>> Announcer: Live from New York, it's theCube! Covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, here in New York City for the AWS Summit. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost is Corey Quinn. And I'm happy to welcome two guests from NetApp. First to my right, welcome back to the program from another cloud show earlier this year. Jonsi Stefansson, who's the CCO and Vice President for Cloud Services. And to his right, well it's a first time on the program. I actually was on one of his earlier podcasts, Jeff Dickey, who's joining NetApp as the chief technologist inside that same cloud and data services group. Jeff, welcome and Jonsi welcome back. >> Thank you, Stuart. >> Thank you. >> Okay so Jonsi, let's start with you. So we've watched the cloud and data services. From my words it's like almost, I want a new brand. It's like this is not the ONTAP, everywhere, you know, best NFS, you know the number one thing there, it's about multi cloud, it's about getting the value out of my data that transformation we've seen overall in what was known as the storage industry. There are a lot of new people, a lot of new products, and it's the you know the and is I think there was one NetApp term is all of the history and the things you could trust, but a lot of new things. So give us the updates on what's exciting in your world. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean of course we are still relying on that old trusted ONTAP and WAFL storage operating system in the back end, but we have extracted a lot of that into a more automation or you're consuming it in a more autonomous way. We are actually taking all the the storage norms that the traditional storage admin is really used to, you know tweaking and all of that. That's all done and managed by us. It's fully as a service and we are more focused on the data management capabilities of ONTAP than the actual storage system or the performance of that storage operating system. I mean we are in a very unique position as NetApp. I mean we have a very strong foothold in the enterprise. And now we have integrated services with all the public clouds. I mean fully native integrated services either going through their own console or at their own APIs or with our own UI. So the data management capabilities that we are actually bringing to the table is you can seamlessly migrate from the core to the edge and to the cloud, depending on where you want your data to reside. So our goal is actually to do something very similar as Kubernetes has done to the application layer. They have made it completely mobile, there is no longer that VM format issues that you had in the old days. It's basically just a kernel module, I can move it wherever on top of a hypervisor of choice or a public cloud of choice. But that has always been sort of left behind on some propriety box sitting there. But NetApp like I said, NetApp is in this very unique position of being able to move, migrate, replicate and split the data according to your strategy whether it's on-premise or the public cloud. >> All right, Jeff, would love to hear your viewpoint as what you're hearing from customers. I've known you for many years. Talk about that journey towards cloud and what is cloud and how does it fit into their customer environment. Give us what brought you into NetApp and some of the conversations you're having if you've been digging in with the NetApp team. >> Well the coming to NetApp is actually a long story. I've known the Green Cloud folks for a long time. I think was the first kind of US partner of theirs and had been a big fan of first their cloud and then their software so I was really excited when the data acquisition happened and you know for about a year I was learning like the stuff they're working on and that was blowing my mind and again, I've worked with almost every storage company out there so it was exciting to, like the future of what was happening and then after the acquisition of Stackpoint which I was currently working with, so it's like NetApp kind of took my two favorite companies in a short time so I said, hey, I want to be working on, you guys are doing the coolest stuff that I've seen right now and the roadmap is blowing my mind, I want to join. So it's been a great time here. I think what's most unique, what I've found is that the typical, when you're doing cloud consulting, you go after the low-hanging fruit. It's very simple strategy. You know, if you were to go to a customer and say, "Let's take your highest demanding, "most revenue generating systems "and we're going to migrate those to AWS first." Well they're going to look at the $10 billion contract and you know the two year engagement and say no, we're not going to do that. You go for the low-hanging fruit. But because of the products that have come out and what we're doing in the public clouds, we're for the first time we have NFS, you know like basically SLA performant file system in the cloud that can handle the biggest, baddest on-prem apps. So now that we're able to do that, what customers are doing, they are now we're taking those big ones and it's accelerating the whole journey of the cloud because instead of creating more of a chasm between your public cloud infrastructure and your on-prem, there's a lot of people, you know face it, if you've got a $50 million budget, you're putting it mostly into cloud and some of your on-prem, which again is still generating a lot of revenue, is not getting the love it needs and it's not becoming cloud either and you have this kind of chasm. So it think it's great that with the customers we're working with, they're very excited to be moving what they thought they were never going to be able to move because it just wasn't there. And now they have native connections to all the services they love, like you know, here at AWS. So it's just great 'cause you know, yes they're consolidating their data and you're having less silos, that's exciting. But what excites me most is what are they going to do next and after that what're they going to do next with that? Like as they learn how to use their data and connect more to cloud services and our cloud services and the public cloud services, they're going to be able to do way more than they ever thought they would. >> Something that I think would resonate with a number of folks has been that, I go a little bit back, I'm a little older than I look, although I wear it super well. And I cut my teeth on WAFL and working with SnapMirror and doing all kinds of interesting things with that, it's easy to glance, walk around the expo hall and glance at it and figure huh, I see there's a NetApp booth. You must still be trying to convince AWS to let you shove a filer into us-east-1. That's not really what your company does anymore in the traditional sense but I think a lot of people may have lost that message. From a cloud perspective, what is NetApp doing in 2019? >> So I mean we are really, really software focused. So I mean we are doing a lot of work. We are containerizing that WAFL operating system, we are really excited about launching that as alpha today. That basically means launching as an alpha in October. That basically means that you could get all the ONTAP data management goodies on top of any storage operating system on top of any physical or persistent discs in any of these different public clouds. EPS, Volumes, Google PDs or Azure, we wanted to make it so anybody can actually deploy ONTAP. We've always have that story with ONTAP Select but being able to containerize it, I don't know if we can actually. So we can actually reap the benefits of Kubernetes when it comes to high availability, rapication, auto-scaling and self-healing capabilities to make it a much more robust scale out as well as scale up solution. So that's truly our focus. And our focus for 2019 is of course, we've been really, really busy with our heads down coding for a long, long time or for a long time. Very short time in NetApp terms, but in cloud terms, very, very long. Like for the last 18 months. But now we're really sort of integrating our entire portfolio where we have monitoring, deep analytics, compliancy, Kubernetes, storage providers, schedulers. So everything is sort of gelling together now. >> So I think back a couple of years ago, if you talked to Amazon, the answer to everything was move everything to the public cloud. Today, Amazon at least admitted that hybrid cloud is a thing. They won't say hybrid necessarily but you know with the outposts and what they're doing with their partnership with VMware and the like, they're doing that. When I look at customers, most of them have multi cloud. Now when we say multi cloud it means they have lots of clouds and whether or not they're tied together, they're not doing that and while Amazon won't admit to it and isn't looking to manage in that environment, they're playing in that because if I have lots of clouds, one of them is likely AWS. NetApp sits at the intersection of a lot of this. You have your huge install base inside the