>>Hello from Chicago, Lisa Martin, back with you and John Furrier. This is day one of the Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. John, we've been having great conversations all morning about automation and how it's really pivotal and central. One of the things that we want to talk about next is automation as a strategy. Yeah. You know, some of the barriers to customer adoption, one of them is, well, can we, can we really understand where the most ROI is gonna be? But another one is automation happening kind of in pockets and silos. And we're gonna be talking next with one of our alumni about breaking those down. >>This is gonna be a great segment from the customer perspective, the conversations they're having problems trying to solve, and really got a great cube alumni back to share. And we're excited. It's be a good segment. >>We do have a great alumni, Walter Bentley, Fresh from the keynote stages back with us, the senior manager of the automation practice at Red Hat. Walter, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me back. I really look forward to doing this every year and you know, it's, it's >>Exciting. So we had your great energetic keynote this morning and you were really talking about organizations need to think about automation from a strategic lens perspective, a really a true long term investment. Where are most organizations today and how are you gonna help them get there? >>Right. So most organizations today are kind of in that sweet spot where they've discovered that they can do the tactical automation and they can deal with those small day-to-day things. And now they wanna move into the space where they're really able to plug automation into their current workflows and try to optimize it. And, and that's the perfect direction to be heading. And, and what I always encourage our customers is that once you get to that point, don't stop. You gotta keep going because the next phase is, is when you begin to innovate with automation. And when automation is at first is, is at the beginning of the, of everything you're creating. And at that point, that's when you're really gonna see the great benefits from it. >>How have your customer conversations evolved over the last couple of years, particularly as the world has changed, but we've also seen the acceleration of automation and so much, so much advancement in the technology. >>Right. You know, you'll be shocked that our customers wanted us to speak to them in more of an enterprise architecture level. They wanted us to really be able to come in and help them design how they're going to lay out their automation vision. And that surprised me at first. My background being in architecture for many years, I didn't know that, you know, automation had evolved to that level. And, and that was one of the things that we, we tried to do our best to rise to the occasion and be able to answer that call. >>You know, Walter, one of the things when we were in person last in 2019, you were on the cube and then we did the remote. We were kind of right. You got it right. When we were, we were talking about this, Hey, if this goes the way we think it's gonna go, the automation layer is gonna be horizontally scaled with the cloud. So income, cloud, growth, lift and shift. Now I got some refactored applications in the cloud and I got on premises edge coming hybrid steady state. What does automation look like? You had said it's gonna scale. Yep. And so as clients realize, well this is was the kind of a group within the group doing some automation stuff with Ansible, all great stuff, Product leadership, great community check, check, check. Now, how do you make that a global architecture for a company? What, what's it take to make that an enterprise scale architecture? What's the next step for the, for the journey and, and for the community and the customers? >>So one of the major announcements today is actually one of the right steps in the right direction, which is now that you can deploy a on all of your hyperscalers, right? So you have it local, you're covering your private cloud area, now you're able to cover your hyperscalers. Now it's time to unite them together so that they can all kind of work as one function. And to me, that is the enterprise approach that that to aap. And I'm just so excited that we finally have rolled it out for aws. We have it for Azure, of course we have it inside. And we're also working on things like you said, like the edge, but also things like making sure we're covering customers that are air gaped customers that do not have the capability of the ingress in, in, in, in being, of being able to go in and out of that environment and that network. Right. We're working on strategic, strategic solutions to be able to do that better >>For what's interesting, we've been talking about super cloud on the cube. I, we coined that term at reinvent about people using cloud in a different way to kind of do things and it's become kind of also a, a term for multi-cloud. Yes. So if you think about what you just said, it's interesting, this cloud services that could, they all have stores, they have compute, There might be a day where they're all kind of invisible. Yes. And you can have spanning services across the cloud, but yet they can still differentiate on their own. So it's not so much about sneakers, it's more about that interoperability. How do you see that? What's your reaction to that? Right. >>Well, that's one of the core reasons why we move to the name of the answ automation platform. Platform being the key right? Is, is the platform is supposed to be able to span into different environments and really kind of unite them together. And that was one of the the things that I really liked about when we went to that late last year. Yeah. Late last year. And, and we've been working with our customers and make sure that we make that front and center, that they move towards that environment so that they can begin to do better scale and really operate at that, at that executive level. >>What's your favorite customer story that you think really articulates the value of what you just said? >>Right. So the one, so I'll give you a different one from the one that I, that I talked about on stage. And, and again, it it, when we went in from a services engagement, we did not expect the outcome of the fact that they would access this particular customer. We went in something very tactical, just laying down the platform for them. And, and the expectation was we would lay it down and walk away and then hopefully they would pick it up and kind of run with it. What we came to realize is that they liked the oversight and they liked the way that we were working with them. And they wanted to take those preferred approaches and really embed them Right. And their organization. And so they invited us back actually for two or three different consulting engagements to come back and just help them drive that adoption. And this is at the, they're at the very beginning, right? So they're doing it a little bit different in a lot of other organizations. The other organizations would lay down the platform, do some things, and then call us back to help them them with adoption, Right. >>Is the report card out? Yeah, >>Absolutely. They did it differently. And, and that to me stood out as the level of maturity their IT organization is. >>It sounds like they went from tactical to strategic Yes. Pretty quickly. Which is not normally the >>Case. No, no, not at all. Not normally the case. But as you can clearly see that, we're starting to see that more and more with our customers. They're upleveling, I hate for the theme, but they're upleveling. Right. And, and, and that's what I meant by my organization, my team that I, that I run, we have to do more with our customers because they're expecting more >>For them to level up. And I loved how that was used this morning. I'm like, Yeah, that's a cool term. Level up. We all gotta level up to some degree. How are you helping organizations do that from a cultural shift perspective? Because of course the people are so integral to this being successful. Can't forget >>That. Absolutely. So, you know, you know, remember the days of when you would have the DevOps team and that was like the thing, like you have to form your DevOps team and once you got that, you're good to go. And, and I always tell our customers that's a good start, but that's definitely not where you want to end. And you have to get to the point where you have all parts of your organization writing automation content, feeling comfortable, being able to kind of control their day to day. And so that's where you have to break down those silos. You have to really have those, you know, your operators and your developers and, and your DBAs and your networking folks really communicating. And, and if everyone kind of takes care of their own world and write content to control what they do on a day to day, they can bring those together. >>Walter, on buzzword it's been kicking around Silicon Valley in the tech industry re recently is multiplayer versus single player software. Yes. And I I heard that must be from gamers obviously. Yes. Discourse pop. I heard that on, stayed here in the matrix announcement earlier. You know, when you talk about teamwork ops devs while working together, clearly the operator role is changing. What that means is changing devs are getting stronger and more open source, they're shifting left and all that good stuff in the, in the CID pipeline as the teams work together, multiplayer in an organization. What's the success form of that you see emerging for how to organize, how to motivate, how to get people kind of in a good, you know, teamwork pass score kind of team oriented approach? >>Well, I'm really proud to talk about is how AAP has really enabled that and, and kind of fast tracks that ability for everyone to work together within a, the all the functionality that's now built into it. There's pieces of it that are focused on different operators or different parts of the IT organization, right. And, and, and we're made to be able to help to bring them all together. You know, I love the components such as the service catalog. You know, imagine being able to have a place where you can publish all of your, your content for other people to consume. You know, back in the day everything was stored in, in a repository, right? And you had to know what you were looking for. And so just small changes like that, having the, the, the Ansible toy, right? So you're having tools that are actually built in for those who are writing the content to be able to have at their fingertips the ability to test their content right from inside of the, the, the toy, right? So the terminal interface, just those small little nuances to me is what helps to bring it all together and kind of create that >>Great leverage glue. Yes. Not a lot of busy work and you know, absolutely. Hunting and packing for stuff like configuring manually. >>Absolutely. >>Awesome. What's next for you guys? >>Well, you know, we have some big announcements coming up tomorrow. I won't, I won't get into as much as I want to talk about >>It. Events. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. Something starts with the e but also some really fantastic technology. We're, what we're doing is, is we're really taking the idea of automation and really feeding into it in a sense that we're building into some mar some, some really smart technology into aap. And I'm, I'm, I'm excited, I'm excited for direction it's going and I know everyone tomorrow are gonna really, really hear some great >>Things. We heard upleveling, we heard upleveling culture shift. If I asked you what does culture shift mean, how would you answer that? >>I would answer that in a sense that it, it, the culture shift is, is shifting from the place where you feel that you're on an island and you have to solve for it alone as well as feeling that you have to solve for the whole ribbon of whatever you're working on. And that culture shift is moving from that mentality to the fact that you have a whole team of folks who may know how to solve for that already. And you feel comfortable being able to reach out to them and work with them to be able to build that. And that's, that to me is the change. You know, I'm, I'm a old school infrastructure dude, you know, I was the one who would, who would wake up two o'clock in the morning to fix a problem, right? I thought it was on me, but now the culture shift is now it's, we are a team and we're gonna work together to solve it. So that's, that's kind of my view on >>It. And the appetite in organizations is there, cuz oftentimes in the, in the siloed world, it's, I own this, this is my baby. Right? Right. How do you help them as a, as a trusted advisor to really open up the kimono and embrace that collaboration? Because ultimately that's the right strategic direction for the business, >>Right? The first step in that is making sure that everyone is kind of operating from the same book, right. Or the same plan. And, and until you actually write that plan down and publish it in a place for other people to consume it, it creates a little bit of a barrier, right? So that's the first thing we do is write down that plan, make it available for all the consume. And at the beginning, you know, not everyone runs to it, but over time if their curiosity begins to peak and then over time they begin to consume it and possibly contribute to it themselves over time, that's, that's how we kind of conquer that. And so far we've seen some good success. >>What would you say if someone said, you know, I want some proof, proof in the pudding proven methods to help accelerate the time to value with automation and help organizations to really understand and quantify the ROI for doing so. >>Right. And, and to me that's, this is the conversation I love having because we've, we've come out with something that we call success metrics and, and yes, they are exactly what they sound like, right? There are some metrics that you can use to measure in your organization to kind of determine your maturity around automation. The two key things that I would love to share about that is that when we think of metrics, right? We think of performance, we think of, you know, how well something is running, how long it's been running. Those are all great, but the two additional success metrics that we include in there are around more of the cultural field. The perception, right? The perception as well as how comfortable your employees feel using that product. And that's where that, that the shift of looking at the cultural, not just the technical side, but the cultural side of things has made a big difference. So I love sharing those metrics with our customers. It usually resonates and then we help them dig in on, to see how they, how they fit, and also give them some ideas as to how they can improve going forward. >>I'm sure they appreciate that knowing where that, where we are now, how do we get to the end, not the end state. Obviously it's a journey, but how do we get farther along in this from a unified front approach rather than absolutely operating in these silos, which is not gonna get us to the, the the on the journey that we should be on. Correct. Yeah. Yep. So some good stuff coming out tomorrow. Not gonna give us any nuggets, which totally understands. Nope. >>No, but it's, you're gonna be very excited. Yes. It's good stuff. >>Awesome. I gotta ask you one quick question before we wrap up. You mentioned multi-cloud earlier. This is a big conversation in the industry. A lot of people are debating what that is. It sounds good on paper. Where is the customer's view as they look at this journey? Because we, we see a future where there'll be services that won't be common across clouds. There's a differentiation and some that will be, and that, that just be shared like compute for instance. And let, let us be there where you can call in to the multi-cloud. What's, how do you, how do your customers think about multi-cloud? Are they having that conversation more they go, Is that more of a destination of the future? In their mind >>It feels more like a destination of the future. Right now, a lot of organizations have kind of solidified on one cloud per se that they want to be able to roll out as far as being able to scale up and down their resources. But the idea is, is eventually, you know, you, you're gonna go with whatever works best for that product or whatever works best for that, that business case that you're trying to solve for. And, and that's why I love the fact that AEP is kind of generically being able to be applied across all of them. So that, that is, that is gonna be your unifier, right? That's gonna be the layer that will stay the same no matter where you go. And that's one of the things that I love about our product around that is that, that we are meant to be the unifier and we're >>Bless the whole today. It's a great opportunity for Ansible that's there. All >>Right. To be the unifier. Last question for you before we wrap. What was some of the feedback about, from your session this morning on Ansible really being that unifier? Any, any folks come up to you and say anything that was particularly insightful? >>Well, you know what, it it, what was kind of alluded to or shared with me directly was the fact that, you know, thinking about automation as you would traditional platforms, right? And, and building a strategy and, and the idea that you need to write that down and actually make some decisions around that. And, and it wasn't that it wasn't thought about it, it was just, it just never came front to mind. And, and so I'm happy that I was able to plant that seed because that, that's what we're seeing that makes the difference between those who are very successful with automation and those, those who may >>Not be writing it down. Sometimes it's fact to basics that back to basics really help absolutely fuel the growth of organizations. Walter, thank you. Thanks for joining John and me on the queue today talking about what's going on, automation as a strategy, the vision and how Ansible is really on its way to becoming that unifier. We appreciate your insights. Cool. >>No, it's my pleasure. And thank you for having me again. All >>Right, cool. Our pleasure for Walter Bentley and John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago. Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022 continues next.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to theCUBE. In this special power panel we're going to dig into and take a peek at the future of cloud. You know a lot has transpired in the last decade. The cloud itself, we've seen a data explosion. The AI winter turned into machine intelligence going mainstream. We've seen the emergence of As-a-Service models. And as we look forward to the next 10 years we see the whole idea of cloud expanding, new definitions occurring. Yes, the world is hybrid but the situation is more nuanced than that. You've got remote locations, smaller data centers, clandestine facilities, oil rigs, autonomous vehicles, windmills, you name it. Technology is connecting our world, data is flowing through the pipes like water, and AI is helping us make sense of the noise. All of this, and more is driving a new digital economy. And with me to talk about these topics are three great guests from IBM. Maia Sisk is the Director of SaaS Offering Management, at IBM Data and AI. And she's within the IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software Group. Stephanie Walter is the Program Director for data and AI Offering Management, same group IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software. And Daniel Berg is a Distinguished Engineer. He's focused on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. He's in the Cloud Organization. And he's going to talk today a lot about IBM's cloud Satellite and of course Containers. Wow, two girls, two boys on a panel, we did it. Folks welcome to theCUBE. (chuckles) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. >> So Maia, I want to start with you and have some other folks chime in here. And really want to dig into the problem statement and what you're seeing with customers and you know, what are some of the challenges that you're hearing from customers? >> Yeah, I think a big challenge that we face is, (indistinct) talked about it earlier just data is everywhere. And when we look at opportunities to apply the cloud and apply an As-a-Service model, one of the challenges that we typically face is that the data isn't all nice cleanly package where you can bring it all together, and you know, one AI models on it, run analytics on it, get it in an easy and clean way. It's messy. And what we're finding is that customers are challenged with the problem of having to bring all of the data together on a single cloud in order to leverage it. So we're now looking at IBM and how we flip that paradigm around. And instead of bringing the data to the cloud bring the cloud to the data , in order to help clients manage that challenge and really harness the value of the data, regardless of where you live. >> I love that because data is distributed by its very nature it's silo, Daniel, anything you'd add? >> Yeah, I mean, I would definitely echo that, what Maia was saying, because we're seeing this with a number of customers that they have certain amount of data that while they're strategically looking that moving to the cloud, there's data that for various reasons they can not move itself into the cloud. And in order to reduce latency and get the fastest amount of processing time, they going to move the processing closer to that data. And that's something that we're looking at providing for our customers as well. The other services within IBM Cloud, through our notion of IBM Cloud Satellite. How to help teams and organizations get processing power manage them to service, but closer to where their data may reside. >> And just to play off of that with one other comment. Then the other thing I think we see a lot today is heightened concerned about risks, about data security, about data privacy. And you're trying to figure out how to manage that challenge of especially when you start sending data over the wire, wanting to make sure that it is still safe, it is still secure and it is still resident in the appropriate places. And that kind of need to manage the governance of the data kind of adds an additional layer of complexity. >> Right, if it's not secure, it's a, non-starter, Stephanie let's bring you into the conversation and talk about, you know, some of the waves that you're seeing. Maybe some of the trends, we've certainly seen digital accelerate as a result of the pandemic. It's no longer I'll get to that someday. It's really, it become a mandate you're out of business, if you don't have a digital business. What are some of the markets shifts that you're seeing? >> Well, I mean, really at the end of the day our clients want to infuse AI into their organizations. And so, you know, really the goal is to achieve ambient AI, AI that's just running in the background unchoosibly helping our clients make these really important business decisions. They're also really focused on trust. That's a big issue here. They're really focused on, you know, being able to explain how their AI is making these decisions and also being able to feel confident that they're not introducing harmful biases into their decision-making. So I say that because when you think about, you know digital organization going digital, that's what our customers want to focus on. They don't want to focus on managing IT. They don't want to focus on managing software. They don't want to to have to focus on, you know, patching and upgrading. And so we're seeing more of a move to manage services As-a-Service technologies, where the clients can really focus on their business problems and using The technologies like AI, to help improve their businesses. And not have to worry so much about building them from the ground up. >> So let's stay on that for a minute. And maybe Maia, Daniel, you can comment. So you, Stephanie, you said that customers want to infuse AI and kind of gave some reasons why, but I want to stay on that for a minute. That, what is that really that main outcome that they're looking for? Maybe there are several, they're trying to get to insight. You mentioned that trynna be more efficient it sounds like they're trynna automate governance and compliance, Maia, Daniel can you sort of add anything to this conversation? >> Yeah, well, I would, I would definitely say that, you know at the end of the day, customers are looking to use the data that they have to make smarter decisions. And in order to make smarter decisions it's not enough to just have the insight. The insight has to, you know, meet the business person that needs it, you know in the context, you know, in the application, in the customer interaction. So I think that that's really important. And then everything else becomes like the the superstructure that helps power, that decision and the decision being embedded in the business process. So we at IBM talk a lot about a concept we call the Ladder to AI. And the the short tagline is there is no AI without IA. You know, there is no Artificial Intelligence without Information Architecture. It is so critical, you know, Maia's version this is the garbage in garbage out. You have to have high quality data. You have to have that data be well-organized and well-managed so that you're using it appropriately. And all of that is just, you know then becomes the fuel that powers your AI. But if you have the AI without having that super structure, you know, you're going to end up making, get bad decisions. And ultimately, you know our customers making their customers experience less than it could and should be. And in a digital world, that's, you know, at the end of the day, it's all about digitizing that interaction with whoever the end customer whoever the end consumer is and making that experience the best it can be, because that's what fuels innovation and growth. >> Okay. So we've heard Arvind Krishna talk about, he actually made this statement IBM has to win the architectural battle for cloud. And I'm wondering maybe Daniel you can comment, on what that architectural framework looks like. I mean Maia just talked about the Information Architecture. You can't have AI without that foundation but we know what does Arvind mean by that? How is IBM thinking about that? >> Yeah, I mean, this is where we're really striving to allow our customers really focusing on their business and focusing on the goals that they're trying to achieve without forcing them to worry as much about the IT and the infrastructure and the platform for which they're going to run. Typically, if you're anchored by your data and the data is not able to move into the cloud, generally we would say that you don't have access to cloud services. You must go and install and run and operate your own software to perform the duties or the processing that you require. And that's a huge burden to push onto a customer because they couldn't move their data to your cloud. Now you're pushing a lot of responsibilities back onto them. So what we're really striving for here is, how can we give them that cloud experience where they can process their data? They can run their run book. They can have all of that managed As-a-Service so that they could focus on their business but get that closer to where the data actually resides. And that's what we're really striving for as far as the architecture is concerned. So with IBM Cloud Satellite, we're pushing the core platform and the platform services that we support in IBM Cloud outside of our data centers and into locations where it's closer to your data. And all of that is underpinned by Containerizations, Containers, Kubernetes and OpenShift. Is fundamentally the platform for which we're building upon. >> Okay. So that, so really it's still it's always a data problem, right? Data is you don't want to move it if you don't have to. Right. So it's, so Stephanie, should we think about this as a new emergent data architecture I guess that's what IA is all about. How do you see that evolving? >> Well I mean, I see it evolving as, I mean, first of all our clients, you know, we know that data is the lifeblood of AI. We know the vast majority of our clients are using more than one cloud. And we know that the client's data may be located in different clouds, and that could be due to costs, that could be due to location. So we have to ask the question, how are our clients supposed to deal with this? This is incredibly complex environments they're are incredibly complex reasons sometimes for the data to be where it is. It can include anything from costs to laws, that our clients have to abide by. So what we need to do, is we need to adapt to these different environments and provide clients with the consistent experience and lower complexity to be able to handle data and be able to use AI in these complex environments. And so, you know, we know data, we also know data science talent is scarce. And if each one of these environments have their own tools that need to be used, depending on where the data is located, that's a huge time sink, for these data scientist and our clients don't want to waste their talents time on problems like this. So what we're seeing is, we're seeing more of a acceptance and realization that this is what our clients are dealing with. We have to make it easier. We have to do Innovative things like figure out how to bring the AI to the data, how to bring the AI to where the clients need it and make it much easier and accessible for them to take advantage of. >> And I think there's an additional point to make on this one, which is it's not just easy and accessible but it's also unified. I mean, one of the challenges that customers face in this multicloud environment and many customers are multicloud, you know, not necessarily by intent but just because of how, you know, businesses have adopted as a service. But to then have all of that experience be fragmented and have different tools not just of data, but different pools of, again catalog, different pools of data science it's extremely complex to manage. So I think one of the powerful things that we're doing here, is we're kind of bringing those multiple clouds together, into more of an integrated or a unified, you know window into the client's data in AI state. So not only does the end-user not have to worry about you know, the technologies of dealing with multiple individual clouds, but also, you know it all comes together in one place. So it can be give managed in a more unified way so that assets can be shared across, and it becomes more of a unified approach. The way I like to think of it is, you know, it's true hybrid multicloud, in that it is all connected as opposed to multi-cloud, but it's pools of multiple clouds, one cloud at a time. >> So it can we stay on that for a second because it's, you're saying it's unified but the data stays where it is. The data is distributed by nature. So it's unified logically, but it's decentralized. Is that, am I getting that right? Correct. Okay. Correct. All right. I'm really interested in how you do this. And maybe we can talk about maybe the approach that you take for some of your offerings and maybe get specific on that. So maybe Stephanie, why don't you start, you know, Yes so, what do you have in your basket? Like Cloud Pak So what we have in our basket I mean lets talk about that. >> We have, so Cloud Pak for Data as a Service. This is our premier data and AI platform. It's offered