAN and Sassy as a service, I think will be super, super meaningful. And, and, and, and >>Well that's interesting. That has implications for a number of companies out >>There. Yeah. Well I think, you know, it's obviously the, you know, it, it's a, it is a big implication for a lot of, a lot of, you know, our customers even, right? Yeah. And so we have to be very careful and thoughtful about how we work to make that happen over time. >>Right. A lot of opportunity. Rex, thank you so much for joining us on the program and really dissecting what Accenture and Palo Alto are doing, all the value in it for organizations across industries. We appreciate your insights. Yep. >>Thank you >>For Rex Dexon and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cubes stick around. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. This is the Cube, the leader in live, emerging and enterprise tech coverage.

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back to Vegas. Guys. We're happy that you're here. Lisa Martin here covering with Dave Valante, Palo Alto Networks Ignite 22. We're at MGM Grand. This is our first day, Dave of two days of cube coverage. We've been having great conversations with the ecosystem with Palo Alto executives, with partners. One of the things that they have is unit 42. We're gonna be talking with them next about cyber intelligence. And the threat data that they get is >>Incredible. Yeah. They have all the data, they know what's going on, and of course things are changing. The state of play changes. Hold on a second. I got a text here. Oh, my Netflix account was frozen. Should I click on this link? Yeah. What do you think? Have you had a, it's, have you had a little bit more of that this holiday season? Yeah, definitely. >>Unbelievable, right? A lot of smishing going on. >>Yeah, they're very clever. >>Yeah, we're very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the queue. Wendy Whitmore is here, the SVP of Unit 42. Welcome back, Wendy. Great to have >>You. Thanks Lisa. So >>Unit 42 created back in 2014. One of the things that I saw that you said in your keynote this morning or today was everything old is still around and it's co, it's way more prolific than ever. What are some of the things that Unit 42 is seeing these days with, with respect to cyber threats as the landscape has changed so much the last two years alone? >>You know, it, it has. So it's really interesting. I've been responding to these breaches for over two decades now, and I can tell you that there are a lot of new and novel techniques. I love that you already highlighted Smishing, right? In the opening gate. Right. Because that is something that a year ago, no one knew what that word was. I mean, we, it's probably gonna be invented this year, right? But that said, so many of the tactics that we have previously seen, when it comes to just general espionage techniques, right? Data act filtration, intellectual property theft, those are going on now more than ever. And you're not hearing about them as much in the news because there are so many other things, right? We're under the landscape of a major war going on between Russia and Ukraine of ransomware attacks, you know, occurring on a weekly basis. And so we keep hearing about those, but ultimately these nations aid actors are using that top cover, if you will, as a great distraction. It's almost like a perfect storm for them to continue conducting so much cyber espionage work that like we may not be feeling that today, but years down the road, they're, the work that they're doing today is gonna have really significant impact. >>Ransomware has become a household word in the last couple of years. I think even my mom knows what it is, to some degree. Yeah. But the threat actors are far more sophisticated than they've ever written. They're very motivated. They're very well funded. I think I've read a stat recently in the last year that there's a ransomware attack once every 11 seconds. And of course we only hear about the big ones. But that is a concern that goes all the way up to the board. >>Yeah. You know, we have a stat in our ransomware threat report that talks about how often victims are posted on leak sites. And I think it's once every seven minutes at this point that a new victim is posted. Meaning a victim has had their data, a victim organization had their data stolen and posted on some leak site in the attempt to be extorted. So that has become so common. One of the shifts that we've seen this year in particular and in recent months, you know, a year ago when I was at Ignite, which was virtual, we talked about quadruple extortion, meaning four different ways that these ransomware actors would go out and try to make money from these attacks in what they're doing now is often going to just one, which is, I don't even wanna bother with encrypting your data now, because that means that in order to get paid, I probably have to decrypt it. Right? That's a lot of work. It's time consuming. It's kind of painstaking. And so what they've really looked to do now is do the extortion where they simply steal the data and then threaten to post it on these leak sites, you know, release it other parts of the web and, and go from there. And so that's really a blending of these techniques of traditional cyber espionage with intellectual property theft. Wow. >>How trustworthy are those guys in terms of, I mean, these are hackers, right? In terms of it's really the, the hacker honor system, isn't it? I mean, if you get compromised like that, you really beholden to criminals. And so, you >>Know, so that's one of the key reasons why having the threat intelligence is so important, right? Understanding which group that you're dealing with and what their likelihood of paying is, what's their modus operandi. It's become even more important now because these groups switch teams more frequently than NFL trades, you know, free agents during the regular season, right? Or players become free agents. And that's because their infrastructure. So the, you know, infrastructure, the servers, the systems that they're using to conduct these attacks from is actually largely being disrupted more from law enforcement, international intelligence agencies working together with public private partnerships. So what they're doing is saying, okay, great. All that infrastructure that I just had now is, is burned, right? It's no longer effective. So then they'll disband a team and then they'll recruit a new team and it's constant like mixing and matching in players. >>All that said, even though that's highly dynamic, one of the other areas that they pride themselves on is customer service. So, and I think it's interesting because, you know, when I said they're not wanting to like do all the decryption? Yeah. Cuz that's like painful techni technical slow work. But on the customer service side, they will create these customer service portals immediately stand one up, say, you know, hey it's, it's like an Amazon, you know, if you've ever had to return a package on Amazon for example, and you need to click through and like explain, you know, Hey, I didn't receive this package. A portal window pops up, you start talking to either a bot or a live agent on the backend. In this case they're hu what appeared to be very much humans who are explaining to you exactly what happened, what they're asking for, super pleasant, getting back within minutes of a response. And they know that in order for them to get paid, they need to have good customer service because otherwise they're not going to, you know, have a business. How, >>So what's the state of play look like from between nation states, criminals and how, how difficult or not so difficult is it for you to identify? Do you have clear signatures? My understanding in with Solar Winds it was a little harder, but maybe help us understand and help our audience understand what the state of play is right now. >>One of the interesting things that I think is occurring, and I highlighted this this morning, is this idea of convergence. And so I'll break it down for one example relates to the type of malware or tools that these attackers use. So traditionally, if we looked at a nation state actor like China or Russia, they were very, very specific and very strategic about the types of victims that they were going to go after when they had zero day. So, you know, new, new malware out there, new vulnerabilities that could be exploited only by them because the rest of the world didn't know about it. They might have one organization that they would target that at, at most, a handful and all very strategic for their objective. They wanted to keep that a secret as long as possible. Now what we're seeing actually is those same attackers going towards one, a much larger supply chain. >>So, so lorenzen is a great example of that. The Hafnia attacks towards Microsoft Exchange server last year. All great examples of that. But what they're also doing is instead of using zero days as much, or you know, because those are expensive to build, they take a lot of time, a lot of funding, a lot of patience and research. What they're doing is using commercially available tools. And so there's a tool that our team identified earlier this year called Brute Rael, C4 or BRC four for short. And that's a tool that we now know that nation state actors are using. But just two weeks ago we invested a ransomware attack where the ransomware actor was using that same piece of tooling. So to your point, yak can get