>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of C CFS, co con EU cloud native con in Valencia Spain, I'm John furrier. This is a preview interview with the co-chairs versus we have Jasmine James senior engineering manager and of developer experience and Coon cloud native con EU co-chair and RI ricotta Rocher computing engineer at CERN and Coon co-chair as well at EU. Great to have you both on great to see you, both of you, >>Hey, to be here, >>Us >>Keep alumni. So, you know, Coon just continues to roll and get bigger and bigger, um, and watching all the end user action watching the corporations enterprises come in and just all the open source projects being green litted and just all the developer onboarding has been amazing. So it should be a great EU and Vale span, great venue. A lot of people I I'm talking to are very excited, so let's get into it as co-chairs take us through kind of the upcoming schedule at a very high level. Then I wanna dig into, uh, some of the new insights into selection and program programming that you guys had to go through. I know every year it's hard. So let's start with the overall upcoming schedule for COCOM. >>Yeah. So I'll dive into that. So the schedule is represents a, quite a diverse set of topics. I would say, um, I personally am a fan of those, you know, more personal talks from an end user perspective. There's also like a lot of the representation from a community perspective and how folks can get involved. Um, as most of, you know, like our tracks, the types of tracks has evolved over the year as well. So we now have a community track student track. So it's gonna be very exciting to hear content within those tracks, um, through in Valencia. So a very exciting schedule. Um, yeah. >>And just real quick for the folks watching it's virtual and physical it's hybrid event May 4th through seventh Ricardo, what's your take on the schedule? Uh, how do you see it breaking down from a high level standpoint? >>Yeah, so, um, I'm pretty excited. Um, I think the, the fact that this hybrid will help keep, um, build on the experiences we had, uh, during the pandemic times to, to give a better experience for people not making, uh, it to Valencia. I'm pretty excited also about the number of co-located events. So the two days before the conference will include, uh, um, a large number of co-located events, focusing on security S uh, and some new stuff for like batch and HPC workloads that I'm pretty close to as well. Uh, and then some, some really good consolidation in some tracks like this value, which I think will be quite, quite interesting as well. >>So you mentioned this is gonna be like watch parties, people gonna be creating kind of satellite events. Is that what you're referring to, uh, in terms of the physical space gonna be an event, obviously, um, what's going on around, outside the event, either online or as part of the program. >>So, yeah, uh, the, the, all the sessions, uh, from, from the collocated events will be available virtually as well. I don't know if people will actually be setting up parties everywhere. <laugh>, I'm sure some people will. Yeah, >>There'll definitely be >>Some. And then for, for, for the conference itself, there will be dedicated rooms where for the virtual talks, uh, people can just join in and sit for a while and watch the virtual talks and then go back to the in person, ones, uh, Monday feel >>Like, yeah, it's always a good event. Uh, Jasmine, we talked about this last time and Ricardo, we always get into the hood as well. What's the vibe on the, the, the, the programming. And honestly, people wanna get, give talks. There's a virtual component, which opens up more aperture, uh, for more community and more actions as, as Ricardo pointed out. What's what was the process this year? Because we're seeing a lot of big trends emerge, obviously securities front and center, um, end user projects are growing data engineering is a new persona. That's just really emerged out of kind of the growth of data and the role of data that it plays and containers. And, and with Kubernetes, just a lot of action. What's the, what was it like this year in, in the selection process for the program? >>Yeah, I mean, the selection process is always lots of fun for the co-chairs. Um, you shout out to program committee, track chairs, you put in a lot of great work and reviewing talks and, and it's just a very, very thorough process. So kudos to all of us who are getting through it for this year. I think that lots of things emerge, but I still feel like security is top of mind for a lot of folks, like security is really has provided. One of the biggest, um, submissions is from, from a quantity perspective, there are tons of talks submitted for security track, and that just kind of speaks for itself, right? This is something that the cloud native community cares about, and there's still a lot of innovation and people wanna voice what they're doing and share it. >>Ricardo, what's your take, we've had a lot of chats around not only some of the hardcore tech, but some of the new waves that are emerging out of the growth, the mature maturization of, of, of the segment. What are you seeing, uh, as terms of like the, the key things that came out during the, the process? >>Yeah, exactly. So I think I would highlight something that Jasmine said, which is the, the emergency emergence of some new