as a service, its fully managed, and there's roughly, there's 30 services integrated services in our services catalog and growing. So we have services to help you through the entire AI life cycle from preparing your data, which is Maia was saying it's very, very, very important. It's critical to any successful AI project. From building your models, from running the models and then monitoring them to make sure that as I was saying before, you can trust them. You don't have to make sure that, you need to make sure that there's not biased. You need to be able to manage these models and then the life cycle them retrain them if needed. So our platform handles all of that. It's hosted on IBM Cloud. And what we're doing now, which is really exciting, is we're going to use, and you mentioned before IBM Cloud Satellite, as a way for us to send our AI to data that perhaps is located on another cloud or another environment. So how this would work is that the services that are integrated with Cloud Pak for Data as a Service they'll be able to use satellite locations to send their AI workloads, to run next to the data. And this means that the data doesn't need to be moved. You don't have to worry about high egress charges. You can see, you can reduce latency and see much stronger performance by running these AI workloads where it counts. We're really excited to to add this capability to our platform. Because, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about earlier all of these challenges that our clients have and this is going to make a big difference in helping them overcome them. Okay. So Daniel, how to Containers fit in? I mean, obviously the Red Hat acquisition was so strategic. We're seeing the real, the ascendancy of OpenShift in particular. Talk about Containers and where it fits into the IBM Cloud Satellite strategy. >> Yeah. So a lot of this builds on top of how we run our cloud business today. Today the vast majority of the services that are available in IBM cloud catalog, actually runs as Containers, runs in a Kubernetes based environment and runs on top of the services that we provide to our customers. So the Container Platform that we provide to our customers is the same one that we're using to run our own cloud services. And those are underpinned with Containers, Kubernetes, and OpenShift. And IBM cloud satellite, based on the way that the designed our Container Platform using Kubernetes and Containers and OpenShift, allows us to take that same design and the same principles and extended outside of our data centers with user provided infrastructure. And this, this goes back to what Stephanie was saying is a satellite location. So using that technology, that same technology and the fact that we've already containerized many of our services and run them on our own platform, we are now distributing our platform outside of IBM Cloud Data Centers using satellite locations and making those available for our cloud service teams, to make their services available in those locations. >> I see and Maia, this, it is as a service. It's a OPEX. Is that right? Absolutely Okay. Absolutely >> Yeah, it's with the two different options on how we can run. One is we can leverage IBM Cloud Satellite and reach into a customer's operating environment. They provide the infrastructure, but we've provide the As-a-Service experience for the Container on up. The other option that we have is for some of our capabilities like our data science capability, where, you know customer might need something a little bit more turnkey because it's, you know, more of a business person or somebody in the CTO's office consuming the As-a-Service. We'll also offer select workloads in an IBM own satellite and environment. I, you know, so that it kind of soup to nuts managed by us. But that is the key is that other than, you know providing the operating environment and then connecting what we do to, you know, their data sources, really the rest is up to us. We're responsible for, you know everything that you would expect in an As-a-Service environment. That things are running, that they're updated, that they're secure, that they're compliant, that's all part of our responsibility. >> Yeah. So a lot of options for customers and it's kind of the way they want to consume. Let's talk about the business impact. You know, you guys, IBM, very consultative selling, you know, tight relationships with customers. What's the business case look like when you go into a client? What's the conversation like? What's possible? What can you share? Stephanie, can you maybe start things off there? Any examples, use-cases, business case, help us understand the metrics. >> Yeah. I mean, so let's talk about a couple of use cases here. So let's say I'm an investment firm, and I'm using data points from all kinds of data sources right? To use AI, to create models to inform my investment decisions. So I'm going to be using, I may be using data sources you know, like regulatory filings, newspaper articles that are pretty standard. I may also be using things like satellite data that monitors parking lots or maybe even weather data, weather forecast data. And all of this data is coming together and being, it needs to be used for models to predict, you know when to buy, sell, trade, however, due to costs, due to just availability of the data they may be located on completely different clouds. You know, and we know that especially capital markets things are fast, fast, fast. So I need to bring my AI to my data, and need to do it quickly so that I can build these models where the data resides, and then be able to make my investment decisions, very fast. And these models get updated often because conditions change, markets change. And this is one way to provide a unified set of AI tools that my data scientists can use. We don't have to be trained on I'm told depending on what cloud the data is stored on. And they can actually build these models much faster and even cheaper. If you would take into egress charges into consideration, you know, moving all the all this data around. Another use case that we're seeing is you know, something like let's say, a multinational telecommunications company that has locations in multiple countries and maybe they want to reduce their customer churn. So they have say customer data that it's stored in different countries and different countries may have different regulations, or the company may have policies that, that data can't be moved out to those country. So what can we do? Again, what we can do is we can send our AI to this data. We can make a customer churn prediction model, that when my customer service representative is on the phone with a customer, and put their information, and see how likely they are to stop using my service and tailor my phone interaction and the offers that I would offer them as this customer service representative to them. If there's a high likelihood that they're going to churn I will probably sweeten the deal. And I can do all that while I'm being fast, right. Because we know that these interactions need to happen quickly. But also while complying with whatever policies or even regulations that are in place for my multinational company. So you know, if you think back to the use cases that I was just talking about you know, latency, performance, reducing costs and also being able to comply with any policy or regulations that our customers might have are really, are really the key pieces of the use cases that we've been seeing. >> Yeah. So Maia there's a theme here. I bring five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data kind of thing. And so Stephanie was talking about speed. There's a an inherent compliance and governance piece. It's it sounds like it's not a bolt on, it's not an afterthought, it's fundamental. So maybe you could add to the conversation, just specifically interested in, you know, what should a client expect? I mean, you're putting data in the hands of you know domain experts in the line of business. There's a self-serve component here, presumably. So there's cross selling is what I heard in some of what Stephanie was just talking about. So it was revenue, there's cost cutting, there's risk reduction, that I'm seeing the business case form. What can you add? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think that the only other thing I would add, is going back to the conversation that we had about, Oh you know, a lot of this is being driven by, you know the digitization of business and you know even moreso this year. You know, at the end of the day there's a lot of costs benefits to leveraging and As-a-Service model, you know, to leveraging that experience in economies of scale from a service provider, as well as, you know leveraging satellite kind of takes that to the next level of, you know, reducing some other costs. But I always go back to, you know at the end of the day, this is about customer experience. It's about revenue creation, and it's about, you know, creating, you know enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty. So there's a top-line benefits here, you know, of having the best possible AI, you know plugging that into the customer experience, the application where that application resides. So it's not just about where the data resides. You can also put it on the other side and say, you know, we're bringing the AI, we're bringing the machine learning model to the application so that the experiences at excellent the application is responsive there's less latency and that can help clients then leverage AI to create those revenue benefits, you know, of having the the satisfied customer and of having the, you know the right decision at the right time in order to, you know propel them to, to spend and spend more. >> So Daniel bring us home. I mean, there's a lot of engineering going on here. There's the technology, the people in the process if I'm a client, I'm going to say, okay, I'm going to rely on IBM R&D to cut my labor costs, to drive automation, to help me, you know, automate governance and reduce my risks, you know, take care of the technology. You know, I'll focus my efforts on my process, my people but it's a journey. So how do you see that shaping out in the next, you know several years or, or the coming decade, bring us home. >> Yeah. I mean what we're seeing here is that there's a realization that customers have highly skilled individuals. And we're not saying that these highly skilled individuals couldn't run and operate these platforms and the software themselves, they absolutely could. In some cases, maybe they can't but in many cases they could. But we're also talking about these are they're highly skilled individuals that are focusing on platform and platform services and not their business. And the realization here is that companies want their best and brightest focused on their business, not the platform. If they can get that platform from another vendor that they rely on and can provide the necessary compute services, in a timely and available fashion. The other aspect of this is, people have grown to appreciate those cloud services. They like that on demand experience. And they want that in almost every aspect of what they're working on. And the problem is, sometimes you have to have that experience in localities that are remote. They're very difficult. There's no cloud in some of these remote parts of the world. You might think that clouds everywhere, but it's not. It's actually in very specific locations across the world, but there are many remote locations that they want and need these services from the cloud that they can get. Something like IBM Cloud Satellite. That is what we're pursuing here, is being able to bring that cloud experience into these remote locations where you can't get it today. And that's where you can run your AI workloads. You don't have to run it yourself, we will run it and you can put it in those remote locations. And remote locations don't actually have to be like in the middle of a jungle, they could be in your, on your plant floor or within a port that you have across the world, right? It could be in a warehouse. I mean, there's lots of areas where there's data that needs to be processed quickly, and you want to have that cloud experience, that usage pay model for that processing. And that's exactly what we're trying to achieve with IBM Cloud Satellite and what we're trying to achieve with the IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service as well. Running on satellite is to give you those cloud experiences. Those services managed as a service in those remote locations that you absolutely need them and want them. >> Well, you guys are making a lot of progress in the next decade is not going to look like the last decade. I can pretty confident in that prediction. Guys thanks so much for coming on the cube and sharing your insights, really great conversation. >> Absolutely. Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from the cube. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, Cube virtual's coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 virtual. We're not face to face this year. I'm your host John Furrier with theCube. We're virtual, this theCube virtual and we're doing our part, getting the remote interviews with all the best thought leaders experts and of course the Red Hat experts. We've got Walter Bentley, Senior Manager of Automation practice with Red Hat and Jason Smith, Vice President of North American services, back on theCube. We were in Atlanta last year in person. Guys, thanks for coming on virtually. Good morning to you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good morning John. Good morning, good morning. >> So since Ansible Fest last year a lot's happened where she's living in seems to be an unbelievable 2020. Depending on who you talk to it's been the craziest year of all time. Fires in California, crazy presidential election, COVID whole nine yards, but the scale of Cloud has just unbelievably moved some faster. I was commenting with some of your colleagues around the snowflake IBO it's built on Amazon, right? So value is changed, people are shifting, you starting to clear visibility on what these modern apps are looking like, it's Cloud native, it's legacy integrations, it's beyond lift and shift as we've been seeing in the business. So I'd love to get, Jason we'll start with you, your key points you would like people to know about Ansible Fest 2020 this year because there's a lot going on this year because there's a lot to build on and there's a tailwind for Cloud native and customers have to move fast. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah so, a lot has happened since last year and customers are looking to be a lot more selective around their automation technologies. So they're not just looking for another tool. They're really looking for an automation platform, a platform that they can leverage more of an enterprise strategy and really be able to make sure that they have something that's secure, scalable, and they can use across the enterprise to be able to bring teams together and really drive value and productivity out of their automation platform. >> What's the key points in the customers and our audience around the conversations around the learning, that's the new stuff happening in using Ansible this year? What are the key top things, Jason? Can you comment on what you're seeing the big takeaway for our audience watching? >> Yeah, so a lots change like you said, since last year. We worked with a lot of customers around the world to implement Ansible and automation at scale. So we're using our automation journeys as we talked about last year and really helping customers lay out a more prescriptive approach on how they're going to deliver automation across their enterprise. So customers are really working with us because we're working with the largest customers in the world to implement their strategies. And when we work with new customers we can bring those learnings and that experience to them. So they're not having to learn that for the first time and figure it out on their own, but they're really able to learn and leverage the experience we have through hundreds of customers and at enterprise scale and can take the value that we can bring in and help them through those types of projects much more quickly than they could on their own. >> It's interesting. We were looking at the research numbers and look at the adoption of what Ansible's doing and you guys are with Red Hat it's pretty strong. Could you share on the services side because there's a lot of services going on here? Not just network services and software services, just traditional services. What are the one or two reasons why customer engaged with Red Hat services? What would that be? >> Yeah so, like I said, I mean, we bring that experience. So customers that typically might have to spend weeks troubleshooting and making decisions on how they're going to deliver their implementations, they can work with us and we can bring those best practices in and allow them to make those decisions and implement those best practices within hours instead of weeks, and really be able to accelerate their projects. Another thing is we're a services company as part of a product company. So we're not there just to deliver services. We're really focused on the success of the customer, leveraging our technologies. So we're there to really train and mentor them through the process so that they're really getting up to speed quickly. They're taking advantage of all of the expertise that we have to be able to build their own experience and expertise. So they can really take over once we're gone and be able to support and advance that technology on their own. So they're really looking to us to not only implement those technologies for them, but really with them and be able to train and mentor them. Like I said, and take advantage of those learnings. We also help them. We don't just focus on the technologies but really look at the people in process side of things. So we're bringing in a lot of principles from DevOps and Agile on open practices and helping customers really transform and be able to do things in a new way, to be much more efficient, a lot more agile, be able to drive a lot more value out of our technology. >> Walter, I got to ask you, last year we were chatting about this, but I want to get the update. And I'd like you to just give us a quick refresh definition about the automation adoption journey because this is a real big deal. I mean, we're looking at the trends. Everyone realizes automation is super important at scale, as you think about whether it's software data, anything's about automation it's super important, but it's hard. I mean, the marketplace we were looking at the numbers. I was talking to IDC for you guys at this festival and of Ansible Fest, and they said about five to 10% of enterprises are containerized, which means this huge wave coming of containerization. This is about the automation adoption journey because you start containerizing, (laughs) right? You start looking at the workflows on the pipelinig and how the codes being released and everything. This is important stuff. Give us the update on the automation adoption journey and where it is in the portfolio. >> Well, yeah, just as you called it out, last year on main stage and Ansible fest, almost every customer expressed the need and desire to have to have a strategy as to how they drive their adoption of automation inside their enterprise. And as we've gone over the past few months of splitting this in place with many customers, what we've learned is that many customers have matured into a place where they are now looking at the end to end workflow. Instead of just looking at the tactical thing that they want to automate, they are actually looking at the full ribbon, the full workflow and determining are there changes that need to be made and adjusted to be more efficient when it comes to dealing with automation. And then the other piece as we alluded to already is the contagious nature of that adoption. We're finding that there are organizations that are picking up the automation adoption journey, and because of the momentum it creates inside of that organization we're finding other municipalities that are associated with them are now also looking to be able to take on the journey because of that contagious nature. So we can see that how it's spreading in a positive way. And we're really looking forward to being able to do more of it as the next quarter and the next year comes up. >> Yeah, and that whole sharing thing is a big part of the content theme and the community thing. So great reference on that, good thing is word of mouth and community and collaboration is a good call out there. A quick question for you, you guys recently had a big win with NTT DoCoMo and their engagement with you guys on the automation, adoption journey. Walter, what were some of the key takeaways? Jason you can chime in too I'd like to get some specifics around where it's been successful >> To me, that customer experience was one that really was really exciting, primarily because we learned very early on that they were completely embodying that open source culture and they were very excited to jump right in and even went about creating their own community of practice. We call them communities of practice. You may know them as centers of excellence. They wanted to create that very early in increment, way before we were even ready to introduce it. And that's primarily because they saw how being able to have that community of practice in place created an environment of inclusion across the organization. They had legacy tools in place already, actually, there was a home grown legacy tool in place. And they very quickly realized that it didn't need to remove that tool, they just needed to figure out a way of being able to how to optimize and streamline how they leverage it and also be able to integrate it into the Ansible automation platform. Another thing I wanted to very quickly note is that they very quickly jumped onto the idea of being able to take those large workflows that they had and breaking them up into smaller chunks. And as you already know, from last year when we spoke about it, that's a pivotal part of what the automation adoption journey brings to our organization. So to sum it all up, they were all in, automation first mindset is what that was driving them. And all of those personas, all of those personal and cultural behaviors are what really helped drive that engagement to be very successful. >> Jason, we'll get your thoughts on this because again, Walter brought up last year's reference to breaking things up into modules. We look at this year's key news it's all about collections. You're seeing content is a big focus, content being not like a blog post or a media asset. Like this is content, but code is content. It's sharing. If it's being consumed by other people, there's now community. You're seeing the steam of enabling. I mean, you're looking at successes, like you guys are having with NTT DoCoMo and others. Once people realize there's a better way and success is contagious, as Walter was saying, you are now enabling new ways to do things faster at scale and all that good stuff has been go check out the keynotes. You guys talk about it all day long with the execs. But I want to learn, right? So when you enable success, people want to be a part of it. And I could imagine there's a thirst and demand for training and the playbooks and all the business models, innovations that's going on. What are you seeing for people that want to learn? Is there training? Is there certifications? Because once you get the magic formula as Walter pointed out, and we all know once people see what success looks like, they're going to want to duplicate it. So as this wave comes, it's like having the new surfboard. I want to surf that wave. So what's the update on Ansible's training, the tools, how do I learn, it's a certification of all. Just take a minute to explain what's going on. >> Yeah, so it's been a crazy world as we've talked about over the last six, seven months here, and we've really had to adapt ourselves and our training and consulting offerings to be able to support our remote delivery models. So we very, very quickly back in the March timeframe, we're able to move our consultants to a remote work force and really implement the tools and technologies to be able to still provide the same value to customers remotely as we have in person historically. And so it's actually been really great. We've been able to make a really seamless transition and actually our C-SAT net promoter scores have actually gone up over the last six months or so. So I think we've done a great job being able to still offer the same consulting capabilities remotely as we have onsite. And so that's obviously with a real personal touch working hand in hand with our customers to deliver these solutions. But from a training perspective, we've actually had to do the same thing because customers aren't onsite, they can't do in person training. We've been able to move our training offerings to completely virtual. So we're continuing to train our customers on Ansible and our other technologies through a virtual modality. And we've also been able to take all of our certifications and now offer those remotely. So as, whereas customers historically, would have had to gone into a center and get those certifications in person, they can now do those certifications remotely. So all of our training offerings and consulting offerings are now available remotely as well as they were in person in the past and will be hopefully soon enough, but it's really not-- >> You would adopt to virtual. >> Excuse me. >> You had to adopt to the virtual model quickly for trainings. >> Exactly. >> What about the community role? What's the role of the community? You guys have a very strong community. Walter pointed out the sharing aspect. Well, I pointed out he talked about the contagious people are talking. You guys have a very robust community. What's the role of community in all of this? >> Yeah, so as Walter said, we have our communities a practice that we use internally we work with customers to build communities of practice, which are very much like a centers of excellence, where people can really come together and share ideas and share best practices and be able to then leverage them more broadly. So, whereas in the past knowledge was really kept in silos, we're really helping customers to build those communities and leverage those communities to share ideas and be able to leverage the best practices that are being adopted more broadly. >> That's awesome. Yeah, break down those silos of course. Open up the data, good things will happen, a thousand flowers bloom, as we always say. Walter, I want to get your thoughts on this collection, what that enables back to learning and integrations. So if collections are going to be more pervasive and more common place the ability to integrate, we were covering for VMware world, there's a VMware module collection, I should say. What are customers doing when you integrate in cross technology parties because now obviously customers are going to have a lot of choice and options. If I'm an integration partner, it's all about Cloud native and the kinds of things we're talking about, you're going to have a lot of integration touch points. What's the most effective way for customers integrating other technology partners into Ansible? >> And this is one of the major benefits that came out of the announcement last year with the Ansible automation platform. The Anible automation platform really enables our customers to not just be able to do automation, but also be able to connect the dots or be able to connect other tools, such as other ITM SM tools or be able to connect into other parts of their workflows. And what we're finding in breaking down really quickly is two things. Collections obviously, is a huge aspect. And not just necessarily the collections but the automation service catalog is really where the value is because that's where we're placing all of these certified collections and certified content that's certified by Red Hat now that we create alongside with these vendors and they're unavailable to customers who are consuming the automation platform. And then the other component is the fact that we're now moved into a place where we now have something called the automation hub. which is very similar to galaxy, which is the online version of it. But the automation hub now is a focus area that's dedicated to a customer, where they can store their content and store those collections, not just the ones that they pull down that are certified by Red hat, but the ones that they create themselves. And the availability of this tool, not only just as a SaaS product, but now being able to have a local copy of it, which is brand new out of the press, out of the truck, feature is huge. That's something that customers have been asking for a very long time and I'm very happy that we're finally able to supply it. >> Okay, so backup for a second, rewind, fell off the truck. What does that mean? It's downloadable. You're saying that the automation hub is available locally. Is that what-- >> Yes, Sir. >> So what does that mean for the customer? What's the impact for them? >> So what that means is that previously, customers would have to connect into the internet. And the automation hub was a SaaS product, meaning it was available via the internet. You can go there, you can sync up and pull down content. And some customers prefer to have it in house. They prefer to have it inside of their firewall, within their control, not accessible through the internet. And that's just their preferences obviously for sometimes it's for compliance or business risk reasons. And now, because of that, we were able to meet that ask and be able to make a local version of it. Whereas you can actually have automation hub locally your environment, you can still sync up data that's out on the SaaS version of automation hub, but be able to bring it down locally and have it available with inside of your firewall, as well as be able to add your content and collections that you create internally to it as well. So it creates a centralized place for you to store all of your automation goodness. >> Jason, I know you got a hard stop and I want to get to you on the IBM question. Have you guys started any joint service engages with IBM? >> Yeah, so we've been delivering a lot of engagements jointly through IBM. We have a lot of joint customers and they're really looking for us to bring the best of both Red Hat services, Red Hat products, and IBM all together to deliver joint solutions. We've actually also worked with IBM global technology services to integrate Ansible into their service offerings. So they're now really leveraging the power of Ansible to drive lower cost and more innovation with our customers and our joint customers. >> I think that's going to be a nice lift for you guys. We'll get into the IBM machinery. I mean, you guys got a great offering, you always had great reviews, great community. I mean, IBM's is just going to be moving this pretty quickly through the system, I can imagine. What's some of the the feedback so far? >> Yeah, it's been great. I mean, we have so many, a large joint customers and they're helping us to get to a lot of customers that we were never able to reach before with their scale around the world. So it's been great to be able to leverage the IBM scale with the great products and services that Red Hat offers to really be able to take that more broadly and continue to drive that across customers in an accelerated pace. >> Well, Jason, I know you've got to go. We're going to stay with Walter while you drop off, but I want to ask you one final question. For the folks watching or asynchronously coming in and out of Ansible Fest 2020 this year. What is the big takeaway that you'd like to share? What is the most important thing people should pay attention to? Well, a couple things it don't have to be one thing, do top three things. what should people be paying attention to this year? And what's the most important stories that you should highlight? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot going on, this technology is moving very quickly. So I think there's a lot of great stories. I definitely take advantage of the customer use cases and hearing how other customers are leveraging Ansible for automation. And again really looking to not use it just as a tool, but really in an enterprise strategy that can really change their business and really drive cost down and increase revenues by leveraging the innovation that Ansible and automation provides. >> Jason, thank you for taking the time. Great insight. Really appreciate the commentary and hopefully we'll see you next year in person Walter. (all talking simultaneously) Walter, let's get back to you. I want to get into this use case and some of the customer feedback, love the stories. And we look, we'd love to get the new data, we'd love to hear about the new products, but again, success is contagious, you mentioned that I want to hear the use cases. So a lot of people have their ear to the ground, they look up the virtual environments, they're learning through new ways, they're looking for signals of success. So I got to ask you what are the things that you're hearing over and over again, as you guys are spinning up engagements? What are some of the patterns that are emerging that are becoming a trend in terms of what customers are consistently doing to overcome some of their challenges around automation? >> Okay, absolutely. So what we're finding is that over time that customers are raising the bar on us. And what I mean by that is that their expectations out of being able to take on tools now has completely changed and specifically when we're talking around automation. Our customers are now leading with the questions of trying to find out, well, how do we reduce our operational costs with this automation tool? Are we able to increase revenue? Are we able to really truly drive productivity and efficiency within our organization by leveraging it? And then they dovetail into, "Well, are we able to mitigate business risk, "even associated with leveraging this automation tool?" So as I mentioned, customers are up leveling what their expectations are out of the automation tools. And what I feel very confident about is that with the launch of the Ansible automation platform we're really able to be able to deliver and show our customers how they're able to get a return on their investment, how by taking part and looking at re-working their workflows how we're able to bring productivity, drive that efficiency. And by leveraging it to be able to mitigate risks you do get the benefits that they're looking for. And so that's something that I'm very happy that we were able to rise to the occasion and so far so good. >> Last year I was very motivated and very inspired by the Ansible vision and content product progress. Just the overall vibe was good, community of the product it's always been solid, but one of the things that's happening I want to get your commentary and reaction to this is that, and we've been riffing on this on theCube and inside the community is certainly automation, no brainer, machine learning automation, I mean, you can't go wrong. Who doesn't want automation? That's like saying, "I want to watch more football "and have good food and good wifi. I mean, it's good things, right? Automation is a good thing. So get that. But the business model issues you brought up ROI from the top of the ivory tower and these companies, certainly with COVID, we need to make money and have modern apps. And if you try to make that sound simple, right? X as a service, SaaS everything is a service. That's easy to say, "Hey, Walter, make everything as a service." "Got it, boss." Well, what the hell do you do? I mean, how do you make that happen? You got Amazon, you got Multicloud, you got legacy apps. You're talking about going in and re-architecting the application development process. So you need automation for the business model of everything as a service. What's your reaction to that? Because it's very complicated. It's doable. People are getting there but the Nirvana is, everything is a service. This is a huge conversation. I mean, it's really big, but what's your reaction to that when I bring that up. >> Right. And you're right, it is a huge undertaking. And you would think that with the delivery of COVID into our worlds that many organizations would probably shy away from making changes. Actually, they're doing the opposite. Like you mentioned, they're running towards automation and trying to figure out how do they optimize and be able to scale, based on this new demand that they're having, specifically new virtual demand. I'm happy you mentioned that we actually added something to the automation adoption journey to be able to combat or be able to solve for that change. And being able to take on that large ask of everything as a service, so to speak. And increment zero at the very beginning of the automation adoption journey we added something called navigate. And what navigate is, is it's a framework where we would come in and not just evaluate what they want to automate and bring that into a new workflow, but we evaluate what they already have in place, what automation they have in place, as well as the manual tasks and we go through, and we try to figure out how do you take that very complex, large thing and stream it down into something that can be first off determined as a service and made available for your organization to consume, and as well as be able to drive the business risks or be able to drive your business objectives forward. And so that exercise that we're now stepping our customers through makes a huge difference and puts it all out in front of you so that you can make decisions and decide which way you want to go taking one step at a time. >> And you know it's interesting, great insight, great comment. I think this is really where the dots are going to connect over the next few years. Everything is as a service. You got to lay the foundation. But if you really want to get this done I got to ask you the question around Ansible's ability to integrate and implement with other products. So could you give an examples of how Ansible has integrated and implemented with other Red Hat products or other types of technology vendors products? >> Right. So one example that always pops to the top of my head and I have to give a lot of credit to one of my managing architects who was leading this effort. Was the simple fact that you when you think about a mainframe, right? So now IBM is our new family member. When you think about mainframes, you think about IBM and it just so happens that there's a huge ask and demand and push around being able to automate ZOS mainframe. And IBM had already embarked on the path of determining, well, can this be done with Ansible? And as I mentioned before, my managing architect partnered up with the folks on IBM's side, so the we're bringing in Red Hat consulting, and now we have IBM and we're working together to move that idea forward of saying, "Hey, you can automate things with the mainframe." So think about it. We're in 2020 now in the midst of a new normal. And now we're thinking about and talking about automating mainframes. So that just shows how things have evolved in such a great way. And I think that that story is a very interesting one. >> It's so funny the evolution. I'm old enough to remember. I came out of college in the 80s and I would look at the old mainframe guys who were like "You guys are going to be dinosaurs." They're still around. I mean, some of the banking apps, I mean some of them are not multi threaded and all the good stuff, but they are powering, they are managing a workload, but this is the beautiful thing about Cloud. And some of the Cloud activities is that you can essentially integrate, you don't have to replace the old to bring in the new. This has been a common pattern. This is where containers, microservices, and Cloud has been a dream state because you can essentially re layer and glue it together. This is a big deal. What's your reaction to that? >> No, it's a huge deal. And the reality is, is that we need all of it. We need the legacy behaviors around infrastructure. So we need the mainframe still because they has a distinct purpose. And like you mentioned, a lot of our FSI customers that is the core of where a lot of their data and performance comes out of. And so it's not definitely not a pull out and replace. It's more of how they integrate and how can you streamline them working together to create your end to end workflow. And as you mentioned, making it available to your organizations to consume as a service. So definitely a fan of being able to integrate and add to and everything has a purpose. Is what we're coming to learn. >> Agility, the modern application, horizontal scalability, Cloud is the new data center. Walter great insights, always great to chat with you. You always got some good commentary. I want to ask you one final question. I asked Jason before he dropped off. Jason Smith, who was our guest here and hit a hard stop. What is the most important story that people should pay attention to this year at Ansible Fest? Remember it's virtual, so there's going to be a lot of content around there, people are busy, it's asynchronous consumption. What should they pay attention to from a content standpoint, maybe some community sizes or a discord group? I mean, what should people look at in this year? What should they walk away with as a key message? Take a minute to share your thoughts. >> Absolutely. Absolutely key messages is that, kind of similar to the message that we have when it comes down to the other circumstances going on in the world right now, is that we're all in this together. As an Ansible community, we need to work together, come together to be able to share what we're doing and break down those silos. So that's the overall theme. I believe we're doing that with the new. So definitely pay attention to the new features that are coming out with the Ansible automation platform. I alluded to the on-prem automation hub, that's huge. Definitely pay attention to the new content that is being released in the service catalog. There's tons of new content that focus on the ITSM and a tool. So being able to integrate and leverage those tools then the easier math model, there's a bunch of network automation advances that have been made, so definitely pay attention to that. And the last teaser, and I won't go into too much of it, 'cause I don't want to steal the thunder. But there is some distinct integrations that are going to go on with OpenShift around containers and the SQL automation platform that you definitely are going to want to pay attention to. If anyone is running OCP in their environment they definitely going to want to pay attention to this. Cause it's going to be huge. >> Private cloud is back, OpenStack is back, OCP. You got OpenShift has done really well. I mean, again, Cloud has been just a great enabler and bringing all this together for developers and certainly creating more glue, more abstractions, more automation, infrastructure is code is here. We're excited for it Walter, great insight. Great conversation. Thank you for sharing. >> No, it's my pleasure. And thank you for having me. >> I'm John Furrier with theCube, your host for theCube virtual's, part of Ansible Fest, virtual 2020 coverage. Thanks for watching. (gentle upbeat music)

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

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's The Cube, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to The Cube. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, continuing The Cube's two day coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. We are very excited to be speaking with one of the Citrix innovation award nominees, ZF Group. We've got Walter Scherer, senior manager of IT workplace foundation. Hi Walter. >> Hello, nice to be here. >> And Greg Lehofer, manager of client virtualization. Greg, great to have you on The Cube. >> Thank you very much. >> So, first congratulations to ZF Group for the Innovation Award nomination. We hear there were over one thousand nominees. Pretty exciting to get to the top three, one of the top three finalists. So Walter let's start with you, tell our audience who ZF is and what you're doing with Citrix. >> So ZF is a global system provider, we enable next generation of mobility. So for us it's very important to invest in technology fields like integrated safety, electricity, like automated driving, that's very important for us so we see the future, the world will change so we see it every day and therefore it's very very important for us that we push innovation, that we push internet of things, and we push the digitalization. That's a must for us. >> So you guys are supplying a company that supplies systems for IC, your passenger cars, commercial vehicles and industrial technology. >> Yeah. >> Across Germany or is this to cross Europe? >> That's globally so we have around 40 confidants where we have locations. Where we have well organized globally and therefore it's very important for us to bring the right product for the future, for our customer. >> Wow so Greg tell us about the landscape, that's 40 countries, tell us how big is the infrastructure to support all of them? >> It's very big, so the transformation of IT is very important for us as Walter mentioned before, so yeah we start to build up a bigger infrastructure now, a virtual infrastructure because in the past we have a lot of water in place and so it's all from from ZF and now we are able that the external service providers and we have a lot of external service provider in place around the globe so that they can bring their own devices now in ZF and can use virtual desktops and so yeah for us the effort is not too big because the infrastructure is more central at the moment and so yeah, we are searching for new ways how we can make that more efficient for us and more easier and manage them and yeah we are looking at cloud infrastructures at the moment and yeah we are working very close together with Citrix and that technology and yeah, for us we are very proud that we are now nominated for the prize and yeah. >> So again about scale, how many partners worldwide do you have? So number of devices connecting to your infrastructure, how big is your customer base? >> So we have a lot of customers there so for our project because of course you mentioned, so we have off-road vehicles, we have product concerning the automotive areas, we have commercial areas so that's a lot of individual customers that we all have there. So and therefore we have to bring the right outcome so with Microsoft or with Citrix technologies and of course with the partnership with Microsoft that's very important too for us and so we have to bring the right infrastructure in place, especially in the user centric experience approach that's very important too for us and therefore we have the good partnership with Citrix so and with Citrix we have a really big and powerful systems in place, product to portfolio, so that will help us in this journey. >> Let's talk about that journey Greg, when you started working with Citrix to virtualize the environment, talk to us about how you went about that from a mobility perspective and what is that enabling your business to achieve for your customers? >> For our customers you have global graphic we have customers all over the world, they are always on airports and traveling around the world and so it's very important for us that we are transformate the IT in that way that the customer is able to work all over the world, anytime anywhere with any device. It's very important for the customers and for a new generation X to work with every device and yeah there is big transformation at the moment in place so yeah we with Citrix it's make it easier for us that we can provide all customers with every device a workplace or an application, that application the customers need or our employees need to work to collaborate all over the world with other engineers and so on on collaborate topics and on tasks and on projects and yeah with that technology, with private cloud and now with public clouds they are able to work with all kinds of devices everywhere in a secure way, and that is important for us because security is one of the important factors for us because when you are traveling all around the world and connecting from every place, security in our perspective yeah, it's very important and so with that technology-- >> And if you are looking for the flexible platforms that's very important, the solutions that Citrix have embized with The Cloud system so that brings us in the situation that we could manage all the platforms that we have in place locally today and if you connected to The Cloud. So therefore we have a common plan so to administrate and manage all the Citrix environments. >> So I imagine there's a large range of applications that you're deploying, you guys seem to provide a lot of services, what type of application data and tasks are happening remotely with your users? Like what's a typical transaction that a user will conduct while they're sitting at a airport? >> So that's what Gregor said so that's very important with the device strategy to treat the promote it with any device anywhere and to each time so and therefore we could provide a virtual desktop so that's independent from the device so we have maybe for collaboration that's a very similar topic, so we have solutions for our third parties, for the contractors and so it could give them a small solution, the Citrix mobile desktop, the mobile app so they have the possibility to connect to ZF and the infrastructure and so we are very flexible about that. So the only what they need, they need a device, they need a browser that's it. So that's the solution from Citrix. >> In terms of the operational efficiencies that you have presumably gained from working with Citrix, sounds like your users as well as your end-user customers are benefiting from the virtualized infrastructure that you've put in place, but talk to us about from an operational perspective, how much more efficient is your organization now? >> From our perspective, it's more efficient because as I mentioned before in the past they we have to give all our external service providers as an example hardware from ZF, and so it's a very big benefit, a lot of doings for our IT to prepare the desktop to make them secure the hardware and so on and now we are not longer responsible for that order because the external bring their own hardware and we only provide them a VDI on a secure way, a NetScaler gateway in that case and though they can connect and we only take care about our workplace and they take care of their hardware and so yeah for us it's much better because our effort is not so big and that is very good and yeah, and so as an example the workplace from Citrix, the new, it's very, very good for our customers because the users intrecities is very high because a lot of tools or applications they need has put the time SAP and read the emails, have a look at the chat, have a look at teams and so on, it's all in one platform and saves a lot of time. And time, everybody knows is very important for us and yeah when we can save time it's very perfect for us. >> Let's dive into that time savings, how long does it take you to onboard a new partner now versus before you had Citrix? >> Now-- >> For the deposit there was a lot of processes and they need I would say days, so in the meantime we have to push a party so internal SATA should automatically create an image, a VDI for example for the the customer, that's it. So and of course in the background we have to set the right direction, the right access, what systems they have in use, (mumbles) and that's it. >> So it sounds like it takes the business processes longer to onboard a customer like, so you have to sign a deal, get involved with a partner and IT it sounds like it's moving way faster than the actual business itself. >> Yeah as I mentioned it's a very fast process in the mean time so you have a portal you could go there so that to request what they need and then there's automatic behind that and so we could create automatically this request for him. >> So it used to take days to onboard a partner, now with Citrix workspace, it's hours, minutes to onboard a partner, how much time can you quantify that time savings? >> I would say if you consider the whole process, it needs some hours so because it's not only the Citrix onboarding, the Citrix onboarding goes very fast. So then the you have to create the operating system and so on, the imaging, so to bring the applications to the client, what they need I would say that needs hours. >> Or days to hours, so big time savings and also what you were talking about Greg I couldn't help but think that now that you don't have to provide all of this hardware to your partners, there's probably a massive cost savings as well that ZF has achieved, can you talk about that? >> Absolutely, from the cost perspective we save a lot of money and the other benefit is that the external can bring the hardware we'll work with. So normally we have one device and the external have to work with that and now he can bring his-- >> Whatever they choose. >> Right right, yeah right. Any device and that is very benefit for them because they can work with smart phones, they can work with tablet or they can work with a notebook as they like and from our perspective, yeah as you mention before you save a lot of money because it's yeah we only have to provide the virtual desktop and yeah we can provide them in a very quick way and we have workflows for that and yeah it's great for us. >> What feedback have they given you now that the process is so much faster for them but also they're able to use whatever device they're already familiar with, I imagine from a customer satisfaction perspective this new experience that you're enabling has really probably driven up your customer loyalty. The customers happier, more satisfied? >> The customers more happier of course so and the important topic for us is the customer is happy, they have a fast solution, it is mobile so and we have the access under control, that's very interesting for us. >> Well making your customers happy is always a top priority and we hear that you're doing that very well, we want to congratulate ZF on your nomination. >> Thank you very much. >> For the Innovation Award, we know that the voting goes through till tomorrow when the winner will be announced, we wish you the best of luck and thank you both for joining Keith and me on The Cube this afternoon. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you, for Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, live from Citrix Synergy 2019, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you buy Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE's Media Production of theCUBE, live here from Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming Walter Isaacson to our program. Author, podcaster, I read every biography that you publish. I listen to every podcast, so thank you. So, Walter, this is a conference of geeks, you know? And I say that lovingly, 14 thousand people. They love technology; they love ideas. You have the chance to study and research some of the, you know, most brilliant minds, that we've had the last couple hundred years. Where do you get your inspiration from? >> You know, I love the fact that the most creative of people, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Einstein, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, Ada Lovelace, whomever they may be, all love the humanities and the science. They stand at that intersection of sort of liberal acts technology, and that's so important in today's world. We can have enormous amounts of data, and the question is, how do you connect humans to it? How do you add the human factor? And so, that's where I get my inspiration, from people who stand at that interaction of humanities and technology. >> Yeah, one of my favorite books of yours is the Innovators. You talked about history, and there's things that we've been looking at or trying. When you talk about forecasting or predicting something, sometimes we have great ideas, but if I take us, you know, decades or longer to get there, any kind of, you know, big inspirations? What do you say to people that work in the tech world, just how they should think about things like that? >> Well, first of all, things happen sometimes slower than you expect, until that inflection point, when they happen faster than you expect. >> It's like going broke, you know? It happens really slow, and then it happens fast. >> I guess we shouldn't say that in Vegas, here where we are for this conference, but I think that the main thing to do is to be one of those people that has an intuitive feel for how humans are going to find a product or service to be transformative to them. And, you know, we didn't know we needed a thousand songs in our pocket till the iPod came along. You know, likewise, we didn't know we needed transistors until somebody invented the transistor radio, and we could take it along with us. So, what turns us on? What makes us human? >> Yeah, so many things out there. You've been not only writing; you're doing podcasts now. What do you think of kind of the state of content? People say sometimes nobody reads anymore. You do hard research, a team of people. What's your thoughts about content these days? >> Well, I think the business model for journalism and production of content has been decimated at times, partly because it's all ad-driven in terms of journalism and, you know, video, and we need to get back to a time when people valued content and are willing to have a direct relationship with the content provider. About 80% of the revenue now for, say, reported or journalistic content does either the Google, Facebook, Instagram, some aggregator, so I think we have to look at the next way of finding micro-payment subscription models that work in addition to the advertising-driven model. >> Yeah, there's so many people sometimes, they look at all of this change, and they get kind of pessimistic. You know, we're going to have the AI apocalypse, or the robots are going to take over. Shows like here we're, that technology is, I say, by definition, are positive about technology. When I read your writings, you seem to have a very positive outcome. >> Oh, I'm definitely optimistic about where technology takes us. You know, I write in the Innovators, begin with Ada Lovelace, who was Lord Byron's daughter. Her father was a lud eyed, you know, defended the followers of Ned Lot, who was smashing the looms of England, thinking that technology would put people out of work. But Ada was somebody who said, "I get it. The punch card's telling those looms how to do patterns could make a calculating machine be able to do numbers, as well as words, as well as pictures." She envisioned the computer, and the notion of technology increases the number of people in the textile industry in England in the 19th century. And the computer has led to so many more jobs than its destroyed, so I think technology will always augment human creativity, not destroy it. >> So, last thing I wanted to ask you, Walter, is, we're here at Dell Technologies World. 34 years ago, Michael Dell started this. And he's a special individual. We've had the opportunity to talk to him, get to know him. I've told people that, you know, inside the company, if you reach out to him, he actually will respond. He seems very special in today's day in age. You've got background with Michael. Tell me, how do you-? >> I think it practically begins with his parents, his late mother and his father, you know, his father's still alive. Care a lot about education; care a lot about creativity. Deeply humane in the sense that they love all of society, human civil discourse, and that's why there's a humanity I see that Michael Dell is able to embed in his products, whether it's a Dell laptop I always use or the new servers, and Dell EMC, which enables people across platforms to say, "How do we collaborate; how do we be creative?" >> All right, well, Walter, I just say thank you so much. A pleasure having you on the program. And you've been watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. Always check out thecube.net for all of our broadcasts, and we also, like Walter, have a podcast. Check it out on iTunes. >> Walter: Thank you, Stu. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hello from Chicago, Lisa Martin here at AnsibleFest 2022 with John Furrier. John, it's great to be here. The transformation of enterprise and industry through automation. This is not only the 10th anniversary of Ansible, this was the first in-person AnsibleFest since 2019. >> It's awesome, it's awesome, Lisa, and I want to welcome everyone to our live performance here in Chicago. We were remote for two years, 2019 in Atlanta. AnsibleFest, part of Red Hat now, Red Hat part of IBM. So much has happened in the past couple years and I think one of the things that we're going to cover this week here in Chicago, is the evolution of Ansible, where it fits into the new cloud-native ecosystems emerging, and also, kind of, what it means for developers and operators. And we're going to see a lot of that here at AnsibleFest with wall-to-wall coverage, keynote just happened. Very interesting to see, you know, Ansible stayed true to their knitting, as you say, you know. What do they do? No big announcements. Some big community news. But humble. >> Very humble. Very humble, but also very excited. All the keynotes did a great job of addressing that community, and being grateful to the community for, really, the evolution that we see at Ansible and now 10 years later. They were talking a lot about smoothing operations for the developers, democratizing automation across the organization. They talked a little bit about that skills gap. I wanted to get your opinion, 'cause as we know there's, they talked about it from a demand perspective, there's over 300,000 open positions on LinkedIn for Ansible skills. So a lot of opportunity there, a lot of opportunity for them to help democratize automation across organizations. >> Yeah, I mean, I think the big theme last year we heard, "Three things, top three things at AnsibleFest 2021, Animation, Automation, Automation." Again, this year the same theme, "Automate everywhere" is what they're talking about. But I think you're right, there's a cultural shift where the entire cloud ecosystems kind of spun to the doorstep of what Ansible's ecosystem stood for for many years in the decade, which is configuration, running things at scale. That notion is now persistent across all the enterprise. And I think the key takeaway from the keynote, in my opinion, is that configuration and automation around devices and infrastructure stuff is an enterprise architecture now, it's not just a, kind of a corner case, or a specific use case, it's going to be native across the entire enterprise architecture. And that's why we heard a lot of cultural shift conversations. And that is where the people who are running the Ansible stuff, they're going to be the keys to having the keys to the kingdom. And I think you're going to see a lot more of this automation at scale. I love the introduction of ops-as-code, that's a little piggyback off of infrastructure-as-code and infrastructure-as-configuration. They're saying operations now is the new software model and it's like ops dev, not dev ops. So it's really interesting to see how the operator is now a very big important role in the next level of cloud native. And it's really exciting because this is kind of what we've been reporting on theCUBE, for over 12 years. So, watching Ansible grow organically into a powerhouse community is very interesting. To see how they operationalize this, you know, going forward. >> Well the operator's becoming really pivotal catalysts in this next way, that you've been covering for 12 years. You know, if we think about some of the challenges and the barriers to adopting automation that organizations have had, one of them has been skills, staff rather. The other has been, "Hey, we need to really determine which processes to automate, that's actually going to give us the most ROI, most bang for our buck." They talked a little bit about that today, but that's still something that Ansible is working with its customers and the community to help sort of demystify. >> Yeah and I think that they were front and center around, "You on the room," people in the room, "you make this happen." They're very much, it's not a top-down corporate thing, Ansible staying true to their roots as I mentioned. But the thing about skills gap is interesting, you heard Kaete Piccirilli talking about, "Level Up how your organization automates, push your people, expand your scope." So the theme is, the power is in the hands of this community to essentially be the new enterprise architecture for operations. At the same time that feeds the trend around, we're seeing this accelerated cloud-native developer we're seeing, we're going to be at KubeCon next week, that cloud-native developer, they want to go faster, they want self-service. So you're seeing higher velocity cloud-native development putting pressure on the ops teams to level up, so the theme kind of connects for me. I think Red Hat has got it right here, with Ansible, that the theme is shifting to ops better get their act together, to level up and to the velocity of what the developers are expecting. At the same time, giving them the freedom to be using infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-configuration, and ultimately, ops-as-code. To me, I think this is like the evolution of how infrastructure-as-code, which is the nirvana of DevOps, now is ops-as-code. Which means, if that's true, ops becomes much more invisible, if you will, which is what developers want. >> And we're going to be breaking down ops-as-code today, no doubt, in our conversations with some of the great Ansible community folks and partners and leaders that we have on, as well as tomorrow in our full two days of coverage. You talked about cultural shift, we talk about that a lot John, it's challenging, but one of the things I think that was very palpable this morning, is the power of the Ansible community. Not just those folks that are here with us in Chicago, but all the folks watching virtually online. >> Yeah. >> Truly help drive that cultural shift that is needed for organizations to really be able to streamline cloud ops. >> Yeah and I think Adam Miller who came on, I thought his portion was excellent, around community. He talked about, you know, the 10 years, put a little exclamation point on that. Managing the communications within the community. He actually brought up IRC and Slack and then, "We have Discord." And they introduced a new standard for communications it's called Matrix, which is open-source based. And even in their decision making, their principles around open source stay true. Again, they checked the box there, I thought that was really cool. The other thing that, within the meat of the product, the automation platform, Matt Jones was talking about the scale, the managing at scale, is one thing. But the thing that I think that hit, jumped out at me, was that this trusted automation messaging was really huge. Signing, having signatures, that really hits the supply chain that we've been talking about, and we're going to talk about it next week at KubeCon, the software supply chain is trusting the code. And I think as you have automation, it's a really big part of the new platform. So, I thought that was really the meat on the bone there. >> That was a very strong theme, was the trust this morning. You know, another thing that was important was Walter Bentley, who's coming on, I believe, later today, talked about how organizations really need to think about the value that automation can deliver to the business and then develop an automation strategy, really thinking at it strategically rather than what a lot of folks have done. And they've put automation in sort of in silos and pockets. He's really talking about, how can you actually make it strategic across the organization and make sure that you really fully see and understand and can articulate the value to the business, from a competitive advantage perspective, that it's going to deliver. >> Yeah, and Stefanie Chiras who's coming on too, she mentioned a lot about the multi-cloud, multi-environment layer, how Ansible can sit across all the environments and then still support the cloud-native through what she called "an automation loop". That's going to be really talking to what we're seeing as multi-cloud or super-cloud, next-gen cloud, where Ansible's role of automating isn't just corner case in the enterprise. Again, if it's an enterprise-wide architecture, it will be a centerpiece of multi-cloud, multiple capabilities. Whether that's compatibility services or, you know, stuff running best of breed on different clouds. 'Cause, obviously Amazon was on stage here, they're talking about this, big Ansible supporter. So, we've got Google supporting Ansible, so you got the multiple clouds and even VM-Ware environments. So, Ansible sits across all this. And so, I think the big opportunity that I'm seeing come out of this, is that if Ansible is in this position, this could be a catalyst for them to be the multi-cloud hybrid architecture for configuration and operations, and I think, the edge is going to be a really interesting conversation. We have a lot of guests coming on, I'll talk about that. But, I think running distributed workloads across multiple clouds in multiple environments, that's a killer app and we'll see if they can pull it off. We're going to be drilling everyone on that topic today, so I'm looking forward to it. >> We're going to be dissecting that. I like how you paint that picture of Ansible really as the nucleus of that hybrid cloud strategy. You know, so many organizations are living in a hybrid cloud world for many reasons, but for Ansible to be able to be that catalyst. And question for you, if we think about that, when we talk about multi-cloud strategically or organically or whatnot, where is automation moving in terms of the customer conversation? We know Ansible's really focused on smoothing the developer experience, but where is automation going, in your vision, up the C-suite stack? >> Well, multi-cloud is a C-suite message and they love to hear that, but you talk to anyone who's in the trenches, they hate multi-cloud. It's more complexity and there's a lot of issues around latency. So what you're seeing is, you're starting to see an evolution of more about compatibility and interoperability. And this is kind of classic enterprise abstraction layers when you start getting into these inflection points, as things get better, so it gets sometimes more complex. So I think Ansible's notion of simplicity and ease of use, could be the catalyst for this abstraction layer between clouds. So it's all about reducing the complexities, because at the end of the day, if you want to do something on multiple clouds, whether that's run common services across, that's not making it simpler. You got to, it's going to be harder before it gets easier. So, if that makes any sense. So doing multi-cloud sounds great on paper, but it's really hard and that's why no one's really doing it. So you're going to start to see multi-cloud, what we call super-cloud, which is more capabilities on one cloud. And then having them still differentiate the idea that some standard's going to emerge, is complete fantasy. I think you're going to, we still need more innovation. Amazon does a great job, Microsoft's coming up on number two position as well, the clouds still need to differentiate. But that doesn't change Ansible's position. They can still be that shim layer or bolt-on, to whatever clouds do best. If you run 'em on machine learning on Google, that's cool. You want to use Amazon for this? How do you make those work? That's a hard problem. And, again, that's where automation ends up. >> And with that context, do you think that Ansible has the capability of helping to dial down some of the complexity that's in this hybrid multi-cloud world? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about what's going on great here, that's unique in the history of the computer industry, is open source is so powerful and it continues to power away with growth. So, more code is coming. So, software supply chain is a big issue, we heard that with the trusted thing, but also now, how people buy now is different. You can actually try stuff out on open source and then go to Red Hat, Ansible, and say, "Hey, I'm going to get some support." So there's a lot of community collective intelligence involved in decision making, not just coding, but buyer selection and consumption. So the entire paradigm of purchasing software and using it, has completely changed. So, that puts Ansible in a leading position because they got a great community, and now you've got open source continuing to thrive away. So, if you're a customer, you don't need the big enterprise sales pitch you can just try the code, if you like it, then you go with Ansible. So it's really kind of set up nicely, this cloud market, for companies like Ansible, because they have the community and they got the software, it's open and it is what it is, it's transparent, everything's above board. >> Yeah, you know, you talk about the community, you mentioned Matrix earlier, and one of the things that was also quite resonant during the keynote this morning was the power of collaboration and how incredibly important that is to them, to stay native to their open-source roots, as you you said. But also really go to where the customers are. And they talked about that with respect to Matrix and Discord and that was an interesting, this is the community reaching out to really kind of grow upon itself. >> Well, being someone who's used all those tools, even IRC 'cause I'm old, all the old folks use IRC. Then the, kind of, Gen X'ers use, and the millennials use Slack. Discord, the way they mentioned Discord, it's so true. If you're a gamer, you're younger, you're using Discord. Now, Matrix is new, they're trying to introduce an open source, 'cause remember they don't control Discord and they don't control Slack. So Slack's Salesforce now, and Discord is probably going to try to get bought by Microsoft, but still, it's not open. So Matrix is their open-sourced chat service. And I thought that was interesting and I think, that got my attention, because that went against the principles of users that like Slack. So, it'd be great. I mean if Matrix, if that takes off, then that's going to be a case study of going against-the-grain on the best-of-breed package software like Slack or Discord. But I think the demographic shift is interesting. Discord is for younger generations, let's see how Matrix will do. And the uptake wasn't that big. Only been around for a couple months, we've seen almost 5,000 members. But, you know, not a failure. >> Right. >> But not a home run either. >> Right. Well we'll have to see how that progresses- >> Yeah, we'll see how that plays out. >> as all of the generations in the workforce today try to work together and collaborate. You know, if we think about some of the things that we're going to talk about today and tomorrow, business outcomes, increasing business agility, being able to ensure compliance, with security and regulatory requirements, which are only proliferating, really also helping organizations to optimize those costs and be as competitive as they possibly can. So I'm excited to dissect the announcements that came out today, some of the things that we're going to hear today and tomorrow, and really get a great view of the automation infrastructure marketplace and what's going on. >> Yeah, it's going to be great. Infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-config, operations-as-code, it's all leading to, you know, distributed computing edge. It's hybrid. >> Yep. All right John- >> Yeah. >> looking forward to two days of wall-to-wall CUBE coverage with you, coming to you live from Chicago, at the first AnsibleFest in person, since 2019. Lisa Martin and John Furrier with you here all day today and tomorrow, stick around, our first guest joins us. We're going to dissect ops-as-code, stick around. (gentle music)

>> TheCUBE presents UI Path Forward Five brought to you by UI Path. >> Welcome back to UI Path Forward Five. You're watching The Cubes, Walter Wall coverage. This is day one, Dave Vellante, with my co-host Dave Nicholson. We're taking RPA to intelligence automation. We're going from point tools to platforms. Neeraj Mathur is here. He's the director of Intelligent Automation at VMware. Yes, VMware. We're not going to talk about vSphere or Aria, or maybe we are, (Neeraj chuckles) but he's joined by Thomas Stocker who's a principal product manager at UI Path. And we're going to talk about testing automation, automating the testing process. It's a new sort of big vector in the whole RPA automation space. Gentleman, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Neeraj: Thank you very much. >> Thomas: Thank you. >> So Neeraj, as we were saying, Dave and I, you know, really like VMware was half our lives for a long time but we're going to flip it a little bit. >> Neeraj: Absolutely. >> And talk about sort of some of the inside baseball. Talk about your role and how you're applying automation at VMware. >> Absolutely. So, so as part of us really running the intelligent automation program at VMware, we have a quite matured COE for last, you know four to five years, we've been doing this automation across the enterprise. So what we have really done is, you know over 45 different business functions where we really automated quite a lot different processes and tasks on that. So as part of my role, I'm really responsible for making sure that we are, you know, bringing in the best practices, making sure that we are ready to scale across the enterprise but at the same time, how, you know, quickly we are able to deliver the value of this automation to our businesses as well. >> Thomas, as a product manager, you know the product, and the market inside and out, you know the competition, you know the pricing, you know how customers are using it, you know all the features. What's your area of - main area of focus? >> The main area of the UiPathT suite... >> For your role, I mean? >> For my role is the RPA testing. So meaning testing RPA workflows themselves. And the reason is RPA has matured over the last few years. We see that, and it has adopted a lot of best practices from the software development area. So what we see is RPA now becomes business critical. It's part of the main core business processes in corporation and testing it just makes sense. You have to continuously monitor and continuously test your automation to make sure it does not break in production. >> Okay. And you have a specific product for this? Is it a feature or it's a module? >> So RPA testing or the UiPath T Suite, as the name suggests it's a suite of products. It's actually part of the existing platform. So we use Orchestrator, which is the distribution engine. We use Studio, which is our idea to create automation. And on top of that, we build a new component, which is called the UiPath Test Manager. And this is a kind of analytics and management platform where you have an oversight on what happened, what went wrong, and what is the reason for automation to **bring. >> Okay. And so Neeraj, you're testing your robot code? >> Neeraj: Correct. >> Right. And you're looking for what? Governance, security, quality, efficiency, what are the things you're looking for? >> It's actually all of all of those but our main goal to really start this was two-front, right? So we were really looking at how do we, you know, deliver at a speed with the quality which we can really maintain and sustain for a longer period, right? So to improve our quality of delivery at a speed of delivery, which we can do it. So the way we look at testing automation is not just as an independent entity. We look at this as a pipeline of a continuous improvement for us, right? So how it is called industry as a CICD pipeline. So testing automation is one of the key component of that. But the way we were able to deliver on the speed is to really have that end to end automation done for us to also from developers to production and using that pipeline and our testing is one piece of that. And the way we were able to also improve on the quality of our delivery is to really have automated way of doing the code reviews, automated way of doing the testing using this platform as well. and then, you know, how you go through end to end for that purpose. >> Thomas, when I hear testing robots, (Thomas chuckles) I don't care if it's code or actual robots, it's terrifying. >> It's terrify, yeah. >> It's terrifying. Okay, great. You, you have some test suite that says look, Yeah, we've looked at >> The, why is that terrifying? >> What's, It's terrifying because if you have to let it interact with actual live systems in some way. Yeah. The only way to know if it's going to break something is either you let it loose or you have some sort of sandbox where, I mean, what do you do? Are you taking clones of environments and running actual tests against them? I mean, think it's >> Like testing disaster recovery in the old days. Imagine. >> So we are actually not running any testing in the production live environment, right? The way we build this actually to do a testing in the separate test environment on that as well by using very specific test data from business, which you know, we call that as a golden copy of that test data because we want to use that data for months and years to come. Okay. Right? Yeah. So not touching any production environmental Facebook. >> Yeah. All right. Cause you, you can imagine >> Absolutely >> It's like, oh yeah we've created a robotic changes baby diapers let's go ahead and test it on these babies. [Collective Laughter] Yeah >> I don't think so. No, no, But, but what's the, does it does it matter if there's a delta between the test data and the, the, the production data? How, how big is that delta? How do you manage that? >> It does matter. And that's where actually that whole, you know, angle of how much you can, can in real, in real life can test right? So there are cases where you would have, even in our cases where, you know, the production data might be slightly different than the test data itself. So the whole effort goes into making sure that the test data, which we are preparing here, is as close to the products and data itself, right? It may not be a hundred percent close but that's the sort of you know, boundary or risk you may have to take. >> Okay. So you're snapshotting, that moving it over, a little V motion? >> Neeraj: Yeah. >> Okay. So do you do this for citizen developers as well? Or is you guys pretty much center of excellence writing all the bots? >> No, right now we are doing only for the unattended, the COE driven bots only at this point of time, >> What are you, what are your thoughts on the future? Because I can see I can see some really sloppy citizen coders. >> Yeah. Yeah. So as part of our governance, which we are trying to build for our citizen developers as well, there there is a really similar consideration for that as well. But for us, we have really not gone that far to build that sort of automation right >> Now, narrowly, just if we talk about testing what's the business impact been on the testing? And I'm interested in overall, but the overall platform but specifically for the testing, when did that when did you start implementing that and, and what what has been the business benefit? >> So the benefit is really on the on the speed of the delivery, which means that we are able to actually deliver more projects and more automation as well. So since we adopted that, we have seen our you know, improvement, our speed is around 15%, right? So, so, you know, 15% better speed than previously. What we have also seen is, is that our success rate of our transactions in production environment has gone to 96% success rate, which is, again there is a direct implication on business, on, on that point of view that, you know, there's no more manual exception or manual interaction is required for those failure scenarios. >> So 15% better speed at what? At, at implementing the bots? At actually writing code? Or... >> End to end, Yes. So from building the code to test that code able to approve that and then deploy that into the production environment after testing it this is really has improved by 15%. >> Okay. And, and what, what what business processes outside of sort of testing have you sort of attacked with the platform? Can you talk to that? >> The business processes outside of testing? >> Dave: Yeah. You mean the one which we are not testing ourself? >> Yeah, no. So just the UI path platform, is it exclusively for, for testing? >> This testing is exclusively for the UI path bots which we have built, right? So we have some 400 plus automations of UI bots. So it's meant exclusively >> But are you using UI path in any other ways? >> No, not at this time. >> Okay, okay. Interesting. So you started with testing? >> No, we started by building the bots. So we already had roughly 400 bots in production. When we came with the testing automation, that's when we started looking at it. >> Dave: Okay. And then now building that whole testing-- >> Dave: What are those other bots doing? Let me ask it that way. >> Oh, there's quite a lot. I mean, we have many bots. >> Dave: Paint a picture if you want. Yeah. In, in finance, in auto management, HR, legal, IT, there's a lot of automations which are there. As I'm saying, there's more than 400 automations out there. Yeah. So so it's across the, you know, enterprise on that. >> Thomas. So, and you know, both of you have a have a view on this, but Thomas's views probably wider across other, other instances. What are the most common things that are revealed in tests that indicate something needs to be fixed? Yeah, so think of, think of a test, a test failure, an error. What are the, what are the most common things that happen? >> So when we started with building our product we conducted a, a survey among our customers. And without a surprise the main reason why automation breaks is change. >> David: Sure. >> And the problem here is RPA is a controlled process a controlled workflow but it runs in an uncontrollable environment. So typically RPA is developed by a C.O.E. Those are business and automation experts, but they operate in an environment that's driven by new patches new application changes ruled out by IT. And that's the main challenge here. You cannot control that. And so far, if you, if you do not proactively test what happens is you catch an issue in production when it already breaks, right? That's reactive, that's leads to maintenance to un-claim maintenance actually. And that was the goal right from the start from the taste suite to support our customers here and go over to proactive maintenance meaning testing before and finding those issues before the heat production. >> Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I'm, I'm still not clear on, so you just gave a perfect example, changes in the environment. >> Yeah. >> So those changes are happening in the production environment. >> Thomas: Yeah. The robot that was happily doing its automation stuff before? >> Thomas: Yeah. Everyone was happy with it. Change happens. Robot breaks. >> Thomas: Yeah. >> Okay. You're saying you test before changes are implemented? To see if those changes will break the robot? >> Thomas: Yeah. >> Okay. How do you, how do you expose those changes that are in the, in a, that are going to be in a production environment to the robot? You must have a, Is is that part of the test environment? Does that mean that you have to have what fully running instances of like an ERP system? >> Thomas: Yeah. You know, a clone of an environment. How do you, how do you test that without having the live robot against the production environment? >> I think there's no big difference to standard software testing. Okay. The interesting thing is, the change actually happens earlier. You are affected on production side with it but the change happens on it side or on DevOps side. So you typically will test in a test environment that's similar to your production environment or probably in it in a pre-product environment. And the test itself is simply running your workflow that you want to test, but mark away any dependencies you don't want to invoke. You don't want to send a, a letter to a customer in a test environment, right? And then you verify that the result is what you actually expect, right? And as soon as this is not the case, you will be notified you will have a result, the fail result, and you can act before it breaks. So you can fix it, redeploy to production and you should be good now. >> But the, the main emphasis at VMware is testing your bots, correct? >> Neeraj: Testing your bots. Yes. Can I apply this to testing other software code? >> Yeah, yeah. You, you can, you can technically actually and Thomas can speak better than me on that to any software for that matter, but we have really not explored that aspect of it. >> David: You guys have pretty good coders, good engineers at VMware, but no, seriously Thomas what's that market looking like? Is that taking off? Are you, are you are you applying this capability or customers applying it for just more broadly testing software? >> Absolutely. So our goal was we want to test RPA and the application it relies on so that includes RPA testing as well as application testing. The main difference is typical functional application testing is a black box testing. So you don't know the inner implementation of of that application. And it works out pretty well. The big, the big opportunity that we have is not isolated Not isolated testing, isolated RPA but we talk about convergence of automation. So what we offer our customers is one automation platform. You create one, you create automation, not redundantly in different departments, but you create once probably for testing and then you reuse it for RPA. So that suddenly helps your, your test engineers to to move from a pure cost center to a value center. >> How, how unique is this capability in the industry relative to your competition and and what capabilities do you have that, that or, or or differentiators from the folks that we all know you're competing with? >> So the big advantage is the power of the entire platform that we have with UiPath. So we didn't start from scratch. We have that great automation layer. We have that great distribution layer. We have all that AI capabilities that so far were used for RPA. We can reuse them, repurpose them for testing. And that really differentiates us from the competition. >> Thomas, I I, I detect a hint of an accent. Is it, is it, is it German or >> It's actually Austrian. >> Austrian. Well, >> You know. Don't compare us with Germans. >> I understand. High German. Is that the proper, is that what's spoken in Austria? >> Yes, it is. >> So, so >> Point being? >> Point being exactly as I drift off point being generally German is considered to be a very very precise language with very specific words. It's very easy to be confused about between the difference the difference between two things automation testing and automating testing. >> Thomas: Yes. >> Because in this case, what you are testing are automations. >> Thomas: Yes. >> That's what you're talking about. >> Thomas: Yes. >> You're not talking about the automation of testing. Correct? >> Well, we talk about >> And that's got to be confusing when you go to translate that into >> Dave: But isn't it both? >> 50 other languages? >> Dave: It's both. >> Is it both? >> Thomas: It actually is both. >> Okay. >> And there's something we are exploring right now which is even, even the next step, the next layer which is autonomous testing. So, so far you had an expert an automation expert creating the automation once and it would be rerun over and over again. What we are now exploring is together with university to autonomously test, meaning a bot explores your application on the test and finds issues completely autonomously. >> Dave: So autonomous testing of automation? >> It's getting more and more complicated. >> It's more clear, it's getting clearer by the minute. >> Sorry for that. >> All right Neeraj, last question is: Where do you want to take this? What's your vision for, for VMware in the context of automation? >> Sure. So, so I think the first and the foremost thing for us is to really make it more mainstream for for our automation developer Excel, right? What I mean by that is, is to really, so so there is a shift now how we engage with our business users and SMEs. And I said previously they used to actually test it manually. Now the conversation changes that, hey can you tell us what test cases you want what you want us to test in an automated measure? Can you give us the test data for that so that we can keep on testing in a continuous manner for the months and years to come down? Right? The other part of the test it changes is that, hey it used to take eight weeks for us to build but now it's going to take nine weeks because we're going to spend an extra week just to automate that as well. But it's going to help you in the long run and that's the conversation. So to really make it as much more mainstream and then say that out of all these kinds of automation and bots which we are building, So we are not looking to have a test automation for every single bot which we are building. So we need to have a way to choose where their value is. Is it the quarter end processing one? Is it the most business critical one, or is it the one where we are expecting of frequent changes, right? That's where the value of the testing is. So really bring that as a part of our whole process and then, you know >> We're still fine too. That great. Guys, thanks so much. This has been really interesting conversation. I've been waiting to talk to a real life customer about testing and automation testing. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for everything. >> All right. Thank you for watching, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and I will be back right after this short break. This is day one of theCUBE coverage of UI Path Forward Five. Be right back after this short break.

