(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)

>> 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)

(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. 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