(upbeat techno music) >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media. I'm often asked a lot about our business and what our business model is. In the wake of media these days, media businesses are not doing well. Some of them are doing better than others. And today a whole new model of media is changing. I get the question all the time from people, what is theCUBE, what is SiliconANGLE? What is Wikibon? You guys have all the software. I want to take some time to explain what the SiliconANGLE Media business is about. And I'm often asked many times, how does it all work together? So I want to take some time to review that. And I've prepared some slides to take us through this, but I also wanted to show you how it works. Some of the technology that we've built, and also some of the things that we offer to our clients and advertisers or marketers, although we don't have any advertising per say. We do have an interesting business model. I want to share that with you. So let's take a look at some of the slides. SiliconANGLE Media is a new model for media, digital TV, journalism, and research. We provide a unique formula that all works together, but yet individually. We have three major parts to our business. We have theCUBE, which is our digital TV interview show where we go out to events and extract the signal from the noise. We have SiliconAngle.com. News and event coverage. This is our technology journalism. This is the site that really focuses on you know editorial, high quality news and analysis, kind of what's happening, instructing the signal of what's going on in the industry. It really is a short cut to the truth of what's happening. And then Wikibon is or consulting and research team that focuses on the key areas that we program into. And all three of them work together. Think of SiliconANGLE Media as three legs of the stool. SiliconANGLE.com is the journalism, which engages in with the industry. Getting all the top stories, telling the most important stories in Enterprise technology, working with public relations professionals and people in the industry to source the best interviews and get the best content, objective and truthful and again, pure editorial. This site has no advertising on it, and it's completely supported by the sponsorship and business model from theCUBE and our Wikibon research team. TheCUBE is a interesting dynamic because we've been for nine years going to events and going to the front lines where the communities are. And theCUBE has become a community brand, a community content source. But we co-create content in the front lines during an event with the community to tell the best stories. Not only news and editorial, but really what's going on in the people's lives and what's happening in technology. And finally Wikibon is where all the action happens. That's our big brains in our organization that dig in and do the analysis from (the data) that. And then this really kind of gets rendered itself into a couple different sites. SiliconANGLE.com and theCUBE.net. And our coverage areas are really focused in and around  key areas and digital. Our content revolves around the core content markets and communities we cover. Infrastructure, Cloud, AI, big data software, blockchain and crypto. And the intersection of these markets is security data and IOT, but this is really the digital landscape. There is no circulation in digital. There is not real boundaries to content, but for us we focus and use our technology to understand where these lines are in the industry, and we program to them. And we program in a deep targeted way that creates network effects in each community. So if you look at this, we interview the most important people we can and the smartest people we can. And that creates a beautiful network effect. And we create community by streaming live event coverage for major events. That's what we're most well known for is theCUBE. 110 events last year. Our ninth year covering all the top enterprise, all the top Cloud events, all the top big data events, and soon all the top block chain events. Our formula drives activation, but because the content is so targeted around communities, it really creates a targeted network effect because everyone we interview becomes a Cube alumni, and everyone that consumes the content becomes part of our community. So content and community drives engagement. Let's take a look at what this means for our customers. Our audiences go to siliconANGLE.com, where on this site all these stories are led by Rob Hof, editor in chief. And this content here is the best of the best. Everything is editorially vetted. Nothing is paid for in this site. It's completely editorial. We have multiple sections. We have research. A section dedicated to our research analysis. This is where we do deep dives and provide special reporting around all the top important areas. Cube coverage is the section of SiliconANGLE that puts all theCUBE event coverage in one spot. If you want to see the stories that our writers cover from theCUBE, which is separate from theCUBE event itself, but our live writers look at the activity on SiliconANGLE, CUBE and cover it as best they can. And if an important story is happening at a CUBE event, it'll be on the front page of SiliconANGLE, and the editors will pick the best, most important stories here at SiliconANGLE. TheCUBE.net is our site where we have all theCUBE content, a featured section here. There's a live event going on. The content will be played right here in the screen. If there's multiple events going on, then the right hand side they'll be there. Upcoming events are here. You can view more, and of course if you missed an event, you can always look for more here and browse the site for all the events that have happened. And of course if you want to search, we have an alumni database to search all the most important people in tech. If you want to search all the people from say, you know Google, you can browse here and find people to connect with. And this is the beginning of some of our technology that we've built, that you're only see more of. Connecting people around content, people around community, and people around topics and interests. And of course if you want to meet our hosts, they're all listed on there too. TheCUBE.net site is software written by our software engineering teams that's built for fully Cloud horizontally scalable systems, asynchronous technologies, APIs, and a lot more will be coming. You'll see social network, you'll see video clips and other variety of things. Some of the most important technology that we have at SiliconANGLE that no one knows about with theCUBE is we have a variety of technologies. You look at this site here, we have a full dashboard of things that we've built for ourselves using Amazon web services. We built our own content Cloud for our business. We can do search, analyze, visualization. We can detect humans from bots, text analytics, entity extractions, machine learning, leader boards, CUBE leader boards, LinkedIn profiles, who, what, and where, trend analysis, influence or overlaps, really in-depth analysis where I can say give me all the AWS reinvent community with VM World, as an example. I'll type it in here, VM World. Type my email address. And our influence overlap engine will go out and determine who are the influences that overlap between those two communities. I can do that for many more communities. This helps us figure out what's going on. And of course we built our own custom listening engine that listens to every tweet of every single person in the Twitter fire hose by community. And we have hundreds of hundreds of communities. And to give you a taste of how much this is, you look at the stats, 62 million total people over 700 million signals, and we're pulling in 292 signals per minute into our ingestion, into or community. That's driving a lot of our engagement, and again, going back to here we can see we can do full search, all kinds of cool things, trending hashtags. This gives our writers and our community more insight into what's happening so we can bring the most important content to people and connect people to the content. Some of our digital services include video clip, a service that we built with our team, that allows us to search and clip videos. So let's take an example. Here's an interview I did at Google Cloud, and here's our Video Clipper service. Here's the YouTube video and a full transcript. I can put it into different languages. Looks like we have a Korean interest here. I can turn this into Korean or English or Chinese. Or I can say, highlight the summary for me. Every CUBE video gets a full transcript. It says, takes advantage of it here. I can come down here. Every piece of the transcript is linked to the video. So if I want to highlight something, like this, I can highlight this. And here's an example of a clip. Thank you very much. I can share this on Twitter instantly. Or Facebook or LinkedIn. So we can, we index every single video from, like it's uploaded to YouTube, into a full transcript. And that transcript is available for that. We can run machine learning and AI techniques, do any of the extractions, transcripts, and we're starting to do that so we can drive more community around the video. Let's go look at my Twitter feed and show where that clip came up. So the ability to clip videos is super important. There's the video, Google spanner in production. So this video was clipped from a YouTube video that has a unique URL, cube365.net that now we can measure that metadata and offer that nugget of that video and share that to the world. This is unique in that you can take pieces of the video and share them throughout the social web, allows for videos to be merchandised. So a CUBE interview that could be 15 or 20 minutes can now be cut down into multiple nuggets. This is great value, and you can roll these clips up from different videos into a highlight reel by the click of the button. We've automated the hard part of using video so that we can bring video onto the marketing mix for our clients and bring video in the center of the user experience for content consumption. Okay, so here's a real life example of how the Clipper tool can work, as these clips can be merchandised down into gold nuggets or pieced down by part of a bigger video. Certainly it changes the nature of video, whether it's in the marketing mix for a marketer or brand or for us as content developers serving audiences. If you have a piece of content that's in video form, it's a data asset. That data asset then can be used. Here's an example. On Twitter we were having an argument, as usual on Twitter, about who's number one in Cloud. My friend, Bob Evans, said Microsoft is number one in Cloud. And that's his position, like him, but I'm not, you know that's him. We disagree, I said Amazon. An ongoing Twitter battle ensued. He called me out, I called him out. We're all friends, but it's all good fun. And you can see here, what's happening. Hey John, if you're going to go down that type of path, you know how about taking some koolaid injection from the Silicon Valley world. Right, and so I come back. And he goes back again. So finally what's interesting is that Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE and my business partner, realized and remembered that he was with me during theCUBE in Washington DC and had a clip, and he sent it here. Furrier, the pressure to catch up with the Amazon experience. And here is an example of why these clips are so powerful. During this conversation that could have gone anywhere, the content needed information. And Dave Vellante then injected content from a video clip of a long interview, and that was a 15 minute interview. And a short sound byte, here it is. >> You say you're doing Cloud, but as they teach you in business school, there's dis-economies of scale trying to match a trajectory of an experienced Cloud vendor. You just mentioned that. Let's explore that. If I want to match Amazon's years of experience, I can say I'm up there with all these services, but you can't just match that over night. It's just dis-economy of scale. Reverse proxies, technical debt, all kinds of stuff. So Microsoft, although looking good on paper, is under serious pressure, and those dis-economy scales creates more risk. That more risk is more down time. We just saw 11 hours of down time on Microsoft Azure than Europe, 11 hours. 11 hours, it's massive, it's not like oh, something just happened. >> Hey, there it is, a clip that was short, part of a longer video. You can always watch it here, that we cut up and created. It instantly changed the nature of the conversation. That's a great example of other things. Let me show you some other tools here, with Video Clipper. That's one example. Certainly we have the notion of creating clip lists. So here's a highlight reel that I put together of Pat Gelsinger's best highlights. I took three, five, four clips and I made it into one beautiful asset. That's Andy Jassy's keynote from VM World. >> Today I'm excited to announce the availability of our, let's talk about that one. We've received hundreds of priorities. >> This is an example. I took a keynote and broke it down into a highlight reel there. There's other clip lists, other CUBE videos, got great stuff, here's the highlights from VM World 2017 that was put together. Look at all those clips. These are different clips. You check a box and you said clip list, creates a highlight reel. You can do this for things like sales enablement. A sales rep could put some clips together and send it to a prospect via email and say here's a minute and a half of our smartest person talking about x. See ya in later for a meeting. It could be used for content to support an article. It could be used to support an argument. It could be used to support a positive thing. This is content for good. This is what we do, and of course, this is all available to our team and also our customers. The best part of all, if I want to find out what's going on with block chain, I can just type into the search engine. We solved the video search problem. I can click on a link and find all I want to do about block chain. Like I say, well, just give me all the clips that have block chain in it. Or give me when there's a block chain mentioned in all the transcripts. So anytime the word block chain is mentioned in any of our videos, we can surface that quickly. 220 clips, I can type in backup. If you're interested in backup and recovery, you can do that. Multi Cloud. Making videos more productive, integral part of the marketing mix is what the purpose of this is. And this is all part of comprehensive back end technology that we're using for our system. So SiliconANGLE Media is not just three properties. It's a coverage area that has technology behind it that you can look at and say, we cover Cloud, we go to the top events in Cloud, we go to the top events in Infrastructure, the top events in AI and big data, and the top events in each of these markets. And we share as much content as possible with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE, and Wikibon. The fastest, most relevant content and engage the community, and we collaborate with them. It's a co-creation business model that has monetization and money making around sponsorships and co-creation. And we make money by monetizing our digital services via our content Cloud, Video Clipper, and data services that help marketers with the co-creation and help them find community, grow community, and create a content market with community. Content plus community equals engagement. Those are the things that are mattering right now. And all of this is happening off someone's website, in the wild, organic discovery. This is the new marketing model that we're taking advantage of, creating a network effect with great content. That's how it works. And of course, we're excited to continue to push the envelope and grow. If you have any questions, I'm happy to talk at any time. You can reach out to me, Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, Greg Ontario, and any of our team. Kent Libbey, Jeff Rick, and our entire sales organization. Of course, Rob Hof, editor in chief. Peter Burris at Wikibon, and Jeff Rick at theCUBE. Thanks for watching. If you have any more questions, happy to do this next time. We'll give you an update on what's going on with or crypto currency community that we're doing. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Hi everyone, I'm Sam Kahane and you're watching The Cube from VM World 2017. Excited to be here with Henning Volkmer, the American CEO of ThinPrint. Henning, thanks for coming on the Cube today. >> Sam, thanks for having me. >> So, can you tell us a little bit about your company? >> Sure, ThinPrint's a pretty well-known name in the virtualization space I think. VM are actually licensed a bit of our technology for us and view we've been working with us Centrics for almost 20 years, Microsoft around their term of services offering. And really trying to build solutions that allow people to manage printing and the enterprise and make it as easy and performance oriented as possible. >> Great so we're now at Wednesday. The event's been going on for a while. And you've been talking to the community and customers, what have you been hearing? >> It's been pretty incredible. I think everyone's extremely excited about the announcement, about the new technologies that are coming out, things moving to the cloud and we've had an announcement of our own, I think that was well received, so it's been a good week. >> So that's part of the reason we wanted to bring you up here. You have an announcement, a big announcement. Could you share that with the community? >> Sure, we're announcing ez-bash. It's a truly cloud-based server that's print management solution. All of the annoying things like assigning drivers to printers, assigning printers to users, that all moves into the cloud. But the actual print process remains a local direct IP printing directly from the user to their printers so that they don't rely on any of the network connections outside of their office and also we never actually see any of the print data for anyone's concerned about privacy. >> What do you want the viewers to take away from this interview, one or two lines, what's the takeaway? >> Printing's important to their business. They may not recognize it as much as it actually is important. It probably is a little bit annoying at times. It really doesn't have to be. Just come talk to us, and we'll have a solution for you. >> Thank you, you heard it here on the Cube.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. >> I'm Stu Miniman, here with my cohost Keith Townsend, and you're watching wall to wall coverage of VM World 2017 on the Cube here in Las Vegas. You know, third day of programming. We've done so many interviews. A lot of people went to parties last night, you know up early for lots of executive meetings, but you know we go strong through the whole show because we've got great guests, so happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Peter FitzGibbon, Vice President and General Manager with Rackspace, and welcome back to the program Ajay Patel with VM Ware. >> Great to be here. >> Alright, so Peter, you know, Rackspace, interesting transformation over the last few years. You know we've had the Cube at OpenStack for a bunch of years. I've heard almost no discussion of OpenStack this week at the show. >> Man: I'm not complaining. >> I talked to Rackers though, at Reinvent. You have, you know, kind of reinvented the business there, but the VM partnership is one that's been going on for many years. Some people I talk to don't understand. I mean this is a sizable business that you've been doing. I said, you know, let's measure the Rackspace managed VM Ware business against the entire revenue stream of OpenStack outside of what RackSpace does, you know, and it's an interesting comparison. >> So RackSpace continues through the multi cloud company, offering our customers the choice and flexibility they want, so our OpenStack practice continues to grow strong and we continue to invest there, as we do in our VM Ware practice, which we have a great partnership with. Ajay and his team, over the last 10 plus years. >> Also for us, the partnership's only growing stronger. If you walk around WM World with all the banners, you've walked into the airports, the investment RackSpace is making around VM Ware technology, I couldn't be much more happier, so thank you for that. >> So Peter, to Stu's point, RackSpace has been part of the VM Ware community for a long time. I've run into a couple of Rackers on the show floor, talked through kind of what they're doing with their feet on the ground, great work. Can you talk through the relationship with the customer to this point? I mean RackSpace is known for fanatical support. How has that conversation changed over the past three years or so as we've gone through this changing VM Ware strategy to where we're at today? >> Yeah, we're continuing to try to support the customer on whichever technology they really want to land on, so it starts with the planning and analysis phase that we sit with customers and analyze their work loads and try to figure out what's the best fit for them outside of determining is it OpenStack, is it VM Ware? Is it our fanatical support on top of AWS? From a VM Ware perspective, we're really helping people to determine how to move out of the data center, or at least not extend the data centers as they have them right now. We recently launched our RackSpace private cloud powered by VM Ware Cloud foundations. It went to general availability last week, so that's a global effort that we're discussing with our clients and it's proving a very attractive options for those looking for an alternative to their own private cloud and moving to hosting private cloud model. >> Peter, that operating experience is one of the things that customers have been challenged with, and RackSpace, you know, known for, you know, they know how to do this. Talk to us about some of this journey as to how your customers are seeing things. You know RackSpace has had a few different private cloud options you talk about. You've given your customers choice, but what's different now in 2017 and what's the mindset of your customers? >> Yeah, we continue to offer 24 by seven, 365 fanatical support. It's what we really see as our true differentiator in the market, or we have 150 certified VM Ware Rackers on the team that really go beyond, above and beyond every single day for these customers, and looking at not just how to migrate into our private cloud, but how to optimize them when we're there, when they've landed on a VM Ware private hosted cloud solution, how do we really optimize it and really get the full value of the technology? And these are expensive and difficult technologies to use, so you want to make sure people are really getting the true value out of NSX and VSAN, and now with VCF, which we're really excited about. >> Yeah, for us, it's, you know, as you were speaking, I mean the biggest challenge and the constraints exclude resources. Having 150 specialists out there with fanatical support with the great VM Ware technology. And in some ways the VM Ware cloud announcement is kind of making the awareness that you have a cloud stack, that you can now get through, you know RackSpace private cloud, so for us it's really all boats are rising as a result, and not having the skilled capability to then accelerate deployment and delivery and operations is pretty exciting. >> So Ajay, can you talk a little