data center, you're working very much with Amazon, and the other cloud providers. What I'm hoping to get from you is your insight on customers, you know, where are they today, what are they struggling with in that hybrid or multi cloud world and where do you see things maturing as we go the next couple of years? >> Well I mean, the fact of the matter is, 83% of all workloads still recite on-premise. Whether it stays like that or doesn't, I mean AWS is doing Outpost, Google is doing Anthos, Azure is doing Azure Stack. And the good thing is we are actually playing with all of them we are collaborating on all these different projects, both on the storage layer as well as on the application life cycle management. From our point of view, it is really important that we start tying all the infrastructure related stuff into the application layer so you're actually managing everything from that layer and down. So for a developer like me, it's actually really simple to actually do all the tasks and completely manage my own solution. Of course I need operations to be managing the infrastructure but I should be oblivious to it as a developer and what we are actually seeing customers doing now more and more and it's actually really impressing coming here to New York and meeting all these financial companies, they have always been like probably the slowest movers to the public cloud because of compliancy reasons and other stuff, but they are actually really adopting it. They have segmented out their workloads and really know what teams are allowed to provision and are supposed to be running in the public cloud in order to tap into the innovation that's happening there and what teams are only allowed to work on on-premise environments. So it sort of relates into the true cloud concept. The true cloud concept being everything is a cloud and there is no lock in, have the freedom of choice where to provision, where to spin up your workloads. So we're seeing that more and more from our customers. Wouldn't you agree? >> Yeah, totally agree. >> Yeah, Jeff I wonder if you could give a little bit more as you said, NetApp's done quite a few acquisitions in the last couple of years. What sort of things should people be thinking about NetApp that they might not have a couple years ago? >> Well I know, I'll tell a quick story. My first day as a NetApp employee was at KubeCon in Seattle and I remember I was wearing the Net badge and I had a friend that I was partnered with and he looked at my badge and says, "NetApp? "Like the box in the closet people?" And I just like well I mean not anymore. You know and I think that's the biggest thing. You mean Network Appliance? >> Those of us that have know NetApp long enough. >> Now it's internet application, right? Now it's a little bit different. I think the big thing is you know, it's not just a storage. I mean storage is a key component, and it's very important, but that's not the only thing and I think that on the cloud side it's very important because we're still maintaining this relationship with our storage appliances and everything but we have more buyers now so we can go across the company and say, "What are you doing? "Are you an SRE? "Are you a developer lead? "Are you a VP of operations?" We have all these products that work for them yet in the end, it's a single vision to the deep insights of everything they're doing with us. >> Just quick followup on that, I think when NetApp bought a Kubernetes company, it was like okay, I'm trying to understand how that fits when I look at NetApp's biggest partners, I think VMware, Cisco, Red Hat, all going heavily after software solutions including the kubernetes piece so how does NetApp do differently because you still have strong partnerships there. >> I think we're in a strong place because now we're doing two things, we're bringing the apps to the data and the data to the apps. So it's, where do you want to be? There's the right place for your app. There's a lot of choice now and now we have, you know, now you can choose. Where is this going to live best? Where is this going to operate? Where is this going to serve our customers best? What's going to be the most cost effective? You know, being able to deploy and manage. You know, type in a couple characters and your entire production of Kubernetes deployment is backed up into where you want. Like there's just you know, the apps are nothing without data, the data is nothing without the app right? So it's bringing those two together. I think it's very important to kind of get out there. My job is getting that out that it's not storage silos, this is about your apps. What are you doing with it? Where do you want your apps, and what is that data, how is the data helping your apps grow? You know, we're helping people move forward and innovate faster with these products. >> I mean both companies, my company Green Cloud and the Stackpoint company, we were really, really early adopters of Kubernetes and we've always taken both companies very application-centric point of view on Kubernetes while most everybody else have taken a very infrastructure-centric approach. We were two staffed of companies just developers and we always sort of felt like, because it's a very common misunderstanding that Kubernetes was actually built for developers. It wasn't. It is an infrastructure play, built and developed by the Google SREs to run code. So everything that we are adding on top of it and beneath it, it ties it all together. So I mean for a developer working on our Kubernetes offerings, he's basically working in his own element, he's just doing commands and magic happens in the packet. We tie the development branch to a specific Node Pole. We apply the staging branch to another one and the production environment, once you commit that, then it actually goes through like an SRE process where they are basically the gate keepers, where they actually either allow or say hey we found the bug or we are not able to deploy this according to our standards. So tying it all together, all the way from the storage layer all the way up to the application layer is what we are all about. And I got the same question when we were acquired. When we were Green Cloud, we were in a really, really, good situation where we had term sheets from three different companies. I'm not allowed to say which ones, but everybody, once I sold it to NetApp they were like, "Why NetApp?" But if you go to KubeCon, and you are always there, there is a very live matrix on what the biggest problems are with Kubernetes and persistent volume clearance and storage and data management hasn't been sold yet. And that's where we believe that we have a unique way of offering those data management capabilities all the way up the stack. >> All right well Jonsi and Jeff, thank you for giving us the update there, absolutely. Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be at KubeCon later this year in San Diego we're at Amazon re:Invent. Always go to theCUBE.net to see all the shows that we're at as well as hit the search and you can see the thousand of videos. Always no registration to be able to check that out so check all out all the interviews. And as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (light techno music)

>> Narrator: From Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2018 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live finishing up our first day of three days of coverage on theCUBE. From the inaugural IBM Think event I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante talking about snow conditions, we're in Vegas, though. It's a beautiful day, so we'll leave the snow to California and the east coast that's again getting slammed. Dave and I are joined by Mark Bregman, the SVP and CTO of NetApp. Great to have you on the show. >> Thank you. >> So what's new? I was talking about, before we started, that I was formerly at NetApp in marketing a few years ago. What's new at NetApp? What's going on with NetApp and IBM? >> Well first of all if you'd been at NetApp a few years ago you probably thought of us as a storage company but increasingly we think about ourselves as a data company because it's really all about the data and so we're doing a lot of work with IBM in a couple of different areas. One of those is extending our data fabric which is really the software capability to manage and move data across different types of storage, moving in and out of the Cloud and it's absolutely crucial, when you look at some of the things that IBM is trying to do with the IBM Cloud and with a lot of the machine learning applications. >> So Mark what's the difference between a storage company and a data company? >> Well, I think about it as, sort of, think about banking. 