>> Voiceover: Live from San Jose, it's The Cube. Presenting Big Data Silicon Valley, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube, our continuing coverage of our event, Big Data SV. We're on day two of this event. I'm Lisa Martin, with George Gilbert. We've had a great day yesterday learning a lot and really peeling back the layers of big data, looking at it from different perspectives, from challenges to opportunities. Joining us next is one of our Cube alumni, Chris Selland, the VP of Strategic Alliances from Unifi Software. Chris, great to meet you, welcome back! >> Thank you Lisa, it's great to be here. I have to say, as a alumni and a many time speaker, this venue is spectacular. Congratulations on the growth of The Cube, and this is an awesome venue. I've been on The Cube a bunch of times and this is as nice as I've ever seen it, >> Yeah, this is pretty cool, >> Onward and upward. This place is great. Isn't it cool? >> It really is. This is our 10th Big Data event, we've been having five now in San Jose, do our fifth one in New York City in the fall, and it's always interesting because we get the chance, George and I, and the other hosts, to really look at what is going on from different perspectives in the industry of big data. So before we kind of dig into that, tell us a little bit about Unifi Software, what do you guys do, what is unique and differentiating about Unifi. >> Sure, yeah, so I joined Unifi a little over a year ago. You know, I was attracted to the company because it really, I think, is aligned with where the market is going, and Peter talked this morning, Peter Burris was talking this morning about networks of data. Unifi is fundamentally a data catalog and data preparation platform, kind of combined or unified together. So, you know, so people say, "What do you do?" We're a data catalog with integrated data preparation. And the idea behind that, to go to Peter's, you know, mention of networks of data, is that data is becoming more and more distributed in terms of where it is, where it lives, where it sits. This idea of we're going to put everything in the data warehouse, and then we're going to put everything in the data lake, well, in reality, some of the data's in the warehouse, some of the data's in the lake, some of the data's in SAS applications, some of the data's in blob storage. And where is all of that data, what is it, and what can I do with it, that's really the fundamental problem that we solve. And, by the way, solve it for business people, because it's not just data scientists anymore, it's really going out into the entire business community now, you know, marketing people, operations people, finance people, they need data to do their jobs. Their jobs are becoming more data driven, but they're not necessarily data people. They don't know what schemas are, or joins are, but they know, "I need better data "to be able to do my job more effectively." So that's really what we're helping with. So, Chris, this is, it's kind of interesting, if you distill, you know, the capability down to the catalog and the prep-- >> Chris: Yep. So that it's ready for a catalog, but that sort of thing is, it's like investment in infrastructure, in terms of like building the highway system, but there're going to be, you know, for those early highways, there's got to be roots that you, a reason to build them out. What are some of those early use cases that justifies the investment in data infrastructure? >> There absolutely are, I mean, and by the way, those roots don't go away, those roots, you know, just like cities, right? New roots get built on top of them. So we're very much, you know, about, there's still data sitting in mainframes and legacy systems and you know, that data is absolutely critical for many large organizations. We do a lot of working in banking and financial services, and healthcare. They're still-- >> George: Are there common use cases that they start with? >> A lot of times-- >> Like, either by industry or just cross-sectional? >> Well, it's interesting, because, you know, analysts like yourselves have tended to put data catalog, which is a relatively new term, although some other big analyst firm that's having another conference this week, they were telling us recently that, starts with a "G," right? They were telling us that data catalog is now the number one search term they're getting. But it's been, by many annals, also kind of lumped in, lumped in's the wrong word, but incorporated with data governance. So traditionally, governance, another word that starts with "G," it's been the term. So, we often, we're not a traditional data governance platform, per se, but cataloging data has to have a foundation of security in governance. You know, think about what's going on in the world right now, both in the court of law and the court of public opinion, things like GDPR, right? So GDPR sort of says any customer data you have needs to be managed a certain way, with a certain level of sensitivity, and then there's other capabilities you need to open up to customers, like the right to be forgotten, so that means I need to have really good control, first of all, knowledge of, control over, and governance over my customer data. I talked about all those business people before. Certainly marketers are a great example. Marketers want all the customer data they can get, right? But there's social security numbers, PII, who should be able to see and use what? Because, if this data is used inappropriately, then it can cause a lot of problems. So, IT kind of sits in a-- they want to enable the business, but at the same time, there's a lot of risk there. So, anyway, going back to your question, you know, the catalog market is kind of evolved out of the governance market with more of a focus on kind of, you know, enabling the business, but making sure that it's done in a secure and well-governed way. >> George: Guard rails. >> Yes, guard rails, exactly, good way to say it. So, yep, that's good, I said about 500 words, and you distilled it to about two, right? Perfect, yep. >> So, in terms of your role in strategic alliances, tell us a little about some of the partnerships that Unifi is forging, to help customers understand where all this data is, to your point earlier, the different lines of business that need it to drive, identify where's their value, and drive the business forward, can actually get it. >> Absolutely, well, certainly to your point, our customers are our partners, and we can talk about some of them. But also, strategic alliances, we work very closely with a number of, you know, larger technology companies, Microsoft is a good example. We were actually part of the Microsoft Accelerator Program, which I think they've now rebranded Microsoft for Startups, but we've really been given tremendous support by that team, and we're doing a lot of work to, kind of, we're to some degree cloud agnostic, we support AWS, we support Azure, we support Google Cloud, but we're doing a lot of our development also on the Azure cloud platform. But you know, customers use all of the above, so we need to support all of the above. So Microsoft's a very close partner of ours. Another, I'll be in two weeks, and we've got some interesting news pending, which unfortunately I can't get into today, but maybe in a couple weeks, with Adobe. We're working very closely with them on their marketing cloud, their experience cloud, which is what they call their enterprise marketing cloud, which obviously, big, big focus on customer data, and then we've been working with a number of organizations and the sort of professional services system integration. We've had a lot of success with a firm called Access Group. We announced the partnership with them about two weeks ago. They've been a great partner for us, as well. So, you know, it's all about an ecosystem. Making customers successful is about getting an ecosystem together, so it's a really exciting place to be. >> So, Chris, it's actually interesting, it sounds like there's sort of a two classic routes to market. One is essentially people building your solution into theirs, whether it's an application or, you know, >> Chris: An enabling layer. >> Yes. >> Chris: Yes. >> Even higher layer. But with corporate developers, you know, it's almost like we spent years experimenting with these data lakes. But they were a little too opaque. >> Chris: Yes. >> And you know, it's not just that you provide the guard rails, but you also provide, sort of some transparency-- >> Chris: Yes. >> Into that. Have you seen a greater success rate within organizations who curate their data lakes, as opposed to those who, you know, who don't? >> Yes, absolutely. I think Peter said it very well in his presentation this morning, as well. That, you know, generally when you see data lake, we associate it with Hadoop. There are use cases that Hadoop is very good for, but there are others where it might not be the best fit. Which, to the early point about networks of data and distributed data, so companies that have, or organizations that have approached Hadoop with a "let's use it what it's good for," as opposed to "let's just dump "everything in there and figure it out later," and there have been a lot of the latter, but the former have done, generally speaking, a lot better, and that's what you're seeing. And we actually use Hadoop as a part of our platform, at least for the data preparation and transformation side of what we do. We use it in its enabling technology, as well. >> You know, it's funny, actually, when you talk about, as Peter talked about, networks of data versus centralized repositories. Scott Gnau, CTO of Hortonworks, was on yesterday, and he was talking about how he had originally come from Teradata, and that they had tried to do work, that he had tried to push them in the direction of recognizing that not all the analytic data was going to be in Teradata, you know, but they had to look more broadly with Hadapt, and I forgot what the rest of, you know-- >> Chris: Right, Aster, and-- >> Aster, yeah. >> Chris: Yes, exactly, yep. >> But what was interesting is that Hortonworks was moving towards the "we believe "everything is going to be in the data lake," but now, with their data plane service, they're talking about, you know, "We have to give you visibility and access." You mediate access to data everywhere. >> Chris: Right. >> So maybe help, so for folks who aren't, like, all bought into Hortonworks, for example, how much, you know, explain how you work relative to data plane service. >> Well, you know, maybe I could step back and give you a more general answer, because I agree with that philosophically, right? That, as I think we've been talking about here, with the networks of data, that goes back to my prior statement that there's, you know, there's different types of data platforms that have different use cases, and different types of solutions should be built on top of them, so things are getting more distributed. I think that, you know, Hortonworks, like every company, has to make the investments that are, as we are, making their customers successful. So, using Hadoop, and Hortonworks is one of our supported Hadoop platforms, we do work with them on engagements, but you know, it's