(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Chicago, guys and gals. Lisa Martin here in Chicago with Ansible Fest 2022 with John Furrier. John, we've had great conversations. This is day two of our coverage. We were here yesterday. >> Yeah. >> We're here today. We've gotten to talk with great folks in the Ansible community, the partner ecosystem customers. We've broken some news that they've talked about. Now we're going to talk about industrial automation, IT/OT convergence. What excites you about this conversation? >> Yeah, this is going to be a great segment. This is one of the feature keynote presenters, customer Rockwell. Huge in OT, IT, edge, robotics, plants, equipment. Everything that we probably have, they do. This guest has really great story about what's cutting edge and what's relevant in the edge and IT slash automation area. Super relevant. Looking forward to the segment. >> Yes, please welcome David Rapini, the Global PlantPAx business manager at Rockwell Automation. David, great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Nice to be here. >> Give the audience a bit of an overview of Rockwell Automation and then let's dig into what you guys are doing there. >> Sure. Rockwell Automation probably is the largest global automation provider of equipment focused exclusively on automation. About 22,000 employees. About 7 billion kind of revenue numbers. We make, basically, controllers for the automation industry, industrialized software, power drives, you know, of the robotics content, smart cart kind of applications. >> Lisa: And what are your key industries that you're covering? >> Wow, so that's a broad market. So we do a lot of different industries. So we cover, obviously, oil and gas, life science, water, wastewater. We do automotive. So just about any industry, actually. Any place that needs industrial automation covering any type of manufacturing process or any type of process application. We're pretty much there. >> John: You know, it's interesting, IOT has been a word, in and of things, light bulb, wearables, industrial IOT where you're in is a really key space. It's physical plants. Sometimes it's sensitive critical infrastructure for governments, businesses. >> David: Exactly. >> I mean there's running stuff. >> David: Definitely. >> This is huge. >> Yeah, and it's a big area for us, like getting that data, you know, everybody talks about analytics and what the world's going to be happening to in that IT, OT space. And Rockwell's really well positioned at that lower level where we actually own the data, create the data for all that analytics that you're talking about. >> What was your main message today on stage? I want to replay that here and then get into it because I think this is really, we're starting to see, real traction in adoption, in automation, cloud scale, edges happening, exploding. What was your key message on stage today? >> Yeah, I think it's that the world's really changing in that space. You know, five years ago you would have had a completely different message around, you know that connectivity and having that content actually delivered to that space and having, like even the connectivity to that OT space makes people uncomfortable in that world because there's obviously moving pieces, you know, damage to equipment, you know God forbid any types of explosions or things like that on bad environmental type conditions. So we're working in that space to really make those connections much more open and now that those connections are starting to happen and we're getting more and more comfort with that, in that layer, there's a lot more we can do in that space which is kind of why we're here. >> And talk about why Ansible and what it's going to be able to unlock for Rockwell to be able to achieve. >> Sure. There's a lot of areas that we want to play with, but our, in Ansible but our first targets are really our, primarily our servers. So there's a lot of edge based servers out there, you know, we call them a pass server, which is a process automation system server. And there's an engineering workstation operator, which are those main core servers. Some of them are redundant, you know, the OT guys to them it's a burden to manage that content. They're good at making, you know, oil and gas they know how to do water wastewater. They know how to build cars. But managing servers, you know, not in their wheelhouse. >> John: Not in their wheelhouse.(laughs) >> Exactly. Right. So having that capability and that connection to get down there gives us some power with Ansible to go ahead and start building them initially. So making that initial builds out of the gate. That makes them really consistent and built together, so every application looks and feels the same and they know what they're going to get when their servers power up. So that's a big one. But, but just maintain them, keeping them patched, you know keeping security vulnerabilities down. You know, I was in a facility not long ago that was still running Windows 2000. Right. So, you know, they have an application there that's just working. It works. They don't want to touch it and it's been running for 20 years, so why touch it? Right. So this was going to kind of hopefully break that challenge. >> Make sure that you keep that password handy. (laughs) >> David: Yeah, exactly right. (laughs) >> We've had (indistinct) people leave. What about the security aspect is OT has been locked down, mindset, hardened, end to end, supply chains, vetted. Everything's kind of tight on the old OT model. Relatively secure when you get to IT, you mentioned vulnerabilities but the innovation's there too. So how does that reconcile for you? What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, we see a big move there, right? So it used to be they were always head head to head butting heads IT, OT, you know it focuses on, you know, keeping the system secure keeping the data down, locked down, and reliable. OT focuses more on production, right? Making sure they hit their numbers in the production. So oftentimes, you know, having it push out a patch in the middle of production line in the middle of a day and rebooting a server shuts down production and you know, that those kind of conflicts. Yeah, exactly. So those conflicts were, were pretty common. There's still a lot of that there, but it's getting better. Yeah, right. And I see more and more of that working together as a team to, to solve a lot of those challenges. And honestly, I keep going back to the analytics angle and the diagnostics and that world of deep data, you know, big data kind of mining, you know, without the IT space to cover that the cloud data storage, the horsepower. >> If you had to kind of like rank the complexity 'cause we were just talking before you came on about things got to get complex before they can get simpler 'cause the inflection points bring that new capability. What's some of the complexities that you're seeing that are going to be either abstracted away or solved with some of these new technologies like Ansible and others that are coming fast? Cause at the end of the day it's got to still be easier. It's not going to be hard. That can't be harder. >> Yeah. So I'll give you a real world example that's a little embarrassing. So today we deliver our past servers as a solution and we we provide that as a VM image that people start with as the first building block. But once you start to deploy that and actually connect it with the rest of the infrastructure, hook it up to our factory talk directory, hook it up to the DNS service, once you start doing all that work it's about 700 mouse clicks that somebody has to know what they're doing to actually spin it up the rest of the way and get it connected with Ansible. We're cutting that number like in half is the hope. So, and, and we're going to continue to expand that and make it even less work for the users to >> Talk about skill gap issue. The training alone on that is to have the right people. >> That's the second big piece, right? So, so those OT people typically don't have that skill set. So you have to have a fairly high skilled level person to do that work. We're hoping to take that, that work off of them and put that on on answer. >> Yeah, that sounds pretty consistent. Do you think, is that the, kind of the consistency of the problem space is that the OT just has a different goal and they just need something to be invisible and easy, like electricity? >> Yeah, I think so. Especially in this world, right? In that OT space, right in in that IT space. Sorry. Yeah, so, so managing servers and things like that it's just is not what they want to want to deal with and it's not what they went to school for and it's not what they're doing when their job when they get hired. Right. Yeah. >> It sounds to me like Rockwell Automation is a facilitator of the IT and OT folks coming together and actually working better together, maybe understanding each other's requirements, goals, objectives. >> Most definitely. So we have, you know we are offering a lot of cloud content now. We're continuing to expand that content. We're working with a lot of different IT departments and OT departments to try to marriage those two groups together to try to bring that stuff together. We have a partnership with Cisco where we actually, you know, industrialize you know, some of their switch components and sell that as as part of our content and that relationship gives us a big inroad with a lot of the IT departments. >> That's important to have that be able to speak the language of both sides. >> Yeah, definitely. Right. Knowing and understanding the terminology and just being able to know the challenges that IT guys face as well as the OTs is really a big component of what we do. >> You know, one of the questions I wanted to ask and 'cause the keynote was very cool, but you made a comment that your claim to fame was that you wrote the code for the Spider-Man ride at Universal. Tell a story. How does that work? I'm just, I've rode them many times. So take us through that little journey. >> Yeah, so I, every time people ask me what we do for a living and automation, you know, I can talk about, you know, making cars and things like that, but it doesn't ring troops. So I did do a lot of work on Spider-Man Ride which is at Universal Studios, you know it was a real challenge, making sure you know how that connections actually work and make, I did most of the motion control content for that to make the movements of the cars, you know, seamless with the backgrounds. Definitely a lot of fun. So those kind of projects are rare