150 years ago if you wanted to get a bank you would probably go in and inspect whether they had a good solid vault to store your money. I guess when you opened your bank account you didn't do that. You just take that for granted but you want to know if they have the services to access my money, move my money, inspect my money and do those kind of things and the same thing is happening in our industry. Storage is still important, just as the vault is still important but it's not the first thing you think about. So the more important thing, the thing you do think about is what can I do with my data, how can I move my data, how can I get access to it, how do I protect it? And the actual storage is critical as an enabler but it's not what most people are focused on. >> So those activities that you just mentioned, those adjacent value producers, those are services that NetApp provides that it didn't use to provide or it provides them in a different way. How are things changing? >> Well, from the very beginning NetApp started as, actually, a software defined storage business long before that was a term. The first capabilities that NetApp delivered were software based on commodity hardware and over the years we had to also get into the hardware business. But most of our value historically has always been in the software and it's really been, how do we ensure the data doesn't get lost, how do we move the data efficiently, how do we make copies, and all of those things which are frankly more data oriented than storage oriented although they were sold with the storage systems. What's changed now is branching out beyond just the NetApp system, to be able to carry that capability to the Cloud and to other places that people want to keep their data. >> So what does that mean from a... Put your CTO hat on for a minute. It used to be it was WAFL and it was the operating system and that was sort of the core focus of the company, the products, still, I'm sure, great products. But it sounds like from a technical perspective you've had to evolve. Could you talk about that? >> Well we have. We've had to take those capabilities which we used to tightly integrate with hardware and build an appliance and sort of peel them apart and say we can take this capability and put it somewhere else. For example in the Cloud and that same capability in the cloud now allows us to essentially treat that element, from a data point of view treat the Cloud just like another NetApp target and that's what allows us to rapidly and easily move data back and forth. >> Talk to us about from an evolution perspective. I'm glad you brought that term Dave. How has NetApp's customer base helped facilitate this evolution to be able to give them the values that they're demanding in terms of Multi-Cloud, different vendors, What's that as a CTO that presumably meets up with your customers? >> I think it's been a very synergistic sort of thing which is, our customers as they move to the Cloud almost force us to figure out how can we continue to help them as they move their data to the Cloud and as we do that the customers and new customers say, oh that capability I didn't realize I could leverage and they find new ways to leverage their data in the Cloud and on traditional hardware in this kind of emerging hybrid environment and that's very crucial for a lot of our customers. >> So I want to go back to something you said before about you were always a software defined company. 10 years ago if you looked at it hardware companies, storage companies would sell a product. It would mark up a C8 disk drive 10X. But the real value was in the software wasn't it? >> Right. >> I don't know how many hardware versus software engineers work at NetApp but I'm guessing there's way more software engineers than there are hardware engineers. So is that essentially what you're doing to change your business? You're now selling software function? >> We are and we're doing it in two different ways. We sell software that you, a customer can put on their own hardware, sort of traditional software defined storage but increasingly we also sell software as essentially sell storage or data management as a service in a Cloud platform and then the customer doesn't have to even think about the software. The Cloud provider may have to think about it and we have a lot of relationships with cloud providers to do that but at that point it just becomes a service to the developer or the user that's building on that platform. >> Some of the announcements coming out this week with IBM with respect to Cloud, AI for example. What are some of the things that excites NetApp about what you're going to be able to help your customers achieve based on some of these new innovations? >> Well I think that the work that IBM is doing in the whole area of AI and machine learning is tremendous and we're benefiting in many ways. One is we are a user of that technology ourselves. We are increasingly using machine learning to analyze mass amounts of data from our customer base so that we can get, we have a solution called Active IQ which collects that data, 70 billion data elements, and allows us then to understand the behavior of our systems and our software in the field, make recommendations proactively to customers, for example, a single customer may have a configuration that isn't optimal. We know that because we see all the other customers. We can see that their configurations are getting better results and so that allows the whole marketplace to benefit and that's leveraging a lot of the AI and machine learning technologies. That is one of the areas where there's a lot of synergy between, in our work with IBM, we're often the storage that's underlying the machine learning and we're using the machine learning at the same time. >> So as you sort of go to market or partner with IBM. NetApp actually, people maybe don't know this, has always had a long relationship with IBM. IBM for years resold your filers and probably still does for all I know but how is that relationship evolving and changing? >> Well I would say it's mostly evolving in the sense that it's not just at the level of storage. It really is moving to this data layer as IBM is defining their platform we're a key partner in helping understand how to bring new capabilities in storage and data management to support their new capabilities in cognitive computing, AI, and machine learning. >> How does that change the way in which you develop products? Do you have to be more API friendly? >> Absolutely. As we build our products today we have to think about how to make our products at each layer a kind of platform for the next layer. So even though IBM is building a platform, at a lower layer they're also accessing our capabilities through API's and you could argue we're turning our data fabric into a platform. >> Does it change? You know people use the word future proof. How do you future proof your products in that world? >> Well I think the beauty of API's is that allows you to continually innovate just below the API's without having to disrupt everything above it and that's why this sort of layered approach between API's allows innovation at the storage layer, innovation in the data management layer, innovation in the AI and machine learning layers, all the way up to the end user application. Without the old world model where everything was monolithically built but if you make one change everything breaks. And so it's allowing us to move much more quickly with our rates of innovation independently of the other layers, the other players who are innovating as well. >> So NetApp has reinvented itself a number of times. >> Yeah. >> You've done it again. I remember NetApp when it started out it was like work station storage and then it was internet storage and then after the dot.com bubble blew up it was enterprise storage and then you changed your name. >> And we started with just filers as you said earlier. >> Right. >> And then we expanded into unified storage doing both NAS and SAN. We also supported initially just NFS and then we supported SIFs. We supported a huge transformation as we went into the virtualization world of VMware. So we've continually evolved and we're doing it again. >> And so how would you characterize the current wave? You said before it's about the data. >> I think the current wave is really, if you think about out traditional or our historical businesses being the appliance business I think we're going in three directions right now. One of which is extending away from the integrated appliance to the software defined, put the software on your own storage or your own system. We're also moving in a direction to put it on the Cloud and partnering with Cloud vendors and we're moving in a third direction which is moving higher up in value to data management, not just the storage elements. So certainly a customer could take our software today and use it purely for storage in the Cloud or on a WhiteBox but what they find is there's a lot of value in the higher value data management and that's where we're working with IBM and others. >> Now you've always focused on the data management piece of it. NetApp, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're kind of reluctant to go out and, for instance, buy a backup software company. You'd rather partner with folks like that, Is that-- >> We do