(gentle upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone, to "theCUBE"'s live stage performance here in Palo Alto, California at "theCUBE" Studios. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, kicking off our first inaugural Supercloud event. It's an editorial event, we wanted to bring together the best in the business, the smartest, the biggest, the up-and-coming startups, venture capitalists, everybody, to weigh in on this new Supercloud trend, this structural change in the cloud computing business. We're about to run the Ecosystem Speaks, which is a bunch of pre-recorded companies that wanted to get their voices on the record, so stay tuned for the rest of the day. We'll be replaying all that content and they're going to be having some really good commentary and hear what they have to say. I had a chance to interview and so did Dave. Dave, this is our closing segment where we kind of unpack everything or kind of digest and report. So much to kind of digest from the conversations today, a wide range of commentary from Supercloud operating system to developers who are in charge to maybe it's an ops problem or maybe Oracle's a Supercloud. I mean, that was debated. So so much discussion, lot to unpack. What was your favorite moments? >> Well, before I get to that, I think, I go back to something that happened at re:Invent last year. Nick Sturiale came up, Steve Mullaney from Aviatrix; we're going to hear from him shortly in the Ecosystem Speaks. Nick Sturiale's VC said "it's happening"! And what he was talking about is this ecosystem is exploding. They're building infrastructure or capabilities on top of the CapEx infrastructure. So, I think it is happening. I think we confirmed today that Supercloud is a thing. It's a very immature thing. And I think the other thing, John is that, it seems to me that the further you go up the stack, the weaker the business case gets for doing Supercloud. We heard from Marianna Tessel, it's like, "Eh, you know, we can- it was easier to just do it all on one cloud." This is a point that, Adrian Cockcroft just made on the panel and so I think that when you break out the pieces of the stack, I think very clearly the infrastructure layer, what we heard from Confluent and HashiCorp, and certainly VMware, there's a real problem there. There's a real need at the infrastructure layer and then even at the data layer, I think Benoit Dageville did a great job of- You know, I was peppering him with all my questions, which I basically was going through, the Supercloud definition and they ticked the box on pretty much every one of 'em as did, by the way Ali Ghodsi you know, the big difference there is the philosophy of Republicans and Democrats- got open versus closed, not to apply that to either one side, but you know what I mean! >> And the similarities are probably greater than differences. >> Berkely, I would probably put them on the- >> Yeah, we'll put them on the Democrat side we'll make Snowflake the Republicans. But so- but as we say there's a lot of similarities as well in terms of what their objectives are. So, I mean, I thought it was a great program and a really good start to, you know, an industry- You brought up the point about the industry consortium, asked Kit Colbert- >> Yep. >> If he thought that was something that was viable and what'd they say? That hyperscale should lead it? >> Yeah, they said hyperscale should lead it and there also should be an industry consortium to get the voices out there. And I think VMware is very humble in how they're putting out their white paper because I think they know that they can't do it all and that they do not have a great track record relative to cloud. And I think, but they have a great track record of loyal installed base ops people using VMware vSphere all the time. >> Yeah. >> So I think they need a catapult moment where they can catapult to the cloud native which they've been working on for years under Raghu and the team. So the question on VMware is in the light of Broadcom, okay, acquisition of VMware, this is an opportunity or it might not be an opportunity or it might be a spin-out or something, I just think VMware's got way too much engineering culture to be ignored, Dave. And I think- well, I'm going to watch this very closely because they can pull off some sort of rallying moment. I think they could. And then you hear the upstarts like Platform9, Rafay Systems and others they're all like, "Yes, we need to unify behind something. There needs to be some sort of standard". You know, we heard the argument of you know, more standards bodies type thing. So, it's interesting, maybe "theCUBE" could be that but we're going to certainly keep the conversation going. >> I thought one of the most memorable statements was Vittorio who said we- for VMware, we want our cake, we want to eat it too and we want to lose weight. So they have a lot of that aspirations there! (John laughs) >> And then I thought, Adrian Cockcroft said you know, the devs, they want to get married. They were marrying everybody, and then the ops team, they have to deal with the divorce. >> Yeah. >> And I thought that was poignant. It's like, they want consistency, they want standards, they got to be able to scale And Lori MacVittie, I'm not sure you agree with this, I'd have to think about it, but she was basically saying, all we've talked about is devs devs devs for the last 10 years, going forward we're going to be talking about ops. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things I learned from this day and looking back, and some kind of- I've been sauteing through all the interviews. If you zoom out, for me it was the epiphany of developers are still in charge. And I've said, you know, the developers are doing great, it's an ops security thing. Not sure I see that the way I was seeing before. I think what I learned was the refactoring pattern that's emerging, In Sik Rhee brought this up from Vertex Ventures with Marianna Tessel, it's a nuanced point but I think he's right on which is the pattern that's emerging is developers want ease-of-use tooling, they're driving the change and I think the developers in the devs ops ethos- it's never going to be separate. It's going to be DevOps. That means developers are driving operations and then security. So what I learned was it's not ops teams leveling up, it's devs redefining what ops is. >> Mm. And I think that to me is where Supercloud's going to be interesting- >> Forcing that. >> Yeah. >> Forcing the change because the structural change is open sources thriving, devs are still in charge and they still want more developers, Vittorio "we need more developers", right? So the developers are in charge and that's clear. Now, if that happens- if you believe that to be true the domino effect of that is going to be amazing because then everyone who gets on the wrong side of history, on the ops and security side, is going to be fighting a trend that may not be fight-able, you know, it might be inevitable. And so the winners are the ones that are refactoring their business like Snowflake. Snowflake is a data warehouse that had nothing to do with Amazon at first. It was the developers who said "I'm going to refactor data warehouse on AWS". That is a developer-driven refactorization and a business model. So I think that's the pattern I'm seeing is that this concept refactoring, patterns and the developer trajectory is critical. >> I thought there was another great comment. Maribel Lopez, her Lord of the Rings comment: "there will be no one ring to rule them all". Now at the same time, Kit Colbert, you know what we asked him straight out, "are you the- do you want to be the, the Supercloud OS?" and he basically said, "yeah, we do". Now, of course they're confined to their world, which is a pretty substantial world. I think, John, the reason why Maribel is so correct is security. I think security's a really hard problem to solve. You've got cloud as the first layer of defense and now you've got multiple clouds, multiple layers of defense, multiple shared responsibility models. You've got different tools for XDR, for identity, for governance, for privacy all within those different clouds. I mean, that really is a confusing picture. And I think the hardest- one of the hardest