bit about working with RackSpace specifically because RackSpace has a tradition of having a very pronounced way of supporting customers, whether you're a Fortune 500 or you're a small ma and pa shop, RackSpace is going to come with full engineering might and help build the most reliable solution, and that comes with kind of, I imagine, a predisposed position on something like VCF, VM Ware Cloud Foundation. What has it been like to engineer? >> I'll speak the best thing from one of the joint customers that we had the opportunity to be on a panel with, Show Tell, right, and it was interesting to say how Show Tell said RackSpace is part of their operating team, so they enrolled up front in terms of having a partner who can help them with the choice, they made the selection based on the excellent support, but more importantly, they're just an extension of the operating team, and being able to have a single team manage both the on prem and the cloud without having to build a separate kind of cloud team, that was a critical piece of this decision, so kind of this common operating model, which they seamlessly augment with skillset, you know, that was really what resonated for Show Tell and was the reason they chose. >> The operating model is something I was just going to go to in terms of really helping people how they're going to live in this multi cloud world across multiple different technology stacks, and that's what our fanatical support is intended to be, to really be an extension of their, of a homegrown IT team so we can really get the full benefit of these complicated technologies. >> Alright, Peter, you talk multi cloud, and one of the things we talk to customers is a lot of times they say they have a cloud strategy, but how they got there wasn't necessarily as plan full as they might have liked. I had somebody writing for Wikibon a couple years ago said we have composite cloud because you kind of look at it and you always said, you know, do I have Amazon? Yeah, everybody does, you know. Oh I've got some app that somebody needed on GCP. RackSpace is a manage service provider for a lot of different pieces. How do you help customers get their arms around it, you know, and you know, maybe talk, the VM Ware on Amazon, the VMC stuff, how do you look at that in the future, how does that tie into kind of the skillset that your team has? >> So we often see customers coming in with that composite cloud situation where they're like we think we're multi cloud, but we're not truly because they don't have a defined strategy about why they put certain workloads in certain places, it just grew up organically, often through lines of business. VMC is a really exciting offer for us and we're going to be launching it in early 2018. It really gives more choice for customers in terms of where they're going to run their workloads, be it running them in different availability zones that RackSpace doesn't cover or potentially used as a DR solution. >> So let's dive into that composite cloud space, and I really love that comment. What, cloud, multi cloud is one of those things, you don't know you don't have a multi cloud until you don't know you don't have a multi cloud. What are some of the surefire indicators that customers are in where a composite cloud experience or environment versus a true multi cloud? Like what is that conversation like? >> Man: What's a good best practice, yeah? >> Well I think there isn't a lot of good best practices from our customers' point of view. I think they often come in and we lay out their, look at their architectures, look at their different applications, and they're often just, central IT doesn't know where most of it is running half the time, so it's really like okay, let's look at each part of this and decide for you what's the best fit, where should it go? Should we be putting something on Azure or Azure Stack? Should it be better suited to OpenStack? Or is it, they're very familiar with VM Ware and they want to continue to leverage VM Ware either on a host model or internally in their own data center. >> What we're learning is you just don't have visibility, so the biggest interest and the demand when we launched our cross cloud or cloud services, the notion of having visibility of what's running where. And the second question is how much is it costing me, and what can I move and what are the data security leakages that I want to put in place because these things weren't controlled. So those are kind of just knowing, right, knowing where your data is, knowing where your workloads are and how much they're costing you. That's the first baseline they're looking for help on. Once they've got that, then they're like okay, how do I still provide some level of self service and control to the end user while putting some structure by which I can go to a multi cloud strategy? So that's the journey we're just about to see with IT coming into play. >> Peter, I have to mention human interest viewpoint on the ecosystem. RackSpace, I think I understand better now than a few years ago what services you did. VM Ware just launched a bunch of SAS offerings. There were some launched last year. I can't count how many companies are helping people with cloud cost management, licensing, you know, you name it, 12 different aspects to take bites out of this giant elephant of multi cloud and do that. What are the biggest pain points you're hearing from customers? How do you help advise some of them and bring some of the pieces together? >> And it's not even what we see from a customer standpoint. You think of RackSpace, we have to integrate all of these clouds into our own internal system, so we get to experience it firsthand as the customer how we create unified billing systems, how we have unified monitoring, how we integrate all their own legacy systems to deal with these clouds, so we effectively learn from integrating into our own systems, then can advise our customers on the pain points we've seen and bring them on that journey to help them through their true multi cloud approach. >> So if we blow it out and a customer comes to you and they want a multi cloud strategy, and you know, you kind of show them the ugly, you show them the truth for where they're at, what's the next step, like from a practical tactical perspective? What's like step one to helping with SAS applications and for viability for each one of the RackSpace offerings? >> Yeah, so we have a framework which we call PADMO. It's plan, analyze, design, migrate, optimize. It took me a second to get the last part out, and trying to, that planning stage is really where we sit with the customer aside, okay, what does your environment look like and why is it that way? Were things made in a conscious decision or did it just happen organically? So we try to figure out what did they do intentionally and what, what just grew up organically? And move from there into designing or analyzing what's best fit for the different cloud strategies, then start designing it, migrating it, and then effectively optimizing it when they land on RackSpace and show the value of our 24 seven, 365 fanatical support. >> For us, it's about, for us the technology part, and we want to enable the core VM Foundation, but we also believe that network connectivity's the next big thing, so things like NSXT is something we're already having conversation with, like how are we going to stitch these clouds together, how do we make it more software defined so as we move towards this kind of policy driven, you know management abstraction, how do we then open up the different clouds and service that capability? So that's really the next journey for both of us from VCM, or VM Ware Cloud Foundation to the broader multi cloud strategy. >> And Ajay, your, you know, cloud provider partners, what about services? Is there any joint engagement or things that VM Ware helps write that are? >> So one of the big service for all, we're kind of coming together is around DR. Consistently the easy step to get to a hybrid or a leverage cloud is disaster recovery. What if we made that a native feature of the VM Ware stack? We could have our customer right click on a VM and protected by all these service provider clouds. That's an example of something we're kind of trying to generalize. Now on each of them, the complexity of operating it, the scale, the visibility, the service levels, those are unique to each partner, but we're trying to make sure that the platform gives you this basic capability to capture workloads. >> I feel like DR is essential to everyone's road map right now. Most of our customers, maybe all of our customers are requiring DR when they land on RackSpace, and we're really looking at that on our 2018 roadmap to see how we make DR, as a service, consistently part of the offering. >> So what works well and what doesn't work well? When you go through that initial setup complication, so DR's a great example of oh, this is low hanging fruit. We either don't have a DR that's working or we don't have DR at all, and there's kind of this, you know, when you whiteboard it, it works extremely well. What are some of the practical business challenges that you see customers experience on that journey? >> There's definitely some easy options to move first for customers. DR is a common one that we see, DevTest as well in terms of okay, how can you test out our environments and do it in a low risk way? There's always going to be those more core applications, those mission critical applications that people will wait till the end until they migrate, so let's migrate them to RackSpace private cloud and see how it operates, maybe as a DR environment, or as a DEV environment test environment, and then as they build confidence and see what fanatical support we offer, then they start moving more mission critical workloads. >> I share the same. Tier one usually is high availability, high design, high touch, tier two often ignored, too expensive, too hard. We're trying to go after the tier two or tier three apps and just provide a convenient cloud economics for protecting those workloads. >> Peter, I'm curious, how often are customers trying one thing and then moving into another? You know I get calls all the time, you know, data gravity of course is a big issue, but you know if I'm building an application, sometimes it's like oh wait, you know maybe this isn't the best place to live. Lots of customers, you know, will build one place and run production in another place. You know we've seen that. How much is mobility in turn, is lock in still a challenge? You know, how much, what's real and what's not? >> I think lock in is still a challenge, but we're certainly looking into how we're helping our customers move from one cloud to another. We continue work in our different business units across RackSpace, be it VM Ware, AWS, Azure Open Stack, and see how we can offer flexibility for customers. When they realize they've gone too far on one or another, we're not seeing specific use cases of everybody moving from one to another, it's more of a pick and choose, and so we're helping customers migrate from one to another as needed. >> So I'd be interested to know what, not percentage, what type of customer kind of has this hybrid IT or hybrid cloud approach in RackSpace where they build cloud native applications and then connect them to a VCF or VM Ware private cloud, and I think more specifically, I think the question that I would like to get at is that a real thing that, not necessarily real thing, is that impacting friction between the public cloud with cloud native applications and your ability to manage that and add that fanatical support in the developer looking to consume that, to integrate it to VM Ware? >> I'm not seeing that friction between the different technologies. I think, at RackSpace we try work across all of them to offer the choice to our clients and our customers as much as possible, make sure we really offer them the best choice and put the workloads in where they really are best suited to run. >> And opposition is you know container and micro sourced architecture are going to provide an excellent frameworks and tools. The maturity's still in the works, and our goal is to say can we make, you know, either VM or physical, be it the best place for deploying, and what are the tools and capability you need to provide? So for us, networking, security, those are kind of fundamental problems regardless if you're building a cloud native app or a traditional app, and how do we insert our value into the equation versus trying to own the whole solution, right? >> Peter FitzGibbon, thank you so much for getting the update on RackSpace. Ajay, always a pleasure. I'm trying to remember what the five time award is. We'll talk to John Furrier, make sure we have it ready for the next time we have you on. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. This is VM World 2017 and you are watching the Cube. >> Man: Thank you guys. (upbeat instrumental music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017 brought to you by VM ware and it's ecosystem partner. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back, we are here on the ground at the VM village live in Las Vegas at VMworld 2017. People buzzing around us here on the ground floor in the hang space, I'm John Ferrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Craig Nunez, Chief VP of Marketing at Datrium, Andre Lebosi? >> Lebosi. >> VP Solutions and Alliances at Datrium. Welcome to The Cube, great to see you. >> I've been looking forward to this since I arrived in Vegas, man. (laughter) >> You guys are the hottest start-up right now on the track in Silicon Valley. A lot of people talking about you guys. Want to get this out there. Give you a minute to just talk about Datrium. You guys are a new model emerging, some real pros. David Doman everyone knows about your success with that. Frank's Loop and that went that way. You guys have a great team of XVM guys. >> Craig: Yes. >> So you're working on a really compelling unique thing but it's getting traction so give a minute to explain what Datrium is. >> In simple terms, we are a very different take on conversions. We were conversing VM ware and Linux virtualization even bare metal container hosts with your primary storage we leveraged host Flash for that with secondary storage and archived to cloud. All in one super simple system. And I mean, what a lot of our customers kind of tell us, wow you are a simpler more scalable kind of nutanix that meets rubrik. You're like this love child of nutanix and rubrik. (laughter) They just love it 'cause it's one thing that does it all, super simple. >> A lot of free love going around this generation. (laughter) You got AWS and VM ware bonding together. Google playing in here, it's like the 60's all over again. (laughter) >> Yeah, yeah, not that I remember. >> Tech B generation.6 >> Dave: Summer love 2017. Summer of love, that I'm going to use that. >> Okay love child between rubrick and nutanix. What specifically does that look like? Just clarify one from a product p6erspective. >> First of all there is absolutely zero Call it, HCI cluster administration and so you know growing is as simple as adding a server. Adding capacity, you add those independently as you need it, so it's super economic. Everything runs fast 'cause it runs right out of Flash in your server adjacent to your VM. Again no back up silo, you take care all of your protection and archiving to the cloud with the same console that you're running your business on. So it's in a nutshell what you get. >> So contrast that Andre with the classical hyper-converged infrastructure in terms of how it's scales and how it's managed. >> Yeah I know that's a good question. So if you think about hyper-convergence. It was great, it really changed the years. In many ways it simplified, you remove the no silos that san was creating complexity around scalability or configuring rate, lunz, zoning. All the things that you'd specialize as skill to manage, right? And as you know, as you move along in your journey in the data center, you end up with multiple different vendors. They have different skill sets to manage. So HCI really changed the game in that way. But it also created different challenges for the data center. And we were lucky enough that HCI's only starting, right? This whole thing about converging is only getting started. So one of the first problems that we are dress is being able to scale performance, independent of capacity. So we've hyper-converged for the most part. You know, if you might want more capacity you need to have a computer, if you need a computer, you need more capacity. So we enable customers to go in different directions as needed. We also enable customers to bring their own existing environment into the solution. With HCI generally speaking, you need to buy that specific appliance or that specific HCL and sort of like pour everything in that specific solution. Which kind of becomes a silo as well. So we enable companies to leverage the existing environments and get the same benefits that you'd get from a performance perspective that HCI is bringing. Data locality and relook or read IO's with ...... But at the same time, with your existing hardware. And allows you to use whatever you want. There are other benefits on the resilience side as well. A primary and secondary bad cops so all the primary data, leaves in the nodes in the servers but we have the copy of the data or the back up in what we call a data cluster. So, what that really makes is the solution is stateless on the server side. I don't know if you remember, it's the same timeframe. All the servers were stateless. If a server went down, you would just, no move. You restart the VM's or the workload in a different server. And it's great. With hyper-convergence, now it's always stateful. All the data is actually living on the server. So when you lose a server, you actually putting data at risk and to be cost effective with ACI, you need to do what they call IFTT1 or replication factor two which means I have two copies of the data across the cluster. But it's not very uncommon to have avoid this failure and the read error and then you down to back up and have to restore. You want to rely on the backup as your insurance-- >> Dave: Not as your-- >> Not as then we use it for a day today. >> Yeah. >> So there are a number of different things that we solved that we believe we solved well. That hyper-convergence was not able to solve in its first instance. But you know what? That said, hyper-convergence started this whole journey to convergence is starting. I think I heard Chad Sakeet saying that, there's 440,000 VMX out there. Those are all coming for renewal, no refresh cycles. And now customers that have been able to see what HCI was doing the past three, four years. What worked and what was not working well and look at the use solutions and see how we are addressing those changes. >> Well what about the data protection side. You guys obviously have with Brian and Hugo, a lot of experience as a target. >> Voiceover: Yeah, yeah. >> But you're talking about more. You're talking about a software platform. >> Yeah from a data protection perspective, first of all you've got a platform that's totally unified with your primary storage environment. You then have this wonderful grandularity at VM and V dis level, container level. Great scale, I mean again the chops that the founders bring to that. But one of the things that you know, it think is really powerful. other platforms will talk about, hey we can snap VM's. We can replicate but then they will store them on expensive Flash in those nods and we have a separate device that is cost optimized, globally dedupped compressed on very low cost capacity. That is ideal for all that capacity you need to keep to protect the business. And so bringing that together with the great performance of Flash, this thing really does it all end to end And so it's a different way to think about it. And when we go in, we typically solving problems on the compute primary storage side. >> Voiceover: Uh huh. >> But when we then describe what we do from a backup or archived to cloud perspective, the lights go on and oh my gosh, I simply don't need-- >> John: I got a two for one here. >> Yes exactly. >> Your file system basically you're saying eliminates the need for any separate backup software, is that right, or? >> We do, I would say 80 or 90% of what most people need because the convenience of having your virtualization engineer do it all is so good. Now what I would say is, there are a lot of requirements in the world that we absolutely are going to turn to our pals at Zerto for and Cool Replication. Our friends at Veem, Rubert Cohesidi. All of those guys, we'll team up with because if you want you know back up off platform you know we're daydream to daydream. >> Voiceover: Yeah, right. >> We're not, going to sugar coat that. But there are specific requirements that those guys do that you need. We're going to give them a ring and bring them in. But what we're finding is, most of our customers are looking for ways to just do it all in one spot with a guy running the business, so. >> So I want to back up for a second. We had Brian's founder on Monday and this is an interesting story. I want you to take a minute to describe why you're doing this, because a lot of people, you come in, okay primary storage compute and then that's how I used to operate and then the next guy comes in with his solution. You guys have an interesting perspective with the data domain backup side. Why are guys taking this approach? Explain the uniqueness, why you guys are engaging in this way and what does it mean for the person the customer on the other end. >> Craig: Yeah. >> Is it all in one, is it optional? I mean, the approach is unique 'cause of the founder. >> Craig: Yeah. Just take a minute to explain that. >> Here's the world, the world is hard and getting harder, right? I mean it's just a morning, noon, night and weekend job to keep businesses running with the pace of this economy we're in, right? >> John: The economists are pulling their hair out, basically. >> And the, exactly and so the winner in the market is the one who can bring the simplest approach that gets the job done. And the problem is the bolt on, peace meal solution's that folks are tasked to live with, if you sit down and just draw all of the software stacks and consoles, then you need to put together to go from your virtualization environment. Flash, your backup environment. Replication DR, security, you want to blow your brains out. (laughter) >> John: Hang from the raftors. And again guys, they're trying to get the job done. They're forced to move fast and they're tight on budget. And so if you Ycan bring them the simplest possible solution that solves the problem today and future proofs it going forward, that's what folks are looking for. And there's a lot of nuanced edges to a lot of different solutions out there but at the end of the day show me simple and that wins. >> Alright so, now give me the reactions. That's important to buyers to understand what the (mumbles) is, thank you very much for that. Now the reactions. So you walk into that buyer and say, hey don't blow your brains out. Don't hang from the rafters, we got you here. This is beautiful for you, simple works. Cleans those lines up. What are they reacting to? Are they skeptical, they say you're full of you know what? Do they test the hell out of it? What goes on? >> When you walk them through it, and I'm going to let you take this too. You've talked to a ton of people already. When you walk them through it, they totally get it. Where should Flash be? Right next to the VM on the host. Makes perfect since, it's cheaper there, right? How should you scale, well stateless host. You know, servers that aren't storage nods. You know you lose two and you cluster down. That's not a great situation. >> Voiceover: No problem. >> Voiceover: Yeah. (laughter) >> And so stateless hosts. Any number of servers can fail, you're still going. People love that, they get that. Bringing all the backup capability into that one console. If you've got it, people get it and by the way, a quick demo is kind of icing on the cake. But I mean-- >> Share some color. >> Yeah, no, I've been traveling the last few weeks and talking to customers. I joined Datrium four months ago, and customers understand the proposition and they like. They like that we bring performers. They like that we bring resiliency. They like that it re-utilize the existing investments in the data center. And they like that we do primary and secondary backup. The customers that we're talking to they get it and they understand it and they want to do POC's and move on. >> So you're talking about a lot of VMX's out there. 