but they're really fun when you get those. >> I hope you have a free pass for any time you want to go on it. >> I don't, unfortunately. >> Oh, you should. >> I try to get in the backrooms all the time at that facility but it's rare to hear. >> I mean it's like, it's a high end rollercoaster machine. It's like, I mean that is this robotics, industrial cause, this, I mean it's an intense ride. >> It is, and you know, you never move more than like eight feet on that whole ride and it feels like you've dropped, you know 2000 feet out of the sky on some of that content. So it's really amazing. I will say it's a little dated. I've been writing on the part of my team worked on the the Harry Potter rides, which are much next generation. >> I couldn't get on that one, line was too long. >> It's a long way, but it's worth it. >> Dave I asked you a question on the future for people watching who are new observing industrial IOT. What's the most important story going on in your world today? Is it the transformation? Is it the standards? Is it the security? What's, what are the top two or three things that are going on that are really transformative right now in automating at the edge? >> I really want to say that it's standardization. It's about using open standards and standard protocols to deliver content in a reusable fashion. So, you know, having custom proprietary content like a lot of automation suppliers or even like a lot of other industries, it's hard to maintain. It doesn't work well with other products. It's great 'cause you can do a lot of flexibility what you want to do, but at the end of the day it's about keeping the thing running and hooking it up to other components so that open standards based solution you'll see us spending more energy on you know, part of the Ansible open community thing is nice in that space as well. And you'll see us doing more stuff in that place that, that play. >> Talk about your influence there in the community. You know, we, we've been talking the last couple of days about Ansible is nothing if not the power of the community, the collaboration within. Talk about being able to influence that and what that means to you personally as well as to Rockwell. >> Yeah, so open communities are big for us. We have, you know, obviously a customer advisory boards and things like that that we deal with but we also have an open community forum where people can share dialogues and share ideas. We have large events, we have a process solution users group events where we bring in, you know hundreds not thousands of engineering people to to talk to all of these problems that they're facing. And it's not a Rockwell event it's a, you know, community event, right. Where we actually are talking about, you know what industry problem people are seeing. And a lot of the IT OT convergence thing is really top of mind. A lot of people say no minds especially the cybersecurity content. >> What are some of the things that you heard the last couple of days, announcement wise? Obviously big news coming out today that excites you about the direction that Ansible's going and how it's responding to the community. >> Yeah, I think a lot of their feedback that they get and sitting a lot of these sessions, they get a lot of interesting feedback from their customer base. And reacting to that I think is very high on their priority list. And what I've been seeing here, you know, some of the AI stuff that they were showing on automatically, like defining some of the scripts for their code that intelligence behind a lot of that content was amazing. I see a lot of that moving forward. And we're heading the same direction at Rockwell as well with more AI in our company. >> The data's a big story too coming out of all the devices, analytics, great stuff. >> Yeah, I'm pulling that data up into the cloud space and trying to do something valuable with all that data. It's, you know, we've had big data for a long time. It's just figuring out analytics and how to actually act on that data and get it back into the control to do something with. >> It's all getting aside. My serious question on this is that, you know is it the year finally OT and IT converge? Seems like it's been trying for about a decade. >> Yeah, that's a tough one to answer. So I would say it's not there yet. I think there's still a lot of conflict in that space. You know, the OT guys still have a long history of that space, but as you see more retirement and more people phasing out of that and younger crowds coming in, you know the automation space is ripe for that kind of transition because coming out of college, you know jumping into automation isn't always the top of the notch. A lot of people want to go work at the big Amazons or wherever. >> A lot, a lot of stuff going on in space. It's pretty cool. A lot of physical, I've seen a lot more machine learning and physical devices in the industry we've been reporting on. It's interesting. I think it's close to a tipping point because we saw machine learning and the trivial apps like chat bots never really took off, yep. Just expert systems basically, but they're not really going the next level. So now they are, you're starting to see more, you know of wisdom projects, you know, different models being adopted. So I see AI now kind of kicking up similar to