parts of Supercloud to solve. >> Yeah, and I thought the security founder Gee Rittenhouse, Piyush Sharrma from Accurics, which sold to Tenable, and Tony Kueh, former head of product at VMware. >> Right. >> Who's now an investor kind of looking for his next gig or what he is going to do next. He's obviously been extremely successful. They brought up the, the OS factor. Another point that they made I thought was interesting is that a lot of the things to do to solve the complexity is not doable. >> Yeah. >> It's too much work. So managed services might field the bit. So, and Chris Hoff mentioned on the Clouderati segment that the higher level services being a managed service and differentiating around the service could be the key competitive advantage for whoever does it. >> I think the other thing is Chris Hoff said "yeah, well, Web 3, metaverse, you know, DAO, Superclouds" you know, "Stupercloud" he called it and this bring up- It resonates because one of the criticisms that Charles Fitzgerald laid on us was, well, it doesn't help to throw out another term. I actually think it does help. And I think the reason it does help is because it's getting people to think. When you ask people about Supercloud, they automatically- it resonates with them. They play back what they think is the future of cloud. So Supercloud really talks to the future of cloud. There's a lot of aspects to it that need to be further defined, further thought out and we're getting to the point now where we- we can start- begin to say, okay that is Supercloud or that isn't Supercloud. >> I think that's really right on. I think Supercloud at the end of the day, for me from the simplest way to describe it is making sure that the developer experience is so good that the operations just happen. And Marianna Tessel said, she's investing in making their developer experience high velocity, very easy. So if you do that, you have to run on premise and on the cloud. So hybrid really is where Supercloud is going right now. It's not multi-cloud. Multi-cloud was- that was debunked on this session today. I thought that was clear. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think- >> It's not about multi-cloud. It's about operationally seamless operations across environments, public cloud to on-premise, basically. >> I think we got consensus across the board that multi-cloud, you know, is a symptom Chuck Whitten's thing of multi-cloud by default versus multi- multi-cloud has not been a strategy, Kit Colbert said, up until the last couple of years. Yeah, because people said, "oh we got all these multiple clouds, what do we do with it?" and we got this mess that we have to solve. Whereas, I think Supercloud is something that is a strategy and then the other nuance that I keep bringing up is it's industries that are- as part of their digital transformation, are building clouds. Now, whether or not they become superclouds, I'm not convinced. I mean, what Goldman Sachs is doing, you know, with AWS, what Walmart's doing with Azure connecting their on-prem tools to those public clouds, you know, is that a supercloud? I mean, we're going to have to go back and really look at that definition. Or is it just kind of a SAS that spans on-prem and cloud. So, as I said, the further you go up the stack, the business case seems to wane a little bit but there's no question in my mind that from an infrastructure standpoint, to your point about operations, there's a real requirement for super- what we call Supercloud. >> Well, we're going to keep the conversation going, Dave. I want to put a shout out to our founding supporters of this initiative. Again, we put this together really fast kind of like a pilot series, an inaugural event. We want to have a face-to-face event as an industry event. Want to thank the founding supporters. These are the people who donated their time, their resource to contribute content, ideas and some cash, not everyone has committed some financial contribution but we want to recognize the names here. VMware, Intuit, Red Hat, Snowflake, Aisera, Alteryx, Confluent, Couchbase, Nutanix, Rafay Systems, Skyhigh Security, Aviatrix, Zscaler, Platform9, HashiCorp, F5 and all the media partners. Without their support, this wouldn't have happened. And there are more people that wanted to weigh in. There was more demand than we could pull off. We'll certainly continue the Supercloud conversation series here on "theCUBE" and we'll add more people in. And now, after this session, the Ecosystem Speaks session, we're going to run all the videos of the big name companies. We have the Nutanix CEOs weighing in, Aviatrix to name a few. >> Yeah. Let me, let me chime in, I mean you got Couchbase talking about Edge, Platform 9's going to be on, you know, everybody, you know Insig was poopoo-ing Oracle, but you know, Oracle and Azure, what they did, two technical guys, developers are coming on, we dig into what they did. Howie Xu from Zscaler, Paula Hansen is going to talk about going to market in the multi-cloud world. You mentioned Rajiv, the CEO of Nutanix, Ramesh is going to talk about multi-cloud infrastructure. So that's going to run now for, you know, quite some time here and some of the pre-record so super excited about that and I just want to thank the crew. I hope guys, I hope you have a list of credits there's too many of you to mention, but you know, awesome jobs really appreciate the work that you did in a very short amount of time. >> Well, I'm excited. I learned a lot and my takeaway was that Supercloud's a thing, there's a kind of sense that people want to talk about it and have real conversations, not BS or FUD. They want to have real substantive conversations and we're going to enable that on "theCUBE". Dave, final thoughts for you. >> Well, I mean, as I say, we put this together very quickly. It was really a phenomenal, you know, enlightening experience. I think it confirmed a lot of the concepts and the premises that we've put forth, that David Floyer helped evolve, that a lot of these analysts have helped evolve, that even Charles Fitzgerald with his antagonism helped to really sharpen our knives. So, you know, thank you Charles. And- >> I like his blog, by the I'm a reader- >> Yeah, absolutely. And it was great to be back in Palo Alto. It was my first time back since pre-COVID, so, you know, great job. >> All right. I want to thank all the crew and everyone. Thanks for watching this first, inaugural Supercloud event. We are definitely going to be doing more of these. So stay tuned, maybe face-to-face in person. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante now for the Ecosystem chiming in, and they're going to speak and share their thoughts here with "theCUBE" our first live stage performance event in our studio. Thanks for watching. (gentle upbeat music)

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Welcome to the Cube virtual and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and with me today is Amiram Shachar, the V P and GM of Spot by Netapp program. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >>So here we are in this virtual world that we're all living in great that we can still connected you. But I wanted to understand you're the founder and CEO of Spot, which was acquired by net up earlier this year. Talk to me a little bit about spot about the technology and what's going on since the Net acquisition. >>Absolutely so Spot is the company that was founded in late 2015 on was centered and concentrated about helping companies thio optimize their cloud infrastructure costs through automation off software of how customers air provisioning their compute so we could possibly help customers to choose their best price off server infrastructure in the price and the best size off server infrastructure in the cloud on, You know, since we launched the company. So we help over 1500 customers worldwide. Thio use our technology scale that revenues to tens of millions of dollars of revenue raised money from top VCs, including Intel Capital, Vertex and Highland on just recently, four months ago, we got acquired by buying it up. >>Excellent. So that's a pretty fast from launch to acquisition, You know, less than five years. Must have a neck brace collar on from the whiplash. That and covert, right