(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Espania this is theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage, we're here in Barcelona, at Cisco Live 2020 inside the Devnet zone. This is day one Eric Herzog is back to talk about cybersecurity he's the CMO and vice president of global channels for IBM storage, good to see you again my friend. >> Dave, Stu, thank you very much for having us we love being on theCUBE and you are the leaders in IT information no one better especially for realtime. >> Thank you very much for that so we're going to talk cyber, very important topic it's a big tailwind for Cisco, IBM obviously a big player in security its on every CIO's mind. What's your angle though in storage specifically? >> Sure, what I think one of the key things is that when people think security they think keep the bad guy out and when the bad guy gets in chase him down and catch him. What they don't realize is sometimes it could be a day, a week or weeks till they know the bad guy is in. So how are you going to protect yourself when all your valuable data is exposed like that, and then when you do have an incident, particularly malware or ransomware, how do you come back to a state where you know you have good data and you basically don't have to pay the ransom or in the case of malware that data is good data. So we can help on both fronts with the things we've done with our cyber resiliency play inside our storage portfolio. So compliments and gives IT and the CSO as well as the CIO, an overall comprehensive security strategy so that when they're in my house how am I keeping them from somehow stealing it even though they're in the house, that's what we can help with. >> Okay I see where you're going here so and by the way I've seen stats that say it's upwards of two hundred or three hundred days before people even realize they've been infiltrated and then it becomes a matter of okay how do I respond, now you've got malware, not only malware but you've got ransomware, and so let's talk more specifically about how you attack that problem. Do you help me sort of find when somethings been penetrated? By looking at the backup corpus? analytics? what do you guys do? >> So we do a couple things, so first of all we do have in our Spectrum Protect Suite, which is our modern data protection, it does the backup et cetera is we can detect anomalous activity in backup data sets, snaps and replicas. We use AI and machine learning to understand if that's a new occurrence so lets take an example, the backup data set runs from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at midnight you have all kinds of weirdo backup activity, why? Because if you're malware or ransomware you want to get to the secondary data sets first before you attack the primary otherwise they'll just go back to the secondary, yeah they'll lose some time but they'll go to that. So we can detect that and alert the backup admin the storage admin whoever you tell us to do. Then overtime if that process changes and so you're always going to have certain activity at time that previously didn't. We learn that and stop sending alerts and stop sending notes. And obviously we don't say we think it's malware this or ransomware that, what we do is alert them to anomalous activity as an attack could be starting. So that's just one of the things we do, we have much more that we do in cyber resiliency, but in that case monitoring and detection, threat detection, we help do by looking at secondary data sets. >> Eric, wonder if you could bring us on sign to the organization of your customers, because is this something that just the storage team buys or are you being bought in you said by the CSO or you know some other organization and you know want it installed then how does this play out inside the organization? >> Sure, so it's a hybrid strategy so lets take for example, we have a thing called Safeguarded Copy, we've had it for eighteen months now in the mainframe, wildly successful, wildly successful, not just with the new Z but with the old Z14 and the reason is we would go in to the storage guys, and in the Z world money was tight, and we said what if we could help you protect against mal or ransomware or even internal threats we has dual access control capability from an internal management perspective they said "really?" And then the storage guys actually took that to the security team and said guess what we can help you and they said "oh my god." and they gave money actually to the storage guys, in other instances we approach the security side and in fact one of the things we've done is talked to a lot of our partners who have a security practice a storage practice and never thought about thinking of them in a holistic fashion, so from a partner perspective it gives a more holistic solution to the end user, they sell keep the bad guy out, track the bad guy down and by the way did you know that IBM's flash system will do data-at-rest encryption with no performance penalties so you can encrypt everything on that and there's no penalty, it's at line speed so if they're there for a week or two hundred days or whatever, that data is protected because it's encrypted. So that's more of a the partners work in a holistic security strategy. >> I mean IBM has a long heritage in security, RACF all you old mainframers, Resource Access Control Facility was the gold standard back in the day, and really you know set the road map for you know best practice. So obviously things have changed a lot, what is best practice today are you recommending customers set up air gaps? certainly tooling but more tooling is a challenge for people but how are you seeing customers combat the problem? >> So what we do is we look at if from a storage perspective so we have a couple things, A we have air gaping to tape and air gaping out to clouds, so our Spectrum Virtualize sits on-prem and off-prem we can do air gaping with our Spectrum scale product which are AI and big data again put it out, IBM can all put eventually a snap or a replica out to a cloud, gives you a logical air gap, tape will work with anything file, block and object, then you have a physical air gap, so that's one aspect, the other thing of course you had mentioned already is encrypting, you can encrypt file block and object data, in fact we can worm it, so make it immutable and then encrypt a worm, so and in fact with our object storage because of the way we do our hashing and the way we do our erasure encoding and the way we hide the key, is we basically make it almost non crackable. So file, block and object, what we do to prevent and then the air gaping and the last thing to do is incidents recovery, so they had an incident to go back to a known good copy, so the Safeguarded Copy we can basically mount instantaneously snaps or replicas, they would do a ring-fence network cause obviously they do it online with the real network they could crash it or compromise so you set up a ring-fence network and you keep bringing back the snaps or replicas and look it at right, have the app guys come in run an app and "oh no there's malware okay we can't use that snap" and it's very easy to do, we can automate the process they have to put the ring-fence around and they can go back to as many copies or replicas they have whether it be the file side block or object. So that would help in incident recovery after they know they've had an attack, they've cleaned it up, now you've got to make sure that your secondary data is good data before you restore it, otherwise you could put the malware, ransomware right back in to what you had. So the recovery side, protection side on-prem with encryption and then obviously with air gaping protection but if you will out of house either physical or out to cloud. >> Eric help us connect the dots between what your talking about and the audience here at Cisco Live, obviously networking people there's always a little bit of security inside there, so help us understand how these go together and the reception you get from them. >> Well again the reception is very good because what we do is, Cisco is looking at doing all the network security we're a partner of theirs again allows them or their channel partners to go in and say here's a holistic strategy, keep the bad guy out, okay here's what you do to track the bad guy down, by the way here's what you do on the network side with our Cisco gear, here's what you can do with the storage gear so, partner can go with a holistic strategy to the end user right and say here's what we will do for the network, here's what we'll do for the storage and of course it doesn't step on each other because you're looking at the network traffic, where looking of course at primary storage and secondary storage and actually hybrid multi cloud storage as ways for them to protect their data so it's completely in complimentary play, by the way the other things that IBM security division does both to keep the bad guy out and track the bad, are also none of these things step on each other, it allows you to have a truly holistic strategy cause right now network security is semi thought about, storage security is almost never though about. So it's like let me give you a whole strategy that's going to work bring the data back, help you understand it, keep the data from being stolen, immutable copies, if they're get there and they steal the data, encrypted data, so all kinds of strategies the networking guys just so it allows the end user or certainly the CIO to go to the CSO or to the chief legal officer and say I've got a holistic strategy yes I'm good, it's not an if question it's a when, so here's what I'm doing to reduce the incidents time, here's what I'm doing to keep the bad guy out which is not what we do in the storage division, here's what we do if they're in to keep the data safe so we know if it gets stolen it can't be used. And by the way once we clean up the malware and ransomware we need to get you up and going as soon as possible mister CEO or CFO now or the line of business guys, we can do that with without having the data being compromised or the data being bad data. >> It's interesting to hear tape as part of the equation, right it keeps coming back, but it is part of the best practice, so there's the air gap but tape kind of the last resort, you don't want to really recover from tape, but you know if you have tape in an offsite location, you know if it's a lot of data it's fast to move, because you're putting it on a truck, it may be an RPO issue, but are you seeing that certain industries, financial services in particular, maybe or certain companies are mandating that last resort? >> So what you're seeing with tape overall, is for IBM to renaissance, both inside the data centers, so from that perspective think enterprise accounts, the global fortune two thousand, and from that perspective it's partially about the air gaping, it's partially I've got gobs of data, what's the cheapest way to make sure I've got a backup copy, okay then we're also seeing a huge take up with hyperscalers and cloud providers. So we have several of the top ten cloud providers on the planet that when you buy their archive or cold store that actually goes onto IBM tape platters, so you have a cost angle which is independent of the cyber resiliency side, then you've got the cyber resiliency side, and for us when we're talking bigger accounts, so think enterprise up to that you know fortune two thousand they're probably going to do different things for different data sets, so certain things might be snapped out to the cloud, other data sets might go out to tape and their are regulated industries still, like healthcare, finance and obviously the government itself where sometimes tape is still like mandated and so even though it's legacy the bottom line is they need it and then once you get in there between the cost angle of what they can save and the fact that oh wait, I thought just back to well wait, what about malware and ransomware and by the way a smart company is going to use a hybrid combination, so they'll have some stuff going out to the cloud then they have on premises. Again our safeguard copy on the mainframe is actually can be on premise, so you've got five hundred immutable snaps that are encrypted and then you keep going back to your final one that didn't have the malware and ransomware, so it's probably a combination strategy even on the storage side which would include tape, what we could do for file block and object on flash we could even do it for if someones got older disk or you know want to use second or like IBM cloud object storage is mostly done on disk, well guess what now that older data is encrypted it's wormed, it's protected, by the way we can air gap IBM cloud objects storage out to the cloud too, so it may well be a very comprehensive strategy based on application workload use case value of the data set and obviously with things like tape and backup to the cloud you have a secondary use case, which is not just about the security but I need to back up the data in case there's a fire or me being the silicon valley guy need to go out to tape cause there might really be an earthquake and as great as IBM arrays are or any of our competitors arrays, cause we as you know with our software support all our competition, those arrays are going to be crushed when the building falls down in silicon valley, so you might need to have tape for cheap backup, so there's a lot of different angles that involve not just cyber resilient but the combination of cyber resiliency and really data reliability and data safety that are independent of the cyber attack worry and you can combine them cause of they way we put this together with our technologies. >> Yeah your talking about a comprehensive strategy, which is very important because this has become a board level topic and it's no longer I'm sure it still happens in many organizations "oh yeah check off item yeah we do that, we do backup to whatever cloud tape" check off, but in many organizations, if not most certainly publicly traded organizations, it's a board level conversation and they really do their homework, down to even the testing, although testing is a little tough right, it's time consuming and cumbersome, but definitely thinking through the board wants to know what happens if okay what about this what about that and they've experienced a lot of different permutations, so it's again not just a check off item anymore you can say oh yeah we comply it's really no we need something that actually works because we know we're going to get hacked. >> Well that's part of the reason Safeguarded Copy on the mainframe side has done so well, companies that are using mainframe it is the most mission critical workloads, the highest transaction workloads, so in the financial sector, in the government sector, in some of the big giant manufacturing or retailers, they're running mainframes and they have been for years and they're not stopping and so for them system uptime is an issue, security is an issue, so the Safeguarded Copy for us has really been really a grand slam home run product, to use a very US centric term, but maybe a sixer if you like cricket or it was a try if you like rugby, but for all those various sports it's been very successful because of what they use that mainframe for and how critical that data, so it's been very successful from that perspective. >> They're like oh, how about, you're obviously sharing a lot of knowledge specific to storage, I said before IBM's got a long heritage in security, how do you collaborate with the other you know security pros at IBM, how much of that sort of filters in to storage and back out? >> So what we do is we make sure that they're aware of what we do, they're looking at some new things, that I can't disclose, around security that would make places for people to go and practice if you will, and do some other things. We're going to be involved in that program which allows people to try things out if you will in a very secure way and someday IBM's going to do a cross storage will be part of its security and some of the other divisions but we haven't yet rolled it out, but it's something they're working on that we'll be part of. And then obviously there are many times in the big accounts where you know the security division are in there the storage guys are in there, but the account team knows that there's both issues and bring us together inside of a big account, so that happens as well more if you will from the sales side versus this official program that we're going to be launching shortly later this year. >> So wrap it up what's going on at Cisco Live? What are the conversations like with customers? What's IBM all about here? >> So for us our big thing has been about both our hybrid mutlicloud technology, which allows seamless move data back and forth, and we have a product called the Versastack, which incorporates our award winning Flashsystems, so we're positioned to either standalone or with the Versastack we have a Versastack in the booth. And then also obviously cyber resiliency, so I just presented yesterday on hybrid multicloud and then today I presented on cyber resiliency and how those things work together, and what we do as Cisco, so it's been a very good show and you know very successful for IBM here at Cisco Live. >> Good to hear, well you guys are great partners thanks for coming on theCUBE, love the shirt as always Eric Herzog IBM thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> All right your welcome, all right keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest for Cisco Live Barcelona, Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman for John Furrier, we'll be right back. 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>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2020, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody, we're here at Cisco Live, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go to the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is day one, really, we started day zero yesterday. Eric Herzog is here, he's the CMO and Vice President of Storage Channels. Probably been on theCUBE more than anybody, with the possible exception of Pat Gelsinger, but you might surpass him this week, Eric. Great to see you. >> Great to see you guys, love being on theCUBE, and really appreciate the coverage you do of the entire industry. >> This is a big show for you guys. I was coming down the escalator, I saw up next Eric Herzog, so I sat down and caught the beginning of your presentation yesterday. You were talking about multicloud, which we're going to get into, you talked about cybersecurity, well let's sort of recap what you told the audience there and really let's dig in. >> Sure, well, first thing is, IBM is a strong partner of Cisco, I mean they're a strong partner of ours both ways. We do all kinds of joint activities with them on the storage side, but in other divisions as well. The security guys do stuff with Cisco, the services guys do a ton of stuff with Cisco. So Cisco's one of our valued partners, which is why we're here at the show, and obviously, as you guys know, with a lot of the coverage you do to the storage industry, that is considered one of the big storage shows, you know, in the industry, and has been a very strong show for IBM Storage and what we do. >> Yeah, and I feel like, you know, it brings together storage folks, whether it's data protection, or primary storage, and sort of is a collection point, because Cisco is a very partner-friendly organization. So talk a little bit about how you go to market, how you guys see the multicloud world, and what each of you brings to the table. >> Well, so we see it in a couple of different facts. So first of all, the day of public cloud only or on-prem only is long gone. There are a few companies that use public cloud only, but yeah, when you're talking mid-size enterprise, and certainly into let's say the global 2500, that just doesn't work. So certain workloads reside well in the cloud, and certain workloads reside well on-prem, and there's certain that can back and forth, right, developed in a cloud but then move it back on, for example, highly transactional workload, once you get going on that, you're not going to run that on any cloud provider, but that doesn't mean you can't develop the app, test the app, out in the cloud and then bring it back on. So we also see that the days of a cloud provider for big enterprise and again up to the 2500 of the global fortunes, that's not true either, because just as with other infrastructure and other technologies, they often have multiple vendors, and in fact, you know, what I've seen from talking to CIOs is, if they have three cloud providers, that's low. Many of 'em talk about five or six, whether that be for legal reasons, whether that be for security reasons, or of course the easy one, which is, we need to get a good price, and if we just use one vendor, we're not going to get a good price. And cloud is mature, cloud's not new anymore, the cloud is pretty old, it's basically, sort of, version three of the internet, (laughs) and so, you know, I think some of the procurement guys are a little savvy about why would you only use Amazon or only use Azure or only use Google or only use IBM Cloud. Why not use a couple to keep them, you know, which is kind of normal when procurement gets involved, and say, cloud is not new anymore, so that means procurement gets involved. >> Well, and it's kind of, comes down to the workload. You got certain clouds that are better, you have Microsoft if you want collaboration, you have Amazon if you want infrastructure for devs, on-prem if you want, you know, family jewels. So I got a question for you. So if you look at, you know, it's early 2020, entering a new decade, if you look at the last decade, some of the big themes. You had the consumerization of IT, you had, you know, Web 2.0, you obviously had the big data meme, which came and went and now it's got an AI. And of course you had cloud. So those are the things that brought us here over the last 10 years of innovation. How do you see the next 10 years? What are going to be those innovation drivers? >> Well I think one of the big innovations from a cloud perspective is like, truly deploying cloud. Not playing with the cloud, but really deploying the cloud. Obviously when I say cloud, I would include private cloud utilization. Basically, when you think on-prem in my world, on-prem is really a private cloud talking to a public cloud. That's how you get a multicloud, or, if you will, a hybrid cloud. Some people still think when you talk hybrid, like literally, bare metal servers talking to the cloud, and that just isn't true, because when you look at certainly the global 2500, I can't think any of them what isn't essentially running a private cloud inside their own walls, and then, whether they're going out or not, most do, but the few that don't, they mimic a public cloud inside because of the value they see in moving workloads around, easy deployment, and scale up and scale down, whether that be storage or servers or whatever the infrastructure is, let alone the app. So I think what you're going to see now is a recognization that it's not just private cloud, it's not just public cloud, things are going to go back and forth, and basically, it's going to be a true hybrid cloud world, and I also think with the cloud maturity, this idea of a multicloud, 'cause some people think multicloud is basically private cloud talking to public cloud, and I see multicloud as not just that, but literally, I'm a big company, I'm going to use eight or nine cloud providers to keep everybody honest, or, as you just said, Dave, and put it out, certain clouds are better for certain workloads, so just as certain storage or certain servers are better when it's on-prem, that doesn't surprise us, certain cloud vendors specialize in the apps. >> Right, so Eric, we know IBM and Cisco have had a very successful partnership with the VersaStack. If you talk about in your data center, in IBM Storage, Cisco networking in servers. When I hear both IBM and Cisco talking about the message for hybrid and multicloud, they talk the software solutions you have, the management in various pieces and integration that Cisco's doing. Help me understand where VersaStack fits into that broader message that you were just talking about. >> So we have VersaStack solutions built around primarily our FlashSystems which use our Spectrum Virtualize software. Spectrum Virtualize not only supports IBM arrays, but over 500 other arrays that are not ours. But we also have a version of Spectrum Virtualize that will work with AWS and IBM Cloud and sits in a virtual machine at the cloud providers. So whether it be test and dev, whether it be migration, whether it business continuity and disaster recovery, or whether it be what I'll call logical cloud error gapping. We can do that for ourselves, when it's not a VersaStack, out to the cloud and back. And then we also have solutions in the VersaStack world that are built around our Spectrum Scale product for big data and AI. So Spectrum Scale goes out and back to the cloud, Spectrum Virtualize, and those are embedded on the arrays that come in a VersaStack solution. >> I want to bring it back to cloud a little bit. We were talking about workloads and sort of what Furrier calls horses for courses. IBM has a public cloud, and I would put forth that your wheelhouse, IBM's wheelhouse for cloud workload is the hybrid mission-critical work that's being done on-prem today in the large IBM customer base, and to the extent that some of that work's going to move into the cloud. The logical place to put that is the IBM Cloud. Here's why. You could argue speeds and feeds and features and function all day long. The migration cost of moving data and workloads from wherever, on-prem into a cloud or from on-prem into another platform are onerous. Any CIO will tell you that. So to the extent that you can minimize those migration costs, the business case for, in IBM's case, for staying within that blue blanket, is going to be overwhelmingly positive relative to having to migrate. That's my premise. So I wonder if you could comment on that, and talk about, you know, what's happening in that hybrid world specifically with your cloud? >> Well, yeah, the key thing from our perspective is we are basically running block data or file data, and we just see ourselves sitting in IBM Cloud. So when you've got a FlashSystem product or you've got our Elastic Storage System 3000, when you're talking to the IBM Cloud, you think you're talking to another one of our boxes sitting on-prem. So what we do is make that transition completely seamless, and moving data back and forth is seamless, and that's because we take a version of our software and stick in a virtual machine running at the cloud provider, in this case IBM Cloud. So the movement of data back and forth, whether it be our FlashSystem product, even we have our DS8000 can do the same thing, is very easy for an IBM customer to move to an IBM Cloud. That said, just to make sure that we're covering, and in the year of multicloud, remember the IBM Cloud division just released the Multicloud Manager, you know, second half of last year, recognizing that while they want people to focus on the IBM Cloud, they're being realistic that they're going to have multiple cloud vendors. So we've followed that mantra too, and made sure that we've followed what they're doing. As they were going to multicloud, we made sure we were supporting other clouds besides them. But from IBM to IBM Cloud it's easy to do, it's easy to traverse, and basically, our software sits on the other side, and it basically is as if we're talking to an array on prem but we're really not, we're out in the cloud. We make it seamless. >> So testing my premise, I mean again, my argument is that the complexity of that migration is going to determine in part what cloud you should go to. If it's a simple migration, and it's better, and the customer decides okay it's better off on AWS, you as a storage supplier don't care. >> That is true. >> It's agnostic to you. IBM, as a supplier of multicloud management doesn't care. I'm sure you'd rather have it run on the IBM Cloud, but if the customer says, "No, we're going to run it "over here on Azure", you say, "Great. "We're going to help you manage that experience across clouds". >> Absolutely. So, as an IBM shareholder, we wanted to go to IBM Cloud. As a realist, with what CIOs say, which is I'm probably going to use multiple clouds, we want to make sure whatever cloud they pick, hopefully IBM first, but they're going to have a secondary cloud, we want to make sure we capture that footprint regardless, and that's what we've done. As I've said for years and years, a partial PO is better than no PO. So if they use our storage and go to a competitor of IBM Cloud, while I don't like that as a shareholder, it's still good for IBM, 'cause we're still getting money from the storage division, even though we're not working with IBM Cloud. So we make it as flexible as possible for the customer, The Multicloud Manager is about customer choice, which is leading with IBM Cloud, but if they want to use a, and again, I think it's a realization at IBM Corporate that no one's going to use just one cloud provider, and so we want to make sure we empower that. Leading with IBM Cloud first, always leading with IBM Cloud first, but we want to get all of their business, and that means, other areas, for example, the Red Hat team. Red Hat works with every cloud, right? And they don't really necessarily lead with IBM Cloud, but they work with IBM Cloud all right, but guess what, IBM gets the revenue no matter what. So I don't see it's like the old traditional component guy with an OEM deal, but it kind of sort of is. 