>>Yes. >>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by two Cube alumni. Please welcome Tarazi, senior vice president and CEO, networking at Dell Technologies. Welcome back. And welcome to the Virtual >>Cube. Thank you. I'm excited about this. Thank you. >>We're gonna have a good conversation, because VJ Ramachandran is also here. VP of product management at VM Ware VJ Welcome back. >>Thank you, Lisa. And happy to be here again. >>So have a lot to unpack. We're on the cusp of the emerald 2021. You guys are making an announcement We want to talk about in the Emmy. Why? It's important will break down the announcement. Go ahead and start. Uh, we'll start with you. Envy me. Why is it important? What is it? All that good stuff? >>Yeah, this is excellent topic, and this is really an important component of infrastructure these days. Um, modern applications are changing how they consume infrastructure. That's because the workloads are evolving. Some of them are ai type machine learning workloads that need very high performance. There's also a continued to end by our customers to put work clothes in public cloud and on um and create a hybrid multi cloud model. Um, and also the new exciting stuff is all have to do with the edge applications and distributing applications everywhere with automation and connectivity to where they need to be operating with, you know, on premise. Uh, so long Storey short, These trends, these new applications, how the deployment models work is really diving the need for envy me becoming the key technology for getting your data and storage and with envy me of a fabric and connectivity is starting to become a very important topic. >>How do you have those discussions with customers in terms of their next steps, especially in the last year and a half will stay with you that we've seen such acceleration of digital transformation. What have those customer conversations? How have they changed? >>Uh, they the conversations have changed in two big ways. One, they really want to discuss outcomes. They know that we can bring, you know, industry leading infrastructure and tools and automation and software. But they really want to discuss outcomes, you know? How do you How do I automate my you know, operations? How do I get to unpack the value of my data? no matter what the data is eyes and where it's coming. So so that's the first big changes. People have shifted completely to outcomes. And the second change is that now there is a really good discussion about performance and sustainability. How do I make sure that I'm meeting my sustainability goals? I'm meeting my performance goals instead of just discussing one piece of the solution. >>Got a BJ wanna bring you into the conversation? Now talk to me about BME Front and its evolution from VM Ware's perspective and some of the changes that you've seen in the last dynamic 18 months in the market. >>Yeah, thanks. Thanks for being, You know, I think that we are living in interesting times now. What we're seeing from the standpoint is that applications are evolving rapidly, demanding more performance, local agencies, higher throughput. And these are modern applications and NBA me. What we're seeing is that NBN me as a protocol is becoming the de facto sort of connected with protocol police applications at the same time. What we're also seeing is that the infrastructure team at scale and then deploy these applications at scale They are moving towards a disaggregated architecture in the data centre, and all the employees are going towards this because they want to emulate, you know, the public club. And so you know what's exciting about this announcement and sort of the, you know, the you know, what we are delivering together the bell is that the combination of Indian P plus T c p I P provides in sort of brings both these worlds together. It provides performance and legacies that these new applications these these new modern applications need at the same time provides a way that is disaggregated. And so the combination of these two is You know, it's, uh, industries changing, in my opinion, and and we'll see that this will become sort of the the fact that we can deploy infrastructure in our data centres. And that's what we're seeing in December. >>Got it? Thank you. Let's go ahead and unpack that announcement. That VJ alluded to telling them or have announced an end to end envy. Any TCP ecosystem solution back over to you. You have talked to me about this. What is it? What are some of the core components and we'll get into >>benefits. Perfect. So So we both see envy any of D c P I p as this new future storage connectivity. And it is a pivotal moment for the industry. There's always been debate about what protocols you use for connecting storage for performance speed. But the time has come for envy any of the TCP IP to become the defect of future protocol. Uh, what we're announcing is, first of all, we're announcing a new, uh, software product called S S s from Dell. And that software product will automate the discovery provisioning and automate the setup of all the storage networking How you connect all the hosts to the storage targets in a fully automated way. This is something that has been very complex, very hard to do manually in a one by one. So that's a whole new software product. Number two announcing the availability of envy me over TCP I pee on our key Dell products, which is power store power edge, which is our server product, and also power switch, which is our networking product. So the combination of the new software tool S. S s and all the availability of envy. Emile, that TCP ip on our compute storage and networking that gives customers the ecosystem to be able to use it along with the capabilities that are essential for it. >>Yeah, And DJ head was going to add to what you have just said. You know, of course, being there is fully committed to bringing this, uh, option of NBA me, You know, along with the partnership, Del, um you know, to the market and has been our partnership has been instrumental in bringing this to the market. Now, you know, the cool thing about this particular announcement and, you know, and what to bring to the market is that the smart fabric, uh, services manager is actually built into the centre. So, you know, from the understand point of this fear administrator being the administrator can so stay with them. They're the centre, um, you know, console and be able to manage provision, manage and monitor, Um, you know, in the in your fabric, uh, me or the PCP, uh, connexions. And so it's sort of bridges the gap between storage and, uh, world with you will >>and also the V sphere. The launch of, uh, envy any of the TCP I p and V. Sphere seven you see is the last component of this announcement between putting S S s inside the Centre V sphere enhancements and the Dell products. The end result is the customers get this bump and new capability. However, they can continue to use all the management tools that they have today. So this is an easy automated lift and they get this new capability >>an easy automated lift. Though that sounds like magic to I'm sure a lot of folks ears sticking with you talk to me about this is a new direction for Dell and talk to me a little bit about that and the impact. >>I think the new direction is that we have supported multiple protocols for connectivity fibre channel R d m A. But I think now, as we go to this next evolution and the fact that the world is going to multi cloud and edge and distribution, the new direction here is we're putting a lot of investment and energy, both of us into making envy me over TCP IP automated and high performance. As VJ said, we've been collaborating for over two years on this project jointly that included new standards, new innovation, new software capabilities, new divers on all our products. So although we make it sounds simple. This is a company wide on both sides. Innovation effort to make this possible. >>Absolutely a big innovation effort. DJ, Go >>ahead. And I was gonna say, you know, just to second what we have said, we work as one team you know, begin to companies. But we work as one team and really brought some innovative features and functionality out of the market and, you know, too excited to see this come to fruition. We're working on it for two years now. >>So two years before the pandemic started, I'm curious to get both of your perspectives on how the tunnels of the economy and the market of the last 18 months have influenced. We've seen so much acceleration in digital. How has this interesting time affected or accelerated what you're announcing? Or has it? >>I will start on V say, you know, whatever you'd like to add is that I think what we have seen during the pandemic is acceleration of adopting of a cloud operating model by using more of public cloud but also using automation that we have built into our products, both vm ware and L. And so this kind of automated type software tools falls completely in line with that. You know, customers more and more want the infrastructure automated and they wanted cloud light with as a service, usage based type models. And we're both invested into that area. >>Yeah, And you know, Lisa, if anything at all in the last, uh, two years since the Pandemic, what we're what we're refining is that it's no longer a decision between on Prem or Public Club, But it's actually and and decision, you know, it's on from and public clothes is truly becoming a multicultural world. And so to make this multi cloud, and then customers deploy the right applications and write workload in the right place, depending on the needs. And so, in this multiple world, having this automation and having a consistent way too, uh, to manage infrastructure, uh, in an automated fashion across these multi coloured deployments is becoming key. And so this is a key component of that. What we did, what pronouncing is a key component of that kind of a model, that customers are moving to >>it. Let's talk about the customer benefits you both mentioned performance sustainability, low latency, high throughput. Give me examples of each of those of how this technology will deliver that for customers across industries. >>This is where we've really enjoyed working together and with VJ and his team did fantastic work to test the value of having this partnership is the end to end. Customer sees the performance and benefit from the eyes of using both the software stack from Dell and VM Ware as well as the infrastructure below it. And we've been able to jointly test what the customer will see and what we have seen, which I have to say was a surprise to us. We expected benefits, but even it was one of those Aha moment. Oh my God, this is We thought it was good, but it turned out to be even better. So on the performance side, it's about 2.5 to 3 times the performance of ice crazy, which is the other technology we would compare this to on the Latin Seaside is 70% less latency and uses even less capacity in terms of CPU. We have not seen that kind of performance improvement from a protocol for a very long time. Changing networking protocols usually gives you some little benefit, but not this kind of a step functional performance. So I think the customers will be very excited about this. >>These are some numbers, PJ go ahead and extend onto that. >>No, I You know, I have nothing more to add because, you know, we having extremely encouraged by the performance numbers that you know, that we saw and, you know, and and and here, this red we actually exceeded expected our expectations, right? And if you, the enemy, was the was the right way to sort of, you know, delivered performance. But, uh, you know, to see this kind of results in real world as, uh is very encouraging. >>You guys said there are several sessions at BM world that are covering this topic. I'd like to get both of your perspectives on some of the sessions that you're presenting in and some of the key takeaways that the audience can learn. I have. We'll start with you. >>Yeah. I mean, we're starting with a session to explain the overall strategy, and we're gonna show demos. Exactly how would you use VM Ware software and L s F s s to configure Implement. How does that compare to the customer experience today? That's going to be an exciting session between myself and Paul Turner, who is the VP of product. Also at the end, where I think that that kind of with these visual demos, people will see how fast automated that is, which is really the message here. Then we have multiple sessions from our key technical experts. We're gonna go through a deep technology review of the stack and how to do it. And the functionality. >>Yeah, and Lisa on on the other side of obviously you have a number of sessions on various topics. Uh, on storage. The one that I want to call out is there's a session that I'm doing with Mark flashing who's a city or for storage and for club platform. Really. And we are discussing VMS vision and strategy for storage and availability, and NBA me is certainly a key part of that. But as we just talked earlier, the whole automation and the multiplayer aspect of, uh of the parameters it's critical. So you know. So we're sharing what? How we are approaching this whole multiple world. Um, in this, you know, with storeys and availability innovation. So I'm really excited about that. >>So a lot of news coming out on the nbn me over TCP ip front talked about the collaboration acceleration of that, the directional shift in terms of go to market and availability. When where can existing customers go to learn more information? What's the joint gtm that Del. And then we have, >>uh I think you wanna start on V sphere and I'll add or >>Okay, >>so all the products we talked about today from V sphere seven dot you the power store power edge All of them will be available starting immediately after VM World And between October and November, everything we talked about will be available And during the, um, world, we will announce how customers can use it downloaded by it. As we said before, because they are a s s s is implemented into the centre. This will be a familiar way for customers to use it downloaded and implemented, and a new lease of these fears something customers are used to. We have many customers on power store, so they will be getting a new software at least an update with the new functionality. We we do plan to care developer experience, modules, sandboxes for people to play with will make more announcements on that in the future. >>Yeah, And this, You know, as you have said, this functionality is built into, you know, the spear and recenter as well. And so the next really next release of the sphere will have this functionality. And you'll see a lot of noise about this at the world. That sort of our coming out party. Mm. >>Excellent. Well, it sounds like it's going to be a good coming out party with a lot of information to come around. The emerald timeframe, some great education and deep technical dive is that you guys and your teams will be providing to customers in all industries, which I'm sure they will be very much appreciative of. I appreciate both of you coming on sharing with me the news. What's exciting about this? The impact that's going to make and we look forward to hearing some of the news as it gets rolled out. >>Thank you. >>Thank you so much. >>Lisa. Thank >>you. Great to have you guys for Ihab Tarazi and VJ Ramachandran. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a cube >>conversation? Mm.

>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin VJ ramen. Shannon joins me next VP of product management at VMware VJ. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you. So >>We're going to be talking about disaster recovery, VMware cloud. Dr. We've had a lot of challenges with respect to cybersecurity, but the world has in the last 18 months, I'd like to get your, your thoughts on the disaster recovery as a service, the dearest market. What are some of the key trends? Anything that you've noticed have particular interest in the last year and a half? >>Yeah, actually you're right. I mean that the last one year, since the pandemic, you know, the whole, um, lot of industries want to, uh, deploy DLR systems and want to protect themselves in France, somewhere and other, uh, other areas of the Amazon predicting that the disaster service market is going to reach about $10 billion by 2025. And so we, uh, we introduced bandwidth disaster recovery, you know, the last beam work with an acquisition of a company called atrium. And since then we've had tremendous success and it was really largely driven by two key trends that we seen in the market. One is that a lot of our customers have regulatory and mandates to do have a PR plan in place. And second is ransomware and ransomware a lot more in this interview, but ransomware is top of mind for a lot of customers. So those, these two combined together is really making a huge push to, uh, to protect all the data against, uh, disasters. >>What type of customers and any particular industries that you see that are really keenly adopting VMware cloud and D anything that you think is interesting. >>Yeah, it's actually interesting that you say it's actually not a single vertical or a size of the customer. What we have again, what we're finding is that a lot of the regulated industries, I, you know, having 92 to do the art, but the existing VR and data production systems are extremely complex and not cost effective. So, you know, customers are asked to do more with less. And so a lot of our customers, a lot of those customers are asking for, uh, looking for a cost-effective way to protect all the data. And, you know, and ransomware is not something that, that impacts, you know, any single vertical or, or any single size of customer. It impacts everyone. So we're seeing interest from all different verticals, different sizes of customers, uh, across, uh, the, you know, the B cell this, >>Yeah, you're right. The ransomware is a universal problem. And as we saw in the last few months, a problem that is really one of national public health and safety and security concerns. So you mentioned that customers from a regulatory perspective, those that need to implement Dr. Ransomware, as we talked about, are there, and then you also mentioned legacy solutions are kind of costly complex. Talk to me about some of the challenges with respect to those legacy solutions that you're helping customers to address with VMware cloud disaster recovery. >>Yeah. There are a few traits of chains that are, uh, that are emerging and then the whole data production space. One is, uh, customers want to do more with the data. And so with legacy systems, what they're finding is that customers are, you know, are able to replicate the data, but the data is sitting idle and not being used. And so, um, you know, and that's extremely, very expensive for our customers on the line. And secondly, from an outpatient standpoint, backup and Dr, as kind of merging into a single single solution and ransomware protection is becoming a critical use case as we spoke about at the talk about for that. So, uh, customers are not looking to deploy different systems for different types of production. They're looking for a similar solution that, that the lowest cost and gives them enough production across all these different use cases. >>And so where the NFL disaster recovery comes into play is that, is that we are able to use the data that we protect for other uses such as, uh, such as ransomware recovery, such as data protection, such as disaster recovery. So single copy of data that's being could be used in multiple use cases. Number one. And secondly, uh, it's a very expensive, uh, proposition to have, um, you know, on-prem to on-prem, you know, having to, you know, people who shouldn't capacity just sitting idle. And so where Vizio comes into play is that they're able to use, uh, protect the data into cloud, store it in a cost effective manner, and then just use the data when it's acquired either fatal or during disasters in ransomware. And that's where you're able to in, in, in, in the market today, >>Dig through some of those differentiators, if you will, one by one, because there's so much choice out there, there's a lot of backup solutions. Some that are providing backup only some that are doing also Dr. Depending on how customers have deployed and how they're using the technology. But when you're in customer conversations, what are the three things that you articulate about VMware cloud DVR that really help it stand out above the pack? >>Yeah, number one is the cost, right? Um, we, you know, we're able to bring down the cost of, uh, of a disaster protection, uh, by 65, by 65%. And, uh, and, you know, um, that's one big value proposition that we, uh, that we know highlight in our solution. Number two, a lot of our customers also becoming environmentally friendly and, you know, and I'm in a conscious, I should say. And so, because we're able to store the data in a more cost-effective manner, in a more efficient manner in the cloud, they're able to bring down the carbon footprint by 80% compared to regular, you know, your legacy, uh, disaster recovery and data protection solution. And the third, you know, sort of major value proposition from, from, uh, from the BMS is that, you know, we're able to integrate the, uh, uh, BCDR solution, the disaster coriander data protection solution. So well into our, um, you know, into, into the ecosystem, uh, can easily operationally easily recover data into a BM ware cloud. And so for, for the BMA ecosystem, it just becomes a natural logical extension of their, uh, their, uh, toolset. >>That's huge having a console that you're familiar with, you know, the whole point of, of backing up data and the need to recover from a disaster is to be able to restore the data in a timely fashion. I talked with a lot of customers who were using legacy technologies, and that was one of the biggest challenges backup windows weren't completing, or they simply couldn't recover data that was either, um, lost in an, in a ransomware attack or accidentally lost that recovery is what it's all about. Right. >>That's it, that's exactly right. And so at this rainbow ledger using a key enhancements and features that specifically speak to that, uh, you know, to that pain point that you just mentioned, you know, uh, we are bringing down, uh, the, uh, you know, the replication time, uh, to 30 to 30 minutes. So in other words, your Delta is, is, is, uh, is at a 300 interval now compared to all us in a traditional backup system. And number two, um, we are extending, uh, you know, be in love with a copy of it regardless it's always had with single file recovery. And so, especially for the, for the ransomware, uh, use case customers are quickly able to figure out which file leads to the restore, and they're able to restore those files individually rather than restoring their entire VM for the entire data center. And so it becomes a critical, uh, use case for, uh, critical functionality, I should say, for a ransomware recovery. And the other huge announcement of a major announcement media announcement had been made, uh, uh, others be involved is the integration into the VMware cloud in such a way that customers who move are migrating data into the BMR, the cloud on AWS can, uh, have the opportunity to, um, uh, protect the data, um, you know, uh, you know, easily BCDR and >>Got it. I'd love to get an example of a customer that you helped to recover from ransomware. As we mentioned, it's on the rise. In fact, I was looking at some cybersecurity data in the last few weeks, and it's the first half of 2021 calendar. It was up nearly 11 ax. And obviously the, the, the hockey stick lists looking like it's going to continue to go up into the right. So give me an example of a customer that you helped recover after they were hit with ransomware. >>Yeah. Yeah, I lose. And in fact, before I give you one set, one statistic that I just saw recently, um, it is, um, every Lennon are going to be across the board. There's some ransomware attack and in the world. And so, uh, you know, it is a big, you know, it is a huge, huge top of mind for a lot of, uh, the CEO's across and I, you know, across the globe now, uh, we, I just give you an example of one customer that we helped, um, you know, protect the data against ransomware. Merrick is the customer name, uh, it's a public reference. It can, um, you know, it's, it's in the BMI website and they had legacy systems, just like we talked about before they had legacy systems for protecting the data and they had, you know, backup systems and they had disaster recovery systems. >>And the big pain point was that, you know, they knew that they are, you know, they needed to protect against ransomware and, but they had two different systems backup and disaster recovery, and their cost was high because they were replicating the light data or production data, uh, you know, across different sites. And so they were looking for a, uh, to lower the cost of disaster recovery, but more importantly, they're looking to, uh, to protect themselves against potential ransomware threats and, um, and they were able to deploy VCR. And how does multiple points in time? Um, you know, I, in, in, um, in the, in the cloud that are, that allows them to go to any point, uh, you know, uh, after a ransomware attack and record from it. And as I said, the single file recovery was a huge benefit for them because they can then figure out exactly which, you know, which of those files, uh, you know, required, um, recovery. And so, um, they're able to lower the cost and protect, uh, and at the same time, uh, you know, meet the regulatory requirements and mandates to have a production in place so that the women all up there in all over the place, >>As you said, there, the data show one ransomware attack occurs every 11 seconds. And of course we only hear about the ones that make the news, right, for the most part, our customers talk about, Hey, we've had this problem. So it is no longer a, if we get hit with ransomware for every industry, like you were saying before, no industry is blind to this. It's when we get hit, we've gotta be able to recover the data. It sounds like what you're talking about from a recovery perspective is it's, it's very granular. So folks can go in and find exactly what they're looking for. Like, they don't have to restore entire VM. They can go down to the file level. >>That's exactly right. And, and you need the grant of the recovery because you want to be able to quickly restore, you know, your data, uh, and get back on, uh, you know, get back in the business. And so, uh, we provide that granular, granular recovery at the file level so that you can quickly scan your data, figure out which file needs to be at least a bit of cover and recollect just those files. Of course, you can also the color. We also provide authorization for the whole data center for the whole, uh, you know, BM and all the beings in the data center, but customers when they hit the trends and where they want to be able to quickly get back, get back into production, to those flights that, you know, that they critically need. And so that's, um, yeah, that's, it's a critical functionality. >>So is this whole entire solution in the cloud, or is there anything that the customer needs to have on premise? >>So this is, uh, all the data is go to the cloud in an efficient day, in an efficient way. Again, uh, you know, this is another sort of, um, like be that behalf, which is it's easy to just store data in the cloud in a debate, but what we do is be efficiently store the data so that, you know, you, uh, you know, you can know what the cost of your storage and, uh, uh, in the cloud. And so, you know, we used to be at BCDR, we'll be in the cloud disaster recovery. Those data in the cloud is, uh, and, and, and the data repository is in the cloud. And, uh, you can either recover data back to where you need to recover, or we allow filo or orchestrate automatically feel or of, uh, workloads into VMware on AWS, again, operational consistent, because it's a BMI software that's running on ground BMI software, that's running on data and you can, um, you know, fail a lot and bring the data onto the in-vitro Needham, VSO. It's, uh, uh, it's, uh, you know, and it's all there to look for SAS customer customer doesn't have to really manage anything on prem fuel, >>Which must've been a huge advantage in the last year and a half when it was so hard to get to the on-prem locations. Right. >>That's exactly right. And this is one of the clear differentiators, you know, against, uh, you know, with, um, uh, compared to the legacy systems, because in legacy backup and disaster recovery systems, you need to manage your, not just your target tourists, but also, you know, the Asians and, you know, all the stuff that, uh, uh, all the software that goes along with that, uh, data production and, uh, and the disaster recovery solution. And so by T and Matt upgrades and patches and so on. And so what we do with, with a SAS based approach is take away that burden away from customer. So we deliver this entire service as a SAS first as a cloud service first, um, uh, delivery mechanisms of customers are don't have water. You don't have to whatever any of those things. >>And that's critical, especially as we've seen in the last 18 months with what's been going on the challenge of getting to locations, but also what's been happening as we talked about in the cybersecurity space, on the increase, the massive increase in ransomware. Talk to me a little bit about, I want to dig in before we go about some of the ways that you've simplified and integrated the way to backup VMware cloud on AWS. Talk to me a little bit more about some of those enhancements specifically. Yeah, >>Yeah. So, um, a lot of the customers, customers, as you know, are, uh, you know, have a dual pronged approach where they have, you know, some workloads running on prem and they have some workloads running and the VMware cloud on AWS and for BNB, uh, for VMs that are running on VMware cloud on AWS. Um, you know, now they have a choice of, uh, of protecting, protecting the data and the VM very simply, uh, using the McLaurin disaster cloud disaster recovery. And what that means is that they don't need to have the full band BR solution, but they can simply protect the data and automatically restore and recover of data. If they, you know, if there's a corruption or something goes wrong with their, uh, you know, the beans, they can simply restore the data without going through an entire field processes. So we provide a simplified way for customers to automatically protect data, and then that are running on VMware cloud on AWS. And that's a, and it's fully integrated with our cloud on AWS, you know, workflows. And, um, and so that's a great win for anyone who's, who's migrating data man workloads into BMC >>Is the primary objective of that to deliver a business resiliency. Dr. >>Both actually that's, that's, that's, that's a great part about that. You know, that's a bit part of the solution is that customers don't have to choose between Dr and business resiliency. They get both with a single solution. They can start off, it's a specific business resiliency and protecting the data, but if they choose to, they can them, uh, you know, add BR as well to that, to those workflows. And so it's not either, or it's both. >>Excellent. Got it. Any other enhancements that you guys are announcing at the Emerald this year? >>Yeah. I just want to reiterate the announcements and the key enhancements and the making, making, uh, you know, the balancing beam. Well, um, the first one, as I said is, uh, uh, is 30 minutes RPO. So customers that are business critical workloads can now pro protect the data and be guaranteed that they're, you know, the, the, you know, the demo data, the data that they, um, you know, they lag behind it's, it's in the 30 minute range and not in the other screens, like with other legacy backup solutions. That's one. The second is the integration, uh, as all enhancements that, you know, that I just talked about for ransom recovery, single file, thin file restore. Um, they always had, you know, number of snapshots and, you know, failure was and so on, but silverish was a key and that's what they've been making for a ransomware recovery. And the third one is the integration with BNB coordinator. So the fully integrated solution and provides a simple, you know, sort of plug and play solution for any workload that's funding in being AWS. Those are the three Tiki announcements. There's a lot more in, um, in the world. So you'll see that in the coming weeks and months, but these are the three on to get the input, >>A lot of enhancements to a solution that was launched just about a year ago. VJ, thank you for sharing with us. What's new with VMware cloud DVR, the enhancements, what you're doing, and also how it's enabling customers to recover from that ever pressing, increasing threat of ransomware. We appreciate your thoughts and likewise for VJ Ramachandra and I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the cubes coverage of VMworld 2021.

>>from around >>the globe. It's >>the cube presenting future >>Cloud one >>event. A >>world of opportunities >>brought to you by Cisco. >>Okay. We're here with costume. Does, who is the Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud and compute at Cisco And VJ Venugopal, who is the Senior Director for Product management for Cloud, compute at Cisco. KTV J Good to see you guys welcome. >>Great to see you. Dave >>to be here. >>Katie. Let's talk about cloud. You. And I, last time we're face to face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud. And I always say to people look, Cisco is not a hyper scaler, but the big public cloud players, they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost actually over $100 billion last year on Capex. The big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about hybrid cloud. So help us understand the strategy. There may be how you can leverage that build out and importantly what a customer is telling you they want out of hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, no, that's that's that's a perfect question to start with Dave. So yes, so the hybrid hyper scholars have invested heavily building out their assets. There's a great lot of innovation coming from that space. Um there's also a great innovation set of innovation coming from open source and and that's another source of uh a gift, in fact the I. T. Community. But when I look at my customers, they're saying, well how do I in the context of my business, implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage um in terms of my contemporary work clothes, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on devops and really harness that innovation that's built in the public cloud, that built an open source that built internally to me and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Siskel's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest, more power, more powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud. And that platform uh is inter site, we've been investing in Inner side, it's a it's a SAS um service um inner side delivers to them that bridge between their estates of today. There were clothes of today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility uh that's needed for the future. The embracing of cloud, Native of new paradigms of deVOPS models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an open source and bridging those two is what inner side has been doing. That's kind of, that's kind of the crux of our strategy. Of course, we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any any version of that, Whether that is on prem in the cloud, hybrid, cloud, multi, cloud and so forth. >>But but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today, the inter site is really a linchpin of that strategy, is it not? >>It really is and may take a second to uh to totally familiarize those who don't know inner side with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we we built a ground up to be an immensely scalable SAs super simple hybrid cloud platform and it's a platform that provides a slew of service is inherently. And then on top of that there are suites of services, the sweets of services that are tied to infrastructure, automation. Cisco, as well as Cisco partners, their suite of services that have nothing to do with Cisco um products from a hardware perspective and it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and inner side and its suite of services um continue to kind of increase in pace and velocity of delivery video. It's just over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things will go a little bit deeper into some of those, but they span everything from infrastructure automation to kubernetes and delivering community than service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate. How much it's costing into your on premise state into your work clothes and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling with both Cisco Abdi uh as well as non Cisco um, assets. And then and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day, the job of it is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient and that includes that. That includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this and do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation, like infrastructure as code and so forth. So it includes self service that so that expand that. But inside the world's simplest hybrid cloud platform, rapidly evolving rapidly delivering new services. And uh, we'll talk about some more of those days. >>Great. Thank you. Katie VJ Let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with the ASCII corp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre covid, I mean in my predictions post, I said, ha she was a name to watch our data partners. Et are you look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream. You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi cloud discussion. And as well, they're attractive to customers. They have open source offerings. You can very easily experiment, smaller organizations can take advantage, but if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever, you can plug right in. Not a big complicated migration. So a very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? >>Mhm. Absolutely. When the spot on every single thing that you said, let me just start by paraphrasing what ambition statement is in the cloud and compute group right ambition statement is to enable a cloud operating model for hybrid cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation orchestration and observe ability across your hybrid cloud idea operations now. Uh So developers >>and applications >>team get a great amount of agility in public clouds and we're on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers. And inter site is a quickie platform and lynchpin to enable that kind of operations. Uh, Cloud like operations in the in the private clouds and the key uh as you rightly said, harsher Carp is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of infrastructure at school and in terra form, they have the world's number one infrastructure as code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with Harsher Card to integrate inter site with hardship cops, terra form to bring the benefits of infrastructure as code to the to hybrid cloud operations. And we've entered into a very tight integration and uh partnership where we allow developers devops teams and infrastructure or administrators to allow the use of infrastructure as code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private club. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed. I see to be delivered to hybrid cloud operations and we've been very happy and proud to be partnering with Russia Carbonara. >>Yeah, telephone gets very high marks from customers. The a lot of value there, the inner side integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud Native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native cady was sort of mentioning before you got the the core apps uh you want to protect those, make sure their enterprise create but they gotta be cool as well for developers. You're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this? Cloud native trend. What other movies are you making in this regard? >>I mean cloud Native is there is one of the paramount I. D. Trends of today and we're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architecture in all modern applications. Now. Cloud native has become synonymous with kubernetes these days and communities has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we have created a brand new SAs delivered kubernetes service that is integrated with inter site, we call it the inter site community service for a. Ks and this just gave a little over one month ago now, what interstate Kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supportive target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure, it could be a third party infrastructure or it could even be public club. But think of it as kubernetes anywhere delivered, as says, managed from inside. It's a very powerful capability that we've just released into inter site to enable the power of communities and cognitive to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important aspect because we have today announced the brand new Cisco service mess manager. The Cisco service mesh manager, which is available as an extension to I K s are doing decide basically we see service measures as being the future of networking. Right in the past we had layer to networking and layer three networking and now with service measures, application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age very differently, how it is managed, how it is deployed, it needs to be ready, developer friendly and developer centric. And so what we have done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the service match manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking through the consumers, like like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud. And we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and deliver the Cisco service mash Manager as an extension to KS. That brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development gives >>God thank you BJ. And so Katie, let's let's let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today, a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >>Absolutely. So couple of things to close on. First of all. Um, inner side is the simplest, most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that that cloud operating model that VJ talked about but enables that across cloud. So it's sad, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encouraged anybody who's not familiar with it to try it out and anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again, because they're probably services in there that you didn't notice or didn't know last time you looked at it because we're moving so fast. So that's the first thing, the second thing I close with is, um we've been talking about this bridge that's kind of bridging, bridging uh your your on prem your open source, your cloud estates. And it's so important to to make that mental leap because uh in past generation we used to talk about integrating technologies together and then with Public cloud, we started talking about move to public cloud, but it's really how do we integrate, how do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyper scale is everything they're doing to innovate superfast. All of that innovation is coming from open source, all of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world including Cisco. How do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud of Steam, if you're an idea of Steam, your job is to deliver an outcome and our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. That's the mission we're on and we're hoping that everybody that's excited as we are about how simple we made that. >>Great, thank you a lot in this announcement today, appreciate you guys coming back on and help us unpack you know, some of the details. Thanks so much. Great having you. >>Thank you. Dave. >>Thank you everyone for spending some time with us. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube, the leader in tech event >>coverage. >>Mm mm.

