>> Welcome back everyone to the closing remarks here before we kick off our ecosystem portion of the program. We're live in Palo Alto for theCUBE special presentation of Supercloud 2. It's the second edition, the first one was in August. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Here to wrap up with our special guest analyst George Gilbert, investor and industry legend former colleague of ours, analyst at Wikibon. George great to see you. Dave, you know, wrapping up this day what in a phenomenal program. We had a contribution from industry vendors, industry experts, practitioners and customers building and redefining their company's business model. Rolling out technology for Supercloud and multicloud and ultimately changing how they do data. And data was the theme today. So very, very great program. Before we jump into our favorite parts let's give a shout out to the folks who make this possible. Free contents our mission. We'll always stay true to that mission. We want to thank VMware, alkira, ChaosSearch, prosimo for being sponsors of this great program. We will have Supercloud 3 coming up in a month or so, or two months. We'll see. Or sooner, we don't know. But it'll be more about security, but a lot more momentum. Okay, so that's... >> And don't forget too that this program not going to end now. We've got a whole ecosystem speaks track so stay tuned for that. >> John: Yeah, we got another 20 interviews. Feels like it. >> Well, you're going to hear from Saks, Veronika Durgin. You're going to hear from Western Union, Harveer Singh. You're going to hear from Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Nick Taylor. Brian Gracely chimes in on Supecloud. So he's the man behind the cloud cast. >> Yeah, and you know, the practitioners again, pay attention to also to the cloud networking interviews. Lot of change going on there that's going to be disruptive and actually change the landscape as well. Again, as Supercloud progresses to be the next big thing. If you're not on this next wave, you'll drift what, as Pat Gelsinger says. >> Yep. >> To kick off the closing segments, George, Dave, this is a wave that's been identified. Again, people debate the word all you want Supercloud. It is a gateway to multicloud eventually it is the standard for new applications, new ways to do data. There's new computer science being generated and customer requirements being addressed. So it's the confluence of, you know, tectonic plates shifting in the industry, new computer science seeing things like AI and machine learning and data at the center of it and new infrastructure all kind of coming together. So, to me, that's my takeaway so far. That is the big story and it's going to change society and ultimately the business models of these companies. >> Well, we've had 10, you know, you think about it we came out of the financial crisis. We've had 10, 12 years despite the Covid of tech success, right? And just now CIOs are starting to hit the brakes. And so my point is you've had all this innovation building up for a decade and you've got this massive ecosystem that is running on the cloud and the ecosystem is saying, hey, we can have even more value by tapping best of of breed across clouds. And you've got customers saying, hey, we need help. We want to do more and we want to point our business and our intellectual property, our software tooling at our customers and monetize our data. So you have all these forces coming together and it's sort of entering a new era. >> George, I want to go to you for a second because you are big contributor to this event. Your interview with Bob Moglia with Dave was I thought a watershed moment for me to hear that the data apps, how databases are being rethought because we've been seeing a diversity of databases with Amazon Web services, you know, promoting no one database rules of the world. Now it's not one database kind of architecture that's puling these new apps. What's your takeaway from this event? >> So if you keep your eye on this North Star where instead of building apps that are based on code you're building apps that are defined by data coming off of things that are linked to the real world like people, places, things and activities. Then the idea is, and the example we use is, you know, Uber but it could be, you know, amazon.com is defined by stuff coming off data in the Amazon ecosystem or marketplace. And then the question is, and everyone was talking at different angles on this, which was, where's the data live? How much do you hide from the developer? You know, and when can you offer that? You know, and you started with Walmart which was describing apps, traditional apps that are just code. And frankly that's easier to make that cross cloud and you know, essentially location independent. As soon as you have data you need data management technology that a customer does not have the sophistication to build. And then the argument was like, so how much can you hide from the developer who's building data apps? Tristan's version was you take the modern data stack and you start adding these APIs that define business concepts like bookings, billings and revenue, you know, or in the Uber example like drivers and riders, you know, and ETA's and prices. But those things execute still on the data warehouse or data lakehouse. Then Bob Muglia was saying you're not really hiding enough from the developer because you still got to say how to do all that. And his vision is not only do you hide where the data is but you hide how to sort of get at all that code by just saying what you want. You define how a car and how a driver and how a rider works. And then those things automatically figure out underneath the cover. >> So huge challenges, right? There's governance, there's security, they could be big blockers to, you know, the Supercloud but the industry's going to be attacking that problem. >> Well, what's your take? What's your favorite segment? Zhamak Dehghani came on, she's starting in that company, exclusive news. That was big notable moment for theCUBE. She launched her company. She pioneered the data mesh concept. And I think what George is saying and what data mesh points to is something that we've been saying for a long time. That data is now going to flip the script on how apps behave. And the Uber example I think is illustrated 'cause people can relate to Uber. But imagine that for every business whether it's a manufacturing business or retail or oil and gas or FinTech, they can look at their business like a game almost gamify it with data, riders, cars you know, moving data around the value of data. This is something that Adam Selipsky teased out at AWS, Dave. So what's your takeaway from this Supercloud? Where are we in your mind? Well big thing is data products and decentralizing your data architecture, but putting data in the hands of domain experts who can actually monetize the data. And I think that's, to me that's really exciting. Because look, data products financial industry has always been doing building data products. Mortgage backed securities is a data product. But why should the financial industry have all the fun? I mean virtually every organization can tap its ecosystem build data products, take its internal IP and processes and software and point it to the world and actually begin to make money out of it. >> Okay, so let's go around the horn. I'll start, I'll get you guys some time to think. Next question, what did you learn today? I learned that I think it's an infrastructure game and talking to Kit Colbert at VMware, I think it's all about infrastructure refactoring and I think the data's going to be an ingredient that's going to be operating system like. I think you're going to see the infrastructure influencing operations that will enable Superclouds to be real. And developers won't even know what a Supercloud is because they'll be using it. It's the operations focus is going to be very critical. Just like DevOps movements started Cloud native I think you're going to see a data native movement and I think infrastructure is critical as people go to the next level. That's my big takeaway today. And I'll say the data conversation is at the center. I think security, data are going to be always active horizontally scalable concepts, but every company's going to reset their infrastructure, how it looks and if it's not set up for data and or things that there need to be agile on, it's going to be a non-starter. So I think that's the cloud NextGen, distributed computing. >> I mean, what came into focus for me was I think the hyperscaler is going to continue to do their thing, you know, and be very, very successful and they're each coming at it from different approaches. We talk about this all the time in theCUBE. Amazon the best infrastructure, you know, Google's got its you know, data and AI thing and it's playing catch up and Microsoft's got this massive estate. Okay, cool. Check. The next wave of innovation which is coming from data, I've always said follow the data. That's where the where the money's going to be is going to come from other places. People want to be able to, organizations want to be able to share data across clouds across their organization, outside of their ecosystem and make money with that data sharing. They don't want to FTP it anymore. I got it. You take it. They want to work with live data in real time and I think the edge, we didn't talk much about the edge today is going to even take that to a new level real time inferencing at the edge, AI and and being able to do new things with data that we haven't even seen. But playing around with ChatGPT, it's blowing our mind. And I think you're right, it's like when we first saw the browser, holy crap, this is going to change the world. >> Yeah. And the ChatGPT by the way is going to create a wave of machine learning and data refactoring for sure. But also Howie Liu had an interesting comment, he was asked by a VC how much to replicate that and he said it's in the hundreds of millions, not billions. Now if you asked that same question how much does it cost to replicate AWS? The CapEx alone is unstoppable, they're already done. So, you know, the hyperscalers are going to continue to boom. I think they're going to drive the infrastructure. I think Amazon's going to be really strong at silicon and physics and squeeze every ounce atom out of every physical thing and then get latency as your bottleneck and the rest is all going to be... >> That never blew me away, a hundred million to create kind of an open AI, you know, competitor. Look at companies like Lacework. >> John: Some people have that much cash on the balance sheet. >> These are security companies that have raised a billion dollars, right? To compete. You know, so... >> If you're not shifting left what do you do with data, shift up? >> But, you know. >> What did you learn, George? >> I'm listening to you and I think you're helping me crystallize something which is the software infrastructure to enable the data apps is wide open. The way Zhamak described it is like if you want a data product like a sales and operation plan, that is built on other data products, like a sales plan which has a forecast in it, it has a production plan, it has a procurement plan and then a sales and operation plan is actually a composition of all those and they call each other. Now in her current platform, you need to expose to the developer a certain amount of mechanics on how to move all that data, when to move it. Like what happens if something fails. Now Muglia is saying I can hide that completely. So all you have to say is what you want and the underlying machinery takes care of everything. The problem is Muglia stuff is still a few years off. And Tristan is saying, I can give you much of that today but it's got to run in the data warehouse. So this trade offs all different ways. But again, I agree with you that the Cloud platform vendors or the ecosystem participants who can run across Cloud platforms and private infrastructure will be the next platform. And then the cloud platform is sort of where you run the big honking centralized stuff where someone else manages the operations. >> Sounds like middleware to me, Dave >> And key is, I'll just end with this. The key is being able to get to the data, whether it's in a data warehouse or a data lake or a S3 bucket or an object store, Oracle database, whatever. It's got to be inclusive that is critical to execute on the vision that you just talked about 'cause that data's in different systems and you're not going to put it all into some new system. >> So creating middleware in the cloud that sounds what it sounds like to me. >> It's like, you discovered PaaS >> It's a super PaaS. >> But it's platform services 'cause PaaS connotes like a tightly integrated platform. >> Well this is the real thing that's going on. We're going to see how this evolves. George, great to have you on, Dave. Thanks for the summary. I enjoyed this segment a lot today. This ends our stage performance live here in Palo Alto. As you know, we're live stage performance and syndicate out virtually. Our afternoon program's going to kick in now you're going to hear some great interviews. We got ChaosSearch. Defining the network Supercloud from prosimo. Future of Cloud Network, alkira. We got Saks, a retail company here, Veronika Durgin. We got Dave with Western Union. So a lot of customers, a pharmaceutical company Warner Brothers, Discovery, media company. And then you know, what is really needed for Supercloud, good panels. So stay with us for the afternoon program. That's part two of Supercloud 2. This is a wrap up for our stage live performance. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and George Gilbert here wrapping up. Thanks for watching and enjoy the program. (bright music)

>>From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and E T R. This is breaking analysis with Dave Valante. >>Making technology predictions in 2022 was tricky business, especially if you were projecting the performance of markets or identifying I P O prospects and making binary forecast on data AI and the macro spending climate and other related topics in enterprise tech 2022, of course was characterized by a seesaw economy where central banks were restructuring their balance sheets. The war on Ukraine fueled inflation supply chains were a mess. And the unintended consequences of of forced march to digital and the acceleration still being sorted out. Hello and welcome to this week's weekly on Cube Insights powered by E T R. In this breaking analysis, we continue our annual tradition of transparently grading last year's enterprise tech predictions. And you may or may not agree with our self grading system, but look, we're gonna give you the data and you can draw your own conclusions and tell you what, tell us what you think. >>All right, let's get right to it. So our first prediction was tech spending increases by 8% in 2022. And as we exited 2021 CIOs, they were optimistic about their digital transformation plans. You know, they rushed to make changes to their business and were eager to sharpen their focus and continue to iterate on their digital business models and plug the holes that they, the, in the learnings that they had. And so we predicted that 8% rise in enterprise tech spending, which looked pretty good until Ukraine and the Fed decided that, you know, had to rush and make up for lost time. We kind of nailed the momentum in the energy sector, but we can't give ourselves too much credit for that layup. And as of October, Gartner had it spending growing at just over 5%. I think it was 5.1%. So we're gonna take a C plus on this one and, and move on. >>Our next prediction was basically kind of a slow ground ball. The second base, if I have to be honest, but we felt it was important to highlight that security would remain front and center as the number one priority for organizations in 2022. As is our tradition, you know, we try to up the degree of difficulty by specifically identifying companies that are gonna benefit from these trends. So we highlighted some possible I P O candidates, which of course didn't pan out. S NQ was on our radar. The company had just had to do another raise and they recently took a valuation hit and it was a down round. They raised 196 million. So good chunk of cash, but, but not the i p O that we had predicted Aqua Securities focus on containers and cloud native. That was a trendy call and we thought maybe an M SS P or multiple managed security service providers like Arctic Wolf would I p o, but no way that was happening in the crummy market. >>Nonetheless, we think these types of companies, they're still faring well as the talent shortage in security remains really acute, particularly in the sort of mid-size and small businesses that often don't have a sock Lacework laid off 20% of its workforce in 2022. And CO C e o Dave Hatfield left the company. So that I p o didn't, didn't happen. It was probably too early for Lacework. Anyway, meanwhile you got Netscope, which we've cited as strong in the E T R data as particularly in the emerging technology survey. And then, you know, I lumia holding its own, you know, we never liked that 7 billion price tag that Okta paid for auth zero, but we loved the TAM expansion strategy to target developers beyond sort of Okta's enterprise strength. But we gotta take some points off of the failure thus far of, of Okta to really nail the integration and the go to market model with azero and build, you know, bring that into the, the, the core Okta. >>So the focus on endpoint security that was a winner in 2022 is CrowdStrike led that charge with others holding their own, not the least of which was Palo Alto Networks as it continued to expand beyond its core network security and firewall business, you know, through acquisition. So overall we're gonna give ourselves an A minus for this relatively easy call, but again, we had some specifics associated with it to make it a little tougher. And of course we're watching ve very closely this this coming year in 2023. The vendor consolidation trend. You know, according to a recent Palo Alto network survey with 1300 SecOps pros on average organizations have more than 30 tools to manage security tools. So this is a logical way to optimize cost consolidating vendors and consolidating redundant vendors. The E T R data shows that's clearly a trend that's on the upswing. >>Now moving on, a big theme of 2020 and 2021 of course was remote work and hybrid work and new ways to work and return to work. So we predicted in 2022 that hybrid work models would become the dominant protocol, which clearly is the case. We predicted that about 33% of the workforce would come back to the office in 2022 in September. The E T R data showed that figure was at 29%, but organizations expected that 32% would be in the office, you know, pretty much full-time by year end. That hasn't quite happened, but we were pretty close with the projection, so we're gonna take an A minus on this one. Now, supply chain disruption was another big theme that we felt would carry through 2022. And sure that sounds like another easy one, but as is our tradition, again we try to put some binary metrics around our predictions to put some meat in the bone, so to speak, and and allow us than you to say, okay, did it come true or not? >>So we had some data that we presented last year and supply chain issues impacting hardware spend. We said at the time, you can see this on the left hand side of this chart, the PC laptop demand would remain above pre covid levels, which would reverse a decade of year on year declines, which I think started in around 2011, 2012. Now, while demand is down this year pretty substantially relative to 2021, I D C has worldwide unit shipments for PCs at just over 300 million for 22. If you go back to 2019 and you're looking at around let's say 260 million units shipped globally, you know, roughly, so, you know, pretty good call there. Definitely much higher than pre covid levels. But so what you might be asking why the B, well, we projected that 30% of customers would replace security appliances with cloud-based services and that more than a third would replace their internal data center server and storage hardware with cloud services like 30 and 40% respectively. >>And we don't have explicit survey data on exactly these metrics, but anecdotally we see this happening in earnest. And we do have some data that we're showing here on cloud adoption from ET R'S October survey where the midpoint of workloads running in the cloud is around 34% and forecast, as you can see, to grow steadily over the next three years. So this, well look, this is not, we understand it's not a one-to-one correlation with our prediction, but it's a pretty good bet that we were right, but we gotta take some points off, we think for the lack of unequivocal proof. Cause again, we always strive to make our predictions in ways that can be measured as accurate or not. Is it binary? Did it happen, did it not? Kind of like an O K R and you know, we strive to provide data as proof and in this case it's a bit fuzzy. >>We have to admit that although we're pretty comfortable that the prediction was accurate. And look, when you make an hard forecast, sometimes you gotta pay the price. All right, next, we said in 2022 that the big four cloud players would generate 167 billion in IS and PaaS revenue combining for 38% market growth. And our current forecasts are shown here with a comparison to our January, 2022 figures. So coming into this year now where we are today, so currently we expect 162 billion in total revenue and a 33% growth rate. Still very healthy, but not on our mark. So we think a w s is gonna miss our predictions by about a billion dollars, not, you know, not bad for an 80 billion company. So they're not gonna hit that expectation though of getting really close to a hundred billion run rate. We thought they'd exit the year, you know, closer to, you know, 25 billion a quarter and we don't think they're gonna get there. >>Look, we pretty much nailed Azure even though our prediction W was was correct about g Google Cloud platform surpassing Alibaba, Alibaba, we way overestimated the performance of both of those companies. So we're gonna give ourselves a C plus here and we think, yeah, you might think it's a little bit harsh, we could argue for a B minus to the professor, but the misses on GCP and Alibaba we think warrant a a self penalty on this one. All right, let's move on to our prediction about Supercloud. We said it becomes a thing in 2022 and we think by many accounts it has, despite the naysayers, we're seeing clear evidence that the concept of a layer of value add that sits above and across clouds is taking shape. And on this slide we showed just some of the pickup in the industry. I mean one of the most interesting is CloudFlare, the biggest supercloud antagonist. >>Charles Fitzgerald even predicted that no vendor would ever use the term in their marketing. And that would be proof if that happened that Supercloud was a thing and he said it would never happen. Well CloudFlare has, and they launched their version of Supercloud at their developer week. Chris Miller of the register put out a Supercloud block diagram, something else that Charles Fitzgerald was, it was was pushing us for, which is rightly so, it was a good call on his part. And Chris Miller actually came up with one that's pretty good at David Linthicum also has produced a a a A block diagram, kind of similar, David uses the term metacloud and he uses the term supercloud kind of interchangeably to describe that trend. And so we we're aligned on that front. Brian Gracely has covered the concept on the popular cloud podcast. Berkeley launched the Sky computing initiative. >>You read through that white paper and many of the concepts highlighted in the Supercloud 3.0 community developed definition align with that. Walmart launched a platform with many of the supercloud salient attributes. So did Goldman Sachs, so did Capital One, so did nasdaq. So you know, sorry you can hate the term, but very clearly the evidence is gathering for the super cloud storm. We're gonna take an a plus on this one. Sorry, haters. Alright, let's talk about data mesh in our 21 predictions posts. We said that in the 2020s, 75% of large organizations are gonna re-architect their big data platforms. So kind of a decade long prediction. We don't like to do that always, but sometimes it's warranted. And because it was a longer term prediction, we, at the time in, in coming into 22 when we were evaluating our 21 predictions, we took a grade of incomplete because the sort of decade long or majority of the decade better part of the decade prediction. >>So last year, earlier this year, we said our number seven prediction was data mesh gains momentum in 22. But it's largely confined and narrow data problems with limited scope as you can see here with some of the key bullets. So there's a lot of discussion in the data community about data mesh and while there are an increasing number of examples, JP Morgan Chase, Intuit, H S P C, HelloFresh, and others that are completely rearchitecting parts of their data platform completely rearchitecting entire data platforms is non-trivial. There are organizational challenges, there're data, data ownership, debates, technical considerations, and in particular two of the four fundamental data mesh principles that the, the need for a self-service infrastructure and federated computational governance are challenging. Look, democratizing data and facilitating data sharing creates conflicts with regulatory requirements around data privacy. As such many organizations are being really selective with their data mesh implementations and hence our prediction of narrowing the scope of data mesh initiatives. >>I think that was right on J P M C is a good example of this, where you got a single group within a, within a division narrowly implementing the data mesh architecture. They're using a w s, they're using data lakes, they're using Amazon Glue, creating a catalog and a variety of other techniques to meet their objectives. They kind of automating data quality and it was pretty well thought out and interesting approach and I think it's gonna be made easier by some of the announcements that Amazon made at the recent, you know, reinvent, particularly trying to eliminate ET t l, better connections between Aurora and Redshift and, and, and better data sharing the data clean room. So a lot of that is gonna help. Of course, snowflake has been on this for a while now. Many other companies are facing, you know, limitations as we said here and this slide with their Hadoop data platforms. They need to do new, some new thinking around that to scale. HelloFresh is a really good example of this. Look, the bottom line is that organizations want to get more value from data and having a centralized, highly specialized teams that own the data problem, it's been a barrier and a blocker to success. The data mesh starts with organizational considerations as described in great detail by Ash Nair