with flash. So talk to me about acquisition a few months ago. What's going on with the technologies, aunt? How is the netapp, um, customer base helping to expand your market penetration? >>Yeah. So it was clear, uh, during the rationality. You know, when we did the rationale of the acquisition, So it was clear that spot is going to remain a an entity with the netapp. So, for example, we preserved our brand, so it's spot by net up. It's not gonna be just integrated, and that's it. So we're not gonna see spot disappearing. It's actually the opposite. So we're gonna leveraged a market credibility. That net up is 27 years. You know storage leading storage provider has in the market, and we're gonna use spot as a brand to lean forward and lead with cloud native applications on Do. What we're gonna do is we're gonna help to netapp transform, like, you know, net up existing customers. They're moving to the cloud so not only they can use netapp storage in the cloud. They can also use thesaurus fair and automation and optimization layers that sport provides. Actually. >>So talk to me about what's going on in the market today. We've been talking for months now about this acceleration of digital transformation, acceleration of cloud adoption given businesses now are working so differently. Talk to me about what you are seeing, what your customers just seeing how you're helping them to manage and not just keep the lights on right now. But be able to be successful in going positions Well, in the future. >>Mhm. So I'm seeing like to two main trends. The first trend is like more cloud usage, but that's very general, very vague. But what I do see in in addition to that is actually like priorities have been changed. And when I talk about priority like priority is not only moving to the cloud but doing it efficiently. So customers who already using cloud we're moving to the cloud they really need Thio, you know, planned this in the most efficient way. So I can tell you, for example, a lot of customers that actually we were talking to them to use us at the beginning of 2020. So they intended to use us in, like, you know, third quarter, fourth quarter of the year, like it all got accelerated and they started to use our platform because they put their priorities have changed and they wanna have, like, optimization of cost, right? Right now, >>yeah, That's been something that a lot of folks have been wanting and needing even to just keep the lights on, get their eyes on visibility where we spending costs. Are we using cloud efficiently? If not, how can we work with technology vendors to help us get that visibility and optimize our costs and spend so tell me about from a conversation perspective, uh, post, you know, during this interesting year, the acquisition occurred. Are your conversations with customers changing? Are we seeing now? Is cloud rising even up that the C suite stacked to the board in terms of the conversations that you're having, >>you know, and I'm seeing this like for five years. Like how our conversations are changing the year over year and year over year, we're seeing like improvement in our type of conversations because people living in, like, you know, to the Cloud Mawr people thinking about about optimization is becoming a priority. As I mentioned, like, you know, four years ago like it's not about optimizing cloud. It's about moving to the cloud. And right now I have so many things in the cloud. I just need to run it well, I need to understand why them thio bring in the cloud. So our conversation has gotten a lot better on, especially in 2020 on. Do you think about cloud expenditure like this is probably the second biggest line item off every company's expenses. So it goes directly to the cause, which is the cost of good salt of every company. So it goes directly go off the margin off cos so Cloud is definitely becoming a board discussion thing. >>So talk to me about some of the new products and capabilities that you guys have now that you're part of that. >>So first of all, is the company we really believe in, like listening to customers, seeing what they need and innovating on their behalf. I think this is like our mission, and I'm always like saying that like customers always want, like cheaper cloud and more simple cloud. This is like a strategy to build a long term business like, I don't know if customers will not need, like, cheaper cloud in 10 years from now. And I don't know if customers would want more complicated cloud in 10 years from cloud in 10 years from now. Um so in order to keep that momentum So we're doubling down like our existing technology, which helping customers to optimize their pricing purchasing. As you know, we're helping companies to purchase across the three pricing models in the cloud and the first pricing model being on demand, which is you pay by the hour the second pricing model being reserved instances or savings plans, which is you basically reserve capacity for longer time, and then you get a discount. And the third pricing model, called Spot and Spot, basically is like either the resource is idle. Compute resource is that cloud providers have and they're willing to sell you that in a low rate, but they can take it away from you at any moment. So what our technology does it actually balancing in the most economical way across these three pricing models that we basically push the savings to the maximum while we also keep the S. L. A and the SLOC over the customers. So what we're releasing now doubling down on the technology is we're introducing something called predictive re balancing, which is basically customers who are launching spot instances and they want to migrate between spot instances, two different spot instances or two reserved instances so we could do it much more proactively than ever before. We've been investing a lot of machine learning engineers on that problem. We've put a lot of brain power toe work on this, and we're gladly happy to release a new, updated version of that. It can help customers to get warnings off almost an hour before an interruption might happen. >>Predictive re balancing, You said it's called one of the things I was thinking when you were talking about the three pricing tiers and what you guys help businesses do. It sounds very dynamic and iterative in the moment. So based on what's it based on usage data volumes, how do you help customers make that? How does the technology actually help customers with that dynamic, that predictive re balancing? >>So it's a great question, because the way that it works, it really matches the technology stack of the customer. So if we understand that this is like a Web service running behind an elastic load balancer, so the predictive rebalancing will have Behavior X. And if we realize that this is a big data workload that requires, um, some other type of compute provisioning. So the predictive rebalancing will behave like why. And there is also the new wave of APS, which are cloud native containers and micro services so actually predictor of balancing notes to identify that. So, basically, if you think about that, what happens behind the scenes is that we migrate between different pricing models and we just move containers around. The customers don't really know what happened behind the scenes, but they that the output of everything is the most optimized and high available capacity they could possibly get from the cloud. >>So what sort of cost savings are we talking about? Can you share an examples of some what some of your customers has have achieved? >>Mhm. So, yeah, we're talking about like, I think the benchmark is anywhere between 70 to 90%. We have a lot of public use cases with our customers and some of our really valuable customers like check, which is an education tech technology company which are running with us. The entire fleet off containers reported like over 65% off cost reduction of the under compute also, ah, gum gum, which is computer vision company that analyzes, um ads in real time. They also reported over 70% off cost reduction of their off their cloud infrastructure a swell as the well known Ticketmaster, which is also a very large customer virus and using us and all of their production communities clusters and also saved, um, over 60 to 70% off their