>> From around the globe. It's theCube. Presenting Future Cloud. One event, a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay we're here with Kaustubh Das, Who is the senior vice president and general manager of cloud and compute at Cisco and Vijay Venugopal who is the senior director of product management for cloud compute at Cisco KD, Vijay, Good to see you guys. Welcome. >> Great to see you Dave. >> Good to be here. >> KD, let's talk about cloud. You- you and I last time we were face-to-face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud. And I always say to people, look Cisco is not a hyperscaler but the big public cloud players they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost- actually over a hundred billion dollars last year on CapEx, the big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about Hybrid Cloud. So help us understand the strategy there and maybe how you can leverage that build out and importantly, what a customer is telling you they want out of Hybrid Cloud. >> Yeah, no, that's, that's that's a perfect question to start with Dave. So yes, so the hyperscalers have invested heavily building out their assets. That's a great, a lot of innovation coming from that space um there is also great innovation- sort of innovation coming from open source. And, and that's another source of a of a gift in fact to the IT community. But when I look at my customers, they're saying, well how do I, in the context of my business, implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage in terms of my contemporary workloads, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on DevOps and really harness that innovation that's built in the public cloud that is built an open source that is built internally to me, and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Cisco's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest, most powerful platform to deliver Hybrid Cloud. And that platform is Intersight. We've been investing in Intersight, it's a it's a SaaS service. Intersight delivers to them that bridge between the states of today, their workload of today the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility that's needed for the future, the embracing of cloud native of new paradigms of DevOps models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an opensource and bridging those two is what Intersight has been doing. That's kind of, that's kind of, the crux of our strategy of course we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any- any version of that whether that is on prem in the Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Multi-Cloud and so forth. >> But, but, but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today the Intersight is really a linchpin of that strategy. Is it not? >> It really is. And may take a second to, to to really familiarize those who don't know Intersight with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we, we built it ground up to be an immensely scalable SAS super simple hybrid cloud platform. And it's a platform that provides a slew of services inherently And then on top of that, there's suites of services there's suites of services that are tied to infrastructure automation, Cisco as well as Cisco partners, the suites of services that have nothing to do with Cisco products from a hardware perspective. And it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and Intersight and its suite of services continue to kind of increase in, in pace and velocity of delivery. Well just, over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things. We'll go a little bit deeper into some of those but they span everything from infrastructure automation to Kubernetes, and delivering Kubernetes that service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate how much it's costing into your on prem state into your workloads and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling, with both Cisco as well as non-Cisco assets. And then, and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day the job of IT is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient. And that includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this then do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation like infrastructures code and so forth. So it includes a self service that, so that spanned that but Intersight, the world's simplest Hybrid Cloud platform rapidly evolving, rapidly delivering new services. And we will talk about some more of those today. >> Great. Thank you, KD Vijay let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with HashiCorp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre-COVID, I ma- in my predictions post, I said Hashi was a name to watch, our data partners ETR You look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream. You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi-cloud discussion and as well they're attractive to customers they have open source offerings, You can very easily experiment smaller organizations can take advantage, but if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever you can plug right in not a big complicated migration. So very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? >> Absolutely Dave And spot on every single thing that you said. Let me just start by paraphrasing what our mission statement is in the cloud and compute group, right? Our mission statement is to enable a cloud operating model for Hybrid Cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation, orchestration, and observability across your Hybrid Cloud IT operations. Now we- so developers and applications teams get a great amount of agility in public clouds. And we are on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers. And Intersight is a key key platform and linchpin to enable that kind of operations cloud- like operations in the private clouds. And a key- as you rightly said- HashiCorp is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of Infrastructure as Code and in telephone, they have the world's number one Infrastructure as Code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with HasiCorp to integrate Intersight with HashiCorp's Terraform to bring the benefits of Infrastructure as Code to the two hybrid cloud operations. And we entered into a very tight integration and a partnership where we allow in our developers DevOps teams and infrastructure administrators to allow the use of Infrastructure as Code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private cloud. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed IAC to be delivered to hybrid cloud operations. And we're very, very happy and proud to be partnering with HasiCorp on that iniative >> Yeah, Terraform gets very high marks from customers. The- a lot of value there the Intersight integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native. KD was sort of mentioning before you got the- the core apps. You want to protect those make sure they're enterprise grade but they got to be cool as well for developers you're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this cloud native trend? What are the moves you are making in this regard? >> I mean, cloud native is the is one of the paramount IT trends of today. And you're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architectures in all modern applications now cloud native has become synonymous with Kubernetes these days. And Kubernetes has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we've created a brand new SaaS delivered Kubernetes service that is integrated with Intersight. We call it the Intersight Kubernetes service for IKS and this just g'd a little over one month ago. Now what Intersight Kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered Kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supported target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure. It could be a third-party infrastructure or it could even be public cloud. But think of it as Kubernetes anywhere Delivered as SaaS managed from Intersight. So very powerful capability that we've just released into Intersight to enable the power of Kubernetes and cloud native to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important announcement Because we have today, announced the brand new Cisco service Mesh Mangager The Cisco service mesh manager which is available as an extension to IKS or to Intersight basically we see service meshes as being the future of networking, right? In the past, we had layer two networking and layer three networking. And now with service meshes application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age, very differently how it is managed, how it is deployed. It needs to be very developer friendly and developer centric And so what we've done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the Service Mesh Manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking to the consumers like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud, and we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and delivered the Cisco service mesh manager as an extension to IKS that brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development teams. >> Got it. Thank you, Vijay. And so KD let's-let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >> Absolutely. So a couple of things to close on first of all, Intersight is the simplest most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that- that cloud operating model that that Vijay talked about, but enables that across cloud. So it's SAS, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encourage anybody Who's not familiar with it to try it out. And anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again because there are probably services in there that you didn't notice, or didn't know last time you looked at it because we were moving so fast. So that's the first thing. The second thing I'll close with is we- we've been talking about this bridge. This kind of bridging- bridging your- your on prem your open source, your- your cloud estates. And it's so important to- to make that mental leap because in p- in past generation we used to talk about integrating technologies together. And then with public cloud we started talking about move to public cloud. But it's really, how do we integrate? How do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyperscale and everything they're doing to innovate super fast. All of that innovation has come from open source. All of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world, including Cisco how do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud ops team if you're an IT ops team, your job is to deliver an outcome. And our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. So that's the mission we're on. And we're hoping that everybody is as excited as we are about how simple they made that. >> Great. Thank you a lot, a lot in this announcement today. I appreciate you guys coming back on and helping us unpack some of the details. Thanks so much. Great having you. >> Thank you Dave >> Thank you >> And thank you everyone for spending some time with us. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCube the leader in tech event coverage. (Closing music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi friend, welcome to this CUBE coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've two great guests here, Travis Hartman Director of Analytics and Weather at Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada who's the Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation Branch at NOAH. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Maxar. What do you guys do? >> Yeah, so Maxar is an organization that does a lot of different activities in earth intelligence as well as space. We have about 4,000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure actually building satellites, and all the infrastructure that's going to help get us back to the moon, and things like that, and then on the other side we have an earth intelligence group which is where I sit, and we leverage remote sensing information, earth science information to help people better understand how and what they do might impact the earth, or how the earth, in its activities, might impact their business mission or operations. So what we wanted to set out to do is help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, businesses, or operations. A big element of that was doing it with speed. So we knew NOAH had capabilities of running numerical weather prediction models and very traditional on-prem, big, beefy, high performance supercomputers, but we wanted to do it in the cloud. We wanted to use AWS as a key partner. So we collaborated with Vijay and NOAH and his teams there to help pull that off. They gave us access, public domain information but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of our research scientists talkin' and yeah, after a pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time, we were able to pull something off a lot of people didn't think was possible. And we got pretty excited once we saw some of the outcomes. >> Travis, Vijay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together? Because this is not your classic Amazon Partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together, Vijay and your team, with AWS. Talk about the relationship and how Amazon played because it's a unique partnership. Explain in more detail, that specific relationship. >> Yeah, with Maxar and AWS, our partnership has gone back a number of years. Maxar being a fairly large organization, there's lots of different activities. I think Maxar was the first client of AWS Snowmobile where they had the big tractor trailer backed up to a data center, load all the data in, and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that 'cause we had over a hundred petabytes of satellite imagery in an archive that just movin' it across the internet it'd probably still be goin'. So the Snowmobile was a good success story for us but just with the amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day, and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or the scalable AIML, we're able to scale out that architecture, scale out the compute, the much easier dynamic and really cost-effective way with AWS 'cause when we don't need to use the machines, we turn 'em off. We don't have a big data center sittin' somewhere where we have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on, literally. AWS allows us to run our organization in a much more efficient way. And NOAH, they're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing, as far as how they could use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud, from cloud architecture, cloud compute, and things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here at Maxar, with our HPC solution in the cloud is something that's pretty interesting to NOAH and it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >> If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute, how did you guys set up the services and what lessons did you learn from that process? >> We're still learnin' is probably the short answer, but it all started with our people. We have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, so they understand the physics of, you know, why the wind blows the way it does and why clouds do what clouds do. But we also, having a key strategic partnership with AWS, we were able to tap into some of their subject-matter experts, and we really put those people together and come up with new solutions and new, innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We were able to steer a little bit of AWS's product roadmap as far as what we were tryin' to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it, but by interacting with us, gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards, and then that's what allowed us to move in a pretty quick fashion. It's neat stuff, technology, but it really comes down to the people. I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here, at Maxar, as well as AWS, as well as bein' able to collaborate with the great teams at NOAH. It's been a lot of fun. >> Well Travis, got a great example, I think it's a template that can be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got a large scale, multi-scale situation, there. Congratulations. Final question, what does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards? As part of the show, you're the best-in-show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give is a quick stub from the field. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that can kind of sum it up. I shared the news with the team last night and you know, there were a lot of, lot of good responses that came from it. A lot of people think it's cool, and at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. And being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing, I think we take a lot of that to heart and we're very honored and proud of what we're able to do and proud that other people recognize the neat stuff that we're doin'. >> Well, certainly takin' advantage of the cloud which is large scale, but you're on a great wave, you've got a great area. I mean, weather, you talk about weather, it's exciting, dynamic, it's always changing, it's big data, it's large scale. So you got a lot of problems to solve and a lot of impact too, when you get it right. So congratulations on an excellent-- >> Thank you very much. >> Great mission. >> Thank you. >> Love what you do, love to followup again and maybe do another interview, and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. Travis, thank you very much. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So NOAH, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center, that's your organization. You guys are competing to be the best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level, then we'll jump into some of the successes. >> So the National Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecasts to save lives and property, and improve the economy of the nation. And as part of that, the National Weather Service is responsible for providing data and also the forecast to the public and to the industry. We are responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are, at the Environmental Modeling Center, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modeling, government, and a nucleation of all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. And that's the kind of the range of products that we download and provide. Our key for managing the emergency of services and hazard management and mitigation, and also improve in the nation's economy by preparing well in advance, for the future events. And it's a science-based organization and we have world-class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the Environmental Modeling Center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modeling, space weather, all weather-related areas, and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most doubled up, advanced modeling center that we use almost all possible computational services available in the world, so this is heavily computational in terms of use of data, use of computers, use of all the power that we can get, and we have a 3.5 protoflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts. And they provide these services every hour for some census like we see the weather outbreaks and for every three hours for hurricanes, and for every six hours for the regular weather like precipitation, the temperature forecasts. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media or the government agencies, they all are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. And I think NOAH is the only center in the world that provides all this information free of cost. So it is a public service organization and we pride in our service to the society. >> Well, I love your title, Chief Modeling and Data Assimulation title, branch over all these organizations. This is, weather's critical. I want to get your thoughts 'cause we were talking before you came on about how the hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forced everyone to kind of rethink things. Weather is an evolving system so it's always changing. Either there's a catastrophe or something happens, or you're trying to be proactive, predicting say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things goin' on. It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big jobs, there's a lot of data, you need horsepower, you need computing, you need to stand up some HPC. Take us through the thinking around the organization and what's the impact that you see, because weather does have that impact. >> So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned there are various weather phenomena that you described like the fiber of the hurricanes, the heavy precipitation, the flooding, so we download solutions for individual weather phenomena. And we have grown in that direction by downloading separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon, it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking had to be changed. And then there is another bigger problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community, like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated government act duty, that we cannot take advantage, and there are no incentives for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking, and as you mentioned, hurricane Katrina was an eye-opener. We have the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information was not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. >> How are you guys using AWS? Because HPC, high performance computing, I mean, you can't ask for more resources than the massive cloud that is Amazon. How has that helped you? Can you take a minute to explain, walk us through AWS partnership? >> There are a few examples I can cite, but before then, I would really like to appreciate Travis Hartman from Maxar who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now, we are expanding on that. So we were able to share our immunity cords with Maxar and with our help, they were able to establish this entire modeling system as it is done in operations at NOAH. They were able to reproduce our operational forecasts using the cloud resources and then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems as they can run even faster and quicker than what NOAH operations can do. So that gives you one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce globally, which will take about eight minutes per day, and Maxar was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement in the efficiency of the cords. And now, the one advantage of this is that the improvements that Maxar or other collaborators are using our cords, that they're putting into the system, are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that in improving the efficiency in operations. So this like a win-win situation for both of what part is fitting in the R&D and what using in operations. And on top of it, you can create multiple conflagrations of this model in various instances on the cloud where you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be catered to individual needs. And the one additional thing I wanted to mention about the user cloud is that this is like when you have a need, you can surge the compute, you can instantiate thousands of simulations to test a new innovation, for instance. You don't need to wait for the resources to be done in sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production of these equipments in no time, and without worrying about, of course, the cost is a factor that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there, the facilities are there to take advantage of the cloud solutions. >> Well Vijay, I'm very impressed with your organization. I'd love to do a followup with you. I love the impact that you're doing. Certainly, the weather impacts society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's planning for potentially a fire season or a water shortage, or anything goin' on, there. But also it's a template. You are succeeding a new kind of way to innovate with community, with large scale, multi-scale data points, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here, part of AWS Partner Awards Program, best HPC solution. Great example, great use case, great conversation. Thanks for watching. Two great interviews here, as part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm John Furrier. The best-in-show for HPC solutions, Travis Hartman, Maxar Technologies, and Vijay Tallapragada at NOAH, two great guests. Thanks for watching. (soft electronic music)

>>from around the globe. It's >>the Cube with digital coverage of >>AWS Public Sector Partner Awards >>brought to you by >>Amazon Web services. Everyone, welcome to this cube coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube with two great guests here. Travis Department director of analytics and Weather at Max. Our technologies and VJ teleplay Gotta Who's the chief? Modeling and data a simulation branch at Noah. Tell us about the success of this. What's the big deal? Take us through the award and why Max are what you guys do. >>Yeah, so Macs are is an organization. Does a lot of different activities unearth intelligence as well as space? We have about 4000 employees around the world. One side of the economy works on space infrastructure, actually building satellites on all the infrastructure that's going to help us get us back to the moon and things like that. And then on the other side we have a north of intelligence group, which is where, I said, and we leverage remote sensing information for science information to help people better understand how, how and what they do might impact the Earth or have the earth, and it's activities might impact their business mission. Our operation. So what we wanted to set out to do was help people better understand how weather could impact their mission, business or operations. And a big element of that was doing it with speed. Ah, so we we knew? No. I had capabilities running America weather prediction models and very traditional on Prem. Big, beefy ah, high performance compute supercomputers. But we wanted to do it in The cloud we want to do is AWS is a key part. So we collaborated with B. J and Noah and his team is there to help pull that off. They gave this access public domain information, but they showed us the right places to look. We've had some of the research scientists talking, and after pretty short effort, it didn't take a lot of time. We were able to pull something off that a lot of people didn't think was possible. I'm we got pretty excited. Once we saw some of the outcome >>Travis to be, Jay was just mentioning the relationship. Can you talk about the relationship together because this is not your classic Amazon partner client relationship that you have. You guys have been partnering together V. J and your team with AWS. Talk about the relationship and that and how Amazon plays because it's a unique partnership plane in more detail at specific relationship. >>Yeah, with Max or in AWS. You know, our partnership has gone back A number of years on Macs are being a fairly large organization. There's lots of different activities. I think Max Star was the first client of AWS Snowmobile, where they have the big tractor trailer back up to a data center, load all the data in and then take it to an AWS data center. We were the first users of that because we had over 100 petabytes of satellite imagery and archive that just moving across the Internet would probably still be going. Um, so the snowmobile is a good success story for us, but just with >>the >>amount of data that we have, the amount of data we collect every day and all the analytics that we're running on it, whether it's in an HPC environment or, you know, the scalable Ai ml were able to scale out that architecture scale out that compute the much easier, dynamic and really cost effective way with AWS, because when we don't need to use the machines, we turn them off. We don't have a big data center sitting somewhere. We have to have security, have all the overhead costs of just keeping the lights on. Literally. AWS allows us to run our organization and a much more efficient way. Um and Noah, you know, they're They're seeing some of that same success story that we're seeing as far as how they can use the cloud for accelerating research, accelerating how the advancement of numerical weather prediction from the United States can benefit from cloud from cloud architecture, cloud computer, things like that. And I think a lot of the stuff that we've done here, Max our with our HPC HPC solution in the cloud. It's something that's pretty interesting to know, and it's it's a good opportunity for us to continue our collaboration. >>If I could drill down on that solution architecture for a minute. How did you guys set up the services, and what lessons did you learn from that process? >>We're still learning. It was probably the the short answer, but it all started with our people. Uh, you know, we have some really strong engineers, really strong data scientists that fundamentally have a background in meteorology or atmospheric science, you know? So they understand the physics. So you know why the wind blows is the way it doesn't. Why Cloud's doing clouds to do, Um, but we also having a key strategic partnership with AWS. We really have to tap into some of their subject matter experts. And we really put those people together, you know, and come up with new solutions, new innovative ideas, stuff that people hadn't tried before. We're able to steer a little bit of AWS is product roadmap for is what we were trying to do and how their current technology might not have been able to support it. But by interacting with us gave them some ideas as far as what the tech had to move towards. And then that's that's what allowed us to move pretty quick fashion. Um, you know, it's it's neat stuff technology, but it really comes down to the people. Um, and I feel very honored and privileged to work with both great people here. Attacks are as well as aws, um, as well as being able to collaborate with your great teams. That power, it's been a lot of fun. Well, >>Travis gonna create example? I think it's a template that could be applied to many other areas, certainly even beyond. You've got large scale, multi scale situation there. Congratulations. Final question. What does it mean to be an award winner for AWS Partner Awards as part of the show? You're the best in show for HPC. What's it like? What's the feeling? Give us a quick side from the field? >>Yeah. I mean, I don't know if there's really a lot of good words that kind of sum it up. It's Ah, I shared the news with the team last night, and you know, there are a lot of a lot of good responses that came from a lot of people think it's cool. And at the end of the day, a lot of people on our team, you know, took a hobby or a passion of weather and turned it into a career. Ah, and being acknowledged and recognized by groups like AWS for best solution in a particular thing. Um, I think we take a lot of that to heart. And, ah, we're very honored and proud of what we were able to do and proud that other people recognize the need stuff that we're doing well, >>Certainly taking advantage. The cloud, which is large scale. But you you're on a great wave. You've got a great area. I mean, whether you talk about whether it's exciting, it's dynamic. It's always changing. It's big data. It's large scale. So you get a lot of problems to solve in a lot of impact to get it right. So congratulations on ECs. >>Thank you very much. Great mission. Thank you. >>Love what you do love to follow up again. Maybe do another interview and talk about the impact of weather and all the HPC kind of down the road. But, Travis, thank you very much. >>Thank you. Appreciate it. >>Good to see you. >>Thank you. Good to be here. >>So Noah, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Center, National Center for Environmental Predictions, Environmental Modeling Center year. That's your organization? You guys are competing to be best in the world. Tell us what you guys do at a high level. Then we'll jump into some of the successes. >>So the national Weather Service is responsible for providing weather forecast to save lives and property and improve the economy of the nation. And that's part of that. That the national weather services responsible for providing data and also the forecasts to the public and the industry and be responsible for providing the guidance on how they create the forecasts. So we are at the Environmental Modeling Center, uh, the nation's finest institute in advancing our numerical weather prediction modelling development, and you play it off all the data that's available from the world to initialize our models and provide the future state of the atmosphere from hours all the way to seasons and years. That's that's the kind of a range of products that we don't lock and provide are our key for managing the emergency services and patch it management and mitigation and also improving the nation's economy by preparing well in advance for the future events. And it's it's a science based organization, and we have ah well class scientists working in this organization. I manage about 170 of them at the moment of modeling center. They're all PhDs from various disciplines, mostly from meteorology, atmospheric sciences, oceanography, land surface modelling space weather, all weather related areas and the mathematics and computer science. And we are at the stage where we are probably the most. Uh huh. Most developed, uh, advanced modelling center that we use almost all possible computational resources available in the world. So this is a really computational in terms of user data, user computer seems off. Uh, all the power that we can get and we have a 3.5 petaflop machine that we use to provide these weather forecasts, and they provide the services every hour. For some sense is like the CDO rather our rates for every three hours for hurricanes and for every six hours for the regular, Rather like the participation, uh, the temperature forecast. So all the data that you see coming out from either the public media, our department agencies, they are originated in our center and disseminated in various forms. I think no one is the only center in the world that provides all this information for your past. So it is, ah, public service organization and we riding on a visa with society. >>We'll I love your title, Chief modeling and data, a simulation title branch of a lot of these organizations. This >>is >>whether it's ever critical. I want to get your thoughts cause we were talking before we came on about how the Hurricane Katrina was something that really kind of forcing you to rethink things. Whether it is an evolving system, it's always changing. Either the catastrophe or something happens. Were you trying to proactive predicting, say, whether it's a fire season in California, all kinds of things going on that's not It's always hard to get a certain prediction. You have big job. It's a lot of data you need. Horsepower need computing. You need to stand up. Some HPC take us through like like the thinking around the organization. And what was The impact is that you see, because whether does have that impact. >>So traditionally, you know, as you mentioned, there are radius weather phenomenon that you describe like the five rather the Americans, every presentation, the flooding. So we developed solutions for individual weather phenomena, and, uh, we have grown in that direction by developing separate solutions for separate problems. And very soon it became obvious that we cannot manage all these independent modeling systems to provide the best possible forecasts. So the thinking has to be changed. And then there is Another big problem is that there's a lot of research going out in the community like the academic institutes, the universities, other government labs. There are several people working in these areas, and all their work is not necessarily a coordinated, uh, development activity that we cannot take advantage. And they have no incentive for people to come and contribute towards the mission that we are engaged in. So that actually prompted to change the direction of thinking. And as you mentioned, Hurricane Katrina was an eye opener. We had the best forecasts, but the dissemination of that information waas not probably accurate enough, and also there is a lot of room for improvement in predicting these catastrophic events. How are >>you guys using AWS? Because HPC high performance computing I mean you can't ask for more resources in the massive cloud that is Amazon. How is that help to you? Can you take a minute to explain, but walk us through? >>What? >>Aws? There >>are a few example. Second site. But before then, I would like to really appreciate a Travis Hartman from Max. Are you know who is probably the only private sector partner that we had in the beginning. And now we're expanding on. That s so we were able to share our community. Cores with Max are and without how they were able to establish this and drive modeling system as it is done in operations that Noah and they were able to reproduce operational forecast using the cloud resources. And then they went ahead and did even more by scaling the modeling systems is that it can run even faster and quicker them are what insert no operations can do. So that gives us one example of how the cloud can be used. You know, the same forecast that we produce, ah, globally, which will take about eight minutes per day. And, uh, Max I was able to do it much faster, like 50% improvement and in the efficiency of the colors. And now the one piece of this is that the improvements that matter are other collaborators are using, or cords that they're putting into the system are coming back to us. So we take advantage of that, improving the efficiency in operations. So this is that this is like a win win situation for both, uh, who are participating in the R and D on who are using it in operations, and on top of it, you can create multiple configurations of this model in various instances on the cloud when you can run it more efficiently and you can create an ensemble of solutions that can be captured toe individual needs. And the one additional thing I want to mention about User Cloud is, is that you know, this is like when you have a need, you can search the compute you can. Instead she 8000 sub simulations to test a new innovation. For instance, you don't need to wait for the resources to be done in a sequential manner. Instead, you can ramp up the production off these apartments in no kind and without Don't worry about. Of course, the cost is the fact that we need to worry about, but otherwise the capacity is there. The facilities are reacting to take advantage of the cloud solutions. If I'm a >>computer scientist person, I'm working on a project. Now I have all this goodness in the cloud, how's morale been and what's the reaction been like from from people doing the work. Because usually the bottleneck has been like I gotta provision resource. I gotta send a procurement request for some servers or I want to really push some load. And right now, I got a critical juncture. I mean, it's got a push morale up a bit, and you talk about the impact to the psychology of the people in your organization. >>Um, I haven't. I have two answers to this question. One from a scientist perspective like me. You know, I was not a computer scientist from the beginning, but I became a software engineer, kind of because I have to work with these software and hardware stuff more more on solving the computational problems than the critical problems. So people like us who have invested their careers in improving the science, they were not care whether it's ah, uh hbc on premise Cloud, what will be delighted to have, uh, resources available alleviate that they can drive. But on the other hand, the computer computational engineers are software engineers who are entering into this field. I think they are probably the most excited because of these emerging opportunities. And so there is a kind of a friction between the scientific and the computational aspects off personnel, I would say. But that difference is slowly raising on and we are working together as never before. So the collective moral is very high to take advantage of these resources and opportunities. I think way of making the we're going in the right direction. >>It's so much faster. I mean, in the old days, you write a paper, you got to get some traction. Gonna do a pilot now It's like you run an experiment, get it out there. VJ I'm very impressed with the organization. Love to do a follow up with you. I love the impact that you're doing certainly in the weather impact society from forecasting disasters and giving people the ability to look at supply chain, whether it's providing for potentially a fire season or water shortage or anything going on there. But also it's a template. You're exceeding a new kind of waiting to innovate with community with large scale, multi scale data points. So congratulations and >>thank you. >>Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier here part of AWS partner Awards program. Best HPC solution. Great. Great Example. Great use case. Great conversation. Thanks for watching two great interviews. Here is part of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrier. The best in show for HPC Solutions. China's Hartman Max, our technologies and Vijay tell Apartado at Noah. Two great guests. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering Answerable Fest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >>Hey, welcome back, everyone. It's the cubes. Live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia, for answerable fast. Part of redheads. Big news. Ansel Automation Platform was announced. Among other things, they're great products. I'm John for ear, with my coast to minimum, but two great guests. You unpack all the automation platform features and benefits. Walter Bentley, senior manager. Automation Practicing red hat and vj Job Olu, director of Red Hat Consulting Guys Thanks for coming on. Thanks. So the activity is high. The buzz this year seems to be at an inflection point as this category really aperture grows big time seeing automation, touching a lot of things. Standardization. We heard glue layer standard substrate. This is what answer is becoming so lots of service opportunity, lot of happy customers, a lot of customers taking it to the next level. And a lot of customers trying to consolidate figure out hadn't make answerable kind of a standard of other couples coming in. You guys on the front lines doing this. What's the buzz? What's the main store? What's the top story going on around the service is how to deploy this. What are you guys seeing? >>So I think what we're seeing now is customers. Reactor building automation. For a long time, I have been looking at it at a very tactical level, which is very department very focused on silo. Whether country realizes with this modern develops and the change in how they actually go to the market, they need to bring the different teams together. So they're actually looking at watching my enterprise automation strategy be how to actually take what I've learned in one organization. And I still roll it across the enterprise so that now struggling and figuring out how to be scared, what we have, how do we change the culture of the organization to collaborate a lot more and actually drive automation across enterprise? >>Walter One of the things we've been we've talked about all the time in the Cube, and it's become kind of cliche. Digital transformation. Okay, I heard that before, and three things people process, technology, process and capability you guys have done You mentioned the siloed having capabilities that's been there. Check was done very, very well as a product technology Red hat in the portfolio. Great synergies. We talked about rail integration, all the benefits there. But the interesting thing this year that I've noticed is the people side of the equation is interesting. The people are engaged, is changing their role because automation inherently changes there, function in the organization because it takes away probably the mundane tasks. This is a big part of the equation. You guys air hitting that mark. How do you How are you guys seeing that? How you accelerating that has that changing your job, >>right? So customers are now economy realizing that going after automation in a very tactical manner is not exactly getting them what they want as a far as a return on investment in the automation. And what they're realizing is that they need to do more. And they're coming to us and more of an enterprise architectural level and say we want to talk mortgage grander strategy. And what they're coming to realize is that having just one small team of people that were calling the Dev Ops team is not gonna be ableto drive that adoption across the organization. So what we're trying to do is work with customers to show them how they collaboration in the culture of peace is huge. It's a huge part of adopting automation. Answerable is no longer considered a emerging tech anymore. And and I when I say that, I mean a lot of organizations are using answerable in many different ways. They're past that point, and now they're moving on to the next part, which is what is our holistic strategy and how we're gonna approach automation. And And we wanted leverage danceable, unanswerable tower to do that. >>Does that change how you guys do your roll out your practices in some of your programs? >>Well, we did have to make some adjustments in the sense of recognizing that the cultural piece is a pivotal part of it, and we can go in and we can write playbooks and rolls, and we can do all those things really great. But now we need to go in and help them structure themselves in a way where they can foster that collaboration and keep a moment. >>And I'll actually add on to that so reactive, large, open innovation labs three years ago, and what we have to learn doing that is using labs and allows practices to actually help customers embrace new culture and change. How they actually operate has actually helped us take those practices and bring it into our programs and kind of drive that to our customers. So we actually run our automation adoption program and the journey for customers through those practices that we actually learned in open innovation loves like open practice, library, even storming priority sliders and all of those modern techniques. So the goal is to help our customers understand those practices and actually embrace them and bring them into the organization to drive the change that that's looking for within the organization. >>A. J. Is there anything particular for those adoption practices when you're talking about Cloud? Because the communication amongst teams silos, you know, making things simpler is something that we absolutely do need for cloud. So I'm just curious how you connect kind of the cloud journey with the automation journey. >>So all of the journey program that actually created, whether it's a contender adoption program or the automation adoption program, we actually followed the same practices. So whether you're actually focused on a specific automation to, like, answerable or actually embarking on hybrid multicolored journey. We actually use the same practices so the customers don't have toe learn new things every time you have to go from one product, one of the so that actually brings a consistent experience to customers in driving change within the organization. So let's picture whether it is focusing automation focused on cloud migrating to the cloud. The practices remained the same, and the focus is about not trying to boil the ocean on day one. Try to break it into manageable chunks that give it a gun back to the business quickly learned from the mistakes that you make in each of the way and actually build upon it and actually be successful. >>So, Walter, I always love when we get to talk to the people that are working straight with customers because you come here to the conference, it's like, Oh, it's really easy Get started. It doesn't matter what role or what team you're in. Everybody could be part of it. But when you get to the actual customers, they're stumbling blocks. You know what are some of those things? What are some of the key things that stop people from taking advantage of all the wonderful things that all the users here are doing >>well. One of the things that I've identified and we've identified as a team is a lot of organizations always want to blow the ocean. And when and when it comes down to automation, they feel that if they are not doing this grand transformation and doing this this huge project, then they're not doing automation. And the reality is is that we're Trent with showing them that you can break things up into smaller chunks, as Visi alluded to. And even if you fail, you fail fast and you can start over again because you're dealing with things in a smaller chunk. And we've also noticed that by doing that, we're able to show them to return on investment faster so they can show their leadership, and their leadership can stand behind that and want to doom. Or so that's one of the areas. And then I kind of alluded to the other area, which is you have to have everybody involved. You want just subject matter experts riding content to do the automation. You don't want that just being one silo team. You want to have everybody involved and collaborate as much as possible. >>Maybe can you give us an example? Is about the r A y How fast to people get the results and, you know, prove toe scale this out. >>So with the automation adoption journey, what we're able to do is is that we come in and sit down with our customers and walk them through how to properly document their use cases. What the dependencies, What integration points, possibly even determining what is that? All right, ranking for that use case. And then we move them very quickly in the next increment. And in the next increment, we actually step them through, taking those use cases, breaking them down into minimum viable products and then actually putting those in place. So within a 90 day or maybe a little bit more than a little bit more than the 90 day window, were able to show the customer in many different parts of the organization how they're able to take advantage of automation and how the return on investment with hopes of obviously reducing either man hours or being able to handle something that is no a mundane task that you had to do manually over and over again. >>What are some of the things that people get confused about when they look at the breath of what's going on with the automation platform? When I see tool to platform, transitions are natural. We've seen that many times in the industry that you guys have had product success, got great community, that customers, they're active. And now you've got an ecosystem developing so kind of things air popping on all cylinders here. >>So the biggest challenge that we're actually being seeing customers is they actually now come to realize that it's very difficult to change the culture of the organization right there, actually embarking on this journey and the biggest confusion that is, how do we actually go make those changes? How do we bring some of the open practice some of the open source collaboration that Riddle had into the organization so they actually can operate in a more open source, collaborative way, and what we have actually learned is we actually have what we call its communities of practice within Red Hack. It is actually community off consultants, engineers and business owners. The actual collaborate and work together on offering the solutions to the market. So we're taking those experiences back to our customers and enabling them to create those communities of practice and automation community that everybody can be a part off. They can share experiences and actually learn from each other much easier than kind of being a fly on the wall or kind of throwing something or defense to see what sticks and what does not. >>What's interesting about the boiling the ocean comment you mentioned Walter and B J is your point. There is, is that the boil? The ocean is very aspirational. We need change rights. That's more of the thing outcome that they're looking for. But to get there is really about taking those first steps, and the folks on the front lines have you their applications. They're trying to solve or manage. Getting those winds is key. So one of things that I'm interested in is the analytics piece showing the victory so in the winds early is super important because that kind of shows the road map of what the outcome may look like versus the throw the kitchen, sink at it and, you know, boil the ocean of which we know to the failed strategy. Take us through those analytics. What are some of the things that people tend to knock down first? What are some of the analytical points that people look at for KP eyes? Can you share some insight into that? >>Sure, sure. So we always encourage our customers to go after the platform first. And I know that may sound the obvious, but the platform is something that is pretty straightforward. Every organization has it. Every organization struggles with provisioning, whether of a private cloud, public cloud, virtualization, you name it. So we have the customer kind of go after the platform first and look at some of their day to operations. And we're finding that that's where the heaviest return on investment really sits. And then once you get past that, we can start looking like in the end, work flows. You know, can they tie service now to tower, to be able to make a complete work flow of someone that's maybe requesting a BM, and they can actually go through that whole workflow by by leveraging tower and integration point like service. Now those air where we're finding that the operators of these systems going getting the fastest benefit. And it also, of course, benefits the business at the end of the day because they get what they need a lot fast. >>It's like a best practice and for you guys, you've seen that? Yes, sir. Docked with that out of E. J. What's your comment on all this? >>So going back to the question on metrics Automation is great, but it does not provide anybody to the business under the actually show. What was the impact, whether it's from a people standpoint, cost standpoint or anything else. So what we try to drive is enable customers. You can't build the baseline off where they are today, and as they're going through the incremental journey towards automation, measure the success of that automation against the baseline. And that actually adds the other way back to the customer. As a business you didn't get to see. I was creating a storage land. I was doing it probably 15 times a month. Take it or really even automated. It spend like a day created a playbook. I'll save myself probably half, of course, and that could be doing something that's better. So building those metrics and with the automation analytics that actually came in the platform trying those bass lines. So the number of executions, actually the huge value they'll actually be ableto realize the benefits of automation and measure the success off within enterprise. >>So I'm a customer prospect, like I want to get a win. I don't want to get fired. I won't get promoted. Right, I say, Okay, I gotta get a baseline and knock down some playbooks. Knock that down first. That what you're gonna getting it. That's a good starting. >>Starting. Understand your baseline today. Plan your backlog as to what you want to knock down. And once you know them down, build a dashboard as to what the benefits were, what the impact was actually built upon it. You actually will see an incremental growth in your success with automation. >>And then you go to the workflow and too, and that's your selling point for the next level. Absolutely good playbook. Is that the automation programs that in a nutshell or is that more of a best practice >>those components of the ah, the automation adoption journey that we allow the customer to kind of decide how they want their journey to be crafted. Of course, we have a very specific way of going about and walking them through it. But we allowed in the kind of crap that journey and that is those the two components that make up the automation. >>We're gonna put you guys on the spot with the tough question We heard from G. P. Morgan yesterday on the Kino, which I thought was very compelling. You know, days, hours, two minutes. All this is great stuff. It's real impact. Other customers validate that. So, congratulations. Can you guys share any anecdotal stories? You know, the name customers? Just about situations Where customs gone from this to this old way, new way and throw some numbers around Shearson Samantha >>is not a public reference, but I like to give you a customer. Exactly. Retail company. When we first actually went and ran a discovery session, it took them 72 days to approach in an instance. And the whole point was not because it took that long. It because every task haven't s l. A We're actually wait for the Acela manually. Go do that. We actually went in >>with our 72 hours, two days, two days, >>actually, going with the automation? We Actually, it was everybody was working on the S L. A. We actually brought it down to less than a day. So you just gave the developers looking to code 71 days back for him to start writing code. So that's the impact that we see automation bringing back to the customers, right? And you'll probably find the use causes across everywhere. Whether J. P. Morgan Chase you actually had the British Army and everyone here on states talking about it. It is powerful, but it is powerful relief you can measure and learn from it >>as the baseline point. Get some other examples because that's that's, uh, that's 70 days is that mostly delay its bureaucracy. It's It's so much time. >>It's manual past and many of the manual tasks that actually waiting for a person to do the task >>waterfall past things sound, although any examples you can >>yes, so the one example that always stands out to me and again, it's a pretty interviewing straight forward. Is Citrix patching? So we work with the organization. They were energy company, and they wanted to automate patching their searches environment, patching this citrus environment took six weekends and it took at least five or six engineers. And we're talking about in bringing an application owners, the folks who are handling the bare metal, all all that whole window. And by automating most of the patching process, we were able to bring it down to one weekend in one engineer who could do it from home and basically monitor the process instead of having to be interactive and active with it. And to me, that that was a huge win. Even though it's, you know, it's such dispatching. >>That's the marketing plan. Get your weekends back. Absolutely awesome. Shrimp on the barbecue, You know, Absolutely great job, guys. Thanks for the insight. Thanks. Come on. The key. Really appreciate it. Congratulations. Thank you. Thanks for sharing this queue here. Live coverage. Danceable fest. Where the big news is the ass. Full automation platform. Breaking it down here on the Q. I'm John. First to Minutemen. We're back with more coverage after this short break

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, CUBE nation, I'm Sam Kahane. Thanks for watching the CUBE. Due to popular demand from the community, I will be interviewing the legendary Stu Miniman, here today. He is S-T-U on Twitter. Stu and I are going to be digging in to the 2019 predictions, and also recapping 2018 for you here. So, Stu, let's get into it a little bit. 2018, can you set the stage? How many events did you go to? How many interviews did you conduct? >> Boy, Sam, it's tough to look back. We did so much with the CUBE this year. I, personally, did over 20 shows, and somewhere between 400 and 450 interviews, out of, we as a team did over a 100 shows, over 2000 interviews. So, really great to be in the community, and immerse ourselves, drink from the fire hose, and some of the data. (laughs) >> So, over 400 interviews this year, that's amazing. What about some of the key learnings from 2018? Yeah, Sam,my premise when I'm going out is, how are we maturing? My background, as you know, Sam, I'm an infrastructure guy. My early training was in networking. I worked on virtualization, and I've been riding this wave of cloud for about the last 10 years. So, about two years ago, it was, software companies, how are they living in these public clouds? Amazon, of course, the dominant player in the marketplace, but we know it will be a multi-cloud world. And the update, for 2018, is we've gone from, how do I live in those public clouds, to how are we maturing? We call it hybrid clouds, or multi-cloud, but living between these worlds. We saw the rise in Kubernetes, as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments, and how they get their arms around that, is a serious challenge out there, today. So, how are the suppliers and communities, and the systems integration, helping customers with this really challenging new environment, that we have today. >> I'd love to hear any OMG moments from you. What surprised you the most this year? >> It's interesting, when I wanna think about some of the big moves in the industry, I mean, we had the largest software acquisition in tech history. IBM, the company you used to work for, Sam, buying Red Hat, a company I've worked with, for about 20 years, for 34 billion dollars. I mean, Red Hat has been the poster child for open source, and the exemplar of that. It was something that was like, wow, this is a big deal. We've been talking for a long time, how important developers are, and how important open source is, and there's nothing like seeing Big Blue, a 107-year-old company, putting in huge dollars, to really, not just validate, cause IBM's been working in open source, working with Linux for a long time, but how important this is to the future. And that sits right at that core of that multi-cloud world. Red Hat wants to position itself to live in a lot of those environments, not just for Linux, but the Middleware, Kubernetes is a big play. We saw a number of acquisitions in the space there. Red Hat bought CoreOS for $250 million. VMware bought Heptio, and was kind of surprised, at the sticker shock, $550 million. Great team, we know the Heptio team well. We talked to them, some of the core people, back when they were at Google. But, some big dollars are being thrown around, in this space, and, as you said, the big one in the world is Amazon. One of the stories that everybody tracked all year was the whole hq2 thing. It kind of struck me as funny, as Amazon is in Seattle. I actually got to visit Seattle, for the first time, this year, and somebody told me, if you look at the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, of course, Amazon is number one, but you need to take number two through 43, and add them together, to make them as big as Amazon. Here in Boston, there's a new facility going up, with 5,000 employees. I know they're going to have 25,000 in Long Island City, right in the Queens, in New York City, as well as Crystal City, right outside of DC, 25,000. But, the realization is that, of course, Amazon's going to have data centers, in pretty much every country, and they're going to have employees all around the world. This doesn't just stay to the US, but Amazon, overall. So, Amazon, just a massive employer. I know so many people who have joined them. (laughs) Some that have left them. But, almost everything that I talk about, tends to come back to Amazon, and what there are doing, or how people are trying to compete, or live in that ecosystem. >> You're always talking to the community. What are some of the hottest topics you're hearing out there? >> So, living in this new world, how are we dealing with developers? A story that I really liked, my networking background, the Cisco DevNet team, led by Suzie Wee, is a really phenomenal example, and one of my favorite interviews of the year. I actually got to talk to Suzie twice this year. We've known her for many years. She got promoted to be a Senior Vice President, which is a great validation, but what she built is a community from the ground up. It took about four years to build this platform, and it's not about, "Oh, we have some products, and developers love it.", but it's the marketplace that they live in, really do have builders there. It's the most exciting piece of what's happening at Cisco. My first show for 2019 will be back at Cisco, live in Barcelona, and Cisco going through this massive transformation, to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That actually, it blew my mind, Sam. You know, Cisco is the networking company. When they say, "When you think of us, "five to ten years from now, "you won't think of us as a networking company. "You'll think of us as a software company." That's massive. They were one of the four horsemen of the internet era. And, if Cisco is making that change, everything changes. IBM, people said if they don't make this move for Red Hat, is there danger in the future? So, everything is changing so fast, it is one of the things that everybody tries to sort out and deal with. I've got some thoughts on that, which I'm sure we'll get to later on. >> (laughs) As is Suzie Wee one of your top interviews of 2018, could you give your top three interviews? >> First of all, my favorite, Sam, is always when I get to talk to the practitioners. A few of the practitioners I love talking to, at the Nutanix show in New Orleans this year, I talked to Vijay Luthra, with Northern Trust. My co-host of the show was Keith Townsend. Keith, Chicago guy, said, "Northern Trust is one "of the most conservative financial companies", and they are all-in on containerization, modernized their application. It is great to see a financial company that is driving that kind of change. That's kind of a theme I think you'll see, Sam. Another, one, was actually funny enough, Another Nutanix show, at London, had the Manchester City Council. So, the government, what they're doing, how they're driving change, what they're doing with their digital transformation, how they're thinking of IOT. Some of my favorite interviews I've done the last few years, have been in the government, because you don't think of government as innovating, but, they're usually resource-constrained. They have a lot of constituencies, and therefore, they need to do this. The Amazon public sector show was super-impressive. Everything from, I interviewed a person from the White House Historical Society. They brought on Jackie O's original guidebook, of being able to tour the White House. So, some really cool human interest, but it's all a digital platform on Amazon. What Amazon is doing in all of the industry-specific areas, is really impressive. Some of these smaller shows that we've done, are super-impressive. Another small show, that really impressed me, is UiPath, robotic process automation, or RPA, been called the gateway drug to AI, really phenomenal. I've got some background in operations, and one of the users on the program was talking about how you could get that process to somewhere around 97 to 98% compliance, and standardize, but when they put in RPA, they get it to a full six sigma, which is like 99.999%, and usually, that's something that just humans can't do. They can't just take the variation out of a process, with people involved. And, this has been the promise of automation, and it's a theme. One of my favorite questions, this year, has been, we've been talking about things like automation, and intelligence in systems, for decades, but, now, with the advent of AI machine learning, we can argue whether these things are actually artificial intelligence, in what they are learning, but the programming and learning models, that can be set up and trained, and what they can do on their own, are super-impressive, and really poised to take the industry to the next level. >> So, I wanna fast forward to 2019, but before we do so, anything else that people need to know about 2018? >> 2018, Sam, it's this hybrid multi-cloud world. The relationship that I think we spend the most time talking about, is we talked a lot about Amazon, but, VMware. VMware now has over 600,000 customers, and that partnership with VMware is really interesting. The warning, of course, is that Amazon is learning a lot from Vmware, When we joke with my friends, we say, "Okay, you've learned a lot from them means that "maybe I don't need them in the long term." But in the short term, great move for VMware, where they've solidified their position with customers. Customers feel happy as to where they live, in that multi-cloud environment, and I guess we throw out these terms like hybrid, and multi, and things like that, but when I talk to users, they're just figuring out their digital transformation. They're worried about their business. Yes, they're doing cloud, so sassify what you can, put in the public cloud what makes sense, and modernize. Beware of lift and shift, it's really not the answer. It could be a piece of the overall puzzle, to be able to modernize and pull things apart. An area, I always try to keep ahead of what the next bleeding-edge thing is, Sam. A thing I've been looking at, deeply, the last two years, has been serverless. Serverless is phenomenal. It could just disrupt everything we're talking about, and, Amazon, of course, has the lead there. So, it was kind of an undercurrent discussion at the KubeCon Show, that we were just at. Final thing, things are changing all the time, Sam, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. I get the chance to talk to some of the most brilliant people, at some of the most amazing companies, and even those, you know, the PhD's, the people inventing stuff, they're like, "I can't keep up with what's going on at my company, "let alone what's going on in the industry." So, that's the wrong thing. Of course, one of the things we helped to do, is to extract the signal from the noise, help people distill that. We put it into video, we put it into articles, we put it into podcasts, to help you understand some of the basics, and where you might wanna go to learn more. So, we're all swimming in this. You know, the only constant, Sam, in the industry is change. >> Absolutely. (laughing in unison) >> So, things are changing. The whole landscape, as you said, is changing. Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions from you? Any big mergers and acquisitions you might see? >> It's amazing, Sam. The analogy I always use is, when you have the hundred year flood, you always say, "Oh gosh, we got through it, "and we should be okay." No, no, no, the concern is, if you have the hundred year flood, or the big earthquake, the chances are that you're going to have maybe something of the same magnitude, might even be more or less, but rather soon. A couple of years ago, Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. We spent a lot of time analyzing it. By the way, Dell's gonna go public, December 28. Interesting move, billions of dollars. As Larry Ellison said, "Michael Dell, "he's no dummy when it comes to money.' He is going to make, personally, billions of dollars off of this transaction, and, overall, looks good for the Dell technologies family, as they're doing. So, that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, yeah, we're probably gonna see a 10-to-20 billion dollar acquisition this year. I'm not sure who it is. There's a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon. The data protection space is one that we've kept a close eye on. From what I hear, Zeam, who does over a billion dollars a year, not looking to go public. Rubrik, on the other hand, somewhere in the north of 200 million dollars worth of revenue, I kind of remember 200, 250 in run rate, right now, likely going to go public in 2019. Could somebody sweep in, and buy them before they go public? Absolutely. Now, I don't think Rubrik's looking to be acquired. In that space, you've got Rubrik, you've got Cohesity, you've got a whole lot of players, that it has been a little bit frothy, I guess you'd say. But, customers are looking for a change in how they're doing things, because their environments are changing. They've got lots of stuff in sass, gotta protect that data. They've got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core. When we actually did our predictions for 2018, data was at the center of everything, when I talked about Wikibon. It was just talking to Peter Burris and David Floyer, and they said there is some hesitancy in the enterprise, like, I'm using Salesforce, I'm using Workday I'm using ServiceNow. We hear all the things about Facebook giving my data away, Google, maybe the wrong people own data, there's that concern I want to pull things back. I always bristle a little bit, when you talk about things like repatriation, and "I'm not gonna trust the cloud." Look, the public clouds are more secure, than my data centers are in general, and they're changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest things we have, in IT, is that I put something in, and making changes is tough. Change, as we said, is the only thing constant. It was something I wrote about. Red Hat, actually, is a company that has dealt with a lot of change. Anybody that sells anything with Linux, or Kubernetes, there are so many changes happening, on not only weekly, but a daily basis, that they help bring a little bit of order, and adult supervision, to what most people would say is chaos out there. That's the kind of thing we need more in the industry, is I need to be able to manage that change. A line I've used many times is, you don't go into a company and say, "Hey, what version of Azure are you running?" You're running whatever Microsoft says is the latest and greatest. You don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday, or 08. I've got that things that's gonna slow down my system for awhile. Microsoft needs to make that invisible to me. They do make that thing invisible to me. So does Amazon, so does Google. >> What's your number one company to watch, this upcoming year. Is it Amazon, Sam? Look, Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. While Amazon adds more in revenue, than the number two infrastructure player does in revenue. So, look, in the cloud space, it is not only Amazon's world. There definitely is a multi-cloud world. I went to the Microsoft show for the first time, this year, and Microsoft's super-impressive. They focus on your business applications, and their customers love it. Office 365 really helped move everybody towards sass, in a big way, and it's a big service industry. Microsoft's been a phenomenal turnaround story, the last couple of years. Definitely want to dig in more with that ecosystem, in 2019 and beyond. But, Amazon, you know, we could do more shows of the CUBE, in 2019, than we did our first couple of years. They have, of course, Amazon re:Invent, our biggest show of the year, but their second year, it's about 20 shows, that they do, and we're increasing those. I've been to the New York City Summit, and the San Francisco Summit. I've already mentioned their Public Sector Summit. Really, really, really good ecosystems, phenomenal users, and I already told you how I feel about talking to users. It's great to hear what they're doing, and those customers are moving things around. Google, love doing the Google show. We'll be back there in April. Diane Greene is one of the big guests of the year, for us this year. I was sorry to miss it in person, 'cause I actually have some background. I worked with Diane. Back before EMC bought VMware. I had the pleasure of working with Vmware, when they were, like, a hundred person company. Sam, one of the things, I look back at my career, and I'm still a little bit agog. I mean, I was in my mid-20s, working in this little company, of about 100 people, signed an NDA, started working with them, and that's VMware, with 600,000 customers. I've watched their ascendancy. It's been one of the pleasures of my career. There's small ones, heck. Nutanix I've mentioned a couple of times. I started working them when they were real small. They have over a billion in revenue. New Cure, since the early days. Some companies have done really well. The cloud is really the center of gravity of what I watch. Edge computing we got into a bit. I'm surprised we got almost 20 minutes into this conversation, without mentioning it. That, the whole IOT space, and edge computing, really interesting. We did a fun show with PTC, here in Boston. Got to talk to the father of AI, the father of virtual reality. It's like all these technologies, many of which have been bouncing around for a couple of decades. How are they gonna become real? We've got a fun virtual reality place right next door. The guy running the cameras for us is a huge VR enthusiast. How much will those take the next step? And, how much are things stalling out? I worry, was having conversations. Autonomous vehicles, we're even looking at the space. Been talking about it. Will it really start to accelerate? Or have we hit road blocks, and it's gonna get delayed. Some of these are technologies, some of these are policies in place, in governments and the like, and that's still one of the things that slows down crowded options. You know, GDPR was the big discussion, leading into the beginning of 2018. Now, we barely talk about it. There's more regulations coming, in California and the like, but we do need to worry about some of those macro-economical and political things that sometimes get in the way, of some of the technology pieces. >> I'd love to put something out into the universe, here. If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be? Let's see if we can make it happen. It's amazing to me, Sam, some of the interviews we've done. I got a one-on-one with Michael Dell this year. It was phenomenal, Michael was one. It took us about three or four years before we got Michael on the program, the first time. Now, we have him two or three times a year. Really, to get to talk to him. There is the founder culture John Furrier always talks about. Some of these founders are very different. Michael, amazing, got to speak to him a couple of times. There's something that makes him special, and there's a reason why he's a billionaire, and he's done very well for himself. So, that was one. Furrier also interviewed John Chambers, who is one of the big gets I was looking at. I was jealous that I wasn't able to get there. I got to interview one of my favorite authors this year, Walter Isaacson, at the shows. When I look at, Elon Musk, of course, as a technologist, is, I'm amazed. I read his bio, I've heard some phenomenal interviews with him. Kara Swisher did a phenomenal sit-down on her podcast with him. Even the 60 Minutes interview was decent this year. >> The Joe Rogan one was great >> Yeah, so, you'd want to be able to sit down. I wouldn't expect Elon to be a 15-minute, rapid-fire conversation, like we usually have. But, we do some longer forms, sit down. So he would be one. Andrew Jassy, we've interviewed a number of times now. Phenomenal. We've got to get Bezos on the program. Some of the big tech players out there. Look, Larry Ellison's another one that we haven't had on the program. We've had Mark Hurd on the program, We've had lots of the Oracle executives. Oracle's one that you don't count out. They still have so many customers, and have strong power in new issues, So there are some big names. I do love some of the authors, that we've had on the program, some thought leaders in the space. Every time we go to a show, it's like, I was a little disappointed I didn't get to interview Jane Goodall, when she was at a show. Things like that. So, we ask, and never know when you can get 'em. A lot of times, it's individual stories of the users, which are phenomenal, and there's just thousands of good stories. That's why we go to some small shows, and make sure we always have some editorial coverage. So that, if their customers are comfortable sharing their story, that's the foundation our research was founded on. Peers sharing with their peers. Some of the most powerful stories of change, and taking advantage of new technologies, and really transforming, not just business, but health care and finance, and government. There's so much opportunity for innovation, and drivers in the marketplace today. >> Stu, I love it. Thanks for wrapping up 2018 for us, and giving us the predictions. CUBE nation, you heard it here. We gotta get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison on the CUBE this year. We could use your help. Stu, thank you, and CUBE nation, thank you for watching. (electronic techno music)

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering micron insight 2018 brought to you by micron welcome back to the San Francisco Bay everybody we saw the Sun rise in the bay this morning of an hour so we're gonna see the Sun set this gorgeous setting here at Pier 27 Nob Hills up there the Golden Gate Bridge over there and of course we have this gorgeous view of the bay you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we're covering micron insight 2018 ai accelerating intelligence a lot of talk on on on memory and storage but a lot more talk around the future of AI so we got a great discussion here on the auto business and how AI is powering that business Jeff Bader is here is the corporate vice president and general manager of the embedded business unit at micron good to see you again Jeff thanks for coming on and Simon and rigor is the vice president BMW and he's also joined by Vijay Nadkarni who was the global head of AI and augmented reality at Visteon which is a supplier to Automobile Manufacturers gentlemen welcome to the cube thanks so much for coming on thank you so you guys had a panel earlier today which was pretty extensive and just a lot of talk about AI how AI will be a platform for interacting with the vehicle the consumer the driver interacting with the vehicle also talked a lot about autonomous vehicles but Simon watch you kick it off your role at BMW let's let's just start there it will do the same for Vijay and then get into it research portion that we do globally in which is represented here in North America and so obviously we're working on autonomous vehicles as well as integrating assistance into the car and basically what we're trying to do is to get use AI as much as possible in all of the behavioral parts of the vehicle that uses have an expectations towards being more personalized and having a personalized experience whereas we have a solid portion of the vehicle is going to be as a deterministic anesthetic as we have it before like all of the safety aspects for example and that is what we're working on here right now Vijay Visteon is a supplier to BMW and other auto manufacturers yes we are a tier 1 supplier so we basically don't make cars but we supply auto manufacturers of which BMW is one and my role is essentially AI technology adversity on and also augmented reality so in AI there are basically two segments that we cater to and one of them is that almost driving which is fully our biggest segment and the second one is infotainment and in that the whole idea is to give the driver a better experience in the car by way of recommendations or productivity improvements and such so that is so my team basically develops the technology and then we centrally integrate that into our products so so not necessarily self-driving it's really more about the experience inside the vehicle that is the and then on the autonomous driving side we of course very much are involved with the autonomous driving technology which is tested with detecting objects are also making the proper maneuvers for the Waker and we're definitely going to talk about that now Jeff you sell to the embedded industry of fooding automobile manufacturers we hear that cars have I forget the number of microprocessors but there's also a lot of memory and storage associate yeah I mean if you follow the chain you have our simon representing the OEMs Vijay represented the Tier one suppliers were supplier to those Tier one suppliers in essence right so so we're providing memory and storage that then goes in to the car in as you said across all of the different sort of control and engine drone and computing units within the car in particular into that infotainment application and increasingly into the a TAS or advanced driver assistance systems that are leading toward autonomous driving so there's a lot of AI or some AI anyway in vehicles today right presumably yeah affected David who did a wonderful job on the panel he was outstanding but he kind of got caught up in having multiple systems like a like an apple carplay your own system I actually have a bit about kind of a BMW have a mini because I'm afraid it's gonna be self-driving cars and I just want to drive a drive on car for this take it away from me though but but you push a button if you want to talk to a Syrian yeah push another button if you want to talk to the mini I mean it's it's gonna use it for different use cases right exactly may I is also about adaption and is also about integrating so AI is is is coming with you with the devices that you have with you anyway right so your might be an Alexa user rather than a Google assistant user and you would have that expectation to be able to ask to chat with your Alexa in your car as well that's why we have them in the vehicle also we have an own voice assistant that we recently launched in Paris Motorshow which augments the experience that you have with your own assistants because it factors in all of the things you can do with the car so you can say there is a solid portion of AI already in the vehicle it's mainly visible in the infotainment section right and of course I remember the first time I'm sure you guys experienced to that the the car braked on my behalf and then kind of freaked me out but then I kind of liked it too and that's another form of machine intelligence well that out well that counts for you that had not that has not necessarily been done by AI because in in in let's say self-driving there is a portion of pretty deterministic rule based behavior and exactly that one like hitting an object at parking you don't need AI to determine to hit the right there is no portion or of AI necessary in order to improve that behavior whereas predicting the best driving strategy for your 20-mile ride on the highway this is where AI is really beneficial in fact I was at a conference last week in Orlando it's the Splunk show and it was a speaker from BMW talking about what you're doing in that regard yeah it's all about the data right learning about it and and in turning data into insights into better behavior yes into better expected behavior from whatever the customer wants so Vijay you were saying before that you actually provide technology for autonomous vehicles all right I got a question for you could it autonomous - could today's state of autonomous vehicles pass a driver's test no no would you let it take one no it depends I mean there are certain companies like way mo for example that do a lot but I still don't think way mo can take a proper driver's test as of today but it is of course trying to get there but what we are essentially doing is taking baby steps first and I think you may be aware of the SAE levels so level 1 level 2 level 3 level 4 SF and a 5 so we and most of the companies in the industry right now are really focusing more on the level 2 through level 4 and a few companies like Google or WAV or other and uber and such are focusing on the level 5 we actually believe that the level 2 through 4 is the market would be ready for that essentially in the shorter term whereas the level 5 will take a little while to get that so