of Warner Brothers. So take a listen to this clip. >>Yeah, so when people think of Warner Brothers, you always think of like the movie studio, but we're more than that, right? I mean, you think of H B O, you think of t n t, you think of C N N. We have 30 plus brands in our portfolio and each have their own needs. So the, the idea of a data mesh really helps us because what we can do is we can federate access across the company so that, you know, CNN can work at their own pace. You know, when there's election season, they can ingest their own data and they don't have to, you know, bump up against, as an example, HBO if Game of Thrones is going on. >>So it's often the case that data mesh is in the eyes of the implementer. And while a company's implementation may not strictly adhere to Jamma Dani's vision of data mesh, and that's okay, the goal is to use data more effectively. And despite Gartner's attempts to deposition data mesh in favor of the somewhat confusing or frankly far more confusing data fabric concept that they stole from NetApp data mesh is taking hold in organizations globally today. So we're gonna take a B on this one. The prediction is shaping up the way we envision, but as we previously reported, it's gonna take some time. The better part of a decade in our view, new standards have to emerge to make this vision become reality and they'll come in the form of both open and de facto approaches. Okay, our eighth prediction last year focused on the face off between Snowflake and Databricks. >>And we realized this popular topic, and maybe one that's getting a little overplayed, but these are two companies that initially, you know, looked like they were shaping up as partners and they, by the way, they are still partnering in the field. But you go back a couple years ago, the idea of using an AW w s infrastructure, Databricks machine intelligence and applying that on top of Snowflake as a facile data warehouse, still very viable. But both of these companies, they have much larger ambitions. They got big total available markets to chase and large valuations that they have to justify. So what's happening is, as we've previously reported, each of these companies is moving toward the other firm's core domain and they're building out an ecosystem that'll be critical for their future. So as part of that effort, we said each is gonna become aggressive investors and maybe start doing some m and a and they have in various companies. >>And on this chart that we produced last year, we studied some of the companies that were targets and we've added some recent investments of both Snowflake and Databricks. As you can see, they've both, for example, invested in elation snowflake's, put money into Lacework, the Secur security firm, ThoughtSpot, which is trying to democratize data with ai. Collibra is a governance platform and you can see Databricks investments in data transformation with D B T labs, Matillion doing simplified business intelligence hunters. So that's, you know, they're security investment and so forth. So other than our thought that we'd see Databricks I p o last year, this prediction been pretty spot on. So we'll give ourselves an A on that one. Now observability has been a hot topic and we've been covering it for a while with our friends at E T R, particularly Eric Bradley. Our number nine prediction last year was basically that if you're not cloud native and observability, you are gonna be in big trouble. >>So everything guys gotta go cloud native. And that's clearly been the case. Splunk, the big player in the space has been transitioning to the cloud, hasn't always been pretty, as we reported, Datadog real momentum, the elk stack, that's open source model. You got new entrants that we've cited before, like observe, honeycomb, chaos search and others that we've, we've reported on, they're all born in the cloud. So we're gonna take another a on this one, admittedly, yeah, it's a re reasonably easy call, but you gotta have a few of those in the mix. Okay, our last prediction, our number 10 was around events. Something the cube knows a little bit about. We said that a new category of events would emerge as hybrid and that for the most part is happened. So that's gonna be the mainstay is what we said. That pure play virtual events are gonna give way to hi hybrid. >>And the narrative is that virtual only events are, you know, they're good for quick hits, but lousy replacements for in-person events. And you know that said, organizations of all shapes and sizes, they learn how to create better virtual content and support remote audiences during the pandemic. So when we set at pure play is gonna give way to hybrid, we said we, we i we implied or specific or specified that the physical event that v i p experience is going defined. That overall experience and those v i p events would create a little fomo, fear of, of missing out in a virtual component would overlay that serves an audience 10 x the size of the physical. We saw that really two really good examples. Red Hat Summit in Boston, small event, couple thousand people served tens of thousands, you know, online. Second was Google Cloud next v i p event in, in New York City. >>Everything else was, was, was, was virtual. You know, even examples of our prediction of metaverse like immersion have popped up and, and and, and you know, other companies are doing roadshow as we predicted like a lot of companies are doing it. You're seeing that as a major trend where organizations are going with their sales teams out into the regions and doing a little belly to belly action as opposed to the big giant event. That's a definitely a, a trend that we're seeing. So in reviewing this prediction, the grade we gave ourselves is, you know, maybe a bit unfair, it should be, you could argue for a higher grade, but the, but the organization still haven't figured it out. They have hybrid experiences but they generally do a really poor job of leveraging the afterglow and of event of an event. It still tends to be one and done, let's move on to the next event or the next city. >>Let the sales team pick up the pieces if they were paying attention. So because of that, we're only taking a B plus on this one. Okay, so that's the review of last year's predictions. You know, overall if you average out our grade on the 10 predictions that come out to a b plus, I dunno why we can't seem to get that elusive a, but we're gonna keep trying our friends at E T R and we are starting to look at the data for 2023 from the surveys and all the work that we've done on the cube and our, our analysis and we're gonna put together our predictions. We've had literally hundreds of inbounds from PR pros pitching us. We've got this huge thick folder that we've started to review with our yellow highlighter. And our plan is to review it this month, take a look at all the data, get some ideas from the inbounds and then the e t R of January surveys in the field. >>It's probably got a little over a thousand responses right now. You know, they'll get up to, you know, 1400 or so. And once we've digested all that, we're gonna go back and publish our predictions for 2023 sometime in January. So stay tuned for that. All right, we're gonna leave it there for today. You wanna thank Alex Myerson who's on production and he manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well out of our, our Boston studio. I gotta really heartfelt thank you to Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight and their team. They helped get the word out on social and in our newsletters. Rob Ho is our editor in chief over at Silicon Angle who does some great editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these podcasts are available or all these episodes are available is podcasts. Wherever you listen, just all you do Search Breaking analysis podcast, really getting some great traction there. Appreciate you guys subscribing. I published each week on wikibon.com, silicon angle.com or you can email me directly at david dot valante silicon angle.com or dm me Dante, or you can comment on my LinkedIn post. And please check out ETR AI for the very best survey data in the enterprise tech business. Some awesome stuff in there. This is Dante for the Cube Insights powered by etr. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis.

>>The Cube presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >>Welcome back to Vegas, guys and girls, it's great to have you with us. The Cube Live. Si finishing our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Ignite. 22 from MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave Cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about because it is so interesting. It is so dynamic. My other favorite thing is to hear the voice of our vendors' customers. And we could to >>Do that. I always love to have the customer on you get you get right to the heart of the matter. Yeah. Really understand. You know, what I like to do is sort of when I listen to the keynotes, try to see how well it aligns with what the customers are actually doing. Yeah. So let's >>Do it. We're gonna unpack that now. Michael Fagan joins us, the Chief Transformation Officer at Village Roadshow. Welcome Michael. It's great to have you >>And thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >>So this is a really interesting entertainment company. I find the name interesting, but talk to us a little bit about Village Roadshow so the audience gets an understanding of all of the things that you guys do cuz theme parks is part of >>This. Yeah, so Village Road show's Australia's largest cinema exhibitor in conjunction with our partners at event. We also own and operate Australia's largest theme parks. We have Warner Brothers movie World, wet and Wild. SeaWorld Top Golf in Australia is, is operated by us plus more. We also do studio, we also own movie studios, so Aquaman, parts of the Caribbean. We're, we're filming our movie studios Elvis last year. And we also distribute and produce movies and TV shows. Quite diverse group. >>Yeah, you guys have won a lot of awards. I mean, I don't know, academy Awards, golden Globe, all that stuff, you know, and so it's good. Congratulations. Yeah. >>Thank you. >>Cool stuff. I wanna also, before we dig into the use case here, talk to us about the role of a chief transformation officer. How long have you been in that role? What does it encompass and what do you get to drive from a transformation perspective? Yeah, >>So the, the, the nature and pace of disruption is accelerating and on, on one side. And then on the other side, the running business as usual is becoming increasingly complex and, and more difficult to do. So running both simultaneously and at pace can put organizations at risk, both financially and and other ways. So in my role as Chief Transformation officer, I support the rest of the executive team by giving them additional capacity and also bring capability to the team that wasn't there before. So I do a lot of strategic and thought leadership. There's some executive coaching in there, a lot of financial modeling and analysis. And I believe that when a transformation role in particularly a chief transformation role is done correctly, it's a very hands-on role. So there's certain things where I, I dive right down and I'm actually hands in, hands-on leading teams or leading pieces of work. So I might be leading particular projects. I tried to drive profit revenue and profitability across the divisions and does any multi or cross-divisional opportunities or initiative, then I will, I will lead those. >>The transformation, you know, a while ago was cloud, right? Okay, hey, cloud and transformation officers, whether or not they had that title, we'll tell you, look, you gotta change the operating model. You can't just, you know, lift and shift in the cloud. That's, you know, that's pennies. We want, you know, big bucks. That's the operating. Now it's, I'm my question is, is did the pandemic just accelerate your transformation or, or was it, you know, deeper than that? >>Yeah, so what in my role have both digital and business transformation, some of it has been organizational. I think the pandemic has had a, a significant and long lasting effect on society, not just on, on business. So I think if you think about how work work used to be a, a place you went to and how it was done beforehand, before the, before COVID versus now where, you know, previously, you know, within the enterprise you had all of the users, you had all of the applications, you had all of the data, you had all of the people. And then since March, 2020, just overnight, that kind of inverted and, you know, you had people working from home and a person working from home as a branch office of one. So, so we ended up with another thousand branches literally overnight. A lot of the applications that we use are now SASS or cloud-based, whether that's timekeeping with Kronos or communica employee communication or work Jam. So they're not sitting within our data center, they're not sitting within, within our enterprise. It's all external. >>So from a security perspective, you obviously had to respond to that and we heard a lot about endpoint and cloud security and refactoring the network and identity. These guys aren't really an identity. They partner for that, but still a lot of change in focus that the CISO had to deal with. How, how did you guys respond to that? And, and you had a rush to do it. Yeah. And so as you sit back now, where do you go from here? >>Well we had, we had two major triggers for our, our network and security transformation. The first being COVID itself, and then the second beam, we had a, a major MPLS telco renewal that came up. So that gave you an opportunity to look at what we were doing and essentially our network was designed for a near, that no longer exists for when, for when p like I said, when people, when people were from home, all the applications were inside. So, and we had aging infrastructure, our firewalls were end of life. So initially we started off with an SD WAN at the SD WAN layer and an SD WAN implementation. But when we investigated and saw the security capabilities that are available now, we that to a full sassy WAN implementation. >>Why Palo Alto Networks? Because you, you had, you said you had an aging infrastructure designed for an era that doesn't exist anymore, but you also had a number of tools. We've been talking about a consolidation a lot the last couple days. Yeah. How did, what did you consolidate and why with Palo Alto? >>So we had a great partner in Australia, incidentally also called Cube. Cube Networks. Yeah. That we worked with great >>Names. Yeah, right. >>So we, so we, we worked for Cube. We ran a, a form of tender process. And Palo Alto with, you know, Prisma access and Global Global Protect was the only, the only solution that gave us everything that we needed in terms of network modernization, the agility that we required. So for example, in our theme part, we want to send out a hotdog cart or an ice cream cart, and that becomes, all of a sudden you got a new branch that I want to spin up this branch in 10 minutes and then I wanna spin it back down again. So from agility perspective, from a flexibility perspective, the security that, that we wanted, you know, from a zero trust perspective, and they were the only, certainly from a zero trust perspective, they're probably the only vendor that, that exists that, that actually provided the, the, all those capabilities. >>And did you consolidate tools or you were in the process of consolidating tools now? >>Yeah, so we actually, we actually consolidated down to, to, to a, to a single vendor. And in my previous role I had, I had implemented SD WAN before and you know, interoperability is a, is a major issue in the IT industry. I think there's, it's probably the only industry in the, the only industry I can think of certainly that where we, we ship products that aren't ready. They're not of all the features, they, they don't have all the features that they should have. They're their plans. They were releasing patches, releasing additional features every, every couple of months. So, you know, if you, if if Ford sold the card, I said, Hey, you're gonna give you backseats in a couple of months, they'd be uproar. But, but we do that all the time in, in it. So I had, when I previously implemented an Sdwan transformation, I had products from two tier one vendors that just didn't talk to one another. And so when I went and spoke to those vendors, they just went, well, it's not me. It's clearly, clearly those guys. So, so there's a lot to be said for having a, you know, a champion team rather than a team of champions. And Palo Alto have got that full stack fully integrated that was, you know, exactly meant what we were looking for. >>They've been talking a lot the last couple days about integration and it, and I've talked with some of their executives and some analysts as well, including Dave about that seems to be a differentiator for them because they really focus on that. Their m and a strategy is very, it seems to be very clear and there's purpose on that backend integration instead of leaving it to the customer, like Village Road show to do it. They also talked a lot about the consolidation. I'm just curious, Michael, in terms of like what you've heard at the show in the last couple of days. >>Yeah, I mean I've been hearing to same mess, but actually we've, we've lived in a >>You're living it. That's what I wanted to >>Know. So, so, you know, we had a choice of, you know, do you try and purchase so-called best of breed products and then put a lot of effort into integrating them and trying to get them to work, which is not really what we want to spend time doing. I don't, I don't wanna be famous for, you know, integration and, you know, great infrastructure. I want to be, I want Village to be famous for delivering great experiences to our customers. Memories that last a lifetime. And you know, when kids grow up in Australia, they, everybody remembers going to the theme parks. That's what, that's what I want our team to be doing and to be delivering those great experiences, not to be trying to plug together bits of software and it may or may not work and have vendors pointing at one another and then we are left carrying the cannon and holding the >>Baby. So what was the before and after, can you give us a sense as to how life changed, you know, pre that consolidation versus post? >>Yeah, so our, our, our infrastructure, say our infrastructure was designed for, you know, the, you know, old ways of working where we had you knowm routers that were, you know, not designed for cloud, for modern traffic, including cloud Destin traffic, an old MPLS network. We used to back haul all the traffic from, from our branches back to central location run where we've got, you know, firewall walls, we've got a dmz, we could run advanced inspection services on that. So if you had a branch that wanted to access a website that was housed next door, even if it was across the country, then it would, we would pull that all the way back to Melbourne. We would apply advanced inspection services to it, send it up to the cloud out back across the country. Traffic would come back, come down to us, back out to our branch. >>So you talk about crossing the country four times, even at the website is, is situated next door now with, with our sasi sdwan transformation just pops out to the cloud now straight away. And the, the difference in performance for our, for our team and for our customers, it, it's phenomenal. So you'll talk about saving minutes, you know, on a log on and, and seconds then and on, on an average transaction and second zone sound like a lot. But when you, it's every click up, they're saving a second and add up. You're talking about thousands of man hours every month that we've saved. >>If near Zuke were sitting right here and said, what could we do better? You know, what do you need from us that we're not delivering today that you want to, you want us to deliver that would change your life. Yeah, >>There's two things. One, one of which I think they're all, they're already doing, but I actually haven't experienced myself. It's around the autonomous digital experience management. So I've now got a thousand users who are sitting at home and they've got, when they've got a problem, I don't know, is it, is it my problem or is it their problem? So I know that p were working on a, an A solution that digital experience solution, which can actually tell, well actually know you're sitting in your kitchen and your routes in your front room, maybe you should move closer to the route. So there, there they, that's one thing. And the second thing is using AI to tell me things that I wouldn't be able to figure out with a human training. A lot of time sifting through data. So things like where I've potentially overcompensated and, you know, overdelivered on the network and security side or of potentially underdelivered on a security side. So having AI to, you know, assess all of those millions and probably billions of, you know, transactions and packets that are moving around our network and say, Hey, you could optimize it more if you, if you dial this down or dial this up. >>So you said earlier we, this industry has a habit of shipping products before, you know they're ready. So based on your experience, seems like, first of all, it sounds like you got a at least decent technical background as well. When do you expect to have that capability? Realistically? When can we expect that as an industry? >>I think I, I think, like I said, the the rate and nature of change is, is, I think it's accelerating. The halflife of degree is short. I think when I left university, what I, what I learned in first year was, was obsolete within five years, I'd say now it's probably obsolete of you. What'd you learn in first year? It's probably obsolete by the time you finish your degree. >>Six months. Yeah, >>It's true. So I think the, the, the rate of change and the, the partnership that I see Palo building with the likes of AWS and Google and that and how they're coming together to, to solve, to jointly solve these problems is I think we will see this within 12 months. >>Who, who are your clouds? You got multiple clouds >>Or We got multiple clouds. Mostly aws, but there are certain things that we run that run in run in Azure as well. We, we don't really have much in GCP or, or, or some of the other >>Azure for collaboration and teams, stuff like that. >>Ah, we, we run, we run SAP that's we hosted in, in Azure and our cinema ticketing system is, is was run in Azure. It's, it was only available in, in in Azure the time we're mo we are mostly an AWS >>Shop. And what do you do with aws? I mean, pretty much everything else is >>Much every, everything else, anything that's customer facing our websites, they give us great stability. Great, great availability, great performance, you know, we've had and, and, and, and a very variable as well. So, we'll, you know, our, our pattern of selling movie tickets is typically, you know, fairly flat except when, you know, there's a launch of a, of a new movie. So all of a sudden we might say you might sell, you know, at 9:00 AM when, you know, spider-Man went on sale last year, I think we sold 100 times the amount of tickets in the forest, 10 minutes. So our website didn't just scale look beautifully, just took in all of that extra traffic scale up. We're at only any intervention and then scale back down >>Taylor Swift needs that she does need that. So yeah. And so is your vision to have Palo Alto networks security infrastructure have be a common sort of layer across those clouds and maybe even some on-prem? Is it, are you, are you working toward that? Yeah, >>We, yeah, we, yeah, we, we'd love to have, you know, our end, our end customers don't really care about the infrastructure that we run. They won't be >>Able to unless it breaks. >>Unless it breaks. Yeah. They wanna be able to go to see a movie. Do you wanna be able to get on a rollercoaster? They wanna be able to go, you know, play around around a top golf. So having that convergence and that seamless integration of working across cloud network security now for most of our team, they, they don't know and they don't need to know. In fact, I, I frankly don't want them to know and be, be thinking about networks and clouds. I kind of want them thinking about how do we sell more cinema tickets? How do we give a great experience to our guests? How do we give long lasting lifetime memories to, to the people who come visit our parks? >>That's what they want. They want that experience. Right. I'd love to get your final thoughts on, we, we had you give a great overview of the ch the role that you play as Chief transformation officer. You own digital transformation, you want business transformation. What advice would you give to either other treat chief transformation officers, CISOs, CSOs, CEOs about partnering, what's the right partner to really improve your security posture? >>I think there's, there's two things. One is if you haven't looked at this in the last two years and made some changes, you're outta date. Yeah. Because the world has changed. We've seen, I mean, I've heard somebody say it was two decades worth of, I actually think it's probably five 50 years worth of change in, in Australia in terms of working habits. So one, you need to do something. Yeah. Need to, you need to have a look at this. The second thing I think is to try and partner with someone that has similar values to your organization. So Village is a, it's a wonderful, innovative company. Very agile. So the, like the, the concept of gold class cinema, so, you know, big proceeds, recliners, waiter service, elevated foods concept that, that was invented by village in 1997. Thank you. And we had thanks finally came to the states so decade later, I mean we would've had the CEO of every major cinema chain in the world come to come to Melbourne and have a look at what Village is doing and go, yeah, we're gonna export that back around around the world. It's probably one of, one of Australia's unknown exports. Yeah. So it's, yeah, so, so partnering. So we've got a great innovation history and we'd like to think of ourselves as pretty agile. So working with partners who are, have a similar thought process and, and managed to an outcome and not to a contract Yeah. Is, is important for us. >>It's all about outcomes. And you've had some great outcomes, Michael, thank you for joining us on the program, walking us through Village Roadshow, the challenges that you had, how you tackled them, and, and next time I think I'm in a movie theater and I'm in reclining chair, I'm gonna think about you and village. So thank you. We appreciate your insights, your time. Thank you. Thanks Michael. For Michael Fagan and Dave Valante. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube. Our live coverage of Palo Alto Networks. Ignite comes to an end. We thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging emerging tech coverage next year. >>Yeah.

