>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson, day four of MWC '23. Show's winding down a little bit, but it's still pretty packed here. Lot of innovation, planes, trains, automobiles, and we're talking 5G all week, private networks, connected breweries. It's super exciting. Really happy to have Warren Jackson here as the Edge Gateway Product Technologist at Dell Technologies, and Scott Waller, the CTO of the 5G Open Innovation Lab. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. >> Good to be here. >> Really interesting stories that we're going to talk about. Let's start, Scott, with you, what is the Open Innovation Lab? >> So it was hatched three years ago. Ideated about a bunch of guys from Microsoft who ran startup ventures program, started the developers program over at Microsoft, if you're familiar with MSDN. And they came three years ago and said, how does CSPs working with someone like T-Mobile who's in our backyard, I'm from Seattle. How do they monetize the edge? You need a developer ecosystem of applications and use cases. That's always been the thing. The carriers are building the networks, but where's the ecosystem of startups? So we built a startup ecosystem that is sponsored by partners, Dell being one sponsor, Intel, Microsoft, VMware, Aspirant, you name it. The enterprise folks who are also in the connectivity business. And with that, we're not like a Y Combinator or a Techstars where it's investment first and it's all about funding. It's all about getting introductions from a startup who might have a VR or AI type of application or observability for 5G slicing, and bring that in front of the Microsoft's of the world, or the Intel's and the Dell's of the world that they might not have the capabilities to do it because they're still a small little startup with an MVP. So we really incubate. We're the connectors and build a network. We've had 101 startups over the last three years. They've raised over a billion dollars. And it's really valuable to our partners like T-Mobile and Dell, et cetera, where we're bringing in folks like Expedo and GenXComm and Firecell. Start up private companies that are around here they were cohorts from our program in the past. >> That's awesome because I've often, I mean, I've seen Dell get into this business and I'm like, wow, they've done a really good job of finding these guys. I wonder what the pipeline is. >> We're trying to create the pipeline for the entire industry, whether it's 5G on the edge for the CSPs, or it's for private enterprise networks. >> Warren, what's this cool little thing you got here? >> Yeah, so this is very unique in the Dell portfolio. So when people think of Dell, they think of servers laptops, et cetera. But what this does is it's designed to be deployed at the edge in harsh environments and it allows customers to do analytics, data collection at the edge. And what's unique about it is it's got an extended temperature range. There's no fan in this and there's lots of ports on it for data ingestion. So this is a smaller box Edge Gateway 3200. This is the product that we're using in the brewery. And then we have a bigger brother of this, the Edge Gateway 5200. So the value of it, you can scale depending on what your edge compute requirements are at the edge. >> So tell us about the brewery story. And you covered it, I know you were in the Dell booth, but it's basically an analog brewery. They're taking measurements and temperatures and then writing it down and then entering it in and somebody from your company saw it and said, "We can help you with this problem." Explain the story. >> Yeah, so Scott and I did a walkthrough of the brewery back in November timeframe. >> It's in Framingham, Mass. >> Framingham, Mass, correct. And basically, we talked to him, and we said, what keeps you guys up at night? What's a problem that we can solve? Very simple, a kind of a lower budget, didn't have a lot money to spend on it, but what problem can we solve that will realize great benefit for you? So we looked at their fermentation process, which was completely analog. Somebody was walking around with a clipboard looking at analog gauges. And what we did is we digitized that process. So what this did for them rather than being completely reactive, and by the time they realized there was something going wrong with the fermentation process, it's too late. A batch of scrap. This allowed them to be proactive. So anytime, anywhere on the tablet or a phone, they can see if that fermentation process is going out of range and do something about it before the batch gets scrapped. >> Okay. Amazing. And Scott, you got a picture of this workflow here? >> Yeah, actually this is the final product. >> Explain that. >> As Warren mentioned, the data is actually residing in the industrial side of the network So we wanted to keep the IT/OT separation, which is critical on the factory floor. And so all the data is brought in from the sensors via digital connection once it's converted and into the edge gateway. Then there's a snapshot of it using Telit deviceWISE, their dashboarding application, that is decoding all the digital readings, putting them in a nice dashboard. And then when we gave them, we realized another problem was they're using cheap little Chromebooks that they spill beer on once a week and throw them out. That's why they bought the cheap ones 'cause they go through them so fast. So we got a Dell Latitude Rugged notebook. This is a brand new tablet, but they have the dashboarding software. So no matter if they're out there on the floor, but because the data resides there on the factory they have access to be able to change the parameters. This one's in the maturation cycle. This one's in the crashing cycle where they're bringing the temperature back down, stopping the fermentation process, getting it ready to go to the canning side of the house. >> And they're doing all that from this dashboard. >> They're doing all from the dashboard. They also have a giant screen that we put up there that in the floor instead of walking a hundred yards back behind a whole bunch of machinery equipment from a safety perspective, now they just look up on the screen and go, "Oh, that's red. That's out of range." They're actually doing a bunch of cleaning and a bunch of other things right now, too. So this is real time from Boston. >> Dave: Oh okay. >> Scott: This is actually real time from Boston. >> I'm no hop master, but I'm looking at these things flashing at me and I'm thinking something's wrong with my beer. >> We literally just lit this up last week. So we're still tweaking a few things, but they're also learning around. This is a new capability they never had. Oh, we have the ability to alert and monitor at different processes with different batches, different brews, different yeast types. Then now they're also training and learning. And we're going to turn that into eventually a product that other breweries might be able to use. >> So back to the kind of nuts and bolts of the system. The device that you have here has essentially wifi antennas on the back. >> Warren: Correct. >> Pull that up again if you would, please. >> Now I've seen this, just so people are clear, there are also paddle 5G antennas that go on the other side. >> Correct. >> That's sort of the connection from the 5G network that then gets transmogrified, technical term guys, into wifi so the devices that are physically connected to the brew vats, don't know what they're called. >> Fermentation tanks. >> Fermentation tanks, thank you. Those are wifi. That's a wifi signal that's going into this. Is that correct? >> Scott: No. >> No, it's not. >> It's a hard wire. >> Okay, okay. >> But, you're right. This particular gateway. >> It could be wifi if it's hard wire. >> It could be, yes. Could be any technology really. >> This particular gateway is not outfitted with 5G, but something that was very important in this application was to isolate the IT network, which is on wifi and physically connected from the OT network, which is the 5G connection. So we're sending the data directly from the gateway up to the cloud. The two partners that we worked with on this project were ifm, big sensor manufacturer that actually did the wired sensors into an industrial network called IO-Link. So they're physically wired into the gateway and then in the gateway we have a solution from our partner Telit that has deviceWISE software that actually takes the data in, runs the analytics on it, the logic, and then visualizes that data locally on those panels and also up to their cloud, which is what we're looking at. So they can look at it locally, they're in the plant and then up in the cloud on a phone or a tablet, whatever, when they're at home. >> We're talking about a small business here. I don't know how many employees they have, but it's not thousands. And I love that you're talking about an IT network and an OT network. And so they wanted, it is very common when we talk about industrial internet of things use cases, but we're talking about a tiny business here. >> Warren: Correct. >> They wanted to separate those networks because of cost, because of contention. Explain why. >> Yeah, just because, I mean, they're running their ERP system, their payroll, all of their kind of the way they run their business on their IT network and you don't want to have the same traffic out on the factory floor on that network, so it was pretty important. And the other thing is we really, one of the things that we didn't want to do in this project is interrupt their production process at all. So we installed this entire system in two days. They didn't have to shut down, they didn't have to stop. We didn't have to interrupt their process at all. It was like we were invisible there and we spun the thing up and within two days, very simple, easy, but tremendous value for their business. >> Talk about new markets here. I mean, it's like any company that's analog that needs to go digital. It's like 99% of the companies on the planet. What are you guys seeing out there in terms of the types of examples beyond breweries? >> Yeah, I could talk to that. So I spent a lot of time over the last couple years running my own little IoT company and a lot of it being in agriculture. So like in Washington state, 70% of the world's hops is actually grown in Washington state. It's my hometown. But in the Ag producing regions, there's lack of connectivity. So there's interest in private networks because the carriers aren't necessarily deploying it. But because we have the vast amount of hops there's a lot of IPAs, a lot of hoppy IPAs that come out of Seattle. And with that, there's a ton of craft breweries that are about the same size, some are a little larger. Anheuser-Busch and InBev and Heineken they've got great IoT platforms. They've done it. They're mass scale, they have to digitize. But the smaller shops, they don't, when we talk about IT/OT separation, they're not aware of that. They think it's just, I get local broadband and I get wifi and one hotspot inside my facility and it works. So a little bit of it was the education. I have got years in IT/OT security in my background so that education and we come forward with a solution that actually does that for them. And now they're aware of it. So now when they're asking questions of other vendors that are trying to sell them some type of solution, they're inherently aware of what should be done so they're not vulnerable to ransomware attacks, et cetera. So it's known as the Purdue Model. >> Well, what should they do? >> We came in and keep it completely separated and educated them because in the end too we'll build a design guide and a starter kit out of this that other brewers can use. Because I've toured dozens of breweries in Washington, the exact same scenario, analog gauges, analog process, very manual. And in the end, when you ask the brewer, what do they want out of this? It keeps them up at night because if the temperature goes out of range, because the chiller fails, >> They ruined. >> That's $30,000 lost in beer. That's a lot to a small business. However, it's also once they start digitizing the data and to Warren's point, it's read-only. We're not changing any of the process. We augmented on top of their existing systems. We didn't change their process. But now they have the ability to look at the data and see batch to batch consistency. Quality doesn't always mean best, it means consistency from batch to batch. Every beer from exhibit A from yesterday to two months from now of the same style of beer should be the same taste, flavor, boldness, et cetera. This is giving them the insights on it. >> It's like St. Louis Buds, when we were kids. We would buy the St. Louis Buds 'cause they tasted better than the Merrimack Buds. And then Budweiser made them all the same. >> Must be an East coast thing. >> It's an old guy thing, Dave. You weren't born yet. >> I was in high school. Yeah, I was in high school. >> We like the hops. >> We weren't 21. Do me a favor, clarify OT versus IT. It's something we talk about all the time, but not everyone's familiar with that separation. Define OT for me. >> It's really the factory floor. You got IT systems that are ERP systems, billing, you're getting your emails, stuff like that. Where the ransomware usually gets infected in. The OT side is the industrial control network. >> David: What's the 'O' stand for? >> Operation. >> David: Operation? >> Yeah, the operations side. >> 'Cause some people will think objects 'cause we think internet of things. >> The industrial operations, think of it that way. >> But in a sense those are things that are connected. >> And you think of that as they are the safety systems as well. So a machine, if someone doesn't push the stop button, you'd think if there's a lot of traffic on that network, it isn't guaranteed that that stop button actually stops that blade from coming down, someone's going to lose their arm. So it's very tied to safety, reliability, low latency. It is crafted in design that it never touches the internet inherently without having to go through a security gateway which is what we did. >> You mentioned the large companies like InBev, et cetera. You're saying they're already there. Are they not part of your target market? Or are there ways that you can help them? Is this really more of a small to mid-size company? >> For this particular solution, I think so, yeah. Because the cost to entry is low. I mean, you talk about InBev, they have millions of dollars of budgets to spend on OT. So they're completely automated from top to bottom. But these little craft brewers, which they're everywhere in the US. Vermont, Washington state, they're completely manual. A lot of these guys just started in their garage. And they just scaled up and they got a cult kind of following around their beers. One thing that we found here this week, when you talk around edge and 5G and beer, those things get people excited. In our booth we're serving beer, and all these kind of topics, it brings people together. >> And it lets the little guy compete more effectively with the big giants. >> Correct. >> And how do you do more with less as the little guy is kind of the big thing and to Warren's point, we have folks come up and say, "Great, this is for beer, but what about wine? What about the fermentation process of wine?" Same materials in the end. A vessel of some sort, maybe it's stainless steel. The clamps are the same, the sensors are the same. The parameters like temperature are key in any type of fermentation. We had someone talking about olive oil and using that. It's the same sanitary beverage style equipment. We grabbed sensors that were off the shelf and then we integrated them in and used the set of platforms that we could. How do we rapidly enable these guys at the lowest possible cost with stuff that's at the shelf. And there's four different companies in the solution. >> We were having a conversation with T-Mobile a little earlier and she mentioned the idea of this sounding scary. And this is a great example of showing that in fact, at a relatively small scale, this technology makes a lot of sense. So from that perspective, of course you can implement private 5G networks at an industrial scale with tens of millions of dollars of investment. But what about all of the other things below? And that seems to be a perfect example. >> Yeah, correct. And it's one of the things with the gateway and having flexibility the way Dell did a great job of putting really good modems in it. It had a wide spectrum range of what bands they support. So being able to say, at a larger facility, I mean, if Heineken wants to deploy something like this, oh, heck yeah, they probably could do it. And they might have a private 5G network, but let's say T-Mobile offers a private offering on their public via a slice. It's easy to connect that radio to it. You just change the sims. >> Is that how the CSPs fit here? How are they monetized? >> Yeah, correct. So one of our partners is T-Mobile and so we're working with them. We've got other telco partners that are coming on board in our lab. And so we'll do the same thing. We're going to take this back and put it in the lab and offer it up as others because the baseline building blocks or Lego blocks per se can be used in a bunch of different industries. It's really that starter point of giving folks the idea of what's possible. >> So small manufacturing, agriculture you mentioned, any other sort of use cases we should tune into? >> I think it's environmental monitoring, all of that stuff, I see it in IoT deployments all over the world. Just the simple starter kits 'cause a farmer doesn't want to get sold a solution, a platform, where he's got to hire a bunch of coders and partner with the big carriers. He just wants something that works. >> Another use case that we see a lot, a high cost in a lot of these places is the cost of energy. And a lot of companies don't know what they're spending on electricity. So a very simple energy monitoring system like that, it's a really good ROI. I'm going to spend five or $10,000 on a system like this, but I'm going to save $20,000 over a year 'cause I'm able to see, have visibility into that data. That's a lot of what this story's about, just giving visibility into the process. >> It's very cool, and like you said, it gets people excited. Is it a big market? How do you size it? Is it a big TAM? >> Yeah, so one thing that Dell brings to the table in this space is people are buying their laptops, their servers and whatnot from Dell and companies are comfortable in doing business with Dell because of our model direct to customer and whatnot. So our ability to bring a device like this to the OT space and have them have that same user experience they have with laptops and our client products in a ruggedized solution like this and bring a lot of partners to the table makes it easy for our customers to implement this across all kinds of industries. >> So we're talking to billions, tens of billions. Do we know how big this market is? What's the TAM? I mean, come on, you work for Dell. You have to do a TAM analysis. >> Yes, no, yeah. I mean, it really is in the billions. The market is huge for this one. I think we just tapped into it. We're kind of focused in on the brewery piece of it and the liquor piece of it, but the possibilities are endless. >> Yeah, that's tip of the spear. Guys, great story. >> It's scalable. I think the biggest thing, just my final feedback is working and partnering with Dell is we got something as small as this edge gateway that I can run a Packet Core on and run a 5G standalone node and then have one of the small little 5G radios out there. And I've got these deployed in a farm. Give the farmer an idea of what's possible, give him a unit on his tractor, and now he can do something that, we're providing connectivity he had never had before. But as we scale up, we've got the big brother to this. When we scale up from that, we got the telco size units that we can put. So it's very scalable. It's just a great suite of offerings. >> Yeah, outstanding. Guys, thanks for sharing the story. Great to have you on theCUBE. >> Good to be with you today. >> Stop by for beer later. >> You know it. All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and the entire CUBE team, we're here live at the Fira in Barcelona MWC '23 day four. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days, cloud storage, immutability, and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on it, has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is, oftentimes, data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats, this is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring, but object storage, historically, was seen as this low-cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard tradeoffs between cost and performance. That has changed, the ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parity with other storage formats, but cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes, my name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose-built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues, first up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi will then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi, and then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss School, let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO and Co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company, David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Great to have you, so look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years, why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder Jeff Flowers and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disk drive was probably 500 gigabytes and now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even 100 terabyte drives coming down the road and, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disk drives is going to run out of steam because, even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new, highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it and they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab, designing and testing this new storage architecture and when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we can sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite. You know, when you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zetabytes or something like that and if you look at that as you know, the potential market size during that data, we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions and so I said, look, this is a great opportunity, if you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on-prem, if you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud, we're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter, and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches, but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes, but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like Veeam, Convo, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups, they're never going to pay a ransom. So, once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well, so that you can't do a full restore from your backups. And that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you, you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know, write once read many, and those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud, and it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff but, you know, the net result is if you store your backups in immutable buckets, in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time, so you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that, once that data is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it, or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty. It's obviously a big deal, I mean, especially for companies with the presence overseas, but what's really is any digital business these days, how should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws and if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in-country, you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, and I've probably forgotten one or two, but the reason we do that is twofold; one is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency, and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos, and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in-country, so, you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in May of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws and we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and think it continues to evolve, we see judgments in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the U.S. and the elimination of third party cookies, what does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things of this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the U.S., Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues so it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world and this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi, where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world and we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia and so forth, you know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base and that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah, it's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David, thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations, what does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud and I think storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth, and it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local, and there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential, you know, the most analysts think that the full, all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range, whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud, like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month and so I think people are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow, that's like a six X more expensive in the clouds, more than six X, all right, thank you, David,-- >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business, you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE, a great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, keep it right there. ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Brenda in sales got an email ♪ ♪ Click here for a trip to Bombay ♪ ♪ It's not even called Bombay anymore ♪ ♪ But you clicked it anyway ♪ ♪ And now our data's been held hostage ♪ ♪ And now we're on sinking ship ♪ ♪ And a hacker's in our system ♪ ♪ Just 'cause Brenda wanted a trip ♪ ♪ She clicked on something stupid ♪ ♪ And our data's out of our control ♪ ♪ Into the hands of a hacker's ♪ ♪ And he's a giant asshole. ♪ ♪ He encrypted it in his basement ♪ ♪ He wants a million bucks for the key ♪ ♪ And I'm pretty sure he's 15 ♪ ♪ And still going through puberty ♪ ♪ I know you didn't mean to do us wrong ♪ ♪ But now I'm dealing with this all week long ♪ ♪ To make you all aware ♪ ♪ Of all this ransomware ♪ ♪ That is why I'm singing you this song ♪ ♪ C'mon ♪ ♪ Take it from me ♪ ♪ The director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince Nairobi ♪ ♪ 'Cuz he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ (gentle music) >> Joining me now is Drew Schlussel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi, hey Drew, good to see you again, thanks for coming back in theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, great to see you. >> All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, Zero Trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword and now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate, what's Wasabi's take on Zero Trust. >> So, absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention, Wasabi's take is Zero Trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places, right, where the bad guys are getting in. And, you know, I think of Zero Trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, it takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are, of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. >> Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and, you know, design and your Zero Trust and you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure, so we're going to talk about that, there's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew, about immutability and air gaps, I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics, how do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? >> So, in terms of air gap and immutability, right, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right, to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data, you need to have a copy stored offsite, and that copy needs to be immutable and we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. >> You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because, sometimes people don't understand, you actually are a cloud, you're not building on other people's public clouds and this storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that, tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. >> Yeah, I appreciate that, so there's definitely some misconception, we are our own cloud storage service, we don't run on top of anybody else, right, it's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard, we interoperate with practically hundreds of applications, primarily in this case, right, we're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage and so we've made it really simple, in many cases, you'll see Wasabi as you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, you know, put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say multifactor authentication, and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. >> I mean, we just heard from David Friend, if I did my math right, he was talking about, you know, 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that, how are you able to achieve such attractive economics? >> Yeah, so, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right, less expensive than the hyperscalers. And you know, we talked about this at Vermont, right? There's some secret sauce there and you know, we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity and the fact is we're also not having to run, you know, a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time, so we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, you know, going to be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right, they see the fact that their data is growing 40, 80% year over year, they know they need to have some place to keep it secure, and, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves, in fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. >> And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What the feature called? Can you double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the term in S3 is Object Lock and what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage, and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape, or form, the application can't change it, the system administration can't change it, Wasabi can't change it, okay, it is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right, in adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors and I named off a few earlier and the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security. Right, when you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right, they can't take away the data and that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. >> And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API, so if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data, beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right, that's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right, point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, you know, for whatever 30, 60, 90 days, and then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you know, you're often running with Wasabi. >> I talked to my open about the allure of object storage historically, you know, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, and we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up, but I forgot to answer something earlier, right, you said that immutability is a feature and I want to make it very clear that it is a feature but it's an API request. Okay, so when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right, is typically something that the other folks charge for, right, and I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge, you want to, you know, pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge, and that's an important thing, because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects, and you want to get a list of those objects, or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data, with Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. >> Excellent, so thank you for that. So, you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? You know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe, a paint a picture for us example, or two? >> Sure, so, again, we just do storage, right, that is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors, whether it's, you know, active archive, backup and recovery, IOT, surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right, those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata, they just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right, so just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right, you literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API, getting started is incredibly easy, right, we offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte, and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right, it's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty, I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're global company, right, so there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world some place that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, as well as your compliance requirements. >> Yeah, we did talk about sovereignty, Drew, this is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of a industry historian, when I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out, and for instance, I know one bought competitor of Carbonite, and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, they couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud in part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems. Like, you know, ransomware, of mutability and recovery, I'll give you the last word, Drew. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right, there's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, you know, but, you know, not all data's hot all the time and by hot, I mean, you know, extremely hot, you know, let's take, you know, real time analytics for, maybe facial recognition, right, that requires sub-millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, right, you want to store that data for a long, long time, and you're going to want to also tap back into it later, so, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like, you know, cold glacial type of tiered storage, yeah, don't believe the hype, you're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a Wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment, you know, what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right, we're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that, I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. >> All right, Drew, thank you for that, definitely we see the momentum, in a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information technology services at The Hotchkiss School, keep it right there. >> Hey, I'm Nate, and we wrote this song about ransomware to educate people, people like Brenda. >> Oh, God, I'm so sorry. We know you are, but Brenda, you're not alone, this hasn't just happened to you. >> No! ♪ Colonial Oil Pipeline had a guy ♪ ♪ who didn't change his password ♪ ♪ That sucks ♪ ♪ His password leaked, the data was breached ♪ ♪ And it cost his company 4 million bucks ♪ ♪ A fake update was sent to people ♪ ♪ Working for the meat company JBS ♪ ♪ That's pretty clever ♪ ♪ Instead of getting new features, they got hacked ♪ ♪ And had to pay the largest crypto ransom ever ♪ ♪ And 20 billion dollars, billion with a b ♪ ♪ Have been paid by companies in healthcare ♪ ♪ If you wonder buy your premium keeps going ♪ ♪ Up, up, up, up, up ♪ ♪ Now you're aware ♪ ♪ And now the hackers they are gettin' cocky ♪ ♪ When they lock your data ♪ ♪ You know, it has gotten so bad ♪ ♪ That they demand all of your money and it gets worse ♪ ♪ They go and the trouble with the Facebook ad ♪ ♪ Next time, something seems too good to be true ♪ ♪ Like a free trip to Asia! ♪ ♪ Just check first and I'll help before you ♪ ♪ Think before you click ♪ ♪ Don't get fooled by this ♪ ♪ Who isn't old enough to drive to school ♪ ♪ Take it from me, the director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince in Nairobi ♪ ♪ Because he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ >> It's a pretty sweet car. ♪ A kid without facial hair, who lives with his mom ♪ ♪ To learn more about this go to wasabi.com ♪ >> Hey, don't do that. ♪ Cause if we had Wasabi's immutability ♪ >> You going to ruin this for me! ♪ This fifteen-year-old wouldn't have on me ♪ (gentle music) >> Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at The Hotchkiss School, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut, hello, Kevin. >> Hello, it's nice to be here, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about The Hotchkiss School and your role. >> Sure, The Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role as the Director of Information Technology Services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >> Yeah, and you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens, what's the unique, you know, or if not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you? >> I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of IT security, IT in general sometimes, so, I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into. >> Because specifically you are potentially spread thin, underfunded, you got students, you got teachers, so there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >> Certainly, because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center, so, data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights and FERPA, some of our students are under 18, so, data privacy laws such as COPPA apply, HIPAA can apply, we have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition so, it's a unique place to be, again, we operate very much like a college would, right, we have all the trappings of a private college in terms of all the operations we do and that's what I love most about working in education is that it's all the industries combined in many ways. >> Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in Drew to the conversation so what are the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your data? >> Well, we take a defense in-depth approach, so we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses, we also keep it simple, you know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching , using multifactor authentication, and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >> Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >> Yeah, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what he's doing, going back to our prior conversation about Zero Trust, right, that defense in-depth approach is beautifully aligned, right, with the Zero Trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right, they need to make sure that the data that they're keeping, evidence, right, is secure and immutable, right, because that's evidence. >> Well, Kevin, paint a picture for us, if you would. So, you were primarily on-prem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and the kind of, I want to get to the before and the after Wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >> Sure, well, I came to The Hotchkiss School about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal, so again, not a lot of funding for IT in general, security, or infrastructure in general, so Nutanix was actually a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hotchkiss and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system that students would use, financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SaaS solutions coming in play, we had also taken some time to do some business continuity, planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue, I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that, so, as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud-based, we didn't really need as much of the on-premise compute and storage as we had, and it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AHV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well and it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small IT shops like ours. >> Yeah, AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor and so you migrated off of VMware avoiding the VTax avoidance, that's a common theme among Nutanix customers and now, did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider Wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >> We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, Wasabi became across our desks and it was such a low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month and then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time, it wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network, you know, some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on the internet that they could be stored as well. So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast, security wise, it has all the features of S3 compliance that works with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily and then there was no egress fees, we can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing as any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs, we need to know what we're going to spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for egress or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously, we need that, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >> So Kevin, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed, were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those concerns as an IT practitioner? >> Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing, there's lots of companies with funny names, I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history, understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from, and really looking into the technology and understanding that the value proposition, the ability to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology in which it lays down data. So, having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for, it may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's not cheap, you know, it's reliable, and that was really our concern. So we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >> Yeah, thank you for that. Drew, explain the whole egress charge, we hear a lot about that, what do people need to know? >> First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, Dave, just like theCUBE, let's be very clear about that, second of all, egress charges, so, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get, every put, every list, everything, okay, it's part of their process, it's part of how they make money, it's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services, we don't do that. And I think, you know, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond what is the list price. In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then, right, their additional cost, the egress costs, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >> So, you used a little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation, so here's what I'm imagining, like I have a lot of stuff, right? And I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly, I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff, that's kind of the same thing here. >> Oh, that's a great metaphor, right? That storage locker, right? You know, can you imagine every time you want to open the door to that storage locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >> No, that would be annoying. >> Or, every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard, you have to pay a door opening fee, right, and then if you want to look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay, and it's ridiculous, it's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker, you've already paid the annual fee, probably, 'cause they gave you a discount on that, so why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what Wasabi does and I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody else. >> Okay, good, that's helpful, it helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin, I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and ransomware protection, for example? >> Yes, cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too, right, this is often the checking the box kind of activity, insurance companies require it, but we want to make it something that people want to do and want to engage with so, even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that, so it wasn't just about protecting our school data, it's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something do in all aspects of your life, especially now that the folks are working hybrid often working from home with equipment from the school, the stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home and so knowing how to protect that is important, so we definitely run those programs in a way that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >> So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until, of course, we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples, is that what you're talking about, about having fun? >> Yeah, I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories, you know, they stop as they run, so they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going, so, you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic, yeah, and that's what I think is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure you know the sender of the email, no, you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not? So, that's where I think the learning comes in. >> Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much, appreciate your time, Kevin, Drew, awesome having you in theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thanks. >> Okay, in a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Announcer: Some things just don't make sense, like showing up a little too early for the big game. >> How early are we? >> Couple months. Popcorn? >> Announcer: On and off season, the Red Sox cover their bases with affordable, best in class cloud storage. >> These are pretty good seats. >> Hey, have you guys seen the line from the bathroom? >> Announcer: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, it just makes sense. >> You don't think they make these in left hand, do you? >> We learned today how a serial entrepreneur, along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data while at the same time, protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple, fast storage, immutability, air gaps, and solid operational processes, let's not forget about that, okay? People and processes are critical and if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign and support of digital transformations. Now, if you want to learn more about immutability and Object Block, click on the Wasabi resource button on this page, or go to wasabi.com/objectblock. Thanks for watching Secure Storage Hot Takes made possible by Wasabi. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, well, see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>>VM is one of the more interesting stories we've covered in the past decade. Born in 2006 with a simple premise to make backing up virtualized systems easy, fast, consistent and cost effective. The company's timing was perfect as it rode the coattails of the virtualization trend with a laser focus on developing great products that just work. That's the tagline fast forward to 2021 and the team has surpassed the billion dollar mark in revenues and is transformed into a leading the, leading the number one independent pure play company for backup and data protection. Software company is expanding its tam extending from its on prem routes into cloud, cloud data backup containers and SAS data protection and with me to talk about its progress and how it thinks about the future of Bill Largent is the Ceo and chairman of VM and Jim Krueger. The CMO at the company. Gentlemen welcome, Great to see you again. >>Hey, great to see you again. Dave. >>Thank you, Dave, Great to be here. >>It's great, great introduction but I appreciate that set up >>following you guys for a long time but you know, you don't sit still so give us the business update. I mean you guys are cranking you just put out a press release on your progress. You're pretty transparent for a private company. We love that. But give us the update bill. >>Yeah, thanks very much. I'll do that really. We're pretty excited about the press release. We said Q one how we're 25% up air our growth, we've made a great transition with our team um super strong on our performance, our economic performance. We like being transparent were transparent with Clearly our owners now insight venture partners and that's been a big transaction that occurred in the last 15, 14 months. And we're we're transparent with our customers, our partners, our distributors, so and our vendors. So we're just that way we like to make sure we're good partners with all those along the line and we care quite a bit about him. So I think that transparency helps us with our customer base and where we're going with our product and what we've had to offer. We're now over 4500, employees strong around the globe. 40 plus countries operating uh, well, in all those jurisdictions with the covid being coming out of, I would say, coming out of hopefully coming out of the rough time period from from the geographical geopolitical covid issues. So we believe we've done extremely well through then businesses continued to grow for us. So we're really excited about where things are, insight has done a great job and helping us advance our business and thinking about looking at new tams to go after. And we're pretty excited about it. So. Well >>I had 13 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth for a company of of of your age and size is is very impressive. You don't see that often. >>Yeah we've we work pretty hard at that. It's I'd say we really focus on that year to year even though our quarters just keep popping along very nicely for us. You know, starting back in oh six, having been around since then we did start at absolute zero. We didn't have a didn't have a bit in the bank at that time. Uh Now it's a whole different story with our second year over a billion dollars. And when you look at A. T. C. V. Kind of calculation and us transforming into an A. R. R. A. Heavy perpetual base. So we've transitioned with new product offering being all subscription base. So that's uh that's making us um making us even more competitive than than we have been passed. >>I like how you couch that because you don't want to be trapped into that, you know, the quarterly shot clock, but still it's quite impressive performance. And with the A. R. R. That sort of smooth things out, jim I want to ask you about vermin again, virtual this year, second year in a row. Uh You know, it's been it's been frustrating because we can't be face to face, but well, what have you learned about the sort of virtual events? How is it performed for you? Do you see that continuing in some way, shape or form when you get back to physical? How are you thinking about that? >>Yeah, we had, we had two major virtual events last year. And so to your point, we we did learn a lot in terms of what works, what doesn't work, and we've continued to refine refine the plans. Uh One thing that it does is it just really opens the doors for a much broader audience. Typically we get about 2000 ISH people Uh that attend in person for vermin. Uh and uh and last year we had actually about 28,000 people representing 150 countries that registered for the event, and we had over 11,000 that actually attended. Uh and the engagement was, was really good and we, we were our scores in terms of satisfaction, we're, you know, four plus out of five. And so I think we did a pretty good job, but we continue to learn one of the things that you need to do is you need to sort of shorten the agenda because the attention span is not not very long. So all of our sessions are 30 minutes or less and we've actually uh put it over two days where it's about 3.5 hours each day, so we try to keep it a little bit lighter. We still have 30 different breakout sessions. We have keynotes, um, uh, some great speakers that are coming, some great customers that are coming, but you have to integrate some fun, some incentives, things of that sort. So we've been creating a lot of buzz leading up to Vermont with um, a lot of social activity. We have some some new uh, VM Nike kicks that people can win, which has generated a lot of excitement uh, and uh, and we'll be doing a lot of incentives and prizes and things as a part of the event. Uh, so, so that that's a key learning that we, we, we know that people love and just creates a lot of us in addition to of course the great content >>VM has good swag too, is an analyst. I always appreciate that VM and pure storage as you guys are at the top of the living >>area and a >>big thanks for that. But I gotta ask you, so one of the hard parts because you guys are all channel, 100% channel have been from day zero. That's some, that's gotta be tough because we've been in this business a long time doing hybrid for a long time and the sellers love to be belly to belly. They never wanted sort of hybrid. So it's gotta be tougher for the partners as well who are big channel. So how do you integrate the partners? What can we expect, you know, in these types of things going forward? >>Yeah. So I can start with just with the man bill and then we can talk a little bit more, but for the moment we actually have a really strong partner registration, so partners are attending Vermont as well, we have separate sort of cordoned off content specifically for our partners, so they're definitely a key part of that. We have 38 uh sponsors uh that uh you know a part of our ecosystem uh and uh so you know, partners kind of overall are a really key part of iman in addition to to customers attending as well. Uh So that's one way that we continue to connect with with our partners >>bill, that's part of the tam expansion, obviously it's leverage. Right? >>Absolutely. It is and you know, we'll stay with that two tier distribution system that we have affected with those partners and distributors as to how we work through them. Uh Partners are absolutely key key for us all around the globe. Different kinds of partners in the U. S. A rather large wind sell a lot of small ones uh same in the media and same in A P. J. So we'll keep that network going. Why? Because they're they're an extension of the VM arm of our internal sales group that numbers well over 2000 of our people that focus on the selling. But the partners are key. They've adapted nicely I believe, to a lot of virtual events like we're going through now and they to sound like they're as excited as we are about getting things back in uh in person. >>So I always been fascinated by tam expansion. It's part of the Ceos job you have. You know, I love the fact that that incite the board promoted from within somebody. They tapped a Ceo who knew the business. You have to do a reset your at $5 billion Mantra. And so when you're thinking about your tam expansion, cast an acquisition cloud, uh, you guys have been into the SAS backup world for for a bit now it's starting to produce. How are you thinking about the future and opportunities ahead. >>We've got great opportunities with cast and so into the cooper Nettie space. That's a huge uh, market expansion for us in an evolving marketplace. So our goal was, let's be that thought leader. Let's get the best technology that's out there and then you'll see us execute really well. This on the sales side. This uh, this year also 2021 here and beyond the public cloud. Peace with azure with aws with our Google offering. So we're continuing to bring those up the up to up to speed in a sense of size because there's this tremendous future there, that's a big expansion of our team. Also I think Jim might talk a little bit about jumping into that security space a little bit. That is going to be big, It's big for us, It's a selling um selling feature that I think has come a long way. So it is about expanding that tam and our focus is always long term. It is, yeah, evaluation is important, but more important is that, you know, that long term customer service uh meaning new products for them like Office 3 65 that we brought out that has had tremendous growth for us. Uh so we're really excited about the growth, but again, our focus is on for that customer over the long term. It's uh it's years out, it's not the quarters and it's not about that valuation, it's really about how we keep them going in their business. >>So jim talk about that positioning, I mean, you're not a security company, you're not like building firewalls and and perimeters and so forth. But the notion of security and data protection plays in there. I mean, you think about these ransomware attacks, if I can actually recover from a ransomware attack, I got way more leverage and you're part of that recovery process. So those lines are blurring. How do you think about it? >>Yeah, that's that's definitely a key benefit that our solution provides in terms of protection from that. Uh And as we've had new releases into the market v 10 last year, the 11 this year, we've continued to up the ante relative to the protection from ransomware that's obviously a hot topic in the marketplace. And uh, and and we have some some great differentiators that we brought to market. And I think that that's part of why we're seeing the, you know, the strong growth, Uh, B 11, you know, Focus on ransomware, but over 200 new features and capabilities that we have brought to market to make it easier for our customers. We have kind of three key pillars around simplicity, flexibility, reliability, uh, and also just super powerful with the features and capabilities that we bring the market. So, uh, so we're seeing great traction there. Uh, and uh, and that's definitely an area that we're focused on. Uh, as again, we're not a security company, but we do protect from that. And some of the capabilities, you know, give you, if you do run into that situation, the capability to recover quickly and not have to pay a ransom And keep your business running, which is a key focus for us across all of our 400,000 plus customers. >>What about cloud? Cloud is a lot of people, you know, traditionally on prem vendors, they're like threatened by cloud. But clouds a gift for wien I mean it's like the internet is a gift is this big platform that's been built out, you can build on top of it. So how are you guys thinking about the cloud opportunity and the SAS data protection? >>Yeah, we want to go and >>Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, Jim. Yeah, it is a tremendous market opportunity for us. We've evolved as, you know, get back to our roots and 06, it was about um protecting those virtual workloads and we've evolved from there with evolved from there maintaining that that on print businesses is not going away. The public cloud businesses skyrocketed the private cloud business the same way. And we want to have products for all um all of those and the ability to move and move data's move, move workloads around, move those datas around, move that data around. So big piece for us, the casting piece, I keep getting back in how that might evolve with the SAs offering or not. Well, we'll tell over time period here as we work on that product roadmap. So, absolutely tremendous opportunity for us. >>Well, when you think about hybrid jim, I mean, the first thing that people say is for developers, containers, first thing you do is containerized the app and then you don't care where run anywhere right at once. Run it anywhere. That's a big opportunity. >>Yeah, so, so we're definitely focused on building a single platform for all environments. Uh So with the storage integration with the top three hyper scale ear's uh moving into kubernetes and containers, uh backup and protection. Uh So that that's a key part of our strategy. It's again to make it easy for customers To be able to manage all of their backup from one single console. Uh So so that's a key strategy and their own, you know, the research that we've done, I think, you know, due to Covid, we're actually seeing an increase in the move to the cloud, uh and we play in in in two key areas, ones with the hyper sailors and providing, you know, the backup and recovery within those environments, but then also with our service providers and as a service we're seeing really strong growth within that market and that ecosystem. So uh you know, working to to partner with them closely and continue to build that ecosystem and support them and their efforts to to uh to drive growth in the market as well. >>All right I'm gonna let you guys go the last question bill is so what's life like with insight? I know these guys are players. We've we've seen the moves they make is what's the future like? Is I. P. O. Still on the table? What can you tell us about life with insight? >>It's a great question. Well keep in mind we worked with insight in our prior entity uh starting in I think in 2002 we brought them in. So and our partner that's on our account has been with us since that time even though after we sold the business they were out of him. So uh No I'm really well they've been a big help their operations operationally efficiency, efficiently focused. I'd say they're helping us bring new ideas back to the M. And A activity back to your I. P. O. Question. I think that's an avenue for us. We clearly are pushing in that direction to get set up that way. What's it do for us? It gives us that bigger currency versus just cash. It gives you that stock currency to use on M. And A activity that you know I think you saw us do that with Kasten. Uh in the sense of acquiring M. And A. That's been different for vein. We build it from within that was a buy from outside. You'll see us do both both of those in the future. Very important I think uh you know without being too predictive I would say hopefully that's something you see in the I. P. O. Side that in the next 12 24 months a run like that. >>Well, Hey, uh, as an upside of observing the street wants growth, they want execution, they want consistency and you guys bring all those guys. Thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. Always a pleasure. And look forward to seeing you face to face. Hopefully before 22. >>It would be nice. >>All right. Thank you. Thanks. >>Dave. All right. >>You're welcome. Alright, keep it right, everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cubes, continuous coverage of them on 2021, the virtual edition, We're right back.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. The digital version I'm Lisa Martin and I have a couple of Cuba alumni joining me from Wien. We've got Danny Allen. It's C T O and S VP of product strategy And Dave Russell, VP of Enterprise Strategy, is here as well. Danny and a Welcome back to the Cube. >>Hi, Lisa. Great to be here. >>Hey, Lisa. Great to be here. Love talking with this audience >>It and thankfully, because of technologies like this in the zoom, were still able to engage with that audience, even though we would all be gearing up to be Go spending five days in Vegas with what 47,000 of our closest friends across, you know, and walking a lot. But I wanted Thio. Danny, start with you and you guys had them on virtually this summer. That's an event known for its energy. Talk to me about some of the things that you guys announced there. And how are your customers doing with this rapid change toe? work from home and this massive amount of uncertainty. >>Well, certainly no one would have predicted this the beginning of the year. There has been such transformation. There was a statement made earlier this year that we've gone through two years of transformation in just two months, and I would say that is definitely true. If you look both internally and bean our workforce, we have 4400 employees all of a sudden, 3000 of them that had been going into the office or working from home. And that is true of our customer base as well. There's a lot of remote, uh, remote employ, mental remote working, and so that has. You would think it would have impact on the digital systems. But what it's done is it's accelerated the transformation that organizations were going through, and that's been good in a number of different aspects. One certainly cloud adoption of clouds picked up things like Microsoft teams and collaboration software is certainly picked up, so it's certainly been a challenging year on many fronts. But on the on the other hand, it's also been very beneficial for us as well. >>Yeah, I've talked to so many folks in the last few months. There's silver linings everywhere. There's opportunity everywhere. But give our audience standing an overview of who them is, what you do and how you help customers secure their data. >>Sure, so VM has been in the backup businesses. What I'll say We started right around when virtualization was taking off a little before AWS and you see two left computing services on DWI would do back up a virtual environments. You know, over the last decade, we have grown into a $1 billion company doing backup solutions that enable cloud data management. What do you mean by that? Is we do backup of all kinds of different infrastructures, from virtual to cloud based Assad's based to physical systems, You name it. And then when we ingest that data, what we do is we begin to manage it. So an example of this is we have 400,000 customers, they're going back up on premises. And one of the things that we've seen this year is this massive push of that backup data into S three into the public cloud and s. So this is something that we help our customers with as they go through this transformation. >>And so you've got a team for a ws Cloud native solution. Talk to me a little bit about that. And how does that allow business is to get that centralized view of virtual physical SAS applications? >>Yeah, I think it all starts with architecture er and fundamentally beams, architectures. ER is based upon having a portable data format that self describing. So what >>does >>that mean? That means it reduces the friction from moving data that might have been born on premises to later being Stan Shih ated in, say, the AWS cloud. Or you can also imagine now new workloads being born in the cloud, especially towards the middle and end of this year. A lot of us we couldn't get into our data center. We had to do everything remotely. So we had to try to keep those lights on operationally. But we also had to begin to lift and shift and accelerate your point about silver linings. You know, if there is a silver lining, the very prepared really benefited. And I think those that were maybe a little more laggards they caught up pretty quickly. >>Well, that's good to hear stick big sticking with you. I'd love to get your perspectives on I t challenges in the last nine months in particular, what things have changed, what remains the same. And where is back up as a priority for the the I T folks and really the business folks, too? >>Yeah, I almost want to start with that last piece. Where? Where's backup? So back up? Obviously well understood as a concept, it's well funded. I mean, almost everybody in their right mind has a backup product, especially for critical data. But yet that all sounds very much the same. What's very, very different, though? Where are those workloads? Where do they need to be going forward? What are the service level agreements? Meaning that access times required for those workloads? And while we're arguably transitioning from certain types of applications to new applications, the vast majority of us are dead in the middle of that. So we've got to be able to embrace the new while also anchoring back to the past. >>Yeah, I'm not so easily sudden, done professionally or personally, Danny, I'd love to get your perspective on how your customer conversations have changed. You know, we're executives like you, both of you are so used to getting on planes and flying around and being able Thio, engage with your customers, especially events like Vermont, and reinvent What's the change been like? And from a business perspective, are you having more conversations at that business? Little as the end of the day. If you can't recover the data, that's the whole point, right? >>Yeah, it is. I would say the conversations really have four sentiments to them. The first is always starts with the pandemic and the impact of the pandemic on the business. The second from there is it talks about resource. We talked about resource management. That's resource management, both from a cost perspective. Customers trying to shift the costs from Capex models typically on premises into Op X cloud consumption models and also resource management as well. There's the shift from customers who are used to doing business one way, and they're trying to shift the resources to make it effective in a new and better way. I'd say the third conversation actually pivots from there to things like security and governance. One of the interesting things this year we've seen a lot of is ransomware and malware and attacks, especially because the attack surface has increased with people working from home. There is more opportunity for organizations to be challenged, and then, lastly, always pivots where it ends up his digital transformation. How do I get from where I used to be to where I want to be? >>Yeah, the ransomware increase has been quite substantial. I've seen a number of big. Of course you never want to be. The brand garment was head Carnival Cruise Line. I think canon cameras as well and you're talking about you know you're right, Danny. The attacks are toe surfaces, expanding. Um, you know, with unprotected cloud databases. I think that was the Facebook Tic Tac Instagram pack. And so it's and also is getting more personal, which we have more people from home, more distractions. And that's a big challenge that organizations need to be prepared for, because, really, it's not a matter of are we going to get a hit? But it's It's when, and we need to make sure that we have that resiliency. They've talked to us about how them enables customers toe have that resiliency. >>Yeah, you know, it's a multilayered approach like you know, any good defensive mechanism. It's not one thing it's trying to do all of the right things in advance, meaning passwords and perimeter security and, ideally, virtual private networks. But to your point, some of those things can fail, especially as we're all working remotely, and there's more dependence on now. Suddenly, perhaps not so. I t sophisticated people, too. Now do the right things on a daily basis and your