difficult for defenders when you're looking through and saying, well wait, they're all using some of the same tools right now and some of the same approaches when it comes to nation states, that's great for them because they can blend into the noise and it makes it harder to identify as >>Quickly. And, and is that an example of living off the land or is that B BRC four sort of a homegrown hacker tool? Is it, is it a, is it a commercial >>Off the shelf? So it's a tool that was actually, so you can purchase it, I believe it's about 2,500 US dollars for a license. It was actually created by a former Red teamer from a couple well-known companies in the industry who then decided, well hey, I built this tool for work, I'm gonna sell this. Well great for Red teamers that are, you know, legitimately doing good work, but not great now because they're, they built a, a strong tool that has the ability to hide amongst a, a lot of protocols. It can actually hide within Slack and teams to where you can't even see the data is being exfiltrated. And so there's a lot of concern. And then now the reality that it gets into the wrong hands of nation state actors in ransomware actors, one of the really interesting things about that piece of malware is it has a setting where you can change wallpaper. And I don't know if you know offhand, you know what that means, but you know, if that comes to mind, what you would do with it. Well certainly a nation state actor is never gonna do something like that, right? But who likes to do that are ransomware actors who can go in and change the background wallpaper on a desktop that says you've been hacked by XYZ organization and let you know what's going on. So pretty interesting, obviously the developer doing some work there for different parts of the, you know, nefarious community. >>Tremendous amount of sophistication that's gone on the last couple of years alone. I was just reading that Unit 42 is now a founding member of the Cyber Threat Alliance includes now more than 35 organizations. So you guys are getting a very broad picture of today's threat landscape. How can customers actually achieve cyber resilience? Is it achievable and how do you help? >>So I, I think it is achievable. So let me kind of parse out the question, right. So the Cyber Threat Alliance, the J C D C, the Cyber Safety Review Board, which I'm a member of, right? I think one of the really cool things about Palo Alto Networks is just our partnerships. So those are just a handful. We've got partnerships with over 200 organizations. We work closely with the Ukrainian cert, for example, sharing information, incredible information about like what's going on in the war, sharing technical details. We do that with Interpol on a daily basis where, you know, we're sharing information. Just last week the Africa cyber surge operation was announced where millions of nodes were taken down that were part of these larger, you know, system of C2 channels that attackers are using to conduct exploits and attacks throughout the world. So super exciting in that regard and it's something that we're really passionate about at Palo Alto Networks in terms of resilience, a few things, you know, one is visibility, so really having a, an understanding of in a real, as much of real time as possible, right? What's happening. And then it goes into how you, how can we decrease operational impact. So that's everything from network segmentation to wanna add the terms and phrases I like to use a lot is the win is really increasing the time it takes for the attackers to get their work done and decreasing the amount of time it takes for the defenders to get their work done, right? >>Yeah. I I call it increasing the denominator, right? And the ROI equation benefit over or value, right? Equals equals or benefit equals value over cost if you can increase the cost to go go elsewhere, right? Absolutely. And that's the, that's the game. Yeah. You mentioned Ukraine before, what have we learned from Ukraine? I, I remember I was talking to Robert Gates years ago, 2016 I think, and I was asking him, yeah, but don't we have the best cyber technology? Can't we attack? He said, we got the most to lose too. Yeah. And so what have we learned from, from Ukraine? >>Well, I, I think that's part of the key point there, right? Is you know, a great offense essentially can also be for us, you know, deterrent. So in that aspect we have as an, as a company and or excuse me, as a country, as a company as well, but then as partners throughout all parts of the world have really focused on increasing the intelligence sharing and specifically, you know, I mentioned Ukrainian cert. There are so many different agencies and other sorts throughout the world that are doing everything they can to share information to help protect human life there. And so what we've really been concerned with, with is, you know, what cyber warfare elements are going to be used there, not only how does that impact Ukraine, but how does it potentially spread out to other parts of the world critical infrastructure. So you've seen that, you know, I mentioned CS rrb, but cisa, right? >>CISA has done a tremendous job of continuously getting out information and doing everything they can to make sure that we are collaborating at a commercial level. You know, we are sharing information and intelligence more than ever before. So partners like Mania and CrowdStrike, our Intel teams are working together on a daily basis to make sure that we're able to protect not only our clients, but certainly if we've got any information relevant that we can share that as well. And I think if there's any silver lining to an otherwise very awful situation, I think the fact that is has accelerated intelligence sharing is really positive. >>I was gonna ask you about this cause I think, you know, 10 or so years ago, there was a lot of talk about that, but the industry, you know, kind of kept things to themselves, you know, a a actually tried to monetize some of that private data. So that's changing is what I'm hearing from you >>More so than ever more, you know, I've, I mentioned I've been in the field for 20 years. You know, it, it's tough when you have a commercial business that relies on, you know, information to, in order to pay people's salaries, right? I think that has changed quite a lot. We see the benefit of just that continuous sharing. There are, you know, so many more walls broken down between these commercial competitors, but also the work on the public private partnership side has really increased some of those relationships. Made it easier. And you know, I have to give a whole lot of credit and mention sisa, like the fact that during log four J, like they had GitHub repositories, they were using Slack, they were using Twitter. So the government has really started pushing forward with a lot of the newer leadership that's in place to say, Hey, we're gonna use tools and technology that works to share and disseminate information as quickly as we can. Right? That's fantastic. That's helping everybody. >>We knew that every industry, no, nobody's spared of this. But did you notice in the last couple of years, any industries in particular that are more vulnerable? Like I think of healthcare with personal health information or financial services, any industries kind of jump out as being more susceptible than others? >>So I think those two are always gonna be at the forefront, right? Financial services and healthcare. But what's been really top of mind is critical infrastructure, just making sure right? That our water, our power, our fuel, so many other parts of right, the ecosystem that go into making sure that, you know, we're keeping, you know, houses heated during the winter, for example, that people have fresh water. Those are extremely critical. And so that is really a massive area of focus for the industry right now. >>Can I come back to public-private partnerships? My question is relates to regulations because the public policy tends to be behind tech, the technology industry as an understatement. So when you take something like GDPR is the obvious example, but there are many, many others, data sovereignty, you can't move the data. Are are, are, is there tension between your desire as our desire as an industry to share data and government's desire to keep data private and restrict that data sharing? How is that playing out? How do you resolve that? >>Well I think there have been great strides right in each of those areas. So in terms of regulation when it comes to breaches there, you know, has been a tendency in the past to do victim shaming, right? And for organizations to not want to come forward because they're concerned about the monetary funds, right? I think there's been tremendous acceleration. You're seeing that everywhere from the fbi, from cisa, to really working very closely with organizations to, to have a true impact. So one example would be a ransomware attack that occurred. This was for a client of ours within the United States and we had a very close relationship with the FBI at that local field office and made a phone call. This was 7:00 AM Eastern time. And this was an organization that had this breach gone public, would've made worldwide news. There would've been a very big impact because it would've taken a lot of their systems offline. >>Within the 30 minutes that local FBI office was on site said, we just saw this piece of malware last week, we have a decryptor for it from another organization who shared it with