>>Good afternoon and welcome back to the Classiest Show in Technology. This is the Cube we are at AWS Reinvent 2022 in Fabulous Sin City. That's why I've got my sequence on. We love a little Vegas, don't we? I'm joined by John Farer, another, another Vegas >>Fan. I don't have my sequence, I left it in my room. We're >>Gonna have to figure out how to get us 20 as soon as possible. What's been your biggest shock for you at the show so far? >>Well, I think the data story and security is so awesome. I love how that's front and center. If you look at the minutes of the keynote of Adamski, the CEO on day one, it's all bulked into data and security. All worked hand in hand. That's on top of already the innovation of their infrastructure. So I think you're gonna see a lot of interplay going on in this next segment. It's gonna tell a lot of that innovation story that's coming next. It's pretty awesome. >>It is pretty awesome, and I'm super excited. It's not only what we do here on the Cube, it's also in my show notes. We are gonna be geeking out for the next segment. Please welcome Paul and Puja. Wonderful to have you both here. Paul from Amazon, s3, glacier, and Pujan, CEO of kuo. I wanna turn to you Pujan, to start us off, just in case the audience isn't familiar, give us the Kuo pitch. >>Yeah, so basically Kuo is a, a backup as a service offering, right? Built in AWS four aws, right? And effectively going after, you know, any service that a customer uses on top of aws, right? And so a lot of the data sitting on s3, right? So that's been like our, our big use case going and basically building backup and air gap protection for, for s3. But we basically go to every other service, e c two, ebs, dynamo, you know, you name it, right? So basically do the whole thing >>And the relationship with aws. Can you guys share, I mean, you got you here together. You guys are a great partnership. Born in the cloud, operation in the cloud. Absolutely. I think talk about the partnership with aws. >>Absolutely. I think the last five years of building on AWS has been phenomenal, right? And I love the platform. It's, it's a very pure platform for us. You know, the APIs and, and the access you get and access you get to the service teams like Paul sitting here and the other teams you have gotten access to, I think has been phenomenal. But we also have, I would say, pushed the envelope in terms of how innovative we have been and how aggressive we have been in utilizing all the innovation that AWS has built in over the last few years. But it would not have happened without the fantastic partnership with the service teams. >>Paul, talk about the, AM the S3 part of this. What's the story there? >>Well, it's been great working with the CUO team over the course of the last few years. We were just upstairs diving deep into the, to the features that they're taking advantage of. They really push us hard on behalf of customers, and it's been a, it's just been a great relationship over the last years. >>That's awesome. And the ecosystem at such a, we're gonna hear tomorrow, the keynote on the, from Aruba who's gonna tend over the ecosystem. You guys are working together. There's a lot of strategic partnerships, so much collaboration between you guys that makes it very, this is the next gen cloud of cloud environment we're seeing. And you heard the, the economies around the corner. It's still gonna be challenging, but still there's more growth in the cloud. This is not stopping. This is impacts the customers. What are the customers saying to you guys when you work backwards from their needs? They want it faster, easier, cheaper. They want it more integrated. What are some of the things, all those you guys hearing from customers? >>So for us, you know, if you think about it, like, you know, as people are moving to the cloud, especially like take a use case like s3, right? So much of critical data sitting on top of S3 today. And so what folks have realized that as they're, you know, putting all of those, you know, what, over two 50 trillion objects, you know, sitting on s3, a lot of them need backup and data protection because there could be accidental deletions, there could be software bugs, there could be a ransomware type event due to which you need a second copy of the data that is outside of your security domain, right? But again, that needs to get be done at the, at the right price point, right? And that's where like a technology like Columbia comes in because since we've been built on the cloud, we've optimized it correctly. So especially for folks who are very cost conscious, given the macroeconomic conditions, we are heading into a technology that's built correctly so that, you know, you get the right architecture and the right solution at the right price point and the scale, right? Talking about trillions of objects, billions of objects within a single customer, within a single bucket sometimes. And that's where Columbia comes in. Cause we basically do that at scale without, again, impacting the, the customer's wallet more than it needs to. >>The porridge has to be the right temperature and the right size bowl. With the right spoon. You've got a lot of complexity when it comes to solving those customer challenges. You have a couple customer story examples you're allowed to share with us. Correct? Paul, do you want to kick one off? Go ahead. Oh, puja. All right. >>No, absolutely. I think there's a ton of them. I, I'll talk about, you know, want to begin with like Cox Automotive, right? A phenomenal customer that we, all of us have worked together with them. And again, looking for a solution to backup S3 to essentially go air gap protection outside of their account, right? They looked at doing it themselves, right? They thought they'll go and basically do it themselves. And then they fortunately bumped into Columbia, they looked at our architecture, looked at what it would really go and take to build it. And guess what, sitting in 2022, getting 23 right now, nobody wants to go and build this themselves. They actually want a turnkey solution that just does it, right? And so, again, we are a phenomenal joint customer of ours doing this at a pretty massive scale, right? And there are many more like that. There's Warner Brothers that are essentially going into the cloud from on premises, right? And they're going really fast accelerating the usage on aws again, looking at, you know, backup and data protection and using clum because of our extreme simplicity that we provide. >>Yeah, I think it's, you've got a, a lot of different people solving different problems that you're working with all the time. Millions of customers. Well, how do you prioritize? >>Well, for us, it really all comes down to fundamentals, right? So Amazon, s3 s unique distributed architecture delivers industry leading durability, availability, performance and security at virtually unlimited scale, right? And it's really been delivering on the fundamentals that has earned the trust of so many customers of all sizes and industries over the course of over 16 years. Now, in terms of how we prioritize on behalf of those customers, we always say that 90% of our roadmap comes directly from what customers are telling us is important. And a large number of our customers now are using S3 through lumino, which is why the relationship is so important. We're here talking about customer use cases here at the show, and we do that regularly throughout the year as well. And that's, that's how we land on a road. >>And what are the, what are the top stories from customers? What, what are they telling you? What's the number one top three things you're hearing? >>I tell you, like, again, it just comes down to the fundamentals, right? Of security, availability, durability and performance at virtually unlimited scale. Like that is the first customer first discussions that we have with customers talking about durable storage, for >>Sure. What I find interesting in, you mentioned scale, right? That comes up a lot scale with data. Yeah. That we heard data. The big theme here, security, what's in my S3 bucket? Can you find out what's in there? Is it backed up properly? How do I get it back? Where's the ransomware? Why not just target the ransomware? So how do you navigate the, the security challenges, the, the need to store all that scale data? What's the secret sauce? >>Yeah, so I think the, the big thing is we'll start with the, you know, how we have architected the product, right? If you think about it, this, you're dealing with a lot of scale, right? You get to a hundred million, a billion and billions very fast on S3 few, especially on a cloud native application. So it starts with the visibility, right? It's basically about, like we have things where you do, where you create a subset of your buckets called protection groups that you can essentially, you know, do it based on prefixes. So now you can essentially figure out what prefix you want to back up and what you don't want to back up. Maybe there's log data that you don't care about, so you don't back that up, right? And it all starts with that visibility that you give. And the prefix level data protection then comes the scale, which is where I was telling you, right? We have basically built an orchestration engine, right? It's like we call the ES for Lambdas, right? So we have a internal orchestration engine and essentially what what we have done is we have our own language internally that spawns off these lambdas, right? And they go after these S3 partitions do the right things and then you basically reel them back. So things like that that we do that are not possible if you're not built on the >>Clock. Well also, I mean, just mind blowing and go back 10 years. Yeah. I mean you got Lambda. What you're talking about here is the gift of the cloud innovation. Yeah. So the benefit of S3 is now accelerated. This is the story this year. Yeah. I mean they're highlighting it at scale, not just in the data, but like what we knew when Lambda came out and what S3 could do. But now mainstream solutions are coming in. Does that change your backup plans? Because we're gonna see a lot more end to end, lot more solutions. We heard that on the keynote. Some are saying it's more complexity. Of course it might, but you can abstract another way with the cloud that's the best part of the cloud. So these abstraction leads. So what's your view on that? But I wanna get your thoughts because you guys are perfectly positioned for this scale, but there's more coming. Yes. Yes. Exactly. What, how are you looking at that? >>So again, I think the, you know, obviously the, the S3 teams and every team in AWS is basically pushing the envelope in terms of innovation. But the key for a partner like us is to go and take that innovation. A lot of complex architectures behind the scene. But what you deliver to the customer is simple. I'll give you one more example. One of the things we launched that, you know, Paul and others are very excited about, is this ability to do instant access on the backup, right? So you could have billions of objects that you backed up. Maybe you need just 10,000 of them for a DR test. And we can basically create like an instant virtual bucket on top of that backup that you can instantly restore >>Spinning up a sandbox of temporary data to go check it >>Out. Exactly. Offer an inte application. >>Think we're geeking out right now. >>Yeah, I know. Brought that part of the segment, John. Don't worry, we're safely there. But, >>But that's the thing, right? That all that is possible because of all the, the scale and innovation and all the APIs and everything that, you know, Paul and the team gives us that we go and build on top of >>Paul, geek out on with us on this. We >>Are super excited for instant restore >>For store. I mean, automation programmability. >>It is, I mean it's the logical next step for backup in the cloud. Exactly. Yeah. But it's a super hard engineering problem to go solve for customers. I mean, the RTO benefits alone are super compelling, but then there's a cost element as well of not having to bring back all that stuff for a test restore, for example. And so it's, it's been really great to, to work with the team on that. We have some ideas on how we may help solve it from our side, and we're looking forward to collaborating on it. >>This is a great illustration of what I was writing about this week around the classic cloud, which is great. And as Adam said, and used like to use the word and, and you got this new functionality we're seeing emerge from the growth. Yes. From the companies that are built on Amazon web services that are growing. You're a partner, they have a lot of other partners and people are taking over restaurant here off action. I mean, there's real growth and new functionality on top of aws. You guys are no different. What's, are you prepared for that? Are you ready to go? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think if you think about, if you think about it, right, I think it's also about doing this without impacting the primary application. Like if the customer is running a primary application at scale on s3, a backup application like ours can't come in and really mess with that. So I think being able to do things where, and this is where you solve really hard computer science problems, right? Where you're bottling yourself. If you are essentially seeing any kind of, you know, interfering with the primary, you're going to cut yourself down. You're gonna go after a different partition. So there are a lot of things you need to do behind the scenes, which is again, all the complexity, all of that, but deliver the, to the customer a very, very simple thing. >>You know, Paul, I wanna get your thoughts and I want you to chime in. Yeah. In 2014, I interviewed Steven Schmidt, my first interview with the, he was the CISO then, and now he's a CSO and, and former ciso, he's back at that time, the word was the cloud's not secure. Now we're talking about security. Just in the complexity of how you're partitioning and managing your sub portions, how you explained it, it's harder for the attackers. The cloud in its in its architecture has become a more secure environment. Yeah. Well, and getting more secure as you have laying out this, this is a new dynamic. This is good. Can you explain the, >>I mean, I, I can just tell you that at AWS security is job zero and that it will always be our number one priority, right? We have a, an infrastructure with under AWS that is vetted and approved to run even top secret workloads, which benefits all customers in all regions. >>And your, your security posture is embedded on top of that. And you got your own stuff. >>Yeah. And if you think of it as a shared responsibility model, so security of the cloud is the responsibility of the cloud provider, but then security of the data on top of it. Like you, you go and delete stuff, your software goes and does something that resiliency, the integrity of the data is your responsibility as a customer. And that's where, you know, we come in. Who >>Shared responsibility has been such a hot topic all week. Yeah. >>I gotta ask him one more question. Cause this is fascinating. And we are talking about on the cube all day today after we saw the announcement and Adam's comment on the cube, Adams LE's comment on the keynote. I mean, he said, if you're gonna tighten your belt, meaning economic cost recovery, re right sizing. If you want to tighten your belt, come to the cloud. So I have to ask you guys, Puja, if you can comment, that'd be great. There's a lot of other competitors out there that aren't born on aws. What is the customer gonna do when they tighten the build? What does that mean? They're gonna go to, to the individual contracts. They're gonna work in the marketplace. I mean this, there's a new dynamic in town. It's called AWS 2022. They weren't really around much in the recession of 2008. They were just starting to grow. Now they're an economic force. People like yourselves have embedded in there. There's a lot of competition. What's gonna happen? >>I think people are gonna just go to a place like, you know, AWS marketplace. You're going to essentially look for solutions and essentially like, and, and the right solutions built in are going to be self-service like aws. It's a very self-service thing. A hundred percent. So you go and do self-service, you figure out what's working, what's not working. Also, the model has to be consumption oriented. No longer can you expect the customer to go and pay a bunch of money for shelfware, right? It's like, like how we charge how AWS charges, which is you pay for what you consume. That and all has to be front and center, >>Right? I think that's a really, I think that's a really important >>Point. It's time >>And I think it's time. So we have a new challenge on the cube. We give you 30 seconds roughly to give us your extraordinarily hot take your shining thought leadership moment and, and highlight what you think is the most important takeaway from the show. The biggest soundbite, the juiciest announcement. Paul, I'll >>Start with an Instagram. Real basically. Yeah. Okay. >>Yeah. Hi. Go. I would just say from an S3 perspective, over the course of the last several years, we've really seen workloads shift from just backup and recovery and static images on websites to data lake analytics applications. And you continue to see that here. And I can tell you that some of these scaled applications are running at enormous mind blowing scale, right? And so, so every year we come here, we talk to customers, and it's just every year it sort of blows me away. And I've been in the storage industry for a long time and it's just is, it blows me away. Just the scale at customers are running in >>And >>Blowing scale. And when it comes to backup, let me just say that it's easy to back up and recover a single object, but doing an easy thing, a billion or 10 billion times over, that's actually quite hard. >>And just to, just to bold that a little bit, just pull out my highlighter. S3 now has over 280 trillion objects. That's a lot. >>That's a lot of objects. >>Yeah. You are not, you are not kidding. When you talk about scale, I mean, this is the most scalable. >>That's not solution's not there. Yeah. That, that's right. And we wake up every, we have a culture of durability and we wake up every single day to raise the bar on the fundamentals and make sure that every single one of those objects is protected and safe. >>Okay. You, I, >>I can't imagine worrying about two, two 80 trillion different things. >>Let's go. You're Instagram real >>For me again, you know, between S3 and us, we are two players out there that are really, you know, processing the data at the end of the day, right? And so I'm very excited about, you know, what we are going to do more and more with the instant restore capability where we can integrate third party services on top of it that can do more things with the data that is not, not passively sitting, but now becomes active data that you can analyze and do things with. So that's something where we take this to the next level is something that I'm super excited about. >>There's a lot to be excited about and, and we're excited to have you. We're excited to hear what happens next. Excited to see more collaboration like this. Paul Pon, thank you so much for joining us here on the show. Thank all of you from for tuning into our continuous wall to wall super thrilling live coverage of AWS reinvent here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, with John Furrier. I'm Savannah Peterson. We're the cube, the leading source for high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 live from Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, my cohost Dave Vellante, we've been here the last day and a half unpacking a lot of news, a lot of announcements, talking with customers and partners, and we have another great session coming for you next. We've got a customer and a partner talking tech and data mash. Please welcome Mitesh Shah, VP in market strategy at Elation. >> Great to be here. >> and Ash Naseer great, to have you, senior director of data engineering at Warner Brothers Discovery. Welcome guys. >> Thank you for having me. >> It's great to be back in person and to be able to really get to see and feel and touch this technology, isn't it? >> Yeah, it is. I mean two years or so. Yeah. Great to feel the energy in the conference center. >> Yeah. >> Snowflake was virtual, I think for two years and now it's great to kind of see the excitement firsthand. So it's wonderful. >> Th excitement, but also the boom and the number of customers and partners and people attending. They were saying the first, or the summit in 2019 had about 1900 attendees. And this is around 10,000. So a huge jump in a short time period. Talk a little bit about the Elation-Snowflake partnership and probably some of the acceleration that you guys have been experiencing as a Snowflake partner. >> Yeah. As a snowflake partner. I mean, Snowflake is an investor of us in Elation early last year, and we've been a partner for, for longer than that. And good news. We have been awarded Snowflake partner of the year for data governance, just earlier this week. And that's in fact, our second year in a row for winning that award. So, great news on that front as well. >> Repeat, congratulations. >> Repeat. Absolutely. And we're going to hope to make it a three-peat as well. And we've also been awarded industry competency badges in five different industries, those being financial services, healthcare, retail technology, and Median Telcom. >> Excellent. Okay. Going to right get into it. Data mesh. You guys actually have a data mesh and you've presented at the conference. So, take us back to the beginning. Why did you decide that you needed to implement something like data mesh? What was the impetus? >> Yeah. So when people think of Warner brothers, you always think of like the movie studio, but we're more than that, right? I mean, you think of HBO, you think of TNT, you think of CNN, we have 30 plus brands in our portfolio and each have their own needs. So the idea of a data mesh really helps us because what we can do is we can federate access across the company so that, you know, CNN can work at their own pace. You know, when there's election season, they can ingest their own data and they don't have to, you know, bump up against as an example, HBO, if Game of Thrones is going on. >> So, okay. So the, the impetus was to serve those lines of business better. Actually, given that you've got these different brands, it was probably easier than most companies. Cause if you're, let's say you're a big financial services company, and now you have to decide who owns what. CNN owns its own data products, HBO. Now, do they decide within those different brands, how to distribute even further? Or is it really, how deep have you gone in that decentralization? >> That's a great question. It's a very close partnership, because there are a number of data sets, which are used by all the brands, right? You think about people browsing websites, right? You know, CNN has a website, Warner brothers has a website. So for us to ingest that data for each of the brands to ingest that data separately, that means five different ways of doing things and you know, a big environment, right? So