point about how personal is getting. If we're all getting emails about, click on this for helpful information on the pandemic, you know there's the likelihood of this goes up. So in addition to try and do good things ahead of time, we've got some early warning detection capabilities. We can alert that something looks suspicious or a novelist, and bare bears out better investigation to confirm that. But ultimately, the couple of things that we do, they're very interesting and unique to beam are we can lock down copy of the backup data so that even internal employees, even somewhat at Amazon, can't go. If it's marked immutable and destroy it, remove it, alter it in any way before it's due to be modified or deleted, erased in any way. But one of the ones I'm most excited about is we can actually recover from an old backup and now introduce updated virus signatures to ensure we don't reintroduced Day zero threats into production environment. >>Is it across all workloads, physical virtual things like, you know, Microsoft or 65 slack talked about those collaboration tools that immune ability, >>so immune ability. We're expanding out into multiple platforms today. We've got it on on premises object storage through a variety of different partners. Actually, a couple dozen different partners now, and we have something very unique with AWS s three object lock that we you can really lock down that data and ensure that can't be compromised. >>That's excellent, Danny, over to you in terms of cloud adoption, you both talked about this acceleration of digital business transformation that we've all seen. I think everyone has whiplash from that and that this adoption of cloud has increased. We've seen a lot of that is being a facilitator like, are you working with clients who are sort of, you know, maybe Dave at that point you talked about in the beginning, like kind of on that on that. Bring in the beginning and we've got to transform. We've got to go to the cloud. How do you kind of help? Maybe facilitate their adoption of public health services like AWS with the technologies that the off first? >>Yeah, I'd say it's really two things everyone wants to say, Hey, we're disrupting the market. We're changing everything about the world around us. You should come with us. Being actually is a very different approach to this one is we provide stability through the disruption around you. So as your business is changing and evolving and you're going through digital transformation, we can give you the stability through that and not only the stability through that change, but we can help in that change. And what I mean by that is if you have a customer who's been on premises and running the workloads on premises for a long while, and maybe they've been sending their backups and deaths three and flagging that impute ability. But maybe now they want to actually migrate the workloads into E. C to weaken. Do that. It's a It's a three step three clicks and workflow to hit a button and say send it up into Easy to. And then once it's in AWS, we can protect the workload when it's there. So we don't just give the stability in this changing environment around us. But we actually help customers go through that transformation and help them move the workloads to the most appropriate business location for them. >>And how does that Danny contending with you from a cost optimization perspective? Of course, we always talk about cost as a factor. Um, I'm going to the cloud. How does that a facilitator of, like, being able to move some of those workloads like attitude that you talked about? Is that a facilitator of cost optimization? Lower tco? I would imagine at some point Yes, >>Yes, it is. So I have this saying the cloud is not a charity right there later in margin, and often people don't understand necessarily what it's going to cost them. So one of the fundamental things that we've had in being back up for a W s since the very beginning since version one is we give cost forecasting and it's not just a rudimentary cost forecasting. We look at the storage we looked compute. We looked at the networking. We look at what all of the different factors that go into a policy, and we will tell them in advance what it's going to cost. That way you don't end up in a position where you're paying a lot more than you expected to pay. And so giving that transparency, giving the the visibility into what the costs of the cloud migration and adoption are going to be is a critical motivator for customers actually to use our software. >>Awesome. And Dave, I'm curious if we look at some of the things trends wise that have gone on, what are you seeing? I t folks in terms of work from home, the remote workers, but I am imagine they're getting their hands on this. But do you expect that a good amount of certain types of folks from industries won't go back into the office because I ts realizing, like more cost optimization? Zor Hey, we don't need to be on site because we can leverage cloud capabilities. >>Yeah, I think it works, actually, in both directions least, I think we'll see employees continue to work remotely, so the notion of skyscrapers being filled with tens of thousands of people, you know, knowledge workers, as they were once called back in the day. That may not come to pass at least any time soon. But conversely to your point everybody getting back into the data center, you know, from a business perspective, the vast majorities of CEO so they don't wanna be in the real estate business. They don't wanna be in the brick and mortar and the power cooling the facilities business. So >>that was >>a trend that was already directionally happening. And just as an accelerant, I think 2000 and 20 and probably 2021 at least the first half just continues that trend. >>Yeah, Silicon Valley is a bit lonely. The freeways there certainly emptier, which is one thing. But it is. It's one of those things that you think you could be now granted folks that worked from home regardless of the functions they were in before. It's not the same. I think we all know that it's not the same working from home during a pandemic when there's just so much more going on. But at the same time, I think businesses are realizing where they can actually get more cost optimization. Since you point not wanting to manage real estate, big data centers, things like that, that may be a ah, positive spin on what this situation has demonstrated. Daddy Last question to you. I always loved it to hear about successful customers. Talk to me about one of your favorite reference customers that really just articulates beams value, especially in this time of helping customers with so many pivots. >>Well, the whole concept of digital transformation is clearly coming to the forefront with the pandemic. And so one of my favorite customers, for example, ducks unlimited up in Canada. They have i ot sensors where they're collecting data about about climate information. They put it into a repository and they keep it for 60 years. Why 60 years? Because who knows? Over the next 60 years, when these sensors in the data they're collecting may be able to solve problems like climate change. But if you >>look at it >>a broader sense, take that same concept of collection of data. I think we're in a fantastic period right now where things like Callum medicine. Um, in the past, >>it was >>kind of in a slow roll remote education and training was on kind of a slow roll. Climate change. Slow roll. Um, but now the pandemics accelerating. Ah, lot of that. Another customer, Royal Dutch Shell, for example. Traditionally in the oil and petrochemical industry, their now taking the data that they have, they're going through this transformation faster than ever before and saying, How do I move to sustainable energy? And so a lot of people look at 2020 and say, I want how does this year? Or, you know, this is not the transformation I want. I actually take the reverse of that. The customers that we have right now are taking the data sets that they have, and they're actually optimizing for a more sustainable future, a better future for us and for our Children. And I think that's a fantastic thing, and being obviously helps in that transformation. >>That's excellent. And I agree with you, Danny, you know, the necessity is the mother of invention. And sometimes when all of these challenges air exposed, it's hard right away to see what are the what are the positives right? What are the opportunities? But from a business perspective is you guys were talking about the beginning of our segment, you know, in the beginning was keeping the lights on. Well, now we've got to get from keeping the lights on, too. Surviving to pivoting well to thriving. So that hopefully 2021 this is good as everybody hopes it's going to be. Right, Dave? >>Yeah, absolutely. It's all data driven and you're right. We have to move from keep the lights up on going the operational aspect to growing the business in new ways and ideally transforming the business in new ways. And you can see we hit on digital transformation a number of times. Why? Because its data driven, Why do we intercept that with being well? Because if it's important to you, it's probably backed up and held for long term safekeeping. So we want to be able to better leverage the data like Danny mentioned with Ducks Unlimited. >>And of course, as we know, data volumes are only growing. So next time you're on day, you have to play us out with one of your guitars. Deal >>definitely, definitely will. >>Excellent for Dave Russell and Danny Allen. I'm Lisa Martin. Guys, thank you so much for joining. You're watching the Cube

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of Veem on 2020 brought to you by beam. >>Hi buddy. Welcome back to the cubes. Ongoing coverage of Veem on 2020s Veem online 2020 I'm Dave Volante and Rick van overs here as a senior director of product strategy at Veem. Rick, it's always a great pleasure to see you. I wish we could see each other face to face. >>Yeah. You know, it's different this year, but, uh, yeah, it is always great to be on the cube. I think, uh, uh, in 2018 had an eight year gap and it's a N a couple of times we've been back since and yeah, happy to be back on the cube. >>So how's it going with you guys with the online format? I mean, breakouts are big for you cause you're, you're profiling some new products that we're going to get into, how's it all working for you? >>Well, it's been different. It's a good way to explain it in one word different, but the reality is I have a, uh, pardon, the language, a side hustle here, where at Veeam, I've worked with the event team to kind of bring the best content. And for the breakouts, that's an area that I've been working a lot with our speakers and our, some of our partners, external experts, users, and people who have, you know, beaten ransomware and stuff like that. But I've worked really hard to aggregate the content and get the best blend of content. And we kind of have taken an interesting approach where the breakouts are that library of content that we think organizations and the people who attend the event really take away the most. So we've got this full spectrum from R and D deep level stuff to just getting started type of stuff, and really all types of levels in between. And yeah, we want the breakouts to focus on generally available products, right? So I've worked pretty diligently to bring a good spread across the, uh, different products. And then a little secret trick we're doing is that into the summer, we're going to open up new content. So there's this broadcast agenda that we've got publicized, but then beyond that, we're going to sneak in some new content into the summer. >>Well, I'm glad you're thinking that way, because you know, a lot of what a lot of people are doing. There's a church trying to take their physical events and mirror it to the, to the digital or the virtual. And I think so often with physical events, people forget about the afterglow. And so I'm glad you guys are thinking about it upfront. >>Yeah. It has to be a mechanism that we've used it a couple of different ways, one to match how things are going to be released. Right? Cause being, we're always releasing products across the different set. I mean, we have one flagship product, but then the other products have their own cycles. So if something works well for that, we'll put it into the summer library. And then it's also a great opportunity for us to reach deep and get some content from people that we might not have been able to get before. In fact, we had one of our engineers who's based in Australia and great resource, great region, strong market for us, but I can't w if we were to have the in person event, I can't bring somebody from Australia for one session, but this was a great way to bring her expertise to the event without, you know, having the travel burden and different variety of speakers and different varieties of content. So there's ways that we've been able to build on it. But again, the top level word is definitely different, but I feel like it's working for sure. >>So Rick, give us the helicopter view of some of the product areas that we should be really be aware of as it relates to what you guys are doing at Veem on 2020. And then we'll, we'll drill in give us the high level though. >>Yeah. So for people attending the event and online, my advice really is that we're spread across about 75 to 80% of the content is for technical people. 20% of the content in the breakouts is going to be for decision makers or executives, that type. And then within that, the context of the technical content, we want to have probably 10 to 15% being like presenters from our R and D group. So very technical, uh, low level type discussions, highest level architect type stuff, kind of after that generic use cases, a nice and in the middle area, because we have a lot of people that are getting started with our products, like maybe they're new to the office three 65 backup, or they're new to backing up natively in the cloud. We have a lot of contexts around the virtual machine backup and storage integration, all those other great things, but the platform is kind of spread out at Veeam. There's a lot to take in. So the thought is wherever anyone is on their journey with any of the products and not some, that's a hard task to do with a certain number of slots. We want to provide something for everyone at every level. So that's the, that's the helicopter view. >>So let me ask you a couple of follow ups on that. So let's start with office three 65. Now you guys have shared data at this event, uh, talking about that most customers just say, Oh yeah, well, I trust Microsoft to do my backup. Well, of course, as we, well, well know it, backup is one thing, but recovery is everything. And so explain why, uh, what will explain the value that you guys bring? Why can't I just rely on the SAS vendor, uh, to, to do my backup and recovery? >>Well, there's a lot to that question, Dave, the number one thing I'll say is that at Veeam, we have partnerships with Microsoft. You have where HPE, all the household brands of it. And in many of these situations, we've always come into the market with the platform itself, providing a basic backup. I'll give windows, for example, anti backup, right? Yeah. Those, you know, it's there, but there's always a market for more capabilities, more functionality, more portability. So we've taken office three 65 is a different angle for backup. And we lead with the shared responsibility model, Microsoft as well as the other clouds, make it very clear that data classification and that responsibility of data that actually sits 100% with the customer. And so, yes, you can add things to the platform, but if we have organizations where we have things like I need to retain my content forever, or I need a discovery use case. >>And then if you think about broader use cases like one drive for business data, especially with the rapid shift of work from home organizations may not be not so much using the file server, but using things like one drive for business, for file exchanges, right? So having a control plane over that data is, is very important. So we really base it on the shared responsibility and Microsoft is one of our strongest partners. So they are very keen for us to provide solutions that are going to consume and move data around to, to meet customer needs in the cloud and in the SAS environment. For sure. So, you know, it's been a very easy conversation for our customers and it's our fastest growing product as well. So, uh, this, this product is doing great. Uh, I don't have the quarterly numbers, but we just released the mid part of Q4. We just released the newest release, which implemented object storage support. So that's been the big ask for our customers, right? So it's a, it's that product's doing great. >>Yeah. So, you know, that notion of shared responsibility, you hear that a lot in cloud security, you're applying it to cloud data protection, which, you know, security and data protection are now, you know, there's a lot of gray area between them now. Uh, and I think it's, you know, security is a, or data protection is a fundamental part of your security strategy, but that notion of shared responsibility is very important. And one that's oftentimes misunderstood because people hear, Oh, it's in the cloud. Okay. My cloud vendor has got to cover it, but what does, what does that shared responsibility mean? Ultimately, isn't it up to the customer to own the end end result. >>It is. And I look at, especially Microsoft, they classify their software for different ways on prem software, uh, software as a service, the infrastructure as a service. Uh, I forget what the third one is, but they have so many different ways that you can package their software, but in all of them, they put the data classification for the customer and it same for other clouds as well. And when, if I'm an organization today, if I'm running data in a SAS platform, if I am running systems in iOS platforms, in the hyperscale public clouds, that is an opportunity for me to really think about that control plane of the data and the backup and restore responsibility, because it has to be easy to use. It has to be very consumable so that customers can avoid that data loss or be in a situation where the complexity to do a restore is so miserable that they may not even want to go do it. I've actually had conversations with organizations as they come to Veeam. That was their alternative. Oh, it's just too painful to do. Like, why would you even do that? You know, so that, that shared responsibility model across the different data types in the cloud and on-premise well, and SAS models, that's really where we find the conversations go pretty nicely. >>Right. And if it's too complicated, you won't even bother testing it. So I want to ask you something about cloud native. You mentioned cloud native, your cloud native capabilities, um, and I'm, I'm inferring from that, that you basically are not just taking your on prem stack and shoving it into the cloud. You're actually taking advantage of the native cloud services. Can you, can you explain what's going on there and maybe some product specifics? >>Sure. So, you know, Veeam has this reputation of number one, VM backup, you know, here in my office, I have posters from all over the years and somewhere down here is number one, VM backup. And that's where we cut our teeth and got our name out there. But now if you're an Azure, if you're an Amazon, we have cloud native backup products available. In fact, the last time you and I spoke was that an Amazon reinvent where we launched the Amazon product. And then last month we launched the Azure product, which provides cloud native backup for Azure. And so now we have this cloud feature parody and those products are going to move very quickly as well. We've had the software as a service product for office three 65, where we keep adding services. And we saw in the general session, we're going to add protection for a new service in office three 65. >>So we're going to continue to innovate around these different areas. And there's also another cloud that we announced a capability for as well. So, you know, the platform at Veem it's growing, and it's amazing to see this happen cause you know, customers are making cloud investments and there's no cloud for all right. So some organizations like this cloud that cloud are a little bit of these two clouds combined. So we have to really go into the cloud with customer needs in mind because there's no one size fits all approach to the cloud, but their data, everybody knows how important that is. >>So to that end though, each, each cloud is going to have a set of native services and you've got to develop specific to that cloud, right? So that you can have the most, the lowest, highest performance, the most efficient, the lowest cost data protection solution backup and recovery possible is that, I mean, taking advantage of those native cloud services is going to be unique for each cloud, right? Because AWS has cloud and Azure cloud. Those are, those are different, you know, technically underneath, is that, is that right? >>You're absolutely right. And the cost models, they have different behaviors across the clouds. In fact, the breakout that I did here at the event with Melissa Palmer, those who are interested in the economics of the cloud should check that out because the cloud is all about consuming those resources. When I look at backup, I don't want backup to be a cost prohibitive insurance policy. Basically I want backup to be a cost effective yet resilient technology that when we're using the cloud, we can kind of balance all these needs. And one of the ways that beam's done that is we've put in cost estimators, which it's not that big of a like flashy part of the user interface, but it's so powerful to customers. The thought is if I want to consume infrastructure as a service in the cloud, and I want to back up via API calls, snapshots to ECE, two instances only nice and high performance, nice and fast. >>But the cost profile of that if I kept them for a year is completely different than if I used object storage. And what we're doing with the Veeam backup for Azure and Amazon products is we're putting those numbers right there in the wizard. So you could say, Hey, I want to keep two years of data. And I have snapshots and I have object storage, totally different cost profiles. And I'll put those costs testaments in there. And you can make egregious examples where it'll be like 10 and 20 X the price, but it really allows customers to get it fast, to get it cost efficient. And more importantly, at the end of the day, have that protection that they need. And that's, you know, that's something that I've been trying to evangelize at this cost. Estimator is a really big deal. >>Yeah. Provides transparency so that you can let the business, you know, drive sort of what the, what the data protection level is as opposed to sort of either, whether it's a one size fit all or you're under protected or overprotected and spending too much, I asked Anton is going to kind of, how do you prioritize it? Because basically his answer was we look at the economics and then ultimately you're giving tools to allow the customer to decide, >>Yeah, you don't want to have that surprise cloud bill at the end of the month. You don't want to have, um, you know, waste in the cloud and Anton's right. The economics are very important. The modeling process that we use is interesting. I had a chat with one of the product managers who is basically in charge of our cloud economic modeling and to the organizations out there. This is a really practical bit is, think about modeling, think about cloud economics, because here's the very important part. If you've already implemented something it's too late and what I mean by that, the economics, if they're not right when you implement it, so you're not modeling ahead of time. Once you implement, you can