us. Here you go. And within 60 minutes, every system was back up and running. Our teams were able to respond and get that disseminated quickly. So efforts like that, I think the government has made a tremendous amount of headway into improving relationships. Is there always gonna be some tension between, you know, competing, you know, organizations? Sure. But I think that we're doing a whole lot to progress it, >>But governments will make exceptions in that case. Especially for something as critical as the example that you just gave and be able to, you know, do a reach around, if you will, on, on onerous regulations that, that ne aren't helpful in that situation, but certainly do a lot of good in terms of protecting privacy. >>Well, and I think there used to be exceptions made typically only for national security elements, right? And now you're seeing that expanding much more so, which I think is also positive. Right. >>Last question for you as we are wrapping up time here. What can organizations really do to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to, to threat actors? We've got internal external threats. What can they really do to just be ahead of that curve? Is that possible? >>Well, it is now, it's not an easy task so I'm not gonna, you know, trivialize it. But I think that one, having relationships with right organizations in advance always a good thing. That's a, everything from certainly a commercial relationships, but also your peers, right? There's all kinds of fantastic industry spec specific information sharing organizations. I think the biggest thing that impacts is having education across your executive team and testing regularly, right? Having a plan in place, testing it. And it's not just the security pieces of it, right? As security responders, we live these attacks every day, but it's making sure that your general counsel and your head of operations and your CEO knows what to do. Your board of directors, do they know what to do when they receive a phone call from Bloomberg, for example? Are they supposed supposed to answer? Do your employees know that those kind of communications in advance and training can be really critical and make or break a difference in an attack. >>That's a great point about the testing but also the communication that it really needs to be company wide. Everyone at every level needs to know how to react. Wendy, it's been so great having, >>Wait one last question. Sure. Do you have a favorite superhero growing up? >>Ooh, it's gotta be Wonder Woman. Yeah, >>Yeah, okay. Yeah, so cuz I'm always curious, there's not a lot of women in, in security in cyber. How'd you get into it? And many cyber pros like wanna save the world? >>Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I joined the Air Force, you know, I, I was a special agent doing computer crime investigations and that was a great job. And I learned about that from, we had an alumni day and all these alumni came in from the university and they were in flight suits and combat gear. And there was one woman who had long blonde flowing hair and a black suit and high heels and she was carrying a gun. What did she do? Because that's what I wanted do. >>Awesome. Love it. We >>Blonde >>Wonder Woman. >>Exactly. Wonder Woman. Wendy, it's been so great having you on the program. We, we will definitely be following unit 42 and all the great stuff that you guys are doing. Keep up the good >>Work. Thanks so much Lisa. Thank >>You. Day our pleasure. For our guest and Dave Valante, I'm Lisa Martin, live in Las Vegas at MGM Grand for Palo Alto Ignite, 22. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable It. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome back one of our cube alumni. AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa. Good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PI's doing. We're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're saying, and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on our ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure RJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely. Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now, when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and, and obviously as part of that, we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored. And, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, a recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact, in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It out, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there was some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided. And also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned, if we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences, whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you gonna think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news. And you know, all the hyperscale that's crashing the head, I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so, as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disc infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindsets. So they're the big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we're all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we were all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. But you can do all of that. But if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us, not only to do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is, is great. And in fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event. >>You know, whether it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, is skating, wanting to skate towards the buck. And it's good, it's good business too, to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the relief. So our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just gonna greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed we definitely see is becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance for what with unmatched storage entities. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning dis. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is say 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you at about, you know, 0.8% of global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades where using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes through failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customers data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end in a reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own. The customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for the service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part. >>The power of ai. I love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in, from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies will also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a cardio customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the Azure service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as a service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems thrown onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that's following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such. Supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you also the business benefit that you can also handle surge in demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with these global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead time went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. >>And so all of these things, you know, the three things are important, but the four thing I say is more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos as a company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all other the areas as well. So if you follow those four items, they, they're the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity. We could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad Oji, that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business and has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. My last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of, of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you kinda handle at the very back end. You design it upfront in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed upfront so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-disruptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enabled you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, the, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's an important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that PI's doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board. >>Great to have you. For AJ saying, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching this special event, peer Storage, the Path to Sustainable It.