that is where our team comes into play. We ingest a lot of the common data sets, but like I said, any unique data sets, data sets regarding theatrical as an example, you know, Warner brothers does it themselves, you know, for streaming, HBO Max, does it themselves. So we kind of operate in partnership. >> So do you have a centralized data team and also decentralized data teams, right? >> That's right. >> So I love this conversation because that was heresy 10 years ago, five years ago, even, cause that's inefficient. But you've, I presume you've found that it's actually more productive in terms of the business output, explain that dynamic. >> You know, you bring up such a good point. So I, you know, I consider myself as one of the dinosaurs who started like 20 plus years ago in this industry. And back then, we were all taught to think of the data warehouse as like a monolithic thing. And the reason for that is the technology wasn't there. The technology didn't catch up. Now, 20 years later, the technology is way ahead, right? But like, our mindset's still the same because we think of data warehouses and data platforms still as a monolithic thing. But if you really sort of remove that sort of mental barrier, if you will, and if you start thinking about, well, how do I sort of, you know, federate everything and make sure that you let folks who are building, or are closest to the customer or are building their products, let them own that data and have a partnership. The results have been amazing. And if we were only sort of doing it as a centralized team, we would not be able to do a 10th of what we do today. So it's that massive scale in, in our company as well. >> And I should have clarified, when we talk about data mesh are we talking about the implementing in practice, the octagon sort of framework, or is this sort of your own sort of terminology? >> Well, so the interesting part is four years ago, we didn't have- >> It didn't exist. >> Yeah. It didn't exist. And, and so we, our principle was very simple, right? When we started out, we said, we want to make sure that our brands are able to operate independently with some oversight and guidance from our technology teams, right? That's what we set out to do. We did that with Snowflake by design because Snowflake allows us to, you know, separate those, those brands into different accounts. So that was done by design. And then the, the magic, I think, is the Snowflake data sharing where, which allows us to sort of bring data in here once, and then share it with whoever needs it. So think about HBO Max. On HBO Max, You not only have HBO Max content, but content from CNN, from Cartoon Network, from Warner Brothers, right? All the movies, right? So to see how The Batman movie did in theaters and then on streaming, you don't need, you know, Warner brothers doesn't need to ingest the same streaming data. HBO Max does it. HBO Max shares it with Warner brothers, you know, store once, share many times, and everyone works at their own pace. >> So they're building data products. Those data products are discoverable APIs, I presume, or I guess maybe just, I guess the Snowflake cloud, but very importantly, they're governed. And that's correct, where Elation comes in? >> That's precisely where Elation comes in, is where sort of this central flexible foundation for data governance. You know, you mentioned data mesh. I think what's interesting is that it's really an answer to the bottlenecks created by centralized IT, right? There's this notion of decentralizing that the data engineers and making the data domain owners, the people that know the data the best, have them be in control of publishing the data to the data consumers. There are other popular concepts actually happening right now, as we speak, around modern data stack. Around data fabric that are also in many ways underpinned by this notion of decentralization, right? These are concepts that are underpinned by decentralization and as the pendulum swings, sort of between decentralization and centralization, as we go back and forth in the world of IT and data, there are certain constants that need to be centralized over time. And one of those I believe is very much a centralized platform for data governance. And that's certainly, I think where we come in. Would love to hear more about how you use Elation. >> Yeah. So, I mean, elation helps us sort of, as you guys say, sort of, map, the treasure map of the data, right? So for consumers to find where their data is, that's where Elation helps us. It helps us with the data cataloging, you know, storing all the metadata and, you know, users can go in, they can sort of find, you know, the data that they need and they can also find how others are using data. So it's, there's a little bit of a crowdsourcing aspect that Elation helps us to do whereby you know, you can see, okay, my peer in the other group, well, that's how they use this piece of data. So I'm not going to spend hours trying to figure this out. You're going to use the query that they use. So yeah. >> So you have a master catalog, I presume. And then each of the brands has their own sub catalogs, is that correct? >> Well, for the most part, we have that master catalog and then the brands sort of use it, you know, separately themselves. The key here is all that catalog, that catalog isn't maintained by a centralized group as well, right? It's again, maintained by the individual teams and not only in the individual teams, but the folks that are responsible for the data, right? So I talked about the concept of crowdsourcing, whoever sort of puts the data in, has to make sure that they update the catalog and make sure that the definitions are there and everything sort of in line. >> So HBO, CNN, and each have their own, sort of access to their catalog, but they feed into the master catalog. Is that the right way to think about it? >> Yeah. >> Okay. And they have their own virtual data warehouses, right? They have ownership over that? They can spin 'em up, spin 'em down as they see fit? Right? And they're governed. >> They're governed. And what's interesting is it's not just governed, right? Governance is a, is a big word. It's a bit nebulous, but what's really being enabled here is this notion of self-service as well, right? There's two big sort of rockets that need to happen at the same time in any given organization. There's this notion that you want to put trustworthy data in the hands of data consumers, while at the same time mitigating risk. And that's precisely what Elation does. >> So I want to clarify this for the audience. So there's four principles of database. This came after you guys did it. And I wonder how it aligns. Domain ownership, give data, as you were saying to the, to the domain owners who have context, data as product, you guys are building data products, and that creates two problems. How do you give people self-service infrastructure and how do you automate governance? So the first two, great. But then it creates these other problems. Does that align with your philosophy? Where's alignment? What's different? >> Yeah. Data products is exactly where we're going. And that sort of, that domain based design, that's really key as well. In our business, you think about who the customer is, as an example, right? Depending on who you ask, it's going to be, the answer might be different, you know, to the movie business, it's probably going to be the person who watches a movie in a theater. To the streaming business, to HBO Max, it's the streamer, right? To others, someone watching live CNN on their TV, right? There's yet another group. Think about all the franchising we do. So you see Batman action figures and T-shirts, and Warner brothers branded stuff in stores, that's yet another business unit. But at the end of the day, it's not a different person, it's you and me, right? We do all these things. So the domain concept, make sure that you ingest data and you bring data relevant to the context, however, not sort of making it so stringent where it cannot integrate, and then you integrate it at a higher level to create that 360. >> And it's discoverable. So the point is, I don't have to go tap Ash on the shoulder, say, how do I get this data? Is it governed? Do I have access to it? Give me the rules of it. Just, I go grab it, right? And the system computationally automates whether or not I have access to it. And it's, as you say, self-service. >> In this case, exactly right. It enables people to just search for data and know that when they find the data, whether it's trustworthy or not, through trust flags, and the like, it's doing both of those things at the same time. >> How is it an enabler of solving some of the big challenges that the media and entertainment industry is going through? We've seen so much change the last couple of years. The rising consumer expectations aren't going to go back down. They're only going to come up. We want you to serve us up content that's relevant, that's personalized, that makes sense. I'd love to understand from your perspective, Mitesh, from an industry challenges perspective, how does this technology help customers like Warner Brothers Discovery, meet business customers, where they are and reduce the volume on those challenges? >> It's a great question. And as I mentioned earlier, we had five industry competency badges that were awarded to us by Snowflake. And one of those four, Median Telcom. And the reason for that is we're helping media companies understand their audiences better, and ultimately serve up better experiences for their audiences. But we've got Ash right here that can tell us how that's happening in practice. >> Yeah, tell us. >> So I'll share a story. I always like to tell stories, right? Once once upon a time before we had Elation in place, it was like, who you knew was how you got access to the data. So if I knew you and I knew you had access to a certain kind of data and your access to the right kind of data was based on the network you had at the company- >> I had to trust you. >> Yeah. >> I might not want to give up my data. >> That's it. And so that's where Elation sort of helps us democratize it, but, you know, puts the governance and controls, right? There are certain sensitive things as well, such as viewership, such as subscriber accounts, which are very important. So making sure that the right people have access to it, that's the other problem that Elation helps us solve. >> That's precisely part of our integration with Snowflake in particular, being able to define and manage policies within Elation. Saying, you know, certain people should have access to certain rows, doing column level masking. And having those policies actually enforced at the Snowflake data layer is precisely part of our value product. >> And that's automated. >> And all that's automated. Exactly. >> Right. So I don't have to think about it. I don't have to go through the tap on their shoulder. What has been the impact, Ash, on data quality as you've pushed it down into the domains? >> That's a great question. So it has definitely improved, but data quality is a very interesting subject, because back to my example of, you know, when we started doing things, we, you know, the centralized IT team always said, well, it has to be like this, Right? And if it doesn't fit in this, then it's bad quality. Well, sometimes context changes. Businesses change, right? You have to be able to react to it quickly. So making sure that a lot of that quality is managed at the decentralized level, at the place where you have that business context, that ensures you have the most up to date quality. We're talking about media industry changing so quickly. I mean, would we have thought three years ago that people would watch a lot of these major movies on streaming services? But here's the reality, right? You have to react and, you know, having it at that level just helps you react faster. >> So data, if I play that back, data quality is not a static framework. It's flexible based on the business context and the business owners can make those adjustments, cause they own the data. >> That's it. That's exactly it. >> That's awesome. Wow. That's amazing progress that you guys have made. >> In quality, if I could just add, it also just changes depending on where you are in your data pipeline stage, right? Data, quality data observability, this is a very fast evolving space at the moment, and if I look to my left right now, I bet you I can probably see a half-dozen quality observability vendors right now. And so given that and given the fact that Elation still is sort of a central hub to find trustworthy data, we've actually announced an open data quality initiative, allowing for best-of-breed data quality vendors to integrate with the platform. So whoever they are, whatever tool folks want to use, they can use that particular tool of choice. >> And this all runs in the cloud, or is it a hybrid sort of? >> Everything is in the cloud. We're all in the cloud. And you know, again, helps us go faster. >> Let me ask you a question. I could go on forever in this topic. One of the concepts that was put forth is whether it's a Snowflake data warehouse or a data bricks, data lake, or an Oracle data warehouse, they should all be inclusive. They should just be a node on the mesh. Like, wow, that sounds good. But I haven't seen it yet. Right? I'm guessing that Snowflake and Elation enable all the self-serve, all this automated governance, and that including those other items, it's got to be a one-off at this point in time. Do you ever see you expanding that scope or is it better off to just kind of leave it into the, the Snowflake data cloud? >> It's a good question. You know, I feel like where we're at today, especially in terms of sort of technology giving us so many options, I don't think there's a one size fits all. Right? Even though we are very heavily invested in Snowflake and we use Snowflake consistently across the organization, but you could, theoretically, could have an architecture that blends those two, right? Have different types of data platforms like a teradata or an Oracle and sort of bring it all together today. We have the technology, you know, that and all sorts of things that can make sure that you query on different databases. So I don't think the technology is the problem, I think it's the organizational mindset. I think that that's what gets in the way. >> Oh, interesting. So I was going to ask you, will hybrid tables help you solve that problem? And, maybe not, what you're saying, it's the organization that owns the Oracle database saying, Hey, we have our system. It processes, it works, you know, go away. >> Yeah. Well, you know, hybrid tables I think, is a great sort of next step in Snowflake's evolution. I think it's, in my opinion, I, think it's a game changer, but yeah. I mean, they can still exist. You could do hybrid tables right on Snowflake, or you could, you know, you could kind of coexist as well. >> Yeah. But, do you have a thought on this? >> Yeah, I do. I mean, we're always going to live in a time where you've got data distributed in throughout the organization and around the globe. And that could be even if you're all in on Snowflake, you could have data in Snowflake here, you could have data in Snowflake in EMEA and Europe somewhere. It could be anywhere. By the same token you might be using. Every organization is using on-premises systems. They have data, they naturally have data everywhere. And so, you know, this one solution to this is really centralizing, as I mentioned, not just governance, but also metadata about all of the data in your organization so that you can enable people to search and find and discover trustworthy data no matter where it is in your organization. >> Yeah. That's a great point. I mean, if you have the data about the data, then you can, you can treat these independent nodes. That's just that. Right? And maybe there's some advantages of putting it all in the Snowflake cloud, but to your point, organizationally, that's just not feasible. The whole, unfortunately, sorry, Snowflake, all the world's data is not going to go into Snowflake, but they play a key role in accelerating, what I'm hearing, your vision of data mesh. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think going forward in the future, we have to start thinking about data platforms as just one place where you sort of dump all the data. That's where the mesh concept comes in. It is going to be a mesh. It's going to be distributed and organizations have to be okay with that. And they have to embrace the tools. I mean, you know, Facebook developed a tool called Presto many years ago that that helps them solve exactly the same problem. So I think the technology is there. I think the organizational mindset needs to evolve. >> Yeah. Definitely. >> Culture. Culture is one of the hardest things to change. >> Exactly. >> Guys, this was a masterclass in data mesh, I think. Thank you so much for coming on talking. >> We appreciate it. Thank you so much. >> Of course. What Elation is doing with Snowflake and with Warner Brothers Discovery, Keep that content coming. I got a lot of stuff I got to catch up on watching. >> Sounds good. Thank you for having us. >> Thanks guys. >> Thanks, you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Snowflake Summit '22. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 live from Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, my cohost Dave Vellante, we've been here the last day and a half unpacking a lot of news, a lot of announcements, talking with customers and partners, and we have another great session coming for you next. We've got a customer and a partner talking tech and data mash. Please welcome Mitesh Shah, VP in market strategy at Elation. >> Great to be here. >> and Ash Naseer great, to have you, senior director of data engineering at Warner Brothers Discovery. Welcome guys. >> Thank you for having me. >> It's great to be back in person and to be able to really get to see and feel and touch this technology, isn't it? >> Yeah, it is. I mean two years or so. Yeah. Great to feel the energy in the conference center. >> Yeah. >> Snowflake was virtual, I think for two years and now it's great to kind of see the excitement firsthand. So it's wonderful. >> Th excitement, but also the boom and the number of customers and partners and people attending. They were saying the first, or the summit in 2019 had about 1900 attendees. And this is around 10,000. So a huge jump in a short time period. Talk a little bit about the Elation-Snowflake partnership and probably some of the acceleration that you guys have been experiencing as a Snowflake partner. >> Yeah. As a snowflake partner. I mean, Snowflake is an investor of us in Elation early last year, and we've been a partner for, for longer than that. And good news. We have been awarded Snowflake partner of the year for data governance, just earlier this week. And that's in fact, our second year in a row for winning that award. So, great news on that front as well. >> Repeat, congratulations. >> Repeat. Absolutely. And we're going to hope to make it a three-peat as well. And we've also been awarded industry competency badges in five different industries, those being financial services, healthcare, retail technology, and Median Telcom. >> Excellent. Okay. Going to right get into it. Data mesh. You guys actually have a data mesh and you've presented at the conference. So, take us back to the beginning. Why did you decide that you needed to implement something like data mesh? What was the impetus? >> Yeah. So when people think of Warner brothers, you always think of like the movie studio, but we're more than that, right? I mean, you think of HBO, you think of TNT, you think of CNN, we have 30 plus brands in our portfolio and each have their own needs. So the idea of a data mesh really helps us because what we can do is we can federate access across the company so that, you know, CNN can work at their own pace. You know, when there's election season, they can ingest their own data and they don't have to, you know, bump up against as an example, HBO, if Game of Thrones is going on. >> So, okay. So the, the impetus was to serve those lines of business better. Actually, given that you've got these different brands, it was probably easier than most companies. Cause if you're, let's say you're a big financial services company, and now you have to decide who owns what. CNN owns its own data products, HBO. Now, do they decide within those different brands, how to distribute even further? Or is it really, how deep have you gone in that decentralization? >> That's a great question. It's a very close partnership, because there are a number of data sets, which are used by all the brands, right? You think about people browsing websites, right? You know, CNN has a website, Warner brothers has a website. So for us to ingest that data for each of the brands to ingest that data separately, that means five different ways of doing things and you know, a big environment, right? So that is where our team comes into play. We ingest a lot of the common data sets, but like I said, any unique data sets, data sets regarding theatrical as an example, you know, Warner brothers does it themselves, you know, for streaming, HBO Max, does it themselves. So we kind of operate in partnership. >> So do you have a centralized data team and also decentralized data teams, right? >> That's right. >> So I love this conversation because that was heresy 10 years ago, five years ago, even, cause that's inefficient. But you've, I presume you've found that it's actually more productive in terms of the business output, explain that dynamic. >> You know, you bring up such a good point. So I, you know, I consider myself as one of the dinosaurs who started like 20 plus years ago in this industry. And back then, we were all taught to think of the data warehouse as like a monolithic thing. And the reason for that is the technology wasn't there. The technology didn't catch up. Now, 20 years later, the technology is way ahead, right? But like, our mindset's still the same because we think of data warehouses and data platforms still as a monolithic thing. But if you really sort of remove that sort of mental barrier, if you will, and if you start thinking about, well, how do I sort of, you know, federate everything and make sure that you let folks who are building, or are closest to the customer or are building their products, let them own that data and have a partnership. The results have been amazing. And if we were only sort of doing it as a centralized team, we would not be able to do a 10th of what we do today. So it's that massive scale in, in our company as well. >> And I should have clarified, when we talk about data mesh are we talking about the implementing in practice, the octagon sort of framework, or is this sort of your own sort of terminology? >> Well, so the interesting part is four years ago, we didn't have- >> It didn't exist. >> Yeah. It didn't exist. And, and so we, our principle was very simple, right? When we started out, we said, we want to make sure that our brands are able to operate independently with some oversight and guidance from our technology teams, right? That's what we set out to do. We did that with Snowflake by design