everybody Christmas and everyone we're gonna have autonomous because I'm not gonna ask you that question because there's such a spectrum of self-driving but I want to ask you the question differently and I ask each of you when do you think that driving your own car will become the exception rather than than the rule well I'd rather prefer actually to rephrase the question maybe to where not when because we're on a highway setting this question can be answered precisely in roughly two to three years the the functionality will kick in and then it's going to be the renewal of the vehicles so if you answer if you if you ask where then there is an answer within the next five years definitely if we talk about an urban downtown scenario the question when is hard to answer yeah well so my question is more of a social question it is a technology question because I'm not giving up my stick shift high example getting my 17 year old to get his permit was like kicking a bird out of the nest I did drive his permanent driver on staff basically with me right so why but I mean when I was a kid that was freedom 16 years old you racing out and there is a large generational group growing up right now that doesn't necessarily see it as a necessity right so not driving your own car I think car share services right share who bore the so and so forth are absolutely going to solve a large portion of the technology of the transportation challenge for a large portion of the population I think but I agree with the the earlier answers of it's gonna be where you're not driving as opposed to necessarily win and I think we heard today of course the you know talking about I think the number is 40,000 fatalities on the roadways in the u.s. in the u.s. yeah everybody talks about how autonomous vehicles are going to help attack that problem um but it strikes me talk about autonomous cars it why don't we have autonomous carts like in a hospital or even autonomous robots that aren't relying on lines or stripes or beacons you one would think that that would come before in our autonomous vehicle am I missing something are there are there there there systems out there that that I just haven't seen well I don't know if you've ever seen videos of Amazon distribution centers yeah but they're there they're going to school on lines and beacons and they are they're not really autonomous yeah that's fair that's fair yeah so will we see autonomous carts before we see autonomous cars I think it's a question what problem that solves necessarily yeah it's just as easy for them to know where something is yeah you think about microns fabs every one of our fabs is is completely automated as a material handling system that runs up and down around the ceilings handling all the wafers and all the cartridges the wafers moving it from one tool to the next tool to the next tool there's not people anymore carrying that around or even robots on the floor right but it's a guided track system that only can go to certain you know certain places well the last speaker today ii was talking about it I remember when robots couldn't climb stairs and now they can do backflips and you know you think about the list of things that humans can do that computers can't do it let's get smaller and smaller every year so it's kind of scary to think about one hand is that does the does the concept of Byzantine fault-tolerance you guys familiar with that does that does that come into play here you guys know what that's about I don't know what it is exactly so that's a problem and I first read about it with it's the Byzantine general problem if you have nine generals for one Oh attack for one retreat and the ninth sends a message to half to retreat or not and then you don't have the full force of the attack so the concept is if you're in a self-driving boat within the vehicle and within the ecosystem around the city then you're collectively solving the problem so there these are challenging math that need to be worked out and and I'm not saying I'm a skeptic but I just wanted more I read about it the more hurdles we have there's some isolated examples of where AI I think fits really well and is gonna solve problems today but this singularity of vehicle seems to be we have a highly regulated environment obviously public transportation or public roads right are a highly regulated environment so it's like it's different than curating playlists or whatever right this is not so much regulated traffic and legislation isn't there yet so especially and it's it's designed for humans right traffic cars roads are designed for human to use them and so the adoption to they the design of any legislation any public infrastructure would be completely different if we didn't drive as humans but we have it we have machines drive them so why are robots and carts not coming because the infrastructure really is designed for humans and so I think that's what's going to be the ultimate slow down is how fast we as a society that comes up with legislation with acceptance of behavioral aspects that are driven by AI on how fast we adopt it technically I think it can happen faster than yeah yeah it's not a technology problem as much as it is the public policy insurance companies think about one of the eventually you can think of from from let's say even level four capable car on a highway is platooning yeah right instead of having X number of car lengths to the turn fryer you just stack them up and they're all going on in a row that sounds great until Joe Blow with their 20 year old Honda you know starts to pull into that Lane right so you either say this Lane is not allowed for that or you create special infrastructure essentially that isn't designed for humans there is more designed specifically for the for the machine driven car right how big is this market it's it feels like it's enormous I don't know how do you look at the tan we can talk to the memory I can talk the memory storage part of it right but today memory and storage all of memory storage for automotive is about a two and a half billion dollar market that is gonna triple in the next three years and probably beyond that my visibility is not so good maybe yours is better for sure but it then really driven by adoption rate and how fast that starts to penetrate through the car of OAM lines and across the different car in vijay your firm is when were you formed how long you've been around or vistas be around basically since around 2001 okay we were part of relatively old spun out whiskey on that at work right okay so so alright so that's been around forever yeah for this Greenfield for you for your your group right where's the aw this is transitional right so is it is it is it you try not to get disrupted or you trying to be the disrupter or is it just all sort of incremental as a 101 year old company obviously people think about you as being ripe for disruption and I think we do quite well in terms of renewing ourselves coming from aeroplane business to a motorcycle business to garbage and so I think the answer is are we fast enough I'll be fast enough in adoption and on the other hand it's fair to say that BMW with all of its brands is part of a premium thing and so it's not into the mass transportation so everything that's going to be eaten up by something like multi occupancy vehicle mass transportation in a smaller effort right this is probably not going to hurt the premium brand so much as a typical econo type of boxy car exciting time so thanks so much for coming on the cube you got a run appreciate thank you so much okay thanks for watching everybody we are out from San Francisco you've watched the cube micron inside 2018 check out Silicon angle comm for all the published research the cube dotnet as well you'll find these videos will keep on calm for all the research thanks for watching everybody we'll see you next time you

(techno music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, It's theCube. Covering the VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube, we are live at the VMworld 2018. Day three of coverage, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. John, we've had a phenomenal three days. >> It's been great. >> Biggest, I think two sets, biggest number of guests. A lot of alumni but also some new folks and I'd like to introduce you to a couple of our guests. We have David Boone, staff solutions architect from VMworld. David >> Hi >> You're not only with VMworld, but you have a very cool Twitter handle, @DavidBoone007, pretty awesome and Vijay Banga, technical >> Yes >> Fellow from FedEx services >> we're happy to be here. >> We'll have to well welcome back. you've been on The Cube before >> Yes, I have been on theCube before, yes. >> So, third day both of you still have your voices >> Oh yeah >> that's very impressive. Lot's of announcements lots of momentum lots of people here we're hearing 21,000 or so. >> Stuff >> Vijay tell us before we get into what your doing with VMworld, tell us a little bit about your roll as a technical fellow at FedEx. >> Okay Okay, so, I work in technical architecture and our role for the team is to evaluate new products. We look at all the stack in the data center all the tools that we need to do. We bring them in evaluate them see if they meets our needs. Then put them through our operations and then most important, lifecycle it out. And, so that's really what my role has been. >> See, You've worked with VMware, sorry, with FedEx for a long time now. >> Yes, yeah. >> So, I think John and I we're, you know, talking before we want to talk about your IT transformation, but you've probably seen, a tremendous amount of evolution not just within FedEx but within >> Yes >> you know, coming to events like this >> Yes >> talk to us a little bit about and maybe some of your peers would want to learn, how do you... how do you take it all in? >> Yes, so it's been an impressive pace all this while and then I look back at that and then I look at just this week, the amount of transformation that's going on the announcements that's happening and the pace at which we have to work and react to. It's just a solid mind boggling pace, so... You know, we have pace our energy just to keep up with it. So, very impressive. >> Well David, can you talk a little bit about your role then at VMware and how you work with companies like FedEx and maybe what some of the current challenges, and you know, successes that your having right now. Talking a lot about conversion infrastructure here we're talking a lot about, you know multi-cloud, you know what's going on with with >> Yes >> Your role and how you help Folks like FedEx. >> So I work in our solutions and availability business unit at FedEx, uhhh, at (laugh) VMware and >> Seems like FedEx (laughing) with that works so. >> It's a tight team. >> Please double.... (laughing with chatter) >> tight bunch >> So, I do help our large enterprise customers and our strategic customers with going through the POC process. Particularly with VSAN, and I've worked with Vijay through the entire process of evaluating VSAN at FedEx and working through any issues that we encountered and making sure that it's going to meet their demands when we go into production. >> So, Vijay how's VSAN treating you? >> Wow, you know, this has been a second iteration of software defined storage. So, David has been an immense help at taking us through this and the team behind him that is what we don't see. So I and my team work very hard at this and you know I was telling you about the pace that we saw. If you just look at one topic, VSAN itself, you know we are laying the foundation for all the products on top convergence infrastructure, hyper-converge and even with VSAN, we are covering lots of our used cases and there several more that we need to cover. So it's really pretty intense. >> So let's talk about how you're working with David and VMWare to meet your demands >> Yeah >> you were talking about it but also the customer demands. I think we're all customers of FedEx. >> Yes, right. >> And we have this expectation now in 2018 that we can go to any location and get something shipped overnight allover the world. >> Yes >> So you've got a lot of demand coming from business users consumers, how, what are some of the key demands on the business that your team is responsible for going alright, lets figure out a way with partners like VMware to solve these problems. >> Yes, so that's a very interesting question because, the demand it doesn't stop, you know, you cover one huge case there are several more that come up and so we are trying to address all the needs so when we did the whole test, we made a great plan work with David and his team to make sure that we covered, you know, all the huge cases and we did the whole test plan and we did an evaluation in-house of how they performed, what the requirements are and so you know the key is to make sure that we meet the business requirements. Speed to market is what we try and get to them so we try to do that upfront make sure that we cover the huge cases so when we bring the product out. We've covered at least 80 percent of the huge cases. Then get to 90 then 100. It's impossible but that's our goal. >> So Vijay, David, VSAN good for a lot of things actually >> Yeah >> huge cases keep multiplying, I'm just kind of curious, you know, what were some of the drivers there and was it all CapEx, OpEx, you know what are you finding out now that, are you in production and you know, what've been some of the results you've seen? Both ways. >> You want? >> So yeah, go for it. >> Yeah, so I can tell you from our perspective. What we've seen, is that you know. We looked at. So today we want to try and get off our fabric that we have with our storage we want to try and use an environment with the conversion infrastructure, white space issues, so we convert 80 percent of requirements upfront with the use issues that we have. It's the last 20 percent that are more difficult, I'm not sure where the industry is but that's what we're here to learn this week, find out, talk to the customers, see how they're doing their use cases and experiences and try and cover the width of that. >> We definitely try to tie-in with all aspects of FedEx run in their IT departments so, Vijay is one aspect from an architectural point of view but then we also make sure that we expand that out into operationalizing on VSAN and making sure that the whole process is covered and that we're making sure that FedEx is successful with our product not just you know, worse thing we could do is try to sell them something that they'd have to put on the shelf. >> In terms of partnerships, sorry John, I'm curious, David how Vmware and Vijay, FedEx, are collaborating because you were saying earlier, you've covered about 80 percent of the use cases but we know in any element of life you can't please all the people all the time. >> Right, right >> So, David are you helping from a consulting perspective Vijay and team decide, okay, what's the priority order of use cases that we can solve now, is that, talk to us about how that partnership evolves. >> Absolutely so, I think over time Vijay and I've established a relationship, a trust and that's really the most valuable thing that we have between us is that we are collaborative, you know, we can talk under nondisclosure about warts and problems and issues and where things may not fit with the FedEx process, what we can do to overcome those or work around those and feed that back into product management and make sure that we're continuing to evolve our product to meet our enterprise customers needs. >> So FedEx is enabling or influencing product development in a good way for VMware, sounds. >> Yeah, we're definitely have a strong draw from our users as to what is needed to be built into the product for the next generations so, yeah people like Vijay are key to us to ensuring our continued success. >> And David made a good point because it's not just the use cases that we can support with VSAN, it's equally important to know what not to venture in now and then venture in as it gets a little more mature and we understand it, so that's really key for us. Yeah. >> Vijay, I'm kind of curious so we talked, this, you've been there at FedEx long time, seen cultural change, how we do projects, how time to value, all that sort of stuff >> Yes >> We're here at VMworld 2018, here in Vegas lots of really I thought this is a really interesting year in terms of product announcements from VMware and others. >> Yes >> A lot of multi-cloud a lot, again, accelerated time to value as a service sorts of things, people who you thought were software providers are actually service providers and vice versa, kind of really, kind of cool stuff What's exciting you as you're looking forward to kind of go to the next level, you know taking FedEx and their infrastructure along? >> It's so, what I see happening is you know, at adoption to trying to get to the cloud as well, I think, you know the speed to market is so important, we don't want to be in the way, we want to be able to enable and or assist to be able to provide the service, the business partner and their requirements drives it, so that's what we see and I think the embracing of that, I think the adoption of it I think we see a good win from our side. >> I'm also curious, speaking of embracing and adopting one of the things Pat Gelsinger talked about in his keynote Monday was this superpowers of AI machine learning IOT... How? Vijay, is FedEx, where are you, I guess on that maybe embracing adoptions journey with embracing and being able to leverage artificial intelligence machine learning to be able to get to market faster. >> I can talk with the IOT first then get to AI because what we've seen in terms of IOT, it's been driven not from the data centers but from our edge, the demand is coming out and that's what we see, coming from the outside and typically we done from the inside out, data centers to the field but we see the drive happening a lot more intense on the field and the data collection and the IOT devices that is driving that in, so that was interesting to us to see. >> About AI, you were also talking about AI? >> Oh yes, and so, you know, FedEx is so huge I think there's lot of development happening on multiple areas on the AI. So, you know, it's just impressive and amazing. What we're doing with it, so. >> Great >> Go ahead >> Well I, so David, if you're working with a customer... You know VSAN stands up, you're working with VSAN the rest of VMware portfolio, you know, what do you, then how do you go, the next steps, like what do you, what does Vijay and his team need to start looking at, right? As the VMware portfolio expands, like how do you help them, Vijay and the executive level, like really thing about this? >> I don't think that it's a matter of what the portfolio brings to the table, it's really more about what is FedEx need from us, what can we do to help them, what gaps can we fill, you know, how do we partner together to make sure that we continue this successful track. >> Nice, nice. >> What we see is, what's important on the road map, cause we said about the 20 percent use cases, state of protection other things that are important to us, which are still being developed, we are okay to partner and work with them test the products with them so, it helps us help them, you know enable us to use the rest of the 20 percent cases. >> Very symbiotic, so I'm curious. FedEx is a massive global customer, >> Yes >> company and customer. >> Yes and customer. I'm curious Vijay what recommendations would you give to your peers, whether they're at a company that's comparable in size >> Right. to FedEx or maybe to some of the smaller companies that VMware works with. What are some of the, you know helping them distill this massive challenge down into some digestible bites. What would you recommend? >> Yeah so are two things that come to mind one is to make sure that you listen to your business partners you know. It's about the business make sure you're meeting their needs and the second thing is you know we build on the foundation that we've laid, I think this is what hit me this morning. It's like, we are all the VMware stack that is there. You know, there are several of the products we could certainly go down those paths and rabbit holes but you know. If we build on the foundations that we have. I think we see a lot of synergy, the operations you know makes it all simple one to do things so, that I think is something that we learn cause we did go down you know some rabbit holes and we are trying to reestablish back and see, build on the foundation that we have. >> And that's just part of it, right? Going down those rabbit holes. >> Yeah it is. >> Try, fail fast, move on. >> Yes, Yeah fail fast. >> Yeah and failure is not a bad F word >> No, I mean in this, if we have failed 6 months. Yeah that's great, but you know, you come out and your product that will lasts you and you know continues on that's awesome, that's our approach. >> Well guys, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing what FedEx and VMware are doing together and your excitement and your ability to advise others. It's great. So, Thank you so much. >> Thank you appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> For my cohost John Troyer, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live from Vmworld 2018. Stick around we'll be back with our next guest shortly. (techno music)

(electronic music) - Welcome to theCube Insights. A podcast that is typically taken from Siliconangle media's theCube interviews, where we share the best of our teams insights from all events we go to and from time to time we want to be able to extract some of our learnings when we're back at the ranch. Joining me for this segment is co-founder, co-CEO, benevolent dictator of a community, my boss, Dave Vellante. - Hey Stu. - Dave. Good to see you dressed down. - Yeah, well. Podcast, right? We got toys, props and no tie. - Yeah, I love seeing this ... we were just talking, John Furrier, who we could really make a claim to say we wouldn't have the state of podcasting today, definitely in tech, if it wasn't for what John had done back in the day with PodTech and it's one of those things, we've talked about podcasts for years but I'd gotten feedback from the community that said, "Wow, you guys have grown and go to so many shows that we want to listen to you guys as to: what was interesting at this show, what did you guys take out of it, what cool people did you interview?" We said, "Well, of course all over youtube, our website thecube.net but it made a lot of sense to put them in podcast form because podcasts have had a great renaissance over the last couple of years. - Yeah, and it's pretty straight forward, as Stu, for us to do this because virtually every show we do, even if it's a sponsor show, we do our own independent analysis upfront and at the tail end, a lot of our people in our community said, "We listen to that, to get the low down on the show and get your unfiltered opinion." And so, why not? - Yeah, Dave. Great point. I love, from when I first came on board, you always said, "Stu, speak your mind. Say what the community; what are the users saying? What does everybody talk about?" As I always say, if there is an elephant in the room we want to put it on the table and take a bite out it. And even, yes, we get sponsored by the companies to be there. We're fully transparent as to who pays us. But from the first Cube event, at the end of the day, where after keynote, we're gonna tell you exactly what we think and we're always welcome for debate. For people to come back, push on what we're saying and help bring us more data because at the end of the day, data and what's actually happening in the world will help shape our opinions and help us move in the direction where we think things should go. - I think the other thing is too, is a lot of folks ask us to come in and talk to them about what we've learned over the past year, the past six months. This is a great way for us to just hit the podcast and just go through, and this is what I do, just go through some of the shows that I wasn't able to attend and see what the other hosts were saying. So, how do you find these things? - Yeah, so first of all, great. theCube insights is the branding we have on it. We're on iTunes, We're on Spotify, We're on Google Play, Buzzsprout's what we use to be able to get it out there. It's an RSS on wikibon.com. I will embed them every once in a while or link to them. We plan to put them out, on average, it's once a week. We wanna have that regular cadence Typically on Thursday from a show that we've been out the spring season is really busy, so we've often been doing two a week at this point, but regular cadence, just podcasts are often a little tough to Google for so if you go into your favorite player and look at thecube insights and if you can't find it just hit you, me, somebody on the team up. - So you just searched thecube insights in one of those players? - Yeah absolutely, I've been sitting with a lot of people and right now it's been word of mouth, this is the first time we're actually really explaining what we're doing but thecube one word, insights is the second word I found it real quick in iTunes I find it in Google Play, Spotify is great for that and or your favorite podcast player Let us know if we're not there. - So maybe talk about some of the things we're seeing. - Yeah absolutely - The last few months. - So, right when we're here, what are our key learning? So for the last year or two Dave, I've really been helping look at the companies that are in this space, How are they dealing with multi cloud? And the refinement I've had in 2018 right now is that multi cloud or hybrid cloud seems to be, where everyone's Landing up and part of it is that everything in IT is heterogeneous but when I talk about a software company, really, where is their strength? are they an infrastructure company that really is trying to modernize what's happening in the data center are they born with cloud are they helping there? or are they really a software that can live in SAAS, in private cloud and public cloud? I kinda picture a company and where's their center of gravity? Do they lean very heavily towards private cloud, and they say public cloud it's too expensive and it's hard and You're gonna lose your job over it or are they somebody that's in the public cloud saying: there's nothing that should live in the data center and you should be a 100% public cloud, go adopt severless and it's great and the reality is that customers use a lot of these tools, lots of SAAS, multiple public Cloud for what they're doing and absolutely their stuff that's living in the data center And will continue for a long time. what do you see in it Dave? - My sort of takeaway in the last several months, half a year, a year is we used to talk about cloud big data, mobile and social as the forward drivers. I feel like it's kinda been there done that, That's getting a little bit long in the tooth and I think there's like the 3DS now, it's digital transformation, it's data first, is sort of the second D and disruption is the 3rd D And I think if you check on one of the podcast we did on scene digital, with David Michella. I think he did a really of laying out how the industry is changing there's a whole new set of words coming in, we're moving beyond that cloud big data, social mobile era into an era that's really defined by this matrix that he talks about. So check that out I won't go into it in detail here but at the top of that matrix is machine intelligence or what people call AI. And it's powering virtually everything and it's been embedded in all types of different applications and you clearly see that to the extent that organizations are able to Leverage the services, those digital services in that matrix, which are all about data, they're driving change. So it's digital transformation actually is real, data first really means You gotta put data at the core of your enterprise and if you look at the top five companies in terms of market cap the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons, the Microsofts Etc. Those top five companies are really data first. But People sometimes call data-driven, and then disruption everywhere, one of my favorite disruptions scenarios is of course crypto and blockchain And of course I have my book "The Enigma war" which is all about crypto, cryptography and we're seeing just massive Innovation going on as a result of both blockchain and crypto economics, so we've been really excited to cover, I think we've done eight or nine shows this year on crypto and blockchain. - Yeah it's an interesting one Dave because absolutely when you mention cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, there's still a lot of people in the room that look at you, Come on, there's crazy folks and it's money, it's speculation and it's ridiculous. What does that have to do with technology? But we've been covering for a couple of years now, the hyper ledger and some of these underlying pieces. You and I both watch Silicon Valley and I thought they actually did a really good job this year talking about the new distributed internet and how we're gonna build these things and that's really underneath one of the things that these technologies are building towards. - Well the internet was originally conceived as this decentralized network and well it physically is a decentralized network, it's owned essentially controlled by an oligopoly of behemoths and so what I've learned about cryptocurrency is that internet was built on protocols that were funded by the government and university collaboration so for instance SMTP Gmail's built on SMTP (mumbles) TCPIP, DNS Etc. Are all protocols that were funded essentially by the government, Linux itself came out of universities early developers didn't get paid for developing the technologies there and what happened after the big giants co-opted those protocols and basically now run the internet, development in those protocol stopped. Well Bitcoin and Ethereum and all these other protocols that are been developed around tokens, are driving innovation and building out really a new decentralized internet. So there's tons of innovation and funding going on, that I think people overlook the mainstream media talks all about fraud and these ICO's that are BS Etc. And there's certainly a lot of that it's the Wild West right now. But there's really a lot of high quality innovation going on, hard to tell what's gonna last and what's gonna fizzle but I guarantee there's some tech that's being developed that will stay the course. - Yeah I love....I believe you've read the Nick Carr book "The Shallows", Dave. He really talked about when we built the internet, there's two things one is like a push information, And that easy but building community and being able to share is really tough. I actually saw at an innovation conference I went to, the guy that created the pop-up ad like comes and he apologizes greatly, he said "I did a horrible horrible thing to the internet". - Yeah he did - Because I helped make it easier to have ads be how we monetize things, and the idea around the internet originally was how do I do micropayments? how do I really incent people to share? and that's one of the things we're looking at. - Ad base business models have an inherent incentive for large organizations that are centralized to basically co-opt our data and do onerous things with them And that's clearly what's happened. users wanna take back control of their data and so you're seeing this, they call it a Matrix. Silicon Valley I think you're right did a good job of laying that out, the show was actually sometimes half amazingly accurate and so a lot of development going on there. Anywhere you see a centralized, so called trusted third-party where they're a gatekeeper and they're adjudicating essentially. That's where crypto and token economics is really attacking, it's the confluence of software engineering, Cryptography and game theory. This is the other beautiful thing about crypto is that there is alignment of incentives between the investor, the entrepreneur, the customer and the product community. and so right now everybody is winning, maybe it's a bubble but usually when these bubbles burst something lives on, i got some beautiful tulips in my front yard. - Yeah so I love getting Insight into the things that you've been thinking of, John Furrier, the team, Peter Borus, our whole analyst team. Let's bring it back to thecube for a second Dave, we've done a ton of interviews I'm almost up to 200 views this year we did 1600 as a team last year. I'll mention two because one, I was absolutely giddy and you helped me get this interview, Walter isaacson at The Dell Show, One of my favorite authors I'm working through his DaVinci book right now which is amazing he talks about how a humanities and technology, the Marrying of that. Of course a lot of people read the Steve Jobs interview, I love the Einstein book that he did, the innovators. But if you listen to the Michael Dell interview that I did and then the Walter isaacson I think he might be working on a biography of Michael Dell, which i've talk to a lot of people, and they're like i'd love to read that. He's brilliant, amazing guy I can't tell you how many people have stopped me and said I listened to that Michael Dell interview. The other one, Customers. Love talking about customers especially people that they're chewing glass, they're breaking down new barriers. Key Toms and I interviewed It was Vijay Luthra from Northern trust. Kissed a chicago guy And he's like "this is one of the oldest and most conservative financial institutions out there". And they're actually gonna be on the stage at DockerCon talking about containers they're playing with severless technology, how the financial institutions get involved in the data economy, Leverage this kind of environment while still maintaining security so it was one that I really enjoyed. How about...... what's jumped out of you in all your years? - (Mumbles) reminds me of the quote (mumbles) software is eating the world, well data is eating software so every company is.... it reminds me of the NASDAQ interview that I did Recently and all we talked about, we didn't talk about their IT, we talked about how they're pointing their technology to help other exchanges get launched around the world and so it's a classic case of procurer of technology now becoming a seller of technology, and we've seen that everywhere. I think what's gonna be interesting Stu is AI, I think that more AI is gonna be bought, than built by these companies and that's how they will close the gap, I don't think the average everyday global 2000 company is gonna be an AI innovator in terms of what they develop, I think how they apply it is where the Innovation is gonna be. - Yeah Dave we had this discussion when it was (mumbles) It was the practitioners that will Leverage this will make a whole lot more money than the people that made it. - We're certainly seeing that. - Yeah I saw.....I said like Linux became pervasive, it took RedHat a long time to become a billion dollar company, because the open stack go along way there. Any final thoughts you wanna go on Dave? - Well so yeah, check out thecube.net, check out thecube insights, find that on whatever your favorite podcast player is, we're gonna be all over the place thecube.net will tell you where we're gonna be obviously, siliconangle.com, wikibon.com for all the research. - Alright and be sure to hit us up on Twitter if you have questions. He's D Villante on twitter, Angus stu S-T-U, Furrier is @Furrier, Peter Borus is PL Borus on twitter, Our whole team. wikibon.com for the research, siliconangle.com for the news and of course thecube.net for all the video. - And @ TheCube - And @TheCube of course on Twitter for our main feed And we're also up on Instagram now, so check out thecube signal on one word, give you a little bit of behind the scenes fun our phenomenal production team help to bring the buzz and the energy for all the things we do so for Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for listening to this special episode of thecube insights. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCube covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Minimin joined by Keith Townsend, and we're here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program Binny Gill, who's the CTO of cloud services at Nutanix, and welcome a first time guest, a long time watcher, first-time caller, Vijay Rayapati, who's the general manager of Nutanix Beam a brand new service at NEXT, came from the Minjar acquisition. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Vijay what, so for those that don't know, bring us back a little bit, you know, Minjar tells a little bit about the company, how many people and then we'll get into the integration and the launch. >> Yeah, so we started Minjar in 2012, late 2012, primarily focused on building our public cloud optimization service, so our flagship product is Bot Metric, which is one of the which is one of the high straighter interview solution in the (mumbles) marketplace. We are primarily based in Bangalo, and focused on helping customers as they're moving to this public, our journey, how can you help them deliver governance across their consumption, from a cost perspective. And compliance from a security perspective. That's what we were focused on, and we joined Nutanix last quarter. I'm really excited to be here, I look forward to continue building on it. >> Alright, Binny maybe you can help us connect the dots, so, look at Zai, look at the services that Nutanix is building, usually it starts with your infrastructure. >> Yep. >> And that's not where Minjar came from so, help us connect the dots as to how, what led to the acquisition, how it expands the portfolio, and what's your first SAS product? >> Yeah, I mean if you look at what we are talking about as our true north, what we're doing is we're building a hybrid cloud. We started with building a private cloud, and customers asking us, hey solve the public cloud problem for us, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. And most of the enterprises today are dispersed. So when we talk about enterprise cloud what we mean is dispersed cloud including IOT devices, you'll see some of that in the demo this evening. So the first question that comes to mind is okay, how am I going to manage all my dispersed cloud entities? And not all of them are owned by Nutanix. So when we looked at Minjar and the capabilities, it was right on target, they're helping customers, consume the cloud and solve the two problems that they have that they lose sleep on, one is do I have control on cost? And the other is do I have control on security compliance? So that's a good capability to have and with Vijay's teams help, we're going to expand it to all the clouds including Nutanix and beyond and provide it to all the customers. >> So today, where is the service, how do I consume it? Help me understand that. >> So this is the first SAS service that Nutanix has launched and it can be consumed from beam.nutanix.com. And we intend to continue on the service in future as a SAS offering, for customers. Both Nutanix customer and non-Nutanix customers. What we have today is we support Amazon cloud, and Azure, and we're working on bringing integration for Nutanix and then we'll bring support for other cloud providers as well. >> So, I'm sorry, just how many customers did you have running on the Bot Metric service in the past? >> We had a couple of hundred customers using Bot Metric, we track close to about a billion dollar plus in public cloud consumption through Bot Metric before it became Nutanix. >> So Vijay, help us understand the larger industry and this larger space. It's been relatively acrotic space for some time, there's been a lot of solutions that helped with cloud security, performance monitoring, et cetera. What was the unique gap or value opportunity you saw at Bot Metric? >> Yeah I mean there are two unique things that we found when we work with these public cloud customers. The challenges are, (mumbles) which are providing this ability, right? But there weren't many tools providing ability to remediate those things that you detect. Essentially form day one, when built Bot Metric platform, we built it like an action-oriented platform. So we not only get visibility, you could essentially automate those issues, either for an optimization or for control. To an automation agent, so there is a lot of invisible automation in Nutanix Beam, versus just being this beautiful UI, which can give you a lot of insights and reports. And that's a big differentiator, that's one of the reasons why a lot of customers when they write reviews of the product, they say man I really love it because it not only tells me what I need to do, I don't need to go and do those hundred things as an engineer, and I can rather click to fix of deploy an automation that can go an do these things, right? >> And one of the other things that was very interesting in what Beam does is, it also can predict what the cost is going to be at the end of the month, instead of being surprised by the end of the month bill, you know how it is today, and how the system is predicting it, and that gives you more control on making sure that if there's an over-expenditure that's going to happen, you can take actions today. >> So what type of automation and adjustments can be made on my behalf? >> Yeah, I think pretty much anything that a cloud ops, or devops engineer do, what we don't do is we don't do any provisioning or orchestration, right? Even as a Bot Metric, we never did that. What we were focused on is, how can we solve operational issues on a day-to-day basis? Whether they're related to cost, or they're related to compliance, or they're related to automation. So it can detect things, you can do custom scaling from Beam, you can do resizing of things, you can clean up unused resources, you can go and run custom audits using Python on Beam. So there are lot of things that day two or a day three on a continuous basis as a cloud ops or a devops engineer that you need to do. That's what we deliver as a invisible automation, or we call it event automation. And so when events happen, how can we automate those things, or right ones use, multiple times. >> Binny, can you walk us through, what kind of Nutanix stamp has been put on the product leading to the Beam, maybe give us a little bit of your philosophy as to how the software acquisitions, what they have to go through before they become real Nutanix products. >> First of all, any acquisition, we want to make sure that the team is a great team. People are the most important. From a technology perspective, they need to be solving the pinpoints of the customers. Now when we integrate any service into our cloud platform, we focus on three things, one is identity. So when a customer logs in to our Zai cloud services, or logs in on PRAM, they should be able to use a single sign-on across all the services. Second thing is billing, we're going to make sure that how we bill the customer, it's not like separate bills that come and they have to put them together, it has to be single billing. Also in terms of how you spend, we're working on programs where you can buy some Nutanix currency coins, and then you can use it either in the private cloud or in the public cloud, but the decision could be a late binding decision. And finally, it's about making sure that the one-click simplicity that we keep talking about and delivering is there. And we've been lucky that with the Beam product, a lot of it is already there, that's why it's already giad. But we make sure that it goes through the same rigor of making sure that the user experience is awesome. >> So let's talk about that time to integration I'll call it. The ability for you guys to take Beam or Bot Metric at that time, a completely separate product from COM, Zai, and then you take that, turn it into Beam, a SAS product, which isn't your first SAS product, How do you keep that consistent view across the entire Nutanix portfolio experience, so that administrators are not leaving one tool to go into another one, which a SAS offering is very different than what you guys have offered in Apetex. >> So we're working on that, both on premises view and in the cloud view. So as you might have noticed when we came up with Zai, we said it's like cloud services. And DR is the first service. 