>>In the early part of this century, we're talking about the 2005 to 2007 timeframe. There was a lot of talk about so-called green it. And at that time there was some organizational friction. Like for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care, or that the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. So it was kind of that split brain. And, and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on it spending, and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. And the second big trend, of course, was the cloud model, you know, kind of became a benchmark for it. Simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity as needed. >>And the third was by the end of the first decade of the, the two thousands, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride. And then you had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive farms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. And so really these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. And as we progressed through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of esg. Environmental, social, and governance. Shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. And most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power cooling and footprint, it has a bottom line impact on the income statement. Now you add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence. >>And you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello and welcome to the Path to Sustainable It Made Possible by Pure Storage and Collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'm one of the host of the program, along with my colleague Lisa Martin. Now, today we're gonna hear from three leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around a thousand sustainability leaders worldwide, and she'll share some metrics from that study. And then next, Lisa will speak to AJ Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had had him on the cube before, and not only will he share some useful stats in the market, I'll also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is ai, which is is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. And then we'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Ballero of Elec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoyed the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started >>At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycled and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of pure arrays purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three. Emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>Hi everyone, welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the Cube. Thanks >>For having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So very interesting at Pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions, >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you received despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And the IT of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those co was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates, and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a, a tip a hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability in IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I wanna dig in a little bit to here's ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our product. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Pure Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time, >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage right in, in your entire IT portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the I the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa, good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PEER is doing, we're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure AJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and and obviously as part of that we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored and, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there's some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided and also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you can think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscale that was crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So there's a big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we are all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we are all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only you do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event, you know, where it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? >>So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, it's skating, wanting to skate towards the, and it's good, it's good business too to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the really, so our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed. We definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per wat with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning this. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is a 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you add about, you know, 0.8% to global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades. We, using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customer's data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, you know, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you, that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, the customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for that service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part, >>The power of ai. Love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies can also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a, your customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the as service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems turned onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you. Also, the big business benefit benefited. >>You can also handle surges and demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. And so all of these things, you know, the three things important, but the fourth thing I say more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos at the company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all of the areas as well, if you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity, if we could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. Yes. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. And last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the Four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your, your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you can handle at the very back end. You design it front in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed up front so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-receptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that peers doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board >>At Pure Storage. The opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pures Evergreen storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, pures implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycle and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80% today, more than 97% of Pure Array purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>We're back talking about the path to sustainable it and now we're gonna get the perspective from Mattia Valerio, who is with Elec Informatica and IT services firm and the beautiful Lombardi region of Italy north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >>All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elec Informatica. What's your focus, talk about your unique value add to customers. >>Yeah, so basically Alma Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy and is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay. So the, the main focus area of Al Meca is reach digital transformation innovation to our clients with focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services. Okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and the innovation through technology and sustainability. >>Yeah. Obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries. A particularly acute right now in, in Europe with the, you know, the energy challenges you've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term Yeah. You know, speak to and, and what can others learn from it? >>Yeah. At at, at our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values and also in customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals. >>Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Cuz this wasn't, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today. And and is it a competitive advantage for you? >>Yeah, yeah. For, for, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for elec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And regarding our business proposition, ELEX attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to sustainability are increasingly frequent and in depth and which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certification such as EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay, >>Got it. So in a previous life I actually did some work with, with, with power companies and there were two big factors in it that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage and that was, we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of, of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disc and it was a big impact. So you, I wanna talk about your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about what your experience there, why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >>Yeah, it was basically an easy and easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay. Because you said before that in Elec we, we manage a lot of data, okay? And in the past we, we, we see it, we see that the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And when, when Pure came to us and share our products, their