containers infrastructure. >>So big savings. I think the lowest number heard you say, with 60% so big impact that the technology is able to make talk to me about the existing customers that and you've got some big brand. You mentioned Ticketmaster? Um, how How have things changed for them or not changed for them with the net acquisition, you talked about maintaining the spot brand. But talk to me about kind of that transition for your existing customers. >>So, you know, it's actually a very, um, you know, e felt lucky, like going through this process of an acquisition, you know, is the founder of a company. And it's, uh it's very, uh, very pleasing. Calls to have with customers is when you call customers and you tell them about the acquisition. And I was lucky enough to tell them like, Hey, guys, nothing is gonna change Like our road map is going to continue in the same way our name is going to remain the same way. The only thing we're gonna bother you with, quote unquote as we're going to add storage capabilities into our computer capabilities, >>that must have been music to their ears. But I gotta ask you, what's it like doing an acquisition in the middle of a global pandemic? And we're completely remote, right? >>You know, this is an experience I will never forget. Uh, you know it, Z, you're just You're at home. You know, I was also I was really lucky to become a father for the first time. And I know earlier this year s Oh, it's like you're with your baby wife, family and just all day calls on going and you know it, Z it's It's a really amazing experience that I think I will never forget. >>Yeah, I think I'm with you on that unique experiences. Well, congratulations for being a new father, but that also makes it challenging, right? You're you're CEO of a startup. It's about to get acquired. And you've got a newborn as, ah coworker. So all of a sudden, all these challenges that just add, um ADM or challenges to the mix. So I'm sure it was great to be able to have the conversation with your existing customers about what little is changing, but also for them. What's the opportunity for those existing customers to really start taking advantage of all of net tax net ops capabilities? >>So that's exactly the intersection between spot and ETA, which I feel like super excited about, because if you think about that like we've built a technology of computer optimization over the last five years. That up is a big, brand, credible company. Going for 27 years, more than 27 years. The last seven years get up has has been doing like a massive shift to the cloud supporting their customers were moving from on Prem to the cloud. So net up what never actually did. And I was very amazed by that, which is the imported >>all of their own >>premise t technology and put it in the cloud in the platform that they call cloud volumes, which is you. Basically, you can get >>all the >>features that Netapp provides, like advanced snap shooting and back up and fast restored and compression D duplication, which I remember managing data centers myself from my military days. I was using a lot of netapp stuff >>on. They took all of these great things and put it in the ground. And now what we can >>actually do for our customers is that we can actually attach like the computer they're buying from us and optimizing with us with the storage, the great storage that offers in the cloud in the cloud volume platform. >>It's a lot of opportunities there. In fact, Netapp has We've been talking about this on the Cube for a while. For years, Netapp has gone, undergone a big transformation, a big evolution, and it sounds like what they're doing with spot and also the opportunities that it's providing. So not just your existing customers, but you're prospective customers. And your new customers is just kind of keeping that door wide open. Which right now in this interesting time is is essential is businesses are continuing to pivot as this time unfold, and we know something's going to remain permanent, but that got to be able to pivot quickly. Otherwise, the competition is probably in the rear view mirror, maybe smaller, more agile and ready to take over. >>That's so true and like, you know, generally speaking about, like transformation, like modernization of application. So, like huge trend that we're seeing. And this is also a huge intersection between netapp and spot. Um, is everything kubernetes and everything containers eso we're seeing organizations moving to the cloud, but they're they're not, like, no, not anymore looking at, like just lift and ship their like, lift modernized ship like people want to modernize our application for various reasons. And we see containers. Technology is just becoming like the de facto technology for shipping applications in the cloud, and we're seeing kubernetes on the rise and one of our products. That spot, called Ocean Eyes, is a product that manages compute for kubernetes. So our our tagline is basically serverless containers, which is customers deploy their containers and then we manage the infrastructure underneath. They don't need to define their infrastructure, think about their infrastructure, just like it's a really a near Vanna for for develops, people responsible for communities. And then when we actually, you know, got into Nana and we saw all of, like, the cloud volumes technology that I was telling you about, we said it like, Hey, what if we can take this service, compute off containers and we can actually make it for storage as well? And we basically you can take all the good things that you get from service, which is, you know, no infrastructure management building Mike utility building, you know, scale to zero scale to like, you know, infinite. If you need >>Andi with no infrastructure management and this is actually possible with the netapp cloud >>volumes technology. So, actually, right now we're launching with net up, something will recall storage less volumes, which is basically for containers were going to allow that directly from our ocean product that you will be able to get storage list volumes that are going to be completely Hence we management of storage. And just to set the tone like, what is storage is like, Is there no storage like, what is surveillance are their storage? Are their service there? Of course there are, but you don't manage them. So what storage is? Is there a storage underneath? Of course there is, but you don't need to manage it. And >>is that something that your customers can take advantage of? Now, is that coming in the next quarter or so? What's the timing on that? >>But this is, um this is right now already in preview. So we already opened that to some of our, you know, advanced customers that are using, like all of our latest and greatest you know, features. So it's already with customers validation working with them. They're actually actually love it and love the fact that they don't need to manage storage, because when you move to the cloud. You actually don't really care about storage anymore because it's becoming just oil for your applications. Eso and it's gonna be generally available. Hopefully, in the first half of 2021. >>Exciting. Something positive to look forward to. You'll have to come back and share with us. Some of the results. Mm. It's been great to have you on the Cube. Thanks for spending some time with me >>today. Likewise. Lisa, thank you very much. >>I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to see CUBE's exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018 live in San Francisco, California at Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, your cohost of theCUBE with John Troyer co-founder of Tech Reckoning advisory and community development firm. Our next two guests Mike Piech Vice President and General Manager of middleware at Red Hat and Mark Little, Vice President of Software Engineering for middleware at Red Hat. This is the stack wars right here. Guys thanks for coming back, good to see you guys again. >> Great to see you too. >> So we love Middleware because Dave Vellante and I and Stu always talk about like the real value is going to be created in abstraction layers. You're seeing examples of that all over the place but Kubernetes containers, multi-cloud conversations. Workload management