all about making customers successful, ultimately. It's not about a particular product, it's about, you know, which data belongs in which location, and for what use case and what purpose, and then at the same time, when we're taking all of these different data sets and data sources, and cataloging them and preparing them and creating our output, where should we put that and catalog that, so we can create kind of a continuous improvement cycle, as well, and for those types-- >> A flywheel. >> A flywheel, exactly, continuous improvement flywheel, and for those types of purposes, you know, that's actually great use case for, you know, Hortonworks, Hadoop. That's a lot of what we typically use it for. We can actually put the data any place our customers define, but that's very often what we do with it, and then, but doing it in a very structured and organized way. As opposed to, you know, a lot of the early Hadoop, and not specific to any particular distro that went bad, were, it was just like, "Let's just dump it all "into Hadoop because it's cheaper." You know, "Let's, 'cause it's cheaper than the warehouse, "so let's just put it all in there, "and we'll figure what to do with it later." That's bad, but if you're using it in a structured way, it can be extremely useful. At the same point, and at the same time, not everything's going to go there belongs there, if you're being thoughtful about it. So you're seeing a lot more thoughtfulness these days, which is good. Which is good for customers, and it's good for us in the vendor side. Us, Hortonworks, everybody, so. >> So is there, maybe you can tell us of the different approaches to, like, the advantage of integrating the data prep with the catalogized service, because as soon as you're done with data prep it's visible within the catalog. >> Chris: Absolutely, that's one, yep. >> When, let's say when people do derive additional views into the data, how are they doing that in a way that then gets also registered back in the catalog, for further discovery? >> Yeah, well, having the integrated data preparation which is a huge differentiator from us, there are a lot of data catalog products out there, but our huge differentiator, one of them, is the fact that we have integrated data preparation. We don't have to hand off to another product, so that, as you said, gives us the ability to then catalog our output and build that flywheel, that continuous improvement flywheel, and it also just basically simplifies things for customers, hence our name. So, you know, it really kind of starts there. I think I, the second part of your question I didn't really, rewind back on that for me, it was-- >> Go ahead. >> Well, I'm not sure I remember it, right now, either. >> We all need more coffee. >> Exactly, we all need more coffee. >> So I'll ask you this last question, then. >> Yes, please. >> What are, so here we are in March 2018, what are you looking forward to, in terms of momentum and evolution of Unifi this year? >> Well, a lot of it, and tying into my role, I mentioned we will be at Adobe Summit in two weeks, so if you're going to be at Adobe Summit, come see us there, some of the work that we're doing with our partner, some of the events we're doing with people like Microsoft and Access, but really it's also just customer success, I mean, we're seeing tremendous momentum on the customer side, working with our customers, working with our partners, and again, as I mentioned, we're seeing so much more thoughtfulness in the market, these days, and less talk about, you know, the speeds and feeds, and more around business solutions. That's really also where our professional services, system integration partners, many of whom I've been with this week, really help, because they're building out solutions. You know, GDPR is coming in May, right? And you're starting to really see a groundswell of, okay, you know, and that's not about, you know, speeds and feeds. That's ultimately about making sure that I'm compliant with, you know, this huge regulatory environment. And at the same time, the court of public opinion is just as important. You know, we want to make sure that we're doing the right thing with data. Spread it throughout organization, make ourselves successful and make our customers successful. So, it's a lot of fun. >> That's, fun is good. >> Exactly, fun is good. >> Well, we thank you so much, Chris, for stopping back by The Cube and sharing your insights, what you're hearing in the big data industry, and some of the momentum that you're looking forward to carrying throughout the year. >> It's always a pleasure, and you, too. So, love the venue. >> Lisa: All right. >> Thank you, Lisa, thank you, George. >> Absolutely. We want to thank you for watching The Cube. You're watching our coverage of our event, Big Data SV, hashtag BigDataSV, for George, I almost said George Martin. For George Gilbert. >> George: I wish. >> George R.R., yeah. You would not be here if you were George R.R. Martin. >> George: No, I wouldn't. >> That was a really long way to say thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin, for this George. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here at the east coast studio for Silicon Angle Media. Happy to welcome back to the program, a many time guest, Chris Selland, who is now the Vice President of strategic growth with Unifi Software. Great to see you Chris. >> Thanks so much Stu, great to see you too. >> Alright, so Chris, we'd had you in your previous role many times. >> Chris: Yes >> I think not only is the first time we've had you on since you made the switch, but also first time we've had somebody from Unifi Software on. So, why don't you give us a little bit of background of Unifi and what brought you to this opportunity. >> Sure, absolutely happy to sort of open up the relationship with Unifi Software. I'm sure it's going to be a long and good one. But I joined the company about six months ago at this point. So I joined earlier this year. I actually had worked with Unifi for a bit as partners. Where when I was previously at the Vertica business inside of HP/HP, as you know for a number of years prior to that, where we did all the work together. I also knew the founders of Unifi, who were actually at Greenplum, which was a direct Vertica competitor. Greenplum is acquired by EMC. Vertica was acquired by HP. We were sort of friendly respected competitors. And so I have known the founders for a long time. But it was partly the people, but it was really the sort of the idea, the product. I was actually reading the report that Peter Burris or the piece that Peter Burris just did on I guess wikibon.com about distributed data. And it played so into our value proposition. We just see it's where things are going. I think it's where things are going right now. And I think the market's bearing that out. >> The piece you reference, it was actually, it's a Wikibon research meeting, we run those weekly. Internally, we're actually going to be doing them soon we will be broadcasting video. Cause, of course, we do a lot of video. But we pull the whole team together, and it was one, George Gilbert actually led this for us, talking about what architectures do I need to build, when I start doing distributed data. With my background really more in kind of the cloud and infrastructure world. We see it's a hybrid, and many times a multi-cloud world. And, therefore, one of the things we look at that's critical is wait, if I've got things in multiple places. I've got my SAS over here, I've got multiple public clouds I'm using, and I've got my data center. How do I get my arms around all the pieces? And of course data is critical to that. >> Right, exactly, and the fact that more and more people need data to do their jobs these days. Working with data is no longer just the area where data scientists, I mean organizations are certainly investing in data scientists, but there's a shortage, but at the same time, marketing people, finance people, operations people, supply chain folks. They need data to do their jobs. And as you said where it is, it's distributed, it's in legacy systems, it's in the data center, it's in warehouses, it's in SAS applications, it's in the cloud, it's on premise, It's all over the place, so, yep. >> Chris, I've talked to so many companies that are, everybody seems to be nibbling at a piece of this. We go to the Amazon show and there's this just ginormous ecosystem that everybody's picking at. Can you drill in a little bit for what problems do you solve there. I have talked to people. Everything from just trying to get the licensing in place, trying to empower the business unit to do things, trying to do government compliance of course. So where's Unifi's point in this. >> Well, having come out of essentially the data warehousing market. And now of course this has been going on, of course with all the investments in HDFS, Hadoop infrastructure, and open source infrastructure. There's been this fundamental thinking that, well the answer's if I get all of the data in one place then I can analyze it. Well that just doesn't work. >> Right. >> Because it's just not feasible. So I think really and its really when you step back it's one of these like ah-ha that makes total sense, right. What we do is we basically catalog the data in place. So you can use your legacy data that's on the main frame. Let's say I'm a marketing person. I'm trying to do an analysis of selling trends, marketing trends, marketing effectiveness. And I want to use some order data that's on the main frame, I want some click stream data that's sitting in HDFS, I want some customer data in the CRM system, or maybe it's in Sales Force, or Mercado. I need some data out of Workday. I want to use some external data. I want to use, say, weather data to look at seasonal analysis. I want to do neighborhooding. So, how do I do that? You know I may be sitting there with Qlik or Tableau or Looker or one of these modern B.I. products or visualization products, but at the same time where's the data. So our value proposition it starts with we catalog the data and we show where the data is. Okay, you've got these data sources, this is what they are, we describe them. And then there's a whole collaboration element to the platform that lets people as they're using the data say, well yes that's order data, but that's old data. So it's good if you use it up to 2007, but the more current data's over here. Do things like that. And then we also then help the person use it. And again I almost said IT, but it's not real data scientists, it's not just them. It's really about democratizing the use. Because business people don't know how to do inner and outer joins and things like that or what a schema is. They just know, I'm trying do a better job of analyzing sales trends. I got all these different data sources, but then once I found them, once I've decided what I want to use, how do I use them? So we answer that question too. >> Yea, Chris reminds me a lot of some the early value propositions we heard when kind of Hadoop and the whole big data wave came. It was how do I get as a smaller company, or even if I'm a bigger company, do it faster, do it for less money than the things it use to be. Okay, its going to be