vision to the data management journey for Element Informatica, it was very easy to choose pure why with values and numbers. We, we create a business case and we said that we, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay. And so of course you have to manage a grade oil deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. >>So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitor monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing pure technology storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, again, challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, IT allows us to improve the facility of the facilities of using technology from our technical side. Okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure storage technologies. Okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say it, allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >>So you talked about how you've seen a 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you in the spot. Yeah, because I, I, I was on Pure's website and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor presuming that competitor was not, you know, a 2010 spinning disc system. But, but, so I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and AJ earlier in the program. Do you think, again, I'm gonna put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen? >>Yeah, of course. Is more competitor improve competitive because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more, that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay. So the customer is always at the center of a proposition of a service provider and trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that pure as inside by design in the technology is, is for us very, very, very important and very, very strategic because, because with like a glass, we can, our self transfer try to transfer the values of pure, pure technologies to our service provider client. >>Okay. Matta, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term it looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for elec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have? Sustainability leaders that wanna make a meaningful impact on the environment, but also on the bottom line. >>Okay, so sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet and capable of expressing our inclination and the, and the particularities and accessibility goals in the near future. I, I say, I can say that are will be basically free one define sustainability plan. Okay? It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint. Okay? And least button list produces certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay. So I can say that this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay. >>Yeah. So I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You gotta monitor and measure, you can't improve what you can't measure. So you gonna set a baseline, you're gonna report on that. Yep. You're gonna analyze the data and you're gonna make continuous improvement. >>Yep. >>Matea, thanks so much for joining us today in sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah, thank you for having aboard. Thank you very >>Much. It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm gonna be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. >>Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus. Rather bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability and you should, many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers. Whereas early green IT initiatives at the beginning of this century, were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results. Today, vendor r and d is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation in machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results. Thankfully. Now remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. So check them out at your convenience and don't forget to go to silicon angle.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out pure storage.com. >>There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. So thank you for that. Pure storage, I love that. There's no squeeze page on that. No friction. It's kind of on brand there for pure well done. But to the topic today, sustainability, there's some really good information on the site around esg, Pure's Environmental, social and Governance mission. So there's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity, and of course you'll see that Pure has some work to do there. But kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress. And there's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed the path to Sustainable it made possible by Pure Storage produced with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech, tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> From theCube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCube and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> While by no means a safe haven, the cybersecurity sector has outpaced the broader tech market by a meaningful margin, that is up until very recently. Cybersecurity remains the number one technology priority for the C-suite, but as we've previously reported the CISO's budget has constraints just like other technology investments. Recent trends show that economic headwinds have elongated sales cycles, pushed deals into future quarters, and just like other tech initiatives, are pacing cybersecurity investments and breaking them into smaller chunks. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we explain how cybersecurity trends are reverting to the mean and tracking more closely with other technology investments. We'll make a couple of valuation comparisons to show the magnitude of the challenge and which cyber firms are feeling the heat, which aren't. There are some exceptions. We'll then show the latest survey data from ETR to quantify the contraction in spending momentum and close with a glimpse of the landscape of emerging cybersecurity companies, the private companies that could be ripe for acquisition, consolidation, or disruptive to the broader market. First, let's take a look at the recent patterns for cyber stocks relative to the broader tech market as a benchmark, as an indicator. Here's a year to date comparison of the bug ETF, which comprises a basket of cyber security names, and we compare that with the tech heavy NASDAQ composite. Notice that on April 13th of this year the cyber ETF was actually in positive territory while the NAS was down nearly 14%. Now by August 16th, the green turned red for cyber stocks but they still meaningfully outpaced the broader tech market by more than 950 basis points as of December 2nd that Delta had contracted. As you can see, the cyber ETF is now down nearly 25%, year to date, while the NASDAQ is down 27% and change. Now take a look at just how far a few of the high profile cybersecurity names have fallen. Here are six security firms that we've been tracking closely since before the pandemic. We've been, you know, tracking dozens but let's just take a look at this data and the subset. We show for comparison the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, again, just for reference, they're both up since right before the pandemic. They're up relative to right before the pandemic, and then during the pandemic the S&P shot up more than 40%, relative to its pre pandemic level, around February is what we're using for the pre pandemic level, and the NASDAQ peaked at around 65% higher than that February level. They're now down 85% and 71% of their previous. So they're at 85% and 71% respectively from their pandemic highs. You compare that to these six companies, Splunk, which was and still is working through a transition is well below its pre pandemic market value and 44, it's 44% of its pre pandemic high as of last Friday. Palo Alto Networks is the most interesting here, in that it had been facing challenges prior to the pandemic related to a pivot to the Cloud which we reported on at the time. But as we said at that time we believe the company would sort out its Cloud transition, and its go to market challenges, and sales compensation issues, which it did as you can see. And its valuation jumped from 24 billion prior to Covid to 56 billion, and it's holding 93% of its peak value. Its revenue run rate is now over 6 billion with a healthy growth rate of 24% expected for the next quarter. Similarly, Fortinet has done relatively well holding 71% of its peak Covid value, with a healthy 34% revenue guide for the coming quarter. Now, Okta has been the biggest disappointment, a darling of the pandemic Okta's communication snafu, with what was actually a pretty benign hack combined with difficulty absorbing its 7 billion off zero acquisition, knocked the company off track. Its valuation has dropped by 35 billion since its peak during the pandemic, and that's after a nice beat and bounce back quarter just announced by Okta. Now, in our view Okta remains a viable long-term leader in identity. However, its recent fiscal 24 revenue guide was exceedingly conservative at around 16% growth. So either the company is sandbagging, or has such poor visibility that it wants to be like super cautious or maybe it's actually seeing a dramatic slowdown in its business momentum. After all, this is a company that not long ago was putting up 50% plus revenue growth rates. So it's one that bears close watching. CrowdStrike is another big name that we've been talking about on Breaking Analysis