and all these things are happening at these really cool abstraction layers. That's obviously you say global I say middleware but you know it's where the action is. So I got to ask you, super cool that you guys have been leading in there but the new stuff's happening. So let's just go review last year or was it this year? What's different this year, new things happening within the company? We see core OS' in there, you guys got OpenShift is humming along beautifully. What's new in the middleware group? >> There's a few things. I'll take one and then maybe Mike can think of another while I'm speaking but when we were here this time last year we were talking about functions as a service or server-less and we had a project of our own called Funktion with a K, between then and now the developer affinity around functions as a service has just grown. Lots of people are now using it and starting to use it in production. We did a review of what we were doing back then and looked around at other efforts that were in the market space and we decided actually we wanted to get involved with a large community of developers and try and move that in a direction that was pretty beneficial for everybody but clearly for ourselves. And we've decided, and we announced this publicly last year but we're now involved with a project called Apache OpenWhisk instead of Funktion. And OpenWhisk is a project that IBM originally kicked off. We got involved, it was tied very closely to cloud foundering so one of the first things that we've been doing is making it more Kubernetes native and allowing it to run on OpenShift. In fact we're making some announcements this week around our functions are service based on Apache OpenWhisk. But that's probably one of the bigger things that's changed in the last 12 months. >> I would just add to that that across the rest of the middleware portfolio which is as you know, a wide range of different technologies, different products, in our integration area we continue to push ahead with containerizing, putting the integration technologies in the containers, making it easier to basically connect the different components of applications and different applications to each other together through different integration paradigms whether it's messaging or more of a bus style. So with our Jboss Fuse and our AMQ we've made great progress in continuing to refine how those are invoked and consumed in the Openshift environment. Forthcoming very shortly, literally in the next week or two is our integration platform as a service based on the Fuse and AMQ technologies. In addition we've continued to charge ahead with our API management solution based on the technology we acquired from Threescale a couple of years ago. So that is coming along nicely, being very well adopted by our customers. Then further up the stack on the process automation front, so some of the business process management types of technologies we've continued to push ahead with containerizing and that was being higher up the stack and a little bit bigger a scale of technology was a little bit more complex in really setting it up for the containerized world but we've got our Process Automation 7.0 release coming out in the next few weeks. That includes some exciting new technology around case management, so really bringing all of those traditional middleware capabilities forward into the Cloud Native, containerized environment has been I would say the most significant focus of our efforts over the last year. >> Go ahead. >> Can you contextualize some of that a little bit for us? The OpenShift obviously a big topic of conversation here. You know the new thing that everyone's looking at and Kubernetes, but these service layers, these layers it takes to build an app still necessary, Jboss a piece of this stack is 17, 18 years old, right? So can you contextualize it a little bit for people thinking about okay we've got OpenStack on the bottom, we've got OpenShift, where does the middleware and the business process, how has that had to be modernized? And how are people, the Java developers, still fitting into the equation? >> Mark: So a lot of that contextualization can actually, if we go back about four or five years, we announced an initiative called Xpass which was to essentially take the rich middleware suite of products and capabilities we had, and decompose them into independently consumable services kind of like what you see when you look at AWS. They've got the simple queuing service, simple messaging service. We have those capabilities but in the past they were bundled together in an app server, so we worked to pull them apart and allow people to use them independently so if you wanted transactions, or you wanted security, you didn't have to consume the whole app server you actually had these as independent services, so that was Xpass. We've continued on that road for the past few years and a lot of those services are now available as part and parcel of OpenShift. To get to the developer side of things, then we put language veneers on top of those because we're a Java company, well at least middleware is, but there's a lot more than Java out there. There's a lot of people who like to use Pearl or PHP or JavaScript or Go, so we can provide language specific clients for them to interact. At the end of the day, your JavaScript developer who's using bulletproof, high performing messaging doesn't need to know that most of it is implemented in Java. It's just a complete opaque box to them in a way. >> John F: So this is a trend of microservices, this granularity concept of this decomposition, things that you guys are doing is to line up with what people want, work with services directly. >> Absolutely right, to give developers the entire spectrum of granularity. So they can basically architect at a granularity that's appropriate for the given part of their job they're working on it's not a one size fits all proposition. It's not like throw all the monoliths out and decompose every last workload into it's finest grain possible pieces. There's a time and a place for ultra-fine granularity and there's also a time and a place to group things together and with the way that we're providing our runtimes and the reference architectures and the general design paradigm that we're sort of curating and recommending for our customers, it really is all about, not just the right tool for the job but the right granularity for the job. >> It's really choice too, I mean people can choose and then based on their architecture they can manage it the way they want from a design standpoint. Alright I got to get your guys' opinion on something. Certainly we had a great week in Copenhagen last week, in Denmark, around CUBECon, Kubernetes conference, Cloud NativeCon, whatever it's called, they're called two things. There was a rallying cry around Kubernetes and really the community felt like that Linix moment or that TCPIP moment where people talk about standards but like when will we just do something? We got to get behind it and then differentiate and provide all kinds of coolness around it. Core defacto stand with Kubernetes is opening up all kinds of new creative license for developers, it's also bringing up an accelerated growth. Istio's right around the corner, Cubeflow have the cool stuff on how software's being built. >> Right. >> So very cool rallying cry. What is the rallying cry in middleware, in your world? Is there a similar impact going on and what is that? >> Yeah >> Because you guys are certainly affected by this, this is how software will be built. It's going to be orchestrated, composed, granularity options, all kinds of microservices, what's the rallying cry in the middleware? >> So I think the rallying cry, two years ago, at Summit we announced something called MicroProfile with IBM, with Tomitribe, another apps vendor, Piara and a few quite large Java user groups to try and do something innovative and microservices specific with Enterprise Java. It was incredibly successful but the big elephant in the room who wasn't involved in that was Oracle, who at the time was still controlling Java E and a lot of what we do is dependent on Java E, a lot of what other vendors who don't necessarily talk about it do is also dependent on Java E to one