tracks as well. Uh, she mentioned the student track, but also we added a research track, which is actually the first time we'll have it. So I'm pretty excited about that. Of course, uh, then for the trends, clearly security observability are, uh, massive tracks for app dev operations, uh, extending Kubernetes had also a lot of submissions. Um, I think the, the main things I saw that, uh, kind of, uh, gain a bit of more consistency is the part for the business value. And, uh, the, the, the fact that people are now looking more at the second step, like managing cloud costs, uh, how to optimize, uh, spot usage and, um, usage of GPUs for machine learning, things like this. So I'm pretty excited. And all these hybrid deployments also is something that keeps coming back. So those were, are the ones that, uh, I, I think came out from, from, from the submission at this time, >>You know, it's interesting as the growth comes in, you see these cool new things happen, but there are also signs of problems that need to be solved to create opportunities. Jasmine, you mentioned security. Um, there's a lot of big trends, scale Ricardo kind of hinting at the scale piece of it, but there's all this now new things, the security posture changes, uh, as you shift left, it's not, it's not, it's not over when you shift left in security in the pipeline in there, but it's, there's audits. There's the size of, uh, the security elements, uh, there's bill of materials. Now, people who got supply chains, these are huge conversations right now in the industry, supply chain security, um, scale data, uh, optimization management, um, notifications, all this is built in, built into a whole nother level. What do you guys see in the key trends in the cloud native ecosystem? >>I, I would say that a lot of the key trends, like you said, it, right, these things are not going anywhere. It's actually coming to a point of maturation. Um, I see more of a focus on how consuming, how, how companies go about consuming these different capabilities. What is that experience like? There's a talk that's gonna be offered, um, as a keynote, um, just about that security and leveraging developers to scale security within your environment. And not only is it a tool problem, it's a mindset thing that you have to be able to get over and partner bridge gaps between teams in order to make this, um, a reality within, within, um, people, within certain organizations. So I see the experience part of it, um, coming a big, a big thing. Um, there's multiple talks about that. >>Ricardo, what's your take on these trends? Cause I look at the, the, the paragraph of the projects now it's like this big used to be like a couple sentences. Now you got more projects coming on, you got the rookies in there and you got the, the veterans, the veteran projects in there. So this speaks volumes to kind of things like notaries new, right? So this is cool. Wait, what does that mean? Okay. Security auditing all this is happening. What are the, what are the big trends that you're excited about that you see that people are gonna be digging in, in, in the pro in, in the event? >>Yeah, I think we, we, we talked about supply chain just before. I think that's, that's a big one. We, we saw a, a keynote back in north America already introducing this, and we saw a lot of consolidation happening now in projects, but also companies supporting this project. Um, I, I'm also quite interested, interested in the evolution of Kubernetes in the sense that it's not just for, what was it, it was traditionally used for like traditional it services and scaling. We start seeing, there will be a very cool keynote from, from deploying, uh, Kubernetes at the edge, but really at the edge with the lower orbit satellites running ES in basically, uh, space. So those things I think are, are, are very cool. Like we start seeing really a lot of consolidation, but also people looking at Kubernetes for, for pretty crazy things, which is very exciting. >>Yeah. You mention, you mentioned space that really takes us to a whole edge, another level of edge thinking, um, you know, I've had many conversations around how do you do break fixing space with some folks in, in the space industry, in, in public sector, software is key in all this. And again, back to open source, open source has to be secured. It has to be, be able to managed effectively. It needs to be optimized into the new workflows space is one of them, you know, you see in, um, 5g edge is huge, uh, with new kind of apps that are being built there. So open source plays a big role in all this. So the, the question I wanna ask you guys is as open source continues to grow and it's growing, we're seeing startups emerge with the playbook of you. You play an open source or you actually create a project and then you get funding behind it because I know at least three or four VCs here in Silicon valley that look at the projects and say, they're looking for deals. And they're saying, keep it open a whole nother level. Can you guys share your insights on how the ecosystem's, uh, evolving with entrepreneurship and, and startups? >>Uh, oh, I guess I'll start. Um, I think that it's such a healthy thing, um, to have such innovation occurring, um, is it's really just, uh, Testament as to how the cloud native community right. Nurtures and cultivates these ideas and provides a great framework for