that through partnerships, and we'll-- >> That philosophy has not changed, is that correct? >> It hasn't changed dramatically. There may be some areas where we have deep expertise and we extend a little further and there will be other areas where, frankly, we don't have that deep domain expertise and we provide the capability for others to extend that into broader data management. >> So as we've kind of touched on the evolution of NetApp we talked with a number of folks today alone, Dave, about this spirit of innovation as a culture within an organization. Is there a programatized innovation group or lab within NetApp that really helps to drive those three directions that you talked about? >> Well, yes and no. I have a small advanced technology group that experiments and looks at things well beyond the roadmaps, but really innovation is done across the company. Every engineering team is thinking about how to go beyond their road map, their driving innovation. We have a lot of communication across the company between my advanced technology groups and the individual business unit development of the teams because in many cases those feed each other. We find new challenges talking to the current business unit developers and they find new ideas talking to some of my team might be looking three or four years out into the future. A great example of that is a very hot topic right now is Blockchain and we're looking very hard at how could we use Blockchain to, again, rethink the way that you handle and manage data through its life cycle? Could you use this as a way to organize data management so that we know the authenticity of the data, we know who's seen the data, we know who's touched the data, and once you can do that you can think of lots of applications in data security, in data life cycle management, in data prominence, across the whole spectrum. >> So as a multi-multi-billion dollar company storage company, software defined, whatever you want to call it, when you see a company like Filecoin get launched, you know, cryptocurrency, peer-to-peer storage, the tendency of established, very credible players might be to laugh that off but we've laughed off a lot of folks, right? We've learned our lesson there but what do you make of a company like that trying to disrupt S3 for example. >> I think it's very interesting and we look at those very carefully. We try to understand what's the unique proposition that has value? Sometimes there's a unique proposition that just has visibility, let's say. Maybe that's not as valuable and sometimes there is really no uniqueness, they're just playing the game a slightly different way. My own personal view is that all of the excitement about, and whenever you put the name coin in it, that's always disturbing right now. All the excitement about the cryptocurrency relationship to Blockchain, I don't think is going to, in the long term matter that much. On the other hand these distributed ledger technologies which Blockchain has won I think are going to be fundamentally important and I think that we're going to find them turning up in core elements. You mentioned WAFL early on, if you think about, several years ago there was a lot of discussion about log-structured file systems. Could you use something like a distributed ledger technology to create that log in an immutable, distributed way where I don't have to trust any individual system, I don't have to worry about availability the same way because there are multiple copies. The Blockchain or the distributed ledger manages that. It could change fundamentally the way we architect these systems. It's not going to happen overnight but that's what we're looking at. We are looking at every one of these little startups that have new ideas. >> Well what I'm fascinated about, Filecoin is interesting because they raise 250 million dollars in like 30 minutes which is, forget about the crypto craze, that's more than a Series A for a storage company. So seemingly some smart guys, we'll see what happens with the innovation piece. The other interesting thing to me about Blockchain is there's these whole new sets of protocols being built out and there's an incentive for developers to actually develop them versus the government who years and years ago developed SNTP and DNS and IP, etc. >> Well to be fair, the government funded that but it was done by the same developers but this way there's a different source of money. >> Yeah but those guys didn't make any money. >> No, that's true. >> Nobody made any money off of Linux really. >> Yeah, you're right. >> So now there's a huge incentive for developers to do that so I'm really curious as to where the next wave of innovation is going to come from as a advanced technologist you got to look at that and say hmmm, I want to keep an eye on that. >> Oh absolutely, I mean that's why we're watching it. >> Do you think Blockchain, I know we got to go, but a lot of concerns about scaling. >> Well that's why I try to distinguish between Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. There are a lot of emerging technologies that are fundamentally similar to very abstract level to Blockchain but are implemented differently. You have to remember Blockchain was built for cryptocurrency and it was built to be inefficient by design. >> Yes, right. >> And so taking that same idea and saying we're going to use it for these high performance applications is probably not the right approach but going back to the idea that I can have a distributed, fundamentally untrusted network and I can create a trusted ledger, that's pretty interesting and there are a lot of interesting emerging technologies that I think some of those will become the core. >> Dave: In use cases for sure. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Distributed databases have never been easy. >> Yeah. >> It's always been challenging for scale, performance, latency, etc., I wonder can those problems be solved? >> You think about the challenge of data prominence and in the world of GDPR and all of these things, the ability to say I know where all the data is, I know where it came from, I know who's touched it, all of the discussion going on, probably here at this conference about GANs where you can make video that looks just like you but you weren't in it, for example. How do you keep track of the data so I know this really came from that camera, it was really you and not a video reproduction, that's going to become more and more important and that's where I think these technologies could become really valuable. Something we've talked about, data prominence, for twenty years but we've never really been able to implement it at scale. >> Well, and you see the explosion of fake news and the like. Facebook is now more powerful than the UN and the 2020 election is going to be about fake news and so things like that are really technologies that could solve that problem, hopefully have legs. >> Mark: I think so. >> Awesome. Thank you. >> Great. Thank you. >> Mark, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing what's going on at NetApp, kind of walking us through you're evolution and some of the exciting things coming. We wish you a great rest of your fiscal year. >> Great, thank you very much. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin and you've been watching theCUBE live from day one of IBM's inaugural Think event. Check out thecube.net where you can find all of the replays of our videos today and check over to siliconangle.com for the written articles about that. We want to thank you for sticking with us and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Thanks. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to our live exclusive coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE and co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. My co-host Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor. Our next two guests is Dave Hitz, who's the co-founder of NetApp, and Anthony Lye, who's the EVP in Cloud Business Unit Manager. Welcome to theCUBE, and welcome back, good to see you, Dave. >> Thank you. >> I always love, I wrote a post years ago called Keep the Founders Around. I always joke with you on this, but the DNA of a company is super critical, and how the products get positioned even as the evolution, the DNA's critical, great to see you out on the front lines, pressing the flesh with the customers here. >> Keep the founders around, so I have a theory about that, 'cause some people say companies where the founder stays around are more successful, and therefore, I must be awesome. I have a different theory, which is companies that are really successful are a more interesting place for founders to continue to be interested to stay. I think that the causality may be the other way around. >> Don't have 'em as a placated-- >> The founders want to keep staying and playing, you must be doing really cool stuff. >> It's a cultural issue, and this is a big DNA discussion. We go back seven years, we've talked, I've talked with your former CEO, Tom