because Snowflake allows us to, you know, separate those, those brands into different accounts. So that was done by design. And then the, the magic, I think, is the Snowflake data sharing where, which allows us to sort of bring data in here once, and then share it with whoever needs it. So think about HBO Max. On HBO Max, You not only have HBO Max content, but content from CNN, from Cartoon Network, from Warner Brothers, right? All the movies, right? So to see how The Batman movie did in theaters and then on streaming, you don't need, you know, Warner brothers doesn't need to ingest the same streaming data. HBO Max does it. HBO Max shares it with Warner brothers, you know, store once, share many times, and everyone works at their own pace. >> So they're building data products. Those data products are discoverable APIs, I presume, or I guess maybe just, I guess the Snowflake cloud, but very importantly, they're governed. And that's correct, where Elation comes in? >> That's precisely where Elation comes in, is where sort of this central flexible foundation for data governance. You know, you mentioned data mesh. I think what's interesting is that it's really an answer to the bottlenecks created by centralized IT, right? There's this notion of decentralizing that the data engineers and making the data domain owners, the people that know the data the best, have them be in control of publishing the data to the data consumers. There are other popular concepts actually happening right now, as we speak, around modern data stack. Around data fabric that are also in many ways underpinned by this notion of decentralization, right? These are concepts that are underpinned by decentralization and as the pendulum swings, sort of between decentralization and centralization, as we go back and forth in the world of IT and data, there are certain constants that need to be centralized over time. And one of those I believe is very much a centralized platform for data governance. And that's certainly, I think where we come in. Would love to hear more about how you use Elation. >> Yeah. So, I mean, elation helps us sort of, as you guys say, sort of, map, the treasure map of the data, right? So for consumers to find where their data is, that's where Elation helps us. It helps us with the data cataloging, you know, storing all the metadata and, you know, users can go in, they can sort of find, you know, the data that they need and they can also find how others are using data. So it's, there's a little bit of a crowdsourcing aspect that Elation helps us to do whereby you know, you can see, okay, my peer in the other group, well, that's how they use this piece of data. So I'm not going to spend hours trying to figure this out. You're going to use the query that they use. So yeah. >> So you have a master catalog, I presume. And then each of the brands has their own sub catalogs, is that correct? >> Well, for the most part, we have that master catalog and then the brands sort of use it, you know, separately themselves. The key here is all that catalog, that catalog isn't maintained by a centralized group as well, right? It's again, maintained by the individual teams and not only in the individual teams, but the folks that are responsible for the data, right? So I talked about the concept of crowdsourcing, whoever sort of puts the data in, has to make sure that they update the catalog and make sure that the definitions are there and everything sort of in line. >> So HBO, CNN, and each have their own, sort of access to their catalog, but they feed into the master catalog. Is that the right way to think about it? >> Yeah. >> Okay. And they have their own virtual data warehouses, right? They have ownership over that? They can spin 'em up, spin 'em down as they see fit? Right? And they're governed. >> They're governed. And what's interesting is it's not just governed, right? Governance is a, is a big word. It's a bit nebulous, but what's really being enabled here is this notion of self-service as well, right? There's two big sort of rockets that need to happen at the same time in any given organization. There's this notion that you want to put trustworthy data in the hands of data consumers, while at the same time mitigating risk. And that's precisely what Elation does. >> So I want to clarify this for the audience. So there's four principles of database. This came after you guys did it. And I wonder how it aligns. Domain ownership, give data, as you were saying to the, to the domain owners who have context, data as product, you guys are building data products, and that creates two problems. How do you give people self-service infrastructure and how do you automate governance? So the first two, great. But then it creates these other problems. Does that align with your philosophy? Where's alignment? What's different? >> Yeah. Data products is exactly where we're going. And that sort of, that domain based design, that's really key as well. In our business, you think about who the customer is, as an example, right? Depending on who you ask, it's going to be, the answer might be different, you know, to the movie business, it's probably going to be the person who watches a movie in a theater. To the streaming business, to HBO Max, it's the streamer, right? To others, someone watching live CNN on their TV, right? There's yet another group. Think about all the franchising we do. So you see Batman action figures and T-shirts, and Warner brothers branded stuff in stores, that's yet another business unit. But at the end of the day, it's not a different person, it's you and me, right? We do all these things. So the domain concept, make sure that you ingest data and you bring data relevant to the context, however, not sort of making it so stringent where it cannot integrate, and then you integrate it at a higher level to create that 360. >> And it's discoverable. So the point is, I don't have to go tap Ash on the shoulder, say, how do I get this data? Is it governed? Do I have access to it? Give me the rules of it. Just, I go grab it, right? And the system computationally automates whether or not I have access to it. And it's, as you say, self-service. >> In this case, exactly right. It enables people to just search for data and know that when they find the data, whether it's trustworthy or not, through trust flags, and the like, it's doing both of those things at the same time. >> How is it an enabler of solving some of the big challenges that the media and entertainment industry is going through? We've seen so much change the last couple of years. The rising consumer expectations aren't going to go back down. They're only going to come up. We want you to serve us up content that's relevant, that's personalized, that makes sense. I'd love to understand from your perspective, Mitesh, from an industry challenges perspective, how does this technology help customers like Warner Brothers Discovery, meet business customers, where they are and reduce the volume on those challenges? >> It's a great question. And as I mentioned earlier, we had five industry competency badges that were awarded to us by Snowflake. And one of those four, Median Telcom. And the reason for that is we're helping media companies understand their audiences better, and ultimately serve up better experiences for their audiences. But we've got Ash right here that can tell us how that's happening in practice. >> Yeah, tell us. >> So I'll share a story. I always like to tell stories, right? Once once upon a time before we had Elation in place, it was like, who you knew was how you got access to the data. So if I knew you and I knew you had access to a certain kind of data and your access to the right kind of data was based on the network you had at the company- >> I had to trust you. >> Yeah. >> I might not want to give up my data. >> That's it. And so that's where Elation sort of helps us democratize it, but, you know, puts the governance and controls, right? There are certain sensitive things as well, such as viewership, such as subscriber accounts, which are very important. So making sure that the right people have access to it, that's the other problem that Elation helps us solve. >> That's precisely part of our integration with Snowflake in particular, being able to define and manage policies within Elation. Saying, you know, certain people should have access to certain rows, doing column level masking. And having those policies actually enforced at the Snowflake data layer is precisely part of our value product. >> And that's automated. >> And all that's automated. Exactly. >> Right. So I don't have to think about it. I don't have to go through the tap on their shoulder. What has been the impact, Ash, on data quality as you've pushed it down into the domains? >> That's a great question. So it has definitely improved, but data quality is a very interesting subject, because back to my example of, you know, when we started doing things, we, you know, the centralized IT team always said, well, it has to be like this, Right? And if it doesn't fit in this, then it's bad quality. Well, sometimes context changes. Businesses change, right? You have to be able to react to it quickly. So making sure that a lot of that quality is managed at the decentralized level, at the place where you have that business context, that ensures you have the most up to date quality. We're talking about media industry changing so quickly. I mean, would we have thought three years ago that people would watch a lot of these major movies on streaming services? But here's the reality, right? You have to react and, you know, having it at that level just helps you react faster. >> So data, if I play that back, data quality is not a static framework. It's flexible based on the business context and the business owners can make those adjustments, cause they own the data. >> That's it. That's exactly it. >> That's awesome. Wow. That's amazing progress that you guys have made. >> In quality, if I could just add, it also just changes depending on where you are in your data pipeline stage, right? Data, quality data observability, this is a very fast evolving space at the moment, and if I look to my left right now, I bet you I can probably see a half-dozen quality observability vendors right now. And so given that and given the fact that Elation still is sort of a central hub to find trustworthy data, we've actually announced an open data quality initiative, allowing for best-of-breed data quality vendors to integrate with the platform. So whoever they are, whatever tool folks want to use, they can use that particular tool of choice. >> And this all runs in the cloud, or is it a hybrid sort of? >> Everything is in the cloud. We're all in the cloud. And you know, again, helps us go faster. >> Let me ask you a question. I could go on forever in this topic. One of the concepts that was put forth is whether it's a Snowflake data warehouse or a data bricks, data lake, or an Oracle data warehouse, they should all be inclusive. They should just be a node on the mesh. Like, wow, that sounds good. But I haven't seen it yet. Right? I'm guessing that Snowflake and Elation enable all the self-serve, all this automated governance, and that including those other items, it's got to be a one-off at this point in time. Do you ever see you expanding that scope or is it better off to just kind of leave it into the, the Snowflake data cloud? >> It's a good question. You know, I feel like where we're at today, especially in terms of sort of technology giving us so many options, I don't think there's a one size fits all. Right? Even though we are very heavily invested in Snowflake and we use Snowflake consistently across the organization, but you could, theoretically, could have an architecture that blends those two, right? Have different types of data platforms like a teradata or an Oracle and sort of bring it all together today. We have the technology, you know, that and all sorts of things that can make sure that you query on different databases. So I don't think the technology is the problem, I think it's the organizational mindset. I think that that's what gets in the way. >> Oh, interesting. So I was going to ask you, will hybrid tables help you solve that problem? And, maybe not, what you're saying, it's the organization that owns the Oracle database saying, Hey, we have our system. It processes, it works, you know, go away. >> Yeah. Well, you know, hybrid tables I think, is a great sort of next step in Snowflake's evolution. I think it's, in my opinion, I, think it's a game changer, but yeah. I mean, they can still exist. You could do hybrid tables right on Snowflake, or you could, you know, you could kind of coexist as well. >> Yeah. But, do you have a thought on this? >> Yeah, I do. I mean, we're always going to live in a time where you've got data distributed in throughout the organization and around the globe. And that could be even if you're all in on Snowflake, you could have data in Snowflake here, you could have data in Snowflake in EMEA and Europe somewhere. It could be anywhere. By the same token you might be using. Every organization is using on-premises systems. They have data, they naturally have data everywhere. And so, you know, this one solution to this is really centralizing, as I mentioned, not just governance, but also metadata about all of the data in your organization so that you can enable people to search and find and discover trustworthy data no matter where it is in your organization. >> Yeah. That's a great point. I mean, if you have the data about the data, then you can, you can treat these independent nodes. That's just that. Right? And maybe there's some advantages of putting it all in the Snowflake cloud, but to your point, organizationally, that's just not feasible. The whole, unfortunately, sorry, Snowflake, all the world's data is not going to go into Snowflake, but they play a key role in accelerating, what I'm hearing, your vision of data mesh. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think going forward in the future, we have to start thinking about data platforms as just one place where you sort of dump all the data. That's where the mesh concept comes in. It is going to be a mesh. It's going to be distributed and organizations have to be okay with that. And they have to embrace the tools. I mean, you know, Facebook developed a tool called Presto many years ago that that helps them solve exactly the same problem. So I think the technology is there. I think the organizational mindset needs to evolve. >> Yeah. Definitely. >> Culture. Culture is one of the hardest things to change. >> Exactly. >> Guys, this was a masterclass in data mesh, I think. Thank you so much for coming on talking. >> We appreciate it. Thank you so much. >> Of course. What Elation is doing with Snowflake and with Warner Brothers Discovery, Keep that content coming. I got a lot of stuff I got to catch up on watching. >> Sounds good. Thank you for having us. >> Thanks guys. >> Thanks, you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Snowflake Summit '22. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and Alkira. I looked at many a company and Alkira seemed the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and now Alkira. I looked at many of companies and I'm curious in the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's fourth year of coverage at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, we're here in San Diego, it's 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, my host for this afternoon is Justin Warren, and happy to welcome two guests from the newly minted platinum member of the CNCF, NetApp, sitting to my right is Matt Baldwin, who is the director of cloud native and Kubernetes engineering, and sitting to his right is Rob Esker, who does product and strategy for Kubernetes, and is also a forward member on the CNCF, thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so Matt, maybe start with you, NetApp, companies that know, I've got plenty of history with NetApp there, what I've been hearing from NetApp for the last few years is, the core of NetApp has always been software, and it is a multicloud world. I've been hearing this message since before the cloud native and Kubernetes piece was going. Of course there's been some acquisitions, and NetApp continuing to go through its transformations, if you will. So help us understand NetApp's positioning in this ecosystem. >> In Kubernetes? >> Yes. >> Okay, so, what we're doing is, we're building a product that allows you to manage cloud-native workloads on top of Kubernetes, so we've solved the infrastructure problem, and that's kind of the old problem we're bored to death talking about that problem, but what we try to do is try to provide a single pane of glass to manage on-premise workloads and off-premise workloads, and so that's what we're trying to do, we're trying to say, it's now more about the app taxonomy in Kubernetes, and then what type of tooling do you build to manage that application in Kubernetes, and so that's what we're building right now, that's where we're headed with the hybrid multicloud. >> There's a piece of it, though, that does draw from the historical strengths of NetApp, of course. So we're building, we are essentially already in market a capability that allows you to deploy Kubernetes, in an agnostic way, using pure open unmodified Kubernetes, on all of the major public clouds, but also on-prem. But over time, and some of this is already evident, you'll see it married to the storage and data management capabilities that we draw from the historical NetApp, and that we're starting to deploy into those public clouds. >> With the idea that you should be able to take a project, so a project being in a namespace, namespace having an application in it, so you have multiple deployments, I should be able to protect that namespace, or that project, I should be able to move that, and that data goes with it, so that we're very data-aware, that's what we're trying to do with our software is, make it very data-aware and have that align with apps inside of Kubernetes. >> Yeah, so Rob, maybe step back for a second, one of the things we've heard a few times at this show before, and it was talked about in the keynote this morning, is that it is project over company when it comes to the CNCF. Project over company, so it's about the ecosystem, the CNCF tries not to be opinionated, so it's okay for multiple projects to fit in a space. NetApp moving up to a platinum sponsor level, participated here, NetApp's got lots of histories in participating and driving standards, helping move where the industry's going, where does NetApp see its position in participating in the foundation and participating in this ecosystem? >> Yeah, so great question, and actually, I love it, it's one of my favorite topics, so, I think the way we look at it is, oftentimes projects, to the extent they become ubiquitous, define a standard, a defacto standard, so not necessarily ratified by some standards body, and so we're very interested in making sure that in the scenario where you want to employ this standard, from a technology integration perspective, our capabilities can operate as an implementation behind the standard. So you get the distinguishing qualities of our capabilities, our products and our services, vis-a-vis, or in the context of the standard, but we're not trying to take you down a walled garden path in a proprietary journey, if you will. We would rather compel you to work with us on the basis of the value, not necessarily operating off a proprietary set of interfaces. So Kubernetes, broadly perceive it as a defacto standard at this point, there's still some work to be done on rounding out the edges, a lot of it underway this week, it's definitely the case that there's an appeal to making this more offerable by, pardon the expression, mere mortals, and we think we can offer some help in that respect as well. >> Yeah, where is its usability? I mean, that's the reason I started stacked on cloud, was that there was a usability problem with Kubernetes. I had a usability problem with Kubernetes. That's what we're trying, that's how I'm looking at the landscape, and I look at all the projects inside of the CNCF, and I look at my role is, our role is to, how do we tie these together, how do we make these so they're very very usable to the users, and how we're engaging with the community is to try to align this, basically pure upstream projects, and create a usability layer on top of that. But we're not going to, we don't want to ever say we're going to fork any of these projects, but we're going to contribute back into these projects. >> So that's one concern that I have heard from some customers, which speaking of which, some of them yesterday, one of the concerns they had was that, when you add that manageability onto the base Kubernetes layer, that often, various vendors become rather opinionated about which way we think this is a good way to do that, and when you're trying to maintain that compatibility across the ecosystem, so some customers say, "Well I actually don't want to have to be too closely welded "to any one vendor, 'cause part of the benefit "of Kubernetes is I can move my workloads around." So how do you navigate what is the right level of opinion to have, and which part should actually just be part of a common standard? >> Think it needs to be along the lines of best practices, is how we do it. So, let's take network policy, for example, applying a sane, default network policy to every namespace. Defining a sane, default pod security policy, building a cluster in a best practices fashion, with security turned on, hardening done, where you would've done this already as a user, so we're not locking you in in any way there. So that's, we're not trying, I'm not trying to curate any type of opinion of the product, what we're trying to do is harmonize your experience across all this ecosystem, so that you don't ever have to think about, "I'm building a cluster on top of Amazon, "so I got to worry about how do I manage this on Amazon." I don't want you to have to think about those providers anymore. And then on top of those, on top of that infrastructure, I want to have a way that you're thinking about managing the applications on those environments in the exact same way, so I'm scaling, or I'm protecting an application on-premise, in the identical way I'm doing it in the cloud. >> So if it's the same everywhere, what's the value that you're providing that means that I should choose your option than something else? >> So, we do have, this is where we have controllers that live inside of the clusters, that manage this stuff for the users. So, you could rebuild what we're doing, but you would have to roll it all by hand. But you could, we don't stand in the way of your operations either, so if we go down, you don't go down, type of idea. But we do have controllers, we're using CRDs, and so our app management technology, our controllers are just watching for a workload to come into the environment, and then we show that in the interface, but you can just walk away as well, if you wanted to. >> There's also a constellation of other services that we're building around, this experience, that do draw, again, from some of the storage and data management