for quite some time. It like Okta has led the industry in a key ETR performance indicator that measures customer spending momentum. Just last week, CrowdStrike announced revenue increased more than 50% but new ARR was soft and the company guided conservatively. Not surprisingly, the stock got absolutely crushed as CrowdStrike blamed tepid demand from smaller and midsize firms. Many analysts believe that competition from Microsoft was one factor along with cautious spending amongst those midsize and smaller customers. Notably, large customers remain active. So we'll see if this is a longer term trend or an anomaly. Zscaler is another company in the space that we've reported having great customer spending momentum from the ETR data. But even though the company beat expectations for its recent quarter, like other companies its Outlook was conservative. So other than Palo Alto, and to a lesser extent Fortinet, these companies and others that we're not showing here are feeling the economic pinch and it shows in the compression of value. CrowdStrike, for example, had a 70 billion valuation at one point during the pandemic Zscaler top 50 billion, Okta 45 billion. Now, having said that Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler are all still trading well above their pre pandemic levels that we tracked back in February of 2020. All right, let's go now back to ETR'S January survey and take a look at how much things have changed since the beginning of the year. Remember, this is obviously pre Ukraine, and pre all the concerns about the economic headwinds but here's an X Y graph that shows a net score, or spending momentum on the y-axis, and market presence on the x-axis. The red dotted line at 40% on the vertical indicates a highly elevated net score. Anything above that we think is, you know, super elevated. Now, we filtered the data here to show only those companies with more than 50 responses in the ETR survey. Still really crowded. Note that there were around 20 companies above that red 40% mark, which is a very, you know, high number. It's a, it's a crowded market, but lots of companies with, you know, positive momentum. Now let's jump ahead to the most recent October survey and take a look at what, what's happening. Same graphic plotting, spending momentum, and market presence, and look at the number of companies above that red line and how it's been squashed. It's really compressing, it's still a crowded market, it's still, you know, plenty of green, but the number of companies above 40% that, that key mark has gone from around 20 firms down to about five or six. And it speaks to that compression and IT spending, and of course the elongated sales cycles pushing deals out, taking them in smaller chunks. I can't tell you how many conversations with customers I had, at last week at Reinvent underscoring this exact same trend. The buyers are getting pressure from their CFOs to slow things down, do more with less and, and, and prioritize projects to those that absolutely are critical to driving revenue or cutting costs. And that's rippling through all sectors, including cyber. Now, let's do a bit more playing around with the ETR data and take a look at those companies with more than a hundred citations in the survey this quarter. So N, greater than or equal to a hundred. Now remember the followers of Breaking Analysis know that each quarter we take a look at those, what we call four star security firms. That is, those are the, that are in, that hit the top 10 for both spending momentum, net score, and the N, the mentions in the survey, the presence, the pervasiveness in the survey, and that's what we show here. The left most chart is sorted by spending momentum or net score, and the right hand chart by shared N, or the number of mentions in the survey, that pervasiveness metric. that solid red line denotes the cutoff point at the top 10. And you'll note we've actually cut it off at 11 to account for Auth 0, which is now part of Okta, and is going through a go to market transition, you know, with the company, they're kind of restructuring sales so they can take advantage of that. So starting on the left with spending momentum, again, net score, Microsoft leads all vendors, typical Microsoft, very prominent, although it hadn't always done so, it, for a while, CrowdStrike and Okta were, were taking the top spot, now it's Microsoft. CrowdStrike, still always near the top, but note that CyberArk and Cloudflare have cracked the top five in Okta, which as I just said was consistently at the top, has dropped well off its previous highs. You'll notice that Palo Alto Network Palo Alto Networks with a 38% net score, just below that magic 40% number, is healthy, especially as you look over to the right hand chart. Take a look at Palo Alto with an N of 395. It is the largest of the independent pure play security firms, and has a very healthy net score, although one caution is that net score has dropped considerably since the beginning of the year, which is the case for most of the top 10 names. The only exception is Fortinet, they're the only ones that saw an increase since January in spending momentum as ETR measures it. Now this brings us to the four star security firms, that is those that hit the top 10 in both net score on the left hand side and market presence on the right hand side. So it's Microsoft, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Okta, still there even not accounting for a Auth 0, just Okta on its own. If you put in Auth 0, it's, it's even stronger. Adding then in Fortinet and Zscaler. So Microsoft, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Okta, Fortinet, and Zscaler. And as we've mentioned since January, only Fortinet has shown an increase in net score since, since that time, again, since the January survey. Now again, this talks to the compression in spending. Now one of the big themes we hear constantly in cybersecurity is the market is overcrowded. Everybody talks about that, me included. The implication there, is there's a lot of room for consolidation and that consolidation can come in the form of M&A, or it can come in the form of people consolidating onto a single platform, and retiring some other vendors, and getting rid of duplicate vendors. We're hearing that as a big theme as well. Now, as we saw in the previous, previous chart, this is a very crowded market and we've seen lots of consolidation in 2022, in the form of M&A. Literally hundreds of M&A deals, with some of the largest companies going private. SailPoint, KnowBe4, Barracuda, Mandiant, Fedora, these are multi billion dollar acquisitions, or at least billion dollars and up, and many of them multi-billion, for these companies, and hundreds more acquisitions in the cyberspace, now less you think the pond is overfished, here's a chart from ETR of emerging tech companies in the cyber security industry. This data comes from ETR's Emerging Technologies Survey, ETS, which is this diamond in a rough that I found a couple quarters ago, and it's ripe with companies that are candidates for M&A. Many would've liked, many of these companies would've liked to, gotten to the public markets during the pandemic, but they, you know, couldn't get there. They weren't ready. So the graph, you know, similar to the previous one, but different, it shows net sentiment on the vertical axis and that's a measurement of, of, of intent to adopt against a mind share on the X axis, which measures, measures the awareness of the vendor in the community. So this is specifically a survey that ETR goes out and, and, and fields only to track those emerging tech companies that are private companies. Now, some of the standouts in Mindshare, are OneTrust, BeyondTrust, Tanium and Endpoint, Net Scope, which we've talked about in previous Breaking Analysis. 1Password, which has been acquisitive on its own. In identity, the managed security service provider, Arctic Wolf Network, a company we've also covered, we've had their CEO on. We've talked about MSSPs as a real trend, particularly in small and medium sized business, we'll come back to that, Sneek, you know, kind of high flyer in both app security and containers, and you can just see the number of companies in the space this huge and it just keeps growing. Now, just to make it a bit easier on the eyes we filtered the data on these companies with with those, and isolated on those with more than a hundred responses only within the survey. And that's what we show here. Some of the names that we just mentioned are a bit easier to see, but these are the ones that really stand out in ERT, ETS, survey of private companies, OneTrust, BeyondTrust, Taniam, Netscope, which is in Cloud, 1Password, Arctic Wolf, Sneek, BitSight, SecurityScorecard, HackerOne, Code42, and Exabeam, and Sim. All of these hit the ETS survey with more than a hundred responses by, by the IT practitioners. Okay, so these firms, you know, maybe they do some M&A on their own. We've seen that with Sneek, as I said, with 1Password has been inquisitive, as have others. Now these companies with the larger footprint, these private companies, will likely be candidate for both buying companies and eventually going public when the markets settle down a bit. So again, no shortage of players to affect consolidation, both buyers and sellers. Okay, so let's finish with some key questions that we're watching. CrowdStrike in particular on its earnings calls cited softness from smaller buyers. Is that because these smaller buyers have stopped adopting? If so, are