millions of dollars and it's going to take me 18 months to roll out. Is it right to say this is kind of an extension of that big data wave or what's different and what's the same? >> Absolutely, we use a lot of that stuff. I mean we basically use, and we've got flexibility in what we can use, but for most of our customers we use HDFS to store the data. We use Hive as the most typical data form, you have flexibility around there. We use MapReduce, or Spark to do transformation of the data. So we use all of those open source components, and as the product is being used, as the platform is being used and as multiple users, cause it's designed to be an enterprise platform, are using it, the data does eventually migrate into the data lake, but we don't require you to sort of get it there as a prerequisite. As I said, this is one of the things that we really talk about a lot. We catalog the data where it is, in place, so you don't have to move it to use it, you don't have to move it to see it. But at the same time if you want to move it you can. The fundamental idea I got to move it all first, I got to put it all in one place first, it never works. We've come into so many projects where organizations have tried to do that and they just can't, it's too complex these days. >> Alright, Chris, what are some of the organizational dynamics you're seeing from your customers. You mention data scientist, the business users. Who is identifying, whose driving this issues, whose got the budget to try to fix some of these challenges. >> Well, it tends to be our best implementations are driven really, almost all of them these days, are driven by used cases. So they're driven by business needs. Some of the big ones. I've sort of talked about customers already, but like customer 360 views. For instance, there's a very large credit union client of ours, that they have all of their data, that is organized by accounts, but they can't really look at Stu Miniman as my customer. How do I look at Stu's value to us as a customer? I can look at his mortgage account, I can look at his savings account, I can look at his checking account, I can look at his debit card, but I can't just see Stu. I want to like organize my data, that way. That type of customer 360 or marketing analysis I talked about is a great use case. Another one that we've been seeing a lot of is compliance. Where just having a better handle on what data is where it is. This is where some of the governance aspects of what we do also comes into play. Even though we're very much about solving business problems. There's a very strong data governance. Because when you are doing things like data compliance. We're working, for instance, with MoneyGram, is a customer of ours. Who this day and age in particular, when there's money flows across the borders, there's often times regulators want to know, wait that money that went from here to there, tell me where it came from, tell me where it went, tell me the lineage. And they need to be able to respond to those inquiries very very quickly. Now the reality is that data sits in all sorts of different places, both inside and outside of the organization. Being able to organize that and give the ability to respond more quickly and effectively is a big competitive advantage. Both helps with avoiding regulatory fines, but also helps with customers responsiveness. And then you've got things GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, I believe it is, which is being driven by the EU. Where its sort of like the next Y2K. Anybody in data, if they are not paying attention to it, they need to be pretty quick. At least if they're a big enough company they're doing business in Europe. Because if you are doing business with European companies or European customers, this is going to be a requirement as of May next year. There's a whole 'nother set of how data's kept, how data's stored, what customers can control over data. Things like 'Right to Be Forgotten'. This need to comply with regulatory... As data's gotten more important, as you might imagine, the regulators have gotten more interested in what organizations are doing with data. Having a framework with that, organizes and helps you be more compliant with those regulations is absolutely critical. >> Yeah, my understanding of GDPR, if you don't comply, there's hefty fines. >> Chris: Major Fines. >> Major Fines. That are going to hit you. Does Unifi solve that? Is there other re-architecture, redesign that customers need to do to be able to be compliant? [speaking at The same Time] >> No, no that's the whole idea again where being able to leave the data where it is, but know what it is and know where it is and if and when I need to use it and where it came from and where it's going and where it went. All of those things, so we provide the platform that enables the customers to use it or the partners to build the solutions for their customers. >> Curious, customers, their adoption of public cloud, how does that play into what you are doing? They deploy more SAS environments. We were having a conversation off camera today talking about the consolidation that's happening in the software world. What does those dynamics mean for your customers? >> Well public cloud is obviously booming and growing and any organization has some public cloud infrastructure at this point, just about any organization. There's some very heavily regulated areas. Actually health care's probably a good example. Where there's very little public cloud. But even there we're working with... we're part of the Microsoft Accelerator Program. Work very closely with the Azure team, for instance. And they're working in some health care environments, where you have to be things like HIPAA compliant, so there is a lot of caution around that. But none the less, the move to public cloud is certainly happening. I think I was just reading some stats the other day. I can't remember if they're Wikibon or other stats. It's still only about 5% of IT spending. And the reality is organizations of any size have plenty of on-prem data. And of course with all the use of SAS solutions, with Salesforce, Workday, Mercado, all of these different SAS applications, it's also in somebody else's data center, much of our data as well. So it's absolutely a hybrid environment. That's why the report that you guys put out on distributed data, really it spoke so much to what out value proposition is. And that's why you know I'm really glad to be here to talk to you about it. >> Great, Chris tell us a little bit, the company itself, how many employees you have, what metrics can you share about the number of customers, revenue, things like that. >> Sure, no, we've got about, I believe about 65 people at the company right now. I joined like I said earlier this year, late February, early March. At that point we we were like 40 people, so we've been growing very quickly. I can't get in too specifically to like our revenue, but basically we're well in the triple digit growth phase. We're still a small company, but we're growing quickly. Our number of customers it's up in the triple digits as well. So expanding very rapidly. And again we're a platform company, so we serve a variety of industries. Some of the big ones are health care, financial services. But even more in the industries it tends to be driven by these used cases I talked about as well. And we're building out our partnerships also, so that's a big part of what I do also. >> Can you share anything about funding where you are? >> Oh yeah, funding, you asked about that, sorry. Yes, we raised our B round of funding, which closed in March of this year. So we [mumbles], a company called Pelion Venture Partners, who you may know, Canaan Partners, and then most recently Scale Venture Partners are investors. So the companies raised a little over $32 million dollars so far. >> Partnerships, you mentioned Microsoft already. Any other key partnerships you want to call out? >> We're doing a lot of work. We have a very broad partner network, which we're building up, but some of the ones that we are sort of leaning in the most with, Microsoft is certainly one. We're doing a lot of work guys at Cloudera as well. We also work with Hortonworks, we also work with MapR. We're really working almost across the board in the BI space. We have spent a lot of time with the folks at Looker. Who was also a partner I was working with very closely during my Vertica days. We're working with Qlik, we're working with Tableau. We're really working with actually just about everybody in sort of BI and visualization. I don't think people like the term BI anymore. The desktop visualization space. And then on public cloud, also Google, Amazon, so really all the kind of major players. I would say that they're the ones that we worked with the most closely to date. As I mentioned earlier we're part of the Microsoft Accelerator Program, so we're certainly very involved in the Microsoft ecosystem. I actually just wrote a blog post, which I don't believe has been published yet, about some of the, what we call the full stack solutions we have been rolling out with Microsoft for a few customers. Where we're sitting on Azure, we're using HDInsight, which is essentially Microsoft's Hadoop cloud Hadoop distribution, visualized empower BI. So we've really got to lot of deep integration with Microsoft, but we've got a broad network as well. And then I should also mention service providers. We're building out our service provider partnerships also. >> Yeah, Chris I'm surprised we haven't talked about kind of AI yet at all, machine learning. It feels like everybody that was doing big data, now has kind pivoted in maybe a little bit early in the buzz word phase. What's your take on that? You've been apart of this for a while. Is big data just old now and we have a new thing, or how do you put those together? >> Well I think what we do maps very well until, at least my personal view of what's going on with AI/ML, is that it's really part of the fabric of what our product does. I talked before about once you sort of found the data you want to use, how do I use it? Well there's a lot of ML built into that. Where essentially, I see these different datasets, I want to use them... We do what's called one click functions. Which basically... What happens is these one click functions get smarter as more and more people use the product and use the data. So that if I've got some table over here and then I've got some SAS data source over there and one user of the product... or we might see field names that we, we grab the metadata, even though we don't require moving the data, we grab the metadata, we look at the metadata and then we'll sort of tell the user, we suggest that you join this data source with that data source and see what it looks like. And if they say: ah that worked, then we say oh okay that's part of sort of the whole ML infrastructure. Then we are more likely to advise the next few folks with the one click function that, hey if you trying to do a analysis of sales trends, well you might want to use this source and that source and you might want to join them together this way. So it's a combination of sort of AI and ML built into the fabric of what we do, and then