400,00 plus, obviously that's been a target for hyper-connected verge. Clearly a target for your guys.6 But you're also talking about stateless. And when you think about these emerging cloud native apps, these stateless apps, certain IOT apps that are being developed. Do you see the emergence within your customer base yet? Of those type of emerging applications that aren't staple. >> Absolutely, I mean well first of all. If you look at the public cloud world. Architecturally what those guys have had to do to kind of get latency low and scalable, they think EC2 and S3, you know think of how Google cloud is architected with Kolassas. They have separated that persistent capacity from what's going on, effectively on the nods, the compute nods. And they've done that for exactly for that reason. To scale, low latency workloads as you need as you grow on demand. >> And to make that infrastructure invisible to the developer. >> Absolutely, absolutely and so the approach we're taking is fundamentally to give customers in kind of this hybrid world a way to bring that kind of infrastructure with the simplicity, scale, performance you need and kind of on prim. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And then it's a wonderful map when you take that in hybrid way to public cloud, 'cause you can very easily map that capacity layer to capacity layer, compute to compute. Instead of this kind of crazy dance you have to do with traditional infrastructure. >> That was actually part of it. You look at the VM ware and nowadays there's keynotes and embracing double ups and container. It's all over the place now. Now we're counting the days for how many store engineers or infrastructural engineers who actually need the data center moving forward. But the way system that we said was the architecture while in mind just support very medal containers and provide all of the performance benefits. And really finding a way to run containers and native apps, called native apps across data centers, across clouds. And we're moving in that direction more and more to support (mumbles) integrated and a few other architectural solutions. >> So I want to follow up with that. I mean, everybody talks about cloud. The show it's cloud, cloud, cloud and obviously the big wave. But the, you know this well John being all the time you spent with AWS, Reinvent and Jassie and so forth. The (mumbles) cloud is not VM's. >> Voiceover: Right. >> Right, and so is the conversation beginning to change? And your customer base around more of a developer mindset and what does that conversation look like. >> For the customers that I've been talking they still are very VM centric. There are some discussions about containers and developing, developers embracing containers. Off brand on the &cloud and on premise but they know VM is still pervasive in the prize. >> Dave: So that's where the money is? (laughter) >> That's where the money is, at least for the large majority of -- >> I'm sorry now on premise. And so cloud is just a different vernacular true but-- >> But the reality is though folks have that've got a VM environment. A lot of people we talk to are they have mason container development work going on. >> John: Right. >> And the challenge is though that those kinds of customers wind up having to silo out the infrastructure that supports those. You just don't have the bridge. >> Dave: And with you, you're saying-- >> And the point is yeah, you can have your ESX, VM's, your Linux VM's, your containers running in those VM's or you can have those containers running bare metal. >> Yeah. >> It's all one shared pool of resources like it ought to be. >> And to some extent when I talk to customers, what I figured out is they all starting using containers running VM's. But as soon as they figured out their frame of work, their management, their orchestration, they wanted to move to bare metal 'cause they wanted to have is that additional 10, 15% performance that they get running bare metal. And that I see constantly and talking to Docker and other companies, that's what they see on their customer base as well. >> Voiceover: Yeah. >> So you know where all that is going, I don't believe everything is going to be running in the cloud. I don't believe everything is going to be running in the data center. There'll be a mix of everything. You talk to two customers, they have different hyper-visors, they had red hat visualization, they have VM ware, they have hyperV. And large customers are embracing everything to some extent. >> Yeah, and you want to set it up in a way that you know, you set your policies and you don't care where it is, right? You set it up, and economical way that is lined with you service levels and who care if it's you know, a different prim site, the cloud, which cloud it doesn't matter. It's all your cloud, one cloud, right? >> Guys, thanks for coming on. Andre Leibovici. >> Andre: Yeah. (laughter) >> Got it right? >> Andre: You, got it. >> Greg Nunez, good friend congratulations on the start-up. >> Craig: Thanks. >> Quick, I want to give you the last word here. Talk about the company's status, what you guys are hiring for, where you guys are in the start-up journey. I see great validation with multiple rounds of funding. How many employees? How much revenue are you doing? Tell me the product cost? (laughter) Share! >> We are growing rapidly, 130% quarter of a quarter. We are hiring literally across the board. We can't hire fast enough to keep up with the demand. And for us the number one goal is just getting in front of customers looking for a way out from personal infrastructure. >> John: Sales people, field organization, channel? >> Channel we have a wonderful channel network and absolutely hiring guys to partner up with our channel. Both sales and marketing and yeah we just-- >> Alright, I'll put you guys on the spot because we love big fan of start-ups, certainly ones that have great pedigree in product that's unique again like Utonics in the early days, no one understood it, founders had stayed on course. You guys are on a similar track where it doesn't look like everything else but it's game changing so. Each of you take a minute to explain to the buyer, a potential customer out there, why they should work with Datrium and what you can bring to the table. We'll start with you. >> So first of all, if you are on a ray based infrastructure now, you're dealing with your performance constraints, managing lines, you've looked at a modern approach to convergence and it just doesn't scale, it's not right for your infrastructure, and enterpriser service provider has to take a look at this new approach to convergence we've got. It will change your world, literally. Your business and your personal world. And if you don't take a look, you're missing out. It is different from hyper-convergence. But fundamentally brings your that wonderful X86 based infrastructure that the whole planet is moving to. Got to take a look. >> Andre you can't say the same thing he's said but in your own words what would you say to the potential buyers that are out there. Potential customers, why should they look at you guys. >> Sure, I'll let you all in on the HCI in the simplicatiion of the data center. You know HCI was great simplying data center, removing a lot of the complexity. We do the same things. We do it in a different way. We remove all the nobs and buttons that you have in the data center as an example our infrastructure doesn't require any tuning on performance. So enable this duplication, enable compression, disable original recording. All those features that people, that when you're managing hundreds or thousands of yams, there's no way you know what needs to be enabled and disabled for each one of your workloads. So we lack from simplicity and that's where I met my pace CI peg, it's simplicity. And we do the same thing but we now solve different challenges that HCI also brought into the market. >> Datrium start-up, hot start-up in Silicon Valley and all around the world. Congratulations. It's The Cube coverage here at VMWorld 2017. I'm John Ferrier and Dave Vellante. We'll be be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering VM World 2017, brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat techno music) >> Hey, welcome back to day two of VM World 2017 theCUBE's continuing coverage, I am Lisa Martin with my co-host Dave Vellante and we have a kind of a cute mafia going on here. We have Eric Herzog the CMO of IBM Storage back with us, and we also have Steve Kenniston, another CUBE alumni, Global Spectrum Software Distance Development Executive at IBM, welcome guys! >> Thank you. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So lots of stuff going on, IBM Storage business health, first question, Steve, to you, what's going on there, tell us about that. >> Steve: What's going on in IBM Storage? >> Yes. >> All kinds of great things. I mean, first of all, I think we were walking the show floor just talking about how VMWare, VM World use to be a storage show and then it wasn't for a long time. Now you're walking around there, you see all kinds of storage. Now IBM, really stepping up its game. We've got two booths. We're talking all about not just, you know, the technologies, cognitive, IOT, that sort of thing but also where do those bits and bytes live? That's your, that's your assets. You got to store that information someplace and then you got to protect that information. We got all we're showcasing all kinds of solutions on the show floor including Versus Stack and that sort of thing where you you know make your copies of your data, store your data, reissue your data, protect your data, it's a great show. >> Lisa: Go ahead. >> Please. So I ever want to get into it, right, I mean, we've watched, this is our eighth year doing theCUBE at VM World, and doing theCUBE in general, but to see the evolution of this ecosystem in this community, you're right, it was storage world, and part of the reason was, and you know this well Eric, it was such a problem, you know. And all the APIs that VMWare released to really solve that storage problem, Flash obviously has changed the game a little bit but I want to talk about data protection if you're my backup specifically. Steve you and I have talked over the years about the ascendancy of VMWare coincided with a reduction in the physical capacity that was allocated to things like the applications like Backup. That was a real problem so the industry had their re-architect its backup and then companies like VM exploded on the scene, simplicity was a theme, and now we're seeing a sort of a similar scene change around cloud. So what's your perspective on that sort of journey in the evolution of data protection and where we are today, especially in the context of cloud? >> Yeah, I think there's been a couple, a couple big trends. I think you talked about it correctly, Dave, from the standpoint of when you think about your data protection capacity being four X at a minimum greater than your primary storage capacity, the next thing you start understanding is now with a growth in data, I need to be able to leverage and use that data. The number one thing, the number one driver to putting data in the cloud is data protection, right? And then it's now how can I reuse that data that's in the cloud and you look at things like AWS and that sort of thing the ability to spin up applications, and now what I need to do is I need to connect to with the data to be able to run those applications and if I'm going to do a test development environment if I'm going to run an analytics report or I'm going to do something, I want to connect to my data. So we have solutions that help you promote that data into the cloud, leverage that data, take advantage of that data and it it's just continually growing and continually shifting. >> So you guys are really leaning in to to VM World this year, got a big presence. What's going on there? You know, one would think, okay you know VMWare it's you know clearly grabbing a big piece of the market. You got them doing more storage. What's going on Eric, is it just, "Hey, we're a good partner." "Hey we're not going to let them you know elbow us out." "We're going to be competitive with the evil machine company." What's the dynamic in the VMWare ecosystem with you guys? >> Well I think the big thing for us is IBM has had a powerful partnership with VMWare since day one. Way back when IBM use to have an Intel Server Division everything was worked with VMWare, been a VMR partner, years and years ago on the server world as that division transferred away to Lenovo the storage division became front and center so all kinds of integration with our all Flash arrays our Versus Stack which you do jointly with Cisco and VMWare providing a conversion for structured solution, the products that Steve's team just brought out Spectrum Protect Plus installs in 30 minutes, recovers instantly off of a VM, can handle multiple VMs, can recover VMs or files, can be used to back up hundreds and thousands of virtual machines if that's what you've got in your infrastructure. So, the world has gone virtual and cloud. IBM is there with virtual and cloud. You need to move data out to IBM cloud, or exams on our azure Spectrum Protect Plus, Spectrum Scale, Spectrum Virtualize all members of our software family, and the arrays that they ship on all can transparently move data to a cloud; move it back and forth at the blink of an eye. With VMWare you need that same sort of level of integration we've had it on the array side we've now brought that out with Spectrum Protect Plus to make sure that backups are, in fact Spectrum Protect Plus is so easily, even me with my masters degree in Chinese history can back up and protect my data in a VMWare environment. So it's designed to be used by the VMWare admin or the app owner, not by the backup guy or the storage admin. Not that they won't love it too, but it's designed for the guys who don't know much about storage. >> I'll tell you Dave I saw it, I watched him get a demo and then I watched him turn around and present it, it was impressive. (laughing) >> I want to ask you a quick question. Long time partners IBM and VMWare as you as you've just said. You were an EMC guy that's where I first met you, from a marketing and a positioning perspective what have you guys done in the last year since the combination has completed to continue to differentiate the IBM VMWare strengths as now VMWare's part of Dell EMC. >> So I think the key thing is VMWare always has been the switch under the storage business. When I was at EMC, we owned 81 percent of the company and you walked into Palo Alto and Pat Gelsinger who I used to work for at EMC is now the CEO of VMWare you walk into the data center and there's IBM arrays, EMC arrays, HP arrays, Dell arrays and then app arrays. And a bunch of all small guys so the good thing is they've always been the switch under the storage industry, IBM because of it's old history and the server industry has always had tight integration with them, and we've just made sure we've done. I think they key difference we've done is it's all about the data. CEO, CIO they hate talking about storage. It's all about the data and that's what we're doing. Spectrum Protect Plus is all about keeping the data safe protected, and as Steve talked about using it in the cloud using real data sets for test and dev for dev opps, that's unique. Not everyone's doing that we're one of the few guys that do that. It's all about the data and you sell the storage as a foundation of that data. >> Well I mean IBM's always been good about not selling speeds and feeds, but selling at the boardroom level, the C level I mean you're IBM. That's your brand. Having said that, there's a lot of knife fights going on tactically in the business and you guys are knife fighters I know you both you're both startup guys, you're not afraid to get you know down and dirty. So Steve, how do you address the skepticism that somebody might have and say, "Alright, you know I hear you, this all sounds great but, you know I need simplicity." You guys you talk simplicity your Chinese History background, but I'm still skeptical. What can you tell me, proof points share with us to convince us that you really are from a from a simplicity standpoint competitive with the pack? >> I think, I think you seen a pretty big transformation over the last 18 months with what the some of the stuff that we've done with the software portfolio. So, a lot of folks can talk a good game about a software defined strategy. The fact that we put the entire Spectrum suite now under one portfolio now things are starting to really gel and come together. We done things like interesting skunkworks project with Spectrum Protect Plus and now we even had business partners in our booth who are backup architects talking about the solution who sell everybody else's solution on the floor saying, "This is, the I can't believe it, "I can't believe this is IBM. "They're putting together solutions that "are just unbelievably easy to use." They need that and I think you're exactly right, Dave. It used to be where you have a lot of technical technicians in the field and people wanted to architect things and put things together. Those days are gone, right? Now what you're finding is the younger generation coming in they're iPhone type people they want click simplicity just want to use it that sort of thing. We've started to recognize that and we've had to build that into our product. We were, we are a humbler IBM now. We are listening to our business partners. We are asking them what do we need to be doing to help you be successful in the field, not just from a product set, but also a selling you know, a selling motion. The Spectrum suite all the products under one thing now working and they're operating together, the ability to buy them more easily, the ability to leverage them use them, put it in a sandbox, test it out, not get charged for it, okay I like it, now I want to deploy it. We've really made it a lot easier to consume technology in a much easier way, right, software defined, and we're making the products easier to use. >> How've you been able to achieve that transformation is it cultural, is it somebody came down and said you thou shalt simplify and I mean you've been there a couple years now. >> Yeah so I think, I think the real thing is IBM has brought into the division a bunch of people from outside the division. So Ed Walsh our general manager who's going to be on shortly five startups. Steve, five startups. Me, seven startups. Our new VP of Offering Manager in the Solutions said not only Net Up, four startups. Our new VP of North American sales, HDS, three startups. So we've brought in a bunch of guys who A, use to work at the big competition, EMC, Net Up, Hitachi, et cetera. And we've also brought in a bunch of people who are startup guys who are used to turning on dime, it's all about ease of use, it's all about simplicity, it's all about automation. So between the infusion of this intellectual capital from a number of us who've been outside the company, particularly in the startup world, and the incredible technical depth of IBM storage teams and our test teams and all the other teams that we leverage, we've just sort of pointed them in the direction like it needs to be installed in 30 minutes. Well guess what, they knew how to do that 30 years ago. They just never did because they were, you know stuck in the IBM silo if you will, and now the big model we have at IBM is outside in, not inside out, outside in. And the engineering teams have responded to that and made things that are easy to use, incredibly automated, work with everyone's gear not just ours. There're other guys that sell storage software. But other than in the protection space all the other guys, it only works with EMC or it only works with Net Up or it only works HP. Our software works with everyone's stuff including every one of our major competitors, and we're fine with that. So that's come from this infusion and combination of the incredible technical depth and DNA of IBM with a bunch of group of people about 10 of us who've all for come from either A, from the big competitors, but also from a bunch of startups. And we've just merged that over the last two years into something that's fortunate and incredibly powerful. We are now the number one storage software company in the world, and in overall storage, both systems and software, we're number two. >> Dave: So where's that data, is that IDC data? >> Yeah, that's the IDC data. >> And what are they what are they, when they count that what are they counting? Are they sort of eliminating any hardware you know, associated with that or? >> Well no, storage systems would be external systems our all Flash arrays, our Ver, that's all the systems side. Software's purely software only, so. >> Dave: No appliances >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Dave: The value of those licenses associated with that >> Well as our CFO pointed out, so if you take a look at our track record of last at the beginning of this year, we grew seven percent in Q1, one of the only storage companies to grow certainly of the majors, we grew eight percent in Q2, again one of the only storage companies to grow of the major players, and as our CFO pointed out in his call in Q2, over 40 percent of the division's revenue is storage software, not full system, just stand alone software particularly with the strength of the suite and all the things we're doing you know, to make it easy to use install in 30 minutes and have a mastery in Chinese History be able to protect his data and never lose it. And that's what we want to be able to do. >> Okay so that's a licensed model, and is it a, is it a, is it a ratable model is it a sort of a perpetual model, what is it? >> We've got both depending on the solution. We have cloud engagement models, we can consume it in the cloud. We got some guys are traditionalists, gimme an ELA, you know Enterprise License Agreement. So we, we're the pasta guys. We have the best pasta in the world. Do you want red sauce, white sauce, or pesto? Dave I said that because you're part Italian, I'm half Italian on my mother's side. >> I like Italian. >> So we have the best pasta, whatever the right sauce is for you we deliver the best pasta on the planet, in our case the best storage software on the planet. >> You heard, you heard Michael up there on stage today, "Don't worry about