capabilities, so staple sets, your traditional workloads that want to interact with or transact data against a block or a shared file system. We're providing capabilities for sophisticated qualities of persistence that can exist in all of those same public clouds, but moreover, over time, we're going to be, and on-premise as well, we're going to be able to actually move, migrate, place, cache, per policy, your persistent data, with your workloads, as you move, migrate, scale, burst, whatever the model is, as you move across and between clouds. >> How far down that pathway do you think we are, 'cause one criticism of Kubernetes is that a lot of the tooling that we're used to from more traditional ways of operating this kind of infrastructure, isn't really there yet, hence the question about, we actually need to make this easier to use. How far down that pathway are we? >> I'd argue that the tooling that I've built has already solved some of those problems. So I think we're pretty far down the path. Now, what we haven't done is open sourced all of my tooling, right, to make it easier on everybody else. >> Rob, NetApp's got strong partnerships across the cloud platforms, I had a chance to interview George at the Google Cloud event, I know you partner of the year, I believe, on some of these stuff, help us understand how some of the things Matt and the team are building interact with the public clouds, you look at Anthos, and Azure Arc, and of course Amazon has many different ways you can do your container and management piece there. Talk a little bit about that relationship and how, both with those partners and then across those partners, work. >> Yeah, it's, how much time do we have, so there's certainly a lot of facets to that, but drawing from the Google experience, we just announced the general availability of Cloud Volumes ONTAP, so the ability to stand up and manage your own ONTAP instance in Google's cloud. Likewise, we announced the general availability of the Cloud Volume service, which gives you the managed push button as a service experience of shared file system on demand, at Google, I believe it was either today or yesterday, in London, I guess maybe I'll blame that on the time zone conversion, not knowing what day it was, but the point is, that's now generally available. Some of those capabilities are going to be able to be connected to our ability from MKS, to deploy a on-demand Kubernetes cluster, and deploy applications from a marketplace experience, in a common way, not just with Google but Azure, with Amazon, and so frankly the story does differ a little bit from one cloud to the next, but the endeavor is to provide common capabilities across all of them. It's also the case that we do have people that are very opinionated about, I want to live only in the Google or the Microsoft or the Amazon ecosystem, we're trying to deliver a rich experience for those folks as well, even if you don't value the agnostic multicloud experience. >> Yeah, and Matt, I'm sure you have a viewpoint on this, but it's that skillset that's really challenging. I was at the Microsoft show, and you've got people, it's not just about .NET, they're embracing and open to all of these environments, but people tend to have the environments that they're used to, and for multicloud to be a reality, it needs to be a little bit easier for me to go between them, but it's still, we're making progress but there's work to do. >> Matt: Yeah, what's the question? >> Yeah, so, I know you're building tools and everything, but what more do we need to do, where are some of the areas that you're hopeful for, but where are the areas that we need to go further? >> So for me it's coming down to the data side. I need to be able to say that, when I turn on data services, inside of Kubernetes, I need to be able to have that workload go anywhere, because as a developer, I'm running a production, I'm running an Amazon, but maybe I'm doing tests locally on my bare metal environments, right, I want to be able to maybe sink down some of my data that I'm working with in production down to my test environment. That stuff's missing, there's no one doing that right now, and that's where we're headed, that's the path, that's where we're headed. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, actually, 'cause one of the things that I feel like I heard a little bit last year but it is highlighted more this year, is we're talking a little bit more to the application developers because, Kubernetes is a piece of the infrastructure, but it's about-- >> It's the kernel. >> Yeah, it's the kernel there, so, how do we make sure we're spanning between what the app developer needs and still making sure that infrastructure is taken care of, because storage and networking are still hard. >> It is, yeah, I mean I'm approaching, I'm thinking more along the lines of, I'm trying to think more about app developers, personally, than infrastructure at this point. For me, so I can give you a cluster in three minutes, right, so I don't really have to worry about that problem. We also put Istio on top of the clusters, so it's like we're trying to create this whole narrative that you can manage that environment on day one, day two type operations. But, and that's for an IT manager, right, so inside of our product, how I'm addressing this is you have personas, and so you have this concept, you have an IT manager, they can do these things, they can set limits, but for the developer, who's building the applications or the services and pushing those up into the environment, they need to have a sense of freedom, and so on that side of the house, I'm trying not to break them out of their tooling, so part of our product ties into Git, so we have cd, so you just do a git push, git commit to a branch, and we can target multiple clusters. But at no point did the developer actually draft DAML, or anything, we basically create the container for you, create the deployment, bring it online, and I feel like there's these lines, and the IT guys need to be able to say, "I need to create the guardrails for the devs, "but I don't want to make it seem like "I'm creating guardrails for the devs, "'cause the devs don't like that." So that's how I'm balancing it. >> Okay, 'cause that has always been the tension, in that there's a lot of talk about DevOps, but you go and talk to application developers, and they don't want to have anything to do with infrastructure, they just want to program to an API and get things done, they would like this infrastructure to be seamless. >> Yeah, and what we do, also what I'm giving them is service dashboards, because as a developer, you know, because now you're in charge of your QA, you're writing your tests, you're pushing it through CI, it's going to CD. You own your service and production, right? And so we're delivering dashboards as well for services that the developers are running, so they can dig in and say, "Oh, here's an issue," or "Here's where the issue's probably going to be at, "I'm going to go fix this." And we're trying to create that type of scenario for a developer, and for an IT manager. >> Slightly different angle on it, if I'm understanding the question correctly, part of the complexity of infrastructure is something we're also trying to provide a deterministic sort of easy button capability for, perhaps you're familiar with NetApp's Nason ATI product, which we kind of expand that as hybrid cloud infrastructure. If the intention is to make it a simple, private cloud capability, and indeed, our NetApp Kubernetes service operates directly off of it, it's a big part of actually how we deliver cloud services from it. So the point is that, if you're that application developer, if you want the effective NKS on-prem, the endeavor with our NetApp ATI product is to give you that sort of easy button experience, because you didn't really want to be a storage admin or a network admin, you didn't want to get into the, be mired in the details of infra, so that's obviously work in progress, but we think we're definitely headed down the right direction. >> It does seem that a lot of enterprises want to have the cloudlike experience, but they want to be able to bring it home, we're seeing that a lot more. >> Yeah, so this turnkey on-premise, turnkey cloud on-premise, and, with NKS we can, the same auto-scaling, so take the dynamic nature of Kubernetes, so I have a base cluster size of say four worker nodes, right, but my workload's going to maybe need to have more nodes, so my auto-scaler's going to increase the size of my cluster and decrease the size, right? Pretty much everybody only can do that in the public cloud. I can do that in public cloud and on-premise, now. And so that's what we're trying to deliver, and that's pretty cool stuff, I think. >> Well there's a lot of advantages to enterprises operating in that way, because people out here, I can go and buy them or hire them, and say "Hey, we need you to operate this gear," and you've already done it elsewhere, you can do it in cloud, you can do it on-site, I can now run my operations the same across, no matter where my applications live, which saves me a lot of money on training costs, on development costs, and generally it makes for a much more smooth and seamless experience. >> So Rob, if you could, just love your takeaway on NetApp's participation here at the event, and what you want people to take away from the show this year. >> So it's certainly the case that we're doing a lot of great work, we like people to become aware of it. NetApp of course is not, I think we talked about this in perhaps other contexts, not strictly a storage and data management company only. We do draw from the strengths of that as we're providing full stack capabilities, in a way that are interconnected with public cloud, things like our NetApp Kubernetes service as really the foundational glue in many ways, to how we deliver the application runtime, but over time we'll build a constellation of data-centric capabilities around that as well. >> Matt, I would just love to get your viewpoint as someone that built a company in this ecosystem, there's so many startups here, give us kind of that founder viewpoint of being in this sort of ecosystem. >> Of the ecosystem... So this is, I came into the ecosystem at the beginning. I would have to say that it does feel different at this point, I'm going to speak as Matt, not as NetApp. And so my thinking has always been it feels a lot like, you're a big fan of that rock band, right, and you go to a local club, and we all get to know each other at that local club, and there's maybe 500 of us or 1000 of us, and then that band gets signed to Warner Brothers, and goes to the top, and now there's 20,000 people or 12,000 people. That's how it feels to me right now. I think, but what I like about it is that, it just shows the power of the community is now at a point where it's drawing in cities now, not just a small collection of a tribe of people. And I think that's a very powerful thing with this community, and like all the, what are they called, the Kubernetes Summits that they're doing, we didn't have any of those back when we first got going, I mean it was tough to fill the room, and now we can fill the room, and it's amazing, and what I like seeing is people moving past the problem of Kubernetes itself, and moving into what other problems can I solve on top of Kubernetes, so you're starting to see all these really exciting startups doing really neat things, and I really like, like this vendor hall I really like, 'cause you get to see all the new guys, but there's a lot of neat stuff going on, and I'm excited to see where the community goes in the next five years, but it's, we've gone from zero to 60 insanely fast, 'cause you guys were at the original KubeCon, I think, as well. >> It's our fourth year doing theCUBE at this show, but absolutely, we've watched it since the early days. I'm not supposed to mention OpenStack at this show, but we remember talking to JJ and some of the early people there, and we interviewed Craig McLuckie back in his Google days, and the like, so we've been fortunate to be on here since really day zero here, and definitely great energy, congrats so much on the progress, I really appreciate the updates on everything going, as you said, we've reached a certain state, and adding more value on top of this whole environment. >> Yeah, we're in junior high now, right, and we were in grade school for a few years. >> All right, well Matt and Rob, thank you so much for the update, hopefully not an awkward dance tonight for the junior people. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>>live from San Diego, California It's the Q covering Koopa and Cloud Native Cot brought to you by Red Cloud. Native Computing Pounding and its ecosystem >>Welcome back. This is the cubes. Fourth year of coverage at Q. Khan Cloud, Native Con. We're here in San Diego. It's 2019. I'm stewed. Minutemen, my host for this afternoon is Justin Warren and happy to welcome to guests from the newly minted platinum member of the CNC F Net Up. Sitting to my right is that Baldwin, who is the director of Cloud Native and Communities Engineering and sitting to his right is Rob Bhaskar, who's the product product strategy for Kubernetes. And it's also a board member on the CME CF, thank you both for joining us. Thank you. All right, s O, you know, maybe start with you. You know, uh, you know, companies that No, I've got plenty of history with net up there. What I've been hearing from that up last few years is you know, the Corvette has always been software, and it is a multi cloud world. I've been hearing this message before. Kind of the cloud native Trinity's piece was going, Of course, there's been some acquisitions and met up continuing to go through its transformations if you will s o help us understand kind of net ops positioning in this ecosystem >>in communities. Yes. Okay, so what we're doing is we're building a product that large manage cloud native workloads on top of community. So we've solved the infrastructure problem. And that's kind of the old problem. We're bored to death. Talking about that problem, but we try to do is try to provide a single painting class to manage on premise. Workloads and off permits were close. So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to say it's now more about the AP taxonomy in communities. And then what type of tooling do you build to manage that that application and communities and says what we're building right now? That's where we're headed with hybrid. >>There's a piece of it, though, that does draw from the historical strength of map, Of course. So we're building way have, essentially already in marketing capability that allows you to deploy communities an agnostic way, using pure, open unmodified kubernetes on all of the major public clouds, but also on trump. But over time and some of this is already evident. You'll see it married to the storage and data management capabilities that we draw from the historical NetApp and that we're starting to deploy into those public clouds >>with the idea that you should be able to take a project. So project being the name space, new space, having a certain application in it. So you have multiple deployments. I should be able to protect that name space or that project. I feel to move that and the data goes with it. So they were very data where that's what we're trying to do with our. Our software is, you know, make it very data. Where have that aligned with APS inside of communities, >>So maybe step back for a second. What? One of the one of things we've heard a few times at this show before and was talking about the keynote this morning is it is project over company when it comes to the C N C F Project Project over company. So it's about the ecosystem. The C in C F tries not to be opinionated, so it's okay for multiple projects to fitness face not moving up to a platinum a sponsor level. You know, participant here, Ned. It's got lots of history's in participating and driving standards, helping move where the industry's going. Where doesn't it up? See its position in, you know, the participating in the foundation and participating in this ecosystem? >>Yeah, So great question, actually. Love it. It's for my favorite topic. So I think the way we look at it is oftentimes, project to the extent they become ubiquitous, define a standard a de facto standard, so not necessarily ratified by some standards body. And so we're very interested in making sure that in a scenario where you would employ the standard from a technology integration perspective, our capabilities can can operate as an implementation behind the standard. So you get the distinguishing qualities of our capabilities. Our products in our service is Visa VI or in the context of the standard. We're not trying to take you down a walled garden path in a proprietary, uh, journey, if you will weigh, would rather actually compel you to work with us on the basis of the value, not necessarily operating off a proprietary set of interface. Kubernetes broadly perceive it as a defacto standard at this point, there's still some work to be done on running out the edges a lot of underway this week. It's definitely the case that there's a new appeal to making this more off herbal by pardon the expression mere mortals way. Think we can offer Cem, Cem, Cem help in that respect as well? >>Yeah, for us, its usability, right? I mean, that's the reason I started stacking. Cloud was that there was usability problem with kubernetes. I had a usability problem. That's what we're trying. That's how I'm looking at the landscape. And I look at kind of all the projects inside the C N c f. And I look at my role is our role is to How do we tie these together? How do we make these? So they're very, very usable to the users. How were engaging with the community is to try to like a line like this, basically pure upstream projects, and create a usability layer on top of that. But we're not gonna we don't want ever say we're gonna fork into these projects what we're gonna contribute back into these. >>That's one concern that I have heard from. Customers were speaking with some of them yesterday. One of the concerns I had was that when you add that manageability onto the base kubernetes layer, that often very spenders become rather opinionated about which way we think this is a good way to do that. And when you're trying to maintain that compatibility across the ecosystem. So some customers saying, Well, I actually don't want to have to be too closely welded to anyone. Vendor was part of the benefit of Kubernetes. I can move my workloads around. So how do you navigate What? What is the right level of opinion? Tohave and which part should actually just be part of a common sense >>should be along the lines of best practices is how we do it. So like, Let's take a number policy, for example, like applying a sane default network policy to every name space defying a saying default pod security policy. You know, building a cluster in the best practices fashion with security turned on hardening done where you would have done this already as a user. So we're not looking you in any way there, so that's we're not trying. I'm not trying to carry any type of opinion in the product we're trying to do is urbanize your experience across all of this ecosystem so that you don't ever have to think about time now building a cluster on top of Amazon. So I gotta worry about how do I manage this on Amazon? I don't want you to think about those providers anymore, right? And then on top of those on top of that infrastructure, I wanna have a way that you're thinking about managing the applications on those environments in the exact same way. So I'm scaling protecting an application on premise in the identical way I'm doing it in the cloud. >>So if it's the same everywhere, what's the value that you're providing? That means that I should choose your option than something else. >>So wait, do have This is where we have controllers and live inside of the clusters that manage this stuff for the user's so you could rebuild what we're doing, But you would have to roll it all by hands, but you could, you know, we don't stand in the way of your operations either. So, like if we go down, you don't go down that idea, but we do have controllers we have. We're using charities. And so, like our management technology, our controllers are just watching for workload to come into the environment. And then we show that in the interface. But you could just walk away as well if you wanted to. >>There's also a constellation of other service is that we're building around this experience, you know, they do draw again from some of the storage and management capabilities. So staple sets your traditional workloads that want to interact with or transact data against a block or a shared file system. We're providing capabilities for sophisticated qualities of persistence that can be can exist in all of those same public clouds. But moreover, over time, we're gonna be in on premises. Well, we're gonna be able to actually move migrate, place, cash her policy. Your put your persistent data with your workload as you move migrate scale burst would repatriate whatever the model is as you move across in between clouds. >>Okay, How how far down that pathway do you think we are? Because 11 criticism of proven it is is that a lot of the tooling that were used to from more traditional ways of operating this kind of infrastructure isn't really there yet. Hence into the question about we actually need to make this easy to use. How far down that pathway away? >>Why would argue that tooling that I've built has already solved some of those problems. So I think we're pretty far down. The people ride down the path. Now what we haven't done is open sourced. You know all my tools, right? To make it easier on everybody else. >>Get up, Scott. Strong partnerships across the cloud platforms. I had a chance to interview George at the Google Cloud event. New partner of the year. I believe some of the stuff help us understand how you know something about the team building. Interact with the public cloud. You look at anthems and azure Arkin. Of course, Amazon has many different ways. You can do your container and management piece there, you know, to talk a little bit of that relationship and how both with those partners and then across those partners, you know, work. >>Yeah, it's a wow. So how much time we have? So so there's certainly a lot of facets to to that, But drawing from the Google experience. We just announced the general availability of cloud volumes on top. So the ability to stand up and manage your own on top instance and Google's cloud. Likewise, we've announced the general availability of the cloud volume service, which gives you manage put fun as a service experience of shared file system on demand. Google, I believe, is either today or yesterday in London. I guess maybe I'll blame that on the time zone covers, not knowing what what day it was. But the point is that's now generally available. Some of those capabilities are going to be able to be connected to our ability from an ks to deploy, uh on demand kubernetes cluster and deploy applications from a market marketplace experience in a common way, not just with Google, but has your with Amazon. And so, you