them to develop over time, going from, you know, the sandbox and incubating and graduating and having the support of a solid framework, I think is a lot of the reason why a lot of these projects grow so quickly and reach certain these high levels of adoption. Um, so it's a really fantastic thing to see. I think that, you know, VCC an opportunity and, and, and there's a lot of great innovation that can be, you know, operationalized and scaled, right. Um, and applied to a lot of industries. So I feel it, I feel like it's a very healthy thing. Um, it also creates a lot of opportunities about something I'm passionate about, which is like, you know, people getting involved in open source as a step into the world of tech. Um, so all of these projects coming about provide an opportunity for folks to get involved in a particular component they're interested in and then grow their career in open source. So really great thing, in my opinion. >>And you mentioned the student track, by the way, I kept to point that out. I mean, that's huge. That's gonna be a lot of people who have, you know, in computer science programs or self learning. I mean, the, the, the ability to get up to speed, uh, from a development standpoint, as a coder, um, you can be a rural comp SI or, uh, just a practitioner just coding. I mean, data's everywhere. So data engineering, coding, I mean, Ricardo, this is huge student and then just every sector's opening up. I mean, the color codes on the calendar is, uh, larger than ever before. >>Yeah. I think, yeah, the, the diversity of the usage and the communities is, is something that is really important and it's been growing still. So I, I think this one not stop. Um, I'm pretty, pretty, pretty excited to see also how we'll handle this growth, because as you mentioned, like everything is increasing in numbers, number of projects, number of startups around this project. Uh, so one, one thing that I'm particularly interested on as an end user is to understand also how to help other end users that are jumping in not only the, the developers or, or the people wanting to support these projects, but also the end users. How, how do they choose their sta how, how it's, how, how should they look like for their use cases, much more than just going, uh, from, from the selection, individual projects to understand how they, they work together. So I think this is a challenge for, for the next couple of years. >>Yeah. I mean, roll your own and building blocks, whatever you wanna call it, you're starting to see people, uh, build their own stacks. And that's not a bad thing. It might be a feature, not a bug. >>Yeah. I, I would agree that I think it's something that we have to work on, uh, together to, to, to help, especially people starting in the ecosystem, but also for, for the experienced ones that start looking at other use cases as well. >>Okay. Jasmine, we talked about this last time, you gotta pick a favorite, uh, child in the, in the, in the agenda. Uh, what's your favorite session? Um, and you gotta pick one or three or maybe put handful, um, as you guys look through this year, what's the theme. I mean, people like you can kind of sense what's happening. Uh, when you look at the agenda, obviously observability is in there, all these great stuff's in there, but what's the, what's your favorite, um, uh, project or topic this year that, uh, you're jazzed about >>For me, I I'd say there's such diverse, um, topics that are being presented both on the keynote stage and throughout, um, the various tracks. I will just reference, um, the talk that I, I sort of alluded to earlier about, um, leveraging developers to scale Kubernetes. Um, it's a talk given by red hat on the keynote stage. Um, I just think it, you know, the abstracts will me because it's talks about bridging two different roles together, um, and scaling what we all know to be so important within the cloud native space, security and Kubernetes. So it's something that's very like real for me, um, in, in my current role and previous roles. So I think that that's the one that spoke to me. >>Awesome. Ricardo, what's your favorite, uh, this year? What do you, what do you, uh, if you had to put a little gold star on something that you're interested in, what it would it be? >>I think I hinted on, on it just before, which is, uh, I'm, I'm kind of a space enthusiast. So all, all this idea of running Kubernetes in space, um, makes me very excited. So really looking forward to that one, but as an end user, I'm also very interested in talks. Uh, like the one Mercedes will be doing, which is the transition from a kind of a more traditional company to this, uh, uh, more modern world of, uh, cloud native. And I'm quite interested to hear how, how, what their experience has been has been like in the last few years. >>Well, you guys do a great job. I love chatting with you and I love, uh, CNCF and following from the beginning, we were there when it was, when it was created and watched it grow from an insider perspective, the hyperscalers people who are really kind of eating glass and building scale, you know, SREs. Now you have, you have the SRE concept going kind of global mainstream, seeing enterprises and end users contributing and participating enterprises, getting, connecting those two worlds. Jasmine, as you said, as you look at that, you're starting to see the scale piece become