it." He was invoking his best Italian, I have an affinity for that. So, so Steve, this is your second stint at IBM, Ed's second stint, I'm very intrigued that Doug Balog is now moved over this is a little inside baseball here, but running sales again. >> Steve: Right. >> So that's unique, actually, to see have a guy who use to run storage, leave, go be the general manager of the Power Systems division, in OpenPOWER, then come back, to drive storage sales. So, you're seeing, it's like a little gravity action. Guys sort of coming back in, what's going on from your perspective? >> Well I I think, I think Eric said it best. We've done an outside in. We've been bringing a lot of people in and I think that the development team and I wanted to to to bounce off of what Eric had said was they always knew how to do it, it's just they they needed to see and understand the motivation behind why they wanted to do it or why they needed to do it. And now they're seeing these people come in and talk about in a very, you know caring way that this is how the world is changing, and they believe it, and they know how to do it and they're getting excited. So now there's a lot more what what people might think, "Oh I'm just going to go develop my code and go home," and whatever they're not; they're excited. They want to build new products. They want to make these things interoperate together. They're, they're passionate about hearing from the customer, they're passionate about tell me what I can do to make it better. And all of those things when one group hears something that's going on to make something better they want to do the same thing, right. So it's it's really, it's breathing good energy into the storage division, I think. >> So question for you guys on that front you talked about Eric, we don't leave it at storage anymore, right? C levels don't care about that. But you've just talked about two very strong quarters in storage revenue perspective. What's driving that what's or what's dragging that? Is it data protection? What are some of the other business level drivers that are bringing that storage sale along? >> So for us it's been a couple things. So when you look at just the pure product perspective the growth has been around our all Flash arrays. We have a broad portfolio; we have very cost effective stuff we have stuff for the mainframe we have super high performance stuff we have stuff for big data analytic workloads. So again there isn't one Flash, you know there's a couple startups that started with one Flash and that's all they had. We think it's the right Flash tool for the right job. It's all about data, applications, workloads and use case. Big data analytics is not the same as your Oracle database to do your ERP system or your logistics system if you're someone like a Walmart. You need a different type of Flash for that. We tune everything to that. So Flash has been a growth engine for us, the other's been software defined storage. The fact that we suited it up, we have the broadest software portfolio in the industry. We have Block, we have File, we have Object, we have Backup, we have Archive. We've got Management Plane. We've got that and by packaging it into a suite, I hate to say we stole it from the old Microsoft Office, but we did. And for the in-user base it's up to a 40 percent discount. I'm old enough to remember the days of the computer store I think Dave might've gone to a computer store once or twice too. And there it was: Microsoft Office at eye level for $999. Excel, Powerpoint and Word above it at $499. Which would you buy? So we've got the Spectrum suite up to a 40 percent savings, and we let the users use all of the software for free in their dev environments at no charge and it's not a timeout version, it's not a lite version, it is a full version of the software. So you get to try a full thing out for free and then at the suite level you save up to 40 percent. What's not to like? >> And I think, I just wanted to compliment that too. I think to also answer the question is one of the things we've done so we've talked about development really growing, getting excited, wanting to build things. The other thing that's also happening is that is at the field level, we've stopped talking speeds and feeds like directly, right, so it has become this, this higher level conversation and now IBMers who go and sell things like cognitive and IOT and that sort of thing, they're now wanting to bring us in, because we're not talking about the feeds and speeds and screwing up like how they like to sell. We're talking about, Jenny will come out and say data is your is your most valuable asset in your company. And we say, okay, I got to store those bits and bytes some place, right? We provide that mechanism. We provide it in a multitude of different ways. And we want to compliment what they're doing. So now when I put presentations together to help the sales field, I talk about storage in a way that is more, how does it help cognitive? How does it help IOT? How does it help test and dev? And and by the way there's a suite, it's storing it, it's using it, it's protecting it. It's all of those things and now it's complimenting their selling motion. >> Well your both of the passion and the energy coming from both of you is very palpable. So thank you for sticking around, Eric, and Steve for coming back to theCUBE and sharing all the exciting things that are going on at IBM. That energy is definitely electric. So wish you guys the best of luck in the next day or so of the show and again, thank you for spending some time with us this afternoon. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Absolutely, and for my co-host Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's live continuing coverage of the Emerald 2017 day two. Stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Welcome to our presentation here at VM World 2017. I'm John Furrier, co-host of The Cube, with Dave Vellante who's taking a lunch break. We are at VM World on the ground on the floor where we have Google's vice president of product management developer platforms Sam Ramji. Welcome to The Cube conversation. >> Great, thank you very much John. >> So you had a keynote this morning. You know, came up on stage, big announcement. Let's get right to it. That container as a service from Pivotal, VM Ware, and Google announced kind of a joint announcement. It was kind of weird. It wasn't a fully joint but it really came from Pivotal. Clarify what the announcement was. >> Sure, so what we announced is the result of a bunch of co-engineering that we've been doing in the open source with Pivotal around kubernetes running on bosh. So, if you've been paying attention to cloud foundry, you'd know that cloud foundry is the runtime layer and there's something called bosh sitting underneath it that does the cluster management and cluster operations. Pivotal is bringing that to commercial GA later this year. So what we announced with Pivotal and VMWare is that we're going to have cost incompatibility between Pivotal's kubernetes and Google's kubernetes. Google's kubernetes service is called Google Container Engine Pivotal's offering is called Pivotal Container Service. The big deal here is that PKS is going to be the standard way that you can get kubernetes from any of the Dell Group companies, whether that's VMWare, EMC. That gives us one consistent target for compatibility because one of the things that I pointed out in the keynote was inconsistency is the enemy in the data center. That's what makes operations difficult. >> And Kubo was announced at Cloud Foundry, Stu Miniman covered it, but that wasn't commercially available. That's the nuance, right? >> That's right, and that still is available in the open source. So what we've committed to is, we've said, every time that we update Google Container Engine, Pivotal Container Service is also going to update, so we have constant compatibility, that that's delivered on top of VMWare's infrastructure including NSX for networking and then the final twist is a big reason why people choose Google Cloud is because of our services. So Big Table, Big Query, a dynamically scaling data warehouse that we run an enormous amount of Google workloads on. Spanner, right. Which is why all of your data is consisted globally across Google's planet scaled data centers. And finally, all of our new machine learning and AI investments, those services will be delivered down to Pivotal Container Service, right, that's going to be there out of the box at launch and we'll keep adding to that catalog. >> It's just that Google Next was a lot of conversations, Oh Google's catching up to Amazon, Amazon's done a great job no doubt about it. We love Amazon. Andy Jassy was here as well. >> Super capable very competent engineering team. >> There's a lot of workloads in VMWare community that runs on AWS but it's not the only game in town. Jerry Chen, investor in Docker, friend of ours, we know, called this years ago. It's not going to be a one cloud winner take all game. Clearly. But there's the big three lining up, AWS, Microsoft, Google, you guys are doing great. So I got to ask you, what is the biggest misconception that people have about Google Cloud out in the market? 'Cause a lot of enterprises are used to running ops, maybe not as much dev as there is ops, and dev ops comes in with cloud native, there's a lot of confusion, what is the thing that you'd like to clarify about Google that they may not know about? >> The single most important thing to clarify about Google Cloud is our strategy is open-hybrid cloud. We think that we are in an amazing place to run workloads, we also recognize that compute belongs everywhere. We think that the durable state of computing is more of a mosaic than a uni-directional arrow that says everything goes to cloud. We think you want to run your containers and your VM's in clouds. We think you want to run them in your data centers. We also think you want to move them around. So we've been diehard committed to building out the open-source projects, the protocols to let all of that information flow, and then providing services that can get anywhere. So open-hybrid cloud is the strategy, and that's what we've committed to with kubernetes, with tensorflow, with apache beam, with so much of the open-source that we've contributed to Linux and others, and then maintaining open standards compatibility for our services. >> Well, it's great to see you at Google because I know your history, great open source guy, you know open source, it's been really part of your life, and bringing that to Google's great, so congratulations. >> There's a reason for that though, it's pragmatic. This is not a crazy crusade. The value of open source is giving control to the customer. And I think that the most ethical way that you can build businesses and markets is based on customer choice. Giving them the ability to move to where they want. Reducing their costs of switching. If they stay with you, then you're really producing a value-added service. So I've spent time in the operator shoes, in the developer shoes, and in the vendor shoes. When I've spent time buying and running the software on my own, I really always valued and preferred things that would let me move my stuff around. I preferred open source. So that's really the method to the madness here. It's not about opening everything up insanely, giving everything away. It serves customers better and in the long run, the better you serve customers, you'll build a winning business. >> We're here on the ground floor at VMWorld 2017 in Las Vegas, where behind us is the VM Village. And obviously Sam was on stage with the big announcement with Pivotal VMWare. And this is kind of important now, we got to debate now, usually I'm not the contrarian in the group, I'm usually the guy who's like yeah, rah rah, entrepreneurial, optimistic, yeah we can do that! You know that future's here, go to the future! But I was kind of skeptical and I told VMWare and I saw Pat Gelsinger and Michael Dell in the hallways and I'm like, they thought this was going to be the big announcement, and it was their big announcement, but I was kind of like, guys, I mean, it's the long game, these guys in the VMWare community, their operations guys, their not going to connect the dots and there was kind of an applause but not a standing ovation that Google would've gotten at a Google Next conference where the geeks would've been like going crazy. What is the operational dynamic that you're seeing in this market that Google's looking at and bringing value to, so that's the question for you. >> This is what the big change in the industry is is going from only worrying about increasing application velocity to figuring out how to do that with reliability. So there's a whole community of operators that I think many of us have left behind as we've talked about clouds and cloud data. We've done a great job of appealing to developers, enabling them to be more productive, but with operators, we've kind of said, well, your mileage may vary or we don't have time for you, or you have to figure it out yourself. I think the next big phase in adoption of cloud native technology is to say, first of all, open-hybrid, run your stuff wherever you want. >> Well you've got to have experience running cloud. Now you bring that knowledge out here. >> And that's the next piece. How do we offer you the tools and the skills that you need as an operator to have that same consistency, those same guarantees you used to have, and move everything forward in the future? Because if you turn one audience, one community, into the bad people who are holding everything back, that's a losing proposition, you have to give everybody a path to win, right? Everybody wants to be the good guy. So I think, now we need to start paying really close attention to operators and be approachable, right? I would like to see GCP become the most approachable cloud. We're already well known as the most advanced cloud. But can we be the easiest to adopt as well, and that's our challenge, to get the experience. >> You got to get that touch, that these enterprise teams historically have had, but it's interesting I mean, the mosaic you'd mentioned requires some unification, right? You got to be likable. You got to be approachable. And that's where you guys are going, I know you guys are building out for that, but the question is, for you, because Google has a lot of experience, and I know from personal knowledge Google's depth of people and talent, not always the cleanest execution out to the market in terms of the front-facing white glove service that some of these other companies have done, but you guys are certainly strong. >> Well, I think this is where Diane Greene has been driving the transformation, I mean like, she breathes, eats, sleeps, dreams enterprise. So, being both a board member at Google and being the SVP of Google Cloud, she's really bringing the discipline to say, you know, white glove service is mandatory. We have a pretty substantial professional services organization and building out partnerships with Accenture, with PWC, with Deloitte, with everyone to make sure that these things are all serviceable and properly packaged all the way down to the end user. So, no doubt there's more, more room for us to improve, there's miles to go on the journey, but the focus and the drive to make sure that we're delivering the enterprise requirements, Dianne never lets us stop thinking about that. >> It's like math, right, the order of operations is super important, and there's a lot of stuff going on in the cloud right now that's complex. >> Yes. >> Ease of use is the number one thing that we're hearing, because one, it's a moving a train in general, right? But the cloud's growing, a lot of complexity, how do you guys view that? And the question I want to ask you is, we know what cloud looks like today. Amazon, they're doing great. Multi-horse race if you will. But in 2022, the expectations and what it looks like then is going to be completely different, if you just take the trajectory of what's happening. So cleaning up kubernetes, making that a manageable, all the self updates, makes a lot of sense, and I think that's the dots no one's connecting here, I get the long game, but what's the customer's view in your opinion as someone who's sitting back and with the Google perch looking out over the horizon, 2022, what's it like for the customer? >> That's an outstanding question. So I think, 2022, looking back, we've actually absorbed so much of this complexity that we can provide ease of use to every workload and to every segment. Backing into that, ease of use looks different, like, let's think about tooling, ease of use looks different to an electrician verus a carpenter versus a plumber. They're doing different jobs, they need different tools, so I think about those as different audiences and different workloads. So if you're trying to migrate virtual machines to a cloud, ease of use means a thing and it includes taking care of the networking layer, how do we make sure that our cloud network shows up like an on premises network, and you don't have to set up some weird VPC configuration, how can those just look like part of your LAN subject to your same security controls. That's a whole path of engineering for a particular division of the company. For a different division of the company focused on databases ease of use is wow, I've got this enormous database, I'm straining at the edges, how do I move that to the cloud? Well, what kind of database is it, right? Is it a SQL database? Is it a NoSQL database? So engineering that in, that's the key. The other thing that we have to do for ease of use is upscaling. So a lot of things that we talked about before are the need to drive IT efficiency through automation. But who's going to teach people how to do the automation especially while they're being held to a very high SLA standard for their own data center and held to a high standard for velocity movement to the cloud. This is where Google has invented a discipline called SRE or site reliability engineering, and it's basically the meta discipline around what many people call dev ops. We think that this is absolutely teachable, it's learnable, it's becoming a growing community. You can get O'Reilly books on the topics. So I think we have an accountability to the industry to go and teach every operator and every operating group, hey here's what SRE looks like, some of your folks might want to do this, because that will give you the lift to make all of these workloads much easier to manage 'cause it's not just about velocity, it's also about reliability. >> It's interesting, we've got about a minute left or so. I'm just going to get your thoughts on this because you've certainly seen it on the developer side, stack wars, whatever you want to call them, the my stack runs this tech, but last night I heard in the hallway here multiple times the general consensus of two stacks coming together, not just software stacks, hardware stacks, you're seeing things that have never run together or been tested together before. So the site reliability is a very interesting concept and developers get pissed off when stacks don't work, right? So this is a super kind of nuance in this new use case that are emerging because stuff's happened that's never been done before. >> Yeah, so this is where the common tutorials get really interesting, especially as we build out a planetary scale computer at Google. Right, we're no longer thinking about how does the GPU as part of your daughter board, we think about what about racks of GPU's as part of your datacenters using NVDIA K80's, what does it mean to have 180 teraflops of tensor processing capability in a cloud TPU. So getting container centric is crucial and making it really easy to attach to all of those devices by having open source drivers making sure they're all Linux compatible and developers can get to them is going to be part of the substrate to make sure that application developers can target those devices, operators can set a policy that say, yes, I want this to deploy preferentially to environments with a TPU or a GPU and that the whole system can just work and be operable. >> Great, Sam thanks so much for taking the time to stop by. One on one conversation with Sam Ramji who's a Google Cloud, he's a vice president of product management and developer platforms for Google. We'll see you at Google Next. Thanks for spending the time. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. >> Thank you John.