'Cause when you log into Zai, you're logging into all of the cloud services. And then the menu of services will show up, and Beam is one, DR is one, and more will come in, so we wanted to be taught through that. On premises, if you'll notice in our history, we had Prism Central, and then we announced Com Support, and it's baked into Prism, it's not a separate tool. We took one and a half years to make sure that it does not look like a schizophrenic set of products. When we announced Flow, if you look at other vendors like VMware, they have separate NSX manager, and SS controllers, in our case, it's the same Prism Central, once you upgrade, you get that feature. So that's in our discipline, and anything we do, we take the time and make sure it's going to be a single experience for the customer. We're doing the same thing so, Vijay's team this quite rapid and agile and doing stuff, they've integrated with our single identity system, integrating with a single billing system. So that has happened rapidly with this case. >> I think we focus a lot, at least at Nutanix, when I joined, there is a lot of emphasis on experience. How do we make sure we deliver consistent experience for the user from an identity perspective, from a service use perspective, as well as from a support perspective, right? I know it's a common support, it's a common identity, and it's a common billing, and you already touched upon it as we are innovating on a lot of the services, you know, there is a lot of thinking going on, saying you know, how do we bring a common experience, unified experience that is seamless, rather than having different endpoints, people need to go on and try to remember these things. I think we will continue to work on, you know, innovate on that front. But experience is one thing that Nutanix is very good at, you know, if you go onto social media and look at, you know a lot of people are saying, oh man, we really like what we saw from a user experience perspective of the product. And we already took a lot of those design concepts, you know, Nutanix has, in terms of the UI and UX. The Beam that you see today is completely consistent with that 3.0 design philosophy, internally for our products. So the customer has same kind of, experience. Of course it's a SAS service, as Binny said, we are trying to bring lot of this SAS services and Zai cloud services so the user can consume it, just like they consume a GCP or an azure, or AWS, right? And of the day, you have EC to RDS. There is a common frame that brings all this together. >> One additional thing that we're doing, which has not been done before is, providing these services in a hybrid mode. Right, so some of these services like COM, and infrastructure as a service capability, we've announced ARA, how do we provide it in hybrid cloud world where you can run the service on PRAM, you can migrate, adapt it, depends on the service. So the service should also be available in the cloud. And those are some of the hard problems that we are working on, but we believe that we have the tools and the experience to make that happen. >> So, Vijay, just one that was announced, you got some cool new T-shirts you're going to show us. What should we be looking for from the roadmap there? And yeah, show that T-shirt off. (laughter) >> There are two primary things that we are very focused on. One is, how can we bring in lot more intelligence, not just from insights and actions. How can we help customers make those choices of moving the workload, because if you see there're a lot of components that Nutanix is building. Even today we announced Cloud Extract, which is kind of a one-click mobility, not just from cloud to Nutanix, it is going to support from Nutanix to other clouds as well. Because there is a strong cultural belief within the company, that we need to have, give customers the freedom of choice. And deliver a good service, that I prize, so that they feel feel confident about what they're doing, and what we deliver to them. So in that context, one is obviously, bringing multiple clouds. Currently we support Amazon and Azure, but we will bring GCP support, and we will launch, Nutanix, we will launch, other providers as well, we won't start just with them. And the next thing is, how do we make this experience a lot more seamless? And we'll also integrate with COM and a couple of other products that we have as we accline. So that customers can get visibility of cost by workloads by apps, they don't need to come to Beam to consume them. >> So Binny one last question. This is critically important as you bring out your first SAS offering. Billing and procurement, what is the average experience for the Nutanix customer who hadn't- The infrastructure team didn't whip out a credit card and buy a NX system, what is the experience for setting up billing with your SAS services? >> Right, so a lot of it is not giad yet, but if you look at some of the demos that we have done for Zai cloud services, including DIA, It's, the customer can provide a credit card, and consume it as they're used to with the public cloud. But we also have programs where they can buy some credits, Nutanix coins up front, and use them both on PRAM, and in the cloud. So these things are in the works, and we are listening to our customers. One size does not fit all and we know that in the enterprise. But we'll have multiple options for them. >> Excellent, sounds just like, I've listened to my children saying, I get the coins to do fortnite, and things like that that the millennials will be good. They buy some credits, buy it here, buy it there, use it up. Binny and Vijay, thanks so much for joining us. Congrats on the launch of the product we look forward to keeping an eye on it as that grows and the portfolio grows. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thank you for having me. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Minimin, back with lots more programming here at Nutanix.next 2018, thanks for watchin' theCube. (futuristic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE. Covering .NExT's conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost Keith Townsend, and this is Nutanix .NEXT conference in New Orleans. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Vijay Luthra, who's the Senior Vice President, global head of technology infrastructure services at Northern Trust. Vijay, great note on the keynote this morning. A lot of cool technologies that you're digging into, thanks for joining us. >> Well, thanks for having me. >> All right, so luckily it's easy, Northern Trust, understand finance, but tell us a little bit about you know, your organization and kind of give us a high level, what are some of the biggest challenges that you're facing? >> Yep, yep, absolutely. So again, Northern Trust, a global financial services firm, primarily in the asset servicing, asset management, wealth management business. Again, 128 year history, built on some very sound principles around service, integrity, and expertise. Some of the challenges we're facing is around growth. The firm is growing. Revenues are growing at a very, very healthy pace, especially when you compare that to our peers and competitors. And the challenge, number one, is how do we scale the business while managing the overall operating expenses, right? So we want to create some leverage in the business and we want the growth to be healthy growth. So that's challenge number one, and we recently, our CEO recently launched a value for spend program where we grow let's make sure we're spending and we're getting the value for the spend. >> Yeah, Vijay, can you just sketch out for us, you talk about growth and scale. You know, how many locations, how many users, they're emanating that you have to like wrap into this stuff? >> Yeah absolutely, so Northern Trust, about 18,200 employees, I would say 50, 60 plus locations. I would say well distributed across the different regions between US, Asia PAC, and EMEA. Yeah, at high level those are kind of the how we're kind of geographically dispersed. >> Okay great, and cloud. What does that mean to your organization? How does that fit in your role and across the company? >> So cloud, we've been on the cloud journey for several years now. We had a very mature virtualization strategy, which transitioned well into our private cloud strategy. We have enough scale internally where we said if we built an efficient private cloud, which by the way, if you heard on the keynote, was built 100% on converged, hyperconverged technologies. We were actually in the forefront when we adopted these technologies back in 2013, 2014. The goal back then was how do we get efficiencies and scale from the private cloud by leveraging automation, you know converged stacks are highly reliable because, for example, the patching is a lot more well tested by the vendors. So on our journey to the cloud that was essentially the first phase, when we transitioned from virtualization to private clouds, and since then we've actually built more value added layers on top of that. Because the goal is not just to cater to traditional applications that leverage infrastructure as a service, but also to cater to some of the more contemporary cloud native applications that we're building or even some of the containerized workloads. So we've built on top of that with PaaS and KaaS and software-defined components like SDN, and we are closely measuring the outcomes and the benefits. >> So Vijay, let's talk a little bit about that initial investment and decision. Northern Trust, well known for being conservative amongst the most conservative of investment firms. I'm from Chicago so I have an affinity for Northern Trust in general. Back in 2013 there was not as simple to look back it's simple to look back now and say oh yeah, right choice. Easy decision. But 2013 OpenStack was, you know, all the rave, building clouds based on these open source and available technologies was kind of the way to go. What made you guys take a look at hyperconverged and say, you know what, we're going to buck the trend and we're going to go with hyperconverged. Not many of your peers made that choice. >> Yes, that's a great question. So at Northern Trust we are heavily focused on outcome-based investment decisions. So within technology infrastructure our mission is pretty straightforward, which is as we scale infrastructure, how do we continue to reduce total cost of ownership, improve time to market, improve client experience, which is a very essential part of our decision-making process, and while we're doing that, not to lose site of reliability, stability, security. So with that kind of as our guiding principles, as we make major investments we take them through these lenders, and Nutanix hit all of them. So it was fairly straightforward. And again, some of the benefits, as you probably heard on stage, were phenomenal. We were able to increase capacity without increasing staff. We were able to reduce some of our automation, sorry bill teams, significantly. Reliability, stability improved drastically. For example, our virtual desktop infrastructure, the number of incidents, client generated incidents, internal client generated incidents, went down by 80, 90%. So again, to answer your question, outcome driven, have key metrics and measures on what you expect the outcomes to be, and then partner with the right firms to make sure you get the outcomes. >> So as we look at the next phase, you know, infrastructure's a service, you guys seem to have that down, mature virtualization practice, you lay it on top of that infrastructures and service. Now we look into the next phase, KaaS, PaaS type solutions. What are some of the major decision points and what's guiding your decisions? >> So clearly on everybody, all head of infrastructures or any organizations' mind today is how do we build a hybrid cloud strategy that is safe, secure, does not lock you into a specific vendor. It's the right application, the right type of workload, and that's where we're focused on now. We've got a few applications. Nothing that's production client centric is in a public cloud from an IaaS perspective. But we think we've invested in the right components to allow us to now orchestrate safely and securely across multi clouds. So that's what we're focused on now. >> Can you talk a little bit more about containerization? What's the experience like been working with Nutanix for those type of solutions? >> Yeah, so we were early adapters of containers with partnering with Docker built on the Nutanix platform. We've been working with them since the last couple years, and more recently since they announced the Kubernetes integration, we are factoring that into the Docker environment. The goal with containerization is, again, back to kind of those guiding principles, right? Lower costs of ownership, improved time to market, reliability, stability, we see an opportunity to consolidate Linux Windows based workloads because of the efficiencies that containers bring, as well as extend devops like functionality to app teams that might not be looking to refactor in a cloud native PaaS like format. They could take advantage of containers to get a devops like experience. We're enhancing security as we move to containers. There are several things we're doing there. So point being, we're looking at it through kind of the same lenses. >> So you threw out a couple things. I heard devops in there. In your keynote one of the things that you talked about a team going from 45 people (mumbles) to something to 12. Maybe explain a little bit about ops in your company, what happened to all those other 33 people. >> Okay quick questions, two parts. On the infrastructure as a service side, a few years ago we had a build team, mostly contractor driven, where we would use them to build servers, deploy applications, extremely manual. With converged technologies and all the automation that we had deployed, that team is down to 14, 15 people. Because a lot of the work has gone away, and our goal is to continue to fine tune that. So that's infrastructure as a service. Devops wise what we did was we carved out a team of four or five of what Gartner calls versatilists, multiskilled, multidisciplinary resources, senior engineers that focused on building out our devops practice on top of our platform as a service, and that has gone extremely well. You know the team has very successfully onboarded hundreds of microservices as we rearchitect some of our applications. So Vijay, talk us about the decision and the capability of being able to take monolithic applications, that are not going to be refactored and going to containers, there's a lot of debate on whether or not that's worth the trouble. But beyond that debate, talk to us about the importance and the reliance on the capability that Nutanix will be bringing in with ACS 2.0, are you guys looking to deploy that or are you looking to manage Kubernetes and that capability of managing these traditional applications inside of Kubernetes? >> Yeah, so we're a few steps ahead of Nutanix. In one of my conversations with Sunil I was saying man I wish this feature was available six months ago. So we are watching that development very closely. We are very interested in it. But because we have an existing Docker footprint, that's what we're leveraging for Kubernetes for now. >> Great, can you speak about Nutanix, the relationship you have with them, and their ecosystem. Things like secondary storage, you know how do you look at Nutanix as a partner and what do you see the maturity of their ecosystem? Any solutions you'd want to highlight there? >> Yeah, I mean, clearly what Nutanix did to the primary storage market, there's an emerging market on the secondary storage side, and we're working with a couple different companies to help us in that space. But just the Nutanix ecosystem itself, just because we are a few steps ahead and we've got some Nutanix components, we've got some third party components as part of Nutanix, I think the fact that Nutanix is becoming a one-stop shop as you can see with some of the announcements today, from a total cost of ownership perspective it becomes very interesting for someone like myself to say if I took out a few vendors or focused on the Nutanix stack, what does that mean? At what point is it usable? When can we start migrating, and those are the types of things we're going to focus on now. >> So have you gotten into a situation, especially considering that you're at least six months or so ahead of Nutanix when it comes to container orchestration, has the infrastructure gotten in your way at all? Have they done anything, because Nutanix can be opinionated in how they manage infrastructure. As that opinionation, has that opinion rather, gotten in your way as you look to go down your KaaS route? >> No, so far I would say no. I think a lot of their tooling is very intuitive, very easy to use. The engineers, with very minimal training, in fact, some of our engineers that retrained themselves on Nutanix happened over such a small duration and had to do with how simple to use Nutanix stack was. >> One of the lines I love from your presentation, you said you run IP as a business. What advice do you give to your peers out there, learnings you've had, staying a little bit ahead of some of the general marketplace. >> Yeah, I think the key is, back to kind of my initial comment, how do you build scale with an infrastructure? Meaning, how do you take on more workloads, new technologies, while managing your operating expenses tightly? We have essentially done that extremely well over the last few years where we have added to capacity, absorbed a lot of growth, introduced a lot of new technologies while keeping a very close eye on operating expenses. So I would say, if anything, when you run IT as a business, you take into account not just all the net adds, you have a program to consider optimizations. For example, we use a technology that helps us reduce physical VMWare based footprint. It helps us optimize and says here's where you have some debt capacity. You, as leaders and somebody in my position, should be willing and able to take out costs as well while taking on new technologies, I would say that's the key. So you're saying you guys are running IT as a business. What have been some of the KPIs and showing success in that transformation? >> Okay, we closely watch our operating expenses and we measure that as a percentage of total company operating expenses, what percentage are we of that? We closely watch time to market. How soon are we providing environments to ab dev teams. We closely watch stability off the underlying platforms, op time of those platforms. So I think those have direct impact on our internal clients as well as end clients. And then as a business, who are your competitors? >> As Northern Trust? >> No as you run IT as a business? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I would say cloud providers are competitors. But to be honest I shouldn't say that. I mean in a new model I want the team to think about cloud as just another endpoint, and we need to be able to safely and securely deploy the right app in the right cloud kind of the end state that we want to be in. So I wouldn't say they're competitors. I think we as a firm, or any firm should get comfortable with being able to orchestrate and move the right workloads in the right data centers to say. >> All right, Vijay, want to give you the final word. You're out there looking at some of the new technologies. What's exciting you, what's on your wishlist from the vendor community, maybe you can share. Personally I'm very excited about AI in ops. I know people talk about AI in financial services and the other industries. But I think the application of machine learning and AI within data center operations is relevant. And there's many things we're doing in that space in terms of a client facing chatbot that integrates with Link. Or certain add-ons onto Splunk that help you with machine learning and analyzing logs. Or bots that help you classify tickets and put them in the right cues at the right time. So we're looking at how to take advantage of those. Again, to build scale, to lower cost ownership, improve experience, etc., etc., so again, I think that's something I'm personally very, very excited about. >> All right, well Vijay Luthra, really appreciate sharing your story. Great success and look forward to catching up with you-- >> All right thank you. >> In the future. For Keith Townsend I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here from New Orleans Convention Center .NEXT, Nutanix's conference 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> PA Announcer: Off the plastic tab, and we'll turn on the colors. Welcome to New Orleans. ♪ This is it ♪ ♪ The part when I say I don't want ya ♪ ♪ I'm stronger than I've been before ♪ ♪ This is the part when I set your free ♪ (New Orleans jazz music) ("When the Saints Go Marching In") (rock music) >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentleman, would you please welcome state of Louisiana chief design officer Matthew Vince and Choice Hotels director of infrastructure services Stacy Nigh. (rock music) >> Well good morning New Orleans, and welcome to my home state. My name is Matt Vince. I'm the chief design office for state of Louisiana. And it's my pleasure to welcome you all to .Next 2018. State of Louisiana is currently re-architecting our cloud infrastructure and Nutanix is the first domino to fall in our strategy to deliver better services to our citizens. >> And I'd like to second that warm welcome. I'm Stacy Nigh director of infrastructure services for Choice Hotels International. Now you may think you know Choice, but we don't own hotels. We're a technology company. And Nutanix is helping us innovate the way we operate to support our franchisees. This is my first visit to New Orleans and my first .Next. >> Well Stacy, you're in for a treat. New Orleans is known for its fabulous food and its marvelous music, but most importantly the free spirit. >> Well I can't wait, and speaking of free, it's my pleasure to introduce the Nutanix Freedom video, enjoy. ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ♪ ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ I'm free, I'm free, I'm free, I'm free ♪ ♪ Gritting your teeth, you hold onto me ♪ ♪ It's never enough, I'm never complete ♪ ♪ Tell me to prove, expect me to lose ♪ ♪ I push it away, I'm trying to move ♪ ♪ I'm desperate to run, I'm desperate to leave ♪ ♪ If I lose it all, at least I'll be free ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome chief marketing officer Ben Gibson ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> Welcome, good morning. >> Audience: Good morning. >> And welcome to .Next 2018. There's no better way to open up a .Next conference than by hearing from two of our great customers. And Matthew, thank you for welcoming us to this beautiful, your beautiful state and city. And Stacy, this is your first .Next, and I know she's not alone because guess what It's my first .Next too. And I come properly attired. In the front row, you can see my Nutanix socks, and I think my Nutanix blue suit. And I know I'm not alone. I think over 5,000 people in attendance here today are also first timers at .Next. And if you are here for the first time, it's in the morning, let's get moving. I want you to stand up, so we can officially welcome you into the fold. Everyone stand up, first time. All right, welcome. (audience clapping) So you are all joining not just a conference here. This is truly a community. This is a community of the best and brightest in our industry I will humbly say that are coming together to share best ideas, to learn what's happening next, and in particular it's about forwarding not only your projects and your priorities but your careers. There's so much change happening in this industry. It's an opportunity to learn what's coming down the road and learn how you can best position yourself for this whole new world that's happening around cloud computing and modernizing data center environments. And this is not just a community, this is a movement. And it's a movement that started quite awhile ago, but the first .Next conference was in the quiet little town of Miami, and there was about 800 of you in attendance or so. So who in this hall here were at that first .Next conference in Miami? Let me hear from you. (audience members cheering) Yep, well to all of you grizzled veterans of the .Next experience, welcome back. You have started a movement that has grown and this year across many different .Next conferences all over the world, over 20,000 of your community members have come together. And we like to do it in distributed architecture fashion just like here in Nutanix. And so we've spread this movement all over the world with .Next conferences. And this is surging. We're also seeing just today the current count 61,000 certifications and climbing. Our Next community, close to 70,000 active members of our online community because .Next is about this big moment, and it's about every other day and every other week of the year, how we come together and explore. And my favorite stat of all. Here today in this hall amongst the record 5,500 registrations to .Next 2018 representing 71 countries in whole. So it's a global movement. Everyone, welcome. And you know when I got in Sunday night, I was looking at the tweets and the excitement was starting to build and started to see people like Adile coming from Casablanca. Adile wherever you are, welcome buddy. That's a long trip. Thank you so much for coming and being here with us today. I saw other folks coming from Geneva, from Denmark, from Japan, all over the world coming together for this moment. And we are accomplishing phenomenal things together. Because of your trust in us, and because of some early risk candidly that we have all taken together, we've created a movement in the market around modernizing data center environments, radically simplifying how we operate in the services we deliver to our businesses everyday. And this is a movement that we don't just know about this, but the industry is really taking notice. I love this chart. This is Gartner's inaugural hyperconvergence infrastructure magic quadrant chart. And I think if you see where Nutanix is positioned on there, I think you can agree that's a rout, that's a homerun, that's a mic drop so to speak. What do you guys think? (audience clapping) But here's the thing. It says Nutanix up there. We can honestly say this is a win for this hall here. Because, again, without your trust in us and what we've accomplished together and your partnership with us, we're not there. But we are there, and it is thanks to everyone in this hall. Together we have created, expanded, and truly made this market. Congratulations. And you know what, I think we're just getting started. The same innovation, the same catalyst that we drove into the market to converge storage network compute, the next horizon is around multi-cloud. The next horizon is around whether by accident or on purpose the strong move with different workloads moving into public cloud, some into private cloud moving back and forth, the promise of application mobility, the right workload on the right cloud platform with the right economics. Economics is key here. If any of you have a teenager out there, and they have a hold of your credit card, and they're doing something online or the like. You get some surprises at the end of the month. And that surprise comes in the form of spiraling public cloud costs. And this isn't to say we're not going to see a lot of workloads born and running in public cloud, but the opportunity is for us to take a path that regains control over infrastructure, regain control over workloads and where they're run. And the way I look at it for everyone in this hall, it's a journey we're on. It starts with modernizing those data center environments, continues with embracing the full cloud stack and the compelling opportunity to deliver that consumer experience to rapidly offer up enterprise compute services to your internal clients, lines of businesses and then out into the market. It's then about how you standardize across an enterprise cloud environment, that you're not just the infrastructure but the management, the automation, the control, and running any tier one application. I hear this everyday, and I've heard this a lot already this week about customers who are all in with this approach and running those tier one applications on Nutanix. And then it's the promise of not only hyperconverging infrastructure but hyperconverging multiple clouds. And if we do that, this journey the way we see it what we are doing is building your enterprise cloud. And your enterprise cloud is about the private cloud. It's about expanding and managing and taking back control of how you determine what workload to run where, and to make sure there's strong governance and control. And you're radically simplifying what could be an awfully complicated scenario if you don't reclaim and put your arms around that opportunity. Now how do we do this different than anyone else? And this is going to be a big theme that you're going to see from my good friend Sunil and his good friends on the product team. What are we doing together? We're taking all of that legacy complexity, that friction, that inability to be able to move fast because you're chained to old legacy environments. I'm talking to folks that have applications that are 40 years old, and they are concerned to touch them because they're not sure if they can react if their infrastructure can meet the demands of a new, modernized workload. We're making all that complexity invisible. And if all of that is invisible, it allows you to focus on what's next. And that indeed is the spirit of this conference. So if the what is enterprise cloud, and the how we do it different is by making infrastructure invisible, data centers, clouds, then why are we all here today? What is the binding principle that spiritually, that emotionally brings us all together? And we think it's a very simple, powerful word, and that word is freedom. And when we think about freedom, we think about as we work together the freedom to build the data center that you've always wanted to build. It's about freedom to run the applications where you choose based on the information and the context that wasn't available before. It's about the freedom of choice to choose the right cloud platform for the right application, and again to avoid a lot of these spiraling costs in unanticipated surprises whether it be around security, whether it be around economics or governance that come to the forefront. It's about the freedom to invent. It's why we got into this industry in the first place. We want to create. We want to build things not keep the lights on, not be chained to mundane tasks day by day. And it's about the freedom to play. And I hear this time and time again. My favorite tweet from a Nutanix customer to this day is just updated a lot of nodes at 38,000 feed on United Wifi, on my way to spend vacation with my family. Freedom to play. This to me is emotionally what brings us all together and what you saw with the Freedom video earlier, and what you see here is this new story because we want to go out and spread the word and not only talk about the enterprise cloud, not only talk about how we do it better, but talk about why it's so compelling to be a part of this hall here today. Now just one note of housekeeping for everyone out there in case I don't want anyone to take a wrong turn as they come to this beautiful convention center here today. A lot of freedom going on in this convention center. As luck may have it, there's another conference going on a little bit down that way based on another high growth, disruptive industry. Now MJBizCon Next, and by coincidence it's also called next. And I have to admire the creativity. I have to admire that we do share a, hey, high growth business model here. And in case you're not quite sure what this conference is about. I'm the head of marketing here. I have to show the tagline of this. And I read the tagline from license to launch and beyond, the future of the, now if I can replace that blank with our industry, I don't know, to me it sounds like a new, cool Sunil product launch. Maybe launching a new subscription service or the like. Stay tuned, you never know. I think they're going to have a good time over there. I know we're going to have a wonderful week here both to learn as well as have a lot of fun particularly in our customer appreciation event tonight. I want to spend a very few important moments on .Heart. .Heart is Nutanix's initiative to promote diversity in the technology arena. In particular, we have a focus on advancing the careers of women and young girls that we want to encourage to move into STEM and high tech careers. You have the opportunity to engage this week with this important initiative. Please role the video, and let's learn more about how you can do so. >> Video Plays (electronic music) >> So all of you have received these .Heart tokens. You have the freedom to go and choose which of the four deserving charities can receive donations to really advance our cause. So I thank you for your engagement there. And this community is behind .Heart. And it's a very important one. So thank you for that. .Next is not the community, the moment it is without our wonderful partners. These are our amazing sponsors. Yes, it's about sponsorship. It's also about how we integrate together, how we innovate together, and we're about an open community. And so I want to thank all of these names up here for your wonderful sponsorship of this event. I encourage everyone here in this room to spend time, get acquainted, get reacquainted, learn how we can make wonderful music happen together, wonderful music here in New Orleans happen together. .Next isn't .Next with a few cool surprises. Surprise number one, we have a contest. This is a still shot from the Freedom video you saw right before I came on. We have strategically placed a lucky seven Nutanix Easter eggs in this video. And if you go to Nutanix.com/freedom, watch the video. You may have to use the little scrubbing feature to slow down 'cause some of these happen quickly. You're going to find some fun, clever Easter eggs. List all seven, tweet that out, or as many as you can, tweet that out with hashtag nextconf, C, O, N, F, and we'll have a random drawing for an all expenses paid free trip to .Next 2019. And just to make sure everyone understands Easter egg concept. There's an eighth one here that's actually someone that's quite famous in our circles. If you see on this still shot, there's someone in the back there with a red jacket on. That's not just anyone. We're targeting in here. That is our very own Julie O'Brien, our senior vice president of corporate marketing. And you're going to hear from Julie later on here at .Next. But Julie and her team are the engine and the creativity behind not only our new Freedom campaign but more importantly everything that you experience here this week. Julie and her team are amazing, and we can't wait for you to experience what they've pulled together for you. Another surprise, if you go and visit our Freedom booths and share your stories. So they're like video booths, you share your success stories, your partnerships, your journey that I talked about, you will be entered to win a beautiful Nutanix brand compliant, look at those beautiful colors, bicycle. And it's not just any bicycle. It's a beautiful bicycle made by our beautiful customer Trek. I actually have a Trek bike. I love cycling. Unfortunately, I'm not eligible, but all of you are. So please share your stories in the Freedom Nutanix's booths and put yourself in the running, or in the cycling to get this prize. One more thing I wanted to share here. Yesterday we had a great time. We had our inaugural Nutanix hackathon. This hackathon brought together folks that were in devops practices, many of you that are in this room. We sold out. We thought maybe we'd get four or five teams. We had to shutdown at 14 teams that were paired together with a Nutanix mentor, and you coded. You used our REST APIs. You built new apps that integrated in with Prism and Clam. And it was wonderful to see this. Everyone I talked to had a great time on this. We had three winners. In third place, we had team Copper or team bronze, but team Copper. Silver, Not That Special, they're very humble kind of like one of our key mission statements. And the grand prize winner was We Did It All for the Cookies. And you saw them coming in on our Mardi Gras float here. We Did It All for Cookies, they did this very creative job. They leveraged an Apple Watch. They were lighting up VMs at a moments notice utilizing a lot of their coding skills. Congratulations to all three, first, second, and third all receive $2,500. And then each of them, then were able to choose a charity to deliver another $2,500 including Ronald McDonald House for the winner, we did it all for the McDonald Land cookies, I suppose, to move forward. So look for us to do more of these kinds of events because we want to bring together infrastructure and application development, and this is a great, I think, start for us in this community to be able to do so. With that, who's ready to hear form Dheeraj? You ready to hear from Dheeraj? (audience clapping) I'm ready to hear from Dheeraj, and not just 'cause I work for him. It is my distinct pleasure to welcome on the stage our CEO, cofounder and chairman Dheeraj Pandey. ("Free" by Broods) ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> Thank you Ben and good morning everyone. >> Audience: Good morning. >> Thank you so much for being here. It's just such an elation when I'm thinking about the Mardi Gras crowd that came here, the partners, the customers, the NTCs. I mean there's some great NTCs up there I could relate to because they're on Slack as well. How many of you are in Slack Nutanix internal Slack channel? Probably 5%, would love to actually see this community grow from here 'cause this is not the only even we would love to meet you. We would love to actually do this in a real time bite size communication on our own internal Slack channel itself. Now today, we're going to talk about a lot of things, but a lot of hard things, a lot of things that take time to build and have evolved as the industry itself has evolved. And one of the hard things that I want to talk about is multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is a really hard problem 'cause it's full of paradoxes. It's really about doing things that you believe are opposites of each other. It's about frictionless, but it's also about governance. It's about being simple, and it's also about being secure at the same time. It's about delight, it's about reducing waste, it's about owning, and renting, and finally it's also about core and edge. How do you really make this big at a core data center whether it's public or private? Or how do you really shrink it down to one or two nodes at the edge because that's where your machines are, that's where your people are? So this is a really hard problem. And as you hear from Sunil and the gang there, you'll realize how we've actually evolved our solutions to really cater to some of these. One of the approaches that we have used to really solve some of these hard problems is to have machines do more, and I said a lot of things in those four words, have machines do more. Because if you double-click on that sentence, it really means we're letting design be at the core of this. And how do you really design data centers, how do you really design products for the data center that hush all the escalations, the details, the complexities, use machine-learning and AI and you know figure our anomaly detection and correlations and patter matching? There's a ton of things that you need to do to really have machines do more. But along the way, the important lesson is to make machines invisible because when machines become invisible, it actually makes something else visible. It makes you visible. It makes governance visible. It makes applications visible, and it makes services visible. A lot of things, it makes teams visible, careers visible. So while we're really talking about invisibility of machines, we're talking about visibility of people. And that's how we really brought all of you together in this conference as well because it makes all of us shine including our products, and your careers, and your teams as well. And I try to define the word customer success. You know it's one of the favorite words that I'm actually using. We've just hired a great leader in customer success recently who's really going to focus on this relatively hard problem, yet another hard problem of customer success. We think that customer success, true customer success is possible when we have machines tend towards invisibility. But along the way when we do that, make humans tend towards freedom. So that's the real connection, the yin-yang of machines and humans that Nutanix is really all about. And that's why design is at the core of this company. And when I say design, I mean reducing friction. And it's really about reducing friction. And everything we do, the most mundane of things which could be about migrating applications, spinning up VMs, self-service portals, automatic upgrades, and automatic scale out, and all the things we do is about reducing friction which really makes machines become invisible and humans gain freedom. Now one of the other convictions we have is how all of us are really tied at the hip. You know our success is tied to your success. If we make you successful, and when I say you, I really mean Main Street. Main Street being customers, and partners, and employees. If we make all of you successful, then we automatically become successful. And very coincidentally, Main Street and Wall Street are also tied in that very same relation as well. If we do a great job at Main Street, I think the Wall Street customer, i.e. the investor, will take care of itself. You'll have you know taken care of their success if we took care of Main Street success itself. And that's the narrative that our CFO Dustin Williams actually went and painted to our Wall Street investors two months ago at our investor day conference. We talked about a $3 billion number. We said look as a company, as a software company, we can go and achieve $3 billion in billings three years from now. And it was a telling moment for the company. It was really about talking about where we could be three years from now. But it was not based on a hunch. It was based on what we thought was customer success. Now realize that $3 billion in pure software. There's only 10 to 15 companies in the world that actually have that kind of software billings number itself. But at the core of this confidence was customer success, was the fact that we were doing a really good job of not over promising and under delivering but under promising starting with small systems and growing the trust of the customers over time. And this is one of the statistics we actually talk about is repeat business. The first dollar that a Global 2000 customer spends in Nutanix, and if we go and increase their trust 15 times by year six, and we hope to actually get 17 1/2 and 19 times more trust in the years seven and eight. It's very similar numbers for non Global 2000 as well. Again, we go and really hustle for customer success, start small, have you not worry about paying millions of dollars upfront. You know start with systems that pay as they grow, you pay as they grow, and that's the way we gain trust. We