huge. You mentioned it a little bit earlier, Jasmine, the SRE role was specific to servers and cloud. You're kind of seeing that kind of role needed for this kind of cloud native layer. We're seeing it with data engineering. It's not for the faint of heart. It may not be a persona. That's got zillions of people, but it scales. It's like an SRE role. You're seeing that with this kind of monitoring and, and with containers and Kubernetes where it's gotta get easier and scale, how do you guys see that? Do you see that emerging in the community, this, this kind of new scale role and, um, what is it, what is this trend? Or maybe I'm misrepresenting it or maybe I'm sensing it wrong, but what do you guys think about the scale piece? How is that F falling into place? >>Yeah, I, I think that is, um, adoption, like, or there's more saturation of, of cloud native technologies within any environment. Um, most in most companies realize that you have to have that represented right within the role that is managing it. Um, if you wanna have it be reliable. Um, so I think that a lot of roles are adopting those behaviors, right. In order to be able to sustain this within their environment and learning as they start to implement these things. Um, so I see that to be something that just happens. Um, we saw it was like DevOps, right? You know, engineers were starting to adopt, you know, working on the systems versus just, you know, working on software. Um, so it's sort of like encompassing all the things, right. We're, we're seeing a shift in the role and, and the behaviors that are within it in order to maintain these cloud native services. So >>Ricardo, what's your take, we've been seeing engineers get to the front lines more and more. Uh, you guys mentioned business value as one of the tracks and, uh, focus topics this year, it's happening, engineers and developers. They're getting in the front lines cuz as you move up that stack, whether it's a headless system for retail or deploying something in another sector, they gotta be in the front lines. If you're gonna be in doing machine learning and have data, you gotta have domain scales about what the business is. Right? >>Yeah. I, I, I agree very much with what Jasmine said and, and uh, if we add this for, for kind of the business value and the, this opportu opportunistic usage of, uh, all types of resources that can come from basically anywhere these days, I think this is, this is really becoming, um, a real role to, to understand how, how to best, uh, use all of this and uh, to, to make the best of all this available resources. When we start talking about, uh, CPUs, it's already important. If we start talking about GPU's, which are more scar or some sort of specialized accelerators, then, then it becomes really like something that, uh, you, you need people that know where, where to go and fish for those. Cause they, they, you can just build your own data center and, and scale that anymore. So you really need to understand what's out there. >>Applications gotta have the security posture nailed down. They gotta have it. Automation built in. You gotta have the observability, you gotta have the business value. I mean, it sounds like a mature industry developing here finally. It's happening. Good job guys. Thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you for having >>Us. And we'll see the cube here at Koon cloud native con May 16th through the 20th in Vale Spain, the cube will be there. We'll have some online coverage as well. Look for the virtual from CNCF. The cube will bring all the, all the action. I'm John fur, your host, see you in Spain and see you on the 16th.

Las Vegas expensing the signal from the noise it's the kue covering you interconnect 2016 brought to you by IBM now your host John hurry and Dave vellante okay welcome back everyone we are live here in Las Vegas this is silicon angles the cube our flagship program when we go out to the events and extract the signal annoys we are at IBM interconnect 2016 it's our fifth year now doing all the IV meds now interconnecting out the cloud show I'm John furrier with my coach Dave vellante our next guest is Eric Herzog vice president of storage and software-defined at IBM welcome back you belong great to see you great thank you very much always loved helping guys out of the cube thank you very much for including us pleasure we are very cognitive today we get cognition going on the cube we have all kinds of real-time we've got api's and notifications or and we're going to stract some insight and predictive and prescriptive analytics from you right first what's going on with storage and software obviously storage right now you're seeing huge change Dell buying EMC which you know a lot about emc IBM buys the weather company two contrasting strategies but Stewart still it's the center of the value proposition we also heard Robert de Blanc say on stage today cheap compute he didn't say cheap storage storage visited it did he didn't say so long about cheap storage okay I stand corrected but you talk about a commoditization of resource still valuable I always said what's wrong with cheap compute want more of it I want more and more compute so storage does he changing the software values their last time we spoke about that what's the update in context to cloud what's the storage equation was a storage angle well for us there's a huge