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, It's the cube, covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by Keith Townsend, welcome back to the program, a multi-time cube-along. Patrick Osborne, who's the senior director of product management with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Patrick, great to see you. >> Great to be back, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, uh, what number VMWorld is this for you? >> Oh gosh, uh, it's, it's, I can't count it at this point, too many. >> Yeah, it's like I've been working with VMWare for 15 years, it's the eighth one of these for me. Keith, I know you've been few, so what's your take so far, the show? Big ecosystem, a lot of news going on. What do you think so far? >> Yeah so I mean, from my perspective, VMWare has been such a huge ecosystem partner for HP for forever, y'know? It covers everything from, y'know, from our perspective on the compute networking, storage side, certainly services. So um, y'know for me it's always good to catch up with, y'know, old colleagues and kind of understand what's going on in the industry. A lot of talk today around private cloud, multi-cloud, y'know, what people are doing around automation. Y'know certainly a lot of things around software defined, software defined networks, software defined storage, so uh, a lot of good topics, um, it's always good to see the customers here too, as well. >> Yeah uh, the joke a few years ago was VMWorld became storage world, so uh, y'know, in your space of availability, and data protection, y'know, and I walk through the show floor, HP's got a big boot but I see a lot of companies that are attacking different angles of that. You brought up the cloud being a, y'know increasing piece. >> What's top of mind, of a customers that are coming to you, and what sort of things are you working on these days? >> Yeah so, um, from our perspective on the storage and data management landscape, I think that you see a lot of vendors in the space right now. Some of them are certainly part of our ecosystem, you see folks like Veem and, y'know, other folks that we partner with out on the floor. There is an increased look from the customer perspective on availability. It's, the segment's changing, the requirements are changing. I don't think people are tackling availability in the same way as sort of traditional data protection architectures. So we see customers, especially when they're looking for certain inflection points in their infrastructure, like, I'm going to go to all flash, or y'know, deploy some new storage. They're definitely rethinking the way they're doing availability from an application standpoint. So we're uh, we're trying to y'know, meet those market demands through our own technologies, as well as having a pretty robust ecosystem here that we barter with. >> So a lot of talk, not just at this show, but at previous HP shows about hybrid IT. It's obvious the data center isn't going anywhere for the majority of customers, but we have the complexity of cloud. How does cloud impact, practically, data protection, data availability. >> Yeah so uh, from our perspective it's certainly an opportunity, right, to help customers out. We have a, we've, y'know, from a strategy standpoint, we've put a couple solutions and things into market that we hope address some of these cases. So y'know, when you talk about Nimble cloud volumes, right, being able to have your data in a co-located facility very close to, y'know, public clouds so you can do some compute arbitrage, and ultimately be able to, y'know, control your data. And then we do other things for example, Store one's cloud bay, being able to back up to the cloud, which is a pretty established use case. I think from our perspective, helping customers make that move in terms of, um, y'know, you can set up the data path, and make the bits move, but when we talk to mid-size, especially large enterprise customers, the governance around that, I think is really important, And the user experience, to make sure that what you're sending out to the cloud is certainly protected, it's audited. We've even had customers coming to us, we just had a big customer that you've had on here before, 21st Century Fox, right, a big customer of HPE talk last week about, I want to back up workloads that are in the cloud to the cloud, right? There's not a lot of great tools for that today, and I want that audited, and I want y'know, a paper trail around that for their own internal uh, capabilities. So I think there's a lot of opportunities in the space. It's very nascent. >> Yeah, Patrick I think you're bringing up a great point. We were talking a lot at this show, kind of the multi-cloud world. I've got my maturation of what's happening in my data center, deploying a bunch of sass on one or multiple public clouds. And there's certain things like security or y'know, data protection availability. I need to get my arms around all of it. HPE's looking to fill some of those y'know, gaps, and help customers, y'know. What's the overriding story in y'know how you're not one of the big three public cloud providers, but why does HP have a position in this discussion, and maybe you can help us kind of round out that story a little. >> Yeah so, we have a position in that discussion because of, y'know, we are very large infrastructure provider to a lot of customers, right? In terms of providing on-prem, hybrid IT experiences. From a public cloud perspective, we're very sort of, public in our strategy of not having a public cloud within HPE, but we certainly partner with folks and we've got a very long standing partnership with Microsoft. We come to market with things like Azure Stack, and we have a number of integrations we do with things like Nimble, and um, in that area we resell y'know, Azure, from an HPE standpoint. So we're really looking to provide y'know, a full experience for customers in that space. And y'know, the other day, like you said before, people are still going to buy and deploy in their data center, right? But, they want to buy and deploy in their data center with the thought that um, y'know multi-cloud is going to be a possibility, and they want to have the infrastructure that's going to allow them to do that. So what we're doing is incrementally, in our product portfolio, I care about storage, right, is to be able to provide those experiences. I buy a 3PAR all flash, I want to be able to tier that or back that up to the cloud. I have Nimble, right, I want to be able to replicate that to a co-located provider that provides Nimble cloud volumes, and then assign compute to and from the cloud, right. So a bunch of things that we want to get customers ready for, and make it easier for them. >> So can we talk a little bit more about that Nimble story? Y'know, the 3PAR, we understand it. It is, covers a great depth of use cases in enterprise, where does Nimble fit in the strategy? Yeah, um so we're super excited to have Nimble in the portfolio for three reasons. They have a great team, number one, they bring a really good go to market engine, and the sales team, y'know, with that, and they have great products. So from the product angle, which we're very interested in, is a couple different areas. Infosite, predictive analytics, right, is something that we want to apply to our entire product line, hands down. So the things that they do around VM Vision, right, with um, with VMWare, we want to apply that to 3PAR, right, and essentially give the people the simplicity that it takes to manage a very large virtualized environment. They have a lot of things that they've done that are very unique. I mentioned Nimble cloud volumes before, that's a use case for primary storage, but could easily be extended to backup, data protection, object storage, right, as not only just a technology provider, but as a way to price it, consume that type of storage. And then they also bring a number of things around, in the availability space, which we find is very interesting. Secondary flash, right. So you think, all flash as high performance maybe a higher cost, right? But certainly is going to help you with that application acceleration. They just, we just released the Nimble secondary flash array for workloads that are tech-dev cloned workloads, y'know, things you can automate, and that you need some performance on it. But it's more performance than your backup storage, not as much cost and not as much storage as your primary. So think about secondary flash as flash for secondary workloads. Very cost optimized. More performance, maybe a little bit more expensive than your backup tier. So there's a lot of things that they bring to the table from a technology standpoint that we want to take advantage of. >> Patrick, HPE's got a broad portfolio, but still to meet all the needs of the customers, especially in like, the divergals niche ecosystem, acquires a lot of partnerships. Where are the, kind of the deep integrations that your team's been doing, where are the places where customers have been asking you to kind of pull things in, and any solutions that you want to highlight specifically? Yeah so, um, I think more and more what you start to see is portfolio vendors, like HPE, they bring great technology that we build organically, or that we go and acquire. I think one of the big things that customers rely on us as well, that doesn't get a lot of air play is that we bring in a vetted ecosystem to a customer. Y'know, so the whole kit and caboodle, from compute networking storage, services to bring that all together, and an ecosystem that's supported, and we basically HPE stamp of quality and support behind that so, y'know when it comes to VMWare, obviously this has a huge ecosystem. So we do a lot with, y'know, innovating with VMWare. I mentioned Nimble, VM Vision, things we're doing there to make hypervisor environments quite a bit more easy to implement for customers from a storage angle. You talked to Jessie from the SimpliVity standpoint. We do a lot around data protection, with certain things, with 3PAR, Nimble. So there's a lot on integrations that we do in, for VMWare specifically, and then in other areas of the portfolio, especially automation, right. So we've got fully supported solutions, I think we've got one of the best docker implementations for storage with Nimble. Huge partnerships with Puppet and Kubernetes, and Sheb, all these great things around the automation side. So when we go out and partner with somebody, we're going to go provide a whole solution, a complete solution to a customer that's vetted, RA's, supported, so from my perspective, partnering is actually one of the most important things we do at HPE. >> So, from a customer's perspective, HPE hugely important, key industry player for most CIO's, you guys are still very very trusted in that area, you have a huge ecosystem, huge portfolio, what should CIO's, CTO's, high level architects be focused on at this point? What's like, the consistent theme that you're telling your customers you really need to pay atttention to this part of the industry? >> So, from a corporate perspective, we've got a couple of things that we're working on, right. So we talk about hybrid IT, right. And that sort of transformation from, I would call it established methodologies of application and development to y'know, sort of new style. And we're definitely helping customers along that journey, and a lot of it is around bringing this vetted portfolio and ecosystem along with the services. So the services I think is one thing that, um, y'know HP is very unique in the fact that we've got a very very broad set of services, in terms of, y'know, we can go and help CIO's and CFO's and CTO's understand y'know, where are you along that journey, right. All the way to implementation, I think one of the things that we're going to be very very focused on over the next couple of years, is providing everything in our portfolio as consumption based pricing, right. So all the things that you like about the cloud, right, the things that are implied there are elasticity, right, agility, consumption based. You're moving from a cap-ex to an op-ex model, making that more predictable. So we want to be able to model that, and provide those experiences. Definitely one of the things that we're really focused on in HPE is IOT in the edge, right, so, that's a very fundamental part of our business that we're going to be looking at to make a lot of investments in big data. Certainly, some of the assets are on Edgeline and Aruba, and all the implications around security for that. So those are some of the key areas that we are, y'know, we talk to CIO's every day about. >> Patrick, from an availability and data protection standpoint, what does something like IOT mean? I have to think, we're not going to store all the data, lots of it's just going to be processed at the edge, we're talking a lot about edge so, I'm curious, what are the things that you're looking at, maybe start there, I think about like, containers, or a lot of times going to be something that is going to fit at that kind, maybe even serverless at the edge, so y'know, I seem to think back, y'know, when we talk about like oh, we're going to go to object store and therefore the way I do everything changes. So y'know, are we going to, couple years from now, is this going to be a very different discussion? >> Well I think, yeah, it's an interesting topic, right. When you talk about that volume of data, right, and the fact that it's very dispersed, right, being able to do, apply traditional availability techniques to something like that is um, it's difficult, it's next to impossible, right? So, um, y'know what we see is customers buying, in these type of ecosystems, you're not buying along horizontal lines, right. You're not buying a specific server vendor, or a networking vendor, or y'know, a storage vendor, and then going best of breed, trying to integrate that yourself. A lot of these things are vertically oriented now in terms of you're buying a stack, y'know, from a portfolio vendor or going to a service, y'know, an integrator. And I think with he volume of data that it takes to, to do some of these implementations, so we have very large customers, autonomous cars, y'know big, big implementations of Hadoop and analytics. I mean a lot of that stuff is built in. I think one thing you're starting to see is that, those types of deployments are outstripping or outpacing, y'know running away from the support of the traditional IT folks. So we have customers that are operationalizing, very large Hadoop customers for example, who don't have methodologies for backing that up and replicate it, so I think there's a lot of technology that needs to catch up with some of these implementations, we see it all the time. So, y'know, I think there's different techniques from a technology standpoint. Y'know, when we try to approach these from a customer perspective, we want to provide a full stack for edge, IOT, um, and but, from a data protection availability standpoint, that's a difficult problem to solve. >> Stu: Well Patrick Osborne, always a pleasure to catch up with you, thanks for all the updates here. Looking forward to tracking some of those, y'know, emerging areas that you were just-- >> Yeah, I look forward to talking to you guys in Discover in Madrid. >> Absolutely, so The Cube, so many events, check out siliconangle.tv, or actually thecube.net is where you're going to be able to see everything. Nice shorter url, you're going to keep the branding of The Cube, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, stay with us, watch more coverage here still to come. VM World 2017, you're watching The Cube. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by vmware, and its ecosystem partner. (electronic music) >> And we're back, this is SiliconANGLE Media's production of the Cube. I'm here with Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Keith, I don't know about you, but one of the things that really excites me when I get to come to events like this is talking to the users, talking about the practitioners, what they're using, how they're using it. And so I'm really happy to welcome to the program, first-time guest Brett Ruth who's the server, storage, and virtualization supervisor at BKD. Brett, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright so BKD. I know you're big in your field, but there might be some people out there that aren't familiar with your organization. Maybe just give us the thumbnail of the company, how long you been there, and your role there. >> Sure, BKD is the number 12 accounting firm in the United States, 36 offices, net revenue 564 million. Tax audit, corporate finance, wealth advisors, technology services, that's BKD in a nutshell. >> Alright, and your role in the organization? >> My role is kind of the server supervisor. I have a team of seven assist admins who report to me. We take care of anything on the Windows server to Lennox server, to our Nutanix environment, our Vmware environment, our IceLAN storage environment, and all the applications that live on those. >> Alright, so Brett, one of the things I'm sure you'll find, your stuff doesn't change, you don't acquisitions to integrate, you don't have new technology being thrown at you all the time. If sure every year they just say how much more budget and how many more people do you want. >> Exactly >> So bring us in the reality. What's your world like? What are some of the big challenges? I'd say first if you can from just kind of the industry standpoint, and how does that impact what you're doing? >> Sure, so BKD is a growth firm so we look at business acquisitions when we can. We look at those, we actually completed one not that long ago in Chicago. We expanded there. So each one's always different, you know different technology. Some of those acquisitions are a couple servers, some of them are completely cloud-based, some of them are mixed in between. So having a platform where we settle on with Nutanix has kind of helped be able to make those integrations a little bit easier. But no, every year budget cycle comes around, and what's the initiative the firm wants to do. And every year it's different. It's fun, you know it's challenging to have different and new things we have to tackle every year. >> So when choosing these platforms, one, quick question around the organization, a bunch of knowledge workers. How many, what's the head count? >> Brett: Around 26,000. >> 26,000. So you guys and your IT organization, you work for the bean counters of bean counters. (laughing) So they understand ROI, TCO. When it comes to selecting these technologies, how much pressure are you under to do less for more, and prove that you're doing, I'm sorry, do more with less, and prove that you're doing more or less? >> Sure, and that comes up during the budget cycles. I mean there is a large amount of time that is spent of what's next year's initiatives? What does that server landscape look like? You know, does there a new product that comes out that requires a head count increase or not? Or is it a new application we need to stand up? And every year that comes around, and the questions come. Well, maybe the firm didn't have a good year, maybe the firm had a better year. So we, you know, the budget gets adjusted based on that. But more times than not, the firm recognizes that putting money into IT does nothing but help the business grow. So as long as we spend it wisely, we usually can, we can get accomplished. >> Alright Brett, I want you to take us inside, you know I hate to do it, but the budgeting thing. Cause one of the promises of, you said you're using Nutanix, used to be okay this year, oh it's time for the server refresh, next year, wait, no, you don't have any server budget, you know, we're doing some storage ad ons, or things like that. You might get some budget here or there if you need it, or if there's an emergency, but you got to justify that. The promise of a pool of resources should be, well I'm consolidating a number of pools, and therefore, I should be able to be more agile, more flexible, I'm buying in smaller chunks, rather than bigger chunks. What's your experience been on kind of that purchasing from that relationship with the finance side of the business? >> Sure, so when I started BKD, I've been there about five years, it was a traditional three-tier architecture when we rolled into it. And the firm was growing at such a rate that we were running into those physical limitations of the hardware. And it's never a fun game to go ask the CIO an unbudgeted SAN purchase you know. Do that a couple of years in a row, and it gets harder and harder to ask those questions. So we finally came to a point as a company of we need to do something different. And, you know, through research and product I had, and my team all had to do to accomplish it, we landed on Nutanix, and we landed on a hybrid converge infrastructure. And what we can do is we build those quote unquote lego blocks, so now there's not a big, giant purchase of a SAN or a new set of UCS Chassis or whatever the product might be. It's a, I know this quarter I need this amount of nodes, or I know for this project I'm going to need this, and I can just build and add on when I need to. So it makes the budgeting and those unbudgeted purchases a lot more easier to take. >> So much of the messaging from day one, day two is aimed kind of at you. You're on the ground, you have to deal with not only the engineers that implement the technology, but also the executives that approve the purchases. So a lot of the messaging here has been for you. How have you received it, and what's your impression of Vmware's messaging around, take your favorite topic? >> Right, you know a lot of cloud talk's been happening here and a lot of DevOps has been talked about here, and a way to improve that. BKD has an internal IT development team, so a lot of those things I can take away here, and try and see if I can help our Dev team however I can. A lot of the messaging is just seeing where the industry is going, not just Vmware, but everyone on the solutions floor. I mean that's a lot of my time here is research and seeing what products that I know we have to complete in the next fiscal year or two, and then what products are out there that I can just buy. >> Alright, can you bring us into your application portfolio? What sits on the Nutanix platform, what doesn't? I hear you said you got a scale-out NAS platform also. You talked about some developers there. I'd love to understand how you figure out what goes where, where you are in building that out. How many nodes you have if you can share? >> The IceLAN is six nodes in each data center, the Nutanix is 26 nodes in each data center. We're probably 99.9% virtualized. The only thing I think we don't have virtualized is we still have a physical domain controller outside of both just from shear, if everything is off, I have one point I can get back into, right. But exchange, sharepoint, our sequel is all virtualized. The IceLAN is really kind of the unstructured file pool that we can put map drives, we can put blob storage from our sharepoint environment lands onto it. Flat files from our sequel land onto it. And, yeah, everything runs on our Nutanix. >> So going into that developer relationship, you know Nutanix, I've talked to these guys before about their ideal of being a cloud company. So developers, when they hear the term cloud, what's the impact of you, on your role, when you have Nutanix, a cloud company, and your developers asking for cloud? >> It's a interesting question because we try and phrase it as BKD, we now have an internal cloud, we have an enterprise cloud, you know the term private cloud. And we can provide those instant resources to DevOps when they need it depending on if they have a new set of QA boxes that need to be stood up. But you know there is some projects that we're looking at of is it AWS or is it Azure or is it Google's cloud. Are there things that make sense to go out there versus keeping 'em in house? And those come up as an as-need basis. >> So DevOps, so (laughing) When we talk about DevOps, what are the pain points that you guys, cause that's a big topic. Do I go all the way as far as Netflix and DevOps all the things that we say, or what have you guys targeted to say, okay, here's where the value add is in the enterprise? >> I think we're still, that's still of of those things that our development team's looking at. I think it really depends on the application and what the business is looking for. I mean there's been some products internally that the team's released that makes sense to stay on Prim. The next project I find out a month from now might be something that's perfect for the cloud. I think they just take that on a kind of case-by-case basis. >> Alright, Brett, you've got a portfolio of partners that you're working with here. What's on your list of to-do's for them? What are you looking for from the ecosystem to make your life easier and help? >> Always looking for more stable code releases. I think any engineer would love stable code releases. You know for the most part everybody gets that. We're always going to have issues. >> Anybody you want to call out for not giving you stable code releases? (laughing) >> I can say everybody because, I mean everyone will do that. No, I think it's continuing to improve the product, continuing to make it. It's that do more with less right? I can't have two or three dedicated people working on the virtualization environment. They have to be multi-skilled you know. My team that I have, my seven assist admins are all great, probably some of the best guys I've worked with. We all have to wear multiple hats, even sometimes maybe we don't want to. So having those products come into the environment that make it easier for them, and then just seeing how those code releases come out, that would just make our lives even better. >> Just real quick, can you say whose hardware your Nutanix is on? >> It's Supermicro, it's from Nutanix. >> It's the basic things. This morning the keynote got a big laugh talking about some of the coope-tition that goes on just between Dell, EMC, Vmware in some of their partnerships. Some of your partners get along better than others. Is that something that impacts you, something you think about at all? >> It's definitely, being a Nutanix guy coming into VM World this year has definitely been an interesting experience. It's that cohabitation that happens between the two. But at the end of the day, I still have severs to run, I have an environment to maintain for BKD, and you know, if I need something done, I know I can go to them, and they'll help work with me on it. >> So the show floor this year, Vmware just as massive as it's been all-- >> Yeah. >> Vmware is all about the ecosystem. How important is this large ecosystem to your everyday operations of you environment? >> I mean it's the never knowing what the next project that comes out, or the next scene the business wants to do, or the next acquisition comes up. Maybe there's a product that I don't have in house that needs to take care of it. And then having this many vendors that I can go and talk with over these couple days has been great because I can now go back to the team and go, man I didn't think about this, and this product would help solve that. Or two months from now something comes around, I go oh yeah I talked to these guys, and go flip through the business cards and the paper stuff we take home and call 'em up. >> I love that even as a Nutanix customer, the Vmware, the coope-tition, that you still find value in the overall-- >> Brett: Oh yeah absolutely. >> Brett, any either announcements or kind of new things coming out in the market, anything catch in your eye? You said you were bringing that back to the office. >> Forgive me but I can't remember the name. The malware kind of virus scanner that Pat was talking about yesterday. That kind of really was a, being able to use that AI to figure out at a base level what milicent code is and isn't was, it would be an awesome game changer if it works out how it looks to be. >> Absolutely, no shortage of new things to look into. Brett Ruth, BKD, really appreciate you sharing your viewpoint everything going on inside. Really appreciate you coming on. >> Thank you guys. >> Hope to catch up with you sometime in the future. For Keith Townsend, and I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VM World 2017. You're watching the Cube. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017, brought to you by VM Ware, and it's eco system partners. >> Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are here at VM World 2017 in Las Vegas. This is the eighth year of the Cube doing VM World, it started in Moscow and Moscow is under construction. So we're here back in Vegas. Although they've had VM World in Vegas a couple times. Collin Gallagher is here. He's the senior director of product marketing for Hyper Converged Infrastructure at Dell EMC. Collin, great to see you, thanks for coming to the Cube. >> Thanks Dave, thanks for having me. >> So first of all, how's the show going for you? >> Fantastic. Incredibly busy. As you can see, Hyper Converged is the hot thing yet again. I think last year was a big thing. But it's nice to see it's being... Customers are asking about it, you're seeing it in the keynotes. You know, the products being mentioned, Vsan, VXrail, et cetera. And just being swamped and busy and having a little bit of fun as well. >> So before we get into the announcements and we want to do that and give you the opportunity to talk about that, Peter and I and folks in the Cube have been talking all week, really all year. >> Peter: Yeah. >> About how customers are coming to the reality that I can't just reform my business and try to stuff it into the cloud, I really got to understand the realities of my business and bring the cloud model to the extent that I can, to the business. So what role does Hyper Converged play, in that context of bringing the cloud to my business? >> Well, I think Hyper Converged is the technology that allows you to do that. But as you bring out, as you mentioned, you have to also rethink about how you maintain your business, right? Because Hyper Converged consolidates you compute, your storage, your networking into one system. But that means that you may have to think about consolidating your storage teams, your compute teams and your networking teams as well. Right? And if you're going to keep them separate but merge the technology, there's going to be some impedance mismatched there. So Hyper Converged is an enabler for that, but it requires you to transform not just the technology, but also how you manage and staff your business as well. >> So I remember, I guess it was three years ago now, at VM World, you guys made the sort of first announcement of sort of software defined true Hyper Converged product and it's really evolved quite dramatically from then so maybe bring us up to where we are today and talk about some of the announcements that you made. >> Yeah, so... Yes, when Hyper Converged was announced a couple years ago, in a couple different products, but the point I was making a little bit earlier is that Hyper Converged is not just a single product. It's enabling technology. And much like Flash was five to seven year ago, it's going everywhere. >> Peter: It's a design approach. >> It's a design, exactly. >> Yeah, it's a design approach. And you're seeing it in appliances that have been very successful today, you're seeing it in larger rack scale systems, you're seeing it in software only systems, it depends on how and much, as you said, Dave, you want to transform right? You can do some of your build your own Hyper Converged stuff and not transform very much at all. You can do full turn-key cloud built on Hyper Converged, but that's going to require a vast degree of not just infrastructure transformation, but also work force transformation to go with it. >> Now, one of the things we've observed, Collin, and get some feedback from you on this is that... Cause we totally agree. In fact, we wrote a piece of research we called the Iron Triangle of IT and the fact that there is this very tight linking between people with skills, the automation that they use to manage products, that dictate the skills that dictate the automation, and breaking that as well. And a lot of our CIO clients are telling us, that you guy don't understand. The biggest problem I got is getting my people to work differently together. New processes, new approach to doing things. So one of the forcing funtions has been is historically when we think about designing systems to run work loads, we started with the CPU. We sized the CPU and then we did everything else. Now we start thinking about a lot of these data driven, digital oriented kinds of systems. We're thinking about something different. That catalyzed with this enormous performance improvements and storage over the last few year through Flash, vSAN related types of things. What are some of the new design principles that people have to factor as they start thinking about the role that Hyper Converged is going to play? >> So let me play off that. So yes, people design for the CPU because that was the bottle neck, right? Then as CPU performance grew, 5X, 10X, et cetera, they started designing for storage because that became the bottle neck, right? So part of your question is what's going to be the next bottleneck? Right? And I think you just had Chad talking on before. I think the network may be that upcoming bottleneck right now. You know, particularly in the Hyper Converged world where everything is connected through the network. That's your back plan. It's a different approach to storage. So designing around your network capabilities or your network infrastructure, you know, deploying Hyper Converged in a branch office with one GIG is very different than deploying Hyper Converged in a data center with 25 GIG and how you do it. So that's one, but I think Hyper Converged is all about balance in general, right. There's a fixed ratio depending on the product implementation of storage to compute, right? And generally they like to be in the Goldilocks zone, right? Not too much CPU, just... Not too CPU heavy or not too much storage heavy. And I think as Hyper Converged is going more mainstream and more normal, it's pushing those subtle boundaries there. And I think things like flexing out to the cloud when you need additional storage or additional compute capability, is one of those design considerations you need to take into account as you're deploying Hyper Converged because, as you said, you're designing around constraints and there's some physical constraints you have to manage and you have to figure out how you can tap into some of the extra ones. >> So literally it's start with the outcomes, identify the data that's associated with those outcomes, figure out the physical characteristics necessary to apply and process and move that data or not move it. And use that as the starting point for the design considerations. Being very cognitive, going back to what Chad was talking about, that at the end of the day, it's the network that's binding these things and how far out is a protocol going to go, local versus wide area. >> I'm going to steal something that I read on Twitter the other day, that data is the new oil. Alright, and that's how you run your business. And just like how you ship oil to and from, from a well to a refinery, to finally to your gas station pump, you have to think of it, what's your data chain and how you get it and where you need to move it. >> So that's a term that we started using in the Cube in, I don't know, 2010. But what we found is that data is plentiful, but insights aren't. And so you see organizations really spending a lot of time, money, energy, trying to get to those insights, to give them competitive advantage and a new infrastructure emerging to support those. So I wonder, Collin, if you could talk about the portfolio, the products that you sort of look after and tie it into some of the things that you've announced this week. >> Yeah. So I look after our VM or Hyper Converged systems so Vxrail and Vxrack SDDC. You know, both jointly developed with VM Ware. I'm sure you've heard Pat and everybody else talk about them so if you've been watching any of the keynotes. But we also have a much larger portfolio. We have our Vsan ready nodes for customers who want to do it themselves, want to build their own systems. And again, that's, as we talk about degree of transformation, that allows customers to get into the Hyper Converged space, but not significantly transform how they're managing their business. We have the appliances. Obviously our Vxrail systems. So by the way, the news with the Vsan ready nodes is we're announcing them available on the Dell Poweredge 14G Platforms. Those are available now to order. On our Vxrail appliances, and the rest of the portfolio that'll be out on the 14G platform by the end of the year. But what's new with Vxrail, we're announcing Vxrail 4 dot 5, which provides life cycle management orchestration for the latest and greatest VM Ware software stacks. So Vsan, 6 dot 5, Vsan 6 dot 6 Vsphere 6 dot 5. So both of those are out now and available. With all the great goodness that you've seen and heard about them. We're also announcing new configuration options for our Vxrack SDDC platform. So that's our much larger, it's the big brother to Vxrail, fully turn-key, you know, software defined data center infrastructure including NSX, all managed under one umbrella. >> So a higher-end solution? >> It's a much higher-end solution. Much higher for larger... Not necessarily scale because you know, it's not necessarily scale because you can start pretty small. As low as-- >> Peter: But still organized, coherent, well-packaged. >> But you have to, again, if we're talking about degrees of transformation, if you go with an appliance, okay you manage your compute and storage together. If you're going with a rack scale system, your managing the network as part of that as well. So that's another degree of transformation you have to be willing to make. So that's what's really the big difference between the two. New configuration options, up to 40 different hardware configs available now for that so really driven by customer choice. I want lower powered CPU's for certain workloads, I want higher powered CPU's, I want more all Flash choices, so really flush that portfolio out. And then lastly, we're announcing, our EHC and NHC platforms from Dell EMC are available built on Vxrack SDDC as well. >> EHC acronym? >> Collin: Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. >> And? >> Native Hybrid Cloud. EHC and NHC, sorry. Both of those two systems, which had run on our Vblock infrastructure before, are now running on Vxrack SDDC as well. So you get fully turn-key hybrid cloud built on top of an HCI system. >> And when you think of a EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, and Native Hybrid Cloud, NHC, can you talk about the work loads? That customers should think about putting on each? >> Yeah, so EHC is much more for traditional workloads. For customers who are looking to get into hybrid cloud. Actually, we see a lot of, our number one customer for someone who buys EHC, is they've tried to build cloud on their own and failed. They want something turn-key, they don't want to make the same mistakes again, they have the scars, and they want something easier and simpler than building it themselves. But that is traditional workloads, your traditional data center workloads managed in a cloud environment. NHC, our Native Hybrid Cloud product is for cloud native workloads, it's actually turn-key pivotal systems. So it's PSC based so if you're deploying workloads that will run in pivotal and you want it as a test dev system in house, or you want to run that in house and then migrate it later to the cloud, that's what NHC is for. >> Okay, we got to leave it there. But I'll give you a last word on VM World 2017, cloud, Hyper Converged, a lot of new innovation. What's your bumper sticker, Collin, on the show? >> My bumper sticker is again, HCI is primetime, it's here, I used to say that, customers, when I started this job two years ago would tell me, "tell me why I need HCI?" And what customers are asking me now is, last year was, "tell me how I use HCI?" and this year it's "tell me where I can't use HCI?" So there's been this waterfall shift in how they're looking at doing it. >> Dave: So they like it, they're trying to apply it. >> Peter: What is it? How it works? And what's the impact? >> Dave: And I want to apply it in as many places as possible. Where are my blind spots? >> Yeah, where doesn't it fit? What are the constraints where it doesn't fit? >> Collin Gallagher, thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. >> Oh, my pleasure. Thanks, Dave. >> Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back, this is Dave Vellante. For Peter Burris, this is the Cube. We're live at VM World 2017 and we'll be right back.

>> Commentator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partner. >> Welcome back to The Cube, we are live covering VMWorld 2017, day two of coverage. I'm Lisa Martin with my co host Stu Miniman, we've had a great morning, main stage, Michael Dell, Patt Gelsinger, Google, et cetera. We're excited to be joined by Doctor Sadir, Sadir is kind of awesome, the CTO of Dell EMC, Stewart, welcome to The Cube! >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> We're excited to have you here, so you were an EMC guy, we talked about that. When people think of Dell, they think of, well maybe used to, PCs, when they think of EMC they think of storage arrays, talk to us about, you know, one year post combination almost, how has your customers' perception changed, what have you heard in the last year? >> Sure yeah, it's been a pretty dramatic change, I would say in the sense of about a year ago when the deal was, or actually two years ago when the deal was first announced that it would be happening there was a lot of skepticism in the customer base obviously around A, what does this mean, how's it going to come together? I think a year into it people started to see some initial signs of better together. And now a year later we're seeing dramatic, dramatic positive energy and feedback from customer base on how, when they're actually seeing the products and solutions coming together in a combined solution I think that's, I mean we used to joke in the old days where our products, you know, EMC's got our portfolio, and our products would only come together on the PO, that was the common joke inside. And I think that perception is changing quite a lot now. >> So bring us into the storage group, because it was one that you know, if you look there were a lot of places where there were no overlaps. Storage, there was a long partnership between Dell and EMC then Dell had acquired a couple of companies, EMC, as you said already had a very large portfolio so bring us inside a little bit, especially kind of with your, you know, your CTO, your technologist. What are those lenses you look through and where are we into, you know, things coming together soon? >> Sure, I think it's a great question, I know and thank you because one of the things that people miss is that the portfolio strategy is a conscious strategy, right? It is really hard to cover the entire spectrum of work loads, use cases with a single widget, if you will. And a lot of our competitors will try to convince customers of that and they're finding that out themselves that it's really hard to cover that gamut so I think fundamentally, first and foremost the portfolio strategy is very important now that said, it is acknowledged and I'll admit that it is perhaps more in the portfolio right now than perhaps is needed. And so that in fact is one of our first, one of our big priorities for this year is to simplify the portfolio because it's confusing for our customers and so we're definitely working towards that. You'll see that roll out starting next year. And then over the next few years. >> So on that front, and sort of maybe waiting things out to simplify, from an innovation perspective Michael Dell also talked on main stage this morning about the importance of customer innervation but I'd love to understand how if you can take us kind of more through that, how is Dell EMC innovating internally so that you can be leaders in innovation-- >> Yeah, that's a great question, it's a great question because you know when you have a multi billion dollar business everybody assumes it's really really hard to innovate and it is, there's no question because you've got a big business to sustain. Now but the, I completely agree with Michael, what he said on stage and what he said to us privately which is in fact Dick Egan used to say the same thing. Founder of EMC he was, if there's one thing that you should be comfortable with, it's change and because this industry is changing like crazy, and I've been in the industry now for what, coming up on 20 years. Seen a lot, you know from FDDI to wherever you're at today. And I'm still constantly amazed by how much change is going on even now. So we do believe in change, we believe in actually innovating constantly, and Jeff Budrow, one of my manager he's a big believer in change as well, we're working on a lump number of innovations internally, organic innovations, big innovations. I can't tell you much about that today but we'll hopefully as we get closer to the next year we'll be able to talk more about it. That said, we're innovating on our existing products as well, we've refreshed our entire portfolio at Dell EMC World earlier this year. At VMWorld just now we announced our availability of our X2 platform which is the next generation of the XGMIL platform, so we're constantly innovating and as a result it's more of a rolling thunder as opposed to like a big bang. >> So I kind of look at it, there's kind of two ways that things are changing along storage. Number one there's kind of the underneath pieces, so you talked about going from FDDI, you know when we saw from disk to flash for EMC was you know, early on that that kind of reemergence of flash after a couple of decades of it being you know, not used for awhile. We've got things like NVME, NVME over fabric coming out so we're going to start there, maybe by one o'clock after there's kind of the operating model on how we change things because we've converged and cloud and all those but on some of those underlying pieces which I know keep the storage people kind of really engaged, you know where are we today with some of those transitions, what are some of the things that you're looking at over the next kind of 12, 24, 36 months? >> Terrific, I mean I see actually three vectors of change impacting the storage business and impacting us. One is the media like you said, there's NVME and we'll talk a little bit more about that. There's actually a whole bunch of stuff beyond NVME right, storage class memory, persistent memory coming out. Second set of things is consumption models, what we call consumption model round, whether it's a cloud consumption model, where if you think of cloud actually more as a consumption model as opposed to a destination. And software defined is a big thing, I think that's going to dramatically change the game, especially when you combine it with things like persistent memory. And then the third thing I think is the new wave of applications as well, that's generating a whole new class of data and adds a whole new set of requirements. For example, real time streaming analytics, right, that changes the, you can't deal with block and file and object in those worlds, you're dealing with new semantics. So those are some of the vectors that we're looking at in terms of. >> So let's start with kind of the low level, the media, you know some of those things right, what is data, what is memory, you know all those things blurring. Where you know, I hear, there seems to be so many people NVME, NVME over fabrics seems to be-- >> Hey look, so let me hit that off right in front. Right so it was 10 years ago that Dell and EMC independently before obviously we were one company actually co founded the contortion that invented NVME so we saw the meat of this technology, the limitations of SAS and SATA 10 years ago, we saw this coming. We helped drive the standards including NVME over fabric standard, and that's like, well before some of these companies that are claiming NVME today weren't actually even born. So NVME to me is a journey, right there's the there's the bus, changing from the SAS bus to the NVME bus. That's one part, then there's the media that stands behind them all, the NVME transport. Things like 3D cross point that are starting to come out, and then even beyond that you get to really persistent memory type of applications. So we see this as a journey, we're going to be rolling our NVME in all our products across the entire portfolio starting this year, later this year. For first, today scale IO already supports NVME devices in 14G, so we're going to, you're going to see that. >> Yeah, I guess my follow up, just to dig in a little deeper because when we got the CTO you've got to dig down. There were some, when flash came out, they were like oh yeah, whatever, I'm going to throw a couple of percentage in, well we saw flash greatly change architectures, it changed some of those application considerations-- >> Absolutely. >> Especially you know, Wikibon's David Floyer has been beating on let's really look at databases, let's do this. NVME, is it an extension and kind of evolution or will this be a similar revolution to what we saw with flash? >> I think it's a similar revolution. It's a similar but perhaps less of a quantum leap, I would say. And the reason is because you're going from like 10s of milliseconds or milliseconds of latency with spinning media to sub millisecond with flash. Now you're going from sub millisecond to sub sub millisecond but you know, it's getting diminishing. I think where you're going to see a lot of dramatic is as it's more on the latency as you get as the applications get closer and closer to the servers. Right so I think you're going to