also the community aspect of more and more people using it. But that's, going back to your original question, That's what I think that... There was quote, I'll misquote it, so I'm not going to directly say it, but it was just.. I think it might have John Ferrier, who was recently was talking about ML and just sort of saying you know eventually we're not going to talk about ML anymore than we talk about phone business or something. It's just going to become sort of integrated into the fabric of how organizations do business and how organizations do things. So we very much got it built in. You could certainly call us an AI/ML company if you want, its actually definitely part of our slide deck. But at the same time its something that will just sort of become a part of doing business over time. But it really, it depends on large data sets. As we all know, this is why it's so cheap to get Amazon Echoes and such these days. Because it's really beneficial, because the more data... There's value in that data, there was just another piece, I actually shared it on Linkedin today as a matter of fact, about, talking about Amazon and Whole Foods and saying: why are they getting such a valuation premium? They're getting such a valuation premium, because they're smart about using data, but one of the reasons they're smart about using the data is cause they have the data. So the more data you collect, the more data you use, the smarter the systems get, the more useful the solutions become. >> Absolutely, last year when Amazon reinvented, John Ferrier interviewed Andy Jassy and I had posited that the customer flywheel, is going to be replaced by that data flywheel. And enhanced to make things spin even further. >> That's exactly right and once you get that flywheel going it becomes a bigger and bigger competitive advantage, by the way that's also why the regulators are getting interested these days too, right? There's sort of, that flywheel going back the other way, but from our perspective... I mean first of all it just makes economic sense, right? These things could conceivably get out of control, that's at least what the regulators think, if you're not careful at least there's some oversight and I would say that, yes probably some oversight is a good idea, so you've got kind of flywheels pushing in both directions. But one way or another organizations need to get much smarter and much more precise and prescriptive about how they use data. And that's really what we're trying to help with. >> Okay, Chris want to give you the final word, Unify Software, you're working on kind of the strategic road pieces. What should we look for from you in your segment through the rest of 2017? >> Well, I think, I've always been a big believer, I've probably cited 'Crossing the Chasm' like so many times on theCUBE, during my prior HP 10 year and such but you know, I'm a big believer and we should be talking about customers, we should be talking about used cases. It's not about alphabet soup technology or data lakes, it's about the solutions and it's about how organizations are moving themselves forward with data. Going back to that Amazon example, so I think from us, yes we just released 2.O, we've got a very active blog, come by unifisoftware.com, visit it. But it's also going to be around what our customers are doing and that's really what we're going to try to promote. I mean if you remember this was also something, that for all the years I've worked with you guys I've been very much... You always have to make sure that the customer has agreed to be cited, it's nice when you can name them and reference them and we're working on our customer references, because that's what I think is the most powerful in this day and age, because again, going back to my, what I said before about, this is going throughout organizations now. People don't necessarily care about the technology infrastructure, but they care about what's being done with it. And so, being able to tell those customer stories, I think that's what you're going to probably see and hear the most from us. But we'll talk about our product as much as you let us as well. >> Great thing, it reminds me of when Wikibon was founded it was really about IT practice, users being able to share with their peers. Now when the software economy today, when they're doing things in software often that can be leveraged by their peers and that flywheel that they're doing, just like when Salesforce first rolled out, they make one change and then everybody else has that option. We're starting to see that more and more as we deploy as SAS and as cloud, it's not the shrink wrap software anymore. >> I think to that point, you know, I was at a conference earlier this year and it was an IT conference, but I was really sort of floored, because when you ask what we're talking about, what the enlightened IT folks and there is more and more enlightened IT folks we're talking about these days, it's the same thing. Right, it's how our business is succeeding, by being better at leveraging data. And I think the opportunities for people in IT... But they really have to think outside of the box, it's not about Hadoop and Sqoop and Sequel and Java anymore it's really about business solutions, but if you can start to think that way, I think there's tremendous opportunities and we're just scratching the surface. >> Absolutely, we found that really some of the proof points of what digital transformation really is for the companies. Alright Chris Selland, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us and thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Chris: Thanks too. (techno music)

>> Advertiser: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to our ongoing CXO series, Charlie Giancarlo season, chief executive officer of Pure Storage. Charlie, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time. >> Thanks, Dave. And like you said, always a pleasure, thank you. >> Well, I got to start asking you, the last time we talked, you were recovering from COVID. How are you doing? >> Yeah, I'm doing great actually. I seem to have fully recovered. I've been on 17 mile hikes at 10,000 feet. I've been doing a lot of biking, so it looks like other than my wife telling me that maybe I'm not all there, but she did that before COVID. So I'm used to it. >> Well, that's awesome to hear. Well, of course, just yesterday, you guys announced your quarter. I want to start there. You beat expectations, although revenue growth was a little less robust than we're used to from Pure, but you clearly had some activity regarding COVID in the US. International, very strong, but again, we'll talk about this US customers kind of reevaluating was your other key point. I got a lot of takeaways from the call that I want to ask you about. But the big thing was you had set a very confident tone on the Earnings Call. So I kind of want to start there. Well, give us your summary. >> Yeah, no, thank you for that. So first of all, we feel like we're operating really with all of our cylinders going. We have operational discipline. We've been adding to our R&D capabilities. We've hired people this year. and we showed a profit this quarter. So we're operating, I think very well. We've introduced a boatload of new products continuously over the last couple of quarters, including, FlashArray//C, the first and only all-flash product that competes at second Tier disc levels. We introduced our file services on FlashArray//C, which really allows us to go into the general purpose of file market. And we picked up a huge amount of share as you well know in Q1. We believe we're going to pick up significant share in Q2 as well, well above our competitors. So we feel like given everything we can control, we're doing very well. As you said, in Q2, what we saw was Europe, which came out of the crisis for the most part recover very, very nicely. The US, that's still in the crisis. Of course, we're seeing some slowness and especially among what we call the mid tier or the commercial market. They've been hurt very badly by the lockdown in the economy. And they have our sympathies, but we definitely saw some slow down there. >> Yeah, so I want to talk about the market share and maybe unpack some of that data. I mean, you guys gave a cautious outlook. It kind of gave no formal guidance, but you did informally guide flat, so you kind of gave some visibility there. So actually I appreciated it. I think some of the analysts were a little bit concerned there, but I think that's prudent. And they're really the expectations are a function of your expectations around the COVID recovery. I think you mentioned your account almost state by state and very clearly the international where you've seen comebacks have been very, very strong. >> Right, so I think our customers' data continues to grow if anything, growing faster under a lockdown environment and the move to more digital engagement with everyone, their customers, their employees, et cetera. So digital continues to grow, which generally creates more demand. However, of course, as you know, in storage customers generally always have a buffer. And what we saw on Q2 was customers starting to reconsider how they're going to spend their IT budget. And whenever you have a reconsideration, you have a slowdown. And that's what we experienced. And especially in the US where the effects of the pandemic, of the economy have been much more severe than in other parts of the world. >> Yeah, so I want to talk about some data. I often, as you know, like to share some data from our partner ETR every quarter we do the survey. So guys bring up that chart. And what it shows here, let's just set it up for the audience and Charlie for you as well. That this is essentially net score, which is a measure of spending velocity for the major primary guys. So we show Pure at the top in orange, that's just a coincidence guys. And then HPE, NetApp, Dell, and IBM. And you can see the net score, and then I've super imposed there in that table, in the upper left. And you can see Pure Storage is really the only one of these majors in the green. Everybody else is in the red, which is either the lower or high teens. And you can see a little bit of a COVID impact, last quarter, but holding strong at about a 40% net score where everybody else is, as I say, in the mid teens. And so that's a real positive. I point out, this is a forward looking survey. So we're asking people, what are you planning on spending in the second half relative to what you spent in the first half. And again, we see Pure with consistent momentum. I'll add, just if you looked at the past quarter, you guys announced plus 2% growth. IBM was plus 3% growth and we know why, they have the mainframe tailwind. HPE played a little hide, the growth ball. I don't know Charlie, how closely you looked at it, but they said 4% growth sequentially. Now, the last quarter they were down 16%. The same quarter last year, they were flat. So it looks to me like they were down this quarter. So we appreciate when you have clear guidance. >> Their storage, by the way, was down 10% year over year. >> Yeah, okay, great, thank you. I didn't pick up on that. And so, yeah, that seemed like that to me. And then NetApp happens tonight and