value proposition when both the cognitive side and in the cloud infrastructure side obviously with the tumultuous change in storage both from just where the world is going we believe that you ride the wave a flash and software-defined and that is our mantra as you know one of the industry analyst firms who tracks the numbers we were number one in flash capacity shift and number one in flash units last year are all flash and we've been number one several years in row and software-defined storage so while the storage envelope is changing if you open up that envelope we're writing the change inside that omelet which is flash software to find converged infrastructure with our pure power product and also with our partnership with Cisco on the verses stack that's two years in a row for flash leadership right yes charge same thing with software to bunt well the good thing is well the other guy leads in revenue we believe in a fair price for an outstanding award-winning product line on the software value now the cell where that fits in we had multiple guests on today we had you know Jamie Thomas former GM and storage now thinking a more systems view its horizontally composable infrastructure now our dead loss infrastructure as code how does that change the equation certainly we want storage but now you've got software driving the change where's the wisdom value points there well when you look at the software-defined infrastructure the magic fairy dust is in the software so we can work with our own hardware we can work with our competitors hardware over 300 different raise from our competitors are completely compatible with our software to find solutions for storage and we can use with white box if one of our channel partners our end users would rather have a white box storage bear hard drives from seagate OWD and some some flash and just a wrapper of metal we are software provides the value add for integration into hybrid cloud configurations in the cognitive configurations into the oceans of data and big data and into analytic environments all powered by software-defined storage ok so you've been on less than a year now all right you came on last summer right yes mid year so what nine months roughly yes inland what are the big learnings that you've encountered and then we'll start from there and then we're going to get into result are you going to transfer yeah I think the big learning is the world is evolving and a lot of the customer base hasn't gotten there yet so we're going to take them on that journey with flash software-defined converged infrastructure so we're going to lead that charge we're going to ride the wave not fight the wave sometimes iBM has fought the wave we've changed that in the storage world so we're going to be a leader we're are a leader in flash we're leader and software-defined are converged infrastructure particularly with Cisco had an incredible year last year you know for our first year we had over 250 customers over 400 units sold and while there are others who are bigger in our first year that was one of the best first years in the converging instructor of any vendor and that's the power of our software to find portfolio our flash portfolio and the things we deliver from a storage perspective that helps customers they convert either the software-defined infrastructure or converged infrastructure so that case so that sort of answers the question as to how you're going to deal with immediate it's not unique you got old stuff that's declining you got new stuff that's growing like crazy but still not big enough to offset the decline of the old stuff you got currency headwinds but the there's light at the end of the tunnel in terms of that transformation to those newer architectures is that fair yes absolutely last year if you look whether it was in the channel with our award from computer reseller news as the best enterprise storage provider in the world and that was in the fall of 2015 so when you look at the channel and what they're looking for from their provider unlike the guys in hopkinton in Austin who are merging they didn't win that IBM one that so great solution for our Channel Partner base we've won awards for software-defined for all flash we did very well in the hybrid or a category last year with several product of the Year awards so again yes we have an older installed base one of our big goals this year is to refresh that installed base with software-defined with all flash with a comprehensive family of hybrid raise to make sure that people understand this is where the market is going this is where you need to go to drive cognitive value hybrid cloud value quite honestly it's all about applications workloads and use cases and even though I've done storage for 31 years let's face it most CEOs can't stand storage have to put it in the language that they understand which is software value-add and how it can enhance their ability to meet the business SLA s that the CIO is under pressure from the VP of Operations the VP of Marketing the finance side and of course ultimately the CEO so in this business I've been in the business maybe not 31 years but maybe 35 okay so the product portfolio is very very important one of the criticisms I've had of IBM over the years has been just not enough product innovation coming out great R&D but doesn't hit the pipeline so when you came to see us in Boston you