monitor it all you want, but you're just going to monitor it off the model. So the thought is, this is all a backwards process. You have to go backwards with the economics, with the modeling, and that will lead you to no surprises down the road. For sure. >>I want to ask you about the COVID impact generally, but specifically as it relates to ransomware, I mean, we've had a lot more inquiries regarding ransomware. There's certainly a lot more talk about it in the press. What have you seen, uh, specifically with respect to ransomware since the pandemic and since the lockdown. >>So that's something that's near and dear to my heart on the technology team here at product strategy, everyone has like a little specialization industry specialization. Ransomware's mine. So good ask. So the one thing that sticks out to me a lot is identifying where ransomware comes in and around. I have one data point that indicated around 58 or so percent of ransomware comes in through remote desktop. And the thought here is if we have shifted to remote access and new working models, what really worries me, Dave is when people hustle, when people hurry and the thought here is you can have it right. Or you can have it right now in mid March, we needed to make a move right now. So I worry about UN UN incomplete security models, right? People hurrying to, um, implement and maybe not taking their security, right. Especially when you think about most ransomware can come in through remote desktop. >>I thought fish attacks were the main attack vector, but I had some data points that told me this. So I have been, and I just completed a great white paper that those watching this can go to dot com and download. But the thought here is I just completed a great white paper on tips to beat ransomware and yes, Veeam has capabilities, but here's the logic. Dave. I like to explain it this way, beating ransomware. And we had a breakout that I recorded here at the event, encourage everyone to watch that I had two users share their story of how they beat ransomware with Veem. Two very different ways too. Any product is, or is not necessarily ransomware resilient. It's like going through an audit. And what I mean by that is people ask me all the time is being compliant to this standard or that standard it's 100% dictated how the product's implemented, how the product's audited, same with ransomware. >>It's 100% dictated on how Veem is implemented. And then what's the nature of the exploit. And so I break it down to three simple things. We have to educate. We have to know what threats are out there. We have to know who is accessing, what data. And then the big part of it is the implementation. How have we implemented Veeam? Are we keeping data in immutable buckets in the cloud? Are we keeping data with an air gap? And then three, the remediation when something does happen, how do we go about solving that problem? I talked to our tech support team who deals with it every day and they have very good insights, very good feedback on this phenomena. And that they've helped me shape some of the recommendations I put in the paper. But, uh, yeah, it's a 30 page paper. I don't know if I can summarize it here. That's a long one for me, but, uh, the threats real, and this is something we'll never be done with. Right. I have, I've done two other papers on it and I'm going to have another one soon after that, but we're building stuff into the product. We're educating the market. And, um, you know, we're winning, we're seeing like I had the two customers, um, beat ransomware, great stories. I think I learned so much hearing from someone who's gone through it and that you can find that in the, in the Vermont broadcast for those attending here. >>Well, you've touched on a couple of having them take advantage of the cloud guys who have these immutable mutable buckets that you can, you can leverage. Um, a lot of people don't even don't even know about that. Um, and then, like you say, create an air gap and presumably there's best practice around how often you write to that bucket and how often you create, you know, that air gap you may be, you may be change up the patterns. I don't know other, other thoughts on that. >>Well, I collectively put, I've created a term and uh, nobody's questioning me on it yet, so that's good, but I'm calling it ultra resilient storage. And what I'm referring to is that immutable backup in the cloud. And if we, it becomes a math calculation, you know, if you have one data point in there, that's good. But if you had a week's worth of data points, that's better. If you had a month's worth of data points, that's even better. But of course those cost profiles are going to change. Same thing with tape tapes, a an air gap, removable media, and I go back and forth on this, but some of the more resilient storage snapshot engines can do ultra resilient techniques as well, such as like, uh, pure storage, safe mode and NetApp snap fall. And then the last thing is actually a Veeam technology. It's been out for three, four years now, insider protection. >>It's a completely out of band copy of backup data that that Veeam cloud connect offers. So my thought here is that these ultra resilient types, those are best defense in these situations. And, you know, it's, it's a, it becomes a calculated risk of how much of it do I want to keep, because I want to have the most restore options available. I want to have no data loss, but I also don't want it old. Right. You know, there's a huge decline in value taking your business back a year ago, because that's the last tape you had, for example, I want today's or yesterday's backup if I'm in that type of situation. So I go through a lot of those points in my paper, but I hope that, um, those out there fighting the war on ransomware have the tools. I know they have the tools to win with them. >>Well, it's like we were talking about before and ransomware is a really good example of the, the blurring lines between security and backup and recovery. Of course. Uh, what role do analytics play in terms of providing transparency and identifying anomalous behavior in the whole ransomware equation? >>Well, the analytics are very important and I have to be really kind of be transparent, you know, VMs, backup company, right? We're not a security tool, but this is it's getting awfully close. And the, I don't want to say the long form historical definition of it. Security was something around this thing called a CIA triad, maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. So security tools are really big on the confidentiality and integrity side of it. But on the availability side, that's ravine can come in. So the analytics come in to our play pretty naturally, right? We have, the Veem has had for years now, uh, an alarm that detects abnormal behavior in regards to CPU rights or CPU usage and disk, right IO. Like if there's both of those or abnormally high, that this is what we call possible ransomware activity. Or if we have a incremental backup, that is like 100% change rate, that's a bad sign, right. >>Things like that. And then the other angle is even on PCs desktops like this computer, I'm talking to you now on w we have just simple logic of, once you take a backup eject the drive. So it's offline, right? So analyzing where the threats come from, what kind of behavior they're going to have when we apply it to backup. Veem can have these built in analytic engines that are just transparently there for our customers. There's no deep reeducation necessary to use these, but the thought is we want a very flexible model. That's going to just provide simple ease of use, and then allow that protection with the threatscape to help it help the customers where we can, because no two ransomware threats are the same. That's the other thing. They are so varied in what they do everything from application specific to files. And now there's these new ones that upload data. The ransom is actually a data leak. They're not encrypting the data. They're just the ransom is to take down potentially huge amounts of data leakage, right? So, um, all kinds of threat actors out there for sure. >>You know, it's a last kind of line of questioning here. Rick is, as I've said, a number of times, it's just, it's ironic that we're entering this new decade in this pandemic hits. And everybody talks about the acceleration of certain trends. But if you think about the trends, you know, last decade, it's always performance and costs. We talked a lot about granularity. We talked about, you know, simplicity, you guys expanded your number of use cases. Uh, the, the support, the compatibility matrix, if you will, all those things are sort of things that you've executed on. As you look forward to this coming decade, we talked about cloud. I mean, we were talking about cloud, you know, back in the, in 2008, 2009 time frame, but it was a relatively small portion of the business. Now everybody's talking cloud. So cloud cloud, native DePaul discussion on ransomware and maybe even broader business resiliency, digital transformation, we've been, we've been given lip service in a lot of cases to digital transformation. All of a sudden that's changed. So as you put on, you pull out the telescope and look forward to the trends that are going to drive your thinking in themes, decision making. What do you look toward? >>Well, I think that laser focused on four things, backup solutions for cloud workloads, and there's incredible opportunity there, right? So yes, we have a great Azure story, great Amazon story. And in the keynote, we indicated the next cloud capability, but there's still more, there's more services in the cloud that we need to go after. There's also the sass pocket. We have a great office, three 65 story, but there's other SAS products that we could provide a story for. And then the physical and virtual platforms. I mean, I feel really confident there we've got really good capabilities, but there's always the 1%. And you know, what's in the corner. What's the 1% of the 1%, right? And those are workloads we can continue to go after. But my thought is, as long as we attack those four areas, we're going to be on a good trajectory to deliver on that promise of being that most trusted provider of cloud data management for backup solutions. >>So my thought here is that we're going to just keep adding products. And it's very important to make it sometimes a new product. We don't want to just bolt it on to backup and replication via 11 or be 10 for that, for that matter, because it'll slow it down, right? The cloud native products are going to have to have their own cadence, their own independent, um, development cycles. And they're going to move faster, right? Because they'll need to, so you'll, you'll see us continuing to add new products, new capabilities, and sometimes it'll, it'll intermix, you know, and that's, that's, that's the whole definition of a platform when one product is talking to another, from a management side, a control plane, given customer portability, all that stuff. So we're going to just go after a cloud, virtual, physical SAS, and new products and new capabilities to do it. >>Well, Rick, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Your home studio looks great. You look good. And, but, but nonetheless, hopefully we'll be able to see each other face to face here shortly. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you, Dave. >>All right. And thank you for watching. Everybody's Dave Vellante and our continuous coverage of the Mon 2020, the online version of right back, right after this short break.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios (upbeat music) in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, coming to you from our Boston Area studio, and today, March 31st, 2020, is World Backup Day. Joining me is one of our CUBE alumni, Simon Taylor, who's the CEO of HYCU. Simon, we had you a couple weeks ago in our studio, of course. Today we have you joining us remotely. Thank you so much for joining us, and great to see you. >> Great to see you, as well Stu, as always. >> So, there's certain dates that everybody circles on the calendar and gets ready. In your industry, I have to imagine, normally World Backup Day would be a huge party, cake, and everything like that. Just, in all jest, it's my understanding, HYCU did not create World Backup Day, but it is gratuitous to talk about that, and it's something that's been around for a few years. Let's start there, thank you for joining. >> Yeah, absolutely Stu, and again, thanks for having me back on. You're going to get sick of having me on your wonderful program if we keep visiting too much, but I do appreciate it. I'm actually calling in today, as you can imagine, from Vermont, as we sort of escape the city here and get out in the countryside away from all the hectic and the crisis. You know, it's speaking of the crisis, I think that World Backup Day really could not have come at a better time, in some senses. It's so important, and I think it was created to help the world remember that their data loss is such a major issue, and that if we don't watch out for our data, if we don't backup our data, if we don't put proper data protection practices into place, we really can have a problem. And I think when we are moving to work-from-home environments, when we are moving out of the office, when the world is in such a state of flux, as it is today with Coronavirus, these are the moments when you want to really know that your data is protected, that you're safe. You know, we're seeing a rise in ransomware attacks. We're seeing all sorts of things that are tangential to the crisis with COVID-19, and I think, you know, us all taking a moment to kind of realize what an issue data loss is in the world, there just couldn't be a more important time to do that than during a crisis like this one. >> Yeah, Simon, unfortunately, it's scary times also for the IT department because bad actors are definitely making even more attacks right now, in the midst of the global pandemic, something that people are concerned about. When I've been looking out at the community, there's been conversations about, you know, "What does this mean for digital transformation, "and cloud adoption?" And some of the things I'm hearing, especially over in Europe, is there were certain companies, and if you look at certain countries, take Germany for one example, where they might have been a little bit slow to say, "Uh, I'm not sure "if I want to do the cloud." Well, if everybody's working from home for a little bit, and IT needs to keep the business running, there's been a push even faster to the cloud, and one of the main things we're going to talk about today is your partnership with Microsoft Azure. So love to hear what you're hearing from your customers out there, especially ones that normally it's, "Oh, I'm going to make my plan," and we know how fast, or slow, the enterprise normally moves, and now there's a little bit of an acceleration to say, "Hey, we need to get involved in the cloud, and my backup, my data protection is absolutely even more critical when I go to the public cloud." >> Oh my gosh, Stu, absolutely. You're right on all counts. I mean, one of the most horrific issues that we're seeing over, and over, and over again with our customers, and it's such a shame, is that there are bad actors out there. There are bad individuals out there who are trying to take advantage of this crisis, and what they're doing is they're understanding that they can now exploit the fact there's so much work from home. We're seeing more man-in-the-middle attacks. We're seeing more customers who are calling us up and saying, "I've just been hit with a ransomware, "all my data's locked down. "Somebody didn't follow protocol when they were working "from home, and boom, all of the sudden we're being asked "to pay a million dollars in bitcoin, "and what do I do?" I'm really, really proud of my team for stepping up during the crisis. We've actually seen more than 10 different customers, just in the last month, who've called us up and have said, "You know, I'm supposed to pay this bitcoin ransom. "Can you get my data back?" In all 10 out of 10 cases, because of how natively integrated HYCU is into the platforms we support, we were actually able to recover that data within the next few hours to days, get it back for them before they had to pay out those ransoms. So again, not just a plug for HYCU, a plug for backup and recovery in general. A plug for everybody who's thinking about, "How do I keep myself safe when I'm moving to the cloud?" Absolutely, this is the time to keep yourself safe with proper data protection strategies. You know, I think the second thing that you bring up, very rightly so, is that there were a lot of countries, Germany's one of them but there's many, who had sort of been on the back foot during this crisis, and had always expected that on-prem was going to be a majority of their infrastructure for the foreseeable future. They were all dipping their toe in the cloud water, the cloud pond, as it were, but you didn't see a lot of folks in Europe who were 100% committing to cloud. Well, wow, has that changed. You know, as we moved to work from home, you need a lot of that dynamic scaling that only true cloud environments, public cloud, can provide. But I think the second thing, and maybe more importantly, is we don't want to see our IT departments having to go into the office. We don't want to see them having to put themselves, and potentially their families at risk, simply to go in and manage data. So being able to work off of infrastructure-as-a-service, hugely critical during the crisis, and to the fact that HYCU is a natively integrated service into those different enterprise and public clouds means that you can do all of it remotely. And I think this is where the whole HYCU simplicity is a pillar, and a guiding principle for the company has become so important. I can't tell you how many customers have called us up and said, "I wanted to be at home with my family. "The other backup companies, the legacy deployments we had, "just simply wouldn't have allowed me to stay at home. "I would have needed to go back to the office. "Do you have something that's as-a-service?" That certainly brings me to, I think, your third point, which is we are absolutely thrilled here today, on World Backup Day, in the midst of this crisis, to be announcing the launch of HYCU for Azure. And again, this is a natively integrated service that customers can literally just VPN to their set data center, go directly to their cloud, go directly to Azure, in the marketplace turn on HYCU for Azure, and boom, you're going to have all of that wonderful, natively integrated, purpose filled backup recovery as a service. You're going to have all of that application support. You're going to have all of the things you've become, sort of used to, Stu, when we talk about HYCU, natively integrated into Azure as well. And again, I think because of this crisis, because we want people to stay at home, we want to flatten that curve, the fact that we've got this new service for Azure, which is so important for everybody, I think is just critical at this particular time. >> Yeah, definitely hugely important. We've been talking to you and HYCU for a number of years, Simon. Of course, started out very focused on, really, a Nutanix environment, broadened out to really the virtualization environment, and you're really going with your customers heavily into a cloud environment. So, Azure, really important. When I was at Microsoft Ignite last year, CEO Satya Nadella, I could sum up his main them in one word, and that was trust. So, number one, it was a knock against a certain company in the cloud that mainly drive their revenue from ads, but when he talked about customers and partners, he wanted Microsoft to really be the company that people trust in that environment. We've seen Microsoft, one of the biggest movers from an application standpoint, the real push to Office 365, got people to really embrace and trust SaaS. Would love to hear your early customers who you've been working through for this announcement, why this is so important that HYCU, not only supporting and integrating with Azure, but in the Azure marketplace, and what your customers are telling you. >> Gosh, that's such a great question, Stu. You know, first, just talking about Satya Nadella, I really think the world of him. I think he does truly believe it, when he, you know, if you've read his book, "Hit Refresh", you do start to see a man who truly cares, not just about the bottom line, or even the top line, for that matter, but really strives to drive real customer value. And I think one of the things he really did at Microsoft is he talks a lot about how the solutions that they're selling have real world effects across so many different industries. It's the net result of the technology that I think he cares about, as opposed to just the sum of its parts. So it's really, really interesting, I think, when we think about him and his leadership style, to think about how HYCU kind of fits into that. And you know, one of the things I'm really proud to announce is that here, on World Backup Day, in the midst of this horrible pandemic, what we're doing, as we launch HYCU for Azure is we're actually going to give it entirely free, no cost, no strings attached, to the entire world for the next three months. And the reason we're choosing to do that is we believe that data protection is so important, that in a situation like this, it's incredibly important that people don't take life threatening risks, things that could threaten not only them, but their families, going in to the office to do this. You know, and I think one of the great things about HYCU and also HYCU with Protege, our multi-cloud data management platform, is that you can now migrate your data from on-prem to the cloud with the touch of a button from home. You can literally go sign up, it's free of charge for all the HYCU backup you want for the next three months. You know, get on there and protect your data, that's number one. You know, that adds real value to customers in the midst of this crisis. Number two is you can use HYCU Protege to then migrate entire workloads, keep them safe, whether it's applications, whether it's databases. You know, we want customers to know that they can trust a third party, like HYCU, to be able to automate the process of migration to the cloud, and then you know, in the midst of a crisis like this everybody's thinking about disaster recovery. Well, guess what? We can even more data back on-prem, using a runbook, and we can actually drive true disaster recovery preparedness, as well, all for Azure customers. You know, Stu, you and I were talking about this offline a few minutes ago, but the reality is, we've interviewed our customers, and 72% of them, and that's in 71 countries now around the world, funny enough, but 72% of those customers are Azure customers, as well. So when we talk about our on-prem business, 72% of our on-prem business is also using Azure. So the ability to dynamically move these workloads to the cloud, move it back again for DR, as well as protect that data wherever it's sitting, and do all of that from home, with simplicity, and for the next three months no cost, I think that's how we're trying to drive value and trust into the Azure marketplace. >> Yeah, first of all, Simon, that's really a lot of good pieces here. It almost becomes a little bit trite when we talk about, "Oh, well, I want to build optionality "into my product, I want to be ready to change "and adjust things." But the environment and landscape that we're living with today is we understand, companies need to be able to react really fast, and they need to be able to adjust with this changing landscape. So what they're doing last month, versus what they're doing today, versus what they might doing in a couple of months, you know, I don't want to get locked in. I don't want to