OT IT. >> Yeah, most definitely. You know, we have a lot of projects in that space like doing predictive analysis on, let's just say something simple like a pump, right? If you have pumps out there that are running for years and years, but you notice that there's a trend that on day 305 or whatever you know, a bearing starts to fail all the time. You know, that kind of analytics can start doing predictive maintenance content and start pushing out work orders in advance before the things fail because downtime costs millions of dollars for these maintenance. >> Downtime also incidents, right? So you never know, right? >> Exactly. Right, right. So it's good to have that safety net at least from a manufacturing perspective. >> Final question for me. What's the most exciting thing going on in your world right now if you had to kind of pick one thing that you're most jazzed up about? >> I have to say, you know, Rockwell's doing a big shift to cloud-based content and more big data numbers like we were just talking about for that AI. That complexity of what you can do with AI and the value that you can do to like just, you know if I can make quality of a product a half a percent better that's millions of dollars for my customer and I see us doing a lot of work in that space and moving that forward. That's big for me, I think. >> And what are some of that, my last question is what are some of the impacts that customers can expect from that? >> Yeah, so everything from downtime to product quality to increasing production rates and volumes of data that come out. You know, we do something called model predictive control that does, you know, very tight control on control loops to improve like just the general product quality with a lot of the big data numbers that are coming in on that. So you'll see us moving more in that space too to improve you know, product quality and then downtime. >> And really driving outcomes, business outcomes for your customers. David, thank you so much for joining us on the program, sharing what Rockwell Automation is doing. We appreciate your insights, your time and we want to keep watching to see what comes next. >> Sure. Glad to be here. It's great. Thank you very much. >> Our pleasure. For our guest, our John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You've watched theCUBE Live in Chicago, Ansible Fest 2022. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's coverage here. Monaco took a trip all the way out here to cover the Monaco crypto summit. I'm John feer, host of the cube, a lot of action happening presented by digital bits and this ecosystem that's coming together, building on top of digital bits and other blockchains to bring value at the application. These new app, super apps are emerging. Almost every category's gonna be decentralized. This is our opinion and the world believes it. And they're here as well. We've got Oscar ballet CEO co-founder of Agora verse ago is a shopping metaverse coming out soon. We'll get the dates, Oscar. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much for having me. >>We were just talking before you came on camera. You're a young gun, young entrepreneur. You're a gamer. Yeah, a little bit too old to miss the eSports windows. You said, you know, like 25. It's great until that's you missed the window. I wish I was 25 gaming the pandemic with remote work, big tailwind acceleration around the idea of this new digital VI virtual hybrid world. We're living in where people want to have experiences that are similar to physical and virtual. You're doing something really cool around shopping. Yeah. Take a explain. What's going on when the, I know it's not out yet. It's in preview. Yeah. Take a minute to explain. >>Absolutely. So a goers really is a way to create those online storefront environments, virtual environments that are really much inspired by video games in their usage and kind of how the experience goes forward. We want to recreate the brand's theme, aesthetic storytelling or the NFT project as well. All of that created in a virtual setting, which is way more interesting than looking at a traditional webpage. And also you can do some crazy stuff that you can't do in real life, in a real life store, you know, with some crazy effects and lighting and stuff. So it's, it's a whole new frontier that we are trying to cover. And we believe that there is a real use case for shopping centric S experiences and to actually make the S a bit more than a buzzword than that. It is at the moment. >>Okay. So a Agora is the shopping. Metaverse a Agora verse is the company name and product name. You're on the Solona blockchain. Got my notes here, but I gotta ask you, I mean, people are trying to do this right now. We see a lot of high end clients like Microsoft showroom, showroom vibes. Yeah. Not so much. E-commerce per se, but more like the big, I mean it's low hanging fruit. Yeah. How do you guys compare to some other apps out there? Other metaverses? >>I think compared to the bigger companies, we are way more flexible and we can act way more quickly than they can. They still have a lot of ground to cover. And a lot of convincing to do with their communities of users metaverse is not really the most popular topic at the moment. It's still very much kind of looked at as a trend, as something