'Cause we can make money no matter what, and that's good for the IBM Corporation, but we do always lead with IBM Cloud first but we work with everybody. >> Right, so Eric, we'd agree with your point that data is not just going to live one place. One area that there's huge opportunity that I'd love to get your comment here on is edge. So we talked about, you know, the data center, we talked about public cloud. Cisco's talking a lot about their edge strategy, and one of our questions is how will they enable their partners and help grow that ecosystem? So love to hear your thoughts on edge, and any synergies between what Cisco's doing and IBM in that standpoint. >> So the thing from an edge perspective for us, is built around our new Elastic Storage System 3000, which we announced in Q4. And while it's ideal for the typical big data and AI workloads, runs Spectrum Scale, we have many a customers with Scale that are exabytes in production, so we can go big, but we also go small. It's a compact 2U all-flash array, up to 400 terabytes, that can easily be deployed at a remote location, an oil well, right, or I should say, a platform, oil platform, could be deployed obviously if you think about what's going on in the building space or I should say the skyscraper space, they're all computerized now. So you'd have that as an edge processing box, whether that be for the heating systems, the security systems, we can do that at the edge, but because of Spectrum Scale you could also send it back to whatever their core is, whether that be their core data center or whether they're working with a cloud provider. So for us, the ideal solution for us, is built around the Elastic Storage System 3000. Self-contained, two rack U, all-flash, but with Spectrum Scale on it, versus what we normally sell with our all-flash arrays, which tends to be our Spectrum Virtualize for block. This is file-based, can do the analytics at the edge, and then move the data to whatever target they want. So the source would be the ESS 3000 at the edge box, doing processing at the edge, such as an oil platform or in, I don't know what really you call it, but, you know, the guys that own all the buildings, right, who have all this stuff computerized. So that's at the edge, and then wherever their core data center is, or their cloud partner they can go that way. So it's an ideal solution because you can go back and forth to the cloud or back to their core data center, but do it with a super-compact, very high performance analytics engine that can sit at the edge. >> You know, I want to talk a little bit about business. I remember seven years ago, we covered, theCUBE, the z13 announcement, and I was talking to a practitioner at a very large bank, and I said, "You going to buy this thing?", this is the z13, you know, a couple of generations ago. He says, "Yeah, absolutely, I'll buy it sight unseen". I said, "Really, sight unseen?" He goes, "Yeah, no question. "By going to the upgrade, I'm able to drive "more transactions through my system "in a certain amount of time. "That's dropping revenue right to my bottom line. "It's a no-brainer for me." So fast forward to the z15 announcement in September in my breaking analysis, I said, "Look, IBM's going to have a great Q4 in systems", and the thing you did in storage is you synchronized, I don't know if it was by design or what, you synchronized the DS8000, new 8000 announcement with the z15, and I predicted at the time you're going to see an uptick in both the systems business, which we saw, huge, 63%, and the storage business grew I think three points as well. So I wonder if you can talk about that. Was that again by design, was it a little bit of luck involved, and you know, give us an update. >> So that was by design. When the z14 came out, which is right when I first come over from EMC, one of the things I said to my guys is, "Let's see, we have "the number one storage platform on the mainframe "in revenue, according to the analysts that check revenue. "When they launch a box, why are we not launching with them?" So for example, we were in that original press release on the z14, and then they ran a series of roadshows all over the world, probably 60. I said, "Well don't you guys do the roadshows?", and my team said, "No, we didn't do that on z12 and 13". I said, "Well were are now, because we're the number one "mainframe storage company". Why would we not go out there, get 20 minutes to speak, the bulk of it would be on the Zs. So A, we did that of course with this launch, but we also made sure that on day one launch, we were part of the launch and truly integrated. Why IBM hadn't been doing for a while is kind of beyond me, especially with our market position. So it helped us with a great quarter, helped us in the field, now by the way, we did talk about other areas that grew publicly, so there were other areas, particularly all-flash. Now we do have an all-flash 8900 of course, and the high-end tape grew as well, but our overall all-flash, both at the high end, mid range and entry, all grew. So all-flash for us was a home run. Yeah, I would argue that, you know, on the Z side, it was grand slam home run, but it was a home run even for the entry flash, which did very, very well as well. So, you know, we're hitting the right wheelhouse on flash, we led with the DS8900 attached to the Z, but some of that also pulls through, you get the magic fairy dust stuff, well they have an all-flash array on the Z, 'cause last time we didn't have an all, we had all-flash or hybrids, before that was hybrid and hard drive. This time we just said, "Forget that hybrid stuff. "We're going all-flash." So this helps, if you will, the magic fairy dust across the entire portfolio, because of our power with the mainframe, and you know, even in fact the quarter before, our entry products, we announced six nines of availability on an array that could be as low cost as $US16,000 for RAID 5 all-flash array, and most guys don't offer six nines of availability at the system level, let alone we have 100% availability guaranteed. We do charge extra for that, but most people won't even offer that on entry product, we do. So that's helped overall, and then the Z was a great launch for us. >> Now you guys, you obviously can't give guidance, you have to be very careful about that, but I, as I say, predicted in September that you'd have a good quarter in systems and storage both. I'm on the record now I'm going to say that you're going to continue to see growth, particularly in the storage side, I would say systems as well. So I would look for that. The other thing I want to point out is, you guys, you sell a lot of storage, you sell a lot of storage that sometimes the analysts don't track. When you sell into cloud, for example, IBM Storage Cloud, I don't think you get credit for that, or maybe the services, the global services division. So there's a big chunk of revenue that you don't get credited for, that I just want to highlight. Is that accurate? >> Yeah, so think about it, IBM is a very diverse company, all kinds of acquisitions, tons of different divisions, which we document publicly, and, you know, we do it differently than if it was Zoggan Store. So if I were Zoggan Store, a standalone storage company, I'd get all credit for supporting services, there's all kinds of things I'd get credit for, but because of IBM's history of how the company grew and how company acquired, stuff that is storage that Ed Walsh, or GM, does own, it's somewhat dispersed, and so we don't always get credit on it publicly, but the number we do in storage is substantially larger than what we report, 'cause all we really report is our storage systems business. Even our storage software, which one of the analysts that does numbers has us as the number two storage software company, when we do our public stuff, we don't take credit for that. Now, luckily that analyst publishes a report on the numbers side, and we are shown to be the number two storage software company in the world, but when we do our financial reporting, that, because just the history of IBM, is spread out over other parts of the company, even though our guys do the work on the sales side, the marketing side, the development side, all under Ed Walsh, but you know, part of that's just the history of the company, and all the acquisitions over years and years, remember it's a 100-year-old company. So, you know, just we don't always get all the credit, but we do own it internally, and our teams take and manage most of what is storage in the minds of storage analysts like you guys, you know what storage is, most of that is us. >> I wanted to point that out because a lot of times, practitioners will look at the data, and they'll say, oh wow, the sales person of the competitor will come in and say, "Look at this, we're number one!" But you really got to dig in, ask the questions, and obviously make the decisions for yourself. Eric, great to see you. We're going to see you later on this week as well we're going to dig into cyber. Thanks so much for coming back. >> Great, well thank you, you guys do a great job and theCUBE is literally the best at getting IT information out, particularly all the shows you do all over the world, you guys are top notch. >> Thank you. All right, and thank you for watching everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this break. We're here at Cisco Live in Barcelona, Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, John Furrier. We'll be right back.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's "theCUBE." Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of "theCUBE Insights," powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis," I want to look into Cisco. You know theCUBE is in Barcelona this week to cover Cisco Live. There's an expected attendance of about 17,000 people. Now today, Cisco is a company in transition. It remains a leader in key segments, but it's refocusing its business for the next decade, having exited a number of areas over the last several years. Allow me to briefly give you my perspective and review how we got here. Near the end of the dot-com bubble, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world, with a $500 billion market cap. It was one of the four horsemen of the internet, remember that? Along with Oracle, Sun, and EMC. Cisco really rose to prominence by betting big on ethernet. Old reliable TCP/IP was the linchpin of the internet, and allowed Cisco to power the wave that virtually decimated the mini-computer industry in the 1990s. There were many levers that Cisco pulled, brilliantly, during its ascendancy, and I want to call out two big ones. First was it created an army of network engineers. Literally hundreds of thousands of professionals trained on installing, configuring, managing, and optimizing Cisco gear. Cisco created very complex solutions and thrived on this complexity, and the Cisco Certified Inter-network Experts, or CCIEs, deeply understood the dark art of networking, and Cisco was their beacon. The second was acquisitions. Under the leadership of CEO John Chambers, Cisco completed about 180 acquisitions over a roughly 20-year period. This enabled TAM expansion, growth, and maintained Cisco's relevance to customers, who very typically and often were the generator of acquisition ideas. Cisco diversified quickly into a conglomerate with a portfolio that spanned video, set-top boxes, telepresence, compute, collaboration, security, wireless. At one point, Chambers talked about dozens of adjacent businesses, each of which would account for a billion dollars of incremental revenue for Cisco. Many, if not most, didn't pan out, and Chambers slashed and burned prior to handing the reins over to current CEO, Chuck Robbins. Now, under Robbins, Cisco was a more focused company, kind of going back to the basics. They're betting on what I would say are more sure bets, including data center, wireless, collaboration, security, and the Edge. Cisco is also evolving its model towards software subscriptions. Now today, I want to look at how some of those bets are performing. I'll discuss the impact of cloud on Cisco's business, and then I want to drill in to the performance in some areas like networking, collaboration, security, and then close on hyper-converged. And then the last thing I'm going to do is share some things that I'm watching as barometers of success, over the next 18 to 24 months. Now the first thing I want to do is give you a snapshot of Cisco's financials today. What this chart shows is some KPIs on a trailing 12-month basis. Cisco is about a $50 billion company with a $200 billion market value. That's a 4X revenue multiple, which is pretty good for a company that's generally viewed as a traditional hardware player. Now Cisco is guiding analysts on a flat to down year, and talking about a challenging macro environment, despite the stock market's seemingly insurmountable rise. Cisco is a very profitable company, with a 33% operating margin, and very nice, 66%, roughly, gross margin. Cisco throws off a lot of cash, around $15 billion annually in free cashflow. They make a big deal that 70% of its software revenue is now coming from subscriptions. And Cisco is mandating a new consumption model that is subscription-based. Now it's somewhat hard to tell exactly how large Cisco's software revenue is, as they're opaque in that detail, but I'm pegging it at between 11 and 12 billion by the end of this year. Today it's probably seven to eight billion. Cisco is riding some big waves, adding software to its portfolio, security grew at 22% last quarter, Wi-Fi 6, 5G, which by 2021 should start kicking in, it uses a chunk of its cash of course to buy back stock to keep the street happy, and it's leveraging a leadership position to compete. Now finally, I want to make some comments, later actually, on how they're approaching developers in a strategy that I really like. Now there are some headwinds that Cisco's facing, namely cloud, this macro picture that they talk about, which is not positive for them evidently, the company's overall complex portfolio, the competitive dynamics, and the perception that they have an aging, or that they are an aging hardware company, and they're really still touting, selling ports. So, let's drill into some of the spending data, and I want to start with this notion of leadership. This chart shows Cisco's position in its core networking segment. The chart depicts market share over time, which remember is a measure of pervasiveness into each ETR dataset. Now look at what happens. Look how Cisco maintains its leadership, far outpacing the others in this networking sector each quarter. I'm going to make some comments on the sector overall, but notice the net score in the blue bars, which is a measure of spending velocity. It holds firm at 25%. Not great, but holding steady. And you can see the pie chart of the public cloud's impact on the sector, and I'm going to make some comments there later as we go on. But first let's look at the networking sector overall. ETR just released its January survey, and here's what they said in their sentiment on networking. So, when you see the networking space, it's been sort of down for a while, and ETR has been somewhat negative on the entire space, but what this shows is really net score, which is spending velocity, and the January 2020 results, with previous periods within Fortune 500 buyers. And you can see there's an uptick in momentum for networking generally, and Cisco is really cited as rebounding. But now look at the blue call-out. It's from an ETR VENN discussion, with an IT buyer, who essentially says, "Look, as we move to the cloud, "we are going to spend less on networking gear." And given that Cisco is the leader, we want to understand how the public cloud is affecting Cisco's networking business. So to answer that, what I'm showing here is data from the latest ETR January spending survey. And I'm filtering the data on organizations that are spending on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platform, and showing Cisco's performance measured in market share, or pervasiveness. You see, that's what's happening now in these big cloud accounts. There's an N of 809 cloud customers, and 480 Cisco customers within those accounts. And you can see the impact that the cloud is having on Cisco, much the same way it is affecting virtually every large supplier of on prime infrastructure. A slow, steady decline over the past 10 years. And you can see a net score, which measures spending intensity, in the upper right-hand corner, of almost 30%, which is somewhat lower than Cisco's average in the ETR dataset. But the story's not just about cloud. There are other waves in the industry, of what I've referred to in the past as innovation cocktail ingredients, namely data, plus AI, plus cloud. So the next question I want to pose is, how is Cisco doing in leveraging these waves? So here we have 916 customers in these superpower segments of data, AI, and cloud, that are combined, and we show the market share, or pervasiveness, over time, of Cisco, as compared to VMware's NSX, HPE, and Dell EMC. What the data shows is a couple of points. One is that Cisco is the most pervasive competitor shown in these customer segments. Its net score is 37%, four points higher, meaningfully, than the cloud-only chart. Actually seven points higher than I showed earlier. Only NSX has a higher net score, and relatively speaking, NSX is much newer, and should be growing much faster than Cisco, so that makes sense. So I would say that Cisco is holding its own here. Its challenge really, in my view, is to use data and AI to create better customer experiences. So, be a consumer of AI, if you will, as a means of better serving customers, and compete in the multi-cloud market directly with these players and others, none of whom own a public cloud. Okay, so I spoke earlier about Cisco's portfolio, so let's look at some of the ETR data, and see how various parts of Cisco's business are doing. This chart shows the net score, or remember, spending velocity, across Cisco's offerings, and includes Meraki, which is wireless, AppDynamics, AppD, is application performance management, we're showing here Cisco overall, Cisco Umbrella, which is cloud and DNS security, and Springpath, which comprises infrastructure for Cisco's hyper-converged offering. And as you can see, the segments in which Cisco plays, there are 10 in the ETR taxonomy, spanning analytics, security, mobile, device management, infrastructure, video conferencing, et cetera, et cetera. In the interest of time, I will say just the following. Red is bad, green is good, and gray is neutral. And again, Cisco is holding its own in these major segments, with decent spending velocity. So now, let's take a look in an area that I think is going to get a lot of attention in Cisco Live, and that's collaboration. This ETR chart that I ran shows net score, or spending velocity, for video conferencing platforms. And you can see, Cisco, they got some work to do. It's sort of teetering on the red zone. So I would expect some continued enhancements there. Now comparatively, you can see GotoMeeting losing steam, and Skype really falling off a cliff in January, but look at Microsoft Teams, that blue dot, with very very strong momentum. So what Microsoft's doing is they're migrating Skype and Lync, their install base, to Teams, and they're really really well-positioned there. And you can see as well, newcomer Zoom is right there in the mix, across this sample of 500 buyers. Now, I want to turn your attention to a really important sector, which of course is security. This chart that I'm showing here shows net score, again, spending velocity, in the cyber security sector. And Cisco is both large and credible in this space. Its security business grew 22% last quarter, as I said, and it's at a $3.2 billion run rate. So, spending momentum, maybe not as strong as Palo Alto Networks, which I'm showing here, and it's not as high as the rocket ship companies, like CrowdStrike, or Okta, or CyberArk, or SailPoint, or some of the others that I've highlighted in previous "Breaking Analysis" episodes, but Cisco's pretty solid. And you can see the likes of IBM and Symantec, by comparison, these guys are leaders in security, but their spending momentum is in the red. So once again, the steam of Cisco as a large player who has credibility, this story is playing out. And clearly this is going to be an area of focus at Cisco Live. So this next data point is kind of interesting, and looks at Cisco's data center business, and specifically, I'm trying to better understand what's going on in hyper-converged, the software-defined platforms that bring together storage, compute, and networking. Now the power of the ETR platform is that I can ask the question, how are the hyper-converged players doing inside of Cisco accounts? So what I've done is I've filtered on 458 Cisco accounts across three sectors, storage, compute, and networking, and I've isolated on Nutanix, VMware, or VMware's vSAN, Cisco itself, and Dell EMC with VxRail. And what we're doing is we're showing net score, or spending intensity, spending velocity. And the first thing to point out is that all of the vendors are in the green, and that's because this is a growing market that still has legs. Nutanix has noticeable spending momentum, ahead of vSAN, ahead of Cisco, and Dell EMC. Now here's the thing about Cisco. On the one hand, it's putting forth its own HyperFlex platform, based on the Springpath acquisition. But it has to tread carefully because it partners with converge players, like NetApp with FlexPod and IBM with VersaStack. And its HyperFlex, as an HCI play, is essentially designed to replace converge platforms like these. Now the same is true for VBlock, the business with Dell EMC, the old VCE business, but Cisco and Dell are at each other's throats, so, neither really cares that it's replacing them. Okay, long segment, a lot to cover, I got to wrap, but I want to end by saying what to look for over the next sort of 18 to 24 months as barometers. First thing is the pace of transition to software. The second thing that I'm watching is the uptake of the new core announcement that Cisco just made for big routers, silicon, and optics. This is Cisco's wheelhouse, and I expect that the 5G rollout in 2021 is really going to start to pick up and be a tailwind for Cisco. You know the macro should be a concern. Cisco is saying its business is soft, kind of across the board, there's China, there's Brexit, but the S and P is on fire. Now does that mean upside for Cisco? In other words, are they sandbagging a little bit? Or, are there more fundamental, structural, or execution issues? I think personally, Cisco may have a little bit of upside here, but they're big and exposed, so that's something to watch. The other thing is the impact of cloud on Cisco's business, and the company's ability to compete in multi-cloud, including how it embraces Kubernetes. Cisco, and I've said this before, has to position itself as the best, the most cost-effective, the most secure, and highest performance network to connect hybrid and multi-clouds. Now as well, the company's got to hold serve in networking, which I fully expect it to do. We're seeing a little uptick in Juniper, Arista's doing okay, but they're sort of smaller in the grand scheme of things relative to Cisco. Now the wild card here is VMware's NSX. So we'll be watching that and what impact it has. A lot of customers have both. Finally, I want to talk about developers. Cisco DevNet, as I've said many times, I really like what Cisco is doing there. I think they've outshone some of the traditional players. They are retraining hundred of thousands of CCIEs to code in Python, and really, code Cisco infrastructure. So Cisco has an infrastructure-as-code strategy that's going to help propel them in multi-cloud, the Edge, new Workloads, and they're leveraging this engineering force that they have. So, very long segment here. Watch the coverage at Cisco Live on theCUBE and on SiliconANGLE. It's a big chewy company, and a lot for me to swallow in one of these segments. So tweet me @DVellante if I've missed something, or comment on my LinkedIn feed, or you can email me at David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis, "theCUBE Insights," powered by ETR. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, day two of our coverage of Cisco Live. We are live also from San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, Stu Miniman is my co-host. And one of our alumni is back with us, Eric Herzog, the CMO of IBM Storage. >> Great, thank you for having us. >> Welcome back. So, lots of buzz, we're in the DevNet Zone. This has been, I hear, one of the busiest expos at Cisco Live this year. The community is, I'm hearing, approaching 600,000 strong. Yesterday we were talking a lot about the big waves of innovation, one of them being GPU's everywhere, AI, but also some of the challenges with respect to data, that companies are generally getting less than 1% of that data to really extract insights from it. So let's talk about what IBM is doing with respect to AI and big data, and really helping customers really turn that dial up on getting more value out of what they have. >> Well, so we're doing a lot in that space. First of all, when you're running AI in particular, if you're really going to do something like run a robotic factory, you'd better make sure the storage doesn't fail. But that's sort of, you know, the checkbox item, just the way a car always has a spare tire. So the real differentiator, from a storage perspective, is what do you do to help the data prep, what do you help to do to make sure that the data is always in the right kind of pipeline? For example, just like a human always learns, right, at least smart humans always learn, so you learned certain things when you were seven or eight, they might've changed by the time you were in college, by the time you have your first kid they might be different again, and by the time you're getting ready to retire, but it could be still the same topic and the data's recycling, and then you learn new things about that topic. So in the case of a data workload, what you need to do is make sure you have data prep along the entire pipeline. And that's what we've done with a whole bunch of software that we offer for the big data and AI workloads and applications. >> So, Eric, we've talked with you many times about what's happening in the multi-cloud world. It feels like IBM and Cisco are on similar, parallel paths as to the move from, traditionally we think about boxes, and from a Cisco standpoint it's ports, and, you know, more and more it's about the software. So can you talk a little bit about that software-defined world in where IBM and Cisco are going together along that journey. >> So, one of the things that we've done from a storage division perspective, we do what we call the VersaStack. It's a converge infrastructure that includes Cisco UCS, our all-flash arrays, but it's packed with a bunch of software. So we can use that to transparently move block data out to a cloud, any cloud, IBM cloud, Amazon, Azure. We could move it out to a block store or to an object store. Now obviously to move it out to an object store, that can help you, can prevent ransomware and malware. And it's all automated. We've done the same thing with Scale-Out File, where we just see cloud as just a tier, and we've done the same thing with object storage. So the big thing we see from a hybrid, multi-cloud perspective at the IBM storage division, is everything needs to be able to have the data easily portable, easily migrateable, and easily replicable back, and constantly moving back and forth, not just going out to the cloud and staying there. So we've done that from our software-defined portfolio. But we also did it with our modern data protection portfolio, Spectrum Protect, which is one of the most award-winning products in the backup space. We've got over 400 small-medium cloud providers where their backup-as-a-service offering is based on Spectrum Protect. So if they go to Wikibon and Wikibon says, we want to back up to the cloud and you're using Tectrade or Cloud Temple or i-Virtualize, all those cloud providers, the backup-as-a-service they sell you is based on IBM Spectrum Protect. So for us cloud is just another tier. Just like hard drives and flash and tape, cloud's just the new tier. >> So in this pivot towards software-defined everything, with, say, VersaStack for example, give us one of your favorite customer success stories that really highlights the value of what IBM and your partnerships deliver. >> Sure, sure. So one of them would be Tectrade. So Tectrade is one of our public references. They only do PCI data. So, Wikibon couldn't be a customer, IBM can't be a customer, theCube can't be a customer, Cisco can't be, because we don't specialize, as you know, in financial-centric data. So they back up about, they do about two million backups a day, all of financial data across Europe and into North America, and they've got a VersaStack that happens to run Spectrum Protect on it. It's all flash, so they're not worried about performance. And then they back up to giant hard drive farms that they've also bought from IBM. But the real thing on the VersaStack is having that very fast edge, and then having the software that allows them to A, control the storage side, but then run Spectrum Protect to do backup. So if you were a bank, if theCUBE was a bank, then you guys could use Tectrade and they use a VersaStack for backing up data as a service. That's a perfect example of what we've done with the VersaStack solution, in this case in a hybrid cloud scenario. >> What are some of the business impacts that they have achieved so far? Are they finding new revenue streams, are they unlocking more valuable data to be more competitive? >> So, what they do is obviously in the PCI world. They're very centered, you can't lose anything. Because it's financial data. So for them, it's all about the security of the data, making sure the data gets there, the data's encrypted in flight, they know that the customers can do a lot of different things, because Spectrum tech is very much a big enterprise package that's very strong in the global Fortune 2000. So they like it for that. Now, we've had some other customers, and their the value has been things like the return on investment. For example, the second-largest dating site on the planet uses VersaStack. And they got a four month return on investment. They bought it, and in four months it paid for themselves, so they bought like four or five more. We had another customer who saved, and this is also a cloud service provider by the way, so they saved the equivalent of five full-time employees that were writing custom code and managing stuff, and they used Spectrum Protect also for backup. But in this case you and I could use them because they're not specialists like Tectrade is, and they'll back up anybody's data. And they saved five full-time equivalents. So they've now redeployed those full-time employees to do something else. So those are just examples from three different companies of ways that they've saved money and really driven a business value, not just about the data, and yeah, the data's fast, but really, if you're a storage guy, been doing it as long as I have, the data's always fast and it just gets faster every generation, so okay, it's fast. And in this case it's really about business value, about the value of the data, not about the storage. >> Eric, you mentioned security. Of course security is one of those topics that's hitting all of the environments here at Cisco, but bring us inside, especially from a storage division, modern data protection and how that's getting involved in the security discussion. >> Sure, so what we've done across the portfolio, even in primary storage, is made sure that we've done all sorts of things that help you against a ransomware or malware attack, keep the data encrypted. I think the key point actually, I think Silicon Angle wrote about this, something like 98% of all enterprises are going to get broken into anyway. So it's great that you've got security software on the edge, whether that be IBM or RSA or BlueCoat or Checkpoint, or who cares who you buy the software from. But when they're in, they're stealing. And sometimes, some accounts have told us that they can track them down in a day, but if you're a giant global Fortune 500 with data centers up, it might take you a week. They could be stealing stuff right and left. So we've done everything from, we have write-once technology, so it's immutable data, you can't change it. We've got encryption, so if they steal it, guess what, they can't use it. But the other thing we've done is real protection against ransomware and malware. So I am going to attack Wikibon, theCUBE, and I am going to charge you $10 million, and I'm going to steal every video you've ever created and hold it for ransom. So the way I would do that is I look at your snapshots, your replicas, and your backups first. So what do we do? We can actually snapshot a replica out to an object store, and ransomware and malware, at least today, doesn't attack object storage. So that way, when I'm talking to you or Stu and said I want $10 million, you start laughing, and go, what are you talking about? We replicate every night. Okay, we lose one day of data. He can't get half the $10 million. So that's ransomware or malware protection. We've also built that into Spectrum Protect, because what happens is when you're starting to, if you will, look at that data to get it wrapped up in the ransomware or malware, you have a whole bunch of extra activity around the backup data sets, so we send an alert. We'd send an alert to you, Lisa, and you would say, oh my god, what's going on? Why is all this activity going on the backup set? Because the backup's not scheduled, let's say, for tonight. And we would send you a note now, at two o'clock, that there's all kinds of activity, and you would go, what is going on, and you would check it out. So we can help with ransomware and malware, encryption on primary data. So we've really integrated across the portfolio, whether it be primary storage or secondary storage. And by the way, almost nobody thinks about storage. They always say, whose security package should I buy? And they never say okay, I'm going to buy it, but I, might buy some security for the storage, too. No one ever talks like that, which is why we're bringing up, and we actually launched a sales play for the field, all around storage for cyber resiliency. >> And how is that going, if you're saying it's-- >> It's actually gone incredibly well. We started with a product called Safeguarded Copy on the mainframe, and we actually got, in the first four months, almost $60 million a pipeline in the first four months of the product shipping. And now we've got it all over the whole portfolio, so we tried it just when we first got started, and now we're now talking about the ransomware and malware stuff, which by the way we've had for three years, but we were never emphasizing it to the end user. Now we're saying, by the way, has it happened or are you worried about it? Well guess what, if you're backing up with Spectrum Protect, we'll warn you. Why don't you go out to tape and air gap? Or why you don't go out to the cloud and we can do essentially a cloud air gap to object storage? And we weren't really talking like that until really we started doing it in Q4 and then really expanded it in Q1, so it's been very, very successful. The end users love it, our business partners who sell to the end users, they're loving it. And by the way, no one else is really talking about it. It's all about the security software company. So we're going beyond that. >> So, Eric, you talked about some of the products with Cisco and IBM working together. I wonder if you can up-level a little bit. You're a great watcher of the industry out there. Chuck Robbins, now four years into his tenure as CEO, Wall Street's doing well with the stock on there, finances look well. IBM and Cisco, two of the bellwethers in tech out there. How's Cisco doing? When you talk to your customers, what are they liking about Cisco, what do they want to see more from Cisco, are they aware of the transformation that Cisco's going through? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. First of all, IBM and Cisco have a mutual relationship that spans billions of dollars. Whether that be, for example, as they publicly have disclosed, IBM is the biggest customer for WebEx on the planet, and they talked about that. There's products that we sell to them that they're one of our biggest customers in the world as well. But then beyond that, whether it's common end users or common channel partners, we make sure that we deliver the right solutions together. So I think the feedback I get from both the end users and the partners is that Cisco's back. Right when Chuck came in, said, oh, what's going on with Cisco? They're still big, but the big sometimes fall over big, right? Like in the beanstalk, the giant falls over, right? So that's what I think people were thinking four years, I don't think people are thinking that now. From our perspective, we've always kept working tightly with them, between our relationship with them as a customer and us as their customer. But more importantly, it's really the common customers we have and the common channel partners, and we've never wavered for that support from a Cisco perspective. But just sort of off the cuff, when people make a comment that's like, hey, those Cisco guys are back. And four years ago people were saying, ehh, what do you think about Cisco? My wife works at Cisco, and my ex-wife works at Cisco, so it's a little easier for them to ask me that. Because I'm a Cisco shareholder too. But now you don't hear that question. It's like Cisco's got their act together, they're doing all the right stuff. So that's very good for me personally with my stock, but it's also good just for the industry. You know, you don't want someone to not be able to make the transition. And the valley's littered with that. DEC, Compaq, they're all gone. They're not the only guys that are gone. So Cisco's not going to go the way that other big companies have. They've made the transition and are transforming to what the end users really need. >> And I think the DevNet community growth is a great, speaks to the pivot that Cisco's making. DevNet has been in large part an accelerator of Cisco's transition from network appliance provider to more of a software services provider. But that community symbiosis with their end user customers, with their partners, and with their developer community, is really a driving force here. And I think just being in this DevNet Zone and how big it is, is a great example of how they're leveraging those other feedback channels to not just persist but be successful. So here we are, their Q3 2019 results are really strong, growth across all three business segments, we're in the middle of their fourth quarter. So for Cisco's FY 2020, what are some of the big bets that you can share with us that IBM and Cisco-- >> Well, the one we've done together has been one on security, so we have joint security products that we've done. We have a joint product on the system side with the VersaStack. We've done joint products with them also in the cloud solution area, both, if you think about hybrid cloud, but also in private cloud, so IBM Cloud Private for example is available on their HCI box, right, so their hyperconverged infrastructure solution includes an option for IBM Cloud Private. So IBM has made many bets with them in the security space, in the cloud space. Also, by the way, one of the biggest providers of service on Cisco solutions is actually IBM. So our services divisions do tons of business with Cisco, whether that's servicing the physical gear or servicing the software. And we've been doing that for years. So whether it be service, whether it be cloud, whether it be infrastructure, IBM is doing joint solutions across the board with the Cisco community. >> Got to ask you one last question, Eric. You've been in this industry a long time, you're a veteran extraordinaire. What keeps you excited about storage? >> Storage always change. Storage is not boring. Storage is boring for the uneducated. It is the most exciting thing, it changes all the time. I remember one of the good things about IBM was not just an array, come here, we only just do backup software, we've got high-end storage arrays, we still do tape. We're by far the dominant player, and we're having a huge resurgence there with hyperscalers and cloud providers. We're going crazy with tape because, for them, they're all about saving money for backup and archive, and we're critical to that. We are the number two storage software company in the world, all of our software works off of our gear. Some of the other guys that sell lots of software, yeah, they sell lots, but it only works on their products. Our software works with all of our competitor's products. So that makes everything exciting. I've done this now for 35 years. I've seen hard drives that were the size of a dishwasher to now flash that fits into your phone, or my MacBook, I've got five terabytes of flash. So, you know, to me that's all exciting. And the software is where it really matters. You know, we've gone from bare metal to virtualization, now to containers and cloud. So there's always new stuff going on. But I really think part of the problem with storage is everybody takes it for granted and doesn't realize, if your storage doesn't work, isn't performing, isn't reliable, and isn't available, basically your entire infrastructure caves in. I don't care whether you're in the cloud, whether you're in a virtual world, or you're still doing it really old hat with bare metal, the storage doesn't work, you're shutting down your company until that storage is back up and running again. So it is the critical foundation for every application workload and use case, in any company, big, medium, or small. And it's always evolving. So to me it's very exciting, although some people think storage is boring. I'd say networking is boring. That, to me, is boring. (Lisa laughs) Storage is exciting. >> Stu: Don't say that too loud, here. (Eric laughs) >> That's true, storage is sexy. Well Eric, it's been a pleasure to have you back on theCUBE once again, and we very much appreciate your time. >> Great, well thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, from Cisco Live in San Diego.

>> Host: Live from San Diego, California, it's the CUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome back to the CUBE, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, covering day one of Cisco Live from sunny San Diego. We're pleased to welcome back a couple of our alumni. To my right Eric Herzog, CMO of IBM Storage. Eric it's always great to have you. >> Great. >> And you fashion choices on the CUBE. >> Always wear a Hawaiian shirt for the CUBE. >> I know, it's a thing. And we've also got Evaristus Mainsah, General Manager of IBM Cloud Private Ecosystem. Evaristus it's great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you very much, delighted to be here. >> So guys here we are, we're in the dove nut zone. Lots of collaboration, lots of conversations day one of Cisco Live. But this events been around for 30 years. Long time, I think Chuck Robins said this morning what also turned 30 this year is Tetris. Anybody a big fan of Tetris? So, so much progress, so much change. I know you've seen a lot of it. Eric lets start with you. The global economy, what are the impacts it's having on IT? >> Well I'd say the number one thing is everyone is recognized the most valuable asset is data. It's not gold, it's not silver, it's not plutonium and it definitely isn't oil, it's all about data. And whether it be a global Fortune 500, a midsize company or Herzogs Bar & Grill, data is your most valuable asset. So at IBM Storage, what we've done is making sure that our focus is on being data-driven. It's all about solutions, it's not about speeds and feeds. Of course, having done this for 35 years I could have whacked poetically on speeds and feeds. And even if you have some speeds and feeds that Stu may not even remember anymore. That said, it's really about data, it's not about storage speeds and feeds. How really storage is that critical foundation for applications, workloads and use cases. And that's what's most important. >> Yeah, so Eric, when they rolled out on stage this morning that 30 year old box with ribbon cable, yeah, that predated a little bit when I was looking at IT. But, I remember when I started in IT, when we talked about security, the main thing was lock the door of the cabinet that everything was in there, because it was kind of self-contained. Security's gone through a few changes in the last you know 20 25 years though. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that kind of security resiliency. Obviously, something that's impacted the network for a long time, something that IBM sees front and center. >> What I think the big deal is what most people think when they think of security, is I got to buy security software. So I got to call up IBM Security or RSA or the Intel Security Division and buy some security software. And while that's great the reality is as many people have written about, in fact Wikibon SiliconANGLE's written about it. Close to 98% of all enterprises, and I mean big enterprises now are going to get to be broken into. And you've seen this all over the news. So the key thing is once they're inside, storage can help you with a cyber resiliency play. And at IBM Storage whether that be data at rest encryption. Whether that be malware or ransomware protection. We put together a whole set of technology that when the bad guys in the house they can't steal the TV. Because we've locked it down. It's almost as if it was in a safe. Maybe it's almost like the cloak in science fiction where you can't even see the Romulan ship, because it's cloaked. Well guess what, that's what IBM storage can do for your data and it is your most valuable asset. So critical to cyber resiliency. >> So helping customers go from reactive to this expectation breach has happened very very frequently every few seconds to being proactive? >> Yeah, I mean. >> Eventually predictive? >> Well what we do is for example with our Spectrum Protect software. When there's a malware or ransomware attack, what happens is they always go after you're secondary data sets first. I know that sounds weird but they go after your backups, your snapshots and your replicas. 'Cause when they attack your primary data, if they've you can just recover from a backup they can't hold you for $10 million of ransom. So our Spectrum Protect software for example, when it sees anomalous activity in backup data sets, sends an email on a warning out to all the admins and says you have weird activity going on, you might want to check it out and that way you would know. Because secondarity is attacked first in a cyber resiliency strategy. >> You know, the other thing we're seeing a lot is just the scope of what's happening in IT. When you talk about things like scale and you talk about you know edge computing and so much change going on. There's got to be AI in there or machine learning to help us because humans alone can't keep up with what's going on here. Tell us a little bit about that Eric. >> So Big data and AI is like the hot topic right now. Cyber resiliency is important 'cause people obviously have been buying security software for a while. So it's more what we do is really an adjunct to that. In the case of Big data and AI, it's a brand new open field. Everyone is looking for solutions in both of those spaces. We have created a complete set of data infrastructure we've called the AI pipeline. It involves not only physical storage arrays but a whole bunch of software. In fact our Spectrum Discover software which allows you to create metadata catalogs about file and object data is being expanded. And we already publicly said this in the second half To include EMC and Netapp and AWS, not just IBM Storage. So it's a critical thing, you've got to make sure the other thing is when you're using AI. Let's say you're going to use AI to run a factory. If the storage goes down, those robots aren't working. So storage is that critical underlying foundation. A in a Big data network load to be able to have this pipeline to get the data. But if you don't have the resiliency, the performance and the availability of the underlying storage everything shuts down if the storage fails. 'Cause the AI software won't run. So that's how we see fitting in to their both the critical foundation also this AI data pipeline with all of our software. >> So before we get in to this Cisco partnership with Evaristus, it's one more question Eric for you. As Chief Marketing Officer, you talk about the customers all of the time. In that example that you just gave about the criticality of storage for AI where are you having conversations within customer organizations. Is it at the level of the storage girls and guys or has it gone up to lines of business to executives. >> Yeah so, from an AI perspective it runs a gamut. It could be sometimes the storage people. Sometimes the infrastructure people. A lot of times it's actually in the line of business or at the data scientist level. On the Big data side it's a little bit more mature so people know they need to do analytics versus AI. And so when you look at it from that perspective on that side it's often the storage guy but it's also the data scientist as well. So that's who we talk to to get things rolling. And it's not, we don't just talk to the storage admin for either of them, because they're both so new and they have such a big impact on the data scientists and the analytic engine committees inside of those giant enterprises. >> I can imagine eventually maybe question for you. Of that conversation elevating it up to the sweet sweet. Because if you can't access the data, if it can't be protected, what good is it? Right, it's really, to say it's the lifeblood is a silly thing, but we say it all the time. But it's critical, it's table stakes. >> Well one of the things that's interesting is I just got my Fortune 500 magazine at home, that had the Fortune 500 list in it. And there was an interesting article on AI and the enterprise. And they did a survey according to Fortune magazine, 50% of the CIO's that are in the Fortune 500 said they're using AI and Big data of some type. So it's sweeping the world. And it started of course in HPC in the academics. But now it's going into all enterprises of all types. >> Alright so we've talked a few years about the Versastack Partnership. But the last year or so we've really been talking about where Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud fit in to this. We talked a little bit at IBM Think. Evaristus we talked at another show about some of the IBM Cloud Private. Give us the update where we are with customers and how that fits, Eric lets start with you and Evaristus just go into the partnership. >> Sure from a storage version perspective, we've been talking about a Hybrid multi-cloud now for several years. And in fact I did a presentation two years ago at Cisco Live on Hybrid cloud using Versastack. Today I gave one on the data driven enterprise and why hybrid multi-cloud is important to use. So that was the 30 minutes presentation I did today. So I think the key thing is we make sure that we A our Hybrid it's not going to all public or all private. And we can move data seamlessly back and forth. And then also multi-cloud. When you look at enterprise shops, they're not just going to use IBM Cloud. I wish they would I'm an IBM shareholder but they're not. They use IBM, they're going to use ABS, they're going to use Amazon and in many cases they're going to use some smaller cloud provider. So we make sure that we can move data around across any multi-cloud of various different providers to accompany. But also Hybrid cloud as well. >> So the status talk to use about you know from a partnership Cisco IBM Cloud Private perspective, what's going on there Evaristus? >> Well Thank you very much. Well IBM and Cisco have been partners for a long long time. And what we are doing now is given the realities, the fact that those clients have found themselves in a multi-cloud environment, >> Hybrid multi-cloud environment. What we can do to help clients so they can develop they can test, they can manage the applications in a consistent manner, whether they are on prime or in the cloud. And there are a couple of initiatives that we are announcing. One of them is that IBM Cloud Private is going to run on Hyperflex, so Cisco's Hyperflex. As well as hyperflex, hyper-conversed infrastructure. What it means is a client who currently has hyperflex can have IBM Cloud Private on it. Which effectively means they have themselves a Private Cloud environment that also connects to other public cloud environments and allows you to really begin to work within a Hybrid cloud environment the way that most clients need to. The second initiative is that we will have ACI pods or V pods, virtual ACI, running in the IBM public cloud. Which basically means that again, Cisco customers, ACI Network customers who currently use the produce on Prime will be able to use exactly you know the same control pane to manage their deployments and to manage their security preferences on Prime as they do in the cloud. And this again surrounding the Public Cloud is running on bare metal on the IBM Cloud. >> Alright, Evaristus can you bring us inside a little bit the applications you know. Eric talked about you know data we know is so important. Really it's the applications that are driving that. It's where we're seeing the most change in customers, as to how they're moving or building new applications. And in Hyber cloud it's one of the biggest questions for customers is what do they do with that application portfolio? >> Yes so what we're seeing is clearly because you know. Clients have now lots of different Public clouds. They also have Private clouds to deal with them. They have lots of applications that are currently that need to move right. We believe 20% of those applications have moved, the remaining 80% are still on Prime. And so the trend that we are really seeing is applications moving to the cloud. And the two ways of doing it you could do this by simply lifting and shifting on VM, you get the contraction benefit of your stack right. So you can some cost impacts. But the really interesting way that you see lots of clients moving is modernizing the applications. Because the real valued driver with infinite cloud is not so much cost as innovation. And when you convert those applications into Microsoft this is the right and let me run them in containers it gives them plenty of flexibility. And wasting lots of clients that want to use IBM Cloud Private as a platform to enable that modernization journey. >> So as every industry is living in this Hybrid multi-cloud world for many reasons. But it sounds like to me is that the IBM Cisco relationship is deepening as a result to enable these organizations that are in these very amorphous environments. You know as we see the explosion of Edge and Mobile, that's what it sounds like to me. Is that this long standing partnership is getting deeper and maybe a stronger foundation. To help customers not just live in this Hybrid multi-cloud world but be successful so that their businesses gain competitive advantage. They can identify new products and services and revenue streams. >> Yeah, I think multi-cloud and Hybrid cloud actually requires partnerships. Because as Eric said later on of course you like everybody to be on the IBM Cloud and it's a great cloud. But we recognize that many clients who have a variety of different plights to deal with. They have a variety of different infrastructures. And that's why when you look at IBM Cloud Private which is you know our offering that really enables that Hybrid cloud. It is designed to managed that. So It is multi-model, so if you want to run it as a VM you can, you want to run your containers, you can run serverless, you can run them bare metal. But also, it supports a range of different infrastructure. So not only does it run on Z, it runs on power, it runs on Spectrum Storage. We announce running now on Hyperflex. It also runs on other peoples Public clouds. It runs on Azure, it runs on Amazon web services, it runs on Google Cloud platform, it runs on the IBM Cloud. And the intent here is to enable clients to basically manage and work with that infrastructure as if it was one. The way that Stu said in the data center where you locked everything up. Well it's not like that anymore. But the most that we can do is to enable clients to treat all of that infrastructure as one. And that's what sort of aim to do with our platforms. >> Alright, I guess last question I'd like to get both of your comments on. Is your advice for customers, you know, customers have that they have a lot of you know existing things that they have to deal with, that they're looking to modernize. What advice do you give them? Where do you start them you know I guess you know one of the things you're starting where they are. But you know what are some of the first steps and recommendations that you have for customers today? >> We have a process that works really well, which is called the IBM Garage. Which is effectively a way that we used to co-create with our clients to solve the immediate problems. So a client for example, who is looking at app modernization but isn't sure where to start, which app. What we do is we get their teams together with our teams line of business together with IT and our teams and we spend a couple of days in a design thinking workshop to identify a minimum viable product. Which is something that solves a problem not big enough that it will take forever, but big enough to matter. Then we get our teams to work side-by-side, we code it, we test it, we deploy it, we'll run it in the IBM Cloud. We manage it, at like in one week sprints. And then you spend another few days at the end of week four or five to do a see retrospective to see whether it solved the problem as you expected. And if it did, you pick the next piece of work to continue your journey. So before you know, five weeks in, you have your first application modernized. Or you have your first cloud negative ready. >> Now from a storage perspective it's a little bit easier. We supported storage on bare metal. We supported storage in all the virtual environments. KVM, OVM, obviously VM we're in Hyper V. And now, we've been supporting containers for over two years. So we say is leave no data behind. If certain data needs to stay on bare metal, that's fine we can support that. But we can also transparently migrate data back and forth between the various tiers of container-based virtualization-based or the old style bare metal. So from our perspective, we help them move data around where they need it. And if they're still running in a hybridized world in this case, containers, virtual and bare metal that's fine. If they just go containers that's fine. If they just go virtual it's fine. So for us, because of what we've been supporting now for several years, we can help them on that journey. And traverse from any one of those three layers, which is where data sits in today's data centers and cloud environments. >> So overall a lot of collaboration, a lot of customer choice. Gentlemen, Thank you for joining Stu and me the program this afternoon, great to have you back. >> Thank you >> Great, Thank you. Glad to be on the CUBE. >> Oooh our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE, live from day one of our coverage on Cisco Live. Thanks for watching. (energetic music)

[Narrator] Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live teach coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Stu, myself, and John Fur will be here all week. Eric Herzog is here, long time Cube alumn friend, great to see you again. He's the CMO of IBM storage division. he's joined by James Amies who's the head of networks at Advanced, the service provider guys. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> Great thanks for having us. Love being on theCUBE. >> So we love having you. So James let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about Advanced, do you want to dig into some of the networking trends? We're hearing a lot about it here at Cisco Live. >> Yeah thanks, Advanced are a manage service provider, software company based in the UK, one of the largest software companies in the UK, providing entrance solutions for lots of different market verticals, including healthcare, local government, regional government, national infrastructure projects we get involved with, as well charity sector, legal sector, a lot of education work that we do. And it's just real diverse portfolio products that we offer. And with the manage services piece, we also offer complete IT outsourcing. So this is desktop support, telephony support, printer support, all the way back into integration with public cloud platforms and private cloud platforms. The majority of which is our own. >> So Eric, Advanced are both a customer and a partner. >> Right >> Right and so you love Versastack, These guys are I presume are Versastack customers as well? >> Yes Versastack customer in the Versastack as you know integrates Cisco UCS Cisco networking infrastructure, IBM storage of all types, entry products up into the fastest off flash rays with our software spectrum virtualizer, spectrum accelerate family, and James' company is using Versastacks as part of their infrastructure. Which they then offer as a service to end users as James just described. >> So let's talk about some of the big trends that guys are seeing and how you're both responding to customers, and you're responding to your customers. So we're seeing here today, a lot about multi-cloud. We've been hearing that for a while. The network is flattening, you're a network expert, love to get your thoughts on that. Security obviously is a huge topic. End to end management, another big topic, something that IBM is focused on. So James what are the big mega trends that you're seeing that are driving your business decisions and your customers' activities. >> So I think one of the big changes we're seeing is a change from large enterprise scale deployments of a particular type of technology and customers are now choosing because they're informed, the best fit for a particular application or a particular service, and that may be coming to a service provider like ourselves, or for our service product to them, or they're looking for us to run an infrastructure service for them, or integrate with a public cloud offering. So the competition of the public cloud for service providers is key. And I think people were looking around a few years ago, thinking how do we compete to this. Well with the partnerships that we have with IBM and Cisco, it gives us a very compelling, competitive offering where we can turn around and say, well we can give you a like for like, but we can give you a slightly better service, because we can give you guaranteed availability. We can give you guaranteed price points, and we this is all backed with key vendor certified designs, so we're not talking about going out and developing a solution that takes as maybe 18 months, to take to market, this is understanding a requirement for a quick Q and A with a customer, align that to a reference architecture, that we can literally just pick up off the shelf, deploy into our data centers using the standard building blocks that we use across the business. So Nexus, nine K seven K's, or our standard` bread and butter inside the data center environment, as Eric pointed out, Cisco UCS is our key intel compute platform that we use. And the storewise IBM product has been a real true success story for us. So we started off being a mixed vendor house, where we would align storage requirement based with what we could find in the market that was a good fit. But the storewise products just basically just allowed us to standardize, and the speed of deployment is one of the key things. So we started out with a very lengthy lead time to serve as ready. Which is when we start charging for revenue. And if we want a 90 day build, well we've got a lot of professional service time, a lot of engineering time getting that ready to go and take to the customer, and then we turn it on, and then we can start seeing revenue from that platform. With Versastack, it's enabled us to accelerate how quickly we can turn that on. And we've seen that drop to literally days through standardization, elements of automation as well. Many of our environments are bespoke because we have such a wide range of different types of customers with different needs. But it allows us to take those standard building blocks, algin them to their needs, and deliver that service. >> James we found the MSP's are often in the middle of those discussions that customers are having on multi-cloud, so you talked a lot about the services you build. Are they also coming to you? Do you tie into the public cloud services? >> Yes. >> Maybe you can help expand a little bit on how that works. Five years ago it was, the public clouds were all going to kill the manage service providers, and what we see is customers can't sort out half of what's going on. They've got to be able to turn to partners like you to be able to figure this out. >> Yeah that's a fantastic question. Because I think three years ago, we'd be talking to our customers, and they were "I am going to this public cloud" or " I am going to build this infrastructure." Whereas now they're making more informed select decisions based on (mumbles) The drive to the hosted office and voice platforms, often by microsoft, is a big drive in many of our ITO customers are going in that direction. But it's how we integrate that with their legacy applications. Some of the ERP solutions that some of our customers use have had millions of pounds of investment into them. And that's not something that I can just turn off and walk away from overnight. So it's how we're integrating that, and we're doing that at the network level, so it's how we're pairing with different service providers, bringing that and integrating that, and offering it to them as a solution. And what we try to position ourselves is really, the same experience regardless of where we're placing IT consumption workload. It doesn't matter if it's inside our data centers, whether we're talking on one of the public cloud platforms, or even on premise, we have quite a few customers that still have significant presence on premise. Because that's right for their business, depending on what they're doing. Especially with some of the research scientists. >> So you've got to deliver flexibility in your architecture. I know you talk a lot about software define, you guys made a big move to software define a couple years ago actually. Maybe discuss how that fits into how you're servicing Advanced and other clients. >> Sure so IBM storage has embraced multi-cloud for several years now. So our solutions, well of course they work with IBM cloud, and IBM cloud private work with Amazon. They work with Azure, Google Cloud. And in fact, some of our products for example, the Versastack not only is Advanced using it, but we've got probably 40 or 50 public small medium sized cloud providers, that are public references for the Versastack, and spectrum protect, which is our back-up product, number one in the enterprise back-up space, spectrum protect has got at least 300 cloud providers, medium, small, and big who offer the engine underneath, for their backup as a service, is spectrum protect. So we make sure that whether it be our transparent cloud tiering, our cyber resiliency technology, what we do in back up archive. Object storage works with essentially, all cloud providers, that way someone like James, a CSP, MSP, can leverage our products, and we like I said, we got tons of public references around Versastack for that. But so can an enterprise, and in fact I saw a survey recently, and it was done in Europe, and in North American, that when you look at a roughly, the two billion US size revenue and up, the average company of that sizing up, will use five different public cloud providers at one