make any big decision. So therefore, it's great to see you're giving customers flexibility there. They've got both the free usage of the software, but also that migration built in to HYCU Protege. You know, how do I move my data around? How do I make sure it's still protected? So important that, you know, we've been talking for years about the ability to make changes fast and to move with speed, but you know, I think today's landscape really just put the point on (laughs), you know, we've been planning for this, in some ways, and this might have been the exact thing we're planning for, but this is the reason that this technology's so important. >> It's so well said, Stu. I mean, honestly, just like you said, we started out with the purpose-built back up recovery for Nutanix, and then we added GCP, we added VMware, now of course, we're launching Azure, but in each case, we said it's got to be natively integrated, it's got to be super simple, we've got to automate every process we can. We want to make sure that customers can wake up in the morning, log in to their cloud infrastructure, whether it's GCP, now Azure, you know, turn this on as a service. We always say, "There's nothing to download "when it's a true service," right? And I think that's so important now. It used to be kind of a talking point, but I think now people are really seeing the true value, which is when you don't need to go in to your data center, when you don't need to VPN in, when you don't need to figure out all the rest of this architecture. Well, when people are moving enormous amounts of data, and buying so much VDI, and deploying all these work-from-home modules to, sort of, protect their infrastructure, and create and environment that works for the current conditions, the last thing they have to do is put themselves at risk for the backup. I think because this is purpose-built, because it's a true service, because it's a natural extension, really, of the cloud provider they've chosen, or multiple, I think we make that really, really easy for customers, and we're very proud of the work we've done on that front. >> All right, Simon, just want to give you the opportunity. You know, what kind of feedback have you had from customers over the last couple of weeks, specifically? You talked about how important Azure was for them, of course, prior to this announcement, but just anecdotally, we'd love to hear just viewpoints as to customers you're talking and working with in these challenging times. >> Sure, sure, so first of all, everybody's hard pressed. I mean, there's a crunch everywhere. You know, people are feeling this sort of potential for a really, really systemic downturn into the economy, but at the same time, there were really urgent needs in terms of acquiring mission-critical infrastructure to support the move to work from home. And I think that's caused massive shifts in the way people are thinking about purchasing technology, and specifically infrastructure technology in the marketplace. People truly want services now. You know, before it was something that maybe drove the valuation of a company, et cetera, et cetera, but now people are saying, "Hey, it's nothing to do with that at all. "I just want a service that I can scale up, "and I can scale down. "I want it now, I want it fast, and I want it simple." So I think anything that's natively integrated, and is acting as a SaaS, true SaaS offering, has a real advantage in today's marketplace. I think the second thing is, that as customers are moving in droves to VDI, you know, I think there's a lot of talk right now about whether it's ever going to move 100% back. I think as people are discovering how effective and powerful we can be as we work from home, I mean, Stu, look at us right now having this very conversation, I think it's amazing what we're able to achieve with the technology that's out there, and I think that's really reduced the panic, and I think it's something that people aren't talking about. That there's such, imagine what the panic would have been if we didn't have Zoom, if we weren't able to do a GoToMeeting, if we weren't able to log in with a VPN and access our infrastructure. I mean, the entire world would have shut down like this. Now there's arguments being made that it may still shut down, et cetera, but you know we have at least delayed that process. I think we've created a lot of support for the economy and the environment through all of the technology that the marketplace is presenting to customers. And I think the next step in that is making sure that we recognize a couple of things. You know, we're seeing, again, a huge rise in ransomware attacks. There are many, many bad actors out there looking to exploit and take advantage of this situation, which is why I say you don't need to buy our product, but please, if you've got Azure, go and turn on the backup. Well, why wouldn't you? Protect your data, make sure it's recoverable. God forbid anything bad happens, or you do get attacked, make sure you can get that data back from a third party. Make sure it's really easy to recover. Make sure all your mission-critical applications and databases are supported. And I think if we do those things, and we work together to protect our customers, and for just a very short period of time, really don't worry so much about how much money we're going to make off of them, but think about how to protect them, truly, I think that's where the value is, and I think that's how we as human beings, can sort of do a better job of protecting each other. >> All right, well, Simon, thank you so much for all the updates. Happy World Backup Day. You know, I definitely look forward to chatting with you soon, and thanks for joining, and please be safe. >> Stu, always a pleasure. Please stay healthy, as well, take care. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, and you've been watching theCUBE here with some of our remote interviews. Check out thecube.net for everything online, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat digital music)

from Las Vegas it's the queue covering VMworld 2018 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners welcome back to the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas everybody you're watching the cube the leader and live tech coverage my name is Dave Volante I'm here with my co-host Peter Burroughs Peter great to be working with you we haven't done much this week but I'm really excited to put a great week despite that it's been a great week this day three of our wall-to-wall coverage last year at vmworld one of the biggest hottest trends was data protection same thing this year a lot of buzz a lot of hype a lot of parties Rio Barrett is here so the vice president of product marketing for the data protection division of Dell EMC welcome great to see you again great to be here brian linden is here he is the IT Directorate Melanson Heath out of Austin as well Brian thanks very much for coming on thanks for having me so Rio I mean we talked and I have talked about this yeah what's going on in data protection I mean VMworld it's not it's become the hottest topic absolutely seeing you guys some of the VC funded startups or trying to duke it out throwing big parties all right you guys got all the customers everybody wants them you're fighting like crazy cloud has now come in what's your take what's going on that's really exciting I mean data protection I started out my career in data protection you know but move forward and back in data protection is hotter than ever it's it's great and I think it has to do with the trends that are happening out in the market the big mega trends that are happening we talked about distribution you know data moving out of the data center where the four walls are no longer defining how you secure something so security recoverability are becoming really critical as you talk about edge and data moving to the edge on to cloud computing and multi cloud computing I think it's going to be one of those frontiers that the enterprise still wants to have a reign over how do I recover my data no matter where it's sitting and how do I get it back and how do I secure it so it's very exciting so Brian talked about Melanson heath set it up the company you know tax accounting Boston based in New England etc your and really want to understand the drivers in IT but start with the company please yes lesson Heath is a top-10 accounting regional accounting firm in New England we have offices in Massachusetts New Hampshire and Maine we service other clients in Vermont etc a large portion of our focus is on auditing we do a lot of misrata it's school districts town cities we also do traditional tax accounting there's been advisory the full gamut of accounting professional services you run IT yes okay what are the big drivers in your business and how are they forcing you to sort of rethink the way in which you generally approach IT but specifically approach data protection over the years we've you know we've gone from the traditional everything on premise to moving things to the cloud whether it's a SAS provider or or whatever so we really need to be able to secure our data no matter where it is whether it's in the cloud game it'll have a backup locally between our various offices etc and uptime is paramount we have deadlines that don't don't shift the IRS does not care if we have a storm or we have something wrong with our building we have our professionals have hard deadlines so I one of my tasks is to make sure that no matter what happens we have a timely backup plan and I need to be able to focus on the business and not be focusing on worrying about the backup and data protection so obviously the other part that equation is the recovery plan so really you know we this is our ninth year of the cube and at the time you know when we first started it was a lot of talk about re-architecting backup to handle the the the V blender if you will and the lack of resources now all the conversation Brian just mentioned is cloud so how are you guys - that from a product standpoint oh my god yeah this has been a big topic of conversation I think one of the areas where we really differentiated you know one of the areas that Brian is in the middle of his mid-market and we see a big propensity for an appetite for cloud from an agility standpoint from time to respond standpoint and one of the biggest trends and we heard about it at yesterday's keynote as well is cloud as a disaster recovery site especially for customers that might not have a secondary site so we recently introduced a product called the DP 4400 Brian's actually the first customer to purchase the product so in July we announced it one of the key differentiation of that product is the ease of which customers can now access cloud you know whether it's for a long term retention or cloud disaster recovery without needing any additional hardware literally it's at the fingertips you manage it exactly the way you would you can manage it directly from your VMware operational tools and have access to cloud as a secondary site whether it's for dr or long term retention so that's one of the ways for mid market customers we're really bringing that cloud and bringing it at their fingertips from a recoverability standpoint and then we've done some exciting announcements Beth was here with yang-ming talking about some of the innovations that we've been delivering in cloud whether you're a service provider whether you're a big enterprise across our portfolio so I think we have that's by far one of our key differentiations and better together stories with VMware so I'm really fascinated Brian about some of the things are doing let me let me throw a thesis at you and Andrea you've probably heard this we tend to think that there's a difference between business and digital business and that difference is the degree to which a digital business uses data as an asset in many respects if you start thinking in those terms then data protection for the new world is not just the technical data is protecting your digital business now if you think about an accounting we normally associate accounting with manual processes manual activities but there's a lot more data being generated by your clients by your by the people that are providing the services how is this relationship between data the value of your business and the value of your service is driving you to adopt these new classes of solutions for millions and Heath we are almost completely paperless so all of our data all of our work product goes through technology so we need to you know it's it's imperative that we be protected if servers go down if the site goes down our professionals don't do work and time is money so you know it first is the old thinking of having paper storage or just having local backups if there's a significant enough then we can leverage the cloud and be able to disperse our staff to places where they can sit down with a computer and do work additionally like you said we're collecting a lot more data you know our various software processes are using more machine learning to get more out of that data so having that protected as it expands is critical so increasingly the services that you're providing to your clients are themselves becoming more digital as well that's correct yes so as you think about where this ends up would you characterize yourself as especially interested in the DP 4400 and the set of services that around that as facilitating that process are you going to be able to tell a better story to your business about how they can adopt new practices offer new services etc that are more digital in nature because of this I think so I think having the DP 4400 with its cloud connections will help our our partners our principals become more comfortable with the cloud and and not not fear it they've tended to be you know a little more insular and want to see and feel and you know know that the data is there so you know being able to recover to the cloud or just use the cloud natively is going to be a game-changer for for our firm and our business just add one thing that we've talked about with Brian one of the capabilities with the DP 4400 is the instant access and restore capabilities and we're seeing more of a trend especially in secondary storage platforms much like the ones we're using with DP 4400 we're basically all your data is there right so you're doing your data for recovery your data for disaster recovery for replication is in a place and we're seeing a trend towards wanting to have flash nvme cache to be able to actually do instant access and restore not only for recoverability purposes for app tests and dev type applications and data sharing so that trend has already left the station and even in our mid tier products like DP 4400 well you know targeted specifically for commercial buyers and midsize organizations we're bringing that enterprise class capabilities and making it available to them to be able to leverage not only cloud but also on-premise and your cloud is you all cloud you some cloud you hire hybrid we do have a lot of on-premise we are migrating things over the years to the cloud and that's certainly going to be the trend and is that in effect or in part what's driving you to rethink how you approach data protection or how did that affect your data protection decisions I think having the capacity to touch all types of systems and services is is critical we need to be thinking not what we're doing now but we're gonna do any year five years from now and you know just looking back to the past five years it's a completely different IT environment so ok so I want to translate a little marketing into what it means for the customers but we agree oh when you guys announced with DP 4400 it was simply powerful was kind of attack okay so what is what are you looking for from the standpoint of simplicity and a same question on on on on power simplicity that you know the DP 4400 is a 2-u unit goes right in the rack it's not use of various interconnected components that you have to you know figure out how to connect it's one interface it's extremely simple and quick to deploy you know I have a very lean IT shop we don't have a lot of time a lot of people to be devoting hours and days and weeks to getting a deed protection environment set up our previous solutions we're much more complicated different interfaces always changing interfaces and they didn't really work well I need you know I need to be able to just set it and forget it it's it's an insurance policy is what it is you know when something goes wrong I need to know what's going to happen - from the moment that the disaster is to recognize - when our staff will be able to get back up and working okay and I the DP for 4,400 just makes that extremely simple okay so it's simple not just simpler know that right it's simple example and what about the powerful piece what is it what does that mean the power of having everything in one unit it's one interface you know giving me and my staff the power to do what we need to do without having to have a degree in data protection it's very simple to learn very simple to use it just works and a couple of the things Brian and I talked about earlier was really no one wants to impact production to do data protection write it like you said it's an insurance policy so the performance of the platform is really significant I think performance performance without compromising efficiency because at the end of the day cost is a big consideration especially for midsize organizations when they're buying a solution so I think it's really hey it's simple to use simple to deploy but it's powerful because you can get your stuff done in the you know a lot of times for data protection which is almost zero these days with the efficiency I got also saying really quickly that I would also presume that because every single document is so valuable and so essential power also relates to being able to sustain the organization of that day absolutely absolutely more you know going further into power as we was indicating is the is the performance of the backups the deduplication rate sending things over the over the network to our disaster recovery site very quickly very efficiently we can pull back you know do backups during business hours don't have to throttle it to just the overnight hours which those hours are you know off hours are getting fewer further between because in tax season in particular we have people working seven days a week all day so to send that data it's work needs to go in comp in a compact form doesn't prevent our staff from doing work whenever they want to want and need to be able to do it organizations increasingly focusing on the data data has more value means it's got to be protected in new ways bring in cloud requires new architectures games on is a big market you know thirty billion dollar plus ten when you add it all up rating it on a lot of people want it you're the leader congratulations guys all right thanks very much for coming on the cube Thanks all right keep it right there buddy the cube will be back from VMworld 2018 right after this short break [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> And we are back live here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We're at the Sands this week. Day one of three days of coverage here on the CUBE. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, and this is really kind of the John segment, if you will. Got John Grieco and Jon Siegal with us. John Grieco is the CTO of the University of Vermont Health Network. John, good to see you, sir. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> John W.: You bet, and Jon Siegal, VP of product marketing at Dell EMC. Jon, pleasure to have you aboard as well. >> Glad to be here again. >> Alright, let's talk about the university, if you will. I can imagine health, obviously, critical data. What's your data center environment like and how's cloud playing into that? >> Yeah, right now we are a seven hospital system with seven data centers managed by seven different IT organizations. So the role I have is really how do we take those >> John W.: You still have hair too, by the way. >> I do, but every day it's getting thinner and thinner. And I'm going to be able to tell with these cameras I hear. But what we're trying to do is really start working as one cohesive system. Give the patient the same experience as they travel through our system, and how do we do that with technology? And what we're trying to do is really simplify and standardize everything we do. Consolidate and centralize our data centers. So we're going from a seven data center infrastructure growth to a two data center platform, one in New York and one in Vermont. But most likely over time, pushing as many of our workloads to the cloud. Really creating that triangle, where you have your private cloud that has rigor and resilience with our clinical most critical workloads close to our IT shop, and we leverage a lot of the nontrivial nonvalue add applications into the cloud. >> John, you threw out a term, private cloud. >> Yes. >> Can you help define for us what that means to your organization? >> Absolutely. It's just like a public cloud, like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft Azure, but you're doing it in your local data center itself. So what we're doing at the University of Vermont Health Network is we're trying to make our private cloud that's local in our data centers act and become more of a private cloud look and feel. We understand that many of our users are leveraging the public cloud, even in their home use. So how do we bring some of that into the private data center that we own and manage, but give our users the look and feel of that public cloud? >> Alright, Jon Siegal, you chuckled a little bit when I said private cloud. It's one of those things we've debated for awhile. We don't need to get into semantics, but underneath Dell EMC provides some of the infrastructure, the platform for those. Maybe give us a little bit of insight as to what are doing there. >> Yeah, as you know, as we've talked about before, cloud is an operating model, right? Not a place. And I think John, and what he's done at the University of Vermont Health Network, really I think shows that. And it takes a change agent, by the way, too, not just technology to do that, I think. You know, he's making it sound easy, but he can tell us a little bit how he's done that. But it's a combination of technology, how you modernize the infrastructure, but also, what are you doing to actually transform that organization to deliver IT as a service. Right, because it's not just a plug and play. You just, you know, plug in a new infrastructure product line and then boom, it works, right? It's not that simple. >> Absolutely. We want to really put a lot of our IT talent into what I call above the value line. In my business, it's closer to the bedside. The new IT is really enabling the business to provide, in my business, better care. So how do we get them out of the data center per se and into the business to enable what they do each and every day? The way we do that is really standardizing on a ruthless infrastructure like Block, Rack, and Rail, and on top of that, automating everything we do within IT from a workflow perspective. >> Give me an example, a real world example. 