>>Welcome back to Falcon 2022. This is Dave LAN. We get a special presentation segment for you today. This is Walter Wall day one of day two's cube coverage, JC Herrera. Here's my designated cohost. Who's the chief human resource officer at CrowdStrike. Craig Neri is to my left. He's the beneficiary and the beneficiary trustee and ambassador of, of operation Motorsport and former us air force. Thank you for your service. Thank you. And Deel Lauder, who is CEO and co-founder of operation Motorsport. Jen, welcome to the cube. Thanks so much for coming on. Great to be JC set this up for us. Explain your role, explain the corporate giving the whole student connection and the veterans take us through that. >>Yeah, sure. Yeah. So as, as head of HR, one of the, one of the things that we do is, is help manage part of the corporate giving strategy. And, and one of those things that, that we love to do is to also invest in students and in our veterans, it's just a part of our giving program. So this partnership with operation Motorsport is really critical to that. And if you want to dive a little bit deeper into that, we just see that there's a gigantic skills gap in cyber security. And so when we, when there's over millions of open roles around the world and 700,000 of 'em in the us alone, we've gotta go close that gap. And so our next gen scholarships that come out of the, that are giving funds are, are awarded to students who are studying cyber security or AI. And the other side of that is that this partnership with operation motor sport, then we get the opportunity to do some internships with veterans through operation motor sport as well, the >>Number 700,000 now, but pre pandemic. I remember number 3 50, 300 50,000. It's it's doubled now just in the us. Amazing. All right, diesel, tell us about the mission of operation motor sport, like who are the beneficiaries let's get into it. >>So operation motor sport engages ill, injured, wounded service members, those that are medically retiring from the service or disabled veterans, these individuals be taken out of their units. They lose their team identity, their purpose. And, and what we do is those that apply to the program and have a desire to work around shiny objects and fast cars and all the great smells or just car guys or gals that we have some of those as well. They, we, we bring them onto the teams as beneficiaries. So embed them into a race team and give them opportunity to find something new. We're a recovery program. We're not about, you know, finding jobs for these folks. It's about networking and getting outta that, you know, outta the dark places where some of them end up going, because this is a, a huge change for them. And, and in doing so, we now expose them to crowd strike. You know, that's, that's one of the new relationships that, that we have where potentially if they want to, they can pursue new opportunities in areas like cyber security. >>And they're chosen through an application process. You're I'm, I'm inferring. >>Yeah. They just go online and say, you know, through word of mouth or through a friend or through the, the USO and other organizations, they go online and they click the apply here and they fill it out. And our beneficiary trustee, Craig, and calls 'em up and says, Hey, tell me about what you're looking for. And, and we, we pair them up with the race team and Craig, >>You're also a, a beneficiary in addition to being the beneficiary trustee. So explain that, what's your story? >>Right. So I started in this organization as a beneficiary. I was the one that hit the button on the website. And, and then a few minutes later, I got a phone call from then Tiffany Lader, diesel's wife, who's our executive director in the organization. And, and I had that same conversation that I now have with beneficiaries today. I did a, I did a full season with them last year in 2021 as a beneficiary. But at the end I realized how big of an impact that this has with folks. Transition can be very difficult, especially if they're ill injured or wounded. And so I asked if I could help if I could give back, cuz it meant such it had such a big impact on me. I'd like to, to help other veterans as well. Can I >>Ask you what made you hit that button? What made you apply? >>That's a great question. So I was one of the very fortunate ones that had a transition coach. I was in the military for 29 years and had a lot of great connections in the military and, and was connected to a coach, a transition coach and just exploring, you know, what that, what that would look like. And she was the one who said, Hey, why don't we, why don't we explore this passion of Motorsports that you have? My family had been going to, to Motorsports events for, you know, 50 years. And so, so I thought back, all right, this is, I like this idea. Let's, let's pursue this. So a quick Google search and operation Motorsport popped up and I hit the button and >>What programs are available in operation >>Motorsport? Yeah. So diesel kind of outline outlined it. We have basically three different programs. We have the, our immersion program, which is exactly what diesel described, where we take that veteran. And we actually immerse them in a race team. They're doing the, exactly what I was doing, doing tires and fuel and whatever the team needs them to do. We also have our emo sports program where folks who can't do the immersion program, immersion program is takes a pretty big time commitment sometimes. And so they just don't have the capacity or abilities to be able to do those. We could put 'em in our emo sports program where they can do it all virtually we're actually, we have a season going on right now where we, we have veterans racing in that emo sports program. And then we have a, a diversionary therapy program where we have a, a Patriot car corral set up at all these tracks. So they can go out with like-minded individuals and spend the day out there with those folks, other veterans. And we do pit pit tours and, and we get 'em out on the track for a little bit of a, you know, highway speeds, nothing ridiculous. But we, we did doing some highway speeds. So we have a, a few, few different ways for them to be >>Involved. So, so the number three is like a splash in the pond, whereas number ones, the, to like full immersion. Right? Correct. And so what are you doing in the full immersion? What is, what is that like? I mean, you're literally changing tires and, and, and you're >>Yeah. You name it. You're >>In the you're you're you're in that sort of sphere of battle, if you will. Right. >>The beauty of this is we could take somebody's capabilities and skill set and we can match it to whatever that looks like on a race team. Some people come in and have no experience whatsoever. And so we find a team that needs, you know, that has a development opportunities where they could come in, their, their initial job might be to fuel fuel cans or, you know, take tires off the car, wipe the car down, it's little things in the beginning. And then slowly as they start to grow and learn, then they take on bigger roles. But we also have different positions. They can be immersed in, in teams, but they can also be immersed in the series. So we have folks that are doing like tech inspections. We have folks that are doing race control up in the, up in the tower, directing race operations. So we have lots of opportunities, tons of potential. We, we foster those relationships and take the folks, whatever their capabilities and, and abilities are and find the right position for >>'em think, thinking about your personal experience, how, how did it, how would you say it affected you? >>Yeah. To understand that you really have to understand military transition. And I think that's where a lot of the folks that have never experienced this really struggle transition from the military is really difficult. And it's really difficult, even if you're, if you're not broken or you don't have some kind of illness or injury, but you add that factor into at the same time and it could be extremely difficult. And that's why we see like the 22, a day suicide rates with veterans, it's very, very high. Right? And so when you, when you come into this program, it, it is a little bit of a leap of faith, right? This is very new experience for somebody, right? For somebody like myself who had 29 years of experience in the military, very senior person in the military. And now you're at the bottom of the totem pole and trying to figure it all out again, it's, it's a, it's a big jump. But what you realize really quickly is a lot of the things that you experience in the military, you experience in that Pata, same exact things, lots of small team environment, lots of diversity, lots of challenges, lots of roadblocks ups downs, you, you deploy just like you would deploy in, in the military, you bring the cars to a track, you execute a mission, then you pack it up and bring it home. So it's, there's so many similarities in >>The process. I mean, yeah. Diesel hearing Craig explained that there are the similarities sound very clear, but, but, but how did how'd you come up with this idea? It makes sense now in retrospect, but somebody just said, Hey, you know, we have this and we have this and we can marry him or no, not >>Really. And it it's a funny story because I always said, I, I, I don't believe in reinventing the wheel, I believe in stealing the car. And so there's a sister organization that we have in the UK called mission Motorsport. And, and, and they invented this five years before we did. And, and they were successful. And I was, you know, through, through friendships and opportunities, I got to witness it in, in 2016. So went over to, to Wales in the UK and, and watched it in action. And we were there for one race weekend, race of remembrance, which is where we go back to, we'll be going back to November, taking 13 beneficiaries over to race in our own race team for a 12 hour race. And that's a whole other story, but that's where it all started. You know, we, we saw the opportunities and said, wow, they're changing lives through recovery, you know, through motor sport and the similarities and what they were achieving. >>Our initial goal was let's just come back and do this again next year, because we need to bring north American transitioning members over to, to witness this and take part. And then fast forward, we said, why stop there? And we stood up an organization. Now I'll tell you that the organization is not what it was, the, the initial vision. This is not where, I mean, I never imagine that we get to this point this day, especially with the announcement this morning, you know, with the partnership with CrowdStrike, it it's huge for us, but we've evolved into something that was very similar to the initial vision. And that was helping, helping medically transitioning service members with their own personal struggles and recovery. You know, the reason we call it operation Motorsport is because operations have no beginning and no end and our, and what we do makes us so different in that we're not a one and done, we take care of these guys. Even when they become alumni, they, they still come back. They, they come back to volunteer, they come back to check in their friends and, and all kinds. It's really, really neat. And, >>And JC of course, CrowdStrike has an affinity for Motorsports, right? You got the logo on the Mercedes. You you've got the safety car at, this is, I think it's called the safety car. Right. That's it? Yeah. So, okay. So that's an obvious connection, but, but where did the idea germinate for this partnership? >>There's so many things, but first and foremost, I think that the, the values of CrowdStrike and those of operation motors were very much aligned. If you think about it, we, we focus a lot on teamwork. There's no way we do these jobs without the teamwork part. We all love data. These guys are all in the data all the time, trying to figure out, you know, what your adversaries are doing. So there's that kind of component to it. And I'd say the last bit is critical thinking. So when we think about our organizations and how well aligned they are, that was a, that was a no brainer. And into the other side of it, we get the opportunity to do mentorship programs. I mean, I think both ways, hopefully I get invited to the Patriot corral. At some point I can go, go work on a car, but we'll do those both ways or mentorship opportunities. If folks from operation motor sport win a team up with a crowd striker. So >>Do you ever get to drive the car? Or is that just an awful question? No, that's >>A good question. Actually I do from the, from the track to the pits, very slow >>Speeds. They don't let you out in the train. That's right. No, I don't get to go out on the track. Diesel, you ever, you ever drive one >>Of these? I, I, I I've been on, on the track on, on different cars, not in the race cars that, that, that, that are on the team, but something that's unique in the Patriot corral, for instance, because JC brought that up is that when we do these Patriot corrals, part of that program at lunchtime is, is taking the individuals and doing parade laps. And now, you know, a parade lap. Well, what's the fun in that, but you drive highway speeds on a racetrack and your own personal car, following a pace car. That's a pretty cool experience. Cool. >>Yeah, that's very cool guys. Congratulations on this program and all your success and all the, the giving that you do for the community and, and your peers really appreciate you guys coming on the cube and telling me great story. Thanks >>For having, thanks for the opportunity. You're very >>Welcome. All right. Keep it right there. Everybody. Dave ante and Dave Nicholson, we'll be back from Falcon 2022 at the area in Las Vegas. You watching the cube.

>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage here in Seattle, Washington for the Avis marketplace seller conference, part of the APN partner network merging with the marketplace to form the Amazon partner organization. I'm John furrier, host of the cube Walter Wall coverage today, Christian Gor cash, who is the VP of alliances at Kong Inc. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. Really glad to be here. Corke exactly. Yeah. It's awesome. >>So Kong we've been following you guys for while Docker Kong cube. You've been part of our cube conversation. Also part of our, our startup showcase fast growing startup, you know, working on stuff that everyone loves APIs. I mean, APIs are so popular now that they now a security concern, right? Yeah. So like it gets squat there everywhere. I won't say API sprawl, but APIs are the connections and that are, is the web. That is the cloud. Okay. Now with cloud native developers who are now in the front lines have taken over it, everyone knows DevOps dev SecOps is now the new it and it's the developers security and data they're below they're the new ops, right? So, so this is where microservices come in, open source service MES new automation is coming down the pike. That's super valuable to businesses as they look at cloud native architecture, what are you guys doing in there? Take a minute to explain Kong's value proposition, the hot products, and then why you're here. >>Yeah. So, you know, I joined Kong now or three years ago, you know, we were still just reaching our hundred employees, mark, which is very important, very startup, but even back then, you know, Kong was relatively well known in industry, you know, so we have one of the most, well the most popular open source project in API gateway area. So con API gateway, you know, we cross now 300 million downloads, even more important is just the scale it, which the product's been used. So between our open source community and enterprise customers, we are now crossing like 11 trillion transactions per month. Now just give you comparison. Like this is like 18, 19 times more than Netflix per month. You know? So for any company that has a technology that operates it at scale, you need to hit few things outta the park. You know, as he mentions cloud data developers, they want simplicity. You know, they want automation. They also want performance and scale and security, which are all critical, you know, to how Kong, you know, start as opensource project. Now, of course we have the whole suite of enterprise products. We also have our con service mesh offering as well as our cloud offerings. >>Yeah. And this is how open source is doing it now, obviously, you know, I, I still remember, I still tell the story to the young startups. Hey, I, there was proprietary software when I was in college. Open source is now everything. Now you've got, got cloud scale. So the dynamic between open source, which has become the software industry open source success doesn't mean it's it's game over. It's the beginning. The commercialization that you guys have gone through is super important. Trillions of transactions. Now you have enterprises working with you. What's the big advantage of the seller relationship that you have with Amazon? Why are customers using it? What are they buying it for? Give the pitch of con for the marketplace customer. >>Yeah, it's actually, we are relatively new in AWS marketplace. You know, so our first transaction that we ever done was actually in July and 2021. So we are just over a year, you know, that journey, you know, when I look what Chris gross talked today, he was talking about, you know, Hey, just publishing marketplace, not enough. You know, you need to understand what's your value proposition. You need to make sure your operations already, your sales is ready. Everything is, is set. And we kind of did this for the first year and a half is spend a lot of time improving our integration with AWS overall, all the first party services relevant to con we also understood, well, what does it take to kind of fine tune our value proposition? We have like three specific sales place. And you know, when we launch our flagship product con connect enterprise and got our first transaction, that was great milestone for, for star like Kong. But then what we've seen is just that work that we've done before really paid off. I mean right now, >>Like what we'll give example. >>Yeah. So, you know, we are focusing on as measure three sales place. Money is we are focused, specific on helping customers who are modernizing and, and their application going to the cloud. And you have a lot of these, you know, lifting shift and are rearchitect and modernized, but most of the attentions on the workloads, what about the connections? You know, so a monolith application had to authentic all the users understand wheres the network and so on. When you build those, when you now decouple this built like 1,000 thousand microservices, you don't want to repeat this for every microservice. So that's where K brings the whole suite from, you know, service match to the API gate to help manage the journey and really support this environment. And we spend a lot of time to just fine tune that message. So that customers understood where, you know, how can we help them on their journey beyond what, for instance, cloud native or AWS API gateway offers them. So we can really help them from day one on the journey and accelerate. And >>I think I it's a no, it's a no braining for a customer to buyer or to come into the marketplace and say, click, I'm gonna buy some data analytics services. I'm gonna buy gateway through Kong. But when they start getting into these microservices, this automation opportunity there, there's more behind the curtain for them with Kong. So I have to ask you with the keynote we heard from Chris, the leader of the marketplace. Now he said that he wants the ISVs to be more native in the cloud. That probably resonates with you. You, >>You guys well with con's relatively simple because we were built at cloud native, you know, so very briefly the whole story of Congo. This is before Ajo, our founders were actually running the, the very popular API exchange col mesh shape. And they had to build their own gateway just to handle the scale and was built on cloud native technologies. And then when everybody's calling you, what are you using to running? This are using PGS. And so else, no, we built ourselves, oh, how can we get our hands on? That's how con actually >>Came to. And that's how the big winners usually happen too. They start build their own, solve their own problem because it's a big scale problem. Exactly. No one's had that problem. >>Yeah. And what we have seen, especially what was very, you know, through, through the pandemic, what we have seen. And it's interesting, you know, being in a startup doing pandemic is like, whoa, will the life just shut down or what we're doing? You know? But actually what we have seen customers prioritize the new business capability. For instance, you have a large parental companies that overnight, they have to understand where the assets are. Yeah. Or banks who are like 45 days of, you know, approving process for the loans. They need to reduce it for a day or two. >>Yeah. And they're adding more developers, too, exactly. To build the modern application. So they need to have that infrastructure as code aspect. Correct. >>And they >>Need in place. >>Yeah. I need to like you have, you know, I don't think that many customers still have waterfall cycles, but they have, have pre pretty long developers development cycles. And now you need to, you know, do this multiple times a day. That's >>Interesting. We talked to a lot of cloud architects and C CIO C says, and you know, the executive just hire more developers take that hill, build. It just don't build a new app. It's not that easy boss. When, when the cloud architect says we have to be fully operationally ready with cloud native infrastructure's code. So with that, you're seeing a lot more enterprises come in now that are more savvy. They getting better. We're seeing Kubernetes more and more. You're seeing containerization. You're seeing that cloud native enterprise acceptance. What does that mean for you guys in the marketplace, as you look at the value proposition, how are you guys working with the marketplace today and where do you see customers buying in the future? >>Yeah, so we as mentioned, you know, we, we are now a year into that journey. We already seen tremendous benefits just in terms of reducing the friction. You know, the whole procurement, you know, you come as a startup with some, some of the largest companies in the world, they used to buy five, 10 billion in software and they have all these processes and you're like, well, but we only have like two people in finance. Sorry. How can you, and where marketplace can really, really helps us is, you know, improve this experience, both sides because they understand like we are fast moving company. They, they want us because of our speed and, and innovation that we, the product's strong. Yeah. They don't want us to get bogged down in all these pro procurement processes either. And so, so that's the first benefit. We also are working very hard to make sure that the customers can provision Kong in AWS and automate across the board. So essentially reducing their time to value dramatically. Yeah. And another thing that we found tremendously beneficial for us is a startup is the whole concept of a standard marketplace contract. Yeah. So instead of us coming with our little MSA or come like 50 page MSA from companies, we now have a middle ground. So we can just agree. You know, there's some differences, some specifics to qu software and it's tremendously reduced costs on both sides. >>Great. For you guys great for the buyers. Yeah. You get deployed services. They're not just buying, they're managing and deploying. Yeah, >>Exactly. Great. >>Quick, final question. Put a plugin for the company. What are you working on now? What's the big news. What's the con update? >>Well, that's an interesting part because I can't tell you because next week we have our con summit. Oh right. In San Francisco. The cubes not so 28, 20 ninth. Yeah. We, we we'll, I think we are gonna fix that in the future. But anyway, this is the first time after pandemic to do this in person, we have number of very exciting announcement, our Kong products, as well as you may hear some news about our AWS partnership, >>We like con we believe that DevOps has happened. Dev sec ops, whatever you gonna call it, dev is now the developers they're in the front lines. They're in the C I CD pipeline. They're shifting left. That's the new they took over it. That's what DevOps does. It's not a title. Now you have security and data ops behind the scenes. That's gonna be middleware. That's gonna have tons of microservices. So more, more, more action coming, all API based. >>Exactly. And the more, you know, the more complexity we can take away from that, the better we, you know, the >>Whole community. Thank you. Spending the time to come on the cube here at the, a us marketplace seller conference. What do you think about the APN merging with the marketplace formed the P the Amazon partner organization. Thumbs up, thumbs down. What's your heard? >>It's excellent. We have a great friend in AP, a great friend, us marketplace. Now both of them work together with huge. >>Fantastic. Yes. Thanks for okay. Cube coverage here in Seattle. I'm John furier APN marketplace together. APOs the new organization making it easier. Of course, we got all the coverage here. Thanks for watching.

>> Welcome back to FalCon 2022. This is Dave Vellante. We get a special presentation segment for you today. This is Walter Wall day one of day two's cube coverage. JC Herrera is here, he's my designated cohost. He's the chief human resource officer at CrowdStrike. Craig Neri is to my left. He's the beneficiary and the beneficiary trustee and ambassador of, of operation Motorsport and former US air force. Thank you for your service. >> Thank you. >> And Diezel Lodder, who is CEO and co-founder of operation Motorsport. Gents, welcome to the cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you, Great to be here >> JC, set this up for us. Explain your role, explain the corporate giving, the whole student connection, and the veterans, take us through that. >> Yeah, sure. Yeah, so as, as head of HR, one of the one of the things that we do is, is help manage part of the corporate giving strategy. And, and one of those things that, that we love to do is to also invest in students and in our veterans, it's just a part of our giving program. So this partnership with operation Motorsport is really critical to that. And if you want to dive a little bit deeper into that we just see that there's a gigantic skills gap in cybersecurity. And so when we, when there's over millions of open roles around the world and 700,000 of them in the us alone, we've got to go close that gap. And so our next gen scholarships that come out of the, are giving funds are, are awarded to students who are studying cyber security or AI. And the other side of that, is that this partnership with operation Motorsport then, we get the opportunity to do some internships with veterans through operation Motorsport as well. >> The number is 700,000 now, but pre pandemic I remember number 350, 350,000. It's, it's doubled now just in the US, amazing. All right, diezel, tell us about the mission of operation Motorsport like who are the beneficiaries let's get into it. >> So operation Motorsport engages ill, injured wounded service members, those that are medically retiring from the service or disabled veterans these individuals will be taken out of their units. They lose their team identity, their purpose. And, and what we do is those that apply to the program and have a desire to work around shiny objects and fast cars and all the great smells or just car guys or gals that we have some of those as well. They, we, we bring them onto the teams as beneficiaries. So embed them into a race team and give them opportunity to find something new. We're a recovery program. We're not about, you know, finding jobs for these folks. It's about networking and getting out of that, you know out of the dark places where some of them end up going because this is a, a huge change for them. And, and in doing so, we now expose them to CrowdStrike. You know, that's, that's one of the new relationships that, that we have where potentially if they want to they can pursue new opportunities in areas like cybersecurity. >> And they're chosen through an application process you're, I, I'm inferring. >> Yep. They just go online and say, you know through word of mouth or through a friend or through the, the USO and other organizations, they go online and they click the apply here and they fill it out. And, our beneficiary trustee Craig, and calls them up and says, Hey, tell me about what you're looking for. And, and we, we pair them up with the race team. >> And Craig you're also a, a beneficiary in addition to being the beneficiary trustee. So explain that, what's your story? >> Right. So I started in this organization as a beneficiary. I was the one that hit the button on the website. And, and then a few minutes later, I got a phone call from then Tiffany Lodder, Diezel's wife, who's our executive director in the organization. And, and I had that same conversation that I now have with beneficiaries today. I did a, I did a full season with them last year in 2021 as a beneficiary. But at the end I realized how big of an impact that this has with folks. Transition can be very difficult, especially if they're ill injured or wounded. And so I asked if I could help if I could give back cause it meant such, it had such a big impact on me. I'd like to, to help other veterans as well. >> Can I ask you what made you hit that button? What made you apply? >> Oh, that's a great question. So I was one of the very fortunate ones that had a transition coach. I was in the military for 29 years and had a lot of great connections in the military and, and was connected to a coach, a transition coach and just exploring, you know what that, what that would look like and she was the one who say, why don't we, why don't we explore this passion of Motorsports that you have? My family had been going to, to Motorsports events for you know, 50 years. And so, so I thought back, all right, this is I like this idea. Let's, let's pursue this. So a quick Google search and operation Motorsport popped up and I hit the button. >> And what programs are available in operation Motorsport? >> And so, Diezel kind of outline, outlined it. We have basically three different programs. We have the, our immersion program, which is exactly what Diezel described, where we take that veteran and we actually immerse them in a race team they're doing the, exactly what I was doing, doing tires and fuel and whatever the team needs them to do. We also have our E-motor sports program where folks who can't do the immersion program, immersion program is takes a pretty big time commitment sometimes. And so, they just don't have the capacity or abilities to be able to do those. We could put them in our E-motor sports program