we get Dell tomorrow. But so you were saying that you gained share, what gives you that confidence? >> Well, several, you mean for Q2? We know we gained Q1, right? We were 15 points above the industry average and maybe about 20 points ahead of our competitors. We saw a similar momentum from our partner. Remember, we're 100% partner fulfilled, right? And so in conversations with our partners, we have a general sense of how we're doing vis-a-vis competitive environments. We also know that our win rates have held very nicely and in quarters, almost every quarter, we're used to about a 20% per annum higher growth rate than our competitors. So when all of our metrics, that is our relative metrics. Things like win rates and so forth continue unabated, we generally expect to have the same outcome. >> Great, and then so let me go through some of the takeaways that I have from the quarter. I'll just run through them and we can go wherever you like. But the COVID snapback obviously is a key indicator. We saw that in international versus the US. >> Charlie: Right. >> New opportunities for growth. I want to talk about that, at some length the FlashArray//C object, the Cohesity pieces and other TAM expansion. The pipeline is very encouraging, but there's some uncertainty leading to your tepid guidance. Very strong, gross margins as usual. The subscription model is growing nicely. I want to hit on that. And the RPO, the remaining performance obligations grew to almost a billion dollars. That's a big number. New logo, solid at 20%. No real change in the competitive, but you called out, you'll see more PowerMax than PowerStore. That was really interesting. You're still hiring pretty aggressively, last quarter. And your technology investments continue. And I'll throw in the seven nines, which I think is another industry first, but where do you want to go there? >> Yeah, well, seven nines is a reliability figure for those of your audience that doesn't know. It relates to how much uptime or availability a product has or in our case, fleet of products. We have tens of thousands of arrays in the field. And last quarter we achieved what's called seven nines, which is the equivalent across the fleet of only three seconds of downtime per array per year. Which is, most other vendors had struggled to stay to five nines. And that's typically without even counting what they call scheduled downtime for upgrades. We don't even count that. We count all downtime of any type. So we're clearly, I think with no doubt, we're the most reliable product on the these days. >> So I want to come back to the TAM discussion because you, I inferred many opportunities for you guys to continue to grow. I mean, it's Flash, it's still about flash. flash is gaining share relative to spinning disk and relative to hybrid, you guys made that point a lot. FlashArray//C, you sound pretty happy with that, again, going after hybrid. And then this notion of bringing file services and object that unify play. kind of the man made great strides years ago with that capability. And then the data protection piece, the recovery with Cohesity, the faster recovery. That's another TAM expansion. So really, I identified four points of potential growth area for you over the next several years. I wonder if you could talk about that? >> Absolutely, we do feel very positive about all these areas. These areas open up a huge amount of the TAM that we didn't play in before. So FlashArray//C for example, as you say, flash was always a primary workload environment for flash 'cause it was very expensive compared to disc. Higher performance, better ecological footprint, denser, faster, cheaper, are more expensive though. So it only went after primary workload, but the vast majority of data storage is secondary workload. Things that don't require the high performance and therefore customers want it less expensive. And of course there were even more bits there. But FlashArray//C now competes very well with low cost disc, which is amazing. And of course it's 10 times lower footprint and 10 times more reliable. So this is the first and literally today only product that has all-flash in that secondary workload market. So just opens up a huge amount for us. And then, yes, I love talking about data protection for the following reason, customers actually don't want to do a backup, right? If you think about it, what they really want is recovery. Backup is what you have to do in order to get recovery. And these backup systems have been very good at backup, but usually can take 24 or 48 or even more hours to be able to recover from a failure. And now with ransomware, you don't want your website to be down for days before it comes back up. You don't want your traders not trading for days. It costs a lot of money. And with what we call rapid recovery and now flash recover, we can have companies come back within an hour or two at most, with a rapid recovery solution. And so the integrated solution that we've put together with Cohesity, allows customers to very quickly get up and running with an anti ransomware solution that allows them to get back up and operating in no time at all. >> Well, was interesting to see you choosing the partner route. I mean, you could have, if you remember EMC in the day. They bought in, data protection and it had actually worked out pretty well for them. You look at a company like NetApp, they've chosen not to vertically integrate with backup. You're choosing the same path. What's the thinking there? Stick to your knitting and partner up and add value where you can? >> Yeah, we have strong partnerships actually with all of the data backup players, Veritas Veeam, with Rubrik and others. In many cases, customers have already made their decision who their backup player is. Also, backup is actually a very relatively fragmented market. There's backup for different types of applications and different vendors have strengths and weaknesses in each one of those. And so our partnership across the backup board is very important to us. We did see however customers wanting an integrated solution, which we have, let's say initiated with Cohesity. But we believe it's the first of what will be multiple pure validated designs. Not all of which will be OEM, but all of which will be available as integrated systems in the market, through our channel partners. And so you can expect to see more of these as we go forward. >> So kind of the PVDs okay. I want to ask you about your subscription model. I mean, it's growing very nicely. Are there nuances there just in terms of understanding the income statement ie, product revenue was down, subscriptions growing. Are you going through that transition and having to sort of educate people on the impact on the income statement? You didn't make a big deal out of that on the Earnings Call and I thought, well, maybe I'm overstating that, but I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic? >> No, no, you're absolutely correct. And there is some of that going on on the earning statement. The bigger part, though, of let's say the lower growth this quarter was due, and the forecast was due to the pandemic. No doubt and especially in the US, especially hard hit in the US. But simultaneously we are going through the transition that many companies have had to go through in the past where a larger proportion over time of our sales are going to be what we call Pure as-a-Service and our unified subscription. So moving to subscription from CapEx. And whenever you do that, it takes a while, even though your sales, as in bookings, can stay in the growth path. The revenue takes a while to catch up as your subscription bookings grow. So there is some of that going on on our P and L as well. >> Yeah, well, it's the nirvana to the extent you can get that model. And of course your RPO is a good indication of you got a nice backlog that's yielding, that's certainty in revenue. >> That's correct. And the RPO is very nice and it reflects the fact that we have multi-year contracts going in with customers who are choosing Pure as-a-Service in Evergreen. And of course, the billing only reflects what we've actually built them for. >> I was struck by your comments regarding your main competitor, which is Dell, Dell EMC. Now, of course, in the early days of Pure, I've always said you guys drove a truck through the old VNX and symmetrics base. You said you're seeing PowerMax more than you're seeing PowerStore. That was interesting and somewhat surprising to me. >> Yeah, well, a standard play of Dell is to offer VMAX because it's less expensive versus our FlashArray. And then when the customer clearly says, well, it's just not performance enough or it just can't do the work that we need, then they'll offer PowerMax at a supposedly a deep discount to be able to compete with a FlashArray. So that's been a favorite tactic of theirs for quite some time. We maintain our win rates against that. PowerStore on the other hand, remember, it's a forklift upgrade with a new product on four different Dell existing products, right? And two things. One, is customers are just reluctant right now to try new things, right? They don't have the time to be able to test them properly. But I also think there's some reluctance even on Dell's part to put those properties up for grabs right now, when customers are more risk adverse. So, we continue, as I said, we are not seeing it as much as we had thought we might going into this. >> Yeah, we'll definitely find out more tomorrow. And I would expect that, to the extent that you're having more and more success in file, you're going to obviously run into NetApp more. >> Yeah, and that's what we're expecting. The file services on FlashArray//C really allow us to start to penetrate the general purpose file market. Clearly not on the very small, and we're not going after the very small market. We're going after the data center file share market on this and the Tier 2 workloads. >> Well, what's the early returns there? I mean, you saw the NetApp did the SolidFire acquisition to shore up NetApp kind of missed flash, and then bought SolidFire but that is obviously a good play. Do you feel like it's a tougher road than perhaps the old EMC install base or what are you seeing early on? >> Well, there's a lot of maturity obviously in files. And it will take us a while to be able to get up to full levels of maturity in files. But what customers love about us is our simplicity. And our file services on FlashArray is just as simple as our block services on FlashArray. And I think what customers are going to find is a very performant product that requires very little maintenance, very little tuning to meet their needs. And I think they're just going to appreciate the fact that it's a true fully capable block product with a fully capable set of file services. And that they'll be able to consolidate more and more of their use cases onto smaller and smaller footprint. So I think that's what they're going to appreciate about what we do. >> That's ironic, outsimplifying NetApp, which of course made its name, taken on guys like ASPEX for those of you remember that or even even the early day. So that's good. And I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about cloud. Thinking on