'Cause you're talking about the patient experience. You have seven hospitals, seven data centers, seven sets of patients, if you will. But are you talking about as people migrate from one healthcare facility to another, something's not going with them or what exactly are you trying to improve in terms of real life care for people that this migration's going to let you facilitate? >> Absolutely. On one of our converged platforms, we're running a vendor neutral archive, and it's going to allow our patients, anytime we have them scan an image, it immediately goes to a central repository where any one of our hospitals can then take a look at that image. And what you're going to see over time is specializing our seven hospitals into certain treatments. So if we have a radiology department that we want to spend send some of our patients to, we want to make sure that they have the data and are reading that data before the patient's there. So the ability to take the image once and read the image while our patient is in transit to get that care. So when they arrive at that hospital, we are ready to take on that patient and immediately provide them the care they're there for. Running on one platform, sharing that platform across our seven hospital system. >> And so what currently happens? What's the situation now for a patient? >> Right now a patient would get an image at one hospital, travel to the other hospital. The image would not be there. We would then retake another image at that hospital, and go through the same exercise. So not only is the patient there when they don't want to, but we're going through repetitive questions and answering. >> John W.: Same song and dance. >> And the outcome is a negative patient experience, which we're avoiding through IT. >> You threw out Blocks, Rails, and Racks. I recognize those as the Dell EMC products. What does hyper converged infrastructure, converged infrastructure, you know, how does that impact what you're doing? And if I saw right, you use some of each, so how do you sort that out? You know, how do you integrate those pieces together? >> Really what drives is the requirements of the applications you're managing. So we do a deep dive with the applications we take in and we decide, based on the requirements of that application, which of those three platforms run the best. What I've seen is a lot of our critical mission, critical have to keep up 24/7 365 workloads, we are leveraging the VX Block for a lot of that. We're seeing a lot of those medium to low-end workloads on Rack or Rail, where we have the ability to really scale out quick and dynamically with those smaller type applications that are mini in size, where we're trying to standardize with our clinical ones more on our Block. So really the application requirement drives where that application sits in our environment. >> Alright, so Jon, how do customers like John you know manage that, this environment then? We want things to get simpler and, you know, even if they've got some various products of yours, how do we pull them all together? >> Well, as you know, I think the promise of converge and hyper converge is to simplify IT, right? And I think this is what you're seeing here, so. A lot of it is automating everything, or at least helping to really simplify everything from deployment, right, to managing the entire infrastructure as one. As well as sustaining it and life cycle managing it as one as well, right? And actually simplifying the upgrade path because I think that's, that can be the most time consuming thing, right? But that's the promise of converged infrastructure. Seven or eight years ago when we came out with VX Block or V Block at the time, it was about, how do we help customers like you get out of the infrastructure business day to day, the mundane business if you will? So you can spend more time, really upleveling your staff to do other more business critical and mission critical tasks. Is that fair? >> It is. We have to. I think we're being asked to move the needle within the business. As Michael Dell says, the business strategy really is the IT strategy. And for that to happen, we really have to bring our IT talent up the stack into where it's really enabling the business. And that's usually at that application layer, not at that infrastructure. We want to leverage our partners, like Dell Technologies, and their technology, to really run the business for us while our IT is more in the transfer informative, innovative and growth of that business. >> Alright. So I loved that you started out with seven data centers and the seven and seven and seven. What's the after state? You know, how does your IT team, you know, look at your operations and your technology? >> What we're doing is we're trying to create one shared service model. Even though we'll have people sitting at the seven hospitals, we are all working in unison. We're all leveraging the same workflows, the same technology, the same skill set. So in essence, we become a dynamic IT shop that I can leverage wherever there's a need. I can take IT personnel and have them move to another and it's the same look and feel. Just like the experience we want to give our users, the same look and feel as they travel, we want to do the same for IT. One logical shared service vision of a department that offers services to our hospitals that they consume, all like for like. >> And Jon just touched on this. He was talking about the mundane, right? And removing that and letting you basically to get a little more creative, but I think take on a different set of challenges. So how do you work with your staff in order to get them to change that mindset so that they can shift? Because it's not just you at the top, you've got to plant this vision, right, for people. So I'm taking this away from you, this is what I do. But now we're going to take what you know and we're going to let you do something else. But you got to get 'em there. So for people maybe watching that share that challenge, maybe, what would you say to them about how you've done that? >> Well as Jon mentioned, you need a change agent, you need a champion, most likely at the senior level, that's going to really ride through this journey, through the ebbs and flows of the challenges you have to deal with. And when you look at people, process, technology, as you mentioned, changing the mind of a person is probably the hardest thing to do of the three. But what we're trying to do is really change one mind at a time. If I can change one mind at a time persistently as a champion of where we're going, and answer the why and the awareness and the desire of someone wanting to go on that journey with us, on behalf of that patient, each and every day is how we're going to do it. Case by case, opportunity by opportunity, mind by mind. We will eventually get them to look at what we're doing and understand this is where I want IT to be. That's how we're going to do it at the University. >> I think the University of Vermont has the right guy for the job. >> Thank you. >> John, thank you for being, John, and Jon, both of you. Thank you for being with us here. We appreciate the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Yeah, and good luck down the road. Well that's it, wrapping up our coverage here on the CUBE. Thanks for joining us for day one. We are back tomorrow. Days two and three, live here at the Sands. Until then, for Stu Miniman and the rest of our CUBE crew, have a good night. (upbeat music)

(energetic electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE! Covering POLYCON18, brought to you by Polymath. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is exclusive live CUBE coverage here in the Bahamas for POLYCON18, it's a crypto event. Just talking economics. It's all the players in the space really discussing the future. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest, Bill Tai, friend, Facebook friend, industry legend, venture capitalist, kite surfer. His Twitter handle is @kitevc. Follow him. He's also involved in Bitfury and a lot of Bitcoin-related activities. Been a mentor to others. Great to have you, Bill. >> Thank you, John. I really appreciate you having me on the show. >> You tweeted in 2010, "This Bitcoin thing is interesting. "Check out this white paper." Can? >> Yeah, that was a >> Seminal moment. >> You know, back then I didn't know it would be, maybe a seminal moment. I was just lonely. (laughing) So, and the back story there, a very good friend of mine is Philip Rosedale, and he had approached me when he was starting a site called Second Life, where you basically create a digital avatar, maybe of yourself, maybe not, and you have this kind of, you know, world where you have people in an unstructured environment. And in the very early days of Second Life, when people were kind of just milling about, I said to Philip, I said, "Hey, Philip. "You know, maybe we should create a currency." I said, you know like, "If you think about it. "Think about what is Las Vegas? "Las Vegas is this pile of sand "but there is this metropolis on it. "How did that happen?" I said, "You know, if you took ten people, "sat them in a circle, and you put one poker chip "in the system, and said 'Pass it to the right,' "and everybody did that a million times a year. "Everybody would have a million dollars of income. "And then you could take chunks off "and build a casino, and build a resort, "and you'd have Las Vegas." So I said, "Let's do that." And so the Linden dollar was born. And so, soon, there was this thriving economy in Second Life that just, it was quite amazing to see. And so, when Bitcoin came out in 2009, as soon as I heard about it, I wanted to see what it was. So I went to the site and I read the paper, and it just seemed really cool. And so I started to play with it a little bit, and by 2010, I just thought it was really cool, but no one else had seen it. >> Yeah. >> So I took to Twitter to say, (laughing) "Is anyone out there "using this P to P digital currency?" You know, and >> It's funny. Our first web, You know, I started SiliconANGLE in 2009. David and I partnered in 2010. Our first website, the developer didn't want PayPal. He wanted Bitcoin. It was 22 cents, I think, at the time and we used the site for about half a year, and then we changed it and went back paid fiat. But if you think about where these come from, you brought up Second Life. Okay, online virtual world, really ahead of its time, but really set the stage for what we're seeing now. Gaming people who know virtual currencies, thrive on crypto. >> Yeah. Yes. >> So I'd like to get your perspective. Because, I know you've done a lot of investing in mobile and gaming, and what not. Where does that cross over? Because there's been a lot of virtual currencies going on in games. >> Yes. >> For a long, long time. >> Yes. >> How is that influencing and impacting this industry? >> Well, you know it's, I guess you have to ask, when you ask, you know, where does the real and where does the digital, like do they cross? And what are they? What is currency? Is the U.S. dollar real, right? And actually, let me pause for a second and reach down to my phone, because did you see a tweet today from Sheila Bair? I have to read this. Okay, so I just saw a tweet from @zerohedge earlier today. Sheila Bair, on Bitcoin, Quote, "I don't think we should ban it. "The green bills in your pocket don't have "an intrinsic value either." >> Well, look, the government wants to get rid of paper money. The people want to get rid of paper money. Why not? >> What is it really? Right? I mean so >> Backed by the U.S. military maybe, I don't know, I mean what >> What is it? >> What is it? Right. >> That's a good question. >> So I don't really see a difference. You know, they're kind of the same thing. You know, it's just something that people believe in, as the embodiment of value exchange. Whatever it is. So if it's a green piece of paper, or it's not. If it's shell, if it's a pebble. There is a fascinating book that you can read called The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. He's at Stanford now at the Hoover Institute, but he got widely known after the great financial crisis unfolded. He basically wrote a book called The Ascent of Money which tracks the history of value exchange across civilized communities, for thousands of years, from pebbles to shells, to feathers, to credit, to default swaps. And coined the term "Cimerica," which is sort of the interdependence of the cash flow. And what became apparent to me when I read that, was that the world of ICOs is actually no different than anything we've experienced in civilized humanity. You know, if you think about, even in the United States, in the 1800s, at one time there were over 200 currencies circulating at the same time. If you think about the formation of the United States as colonies, a bunch of guys get off the boats. They draw lines around the forest. Here's Connecticut, here's Vermont, here's New York, here's Virginia. Let's do an ICO. They all did an ICO. If you think about it, they created their own unit of currency per their community and geography, no different than what's happening today. >> When Lincoln was shot, there was a five dollar confederate bill in his wallet, right? I mean, the confederates had their own money. >> Yeah, and also you brought a point up in the conference you were in in Dubai, which I thought was really intriguing, and provocative, but also kind of real. The Oil Dollar Association post-World War II, >> Yeah >> Essentially wasn't actually securitizing oil That was an ICO. >> It was the tokenization of oil, right. Yeah, so, you know, the modern currency system that we have today, that is commonly known as the Petrodollar, so it's actually a relatively recent phenomenon. So if you think about, of course, the quote "U.S. dollar" was around a little bit longer than 1944, but it was really at Brett Woods that the dollar had its sort of birth to become the world's standard currency. And, you know, this is maybe a little bit of an over-simplification, but think about the picture after World War II. So, you basically have every major productive economy have war, destroy themselves. The U.S. enters late, finishes it all off completely, and you basically have 100 million people milling about. A little bit like Second Life, right? So, what do you do? Got to make them productive. Create a currency, set of currencies. So for every community of interest, like every token community of interest, you say, "Well, here's a lira, here's a franc, "Here's a pound, here's a mark. "Let's take gold, "reference the dollar to gold, and reference "every one of these currencies against the dollar. "Gentlemen, start your engines." Right? >> There you go. >> So how is that different than an ICO? Okay, so that was fixed to gold for a long time until people started to game it. And when the French accumulated a lot of dollars and they realized, whoa, there's more dollars than there is gold, I'm just going to go cash all this in. So they literally came over to take all the gold, and then the president took it off the gold standard. >> Dave Vellante: That's right. >> So it had to couple with something. So what it the utility token that that became? That became referenced to petroleum because the U.S. had basically forced everybody in the Middle East to accept dollars as payment and what that did was it created the dollar as a storage of energy. So you could basically take a token of oil and, as a separate nation, you could store that through your trade, if you had sort of a surplus, and you provided yourself energy security. >> Well, most currencies, right, historically have had a pretty short shelf life. Presumably the same will be true in the Blockchain world. >> Don't know. >> The crypto world. >> Yeah, it's, if you look at the history of humans over six million years, and it's arguable it's at four or six, or whatever it is, you're right. Like there have always been multiple currencies all the time. And very rarely have they ever become sort of like super-dominating currencies. That is also a very recent phenomena. I think, driven by the industrial revolution, and a combination of the Petrodollar and scale economics and manufacturing. So, so that >> Yeah, and overwhelmingly here, at this event, people feel like security tokens, as an asset class, are going to vastly overtake utility tokens. >> You know, actually, securities are a whole, I mean regular securities, (laughing) that's an interesting subject altogether. Right, okay, so there was a time, in my lifetime, when I was a securities analyst at Alex Brown in the '80s, and in that period of time, everything traded at ten times earnings, right? So you had a barometer for, a stock should be valued at this, because is should have a PE of actual real earnings. >> Dave Vellante: Independent of its growth or anything else, right? >> Yes, and if it grew, you had a PEG ratio, so you'd have a little bit higher growth, and so a little higher PE, but what's happened to securities over time, of that ilk, okay, you had to get these companies profitable to get them public in that era, and then over time the sort of like network effects have come in, and communities of interest have formed around companies. So, and the structure of securities has moved from give me something with earnings multiply it by a number to get the value, to give me a share of something that has no voting rights and no earnings. Does that sound like a token? That's Snapchat, right? (laughing) >> So you literally have, you know, Google, Facebook, all these companies now issue shares that don't have the characteristics of equity shares. They don't vote. What are they now, right? So tokenization is sort of a natural extension of that. >> Dave Vellante: Do you see that as a >> They don't have dividends either >> You see that as a fundamental shift in the value equation, the perceived value equation? Both? Is it sustainable? >> I think it's basically, so, you know, I go back and forth on this, because is it a trend line or is it a return in the past? Right? So what is a confederate dollar that was in Abraham Lincoln's pocket? It's a belief. So what is a share of Snapchat? It's a belief. It doesn't have earnings >> John Furrier: And a token is a belief. >> Right. >> But the trend is securing something, right? So the trend we're seeing is, obviously the ruling, first of all the ruling in Switzerland was interesting. You now have a trading so an asset, so security, asset, and then trading. So they kind of went a little bit deeper, which I think is helpful. >> Yeah. >> For the community. But what are they securing? So the trend, as we see, is percentage of revenue, non dilutive and equity in the classic sense, so kind of a token. And then some sort of either buyback options, people are doing things like that. Do you see patterns like that? What are you seeing for? >> Well. >> I mean a security token makes sense. It's all credited. The paperwork's known. >> Yeah, so, you know, it feels like, so some people refer to sort of Bitcoin as digital gold, you know, and in that sense, like gold is a commodity but is the root of securities, you know, whether it's gold ETF's or something, because you perceive a limited supply, and you perceive a storage of value, so that is where I think Bitcoin sits. But then I think this whole other category of utility tokens, that may be considered security tokens by definition of law, that resembles the petrodollar. And as we were talking about earlier, you know gold used to represent or a dollar used to represent a share of gold, but it didn't anymore. So what was underpinning it? It was basically, in my opinion, the ability for that token to have utility as an instrument to purchase oil for your energy security. And so, I think that's kind of where the utility tokens are today. >> You're a leader in the industry, and you're well-known. Communities need to thrive. And factions form, curriencies form, and can be very productive, and also can be counterproductive. >> Yeah. >> So what is the unwritten rules that you guys are putting forth. Are people meeting? Are you talking? And sometimes, as people make money, which a lot of people are making a lot of money right now. I mean, for some people, it's the first time. Didn't have money, make money. You know, egos kind of come in. So all of these are normal things. But again, this is a societal community dynamic, >> Yes. >> But super important. Institutional investors are coming in. >> Right. >> Big money. This isn't Burning Man. This isn't. Burning Man's cool, but you can't model this industry after Burning Man. Maybe you could. I don't know. What is your take? >> Well, you know, it's, I think that the guiding principle really needs to be looking out for the greater good, because I think that is the issue that everyone is trying to solve for. And it's not just endemic to Bitcoin and Blockchain. It's a societal issue that's been with us since the creation of civilization. And I don't know how to solve for that, but I think you need people to stand up and just make sure that people are thinking about that all the time. You know, and I think, over my career, I think I started as kind of like a geek hacker, sitting in the back of the room, working on little microchips and building stuff, and I still do that on weekends sometimes, but, you know, for whatever reason, I've been thrust into this role now where I do have a set of communities of interest that started actually around kiteboarding, but it became sort of a larger community around entrepreneurship. And we've actually, I have a 501(c)(3) that supports ocean causes and entrepreneurial things, and it's called ACTAI Global, and we have a couple value statements. We actually, we're codifying it, so we actually have a little pin, you know the ACTAI stands for Athletes, Conservationists, Technologists, Artists and Innovators, and all of us collectively, we combine our energy to work on causes. Some of the things that we support are around ocean conservation and the preservation of ecosystems, but we also work on a lot of other entrepreneurial efforts to help each other. But the thing that I've realized with our group is we've been very productive as a community, and you see a lot of companies that are born in our community, funded in our community, like, you know, whether it's Canva or Zoom, or any number of projects that turn into community-based companies because the group of people, they think and they stand for something greater than themselves. So that's kind of one principle. It's sort of like, how do you, how do you place your values as something to support the greater community, and that's something that I think, if everybody would just think about that a little bit, and stand for something greater than themselves, the world would be a better place. And on that note, the second ethos that we operate to is that we strive to leave every person or place we touch better than before we touched it. So when you see us like kiting at a beach, you'll see us picking up garbage, too. You know? We don't go someplace without trying to improve it a little bit. And I think we help each other on the companies, too. And I think the last thing that people really should try to do, everybody in this world of technology, has a little bit of a superpower, whatever that is. You know, they wouldn't be doing the things that they're doing if they weren't totally insanely focused on a piece of technology. They know something that other people don't. And if everybody would just try a little bit to use the powers the universe has granted them, to empower others, to unlock other people, the world would be a better place. So I think, you know, I think all of these factions, if we could just get people to stand for something greater than themselves, work to make people and places better off than before they touched them, and empower other people, I think we'll have some great outcomes. >> You know, empathy, empathy is a wonderful thing. And also you mentioned, know your neighbor. You know, that's a big thing. We're doing our part here in theCUBE, bringing our mission content. Bill, been great to have you on. And we'll get that clip out on the network about your mission. Great stuff. >> Thank you, thanks. >> And great to see you >> It's an awesome philosophy. >> be successful, you're a great leader. People look up to you, and certainly we're glad to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Hey, more live coverage after this short break here on theCUBE in the Bahamas for crypto currency, token economics, POLYCON18. We'll be back with more after this short break.