showed us a little you know glimpse of the roadmap and it's very clear that's accelerating I wonder if you could talk about that what can you share with our audience sure we've done it we've done a couple things first of all we have the flash religion we acquired a flash company get started but so did several of our competitors in addition to spending money on that acquisition we've invested over a billion dollars in engineering resources on the flash site software-defined we're spending a billion dollars in that as you know we recently bought the award-winning and market-leading object storage technology with clever safe and we spent money on that so IBM is putting its money where its mouth is its focus is on storage and how storage enhances hybrid clouds cognitive big data analytics and you know deals with these oceans of data that our customers are facing and how do you manage that and how do you make the data more valuable and more productive to the business because that's what about it's not about storage it's about the management that data to optimize our customers business and how we can deliver that with effective cost so clever save was mentioned in the keynote in context to LeBlanc's reference to the digital transport transit of you know new stream the video stuff interesting how he plugged in clever see how it is that relate I mean honestly I know it's a recent acquisition is it's just the objects towards an unstructured data why is clever stay plugged into that kind of portfolio of those four companies you mentioned around you know is when you develop that type of technology you end up with incredible amounts of data and an object store is designed to handle exabytes of capacity and exabytes of information it doesn't necessarily have to be fast for example video surveillance data and all kinds of other data may be hot for a while and one of the values of clever say for example is on our spectrum scale product which is our scale out network attached storage actually will automatically cheer too clever safe we're in a public beta right now our spectrum protect product we've also talked about is going to support clever safe either as an source so you could back it up but more importantly as a target so you could take gobs of data and back it up into a clever safe repository when you've got oceans of data and people are generating exabytes and exabytes of data what you can get with clever safe on premises or in a cloud configuration allows you to handle this extensive data growth cost-effectively and in an easy to manage and configure way about the end where relationship with storage obviously there in an announcement today with IBM EMC recently had an announcement with VMware and VX rail rom and the big debate was I see his hybrid cloud was deposition using their software stack to be a glue and into the hybrid cloud journey but one of the comments that we made note of that we captured on the prowl chat was from Keith Townsend one of our members of our community he wrote it took Netflix seven years to move to the public cloud meaning everything all flash they had one of the first all flesh implementations that Amazon ever rolled out what does that mean for the average VMware customer in this case IBM customer from a product perspective so you got you know your relationship VMware you have this notion of hybrid cloud right it took Netflix seven years there in the cutting edge what does that mean for the average customer this whole notion of using software in storage plugging the hybrid cloud it took them seven years was it 70 years for an average company well you've got to remember that that started a while ago and the move to the hybrid cloud is just accelerated dramatically so our spectrum scale product our spectrum accelerate product our spectrum protect product all are designed for hybrid cloud configurations right this minute they're easy to employ they're easy to use they're all available in softlayer they're also filled with other cloud providers spectrum protect as close to a hundred different msps and csps who provide backup and archive services with award-winning spectrum protect so our specialist families and I've different than it was seven years ago today actually its accelerated easy-to-deploy it's easy to use you have a wide choice of msps and csps to use whether it's soft layer or other providers in the industry and our software-defined storage supports all of that vendor base regardless of whether it's IBM SoftLayer or other cloud providers as well well you could argue to Netflix did it at a time when it was early days right it was near the Pioneer they were they were final trees hack and you know right they're the ones with the arrows in motion tracking chaos monkeys everywhere so so Tommy you guys okay all right sorry John I want to talk about the state of the industry it's a lot of interesting stuff going on even in the business for four decades you understand some of the trends you've seen a lot of the ebb and the flow how would you describe where we're at right now seems like an uncertain time so storage is incredibly tumultuous right now one of the good things about storage it's constantly filled with innovation as you know from my past I've done seven startups thank God five have been acquired so I can wear a Hawaiian shirt they're expensive these days ISA why insurance so every five six