see a lot of pretty dramatic change in that space. >> Speaking of change and revolution, the three vectors that you talked about, media, consumption models, this new wave of applications, how, ST to you are you seeing the buyers' journey change as a result of these vectors? >> So that's actually part two of the question that Stu was just asking is while I agree that it's going to be a revolution, what I've also seen in 20 years is that these things don't happen instantly, yes flash was a big change. But even today, over 40, 40, 50% of our revenue still comes from hybrid systems. Mixed flash and, so these things take time, right? So customers are taking leaps I would say I'm seeing a spread of the early adopters and, we're probably in the big medium, in the big, the bell curve right now and then there's some laggards as well that are still buying you know, pure HDD only systems. >> Do you see a difference there, sorry, with respect to industries, maybe healthcare or financial services that are early adopters? >> Definitely, I think, there's industries and there's also size of customer, right, the bigger the customer the more, eager we see they are in doing this digital transformation so we're seeing a lot of them going all in on software defined, right, so we're definitely seeing that shift from buying purpose build arrays to software defined. Now it's not going to be instantaneous, again it's going to be over many years, similarly in the mid range and below we're seeing a shift from, modular systems to hyper converged systems as well. So we're seeing that as well, we're seeing a lot of shift from purely on prem to a hybrid solution of on prem plus cloud, so all of our products are now attaching to the cloud as well. So we're definitely seeing all of these transitions. >> When it comes to the cloud native piece, there are some that have said well, it's kind of could be a kind of completely different way of doing things, really focused on the developers and won't that just live in the public cloud, or you know will SAS applications you know, be where a lot of those live, so you know what do you say to the, you've improved media, you've improved consumption models but, maybe they're just, it's easier for me not to own some of these pieces, one of the company, small companies, I don't want to deal with infrastructure at all, let me, you know, let me yeah-- >> Yeah that's another great, great question. What we are seeing I would say is definitely some of that. Especially as you said in the smaller companies it's easy for them to get started, right, with minimal initial expenses they can get started in the public cloud so we definitely see that. But as you get larger, what we're seeing is the economics of running everything in the cloud on a sustained basis, just don't work out, it's much more cost effective to run things on ground, so I think for cost reasons when you're running over a sustained operations as well as for security reasons, we're still seeing a lot of hesitation and especially as you get to the higher end of the market, people are concerned especially with all the breaches and things like that, that they're concerned about where their assets are. So we actually at Dell Technologies I would say, and Dell EMC in particular, we're seeing a pretty significant opportunity popping up where customers want to run on prem data centers just like the cloud. And that's where things like software defined storage become really important because hey, the public clouds are running all the software defined, that's their, one of the secrets to their agility and speed. Why can't we have that prem and we actually absolutely see that in fact today's announcement of PKS is right on the money for that. >> So we're here at VMWorld, with respect to that, seeing more customers want to bring things on prem maybe kind of the true private cloud that Wikibon's been talking about. What are you guys doing now with VM or to align that, we've heard a number of things about, yesterday with AWS you mentioned Pivotal today, Google, what's going on today with Dell EMC and WM Ware to help customers really build a solid on prem solution? >> Yeah so I think Pivotal is certainly a key piece of that, Pivotal, VM Ware, so the whole VM Ware cloud foundation, cloud suite is a key piece of that. The integration with PCF is actually going to be very key because what customers need, especially the traditional customers, if you will, who don't quite have the expertise yet to build cloud native applications, they need a platform, not just an infrastructure. So I think that's why Pivotal is very important. And we're working very closely with, as Dell EMC we're working closely with both of those partners in delivering those solutions, VX Rail is a good example of that. VX Rail, VX Rack are good examples of the two technologies coming together. And so those are the kinds of things, I think that's where software defined storage, you'll see a lot more integration between Dell EMC's software defined portfolio, with the VM Ware and Pivotal ecosystems. >> So the storage group you've talked about you have a lot of options, we've been talking about software defined storage, how that you know is driving a lot of the change there, gives a lot of flexibility there. How does the storage team look at things like VMAX and Extreme IO compared to the software defined storage these days? >> Yeah so I think we, I presume everybody's seen the famous chart where there's the traditional infrastructure and then there's the cloud native, the new world. And that's a transition that's going to happen and we think it's going to be a really long transition, right. Mainframes are not dead, right, so they're still alive. And there's a reason, because people are running their absolute mission critical application on those infrastructures so we think there's definitely going to be a place for both, and it isn't all or nothing. And that's, I think, going back to innovation, your question about it, where is Dell EMC innovating, we're the only company that's actually embracing these changes, this transition to software defined, right? Where with products like ECS and Scale IO and so on and so forth, so we see that the transitions will happen slowly but there's going to be a lot of opportunity for highly reliable, you know, six, seven, nines reliable infrastructure based on purpose built infrastructure. >> Yeah, it definitely matches a lot of as you said the true private cloud report that we have on Wikibon. >> Well thank you so much, Sadir, for joining us on The Cube, we now bring you into The Cube alumni, the illustrious Cube alumni category. >> Glad to be here. >> Lisa: And thank you for sharing your insights as CTO on what you're doing with customers and innovation. >> Sadir: Thank you very much. >> And we want to thank you for watching, I'm Lisa Martin. From my cohost Stu Miniman we are live covering day two of VM World 2017 from Las Vegas, stick around, we will be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to The Cube's three day coverage of VM World 2017. This is day two. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Wikibon analysts Peter Burris and Stu Miniman. Peter, head of research, Wikibon.com, Stu Miniman, analyst. Guys, and cohost too on stage two, we have two sets. Day one and we've got two more days, Stu. 27 videos, a lot of content, keynote is up. Gelsinger's on stage with Mike O'Dell. Your thoughts? >> Yes, so, John, first of all, last year, you know, we've been doing this show for a lot of years. Last year, the energy was a little off, you know? We talked about on the intro, there's rumors about management change, everything like that? Energy's up. The attendance isn't up much, but, there's a lot of good discussions. People are digging into, kind of this whole, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud world. The keynote this morning, they've got, you know, folks from Google Cloud, up on stage. It's supposed to be the biggest announcement in the platform, in the last four years. I think we'll dig into that some. I'm not sure if it's the biggest announcement. >> Was there an applause? >> There was actually a bigger applause when Andy Jassy got on stage yesterday, than there was when they announced that, you know, VMware and Pivotal are now part of the Cloud Native Container Foundation, so, you know. CNCF, you know, three weeks, a few weeks ago, Amazon joined the CNCF, Microsoft part of the CNCF. Good step. Cubernetti's absolutely hugely important. VM and Pivotal, they'll want to ride that wave, participate in that wave, but, I'm not sure that they're, you know, that the leading edge of it, I like NSX's plugging into it, they're starting to figure out all of those internetworking pieces. But it's not the one I think, you know, we'll come a year from now and say oh, jeez, remember when they announced PKS, That's the thing that really changed the landscape. >> Yeah, I think the Google announcement was a little bit, seemed desperate to me, although very important, I said it's more of a long game on my tweet stream. But I think they try to force that a little bit. Certainly, I personally don't think it was a good move for them to do that at this stage and try to hype it up given the impact that Jassy had. And also Jassy's jab, a little bit, at some of these optical deals, we used to call them Barney deals, named after the cartoon. Barney, you know, they love each other, but no real deal there. Jassy, he's hinting that most of these cloud deals are optical, not a lot of meat behind it, unlike their deal. >> You know, I'm going to be the contrarian in this one, guys. I'm not going to say it's the most important infrastructure deal in the last four years. I think that's very true, Stu. But I will say this: our research when the AWS VMware deal was announced last October, was that it was an important deal, and it was going to have a material impact on the industry. Because it promised a way for a lot of VM customers to get to the cloud. And now we're seeing that happen. But we also observed that it became pretty clear, it was kind of obvious, that AWS had a lot to gain in that. And VMware was, I don't want to say desperate, but VMware was holding on and trying to remain relevant as we go through these transitions. I think a great thing about this conference is that VMware is demonstrating, is transforming. But think about this Google deal. Who gets the most out of this deal? >> John: VMware. >> VMware, but Google needs this really bad. Google really needs that enterprise presence. And VMware is in a great position relative to the Google deal. So VMware has not got a couple of companies that it can kind of-- >> You're shaking your head. >> Yeah, so here's the thing I'd say: while Google Cloud is standing up there, this is not VMware saying use Google Cloud. This is Pivotal and VMware saying we're fully integrated with Cooper Netties, which means that if I have Pivotal and VMware using PKS, it is now fully compatible with GKE. But that is very different from what we're seeing with Amazon. I talked to a VMware and Amazon joint customer this morning and he said I've got my data center. We've been using AWS for four years. And my data center guys are kind of slow. VMware and AWS allows them to be agile. They have the operating model. They have the tools. They like to use this. As opposed to Cooper Netties. That changes. You don't talk to a lot of people at VMware that are like, oh yeah, hey, I'm ready for microservices. I'm going to refactor all my applications. VMware, from day one, was like I'm going to take my applications, I want to, without changing a lot of code, move it in there. So, we've been talking for years on this show. You know, where are the developers? Are they here? Cooper Netties, all about the developers. I didn't hear a strong developer push in the announcement this morning. So, that's where I think it's still very different. >> It's a good conversation. I think Pete is right. Google does need this. But here's the nuance that's kind of in this game. It came from the VMware Cloud Native group. So Cloud Native certainly is strategy for VMware to play. VMware doesn't want to have just Amazon. They need to be multicloud. So-- They need to be multicloud, but I don't think that they should be playing the cards. This is a long game. The Cooper Nettiers that you know and I know, it's really difficult. People want to make it simple. There needs to be cross compatibility on, with application workloads. Very strategic, very important. Not a lot of meat on the bone. Okay, they're shipping commercial version of Google. Big deal. >> Most container implementations are running in a virtual machine. They just are. >> John: Yeah, true. >> This is an important deal for users. And that's the most important thing. >> Potential users that are going to be in the evolution of where this is going. To Stu's point, I think that where this connects is, the conversation here is: I'm just trying to get my act together on the on prim true private cloud. >> We're seeing the industry start to reform. So, again, Stu, you're right. It's not the most important thing in four years. But it's not also something to be-- >> It's a strategic enchant. It's very important. >> But it's also got near term implications. That for anyone who's doing container-based development, is running that whole thing inside of VM, and along comes VMware that says, hey you know what, we're going to bring industrial strength to this. It's a good thing. >> It's a good thing. Again, we all have a good conversation. This is a frothy conversation. I love it. Which means it's relevant to you guys out there. I think its timing is interesting. Again, I would have done a strategic play on this one. I would have done a strategic intent. The shipping stuff, okay cool. But you guys are on it. We will be monitoring it. Peter, I've got to ask you the question, and let's kick off Day Two. You guys have been beavering away for two days now here in analyst sessions, meeting all the executives, what's your observation? What's your take away so far? >> Well, the thing that we talked about, we did the wrap up yesterday, and now the analyst day came a couple of things. The first thing I'll say is that: when you pull back the covers of any new VMware initiative, increasingly you find NSX staring back at you. And it didn't used to be that way. So, increasingly, you're finding that NSX is becoming that kind of crown jewel. And that plays into this notion of VMware wanting to be the multicloud orchestrator using NSX as kind of a cross-multicloud technology. The second thing is that it's always interesting to observe how software technology, we talk about software technology in abstraction or independent of hardware. But the two always do move together. And we talked about yesterday about how vSAN has become such an important technology industry, Stu. And the observation we made, and isn't it interesting, that vSAN's importance grew just as people started doing flash-based storage arrays. And so those two things are becoming much more important in the aggregate universe here. And the third thing here is VMware is trying to do more around simplification through the cloud foundation, but they have to make sure it doesn't just look like a new marketecture, a new set of marketing. >> I want to throw some controversy out there. Stu, I heard some hallway conversations all last night, and the theme pretty much was this. I'm kind of paraphrasing multiple conversations. Love the direction, love vSAN, love all this NSX stuff. I do agree NSX is looking like the crown jewel. Clouding over the top. Orchestration is going to be the battleground for middleware. Great, I love that. But now, I'm an operations guy. I have VMware and I've got to go to the cloud in a big way. I've got to manage all this stuff. I have operational stacks merging together that have not been tested into multiple configurations with VMs, hardware stacks, software stacks, jamming together untested. This is a new pain point, and a slow point. We're slowing people down. Stu, do you agree? >> Yeah, really interesting point, because let's look at vSAN and NSX. vSAN, I can hand that to a virtualization admin, and they can get running pretty fast on that. Actually, I have one of the executives from VMware, he's like, we save money for customers really fast. NSX, a little bit more of a longer game. A little bit more complicated. Especially when you start getting into it. This whole interfabric between clouds, this is not an easy button for multicloud or anything like that. But NSX is really cool. John, we've been watching since day one. I mean, I remember when you and I interviewed Martín Cansado right after the acquisition. You know, huge acquisition, and as Pat Gelsinger said in the keynote yesterday, what vsphere was in the last 20 years, NSX will be for the next decade or more. So, absolutely, we kind of understand where the battlegrounds are. The devil's always in the details. >> Is it stable, Stu. Is this stuff stable? >> No, none of it is stable. But we're in the midst of a significant transformation, so we shouldn't expect stability. >> You're implying the outcome for the customers is significantly there to make the investment? >> Stu's right. This isn't plug and play world. There's a lot of work going on and what users are looking for now is who in the technology companies are going to make and sustain the investments to drive simplification. And VMware is in the mix. One of the other things we said last night, John, is that, if you look back, there have been very few technology companies that have successfully made a major transformation. IBM did it in the early 1990s. Microsoft has done it a couple of times. We may be witnessing VMware making a pretty significant transformation here. >> This show's not a dud, that's for sure, no doubt. VMworld and reinvent will probably become the two most important shows in cloud, hands down. Obviously besides from the international stuff-- >> Peter: That's important. >> You know, Microsoft, I'm seeing not a lot of clarity around Microsoft. Google, they're trying to get that cloud event going. Again, it's a great cloud wars going on, guys. So this is going to be crazy. >> Peter: It's starting to take shape. >> Well, you mentioned simplicity. Michael Dell's coming on. One of things I'm going to ask him, and I'd love to get your thoughts on what we should ask him. I'm going to ask him how do you make this shit simple? That ultimately, in the era of all this stuff jamming together, stacks, hardware stacks, software stacks, seamless operational capability, new developers coming on board, edge of the network. >> One of the things, a critique I have for Dell the company, is they want to give you choice. You're going to talk to Michael, and he's going to say Azure Stack, I've got that solution. AWS, VMware's got that solution. We've got the VMware solutions. We've got virtu-stream over here and everything. Customers want opinionated offerings to help them through that. Because, oh my gosh, I figured out the virtualization stuff, and I'm figuring out some of the networking security fees, I've got containers and there's other stuff coming from the future, and oh my God, security is beating me over the head nonstop. And now you want to be a major player in that? Yeah, how can they help customers get in the right swim lanes, help customers get comfortable in the deep end? >> Peter just talked about what I think is kind of key, he just mentioned plug and play. I'll just go a step further. This general purpose computing market is over. Nothing is general purpose anymore. Those things that you need to bolt on, but you have a unique requirement by corporations and enterprises-- >> I'll push on that a second, and I'll give you the question I would ask. If we look at the big picture, the big picture goes like this, the first fifty years of the computing industry were dominated by an OLTP-oriented model of how you use computers. Highly imperative programming. The tool sets were set up that way. Single database manager. You serialize everything from the database manager. That is the model that drove the first 50 years. We're in the middle of something totally different right now. We really don't know what it is. We conceived the peace parts with the coming together. It's going to be more hunks of programming, more declarative, distributed data, we're not going to serialize the same way. We can see what it's going to look like. But it's unclear exactly what shape it's going to take. The question I would ask, and I think it kind of builds on what you said, is what is Dell's commitment to the cloud's experience on 2022? We know what the cloud experience is today. The cloud experience today is defined by Amazon. They've done an absolutely magnificent job. Nobody thought they could do it except for Amazon. And they did it. And they did an absolutely magnificent job of it. But what's the cloud experience of 2022? We say it's going to be true private cloud, hybrid cloud, and a set of methods and a computing model that starts with data and finishes with outcome. What is Michael Dell say it's going to be? >> I was just going to say, Peter, that is The Question you talk about. When we think about the mega-merger of Dell, EMZ, and Vmware, at the end of the day, Michael wants to pull through more servers. But it's that operating model that's going to drive things. So, will VMware really be able to fix their management stack. Peter, when I became an analyst seven years ago, I was like, well anytime I can say back security and management are broken and they still suck, right? And so the question is, five years from now, will we, you know, be able to day hey, VMware is really doing some awesome things, Pivotal is really bringing this together, Dell technology's really front and center to help that experience. >> I was going to ask him who he's voting for, Mayweather or McGregor, in the fight night. >> Mike Tyson, right? >> Put you over to Mike Tyson. All right, serious question to end this. Peter, I know this is something near and dear to your heart, and Stu, at Wikibon, you guys are really, there's a lot of end user conversations, how should end users start preparing themselves. Because Pat Gelsinger's still laying out the narrative of today is the last day, the shortest time, whatever his quote was, it's going to get faster. And to your point of all this work that needs to get done on the investment, the customer environment is going to get crazier and harrier and more complex. What are end user enterprise customers having to do? >> So if I'm a CIO I'm doing three things. The first thing I'm doing is I'm introducing the core principles that are related to Agile. So I'm telling my people, culturally, we're going to me empirical, we're going to use data to make decisions, we're going to be iterative, we're going to cycle, and we're going to be really opportunistic. We're going to be very willing to break down sacred cows. That's the first thing I'm doing. The second things I'm doing is I'm starting to introduce a set of etics that say if we can put it in the public cloud, we will put in in the public cloud. But we have to use iterative, empirical, and opportunistic to recognize that we won't always be able to put it in the public cloud. And we have to be prepared to be able to do stuff on-premise, because we are going to be doing things on-premise. The third thing that I'm going to do, and I think this is really important, is that IT, for the last n number of years, has been focused on taking costs out of the business. David Floyer talks about this a lot, the idea