that is just passing and they have to deal with this community interaction that is not really favorable for them. There are other questions about the metaverse that are not being talked about as often, but the ecological costs, for example, of running a metaverse like Facebook envisions it, of running those virtual headsets, running those environments. It's very costy on, on, on the ecological side of things and it's not as often mentioned. And I think that's actually their biggest challenge. >>Can you get an example for folks that don't are in the weeds on that? What's the what's what do you mean by that? The cost of build the headsets? Is it the >>Servers? It's more of the servers, really? You need to run a lot of servers, which is really costly on the environment and environmental questions are at the center of public debates. Anyways, and companies have to play that game as well. So they will have to find kind of this balance between, well, building this cool metaverse, but doing it in an ecological friendly manner as well. I think that's their toughest challenge. >>And what's your solution just using the blockchain? Well, an answer to that, cause some people say, Hey, that's not that's, that's not. So eco-friendly either, >>That's part of it. And it's also part of why we're choosing an ecosystem such as Lana as a starter. It's not limited to only Salana, but Salala is, is known as a blockchain. That is very much ecological. Inclined transactions are less polluting. And definitely this problem is, is tackled in the fact that we are offering this product on a case by case scenario brands come to us, we build this environment and we run something that is proper to them. So the scale of it is also way less important that what Facebook is trying to build. >>Yeah. They're trying to build the all encompassing. Yeah. All singing old dancing, as we say system, and then they're not getting a lot of luck. They just got slammed dunked this week on the news, I saw the, you know, FTC moved against them on the acquisition of the exercise app. >>It's it's a tough, it's a tough battle for them. Let's say they >>Still have, they got a headwind. I wouldn't say tailwind. They broke democracy. So they gotta pay for it. Right. Exactly. I always say definitely revenge going on there. I'm not a big fan of what they did. The FTC. I think that's bad move. They shouldn't block acquisitions, but they do buy, they don't really build much. That's well documented. Facebook really hasn't built anything except for Facebook. That's right. Mean what's the one thing Facebook has done besides Facebook. >>I mean, >>It's everything they've tried is failed except for Facebook. Yeah. >>So we'll see what's going on with the Methodist side. >>Well, so successful, not really one trick bony. Yeah. They bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp, you know, and not really successful. >>That's true. They do have the, the means though, to maybe become successful with something. So >>You're walking out there, John just said, Facebook's not successful. I meant they don't. They have a one product company. They use their money to buy everything. Yeah. And that's some people don't like that, but anyway, the startups like to get bought out. Yeah. Okay. So let's get back to the metaverse it's coming out is the business model to build for others. Are you gonna have a system for users? What's what's the approach? How do you, how are we view viewing this? What's the, the business you're going after? >>So we are very much a B2B type of service where we can create custom kind of tailor made virtual environments for brands, where we dedicate our team to building those environments, which has been what we have been at the start to really kickstart the initiative. But we're also developing the tool that will allow antibody to develop their own shop themselves, using what we give them to do something kind of like the Sims for those that know, building their environment and building their shop, which will they, they, they will then be to put online and for anybody of their user base customers to have a look at. So it's, it's kind of, yeah, the tailor made experience, but also the more broader experience where we want to create this tool, develop this tool, make it accessible to the public with a subscription based model where any individual that has an idea and maybe a product that is interesting for the metaverse be able to create this virtual storefront and upload it directly. >>How long does it take to build an environment? Let's say I was, I wanna do a cube. Yeah. I go to a lot of venues all around the world. Yeah. MOSCON and San Francisco, the San convention center in Las Vegas, we're here in Monaco. How do I replicate these environments? Do I call you up and say, Hey, I need some artists. Do you guys render it? What's the take us through the process. >>Yeah. It's, it's basically a case by case scenario at the moment, very much. We're working with our partners that find brands that are interested in getting into the metaverse and we then design the shops. Well, it depends on the brands. Some have a really clear idea of what they want. Some are a bit more open to it and they're like, well, we have this and this, can you build something? >>I mean, I mean, I can see the apple store saying, Hey, you