Georgens, about this. Why are you going with Amazon? Everyone's saying that's a bad move, contrarian move. You guys said, hey, the customers are asking for it. Now it's all cloud all the time, data as a fabric. This is now mainstream. Really good tailwinds for NetApp right now, 'cause you got the core base, the shiny new toys not winning the day, but blocking and tackling good technology and the right customer focus. Talk about the cloud impact, Anthony. >> Yeah, just to make a point just on the last comment, I mean, what Dave does I think is you lean into things that are disruptive, and I think very few founders have that ability to sort of. >> Sometimes, I think the biggest value add I can bring to NetApp is to give people permission to let go of the old stuff, and some of it's hard. I'm the guy that wrote WAFL for ONTAP, and so, I'm not saying, I mean, we're still >> That was a big deal. >> We're still shipping a lot of that stuff, and it's awesome, but some people struggle to say what do you mean we're going to sell another storage system? This is always the best one for everything. That's what we've been saying for so long. >> ONTAP everywhere. >> And so, if I can let go, it's like it's my baby, and I still love it, but can we have another kid, too? I think that's a valuable role. >> You've been instrumental in the cloud strategy, and you tell that cloud story first, and it's not what you'd expect. And I think that's what gives NetApp its sort of unique and, I think, its 25 years is you go out, and you could easily talk about all the things that NetApp has done, but you choose to talk about where you think NetApp has to go. >> You do, yeah. >> You know, what was interesting to me about today's general session, 'cause we had so much new stuff, I think you almost can't get your head around it. We had to divide it into categories, and the categories we chose really align with how we see customers working. And so, the first category is a lot of people have and will continue to have for years the traditional style of data center with client servers and Linux, Windows. You rack and design it, like what should the fiber channel be? And it's virtualized, but here's the chunk for Oracle, here's the chunk for Virtual Desktop. >> It's running apps, by the way, running critical apps for the incoming. >> Yeah, of course. All of this stuff, and then, you've got this new style, which is all when you racks and wired to the top HCI, and you know, this whole next generation data center. And then, all the cloud stuff that, you know, it's services running entirely in Amazon. We've got services where we're moving data from one hyperscalar public cloud to a different hyperscalar public cloud with no NetApp hardware involved. I mean, these are entirely cloud-native, cloud-resident services. >> Help me solve, like one, from one region to another region of AWS. So, you're saying that the solution can move from one cloud provider to another. >> We've been doing that for a while. I mean, ONTAP itself, you can buy ONTAP Cloud for AWS, and you can buy it for Azure, and so, you can establish a cluster on one and connect it to a cluster on a different one and let ONTAP snap between the two, move workloads between the two, backup between the two. We've always had that. Now, the orchestrator that we showed today pushes us much, much higher and provides our customers with a true multi-cloud platform, but a multi-cloud platform that really starts to blend compute and storage together. And it's a platform that's built from the ground up on Kubernetes, which is now, I think, the sort of universally accepted container strategy for microservice-based applications. And yes, that platform will allow you to deploy an application package at the same time on any of the big three hyperscales. >> A lot of the pushback that I saw on social media was from the announcement yesterday, where Microsoft Azure NFS. Why are? >> Anthony: You got pushback? >> Yeah, pushback, like why, the object storage is no future in this. It's the best way to do cloud, period. Actually, it was the only way. Can you talk about the importance of NFS in the data fabric? >> Well, can I back up a step? Just to be clear, object storage is awesome. >> Keith: It is. >> And NetApp has an object storage solution, and I'm not going to diss object storage, right. It's great. However, NFS is cool, too, and a lot of people have a whole bunch of apps on-prem, and they've written them already. They run whatever they run. And if it uses NFS and you'd like to have it in the cloud, you don't want step number one is let's rewrite it. >> Keith: Exactly. >> You want step number one is it already works, and I would just like to be working over there so I don't have to mess with physical hardware. >> I know this might be sacrilegious for me to say to be from Silicon Valley and you are, too, but the shiny new toy doesn't win the day, and what we learned from the Hadoop, and we've seen it a little bit OpenStack, but they caught it early before it became a tumor, was the cost of ownership to write stuff from scratch is problematic. There's an issue of, legacy's not a bad thing, look with containers, your point about Kubernetes. So, you have to run these apps. No one wants to rewrite code. >> I'm not going to argue if it's a bad thing or not a bad thing, it exists. >> Accurate. >> And we want to help take care of it. >> But rewrite code as a mandate to get this? Nobody, I mean, if it makes total sense, okay you look at it, but it's not. >> I think IDC pegs file-based workloads at more than 24 exabytes with on-prem growing at somewhere around 18% K year and cloud growing at 25%. You know, objects are not the answer to everything, old or new, actually. As an application developer, I like the opportunity to have both, and I think applications will consume both. >> Let me jump into the announcements that were on-stage here, the conversations, a lot of stuff as you mentioned, so the folks should look at the keynote. We've streamed it live, so you can go to SiliconANGLE, or go to NetApps.com, check it out. But a couple things jumped out at me. The ONTAP, was it 9.3? And SolidFire, interesting integration there, shipped, great stuff. The cloud orchestrator, seamless moving data across multiple clouds. Everyone knows me, I've been critical of this. >> And applications. >> This is, I've been looking for someone to actually show me, just multi-cloud is hard, you got latency issues, there's a ton of stuff. But you're not rewriting code to do it. >> Exactly. >> You can do it on-prem, huge deal. And then, the other thing is just a general sentiment of the 18 guys around the channels, the channel partners are energized. They see an opportunity to build a business, sales channel for NetApp, but more importantly, they can come and deliver the customers. Guys, unpack those dynamics. Obviously, the SolidFire thing flashed. >> Can I start with the channel? When I look at how the channel interacts with a lot of customers, they make their money selling stuff, often gear. But if you look at what are they really providing, a lot of them are acting as IT consultants, in some cases with smaller companies as CIOs for hire. And so, it doesn't, people are, oh, well, what do they do if it's cloud? Or what they do if it's on-prem? It's like, the customer still needs that same advice and consulting. >> Your studio has cloud concierge, they have have their own cloud service for their customers. >> And so, I just think that there's a big opportunity for the people who choose to embrace it. Anyone who's telling their customers, whoa whoa whoa, slow down, you don't want to go on the cloud, we'll help you not go on the cloud. Like, I don't think that's a long-term business model anymore. >> Cloud is destinations happening. >> The only thing I would say on the partner side that we've seen is that we now have, I think, credibility in the cloud, so much so that we are signing partners that only work in the cloud. A lot of Amazon partners, a lot Azure partners have come to us and said, hey, you know, we didn't realize you had all of these data services, and we are running customers' infrastructures on the hyperscalars, and we'd like to use your software to make our lives easier, we'd like to use ONTAP Cloud, we'd like to use classing. As well as our traditional partners, there are other partners here at this event that are first timers at Insight. >> Talk about the cloud dynamic because certainly it's a lift, rising tide floats all boats or tailwind, whatever you want to call it, but now, I'm a CEO having a conversation, like, whoa, you got my attention. NetApp on my old trusted NetApp guys, the storage guys, and they're talking data, which music to my ears, 'cause I got all this stuff going on, GPPR. All of a sudden cloud, I didn't know they had a cloud. And you don't get a cloud strategy. You either do cloud or you don't, so this has come up on theCUBE a lot. Talk about the dynamic of how you talk about the damages. I'm like, okay, I know I got to build through the cloud. How does NetApp fit into my strategy? 