time, whether that be due to legal reasons, whether that procurement, the web is really the internet. And the cloud is really just, it's been around for 20 some years. So in bigger accounts, guess who is now involved? Procurement, well we love that you did that deal with IBM cloud, but you are going to get a competitive quote now from Amazon and Microsoft right. So that's driven it, legal's driven it, certain countries right the data needs to stay in that country, even if you're cloudafying it, so to speak. So If the cloud provider doesn't have a data center there, guess what, another GI use different, and then you of course still have some large entities that still allow regional buying patterns, so they'll have three or four different cloud providers, that are quote, certified by corporate, and then you can use whichever one you want. So we make sure that we can take advantage of that wave. At IBM we ride the wave. We don't fight the wave. >> So you've got in that situation, you've got these multi clouds, you've got different API's. You've got different frameworks. How do you abstract all that complexity, you got Cisco coming at it from a networking standpoint, IBM now with red hat is good. They'd be a big player in that, that world VM ware. What do you guys do James, in terms of simplifying all that multi cloud complexity for people? >> I think with some of it, is actually demystifying and it's engaging with our partners to understand what the proposition is, and how we can develop that and align that to, not only in your own business, but more importantly to the needs of our customers. We've got some really really talented technicians work within Advanced. We've got a number of different forums that allow them to feedback their ideas. And we've got the alignments between those partners, and some of those communities, so that we can have an open discussion, and drive some of that thinking forward. But ultimately it's engaging with the customers. So the customers' feedback is key on how we shape and deliver, not only the service to them, but also to the service to other customers. We have a number of customers that are very similar, but they may work in different spaces. Some are even competitive, so we have to tread that line very carefully and safely. But it's a good one to one relationship between the client service managers, the technicians we have inside the business, having that complete 360 communication is key. And that's really the bottom too, is communication. >> James I'd like you to dig into security a little bit. I think we surpassed a couple years ago. I'm not going to go to the cloud because it's not secured to, oh I understand, it's time for me to at least re-evaluate my security, and most likely manage service providers, public clouds are probably more secure than what I had in my data center. But if I've got multiple environments, there's a lot of complexity there, so how do you traverse that, make sure that you've got a comprehensive security practice, not sure all these point solutions, all over the place? >> Yeah so that comes down to visibility. So it's visibility, understanding where all the control points are, within a given infrastructure. And how the landscape looks, so we're working quite closely with a number actually of key Cisco and IBM partners, as well as IBM and Cisco themselves directly. To have a comprehensive offering that allows us to position to our customers, you used to once upon a time. You had one gate. So all we needed is good security on your internet fighting firewall. But now you may have a 10, 20, 30 of those, we need to have consistent policies across those. We need to understand how they're performing, but also potentially if there's any attack vector on one of them, how somebody's trying to look into compromise that. So it's centralized intelligence, and that's where we're starting to look at AI operations to gather all our information. Long gone are the days where you have 20 people sitting in a room just reading screens. Those 20 people now need to see reams and reams of information instantly. Something needs to be caught up to them, so they can make their decision quickly, and access upon it. And that's really where we're positioning ourselves in the market to differentiate. I'm working with few partners to be able to do that. >> Eric talk about your announcement cadence. IBM has big show, Think, coming up in a couple weeks, Cube's going to be there of course. What can we expect from you guys? >> So we're actually going to announce on the fifth before Think. We want to drive end users and our business partners to the storage campus, which probably one of the largest campuses at IBM Think. We'll have over 15 pedestals of demo. And actually multiple demos because we have such a broad portfolio from the all flash arrays to our Versastack offering, to a whole set of modern day protection, management and control for storage. Which manage is going to control storage that's not ours right, our competitor's storage as well. And of course our software Defined storage. So we're going to do a big announcement. The focus of that will be around our storage solutions. These are solutions, blueprints, references, architectures, Jame you mentioned that use our software, and our storage systems that allow reseller or end user to configure systems easily. Think of it as the ultimate recipe for the german chocolate cake, but it's the perfect recipe. It's tried it's true it's tested, it's been on the food channel 27 times and everybody loves it. That's what we do with our solutions blueprints. We'll all have some announcements around modern data protection and obviously a big focus of IBM storage is been in the AI space. So both storage as an AI platform for AI applications workloads, but also the incorporation of AI technology into our own storage systems and software. So we'll be having announcements around that on February fifth, going into Think, which will be the week after in San Francisco. >> Great so I'm hearing trusted, data protection plays into that. Ai intelligence, machine intelligence and I'm also hearing heterogeneity, multiple platforms whether it's your storage you said, or competitor's storage. Now does that also include the cloud sphere? Without announcing anything, but you guys have -- >> Yeah. >> I've seen your pictures ads Azure. It's AWS, I mean that continues yes? >> Absolutely so whether it be what we do from back up in archive right. Let's take the easy one, so we support not only the protocol of IBM cloud object storage, which we acquired, and allows you to have object storage either on premise or in a cloud instantiation. But we also support the S3 protocol, so for example our spectrum scale software, giant scale out in fact, the two fastest super computers in the world, use spectrum scale. Over 450 petabytes running on spectrum scale. And they can tier to an object store that supports S3. Or it can tier to IBM cloud and object storage. So we have IBM storage customer that's great. If you're using the S3 protocol, you can tier to that at well. So that's just one example. Same thing we do for cyber resiliency, so for a cyber resiliency perspective, we can do things with any cloud vendor of an air gap right. And so you can do that, A with tape, but you can also do that with the cloud. So if your cloud is your backup archive replication repository, then you can always roll back to a known good copy. You don't have to pay the ransom right. Or when you clean up the malware, you can roll back to a known good copy, and we provide that across all of the platforms in a number of different ways, our protect family, our new product safe guard copy for the main frame that we announced it on October. So all that allows us to be multi-cloud resiliency, as well as how do we connect to multi-cloud, back up archive automated tiering to all kinds of clouds, whether it be IBM cloud, and of course I'm a share holder, so I love that. But at the same time we're realistic. Lots of people us Amazon, Google, Azure, and like I said there's thousands of mid to small cloud providers all over the world. And we support them too. We engage with everyone. >> What about SAS, one of the questions we've been trying to squint through, and understand is, because when you talk about five cloud providers, there's obviously infrastructures of service, and then there's service providers like Advanced, and then there's like a Gazillion SAS companies. >> Right. >> Lot of data in there. >> And a lot of Data in there. How should we think about protecting that data, securing that data? Is that up to the SAS vendor, and thou shalt not touch or should that be part of the scope of a storage company? >> Well so what we do is we engage with the SAS vendor, so we have a number of different SAS companies in fact, one was on theCUBE two years ago with us. They were a start up in the cybersecurity space, and all of it's delivered over SAS. What they do is in that case, they use our flash system product line, they get the performance they need to deliver SAS. They want no bottle necks. Because obviously you have to go over the network when you're doing SAS. And then also what they do is data encryption at rest. So when the data is brought it because we have on our flash arrays, the capability in most of our product line, especially the flash systems, to have no performance suit on encrypt or decrypt because it's hardware embedded, they're able to have the data at rest encrypted for all their customers that gives them a level of security when it's at rest on their site. At the same time we give them the right performance they need to have softwares and service. So we probably have 300,400 different SAS companies who are the actual software vendor and their deployment model is softwares and service, by the way we do that as well. As I mentioned over 300 cloud providers today have a backup as a service and the engine needs a spectrum protect or spectrum protect plus, but they may call it something else. In fact we just had a public reference out from Silver String, which is out in the UK. And all they do is Cyber resiliency backup and archive, that's their service. They have their own product, but then spectrum protect, and spectrum protect plus is the engine underneath their product. So that's an example, in this case, of back up as a service, which I would argue is not infrastructure. But more of an application. But then true what you call real application providers like cybersecurity vendors. We have a vendor who in fact, does something for all of the universities and colleges in the United States. They have about 8,000 of them, including the junior colleges. And they run all of their bookstores, so when you place an order all their AR and PR, everything they do is from this SAS vendor. They're in the northeast and they've got like I said, about 8,000 colleges and universities in the US and Canada. And they offer this, if you will, bookstore as a SAS service. And the students use it, the university uses it. And of course the bookstores are designed to at least make a little money for the University. And they all use that. So that's another example, and they use our flash systems as well. And then they back up that data internally with spectrum protect because they obviously it's the financial data as well as the inventory of all of these bookstores all over the United States at the colligate level. >> Right. >> Now James we got to wrap, but just to give you the final word, UK specialist right, so Brexit really doesn't affect you. Is that a fair statement or? >> It will do yes. >> How so? >> I think it's too early to tell. And no one really knows. I think that's what all the debates are about, is trying to understand that. And for us, I think we're just watching and observing. >> And staying focused on your customers obviously >> Yeah. >> So no predictions as to what's going to happen. When I was in the UK-- >> Not from me. a few weeks ago I heard both sides. You know oh it's definitely going to happen, oh it might not happen. But okay, again give you the last word. What's your focus over the next 12, 18 months? >> Our focus is really about visibility so Dave touched on that when we were talking about the security. For customers understanding where their data is, where their exposure points are. That's our key focus. And Versastack and the IBM storewise products underpin all of those offerings that we have. And that will continue to be so moving forward. >> Guys great to see you. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. And our pleasure hosting you. >> Great thank you really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome, alright keep it right there everybody. We'll be back. Dave Velante with Stu Minamin from Cisco live in Barcelona. (electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (electronic music flourish) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando Florida. Joining me, my co-host for this segment Dave Vellante sitting in for John Furrier and happy to welcome to the program Jeff Eckard, who's the Vice President of Storage Solutions at IBM. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, good to see you guys. >> All right, and 26,000 people here. It'd been many years since I'd been to Cisco Live. There's some things that are same, many of the same faces, but a lot of new jobs, a lot of buzz going on. What's your impression been of the show this week? >> Yeah, it's been an interesting, great show for IBM and our presence, but it's a very large ecosystem of Cisco partners, a lot of their, our joint end users and a lot of focus on multi-cloud. You've consistently heard that as a theme from Cisco as well as IBM since last fall at their partner forum and they've continued it here with a lot of focus on being able to take tools and capabilities and enabling enterprises to manage data where they want to manage it. And it's really interesting, from traditional systems vendors like Cisco, to see that focus particularly around developers. >> It's been fascinating for me to watch. Jeff, you and I have some background in the storage and storage networking piece, specifically, where it was like, OK, where I sit in the stack and I've got a couple of integrations, and we work on our standards here. It's much broader. >> Oh, absolutely. The things that we're working on. We're talking about cloud. There's a lot of software that flows. Data and applications are critically important. Talk a little bit about some of that transformation and how you're seeing the expansion, and-- >> Yeah, no, it's a interesting time. If you think about the opportunities and challenges facing all enterprises, data is at the core of digital transformation, digital enhancement, whatever term you wanna use with it. Typically, it's focused in on wanting to provide realtime insights so that you make better decisions against threats or opportunities. Being able to deliver personalized services to your clients, and then also improving your internal processes and business outcomes. And so data is core for digital transformation, and you kinda see, kind of this web of what we're talking about here and then what we're doing with clients as well. >> You know, Jeff, you talk about multi-cloud, you've been in the business for a while, and throughout your career you've tried to help customers simplify their lives, and everybody felt, I thought, OK, I'm gonna put stuff in the cloud, it's gonna get simpler, and now you see this spate of clouds, whether it's infrastructures of service, private clouds, SaaS, and complexity is, in some regards, never have been higher, particularly as it relates to the data. >> That's right. >> You've gotta figure out, where do you put this stuff? How do you protect it, what about governance? Even if you think security's better in the cloud, it might be different for every cloud. So how is IBM approaching, generally in your team, specifically approaching simplifying the complex of this multi-cloud world? >> Sure, so from an IBM Perspective, at the top level we approached it with innovative technology and a lot of industry expertise, whether it's in financial services or healthcare, cloud and what we do with the public IBM cloud is really important around the services we provide there, data and AI, and then as you come down from that, modern infrastructure is key because modern infrastructure supports the data. So when you look at 80% of enterprises are intending to be multi-cloud. Something like 70% already are, right? Because of what you referenced with the consumption of SaaS. So, multi-cloud is the defacto operating model for applications and then, therefore, for the data. So from an IBM storage and SDI perspective, we kind of view... There are three primary adoption patterns that we're seeing with our clients. The first is around modernizing traditional applications or workloads, which also drags modern infrastructure, flash-based systems, leveraging more of storage efficiency technologies, like compression and dedupe, being able to protect that data, whether it's in a traditional VMware environment or the emerging containers environment. So, yeah, data's at the core. The partnership that we have with Cisco around VersaStack enables us to support traditional private clouds, whether those are built on the VMware set of tools or now, as last week we announced, the VersaStack for IBM Cloud Private. IBM Cloud Private is an enterprise platform for developers to leverage microservices and containerized IBM Middleware Services, whether that's WebSphere or MQ or Microservices Builder, as well as a whole catalog of open source technologies and tools to get agility out of the DevOps process and then also layer on analytics on top of that. >> So customers, they're gonna want consistency across all those clouds. So what role do you guys bring? Are you trying to be a platform of platforms, or is that too aspirational? Obviously, you can't have 100% market shares, so that's not practical. But to the extent that people adopt your technologies, is that how we should be thinking of about it? >> Well, so IBM Cloud Private is an open platform. It's built on Docker runtimes and Kubernetes orchestration. It's open to where you can leverage things like Red Hat OpenShift if you've chosen them for your containers platform, and then we also support the traditional Private Clouds with VMware. So, there's a whole set of tools in there. What we're trying to do from a data management perspective is protect it, whether that's backup and recovery, morphing into this new category of secondary data reuse. So, for instance, from a traditional workflow of just doing backup and recovery, we can now take native format copies of the data, whether that's in Oracle or SQL Server database, et cetera, and take that data to the Public Cloud, where different personas and use cases can act on that data. So you can spin up a VM from that Native format within our tools in the IBM cloud. So that's from a data protection standpoint. On data management, we have, later this year, we'll talk more formally about programs that we have around metadata management. That's where you can index and classify, for instance, unstructured or structured data, and act on that in terms of, where was it last accessed? Who should be accessing it? Is it personally identifiable information? Do I wanna run analytics on it? So the metadata management is an opportunity to plug in to broader IBM things, whether it's Watson data platform or information governance catalogs, to provide that kind of uber across cloud infrastructure management. >> And that's a machine sort of intelligence, automation component, that scale, right? >> It could absolutely be used for augmented intelligence, artificial intelligence, some of the machine learning pieces as well. >> Jeff, Jeff, I'm wondering if you could give us a little insight of some of the places that customers are falling down. We were just talking to a systems integrator before you came on and he said, "Well, sometimes I take a virtualized environment "and I move it and it's not really geared "for this modern platform." Containerization can help in a lot of these environments, so when you talk about the pattern we've seen that works many times is you modernize the platform, and then I can modernize the application, start pulling things apart, start refactoring, start playing with some of these environments because I can't just... Lift and shift can help, but it can't be that's the only move. There's a lot of work that needs to get done, and a lot of time that's underestimated. >> Right, well it's not a panacea, but there is a key tool called Transformation Advisor that is part of the IBM cloud platform. It's intended to assist with the challenge that you just stated, which is, OK, how do I take a traditional workload, determine if it's ready to be containerized, and then start the process of containerization. You can go back to some of the VM migration pieces, too. There's a whole set of tools that enterprises have used. Transformation Advisor is one tooling example of what we can do in the platform. And then we obviously have services through Global Services that can help at a large scale for enterprises to kinda make that step. >> You bring up a good point there, 'cause we always struggle with some of these tool transformations, but if you go back to virtualization it was really some of the organizational things that had to shift. Wonder if you can talk about some of the things that are changing here. This show, we've spent a lot of time talking about Cisco's moving up the stack, network people are much more closer tied to some of those new application development, especially with things like intent-based networking. >> Well, it's a interesting reminder that we get often from clients, 'cause you're really touching at some of the remember the operational steps, things like containerization are interesting new technologies, and there's a lot of advantages to them. But just going back a minute, of the heritage with what we've been doing with Cisco around VersaStack, leveraging it on a VMware environment, we hear a lot from customers that their operational practices really are set around Vmware and the VMware tooling. So one of the things that we did with IBM Cloud Private is, it can run on top of VMware. So as customers want to take a kind of transitive step towards microservices, they can continue to leverage their operational practices around VMware. So it's important to, it sometimes takes enterprises a little bit longer than you may guess, right, to embrace the new set of things. Our product portfolio and our directions are set where they can leverage some of the operational pieces they already have. >> Well, just for our viewers who may not know, I mean, the recent history of IBM and Cisco is quite interesting. IBM at one point purchased a company called BNT, which got sold as part of the X86 sale to Lenovo. That opened up a huge opportunity for IBM and Cisco to partner because it was very clear swim lanes. And that sorta catalyzed a relationship that from your standpoint, VersaStack was sort of the first instantiation of that relationship. So, take us through, sort of, where you guys are in the partnership and where you see it going. >> Sure, yeah, so VersaStack, for folks who may not be familiar, it's a Converge System, right? So it's IBM storage, flash or otherwise, leverages Cisco UCS servers, and then their Nexus and MDS Switching. So it's integrated, validated as a single solution to, as the name implies, to be very versatile and provide agility and flexibility. And so, through our routes to market, either with distribution or resellers or system integrators, it is a way that we can address platforms that matter to our joint customers. We've talked about IBM Cloud Private. A lot of heritage around VMware and SQL server and Oracle and a lot of focus around SAP HANA. So, we typically will partner around which enterprise platforms are we going, and then we also partner, in general, around MDS Switching with Cisco, and we'll talk more about that in months to come as we enhance that relationship. >> So, the solutions part of your title, you just mentioned VMware, Oracle, SAP HANA, there may be others. How do you guys approach solutions? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so a solution, at a PetaLogic level, is a successful repeatable outcome. And what we focus on, then, are the integrations that matter. Those could be, integrations with IBM tools, like we talked about with IBM Cloud Private. Could be the integrations that we do jointly with Cisco through the validated design process for some of these applications or databases. And so we have teams that do the validation work and figure out how we marry IBM capabilities with ecosystem capabilities. And there's a whole, whether we're automating private clouds or accelerating workloads including the partnership that IBM and Cisco have with Horton Works. And then in industry context as well, particularly in healthcare and financial services. We'll pick the platforms that really matter and then do the integrations that enable us to take, whether it's our systems or our software or IBM level capabilities to market. >> I wanna come back to this simplicity theme, specifically in the context of data protection. With all this multi-cloud, data protection has become a really hot topic. You guys have dramatically simplified your data protection offering with Spectra Protect Plus. Talk about data protection, how it's changing from where it used to be just, OK, it's a virtualized world. We kind of understand the challenges of virtual data protection. That has played itself out, and now there's a whole new wave coming. What's your perspective on this? >> Well, I don't know if the virtual is play, I mean, the virtualized environment is still kind of paying the freight, if you will. >> Yeah, played out in terms of-- >> Yes, no, no, yeah, right. >> We understand what had to change. >> Right. And customers have made that change >> Yeah, and your simplicity point on that is really key. So one of the enhancements that we announced last year at VMWorld was Spectrum Protect Plus. So that's an agent list, OVA based, VM based backup and recovery tool. And it's very simple to use. The trick is that we've focused its capabilities around secondary data re-use. So I mentioned earlier, that whole workflow has evolved to where the data has increasing value beyond its primary use, right? So backup and recover, but then we can leverage those native format copies. Spectrum Protect Plus is available either on a bring your own license or a monthly subscription in the IBM cloud, other clouds over time. And so we enable enterprises to not only do the traditional backup and protection, but very simply, move that data to either a secondary or tertiary data center, if that's still a part of their backup architecture, or into the public cloud. And so the simplicity factor comes in, again, that it's agent lists. There's a catalog of where all your copies are, and you can reuse that data for whether it's DevOps or DevTest or analytics purposes. >> OK, so that's helpful. So what I'm trying to get to was sort of the enablers, maybe from a technology standpoint, because in the virtualization world, it was all about efficiency because you didn't have the underutilized physical resources anymore. >> Yep, right. >> All the servers utilized 10%. (chuckles) Well, I got rid of a lot of those physical servers, and the one job that needed that power was backup, so I needed a new way to approach it. What I'm hearing is, in this multi-cloud world, it's a focus on simplicity. I'm inferring from that, a cloud-like experience, maybe some other capabilities that you guys are-- >> Yeah, so. >> Doing away with. >> The containers are a progression. I mean, VMware came around to maximize your CPU and storage utilization. Containers provide yet another level of efficiency on top of that. They bring with them the need for changes in your data protection. And so we, at Think in March, we talked about our directions around container aware data protection and container aware snapshots. Most vendors will use snapshots and then volume level controls of how we've traditionally done backup. We have a progression, and we'll talk more about it later in the year, of how we do snapshots, again, that are container aware. They leverage our tools, such as Spectrum Copy Data Management, Spectrum Protect Plus, integrate with our arrays. But they'll bring the same level of capability that we've had traditionally in a virtualized environment to also support data protection in a container world. >> Well, it's an interesting landscape right now in data protection. >> Oh, it's awesome! There's so many new tools, and it's great to be able, (Dave chuckling) like we talked about earlier, to partner with Cisco around some of this as well. >> Great, Jeff, I wanna give you the final word, as if, for those that couldn't make it to the show, either share key conversation you're having, you're hearing from customers, or a big takeaway from the show that you'd like to share. >> Sure, yeah, we've had a lot of customers come up and wanna know, OK, well, how do you start, right? And we talked about, there are three primary adoption patterns, whether it's modernizing, and typically it will start with modernizing traditional workloads. 