they more at risk, or are they tactically moving toward the easy button, aka, Microsoft's good enough approach. What does that mean for the market if smaller company cohorts continue to soften? How about MSSPs? Will companies continue to outsource, or pause on on that, as well as try to free up, to try to free up some budget? Adam Celiski at Reinvent last week said, "If you want to save money the Cloud's the best place to do it." Is the cloud the best place to save money in cyber? Well, it would seem that way from the standpoint of controlling budgets with lots of, lots of optionality. You could dial up and dial down services, you know, or does the Cloud add another layer of complexity that has to be understood and managed by Devs, for example? Now, consolidation should favor the likes of Palo Alto and CrowdStrike, cause they're platform players, and some of the larger players as well, like Cisco, how about IBM and of course Microsoft. Will that happen? And how will economic uncertainty impact the risk equation, a particular concern is increase of tax on vulnerable sectors of the population, like the elderly. How will companies and governments protect them from scams? And finally, how many cybersecurity companies can actually remain independent in the slingshot economy? In so many ways the market is still strong, it's just that expectations got ahead of themselves, and now as earnings forecast come, come, come down and come down to earth, it's going to basically come down to who can execute, generate cash, and keep enough runway to get through the knothole. And the one certainty is nobody really knows how tight that knothole really is. All right, let's call it a wrap. Next week we dive deeper into Palo Alto Networks, and take a look at how and why that company has held up so well and what to expect at Ignite, Palo Alto's big user conference coming up later this month in Las Vegas. We'll be there with theCube. Okay, many thanks to Alex Myerson on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well, as our newest edition to our Boston studio. Great to have you Ken. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our EIC over at Silicon Angle. He does some great editing for us. Thank you to all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com, or you can email me directly David.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. Please do checkout etr.ai, they got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, brilliant cloud community, and welcome back to AWS re:Invent. We are here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, how you doing? >> I'm doing well, thanks, yeah. >> Yeah, I feel like... >> I'm hanging in there. >> you've got a lot of pep in your step today for the fourth day. >> I think my voice is coming back, actually. >> (laughs) Look at you, resilient. >> I was almost lost yesterday, yeah. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> So, I actually, at a Hitachi event one time almost completely lost my voice. The production guys pulled me off. They said, "You're done." (Savannah laughing) They gave me the hook. >> You got booted? >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, you actually (laughs) got the hook, wow. >> So, I have good memories of Hitachi. >> I was going to say (Dave laughing) interesting that you mentioned Hitachi. Our two guests this morning are from Hitachi. Sid and KP, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: How you guys doing? Looking great for day four. >> Great. Thank you. >> Great. >> Hanging in there. >> Thank you, Dave and Savannah. (Savannah laughing) >> Dave: Yeah, cool. >> Savannah: Yeah. (laughs) >> Yeah, it was actually a Pentaho thing, right? >> Oh, Pentaho? Yeah. >> Which kind of you guys into that software edge. It was right when you announced the name change to Hitachi Vantara, which is very cool. I had Brian Householder on. You remember Brian? >> Yeah, I know. >> He was explaining the vision, and yeah (indistinct). >> Yeah. Well, look at you a little Hitachi (indistinct). >> Yeah, I've been around a long time, yeah. >> Yeah, all right. (Dave laughing) >> Just a casual flex to start us off there, Dave. I love it. I love it. Sid, we've talked a lot on the show about delivering outcomes. It's a hot theme. Everyone wants to actually have tangible business outcomes from all of this. How are customers realizing value from the cloud? What does that mean? >> See, still 2007, 2008, it was either/or kind of architecture. Either I'm going to execute my use cases on cloud or I'm going to keep my use cases and outcomes through edge. But in the last four or five years and specifically we are in re:Invent, I would talk about AWS. Lot of the power of hyperscalers has been brought to edge. If you talk about the snowball family of AWS, if you talk about monitor on edge devices, if you talk about the entire server list being brought into Lambda coupled inside snowball, now the architecture premise, if I talk about logical shift is end. Now the customers are talking about executing the use cases between edge and cloud. So, there is a continuum rather than a binary bullion decision. So, if you are talking about optimizing a factory, earlier I'll do the analytics at cloud, and I'll do machine on edge. Now it is optimization of a factory outcome at scale across my entire manufacturing where edge, private cloud, AWS, hyperscalers, everything is a continuum. And the customer is not worried about where, which part of my data ops, network ops, server ops storage ops is being executed. >> Savannah: It's like (indistinct). >> The customer is enjoying the use cases. And the orchestration is abstracted through an industrial player like Hitachi working very collaboratively with AWS. So, that is how we are working on industrial use cases right now. >> You brought up manufacturing. I don't think there's been a hotter conversation around supply chain and manufacturing than there has been the last few years. I can imagine taking that guessing game out for customers is a huge deal for you guys. >> Big because if you look at the world today, right from a safety pin, to a cell phone jacket, to a cell phone, the entire supply chain is throttled. The supply chain is throttled because there are various choke points. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And each choke points is surrounded by different kind of supply and geopolitical issues. >> Savannah: 100%. >> Now, if we talk about the wheat crisis happening because of the Ukraine-Russia war, but the wheat crisis actually creates a multiple string of impacts which impact everything. Silicon, now we talk about silicon, but we then forget about nickel. Nickel is also controlled in one part of that geopolitical conflict. So, everything is getting conflagrated into a very big supply issue. So, if your factories are not performing beyond optimum, if they are not performing at real, I'm, we are talking about factory, hyperscale of the factory. The factory needs to perform at hyperscale to provide what the world needs today. So, we are in a very different kind of a scenario. Some of the economists call it earlier the recession was because of a demand constraint. The demand used to go down. Today's recession is because the supply is going down. The demand is there, but the supply is going down. And there is a different kind of recession in the world. The supply is what is getting throttled. >> And the demand is somewhat unpredictable too. People, you know, retailers, they've... >> Especially right now. >> kind of messed up their inventory. And so, the data is still siloed. And that's where, you know, you get to, okay, can I have the same experience across clouds, on-prem, out to the edge? Kind of bust those silos. >> Yep. >> You know, I dunno if it's, it's certainly not entirely a data problem. There's (laughs), like you say, geopolitical and social issues. >> Savannah: There's so much complexity. >> But there's a data problem too. >> Yes. >> Big. >> So, I wonder if you could talk about your sort of view of, point of view on that cross-cloud, hybrid, out to the edge, what I call super cloud? >> Absolutely. So, today, if you look at how enterprises are adopting cloud or how they're leveraging cloud, it's not just a hosting platform, right? It is the platform from where they can draw business capabilities. You heard in the re:Invent that Amazon is coming up with a supply chain service out of the box in the cloud. That's the kind of capabilities that business wants to draw from cloud today. So, the kind of multicloud or like hybrid cloud, public cloud, private cloud, those are the things which are kind of going to be behind the scenes. At the end of the day, the cloud needs to be able to support businesses by providing their services closer to their consumers. So, the challenges are going to be there in terms of like reliability, resilience, cost, security. Those are the ones that, you know, many of the enterprises are grappling with in terms of the challenges. And the way to solve that, the way how we approach our customers and work with them is to be able to bring resilience into the cloud, into the services which are running in cloud, and by driving automation, making autonomous in everything that you do, how you are monitoring your services, how we are making it available, how we are securing it, how we are making it very cost-effective as well. It cannot be manually executed; it has to be automated. So, automation is the key in terms of making the services leveraged from all of