'Cause I got to cross the bridge to the future, I got business to take care of today, both on-prem, in the three pillars, but I got to have a cloud vision. >> Let me back up a little bit. One of the reasons we think we can help, that we're very well-positioned to help, it's very easy to fire up 1,000 CPUs in the cloud. You want 1,000 CPUs, you fire 'em up, and you unfire 'em up, and everything is easy, until there's any data. What do they want to look at? How do you get it in there? What do they create? How are you going to keep it safe? Do you want to leave it in that cloud or a different cloud, or do you want it on-prem, or all three? And as you soon as you getting yourself into those questions, you go, whoa, that's the hard part of the cloud. The good news is that's exactly what NetApp does. That's the kind of work that NetApp focuses on. And so, the starting point is, look, CPUs, computes, lambdas, container, all that stuff is easy until you get to the data, which lives forever, and you're legally required to do something with it. Now, let's talk about what you're trying to accomplish and where you're going, like that now is. One of my goals these days, how long can we talk without mentioning a product? Because it's not, eventually you're going to have to get to, oh, by the way, we have a backup tool that'll reach into Office 365 and suck it out as objects and put it on your on-prem object storage. >> Well, backup's a whole other story. >> It's AWS or something like that. >> There's no laws in the cloud. >> So eventually, you get to some tool or some product, but you want to talk for a long time about where they're going, what they're trying to solve, what they care about. Often they don't care about a thing you think they should, like aren't you really concerned about budget? No, actually, we're dying, 'cause we can't solve this problem. The budget comes after we solve that. Okay. >> We were talking last week about the, I was calling it the toolshed paradigm, or paradox, and the toolshed paradox is that they're focusing so much on the tools that they have, that they have this bloated tool chest. Some of these are getting, collecting dust. They bought a hammer that they're trying to mow their lawn with. You have problem of too many tools, pun intended. The question is is that, as it kind of distracts from the focus, to your point, data. Data seems to be the killer app in the cloud because now, not just moving data around cloud, developers are using data in real time, so batch in real time is huge. >> How are they enriching the data? >> How is the application developed, because I'm a CIO, I've a lot of things going on, on my plate, I'm ramping up dev ops and more application development, new developers, open source, blah blah blah, security, governance. >> To me, I sort of think a really nice soundbite that I got was, I was an application developer, and my career has always been building applications, and it's always been the applications that own the data. There was an application server, and it executed business logic that read or wrote into a repository. >> A data bank. >> I am at the point where I believe we are in an inflection where now the data will own the application. And what I mean by that is the data has to be fluid and available for many applications to consume it. Some of them will enrich it, some of them will replace pieces of it, and so, architectures have to change. And I think NetApp's incredibly fortunate that we have such a strong data story at a time where the data itself will be the primary asset on a company's balance sheet. >> If you believe that point, which I do, by the way, I think you're 100% right, that changes the paradigm, flips it upside down, but this also creates the conundrum of data governance because I got a policy, I'm going to put the brakes on that because you're freeing the data to be addressable, to be more Alchemist kind of model where I can't control it, but I need to control it because I've got regulations, I've got governance issues. Give me a pause, how do you guys address that? I know you got governance to it, but that's a dynamic, that's a psychology. >> To add on to that, you talk about-- >> How are you going to do that? >> In governance, so there's the policy piece of it, and then, there's the availability piece of it. Just because I can move from an application developer's perspective, just because I can move an application to the cloud, doesn't mean that it will perform like it will when I use in 100 microseconds of latency in my private data center. So, how do I get the policy and the technology governance that combine together in the cloud? >> I think, I'll make two points. I think the obvious answer to the first question is we have the data fabric, and I think NetApp has pioneered its strategy around a set of data services that do certain tasks that can be consumed as applications or as APIs, but then, we've gone one level higher, and now, we orchestrate and connect those things up and provide meaningful solutions. And data has a fantastic, you know, we were talking about a fantastic demo with StorageGRID. I'll let Dave explain that. The second point I would make, though, is what you've got to understand is that the customer that we talk to isn't AT&T, that's just a big building with a logo on it. A customer is the person inside the organization, and we all now know that there is a new customer, and that customer people refer to as the data scientist. And there haven't been data scientists before, but now, every company is hiring data scientists, why? Because the data itself has become the primary asset. Application developers are now serving the data scientists. >> So, dev ops was developers making infrastructure as code with operations. You're essentially describing a new paradigm data ops. >> Anthony: Correct. >> Data as code, 'cause you need to have it programmable. >> And I think that's what most people call meta-data, or they talk now about APIs for everything. And so, I think that's the new norm, I think that there will be very large catalogs of data, surrounded by policy and governance, but expressed essentially as an API and that the data itself can be manipulated in real time or through batch, using a set of RESTful APIs. And I think, Dave, you should share the demo, the StorageGRID guys today. It's just a fantastic data fabric use case. >> Some of my favorite use cases with the data fabric is where you're confused, the line is blurred even. Is it cloud, or is it on-prem, or what is it? And we've been working hard to integrate those things. Here's an example: we showed, and this a made-up use case, but it was an on-prem solid storage grid, so it's a bucket of objects. Did I mention we love objects? It's a bucket of objects and their faces, and the problem was, how do we identify what's going on with these faces? Are they happy, are they sad, are they angry? And you don't want to write your own face recognizer. And Amazon has good face recognition technology, Recognize. And so, the use case that we constructed is here's the bucket, we have integrated our StorageGRID object storage with Amazon Simple Notification Service. And so, any time a new object gets put into the bucket, it notifies Amazon. Amazon can do whatever it want with that information. Hey, here's the bucket, here's the new object added. What we had it do is issue a lambda, connect up the notification to a lambda, have the lambda come back out, grab the data from on-prem, look at it with the face recognizer. Okay, happy, and then go back on-prem and update that meta-data. Is that cloud, or is that on-prem? We used Amazon's lambda, where this is data fabric. >> This is the new development reinvention. This is what I think a renaissance is coming big time because making that happen takes creativity. The barriers to pull that off now are almost down to just knowing what's available. And so, I think a renaissance is coming because that's amazing, but now you got to say, how do you scale that, and this is the channel CXO's at. >> These are what people call microservices, or serverless computing environments, where they're breaking down the basic construct of an application to be a set of consumable services that can be orchestrated around particular data flows. >> And I think a problem with data, how do you discover those microservices? So, having a trusted provider to go and aggregate all of those microservices is a helpful approach. >> Guys, I know we're tight on time, you got to go, and super thankful for your time coming on theCUBE and sharing your insight and color commentary, what's going on. >> Thank you. >> Final question for both of you guys before you split is this. I've been watching NetApp for years, big fan of the company, obviously, Silicon Valley darling. Sometimes takes a lot of heat. "NetApp's dead," and they never die, but you guys are always winning. Reinvention's been a big part of your culture, but that's not about pivoting, it's about building and just adjusting. Secret to the success, how