where they can do it all virtually. we're actually, we have a season going on right now where we're, we have veterans racing in that E-motor sports program. And then we have a, the diversionary therapy program where we have a, a Patriot car corral set up at all these tracks so, they can go out with like-minded individuals and spend the day out there with those folks, other veterans. And we do pit, pit tours and, and we get 'em out on the track for a little bit of a, you know, highway speeds nothing ridiculous, but we, we been doing some highway speeds. So we have a, a few, few different ways for them to be involved. >> So, so the number three is like a splash in the pond whereas number one's the, like full immersion. >> Yeah, correct, yes. >> And so what are you doing in the full immersion? What is, what is that like? I mean you're literally changing tires and, and you're, >> Yeah. You name it. >> In the, you're, you're in that sort of sphere of battle, if you will. >> The beauty of this is we could take somebody's capabilities and skill set and we can match it to whatever that looks like on a race team. Some people come in and have no experience whatsoever. And so we find a team that needs, you know, that has a development opportunities where they could come in, their, their initial job might be to fuel fuel cans or, you know, take tires off the car or wipe the car down, it's little things in the beginning. And then slowly as they start to grow and learn then they take on bigger roles. But we also have different positions. They can be immersed in, in teams, but they can also be immersed in the series. So we have folks that are doing like tech inspections. We have folks that are doing race control up in the, up in the tower, directing race operations. So, we have lots of opportunities, tons of potential. We, we foster those relationships and take the folks and whatever their capabilities and, and abilities are and find the right position for them. >> Think, thinking about your personal experience, how, how did it, how would you say it affected you? >> Yeah, um, to understand that you really have to understand military transition. And I think that's where a lot of the folks that have never experienced this really struggle. transition from the military is really difficult. And it's really difficult, even if you're, if you're not broke and, or you don't have some kind of illness or injury but, you add that factor into it at the same time and it could be extremely difficult. And that's why we see like the 22 a day suicide rates with veterans, it's very, very high, Right? And so when you, when you come into this program, it's, it is a little bit of a leap of faith, right? This is very new experience for somebody, right? For somebody like myself who had 29 years of experience in the military, very senior person in the military. And now you're at the bottom of the totem pole and trying to figure it all out again, it's, it's a it's a big jump. But, what you realize really quickly is a lot of the things that you experience in the military you experience in that paddock, same exact things, lots of, small team environment, lots of diversity, lots of challenges, lots of roadblocks ups downs, you, you'd deploy just like you would deploy in, in the military you bring the cars to a track, you execute a mission then you pack it up and bring it home. So it's, there's so many similarities in the process. >> I mean, yeah. Diezel hear, hearing Craig explained that there are, the similarities sound very clear, but, but, but how did how'd you come up with this idea? (Diezel laughs) It makes sense now in retrospect, but, somebody just said Hey, you know, we have this and we have this and we can marry them or... >> No, not really. And it, it's a funny story because I always said, I, I, I don't believe in reinventing the wheel I believe in stealing the car. And so there's a sister organization that we have in the UK called mission Motorsport. And, and, and they invented this five years before we did. And, and they were successful. And I was, you know, through, through friendships and opportunities, I got to witness it in, in 2016. So went over to, to Wales in, in the UK and, and watched it in action. And we were there for one race weekend, race of remembrance which is where we go back to we'll be going back to November, taking 13 beneficiaries over to race in our own race team for a 12 hour race. And that's a whole other story but that's where it all started. You know, we, we saw the opportunities and said, wow they're changing lives through recovery, you know through Motorsport and the similarities and what they were achieving, our initial goal was let's just come back and do this again next year, because we need to bring north American transitioning members over to, to witness this and take part. And then fast forward, we said, why stop there? And we, stood up an organization. Now, I'll tell you that the organization is not what it was the initial vision, this not where, I mean I never imagine that we get to this point this day especially with the announcement this morning, you know with the partnership with CrowdStrike, it it's huge for us but, we've evolved into something that was very similar to the initial vision. And that was, helping, helping medically transitioning service members with their own personal struggles and recovery. You know, the reason we call it operation Motorsport is because operations have no beginning and no end and our, and what we do makes us so different in that we're not a one and done, we take care of these guys. Even when they become alumni, they, they still come back. They, they come back to volunteer they come back to check in their friends and, and all kinds, it's really, really neat. >> And, and JC of course CrowdStrike has an affinity for Motorsports, right? You got the logo on the Mercedes. You, you've got the safety car at this. I think it's called the safety car, right? >> That's it, yeah. >> So, okay. So that's an obvious connection, but, but where did the idea germinate for this partnership? >> There's so many things, but first and foremost, I think that the, the values of CrowdStrike and those of operation motors were very much aligned. If you think about it, we, we focus a lot on teamwork. There's no way we do these jobs without the teamwork part. We all love data. These guys are all in the data all the time trying to figure out, you know, what your adversaries are doing. So there's that kind of component to it. And I'd say the last bit is critical thinking. So when we think about our organizations and how well aligned they are, that was a, that was a no brainer. And into the other side of it, we get the opportunity to do mentorship programs. I mean, I think both ways, hopefully I get invited to the Patriot corral at some point I can go, go work on a car but, we'll do those both ways or mentorship opportunities. If folks from operation Motorsport win a team up with a CrowdStrikers. >> Do you ever get to drive the car? Or is that just an awful question? >> No, it's a good question. Actually I do from the from the track to the pits at, you know, very slow speeds. >> They don't let you out on the track? >> That's right, no, I don't get to go out the track. >> Diezel You ever, you ever drive one of these? >> I, I, I, I've been on, on the track on, on different cars not in the race cars that, that, that that are on the team, but something that's unique in the Patriot corral, for instance, because JC brought that up, is that when we do these Patriot corrals part of that program at lunchtime is, is taking the individuals and doing parade laps. And I'll, you know, a parade lap, well, what's the fun in that? but you drive highway speeds on a racetrack and your own personal car following a pace car, that's a pretty cool experience. >> Yeah, that's very cool. Guys, congratulations on this program and all your success and all the, the giving that you do for the community and, and your peers, really appreciate you guys coming on The Cube and telling your story. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for the opportunity. >> You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, we'll be back from FalCon 2022, at the ARIA in Las Vegas. You're watching the cube. (relaxing music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John Forer host of the cube with Dave Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, two sets for three days. We're on three days, we're here breaking down all the action of what's going on around VMware is our 12th year covering VMware's user conference. Formerly known as world. Now explore as it explores new territory, its future multi-cloud vSphere eight and a variety of new next generation cloud. We're here on day three, breaking out. This is day three more, more intimate, much more deeper conversations. And we have coming back on the Q Keith Norby with NetApp, the worldwide product partner solutions executive at NetApp Keith. Great to see you industry to veteran cube alumni. Thanks for coming back. It's >>Good to see you >>Again. Yeah. I wanted to bring you back for a couple reasons. One is I want to talk about the NetApp story and also where that's going with DM VMware as that's evolving and, and is changing and, and with Broadcom and, and the new next generation, but also analyzing kind of the customer impact piece of it. You're like an analyst who've been in the industry for a long time. Been commentating on the cube. VMware's in an interesting spot right now because I, I mean, I love the story. I mean, we can debate the messaging. Some people are very critical of it a little bit too multicloud, not enough cloud native, but I see the waves, right? I get it. Virtualization kicked ass tech names. Now it moves to hybrid cloud. And now this next gen is a, you know, clear cloud native multi-cloud environment. I, I get that. I can see, I can, I can get there, but is it ready? And the timing. Right. And do they have all the peace parts? What's the role of the ecosystem? These are all open questions. >>Yeah. And, and the reality is no one has a single answer. And that's part of the fun of this, is that not just a NetApp, but the rest of the ecosystem and videos here, as an example, who, who is thinking, you know, the Kings of AI are gonna be sitting at a V VMware show and yet it's absolutely relevant. So you have a very complex set of things that emerge, but yet also it's, it's, that's not overcomplicated. There is a set of primary principles that, you know, organizations I think are all looking to get to. And I think the reality is that this is maturing in different spurts. So whether it's ecosystem or it's, you know, operations modes and several other factors that kind of come into it, you know, that's part of the landscape, >>You know, I gotta ask you, you know, you and I are both kind of historians. We always talk about what's happened and happening and gonna happen. You know, it's interesting 12 years covering world and now explore NetApp has always been such a great company. We've been, I've been following that company, you know, since, you know, 1997, you know, days. And, and certainly with the past decade of the cloud or so the moves you guys may have been really good, but NetApp's never really had the kind of positioning in the VMware story going back in the past 12 years. And this keynote, you guys were mentioned in the keynote. Yeah. Has there ever been a time where NetApp was actually mentioned in a keynote at world or now explore? >>Well, you know, when we started this relationship back when I was a partner, I really monetized and took advantage of some of the advantages that NetApp had with VMware back in the early days, we're talking to ESX three days and they were dominant to the point where the rest of, you know, the ecosystem was trying to catch up. And of course, you know, a lot of competition from there, but yeah, it, it, it was great seeing a day, one VMware keynote with NetApp mentioned in the same relevance as AWS and VMware, which is exactly where we've been. You know, one thing that NetApp has done really well is not just being AWS, but be in all the hyperscalers as first party services and having a, a portfolio of other ways that we deal with things like, you know, data governance and cloud data management and cloud cloud backup, and overall dealing with cyber resiliency and, and ransomware protection and list goes on and on. So we've done our job to really make ourself both relevant and easy for people to consume. And it was great to see VMware and AWS come together. And the funny part was that, you know, we had on, on the previous cube session, you have VMware and AWS in between NetApp, all talking about, we have this whole thing running at all three of our booths. And that's fantastic. You >>Know, I, I can say because I actually was there and documented it and actually wrote about it in the early 20 11, 20 12, the then CEO Georgian's and I had an interview. He actually was the first storage company to actually engage with AWS back then. Yeah. I mean, that's a long time ago. That's that's 10 years ago. And then everyone else kind of followed EMC kind of was deer in the headlights at that point. They were poo pooing, AWS. Oh yeah, no, it'll never work either of which will never work. It's just a, a fluke. Yeah. For developers. NetApp was on the Amazon web services partnership train for a long time. >>Yeah. It, it, it's really amazing how early we got on this thing, which you can see the reason why that matters now is because it's not only in first party service, but that's also very robust and scalable. And this is one of the reasons why we think this opens it up. And, you know, as much as you wanna talk about the technology capabilities in, in this offering, the funny part is, is the intro conversation is how much money you save. So it unlocks all the, the use cases that you weren't able to do before. And when you, when you look at use case after use case on these workloads, they were hell held back. The number one conversation we had at this show was partner after partner, organization, after organization that came into our booth and talked to us about, yeah, I've got a bunch of these scenarios that I've been holding back on because I heard whispers about this. Now we're gonna go in >>Unleash those. All right. So what are, what's the top stories for you guys now at NetApp? What's the update it's been a while, since we had a cube update with you guys, what are you guys showing of the show? What's your agenda? What are your talking points? What's the main story? >>Well, for us, it's, it's, it's, it's always, you know, a cloud and on-prem combination of priorities within our partner ecosystem. The way we kind of communicate that out is really through three lenses. You know, one is on the hybrid cloud opportunity, people taking data center and modernizing the data center with the apps and getting the cloud, just like we're delivering here at this VMware world show. Also the AI and modern data analytics opportunity, and then public cloud, because really in a lot of these situations at apps, you know, the, the buyer, the consumer, the people that are interested in transforming are looking at it from different lenses. And these all start with really the customer journeys, the data ops buyer is different than the data center ops buyer. And, and that's exactly who we target this in is, is NetApp. I think, focuses relentlessly on how we reach them. And by the way, not just on storage products, if you look at like our instant cluster acquisition and all these other things, we're trying to be as relevant, we, as we can in data management and you know, whether that's pipelining data management or storing data management, that's >>Where we're there. You know, I, I was talking with David Nicholson, cuz we have, you know, we joked together. I say the holy Trinity, he goes with the devil's triangle. I'm Catholic, gotta know what his, his denomination is, but storage, networking, and compute. Obviously the, the three majors, it never changes. And I think it was interesting now, and I wanna get your reaction to this and what NetApp's doing around it is that if look at the DevOps movement, it's clearly cloud native, but the it ops is not it anymore. It's basically security and data I'm I'm oversimplifying, but DevOps, the developers now do a lot of that. I call it work in, in the CSD pipeline, but the real challenge is data and ops. That's a storage conversation. Compute is beautiful. You got containers, Kubernetes, all kinds of stuff going on with compute, move, compute around, move the data to compute. But storage is where the action is for cyber and data ops. Yeah. And AI. So like storage is back. They never left, but it's, it's transformed to even be more important because the role of hyper-convergence shows that compute and storage go well together. What's your take on this and how is NetApp modernized to, to solve the data ops and take that to the next level and of obviously enable and, and enable in great security and or defense ability. >>Yeah. And that's why no one architecture is gonna solve every problem. That's why, when we look at the data ops buyer, there's adjacencies to the apps buyer, to the other cloud ops buyer. And there's also the fin ops buyer because all of 'em have to work together. What we're, what we're focusing on. Isn't just storing data. But it's also things around how you discover govern data. You know, how you protect data, even things like in the ed workspace, the chip manufacturers, how we use cloud bursting to be able to accelerate performance on chip design. So whether you're translating this for the industry vernacular about how we help say in the financial sector for AI and what we do within Invidia, or it's something translated to this VMware opportunity on AWS, you know, what we've put together is, is something that has as much meaningful relevance for storing data, but also for all the other adjacencies that kind of extend off there. >>Talk about what you're doing with your partner. I saw last night I did, I did a fly by a NetApp event. It was Nvidia insight, which is a partner, an integrator partner. So you got a lot of the frontline on the front lines, you got partners and you got, you know, big solutions with NetApp and now vendors like Nvidia, what are you actually selling? What's what's getting, I guess what's being put together, not selling, I'm obviously selling gear and what, but like solutions, but what's being packaged to the customer. Where does, what does and video fit in? What are you guys? And what's the winning formula. Take us through the highlights. >>Yeah. And so the VMware highlights here are obviously that we're trying to get infrastructure foundations to just not have, be, be trapped in one cloud or anyone OnPrem. So having a little more E elasticity, but if you extend that out, like you, like you mentioned with a partner that's trying to, to go drive AI within Nvidia, you know, NetApp doesn't create any AI deals cuz no one starts an AI journey with storage. They always start it with the, a with the data model. So the data scientists will actually start these things in cloud and they'll bring 'em on prem. Once the data sets get to a, a big enough scenario and then they wanna build it into a multi-cloud over time. And that's where Nvidia has really led the charge. So someone like an insight or other partners could be Kindra or, or Accenture, or even small boutique partners that are in the data analytics space. They'll go drive that. And we provide not just data storage, but are really complimentary infrastructure. In fact, I always say it like on the AI story alone, we have an integration for the data scientists. So when they go pull the data sets in, you can either do that as a manual copy that takes hours sometimes days, or you can do it instantaneously with our integration to their Jupyter notebook. So I say for AI, as an example, NetApp creates time for data scientists. Got >>It. And where's the, the cloud transformation with you guys right now? How is the hybrid working? Obviously you got the public and hybrids, a steady state right now multi-cloud is still a little fantasy in terms of actual multi-cloud that's coming next, but hybrid and cloud, what's the key key configuration for NetApp what's the hot products? >>Well, I think the key is that you can't just be trapped in one location. So we started this whole thing back with data fabric, as you know, and it's built from there up into, into more of the ops layer and some of the technology layers that have to compliment to come with it. In fact, one of the things that we do that isn't always seen as adjacency to us is our spot product on cloud, which allows you to play in the finops space to be able to look at the analyzed spend and sort of optimized environments for a DevOps environment cloud, to be able to give back a big percentage of what you probably misallocate in those operating models. Once you're working with NetApp and allow it to re re redeploy it in the place that you wanna spend it, you know, so it's, it's both the upper and lower stories coming together. >>Yeah. I was on the walking around the hallway yesterday and I was kind of going through the main event last night, overheard people talking about ransomware. I mean, still ransomware is such a big problem. Security's huge. How are you guys doing there? What's the story with security? Obviously ransomware is a big storage aspect and, and backup recovery and whatnot. All that's kind of tied together. How does NetApp enable better security? What's the story >>There? Yeah, it's funny because that's, that's where a lot of the headlines are at this show at every other show is security for us. It's really about cyber resilience. It is one of the key foundational parts of our hybrid cloud offerings. So as we go out to the partners, you mentioned, you know, insight and there's others, you know, CDW ahead here, and the GSI hosting providers, they're all trying to figure out the security opportunity because that is live. So we have a cyber resiliency solution that isn't just our snapshot technologies, but it's also some of the discovery data governance. But also, you know, you gotta work this with ecosystem, as we said, you know, you have all the other ISVs out there that have several solutions, not just the traditional data protection ones, but also the security players. Because if you look at the full perimeter and you look at how you have to secure that and be able to both block remediate and bring back a site, you know, those are complex sets of things that no one person owns. But what we've tried to do is really be as, as meaningful and pervasive and integrated to that package as possible. That's why it's a lead story in the hybrid clouds. >>Can you share for a minute, just give the NetApp commercial plug cuz you guys have continued to stay relevant. What's the story this year for the folks watching that our customers or potential customers, what's the NetApp story for this year? >>Well, the net, the nets right for this year is kind of what I mentioned, which is, you know, we're in this multi-cloud world. So whether you're coming at this from any perspective, we have relevancy for, for the, the on-prem place that you've always enjoyed us, but at the opposite of the spectrum, if you're coming at us from an AWS show or the cloud op the cloud ops buyer, we have a complete portfolio that if you never knew net from the on-prem, you're gonna see us massively relevant in that, in that environment. And you just go to an AWS show or a Microsoft Azure, so, or a Google show, you'll see us there. You'll see exactly why we were relevant there. You'll see them mention why we're relevant there. So our message is really that we have a full portfolio across the hybrid multi-cloud from anyone buyer perspective, to be able to solve those problems, but by the way, do it with partners cuz the partners are the ones that complete all this. None of us on our own, AWS, Microsoft, VMware, NetApp, none of us have the singular solution ourselves. And we can't deliver ourselves. You have to have those partners that have those skills, those competencies. And that's why we, we leverage it that way. >>Great, great stuff. Now I gotta ask you what what's going on in your world with partners. How's it going? What's the vibe what's that just share some insight into what's happening inside the partners? Are they happy with the margins? Are they shifting behavior? What are some of the, the high order bit news items or, or trends going on at the, on the front lines with your partners? >>Well, I think listen, the, the, the challenges pitfalls, the, the objections, the, all the problems that have been there in the past are even more multiplied with today's economy and all the situations we've gone through with COVID. But the reality is what's emerged is an interesting kind of tapestry of a lot of different partner types. So for us, we recognize that across the traditional GSIs, you see these cloud native partners emerging, which is an exciting realm, you know, to look at folks that really built their business in the cloud with no on-prem and being relevant with them, just consulting partners alone. Like the SAP ecosystem has a very condensed set of partners that really drive a lot of the transformation of SAP. And a lot of them don't, you know, don't do product business. So how does someone like NetApp be relevant with them? You gotta put together an offering that says we do X, Y, and Z for SAP. And so it's, it's a combination of these partners across the, the different >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And I, and I, I'm gonna, I wanna get your reaction to something and you probably don't, you don't have to go out, out in the limb and, and put NetApp in a, in a position on official position. But I've been saying on the cube that no matter what happens with VMware's situation with Broadcom, this is not a dying market, right? I mean like you you'd think when someone gets bought out or, or intention bought out, that'd be like this, this dark cloud that would hang over the, the company and this condition is their user conference. So this is a good barometer to get a feel for it. And I gotta tell you, Sunday night here at VMware Explorer, the expo floor was not dead. It was buzzing. It was packed the ecosystem and even the conversations and the positionings, it's all, all growth. So, so I think VMware's in a really interesting spot here with the Broadcom, because no matter what happens that ecosystem's going to settle somewhere. Yeah. It's not going away cuz they have such great customer base. So, you know, assume that broad Tom is gonna do the right thing and they keep most of the jewels they'll keep all the customers. So, but still that wave is coming. Yeah. It's independent of VMware. Yeah. That's the whole point. So what happens next? >>Well, I think, you know, we, >>We, you guys are gonna get mop up in business. Amazon's gonna get some business, Microsoft, HPE, you name it all gonna, >>Yeah. I think, you know, we've, we've been in business with Broadcom for a long time, whether it be the switch business, the chip business, everything in between. And so we've got a very mature relationship with them and we have a great relationship with VMware. It's it's best. It's almost ever been now and together. I think that will all just rationalize and, and settle over time as this kind of goes through both the next Barcelona show and when it comes back here next year, and I think, you know, what you'll see is probably, you know, some of the stuff settle into the new things they announced here at the show and the things that maybe you haven't heard from, but ultimately the, these, these, these solutions that they have to come forward with, you know, have to land on things that go forward. And so today you just saw that with VMware trying to do VMware cloud and AWS, they realized that there was a gap in terms of people adopting and wanting to do a storage expansion without adding compute. So they made a move with us that made total sense. I think you're gonna see more of those things that are very common sense, ways to solve the, the barriers to, you know, modernization, adoption and maturity. That's just gonna be a natural part of the vetting. And I think they'll probably come a lot more. >>It's gonna be very interesting. We interviewed AJ Patel yesterday. He heads up he's SVP G of the modern app side. He's a middleware guy. So you can almost connect the dots kind of where we're going with this. Yeah. So I assume there's a nice middleware layer of developing everybody wins yeah. In this, if done properly. So it's clearly that VMware, no matter what happens at Broadcom from this show, my assessment's all steam all steam ahead. No, one's holding back at this point. >>Yeah. It's funny. The, the most mature partners we talk to have this interesting sort of upper and lower story and the upper story is all about that, that application data and middleware kind of layer. What are you doing there to be relevant about the different issues they run into versus some of the stuff that we've grown up with on the infrastructure side, they wanna make that as, as nascent as possible, like infrastructure's code and all this stuff that the automation platforms do. But you're right. If you don't get up into that application, middleware space, you know, and work on that, on that side of the house, you know, you're not gonna be >>Relevant. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, you know, most people, people take it literally. It doesn't mean middleware. We don't mean middleware. We mean that what middleware was yeah. In the old metaphor just still has to happen. That's where complexity solved. You got hardware, essentially cloud and you got applications, right. So it's all, all kind of the same, but not >>Yeah. In a lot of cases, it could be conceived as even like pipelining, you know, it's it's, you have data and apps going through a transformation from the old style and the old application structures to cloud native apps and a, a much different architecture. The, the whole deal is how you're relevant there. How you solving real problems about simplifying, improving performance, improving securities, you mentioned all those things are relevant and that's where, that's where you have to place >>Your bets. I love that storage is continuing to be at the center of the value proposition. Again, storage compute, networking never goes away. It's just being kind of flexed in new ways just to continue to say, deliver better value. Keith, thanks for coming on the queue. Great to see you for the, see you again, man, day three for coming back on and give us some commentary. Really appreciate it. And congratulations on all the success with the partners and having the cloud story. Right. Thanks. Cheers. Okay. More cube coverage. After this short break day three, Walter Wall coverage. I'm John furier host Dave ante, Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all here covering VMware. We'll be back with more after this short break.