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special presentation, The Future of Converged Infrastructure, my name is David Vellante, and I'll be your host, for this event where the focus is on Dell EMC's converged infrastructure announcement. Nearly a decade ago, modern converged infrastructure really came to the floor in the marketplace, and what you had is compute, storage, and network brought together in a single managed entity. And when you talk to IT people, the impact was roughly a 30 to 50% total cost of ownership reduction, really depending on a number of factors. How much virtualization they had achieved, how complex their existing processees were, how much they could save on database and other software licenses and maintenance, but roughly that 30 to 50% range. Fast forward to 2018 and you're looking at a multibillion dollar market for converged infrastructure. Jeff Boudreau is here, he's the President of the Dell EMC Storage Division, Jeff thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. So we're going to set up this announcement let me go through the agenda. Jeff and I are going to give an overview of the announcement and then we're going to go to Trey Layton, who's the Chief Technology Officer of the converged infrastructure group at Dell EMC. He's going to focus on the architecture, and some of the announcement details. And then, we're going to go to Cisco Live to a pre-recorded session that we did in Barcelona, and get the Cisco perspective, and then Jeff and I will come back to wrap it up. We also, you might notice we have a crowd chat going on, so underneath this video stream you can ask questions, you got to log in with LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, I prefer Twitter, kind of an ask me anything crowd chat. We have analysts on, Stu Miniman is hosting that call. We're going to talk about what this announcement is all about, what the customer issues are that are being addressed by this announcement. So Jeff, let's get into it. From your perspective, what's the state of converged infrastructure today? >> Great question. I'm really bullish on CI, in regards to what converged infrastructure and kind of the way the market's going. We see continued interest in the growth of the market of our customers. Driven by the need for simplicity, agility, elasticity of those on-prem resources. Dell EMC pioneered the CI market several years ago, with the simple premise of simplify IT, and our focus and commitment to our customers has not changed of simplifying IT. As our customers continue to seek for new ways to simplify and consolidate infrastructure, we expect more and more of our customers to embrace CI, as a fast and easy way to modernize their infrastructure, and transform IT. >> You talk about transformation, we do a lot of events, and everybody's talking about digital transformation, and IT transformation, what role does converged infrastructure play in those types of transformations, maybe you could give us an example? >> Sure, so first I'd say our results speak for themselves. As I said we pioneered the CI industry, as the market leader, we enabled thousands of customers worldwide to drive business transformation and digital transformation. And when I speak to customers specifically, converged infrastructure is not just about the infrastructure, it's about the operating model, and how they simplify IT. I'd say two of the biggest areas of impact that customers highlight to me, are really about the acceleration of application delivery, and then the other big one is around the increase in operational efficiencies allowing customers to free up resources, to reinvest however they see fit. >> Now since the early days of converged infrastructure Cisco has been a big partner of yours, you guys were kind of quasi-exclusive for awhile, they went out and sought other partners, you went out and sought other partners, a lot of people have questions about that relationship, what's your perspective on that relationship. >> So our partnership with Cisco is strong as ever. We're proud of this category we've created together. We've been on this journey for a long time we've been working together, and that partnership will continue as we go forward. In full transparency there are of course some topics where we disagree, just like any normal relationship we have disagreements, an example of that would be HCI, but in the CI space our partnership is as strong as ever. We'll have thousands of customers between the two of us, that we will continue to invest and innovate together on. And I think later in this broadcast you're going to hear directly from Cisco on that, so we're both doubling down on the partnership, and we're both committed to CI. >> I want to ask you about leadership generally, and then specifically as it relates to converged infrastructure and hyper converged. My question is this, hyper converged is booming, it's a high growth market. I sometimes joke that Dell EMC is now your leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrants, 101 Gartner Magic Quadrants out of the 99. They're just leading everything and I think both the CI and the HCI categories, what's your take, is CI still relevant? >> First I'd say it's great to come from a leadership position so I thank you for bringing that up, I think it's really important. As Micheal talks about being the essential infrastructure company, that's huge for us as Dell Technologies, so we're really proud of that and we want to lean into that strength. Now on HCI vs CI, to me it's an AND world. Everybody wants to get stock that's in either or, to me it's about the AND story. All our customers are going on a journey, in regards to how they transform their businesses. But at the end of the day, if I took my macro view, and took a step back, it's about the data. The data's the critical asset. The good news for me and for our team is data always continues to grow, and is growing at an amazing rate. And as that critical asset, customers are really kind of thinking about a modern data strategy as they drive foreword. And as part of that, they're looking at how to store, protect, secure, analyze, move that data, really unleashing that data to provide value back to their businesses. So with all of that, not all data is going to be created equal, as part of that, as they build out those strategies, it's going to be a journey, in regards to how they do it. And if that's software defined, vs purpose built arrays, vs converged, or hyper converged, or even cloud, those deployment models, we, Dell EMC, and Dell Technologies want to be that strategic partner, that trusted advisor to help them on that journey. >> Alright Jeff, thanks for helping me with the setup. I want to ask you to hang around a little bit. >> Jeff: Sure. >> We're going to go to a video, and then we're going to bring back Trey Layton, talk about the architecture so keep it right there, we'll be right back. >> Announcer: Dell EMC has long been number one in converged infrastructure, providing technology that simplifies all aspects of IT, and enables you to achieve better business outcomes, faster, and we continue to lead through constant innovation. Introducing, the VxBlock System 1000, the next generation of converged infrastructure from Dell EMC. Featuring enhanced life cycle management, and a broad choice of technologies, to support a vast array of applications and resources. From general purpose to mission critical, big data to specialized workloads, VxBlock 1000 is the industry's first converged infrastructure system, with the flexible data services, power, and capacity to handle all data center workloads, giving you the ultimate in business agility, data center efficiency, and operational simplicity. Including best-of-breed storage and data protection from Dell EMC, and computer networking from Cisco. (orchestral music) Converged in one system, these technologies enable you to flexibly adapt resources to your evolving application's needs, pool resources to maximize utilization and increase ROI, deliver a turnkey system in lifecycle assurance experience, that frees you to focus on innovation. Four times storage types, two times compute types, and six times faster updates, and VME ready, and future proof for extreme performance. VxBlock 1000, the number one in converged now all-in-one system. Learn more about Dell EMC VxBlock 1000, at DellEMC.com/VxBlock. >> We're back with Trey Layton who's the Senior Vice President and CTO of converged at Dell EMC. Trey it's always a pleasure, good to see you. >> Dave, good to see you as well. >> So we're eight years into Vblock, take us back to the converged infrastructure early days, what problems were you trying to solve with CI. >> Well one of the problems with IT in general is it's been hard, and one of the reasons why it's been hard is all the variability that customers consume. And how do you integrate all that variability in a sustaining manner, to maintain the assets so it can support the business. And, the thing that we've learned is, the original recipe that we had for Vblock, was to go at and solve that very problem. We have referred to that as life cycle. Manage the life cycle services of the biggest inner assets that you're deploying. And we have created some great intellectual property, some great innovation around helping minimize the complexity associated with managing the life cycle of a very complex integration, by way of, one of the largest data center assets that people operate in their environment. >> So you got thousands and thousands of customers telling you life cycle management is critical. They're shifting their labor resource to more strategic activities, is that what's going on? Well there's so much variation and complexity in just maintaining the different integration points, that they're spending an inordinate amount of their time, a lot of nights and weekends, on understanding and figuring out which software combinations, which configuration combinations you need to operate. What we do as an organization, and have done since inception is, we manage that complexity for them. We delivery them an outcome based architecture that is pre-integrated, and we sustain that integration over it's life, so they spend less time doing that, and letting the experts who actually build the components focus on maintaining those integrations. >> So as an analyst I always looked at converged infrastructure as an evolutionary trend, bringing together storage, servers, networking, bespoke components. So my question is, where's the innovation underneath converged infrastructure. >> So I would say the innovation is in two areas. We're blessed with a lot of technology innovations that come from our partner, and our own companies, Dell EMC and Cisco. Cisco produces wonderful innovations in the space of networking compute, in the context of Vblock. Dell EMC, storage innovations, data protection, et cetera. We harmonize all of these very complex integrations in a manner where an organization can put those advanced integrations into solving business problems immediately. So there's two vectors of innovation. There are the technology components that we are acquiring, to solve business problems, and there's the method at which we integrate them, to get to the business of solving problems. >> Okay, let's get into the announcement. What are you announcing, what's new, why should we care. >> We are announcing the VxBlock 1000, and the interesting thing about Vblocks over the years, is they have been individual system architectures. So a compute technology, integrated with a particular storage architecture, would produce a model of Vblock. With VxBlock 1000, we're actually introducing an architecture that provides a full gamut of array optionality for customers. Both blade and rack server options, for customers on the UCS compute side, and before we would integrate data protection technologies as an extension or an add-on into the architecture, data protection is native to the offer. In addition to that, unstructured data storage. So being able to include unstructured data into the architecture as one singular architecture, as opposed to buying individualized systems. >> Okay, so you're just further simplifying the underlying infrastructure which is going to save me even more time? >> Producing a standard which can adapt to virtually any use case that a customer has in a data center environment. Giving them the ability to expand and grow that architecture, as their workload dictates, in their environment, as opposed to buying a system to accommodate one workload, buying another system to accommodate another workload, this is kind of breaking the barriers of traditional CI, and moving it foreword so that we can create an adaptive architecture, that can accommodate not only the technologies available today, but the technologies on the horizon tomorrow. >> Okay so it's workload diversity, which means greater asset leverage from that underlying infrastructure. >> Trey: Absolutely. >> Can you give us some examples, how do you envision customers using this? >> So I would talk specifically about customers that we have today. And when they deploy, or have deployed Vblocks in the past. We've done wonderful by building architectures that accommodate, or they're tailor made for certain types of workloads. And so a customer environment would end up acquiring a Vblock model 700, to accommodate an SAP workload for example. They would acquire a Vblock 300, or 500 to accommodate a VDI workload. And then as those workloads would grow, they would grow those individualized systems. What it did was, it created islands of stranded resource capacities. Vblock 1000 is about bringing all those capabilities into a singular architecture, where you can grow the resources based on pools. And so as your work load shifts in your environment, you can reallocate resources to accommodate the needs of that workload, as opposed to worrying about stranded capacity in the architecture. >> Okay where do you go from here with the architecture, can you share with us, to the extent that you can, a little roadmap, give us a vision as to how you see this playing out over the next several years. >> Well, one of the reasons why we did this was to simplify, and make it easier to operate, these very complex architectures that everyone's consuming around the world. Vblock has always been about simplifying complex technologies in the data center. There are a lot of innovations on the horizon in VME, for example, next generation compute platforms. There are new generation fabric services, that are emerging. VxBlock 1000 is the place at which you will see all of these technologies introduced, and our customers won't have to wait on new models of Vblock to consume those technologies, they will be resident in them upon their availability to the market. >> The buzz word from the vendor community is future proof, but your saying, you'll be able to, if you buy today, you'll be able to bring in things like NVME and these new technologies down the road. >> The architecture inherently supports the idea of adapting to new technologies as they emerge, and will consume those integrations, as a part of the architectural standard footprint, for the life of the architecture. >> Alright excellent Trey, thanks very much for that overview. Cisco obviously a huge partner of yours, with this whole initiative, many many years. A lot of people have questioned where that goes, so we have a segment from Cisco Live, Stu Miniman is out there, let's break to Stu, then we'll come back and pick it up from there. Thanks for watching. >> Thanks Dave, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at Cisco Live 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. Happy to be joined on the program by Nigel Moulton the EMEA CTO of Dell EMC, and Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks Stu. >> Looking at the long partnership of Dell and Cisco, Siva, talk about the partnership first. >> Absolutely. If you look back in time, when we launched UCS, the very first major partnership we brought, and the converged infrastructure we brought to the market was Vblock, it really set the trend for how customers should consume compute, network, and storage together. And we continue to deliver world class technologies on both sides and the partnership continues to thrive as we see tremendous adoption from our customers. So we are here, several years down, still a very vibrant partnership in trying to get the best product for the customers. >> Nigel would love to get your perspective. >> Siva's right I think I'd add, it defined a market, if you think what true conversion infrastructure is, it's different, and we're going to discuss some more about that as we go through. The UCS fabric is unique, in the way that it ties a network fabric to a compute fabric, and when you bring those technologies together, and converge them, and you have a partnership like Cisco, you have a partnership with us, yeah it's going to be a fantastic result for the market because the market moves on, and I think, VxBlock actually helped us achieve that. >> Alright so Siva we understand there's billions of reasons why Cisco and Dell would want to keep this partnership going, but talk about from an innovation standpoint, there's the new VxBlock 1000, what's new, talk about what's the innovation here. >> Absolutely. If you look at the VxBlock perspective, the 1000 perspective, first of all it simplifies an extremely fast successful product to the next level. It simplifies the storage options, and it provides a seamless way to consume those technologies. From a Cisco perspective, as you know we are in our fifth generation of UCS platform, continues to be a world class platform, leading blade service in the industry. But we also bring the innovation of rack mount servers, as well as 40 gig fabric, larger scale, fiber channel technology as well. As we bring our compute, network, as well as a sound fabric technology together, with world class storage portfolio, and then simplify that for a single pane of glass consumption model. That's absolutely the highest level of innovation you're going to find. >> Nigel, I think back in the early days the joke was you could have a Vblock anyway you want, as long as it's black. Obviously a lot of diversity in product line, but what's new and different here, how does this impact new customers and existing customers. >> I think there's a couple of things to pick up on, what Trey said, what Siva said. So the simplification piece, the way in which we do release certification matrix, the way in which you combine a single software image to manage these multiple discreet components, that is greatly simplified in VxBlock 1000. Secondly you remove a model number, because historically you're right, you bought a three series, a five series, and a seven series, and that sort of defined the architecture. This is now a system wide architecture. So those technologies that you might of thought of as being discreet before, or integrated at an RCM level that was perhaps a little complex for some people, that's now dramatically simplified. So those are two things that I think we amplify, one is the simplification and two, you're removing a model number and moving to a system wide architecture. >> Want to give you both the opportunity, gives us a little bit, what's the future when you talk about the 1000 system, future innovations, new use cases. >> Sure, I think if you look at the way enterprise are consuming, the demand for more powerful systems that'll bring together more consolidation, and also address the extensive data center migration opportunities we see, is very critical, that means the customers are really looking at whether it is a in-memory database that scales to, much larger scale than before, or large scale cluster databases, or even newer workloads for that matter, the appetite for a larger system, and the need to have it in the market, continues to grow. We see a huge install base of our customers, as well as new customers looking at options in the market, truly realize, the strength of the portfolio that each one of us brings to the table, and bringing the best-of-breed, whether it is today, or in the future from an innovation standpoint, this is absolutely the way that we are approaching building our partnership and building new solutions here. >> Nigel, when you're talking to customers out there, are they coming saying, I'm going to need this for a couple of months, I mean this is an investment they're making for a couple years, why is this a partnership built to last. >> An enterprise class customer certainly is looking for a technology that's synonymous with reliability, availability, performance. And if you look at what VxBlock has traditionally done and what the 1000 offers, you see that. But Siva's right, these application architectures are going to change. So if you can make an investment in a technology set now that keeps the premise of reliability, availability, and performance to you today, but when you look at future application architectures around high capacity memory, adjacent to a high performance CPU, you're almost in a position where you are preparing the ground for what that application architecture will need, and the investments that people make in the VxBlock system with the UCS power underneath at the compute layer, it's significant, because it lays out a very clear path to how you will integrate future application architectures with existing application architectures. >> Nigel Moulton, Siva Sivakumar, thank you so much for joining, talking about the partnership and the future. >> Siva: Thank you. >> Nigel: Pleasure. >> Sending back to Dave in the US, thanks so much for watching The Cube from Cisco Live Barcelona. >> Thank you. >> Okay thanks Stu, we're back here with Jeff Boudreau. We talked a little bit earlier about the history of conversion infrastructure, some of the impacts that we've seen in IT transformations, Trey took us through the architecture with some of the announcement details, and of course we heard from Cisco, was a lot of fun in Barcelona. Jeff bring it home, what are the take aways. >> Some of the key take aways I have is just I want to make sure everybody knows Dell EMC's continued commitment to modernizing infrastructure for conversion infrastructure. In addition to that was have a strong partnership with Cisco as you heard from me and you also heard from Cisco, that we both continue to invest and innovate in these spaces. In addition to that we're going to continue our leadership in CI, this is critical, and it's extremely important to Dell, and EMC, and Dell EMC's Cisco relationship. And then lastly, that we're going to continue to deliver on our customer promise to simplify IT. >> Okay great, thank you very much for participating here. >> I appreciate it. >> Now we're going to go into the crowd chat, again, it's an ask me anything. What make Dell EMC so special, what about security, how are the organizations affected by converged infrastructure, there's still a lot of, roll your own going on. There's a price to pay for all this integration, how is that price justified, can you offset that with TCO. So let's get into that, what are the other business impacts, go auth in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, Twitter is my preferred. Let's get into it thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you in the crowd chat. >> I want IT to be dial tone service, where it's always available for our providers to access. To me, that is why IT exists. So our strategy at the hardware and software level is to ruthlessly standardize leverage in a converged platform technology. We want to create IT almost like a vending machine, where a user steps up to our vending machine, they select the product they want, they put in their cost center, and within seconds that product is delivered to that end user. And we really need to start running IT like a business. Currently we have a VxBlock that we will run our University of Vermont Medical Center epic install on. Having good performance while the provider is within that epic system is key to our foundation of IT. Having the ability to combine the compute, network, and storage in one aspect in one upgrade, where each component is aligned and regression tested from a Dell Technology perspective, really makes it easy as an IT individual to do an upgrade once or twice a year versus continually trying to keep each component of that infrastructure footprint upgraded and aligned. I was very impressed with the VxBlock 1000 from Dell Technologies, specifically a few aspects of it that really intrigued me. With the VxBlock 1000, we now have the ability to mix and match technologies within that frame. We love the way the RCM process works, from a converged perspective, the ability to bring the compute, the storage, and network together, and trust that Dell Technologies is going to upgrade all those components in a seamless manner, really makes it easier from an IT professional to continue to focus on what's really important to our organization, provider and patient outcomes.