cloud, I know it's early days and I know most of your subscriptions of course are still with on-prem, but you made an interesting announcement last year to accelerate with Cloud Block Store running on AWS. How's the uptake been there? What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, we're seeing a good uptake there. I'd say more of it is in the DevOps environment than in the actual NDR, disaster recovery, more than it is in transition of primary workloads into the cloud. And we're just seeing a bit less of that than one would expect given all the press around it. I don't think it's us. I think customers are just taking a while. They're focusing their new activities in the cloud and much less about transitioning existing environments. But we are seeing work done there. What we are seeing is a huge uptake in what we call our unified subscription, which is a Pure as-a-Service on-prem where we deliver to our customers, basically cloud, the equivalent from their point of view of cloud storage on-prem, where we manage the entire environment plus the unified subscription is that plus Cloud Block Store. So regardless of where our customers want to place their data, either on-prem or in the cloud, it's the same price and the same contract, same interface, same management to them. So we've seen a huge, I mean, literally an incredible spike in uptake in that. >> Great, thank you for that. And then I got to end with, I asked you last time about networking. You have a, a very wide observation space and a lot of expertise in a lot of different areas. So I want to ask you about, we've seen the spate of IPOs this week. Snowflake came , Palantir, UniFi, JFrog, number of others. Very interesting to see that in the Valley, you're in the Valley. Of course you shot in the Valley like everybody else these days, but what do you make of that? Is it kind of everybody trying to get in before the election? Or is it just a really good time? What's your take on that? >> I think a lot of it is getting in before the election, but a lot of stock market movements as you well know, has to do with cash flows more than it has to do with the prospects of individual companies and just given the amount of stimulus that's taking place, not just in US but worldwide. There's a lot of money floating around, which is boiling stock market prices. And so it's a great, an old colleague of mine had a saying, "When Monday's on sale, take it." And that seems to be the case right now, at least as far as the stock market is concerned. And I've stood there for a good time for IPOs. >> Well, the Palantir IPO took a swipe at Silicon Valley broadly, really targeting, I think Facebook and Google. It really doesn't have anything to do with your business, but I mean, I think as an executive in Silicon Valley, you see the innovation and the software development that's going into so many good things. I was struck by that though. I thought it was a little bit of a cheap shot at Silicon Valley. It really was aimed at Google and Facebook because there's so many companies from you guys, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, it'll work on and on and on. They are just doing some great software work. And we're seeing that with COVID, where would we be without Big Tech? >> Well, thank you, Dave. I think the press tends to focus on the consumer companies. And we all have maybe our own individual opinions about the way they operate, but you're correct. I mean, I think the good foundational work that many companies in Silicon Valley are doing to make our lives easier every day, just continues to really impress. >> Well, Charles Giancarlo it's always a pleasure. Thanks so much. You're generous with your time. I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. Again, as you said, always a pleasure to speak with you and look forward to doing it next quarter. >> All right, us as well. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time, we're out. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: At the DataWorks Summit, Europe 2017. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live from Munich, Germany at DataWorks 2017, Hadoop Summit formerly, the conference name before it changed to DataWorks. I'm John Furrier with my cohost Dave Vellante. Our next guest, we're excited to have Alan Nance who flew in, just for the CUBE interview today. Executive Vice President with Virtual Clarity. Former star, I call practitioner of the Cloud, knows the Cloud business. Knows the operational aspects of how to use technology. Alan, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you for having me again. >> Great to see you, you were in the US recently, we had a chance to catch up. And one of the motivations that we talked with you today was, a little bit about some of the things you're looking at, that are transformative. Before we do that, let's talk a little about your history. And what your role is at Virtual Clarity. >> So, as you guys have, basically, followed that career, I started out in the transformation time with ING Bank. And started out, basically, technology upwards. Looking at converged infrastructure, converged infrastructure into VDI. When you've got that, you start to look at Clouds. Then you start to experiment with Clouds. And I moved from ING, from earlier experimentation, into Phillips. So, while Phillips, at that time had both the health care and lighting group. And then you start to look at consumption based Cloud propositions. And you remember the big thing that we were doing at that time, when we identified that 80% of the IT spend was non differentiating. So the thing was, how do we get away from almost a 900 million a year spend on legacy? How do we turn that into something that's productive for the Enterprise? So we spent a lot of time creating the consumption based infrastructure operating platform. A lot of things we had to learn. Because let's be honest, Amazon was still trying to become the behemoth it is now. IBM still didn't get the transition, HP didn't get it. So there was a lot of experimentation on which of the operating model-- >> You're the first mover on the operating model, The Cloud, that has scaled to it. And really differentiated services for your business, for also, cost reductions. >> Cost reductions have been phenomenal. And we're talking about halving the budget over a three year period. We're talking about 500 million a year savings. So these are big, big savings. The thing I feel we still need to tackle, is that when we re-platform your business, it should leave to agile acceleration of your growth path. And I think that's something that we still haven't conquered. So I think we're getting better and better at using platforms to save money, to suppress the expenditure. What we now need to do is to convert that into growth platform business. >> So, how about the data component? Because you were CIO of infrastructure at Phillips. But lately, you've been really spending a lot of time thinking about the data, how data adds value. So talk about your data journey. >> Well if I look at the data journey, the journey started for me, with, basically, a meeting with Tom Ritz in 2013. And he came with a very, very simple proposition. "You guys need to learn how to create "and store, and reason over data, "for the benefit of the Enterprise." And I think, "Well that's cool." Because up until that point, nobody had really been talking about data. Everyone was talking about the underlying technologies of the Cloud, but not really of the data element. And then we had a session with JP Rangaswami, who was at Salesforce, who basically, also said, "Well don't just think "about data lakes, but think also "about data streams and data rivers. "Because the other thing that's "going to happen here is that data's "not going to be stagnant in a company like yours." So we took that, and what happened, I think, in Phillips, which I think you see in a lot of companies, is an explosion across the Enterprise. So you've got people in social doing stuff. You got CDO's appearing. You've got the IOT. You've got the old, legacy systems, the systems of record. And so you end up with this enormous fragmentation of data. And with that you get a Wild West of what I call data stewardship. So you have a CDO who says, "Well I'm in charge of data." And you got a CMO who says, "Well I'm in charge of marketing data." Or you've got a CSO, says, "Yeah, "but I'm the security data guy." And there's no coherence, in terms of moving the Enterprise forward. Because everybody's focused on their own functionality around that data and not connecting it. So where are we now? I think right now we have a huge proliferation of data that's not connected, in many organizations. And I think we're going to hybrid but I don't think that's a future proof thing for most organizations. >> John: What do you mean by that? >> Well, if I look at what a lot of those suppliers are saying, they're really saying, "The solution "that you need, is to have a hybrid solution "between the public Cloud and your own Cloud." I thought, "But that's not the problem "that we need to solve." The problem that we need to solve is first of all, data gravity. So if I look at all the transformations that are running into trouble, what do they forget? When we go out and do IOT, when we go out and do social media analysis, it all has to flow back into those legacy systems. And those legacy systems are all going to be in the old world. And so you get latency issues, you get formatting issues. And so, we have to solve the data gravity issue. And we have to also solve this proliferation of stewardship. Somebody has to be in charge of making this work. And it's not going to be, just putting in a hybrid solution. Because that won't change the operating model. >> So let me ask the question, because on one of the things you're kind of dancing around, Dave brought up the data question. Something that I see as a problem in the industry, that hasn't yet been solved, and I'm just going to throw it out there. The CIO has always been the guy managing IT. And then he would report to the CFO, get the budget, blah, blah, blah. We know that's kind of played out its course. But there's no operational playbook to take the Cloud, mobile data at scale, that's going to drive the transformative impact. And I think there's some people doing stuff here and there, pockets. And maybe there's some organizations that have a cadence of managers, that are doing compliance, security, blah, blah, blah. But you have a vision on this. And some information that you're tracking around. An architecture that would bring it to scale. Could you share your thoughts on this operational model of Cloud, at a management level? >> Well, part of this is also based on your own analyst, Peter Boris. When he says, "The problem with data "is that its value is inverse to its half life." So, what the Enterprise has to do is it has to get to analyzing and making this data valuable, much, much faster then it is right now. And Chris Sellender of Unifi recently said, "You know, the problem's not big data. "The problem's fast data." So, now, who is best positioned in the organization to do this? And I believe it's the COO. >> John: Chief Operating Officer? >> Chief Operating