degree or another. Even Pivotal with Springboot requires a lot of core services like messaging and transactions that are defined in Java E. So two years further forward where we are today, we've been working with IBM and Oracle and others and we've actually moved, or in process of moving all of Java E away from the old process, away from a single vendor's control into the Eclipse Foundation and although that's going to take us a little while longer to do we've been on that path for about four or five months. The amount of buzz and interest in the community and from companies big and small who would never have got involved in Java E in the past is immense. We're seeing new people get involved with Eclipse Foundation, and new companies get involved with Eclipse Foundation on a daily basis so that they can get in there and start to innovate in Enterprise Java in a much more agile and interesting way than they could have done in the past. I think that's kind of our rallying call because like I said we're getting lots of vendors, Pivotal's involved, Fujitsu. >> John F: And the impact of this is going to be what? >> A lot more innovation, a lot quicker innovation and it's not going to be at the slow speed of standards it's going to be at the fast, upstream, open source innovative speed that we see in likes of Kubernetes. >> And Eclipse has got a good reputation as well. >> Yeah, the other significant thing here, in addition to the faster innovation is it's a way forward for all of that existing Java expertise, it's a way for some of the patterns and some of the knowledge that they have already to be applied in this new world of Cloud Native. So you're not throwing out all that and having to essentially retrain double digit millions of developers around the world. >> John F: It's instant developer actually and plus Java's a great language, it's the bulldozer of languages, it can move a lot, it does a lot of heavy lifting >> Yep. >> And there's a lot of developers out there. Okay, final question I know you guys got to go, thanks for spending the time on theCUBE, really appreciate certainly very relevant, middleware is key to the all the action. Lot of glue going on in that layers. What's going on at the show here for you guys? What's hot, what should people pay attention to? What should they look for? >> Mark: I'll give my take, what's hot is any talk to do with middleware >> (laughs) Biased. >> But kind of seriously we do have a lot of good stuff going on with messaging and Kafka. Kafka's really hot at the moment. We've just released our own project which is eventually going to become a product called Strimsy, integrated with OpenShift so it's coognative from the get-go, it's available now. We're integrating that with OpenWhisk, which we talked about earlier, and also with our own reactive async platform called Vertex, so there's a number of sessions on that and if I get a chance I'm hoping to say into one >> John F: So real quick though I mean streaming is important because you talk about granularity, people are going to start streaming services with service measures right around the corner, the notion of streaming asynchronously is going to be a huge deal >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Mark: And tapping into that stream at any point in time and then pulling the plug and then doing the work based on that. >> Also real quick, Kubernetes, obviously the momentum is phenomenal in Cloud Native but becoming a first class citizen in the enterprise, still some work to do. Thoughts on that real quick? Would you say Kubernetes's Native, is it coming faster? Will it ever be, certainly I think it will be but. >> I think this is the year of Kubernetes and of enterprise Kubernetes. >> Mike: I mean you just look at the phenomenal growth of OpenShift and that in a way speaks directly to this point >> Mike, what's hot, what's hot? What are you doing at the show, what should we look at? I'd add to, I certainly would echo the points Mark made and in addition to that I would take a look at any session here on API management. Again within middleware the three-scale technology we acquired is still going gangbusters, the customers are loving that, finding it extremely helpful as they start to navigate the complexity of doing essentially distributive computing using containers and microservices, getting more disciplined about API management is of huge relevance in that world, so that would be the next thing I'd add. >> Congratulations guys, finally the operating system called the Cloud is taking over the world. It's basically distributed computer all connected together, it sounds like >> All that stuff we learned in the eighties right (laughs) >> It's a systems world, the middleware is changing the game, modern software construction of Apple cases all being done in a new way, looking at orchestration, server lists, service meshes all happening in real time, guys congratulations on the all the work and Red Hats. Be keeping it in the open, Java E coming around the corner as well, it's theCUBE bringing it out in the open here in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier with John Troyer we'll be back with more live coverage after this short break

>> Announcer: Live from the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Magento. (music fades out) >> Hello everyone welcome back we are here, broadcasting here at the Wynn in Las Vegas for the Magento event here, theCUBE with exclusive coverage 2018, Imagine 2018. And I'm here with John Stockton, who is the Vice President of Product Management at Magento. Tell me about the new product news really modernizing the e-commerce tag and enabling digital growth. Great to have you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great! Thanks for being here. >> So, you guys have a digital experience culture here at the company but one of the things that's interesting is the modern stack of e-commerce needs an upgrade. >> John S.: Right >> It's been talked about for years. You guys are doing that, you've got thousands and thousands of customers and partners you've got product news here. >> John S.: Yep. >> Let's dig into the news, what do you guys have, what are you refreshing, what are you bringing to the table? >> Well it's a really exciting time here to be at Magento. We are announcing a number of big initiatives here at the conference. The first is around our superior shopping experience goal, our goal is to continue to support an evolving consumer culture where more and more people are doing things on mobile devices, more and more people are doing things in store. >> We've been working very closely with Google on their progressive web apps initiative, and we'll be announcing here our PWA developers studio is going to be an early adopter program and generally available at the end of the year. That's going to enable Magento merchants, and our partners, and our ecosystem, to be able to create really cool progressive web apps. Progressive web apps are going to revolutionize the way we experience digital commerce on mobile devices, they're much more performant, much faster. They're going to be the way of the future and I don't think any merchant in the world can afford to ignore them. Our PWA dev studio is going to make it easy for merchants to create those apps, and that's really exciting. >> That's the first big news. >> John S.: That's the first big news. >> Let's dig into that, I know you got two more I want to get to but, this is kind of important. We've been hearing about mobile first for years. >> John S.: Right. >> Certainly Google has put the screws on search results, >> John S.: Absolutely. >> response time on mobile. What's the impact to customers on this news, what does it give them? >> Yeah, for a lot of our customers more than 50% of their transactions today are coming from mobile so it's just a trend that they can't ignore at all. What happens when you take a native app in mobile today is, you might be able to do a bit of work with responsive design but the performance expectations the consumers have for a page loading instantaneously, for no delays in scrolling around, for checkout. Increasingly things like Apple Pay and Google Pay, the ability to just do a facial recognition and actually check-out and pay for something