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave Valante host of the cube. We're here on the ground floor, Moscone west two sets Walter Wall coverage. Three days. We heard Laura Heisman, the senior vice president and CMO of VMware, put it all together. Great to see you. Nice, thanks for, to see you for spending time outta your very busy week. >>It is a busy week. It is a great week. >>So a lot of people were anticipating what world was gonna look like. And then the name changed to VMware Explorer. This is our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference, formerly known ASM world. Now VMware Explorer, bold move, but Raghu teased it out on his keynote. Some reason behind it, expand on, on the thought process. The name change, obviously multi-cloud big headline here. vSphere eight partnerships with cloud hyperscale is a completely clear direction for VMware. Take us through why the name changed. Exactly, exactly. And why it's all coming together. Think he kind of hinted that he kinda said exactly, you know, exploring the new things, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. But take us through that. You've architected it. >>Yeah. It is a, a change of, we have a great past at VMware and we're looking to our future at the same time. And so when you come back from a pandemic and things changing, and you're really looking at the expansion of the business now is the time because it wasn't just to come back to what we were doing before. And every company should be thinking about that, but it's what are we gonna do to actually go forward? And VMware itself is on our own journey as expanding in more into the cloud, our multi-cloud leadership and everything that we're doing there. And we wanted to make sure that our audience was able to explore that with us. And so it was the perfect opportunity we're back live. And VMware Explorer is for everyone. That's been coming Tom world for so many years. We love our community and expanding it to our new communities that maybe don't have that legacy and that history and have them here with us at >>VMware. You did a great job. I love the event here. Love how it turned out. And, and a lot of interesting things happened along the way. Prior to this event you had we're coming outta the pandemic. So it's the first face to face yes. Of the VMware community coming together, which this is an annual right of passage for everyone in the customer base. Broadcom buys VMware. No, no, if you name change it to VMware Explorer and then Broadcom buys VMware. So announces, announces the, the buyout. So, and all the certainty, uncertainty kind of hanging around it. You had to navigate those waters, take us through, what was that like? How did you pull it off? It was a huge success. Yeah, because everyone showed up. Yeah. It's, it's, it's the same event, different name, >>It's >>Same vibe. >>The only thing constant is change. Right? And so it's the, we've gotta focus on the business and our VMware customers and our partners and our community at large. And so it's really keeping the eye on what we're trying to communicate to our community. And this is for our VMware community. The VMO community is here in spades. It is wonderful to have the VMO community here. We have tons of different customers, new customers, old customers, and it's just being able to share everything VMware. And I think people are just excited about that. It's great energy on the show floor and all >>Around. And it's not like you had years to plan it. I mean, you basically six months in you, you went, you said you went on a six month listening tour the other day. What was the number one question you got on that listening tour? >>Well, definitely about the name change was one, but I would say also, it's not just the question. It was the ask of, we have we're in what we call our chapter three here. And it's really our move into multicloud and helping all of our customers with their complexities. >>So virtualization, private cloud, and now multi-cloud correct. The third chapter. >>Yeah. And the, the question and the ask is how do we let our customers and partners know what this is, help us Laura. Like that was the number one ask to me of help us explain it. And that was my challenge and opportunity coming into explore, and really to explain everything about our, if you watched the gen session yesterday, these was, was going through our multiple different chapters where we are helping our customers with their multi-cloud strategies. And so it is been that evolution gets us today and it doesn't end today. It starts today. And we keep going, >>Like, like a lot of companies, obviously in you in this new role, you inherited a hybrid world and, and you've got, you got two years of virtual under your belt, and now you're running a completely different event from that standpoint. How does the sort of the COVID online translate into new relationships and how you're cultivating those? What's that dynamic like? >>Well, let's start with how happy everyone is to see each other in person. No doubt. Yeah. It is amazing just to see people, the high fives in the hallways, the hugs, oh, some people just the fist pump, whatever people mats are there masks aren't there, right? It is something of where everyone's comfort level, but it is really just about getting everyone together and thinking about how do, how was it before the pandemic? You don't necessarily just wanna repeat coming back. And so how do you think about this from an in-person event? People have been sitting behind their screens. How do we engage and how are we interactive? Knowing that attention spans are probably a little bit shorter. People are used to getting up and going get their coffee. We have coffee in the conference rooms, right? Things like that, making the experience just a really great one for everyone. So they're comfortable back in person, but I mean, honestly the energy and seeing people's smiles on their faces, it's wonderful to be back in person. >>It's interesting, you know, the cube, we've had some transformations ourselves with the pandemic and, and living through and getting back to events, but hybrid cloud and hybrid events is now the steady state. So, and in a way it's kind of interesting how hybrid cloud and now multi-cloud the digital aspect of integrating into the physical events is now key. First class citizen thinking. Yeah. For CMOs, you guys did a great job of preserving the, the, the, the best part of it, which is face to face people seeing each other and now bringing in the digital and then extending this. So that it's an always on kind of explore. Is that the thinking behind it? Yes. What's your vision on where you go next? Because if it's not, it's not one and done and see you next year. No anymore, because no, the pandemic showed us that hybrid and digital and physical together. If design as first class citizens with each other. Yeah. One sub-optimize me obviously face to face is better than digital, but if you can't make it, it shouldn't be a bad experience. >>No, not at all. Good's your vision. And, and we're in a point where not everyone's gonna come back, that everyone has what's going on with their life. And so you have to think about it as in person and online, it's not necessarily even hybrid. And so it's, what's the experience for people that are here, you know, over 10,000 people here, you wanna be sure that that is a great experience for them. And then our viewers online, we wanna be sure that they're able to, to know what's going on, stay in touch with everything VMware and enjoy that. So the gen session that was live, we have a ton of on demand content. And this is just the start. So now we go on to essentially multiple other VMware explorers around the world. >>It's interesting. The business model of events is so tickets driven or sponsorship on site on the location that you can get almost addicted to the, no, we don't wanna do digital and kind of foreclose that you guys embraced the, the combo. So what's the attendance. I mean, probably wasn't as big as when everyone was physical. Yep. What are some of the numbers? Can you give us some D data on attendance? Some of the stats around the show, cuz obviously people showed up and drove. Yes. It wasn't a no show. That's sure a lot of great stuff here >>We have. So it's over 10,000 people that are registered and we see them here. The gen session was packed. They're walking the show floor and then I don't have the numbers yet for our online viewership, but everything that we're doing to promote it online, if anyone missed it online, the gen session is already up and they'll see more sessions going live as well as all the on demand content so that everyone can stay in the loop of what's happening. And all of our announcements, >>You're obviously not disappointed. Were you surprised? A little nervous. >>So I will say one thing that we learned from others, thank goodness others have gone before us. So as far as coming back in person is the big change is actually registration happens closer to the event, right. Is a very big change from pre so, >>So it's at the end. Yes. >>The last three weeks. And we had been told that from peers at RSA and other conferences, that that's what happens. So we were prepared for that, but people wanna know what's going on in the world. Yeah. Right. You wanna have that faith before you buy that ticket and book your travel. And so that has definitely been one of the biggest changes and one that I think that will maybe continue to see here. So that was probably the biggest thing that changed as far as what to expect as registration. But we planned for this. We knew it was not going to be as big in the past and that that's gonna be, I think the new norm, >>I think you're right. I think a lot of last minute decisions, you know, sometimes people >>Wanna know, I mean, it's, what's gonna happen another gonna be outbreak or, I mean, I think people have gotten trained to be disappointed >>Well and be flexible >>With COVID I and, and, and weirded out by things. So people get anxiety on the COVID you've seen that. Yeah. >>Yeah. Yeah. I wanna ask you about the developer messaging cause that's one of the real huge takeaways. It was so strong. And you said the other day in the analyst session, the developers of the Kings and the Queens now, you know, we, when we hear developers, we think we pictured Steve Bama running around on stage developers develop, but it's different. It's a different vibe here. It it's like you're serving the Kings in the, in the Queens with, through partnerships and embracing open source. Can you talk a little bit about how you approached or, and you are approaching developer messages? Yeah, >>I, so, you know, I came from GitHub and so developers have been on my mind for many years now. And so joining VMware, I got to join this great world of enterprise software background and my developer background. And we have such an opportunity to really help our developer community understand the benefits of VMware to make them heroes just like we made sort of virtualization professionals heroes in the past, we can do the same thing with developers. We wanna be sure that we're speaking with our developer community. That was very much on stage as well as many of the sessions. And so our, we think about that with our products and what we're doing as far as product development and helping developers be able to test and learn with our products. And it's really thinking about the enterprise developer and how can we help them be successful. >>And I think, I think the beautiful thing about that message is, is that the enterprises that you guys have that great base with, they're all pretty much leaned into cl cloud native and they see it and it's starting to see the hybrid private cloud public cloud. And now with edge coming, it's pretty much a mandate that cloud native drive the architecture and that came clear in the messaging. So I have to ask you on the activations, you guys have done how much developer ops customer base mix are you seeing transfer over? Because the trend that we're seeing is is that it operations and that's generic. I'll say that word generically, but you know, your base is it almost every company has VMware. So they're also enabling inside their company developers. So how much is developer percentage to ops or is they blending in, it's almost a hundred percent, which how would you see >>That it's growing? So it's definitely growing. I wouldn't say it's a hundred percent, but it is growing. And it is one where every company is thinking about their developer. There's not enough developers in the world per the number of job openings out there. Everyone wants to innovate fast and they need to be able to invest in their developers. And we wanna be able to give them the tools to be able to do that. Cuz you want your developers to be happy and make it easier to do their jobs. And so that's what we're committed to really being able to help them do. And so we're seeing an uptick there and we're seeing, you'll see that with our product announcements and what we're doing. And so it's growing. >>The other thing I want to ask you, we saw again, we saw a lot of energy on the customer vibe. We're getting catching that here, cuz the sessions are right behind us and upstairs the floor, we've heard comments like the ecosystem's back. I mean not to anywhere, but there was a definitely an ecosystem spring to the step. If you will, amongst the partners, can you share what's happening here? Observations things that you've noticed that have been cool, that that can highlight some trends in the partner side of it. Yeah. What's going on with partners. >>Yeah. I mean our partners are so important to us. We're thrilled that they're here with us here. The expo floor, it is busy and people are visiting and reuniting and learning from each other and everything that you want to happen on the expo floor. And we've done special things throughout the week. For example, we have a whole hyperscaler day essentially happening where we wanna highlight some of the hyperscalers and let them be able to, to share with all of our attendees what they're doing. So we've given them more time within the sessions as well. And so you'll see our partner ecosystem all over the place, not just on the expo >>Floor, a lot of range of partners. Dave, you got the hyperscalers, you have the big, the big whales and cloud whales. And then you have now the second tier we call 'em super cloud type customer and partners. And you got the multi-cloud architecture, developing a lot of moving parts that are changing and growing and evolving. How do you view that? How you just gonna ride the wave? Are you watching it? Are you gonna explore it through more, you know, kind of joint marketing. I mean, what's your, how do you take this momentum that you have? And by the way, a lot of stuff's coming outta the oven. I was talking with Joan last night at the, at the press analyst event. And there's a lot of stuff coming outta the VMware oven product wise that hasn't hit the market yet. Yep. That's that's that's I mean, you can't really put a number on that sales yet, but it's got value. Yep. So you got that happening. You got this momentum behind you, you just ride the wave and what's the strategy. Well, >>It is all about how do we pass to the partner, right? So it is about the partner relationship. And we think about that our partner community is huge to us at VMware. I'm sure you've been hearing that from everyone you've been speaking to. So it's not even it's ride the wave, but it's embrace. Got it. It's embrace our partners. We need their help, our customer base. We do touch everybody and we need them to be able to support us and share what it is that we're doing from our product E evolution, our product announcements. So it's continuous education. It's there in educating us. It's definitely a two way relationship and really what we're even to get done here at explore together. It's progress that you can't always do on a zoom or a teams call or a WebEx call. You can't do that in two weeks, two years sometimes. And we're able to even have really great conversations >>Here and, and your go to market is transforming as well. You, you guys have talked about how you're reaching many different touchpoints. We've talked about developers. I mean, the other thing we've seen at events, we talked about the last minute, you know, registrations. The other thing we've seen is a lot more senior members of audiences. And now part of that is maybe okay, maybe some of the junior folks can't travel, they can't get, but, but, but why is it that the senior people come, they, they maybe they wouldn't have come before maybe because they're going through digital transformations. They wanna lean in and understand it better. But it seemed, I know you had an executive summit, you know, on day zero and Hawk 10 was here and, and so forth. So, okay. I get that. But it seems in talking to the partners, they're like, wow, the quality of the conversations that we're having has really been up leveled compared to previous years in other conferences. >>So yeah. Yeah. I think it's that they're all thinking about their transformation as well. We had the executive summit on day zero for us Monday, right? And it was a hundred plus executives invited in for a day who have stayed because they wanna hear what's going on. When I joined VMware, I said, VMware has a gift that so many companies are jealous of because we have relationships with the executives and that's what every company's startup to large company wants. And they're, they're really trusted customers of ours. And so we haven't been together and they want to be here to be able to know what's going on and join us in the meetings. And we have tons of meetings happening throughout >>The event and they're loyal and they're loyal. They're absolutely, they're active, active in a good way. They'll give you great feedback, candid feedback. Sometimes, you know, you might not wanna hear, but it's truthful. They're rare, engaging feedback gift. And they stay with you and they're loyal and they show up and they learn they're in sessions. So all good stuff. And then we only have about a minute left. Laura. I want to get your thoughts and, and end the segment with your explanation to the world around explore. What's next? What does it mean? What's gonna happen next? What does this brand turn into? Yeah. How do you see this unfolding? How do people, how should people view the VMware Explorer event brand and future activities? >>Yeah. VMware Explorer. This is just the start. So we're after this, we're going to Brazil, Barcelona, Singapore, China, and Japan. And so it is definitely a momentum that we're going on. The brand is unbelievable. It is so beautiful. We're exploring with it. We can have so much fun with this brand and we plan to continue to have fun with this brand. And it is all about the, the momentum with our sales team and our customers and our partners. And just continuing what we're doing, this is, this is just the beginning. It's not the, it's a global >>Brand explore >>Global. Absolutely. Absolutely. >>All right, Dave, that's gonna be great for the cube global activities. There you go, Laura. Great to see you. Thank you for coming on. I know you're super busy. Final question. It's kind of the trick question. What's your favorite aspect of the event? Pick a favorite child. What's going on here? Okay. In your mind, what's the most exciting thing about this event that that's near and dear to >>Your heart? So first it's hearing the feedback from the customers, but I do have to say my team as well. I mean, huge shout out to my team. They are the hub and spoke of all parts of explore. Yeah. VMware Explorer. Wouldn't be here without them. And so it's great to see it all coming >>Together. As they say in the scoring and the Olympics, the degree of difficulty for this event, given all the things going on, you guys did an amazing job. >>We witnessed >>To it. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for a great booth here. It looks beautiful. Thanks for coming. Wonderful. >>Thank you for >>Having me. Okay. The cues live coverage here on the floor of Moscone west I'm Trevor Dave. Valante two sets, three days. Stay with us for more live coverage. We'll be right back.

>>Good morning. Good afternoon. And good evening. I am Kevin Duke with HPE GreenLake cloud services and welcome to the HPE GreenLake per private cloud session. I enjoined today by Raj mystery and Steve show Walter, who will walk us through today's presentation and demonstration. We'd like to keep this session interactive. So please submit your questions in the chat window. We have subject matter experts on the line to answer your questions. So with that, I'll hand over to Raj Kilz. Thanks Kevin. So cloud is now fast becoming a reality. We says HPE and what our customers say to is that it's not an expectation anymore. It's an absolute necessity. So the research and the stats that you see on the screen, just kind of like prove that over the last five to six years, organizations, enterprises are adopting cloud. Be it in the data center with the hyperscalers are a mixture of both. >>But the interesting thing that we see now is a moving investment to basically increase private cloud capability. Uh, and in that vein, what we've done with Greenlight cloud services is create a rich portfolio that delivers that cloud-like experience either at the edge in your data center, co-location the actually matches and actually embraces the work that you do with the hyperscalers. What we're doing here is we're providing self-service capability elasticity in the means and the way that you would use this and the way that you would flex things open down more importantly, all of this is one and operated for you, which comes true to what we say in terms of delivering that cloud experience within those locations, being at the edge, the data center or the Colwell, um, Greenlight for private cloud was initially launched, uh, in summer 2020, it was the first iteration of what we call the Greenlight platforms. >>What we're trying to do with this element of the Greenlight cloud services portfolio is four things which is eliminate the complexity of building things that live, breathe, behave, and act like in a cloud-like manner in the data center, because this is hard. Yeah, the visibility around the way that you would manage and understand and run and operate certain elements of that cloud, uh, the governance and the compliance pace, which is important, especially when it comes to things like applying policies, et cetera, that you would have. And then the skills gap that we do from our managed services perspective, that takes things off. So from an infrastructure standpoint, beginning of the left, well class HPE compute storage networks, which is embracing the virtualization and the software defined networking layer together with a pretty rich cloud automation and orchestration portal all wrapped up for you. Pre-built pre architected, removing complexity, increasing time to value, uh, and, and, uh, the, the actual delivery timescales, if we move to the actual experience, although this is actually, uh, embracing the way that you would access these, uh, solutions. >>So in, through GreenLake central, uh, that's where your other service experience begins with HPE is your entry point into the world of as a service from here on which you would actually access that service. So from a, from a private cloud standpoint, this is where you would initiate the cloud management portal. And then you would begin either working in that and the roles of either administrator, consumer, et cetera. Lastly, you know, pushing buttons and provisioning stuff is really easy, but a lot of our focuses is in the pulse provisioning processes, understanding is it turned on? Is it off? How much is it costing me? Am I getting the most efficiency out of it? Am I running out of capacity to deliver services to my users? All of this is finally wrapped up with the managed platform capability, which means you now have to understand and treat Hewlett-Packard enterprise as an MSP and a cloud provider within our data center. We take care of the infrastructure, the software, and the experience, your entry point is that the cloud management layer, that's how we get you going. >>Hey, Roger, I know we made some announcements earlier today about a new scalable form factor version of private cloud. I was wondering if maybe you could talk about how that extends the value proposition for customers >>Question Steve. Um, so what the scalable form factor is really is it's also looking at market feedback, understanding of what our customers are bringing this as a entry point into the smaller and the more medium enterprise who are looking to deliver private cloud capabilities, you know, making it easier for them to embrace it and then scale. The other differences is the way that we actually have flexibility in the way that that cloud solution now grows. So different options, uh, available to customers in terms of what they want to do. We typically talk as a team and to our customers about different roles. So we have a notion of the cloud administrator or the cloud operator. This is more of your classic kind of like administrative role. So this is where our customers would come in, right at the cloud management layer and begin configuring their EMR environment, networking services, et cetera, from here, onwards is the cloud consumer. >>So applications, line, application, developers, lines of business, et cetera, they're presented with a self-service catalog for them to come and provision stuff. It could be normal VMs. It could be kind of like applications depending on what the administrators or the operators of Charles and to present to them. Lastly, it's around, how do I understand what's going on in the environment? So the focus, as I mentioned beforehand, visibility to them understand what's happening to then optimize later. So addressing the needs of lines of, or it leaders and business leaders within our customer base, although this then begins from our central point of access, which is GreenLake central from here, services and solutions that customers subscribe to are presented, depending on who you are, your privileges, your role within the actual environment, you get different options. So a cloud administrator may see different things in central because they require administrative functions within the cloud environment. I consume it such as me may have limited views in central access a service, but I can basically only read our provision set, things that are done for me from a lines of business or from an it leadership perspective. It's about providing predictive billing visibility into cost, understanding from a planning standpoint and allowing people to optimize it, ease and speed. So central is where your journey begins. And then from within there, you launch the necessary service like you're subscribed to today's focus is the private cloud. >>So who is this a solution built for Raj? Uh, initially we started off at the large enterprise level, Kevin, but what we've done as we did as HPE has listened to our customers. So we've reintroduced on them. We're launching today, the scalable form factor to address the needs of a multitude of clients, both large and small and enable people to have different kind of like deployment types. So remote office branch office for the larger customers, and for those smaller enterprises wanting to begin their private cloud journey, a great way for them to do that with HPE. >>All right. Thank you. >>Um, how does the customer access the private cloud environment, uh, by agreeing like central Kevin? Great question. That's our entry point for any of the services? Uh, easier to see later on in the demo that Steve's going to walk through, uh, it's where customers come in and depending on role access, privilege, rights, et cetera, you are presented with your services. And from within that you access the service depending on the role that's been assigned to you. So state, why don't you show us a little bit about what a cloud administrator or a cloud operator can do within the environment? Sure. Happy to rush. As we talked to these personas are use cases. You know, our experience, as Raj mentioned, will always start in GreenLake central. So the role or persona I'm taking on here is that of an administrator of this private cloud environment. So again, I start off by logging into GreenLake central. Once this stood up, services stood up and available, uh, within my data center, I see the green Lake for private cloud tile, which gives me an overview of services I'm consuming. And some of the things that might be running in that environment, clicking on the tile, takes me to the cloud management platform dashboard. This is where I, as an administrator can configure and control lots of things in the environment on behalf of my end users. So a couple of examples of things I might want to do first off. Uh, there's an important >>Notion of grouping that we use for access control within the environment. So I may want to organize my users into groups to control what they can see, what they can do, what sort of policies I can apply to them next. I probably want to configure the underlying software defined network that Raj talked about. So again, we deliver a software defined networking capability from within the software defined network. This is where I can create things like underlying networks, underlying distributed V switches at an IP address pools. I can also configure and manage software defined routers, firewall rules, and some of those sorts of things within the environment, uh, in the IP address pools I have that I want to make available to some of those underlying networks I could manage from within here as well. We also feature software to find load balancing capabilities. So again, if I expect to my developers or my end users, to be able to provision resources that require some load balancing, I can create those load balancers define the types of load balancing I want to make available to those end users from within here as well. >>Finally, I can manage keys and certificates. So if I have things like key payers or SSL certificates, again, that I want to make available to my end users, um, I could manage all that from within here. And then one of the final things I might want to do is start to manage a, an automation library. So a library of virtual images, I don't want to make available for, for my end users because the private cloud solution is based on VMware. I might want to just pull in some existing VMware images. I have, I might want to create some new custom images, but really I have a central place to be able to manage that library of images and then, you know, decide who has access to which images and how I want to make those available to end users users to be able to provision and lifecycle manage. >>So that's a quick overview of some of the administrative capabilities, uh, Kevin, any questions at this point about that capability? I got one for you customers bring their own tooling to the private cloud. Oh yeah. So that's a great question. So, you know, almost every customer I talk to nowadays has made a large investment, typically in some sort of automation tooling. And one of the things that we want to provide is the ability to surface that tooling and kind of allow customers to be able to reuse that tooling within our private cloud environment. So within the private cloud platform, as an administrator, I can create all sorts of scripts and, you know, maybe some basic capabilities I wanted to find for scripts, but they also have the ability to integrate automation platforms. So we can see in this particular environment, I've, I've onboarded a, uh, a set of Ansible playbooks that exist in a get repo. Uh, I really just point the cloud management platform to that repo it scrapes all the playbooks that it finds there and those become available as tasks and workflows that I can use, uh, after I provisioned BM. So again, I can reuse that investment that I've made in automating things like application provisioning, application configuration for my end users within my environment. >>I've got another one for you. Uh, how do customers improve control and governance of their private cloud? Yeah. So there are a couple of different ways to do that. So, you know, we'll talk specifically. One of the capabilities I have within, uh, the cloud management platform is the ability to create, uh, policies. Policies are really a way I can provide my users with, you know, self-service access to kind of go do the things that they need to do, but provide some control around what they can do. So there's all sorts of policies I can create. So policies around things like if I've got certain group of users that I want to require to get provision approval, anytime they approve provision something, I wanted an administrator to approve it. I can also limit the things that maybe a group of consumers of consumers can consume within my environment. Maybe I want to define a certain host name rule. So rather than create your own host names, I have a rule I want applied. Um, if tagging and showback is important, I might want to force some tags within my environment, say, Hey, anybody who provisioned something needs to provide me a value for this tag. And then I can define how that applies within the environment. So hopefully that answers some questions and gives you a feel of how these cloud administrators would work within the environment, TB to be able to manage the overall environment itself. >>Perfect. Thanks Steve. So what we've just described in seeing is, is the ability for a cloud administrator to a do day one tasks, set things up, set some services off and more importantly, apply some rules, controls, and governance. So it keeps users safe and it keeps it happy. Really. So let's say I'm Raj, I'm the head of applications and I've got a team of developers. So I'm now going to come in as a consumer. Can you show me what I can do as a consumer pleaser? >>Sure. Raj. So again, just like with the administrative use case, we talked about as a, as