Officer. I don't think it's going to be the CIO. Because I'm trying to figure out who's got the problem. Who's got the problem of connecting the dots to improving the operation of the company? Who is in charge of actually creating an operating platform that the business can feed off of? It's the C Tower. >> John: Why not the CFO? >> No, I think the CFO is going to be a diminishing value, over time. Because a couple of reasons. First of all, we see it in Phillips. There's always going to be a fiduciary role for the CFO. But we're out of the world of capex. We're out of the world of balancing assets. Everything is now virtual. So really, the value of a CFO, as sitting on the tee, if I use the racquetball, the CFO standing on the tee is not going to bring value to the Enterprise. >> And the CIO doesn't have the business juice, is your argument? Is that right? >> It depends on the CIO. There are some CIO's out there-- >> Dave: But in general, we're generalizing. >> Generally not. Because they've come through the ranks of building applications, which now has to be thrown away. They've come through the ranks of technology, which is now less relevant. And they've come through the ranks of having huge budgets and huge people to deploy certain projects. All of that's going away. And so what are you left with? Now you're left with somebody who absolutely has to understand how to communicate with the business. And that's what they haven't done for 30 years. >> John: And stream line business process. >> Well, at least get involved in the conversation. At least get involved in the conversation. Now if I talk to business people today, and you probably do too, most of them will still say there's this huge communication gulf. Between what we're trying to achieve and what the technology people are doing with our goals. I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day. And this lady heads up the sales for a global financial institution. She's sitting on the business side of this. And she's like, "The conversation should be "about, if our company wants to improve "our cost income ratio, and they ask me, "as sales to do it, I have to sell 10 times "more to make a difference. "Then if IT would save money. "So for every Euro they save. "And give me an agile platform, "is straight to the bottom line. "Every time I sell, because of our "cost income ratio, I just can't sell against that. "But I can't find on the IT side, "anybody who, sort of, gets my problem. "And is trying to help me with it." And then you look at her and what? You think a hybrid solution's going to help her? (laughs) I have no idea what you're talking about. >> Right, so the business person here then says, "I don't really care where it runs." But to your point, you care about the operational model? >> Alan: Absolutely. >> And that's really what Cloud should be, right? >> I think everybody who's going to achieve anything from an investment in Cloud, will achieve it in the operating world. They won't just achieve it on the cost savings side. Or on making costs more transparent, or more commoditized. Where it has to happen is in the operating model. In fact, we actually have data of a very large, transportation, logistics company, who moved everything that they had, in an attempt to be in a zero Cloud. And on the benchmark, saved zero. And they saved zero because they weren't changing the operating model. So they were still-- >> They lifted and shifted, but didn't change the operational mindset. >> Not at all. >> But there could have been business value there. Maybe things went faster? >> There could have been. >> Maybe simpler? >> But I'm not seeing it. >> Not game changing. >> Not game changing, certainly yes. >> Not as meaningful, it was a stretch. >> Give an example of a game changing scenario. >> Well for me, and I think this is the next most exciting thing. Is this idea of platforms. There's been an early adoption of this in Telco. Where we've seen people coming in and saying, "If you stock all of this IT, as we've known it, "and you leverage the ideas of Cloud computing, "to have scalable, invisible, infrastructure. "And you put a single platform on top of it "to run your business, you can save money." Now, I've seen business cases where people who are about to embark on this program are taking a billion a year out of their cost base. And in this company, it's 1/7th of their total profit. That's a game changer, for me. But now, who's going to help them do that? Who's going to help them-- >> What's the platform look like? >> And a million's a lot of money. >> Let's go, grab a sheet of paper how we-- >> So not everybody will even have a billion-- >> But that gets the attention of certainly, the CEO, the COO, CFO says, "Tell me more." >> You're alluding to it, Dave. You need to build a layer to punch, to doing that. So you need to fix the data stewardship problem. You have to create the invisible infrastructure that enables that platform. And you have to have a platform player who is prepared to disrupt the industry. And for me-- >> Dave: A Cloud player. >> A Cloud player, I think it's a born in the Cloud player. I think, you know, we've talked about it privately. >> So who are the forces to attract? You got Microsoft, you got AWS, Google, maybe IBM, maybe Oracle. >> See, I think it's Google. >> Dave: Why, why do you think it's Google? >> I think it's because, the platforms that I'm thinking of, and if I look in retail, if I look in financial services, it's all about data. Because that's the battle, right. We all agree, the battle's on data. So it's got to be somebody who understands data at scale, understands search at scale, understands deep learning at scale. And understands technology enough to build that platform and make it available in a consumption model. And for me, Google would be the ideal player, if they would make that step. Amazon's going to have a different problem because their strategy's not going down that route. And I think, for people like IBM or Oracle, it would require cannibalizing too much of their existing business. But they may dally with it. And they may do it in a territory where they have no install base. But they're not going to be disrupting the industry. I just don't think it's going to be possible for them. >> And you think Google has the Enterprise chops to pull it off? >> I think Google has the platform. I would agree with Alan on this. Something, I've been very critical on Google. Dave brings this up because he wants me to say it now, and I will. Google is well positioned to be the platform. I am very bullish on Google Cloud with respect to their ability to moon shot or slingshot to the future faster, than, potentially others. Or as they say in football, move the goal posts and change the game. That being said, where I've been critical of Google, and this is where, I'll be critical, is their dogma is very academic, very, "We're the technology leader, "therefore you should use Google G Suite." I think that they have to change their mindset, to be more Enterprise focused, in the sense of understand not the best product will always win, but the B chip they have to develop, have to think about the Enterprise. And that's a lot of white glove service. That's a lot of listening. That's not being too arrogant. I mean, there's a borderline between confidence and arrogance. And I think Google crosses it a little bit too much, Dave. And I think that's where Google recognizes, some people in Google recognize that they don't have the Enterprise track record, for sure on the sales side. You could add 1,000 sales reps tomorrow but do they have experience? So there's a huge translation issue going on between Google's capability and potential energy. And then the reality of them translating that into an operational footprint. So for them to meet the mark of folks like you, you can't be speaking Russian and English. You got to speak the same language. So, the language barrier, so to speak, the linguistics is different. That's my only point. >> I sense in your statements, there's a frustration here. Because we know that the key to some really innovative, disruption is with Google. And I think what we'd all like to do, even while I was addressing the camera. I'd love to see Diane, who does understand Enterprise, who's built a whole career servicing Enterprises extremely well, I'd like to see a little bit of a glimpse of, "We are up for this." And I understand when you're part of the bigger Google, the numbers are a little bit skewered against you to make a big impact and carry the firm with you. But I do believe there's an enormous opportunity in the Enterprise space. And people are just waiting for this. >> Well Diane Greene knows the Enterprise. So she came in, she's got to change the culture. And I know she's doing it. Because I have folks at Google, that I know that work there, that tell me privately, that it's happening, maybe not fast enough. But here's the thing. If you walked in the front door at Google, Alan Nance, this is my point, and he said, "I have experience and I have a plan "to build a platform, to knock a billion "dollars off seven companies, that I know, personally. "That I can walk in and win. "And move a billion dollars to their "bottom line with your platform." They might not understand what that means. >> I don't know, you know I was at Google Next a few weeks ago, last month. And I thought they were more, to your point, open to listening. Maybe not as arrogant as you might be presenting. And somewhat more humble. Still pretty ballsy. But I think Google recognizes that it needs help in the Enterprise. And here's why. Something that we've talked about in the past, is, you've got top down initiatives. You've got bottom up initiatives. And you've got middle out. What frequently happens, and I'd love for you to describe your experiences. The leaders say, the top CXO's say, "Okay we're going." And they take off and the organization doesn't follow them. If it's bottoms up, you don't have the top down in premature. So how do you address that? What are you seeing and how do you address that problem? >> So I think that's a really, really good observation. I mean, what I see in a lot of the big transformations that I've been involved in, is that speed is of the essence. And I think when CEO's, because usually it's the CEO. CEO comes in and they think they've got more time than they actually have to make the impact in the Enterprise. And it doesn't matter if they're coming in from the outside or they've grown up. They always underestimate their ability to do change, in time. And now what's changed over the past few years, is the average tenure of a CEO is six years. You know, I mean, Jack Welch was 20 years at GE. You can do a lot of damage in 20 years. And he did a lot of great things at GE over a 20 year period. You've only got six years now. And what I see in these big transformation programs is they start with a really good vision. I mean Mackenzie, Bain, Boston. They know the essence of what needs to happen. >> Dave: They can sell the dream. >> They can sell the dream. And the CEO sort of buys into it. And then immediately you get into the first layer, "Okay, okay, so we've got to change the organization." And so you bring in a lot of these