do you guys do it? Advice for others? >> We have repeatedly leaned in to the thing that was going to kill us. So, when VMWare came along, everyone was like, oh, software-defined data center, nobody's going to need data storage services anymore, data management, VMWare will do it all. And we said, you know what, that's not right. It's hard to do the data part, and we're going to go make VMWare better, and if we do that, our customers will pay us money to help them move to VMWare faster. We leaned in on the thing that was going to kill us, and we're doing exactly the same. I mean, everyone's going, oh cloud's going to kill NetApp. >> You built around it rather than let it roll over you. >> Not just built around it, we said we'll make it better. And we did the same thing again with the cloud. Oh, the cloud's going to kill you, and we're like, you know what, let's go figure out how to make Amazon better, make Microsoft better. If we can make them better, I mean, if you solve a hard problem for a customer, some way or another you can figure out how to get paid for that, and I think that's what we've been doing. >> And you get in early, too. The timing is critical. It's not like you're late to the game and saying there's a pony in there somewhere. You look at it, although a little bit maybe applied. >> We first announced that we were working on this cloud stuff three years ago. 2014, we had been started working in 2013, we were there from the ground with Amazon and with Azure running our ONTAP code, and they were changing their environment to fit with us, and we were changing our code to fit with them, and years later when Microsoft says, who are we going to go to to help us manage the enterprise? They came to NetApp because we've been working with them for so long, I love that. >> Guys, I wish you had more time, we're going to get in our studio in Palo Alto. Great conversation, real fire energy going on here from the execs here at NetApp. This is theCUBE, more live coverage in Las Vegas at NetApp Insight 2017 after this short break. (upbeat electronic keyboard music)

>> Commentator: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam >> We're back, this is theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. We're here at VeeamON 2017 day two. Bill Philbin is here, Senior Vice President at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And runs the storage business for HPE. Great to see you again my friend. >> Hey Dave, it's always good to see you. >> Really? >> Always look so fantastic. >> Thank you, where's the tie? >> There's no tie. >> I will say, you guys, those of you who didn't see it, Bill nailed the Keynote this morning. It was great, it was funny, self deprecating, and genuine. And essentially you resonated with me, 'cause I got four kids and you were talking about how you call your kids, you either get voicemail, or their voicemails full. >> Bill: That's right. >> You text them, at least your kids text you back. I got to Snapchat my kids to get a hold of them. So you got to get into Snapchat >> They have told me that texting and Facebook is so, you know, 20th century Dad. >> You email 'em, right? >> Yeah. >> You get some important email, you send it to 'em. Like, email? What are you kiddin' me? >> No you know it's not in >> Our lives are challenged, but nonetheless, you got some of your challenges of your own. You're running a big business now at HPE. You guys are making some serious moves in the marketplace. Give us the update on the HPE storage business. >> Yeah, so thanks Dave. >> Every squirrel finds a nut in the forest eventually, so I just had a pretty good day today. But, that was because we have a great story, frankly, to tell. And I think you know, as I was saying before, the storage business is changing. Rather dramatically. Now is it, is it self inflicted? Or is it you know, just a a course correction. I actually believe it's self inflicted in a sense that we've taken many of the capabilities that were previously on high end systems. And we brought 'em to the mid range. We've thinned it, we've de-uped it, we've compressed it, We've got it on SSDs. And so the whole business model, now is different than it was five years ago. Before you sold somebody an appliance, you chocked it full of spinning media. They ran out of IOPS, you sold another appliance, you chocked it full. It was a pretty good business model. That's how I kept Mrs. Philbin in the lifestyle she's grown accustomed, right? Well, now, you don't chock it full of spinning media, you chock it full of SSDs. IOPS are always on guarantee. And then you take all that compaction technology, and that has actually forced a fundamental change, I think, in the storage landscape. That we, including Hewlett Packard have inflicted upon ourselves. I think we take a look at that, and need to take a look at the storage landscape, the number of vendors that are out there. You know, I think that is changing as well, which is, you know, part of the reason why we decided to get into acquiring companies like SimpliVity and Nimble. >> Dave: And you've got a knife fight going on in All-Flash. I got to say, you know, what HPE did with 3PAR surprised me and probably a lot of people. >> Bill: Mhm. >> Most people didn't think you could quote, unquote "bolt on" flash into that architecture. Obviously it wasn't a bolt on, you guys have been very successful. When you talk to your competitors, certainly when you talk to customers they love it. When you talk to competitors they say "yeah, we can compete with company A, B, and C. It's 3PAR that we have trouble with. Because it's simple and it works. >> And some times enduring technologies actually extend beyond, you know, single generations, right? And so, we certainly have heard the story about the new versus the old, and being old maybe this is my perspective. But, you know, enduring technologies actually can transition across architectural and technology boundaries. And that's exactly what we've done, exactly what we've done with 3PAR. >> Now, having said that, you guys have been, I mean you saw 3PAR initially with you know, spinning, and hybrid. Took off, you know, justified the acquisition, made the transition to All-Flash >> Bill: Yeah. >> I've called it many times, 3PAR's the gift that keeps on giving. So how many times can you go to that well, right? So you guys have made some moves here. Not the least of which was Nimble, want to talk about that. And SimpliVity, so. Even though SimpliVity's not under your organization, you have an affinity there. Talk about those two moves and where they fit in the portfolio. >> So let's just start with the 3PAR, just the 3PAR comment just for a quick second. The pure plays versus sort of the, what they call the stayed play. So, it's hard to imagine that 3PAR as a stayed play technology, right? I don't agree with that statement. But that, the reason I don't agree with it is, we're actually going faster than the pure plays in the All-Flash market. We have more revenue than they do, so. I think it's comfortable for people to sort of set one technology off over another but the fact of the matter is, that we're growing faster. The other thing about the market is it generally gravitates toward technologies that are unique in purpose regardless of what they cost. Because the customer demands it. And All-Flash started with guys like Fusion-io and Violin Memory, and all of those guys, right? Eventually what happens though, is customers tire of those additional assets in their data center, right? One more thing they don't want in their data centers, is one more thing in their data center. And that's when the big guys eventually sort of overtake that position. So, I think what you're going to, you're starting to see in the storage landscape is compression at a company level, right? You're seeing the Neutonics and Pures out there. You're seeing then the next tier of companies trying to sort of, you know, make the big break. And the last time a company made a big break in the storage business, that's still independent today. It's a billion dollars of revenue or more, was? >> Dave: NetApp. >> NetApp. Because storage looks like it's easy goin' in but it's not easy when you think about bare metal and databases and transactional systems, and highly available. It's not that easy, and so, that's why a company like a Nimble, who has great technology, Infosite, the CASL file system, great people. To order scale that business, profitably, and have to go to market reach, it needs to align themselves with a company like Hewlett Packard. So, we're really, really excited about Nimble joining the family for sure. That now enables us to sort of take the flash portfolio further across the across the landscape. On SimpliVity, I think the way that you should think about our strategy at Hewlett Packard is it's all about choice. So, you're a customer who wants to sort of, you know, put assets in your data center, and have assets in Microsoft as your cloud we should enable that. If you think Software Defined's the right way to go, we