on a phone. That's what consumers are going to expect in the future, and PWA is really the only way you're going to be able to meet those expectations. >> That makes them have to take a web response design, >> John S.: Right. >> and make it feel like a native app. >> John S.: Yes. >> Both performance, and experience. >> John S.: (talking over John F.) Very high performance and very high integration with the actual phone itself. >> Alright so the next announcement is what? >> The next big this is on our Omnichannel initiative we want to enable our merchants to be able to sell effectively in any channel. The big news there is we are going to be releasing a Amazon sales channels module for Magento commerce that enables the Magento merchant to push their catalog out to the Amazon marketplace, do things like dynamic competitive pricing, and then track all that transaction data as their products are sold on Amazon. So from directly within Magento they can manage both channels, and see all their results all in one place. >> So this is kind of interesting. Amazon obviously is Amazon, we know what's going on with those guys. So what's the improvement, I mean obviously you can publish-- >> John S.: Right. >> Amazon marketplace. What's the innovation, where's the new updates, you mention pricing, the relationship with Amazon is it the code native, what's going on? >> The innovation is in the data integration of getting you product catalog into Amazon which is going to be easier than ever before. You're going to have visibility into performance within Amazon directly from Magento, and then all that transaction data is going to come back to Magento. So when you're using Magento commerce or our business intelligence tools, you're going to have a single source of truth for how you're performing across both channels. >> John F.: And plus massive sales opportunity for growth >> Right. >> Just on a sales perspective. (laughing) >> Right, right, yeah, yeah. >> Amazon's the big gorilla. >> Yep. >> Okay so third announcement? >> The third announcement is in our business intelligence planning so we have a Magento business intelligence product is now available to all Magento customers who have a commercial license with us, at no extra cost, so. MBI is a full-stack business intelligence data warehouse solution that tracks all your data from all Magento products, commerce, order management, and rolls it up into great dashboards, visualization tools, allows you to integrate it with Google analytics and other data sources, so. We're collecting rich data on consumers behavior across both your physical store, with our order management solution, and your online properties with Magento commerce, and giving you really an unbeatable combination of data points on your consumers that's going to really unlock a lot of potential value. >> So does this bring more wrangling to the table, less complexity, offline-online kind of perspective? >> Yeah a lot less complexity. It is an out of the box PI solution, it's an out of box data warehouse that integrates the core data that you want. We have a pro edition that allows you to integrate your other data, so you could integrate CRM data or other things. It's a great way to get a single source of truth reporting solution for all of your commerce touch points. >> And that's all customers, no charge, part of the platform? >> Yeah the essential edition is now included no charge, and there is a pro edition that is a premium product. >> So product, you run the product management, which you got to-- >> Yep keep your eye on the prize, you got to look at the engineering, and then look at the customers. You've got to kind of make decisions, so as you look at the growth of commerce, just in general, online. >> Yeah. >> There's no denying that we're going to a whole nother level. >> Yep. >> (laughing) How do you guys prioritize? (laughing) Because I mean, there's like so many things you could work on. >> Yeah, it is-- >> What are some of the guiding principles, how do you guys make these decisions, what's the internal DNA like? Share some inside baseball, what goes on? >> Yeah sure. You know our philosophy is the three pillars I mentioned, superior shopping experiences, omnichannel, and business intelligence, those are areas that we know are durable areas of investment that are going to provide value to a merchant. The fourth one is our open ecosystem, and that's really unique to Magento, so we partner with over eleven hundred partners, we have an open source platform that a community contributes to. We're doing a lot to get a lot more leverage out of that, and that allows us to innovate a lot faster. So for example, the day the Amazon patent expired, we had a community partner submit a one-click order feature into the code base, we ran it through a quality assurance product. And I believe we were the first to market with one-click order. So what happens is, even beyond the core organic development that the internal R&D team is doing, we have so much innovation going on, that's customer driven, partner driven. That gives us a very rich opportunity to go into areas that, even where we are following our partners or our community, we're able to incorporate things into the product as the market demands them. >> You know I think that's a unique and compelling thing that's different I think about you guys that I like is, you know the old model was we got to own everything, >> John S.: Right. >> every little feature. And you know you look at startups out there, oh that's really a feature not a startup, that's the old joke of silicon valley but, the reality is, is that, you have partners that have business, >> John S.: Yep. >> So they could build a really hyper focused feature, >> John S.: Yep. >> Bring it to the table, you incorporate it in through your ecosystem, >> John S.: That's right. >> That's what you're referring to, right? >> Yeah absolutely, and you know, I think the business model around closed platforms is kind of fundamentally flawed in that regard, because the vendor can never keep up with the rate of innovation. Especially not a space like e-commerce where things are happening so fast, it would be impossible for any one vendor to stay on top of it all. >> John F.: So your strategy: Stay to your core pillars >> John S.: Yep. >> Let the ecosystem innovate, you've got the open source which is the playground for more innovation-- >> John S.: Yep. creative ideation. And then you have a pipeline in through the product team. >> Yep. >> For QA, quality assurance kind of thing going on there. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> And then ship it our to all your customers-- >> That's right. >> Through what, marketplace? >> That's right. Well we have a variety of ways to get out. So our partners can get extensions out to the market through our marketplace, which is the best place to get Magento extensions. We're also doing a core bundled extension program, so we will be announcing tomorrow that we're-- we have three new core bundled extension partners. We're partnering with Vertex for tax, (mumbling) for deferred payments, and Amazon Pay as a payment method. So those are integrations that those vendors have done to Magento, that we have certified and blessed as the highest quality. And merchants who deploy Magento 224 which will include those bundled extensions and turn them on with the flip of the switch. So we're doing a lot more innovation to make those solutions available to customers. >> I mean it's innovative because you have some things that might not be in the product, well we've got resources, there's always the contention for resources, but when you've got partners innovating. I just saw folks, I was taking a lunch break walking around, you got a coin crypto solution here, hey we could do, you know, 400 tokens. >> John S.: Yeah. >> Or I don't even know, it's like thousands of tokens but, if someone wants to do say cryptocurrency. >> John S.: Right. >> A partner steps up, >> Yeah. >> And that's enabled, that's an option >> Yes, yep. >> So today I want to take bitcoin, >> Yep. >> You could fit that in. >> John S.: Yes, absolutely. it also gives us great advantage on our global reach as well because we can work with partners who want to localize this and take us