years you have a wave of startups of the storage business that's not common in most other segments of the IT market space but in storage it is so you have a constant wave of startups that happens on a normal basis and we're in one of those phases right now at the same time you have massive change in the Tier one vendor base EMC and Dell emerging HP splits into two network appliance which had been an incredibly great company it's fast has now missed their numbers almost eight quarters in Rowan just last week announced they're laying off 1500 people so the world is changing dramatically also the applications workloads and use cases are changing dramatically so you've gone to a cognitive ear you don't have cereal management of data you now have parallel management of data you don't want databases that react or let's say a data warehouse it takes 30 hours to run a report you want the report to run in one so if you will real-time cognitive data availability and ability to analyze that data and that is dramatically changing what startups are out how successful they'll be how the tier 1 vendors are reacting you know for example one of the great things about IBM is we are focused on flash which is the fastest grain storage systems market and software to find which was one of the fastest growing storage software markets and we're leaders in both market spaces so when you open up the envelope of what's inside storage it's a slow growth market three to four percent per year is all it's growing but certain segments are growing rapidly and IBM focuses on those rapid growth segments now but the cloud piece right so you make you guys are talking about clever safe before I was thought that was a cloud acquisition which it was in part right but it's also something that falls into the storage portfolio right and that's because clever safe can be configured in a number of different ways on-premises only cloud only or hybrid configuration we can have an on-premises clever safe configuration talking to a cloud-based configuration so again part of IBM strategy to make sure that from a storage perspective all of our software to find infrastructure and what we acquired with clever safe are designed for hybrid cloud configurations or private cloud configurations or public again our spectrum family is used by hundreds of public cloud service writers to deliver a backup service for example a spectrum protect so the reason my question was this very clearly in effect on that you talked about three percent or whatever you know the the latest numbers are it's flat Marcus gases and flat is flat but the cloud market of course is growing like that from a smaller base but it's clearly having an impact on demand is that a fair statement yeah I think what's happening when you look at it from a storage perspective where you're really having the biggest impact on cloud is in the lower end in the entry space yes the capacity is growing exponentially but whether it's the department level of a giant at global fortune 500 whether it's Herzog's bar and grill or a midsize company when they need a small array a lot of times are going to a public cloud configuration so that low end of the market is shrinking at the same time when you do software-defined if you're one of the tier 1 vendors the storage could come from off-the-shelf hard drives so the values in the software but that also delivers a revenue hit to the vendor base and Ashley when you think about how would you get incredible performance five or six years ago you would have bought an array that was five to eight million dollars best case if not closer to 10 you'd be lucky if you could get 200,000 I ops maybe you could get five milliseconds latency today at an average sale place of 300,000 dollars we can deliver over a million I ops and sub hundred micro center and latency so you don't need to buy your big iron at five eight 10 million you can do it with something for three hundred thousand dollars huge the bottleneck John okay I mean this is back to our kena brian.krall from Apple was on stage another great company leaders in the delivering great value but he made a comment I want to get your reaction to because I know it's a phone analogy but I want to bring into storage if the values and the software and all flash is the bet you guys are making the numbers are impressive in terms of performance in terms of I ops throughput and and cost per puss per megabyte he said you got to get closer to the hardware to write your native apps and he's referring to the iphone software app using Swift and xcode to the hardware so in storage look different how does the software piece take advantage of the hardware and is that built-in is an obstacle the customer because we're seeing this notion of okay take care of it take advantage of the hardware so what was how do you reconcile the we've done some very strong things there so let's take for example our spectrum virtualized software spectrum virtualize allows enterprise class data services across heterogeneous storage environments hours our competitors and anything that's white box over 300 arrays we have taken the spectrum virtualized platform and integrate it into our v nine thousand flash systems all-flash array into our mid tier storwize v7000 and our mid tier storwize v5000 which we just launched last week three new configurations we also have the sand volume controller