70% of private cloud usage is for that particular use case. Well, you can pretty quickly show them, then, the progression to, OK, they wanna be more agile. They wanna go cloud-native. From that private cloud infrastructure, you can do that, and then you can have a consistent way that you interact around services in the public cloud. And so that's what we've been talking to clients about. They wanted to know, how do I start with what I have, and then how do I get to this better future? And how do I leverage your tools and capabilities? And so whether that's with IBM systems components or what we do with our partnership with Cisco, we're showing them how we, collectively, can help them on that journey. >> All right, Jeff, I really appreciate all the updates. Dave, thanks so much for joining me for this segment. >> Yeah, thank you. >> We still have a full day here, three days wall-to-wall coverage of theCUBE, Cisco Live 2018. Thanks so much for watching. (techno musical flourish)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President Global Channel Sales for IBM Storage. CUBE alum, great to see you. Thanks for comin' by. >> Great, we always love comin' and talkin' to theCUBE. >> Love havin' you on. Get the insight, and you get down and dirty in the storage. But I gotta, before we get into the storage impact, the cloud, and all the great performance requirements, and software you guys are building, news is that the CEO of Cisco swung by your booth? >> Yes, Chuck did come by today and asked how-- Chuck Robbins came by today, asked how we're doin'. IBM has a very broad relationship with Cisco, beyond just the storage division. The storage division, the IOT division, the collaboration group. Security's doin' a lot of stuff with them. IBM is one of Cisco's largest resellers through the GTS and GBS teams. So, he came by to see how were doin', and gave him a little plug about the VersaStack, and how it's better than any other converge solutions, but talked about all of IBM, and the strong IBM Cisco relationship. >> I mean, it's not a new relationship. Expand on what you guys are doin'. How does that intersect with division that he put on stage yesterday with the keynote. He laid out, and said publicly, and put the stake in the ground, pretty firmly, "This is the old way." Put an architecture, a firewall, a classic enterprise network diagram. >> Right, right. >> And said, "That's the old way," and put in a big circle, with all these different kinda capabilities with the cloud. It's a software defined world. Clearly Cisco moving up the stack, while maintaining the networking shops. >> Right. >> Networking and storage, always the linchpin of cloud and enterprise computing. What's the connection? Share the touch points. >> Sure, well I think the key thing is everyone's gotta realize that whether you're in a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or a public cloud configuration, storage is that rock solid foundation. If you don't have a good foundation, the building will fall right over, and it's great that you've got cloud with its flexibility, it's ability to transform, the ability to modernize, move data around, but if what's underneath doesn't work, the whole thing topples over, and storage is a cruel element to that. Now, what we've done at IBM is we have made all of our solutions on the storage side, VersaStack, our all-flash arrays, all of our software defined storage, our modern data protection, everything is what we'll say is cloudified. K, it's, I designed for multiple cloud scenarios, whether it be private, hybrid, or public, or, as you've probably seen, in some the enterprise accounts, they actually use multiple public cloud providers. Whether it be from a price issue, or a legal issues, because they're all over the world, and we're supporting that with all our solutions. And, our VersaStack, specifically, just had a CVD done with Cisco, Cisco Validated Design, with IBM Cloud Private on a VersaStack. >> Talk about the scale piece, because this becomes the key differentiator. We've talked about on theCUBE, many of the times with you around, some of the performance you guys have, and the numbers are pretty good. You might wanna do a quick review on that. I'm not lookin' for speech and feeds. Really, Eric, I'd like to get your reaction, and view, and vision, on how the scale piece is kicking, 'cause clients want scale optionality. They're gonna have a lot of stuff on premise. They have cloud goin' on, multi cloud on the horizon, but they gotta scale. The numbers are off the charts. You're seein' all these security threats. I mean, it's massive. How are you guys addressing the scale question with storage? >> So, we've got a couple things. So first of all, the storage itself is easily scalable. For example, on our A9000 all-flash array, you just put a new one, automatically grows, don't have to do anything, k? With our transparent cloud tiering, you can set it up, whether it be our Spectrum Scale software, whether it be our Spectrum Virtualize software, or whether it be on our all-flash arrays, that you could automatically just move data to whatever your cloud target may be. Whether that be something with an object store, whether that be a block store, and it's all automated. So, the key thing here on scalability is transparency, ease of use, and automation. They wanna automatically join new capacity, wanna automatically move data from cloud to cloud, automatically move data from on premise to cloud, automatically move data from on premise to on premise, and IBM's storage solutions, from a software perspective, are all designed with that data mobility in mind, and that transportability, both on premise, and out to any cloud infrastructure they have. >> What should Cisco customers know about IBM storage, if you get to talk to them directly? We're here at Cisco Live. We've talked many times about what you guys got goin' on with the software. Love the software systems approach. You know we dig that. But a Cisco deployment, they've been blocking and tackling in the enterprise for years, clouds there. What's the pitch? What's the value proposition to Cisco clients? >> So, I think they key thing for us talkin' to a Cisco client is the deep level of integration we have. And, in this case, not just the storage division, but other things. So, for example, a lot of their collaboration stuff uses under pitting software from IBM, and IBM also uses some software from Cisco inside our collaboration package. In our storage package, the fact that we put together the VersaStack with all these Cisco Validated Designs, means that the customer, whether it be a cloud product, for example, on the VersaStack, about 20 of our public references are all small and medium cloud providers that wheel in the VersaStack, connect 'em, and it automatically grows simply and easily. So, in that case, you're looking at a cloud provider customer of Cisco, right? When you're looking at a enterprise customer of Cisco, man, the key thing is the level of integration that we have, and how we work together across the board, and the fact that we have all these Cisco Validated Designs for object storage, for file storage, for block storage, for IBM Cloud Private. All these things mean they know that it's gonna work, right outta the box, and whether they deploy it themselves, whether they use one of our resellers, one of our channel partners, or whether they use IBM services or Cisco service. Bottom line, it works right out of the box, easy to go, and they're up and running quickly. >> So, Eric, you talked a bunch about VersaStack, and you've been involved with Cisco and their UCS since the early days when they came up, and helped drive, really, this wave of converged infrastructure. >> Right. >> One of the biggest changes I've seen in the last couple years, is when you talk to customers, this is really their private cloud platform that they're building. When it first got rolled out, it was virtualization. We kinda added a little bit of management there. What, give us your viewpoint as to kinda high-level, why's this still such an important space, what are the reasons that customers are rolling this out, and how that fits into their overall cloud story? >> Well, I think you hit it, Stu, right on the head. First of all, it's easy to put in and deploy, k? That is a big check box. You're done, ready to go. Second thing that's important is be able to move data around easily, k? In an automated fashion like I said earlier, whether that be to a public cloud if they're gonna tier out. If I'm a private cloud, I got multiple data centers. I'm moving data around all the time. So, the physical infrastructure and data center A is a replica, or a DR center, for data center B, and vice versa. So, you gotta be able to move all this stuff around quickly easy. Part of the reason you're seeing converge infrastructure is it's the wave of what's hit in the server world. Instead of racking and stacking individual servers, and individual pieces of storage, you've got a pre-packed VersaStack. You've got Cisco networking, Cisco server, VMware, all of our storage, our storage software, including the ability to go out to a cloud, or with our ICP IBM Private Cloud, to create a private cloud. And so, that's why you're seeing this move towards converge. Yes, there's some hyperconverged out there in the market, too, but I think the big issue, in certain workloads, hyperconverged is the right way to go. In other workloads, especially if you're creating a giant private cloud, or if you're a cloud provider, that's not the way to go because the real difference is with hyperconverged you cannot scale compute and storage independently, you scale them together, So, if you need more storage, you scale compute, even if you don't need it. With regular converge, you scale them independently, and if you need more storage, you get more storage. If you need more compute-- If you need both, you get both. And that's a big advantage. You wanna keep the capex and opex down as you create this infrastructure for cloud. 'Member, part of the whole idea of cloud are a couple things. A, it's supposed to be agile. B, it's supposed to be super flexible. C, of course, is the modern nomenclature, but D is reduce capex and opex. And you wanna make sure that you can do that simply and easily, and VersaStack, and our relationship with Cisco, even if you're not using a VersaStack config, allows us to do that for the end user. >> And somethin' we're seeing is it's really the first step for customers. I need to quote, as you said, modernize the platform, and then I can really start looking at modernizing my applications on top of that. >> Right. Well, I think, today, it's all about how do you create the new app? What are you doin' with containers? So, for example, all of our arrays, and all of our arrays that go into a VersaStack, have free persistent storage support for any containerize environ, for dockers and kubernetes, and we don't charge for that. You just get it for free. So, when you buy those solutions, you know that as you move to the container world, and I would argue virtualization is still here to stay, but that doesn't mean that containers aren't gonna overtake it. And if I was the CEO of a couple different virtualization companies, I'd be thinkin' about buyin' a container company 'cause that'll be the next wave of the future, and you'll say-- >> Don't fear kubernetes. >> Yeah, all of that. >> Yeah, Eric Herzog's flying over to Dockercon, make a big announcement, I think, so. (laughing) >> Evaluation gonna drop a little bit. I gotta ask you a question. I mean, obviously, we watch the trends that David Floy and our team, NVMe is big topic. What is the NVMe leadership plan for you, on the product side, for you? Can you take a minute to share your vision for what that is gonna be? >> Sure, well we've already publicly announced. We've been shipping an NVMe over fabric solution leveraging InfiniBand since February of this year, and we demoed it, actually, in December at the AI Conference in New York City. So, we've had a fabric solution for NVMe already since December, and then shipping in February. The other thing we're doing is we publicly announced that we'd be supporting the other NVMe over fabric protocols, both fabric channel and ethernet by the end of the year. We publicly already announced that. We also announced that we would have an end to end strategy. In this case, you would be talking about NVMe on the fabric side going out to the switching and the host infrastructure, but also NVMe in a storage sub-system, and we already publicly announced that we'd be doing that this year. >> And how's the progress on that plan? You feel good about it? >> We're getting there. I can't comment yet, but just stay tuned on July 1st, and see what happens. >> So, talk about the Spectrum NAS, and other announcements that you have. What's goin' on? What are the big news? What's happening? >> Well, I think that, yeah, the big thing for us has been all about software. As you know, for the analysts that track the numbers, we are, and ended up in 2017, as tied as the number one storage software company in the world, independent of our system's business. So, one of the key powers there is that our software works with everyone's gear, whether it be a white box through a distributor or reseller, whether it be our direct competitors. Spectrum Protect, which is a, one of the best enterprise backup packages. We backup everybody's gear, our gear, NetApp's gear, HP's gear, Pure's gear, Hitachi's gear, the old Dell stuff, it doesn't matter to us, we backup everything. So, one of the powers that IBM has, from a software perspective, is always being able to support not only our own gear, but supporting all of our competitors as well. And the whole white box market, with things that our partners may put together through the distributors. >> I know somethin' might be obvious to you, but just take me through the benefits to the customer. What's the impact to the customer? Obviously, supporting everything, it sounds like you guys have done that with software, so you're agnostic on hardware. >> Right. >> So, is it a single pane of glass? What's the benefit to the customer with that software capability? >> Yeah, I feel there's a couple things. So, first of all, the same software that we sell as standalone software, we also sell on our arrays. So if you're in a hybrid configuration, and you're using our Flashsystem V9000 in our Storwize family, that software also works with an EMC, or NetApp box. So, one license, one way to do everything, one set of training, which in a small shop is not that important, but in a big shop, you don't have to manage three licenses, right? You don't have to get trained up on three different ways to do things, and you don't have to, by the way, document, which all the big companies would do. So it dramatically simplifies their life from an opex perspective. Makes it easier for them to run their business. >> Eric, we'd love to get your opinion on just how's Cisco doin' out there? It's a big sprawling company. I looked at the opening keynote, the large infrastructure business doing very well in the data center, but they've got collaboration, they do video, they're moving out in the cloud. Wanna see your thoughts as to how are they doing, and still making sure they take care of core networking, while still expanding and going through their own transformation, that they're talkin' very public about. How do we measure Cisco as a software company? >> Well, we see some very good signs there. I mean, we partner with 'em all the time, as I mentioned, for example, in both the security group and our collaboration group, and I'm not talkin' storage now, just IBM in general, we leverage software from them, and they leverage software from us. We deliver joint solutions through our partners, or through each of the two service organizations, but we also have products where we incorporate their software into ours, and they incorporate software in us. So, from our perspective, we've already been doing it beyond their level, now, of expanding into a much greater software play. For us, it's been a strong play for us already because of the joint work we've been doing now for several years on software that they've been selling in the more traditional world, and now pushing out into the broader areas, like cloud, for example. >> Awesome work. Eric, thanks for coming on. I gotta ask you one final, personal, question. >> Sure. >> You got the white shirt on, you usually have a Hawaiian shirt on. >> Well, because Chuck Robbins came by the booth, as we talked about earlier today, felt that I shouldn't have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on, however, now that I've met Chuck, next time, at next Cisco Live, I'll have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on versus my IBM traditional shirt. >> Chuck's a cool guy. Thanks for comin' on. As always, great commentary. You know your stuff. >> Great, thank you. >> Great to have the slicing and dicing, the IBM storage situation, as well as the overall industry landscape. At Cisco Live, we're breakin' it down, here on theCUBE in Orlando. Second day of three days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more live coverage after this break.

>> Narrator: Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to day two of live coverage with theCUBE here at Cisco live 2018 in Europe. We're in Barcelona, Spain. I'm John, for the co-founder of Silicon Angle. Co-host of the theCUBE, with Stu Miniman, analyst on wikibon,com. As well as Cube co-host many events certainly Stu is not a stranger to Cisco. Open-sourced. And overall, the discretion that digital is having on the enterprise. Our next guest is Michael Kay, global technologist of product strategy of theme software. Michael it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey John, hey Stu. >> So, you guys are here with Cisco Veeam, you guys have been a big success story we've coverd on theCUBE many times. You're up Cisco. What's the vibe here, what's going on in the show? >> So back in mid 2017, October 2017, we announced we were going to be on the global price list, and so obviously that this is different from last year in that we're having more conversations, people know what we're doing. For starters, asking how do we protect the network? How do we protect the ASA? Using the firewall and etc. It's very good to have those conversations with the enterprise guys. And they now understand we're able to protect their workload, their data. So, I imagine that it will be exactly the same when we go over to Cisco Live in the US, but this is obviously the first show that we've had where we are talking about availability with Cisco as a joint partner on their global price list. >> One of things that we always see is that with you guys, your logo is everywhere. You've got the big green Veeam. What's the relationship that you guys have with customers? Because you're playing a lot of great spaces. I mean, what's the main relationship in brand promise that Veeam has? >> So I guess from our point of view is that we come from SMB root, if you'd like. But over the years, over that last 10 years, we've developed that scalable product that allows us to protect the larger workload within the enterprise. We also have cloud offerings to enable our service provider partners. So, exactly that, we want to be able to play and protect data in whatever facet that needs to be. So, whether it be cloud, whether it be on-premises, SMB, commercial, enterprise, we want to be able to protect all of those workloads. >> So Michael, one of the things we've been talking about here at the show, you won't just go look at world's agents. It's a big ecosystem and it's been changing. Cisco has got a lot of pieces of big movement software that's happening to cloud and data center. They have dozens of storage relationships and that's where Veeam ties in a lot. Maybe gives a little bit of an overview, kind of the breath and depth of the relationship where you play in relation to UCS, Converged, Hyper Converged, all those pieces. >> Yeah so I guess Converged first. If we look at the majority of the data centers and the customers that we speak to there is still very much, there is a large footprint of Converged infrastructure where that be FlexPod, VersaStack, Pure FlashStack, or Vblock from a DeliMC point of view. And the good thing where we come in is that we have storage integrated in all of them. So, regardless of like, compute, however it brings a nice simplicity model to the customer from that stack. But for us to just slot into that and be able to leverage the storage integrations and to be able to take an efficient snapshot of those virtual machines and push them onto a, maybe Cisco 2600, that modular, scalable server that will both compute and high density storage really gives us a best of both worlds in terms of plugging it into that fabric interconnector. Making is converge backup story or converge available story. >> Yeah so, you mentioned a lot of options out there. Still, most customers, there are more customers that aren't doing some flavor of Converged drive or Converged than are - there is a lot of buzz behind the Hyper Converged piece of it. What are you hearing from customers? You know, you've said there's a lot of kind of CI versus HI that numbers show that out. I mean, there's a lot more solutions out there. It should be in the market a lot longer. But you know, where are the customers? What are some of the decision points and how has your organization held on them? >> So I guess where we are seeing things that are HyperFlex, where we also have storage integration there from a protection point of view. Seeing many of them feed into that main data center. So, we're protecting the data, we're using our replication engine to push data into that larger data center for hot DR or high ability type solution. And I think that's where we're seeing it. But we are also seeing it more HyperFlex or more HCI come into that main data center for some certain verticals from that point of view. >> Okay, so if I could just unpack what you're saying there, you know, mostly HCIs have been kind of the robust, smaller environments where you know, traditional three tier or CI has been there but we're starting to see that. That blurring of the lines between what is there. >> Yeah, people are definitely bringing that HCI, that simplicity, that scalable simplicity model into their main data center as it kind of merges with that converged offering right? So. >> Yeah, the other thing that's very clear, the Veeam show last year when we covered it really customers trying to bake out their cloud strategy. You know, how does that tie into all this discussion here? Cisco is talking a lot about multicloud, that's really the management plain, how do you see that from an availability solution? >> Yeah, okay, so yesterday I sat in the Keynote and reading some of the stuff, we had our sales kick off last week and some of our stuff really resonates with our message as well that's out there. So the whole multicloud, our tagline is around any app, any data, any cloud. So it kind of resonates with what Cisco is saying. And that's obviously a good thing. But, so whether that be the public cloud, whether it's to enable our service providers to leverage the Cisco technology plus Veeam to offer a service out to our existing Veeam customers. The On-Premise's solution. Or whether that'd just be on-premises they sense that we just talked about whether Converged or whether HCI top plate. >> What the big thing you guys learned at your sale's kick-off because we always wonder what goes on in these sale's kick-off. People like cheering, their making their quota, business is good, but they listen to customers. What's the big used cases that you guys are really doing well with Cisco on? I mean that's ultimately the pattern that has kind of emerged. There is always a best product. What's the hot, used case for you guys? >> So I think one of our biggest things is about how do we partner with the likes of Cisco. How do we leverage that relationship to bring more Cisco validated designs, reference architectures, from a technical point of view up. So when the good door, the numbers being rah-rah as you're in the sale's kick-off but ultimately it's about the vision. How do we go forward with that partnership? Being on that price list is really going to help us get into some of those accounts, from that point of view. But also, we've got, from a technical point of view, I know that we've got the design, we've got the model behind this. >> Yeah, when did you guys get onto the price list? Recently? >> Uh, I believe it was October. >> So just recently? >> So really recently. >> Some deals are just going to be flying in. Right? (laughs) >> Hopefully, right. >> What's the biggest challenge that you find with Veeam's customers? Because you guys have certainly done really well. Again, we've covered your success on theCUBE many times with other events, like Vmworld and others. What's the ah ha moment for the customers with Veeam? Is it just the easiest solution? Is it a technical paid point they saw? What's that moment when the customer really gets it? >> So, I think the simplicity, that easy-to-use, easy to deploy, regardless whether you're three, six tier host shop or whether you're a multi 10,000 VM type enterprise estate. It's being able to use that same tool-set to protect all the way through. That's really simple. We really want to keep that user interface really easy to consume, and use, and scale. So that's one of the key areas that I've seen that we're playing in. >> Alright, so it's 2018 now, we've got a looming, headwind that a lot of customers we are concerned about, haven't heard a lot about it at this show, but GDPR, that's definitely something on everybody's mind. Is this another Y2K that's going to slow down ID bind or are there engagements? How does Veeam work with customers? What's it going to do with the landscape of IT this year? >> So we were, we've been looking at GDBR Compliance and our messaging in those has been, we've been really working on how we start mentioning this and marketing this out from a Veeam perspective. So we're not going to keep, we're not going to get anyone GDBR compline. But what we are going to do is help you understand where that data is, how long has it been kept for, where is it kept, where it's stored, et cetera. So update three that we've released just before Christmas it was around location tag in. So if that back-up comes into a certain GO then we want to be able to tag that, and that tag stays with that back-up data wherever it goes. Then we've got Veeam ONE, the monitors and reports against that. So you know whether you've violated GBDR compliance or a violation of where that data should have be located. But it's one of the things that it's not a day that kind of goes back the moment where I'm not speaking to someone about GDPR. And obviously, it's really, it's coming around very fast. May this year, is when it comes into force. >> Are people shaking in their boots? I mean, I'm hearing, like, a lot of people really nervous. I mean it's kind not has been played up. Certainly the press has been covering it but I mean the Y2K problem, you remember those glory days, you know, the millennial, you know that bug never really happened. But GDPR is a freaking, hard-core enforcement. And the penalties are stiff. >> Yeah. >> I mean it's ridiculous. >> That's a big percentage of your gross income. Right, the people that I speak to are definitely aware and concerned that they need to be in this particular state by the time we get to May. It's not about waiting until that date in May. It's about how do we do it now and start understanding it a bit more about our data. Cisco yesterday, on the main stage said, "it's all about data." And absolutely resonates exactly with what we want to do. We want to be able to do more with that but also we need to understand what that data is and how long do we keep them for. Or why we're keeping it? And ask those questions to these new data protection officers, data-- >> Well people are having more data driven strategies and we were commenting yesterday. We didn't kind of, we didn't hear much here about that Cisco not using that data driven. Is it just not a real big data show or not a lot of AI here yet but if you got data driven, you better have data protection, right? I mean, you can't have both. >> They kind of go hand-in-hand, right? And I think that's another thing where we're coming into the fold. Is that we've got features in our tool-set that allows us to spin up that data, in an isolated network. We had to run test against them. Run compliance checks against them. To make sure that, one, the back-up comes up. So, when you're not waiting until that problem hits. So you can bring it up but also test against updates, et cetera. >> Alright, so here is a question for you. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Okay, "Well you know, I really am on-premises, on-prem." Stu, depend on how you want to argue that point. Well Stu and I argued about it yesterday about on-prem versus on-Premises. I'm on-premises, I'm getting my cloud operation. I've got my data protection. But I really got to get into the cloud. I've got some stuff in the cloud now. Cloud is my mision. I'm going to be moving to the cloud in a very big way. How does Veeam help me? >> So, we want to bring the technology that you've been using on-premises, hopefully, maybe Veeam, and we want to take that same, easy-to-use concept, that same UI that you've using and really, hopefully you've seen it as a simplistic approach to your data. We're taking the headache out of the data protection story. But if you are pushing into those public clouds, being able to give you a seamless way-- >> So same dashboard, same-- >> Similar tool-sets, exactly that. And being able to protect that. >> Across multiple clouds as well? Because multicloud is hot. >> Yeah, exactly, we want to be able to be like we are within virtualization. Being able to protect any workload on VMWare, Hyper-V, et cetera. We also want to be able to protect any of those public clouds. From using the same tool-set to be able to protect that same file format that we're backing up to, same fundamentals that we have. >> I want to get your view on Cisco Live here. You're in on Keynote, you go to number shows, you know, this show used to be, it was hard-core networking, it was all networking. CCIEs and everything. We're sitting here in the DevNet zone. They've got developers, got good storage ecosytsems here. How do you look at the audience here compared to say, a VM world or some of the other partner activities that you go to? >> So I think like couple of years ago, they were kind of saying that you need to broaden your knowledge as an IT consultant, IT person, within a company. You have to expand your technologies. You can't just be the networking guy. You can't just be the storage guy. And I think that we're, I don't know if you guys see it, but definitely seeing more broaden people like, again, like I said there, the people that I'm having conversations with at the booth, they're all aware of what we do now. So, they have clearly broaden their knowledge away from that networking. But, also with the likes of the DevNet. So like being able to code, and all of the API driven type stories that we hear. It's also being able to leverage that and push that into whatever that data center needs to be from an automation orchestration point of view. So, and everyone plays a part in that. Whether it's the storage, whether it's the availability, whether it's the compute vendors, whether it's the virtualization. Everyone has a part to play in that, that automation orchestration piece. >> Awesome. Well how has your experience with the show has been as a European flavor year, what's your take away? >> Um, I guess-- >> John: Customer action, good partners? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm speaking to your Cisco reps. Kind of seeing it from a Veeam point of view in your region. Understand a bit more about around GDBR. GDBR is coming in. So there is no way of getting around that. Understand what tools can actually help you be more compliant. Also, look at, I've spoken to a number of people around that conversion, HCI piece, and they weren't aware around the integration. So, go away and see if we do fit in that integration piece. Existing customers go away and find out that information, and yeah. >> So what's the difference between an North American customer and an European customer? Do they have little nuances? Do they have regional issues by sovereignty in countries? Is there a buyer behavior from a Veeam customer standpoint? Difference between a customer in North America versus Europe? >> So, I'm mostly over in Europe but the customers that we speak to over in the US, that's the most concerning part around that GDBR piece, there is still, I have that understanding of what GDBR is doing. If they are holding data. Especially these larger enterprises. They are going to be holding data for those European countries. So they need to be compliant that way. And that's the misunderstanding maybe from some of the people. >> So European are more savvier on the compliance side? >> From the people that I have spoken to they know that it affects them because they're in country and holding that data. However, it affects everyone. It's a global compliance if you're holding data from anyone. >> I think in North America they kicked the can down the road. Oh wow, GDBR's upon Europe. Alright, Europeans are very savvy on compliance. That's a huge issue, data drive, data protection. We're here inside theCUBE with Veeam software. I'm John Furrier and Stu Mimiman live from Barcelona for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's the Cube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and the Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. Kicking off 2018 here in Europe is Cisco's annual event. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of the Cube, with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon. Our next guest is Todd Brannon, who's the marketing director at Cisco, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Great, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> You guys announced HyperFlex before the show. >> We did. >> And a lot of cloud happening here in the keynote. Seeing IOT, well security number one obviously. Security, that's always going to be number one, but the other themes are obviously IOT and multi-cloud. >> Todd: Multi-cloud. >> Huge conversations, both developing rapidly in kind of it's own way. >> Well that's crucial for us 'cause we talk about HyperFlex 3.0, a lot of cool features that we're building into that, but the scope for us is much, much broader because of the multi-cloud piece. That's reality for our customers. They've told us very, very clearly, I'm going to use multiple public clouds, but I'm also going to have to get my on-prem side of it. So we tell 'em, absolutely, good multi-cloud starts at home with platforms like, with HyperFlex, and that's exactly the way we've brought it together. So we talk about a kind of a very modest aspiration with this is we want to help customers power any application, on any cloud, on any scale. >> Well take a minute before we get started, help us with some questions. What is HyperFlex 3.0 for the folks watching? What is it? >> So we introduced HyperFlex as our hyper converged platform built on UCS. We acquired a company called Springpath. They brought in a purpose-built, log-structured file system for the cluster and we combined these things together to create HyperFlex. So it's really unique in the sense that, well let me back up, I'd say a lot people ignore how crucial a file system and a network are to a clustered system. It kind of goes without saying, but a lot of the focus has been on, okay what's the individual node in that stack look like, but we look at it much more at the cluster level. And so, our uniqueness is that we've engineered all of this thing together. So we brought that out in 2016, last year really we focused on performance, 40 gig, all-flash, open up the network pipes and then this year is really about our multi-cloud integration and then additional features that we're bringing in to support more workloads, Hyper-V support, containers. So 3.0 is really just filling in a lot of features that we need to really make this a ideal platform for multi-cloud. >> Todd, we've tracked UCS since the early days. UCS really created and led the whole converged infrastructure ten. >> When we heard about CI though, it's really about simplification. It's infrastructure, it's that next step. Hyper converged, a lot of the things you were talking about there, it's about cloud and the underlying platform, and while CI can be used for that, seems like a different discussion. Can you give us a little bit compare/contrast as to what you see? >> Absolutely. Well, I mean, the conversion infrastructures, you know, we started that way back in the day with Vblock and VCE, and then FlexPod, VersaStack, FlashStack, there's lots of different storage partnerships that we have we can bring customers. And private cloud has been a big workload for those infrastructure components. You know, it's really just a storage question of how you want to address that component, but it all revolves around the operating model. So our mission is, look, we've got a huge install basic customers are used to acquiring and deploying pre-engineered chunks of infrastructure like a Vxblock or a FlexPod, what have you, we need to continue to serve them, while they also evaluate where hyper convergence might fit in the equation as well, and how do we offer those both up with a common set of policy and management, with UCS management, with Intersight. So we think that these are going to coexist for quite some time and customers are going to have to decide how they want to use those different types of infrastructure, but ultimately, it's just about the workload. >> Cisco and it's storage partners have billions of reasons why they're going to keep selling CI's for a while. >> Certainly, yep. >> Help connect the dots though. You talked about that operating model in the keynote this morning, big focus on multi-cloud, >> Todd: Certainly. >> And things like, we talked to AppD at AWS re:Invent, how does the public cloud mesh with these other solutions. >> So, one of the things that we're announcing here at the show is the cloud, our Cisco container platform. That's an example of how we're going to work with Google to create an integrated stack, focused initially around Kubernetes, and we have HyperFlex as an infrastructure component under that, and that's, for people that are really accelerating their application development or maybe they're modernizing older workloads with containers, we're going to provide that element. But the true multi-cloud functionality is what we do with things like CloudCenter. So that was our CliQr acquisition, allows us to profile workloads, take 'em out to the cloud, multiple public clouds. So for us, when we talk about HyperFlex as a platform for multi-cloud it's those integrations with CloudCenter, but then also AppD, which is hugely important because like we were talking about earlier, you've got applications now that are distributed across on-prem and multiple public clouds potentially. So maybe you got a front end out in the public cloud, customer data or business logic on-prem, how do you keep track of the performance of that collection of functions and systems that are running independently and you have to do that with something like AppD. So we have a lot of the software components to help customers really get their multi-cloud going. >> So bringing it back to HyperFlex, my understanding, not just virtual environment anymore, you're also doing containers and that tied into that multi-cloud piece. >> So, a couple important things with this 3.0 release. We're bringing for Hyper-V, for customers who want to do different hypervisors, and then we developed a persistent storage plug-in into the file system for those stateful workloads that are going to be in containers. So again, with Kubernetes, as developers want to go out and do pod requests, basically self-service volumes on the HyperFlex storage environment, that's huge. And so we've opened it up to two more classes of workloads right there. >> I mean, what aren't you doing? Got these centralized apps. Is there going to be a Cisco coin in the future? (laughs) >> I think -- >> There's a rumor going around. >> So yeah, I can't speak to our cryptocurrency strategy. That's out of my domain. >> Probably coming, these centralized apps, again, on the horizon, another future thing you guys are positioned for. In all seriousness though, I want to put a plug in for Stu's Wikibon team. They came out with a true private cloud report recently last year, really kind of the only ones looking at it this way, but it really is interesting. I want to get your comment to this because we go to 100 of events a year, last year was over 100, I think, 30, and what we've observed is the same thing that's happening here. DevNet's got a lot of attraction. You've got DevNet Create, more of an open-source, cloud native focus. >> Todd: Sure. >> You're seeing the enterprises getting their act done at home, inside the premise. >> Todd: That's right. >> So it's not so much they're moving to cloud. Yeah, some stuff's going in the cloud, but they're kind of cleaning up the house first, going cloud ops on premise. >> That's right. >> And then, as a preparation to all the spend and all the intention is really on the private cloud, what they call true private cloud. Do you see the same thing? >> Absolutely. >> And is that a stepping stone to the cloud? >> Absolutely, and that's exactly, that's informed everything we've done here in this latest, this past year really, of development around HyperFlex is our IT customers telling us, look I've got the developer as my new constituent. As much as I need to maintain shrink wrapped apps or legacy workloads for the core business, the developer is really my customer now and I have to provide infrastructure on-prem that behaves like the cloud in terms of infrastructure as code and being able to do things like we're doing with this Kubernetes environment, where the developers can withdraw the resources they need, turn 'em back in and the IT team can get out of the way. That's hugely important. >> I think we're observing on our opening this morning when we were commenting on the keynote and some of the trends here is that Cisco is moving up the stack pretty rapidly over the years, this year more than ever, you can start to see a clear line of sight that it's not just network plumbing, although that's pretty critical. But with Kubernetes and the growth, you mentioned Google, it's pretty interesting, a renaissance is going on in the software world, certainly with open-source, you have app developers, which are like just classic building software apps, then you got engineering, software engineering. So I use that that term software engineering as a throwback to the age when I graduated with my CS degree, that was what you called yourself when you got a job. You were a software engineer. You have network engineers, so you're seeing a line of under the hood engineering with software and networks and whatnot. And then, above Kubernetes you're seeing, just hey I just want a program, just give me some functions. >> Absolutely, and it's the IT generalist that are emerging as the heroes here that have to understand, okay, how do I build that on-prem platform, how do I have the capability to get my developers out to the public cloud, as in when they need to and it makes sense, or potentially bring things back. And you're right, and then on the development side they don't want to have to worry about the mechanics of that. So to the degree we can enable our IT customer to provide that service, but also simplify that for them is essential. >> Talk about your posture to those two different personas because you guys just provide the network in the old days and app developers programmed on them. They get some storage or perusing some storage. Now you got to lean in towards the network engineers, which are now software engineers under the hood, and then you got to lean in to the app developers and enable them to be successful. How are you attacking those, not attacking, how are you servicing and leaning into those groups. >> We brought the storage and computing experts into the fold with UCS, nine years ago, but now when you look at our acquisition of AppD, that's where we really start to take care of the application owner, be it the developer or the business owner for the application and allowing them to kind of see across on-prem, out in the public cloud, how do I ensure that I'm going to stay out of trouble, and if something goes wrong I know exactly where in that constellation of services the problem resides. So AppD is critical in that sense because -- >> So they fill a big hole. >> Absolutely, because that's how we can, all this comes together to power our workload, power business service. Applications are the heart of new business. >> Todd, what about from a training perspective? Cisco Live's always been a show where people get their certifications, they build their careers on this stuff. It's changing so fast. How are you keeping, the training tracks, and giving that career help to all the people that do this for a living. >> We're adding the pillars for all the things we're talking about, the multi-cloud software portfolio, new infrastructure components, like HyperFlex. Those are all being built into our training regimen and also our training partners, so they can take that out and scale it for us. >> All right, so you went and just connected the dots on what I was finishing up for network engineers, software engineers, under the hood, app developers, AppD, you guys have a good solid footing there, good approach. Multi-cloud, is that the Kubernetes? Is that the secret sauce to multi-cloud in your opinion? And/or how do you guys look at multi-cloud and how do you talk to your customers about it? >> Well we talk about, the data is pretty clear, customers want to be able to use multiple public clouds and they want to be able to evaluate them. So I think the center of our strategy, we have our multi-cloud portfolio, how we organize all these things. The cloud consume pillar of that is really comprised of AppD, which we talked about, but also CloudCenter. And so CloudCenter is a tool that allows our customers basically profile an application and then go understand what's it going to cost me and what are the different attributes of these public cloud services, and which one matches up the best. So I'd say that's the center of the strategy. Obviously, particularly around containers, but more workloads in the future, Kubernetes becomes a much bigger -- >> So orchestration is pretty key. >> Yeah, orchestration's essential and it's not just in a pure software context, but how do we hook down into infrastructure. So we've already built this programmable infrastructure, so how do we expose those knobs and dials to orchestration engines so that we're not just virtualizing, but we're actually optimizing the infrastructure they need. >> That's the beautiful thing about service and function-based software. Okay, so now I've heard about this dCloud. What is dCloud? >> So dCloud's basically a demo environment that our engineering team can use and our partners can use to demo software. So, for example, we launched our cloud management platform for UCS and HyperFlex last fall, we call it Intersight. So software like that, you know software becomes central to our strategy, dCloud becomes the way that we show that. >> Customers can come in and play on that and partners? >> Partners and our sales teams can take customers through it. >> But not customers. >> I don't believe there's an end user entrance to that yet. >> So it's like a sandbox for the cloud. >> But I could be wrong. I'm not a dCloub expert. >> So for the folks watching, what's different this year at Cisco Live in Europe from other shows? Is there anything that stands out to you around this year? >> Definitely the multi-cloud theme and we're hearing that from customers. They don't, there's always been the question of what type of infrastructure should I provision for different workloads, but it's really moved that past that to here's the workload spectrum I need to support. What are the tools you're going to give me for that on-prem? How can you help me get to the cloud? And I think the other thing, more narrowly speaking, hyper convergence is really turning the corner in terms of adoption. So when we first, we weren't the first ones to arrive at the hyper convergence party in the industry by any means, but we brought the keg. So when we showed up the party kind of got started. We think we brought the complete answer and now we're seeing as more and more workloads can go onto a HCI platform, the adoption's starting to, and we're seeing large organizations bring it on, both in the core and out at the edge. So those are a couple big changes -- >> Todd, any bold predictions? Will Cisco be number three in HCI by the end of 2018? >> Todd: Yes, 'cause we already are. >> Okay. (laughs) >> We already are. So, today it's a three horse race right now. So it's Dell, Nutanix, Cisco in the latest IDC numbers. So I think by the end, I'd like to see number two within a type of a timeframe. I'll give you number two within six quarters, how about that? >> And Stu wants to know what are you going to do with all that cash that you bring over from, to the US? (laughs) >> John: What are you going to buy? >> Your patriotion, yeah. >> I heard Chuck talking about investing in employees so I hope to get some of that, or no. No guys, I think Chuck's already kind of laid it out. We got our investors, we've got potential things we can do, bringing in new technology, so he's really laid that out. >> Todd, final question for you at the end of the segment. >> Sure. >> As the personnel change, excitedly, the infrastructure of the cloud and the evolution of the renaissance that's coming with software, DevNet, DevNet Create, doing some great stuff as an indicator of what's coming, >> Sure. >> How is the roll of the network, your target customer, who's been loyal Cisco net MVP all these years and you got storage guys, interdisciplinary has been a big thing, what skill sets do you see evolving for that Cisco hero out there? What the trend that you can talk to? >> It's the ability to automate. It's the ability to take advantage of some of the technologies we're bringing in terms of assurance. It's how do you bring all of that insight that resides in the network, in the telemetry and that data, how do you bring that out and use it in a way that can help the business. I think for our core audience, for those folks you talk about, it's how do I become much more adept at bringing these pieces together in an automated way, but then how do take advantage of some of the things that are available to me now in terms of bringing the power of analytics, AI, into an IT context and take advantage of those things for all the different things you can imagine, security, assurance, et cetera. >> So the big thing then, just to summarize, if I hear you correctly, the difference this year is that you got AppD, and you got end to end DevOps. >> I think it's our multi-cloud story has really jelled over the past year, and now we're bring it in to the context of on-prem infrastructure in addition to the public cloud side of it, so I think that's the, that's big news from data center side. >> Todd Brannon who's the marketing director at Cisco here inside the Cube. We are in Barcelona, live coverage, two days, wall to wall. I'm John Furrier for Stu Miniman. More live coverage at the Cube after this short break. (synthesizer beat)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. This is theCUBE live here in Barcelona for Cisco Live Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, with Stu Miniman analyst at Wikibon, covering networking storage and all infrastructure cloud. Stu Miniman, Stu. Our next guest is Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at IBM Storage Systems. Eric, CUBE alumni, he's been on so many times I can't even count. You get the special VIP badge. We're here breaking down all the top stories at Cisco Live in Europe, kicking off 2018. Although it's the European show, not the big show, certainly kicking off the year with a lot of new concepts that aren't necessarily new, but they're innovative. Eric, welcome to theCUBE again. >> Well, thank you. We always love participating in theCUBE. IBM is a strong supporter of theCUBE and all the things you do for us, so thank you very much for having us again. >> A lot of great thought leadership from IBM, really appreciate you guys' support over the years. But now we're in a sea change. IBM had their first quarter of great results, and that will be well-reported on SiliconANGLE, but the sea change is happening. You've been living this generation, you've seen couple cycles in the past. Cisco putting forth a vision of the future, which is pretty right on. They were right on Internet of Things ten years ago, they had it all right, but they're a networking company that's transformed up the stack over the years. Now on the front lines of no perimeter, okay, more security challenges, cloud big whales with no networking and storage. You're in the middle of it. Break it down. Why is Cisco Live so important now than ever before? >> Well, for us it's very important because one, we have a strategic relationship with Cisco, the Storage Division does a product with Cisco called the VersaStack, converged infrastructure, and in fact one of our key constituents for the VersaStack are MSPs and CSPs, which is a key constituent of Cisco, especially with their emphasis on the cloud. Second thing for us is IBM storage has gone heavily cloud. So going heavily cloud with our software, in addition to what we do with our solutions as a foundation for CSPs and MSPs. Just what we've integrated into our software-defined storage for cloud makes Cisco Live an ideal venue for us, and Cisco an ideal partner. >> So I've got to ask you, we've had conversations on theCUBE before, they're all on youtube.com/siliconangle, just search Eric Herzog, you'll find them. But I want to recycle this one point and get your comments and reaction here in Barcelona. You guys have transformed with software at IBM big-time with storage. Okay, you're positioned well for the cloud. What's the most important thing that companies have to do, like IBM and Cisco, to play an innovator role in the cloud game as we have software at the center of the value proposition? >> Well I think the key thing is, when you look at cloud infrastructure, first of all, the cloud's got to run on something. So you need some sort of structural, infrastructure foundation. Servers, networking, and compute. So at IBM and with Cisco, we're positioning ourselves as the ideal rock-solid foundation for the cloud building, if you will. So that's item number one. Item number two, our software in particular can survive, not only on premises, but can bridge and go from on-premise to a public cloud, creating a hybrid infrastructure, and that allows us to also run cloud instantiation. Several of our products are available from IBM Cloud Division, Amazon offers some of the IBM storage software, over three hundred cloud service providers, smaller ones, offer IBM Spectrum Protect as a back-up service. So we've already morphed into storage software, either A, bridging the cloud in a hybrid config, or being used by cloud providers as some of their storage offerings for end-users and businesses. >> Eric, wanted to get to, one of the partnership areas that you've talked about with Cisco is VersaStack. We've talked with you a number of times about converged infrastructure, that partnership, Cisco UCS taking all the virtualization. The buzz in the market, there's a lot of discussion, oh it's hyper-converged, it's cloud. Why is converged infrastructure still relevant today? >> Well, when you look at the analysts that track the numbers, you can see that the overall converged market is growing and hyper-converged is viewed as a subset. When you look at those numbers, this year close to 17 billion US, about 75% of it is still standard converged versus hyper-converged. One of the other differences, it's the right tool for the right job. So customers need to go in eyes open. So when you do a hyper-converged infrastructure, by the way IBM offers a hyper-converged infrastructure currently with Nutanix, so we actually have both, the Nutanix partnership offering hyper-converged and a partnership with Cisco on standard converged. It's really, how do you size the right tool for the right job? And one of the negatives of hyper-converged, very easy to deploy, that's great, but one of the negatives is every time you need more storage, you have to add more server. Every time you need more server, you add more storage. With this traditional converged infrastructure, you can add servers only, or networking only, or storage only. So I think when you're in certain configurations, workloads, and applications, hyper-converged is the right solution, IBM's got a solution. In other situations, particularly as your middle-sized and bigger apps, regular converged is better 'cause you can basically parse and size up or down compute, networking, and the storage independent of each other, whereas in hyper-converged you have to do it at the same time. And that's a negative where you're either over-buying your storage when you don't need it, or you're over-buying your compute when you don't need it. With standard converged, you don't have that issue. You buy what you need when you need it. But I think most big companies, for sure, have certain workloads that are best with hyper-converged, and we've got that, and other workloads that are best with converged, and we have that as well. >> Okay, the other big growth area in storage for the last bunch of years has been flash. IBM's got a strong position in all-flash arrays. What's new there, how are some of the technologies changing? Any impact on the network that we should be really understanding at this show? >> Sure, so couple things. So first of all, we just brought out some very high-density all-flash arrays in Q4. We can put 220 terabytes in two rack U, which is a building block that we use in several different of our all-flash configurations, including our all-flash VersaStack. The other thing we do is we embed software-defined storage on our, software-defined storage actually on our physical all-flash arrays. Most companies don't do that, so they've got an all-flash offering and if they have a software-defined offering it's actually a different piece of software. For us it's the same, so it's easier to deploy, it's easier to train, it's easier to license, it's easier for a reseller to sell if you happen to be using a reseller. And the other thing is it's battle-hardened, because it's not only standalone software, but it's actually on the arrays as well. So from a test infrastructure quality issue, versus other vendors that have certain software that goes on their all-flash array, and then a different set of software for all software-defined. It doesn't make logical sense when you can cover it with one thing. So that's an important difference for us, and a big innovator. I think the last thing you're going to see that does impact networking is the rise of NVMe over fabrics. IBM did a statement of direction last May outlining what we're doing. We did a public demonstration of an InfiniBand fabric at the AI summit in New York in December, and we will be having an announcement around NVMe fabrics on the 20th of February. So stay tuned to hear us then. We'll be launching some more NVMe with fabric infrastructure at that time. >> Eric, I just, people that have been watching, there's been a lot of discussion about NVMe for a number of years, and NVMe over fabric more recently. How big a deal is this for the industry? You've seen many of these waves. Is this transformational or is it, you know, every storage company I talk to is working on this, so how's it going to be differentiated? What should users be looking to be able to, who do they partner with, how do they choose that solution, and when's it going to be ready? >> So first of all, I view it as an evolution, okay. If you take storage in general, arrays, you know we used to do punch cards. I'm old enough I remember using punch cards at the University of California. Then, it all went to tape. And if you look at old Schwarzenegger movies from the 80s, I love Schwarzenegger spy movies, what's there? IBM systems with big IBM tape, and not for back-up, for primary storage. Then in the late-80s, early-90s, IBM and a few other vendors came out with hard drive-based arrays that got hooked up to mainframes and then obviously into minis and to the rise of the LAN. Those have given away to all-flash arrays. From a connectivity perspective, you've had SCSI, you had ultra SCSI, you had ultra fast SCSI, ultra fast wide SCSI. Then you had fiber channel. So now as an infrastructure both in an array, as a connectivity between storage and the CPUs used in an array system, will be NVMe, and then you're going to have NVMe running over fabrics. So I view this as an evolution, right? >> John: What's the driver, performance or flexibility? >> A little bit of both. So from the in-box perspective, inside of an array solution, the major chip manufacturers are putting NVMe to increase the speed from storage going into the CPUs. So that will benefit the performance to the end-user for applications, workloads, and use cases. Then what they've done is Intel has pushed, with all the industry, IBM's a member of the NVMe consortium as well, has pushed using the NVMe protocol over fabrics, which also gives some added performance over fabric networks as well. So you've got it, but again I view this again as evolution, because punch cards, tape was faster, hard drive arrays were faster than tape, then flash arrays are faster, now you're going to have NVMe in the flash array, and also NVMe over fabric with connecting all-flash array. >> So I have to ask you the real question that's on everyone's mind that's out there, because storage is one of those areas that you never see it stopping. There's always venture back start-ups, you see new hot start-ups coming out of the woodwork, and there's been some failures lately and some blame NVMe's innovation to kind of killing some start-ups, I won't name names. But the real issue is the lines that were once blurred are now forming, and there's the wrong side of history and the right side of history. So I've got to ask you, what's going to be the right side of history in the storage architecture that people need to get onto to win in the future? >> So, there's a couple key points. One, all storage infrastructure and storage software needs to interface with cloud infrastructure. Got to be hybrid, if you have a software play like we do, where the software, such as our Spectrum Scale or our Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus, can exist as a cloud service through a service rider, that's where you want to be. You don't want to have just a standard array and that's all you sell. So you want to have an array business, you want to make sure that's highly performant, you want to make sure that's the position, and the infrastructure underneath clouds, which means not only very fast, but also incredibly resilient. And that includes both cloud configs and AI. If you're going to do real-time AI, if you're going to do dark trading on Wall Street using AI instead of human beings, A, if the storage isn't really fast you're going to miss a 10 million dollar, hundred million dollar transaction. Second thing, if it's not resilient and always available, you're really in trouble. And god forbid when they bring AI to healthcare, and I mean AI in the operating room, boy if that storage fails when I'm on the table, wow. That's not going to be good. So those are the things you got to integrate with in the future. AI and cloud, whether it's software-defined in the array space, or if you're like IBM in both markets. >> John: Performance and resilient. >> Performance and resiliency is critical. >> All right, so Eric I have a non-storage question for you. >> Eric: Absolutely. >> So you've got the CMO hat for a division of IBM. You've been CMO of a start-up, you've been in this industry for a while. What's the changing role of the CMO in today's digital world? >> So I think the key thing is digital is a critical method of the overall marketing mix. And everything needs to reinforce everything. So let's take an example. One of the large storage websites and magazines recently announced that IBM is a finalist for four product-of-the-year awards. Two for all-flash arrays and two for software-defined storage. So guess what we've done? We've amplified it over LinkedIn, over IBM Facebook, through our Twitter handle, we leverage that. We use it at trade shows. So digital is A, the first foray, right? People look on your website and look at what you're doing socially before they even decide, should I really call them up, or should I really go to their booth a trade show? >> So discovery and learning is happening online. >> Discovery and learning, but even progression. We just, I just happened to tweet and LinkedIn this morning, Clarinet, a large European cloud MSP and CSP, just selected IBM all-flash arrays, IBM Spectrum Protect, and IBM Spectrum Virtualize for their cloud infrastructure. And obviously their target, they sell to end-users and companies, right? But the key thing is we tweeted it, we linked it in, we're going to use it here at the show, we're going to use it in PR efforts. So digital is a critical element of the marketing mix, it's not a fad. It also can be a lead dog. So if you're going to a trade show, you should tweet about it and link it in, just the way you guys do. We all knew you were coming to this show, we know you're going to IBM Think, we know you're going to VM World and Oracle, all these great shows. How do we find out? We follow you on social media and on the digital market space, so it's critical. >> And video, video a big role in - >> Video is critical. We use your videos all the time, obviously. I always tweet them and link them in once I'm posted. >> Clip and stick is the new buzzword. Clip 'em and stick 'em. Our new clipper tool, you've seen that. >> (laughs) Yes, I have. So it's really critical, though, that, you can, and remember, I'm like one of the oldest guys in the storage business, I'm 60 years old, I've been doing this 32 years, seven start-ups, EMC, IBM twice, Mac store Seagate, so I've done big and small. This is a sea change transformation in marketing. The key thing is you have to make it not stand on its own, integrate everything. PR, analyst relations, digital in everything you do, digital with shows and how you integrate the whole buyer's journey, and put it together. And people are using digital more and more, in fact I saw a survey from a biz school, 75% of people are looking at you digitally before they ever even call you up or call one of your resellers if you use the channel, to talk about your products. That's a sea change. >> You guys do a great job with content marketing, hats off to you guys. All right, final question for you, take a minute to just quickly explain the relationship that IBM has with Cisco and the importance of it, specifically what you guys are doing with them, how you guys go on to market to customers, and what's the impact to the customer. >> So, first of all, we have a very broad relationship with Cisco, Obviously I'm the CMO of the Storage Division, so I focus on storage, but several other divisions of IBM have powerful relationships. The IoT group, the Collaboration group. Cisco's one of our valued partners. We don't have networking products, so our Global Technology Services Division is one of the largest resellers of Cisco in the world, whether it be networking, servers, converge, what-have-you, so it's a strong, powerful relationship. From an end-user perspective, the importance is they know that the two companies are working together hand-in-glove. Sometimes you have two companies where you buy solutions from the A and B, and A and B don't even talk to each other, and yes they both go to the PlugFest or the Compatibility Lab, but they don't really work together, and their technology doesn't work together. IBM and Cisco have gone well beyond that to make sure that we work closely together in all of the divisions, including the storage division, with our Cisco-validated designs. And then lastly, whether it's delivered through the direct sales model or through the valued business partners that IBM and Cisco share, it's critical the end-user know, and the partners know, they're getting something that works together and doesn't just have the works option. It's tightly-honed and finely-integrated, whether it be storage or the IoT Division, the Collaboration Division, Cisco is a heavy proponent of IBM Security Division. >> Product teams work together? >> Yeah, all the product teams work together, trade APIs back and forth, not just doing the, and let's go do a test, compatibility test. Which everybody does that, but we go well beyond that with IBM and Cisco together. >> And it's a key relationship for you guys? >> Key relationship for the Storage Division, as well as for many of the other divisions of IBM, it's a critical relationship with Cisco. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer for the Storage Systems group at IBM. It's theCUBE live coverage in Barcelona, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more from Barcelona Cisco Live Europe after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's the CUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and the CUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in Barcelona, Spain, this is the CUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe, I'm John Furrier, and my co-host Stuart Miniman, Analyst at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Shaun Coulson, who's the Vice President of Storage for IBM Europe. He is the one on the ground, leading the team for IBM and the Cisco relationship. Driving the storage, which is driving the cloud, and servers and everything else. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you, and welcome to Barcelona. >> Thank you very much, great to have you. Want to get, you're close to the front lines, driving all the business for IBM storage. Congratulations, you had a great year. How's business going in Europe, what's the scene like here? Give a little color, and what's goin' on in Europe. >> Okay, yeah. 2017 was a bumpy year for IBM storage, across the board, across all, both our software and our hardware portfolios, but also our go-to-market with our partners as well, and Cisco's clearly one of those partners. We're in the setup mode for 2018. My worldwide boss would probably say, "We're already setup, Shaun, and you're behind, because it's nearly the end of January." So, it's a vibrant time. Ginni Rometty, mentioned storage specifically in her Address the Nation and the 2017 results and that's partly down to the work that we did in Europe. So, I'm pretty proud of where we're at right now and what we've done. >> Wow, good re-tooling of the product over the years, and now, sales are up, what's the driver of the business right now? We here Cloud, we here On-Premises, Private Cloud, True Private Cloud, as we keep on reports. Certainly Hybrid is there, what's the key customer success driver that you guys are having? >> I think the key success is really, you're correct, everybody's talking about Cloud. Mainly, the main driver in my view, is how do they prepare for Cloud? And that's a Hybrid solution, and, with that, you've also then got the On-Prem. The refresh, the technology Transform and Modernize, is a massive program for us and our customers right now. I was in the Nordics, just before Christmas, and I went to one of the big financial institutions, and they have a Cisco/IMB VersaStack solution there, and I said to them, what was they main reason you chose that, and why did you go with IBM, 'cause, they weren't an IBM customer before, so it was a big win-back account for us. And he was about reduction of risk, reduction of cost, and allowing me to transfer some of my operational skills to new work-loads and prepare myself for the cloud. And I think that message has been driven pretty hard by all our customer sales. >> The refresh is interesting, I didn't look at that angle, but, you can see the Digital Transformation story that we've been talking on the Cube for multiple years, playing out because people now see no perimeter with their networks, they're seeing real-time demands from applications. Now IOT. They had to modernize, right, I mean, this is the era of (laughs) not just PO's slappin' down storage, back-room, stack em' rack 'em, it's a new storage paradigm. >> I don't think I've ever been in the era where I sat by the fax machine and the orders come in, but, maybe one day >> What's a fax machine, what's a fax machine again? >> maybe one day (laughing) >> Ask a millennial, they don't even know how to use a fax machine. >> So coming back to this discussion in the Nordics, they really talked about the technology of Flash, the UCS server stacking and the network from Cisco how did that allow them to move some of their resource, reduce on their cost, and it was all around, every month they do net software patches from Microsoft. They used to have a team of 8 people that would take up to 5 working days, fully, to transform that. That, with the introduction of the system the UCS and the Flash, has gone from a 8 team to 2 team and it's done in 2 days. That's a massive reduction in cost but at the same time allowing them to move to that net-new. >> Shaun, bring us in to customers a little bit, 'cause, we've been tracking Converge since that wave started, a lot of it was just organizationally getting set because, I have a server refresh, I have the storage refresh, how do I get budgets, who owns it, but it's that simplicity that you mention, which is you know, we know if I can put it all together, you're talking the networking team. The networking team often doesn't update their code. They put it in, saying like, okay, it's all working, don't breathe on it, but when I go to Converge, really, it makes it easier for me to refresh, with security top of mind for almost every customer that I talk to, they need to stay more up-to-date and they need to, what we have said at Wikibon is, you need to be able to shift to platforms and partners to be able to take some of that burden off, I can't have 6 months of testing every time I need to roll something out, so, where are the customers in Europe, how are they doing along that journey, organizational dynamics you can share. >> I go to a Entertainment customer in the UK. They've taken, they integrated Stack and their deployment of systems out into the field has reduced by 90%. That is a real benefit, and then, we come back to that, how do you maintain, how do you drive, there's one single point, you can drive it through. It's done, it's moved on and I think there is a huge opportunity of customers starting to look at that simplicity because, that's the transformation that's the, I think for a long time this industry has, and the storage business has tried to make things complex. Because that's part of the art of where we've looked to sell, you know, "It's hard, it's not easy guys, therefore, you need us" and I think there's a massive switch away to that simplified model. >> How do customers think of their data center in the context of Cloud in the industry there's been all this argument, what is Private Cloud? Virtualization? I talk to most customers, they have a cloud strategy and their doing Saas, their doing some Public Cloud, they think about their own data center, they don't get caught over the terms, but, I'm curious how they define it, how they do it do they have initiatives on codifying what they do? >> I think any large customer or small customer would be crazy not to have a cloud strategy some way, shape, or form and I think that has been going on for the last 2 to 3 years with all our major customers. Some are further down the track where everything is going to be Cloud on all their systems, especially the newer, more agile customers but there's also a lot of customers that, for security reasons, financial regulation reasons, are never going to be that far down the track on Cloud, so, I think it's a mixed bag. I think, while their is that transformation and that journey, there's opportunity for everybody and I think that's the bit that we see, where we have the skill set to help our customers going forward. >> I'm curious, usually when I come talk to a European audience, the governance is, a major sticking point has been one of the headwinds against moving to public cloud, we see the big public cloud players putting data centers in every country that they can, but is it still kind of challenge today? >> I think there will always be that concern from the regulatory authorities. And I think if you take the first uptake in Europe of what customers that really moved to the cloud. Then I would say it was the more commercial, mid-size customers that saw the attraction, especially the ability to have the variable cost rate that they can associate with the cloud. But, I think there are also parts of the larger government organizations that are now looking at what applications what workloads they can actually put on the cloud, where there is no regulatory governance to be followed. So, I think it's a bit of both. >> Shaun, talk about the European differences by country, because we've been covering the GDPR pretty hard, that deadline's coming up, that's going to have an impact on storage, obviously, and then also, networking, IP addresses can determine which country you're from, 'cause now each country will have their own little nuances. What is the impact to your job and as you execute your mission what does it mean for the customer? Because, a lot of people don't just live in one country, or work in one country. They span multiple regions. >> And you think of it, most international customers have offices in probably 20 or 30 of the countries that we cover in Europe. I think you can have a view from a technology point of view that some people will be early adopters and some people will be slower adopters. And what you can do, and what is very prevalent in the European marketplace is taking those learning lessons from the early adopters, finessing them, and then driving them out to the other ones, so, I would say for example, the Nordics, again, are probably an early adopter of a lot of the new technologies. They're very happy to try and drive and yet, some of the more traditional ones will wait and see and then think it through a little bit more carefully. But that's the beauty of the nature of Europe. >> What's the big change that you've seen over the past couple years? Obviously, software's at the center of it. Any observations that you can share that's different in the market for buyers? >> I think from a technology point of view, the indoctrination of Flash and there I say the commoditization of Flash has been prolific over the last 18 months. From the price point that it initially started to where we are today has meant that it has become more and more accessible for a lot more of the customer sets that we work with. And especially when you look at performance price point, it starts to become a no-brainer. I'm not sure, when we look at some of the stats in 4th quarter, we actually sold more core Flash modules than we did revenue-wise on traditional SSDs. Which is a kind of indication of where we've gone with the price performance. >> Any trends and patterns that you've seen with buyers that you can, that you see happening, what's the big takeaway? >> I think the big takeaway is storage is alive and kicking. The cloud is formed on the use of data. The use of data means you got to have good storage systems to go and drive that. And I think that is a major theme that runs through all our customer sets. >> And that's trying the modernization, big time. >> Shaun, are there any verticals that you're finding that are leading the charge in some of this transformation of data, leveraging data more than others. >> I think a lot of the smaller organizations which have more agility, they're actually leading in terms of willing to put their first foot forward, but, I think what happens is, then, once that is proven, then the larger organizations come in and work it, so, you're always going to have the big Toco, media companies that are always at forefront of technology. You'll also have the financial organizations that are looking at, where Cloud's good, where's not, block change, GDPR that we talked about earlier, and I think that is traditionally IBM's strength in those kind of marketplaces. >> Shaun, thanks for coming on the Cube, really appreciate the commentary and insight to Europe, congratulations-- >> Thank you. >> on your sales. Shaun Coulson is the Vice President of IBM Europe Storage. This is the Cube breaking down the European show for Cisco Live 2018, Europe, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to The Cube's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. Day 2, lots of stuff going on. I'm Lisa Martin with my esteemed colleague Dave Vellante. >> Hey hey. >> Hey hey! I'm excited to welcome an old friend, Eric Herzog, the CMO of IBM, as well as Sam Warner offering management IBM software-defined storage. Welcome, guys! >> Well thanks, we always love to be on The Cube, always. >> Dave: Love the shirt. >> Thank you, I'm glad I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt again. >> Dave: Thank you for making sure you wore that, yeah. >> I think it's like my 25th time on The Cube with a Hawaiian shirt. >> Lisa: Oh you're like the Alec Baldwin of The Cube. (laughs) >> Lisa: Alright guys, so here we are- >> Dave: If we have the record, that is the same shirt you wore last year, isn't it? >> Yes, but I did clean it, Dave. (laughs) >> He wears it once a year. >> I've never had to ask anyone about dry cleaning on The Cube but there's a first time for everything. Alright guys, so here we are at VMworld. What's new with IBM and VMware? Kind of talk to us, Eric, from a marketing perspective. What's going on there? >> Sure, well the big thing is IBM and VMware have a very strong alliance across our entire portfolio. The Cloud Division has a big agreement with VMware that was announced with Pat Gelsinger and the head of the division last year, the Storage Division has all kinds of heavy duty integration with our VersaStack product, as well as in all of our all-flash arrays, and then Sam's team brought out a new backup and recovery product, Spectrum Tech Plus, which is optimized for VMware and hypervisor and cloud environments. >> Excellent. And that's one of the things actually thematically that we heard yesterday is that, you know, backup is hot. So tell us a little bit more about that hotness and how you guys are working with VMware to dial that- >> Dial that heat. >> Yeah, dial that heat up. >> Sam: Well it's actually, it's more than backup, right, it's about data availability, and ensuring your data's safe, data's the bloodline of your company now, right? Everything's moving toward cognitive and AI, you can't do that without data. Most of your data's trapped as a backup. And what we're trying to do now is make it really easy for people to get at that data and use it for other purposes. So first of all, making sure you're safe from things like ransomware, but also making sure you can get some value out of that data. Make it very easy to recover that data. >> So, lots of topics that we could cover there, I wonder, did you have one more and I want to jump in. >> I did. Just, Eric from a, as the CMO, from a messaging perspective now we've heard backup is hot, you've just kind of articulated that a little bit more, same with storage. From a conversation perspective, and you talked about the importance of data, Michael Dell talked about that this morning, that the data conversation is a CEO agenda. How is the conversation changing, and the position of IBM changing when you guys are talking to customers that, is backup, is storage a conversation around data that you're having with the C-suite of your customers? >> So, a couple things, and I've done storage for 32 years. EMC, IBM twice, seven startups, and the C-suite hates storage, including the CIO, but they do love their data. So they all know they need storage but when you talk about data, data availability, the resiliency of the data, the data always needs to be there, you don't even use things like data resiliency 'cause the CEO doesn't know what that is, so you need to say, so how'd you like it if you were in Star Trek, and Bones wanded you with a new healthcare wand, and it came back with no answer? (laughs) That's 'cause your storage is not resilient and it's not fast enough. So the data has to be available and it has to be fast. So we're moving to this world where everything is AI and everything is immediate. If your storage goes down and you're in dark trading, you just lost ten million bucks per second. So, but it's all about the data. So basically what we're doing is getting out of the storage conversation and talking about the data conversation. How data is used to optimize their business, and then you weave the storage in underneath as, well as you know if you've got a bad foundation to your building and the earthquake hits, boom. You building falls down. So data is that building, and storage is the foundation on which your data rests. >> I love this conversation, and I think you're right on. The C-suite, they hate storage because it's to them, it's just an expense, but I want to pick up on something that was one of my favorite interviews thus far this year. Believe it or not, it was the interview that you and Burris and Ed Walsh did in our studio in Palo Alto. And I wonder if you could add some color, and then Sam I want you to chime in. What I loved about that interview is you guys talked about digital business and digital business being all about data and how you leverage data. And you said something there, and I want to unpack it a little bit. Storage should not be just a dumb target that is unintelligent. it should be an active element of your data and digital strategy. >> Eric: Right. >> So what did you mean by that and how does IBM make it, storage, an active element of a data strategy? >> So the first thing you want to do is you want to make it all automated. You want to make it transparent to the user. So, whether it's in the healthcare space, I don't care what your business, Herzog's bar and grill? My storage is transparent. Okay I'm running a bar and grill, I don't have time to fool around with the storage. I need it automated, I need it fast, I need to see who's drinking what, how many cigars I can sell, I don't have time to fart around. Right? Storage can make that happen. So you've got certain CPU that's done on the server level or in the virtual machines, and then you've got to have storage that's intelligent. So, we're working on some products we're not ready to announce yet, but we've got some products that have built-in AI into the storage themselves. So things like, you can search in the storage instead of search on the server. How do like, be able to look at metadata and have the storage actually fetch the data not the server fetch the data, so the server's crunching, crunching, crunching, and the storage is smart enough to go grab the data on its own and then bring it to the server. Versus the server having to do that work. So all that's about making data more available, more resilient, and again, having smart storage not dumb storage. >> So Sam, when we were talking about backup it's how you say, it's not just backup, it's more than that. >> Sam: Right. >> Pick up on what Eric just said. How is Spectrum Protect more than just backup and playing into what Eric just talked about? >> Well a lot of things Eric was just talking about you don't necessarily, you're not necessarily going to be able to do all this analysis reporting, analytics on your production data, you don't want to get in the way of your critical workloads, so how can we make copies off to the side where you can do things like analytics, where you can do dev test, quickly build new applications, so we give the ability to have access to that data in a way that's not going to jeopardize your core applications as well. And of course, that data, you can't lose it, right? I mean, you've got to make sure it's protected. So we also offer you a very simple way to protect it, and very rapidly restore it. >> So, let's go through an example or use case. You mentioned ransomware before. >> Yeah. >> So a lot of people think okay I'll create an air gap, but air gap, in and of itself, you know, you watch these Black Hat shows, and they go, "Air gap is a joke. It's easy for me to get through an air gap." >> Sam: Right. >> So how do you deal with that problem? Presumably, you have insights and analytics that can help you identify anomalies, but I wonder if you can address what's the conversation like with your customers and how are you solving a problem like that? >> Well I think there's a lot of stages that would solve it. First of all, there's simple things you can do like have copies that are immutable, so they can't be changed, encryption can't go and encrypt a read-only volume, there is air gapping, which like you said there are ways around that, but then there's also, Eric touched on some of the metadata analysis. If you can find anomalies and changes in the metadata that are unexpected, you can take action and alert an administrator and let them know that something doesn't seem right, so there's a lot more work we're doing to introduce cognitive capabilities that can also detect that. >> One of the things actually that Pat Gelsinger said this morning, and this may have put a smile on your face when you said there's something you can't quite talk to yet is, companies have to integrate AI into their products. And machine learning. >> Eric: So, that's the plan at IBM, and we've already done some of that, we have some products that we've hinted at, that's product code name Harmony, and we've already done a public blog on that, a statement of direction, and that is our first step in implementing AI technology directly into the storage, again it's part of what I talked about a couple weeks ago when I filmed at your Palo Alto office, storage is not dumb anymore. I may be dumb, but storage is not. Storage is smart, storage is intelligent, storage is active not passive, and in the old worlds, when I started doing storage a long time ago, storage was just passive. Just a big brick. It's no longer a brick. It's a brain, and it thinks and it acts, and it relieves the CPU, and the other areas of your IT infrastructure from having to do the work, which is part of the metadata action that Sam talked about that we're working on and also this project Harmony that we talked about, is adding AI intelligence, things like Watson for example, maybe, but I can't quote me on that yet, but maybe we might put Watson inside of our storage, since we happen to own Watson, the dominant AI platform on the planet, we could probably put that into our storage. Maybe we will. >> So there's still a... okay why not? There's still a lot of dumb storage out there though. >> Yes. >> Huge install base. You actually probably sold a lot of it back in the day, so fixing the problem that you created, that's smart marketing. (laughs) But when you talk about the technical debt that exists, how do you go from point A to point B, going from that dumb storage to that active element? What's that conversation like with customers? >> So, it's actually pretty easy. First of all, storage refreshes every three to five years anyway. So now you can say, "Well you know the storage you had only did this, how about if we could do this, this, this or this, and really raise the bar?" The other thing of course is that IBM is the number one storage software company in the world, so anything we do is going to be integrated into the software side of our business, not just embedded in the storage systems we sell. And that software works with everyone's arrays. So that, if you will, artificial intelligence that we can bring to bear in an IBM Storwize or flash systems would also work on an EMC VNX2, would also work on a Dell Compellent, would also work on an HP 3PAR, would also work on this guy, that guy, and the other guy, because we are the number one storage software company in the world, for the guys that track the numbers, and all of this is being implemented into the software layer, which means it'll work with the other guys' gear. So we can take the old stuff I used to do at the evil machine company and make that stuff smart. >> What do you mean when you say you're the number one software company, because when you worked for that company you guys would always tell me, us as analysts, "Look, we don't really have any hardware engineers any more, we spend all our time on software, so we're a software company." You're talking about something different today, you guys leaned in to software to find, you've put your chips in, you did your billion dollar Steve Mills bet, what does it mean today to be a software company in storage? >> So for us, let's take all of our storage systems for example, FlashSystem V9 comes with Spectrum virtualized software, which works with over 400 arrays that aren't IBM logo. That software comes on that system. FlashSystem A9000 comes with Spectrum Accelerate, which is a scale-out block infrastructure that works both on-premise and in the cloud. Again, not just with our own gear. So we basically decided that, do we want to sell the full system solution? Sure we do. But if we sell the software only, that's fine with us, and remember, most of the big shops in IBM is exceedingly strong, enterprise to the Global Fortune 1000, and the Global Fortune 1000 down to those sort of, you know, one billion dollar company and up, most of them are heterogeneous anyway, so you're, if you're smart, and we think we are at IBM, to this effect, we made sure our software works with everybody else's gear. Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus will back up any storage from any vendor, old or new, will go to any tape drive, will go to any cloud, we can automatically back up to the cloud, will automatically go to an object store, not just to our own object store, but other object stores. Will automatically go to disk or flash, so we've made it completely heterogeneous and, if you will, media and technology independent. And we're doing that across the board with all the IBM storage software. >> So that compatibility matrix, if I can call it that, is very important, has always been important in the storage business, but I feel like it's insufficient in today's cloud world. And let me tell you, explain what I mean and get your reaction. I'll start with Sam. So we've been talking all week about the imperative to not try to reform your business and bring it to the cloud, but rather to shape the cloud and bring cloud services to your data. And that's the right model, and now part of that, a big part of that, a huge part of that is simplicity. So we're here at VMworld, we're talking about backup and data protection, simplicity is fundamental. What are you guys doing in that regard, generally and specifically with regard to Spectrum Protect? >> Yeah, I think what you want is a very simple way to do data protection, and a methodology to do data protection that's consistent between your applications that you're running in your own data center and what you're running in the cloud. So you don't want to find out that, yeah your traditional applications that you've been you know, running in your data center for years are all protected, but it turns out all the new applications being built out on the cloud don't have the same rigor, aren't following the same standards, you're breaking your governance models, and you're at risk. So what you want is a simple way to manage both sides, you want a simple dashboard that gives you visibility to the entire environment in one space, so you know I've got 2,000 VMs, 1,800 of them are backed up, two of them aren't backed up, oh those are in the cloud, somebody didn't set it up correctly. You want to be able to see it very easily on a simple dashboard, and that's what we're bringing with Spectrum Protect Plus. >> Speaking of simple, Eric, last question to you, as the CMO, how do you make this message simple for a C-suite to comprehend and understand and help take them to the next level for them? >> Well for us, we don't even talk storage anymore. We just talk data, applications, their workloads and their use cases. That's it, and then you bring storage up underneath it, again it's the foundation of your data infrastructure, your data is the primary building, but if you don't have a solid foundation and, being from Silicon Valley and being from the '89 earthquake, when the earthquake hits, if you have a solid foundation, the building stays up, if you don't the building falls down. So, we lead with data, data, data, ease of use, simplicity, but really focus on what's your application, what's the workload you're trying to accomplish, what's the use case you need. And when you do it that way, you take the discussion away from being, "You're a storage guy." It's, "You're the data guy. You're the business guy." And that's how you have to pitch it. >> I like that. Hashtag data data data you heard it here first. (laughs) Eric and Sam, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube, I wish you best of luck and we'll be keeping our eyes and ears open for what's coming with AI and machine learning. Thank you for watching The Cube, continuing coverage live from VMworld 2017 Day 2, I'm Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante. Stick around, we've got more great conversations coming right back up. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay for exclusive Cube coverage for three days for IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier. My co-host, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Ed Walsh, General Manager of Storage and Software-Defined Infrastructure at IBM. Welcome back. >> Ed: That was a mouth full wasn't it? >> Welcome back to The Cube. Welcome back to the fold at IBM. >> Thank you very much, always good. >> You're leading up a big initiative. Take a quick second to talk about what you're the general manager of scope wise, and then we'll jump right in. >> Yeah, so I run basically the storage division, which has all of our storage from mainframe to open systems, tape, software defined storage and software defined compute, but it's all under our storage portfolio. So development, sales, you know, run the PINA. >> Right, and the new innovations that are coming out, what do you have your eye on? What's your goal, you know, you got a spring in your step. What's the objective? >> So we talked probably in October, I was 90 days in. So now I'm a whopping 8 months in. I think we kind of talked about it. I kind of... my hypothesis for coming here was you know, clients are going through this big change and some of your write ups lately about the True Private cloud and how they're trying to go from where they are now to where they're trying to get to. And that confusion eats up leadership so as confusion... IBM has the right vision, but it's like clouding cognitive, as is much on PRIM. So we have the right vision to help them get through that. And we have a history of doing that. And the second one was that we have a portfolio that's pretty broad. So we almost have an embarrassment of riches on what we can do with someone when they're really trying to look to modernize environments or transform, we can help them from anything. From the biggest and baddest. But it really doesn't matter. The broad portfolio allows us to engage and bring it forward and get them to the... Whatever their path forward is we can give that vision. And then, the one thing I was really talking about is he could bring in IBM. If I could bring in IBM, the greater IBM, the True Cognitive, the analytic team, and bring that together to bear for our infrastructure clients, or inside storage itself, that would be where we'd have the trifecta taking off. So we're in the middle of that transformation. Going very well. But along the same lines I have a fantastic product line. We're going to continue, in fact we're putting more investments on that. Not only on the hardware raise, but as much on the software-defined, and going all flash just because a lot of operational benefits. But then really what we're able to do by bringing the large IBM behind us... IBM also did some interesting organizational changes in January. Arvind Krishna is now running Hybrid Cloud and research for IBM so it's bringing the girth of IBM behind what's on PRIM hybrid into the Cloud. So it allows us to play a very strategic role. >> So a couple Wikibomb buzzwords, right? The True Private Cloud, we talked about server sandwiches, really sort of instantiation of software-defined. Really the impetus is that customers on PRIM want to run the Public Cloud. With that kind of agility and automation. So what are you seeing? What is IBM delivering to support that? First of all, are you seeing that? >> So it's kind of funny, so that... I do talk about study a lot because I thought the True Private Cloud, the way you coined it, is the right way to almost just say it's not what you're thinking I'm about to say. But the study, it's everything you get in the Public Cloud and you want to bring it on PRIM. All the flexibility, all the development models, right? How you engage developers. All the financial models as well, but bring that. And then it easily extends the Hybrid Cloud. When you start going through that, every one of our clients we engage, they know we understand the value of Cloud. They're at different maturity levels of how they're using Cloud, but it's all in their vision. We do a lot of work to help people bridge. So where are you know, let's talk about where you need to get to and have some meaningful steps to get there. So the True Private Cloud resonates with them. And then what we're doing is launching. In fact we launched this week with Cisco. So we have a converged offering with Cisco called VersaStack. But what we're operating on is, how do you make a Private Cloud as agile, and has the same use cases specifically for developers or DBA's that you have on the Public Cloud? And we're bringing that to the offering set for a converged offering. So what we do around on API later... So a key use case would be to do would be, why do people go to Public Cloud? Business units like it because the developers. It's easy to use, they have true DevOps capabilities. They're able to swipe a credit card. Single line of code. Spin up an environment. Signal out a code. Spin it down. They don't have to talk to an IT guy. They don't have to wait three weeks or do a ticket system. So how do you do that on PRIM? So what we have now, in market is, imagine a API abstraction layer, that for storage allows all the orchestration and all the DevOps tools to literally do the exact same thing on PRIM. So once you set it up, it allows the IT team, it's called Spectrum Copy Data Management, allow the IT team to set up templates. But through roles based access, allow a developer or a DevOps tool like Chef or Puppet to literally infrastructures code. Single line of code, spin up a whole environment. An environment would be, let's say three or four VM's, last good snapshot, maybe Datamaster or not. Most times it's Datamast. Bring up an offense network, but literally it goes from, on PRIM I just can't get it done. It takes me two or three weeks. So that's why I go the Public Cloud for other reasons. I can not only choose where I put it, where it's the right place to do, but I can give the exact same use case on PRIM by just doing API calls and they use exactly the same tools for development that are used in the Cloud, like Chef, Puppet, Urbancode, Python scripts. >> How's the reaction been to that? Give us some anecdotal... >> So once you have that conversation, that's just one of the things we're doing to make the True Private Cloud come to life. Of course the extension to SoftLayer, in other Clouds to get the... People, all of the sudden they see a path forward. It's not as easy to... You have to explain how it works, but the fact of the matter is they don't have a lot of tools now to make... We can bring down cost, give you a little bit more efficiancy, consolidate it. But that's not really how True Private Cloud is. You need the automation. So they're responding to it well. In fact it's the number one demo on the floor. For us, as far as systems, people trying figure out actually how to do the DevOps on the PRIM. >> John: That's awesome. >> Talk more about he Cisco relationship. There's a lot of interesting things going on in the storage business. There's consolidation, and you know the whole VCE thing and then Cisco looking for partners. You guys selling off BNT, it opens up a whole new partnership potential. So how has that evolved and where do you want to take it? >> So I think, match made in heaven between us, especially in storage, and Cisco. If you look at the overall environment conversion Hipaa converts account for about a third of the storage industry, so we play well. There's no overlap between us and Cisco. It's great. We're after the exact same accounts and actually, from a... You think of the very top level of our organization all the way down, the two companies have a lot of the same cultures and to be honest we're very tight. So it allows us to have a great relationship. We've already had a good relationship. About 25 thousand joint clients, which is amazing. And then what we're doing with VersaStack specifically is we're putting in the next generation, so we have a great converged offering that has all our all flash storage, but also software-defined. But what we added is we brought in what they did with their CliQr acquisition, which is called CloudCenter, and you add that on top make it single click, deploy and application anywhere, both on PRIM in the different Clouds, and it makes it very simple for developers. We talked about the API Layer. You bring that in to DevOps environment. So we feel really strong that as far as, if you're looking to bring in a True Private Cloud probably the best answer that we could do, is what we do with VersaStack. And we just announced it this week. And also we gave a preview. It's Cisco live in Melbourne a week ago. I think it's been a good uptake. But it kind of plays to... When you know what people were trying to do, but you need to bring the automation. You got to make it self-service and that really drives, for the business units, as well as developers. That drove what we brought into VersaStack. So we brought different assets in it from Cisco and IBM to make that kind of a reality. >> John and I were talking earlier on theCUBE this week and somebody brought up, yeah the CIO, they really don't think about storage. They certainly don't want to be thinking about the media. And the conversation shifted way off... Even flash now, it's like, oh yeah, yeah we get it. But you mentioned something earlier and this is very relevent to CIO's. They want to get from point a to point b with this minimal disruption, they don't want to have to buy a boat load of services to get it done. And now you're talking about things like automation and self-service. What are the discussions like with senior IT executives and how are you helping them get from point a to point b with minimum disruption? >> So the good thing about... You think about the IBM brand. It's as much about trust and helping people through it. So people give us just a credit to say I can engage with them, get the innovation. But also we've been through the zeros So a lot of the times they're asking how are we doing it? How are we transforming our company? How are we doing it internally? And then if you jut kind of, common sense, walk them through because of the broadness of the portfolio, we don't just have this point solution and every answer is, well you buy this box, right? We're able to have that conversation and when you get that broader IBM together that's where it kind of differentiates and they love it. Now I've been to a lot of, oh I'll say, IBM friendly accounts which is great. But also, some people that have never dealt with us are eyes wide open because it's a new day. People are struggling with this big transfer, right? How do you get from now to where you want to go in Cloud is a big change. >> Those new customers, what are they getting wide-eyed about? What are they focusing on? What's the big focus? >> So we'll talk about, we'll do True Private Cloud, but really what you can do as far as data, and what we're doing around Cognitive is really telling, right? The ability to really show 'em with symbol API calls they get more... So to have a Cognitive conversation that's an industry specific conversation really gets people lit up. In the end it ends up being, okay I see the possible. Then, how do I get from here to there. And typically it doesn't start, well I'm just going to go directly that direction. It's help me with a multi-year plan to get to there, while I'm taking out costs, adding agility over time. But I would say the kind of conversations are especially with an industry lens, which is what IBM brings to it, is really telling. >> So I got to ask you about the Convergent reStructured markup because the hot trend that's in the Cloud native world is server lists. So is there a storage list version? Cause what you're basically saying with the True Private Cloud is, you're essentially doing server lists, storage lists, philosophy. Is that, I mean how do you guys rationalize this server list trend. Cause servers and storage are basically the same things in my mind these days. But, I mean, you might disagree. >> I think in general people aren't looking to the different components. They're looking for a way to operate in their environment that's more efficient. They're looking for use cases. They're also trying to have IT not be in the way of what they're trying to do in development, but actually give the right tools. So that's why, to be honest, go back to True Private Cloud, I've been using it a lot cause it really resonates with people. Is how do you get that same experience but on PRIM, cause there's different reasons to be on PRIM. >> It's like Cloud native on PRIM. You could get all the benefits of what Serverless promotes, which is here's an unlimited pool of resources. The software will just take of that for you. That's DevOps. >> And doing... >> John: On PRIM. >> And doing true DevOps, Chef, Puppet, no compromises is exactly how you do it. So you change nothing for your developers. But now you're running it on PRIM or in a Hybrid Cloud. Cause there's a lot good use cases for Hybrid Cloud even if it's born in the Cloud application. You're making a web application or iPhone application, the fact of the matter is, you might want to test it against the back end. So being able to do a Hybrid Cloud, bring this system record data there, to be able to do DevOps on what production looked like maybe last night, or a week ago is much different than the current DevOps models. >> Well it's a good strategy too. If you think about the True Private Cloud, the way you're looking at it, which I think is the right way, is a lot of the things that we look at on theCUBE, and talk about, is three areas. Product gaps, organizational gaps, and process gaps. The number one thing is organizational gaps. So when you have that True Private Cloud on PRIM, it's not a big leap to go Cloud Native Public. >> It's seamless in fact. >> John: It's totally seamless. >> And on that case that a lot of the stuff we're talking about is, we help people modernize and transform their environment. And the message is all about optimization on the traditional application environment. It's all about freeing up the resources. So... >> John: That's the ovation strategy. That's the creativity, that's the Dev element. >> And if you don't free up the key resources they can't be on the digital transformation. And without the right skill set, because they're kind of trapped in operation. So a lot of the automation things we're doing are things that, to be honest, the storage team, or the admin team will be doing. It's manual error prone, but take it away. But also you free up the team. So it kind of plays to all those. >> That must really resonate with the CIO. I mean, I would imagine CxO goes, okay I could have Cloud on PRIM and then train my organization to then start thinking Hybrid workloads as they start moving Hybrid pretty quickly. >> And here's the thing, is what do you have to change for developers? Tell me what I have to get by the developer or DBA's? And the answer is nothing. Use the exact same tools. So you know, on stage it'll literally show me how Chef or Puppet... They're not doing trouble tickets or spinning things up, down, but... Same thing with deploying applications. It's like Cloud Center application. Set up the stack and deploy either on PRIM, different architectures, both converged and non-converged or in different Clouds. And they allow you to just, one click and deploy it. And they deal with all those differences. But that's how you want to make it, you use it serverless. They don't have to worry about the infrastructure. But also we're freeing up the team. >> So Ed, I got to ask ya, on a sort of personal note, I mean I've followed your career for a long time. John and I call you the Five Tool Star. You've had the start-up experience, you've got technical chops, you did a stint at IBM, you went to MIT and came back with that big MIT brain, brought it to IBM, so pretty awesome career. By no means even close to over. What have you brought to IBM? I think I've known every GM of storage, since the first GM of storage at IBM. What specific changes have you brought and what's the vision and the direction that you want to take this organization? >> It's a great culture, great history of storage. So I guess that I would be the first outsider coming into storage. But I don't think it's any different. I've been in storage my entire career. I understand it. Some of it is optimizing their current model. The portfolio of what we're doing. Some of it is just making sure we have the right things in sales and working with channels, which one of my companies was an actual channel partner. So I think it's just the perspective of maybe a fresher look, but again we are a great team. Great portfolio. We're quietly number two in storage hardware software. Shhhhhhhh. Don't tell anyone. Cause we don't do a good job of getting the news out... But the fact of the matter is... >> Now we'll tell everyone. You say don't tell anyone, we're telling everybody. You tell us to tell everyone, we don't tell anyone. >> Together: (laughing) >> But we still get people, are you guys still doing storage? We're like, literally we're number two by revenue. And this is IDC and Gartner software hardware. So we are a player in the space. We have a lot of technology and I guess what I'm bringing is just maybe a little spice of vision and... >> Well you guys have a strategy that's unique and different but aligned with the mega trend. That, to me I think, is something that's been in the works for a while. It's been cobbled together. Dave always points it out, how the storage groups change. But the game is still the same, right? Ultimately it's about storage. Now the market conditions are changing on the organizational side. That seems to be the thing. >> Ed: Agreed. >> Well all flash is probably the thing. >> But also what you're going to start seeing is bringing Cognitive capabilities. So we're not going to call in Watson for storage, but imagine bringing Watson to storage, right? Think of all the metadata we have. Not only for support but for insight. You're going to all start doing more Cognitive data management, and not only look at metadata, but taking action on them. Using Watson to look at images, so very interesting use cases that I think only IBM can do. >> I can just envision the day where I just voice activate, Watson spin me up more servers. And provision all flash petabyte. Done. >> (giggling) Believe it or not, we can do a chat, but we have that working. >> John: (laughing) >> We're looking for applicability of that, so. >> And then Watson would tell me, well you can't right now. >> You're not authorized. (laughing) >> You got to grab the Watson for storage url. He's been grabbing url's all day on GoDaddy. (laughing) >> Ed, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on taking names and kicking butt in storage, in the strategy. True Private Cloud, a good one, love that research, again from Wikibomb. >> Yup. >> Kind of new but different, but relevant. >> Ed: Very relevant. >> Thanks so much. >> Ed: (mumbles) So thank you, thank you very much. I appreciate it. >> Okay, live coverage here at Mandalay Bay here at IBM Interconnect 2017. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us. More coverage coming up after this short break. (pulsing tech music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live here in Las Vegas, this is The Cube's coverage of IBM's Interconnect 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Eric Herzog, Cube alumni, Vice President of Product Market at IBM storage. Welcome back to The Cube. Good to see you with the shirt on. You got the IBM tag there, look at that. >> I do. Well, you know, I've worn a Hawaiian shirt now, I think, ten Cubes in a row, so I got to keep the streak going. >> So, pretty sunny here in Vegas, great weather. Storage is looking up as well. Give us the update. Obviously, this is never going away, we talk about it all the time, but now cloud, more than ever, a lot of action happening with storage, and data is a big part of it. >> Yeah, the big thing with us has been around hybrid cloud. So our software portfolio, the spectrum family, Spectrum Virtualize, Spectrum Protect, our backup package, Spectrum Scale, our scale out NAS, IBM Cloud Object Storage, all will move data transparently from on-premises configurations out to multiple cloud vendors, including IBM Bluemix. But also other vendors, as well. That software's embedded on our array products, including our VersaStack. And just two weeks ago, at Cisco Live in Melbourne, Australia, we did a announcement with Cisco around our VersaStack for the hybrid cloud. >> So what's the hybrid cloud equation look like for you guys right now, because it is the hottest topic. It's almost like brute force, everywhere you see, it's hybrid cloud, that's what people want. How does it change the storage configurations? What's the solutions look like? What's different now than it was a year ago? >> I think the key thing you've got to be able to do is to make sure the data can move transparently from an on-premise location, or a private cloud, you could have started as a private cloud config and then decid it's OK to use a public cloud with the right security protocols. So, whether you've got a private cloud moving to a public cloud provider, like Bluemix, or an on-premises configuration moving to a public cloud provider, like Bluemix, the idea is they can move that data back and forth. Now, with our Cisco announcement, Cisco, with their cloud center, is also providing the capability and moving applications back and forth. We move the data layer back and forth with Spectrum Virtualize or IBM's copy data management product, Spectrum Copy Data Management, and with Cloud Center, or the ECS, Enterprise Cloud Sweep, from Cisco, you can move the application layer back and forth with that configuration on our VersaStacks. >> So this whole software-defined thing starts, it started when people realized, hey, we can run our data centers kind of the way the big hyper-scalers do. IBM pivoted hard toward software-defined. What's been the impact that you've seen with customers? Are they actually, I mean, there was a big branding announcement with Spectrum and everything a while back. What's been the business impact of that shift? >> Well, for us, it's been very strong. So if you look at the last couple quarters, according to the analysts that track the numbers, from a total storage perspective, we've moved into the number two position, and have been, now for the last two years. And for software-defined storage, we're the number one provider of software-defined storage in the world, and have been for the last three years in a row. So we've been continuing to grow that business on the software-defined side. We've got scale-up block configurations, scale-out block configurations, object storage with IBM Cloud Object Storage, and scale-out NAS and file with our IBM Spectrum Scale. So if you're file, block, or object, we've got you covered. And you can use either A, our competitor's storage, we work with all our competitor's gear, or you could go with your reseller, and have them, or your distributor provide the raw infrastructure, the servers, the storage, flash or hard drives, and then use our software on top to create essentially your own arrays. >> So when you say competitor's gear, you're talking about what used to be known as the SAN Volume Controller, and now is Spectrum Virtualize, right? Did I get that right? >> Yes, well, we still sell the SAN Volume Controller. When you buy the Spectrum Virtualize, it comes as just a piece of software. When you buy the SAN Volume Controller as well as our FlashSystem V9000, and our Storwize V7 and V5000, they come with Spectrum Virtualize pre-loaded on the array. So we have three ways where the array is pre-loaded: SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystems V9000, and then the Storwiz products, so it's pre-loaded. Or, you can buy the stand-alone software Spectrum Virtualize and put it on any hardware you want, either way. >> So, I know we're at an IBM conference, and IBM hates, they don't talk about the competition directly, but I have to ask the competitive questions. You've had a lot of changes in the business. Obviously, cloud's coming in in a big way. The Dell EMC merger has dislocated things, and you still see a zillion starups in storage, which is amazing to me, alright? Everybody says, oh, storage is dead, but then all this VC money still funneling in and all this innovation. What's happening in the storage landscape from your perspective? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. So, first of all, software-defined has got its legs, now. When you look at it from a market perspective, last quarter ended up at almost 400 million, which put it on a, let's say, a 1.6 to 2 billion dollar trajectory for calendar 2017, out of a total software market of around 16 billion. So it's gone from nothing to roughly 2 billion out of 16 billion for all storage software of all various types, so that's hot. All flash arrays are still hot. You're looking at, right now, last year, all flash arrays end up at roughly 25% of all arrays shipped. They're now in price parity, so an all-flash array is not more expensive. So you see a lot of innovation around that. You're still seeing innovation around backup, right? You've got guys trying to challenge us with our SpectrumProtect with some of these other vendors trying to challenge us, even though backup is the most mature of the storage software spaces, there's people trying to challenge that. So, I'd say storage is still a white-hot space. As you know, the overall market is flat, so it is totally a drag out, knock-down fight. You know, the MMA and the UFC guys got nothing on what goes on in the storage business. So, make sure you wear your flak jacket if you're a storage guy. >> Meaning, you got to gain share to grow, right? >> Yes, and it's all about fighting it out. This Hawaiian shirt looks Hawaiian, but just so you know, this is Kevlar. Just in case there's another storage company here at the show. >> So what are the top conversations now with storage buyers? Because we saw Candy's announcement about the object store, Flex, for the cold storage. It changes the price points. It's always going to be a price sensitive market, but they're still buying storage. What are those conversations that you're having? You mentioned moving data around, do they want to move the data around? Do they want to keep it at the edge? Is it moving the application around? What are some of those key conversations that you're involved in? >> So we've done a couple innovative things. One of the things we've done is worked with our sales team to create what we call, the conversations. You know, I've been doing this storage gig now for 31 years. Seven start-ups, IBM twice, EMC, Maxtor and Seagate- >> John: You're a hardened veteran. >> I'm a storage veteran, that's why this is a Kevlar Hawaiian shirt. But no CIO's a storage guy, I've never met one, in 31 years, ever, ever, ever met a storage guy. So what we have to do is elevate the conversation when you're talking to the customer, about why it's important for their cloud, why it's important for machine learning, for cognitive, for artificial intelligence. You know, this about it, I'm a Star Trek guy. I like Star Wars, too, but in Star Trek, Bones, of course, wands the body. So guess what that is? That's the edge device going through the cloud to a big, giant server farm. If that storage is not super resilient, the guy on the table might not make it. And if the storage isn't super fast, the guys on the table might not make it. And while Watson isn't there, yet, Watson Health, they're getting there. So, in ten years from now, I expect when I go to the doctor, he's just like in Star Trek, waving the wand, and boy, you better make sure the storage that that wand is talking to better be highly resilient and high performing. >> Define resilient, in your terms. >> So, resilient means you really can't have more than 30 seconds, 50 seconds a year of down time. Because whoever's on the table when that thing goes down has got a real problem. So you've got to be up all the time, and if you take it out of the healthcare space and look at other applications, whether you look at trading applications, data is the new gold. Data is the new diamonds. It's about data. Yes, I'd love to have a mound of gold, but you know what, if you have the right amount of data, it worth way more than a mound of gold is. >> You're right about the CIO and storage. They don't want to worry about storage. They don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about it. A CIO once said to me, "I care about storage like this, "I want it to be dirt cheap, lightning fast, and rock solid." Now, the industry has done a decent job with rock solid, I would say, but up until Flash, not really that great with lightning fast, and really not that great with dirt cheap. Price has come down for the hardware, but the management has been so expensive. So, is the industry attacking that problem? And what's IBM doing? >> Yeah, so the big thing is all about automation. So when I talk about moving to the hybrid cloud, I'm talking about transparent migration, transparent movement. That's an automation play. So you want to automate as much as you can, and we've got some things that we're not willing to disclose yet that'll make our storage even more automated whether it be from a predictive analytics perspective, self-healing storage that actually will heal itself, you know, go out and grab a code load and put the new code on because it knows there's a bug in the old code, and do that transparently so the user doesn't have to do anything. It's all about automating data movement and data activity. So we've already been doing that with the Spectrum family, and that Spectrum family ships on our storage systems and on our VersaStack, but automation is the critical key in storage. >> So I wonder, does that bring up new KPIs? Like, I presume you guys dog food your own storage internally, and your own IT. >> Eric: Yes >> Are you seeing, because it used to be, OK, the light's green on the disc drive, and you know, this is our uptime or downtime, planned downtime, you know, sort of standard metrics that we've known for 30-40 years. With automation, are we seeing a new set of metrics in KPIs emerge? You know, self-healing, percentage of problems that corrected themselves, or- >> Well, and you're also seeing things like time spent. So if you go back to the downturn of seven, eight, and nine, IT was devastated, right? And, as you know, you've seen a lot of surveys that IT spend is basically back up to '08, OK, the pre-08 crash. When you open up that envelope, they're not hiring storage guys anymore, and usually not infrastructure guys. They're hiring guys to do devops and testdev, and do cloud-based applications, which means there's not a lot of guys to run the storage. So one of the metrics we're seeing is, how much guys do I have managing my storage, or, my infrastructure? I used to have 50, now I'm a big bank, can I do it with 25? Can I do it with 20? Can I do it with 15? And then, how much time do they spend between the networking, the storage, the facilities themselves. These data center guys have to manage all of that. So there are new metrics about, what is the workload that my actual human beings are doing? How much of that is storage versus something else? And there's way less guys doing storage as a full-time job, anyway, because what happened in the downturn? And, so automation is critical to a guy running a datacenter, whether he's a cloud guy, whether he's a small shop. And clearly in the Fortune, global 2500, those guys, where they've got in-house IT, they've cut back on the infrastructure team and the storage team, so it's all about automation. So, part of the KPIs are not just about the storage itself, such as uptime, cost per Gig, cost per transaction, the bandwidth, you know, those sorts of KPIs. But it's also about how much time do I really spend managing the storage? So if I've only got five guys, now, and I used to have 15 guys, those five guys are managing, usually, three, to four, to five times more storage than they did in 2008 and 2009. So now you've got to do it with five guys instead of 15, so there's a KPI, right there. >> So, what about cloud? We heard David Kinney talk today about the object store with that funny name, and then he talked about this cloud-tiering thing, and I couldn't stay. I had to get ready for theCube. How do you work with those guys? How do you sell a hybrid story, together, because cloud is eating away at the traditional infrastructure business, but it's all sort of one big, happy family, I'm sure. But how do you work with a cloud group to really drive, to make the water level higher for IBM? >> So, all of our products from the Spectrum family, not all, but almost all our products from the Spectrum family, will automatically move data to the cloud, including IBM Bluemix/SoftLayer. So our on-premises can do it. If you buy our software only, and don't buy our storage arrays, or don't buy a Storwize, or don't buy a flash system, you still can automatically move that data to the cloud, including the IBM cloud object store. Our Spectrum Scale product, for example, ScaleOut NAS, and file system, which is very highly used in big data analytics and cognitive workloads, automatically, by policy, will tier-data to IBM cloud object storage. Spectrum Protect can be set up to automatically take data and back it up from on-premises to IBM cloud object storage. So we've automated those processes between our software and our array family, and IBM cloud object storage, and Bluemix and SoftLayer. And, by the way, in all honesty, we also work with other cloud vendors, just like they work with other storage vendors. All storage vendors can put data in Bluemix. Well, guess what, we can put data in clouds that are not Bluemix, as well. Of course, we prefer Bluemix. We all have IBM employee stock purchase, so of course we want Bluemix first, but if the customer, for whatever reason, doesn't see the light and doesn't go to Bluemix and goes with something else, then we want to make sure that customer's happy. We want to get at least some of the PO, and our Spectrum family, and our VersaStack family, and all of our array family can get that part of the PO. >> You need versatility to be on any cloud. >> Eric: We can be on any cloud. >> So my question for you is, the thing that came out of our big data, Silicon Valley event last week was, Hadoop was a great example, and that's kind of been, now, a small feature of the overall data ecosystem, is that batch and real time are coming together. So that conversation you're having, that you mentioned earlier, is about more real time than there is anything else more than ever. >> Well, and real time gets back to my examples of Bones on Star Trek wanding you over healthcare. That is real time, he's got a phaser burn, a broken leg, a this and that, and then we know how to fix the guy. But if you don't get that from the wand, then that's not real time analytics. >> Speaking of Star Trek, just how much data do you think the Enterprise was throwing off, just from an IOT standpoint? >> I'm sure that they had about a hundred petabytes. All stored on IBM Flash Systems arrays, by the way. >> Eric, thanks for coming on. Real quick, in the next 30 seconds, just give the folks a quick update on why IBM storage is compelling now more than ever. >> I think the key thing is, most people don't realize, IBM is the number two storage company in the world, and it has been for the last several years. But I think the big thing is our embracing of the hybrid cloud, our capability of automating all these processes. When they've got less guys doing storage and infrastructure in their shop, they need something that's automated, that works with the cloud. And that's what IBM storage does. >> All right, Eric Herzog, here, inside theCube, Vice President of Product Market for IBM Storage. I'm John Furrier, and Dave Velante. More live coverage from IBM InterConnect after this short break. Stay with us. (tech music)