of automation. Well, increasingly IT is going to be asked to find ways to add revenue to the business. That's kind of where a lot of his digital engagement goes. What that boils down to, ultimately, is that the history of working, collaborating, has been based on taking costs out driven by procurement, and this notion of strategic relationships has been kind of a fraud, has been kind of something we just say. So the third thing is: you're going to have to start focusing on what it really means to be strategic. Vendor management, to truly partner, to transfer and control intellectual property boundaries and how that happens. So those are the three things I think CIOs absolutely must start doing. >> And that is what Andy Jassy's been hinting around is optical illusions, is whether its vendor. Where's the partnerships? Where's the coding? Great observation, Peter, I've got to say that was phenomenal. I would agree. I mean, this is ultimately coming to a new era with computing with AI, IOT Edge. I think Pat Gelsinger laid out the wave slide beautifully yesterday. >> We're throwing the computing industry up in the air right now and seeing where it's going to land. It's time to start shaping that into the new model of how we're going to think through problems and how we're going to solve problems with technology. >> And we had the CIO perspective yesterday with Bask Iyer, who's the CIO of VMware. He said, John, look it, some things in IT are recognizable. There are certain patterns. We know when retail has spiked. So, yeah, I'll do bursting of the cloud, but most things can be patternized, and that's okay. Some things will always be unrecognizable. But it's not always that dynamic. Once you get that nailed down, that's where the true private cloud report comes in. Congratulations, by the way, on the true private cloud report from Wikibon. It's going viral here on the show. >> Some great work from Stu and David Floyer for many years. >> Great work. It's going viral. Talk of the town here in Vegas. Congratulations, Stu. >> Well, thank you. It's something, we've been having this conversation in this community specifically at VMworld for years. Because it was that air gap between I virtualized and that helped utilization to I really need to get to that operating model of the cloud. I interviewed a consultant from Australia last year on the other set. And he said a lot of the companies he still talks to is IT is still a call center. And we've been talking for years about moving from just being a call center to really partnering with a business. Or, you know, Jeremy Burton, who I interview recently, he's like no It's driving the business. And it's great that there are some companies that fully transformed and they are engaging in that or at least they tell a good story. But there's a lot of customers that are still working on their own journey. And that's what shows like this are all about. >> So really quick John. So the way I describe that is when you think about cost benefit, when you think about productivity, it's how much work am I going to get done for how much cost? The cost is the denominator. What we like to say is that IT has to start taking on a numerator mentality. What benefits am I going to create? What opportunities am I going to create? What revenue am I going to help create? Got to think on the numerator side of the equation. >> You guys are doing some great work. You know, a lot of analysts are always pumping in reports: Oh, you got to see this. And then pushing out to the analyst relationship. If you're in this business, whether you're a CXO, an advisor, or you work for a company and you don't read that true private cloud report, you possibly could be fired. It's really game-changing. It's like the software reading the world memo. This is the marketplace that's hot right now. True Private Cloud Report by Wikibon. Check it out. The Cube Day Two Coverage continues. We'll be right back with more after this short break.

>> ANNOUNCER: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by Vmware and its ecosystem partner. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with John Troyer and excited to welcome back to the program Chris Wahl, who's the Chief Technologist at Rubrik. Chris, thanks for joining us. >> Oh, my pleasure. It's my first VMworld CUBE appearance so I'm super stoked. >> Yeah, we're pretty excited that you hang out with, you know, just a couple of geeks as opposed to, what's it Kevin Durant and Ice Cube. Is this a technology conference or Did you and Bipple work for some Hollywood big time company? >> It's funny you say that, they'll be more tomorrow. So I'll allude to that. But ideally, why not hang out with some cool folks. I mean I live in Oakland. Hip Hop needs to be represented and the Golden State Warriors. >> It's pretty cool. I'm looking forward to the party. I know there will be huge lines. When Katie comes to throw down with a bunch of people. So looking forward to those videos. So we've been looking at Rubrik since, you know, came out of stealth. I got to interview Bipple, you know, really early on, so we've been watching. What you're on like the 4.0 release now right? How long has that taken and you know why don't you bring us up to speed with what's going on with Rubrik. >> Yeah, it's our ninth, our ninth major release over basically eight quarters. And along with that, we've announced we've hit like a 150 million dollar run rate that we've included when we started it was all about VMWare, doing back-ups providing those back-ups a place to land, meaning object store or AWS S3. And now it's, we protect Hyper-V, Acropolis from Nutanix, obviously the VMWare Suite, we can do archive to Azure, we can do, there's like 30 some-odd integration points. With various storage vendors, archive vendors, public cloud, etcetera. And the ulta release which is 4.0, just really extends that because now, not only can we provide backups and recovery and archive, which is kind of our bread and butter. But you can archive that to public cloud and now you can start running those workloads. Right, so what we call a cloud on, I can take either on demand or archive data that's been sent to S3, and I can start building virtual machines, like I said on demand. I can take the AMI, put it in EC2 and start running it right now. And I start taking advantage of the services and it's a backup product. Like, that's what always kind of blows my mind. This isn't, that's not the use case, it's one thing that we unlock from backup to archive data >> One of the challenges I usually see out there, is that people are like, oh Rubrik, you know they do backups for VMWare, how do you, you know, you're very much involved in educating and getting out there and telling people about it, how do you get over the, oh wait you heard what we were doing six months ago or six weeks ago, and now we're doing so much more. So how do you stay up with that? >> It's tough to keep up obviously, because every quarter we basically have either some kind of major or a dot release that comes out. I mean realistically, I set the table a little bit differently, I say, what are you looking to do? What are the outcomes that you're trying to drive? Simplicity's a huge one because everyone's dealing with I have a backup storage vendor and I have a storage vendor, and I have tape vendor, and all this other hodge podge things that they're dealing with. They're looking to save money, but ultimately they're trying to automate, start leveraging the cloud. Start really like, taking the headache out of providing something that's very necessary. And when I start talking about the services they can add, beyond that, because it's not just about taking a backup, leaving it in some rotting archive for 10 years, or whatever, it's really what can I do with the data once I have this duplicated and compressed, kind of pool, that I can start drawing from. And that's where people start to, their mind gets blown a little bit. Now that the individual features and check boxes sets, it is what it is, you know, like if you happen to need Hyper-V or Acropolis or whatever, it's really just where you are on that journey to start taking advantage of this data. And I think that's where people start to get really excited and we start white boarding and nerding out a little bit. >> Well Chris, so don't keep us in suspense, what kinds of things can you do once you have a copy of this data? It's still, it's all live, it's either on solid state or spinning disk or in the cloud somewhere. That's very different than just putting it on tape, so what do I do now, that I have all this data pool? >> So probably the most common use case is, I have VBC and a security group in Amazon. That exists today. I'm archiving to S3 in some way, shape, or form. Either IA or whatever flavor vessel you want. And then you're thinking, well I have these applications, what else can I do with them? What if I put it to a query service or a relational data base service, or what if I sped up 10 different copies because I need to for lode testing or some type of testing. I mean it all falls under the funnel of dev test, but I hate just capping it that way, because I think it's unimaginative. Realistically, we're saying here you have this giant pile of compute, that you're already leveraging the storage part of it, you the object store that is S3. What if you could unlock all the other services with no heavy lift? And the workload is actually built as an AMI. Right, so an ami, it's actually running an EC2, so there's no, you don't necessarily have to extend the Hyper Visor layer or anything like that. And it's essentially S3 questions, from the product perspective. It's you know, what security group, BCP, and shape of the format you want it to be. Like large, small, Xlarge, et cetera. That's it. So think about unlocking cloud potentials for less technical people or people that are dipping their toe in a public cloud. It really unlocks that ability and we control the data plane across it. >> Just one thing on that, because it's interesting, dev tests a lot of times, used to get shoved to the back. And it was like, oh you can run on that old gear, you know you don't have any money for it. We've actually found that it can increase, kind of the companies agility and development is a big part of creating big cool things out of a company, so you don't under sell what improving dev tests can do. So did you have some customer stories or great things that customers have done with what this capability has. >> Yeah, but to be fair, at first when I saw that we were going to start, basically taking VMWare backups and pushing that in archive and then turning those into EC2 instances of any shape or quantity. I was like, that's kind of crazy, who has really wanted that Then I started talking to customers and it was a huge request. And a lot of times, my architectural background would think, lift and shift, oh no, don't necessarily do that. I'm not a huge fan of that process. But while that is certainly something you can do, what they're really looking to do is, well, I have this binary package or application suite that's running on Elk Stack or some Linux distro, or whatever, and I can't do anything with that because it's in production and it's making me money, but I'd really like to see what could be done with that? Or potentially can I just eliminate it completely and turn it into a service. And so I've got some customers that completely what they're doing, they're archiving already and what they have the product doing is every time a new snapshot is taken and is sent to the cloud, it builds automatically that EC2 instance, and it starts running it. So they have a collection of various state points that they can start playing with. The actual backup is immutable, but then they're saying, alright, what if exactly what I kind of alluded to a little, what if I start using a native service in the cloud. Or potentially just discard that workload completely. And start turning it into a service, or refactor it, re platform it et cetera. And they're not having to provision, usually you have to buy infrastructure to do that. Like you're talking about the waterfall of Chinese stuff, that turns into dev stuff three years later. They don't have to do that, they can literally start taking advantage of this cloud resource. Run it for an hour or so, because devs are great at CDIC pipelines, let's just automate the whole stack, let's answer our question by running queries through jenkins or something like that. And then throw it away and it cost a couple of bucks. I think that's pretty huge. >> Well Chris, can you also use this capability for DR, for disaster recovery? Can you re hydrate your AMI's up there if everything goes South in your data center? >> Absolutely. I mean it's a journey and this is for dot zero. So I'm not going to wave my hands and say that it's an amazing DR solution. But the third kind of use case that we highlight with our product is that absolutely. You can take the work loads either as a planned event, and say I'm actually putting it here and this is a permanent thing. Or an unplanned event, which is what we all are trying to avoid. Where you're running the work loads in the cloud, for some deterministic period of time, and either the application layer or the file system layer, or even, like a data base layer, you're then protecting it, using our cloud cluster technology, which is Rubrik running in the cloud. Right there, it has access to S3 and EC2, you know, adjacently, there is not net fee and then you start protecting that and sending the data the other way. Because Rubriks software can talk to any other Rubrik's software. We don't care what format or package it's in. In the future we'd like to add more to that. I don't want to over sell it, but certainly that's the journey. >> Chris tell us about how your customers are feeling about the cloud in general. You know you've lived with the VM community for a lot of years, like many of us, and that journey to cloud and you know, what is Hybrid and multi-cloud mean to them, and you know, what you've been seeing at Rubrik over the last year. >> Yeah it's ahh, everybody has a different definition between hybrid, public, private-- >> Stu: Every customer I ever talked to will have a different answer to that. >> I just say multi cloud, because it feels the most safe And the technically correct version of that definition. It's certainly something that, everyone's looking to do. I think kind of the I want to build a private cloud phase of the journey is somewhat expired in some cases. >> Stu: Did you see Pat's keynote this morning? >> Yeah, the I want to build a private cloud using open stack and you know, build all my widgets. I feel that era of marketing or whatnot, that was kind of like 2008 or 2010. So that kind of era of marketing message has died a little bit. It's really just more I have on prem stuff, I'm trying to modernize it, using hyper-converge, or using software to find X, you know, networking et cetera But ultimately I have to start leveraging the places where my paths, my iya's and my sas are going to start running. How do I then cobble all that together. I mean at the sea level, I need visibility, I need control, I need to make executable decisions. That are financially impactful. And so having something they can look across to those different ecosystems, and give you actionable data, like here's where it's running, here's where it could run, you know, it's all still just a business decision, based on SLA. It's powerful. But then as you go kind of down message for maybe a director or someone's who's managing IT, that's really, someone's breathing down their neck, saying, we've got to have a strategy. But they're technically savvy, they don't want to just put stuff in the cloud and get that huge bill. Then they have to like explain that as well. So it kind of sits in a nice place where we can protect the modern apps, or kind of, I guess you can call them, modern slash legacy in the data center. But also start providing protection at a landing pad for the cloud native to use as an over watch term The stuff that's built for cloud that runs there, that's distributed and very sensitive to the fact that it charges per iota of use at the same time. >> Well Chris, originally Rubrik was deploying to customers as an appliance, right? So can you talk a little bit about that, right, you have many different options now, the customer, right? You can get open source, you can get commercial software, or you can get appliances, you can get SAS, and now it sounds like you're, there's also a piece that can run in the cloud, right? That it's not just a box that sits in a did center somewhere So can you talk about, again, what do customers want? What's the advantage of some of those different deployment mechanisms, what do you see? >> I'm not saying this as a stalling tactic, but I love that question. Because yes, when we started it made sense, build a turnkey appliance, make sure that it's simple. Like in deployment, we used to say it can deploy in an hour and that includes the time to take it out of the box and that only goes so far because that's one use case. So certainly, for the first year or so, the product that was where we were driving it, as a scale out node based solution then we added Rubrik edge as a virtual appliance. And really it was meant to, I have a data center and I'm covering those remote offices, type use cases. And we required that folks kind of tether the two, because it's a single node that's really just a suggesting data and bringing it back using policy. Then we introduced cloud cluster in 3.2 which is a couple of releases ago. And that allows you to literally build a four plus node cluster as your AWS, basically you give us your account info and we share the EMI with you or the VM in case of Azure and then you can just build it, right? And that's totally independent, like you can just be a customer. We have a couple of customers that are public, that's all they do, they deploy cloud cluster they backup things in that environment. And then they replicate or archive to various clouds or various regions within clouds. And there's no requirement to buy the appliance because that would be kind of no bueno to do that. >> Sure. >> So right, there's various packages or we have the idea now where you can bring your own hardware to the table. And we'll sell you the software, so like Lenovo and Cisco and things like that. It can be your choice based on the relationships you have. >> Wow Chris your teams are gone a lot, not just your personal team but the Rubrik team I walked by the booth and wait, I saw five more people that I know from various companies. Talk about the growth of like, you know Rubrik. You joined a year ago and it felt like a small company then. Now you guys are there, I get the report from this financial analyst firms and like, have you seen the latest unicorn, Rubrik and I'm like, Rubrik, I know those guys. And gals. So yeah absolutely, talk about the growth of the company. What's the company hiring for? Tell us a little bit about the culture inside. >> Sure, I mean, it's actually been a little over two years now that I've been there, it's kind of flying. I was in the first 50 hires for the company. So at the time I felt like the FNG, but I guess now, I'm kind like the old, old man. I think we're approaching or have crossed the 500 employee threshold and we're talking eight quarters essentially. A lot of investment, across the world, right, so we decided very early on to invest in Europe as a market. We had offices in Utruck in the Netherlands. And in London, the UK, we've got a bunch of engineering folks in India. So we've got two different engineering teams. As well as, we have an excellent, center of excellence, I think in Kansas City. So there's a whole bunch of different roots that we're planting as a company. As well as a global kind of effort to make sales, support, product, engineering, marketing obviously, something that scales everywhere. It's not like all the engineers are in Palo Alto and Silicone Valley and everyone else is just in sales. But we're kind of driving across everywhere. My team went from one to six. Over the last eight or nine months. So everything is growing. Which I guess is good. >> As part of that you also moved to Silicone Valley and so how does it compare to the TV show. >> Chris: It's in Oakland. >> Well it's close enough to Silicone Valley. >> It's Silicone Valley adjacent. I will say I used to visit all the time, you know. For various events and things like that. Or for VM World or whatnot. I always got the impression that I liked being there for about a week and then I wanted to leave before I really started drinking the kool aid a little heavily so it's nice being just slightly on the east bay area. At the same time, I go to events and things now. More as a local and it's kind of awesome to hear oh I invented whatever technology, I invented bootstrap or MPM or something like that. And they're just available to chat with. I tried it at that the, the sunscreen song, where he says, you know, move to california, but leave before you turn soft. So at some point I might have to go back to Texas or something to just to keep the scaley rigidity to my persona intact. >> Yeah, so you missed the barbecue? >> Well I don't know if you saw Franklin's barbecue actually burned down during the hurricane, so. >> No >> Yeah, if you're a, a huge barbecue fan in Austin, weep a tear, it might be a bad mojo for a little bit. >> Wow. Alright, we were alluding at the very beginning of the interview, you've got some VIP guests, we don't talk too much about, like, oh we're doing this tomorrow and everything, but you got some cool activities, the all stars, you know some of the things. Give us a little viewpoint, what's the goal coming into VM World this year and what are some of the cool things that you're team and the extended team are doing. >> Yeah, so kind of more on the nerdy fun side, we've actually built up, one of my team, Rebecca Fitzhughes build out this V all stars card deck so we picked a bunch of infuencers, and people that, you know friends and family kind of thing built them some trading cards and based on what you turn in you can win prizes and things like that. It was just a lot of other vendors have done things that I really respect. Like Solid Fire has the socks and the cards against humanity as an example. I wanted to do something similar and Rebecca had a great idea. She executed on that. Beyond that though, we obviously have Ice Cube coming in. He's going to be partying at the Marquis on Tuesday evening so he'll be, he'll be hanging around, you know the king of hip hop there. And on a more like fun, charitable note, we actually have Kevin Durant coming in tomorrow. We are shooting hoops for his charity fund. So everybody that sinks a goal, or ahh, I'm obviously not a basket ball person, but whoever sinks the ball into the hoop gets two dollars donated to his charity fund and you build it to win a jersey and things like that. So kind of spreading it across sports, music, and various digital transformation type things. To make sure that everyone who comes in, has a good time. VMWare's our roots, right? 1.0, the product was focused on that environment. It's been my roots for a long time. And we want to pay that back to the community. You can't forget where you came from, right? >> Alright, Chris Wahl, great to catch up with you. Thanks for joining us sporting your Alta t-shirt your Rubrik... >> I'm very branded. >> John Troyer and I will be back with lots more coverage here at VM World 2017, you're watching theCUBE.