know, frankly, the story doesn't differ a little bit from one cloud to the next, but the the Endeavour is to provide common capabilities across all of them. It's also the case that we do have people that are very opinionated about I want to live only in the Google or that Microsoft of the Amazon, because we're trying to deliver a rich experience for those folks as well, even if you don't value the agnostic multi cloud expert. >>Yeah and Matt, You know, I'm sure you have a viewpoint on this, but you know, it's that skill set that that's really challenging. And I was at the Microsoft show and you've got people you know. It's not just about dot net, there's all that. They're they're embracing and opened all of these environment. But people tend to have the environment that you used to and for multi cloud to be a reality, it needs to be a little bit easier for me to go between them, but it's still we're still we're making progress. But there's work to do. Yeah, s so I just, you know, you know, I know you're building tools and everything, but what what more do we didn't need to do? What were some of the areas that you know you're hopeful for about a >>year before I need to go for the supreme? It's down. It's coming down to the data side like I need to be able to say that on when I turn on data service is inside of kubernetes. I need be able to have that work would go anywhere, right? And because it is a developer. So I have I'm running a production. I'm running an Amazon. But maybe I'm doing test locally on my bare metal environments. Right? I need I want to be able to maybe sink down some of my data. I'm working with a production down to my test environment. That stuff's missing. There's no one doing that right now, and that's where we're headed. That's the path that's where we're headed. >>Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up, actually, because one of the things that I feel like I heard a little bit last year, but it is violated more this year is we're talking a little bit more to the application to the application developer because, you know, communities is a piece of the infrastructure, But it's about the Colonel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the colonel there. So, you know, how do we make sure you know, we're standing between what the APP developer needs and still making sure that, you know, infrastructure is taken care of because storage and networking they're still hard. >>It is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm approaching. I'm thinking more along the lines of I'm trying to work about app developers personally than infrastructure This point on for me, you know, like so I have I give you a cluster in three minutes, right? So I don't really have to worry about that problem, you know, way also put Theo on top of the clusters. So it's like we're trying to create this whole narrative that you can manage that environment on day one day, two versions. But and that's for like, an I T manager, right? And society instead of our product. How I'm addressing this is you have personas and so you have this concept. You have an I T manager. They do these things that could set limits for the developer who's building the applications or the service's and pushing those up into the environment. They need to have a sense of freedom, right? And said on that side of the house, you know, I'm trying not to break them out of their tooling. So, like wait part of our product ties in to get s o. We have CD, you know? So you just get push, get commit to a branch and weaken target multiple clusters, Right? But no point to the developer, actually, drafty animal or anything. We make way basically create the container for you. Read the deployment, bring it online. And I feel like there's these lines and that I t guys need to be able to say I need to create the guard rails for the Debs. I don't want to make it seem like I'm creating guardrails for the deaths caused the deaths. Don't like that. That's how I'm balancing it. >>Okay, Because that has always been the tension and that there's a lot of talk about Dev ops, but you don't talkto application developers, and they don't wanna have anything to do with infrastructure. They just want a program to an A p I and get things done. They would like this infrastructure to be seamless. Yeah, >>and what we did, like also what I'm giving them is like service dashboards. Because as a developer, you know, because now you're in charge of your cue, eh? You're writing your tests you're pushing. If your c I is going to ct you on your service in production, right? And so we're delivering dashboards as well for service Is that the developers are running, so they dig in and say, Oh, here's an issue or here's where the issue is probably gonna be at I'm gonna go fix this. Yeah, and we're trying to create that type of like scenario for developer and for an I T manager, >>slightly different angle on it, by understanding that question correctly is part of the complexity of infrastructure is something we're also turned Friday deterministic sort of easy button capability, for perhaps you're familiar with them. That's nice. And a C I product, which we we kind of expand that as hybrid cloud infrastructure. If the intention is to make it a simple private cloud capability and indeed are not, a community service operates directly off of it. It's a big part of actually how we deliver Cloud Service is from it. The point is, is that if you're that application developer, if you want the effective and CASS on prom thing, Endeavor with are not a PhD. I product is to give you that sort of easy button extremes because you didn't really want to be a storage admin network at you didn't want to get into the be mired in the details of infra. So So you know, that's obviously work in progress. But we think we're definitely headed down the right direction >>for him. >>Yeah, it just seemed that a lot of enterprises wanna have the cloud like experience, but they want to be able to bring it home that we're seeing a lot more. Yeah. >>So this is like, this turn cheon from this turnkey cloud on premise and played with think has weaken like the same auto scaling. So take so take the dynamic nature of opportunities. Right. So I have a base cluster size of four worker notes, right? But my work, let's gonna maybe maybe need to have more notes. So my out of scale is gonna increase the size my cluster and decrease the size right Pretty much everybody only do that in the public cloud. I could do that in public and on premise now and so that's That's what we're trying to deliver. And that's nickel stuff. I think >>that there's a lot of advantages thio enterprises operating in that way because I have I people that here I can I can go and buy them, hire them and say way, need you to operate this gear and you, you've already done elsewhere. You can do it in cloud. You can do it on side. I could know run my operations the same across no matter where my applications leave, Which saves me a lot of money on training costs on development costs on generally makes for a much more smooth and seamless experience. So, Rob, if you could just love >>your takeaway on, you know, kind of net up participation here at the event and what you want people to take away off from the show this year. >>So it's certainly the case that we're doing a lot of great work. We, like people toe become aware of it. Not up, of course, is not. I think we talked about this and perhaps other context, not strictly a storage and data management company. Only way do draw from the strength of that as we're providing full stack capabilities in a way that are interconnected with public cloud things like are not a Cuban. Any service is really the foundational glue in many ways how we deliver the application run time, but over time will build a consolation of data centric capabilities around that as well. >>I would just love to get your viewpoint Is someone that you know built a company in this ecosystem. There's so many start ups here. Give us kind of that founder viewpoint of being in. They're so sort of ecosystem of the >>ecosystem. So this is how I came into the ecosystem at the beginning. I would have to say that it does feel different. Att This point, I'm gonna speak as Matt, not as now. And so my my thinking has always been It feels a lot like kind of your really your big fan of that rock bands, right? And you go to a local club way all get to know each other at that local club. There's, like maybe 500 of us or 1000 of us. And then that band gets signed a Warner Brothers and goes to the top it. Now there's 20,000 people or 12,000 people. That's how it feels to me right now, I think. But what I like about it is that just shows the power of the community is now at a point where is drawing in like cities now, not just a small collection of a tribe of people, right? And I think that's a very powerful thing with this community. And like all the where they called the kubernetes summits that they're doing way, didn't have any of those back when we first got going. I mean, it was tough to fill the room, you know, Now, now we can fill the room and it's amazing. And what I like seeing is is people moving past the problem with kubernetes itself and moving into, like, what other problems can I solve on top of kubernetes, you know? So you're starting to see that all these really exciting startups doing really need things, you know, and I really likes it like this vendor hall I really like, you know, because you get to see all the new guys. But there's a lot of stuff going on, and I'm excited to see where the community goes in the next five years. But it's we've gone from 0 to 60 insanely because you guys were at the original coupon. I think, Well, >>it's our fourth year doing the Cube at this show, but absolutely we've watched the early days, You know, I'm not supposed to mention open stack of this show, but we remember talking T o J j. And some of the early people there and wait interviewed Chris McCloskey back into Google days, right? So, yeah, we've been fortunate to be on here, really? Day zero here and definitely great energy. So much. Congrats. So much on the progress. Really appreciate the updates, Everything going. As you said, right, we've reached a certain estate and just adding more value on top of this whole >>environment. We're now like we're in, like, Junior high now. Right on were in grade school for a few years. >>All right, Matt. Rob, Thank you so much for the update. Hopefully not an awkward dance tonight for the junior people. For Justin Warren. I'm stupid and back with more coverage here from Q Khan Cloud native 2019. Diego, Thank you for watching Cute

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's The Cube, covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube, we're at E3 at the LA Convention Center, 68,000 people milling around, but we've got kind of the backdoor access here to the Warner Brothers Games booth, so we're really excited to be back in here, the inner sanctum, talking about some of the new games coming out and we got Phill Ring, he's the Executive Producer of TT Games, Phil, great to see you. >> No, thank you very much for having me. >> Absolutely, so you're in charge of this wonderful game, that we've got on the wall behind us, the Lego DC Super-Villains? >> Sure, yeah, I'm lucky enough to be one of the incredibly talented team, 'cause we're really excited about this game, Lego DC Super-Villains is something we've actually been playing around with as an idea for a while, you get to be the villains, you get to be the bad guys, so we're really excited we actually finally get to show and talk about it. >> Right, after doing what, three games of Batman, so now you get a flip over, you get to be the Riddler or the Joker? >> Yeah, this is it, so with the kind of DC universe, we did the Lego Batman titles, but DC has amazing villains, you've got Joker, you've got Harley, you've got Lex and we were like you know what? Let's play as those, let's do something really cool, let's do a story where we're focusing on the villains, because we've never done it before, we think it'll be quite fun and hopefully people are gonna really enjoy it. >> Great, so it's coming out, so give the particulars for everybody at home, who's waiting to get their order in. >> Sure, so it's available October 16th, it's actually available for pre-order now and depending where you're pre-ordering it from, there's actually a really cool Lex Luthor power-suit mini figure you can get, so it features in the game and then you can actually have that model sat on your desk, so I'm really excited, I'm gonna run off and pre-order it as soon as I can, 'cause I want that figure. >> Well, that's cool, but the other feature you talked about before we turned on the cameras, you can actually make yourself into a Lego figure, right? >> This is really cool, yeah. So when we were looking at this game, we were sat there thinking, okay, villains are really, really cool, but I wonder what it would be like if I could put myself into this world, what happens if I'm playing with Joker and with Lex, so we decided to put the Character Customizer in, so right at the very beginning of the game, Commissioner Gordon's heading to find out some information about this new character and then you customize that character and that's your character, so you make whoever you want, as crazy as you want, there's loads of kind of depth to the Customizer, you can change decors, colors, torsos, facial features, hair pieces and then that character appears throughout the story, so they walk out in a cut scene and that's really cool and then that character unlocks new powers and abilities and becomes stronger as you play through the game. >> Right, so I'm just curious on kind of the evolution of the game, again you did some earlier versions, that weren't the same game, but you know, this one is kind of built onto that, what did you discover, in terms of how people play the game? One of my favorite topics is degree of difficulty, >> Sure. >> How do you figure out the degree of difficulty, to make it difficult enough from excited to attack a challenge and conquer it, but not so difficult, where I'm just banging my head against a wall and throw my controller out the window and say, I just can't get through this thing. >> So that's something that the team do really, really well. We always look at it and go, okay, we know that these games are for a younger audience or at least to start with, so we want something that an eight-year old kid, who may have never played a Lego game before can come along, have loads of fun with this world, so we're making sure that we're kind of educating the player, we have a new tutorial system in this game, where we can show little videos to go, so you've just unlocked this cool power, this is how it works. So we can kind of educate people, but then we know that we're gonna have like either fans of Lego games, but also like DC Comic fans, like we have people kind of telling us, "Oh, I play this with my wife and things," so they want a bit more of a challenge and that's when we get to go into like the Free Play world, so once you're playing the story, you can then go explore all these locations and you find the slightly trickier puzzles, where it's like, oh, I need to figure out what I need to do here, what character do I need, what ability do I need to use? So having that kind of accessibility, so it's really accessible to get into the game, but then there's loads of depth to it, >> Right. >> so that's really cool for us and it's one of these things that we're really kind of happy with, 'cause we also find that the eight-year old kids run around doing all the hard puzzles and we struggle with them, so sometimes it swings, so. >> I was gonna say, so what are some of the things you measure to see if you're hitting that objective? Is it time in a level? Is it time being in there? I mean, what are some of the factors, that you guys are actually looking and measuring to see if you maybe have to make an adjustment, based on the actual behavior? >> So we love getting people to play the game, so we bring kids in and we'll sit there, then we see them playing it and if they're getting stuck, if there's something that's not really kind of standing out to them, if they're spending too much time in an area, not knowing what they're doing, we'll go okay, right, we need to change that, we need to signpost that differently, we need to turn round and say, how can we make it clearer to the player, so they know what they do, but also keep the rewards, so that they feel like they've achieved, that they feel like they've figured it out. >> Right. >> So that's one of the things, like if someone's getting stuck on a level and they're there for like three, four, five minutes and they don't know what to do, we don't want that experience for people, so we'll sit there and go, okay, how can we make that clearer? Is there something we can do? Is there something we can maybe flash a piece of Lego or something and sit there and go, these Lego bricks, maybe you wanna smash those up and that's also really cool, 'cause villains get to smash things up. >> Right, right. >> and go, okay, if I break that, I can make that clearer, then the player will then know what to do and they'll be able to progress. >> So it's really signaling is really the big kind of, way to help them get over that, versus completely changing that piece of the play? >> Yeah, we really do think that we can hopefully change the puzzles to be able to do that, we have had instances though, where we sit there and go, actually, no one gets this, this is too complicated, back to the drawing board and so we'll rip a puzzle out and sit there and go, actually, how do we change this, this is overly complicated, it's too confusing, let's do something different, let's do something that's really cool and it also means that we get to go, let's have a second stab at it and sometimes we get really cool results from it and some of the puzzles are even better than what we had previously, so. >> And the other piece I think is really interesting is clearly these are very well-known brands, Lego's a very well-known brand, DC is a very well-known brand, so you've got a narrative, you've got a story, you have kind of the look and feel, at the same time you want players to be able to do all kinds of things and you don't necessarily know where they're gonna go, how they're gonna interact, so how do you kind of balance the play with the narrative? >> So one of the great things about this game is from a story point of view and a narrative, we actually, it's an original creation and we worked really closely with DC and that allows us to kind of really help with the kind of pacing of the adventure, so as you're playing through and you start off on the first level, when you're breaking out of a prison, you then get dropped into the Open World Hub and we get to signpost people and say, hey, you can go over here to continue the story, but if you wanna go off and explore, you do that, go for it, go see what you can find and then we kind of have something that allows players to keep coming back, because these worlds, we know that there are massive fans of them, so if you turn round to someone and say, you can go to Gotham City, they'll know where they wanna go, like if I'm a Batman fan, I'm like, I'm going to the Iceberg Lounge, I wanna see what it is. So we give players that freedom to really explore it, but then always kind of let them be able to kind of return to the story path and that's another thing that we think is really important, because when people are playing these games, we want them to be able to make the choices of how they play the game. >> Right, great, that's interesting, so if there is a place, that they want to go to, 'cause they love Gotham City, they're big fans of Batman and it's not there, you guys hear a lot of feedback? I mean, do people come back, so that you've got to pump that into the next iteration of the game and the next update? >> Yeah, we do, we listen to what fans do and we've been doing that for years, so ever since we've been doing these DC titles, we sit there and go, what do people wanna do, what do people wanna see? One of the things that I love is that we have massive DC fans in the office, so a lot of the stuff, we'll sit there and we'll see like requests coming in on social media going, I really hope this character's there and we get to look at our character list and go, yep, he's there, who put it in? And then we go chat with them and they go, of course I'm gonna include that character, I love them and some of them are really obscure. >> Right. >> But yeah, we love listening to feedback and seeing what people expect and what they want to see from this world. >> It's really interesting balance, 'cause you get all the leverage from those known brands, those known characters, those known stories, >> Sure. >> but at the same time, as you said, you've got a lot of people, that are really into it and they're gonna hold you to a standard, >> Yeah. >> to make sure, that you're representing everything as they think it really should be. >> Yeah, very much so and this is the other thing about having fans in the office is we keep ourselves to that high standard as well, we sit there and go, it needs to be right, like I am a fan of Gorilla Grodd, he needs to do everything I want him to do, because I know this character inside and out and so when we have people, who are that passionate about the game on staff, we just wanna be able to share that with the world and so when we hear feedback, that people go, "Oh, we love it, it's exactly what I wanted," it's like we love that, it's incredible to know that we kind of feel like we've got it right, we've got these characters right. >> It's so cool though, just the integration of the Legos with all these other brands and just the, and it's not even the Lego blocks, the Lego people and how well it's been able to be integrated with all these other brands and the integration just seems to work so, so, so well. >> Yeah, no, I've been lucky enough to be with TT for over 11 years now, so being able to work on these games and see how we can do a Lego version of these stories and these worlds and these universes, I'm so privileged to be able to do that and the Lego version is different, so Lego DC Super-Villains is a world of DC, that you won't see anywhere else, because it's our take on it, >> Right. >> it's the developer and working with DC, being able to go, let's make something cool and working really closely with Lego and going, what sets are you making? Let's put those in, that's really cool, so. >> It's awesome, alright, well Phill, thanks for taking a few minutes, congratulations on the game and good luck on October 16th. >> Great, thank you very much, thank you. >> Alright, he's Phill, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube from E3 and LA Convention center. Thanks for watching. (dynamic music)