into markets where we don't have direct presence today. But the open platform and the fact that we're so partner friendly and ecosystem friendly, makes it possible for other people to build businesses and to take us into places faster than anybody else. >> We were talking before we came on camera about your previous experience, you've been in the industry for a while, you've seen some waves. We know, we're old enough to see some of those. E-commerce, and again, e-commerce is 25 years old, and you know it's always been kind of monolithic, you know, one directional. >> John S.: Right. You push to an endpoint, yeah you got JSON now endpoints but the demand is for rich experience, consumer to consumer potentially, >> John S.: Right. >> Peer to peer action, >> John S.: Right. >> All this stuffs going on, what attracted you to these guys for you job, and what do you look at in terms of big waves, that you guys want to ride on. >> Yeah, you know what attracted me, Magento is my first opportunity to be at an open source platform company. And so the excitement all around here at this event is really validating that this is a fun place to be and this is a great approach to market, I think it's a much more interesting way to build products than the old school ways are. So I'm really excited about that. You know, to your point about evolving needs, both the omnichannel need and then also, we've been doing a lot of b to b scenarios, so we have customers using Magento in very innovative ways that again, are outside the box of what we intended when we first built the product. We have partners here who are doing marketplace solutions right now, where our customers are hosting marketplaces where other consumers are selling products to each other, which is a really cool use case. We have always had customers using us in a b to b context, even though we didn't have native b to b functionality built in. In two dot two which just came out last year, we made a big investment to beef up some b to b capabilities in the product and we'll be making more investments in those in the coming years as well. >> Everything flows from the b to c because, mobiles expected there-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> Now you're seeing mobile first-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> cloud first-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> for b to b-- >> John S.: Yeah. And they're kind of upping their game-- >> John S.: Yep. >> You got to up your game, you know everything's online now. And a lot of, if not all of our b to c customers have some b to b dimension to their business, right? So it makes sense for their digital platform to serve not only their direct consumer up fronts, but all their commerce initiatives. >> What's the big thing that you see out there, for the b to b customers because I see b to b really, moving faster now-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> Than ever before-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> Because they used to have the old websites-- >> John S.: Right. >> Now they're puttin' rich media on there they want to do some, you know, some for some service-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> Everything's moving digital-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> On b to b-- >> John S.: Yep. >> Is it awakening, is it-- >> John S.: Yeah, no I think-- >> like, they're waking up and smelling the coffee, what's going on? >> I think it is, I don't think, you know, people are people, and whether you're shopping for a blender or you're a procurement officer and you need to buy IT equipment, you have expectations that you're going to be digitally served with a high quality. The market is moving that way very fast, there's a lot of potential to create better experiences for your customer that way. There's a lot of opportunity to get more efficiency out of your processes by bringing them to the digital so that they can carry on. >> And then obviously outsourcing the role of the community is super important. Talk about the labs, Magento labs, how does that fit into all this, we saw some folks up there gettin' awards on keynote today. >> John S.: Yeah. What's this labs thing about? >> So we have a program with our Magento masters where we recognize people for contributions to the community and so we gave out awards yesterday morning for the top contributors. We had in the two dot two dot four release, that's coming out tomorrow, we had over 200 community contributions before submitting. Enhancements to the product, fixes, improvements. Security improvements, performance improvements, so the amount of contribution to the community is still, really, from the community is still really really valuable and we really recognize and reward and support that. >> Real competitive advantage. So I got to ask you the data question. >> John S.: Yeah. >> The role of data's so valuable you're seeing data, whether it's IOT devices being potentially in retail outlets i mean, wearables is a IOT device. >> John S.: Yep. >> You know Apple pay could be considered a wearable, to some degree as a device. But data moving around, having data integrate-- >> John S.: Right. >> Is a huge issue-- >> John S.: Yes. >> How is that impacting your business, obviously can imagine pretty significantly impacting both market intelligence, real-time bidding, real-time user experiences-- >> John S.: Yeah. >> Without data you really can't get near real time. >> John S.: That's absolutely right, yeah. >> What's your view on that? >> So data is going to be the next big revolution, I think, as digital commerce spreads across all panels consumers are going to expect you to know who they are when you walk in the store, you, they, you remember the past transactions and interactions you had with them. You're personalizing your outreach and experience for them. Data is key to all that. Right now we're in a foundation building phase where we're getting all that data into Magento business intelligence, we're building a data lake. We recognize, for our customers, that connecting all that data together and rationalizing it all is a challenge. We think we can do a lot to solve that challenge for them through our business intelligence tools and our data. >> John great to have you on theCUBE sharing the insights, final question for you is what's one or two things that someone might not know about Magento that they should know about? The approach, the products, how you guys build technology, happy customers, let's see one-two things that they should know about, that may not know about. >> I would say I mean, I think people know Magento as an opensource platform, an opensource brand. They may not know that we are having a lot of success up market right now, we are increasingly getting pulled into enterprise businesses and running very large-scale businesses for people. They may not know us as a b to b solution provider, they may think of us as a b to c only solution provider, so we're doing a lot in b to b right now. They may not know how much we've invested in the people of Magento. In the Austin office where I work, we've more than doubled in size in the last year. So we are growing like crazy, we're bringin' a lot of talent to the company and it's a great place to be. >> John F.: Yeah, you've got a great ecosystem. And what's the reason why you guys are being successful, speed, performance, flexibility, all of the above, what's the key thing? >> All of the above, I mean, I think we get a lot of pull from the market, the Magento brand is still very solid, there's a lot of people out on opensource who are looking to upgrade and move up and that creates a great pipeline for us. I think the competitive landscape is, got options on the lower end and options on the higher end that are a little bit old-school. I think we have an advantage in the innovation and the things we're bringin' to the market that's going to serve us well in the future. >> The pressure to go digital all the time, 100%, is really on every ones shoulders these days, everything's digital. >> John S.: Yep. >> John Stockton Vice President of Product Management at Magento here at Imagine 2018 in Vegas, theCUBE's exclusive coverage. Be back with more coverage after this short break. (pop music)