but what we've done is integrate that spectrum virtualized software which rides a virtual back end of all storage not just our own provides a single way to replicate a single way to snapshot transparent block migration on the fly and integrate that right into flash systems and storwize as a software comes as a hard annick Stauffer comes with it exactly it's built into the size of Jeff managed as a code or estructuras code like an apple programa billion native app to the iphone what does that develop or doing with you guys is it through that software layer or how they could be right i mean the key thing when you look from a DevOps perspective they want to quickly be able to provision storage okay and with things like all the spectrum family and with the gooeys we've implemented into our store wise our XIV and all of our storage products it's very easy to deploy storage you can do it in minutes so whether the DevOps guy does or where the deadlock flight calls the storage guy the bottom line is they can get the storage up and running in a virtual environment a containerized environment in a matter of minutes and from a DevOps perspective that's what they want so we're able to meet the needs of the DevOps guy but also the traditional storage vendor as well don't get one last question for me for the henna we've run out of time they might have one more but I want to get your take on this because it's really been an interesting industry chess game with VCE and VMware and EMC doing the hyper converged x4 star calling it this hyper conversion without Cisco right this is because no longer you mentioned you in partnership with Cisco so VCC and bx rails was talked about last week what's going on with VCE is it still going to be around you see you're taking multiple forms is the increased breadth of solution is going to be multi-vendor what's your in it what you're taking on so you were at IBM cell you have relationship with cisco has that how does that what a customer's deal and what does the customer do because they're like okay who do I so I think there's a couple things that customers to look at first of all there's going to be a transformation VCE as it was originally constructed a partnership with cisco EMC and VMware will not exist after the acquisition this is my theory what will happen this distinctive sorry Cisco is go in there's no luck involved so all happen is those Cisco servers will be transitioned now and dell servers will be tradition did it's exactly what's going to happen so cisco is aware of this and cisco has been engaging with other partners like i mentioned the vs. tak had the best first year of any converged infrastructure in the history within its first year why well in the middle of last year what happened Dell an EMC an announced a merger so a lot of the business partners a lot of the end users there's cause for concern and EMC is already taken Cisco out of a number of configurations and there's a number of things for an end-user to think about one look at the development budgets what was the EMC development budget what's the dell development budget and substantially lower EMC did an outstanding job of acquiring startups with the debt load that's been written about publicly not just in the storage fresh but really in the financial press will be able to afford to buy a bunch of cool startups like EMC used to do the old days hard to say an EMC well I thought of stata domain was a great acquisition for uniting isilon same thing will they be able to continue to do that and like IBM EMC has a pretty good reputation for support and service that's not really reputation of the guys in Austin their reputation is cost-effective rapid delivery not necessarily the best important service the enterprise side people looking for that enterprise-class important service so those the questions that a customer needs to ask at the end user level where a channel partner use a civ as this merger goes for how's it going to impact the roadmap for the future the development expense my support capability those are things that have different models in those two companies so being should see how it pans out unfortunately we're out of time because we could do a whole cube second just on that area thanks for coming by give you the last word what does the digital transformation for the customer of IBM the buyer when they talked to you in the elevator and they say hey what's the storage angle on this digital treasure where the stores fit into my digital transformation what's the what's the bumper sticker what's the value proposition well the key thing digital transformation is a different sort of data it's been data for years and years and years data has to sit on storage the better the storage is your better the digital environment is the faster it is things like flash systems or our spectrum scale for cognitive the better that date is going to be so the digital era is powered by storage underneath it's like the foundation of a home good foundation great home good foundation great digital data great foundation the cube day one here more foundational coverage tomorrow the cube conversation will continue tomorrow day two we had more interviews today but tomorrow a lot of big names the biggest names in tech most powerful people here IBM interconnect is the cube we right back with more coverage here on day ones wrap up after the short break