>> [Narrator] Live from Los Angeles, it's The Cube, covering E3 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're actually in the Warner Brothers games booth. This humongous booth, we're kind of in the inner sanctum here at E3 in the LA Convention Center. Lot of stuff going on with Warner Brother Games. A lot of really cool combinations of brands and games and movies. But this is a very special one, Hitman 2. We're all excited to be here and learn more about it with Jacob Mikkelsen. He's actually the game director for IO Interactive. Jacob, great to see you. >> Oh, thank you. >> So let's just get to the basics. First off, when is Hitman 2 coming out? What do people need to know, we'll get that out of the way, and then we'll get into it. >> Hitman 2 is out November 13. And if you pre-order now, you have a special pre-order bonus where you get access to a new game mode called Sniper Assassin, which is a sniper-only mission. And then for the first time in Hitman history, we also have a co-op mode where you can snipe alongside a friend, into the mission and create all sorts of havoc. It's still deeply founded in the roots of the game's DNA, where it's all about getting away with the sniping without anyone noticing that you're there. So it has a very, very strong puzzle element to it. So it's about peeling off the layers of an onion, without anyone noticing you're there. >> So you talked a little bit before we turned on the cameras about the freedom that a player gets, not like in a traditional game, where they can can choose a lot of different options of how they're gonna do the mission. So how do you guys come up with that? How is that all determined? And how do you actually still keep the game true to the mission? >> Well, the thing is that as you say, it's very much, we call that hyper-detailed sandbox. So when you play a Hitman mission, we don't give you a linear path through the level that you follow. We give you an open sandbox where you have to figure out how do you want to approach this mission. And in the case of the mission we're showing here at E3, it's a race event in Miami. And your target is one of the race drivers, actually. That's our half of the mission. And she's roaming around the track. So the whole thing in the demo today is like, "Okay, so how do you get close to Sierra's car?" And then in order to do that, then you need to obtain disguises, which is a key element in the Hitman franchise, that you can disguise as the characters you meet in the scene. So you can knock them out and become, take their uniforms on, and then infiltrate the areas. Some guards are more suspicious of you than others, so you have to mingle your way through the level. So it's very much up to you if you want to sneak in and try not to do the disguise stuff, or you can go for the disguise stuff and then make your way. And then the game adapts, in a way, because we have to foresee all these different permutations of play. So there's a lot of things you can do in the game, in terms of which way you take and how you get there. >> So I'm just curious from a game development point of view, in terms of building in difficulty, 'cause you want to have enough difficulties that it's a challenge and people feel satisfaction in rising to the challenge, but clearly you could make it so they just got wiped out every time. You could make it an impossible game. So how do you find that balance? How do you tune that balance? What are some of the things you think about when you're trying to get in degree of difficulty? >> Well, that's a really, how difficult should it be, that's a really hard question to answer in a Hitman game, because of the many ways that the players can do it. So we have an initial idea about where we want to challenge the players and where we want to give them a bit more leash where they can just roam around. But once you get a new disguise, then it's a different scenario. And we have to account for that in our design. So we do a lot of iterations on this. Okay, so if I went to the right and went this way in through the level but there was no resistance, I didn't have to do anything, I could just walk straight in the main door, then we have to go back to the drawing board and then jiggle around the characters, maybe add some new ones, remove some, and change the amount of guards, so the player will have challenges no matter how they approach it. But in the end, the crazy thing is, no matter how hard we make it or how challenging we make it, they will always find crazy ways of bypassing the systems and bending the rules of the game so much. And that's what makes Hitman great, is that you can do all of these things. Just, okay, can I do this? Yes, and you go and try it, and maybe it worked out, maybe it was not a good idea in the end. But it's very much up to you, as the player, to figure out how you want to be creative in this. >> So we're doing this series as part of the Western Digital data makes possible. And data is such a bit part of what you guys do. And really, as gaming has moved off of the pure console into the connected world, gives you an opportunity as a developer to see really, how are people interacting with the game? How are they making decisions? So how did you guys look at the analytics? You must be doing more and more and more analytics on all these various movements and potential options that they have. >> We have systems in place to figure out where people get spotted, so we can actually see that. The tricky part about metrics is that during development, there's actually not that many people playing the game besides ourselves. So we rely heavily on user testing, where we subdue people to the, we place people in front of the game in very early stages, to see if our core ideas are working. And then based on that, we then look at video footage, interviews, and all that stuff. That feeds back into the design loop of the process. >> And have you mapped every potential option, or are you using AI? You just used the example, some guy's too smart, we really need to have more guards for this guy. Is there AI and intelligence in the game that you can make little fine-tuned adjustments along the path as people actually play the game? 'Cause you're gonna have a whole lot more data by December first than you have today. >> Precisely, the amount of data we get is pretty wild in the end. But the core of the game, the characters are AI-driven. They have their own plans that they want to do. And the way it works is that we then build stories on top of this core AI. So the designers, they have freedom to create custom moments. But at some point when things go in the fence for the player, you get spotted or someone sees through your disguise, then the AI takes over. And I dare to say that we have some of the most complex AI systems in the industry. We go to great lengths to have them be very living and communicating a lot. So if one guy finds a body, then it's one situation. If he has a friend, then they begin to talk about what they've just experienced. And they work together to figure out what is actually going on. So there's a very high level of AI running behind the scenes in the Hitman game. >> Now, do you do that at the level of the characters? So it's really how a character responds to different stimuli-- >> Yes. >> Versus just a generic overlay for the whole game? >> Well, it's a mix. Some of them are different kinds of characters, guards or civilians, and they have different behaviors, based on what happens. But each character is more or less himself. And then he is not hive-mind controlled. It is a lot of agents that are running around in the world, trying to figure out what this player's up to, creating havoc behind the scenes. So it's a lot of fun to work with it, because it's also so unpredictable. And then all of a sudden, something happens that you didn't expect. >> Right, 'cause you can't possibly scenario every potential outcome, right? >> Exactly, we have some control, but it's systemically based. So we kind of, the way we normally say it is, we encourage the characters to do things. And then they might do it. For instance, you and I having an interview right now, that requires that you're standing in your spot and I'm standing in my spot. If I were to create that scene in the game, then there is a certain chance that one of us is lying in a dumpster somewhere and never shows up for the interview. And then the next question is, okay, so what do you do? So we have to construct the game in a way so that you won't break down and stop here. I don't know if you remember in season one of Westworld, if you've seen that? >> I have seen season one. I haven't caught up on season two yet, but yeah, season one. >> I haven't seen season two yet. But in season one, there's this scene where there's a bonfire scene that breaks down, where all the characters just stop. And then it turns out that the guy who went for firewood has been killed. So he never returned with the firewood, and thereby, the entire bonfire scene just grinds to a halt. >> [Jeff] Just freezes. >> That is Hitman gave development in a nutshell. Then we have a bug when that thing happens. And that can happen during development, we do that stuff. >> It's gotta be so cool, to discover how people actually work their way through the game. >> Absolutely. >> 'Cause the other thing I think it's interesting that you guys always have to balance is you have narrative, you want to have a narrative. You have a story, you have characters, and a look and feel. At the same time, you have individual operators, the players, that bring in their own point of view to the game. So how do you balance? When does one take priority to the other? How do you keep it on that narrative flow? >> It's been one of these returning challenges of making a Hitman game. And with the previous game, we narrowed in on, okay, so how do we do this? So we have a main story that is told outside the levels, which the levels don't directly affect. So the overall main arc and storyline is set. But what happens in the levels stays in the levels, so to speak. So in season one, we actually managed to go through the main story with some characters left alive, which is good. Because now in the second, in Hitman 2, we're going to get closer to them. And the story evolves around Agent 47, and we get a glimpse into his past, which is a bit of some things we haven't told yet. So that's going to be very exciting to see that, as well. >> Right, well Jacob, thanks for spending a few minutes. And good luck with the launch, congrats on the new product. >> Thank you very much, nice talking to you. >> He's Jacob, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube. We're in the Warner Brothers games booth at E3, LA Convention Center. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube, we're at NAB 2017, at the Las Vegas Convention Center. A hundred thousand people that are here, have been coming for decades, it's really quite a convention. It's our first trip here, but we're really excited to be joined by an industry veteran, she's been coming for a while, coming off a pretty impressive keynote, it's Wendy Aylsworth. She's the Chief Executive Officer at Walden Pond, and a many year veteran at Warner Brothers, right? So, welcome. >> Yes I am. Thank you. >> So first impressions of the show. You've been coming for a while, it seems to have kind of a different theme every year, what do you see this year that kind of strikes you? >> A little less focus on physical devices and I think there's a growing focus on software, and how those applications help streamline production processes, distribution processes, so you're seeing the real, more heavy move to IP and software applications. >> Right, right. Which, of course, is so consistent with what we see in many other industries, right? Between, a lot of it is driven by your mobile phone and expected behavior, and basically the entire world. I say it's like your remote control for your life now. Basically everything is on your phone. But a big piece of it is Cloud. And with Cloud now, people can dial-up at a moment's notice, basically infinite amounts of compute and store, and leverage that horse power in ways that you just can't do on a local device. So I'm curious, you've been in the business for a while, how has Cloud adoption changed the game? And how does it continue to change the game as we look forward? >> Yeah exactly. I just came from this keynote by Steven Guggenheimer, of Microsoft, where he talked about it being all about bandwidth, processing and storage. And, as those increase, and become more available it kind of democratizes the ability for people to get away from having to purchase their own physical devices, and it has opened up really a wide capability for new methods of doing production that actually couldn't even be done before. As well as long distance collaboration, and more rapid distribution, and then the ability to track and understand how data is flowing, so that you might be able to better understand the consumer. It really allows a content creator to get closer to their audience. And over time I think we will continue to see that ability grow. >> Which is so interesting because the proliferation of types of content is exploding, right? >> Wendy: It is. >> Everything from your classic big houses, to new houses like Netflix. Somebody told me earlier in the week that Netflix is one of the biggest producers now of independent content, to YouTubers, with not much more than an iPhone and a microphone that can go out, and if they've got a compelling piece of content, and they relate to a specific audience, can see tremendous numbers that a lot of people would do anything for. So that democratization is a huge item, but if you don't have an audience and you're not reaching them, and you're not measuring them, pretty tough because everybody is one swipe away from something else to watch. >> Well in fact, one of the discussions, really now is about that marketing capability because, the best marketing capabilities are still in the hands of the people who have been doing it for decades and decades and know where their audiences are and how to reach them, although those are shifting. And, the ability to provide tools that help new content creators find their audience are going to become critical needs in the future. >> Right, right. And less and less we see at other places, I'm sure we'll see it here, is that marketing intuition going to be the driver of the big spin. Now it's okay, you have intuition, but what's, You know, do you have some data to back it up? And the intuition can help drive the direction and the data collection, but at the end of the day, we see it in every other industry, I'm sure we'll see it here too, where it's data-driven decisions, using automation, using software to get better results in an increasingly competitive world. >> Yeah, and getting the right results because, as we know, there's tons and tons and tons of data, but it's understanding the data and putting good intelligence to it that allows you to make the right decisions. >> Right, right. Now as you're consulting to executives, who've been in the industry a while, what are they telling you? Are they excited? Are they scared? Are they slightly caught off guard? I mean there's so much new information opportunity. I'm struck by this kind of compression, it seems like, from the outside looking in, around your release weekend, it's so competitive to have. So there's only, whatever, 52 weekends a year, so many films trying to hit that particular window, and it seems like this, such pressure to make that number in a really short period of time. At the other hand, there's all these on-demand opportunities, there's all these alternate forms of distribution. It seems like a really difficult changing environment for these houses to be in. >> It is. It's a difficult changing environment. I haven't heard anybody be disappointed or pessimistic about it. I think they recognize that throughout history things change and you must change with it. The interesting thing there is, is that it's traditional windows are shrinking, but hopefully over time it'll become more apparent where there can be other moneys to be made in later windows or in different augmented settings. So I'll use as an example virtual reality. If virtual reality becomes a type of media in its own right, then it could be that you take a title type of content and one of its offshoots is a virtual reality piece that's then sold separately and monetized separately. So I think there is pressure on the traditional windows, to make them shorter, to get more revenue faster, but there are an awful lot of new technologies bubbling up that will create new types of content in the future and the smart players will get into that and monetize it as rapidly as they can. >> The other thing of course, that's changed significantly, along with Cloud, is just the cost of all this technology infrastructure, in terms, you know, just compute, and store, and networking just continue to crash down in terms of the cost and now, with these alternative things that you might have down the road, that you may or may not even know are going to be opportunities. How is that changing looking at the asset value? Cuz before, maybe you couldn't keep dailies, or maybe storage of all this stuff was a liability, it was expensive, and once you've got the finished product out the door maybe you're less likely to keep all the derivative works. But in today's world you might have some new distribution form that you didn't even think about before. Oh I wish I had this version, or that version, or that rough cut. >> I think asset keeping is always going to be a problem. I don't think it's any different than our homes, or any closet or drawer you own with, you know, when you started in your first apartment you had limited space and every time you get a bigger house then you fill it up, and then all of a sudden you decide you want to downsize and you got a problem. And I think that's always going to be a challenge, where companies have to figure out, what is the best of these assets that I should retain, and what should I not bother to retain. Because it's frankly too expensive to keep everything. That said, in the shift from analog to digital content creation, we've seen the production step, it's just so easy to take more photos and keep them. So there's been a shift in putting the onus on the content, directly on the content creator to decide what they think is the best of their work that should be kept, because it's unmanageable now. Just like my cellphone pictures are unmanageable. >> It's funny the pictures, because before, you know, pictures were rare, and a special picture was special, because it was like open up an Easter egg, right? You took your film down, maybe it was a couple weeks after you got back from vacation, you had a couple rolls of 36, and maybe one or two great ones right, >> Maybe you got one great shot, yeah. >> where you had that treasured picture of a relative or something. Now it's almost a curse of abundance because you can just push your button down, and the hard drives are getting bigger, and everything is getting faster. Now I have thousands, I can't even find a good one, not because I didn't have a good one, because I have to wallow through 2,472 cuz the 73rd is the one that I really want. That must be amplified tremendously in this space. >> Maintenance of your storage, again, I don't care whether it's the shoes in your closet or your photographs on your phone, or for a movie production. All of the footage that they're shooting and all of the special effects, and all these different forms of content that are coming in. Management of what you're going to retain is still a problem. Maybe there's machine learning that can help us wittle that down. >> Right, right. Certainly AI and machine learning are coming. But I wonder if you're hearing much about that, not only for the standard metadata that we would want, we had someone on earlier talking about archiving and basic kind of metadata, but now we can get into the metadata at a frame level, and a lot better intelligence. I'm sure in the future will be value judgements as well, as to whether this is a good shot, or not a bad shot, or it's applicable to whatever. Are you seeing much curiosity, adoption, experimentation, what do you kind of see? >> A lot of interest, a couple of experiments, not particularly in the what to say area, but a lot of experiments in other areas of production that are monotonous and boring like, take the example of pulling great shots from a film, in order to cut together a trailer, or a teaser that's going to go on the air. Well, a machine can pick out the best shots, thereby saving the person time of going through all the shots, and pulling the right footage. And then the editor can spend their time doing what they do best, which is taking those shots, and cutting them into an interesting sequence. So, I see a lot of experimentation going on that rudimentary machine learning being applied to quality control. So every time a file gets shipped from one company to another, they check it to make sure that it's correct. Well applying a machine, that's a really boring job, applying a machine to figure out whether that pile came in correctly and didn't get corrupted, great use of machine learning. >> So when you're in the field, what do you hear as kind of the top priorities from some of the people that you're working with now, in this super crazy, evolving environment? What are they looking to your help and assistance for? >> Well, in terms of Cloud sorts of work, they're looking to reduce their capital assets and be able to aggregate and use the resources of the Cloud to lower their costs of development. >> Just kind of a classic CAPEX versus, yeah... versus OPEX. >> And in some cases, whether they can help streamline their process, and speed up their schedule, and do things more in parallel. >> It seems like a perfect match. Because movies, by their very nature, are these transient little projects that form and come together, be produced, and then they disappear. >> Wendy: And then they disappear. >> And that's like perfect kind of an application for a Cloud world, which is the same thing, it's on demand, you assemble it, use it, when it's done it goes back. So it seems like a pretty good match. >> And applications in the Cloud that are modeling themselves to offer the services, based upon the usage, as opposed to setting up a long-term contract, those are the apps that are going to win. >> Right, and that's very consistent with the way that industry has worked for a long long time, right? >> Wendy: Yeah. >> Yeah, alright, well I'll give you the last word as you're leaving the show here in a couple days, headed back to L.A. What do you thinking about for the balance of 2017 that you're taking away, that you're excited to share with some of your clients? >> I think the power of doing little steps, and getting involved into using machine learning in various methods, whether that be in the Cloud or in a local Cloud. And then looking longer range to where artificial intelligence will actually play into that. But there's initial steps that have to be done in terms of applying machine learning first, and then I think we'll get into the more interesting stuff of artificial intelligence five years down the street. >> Yeah, early days, exciting times. >> Wendy: It is very exciting. >> Alright well Wendy, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day. >> I really appreciate the time. >> Alright, Wendy Aylsworth from Walden Pond. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching the Cube. We're at NAB 2017, from Las Vegas. We'll be right back.