have the same non Global 2000 pay $6 1/2 for the first dollar they've actually spent on us. And with this, I think the most telling moment was when Dustin concluded. And this is key to this audience here as well. Is how the current cohorts which is this audience here and many of them were not here will actually carry the weight of $3 billion, more than 50% of it if we did a great job of customer success. If we were humble and honest and we really figured out what it meant to take care of you, and if we really understood what starting small was and having to gain the trust with you over time, we think that more than 50% of that billings will actually come from this audience here without even looking at new logos outside. So that's the trust of customer success for us, and it takes care of pretty much every customer not just the Main Street customer. It takes care of Wall Street customer. It takes care of employees. It takes care of partners as well. Now before I talk about technology and products, I want to take a step back 'cause many of you are new in this audience. And I think that it behooves us to really talk about the history of this company. Like we've done a lot of things that started out as science projects. In fact, I see some tweets out there and people actually laugh at Nutanix cloud. And this is where we were in 2012. So if you take a step back and think about where the company was almost seven, eight years ago, we were up against giants. There was a $30 billion industry around network attached storage, and storage area networks and blade servers, and hypervisors, and systems management software and so on. So what did we start out with? Very simple premise that we will collapse the architecture of the data center because three tier is wasteful and three tier is not delightful. It was a very simple hunch, we said we'll take rack mount servers, we'll put a layer of software on top of it, and that layer of software back then only did storage. It didn't do networks and security, and it ran on top of a well known hypervisor from VMware. And we said there's one non negotiable thing. The fact that the design must change. The control plane for this data center cannot be the old control plane. It has to be rethought through, and that's why Prism came about. Now we went and hustled hard to add more things to it. We said we need to make this diverse because it can't just be for one application. We need to make it CPU heavy, and memory heavy, and storage heavy, and flash heavy and so on. And we built a highly configurable HCI. Now all of them are actually configurable as you know of today. And this was not just innovation in technologies, it was innovation in business and sizing, capacity planning, quote to cash business processes. A lot of stuff that we had to do to make this highly configurable, so you can really scale capacity and performance independent of each other. Then in 2014, we did something that was very counterintuitive, but we've done this on, and on, and on again. People said why are you disrupting yourself? You know you've been doing a good job of shipping appliances, but we also had the conviction that HCI was not about hardware. It was about a form factor, but it was really about an operating system. And we started to compete with ourselves when we said you know what we'll do arm's length distribution, we'll do arm's length delivery of products when we give our software to our Dell partner, to Dell as a partner, a loyal partner. But at the same time, it was actually seen with a lot of skepticism. You know these guys are wondering how to really make themselves vanish because they're competing with themselves. But we also knew that if we didn't compete with ourselves someone else will. Now one of the most controversial decisions was really going and doing yet another hypervisor. In the year 2015, it was really preposterous to build yet another hypervisor. It was a very mature market. This was coming probably 15 years too late to the market, or at least 10 years too late to market. And most people said it shouldn't be done because hypervisor is a commodity. And that's the word we latched on to. That this commodity should not have to be paid for. It shouldn't have a team of people managing it. It should actually be part of your overall stack, but it should be invisible. Just like storage needs to be invisible, virtualization needs to be invisible. But it was a bold step, and I think you know at least when we look at our current numbers, 1/3rd of our customers are actually using AHV. At least every quarter that we look at it, our new deployments, at least 35% of it is actually being used on AHV itself. And again, a very preposterous thing to have said five years ago, four years ago to where we've actually come. Thank you so much for all of you who've believed in the fact that virtualization software must be invisible and therefore we should actually try out something that is called AHV today. Now we went and added Lenovo to our OEM mix, started to become even more of a software company in the year 2016. Went and added HP and Cisco in some of very large deals that we talk about in earnings call, our HP deals and Cisco deals. And some very large customers who have procured ELAs from us, enterprise license agreements from us where they want to mix and match hardware. They want to mix Dell hardware with HP hardware but have common standard Nutanix entitlements. And finally, I think this was another one of those moments where we say why should HCI be only limited to X86. You know this operating systems deserves to run on a non X86 architecture as well. And that gave birth to this idea of HCI and Power Systems from IBM. And we've done a great job of really innovating with them in the last three, four quarters. Some amazing innovation that has come out where you can now run AIX 7.x on Nutanix. And for the first time in the history of data center, you can actually have a single software not just a data plane but a control plane where you can manage an IBM farm, an Power farm, and open Power farm and an X86 farm from the same control plane and have you know the IBM farm feed storage to an Intel compute farm and vice versa. So really good things that we've actually done. Now along the way, something else was going on while we were really busy building the private cloud, we knew there was a new consumption model on computing itself. People were renting computing using credit cards. This is the era of the millennials. They were like really want to bypass people because at the end of the day, you know why can't computing be consumed the way like eCommerce is? And that devops movement made us realize that we need to add to our stack. That stack will now have other computing clouds that is AWS and Azure and GCP now. So similar to the way we did Prism. You know Prism was really about going and making hypervisors invisible. You know we went ahead and said we'll add Calm to our portfolio because Calm is now going to be what Prism was to us back when we were really dealing with multi hypervisor world. Now it's going to be multi-cloud world. You know it's one of those things we had a gut around, and we really come to expect a lot of feedback and real innovation. I mean yesterday when we had the hackathon. The center, the epicenter of the discussion was Calm, was how do you automate on multiple clouds without having to write a single line of code? So we've come a long way since the acquisition of Calm two years ago. I think it's going to be a strong pillar in our overall product portfolio itself. Now the word multi-cloud is going to be used and over used. In fact, it's going to be blurring its lines with the idea of hyperconvergence of clouds, you know what does it mean. We just hope that hyperconvergence, the way it's called today will morph to become hyperconverged clouds not just hyperconverged boxes which is a software defined infrastructure definition itself. But let's focus on the why of multi-cloud. Why do we think it can't all go into a public cloud itself? The one big reason is just laws of the land. There's data sovereignty and computing sovereignty, regulations and compliance because of which you need to be in where the government with the regulations where the compliance rules want you to be. And by the way, that's just one reason why the cloud will have to disperse itself. It can't just be 10, 20 large data centers around the world itself because you have 200 plus countries and half of computing actually gets done outside the US itself. So it's a really important, very relevant point about the why of multi-cloud. The second one is just simple laws of physics. You know if there're machines at the edge, and they're producing so much data, you can't bring all the data to the compute. You have to take the compute which is stateless, it's an app. You take the app to where the data is because the network is the enemy. The network has always been the enemy. And when we thought we've made fatter networks, you've just produced more data as well. So this just goes without saying that you take something that's stateless that's without gravity, that's lightweight which is compute and the application and push it close to where the data itself is. And the third one which is related is just latency reasons you know? And it's not just about machine latency and electrons transferring over the speed light, and you can't defy the speed of light. It's also about human latency. It's also about multiple teams saying we need to federate and delegate, and we need to push things down to where the teams are as opposed to having to expect everybody to come to a very large computing power itself. So all the ways, the way they are, there will be at least three different ways of looking at multi-cloud itself. There's a centralized core cloud. We all go and relate to this because we've seen large data centers and so on. And that's the back office workhorse. It will crunch numbers. It will do processing. It will do a ton of things that will go and produce results for you know how we run our businesses, but there's also the dispersal of the cloud, so ROBO cloud. And this is the front office server that's really serving. It's a cloud that's going to serve people. It's going to be closer to people, and that's what a ROBO cloud is. We have a ton of customers out here who actually use Nutanix and the ROBO environments themselves as one node, two node, three node, five node servers, and it just collapses the entire server closet room in these ROBOs into something really, really small and minuscule. And finally, there's going to be another dispersed edge cloud because that's where the machines are, that's where the data is. And there's going to be an IOT machine fog because we need to miniaturize computing to something even smaller, maybe something that can really land in the palm in a mini server which is a PC like server, but you need to run everything that's enterprise grade. You should be able to go and upgrade them and monitor them and analyze them. You know do enough computing up there, maybe event-based processing that can actually happen. In fact, there's some great innovation that we've done at the edge with IOTs that I'd love for all of you to actually attend some sessions around as well. So with that being said, we have a hole in the stack. And that hole is probably one of the hardest problems that we've been trying to solve for the last two years. And Sunil will talk a lot about that. This idea of hybrid. The hybrid of multi-cloud is one of the hardest problems. Why? Because we're talking about really blurring the lines with owning and renting where you have a single-tenant environment which is your data center, and a multi-tenant environment which is the service providers data center, and the two must look like the same. And the two must look like the same is that hard a problem not just for burst out capacity, not just for security, not just for identity but also for networks. Like how do you blur the lines between networks? How do you blur the lines for storage? How do you really blur the lines for a single pane of glass where you can think of availability zones that look highly symmetric even though they're not because one of 'em is owned by you, and it's single-tenant. The other one is not owned by you, that's multi-tenant itself. So there's some really hard problems in hybrid that you'll hear Sunil talk about and the team. And some great strides that we've actually made in the last 12 months of really working on Xi itself. And that completes the picture now in terms of how we believe the state of computing will be going forward. So what are the must haves of a multi-cloud operating system? We talked about marketplace which is catalogs and automation. There's a ton of orchestration that needs to be done for multi-cloud to come together because now you have a self-service portal which is providing an eCommerce view. It's really about you know getting to do a lot of requests and workflows without having people come in the way, without even having tickets. There's no need for tickets if you can really start to think like a self-service portal as if you're just transacting eCommerce with machines and portals themselves. Obviously the next one is networking security. You need to blur the lines between on-prem and off-prem itself. These two play a huge role. And there's going to be a ton of details that you'll see Sunil talk about. But finally, what I want to focus on the rest of the talk itself here is what governance and compliance. This is a hard problem, and it's a hard problem because things have evolved. So I'm going to take a step back. Last 30 years of computing, how have consumption models changed? So think about it. 30 years ago, we were making decisions for 10 plus years, you know? Mainframe, at least 10 years, probably 20 plus years worth of decisions. These were decisions that were extremely waterfall-ish. Make 10s of millions of dollars worth of investment for a device that we'd buy for at least 10 to 20 years. Now as we moved to client-server, that thing actually shrunk. Now you're talking about five years worth of decisions, and these things were smaller. So there's a little bit more velocity in our decisions. We were not making as waterfall-ish decision as we used to with mainframes. But still five years, talk about virtualized, three tier, maybe three to five year decisions. You know they're still relatively big decisions that we were making with computer and storage and SAN fabrics and virtualization software and systems management software and so on. And here comes Nutanix, and we said no, no. We need to make it smaller. It has to become smaller because you know we need to make more agile decisions. We need to add machines every week, every month as opposed to adding you know machines every three to five years. And we need to be able to upgrade them, you know any point in time. You can do the upgrades every month if you had to, every week if you had to and so on. So really about more agility. And yet, we were not complete because there's another evolution going on, off-prem in the public cloud where people are going and doing reserved instances. But more than that, they were doing on demand stuff which no the decision was days to weeks. Some of these things that unitive compute was being rented for days to weeks, not years. And if you needed something more, you'd shift a little to the left and use reserved instances. And then spot pricing, you could do spot pricing for hours and finally lambda functions. Now you could to function as a service where things could actually be running only for minutes not even hours. So as you can see, there's a wide spectrum where when you move to the right, you get more elasticity, and when you move to the left, you're talking about predictable decision making. And in fact, it goes from minutes on one side to 10s of years on the other itself. And we hope to actually go and blur the lines between where NTNX is today where you see Nutanix right now to where we really want to be with reserved instances and on demand. And that's the real ask of Nutanix. How do you take care of this discontinuity? Because when you're owning things, you actually end up here, and when you're renting things, you end up here. What does it mean to really blur the lines between these two because people do want to make decisions that are better than reserved instance in the public cloud. We'll talk about why reserved instances which looks like a proxy for Nutanix it's still very, very wasteful even though you might think it's delightful, it's very, very wasteful. So what does it mean for on-prem and off-prem? You know you talk about cost governance, there's security compliance. These high velocity decisions we're actually making you know where sometimes you could be right with cost but wrong on security, but sometimes you could be right in security but wrong on cost. We need to really figure out how machines make some of these decisions for us, how software helps us decide do we have the right balance between cost, governance, and security compliance itself? And to get it right, we have introduced our first SAS service called Beam. And to talk more about Beam, I want to introduce Vijay Rayapati who's the general manager of Beam engineering to come up on stage and talk about Beam itself. Thank you Vijay. (rock music) So you've been here a couple of months now? >> Yes. >> At the same time, you spent the last seven, eight years really handling AWS. Tell us more about it. >> Yeah so we spent a lot of time trying to understand the last five years at Minjar you know how customers are really consuming in this new world for their workloads. So essentially what we tried to do is understand the consumption models, workload patterns, and also build algorithms and apply intelligence to say how can we lower this cost and you know improve compliance of their workloads.? And now with Nutanix what we're trying to do is how can we converge this consumption, right? Because what happens here is most customers start with on demand kind of consumption thinking it's really easy, but the total cost of ownership is so high as the workload elasticity increases, people go towards spot or a scaling, but then you need a lot more automation that something like Calm can help them. But predictability of the workload increases, then you need to move towards reserved instances, right to lower costs. >> And those are some of the things that you go and advise with some of the software that you folks have actually written. >> But there's a lot of waste even in the reserved instances because what happens it while customers make these commitments for a year or three years, what we see across, like we track a billion dollars in public cloud consumption you know as a Beam, and customers use 20%, 25% of utilization of their commitments, right? So how can you really apply, take the data of consumption you know apply intelligence to essentially reduce their you know overall cost of ownership. >> You said something that's very telling. You said reserved instances even though they're supposed to save are still only 20%, 25% utilized. >> Yes, because the workloads are very dynamic. And the next thing is you can't do hot add CPU or hot add memory because you're buying them for peak capacity. There is no convergence of scaling that apart from the scaling as another node. >> So you actually sized it for peak, but then using 20%, 30%, you're still paying for the peak. >> That's right. >> Dheeraj: That can actually add up. >> That's what we're trying to say. How can we deliver visibility across clouds? You know how can we deliver optimization across clouds and consumption models and bring the control while retaining that agility and demand elasticity? >> That's great. So you want to show us something? >> Yeah absolutely. So this is Beam as just Dheeraj outlined, our first SAS service. And this is my first .Next. And you know glad to be here. So what you see here is a global consumption you know for a business across different clouds. Whether that's in a public cloud like Amazon, or Azure, or Nutanix. We kind of bring the consumption together for the month, the recent month across your accounts and services and apply intelligence to say you know what is your spent efficiency across these clouds? Essentially there's a lot of intelligence that goes in to detect your workloads and consumption model to say if you're spending $100, how efficiently are you spending? How can you increase that? >> So you have a centralized view where you're looking at multiple clouds, and you know you talk about maybe you can take an example of an account and start looking at it? >> Yes, let's go into a cloud provider like you know for this business, let's go and take a loot at what's happening inside an Amazon cloud. Here we get into the deeper details of what's happening with the consumption of a specific services as well as the utilization of both on demand and RI. You know what can you do to lower your cost and detect your spend efficiency of a dollar to see you know are there resources that are provisioned by teams for applications that are not being used, or are there resources that we should go and rightsize because you know we have all this monitoring data, configuration data that we crunch through to basically detect this? >> You think there's billions of events that you look at everyday. You're already looking at a billon dollars worth of AWS spend. >> Right, right. >> So billions of events, billing, metering events every year to really figure out and optimize for them. >> So what we have here is a very popular international government organization. >> Dheeraj: Wow, so it looks like Russians are everywhere, the cloud is everywhere actually. >> Yes, it's quite popular. So when you bring your master account into Beam, we kind of detect all the linked accounts you know under that. Then you can go and take a look at not just at the organization level within it an account level. >> So these are child objects, you know. >> That's right. >> You can think of them as ephemeral accounts that you create because you don't want to be on the record when you're doing spams on Facebook for example. >> Right, let's go and take a look at what's happening inside a Facebook ad spend account. So we have you know consumption of the services. Let's go deeper into compute consumption, and you kind of see a trendline. You can do a lot of computing. As you see, looks like one campaign has ended. They started another campaign. >> Dheeraj: It looks like they're not stopping yet, man. There's a lot of money being made in Facebook right now. (Vijay laughing) >> So not only just get visibility at you know compute as a service inside a cloud provider, you can go deeper inside compute and say you know what is a service that I'm really consuming inside compute along with the CPUs n'stuff, right? What is my data transfer? You know what is my network? What is my load blancers? So essentially you get a very deeper visibility you know as a service right. Because we have three goals for Beam. How can we deliver visibility across clouds? How can we deliver visibility across services? And how can we deliver, then optimization? >> Well I think one thing that I just want to point out is how this SAS application was an extremely teachable moment for me to learn about the different resources that people could use about the public cloud. So all of you who actually have not gone deep enough into the idea of public cloud. This could be a great app for you to learn about things, the resources, you know things that you could do to save and security and things of that nature. >> Yeah. And we really believe in creating the single pane view you know to mange your optimization of a public cloud. You know as Ben spoke about as a business, you need to have freedom to use any cloud. And that's what Beam delivers. How can you make the right decision for the right workload to use any of the cloud of your choice? >> Dheeraj: How 'about databases? You talked about compute as well but are there other things we could look at? >> Vijay: Yes, let's go and take a look at database consumption. What you see here is they're using inside Facebook ad spending, they're using all databases except Oracle. >> Dheeraj: Wow, looks like Oracle sales folks have been active in Russia as well. (Vijay laughing) >> So what we're seeing here is a global view of you know what is your spend efficiency and which is kind of a scorecard for your business for the dollars that you're spending. And the great thing is Beam kind of brings together you know through its intelligence and algorithms to detect you know how can you rightsize resources and how can you eliminate things that you're not using? And we deliver and one click fix, right? Let's go and take a look at resources that are maybe provisioned for storage and not being used. We deliver the seamless one-click philosophy that Nutanix has to eliminate it. >> So one click, you can actually just pick some of these wasteful things that might be looking delightful because using public cloud, using credit cards, you can go in and just say click fix, and it takes care of things. >> Yeah, and not only remove the resources that are unused, but it can go and rightsize resources across your compute databases, load balancers, even past services, right? And this is where the power of it kind of comes for a business whether you're using on-prem and off-prem. You know how can you really converge that consumption across both? >> Dheeraj: So do you have something for Nutanix too? >> Vijay: Yes, so we have basically been working on Nutanix with something that we're going to deliver you know later this year. As you can see here, we're bringing together the consumption for the Nutanix, you know the services that you're using, the licensing and capacity that is available. And how can you also go and optimize within Nutanix environments >> That's great. >> for the next workload. Now let me quickly show you what we have on the compliance side. This is an extremely powerful thing that we've been working on for many years. What we deliver here just like in cost governance, a global view of your compliance across cloud providers. And the most powerful thing is you can go into a cloud provider, get the next level of visibility across cloud regimes for hundreds of policies. Not just policies but those policies across different regulatory compliances like HIPA, PCI, CAS. And that's very powerful because-- >> So you're saying a lot of what you folks have done is codified these compliance checks in software to make sure that people can sleep better at night knowing that it's PCI, and HIPA, and all that compliance actually comes together? >> And you can build this not just by cloud accounts, you can build them across cloud accounts which is what we call security centers. Essentially you can go and take a deeper look at you know the things. We do a whole full body scan for your cloud infrastructure whether it's AWS Amazon or Azure, and you can go and now, again, click to fix things. You know that had been probably provisioned that are violating the security compliance rules that should be there. Again, we have the same one-click philosophy to say how can you really remove things. >> So again, similar to save, you're saying you can go and fix some of these security issues by just doing one click. >> Absolutely. So the idea is how can we give our people the freedom to get visibility and use the right cloud and take the decisions instantly through one click. That's what Beam delivers you know today. And you know get really excited, and it's available at beam.nutanix.com. >> Our first SAS service, ladies and gentleman. Thank you so much for doing this, Vijay. It looks like there's going to be a talk here at 10:30. You'll talk more about the midterm elections there probably? >> Yes, so you can go and write your own security compliances as well. You know within Beam, and a lot of powerful things you can do. >> Awesome, thank you so much, Vijay. I really appreciate it. (audience clapping) So as you see, there's a lot of work that we're doing to really make multi-cloud which is a hard problem. You know think about working the whole body of it and what about cost governance? What about security compliance? Obviously what about hybrid networks, and security, and storage, you know compute, many of the things that you've actually heard from us, but we're taking it to a level where the business users can now understand the implications. A CFO's office can understand the implications of waste and delight. So what does customer success mean to us? You know again, my favorite word in a long, long time is really go and figure out how do you make you, the customer, become operationally efficient. You know there's a lot of stuff that we deliver through software that's completely uncovered. It's so latent, you don't even know you have it, but you've paid for it. So you've got to figure out what does it mean for you to really become operationally efficient, organizationally proficient. And it's really important for training, education, stuff that you know you're people might think it's so awkward to do in Nutanix, but it could've been way simpler if you just told you a place where you can go and read about it. Of course, I can just use one click here as opposed to doing things the old way. But most importantly to make it financially accountable. So the end in all this is, again, one of the things that I think about all the time in building this company because obviously there's a lot of stuff that we want to do to create orphans, you know things above the line and top line and everything else. There's also a bottom line. Delight and waste are two sides of the same coin. You know when we're talking about developers who seek delight with public cloud at the same time you're looking at IT folks who're trying to figure out governance. They're like look you know the CFOs office, the CIOs office, they're trying to figure out how to curb waste. These two things have to go hand in hand in this era of multi-cloud where we're talking about frictionless consumption but also governance that looks invisible. So I think, at the end of the day, this company will do a lot of stuff around one-click delight but also go and figure out how do you reduce waste because there's so much waste including folks there who actually own Nutanix. There's so much software entitlement. There's so much waste in the public cloud itself that if we don't go and put our arms around, it will not lead to customer success. So to talk more about this, the idea of delight and the idea of waste, I'd like to bring on board a person who I think you know many of you actually have talked about it have delightful hair but probably wasted jokes. But I think has wasted hair and delightful jokes. So ladies and gentlemen, you make the call. You're the jury. Sunil R.M.J. Potti. ("Free" by Broods) >> So that was the first time I came out from the bottom of a screen on a stage. I actually now know what it feels to be like a gopher. Who's that laughing loudly at the back? Okay, do we have the... Let's see. Okay, great. We're about 15 minutes late, so that means we're running right on time. That's normally how we roll at this conference. And we have about three customers and four demos. Like I think there's about three plus six, about nine folks coming onstage. So we'll have our own version of the parade as well on the main stage for the next 70 minutes. So let's just jump right into it. I think we've been pretty consistent in terms of our longterm plans since we started the company. And it's become a lot more clearer over the last few years about our plans to essentially make computing invisible as Dheeraj mentioned. We're doing this across multiple acts. We started with HCI. We call it making infrastructure invisible. We extended that to making data centers invisible. And then now we're in this mode of essentially extending it to converging clouds so that you can actually converge your consumption models. And so today's conference and essentially the theme that you're going to be seeing throughout the breakout sessions is about a journey towards invisible clouds, but make sure that you internalize the fact that we're investing heavily in each of the three phases. It's just not about the hybrid cloud with Nutanix, it's about actually finishing the job about making infrastructure invisible, expanding that to kind of go after the full data center, and then of course embark on some real meaningful things around invisible clouds, okay? And to start the session, I think you know the part that I wanted to make sure that we are all on the same page because most of us in the room are still probably in this phase of the journey which is about invisible infrastructure. And there the three key products and especially two of them that most of you guys know are Acropolis and Prism. And they're sort of like the bedrock of our company. You know especially Acropolis which is about the web scale architecture. Prism is about consumer grade design. And with Acropolis now being really mature. It's in the seventh year of innovation. We still have more than half of our company in terms of R and D spend still on Acropolis and Prism. So our core product is still sort of where we think we have a significant differentiation on. We're not going to let our foot off the peddle there. You know every time somebody comes to me and says look there's a new HCI render popping out or an existing HCI render out there, I ask a simple question to our customers saying show me 100 customers with 100 node deployments, and it will be very hard to find any other render out there that does the same thing. And that's the power of Acropolis the code platform. And then it's you know the fact that the velocity associated with Acropolis continues to be on a fast pace. We came out with various new capabilities in 5.5 and 5.6, and one of the most complicated things to get right was the fact to shrink our three node cluster to a one node, two node deployment. Most of you actually had requirements on remote office, branch office, or the edge that actually allowed us to kind of give us you know sort of like the impetus to kind of go design some new capabilities into our core OS to get this out. And associated with Acropolis and expanding into Prism, as you will see, the first couple of years of Prism was all about refactoring the user interface, doing a good job with automation. But more and more of the investments around Prism is going to be based on machine learning. And you've seen some variants of that over the last 12 months, and I can tell you that in the next 12 to 24 months, most of our investments around infrastructure operations are going to be driven by AI techniques starting with most of our R and D spend also going into machine-learning algorithms. So when you talk about all the enhancements that have come on with Prism whether it be formed by you know the management console changing to become much more automated, whether now we give you automatic rightsizing, anomaly detection, or a series of functionality that have gone into it, the real core sort of capabilities that we're putting into Prism and Acropolis are probably best served by looking at the quality of the product. You probably have seen this slide before. We started showing the number of nodes shipped by Nutanix two years ago at this conference. It was about 35,000 plus nodes at that time. And since then, obviously we've you know continued to grow. And we would draw this line which was about enterprise class quality. That for the number of bugs found as a percentage of nodes shipped, there's a certain line that's drawn. World class companies do about probably 2% to 3%, number of CFDs per node shipped. And we were just broken that number two years ago. And to give you guys an idea of how that curve has shown up, it's now currently at .95%. And so along with velocity, you know this focus on being true to our roots of reliability and stability continues to be, you know it's an internal challenge, but it's also some of the things that we keep a real focus on. And so between Acropolis and Prism, that's sort of like our core focus areas to sort of give us the confidence that look we have this really high bar that we're sort of keeping ourselves accountable to which is about being the most advanced enterprise cloud OS on the planet. And we will keep it this way for the next 10 years. And to complement that, over a period of time of course, we've added a series of services. So these are services not just for VMs but also for files, blocks, containers, but all being delivered in that single one-click operations fashion. And to really talk more about it, and actually probably to show you the real deal there it's my great pleasure to call our own version of Moses inside the company, most of you guys know him as Steve Poitras. Come on up, Steve. (audience clapping) (rock music) >> Thanks Sunil. >> You barely fit in that door, man. Okay, so what are we going to talk about today, Steve? >> Absolutely. So when we think about when Nutanix first got started, it was really focused around VDI deployments, smaller workloads. However over time as we've evolved the product, added additional capabilities and features, that's grown from VDI to business critical applications as well as cloud native apps. So let's go ahead and take a look. >> Sunil: And we'll start with like Oracle? >> Yeah, that's one of the key ones. So here we can see our Prism central user interface, and we can see our Thor cluster obviously speaking to the Avengers theme here. We can see this is doing right around 400,000 IOPs at around 360 microseconds latency. Now obviously Prism central allows you to mange all of your Nutanix deployments, but this is just running on one single Nutanix cluster. So if we hop over here to our explore tab, we can see we have a few categories. We have some Kubernetes, some AFS, some Xen desktop as well as Oracle RAC. Now if we hope over to Oracle RAC, we're running a SLOB workload here. So obviously with Oracle enterprise applications performance, consistency, and extremely low latency are very critical. So with this SLOB workload, we're running right around 300 microseconds of latency. >> Sunil: So this is what, how many node Oracle RAC cluster is this? >> Steve: This is a six node Oracle RAC deployment. >> Sunil: Got it. And so what has gone into the product in recent releases to kind of make this happen? >> Yeah so obviously on the hardware front, there's been a lot of evolutions in storage mediums. So with the introduction of NVME, persistent memory technologies like 3D XPoint, that's meant storage media has become a lot faster. Now to allow you to full take advantage of that, that's where we've had to do a lot of optimizations within the storage stack. So with AHV, we have what we call AHV turbo mode which allows you to full take advantage of those faster storage mediums at that much lower latency. And then obviously on the networking front, technologies such as RDMA can be leveraged to optimize that network stack. >> Got it. So that was Oracle RAC running on a you know Nutanix cluster. It used to be a big deal a couple of years ago. Now we've got many customers doing that. On the same environment though, we're going to show you is the advent of actually putting file services in the same scale out environment. And you know many of you in the audience probably know about AFS. We released it about 12 to 14 months ago. It's been one of our most popular new products of all time within Nutanix's history. And we had SMB support was for user file shares, VDI deployments, and it took awhile to bake, to get to scale and reliability. And then in the last release, in the recent release that we just shipped, we now added NFS for support so that we can no go after the full scale file server consolidation. So let's take a look at some of that stuff. >> Yep, let's do it. So hopping back over to Prism, we can see our four cluster here. Overall cluster-wide latency right around 360 microseconds. Now we'll hop down to our file server section. So here we can see we have our Next A File Server hosting right about 16.2 million files. Now if you look at our shares and exports, we can see we have a mix of different shares. So one of the shares that you see there is home directories. This is an SMB share which is actually mapped and being leveraged by our VDI desktops for home folders, user profiles, things of that nature. We can also see this Oracle backup share here which is exposed to our rack host via NFS. So RMAN is actually leveraging this to provide native database backups. >> Got it. So Oracle VMs, backup using files, or for any other file share requirements with AFS. Do we have the cluster also showing, I know, so I saw some Kubernetes as well on it. Let's talk about what we're thinking of doing there. >> Yep, let's do it. So if we think about cloud, cloud's obviously a big buzz word, so is containers in Kubernetes. So with ACS 1.0 what we did is we introduced native support for Docker integration. >> And pause there. And we screwed up. (laughing) So just like the market took a left turn on Kubernetes, obviously we realized that, and now we're working on ACS 2.0 which is what we're going to talk about, right? >> Exactly. So with ACS 2.0, we've introduced native Kubernetes support. Now when I think about Kubernetes, there's really two core areas that come to mind. The first one is around native integration. So with that, we have our Kubernetes volume integration, we're obviously doing a lot of work on the networking front, and we'll continue to push there from an integration point of view. Now the other piece is around the actual deployment of Kubernetes. When we think about a lot of Nutanix administrators or IT admins, they may have never deployed Kubernetes before, so this could be a very daunting task. And true to the Nutanix nature, we not only want to make our platform simple and intuitive, we also want to do this for any ecosystem products. So with ACS 2.0, we've simplified the full Kubernetes deployment and switching over to our ACS two interface, we can see this create cluster button. Now this actually pops up a full wizard. This wizard will actually walk you through the full deployment process, gather the necessary inputs for you, and in a matter of a few clicks and a few minutes, we have a full Kubernetes deployment fully provisioned, the masters, the workers, all the networking fully done for you, very simple and intuitive. Now if we hop back over to Prism, we can see we have this ACS2 Kubernetes category. Clicking on that, we can see we have eight instances of virtual machines. And here are Kubernetes virtual machines which have actually been deployed as part of this ACS2 installer. Now one of the nice things is it makes the IT administrator's job very simple and easy to do. The deployment straightforward monitoring and management very straightforward and simple. Now for the developer, the application architect, or engineers, they interface and interact with Kubernetes just like they would traditionally on any platform. >> Got it. So the goal of ACS is to ensure that the developer ecosystem still uses whatever tools that they are you know preferring while at that same time allowing this consolidation of containers along with VMs all on that same, single runtime, right? So that's ACS. And then if you think about where the OS is going, there's still some open space at the end. And open space has always been look if you just look at a public cloud, you look at blocks, files, containers, the most obvious sort of storage function that's left is objects. And that's the last horizon for us in completing the storage stack. And we're going to show you for the first time a preview of an upcoming product called the Acropolis Object Storage Services Stack. So let's talk a little bit about it and then maybe show the demo. >> Yeah, so just like we provided file services with AFS, block services with ABS, with OSS or Object Storage Services, we provide native object