this cloud. >> That's your value add. >> Absolutely. >> And how do I consume that value add? Is it sort of embedded into infrastructure? Is it a service layer on top? >> Yeah, so everything that we do today in terms of like how these services have to be provided, how the services have to be consumed, there has to be a modern operating model, right? I think this is where Hitachi has come up with what we are calling as Hitachi Application Reliability Center and Services. That is focusing on modern operating, modern ways of like, you know, how you support these cloud workloads and driving this automation. So, whether we provide a hyper-converged infrastructure that is going to be at the edge location, or we are going to be able to take a customer through the journey of modernization or migrating onto cloud, the operating model that is going to be able to establish the foundation on cloud and then to be able to operate with the right levels of reliability, security, cost is the key. And that's the value added service that we provide. And then the way we do that is essentially by looking at three principles: one, to look at the service in totality. Gone are the days you look at infrastructure separately, applications separately, data and security separately, right? >> Savannah: No more silos. >> No more silos. You look at it as a workload, and you look at it as a service. And number two is to make sure that the DevOps that you bring and what you do at the table is totally integrated and it's end to end. It's not a product team developing a feature and then ops team trying to keep the lights on. It has to be a common backlog with the error budget that looks at you know, product releases, product functionalities, and even what ops needs to do to evolve the product as well. And then the third is to make sure that reliability and resiliency is inbuilt. Cloud offers native durability, native availability. But if your service doesn't take advantage of that, it's kind of going to still be not available. So, how do you kind of ingrain and embed all of these things as a value add that we provide? >> There's a lot of noise. We've got hybrid cloud. We've got multicloud. We've got a lot going on. It adds to the complexity. How do you help customers solve that complexity as they begin their transformation journey? I mean, I'm sure you're working with the biggest companies, making really massive change. How do you guide them through that process? >> So, it is to look at the outcome working backwards, like what AWS does, right? Like, you know, how do you look at the business outcome? What is the value that you're looking to drive? Again, it's not to be pinned through one particular cloud. I know there is lot of technology choices that you can make and lot of deployment models that you can choose from. But at the end of the day, having a common operating model which is kind of like modern, agile, and it is kind of like keeping the outcomes in the mind, that is what we do with our customers to be able to create that operating model, which completes the transformation, by the way. And cloud is just one part of the LEGO blocks which provides that overall scheme and then the view for driving that overall transformation. >> So, let's paint a picture. Let's say you've got this resilient foundation; you've kind of helped the customers build that out. How do they turn that into value for their customers? Do you have any examples that you can share? That'd be great. >> Yeah, I can start with what we're doing for one of the, you know, world's largest facility, infrastructure, power, cooling, security, monitoring company that has their products deployed in 2,000 locations across the globe. For them, and always on business means you are monitoring the temperature. You are monitoring the safety of people who are within the facility, right? A temperature shift of one to two degree can affect even the sustainability goals of NARC, our customer, but also their end consumers. So, how do you monitor these kind of like critical parameters? How do you have a platform? >> Savannah: Great example, yeah. >> How you have cloud resources that are going to be always on, that are going to be reliable, that are going to be cost-effective as well is what we are doing for one of our customers. Sid can talk about another example as well. >> Great. >> Yeah, go for it, Sid. >> So, there are examples: rail. We are working with a group in England; it's called West Coast Partnership. And they had a edge device which was increasing in size. Now, this edge device was becoming big because the parameters which go into the edge device were increasing because of regulation and because the rail is part of national security infrastructure. We have worked with West Coast Partnership and Hitachi Rail, which is a group company, to create a miniaturization of this edge device, because if the size of the edge device is increasing on the train, then the weight of the train increases, and the speed profile, velocity profile, everything goes down. So, we have miniaturized the edge device. Secondly, all the data profiles, signal control, traction control, traction motors, direction control, timetable compliance, everything has been kept uniform. And we have done analytics on cloud. So, what is the behavior of the driver? What is a big breaking parameter of the driver? If the timetable has being missed, is there an erratic behavior being demonstrated by the driver to just meet the timetable? And the timetable is a pretty important criteria in rail because if you miss one, then... So, what we have done is we have created an edge-to-cloud environment where the entire rail analytics is happening. Similarly, in another group company, Hitachi Energy, they had a problem that arguably one of the largest transformer manufacturer in the world. The transformer is a pretty common name now because you're seeing what is happening in Ukraine. Russia went after the transformers and substations before the start of the winter so that their district heating can be meddled with. Now, the transformer, it had a lead time of 17 weeks before COVID. So, if you put me an order of a three-phase transformer, I can deliver it to you in 17 weeks. After and during COVID, the entire lead time increased to 57 to 58 weeks. In cases of a complex transformer, it even went up to something like two years. >> Savannah: Ooh! >> Now, they wanted to increase the productivity of their existing plant because there is only that much sheet metal, that much copper for solenoid, that much microprocessor and silicon. So, they wanted to increase the output of their factory from 95 to 105, 10 more transformers every day, which is 500 and, which is 3,650 every- >> Savannah: Year. >> Year. Now, to do that, we went to a very complex machine; it's called a guard machine. And we increased the productivity of the guard machine by just analyzing all the throttles and all the wastages which are happening there. There are multiple case studies because, see, Hitachi is an industrial giant with 105 years of body of work. KP and I just represent the tip of the digital tip of the arrow. But what we are trying to do through HARC, through industry cloud, through partnership with AWS is basically containerizing and miniaturizing our entire body of work into a democratized environment, an industrial app store, if I may say, where people can come and take their industrial outcomes at ease without worrying about their computational and network orchestration between edge and cloud. That's what we are trying to do. >> I love that analogy of an industrial app cloud. Makes it feel easier in decreasing the complexity of all the different things that everyone's factoring into making their products, whatever they're making. So, we have a new challenge here on theCUBE at AWS re:Invent, where we are looking for your 30-second hot take, your Instagram reel, sound bite. What's the most important story or theme either for you as a team or coming out of the show? You can ponder it for a second. >> It might be different. See, for me, it is industrial security. Industrial OT security should be the theme of the Western world. Western world is on the crosshairs of multiple bad actors. And the industrial security is in the chemical plants, is in the industrial plants, is in the power grids, is in our postal networks and our rail networks. They need to be secured; otherwise, we are geopolitically very weak. Gone are the days when anyone is going to pick up a battle with America or Western world on a field. The battle is going to be pretty clandestine on an cyber world. And that is why industrial security is very important. >> Critical infrastructure and protecting it. >> Absolutely. >> Well said, Sid. KP, what's your hot take? >> My take is going to be a modern operating model, which is going to complete the transformation and to be able to tap into business services from cloud. So, a modern operating model through HARC, that is going to be my take. >> Fantastic. Well, can't wait to see what comes out of Hitachi next. Sid, KP... >> KP: Thank you. >> thank you so much for being here. >> Sid: Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> Dave: Thanks, guys. >> Savannah: This is I could talk to you all about supply chain all day long. And thank all of you for tuning in to our continuous live coverage here from AWS re:Invent in fantastic Sin City. I'm Savannah. Oh, excuse me. With Dave Vellante, I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (digital xylophone music)