should enable that. You have an appliance customer, we should enable that. If you want to co-locate applications in a simple easy to use interface with storage, we have that, that's SimpliVity. But that choice shouldn't come with operational complexity. So, one of the things that we have to do, and I was talking about this at the Keynote, is we have to somewhat hide ourselves behind the application and make it easier for customers to consume. Because that is what the web offers them. We ought to be able to federate the data, so that you can actually move your data around when your requirements change, or you've got to burst. And the administration ought to be really, really simple. So, our strategy around technologies like SimpliVity, or Nimble, or 3PAR, or you know, MSA, XP, is all around giving customers choice without the operational complexity of having lots of things to manage. >> Bill, I guess I'm trying to, for our audience, try to maybe compare and contrast a little bit >> Yeah. >> Against you know, what was formerly EMC, now Dell EMC, >> Uh-huh. >> Which the knock on them for many years has been, they've got so many products, they overlap. We've covered for many years how, you know, if I have 3PAR and some of the other HP, HPE storage products, I can move between them, is that the difference issues thing So even though if you have Nimble, plus SimpliVity, plus you know, 3PAR. >> So, three is less than seven. Let's just start with that answer. And maybe it's not seven anymore, you know, I've lost track. Second, I think if you're really talking about provisioning storage and networking compute from an application layer, really what you've doing is you want to have a conversation about the service level underneath that the storage provides. Maybe for certain applications you're okay with thinly provisioned or not thinly provisioned et cetera. So, one answer is, a lot of those capabilities are actually hidden by the application layer. However, we know that the thing that doesn't move all that well is data. And data has gravity. So, being able to move data in addition to moving your compute, is one of the reasons that they differentiation for us over the other guys. >> Dave: But, you know, let me just stay on that for a second Stu. We're all storage guys or quasi-storage guys. >> Bill: He's only a quasi-storage guy? >> He's really a networking guy. >> I worked at a storage company for ten years but, yeah. >> You're a newbie then. >> But if you look at history, it is shown that you actually have to have multiple architectures to increase the size of your TM, and penetrate the marketplace. I mean, NetApp is the exception that proves the rule. I mean, they could only go so far with WAFL. I mean you were there, and you know, And so even now NetApp makes a move for solid fire. Obviously EMC has been very successful with, I think it's 17, so not 7. But it actually works, and so, that dogma of oh we have to have one architecture is never proven to really be a winning strategy. >> And frankly, it is really hard to actually stress an architecture from top to bottom, right? So I don't disagree with the comment you made, but that is effectively, however the same problem with the storage startups today is if they do a single thing, only support virtualized environments, whatever it is, right. Only support VDI. The breath is what customers are looking for. And if you don't have the breath, or you're forced to go get the breath, by adding bolt-ons to try and get the breath. It's just going to make it very, very difficult for them to survive in the new world order. Both acquisitions SimpliVity and Nimble were great for the company. >> Bill, can you tie together for us HPE and Veeam, how those fit together. One of the big themes we've been covering is the extension of Veeam started very, very much virtualized now they're physical they're talking about all the cloud solutions. Expect there's a lot of fit between your strategies. >> There is, for years we've have a very, very strong technical partnership between the Veeam engineering team and the StoreOnce engineering team. I think, you know, that is like the basis of trust, I think is the best way to think about it. We've both sort of got competing road maps on occasion, but at the end of the day it's all about, sort of, what's best for the customer. Number one is technical people, second is we have the same view of the market. And I talked about this, this morning, which is, this highly available, always on sort of environment is the same story that we tell. So the messages are aligned. The third is that it's complimentary, we have our own sort of data protection technology with data protector. We have our own sort of snapshot management capability with RMC. The question is, how do we sort of you know, protect the entire environment. And Veeam is a critical asset in that. It's a great business partnership, great technology partnership. The fact that our folks kind of resell Veeam, has just launched the business forward . >> Well, the move to sell the software business to Micro Focus has just opened up new partnership opportunities for you guys. >> Bill: In regards to that we still have a very, very strong partnership with the software guys. You know there's, the largest connect that we have on a backup product today, is get a protector. So I don't expect that to change. But there are people who prefer, you know, to use Veeam and we have to support that. >> Dave: Yeah, but still I mean, if you got the your colleagues in data protector and you're out aggressively partnering with Veeam and it's part of HPE. Maybe you get an email or, you get a "hey, come on Bill, you know, give me a break here." And now I feel like you know, the gloves are off you can do independent of all that internal stuff, plumbing. It's what's right for the customer. Maybe I'm overstating that. >> Perhaps a bit, because we'll still have equity ownership in the new company. Again with all the sort of connect I have, I think that regardless of where the paychecks come from if you will, we have to have a really strong partnership with them. And it's no different than, you know, we also have a partnership with Symantec, I mean we have other partnerships that customers just have made a preference around. That we're not going to convince them, you know, to do something different. Therefore, we've got to have a strong partnership. >> Dave: Alright, so we're going to be at Discover, theCUBE will be there for, been there many years now. I think this is our seventh Discover. >> You've been there as many years as I have, >> So what are we looking forward to there. >> So I think there's a bunch of announcements, we've highlighted one of them today around the secondary flash array for Nimble. There's some new 3PAR announcements that are certainly coming. The Synergy guys are going to certainly have a thing or two to say, I'm thinking. Based on the strength of that platform, that platform's really starting to take off. And so I think you're going to see that, I think this will probably be really the first Discover where, you know, you'll start to see, and maybe Madrid Discover will be different. But you'll start to see the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We keep focusing on things that we've spin-merged out, but the thing I think we need to focus on is the fact that we're, this is like a Phoenix of a new company, right? Solely focused on enterprise infrastructure and the customer needs. We've rebranded the TS business and PointNext, which is all around transformation and technology services, so. It's almost like we're starting the clock over again. For the HP employees, we're not changing your service levels. But, for almost everything else, we're rebuilding a brand new company. And that is what Meg and the board are doing, it's really exciting. >> Well, it's true the last couple of Discovers there was a distraction with the split, there was a distraction with two spin-merges. But you've now seen the M&A activity focus on areas like storage, areas like converge, type or converge. >> I always tell this story 'cause you guys like my analogies which is, you know, when you've got lots of kids in your family, my family, my oldest I've got lots of pictures of. The middle kid, you know, some pictures of. The third one virtually no pictures of, right? 'Cause you go from man to man defense, to zone defense. Same is true with a CEO. When you've got seven or eight different things to manage, you're focused, it needs to be spread over seven different or eight things. Now, Meg is actually, got fewer children to manage if you roll the analogy out a little bit. We got a lot of her attention, and a lot of focus. And that I think is really, really important. >> Dave: And now all the pictures are digital, they're in the cloud, they're protected. >> Bill: Yeah. >> Bill, great to see you. >> Good to see you guys. >> Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, we'll see you in Vegas. >> Bill: You bet. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.