storage, compatibility and capability within the Nutanix platform. Now this provides a very simply common S3 API. So any integrations you've done with S3 especially Kubernetes, you can actually leverage that out of the box when you've deployed this. Now if we hop back over to Prism, I'll go here to my object stores menu. And here we can see we have two existing object storage instances which are running. So you can deploy however many of these as you wanted to. Now just like the Kubernetes deployment, deploying a new object instance is very simple and easy to do. So here I'll actually name this instance Thor's Hammer. >> You do know he loses it, right? He hasn't seen the movies yet. >> Yeah, I don't want any spoilers yet. So once we specified the name, we can choose our capacity. So here we'll just specify a large instance or type. Obviously this could be any amount or storage. So if you have a 200 node Nutanix cluster with petabytes worth of data, you could do that as well. Once we've selected that, we'll select our expected performance. And this is going to be the number of concurrent gets and puts. So essentially how many operations per second we want this instance to be able to facilitate. Once we've done that, the platform will actually automatically determine how many virtual machines it needs to deploy as well as the resources and specs for those. And once we've done that, we'll go ahead and click save. Now here we can see it's actually going through doing the deployment of the virtual machines, applying any necessary configuration, and in the matter of a few clicks and a few seconds, we actually have this Thor's Hammer object storage instance which is up and running. Now if we hop over to one of our existing object storage instances, we can see this has three buckets. So one for Kafka-queue, I'm actually using this for my Kafka cluster where I have right around 62 million objects all storing ProtoBus. The second one there is Spark. So I actually have a Spark cluster running on our Kubernetes deployed instance via ACS 2.0. Now this is doing analytics on top of this data using S3 as a storage backend. Now for these objects, we support native versioning, native object encryption as well as worm compliancy. So if you want to have expiry periods, retention intervals, that sort of thing, we can do all that. >> Got it. So essentially what we've just shown you is with upcoming objects as well that the same OS can now support VMs, files, objects, containers, all on the same one click operational fabric. And so that's in some way the real power of Nutanix is to still keep that consistency, scalability in place as we're covering each and every workload inside the enterprise. So before Steve gets off stage though, I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about something that you know how many of you been to our Nutanix headquarters in San Jose, California? A few. I know there's like, I don't know, 4,000 or 5,000 people here. If you do come to the office, you know when you land in San Jose Airport on the way to longterm parking, you'll pass our office. It's that close. And if you come to the fourth floor, you know one of the cubes that's where I sit. In the cube beside me is Steve. Steve sits in the cube beside me. And when I first joined the company, three or four years ago, and Steve's if you go to his cube, it no longer looks like this, but it used to have a lot of this stuff. It was like big containers of this. I remember the first time. Since I started joking about it, he started reducing it. And then Steve eventually got married much to our surprise. (audience laughing) Much to his wife's surprise. And then he also had a baby as a bigger surprise. And if you come over to our office, and we welcome you, and you come to the fourth floor, find my cube or you'll find Steve's Cube, it now looks like this. Okay, so thanks a lot, my man. >> Cool, thank you. >> Thanks so much. (audience clapping) >> So single OS, any workload. And like Steve who's been with us for awhile, it's my great pleasure to invite one of our favorite customers, CSC Karen who's also been with us for three to four years. And I'll share some fond memories about how she's been with the company for awhile, how as partners we've really done a lot together. So without any further ado, let me bring up Karen. Come on up, Karen. (rock music) >> Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, thank you. So I remember, so how many of you guys were with Nutanix first .Next in Miami? I know there was a question like that asked last time. Not too many. You missed it. We wished we could go back to that. We wouldn't fit 3/4s of this crowd. But Karen was our first customer in the keynote in 2015. And we had just talked about that story at that time where you're just become a customer. Do you want to give us some recap of that? >> Sure. So when we made the decision to move to hyperconverged infrastructure and chose Nutanix as our partner, we rapidly started to deploy. And what I mean by that is Sunil and some of the Nutanix executives had come out to visit with us and talk about their product on a Tuesday. And on a Wednesday after making the decision, I picked up the phone and said you know what I've got to deploy for my VDI cluster. So four nodes showed up on Thursday. And from the time it was plugged in to moving over 300 VDIs and 50 terabytes of storage and turning it over for the business for use was less than three days. So it was really excellent testament to how simple it is to start, and deploy, and utilize the Nutanix infrastructure. Now part of that was the delight that we experienced from our customers after that deployment. So we got phone calls where people were saying this report it used to take so long that I'd got out and get a cup of coffee and come back, and read an article, and do some email, and then finally it would finish. Those reports are running in milliseconds now. It's one click. It's very, very simple, and we've delighted our customers. Now across that journey, we have gone from the simple workloads like VDIs to the much more complex workloads around Splunk and Hadoop. And what's really interesting about our Splunk deployment is we're handling over a billion events being logged everyday. And the deployment is smaller than what we had with a three tiered infrastructure. So when you hear people talk about waste and getting that out and getting to an invisible environment where you're just able to run it, that's what we were able to achieve both with everything that we're running from our public facing websites to the back office operations that we're using which include Splunk and even most recently our Cloudera and Hadoop infrastructure. What it does is it's got 30 crawlers that go out on the internet and start bringing data back. So it comes back with over two terabytes of data everyday. And then that environment, ingests that data, does work against it, and responds to the business. And that again is something that's smaller than what we had on traditional infrastructure, and it's faster and more stable. >> Got it. And it covers a lot of use cases as well. You want to speak a few words on that? >> So the use cases, we're 90%, 95% deployed on Nutanix, and we're covering all of our use cases. So whether that's a customer facing app or a back office application. And what are business is doing is it's handling large portfolios of data for fortune 500 companies and law firms. And these applications are all running with improved stability, reliability, and performance on the Nutanix infrastructure. >> And the plan going forward? >> So the plan going forward, you actually asked me that in Miami, and it's go global. So when we started in Miami and that first deployment, we had four nodes. We now have 283 nodes around the world, and we started with about 50 terabytes of data. We've now got 3.8 petabytes of data. And we're deployed across four data centers and six remote offices. And people ask me often what is the value that we achieved? So simplification. It's all just easier, and it's all less expensive. Being able to scale with the business. So our Cloudera environment ended up with one day where it spiked to 1,000 times more load, 1,000 times, and it just responded. We had rally cries around improved productivity by six times. So 600% improved productivity, and we were able to actually achieve that. The numbers you just saw on the slide that was very, very fast was we calculated a 40% reduction in total cost of ownership. We've exceeded that. And when we talk about waste, that other number on the board there is when I saved the company one hour of maintenance activity or unplanned downtime in a month which we're now able to do the majority of our maintenance activities without disrupting any of our business solutions, I'm saving $750,000 each time I save that one hour. >> Wow. All right, Karen from CSE. Thank you so much. That was great. Thank you. I mean you know some of these data points frankly as I started talking to Karen as well as some other customers are pretty amazing in terms of the genuine value beyond financial value. Kind of like the emotional sort of benefits that good products deliver to some of our customers. And I think that's one of the core things that we take back into engineering is to keep ourselves honest on either velocity or quality even hiring people and so forth. Is to actually the more we touch customers lives, the more we touch our partner's lives, the more it allows us to ensure that we can put ourselves in their shoes to kind of make sure that we're doing the right thing in terms of the product. So that was the first part, invisible infrastructure. And our goal, as we've always talked about, our true North is to make sure that this single OS can be an exact replica, a truly modern, thoughtful but original design that brings the power of public cloud this AWS or GCP like architectures into your mainstream enterprises. And so when we take that to the next level which is about expanding the scope to go beyond invisible infrastructure to invisible data centers, it starts with a few things. Obviously, it starts with virtualization and a level of intelligent management, extends to automation, and then as we'll talk about, we have to embark on encompassing the network. And that's what we'll talk about with Flow. But to start this, let me again go back to one of our core products which is the bedrock of our you know opinionated design inside this company which is Prism and Acropolis. And Prism provides, I mentioned, comes with a ton of machine-learning based intelligence built into the product in 5.6 we've done a ton of work. In fact, a lot of features are coming out now because now that PC, Prism Central that you know has been decoupled from our mainstream release strain and will continue to release on its own cadence. And the same thing when you actually flip it to AHV on its own train. Now AHV, two years ago it was all about can I use AHV for VDI? Can I use AHV for ROBO? Now I'm pretty clear about where you cannot use AHV. If you need memory overcome it, stay with VMware or something. If you need, you know Metro, stay with another technology, else it's game on, right? And if you really look at the adoption of AHV in the mainstream enterprise, the customers now speak for themselves. These are all examples of large global enterprises with multimillion dollar ELAs in play that have now been switched over. Like I'll give you a simple example here, and there's lots of these that I'm sure many of you who are in the audience that are in this camp, but when you look at the breakout sessions in the pods, you'll get a sense of this. But I'll give you one simple example. If you look at the online payment company. I'm pretty sure everybody's used this at one time or the other. They had the world's largest private cloud on open stack, 21,000 nodes. And they were actually public about it three or four years ago. And in the last year and a half, they put us through a rigorous VOC testing scale, hardening, and it's a full blown AHV only stack. And they've started cutting over. Obviously they're not there yet completely, but they're now literally in hundreds of nodes of deployment of Nutanix with AHV as their primary operating system. So it is primetime from a deployment perspective. And with that as the base, no cloud is complete without actually having self-service provisioning that truly drives one-click automation, and can you do that in this consumer grade design? And Calm was acquired, as you guys know, in 2016. We had a choice of taking Calm. It was reasonably feature complete. It supported multiple clouds. It supported ESX, it supported Brownfield, It supported AHV. I mean they'd already done the integration with Nutanix even before the acquisition. And we had a choice. The choice was go down the path of dynamic ops or some other products where you took it for revenue or for acceleration, you plopped it into the ecosystem and sold it at this power sucking alien on top of our stack, right? Or we took a step back, re-engineered the product, kept some of the core essence like the workflow engine which was good, the automation, the object model and all, but refactored it to make it look like a natural extension of our operating system. And that's what we did with Calm. And we just launched it in December, and it's been one of our most popular new products now that's flying off the shelves. If you saw the number of registrants, I got a notification of this for the breakout sessions, the number one session that has been preregistered with over 500 people, the first two sessions are around Calm. And justifiably so because it just as it lives up to its promise, and it'll take its time to kind of get to all the bells and whistles, all the capabilities that have come through with AHV or Acropolis in the past. But the feature functionality, the product market fit associated with Calm is dead on from what the feedback that we can receive. And so Calm itself is on its own rapid cadence. We had AWS and AHV in the first release. Three or four months later, we now added ESX support. We added GCP support and a whole bunch of other capabilities, and I think the essence of Calm is if you can combine Calm and along with private cloud automation but also extend it to multi-cloud automation, it really sets Nutanix on its first genuine path towards multi-cloud. But then, as I said, if you really fixate on a software defined data center message, we're not complete as a full blown AWS or GCP like IA stack until we do the last horizon of networking. And you probably heard me say this before. You heard Dheeraj and others talk about it before is our problem in networking isn't the same in storage. Because the data plane in networking works. Good L2 switches from Cisco, Arista, and so forth, but the real problem networking is in the control plane. When something goes wrong at a VM level in Nutanix, you're able to identify whether it's a storage problem or a compute problem, but we don't know whether it's a VLAN that's mis-configured, or there've been some packets dropped at the top of the rack. Well that all ends now with Flow. And with Flow, essentially what we've now done is take the work that we've been working on to create built-in visibility, put some network automation so that you can actually provision VLANs when you provision VMs. And then augment it with micro segmentation policies all built in this easy to use, consume fashion. But we didn't stop there because we've been talking about Flow, at least the capabilities, over the last year. We spent significant resources building it. But we realized that we needed an additional thing to augment its value because the world of applications especially discovering application topologies is a heady problem. And if we didn't address that, we wouldn't be fulfilling on this ambition of providing one-click network segmentation. And so that's where Netsil comes in. Netsil might seem on the surface yet another next generation application performance management tool. But the innovations that came from Netsil started off at the research project at the University of Pennsylvania. And in fact, most of the team right now that's at Nutanix is from the U Penn research group. And they took a really original, fresh look at how do you sit in a network in a scale out fashion but still reverse engineer the packets, the flow through you, and then recreate this application topology. And recreate this not just on Nutanix, but do it seamlessly across multiple clouds. And to talk about the power of Flow augmented with Netsil, let's bring Rajiv back on stage, Rajiv. >> How you doing? >> Okay so we're going to start with some Netsil stuff, right? >> Yeah, let's talk about Netsil and some of the amazing capabilities this acquisition's bringing to Nutanix. First of all as you mentioned, Netsil's completely non invasive. So it installs on the network, it does all its magic from there. There're no host agents, non of the complexity and compatibility issues that entails. It's also monitoring the network at layer seven. So it's actually doing a deep packet inspection on all your application data, and can give you insights into services and APIs which is very important for modern applications and the way they behave. To do all this of course performance is key. So Netsil's built around a completely distributed architecture scaled to really large workloads. Very exciting technology. We're going to use it in many different ways at Nutanix. And to give you a flavor of that, let me show you how we're thinking of integrating Flow and Nestil together, so micro segmentation and Netsil. So to do that, we install Netsil in one of our Google accounts. And that's what's up here now. It went out there. It discovered all the VMs we're running on that account. It created a map essentially of all their interactions, and you can see it's like a Google Maps view. I can zoom into it. I can look at various things running. I can see lots of HTTP servers over here, some databases. >> Sunil: And it also has stats, right? You can go, it actually-- >> It does. We can take a look at that for a second. There are some stats you can look at right away here. Things like transactions per second and latencies and so on. But if I wanted to micro segment this application, it's not really clear how to do so. There's no real pattern over here. Taking the Google Maps analogy a little further, this kind of looks like the backstreets of Cairo or something. So let's do this step by step. Let me first filter down to one application. Right now I'm looking at about three or four different applications. And Netsil integrates with the metadata. So this is that the clouds provide. So I can search all the tags that I have. So by doing that, I can zoom in on just the financial application. And when I do this, the view gets a little bit simpler, but there's still no real pattern. It's not clear how to micro segment this, right? And this is where the power of Netsil comes in. This is a fairly naive view. This is what tool operating at layer four just looking at ports and TCP traffic would give you. But by doing deep packet inspection, Netsil can get into the services layer. So instead of grouping these interactions by hostname, let's group them by service. So you go service tier. And now you can see this is a much simpler picture. Now I have some patterns. I have a couple of load balancers, an HA proxy and an Nginx. I have a web application front end. I have some application servers running authentication services, search services, et cetera, a database, and a database replica. I could go ahead and micro segment at this point. It's quite possible to do it at this point. But this is almost too granular a view. We actually don't usually want to micro segment at individual service level. You think more in terms of application tiers, the tiers that different services belong to. So let me go ahead and group this differently. Let me group this by app tier. And when I do that, a really simple picture emerges. I have a load balancing tier talking to a web application front end tier, an API tier, and a database tier. Four tiers in my application. And this is something I can work with. This is something that I can micro segment fairly easily. So let's switch over to-- >> Before we dot that though, do you guys see how he gave himself the pseudonym called Dom Toretto? >> Focus Sunil, focus. >> Yeah, for those guys, you know that's not the Avengers theme, man, that's the Fast and Furious theme. >> Rajiv: I think a year ahead. This is next years theme. >> Got it, okay. So before we cut over from Netsil to Flow, do we want to talk a few words about the power of Flow, and what's available in 5.6? >> Sure so Flow's been around since the 5.6 release. Actually some of the functionality came in before that. So it's got invisibility into the network. It helps you debug problems with WLANs and so on. We had a lot of orchestration with other third party vendors with load balancers, with switches to make publishing much simpler. And then of course with our most recent release, we GA'ed our micro segmentation capabilities. And that of course is the most important feature we have in Flow right now. And if you look at how Flow policy is set up, it looks very similar to what we just saw with Netsil. So we have load blancer talking to a web app, API, database. It's almost identical to what we saw just a moment ago. So while this policy was created manually, it is something that we can automate. And it is something that we will do in future releases. Right now, it's of course not been integrated at that level yet. So this was created manually. So one thing you'll notice over here is that the database tier doesn't get any direct traffic from the internet. All internet traffic goes to the load balancer, only specific services then talk to the database. So this policy right now is in monitoring mode. It's not actually being enforced. So let's see what happens if I try to attack the database, I start a hack against the database. And I have my trusty brute force password script over here. It's trying the most common passwords against the database. And if I happen to choose a dictionary word or left the default passwords on, eventually it will log into the database. And when I go back over here in Flow what happens is it actually detects there's now an ongoing a flow, a flow that's outside of policy that's shown up. And it shows this in yellow. So right alongside the policy, I can visualize all the noncompliant flows. This makes it really easy for me now to make decisions, does this flow should it be part of the policy, should it not? In this particular case, obviously it should not be part of the policy. So let me just switch from monitoring mode to enforcement mode. I'll apply the policy, give it a second to propagate. The flow goes away. And if I go back to my script, you can see now the socket's timing out. I can no longer connect to the database. >> Sunil: Got it. So that's like one click segmentation and play right now? >> Absolutely. It's really, really simple. You can compare it to other products in the space. You can't get simpler than this. >> Got it. Why don't we got back and talk a little bit more about, so that's Flow. It's shipping now in 5.6 obviously. It'll come integrated with Netsil functionality as well as a variety of other enhancements in that next few releases. But Netsil does more than just simple topology discovery, right? >> Absolutely. So Netsil's actually gathering a lot of metrics from your network, from your host, all this goes through a data pipeline. It gets processed over there and then gets captured in a time series database. And then we can slice and dice that in various different ways. It can be used for all kinds of insights. So let's see how our application's behaving. So let me say I want to go into the API layer over here. And I instantly get a variety of metrics on how the application's behaving. I get the most requested endpoints. I get the average latency. It looks reasonably good. I get the average latency of the slowest endpoints. If I was having a performance problem, I would know exactly where to go focus on. Right now, things look very good, so we won't focus on that. But scrolling back up, I notice that we have a fairly high error rate happening. We have like 11.35% of our HTTP requests are generating errors, and that deserves some attention. And if I scroll down again, and I see the top five status codes I'm getting, almost 10% of my requests are generating 500 errors, HTTP 500 errors which are internal server errors. So there's something going on that's wrong with this application. So let's dig a little bit deeper into that. Let me go into my analytics workbench over here. And what I've plotted over here is how my HTTP requests are behaving over time. Let me filter down to just the 500 ones. That will make it easier. And I want the 500s. And I'll also group this by the service tier so that I can see which services are causing the problem. And the better view for this would be a bar graph. Yes, so once I do this, you can see that all the errors, all the 500 errors that we're seeing have been caused by the authentication service. So something's obviously wrong with that part of my application. I can go look at whether Active Directory is misbehaving and so on. So very quickly from a broad problem that I was getting a high HTTP error rate. In fact, usually you will discover there's this customer complaining about a lot of errors happening in your application. You can quickly narrow down to exactly what the cause was. >> Got it. This is what we mean by hyperconvergence of the network which is if you can truly isolate network related problems and associate them with the rest of the hyperconvergence infrastructure, then we've essentially started making real progress towards the next level of hyperconvergence. Anyway, thanks a lot, man. Great job. >> Thanks, man. (audience clapping) >> So to talk about this evolution from invisible infrastructure to invisible data centers is another customer of ours that has embarked on this journey. And you know it's not just using Nutanix but a variety of other tools to actually fulfill sort of like the ambition of a full blown cloud stack within a financial organization. And to talk more about that, let me call Vijay onstage. Come on up, Vijay. (rock music) >> Hey. >> Thank you, sir. So Vijay looks way better in real life than in a picture by the way. >> Except a little bit of gray. >> Unlike me. So tell me a little bit about this cloud initiative. >> Yeah. So we've won the best cloud initiative twice now hosted by Incisive media a large magazine. It's basically they host a bunch of you know various buy side, sell side, and you can submit projects in various categories. So we've won the best cloud twice now, 2015 and 2017. The 2017 award is when you know as part of our private cloud journey we were laying the foundation for our private cloud which is 100% based on hyperconverged infrastructure. So that was that award. And then 2017, we've kind of built on that foundation and built more developer-centric next gen app services like PAS, CAS, SDN, SDS, CICD, et cetera. So we've built a lot of those services on, and the second award was really related to that. >> Got it. And a lot of this was obviously based on an infrastructure strategy with some guiding principles that you guys had about three or four years ago if I remember. >> Yeah, this is a great slide. I use it very often. At the core of our infrastructure strategy is how do we run IT as a business? I talk about this with my teams, they were very familiar with this. That's the mindset that I instill within the teams. The mission, the challenge is the same which is how do we scale infrastructure while reducing total cost of ownership, improving time to market, improving client experience and while we're doing that not lose sight of reliability, stability, and security? That's the mission. Those are some of our guiding principles. Whenever we take on some large technology investments, we take 'em through those lenses. Obviously Nutanix went through those lenses when we invested in you guys many, many years ago. And you guys checked all the boxes. And you know initiatives change year on year, the mission remains the same. And more recently, the last few years, we've been focused on converged platforms, converged teams. We've actually reorganized our teams and aligned them closer to the platforms moving closer to an SRE like concept. >> And then you've built out a full stack now across computer storage, networking, all the way with various use cases in play? >> Yeah, and we're aggressively moving towards PAS, CAS as our method of either developing brand new cloud native applications or even containerizing existing applications. So the stack you know obviously built on Nutanix, SDS for software fine storage, compute and networking we've got SDN turned on. We've got, again, PAS and CAS built on this platform. And then finally, we've hooked our CICD tooling onto this. And again, the big picture was always frictionless infrastructure which we're very close to now. You know 100% of our code deployments into this environment are automated. >> Got it. And so what's the net, net in terms of obviously the business takeaway here? >> Yeah so at Northern we don't do tech for tech. It has to be some business benefits, client benefits. There has to be some outcomes that we measure ourselves against, and these are some great metrics or great ways to look at if we're getting the outcomes from the investments we're making. So for example, infrastructure scale while reducing total cost of ownership. We're very focused on total cost of ownership. We, for example, there was a build team that was very focus on building servers, deploying applications. That team's gone down from I think 40, 45 people to about 15 people as one example, one metric. Another metric for reducing TCO is we've been able to absorb additional capacity without increasing operating expenses. So you're actually building capacity in scale within your operating model. So that's another example. Another example, right here you see on the screen. Faster time to market. We've got various types of applications at any given point that we're deploying. There's a next gen cloud native which go directly on PAS. But then a majority of the applications still need the traditional IS components. The time to market to deploy a complex multi environment, multi data center application, we've taken that down by 60%. So we can deliver server same day, but we can deliver entire environments, you know add it to backup, add it to DNS, and fully compliant within a couple of weeks which is you know something we measure very closely. >> Great job, man. I mean that's a compelling I think results. And in the journey obviously you got promoted a few times. >> Yep. >> All right, congratulations again. >> Thank you. >> Thanks Vijay. >> Hey Vijay, come back here. Actually we forgot our joke. So razzled by his data points there. So you're supposed to wear some shoes, right? >> I know my inner glitch. I was going to wear those sneakers, but I forgot them at the office maybe for the right reasons. But the story behind those florescent sneakers, I see they're focused on my shoes. But I picked those up two years ago at a Next event, and not my style. I took 'em to my office. They've been sitting in my office for the last couple years. >> Who's received shoes like these by the way? I'm sure you guys have received shoes like these. There's some real fans there. >> So again, I'm sure many of you liked them. I had 'em in my office. I've offered it to so many of my engineers. Are you size 11? Do you want these? And they're unclaimed? >> So that's the only feature of Nutanix that you-- >> That's the only thing that hasn't worked, other than that things are going extremely well. >> Good job, man. Thanks a lot. >> Thanks. >> Thanks Vijay. So as we get to the final phase which is obviously as we embark on this multi-cloud journey and the complexity that comes with it which Dheeraj hinted towards in his session. You know we have to take a cautious, thoughtful approach here because we don't want to over set expectations because this will take us five, 10 years to really do a good job like we've done in the first act. And the good news is that the market is also really, really early here. It's just a fact. And so we've taken a tiered approach to it as we'll start the discussion with multi-cloud operations, and we've talked about the stack in the prior session which is about look across new clouds. So it's no longer Nutanix, Dell, Lenova, HP, Cisco as the new quote, unquote platforms. It's Nutanix, Xi, GCP, AWS, Azure as the new platforms. That's how we're designing the fabric going forward. On top of that, you obviously have the hybrid OS both on the data plane side and control plane side. Then what you're seeing with the advent of Calm doing a marketplace and automation as well as Beam doing governance and compliance is the fact that you'll see more and more such capabilities of multi-cloud operations burnt into the platform. And example of that is Calm with the new 5.7 release that they had. Launch supports multiple clouds both inside and outside, but the fundamental premise of Calm in the multi-cloud use case is to enable you to choose the right cloud for the right workload. That's the automation part. On the governance part, and this we kind of went through in the last half an hour with Dheeraj and Vijay on stage is something that's even more, if I can call it, you know first order because you get the provisioning and operations second. The first order is to say look whatever my developers have consumed off public cloud, I just need to first get our arm around to make sure that you know what am I spending, am I secure, and then when I get comfortable, then I am able to actually expand on it. And that's the power of Beam. And both Beam and Calm will be the yin and yang for us in our multi-cloud portfolio. And we'll have new products to complement that down the road, right? But along the way, that's the whole private cloud, public cloud. They're the two ends of the barbell, and over time, and we've been working on Xi for awhile, is this conviction that we've built talking to many customers that there needs to be another type of cloud. And this type of a cloud has to feel like a public cloud. It has to be architected like a public cloud, be consumed like a public cloud, but it needs to be an extension of my data center. It should not require any changes to my tooling. It should not require and changes to my operational infrastructure, and it should not require lift and shift, and that's a super hard problem. And this problem is something that a chunk of our R and D team has been burning the midnight wick on for the last year and a half. Because look this is not about taking our current OS which does a good job of scaling and plopping it into a Equinix or a third party data center and calling it a hybrid cloud. This is about rebuilding things in the OS so that we can deliver a true hybrid cloud, but at the same time, give those functionality back on premises so that even if you don't have a hybrid cloud, if you just have your own data centers, you'll still need new services like DR. And if you think about it, what are we doing? We're building a full blown multi-tenant virtual network designed in a modern way. Think about this SDN 2.0 because we have 10 years worth of looking backwards on how GCP has done it, or how Amazon has done it, and now sort of embodying some of that so that we can actually give it as part of this cloud, but do it in a way that's a seamless extension of the data center, and then at the same time, provide new services that have never been delivered before. Everyone obviously does failover and failback in DR it just takes months to do it. Our goal is to do it in hours or minutes. But even things such as test. Imagine doing a DR test on demand for you business needs in the middle of the day. And that's the real bar that we've set for Xi that we are working towards in early access later this summer with GA later in the year. And to talk more about this, let me invite some of our core architects working on it, Melina and Rajiv. (rock music) Good to see you guys. >> You're messing up the names again. >> Oh Rajiv, Vinny, same thing, man. >> You need to back up your memory from Xi. >> Yeah, we should. Okay, so what are we going to talk about, Vinny? >> Yeah, exactly. So today we're going to talk about how Xi is pushing the envelope and beyond the state of the art as you were saying in the industry. As part of that, there's a whole bunch of things that we have done starting with taking a private cloud, seamlessly extending it to the public cloud, and then creating a hybrid cloud experience with one-click delight. We're going to show that. We've done a whole bunch of engineering work on making sure the operations and the tooling is identical on both sides. When you graduate from a private cloud to a hybrid cloud environment, you don't want the environments to be different. So we've copied the environment for you with zero manual intervention. And finally, building on top of that, we are delivering DR as a service with unprecedented simplicity with one-click failover, one-click failback. We're going to show you one click test today. So Melina, why don't we start with showing how you go from a private cloud, seamlessly extend it to consume Xi. >> Sounds good, thanks Vinny. Right now, you're looking at my Prism interface for my on premises cluster. In one-click, I'm going to be able to extend that to my Xi cloud services account. I'm doing this using my my Nutanix credential and a password manager. >> Vinny: So here as you notice all the Nutanix customers we have today, we have created an account for them in Xi by default. So you don't have to log in somewhere and create an account. It's there by default. >> Melina: And just like that we've gone ahead and extended my data center. But let's go take a look at the Xi side and log in again with my my Nutanix credentials. We'll see what we have over here. We're going to be able to see two availability zones, one for on premises and one for Xi right here. >> Vinny: Yeah as you see, using a log in account that you already knew mynutanix.com and 30 seconds in, you can see that you have a hybrid cloud view already. You have a private cloud availability zone that's your own Prism central data center view, and then a Xi availability zone. >> Sunil: Got it. >> Melina: Exactly. But of course we want to extend my network connection from on premises to my Xi networks as well. So let's take a look at our options there. We have two ways of doing this. Both are one-click experience. With direct connect, you can create a dedicated network connection between both environments, or VPN you can use a public internet and a VPN service. Let's go ahead and enable VPN in this environment. Here we have two options for how we want to enable our VPN. We can bring our own VPN and connect it, or we will deploy a VPN for you on premises. We'll do the option where we deploy the VPN in one-click. >> And this is another small sign or feature that we're building net new as part of Xi, but will be burned into our core Acropolis OS so that we can also be delivering this as a stand alone product for on premises deployment as well, right? So that's one of the other things to note as you guys look at the Xi functionality. The goal is to keep the OS capabilities the same on both sides. So even if I'm building a quote, unquote multi data center cloud, but it's just a private cloud, you'll still get all the benefits of Xi but in house. >> Exactly. And on this second step of the wizard, there's a few inputs around how you want the gateway configured, your VLAN information and routing and protocol configuration details. Let's go ahead and save it. >> Vinny: So right now, you know what's happening is we're taking the private network that our customers have on premises and extending it to a multi-tenant public cloud such that our customers can use their IP addresses, the subnets, and bring their own IP. And that is another step towards making sure the operation and tooling is kept consistent on both sides. >> Melina: Exactly. And just while you guys were talking, the VPN was successfully created on premises. And we can see the details right here. You can track details like the status of the connection, the gateway, as well as bandwidth information right in the same UI. >> Vinny: And networking is just tip of the iceberg of what we've had to work on to make sure that you get a consistent experience on both sides. So Melina, why don't we show some of the other things we've done? >> Melina: Sure, to talk about how we preserve entities from my on-premises to Xi, it's better to use my production environment. And first thing you might notice is the log in screen's a little bit different. But that's because I'm logging in using my ADFS credentials. The first thing we preserved was our users. In production, I'm running AD obviously on-prem. And now we can log in here with the same set of credentials. Let me just refresh this. >> And this is the Active Directory credential that our customers would have. They use it on-premises. And we allow the setting to be set on the Xi cloud services as well, so it's the same set of users that can access both sides. >> Got it. There's always going to be some networking problem onstage. It's meant to happen. >> There you go. >> Just launching it again here. I think it maybe timed out. This is a good sign that we're running on time with this presentation. >> Yeah, yeah, we're running ahead of time. >> Move the demos quicker, then we'll time out. So essentially when you log into Xi, you'll be able to see what are the environment capabilities that we have copied to the Xi environment. So for example, you just saw that the same user is being used to log in. But after the use logs in, you'll be able to see their images, for example, copied to the Xi side. You'll be able to see their policies and categories. You know when you define these policies on premises, you spend a lot of effort and create them. And now when you're extending to the public cloud, you don't want to do it again, right? So we've done a whole lot of syncing mechanisms making sure that the two sides are consistent. >> Got it. And on top of these policies, the next step is to also show capabilities to actually do failover and failback, but also do integrated testing as part of this compatibility. >> So one is you know just the basic job of making the environments consistent on two sides, but then it's also now talking about the data part, and that's what DR is about. So if you have a workload running on premises, we can take the data and replicate it using your policies that we've already synced. Once the data is available on the Xi side, at that point, you have to define a run book. And the run book essentially it's a recovery plan. And that says okay I already have the backups of my VMs in case of disaster. I can take my recovery plan and hit you know either failover or maybe a test. And then my application comes up. First of all, you'll talk about the boot order for your VMs to come up. You'll talk about networking mapping. Like when I'm running on-prem, you're using a particular subnet. You have an option of using the same subnet on the Xi side. >> Melina: There you go. >> What happened? >> Sunil: It's finally working.? >> Melina: Yeah. >> Vinny, you can stop talking. (audience clapping) By the way, this is logging into a live Xi data center. We have two regions West Coat, two data centers East Coast, two data centers. So everything that you're seeing is essentially coming off the mainstream Xi profile. >> Vinny: Melina, why don't we show the recovery plan. That's the most interesting piece here. >> Sure. The recovery plan is set up to help you specify how you want to recover your applications in the event of a failover or a test failover. And it specifies all sorts of details like the boot sequence for the VMs as well as network mappings. Some of the network mappings are things like the production network I have running on premises and how it maps to my production network on Xi or the test network to the test network. What's really cool here though is we're actually automatically creating your subnets on Xi from your on premises subnets. All that's part of the recovery plan. While we're on the screen, take a note of the .100 IP address. That's a floating IP address that I have set up to ensure that I'm going to be able to access my three tier web app that I have protected with this plan after a failover. So I'll be able to access it from the public internet really easily from my phone or check that it's all running. >> Right, so given how we make the environment consistent on both sides, now we're able to create a very simple DR experience including failover in one-click, failback. But we're going to show you test now. So Melina, let's talk about test because that's one of the most common operations you would do. Like some of our customers do it every month. But usually it's very hard. So let's see how the experience looks like in what we built. >> Sure. Test and failover are both one-click experiences as you know and come to expect from Nutanix. You can see it's failing over from my primary location to my recovery location. Now what we're doing right now is we're running a series of validation checks because we want to make sure that you have your network configured properly, and there's other configuration details in place for the test to be successful. Looks like the failover was initiated successfully. Now while that failover's happening though, let's make sure that I'm going to be able to access my three tier web app once it fails over. We'll do that by looking at my network policies that I've configured on my test network. Because I want to access the application from the public internet but only port 80. And if we look here under our policies, you can see I have port 80 open to permit. So that's good. And if I needed to create a new one, I could in one click. But it looks like we're good to go. Let's go back and check the status of my recovery plan. We click in, and what's really cool here is you can actually see the individual tasks as they're being completed from that initial validation test to individual VMs being powered on as part of the recovery plan. >> And to give you guys an idea behind the scenes, the entire recovery plan is actually a set of workflows that are built on Calm's automation engine. So this is an example of where we're taking some of power of workflow and automation that Clam has come to be really strong at and burning that into how we actually operationalize many of these workflows for Xi. >> And so great, while you were explaining that, my three tier web app has restarted here on Xi right in front of you. And you can see here there's a floating IP that I mentioned early that .100 IP address. But let's go ahead and launch the console and make sure the application started up correctly. >> Vinny: Yeah, so that .100 IP address is a floating IP that's a publicly visible IP. So it's listed here, 206.80.146.100. And that's essentially anybody in the audience here can go use your laptop or your cell phone and hit that and start to work. >> Yeah so by the way, just to give you guys an idea while you guys maybe use the IP to kind of hit it, is a real set of VMs that we've just failed over from Nutanix's corporate data center into our West region. >> And this is running live on the Xi cloud. >> Yeah, you guys should all go and vote. I'm a little biased towards Xi, so vote for Xi. But all of them are really good features. >> Scroll up a little bit. Let's see where Xi is. >> Oh Xi's here. I'll scroll down a little bit, but keep the... >> Vinny: Yes. >> Sunil: You guys written a block or something? >> Melina: Oh good, it looks like Xi's winning. >> Sunil: Okay, great job, Melina. Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Melina. >> Melina: Thanks. >> Thank you, great job. Cool and calm under pressure. That's good. So that was Xi. What's something that you know we've been doing around you know in addition to taking say our own extended enterprise public cloud with Xi. You know we do recognize that there are a ton of workloads that are going to be residing on AWS, GCP, Azure. And to sort of really assist in the try and call it transformation of enterprises to choose the right cloud for the right workload. If you guys remember, we actually invested in a tool over last year which became actually quite like one of those products that took off based on you know groundswell movement. Most of you guys started using it. It's essentially extract for VMs. And it was this product that's obviously free. It's a tool. But it enables customers to really save tons of time to actually migrate from legacy environments to Nutanix. So we took that same framework, obviously re-platformed it for the multi-cloud world to kind of solve the problem of migrating from AWS or GCP to Nutanix or vice versa. >> Right, so you know, Sunil as you said, moving from a private cloud to the public cloud is a lift and shift, and it's a hard you know operation. But moving back is not only expensive, it's a very hard problem. None of the cloud vendors provide change block tracking capability. And what that means is when you have to move back from the cloud, you have an extended period of downtime because there's now way of figuring out what's changing while you're moving. So you have to keep it down. So what we've done with our app mobility product is we have made sure that, one, it's extremely simple to move back. Two, that the downtime that you'll have is as small as possible. So let me show you what we've done. >> Got it. >> So here is our app mobility capability. As you can see, on the left hand side we have a source environment and target environment. So I'm calling my AWS environment Asgard. And I can add more environments. It's very simple. I can select AWS and then put in my credentials for AWS. It essentially goes and discovers all the VMs that are running and all the regions that they're running. Target environment, this is my Nutanix environment. I call it Earth. And I can add target environment similarly, IP address and credentials, and we do the rest. Right, okay. Now migration plans. I have Bifrost one as my migration plan, and this is how migration works. First you create a plan and then say start seeding. And what it does is takes a snapshot of what's running in the cloud and starts migrating it to on-prem. Once it is an on-prem and the difference between the two sides is minimal, it says I'm ready to cutover. At that time, you move it. But let me show you how you'd create a new migration plan. So let me name it, Bifrost 2. Okay so what I have to do is select a region, so US West 1, and target Earth as my cluster. This is my storage container there. And very quickly you can see these are the VMs that are running in US West 1 in AWS. I can select SQL server one and two, go to next. Right now it's looking at the target Nutanix environment and seeing it had enough space or not. Once that's good, it gives me an option. And this is the step where it enables the Nutanix service of change block tracking overlaid on top of the cloud. There are two options one is automatic where you'll give us the credentials for your VMs, and we'll inject our capability there. Or manually you could do. You could copy the command either in a windows VM or Linux VM and run it once on the VM. And change block tracking since then in enabled. Everything is seamless after that. Hit next. >> And while Vinny's setting it up, he said a few things there. I don't know if you guys caught it. One of the hardest problems in enabling seamless migration from public cloud to on-prem which makes it harder than the other way around is the fact that public cloud doesn't have things like change block tracking. You can't get delta copies. So one of the core innovations being built in this app mobility product is to provide that overlay capability across multiple clouds. >> Yeah, and the last step here was to select the target network where the VMs will come up on the Nutanix environment, and this is a summary of the migration plan. You can start it or just save it. I'm saving it because it takes time to do the seeding. I have the other plan which I'll actually show the cutover with. Okay so now this is Bifrost 1. It's ready to cutover. We started it four hours ago. And here you can see there's a SQL server 003. Okay, now I would like to show the AWS environment. As you can see, SQL server 003. This VM is actually running in AWS right now. And if you go to the Prism environment, and if my login works, right? So we can go into the virtual machine view, tables, and you see the VM is not there. Okay, so we go back to this, and we can hit cutover. So this is essentially telling our system, okay now it the time. Quiesce the VM running in AWS, take the last bit of changes that you have to the database, ship it to on-prem, and in on-prem now start you know configure the target VM and start bringing it up. So let's go and look at AWS and refresh that screen. And you should see, okay so the SQL server is now stopping. So that means it has quiesced and stopping the VM there. If you go back and look at the migration plan that we had, it says it's completed. So it has actually migrated all the data to the on-prem side. Go here on-prem, you see the production SQL server is running already. I can click launch console, and let's see. The Windows VM is already booting up. >> So essentially what Vinny just showed was a live cutover of an AWS VM to Nutanix on-premises. >> Yeah, and what we have done. (audience clapping) So essentially, this is about making two things possible, making it simple to migrate from cloud to on-prem, and making it painless so that the downtime you have is very minimal. >> Got it, great job, Vinny. I won't forget your name again. So last step. So to really talk about this, one of our favorite partners and customers has been in the cloud environment for a long time. And you know Jason who's the CTO of Cyxtera. And he'll introduce who Cyxtera is. Most of you guys are probably either using their assets or not without knowing their you know the new name. But is someone that was in the cloud before it was called cloud as one of the original founders and technologists behind Terremark, and then later as one of the chief architects of VMware's cloud. And then they started this new company about a year or so ago which I'll let Jason talk about. This journey that he's going to talk about is how a partner, slash customer is working with us to deliver net new transformations around the traditional industry of colo. Okay, to talk more about it, Jason, why don't you come up on stage, man? (rock music) Thank you, sir. All right so Cyxtera obviously a lot of people don't know the name. Maybe just give a 10 second summary of why you're so big already. >> Sure, so Cyxtera was formed, as you said, about a year ago through the acquisition of the CenturyLink data centers. >> Sunil: Which includes Savvis and a whole bunch of other assets. >> Yeah, there's a long history of those data centers, but we have all of them now as well as the software companies owned by Medina capital. So we're like the world's biggest startup now. So we have over 50 data centers around the world, about 3,500 customers, and a portfolio of security and analytics software. >> Sunil: Got it, and so you have this strategy of what we're calling revolutionizing colo deliver a cloud based-- >> Yeah so, colo hasn't really changed a lot in the last 20 years. And to be fair, a lot of what happens in data centers has to have a person physically go and do it. But there are some things that we can simplify and automate. So we want to make things more software driven, so that's what we're doing with the Cyxtera extensible data center or CXD. And to do that, we're deploying software defined networks in our facilities and developing automations so customers can go and provision data center services and the network connectivity through a portal or through REST APIs. >> Got it, and what's different now? I know there's a whole bunch of benefits with the integrated platform that one would not get in the traditional kind of on demand data center environment. >> Sure. So one of the first services we're launching on CXD is compute on demand, and it's powered by Nutanix. And we had to pick an HCI partner to launch with. And we looked at players in the space. And as you mentioned, there's actually a lot of them, more than I thought. And we had a lot of conversations, did a lot of testing in the lab, and Nutanix really stood out as the best choice. You know Nutanix has a lot of focus on things like ease of deployment. So it's very simple for us to automate deploying compute for customers. So we can use foundation APIs to go configure the servers, and then we turn those over to the customer which they can then manage through Prism. And something important to keep in mind here is that you know this isn't a manged service. This isn't infrastructure as a service. The customer has complete control over the Nutanix platform. So we're turning that over to them. It's connected to their network. They're using their IP addresses, you know their tools and processes to operate this. So it was really important for the platform we picked to have a really good self-service story for things like you know lifecycle management. So with one-click upgrade, customers have total control over patches and upgrades. They don't have to call us to do it. You know they can drive that themselves. >> Got it. Any other final words around like what do you see of the partnership going forward? >> Well you know I think this would be a great platform for Xi, so I think we should probably talk about that. >> Yeah, yeah, we should talk about that separately. Thanks a lot, Jason. >> Thanks. >> All right, man. (audience clapping) So as we look at the full journey now between obviously from invisible infrastructure to invisible clouds, you know there is one thing though to take away beyond many updates that we've had so far. And the fact is that everything that I've talked about so far is about completing a full blown true IA stack from all the way from compute to storage, to vitualization, containers to network services, and so forth. But every public cloud, a true cloud in that sense, has a full blown layer of services that's set on top either for traditional workloads or for new workloads, whether it be machine-learning, whether it be big data, you know name it, right? And in the enterprise, if you think about it, many of these services are being provisioned or provided through a bunch of our partners. Like we have partnerships with Cloudera for big data and so forth. But then based on some customer feedback and a lot of attention from what we've seen in the industry go out, just like AWS, and GCP, and Azure, it's time for Nutanix to have an opinionated view of the past stack. It's time for us to kind of move up the stack with our own offering that obviously adds value but provides some of our core competencies in data and takes it to the next level. And it's in that sense that we're actually launching Nutanix Era to simplify one of the hardest problems in enterprise IT and short of saving you from true Oracle licensing, it solves various other Oracle problems which is about truly simplifying databases much like what RDS did on AWS, imagine enterprise RDS on demand where you can provision, lifecycle manage your database with one-click. And to talk about this powerful new functionality, let me invite Bala and John on stage to give you one final demo. (rock music) Good to see you guys. >> Yep, thank you. >> All right, so we've got lots of folks here. They're all anxious to get to the next level. So this demo, really rock it. So what are we going to talk about? We're going to start with say maybe some database provisioning? Do you want to set it up? >> We have one dream, Sunil, one single dream to pass you off, that is what Nutanix is today for IT apps, we want to recreate that magic for devops and get back those weekends and freedom to DBAs. >> Got it. Let's start with, what, provisioning? >> Bala: Yep, John. >> Yeah, we're going to get in provisioning. So provisioning databases inside the enterprise is a significant undertaking that usually involves a myriad of resources and could take days. It doesn't get any easier after that for the longterm maintence with things like upgrades and environment refreshes and so on. Bala and team have been working on this challenge for quite awhile now. So we've architected Nutanix Era to cater to these enterprise use cases and make it one-click like you said. And Bala and I are so excited to finally show this to the world. We think it's actually Nutanix's best kept secrets. >> Got it, all right man, let's take a look at it. >> So we're going to be provisioning a sales database today. It's a four-step workflow. The first part is choosing our database engine. And since it's our sales database, we want it to be highly available. So we'll do a two node rack configuration. From there, it asks us where we want to land this service. We can either land it on an existing service that's already been provisioned, or if we're starting net new or for whatever reason, we can create a new service for it. The key thing here is we're not asking anybody how to do the work, we're asking what work you want done. And the other key thing here is we've architected this concept called profiles. So you tell us how much resources you need as well as what network type you want and what software revision you want. This is actually controlled by the DBAs. So DBAs, and compute administrators, and network administrators, so they can set their standards without having a DBA. >> Sunil: Got it, okay, let's take a look. >> John: So if we go to the next piece here, it's going to personalize their database. The key thing here, again, is that we're not asking you how many data files you want or anything in that regard. So we're going to be provisioning this to Nutanix's best practices. And the key thing there is just like these past services you don't have to read dozens of pages of best practice guides, it just does what's best for the platform. >> Sunil: Got it. And so these are a multitude of provisioning steps that normally one would take I guess hours if not days to provision and Oracle RAC data. >> John: Yeah, across multiple teams too. So if you think about the lifecycle especially if you have onshore and offshore resources, I mean this might even be longer than days. >> Sunil: Got it. And then there are a few steps here, and we'll lead into potentially the Time Machine construct too? >> John: Yeah, so since this is a critical database, we want data protection. So we're going to be delivering that through a feature called Time Machines. We'll leave this at the defaults for now, but the key thing to not here is we've got SLAs that deliver both continuous data protection as well as telescoping checkpoints for historical recovery. >> Sunil: Got it. So that's provisioning. We've kicked off Oracle, what, two node database and so forth? >> John: Yep, two node database. So we've got a handful of tasks that this is going to automate. We'll check back in in a few minutes. >> Got it. Why don't we talk about the other aspects then, Bala, maybe around, one of the things that, you know and I know many of you guys have seen this, is the fact that if you look at database especially Oracle but in general even SQL and so forth is the fact that look if you really simplified it to a developer, it should be as simple as I copy my production database, and I paste it to create my own dev instance. And whenever I need it, I need to obviously do it the opposite way, right? So that was the goal that we set ahead for us to actually deliver this new past service around Era for our customers. So you want to talk a little bit more about it? >> Sure Sunil. If you look at most of the data management functionality, they're pretty much like flavors of copy paste operations on database entities. But the trouble is the seemingly simple, innocuous operations of our daily lives becomes the most dreaded, complex, long running, error prone operations in data center. So we actually planned to tame this complexity and bring consumer grade simplicity to these operations, also make these clones extremely efficient without compromising the quality of service. And the best part is, the customers can enjoy these services not only for databases running on Nutanix, but also for databases running on third party systems. >> Got it. So let's take a look at this functionality of I guess snapshoting, clone and recovery that you've now built into the product. >> Right. So now if you see the core feature of this whole product is something we call Time Machine. Time Machine lets the database administrators actually capture the database tape to the granularity of seconds and also lets them create clones, refresh them to any point in time, and also recover the databases if the databases are running on the same Nutanix platform. Let's take a look at the demo with the Time Machine. So here is our customer relationship database management database which is about 2.3 terabytes. If you see, the Time Machine has been active about four months, and SLA has been set for continuously code revision of 30 days and then slowly tapers off 30 days of daily backup and weekly backups and so on, so forth. On the right hand side, you will see different colors. The green color is pretty much your continuously code revision, what we call them. That lets you to go back to any point in time to the granularity of seconds within those 30 days. And then the discreet code revision lets you go back to any snapshot of the backup that is maintained there kind of stuff. In a way, you see this Time Machine is pretty much like your modern day car with self driving ability. All you need to do is set the goals, and the Time Machine will do whatever is needed to reach up to the goal kind of stuff. >> Sunil: So why don't we quickly do a snapshot? >> Bala: Yeah, some of these times you need to create a snapshot for backup purposes, Time Machine has manual controls. All you need to do is give it a snapshot name. And then you have the ability to actually persist this snapshot data into a third party or object store so that your durability and that global data access requirements are met kind of stuff. So we kick off a snapshot operation. Let's look at what it is doing. If you see what is the snapshot operation that this is going through, there is a step called quiescing the databases. Basically, we're using application-centric APIs, and here it's actually RMAN of Oracle. We are using the RMan of Oracle to quiesce the database and performing application consistent storage snapshots with Nutanix technology. Basically we are fusing application-centric and then Nutanix platform and quiescing it. Just for a data point, if you have to use traditional technology and create a backup for this kind of size, it takes over four to six hours, whereas on Nutanix it's going to be a matter of seconds. So it almost looks like snapshot is done. This is full sensitive backup. You can pretty much use it for database restore kind of stuff. Maybe we'll do a clone demo and see how it goes. >> John: Yeah, let's go check it out. >> Bala: So for clone, again through the simplicity of command Z command, all you need to do is pick the time of your choice maybe around three o'clock in the morning today. >> John: Yeah, let's go with 3:02. >> Bala: 3:02, okay. >> John: Yeah, why not? >> Bala: You select the time, all you need to do is click on the clone. And most of the inputs that are needed for the clone process will be defaulted intelligently by us, right? And you have to make two choices that is where do you want this clone to be created with a brand new VM database server, or do you want to place that in your existing server? So we'll go with a brand new server, and then all you need to do is just give the password for you new clone database, and then clone it kind of stuff. >> Sunil: And this is an example of personalizing the database so a developer can do that. >> Bala: Right. So here is the clone kicking in. And what this is trying to do is actually it's creating a database VM and then registering the database, restoring the snapshot, and then recoding the logs up to three o'clock in the morning like what we just saw that, and then actually giving back the database to the requester kind of stuff. >> Maybe one finally thing, John. Do you want to show us the provision database that we kicked off? >> Yeah, it looks like it just finished a few seconds ago. So you can see all the tasks that we were talking about here before from creating the virtual infrastructure, and provisioning the database infrastructure, and configuring data protection. So I can go access this database now. >> Again, just to highlight this, guys. What we just showed you is an Oracle two node instance provisioned live in a few minutes on Nutanix. And this is something that even in a public cloud when you go to RDS on AWS or anything like that, you still can't provision Oracle RAC by the way, right? But that's what you've seen now, and that's what the power of Nutanix Era is. Okay, all right? >> Thank you. >> Thanks. (audience clapping) >> And one final thing around, obviously when we're building this, it's built as a past service. It's not meant just for operational benefits. And so one of the core design principles has been around being API first. You want to show that a little bit? >> Absolutely, Sunil, this whole product is built on API fist architecture. Pretty much what we have seen today and all the functionality that we've been able to show today, everything is built on Rest APIs, and you can pretty much integrate with service now architecture and give you your devops experience for your customers. We do have a plan for full fledged self-service portal eventually, and then make it as a proper service. >> Got it, great job, Bala. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, John. Good stuff, man. >> Thanks. >> All right. (audience clapping) So with Nutanix Era being this one-click provisioning, lifecycle management powered by APIs, I think what we're going to see is the fact that a lot of the products that we've talked about so far while you know I've talked about things like Calm, Flow, AHV functionality that have all been released in 5.5, 5.6, a bunch of the other stuff are also coming shortly. So I would strongly encourage you guys to kind of space 'em, you know most of these products that we've talked about, in fact, all of the products that we've talked about are going to be in the breakout sessions. We're going to go deep into them in the demos as well as in the pods. So spend some quality time not just on the stuff that's been shipping but also stuff that's coming out. And so one thing to keep in mind to sort of takeaway is that we're doing this all obviously with freedom as the goal. But from the products side, it has to be driven by choice whether the choice is based on platforms, it's based on hypervisors, whether it's based on consumption models and eventually even though we're starting with the management plane, eventually we'll go with the data plane of how do I actually provide a multi-cloud choice as well. And so when we wrap things up, and we look at the five freedoms that Ben talked about. Don't forget the sixth freedom especially after six to seven p.m. where the whole goal as a Nutanix family and extended family make sure we mix it up. Okay, thank you so much, and we'll see you around. (audience clapping) >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our morning keynote session. Breakouts will begin in 15 minutes. ♪ To do what I want ♪

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and it's ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back as we continue our coverage here on theCube, of Dell Technologies 2018. Big show going on here in Las Vegas, we're at the Sands right now, 14,000 people strong in attendance. This is day two of three of live coverage right here on theCube. Along with Keith Townsend, I am John Walls and we're now joined by Matt Liebowitz who is the Global Lead of Multi-Cloud Infrastructure at Dell EMC Consulting. Matt, thank you for joining us here on theCube. >> Happy to be here. Long time listener, first time caller. (laughter) >> John: Alright. You're on the phone, Matt go. (laughter) And Vijay Kanchi, who is the Global Innovation Lead of IT Transformation at Dell EMC. First time listener as well, Vijay? >> Yes, absolutely, and delighted to be here, thank you. >> John: Or long time listener, first time caller. >> Matt: Got to get that terminology right. >> John: Matt in New Jersey you're on, go. Let's talk New Jersey Devils. Let's talk first off about the way your two units intertwine. Just so we set the table here a little bit and understand how the two of you and the people with whom you work, how you interact at Dell. >> Matt: It'd maybe make sense if you start Vijay, and then I'll... >> Yes, so we're part of Dell EMC's consulting organization, and within that consulting organization, Matt and I work together to focus on IT transformation programs. So we design and develop services for our consulting services organization, to go deliver IT transformation programs. >> John: Okay. So, digital transformation you know, thrown around quite a bit these days. >> Vijay: Yeah When you look at it from the macro picture, from an organizational standpoint, from their perspective. What does that mean, if you will, how do you get organizations to buy-in? Because I'm sure the IT professionals with whom you work, they're in large part, they're there, I would guess. But they've got to bring along an entire organization with them, and that's a tall task, Matt. >> Matt: Yeah, there's no doubt that when it comes to Cloud, and especially Multicloud, Like you said, the whole organization needs to come along for the ride. It's not something that IT can do in a vacuum, and we've seen when they try to do it in a vacuum, they're often unsuccessful. So get those stakeholders involved, outside of IT, executive level, bring them in, show them, share with them your KPI's for success. Show them what success looks like, and then bring them along for the ride. That's ultimately how you get success with Cloud. >> Keith: So let's talk progression. What are the most successful projects, at least what is the data points you see out of the most successful projects when the C-Suite says you know what, we're going to do digital transformation, IT go execute. What are the critical points of information IT needs to collect, so that they can come to Dell EMC Consulting to help execute on that strategy? >> Matt: Well it's a long list. How much time do we have? (laughter) You know again, I think success criteria, what success looks like is really important. Because I think what you said is what often happens. You know IT leaders or leaders of the organization say we need to transform, we need to change our business to adapt. >> Keith: Yeah, what is transformation, what does that even mean? >> Right. That's up to the business to define what the next stage looks like. And so that could be anything from just being able to operate like a Public Cloud, provision quickly, iterate quickly on new software and new development tools. Or it could be a major transformation of the whole business, where they're entering a new market and they need to operate a little differently. >> Keith: So what... >> Vijay: Just to add to what Matt just said, you know from a digital transformation perspective, it's all about getting velocity of application, functionality out to customers, users, and stakeholders. When a C-Suite leadership comes and says we need to go transform all our business, then they really look to IT as a significant player to enable that. And one of the biggest issues that you have in driving capability to market fast, is being able to go build infrastructure or environment pretty quickly. Most IT organizations are, you know, dealing with technical debt that's been around for at least 25, 30 years. It starts with, you know, Legacy critical systems that are potentially Mainframe, Client Server, all the way through, you know, digital platforms that they've built up. And so in order to be able to go make that work, I think the one key important thing that we always talk about is, you need to go get automation of your code delivery process, and then you need to go in and build infrastructure and environment so that you don't have as much queue time versus run time. Cause ITs have historically been in the request-response business. I'm sure in your world as well, if you need a fix to your computer, the first thing you have to do, call up or send a request that goes to somewhere, somebody is sitting behind the queue and they're processing it. And so the whole objective to make digital transformation, is to be able to reduce and eliminate the queue time eventually, and enable the run time. So that's kind of the first thing, from an operational perspective, and then from an outcomes perspective, it's about sitting down and bringing a cross-functional team of folks from Marketing, Business units, IT, Security and Compliance, and bringing them together to figure out what sort of outcomes they're looking to achieve, what does that journey look like timing-wise, from an outcomes perspective, and then work to bring everybody together to establish a shared purpose, and a shared objective. So those are some of the key things that we find that almost every single time you engage with customers, you've got to have those conversations first in order to be able to go dig under the covers to figure out where the issues are, and then start to unclog the jams where they exist. (coughing) In the plumbing of IT. (laughter) >> This is part of that people transformation Michael talked about on stage today, yesterday, and then was brought up again on stage today. Having that conversation, for someone who's usually head down, maintaining AIX, maintaining new infrastructure for a digital, we're not equipped to normally have that conversation. Where are you seeing the gaps in skill, and how do organizations close that gap so they can even come to you guys and say, you know what, we can see clearly we need to automate our CICD process, help us through that, which is where you guys excel. >> So go ahead Matt. >> Well I think that it's a challenge because sometimes they don't even know what they don't know. >> Keith: Yeah, don't know what we don't know. >> Right. And so they'll come to us and give us a request like that. We need to modernize our infrastructure, we need to automate, and deliver IT as a service. They don't really know what that means. And so they're going to need to re-skill some of their folks. And I think that's operationally very scary for individuals who work in IT. But the reality is, and you know we see this over and over again, if you want to attract the best and the brightest in IT, you need to be working with the latest technology. And so folks shouldn't be afraid of that change. They should embrace it because ultimately it's going to drive their career forward, and when they're working on the latest and the greatest, they're going to deliver value for the business instead of just keeping the lights on. >> John: And that's kind of the challenge. So it is, I just figured this out, right, (laughter) and all of a sudden, that cycle exponentially, I mean capabilities increase, your skill set is lagging, and now you've got to play catch-up as an IT professional. >> Keith: I just learned how to spell Kubernetes yesterday. (laughter) >> If you could teach me, that'd be great. >> Capital K. (laughter) >> I mean it's true though. I've been working with virtualization for a long time, and it's funny to see the progression back in 2001, 2002, where everyone just thought this thing is crazy, nobody's going to do this. You know, we get to the point where we're having conversations around virtualization-first policies, and now we're talking about Cloud-first policies. So technology and the pace of change waits for nobody. And so we have to help organizations be ready to adopt that change. >> John: What is it right now? What's the big leap you think that on the client's side, that their teams have to make? >> Vijay: So there's probably three areas that I see that they have to make some changes. So from a business perspective in IT, they need to trust IT and integrate their needs and requirements into a process where, businesses really often times don't know what specifically they want from IT. They know and they have some vision of what they want to achieve. And so they need to go sit with, in a collaborative way, that the IT teams and often times the security teams, the CISO teams, to build together, I'll call it a cross-functional team, that can really come together to tease out, and brainstorm their way through to figure out what are the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. What is the strategy, and what do they need to look like in three years from now, and then work their way back. So that's one piece, this cultural shift in how IT engages with business. The second part is around how do organizations get better? We've been hearing about the DevOps changes that drive, but DevOps is as much a tools and technologies conversation as it is a cultural shift to get the people that were authors and critics, coders and operations folks, problem creators versus problem managers and maintainers. So those roles have been very cantankerous for the last 20 years, because the operations folks are responsible in driving for stability, reliability, and availability. Whereas coders are focused on driving new innovation. So fundamentally different objectives. So in order to make that shift, you need to go in and create another environment and culture of shared pain and shared objectives and shared rewards. So that's another key chain. And then from a skills perspective, what we're finding is that, when we get to the technology and infrastructure part, the folks who used to be storage, administrators, network administrators, computer administrators, et cetera, they now have to go broader, not as much deep in silos, and they need to look at convergence, for example, infrastructure. They need to be thinking about stitching that together with security and DevOps and Cloud SecOps. And so those are the key differences. From an administrator perspective, you need to go in and take your existing skills, and expand to be more broader, versus silo. There are some new skills that are needed to enable all this. I kind of look at the third part being the new skills are, you need folks that never did this type of stuff before to go start doing Cloud Administrative, Multi-Cloud Management and Operations. You need to be able to go do what Google calls Sight Reliability Engineering, and what Cloud Foundry calls Platform Operations and Platform Engineering. So those are... >> Keith: So, even before we get there, >> Yeah, yeah >> From a brefa capability for the Dell organization, consulting organization, the requirements and demand on the organization has changed. It went from, you know I help design, install, and operationalize a VMAX and VMR infrastructure to help me enable a DevOps practice, which is two completely different sets of skill. From a practical perspective, >> Vijay: Absolutely two years ago you look at Comcast's DevOps team, that whole team is now at Wal-Mart. >> Vijay: Yep. >> How do you guys create and nurture the skill set needed to even deliver the capability from a services side? >> Well I mean, that's a great question because we have to transform too. >> Right. >> Because we have to transform and meet the needs of our customers. That's primarily the responsibility of the consulting organization, to stay on top of technology, and move into those new areas of skill. You know if you look back just a couple of years ago and you saw the kind of work that our consulting organization was doing, you know a lot of things like helping customers migrate Exchange Servers and SQL Servers, we don't do a lot of that anymore. We're helping them design and create a transformation roadmap for Multicloud. So it's really important for us to keep our folks as skilled and looking six, 12, 18 months in advance, so that we don't have the problem you just described, where our entire team moves from, you know, one organization to another, our customers need something from us and we can't deliver it. That's a high importance for us. >> Viajy: And from a consulting organization perspective, as Matt said, we are having to reinvent ourself probably at least two or three times in the last five years. That's because of the pace of change in the marketplace. And so we have a shared responsibility to help drive some of our thinking around this transformation, internally ourself. One is to be able to go figure out what other types of services we need to go build, to deliver transformational programs to our customers. So define the what. And that's primarily my responsibility. And then I work very closely with Matt to figure out, what are the skills we have in our organization today, what are the next new skills that we need to go build, and then what are the skills that we have today that we can extend to support these new things that we see coming. Such as taking infrastructure administration and management, to providing and transforming that into providing it in the context of micro services, for example. Or infrastructure as code, storage as code, security as code, et cetera. So those are some of the things that we try to make. And then from a business perspective, we are trying to build-out skills to look at what types of organizational changes do we need to make. What other types of transformational programs and transformational metrics that you need to track, so if you have an 18 month transformation program, or a nine month transformation program, that you're not going to go wait for 18 months to see if you've achieved your outcomes. We've identified KPI's for the transformation program, where you look every 90 days to say are you achieving that. So we have two teams. We have a team of what we call Discipline Leads, folks like Matt, who are championing and evangelizing our organization to say here are the things that you guys need to change to, and find training enablement, to go drive that globally around the world as part of our consulting organization. And then there are going to be skills that we don't have that we go and acquire in the marketplace. But to your point, it's not like they're sitting around waiting to be plucked off the marketplace. (laughter) So you know, part of it is finding the right people who have a little bit of the aptitude that can make the pivot, and then learn fast. So it's a little bit of everything, and it's as much an art as it is to science, to cope with that. >> Matt: It's funny too again, if you look back at our organization just a few years ago, we didn't have a focus on Public Cloud, and now we've got folks that are trained and certified and some of the best in the world at Public Cloud technologies, because we have to change and we have to transform just like our customers. >> John: You know we talk about being nimble and agility. >> Oh yeah. >> You do too, right? >> Yeah. >> You have to walk that walk as well. >> I'm less nimble the older and older I get. (laughter) >> Aren't we all, Matt? Aren't well all? >> Organizationally you're absolutely right. >> Well listen gentlemen, thanks for being here. We appreciate the time. No longer first-time callers. >> That's right. >> Alright. >> We'll be back soon. >> You're now Cube veterans. Thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for the time. >> Back with more here from Las Vegas. You're watching theCube coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. (techno music)