know, they're pretty standard apple stores. You got cases of iWatches. Yeah. I mean that's easily to, replicateable probably good ROI for them. >>Exactly. It's it's is that what you're thinking? Their team. Exactly. Yeah. It depends. And we, we want to add a layer of something cuz just replicating the store simply. Yeah. It's it's maybe not as interesting, you know, it just, oh, okay. I'm in the store. It's white, everywhere. It's apple. Right. It's like, oh I'm in at the dentist, but we want to add some video game elements to the, to those experiences. But very subtle ones, ones that won't make you feel, oh, I'm playing one of these games, you know? It's yeah. Very supple. >>You can, you can jump into immersive experience as defined by the brand. Yeah. I mean the brand will control the values. So you're say apple and you're at the iWatch table. Yeah. You could have a digital assistant pop in there with an avatar. Exactly. You can jump down a rabbit hole and say, Hey, I want this iWatch. I'm a bike mountain biker. For example, I could get experience of mountain biking with my watch on I fall off, ambulance sticks me up. I mean, all these things that they advertise is what goes >>On. Yeah. And we can recreate these experiences and what they're advertising and into a more immersive experience is what we're trying to our, our goal is to create experiences. We know that, you know, why does someone is someone spend so much at Disneyland? It's like triple the price of whatever, because you know, it's Mickey mouse around you. It's, that's the experience that comes around. And often the experience is more important than the product. Sometimes >>It's hard. It's really hard to get that first class citizen experience with the event or venue physical. Yeah. Which is a big challenge. I know the metaverse are gonna try to solve this. So I gotta ask you what's your vision on solving that? Okay. Cause that's the holy grail. That's what we're talking about here. Yeah. I got a physical event or place. I wanna replicate it in the metaverse but create that just as good first party citizen like experience. >>Yeah. I mean that's the whole event event type of business side of the metaverse is also a huge one. It's one that we are choosing to tackle after the e-commerce one. But it's definitely something that has been asked a lot by the brands where like we want to create, like, we want to release this store for an event that is in real life, but we want to make it accessible to the largest number. That's why we saw with Fortnite as well. All those events, the fashion week in the central land. And >>Sand's a Cub in the Fortnite too. >>There you go. And so the, the event aspect is super important and we want those meta shops to be places where a brand can organize an event. Let's say they want to make the entrance paid. They can do an NFD for that if they want. And then they have to, the user has to connect the NFD to access the event with an idea. Right. But that's definitely possible. And that's how we leverage blockchain as well with those companies and say, you know, you're not familiar with >>This method. You're badging, you know, you're the gaming where we were talking earlier. Yeah. Badging and credentials and access methods. A tech concept can be easily forwarded to NFTs. Yeah, >>Exactly. Exactly. And brands are interested in that. >>Sure. Of course. Yeah. By being the NFT. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I gotta ask you the origination story. Take me through the, the, how this all started. Yeah. Was it a seat of an idea you and your friends get together? Yeah. It was an it scratch. And when you're really into this, what's the origination story and where you're at now. >>So we started off in January really with a, quite a, a different idea. It was called the loft business club. It's an NFT collection on the Salina blockchain. And the whole idea beyond it is that NFT holders would have access to their virtual apartments that we called the lofts. It got very popular. We got a really big following at the start. It was really the trend back in January, February. And we managed to, to sell out successfully the whole collection of 5,000 NFTs. And yeah, we started as a group of friends, really like-minded friends from my hometown in, in, met in France who are today, the co-founders and the associates with different backgrounds. Leo has the marketing side of things. A club has the 3d designing. We had all our different skills coming into it. Obviously my English was quite helpful as well cause French people in English it's, it's not often the best French English. Yeah. And I was, the COO has been doing amazing on the kind of the serious stuff. You know, the taxis lawyers >>Operational to all of trains running on time. >>Exactly >>Sure. People get their jobs done. >>Yeah, exactly. So >>It's well too long of a lunch cuz you know, French would take what, two hour lunches. Yeah. You >>Have to enjoy it. Yeah. >>Coffee and stuff. That's wine, you know about creative, >>But yeah, it's, it's a friend stuff that started as a, as a passion project and got so quick. And today I'm here talking to you in this setting. It's like, >>You're pretty excited. >>I mean it's super excited. It's such a we're you know, we feel like we're building something that's new and our