a cloud consumer, my experience starts in GreenLake central. So once I'm logged into GreenLake central, if I've been provided access to the environment by my administrators, I see the green Lake for private cloud tile, and I click on it to get to the cloud management platform. Just like the administrator you use. Now, I probably see a lot less because I probably have a lot less capabilities here, but one of the first places I'd probably want to go is take a look at what instances have been provisioned and maybe provision an instance on my own. So, you know, instance provisioning is very simple. Really. It's just a few clicks and answer a few questions. Uh, so in this case, if I have access to multiple groups, so kind of that logical separation that I talked about, I'd first pick, you know, which group is this a part of? >>Uh, again, in my particular case, I can provide a freeform name because that's the policy that's been set up for me. Um, I've got a forced tag, right? So I have to provide a tag or a label that tells me what, uh, what, what area this is a part of. And as I continue to drill down, now I get to a point where I can select my image based on the images that have been made, made available to me. Um, I can choose a size of a VM. So we have sort of some pre-provision sizes that might administrators have made available to me. And in some cases I can customize some things within those sizes, or maybe I can't, again, just depending on how this was created, select the network that I want to connect to, uh, and provide a few other options. One, the things I do want to talk about is this notion of tagging tagging is very important from a showback perspective. >>And we'll talk about when we get to cost analysis, how we can use any tags that get applied here to be able to do some show back reporting later. So if I want to provide a tag for an owner to make sure I can always write a report that says, show me everything that Steve has consumed. I've got the ability to provide those tags here. And again, through a policy, I can make those tags required. A couple of other choices. I have any of that available automation that maybe my administrators have made available. I can run here. I can select some scaling of my application, maybe go ahead and auto select the backup schedule, manage some lifecycle actions if maybe this VM only needs to run during weekdays. And I don't need it on the weekends. I can have it automatically shut down and start up. >>And at the end, just click on complete. Uh, and my VM is often being built. And then, you know, once my VMs are up and running, I've got access to be able to manage those VMs on a running basis. So, you know, if I have a VM that's running and I want to be able to manage it very simple again, from within the cloud management platform to go take a look at maybe how this VM is performing, maybe I want to log into the console. Maybe I want to take a look at the log stash that, you know, the log log error messages that this VM has created, or maybe I just want to stop it, start, it can create an image from it, or maybe, you know, after I've provisioned, it runs some of those workflows on it as a, as a end-user, I've got the capability to kind of fully manage and fully control those VMs once I have them up and running. >>So that's a quick overview of that cloud consumer use case. Uh, Kevin, do you have any questions right now about that use case? Yeah, I do, uh, cloud consumers today want more than a VM, so how can a private cloud deliver more value for cloud consumers? Yeah, so that's a great question. So we talked a little bit about the cloud management platforms, ability to integrate with existing automation, for things like, uh, application installation and configuration. Uh, but one thing I didn't talk about is kind of an alternate way. We can use that and that's through this notion of blueprints. So within the cloud management platform, I, as a developer or as an administrator can set up blueprints, which are really, uh, very complex applications. These could be multi-node multi-tiered applications where each tier may have a different application installed. They may be load balanced, all those sorts of things, and I can stitch all those together and make them available as a catalog item. >>It's just kind of one simple catalog item for an end user to consume. So they don't have to understand all the complexity or all the multiple nodes or all the workflows required on the backend to provide that service. I've already done all that hard work. I advertise it to them and they don't have to know, again, in this particular case, I've got a web tier made up of a couple of VMs, a database tier made up of a couple of VMs. Uh, there's some automation running, maybe through those Ansible playbooks, uh, in, in the backend to make all those things happen really, as an end user, I just say, Hey, I want one of these applications. I may need to answer a few questions, uh, depending on how the application or their blueprint is built. And then I could push that out as an application. And again, I don't have to understand all the complexities that make up that multi-node multi-tiered application on in the background >>Stay. That's really cool. So like phase as good as it can be. So, right. So we've pushed some buttons, we've set some stuff up, we've provisioned some stuff. So right at the beginning, you know, we spoke about the post provisioning stuff. So how do we actually manage the costs and also look at their usage within their environment, which is also important to our customers. >>Yeah. So it's a great question, Raj. So, you know, obviously customers want to understand what their overall green link consumption is, what their bill is, how all those things relate together. And then they probably want to do much more detailed cost analysis as well. So the good news here, we provide all this tooling and all this is available right through GreenLake central. So a couple of the tiles that you'll see in GreenLake central tie into the private cloud solution, just like they would any other GreenLake solution. So if I want to see overall what I've consumed, uh, within my private cloud, as a GreenLake resource, I can drill down to understand, Hey, what was actually metered as what I consumed, how did that relate to my GreenLake rate card? You know, how did that, how did that create the number that appeared on my GreenLake bill for this particular service at the end of the month, I've also got the tools to do capacity planning, again, just like every other green Lake environment. >>Uh, we want to be able to show kind of that capacity planning view so customers can understand kind of what they're consuming, uh, what direction that's trending. And when we need to add some, we may need to add some more additional capacity. So again, when a customer needs more, it's already there and ready to go, they just start to consume it and pay for it as a part of their green Lake bill. So Greenlight customers have a dedicated account team that kind of works with them to keep an eye on that capacity. And again, make sure we're working with customers to make the right decisions about when is the right time to add additional capacity to the environment. And then finally, you know, our customers also get access to consumption analytics for much more detailed cost reporting. So within consumption analytics, I can take advantage of those tags that I talked about previously. >>So here's a report I created where I want to see my private cloud consumption and use really broken down by cost center. And by the VMs that my users within each of those cost centers is consuming. So I wrote a report to do some showback costing based on those tags. So in this particular case, I can tell, for example, the colo engineer cost center that Hey you over the last month, you've consumed 32, uh, elements within the private cloud environment. You know, your total cost for that was $860. And I can give them the ability to, you know, if they want drill down on this. So, you know, now they'll see every individual VM that was provisioned, uh, where it ran when it ran. And in this particular case, I've broken down the cost between compute and storage, because I really wanted to see those separately as separate line items, but, you know, really give customers the ability to do whatever showback or chargeback reporting makes sense within their organization, based on the tags. >>They want to apply it and how they want to be able to show and consume those costs. So, Kevin, any questions about, uh, sort of this cost analysis use case? Yep. Is there a way to proactively monitor consumption of the private cloud environment? Yeah, so we actually provide a couple of different ways to do that. Uh, one right within consumption analytics that we talked about, one of the capabilities I have is, is the ability to set a budget. So in this particular case, I've set a budget again, kind of by that cost center that I can take a look at, Hey, you know, what are all these cost centers consuming within this private cloud environment? Uh, and how does that relate to, you know, what maybe, uh, an amount that I've given them to be able to use? So I can take a look at it and see, Hey, in the current period, you know, I've got one, a cost center that's over budget two that are under budget and take a look at their historical use as well. >>Going back to the cloud management platform. I also have more of a hard way to be able to set those consumption boundaries, uh, by using a policy. So again, if I want to create a policy that says, Hey, you know, Steve can only have 20 VMs. Uh, once he's provisioned those 20 VMs, he can't have any more, um, you know, he's got to come back and ask for more. And again, you know, when I create this policy, I could apply it to a group or an individual user just kind of based on how I want to put those guard rails around that environment and then sort of do that around that environment. So there's kind of a way to do this in more of a soft way based on cost to understand budgets and get notifications. When I get close to my budget limits or more of a hard way to actually, you know, be able to limit resources that customers can consume within the environment itself. So with that, Raj, I'll throw it back to you. >>Thanks, Dave, >>Just to wrap up really, you know, Steve and Kevin, thank you for the great demonstration and the chat, really, um, a few things for the audience and our customers, uh, to understand what we're now doing with Greenlight for private cloud and other platform solutions is helping you to get started really, really quickly, allowing you to begin your journey with us at the right level. And then you can scale depending on how you are actually managing your transformation, be it from an infrastructure standpoint application standpoint, or you are looking to basically just modernize the way that you deliver services back out to your internal users. The other side of it is, is the important fact that we now act and behave very much like a cloud. So because we run those environments for you, we eliminate the complexity of feeding them all, Trang, all the infrastructure, the configuration, and the updates of the software layer. It leaves you free to basically deliver the services like Steve has just shown the other side of it. Final point, is this all usage based? Uh, so again, lowering kind of like the initial investment risk for you guys, allowing you to, uh, benefit from the way that we've actually integrated the solutions and technologies. So you can just embrace them and take advantage of. >>Excellent. Thank you, Raj. So I would like to thank you all for today. Thank >>You, Raj and Steve, for a brilliant demonstration. If you would like more information or like to speak to someone directly, then please fill out the poll by clicking on the poll option at the top of the chat box. So in closing, if you are interested in HPE GreenLake for private cloud, then please start a trial. It's easy. Thank you. Thank you all and goodbye for now..

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah, okay. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage here. Reinvent 2020 for a W s amazing content happening here within across the industry on digital transformation and more, more important than ever in the public sector has been mawr impacted by anyone during the cove and pandemic. And we're here remotely with the Cube Virtual because of the pandemic. Got a great guest, Kim, a jurist. She's the leader on the U. S. Education, state and local government for a W s public sector Kim, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Remotely, at least we get to have a remote interview. >>Well, thank you for taking the time. This is This is our world these days, so it's good to be able to connect. >>Well, thanks for coming on. We're doing some specialty programming around public sector, mainly because it's such an important area. Uh, Andy Jassy Esquina, which is for the best conference at large at reinvent talks broadly, but I think it highlights what's going on in your world and that is this facing the truth. Um, this digital transformation has been forced upon us. It's accelerated and it's get busy, busy building or get busy figuring out how it might unwind and mawr education virtual remote if we >>didn't >>have video conference, and this could have been a disaster even further, but certainly has impacted everybody in the government education. How is it impacting share with us? What's going on? >>You know, I think that difficult partisans. When we turned on the news early days there in Cove it it was clear that students weren't learning and citizens couldn't get in contact with their government to ask for support. Um, I would say it was that moment in time where the technical debt that whether your state, local or education, you had to quickly realized that you need to connect with your students and your citizens. But I take a look at how quickly they were able to turn across the US Many of them realized what usually took years, literally turned into innovating overnight to support students as well as those filing for on unemployment claims. And I think that's what we heard a lot of, and those were some of the opportunities that Amazon really took, uh, to our customers said, Hey, we can help you solve these problems with great services such as connect >>you know, Connect came up in the keynote multiple times, and he really spend time on that as a as a disruption slash enabler for value. Can you share how cloud has scaled up some of your customers? I know connects, been pretty prominent in the public sector for Covic support and really has changed in saves lives in many cases. Can you share an example of how it's worked out? >>Absolutely. I mean, Rhode Island is is a great example. They use Amazon connect. They helped the state literally address this massive surgeon of unemployment insurance applications due to Cova 19. But literally the call times and the vines were cut down in What they were able to do is answer the call, not just have it be on a fast busy or a disconnect. Whether it was Department of Labor at Rhode Island, whether it was the state of Kentucky or the state of West Virginia, all those authorities use had to deal with that surge, and they were able to do it successfully and literally, in some cases, overnight to support citizens. That's how quickly they were able to innovate and hit those call centers, Um, effectively. But it's not just about the call center, because keep in mind they would go into those call centers with connect. They were able to actually take those calls from home, and we saw that in education as well. Take a look at L. A unified school district. What they had to do to quickly transition from in person training to supporting these students remotely. They had to do it overnight, and they use connect their asses well, not only to support the students, the teachers or the staff, but they took that opportunity to really continue educating and continue serving. >>You know, one of the things I was talking anti about in my one on one interview before reinvent was necessity is the mother of all invention in these days, and I think that came from a quote from one of your customers, like interviewed when asked, You know how the innovation strategy come about, and that's what they said. They said we needed it really bad, and we had to move quickly and then Andy said in his keynote that everything is on full display right now, meaning that the pandemic is forced one and you can see who's winning and who's not based on where they are in the cloud journey. So have to ask you leaderships a big part of this. What is the trend that you're seeing within your world because, you know, government not known for moving fast. And this is a speed game at this point. Healthcare. A big part of that. You got education. Government. What's >>the >>leadership mindset on innovating right now? And can you share because, yeah, you got some easy, you know, examples. Now the point is, hey, way have connect with people were like productivity opportunity that's now the new normal. So even in life does come back. There's new new things that have been discovered. Is that resonating with your your customers? And can you share the leadership mindset? >>Absolutely. So make no mistake. It was never a question of if it was a question of when the pandemic clearly is accelerating it. But, you know, we've been working with over 6500 government agencies and collaborating with them to really focus on some of their mission critical, um called based services. So and this is the new normal. They recognize it. And it's the foundation that during the pandemic that it's been said to say, Hey, we're going to push and we're gonna push quicker because they were actually able to demonstrate that they could do it. I'll give you an example. It's It's a heartbreaking one from my perspective. Being a mom, um, l. A. County Department of Child and Family Services, They operated their analog child protection hotline. Now the numbers are are unfortunate and staggering. But when you took a look at the peak before the pandemic, the call center received as many as 21,000 reports of child abuse and neglect in a month. During those pick times, up to 100 staff members would log in and literally take 120 back to back calls per hour. Now, when you think about that legacy environment with Amazon connect, they were able to continue the service, continue the support to help these Children and available 24 7, and they were able to do it from their homes. So e mean it gives me chills, just thinking about three unfortunate situations. But they were able to quickly move and and continue to support. Yeah, >>and the thing to I want to just bring up also had a customer I interviewed from Canada. I think they were partner with a censure. They had unemployment checks, they couldn't get out, and entitlement things that were literally checks and connect stood up that in like, record time. He was convinced. He's like he was kind of Amazon fan, but he was kind of still out of Amazon. He was like, I'm convinced we're gonna use Amazon going forward. It was a tipping point for him. There's a lot of these tipping points going on right now. This has been a big theme of this reinvent so far. Yeah, cloud transition, two full cloud value. This is the new normal What? What what what can clients get when they have budget or trying to get budget when they say the benefit? The clouds are what? >>Well, I mean again, use another use case. I'll go back to another example in L. A county. So when you think about l. A county itself, um, I won't give you the exact numbers because I don't know him off the top, but approximately 10 million residents and employs over 100,000 staff again. Look at the cost savings that they saw. So, you know, technical data is a problem. Being able to invest is a challenge because of budgets, but they were able to save 60% in one year from there on prem environment and licensing costs. But the cost is one piece. If you could take 17% fewer calls and you're solving those challenges by using a i N M l. Through the technology of what they were gathering through those calls, it made a huge impact and improved their service to their citizens. So you know it. The cost savings air there. And there are so many examples that states air, recognizing that they need to move quicker because they could take advantage of those costs, especially with some of the budget challenges we're going to see across the U. S. >>And the machine learning examples are off the charts. So, Kim, I gotta ask, you going forward now in reinvent what's the big focus for you and your teams and your customers because you guys are very customer focused. You're working backers from the customers. We hear that on and on what is going on in your customer base? One of the priorities, >>um, priorities for us will always remain on the mission to which our customers are focusing on. If we think about education, the question is, how are they re imagining the the delivery and the success in this new world that we're dealing with? So we'll continue to work and innovate with our partners and with amazing All right, a text that are in our business take a look at blackboard, right? They were able to scale 50 times their normal capacity globally, literally within 24 hours they're looking at How do they continue to innovate to serve? We're gonna work with K through 12 through academic medical centers and research, because when you think about what we need is we need to find that vaccine we need to find the ability to treat and serve. We're focused on those missions with the states, the research and the education teams. >>It's been unusual year learning is changing remote learning, remote work, the workforce, the workplace, the workloads. They're all changing. Onda clouds a big part of it. Um, final question for you. What's the take away for reinvent this year means different. You mentioned some of those highlights. What's the big take away for your audience? >>I think for state local education is it's available. It's now, and they have to serve their students and citizens quit. Um, what they've been able to do in the cloud again? A zay said at the start of the interview. They can now do overnight within minutes and hours and and support their citizens. And they have to do it quickly. So, >>uh, coyote to coyote goodness for the state and local governments to >>absolutely it's going to continue. And I think the important part is focused on the opportunity of innovating and supporting the mission >>Can Great to see you. Thanks for the insight. Thanks for the update. Appreciate it. We'll be following it. A lot of great successes. You guys have been having the Cuban involved in a bunch of them and we'll continue to follow the transformation. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Enjoy Sena. >>Okay. This is the Cube Virtual. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching more coverage. Walter Wall reinvent 2020 Virtual. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Special coverage sponsored by A. W s Global Partner Network. >>Okay, welcome back to the Cube. Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host of the Cube. Virtual were not there in person. We're doing remote interviews, bringing that content to you virtually obviously with the virtual vent over three weeks, Walter Wall coverage Got a great guest here. Norman Quijano, Chief market officer for Acoustic. Normally great to have you on the Cube. Great story. Want to get into independent marketing? Cloud all that good stuff? Thanks for joining me. >>It's a pleasure to be here, John. I'm excited to chat with you, and it's exciting during reinvent. >>Yeah, a lot of great stuff. I mean, just every year I just get kind of nerdy, and I nerd out on all the massive new stuff and some of its kind of, you know, futuristic, you know, not yet available, but most is. But let's get into what you guys do. So first tell me the story about Acoustic and you guys were originally part of IBM spun out, and now independent. Take us through what happened. >>Yeah, sure, it's It's actually a super fascinating story overall, because in short, Acoustic was created last year, July 2019, as a carve out from IBM. The interesting history is that over the course of about a decade, IBM said, this marketing technology space is pretty interesting. So it went and acquired a number of companies across multiple years. Hold it all together in what it called IBM Watson marketing ultimately and said, We're in the marketing technology space, unfortunately. Turns out that's probably not, ah, core business for IBM. So Ah, few years ago, someone said, Maybe we're not in this space. Let's see if we can put this car of this out. And so we were born last July were private equity owned and from, ah, great history became a great new beginning. >>Awesome. So talk about the value proposition. You guys living here says you guys were the independent marketing cloud. Does that mean independent in the sense of you don't take a position on certain technologies or independent as a company? Just what does that mean? >>Why independent used to be a simple word, but it doesn't have so It's not so simple anymore, now, is it? You know what we mean by that is very straightforward. One. We are private, and we are focused on marketing and marketers, and we are not beholden to other parts of the business that may be trying to serve back, office or finance or other elements in a business. And what we think that the marketer today which, as you know, marketers usually have the or one of the biggest I T budgets in a company. We think they need providers that are focused on their needs and their needs only. >>Yeah, it's interesting. The Martek stack and I just had a conversation with the venture capitalists live on the kickoff of the program for the show Review it this pre cloud There's cloud transition Now. You got all in cloud benefits of being cloud native, right? So you kind of 2021. I think we're in this post covert era. You got to see a whole new set of advantages. Yeah, they'll still be hybrid. They'll still be on premise. But if you look at the all the Martek marketing technology stuff, it's just so much stuff and salesforce just bought slack. You have Microsoft tea and the big guys, all these things, and you only have a departments don't have a lot of staff. It's not >>like eso. You need >>technology to try. Great do the heavy lifting. This is a big theme of of the Amazon reinvent culture. Using tech creates the customer value, reduced the heavy lifting. How are you guys doing that? How do you serve customers >>in that competitive landscape? It's a well set up job, because the reality is that we have a lot. There's a lot of companies in the marketing technology space you can look at charts online there, 8000 companies evidently on. But the reality is that very few of those companies are trying to provide big sort of end to end solutions the way that we are and some of our large competitors are. But they're all at different stages of the revolution in the cloud, because most of the bigger companies in this space got their Martek capabilities through acquisition, and they may have sort of carry forward a pre cloud, uh, technology stack with them. What we're trying to do is really two things. One We moved our technology to the cloud. In particular. Over 90% of our workload is on AWS now. And we're trying to find the integration points with our customers with their equally moving to public cloud like AWS, and give them the capability of being able to bring up capabilities quickly, particularly in something like email Be able to scale. Right? We're in the middle of the holiday season is the busiest time of the year for businesses to send email, and we wanna make sure that our customers can scale up. We want them to have that capability, and we wanna be able to take advantage of that so we don't have toe over invest in back end technology. We want marketers to feel as empowered as the CEO who's here. So I'm all in on the cloud. Well, what about the marketers? They're the ones who should be using that, and and I think something like a w s and continue to grow. And me and the capabilities that every part are they AWS will continue to provide value to the marketers to the customer experience team as well as to the I T team. >>How are you guys using data and AI because obviously you seeing that huge part of every single product. It's one of those things that you see on and we've been saying for years now it's kind of mainstream, the benefit of clouds. You get horizontal scalability of infrastructure. Now you got lamb Daniel containers and then you got data you can get vertically specialized within the app. So if you do the micro services or deconstruct the monolith, you could really provide point value and still get that data scale. So this opens up massive data intelligence opportunities, which every marketer wants to be data driven. S O R O r. Use the data to make a great user experience or customer experience. How do you guys see that? And Acoustic. And what do you guys doing in the clouds around that you >>share? Well, first of all, somehow you got ahold of our are confidential roadmap because you just laid it out right there. And what you said, it's not so confidential. But the reality is it's market >>leading for sure. I mean, I think you can. That's the Holy Grail. I mean, >>it's where everyone wants to be, and we had at Acoustic have a very specific philosophy is that we want to. We want to embrace data, and we mean, of course, on behalf of our customers. And we want to bring data to empower every every application in every part of the marketers business. And for better or worse, there's some marketing technology sort of have a little bit of, ah, little hands off with data, particularly if it's not their own data. We believe that whether it's first party, second party, third party data it needs to be brought into the marketing life cycle, and we are building or have built capabilities to do that. We believe in being open, believe in being ableto bring in all sorts of different data types, and then use that to build the best marketing campaigns and experiences for our customers and for their customer. And if you're not embracing all the types of data out there in creating a unique formula for each particular customer, you're not gonna deliver the best marketing experience. Yeah, >>I totally agree. And I think one of these things where modern applications there's two themes here. Modern applications and then completely programmable infrastructure for Amazon and this again. I've been covering cloud for many, many years since the beginning of cloud, and I've looked at all the big three. And I see Amazon's been clearly winning on the infrastructure of the service platform as a service. They Yeah, they have sass apps out there, but they have an ecosystem. Microsoft has their own strategy. Google the other you picked Amazon is a preferred partner. Could you share? Um, Why? Why Amazon And what specifically does that enable you to dio a za company? Because, um, yeah, Amazon's huge and some people get nervous like Okay, I'm just gonna be Oh, you're gonna eat me up and you're in a marketing focus, not a not a court. I don't have a core building block out there called Marketing Cloud like Oracle does or one of the company's. Why Amazon. >>Yeah, I think that you really sort of laid the landscape out well, and Amazon is very much a a full stack. And and there's so much maturity in AWS overall, which you don't necessarily see the sort of top to bottom maturity that you see in the other of the clouds and Amazon and all clouds right we we all want to be able to tap into micro services. So when we were trying to figure out what gave us the scalability that we needed, we were really focused on the ability to integrate at multiple touch points. Three. Ability to scale up really fast because, like during the holiday season were transacting billions of transactions. Whether it be emails that our customers are sending or SMS messages that they're sending so billions of transactions over a fixed period of time, we need to be able to scale quickly at an affordable price on We also believe that actually, a lot of marketing departments are going to start to realize the value of plugging into the service is available in a public cloud, particularly is they see things such as taking data from 33rd parties, right? How did they get that into the system or taking their marketing stacks and ultimately may potentially putting those stacks in containers, right. How do you move that into a container and be able to quickly connect other micro services to that container? So we think that this is the absolute future of where the marketing department is gonna end up. And we think Amazon and AWS could be a great partner because it gives you that global footprint gives you that ability to scale and gives you the richest set of services available right now. That was a really easy decision for us. >>Awesome stuff. Thanks for coming on. Normal. Really appreciate you laying out your vision of the cloud. Take a minute real quick. We got a couple minute left, put the plug out for Acoustic. What do you guys looking to do? What's the value proposition? Give a plug for the company. >>Yeah, we we left talking about Acoustic, and you can certainly visit us it Acoustic dot com Acoustic is a full service marketing platform. We are modern, we are cloud based, and one of the things that we do is we specialize and focus on marketing and the marketing function. And if anybody out there is interested in finding out more, you can not only come to Acoustic dot com. You can ping me because we believe that marketers are key decision makers and myself is our CMO wants to talk to every potential client. >>No one. Thanks for coming on. The Moncada you Chief market officer Acoustic here, featured on the Cube. But Adam's reinvent Thanks for coming on. Thanks. It >>was a pleasure, John. >>Thank you. I'm John Fair hosted the Cube. More coverage after this short break. Stay with us. Form or cube. Live coverage. Yeah.