companies that will run 13 work streams over three years, with hundreds of people. And at the end of that time, you're almost halfway through your tenure. And all you've got is a new design. Or a new set of job descriptions or strategies. You haven't actually achieved anything. And then the layer down is going to run into real problems. One of the problems that we had at the company I worked at before, was in order to support these platforms you needed really good master data management. And we suddenly realized that. And so we had to really put in an accelerated program to achieve that, with Impatica. We did it, but it cost us a year and 1/2. At a bank I know, they can't move forward because they're looking at 700 million of technology debt, they can't get past. So they end up going down a route of, "Maybe one of these big suppliers "can buy our old stuff. "And we can tag on some transformational "deal at the back end of that." None of those are working. And then what happens is, in my mind, if the CEO, from what I see, has not achieved escape velocity at the end of year three. So he's showing the growth, or she's showing the digital transformation, it's kind of game over. The Enterprise has already figured out they've stalled it long enough, not intentionally. And then we go back into an austerity program. Because you got to justify the millions you've spent in the last three years. And you've got nothing to show for it. >> And you're preparing three envelopes. >> So you got to accelerate those layers. You got to take layers out and you've got to have a really, I would say almost like, 90 day iteration plans that show business outcomes. >> But the technology layer, you can put in an abstraction layer, use APIs and infrastructure as code, all that cool stuff. But you're saying it's the organizational challenges. >> I think that's the real problem. It is the real problem, is the organization. And also, because what you're really doing in terms of the Enterprise, is you're moving from a more traditional supply chain that you own. And you've matriculated with SAP or with Oracle. Now you're talking about creating a digital value chain. A digital value chain that's much more based on a more mobile ecosystem, where you would have thin text in one area or insurance text, that have to now fit into an agile supply chain. It's all about the operating model. If you don't have people who know how to drive that, the technology's not going to help you. So you've got to have people on the business side and the technology side coming together to make this work. >> Alan, I have a question for you. What's you're prediction, okay, knowing what you know. And kind of, obviously, you have some frustrations in platforms with trying to get the big players to listen. And I think they should listen to you. But this is going to happen. So I would believe that what you're saying with the COO, operational things radically changing differently. Obviously, the signs are all there. Data centers are moving into the Cloud. I mean this is radical stuff, in a good way. And so, what's your prediction for how this plays out vis a vis Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform Azure, IBM Cloud SoftLayer. >> Well here's my concern a little bit. I think if Google enters the fray I think everybody will reconfigure. Because if we'd assume that Google plays to its strengths and goes out there and finds the right partners. It's going to reconfigure the industry. If they don't do that, then what the industry's going to do is what it's done. Which means that the platforms are going to be hybrid platforms that are dominated by the traditional players. By the SOPs, by the Oracles, by the IBMs. And what I fear is that there may actually be a disillusionment. Because they will not bring the digital transformation and all the wonderful things that we all know, are out there to be gained. So you may get, "We've invested all this money." You see it a little bit with big data. "I've got this huge layer. "I've got petabytes. "Why am I not smarter? "Why is my business not going so much better? "I've put everything in there." I think we've got to address the operating problem. And we have to find a dialogue at the C Suite. >> Well to your point, and we talked about this. You know, you look at the core of Enterprise apps, the Oracle stuff is not moving in droves, to the Cloud. Oracle's freezing the market right now. Betting that it can get there before the industry gets there. And if it does-- >> Alan: It's not. >> And it might, but if it does, it's not going to be that radical transformation you're prescribing. >> They have too much to lose. Let's be honest, right. So Oracle is a victim of it's own success, pretty much like SAP. It has to go to the Cloud as a defensive play. Because the last thing either of those want is to be disintermediated by Amazon. Which may or may not happen anyway. Because a lot of companies will disintermediate if they can. Because the licensing is such a painful element for most enterprises, when they deal with these companies. So they have to believe that the platform is not going to look like that. >> And they're still trying to figure out the pricing models, and the margin models, and Amazon's clearly-- >> You know what's driving the pricing models is not the growth on the consumer side. >> Right, absolutely. >> That's not what's driving it. So I think we need another player. I really think we need another player. If it's not Google, somebody else. I can't think who would have the scale, the money to-- >> The only guys who have the scale, you got 10 cents, maybe a couple China Clouds, maybe one Japan Cloud and that's it. >> To be honest, you raise a good point. I haven't really looked at the Ali Baba's and the other people like that who may pick up that mantle. I haven't looked at them. Ali Baba's interesting, because just like Amazon, they have their own business that runs on platforms. And a very diverse business, which is growing faster than Amazon and is more profitable than Amazon. So they could be interesting. But I'm still hopeful. We should figure this out. >> Google should figure it out. You're absolutely right. They're investing, and I thought they put forth a pretty good messaging at the Google Next. You covered it remotely but I think they understand the opportunity. And I think they have the stomach for it. >> We had reporters there as well, at the event. We just did, they came to our studio. Google is self aware that they need to work on the Enterprise. I think the bigger thing that you're highlighting is the operational model is shifting to a scale point where it's going to change stewardship and COO meaning to be, I like that. The other thing I want to get your reaction to is something I heard this morning, on the CUBE from Sean Connelly. Which that goes with some of the things that we're seeing where you're seeing Cloud becoming a more centralized view. Where IOT is an Edge case. So you have now, issues around architectural things. Your thoughts and reaction to this balance between Edge and Cloud. >> Well I think this is where you're also going to have your data gravity challenge. So, Dave McCrory has written a lot about the concept of data gravity. And in my mind, too many people in the Enterprise don't understand it. Which is basically, that data attracts more data. And more data you have, it'll attract more. And then you create all these latency issues when you start going out to the Edge. Because when we first went out to the Edge I think, even at Phillips, we didn't realize how much interaction needed to come back. And that's going to vary from company to company. So some company's are going to want to have that data really quickly because they need to react to it immediately. Others may not have that. But what you do have is you have this balancing act. About, "What do I keep central? "And what do I put at the Edge?" I think Edge Technology is amazing. And when we first looked at it, four years ago, I mean, it's come such a long way. And what I am encouraged by is that, that data layer, so the layer that Sean talks about, there's a lot of exciting things happening. But again, my problem is what's the Enterprise going to do with that? Because it requires a different operating model. If I take an example of a manufacturing company, I know a manufacturing company right now that does work in China. And it takes all the data back to its central mainframes for processing. Well if you've got the Edge, you want to be changing the way you process. Which means that the decision makers on the business need to be insitu. They need to be in China. And we need to be bringing, systems of record data and combining it with local social data and age data, so we get better decisions. So we can drive growth in those areas. If I just enable it with technology but don't change the business model the business is not going to grow. >> So Alan, we always loved having you on. Great practitioner, but now you've kind of gone over to the dark side. We've heard of a company called Virtual Clarity. Tell us about what you're doing there. >> So what we're vested in, what I am very much vested in, with my team at Virtual Clarity, is creating this concept of precision guided transformation. Where you work on the business, on what are the outcomes we really need to get from this? And then we've combined, I would say it's like a data nerve center. So we can quickly analyze, within a matter of weeks, where we are with the company, and what routes to value we can create. And then we'll go and do it. So we do it in 90 day increments. So the business now starts to believe that something's really going to happen. None of these big, insert miracle here after three year programs. But actually going out and doing it. The second thing that I think that we're doing that I'm excited about is bringing in enlightened people who represent the Enterprise. So, one of my colleagues, former COO of Unilever, we just brought on a very smart lady, Dessa Grassa, who was the CDO at JP Morgan Chase. And the idea is to combine the insights that we have on the demand side, the buy side, with the insights that we have on the technology side to create better operating models. So that combination of creating a new view that is acceptable to the C Suite. Because these people understand how you talk to them. But at the same time, runs on this concept of doing everything quickly. That's what we're about right now. >> That's awesome, we should get you hooked up with our new analyst we just hired, James Corbelius, from IBM. Was focusing on exactly that. The intersections of developers, Cloud, AI machine learning and data, all coming together. And IOT is going to be a key application that we're going to see coming out of that. So, congratulations. Alan thank you for spending the time to come in. >> Thanks for allowing me. >> To see us in the CUBE. It's the CUBE, bringing you more action. Here from DataWorks 2017. I'm John Furrier with my cohost Dave Vallante, here on the CUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program. Where we've got the events, straight from SiliconANGLE. Stay with us for more great coverage. Day one of two days of coverage at DataWorks 2017. We'll be right back.