developer team, we're now a team of 15 in total with developers based in Paris, mostly. And everybody is, is feeling like, you know, they're contributing to something new and that's, what's exciting about it. You know, it's something that's not really done or it's trying to be done, but nobody really knows the way >>It's pioneering days. But the, but the pandemic has shifted the culture faster because people like certainly the gen Zs are like, I don't wanna reuse that old stuff. Yeah. And, but they still want to go to like games or events or go to stores. Yeah. But once to go to a store, I mean, I go to apple store all the time where I live in Palo Alto, California. And it's like, yeah, I love that store. And I know it by heart. I don't, I don't have to go there. Yeah. Walking into the genius bar virtually I get the same job done. Yeah, >>Exactly. That's that's what we want to do. And the other pandemic is just it's it's been all about improving, you know, people's condition, life conditions at home, I think. And that's what kind of boosted the whole metaverse conversation and Facebook really grabbing onto it as well. It's just that people were stuck at home and for gamers, that's fine. We used to be stuck at home playing video games all day. Yeah. We survived the pandemic fine. But for other people it was a bit more of a new >>Experience. Well, Oscar, one of the cool things is that you said like mind you and your founding team, always the secret to success. But now you see a lot of old guys like me and gals coming in too, your smart people are like-minded they get it. Especially ones that have seen the ways before, when you have this kind of change, it's a cultural shift and technology shift and business model shift at the same time. Yeah. And to me there's gonna be chaos, but at the end of the day, >>I mean there's fun and >>Chaos. That's opportunity. There's a fun and fun and opportunity. >>It's fun and chaos, you know, and yeah. Likeminded people and the team has really been the driving factor with our company. We are all very much excited about what we're doing and it's been driving us forward. >>Well, keep in touch. Thanks for coming on the cube and sharing, sharing a story with us in the world. We really appreciate we'll keep in touch with you guys. Do love what you do. Oscar ballet here inside the cube Argo verse eCommerce shop. The beginning of this wave is happening. The convergence of physical virtual is a hybrid mode. It's a steady state. It is not gonna go away. It's only gonna get bigger, more cooler, more relevant than ever before. Cube covering it like a blanket here in Monaco, crypto summit. I'm John furrier. We'll be right back after this short break.

(digital pulsing music) >> We're back at VeeamON 2022. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host David Nicholson. I've got another mass boy coming on. Patrick Osborne is the vice president of the storage business unit at HPE. Good to see you again, my friend. It's been a long time. >> It's been way too long, thank you very much for having me. >> I can't even remember the last time we saw each other. It might have been in our studios in the East Coast. Well, it's good to be here with you. Lots have been going on, of course, we've been following from afar, but give us the update, what's new with HPE? We've done some stuff on GreenLake, we've covered that pretty extensively and looks like you got some momentum there. >> Quite a bit of momentum, both on the technology front and certainly the customer acquisition front. The message is certainly resonating with our customers. GreenLake is, that's the transformation that's fueling the future of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So the momentum is great on the technology side. We're at well over 50 services that we're providing on the GreenLake platform. Everything from solutions and workloads to compute, networking and storage. So it's been really fantastic to see the platform and being able to really delight the customers and then the momentum on the sales and the customer acquisition side, the customers are voting with their dollars, so they're very happy with the platform, certainly from an operational perspective and a financial consumption perspective and so our target goal, which we've said a bunch of times is we want to be the hyperscaler on on-prem. We want to provide that customer experience to the folks that are investing in the platform. It's going really well. >> I'll ask you a question, as a former analyst, it could be obnoxious and so forth, so I'll be obnoxious for a minute. I wrote a piece in 2010 called At Your Storage Service, saying the future of storage and infrastructure as a service, blah, blah, blah. Now, of course, you don't want to over-rotate when there's no market, there was no market for GreenLake in 2010. Do you feel like your timing was right on, a little bit late, little bit early? Looking back now, how do you feel about that? >> Well, it's funny you say that. On the timing side, we've seen iterations of this stops and start forever. >> That's true. Financial gimmicks. >> I started my career at Sun Microsystems. We talked about the big freaking Web-tone switch and a lot of the network is the computer. You saw storage networks, you've seen a lot, a ton of iterations in this category, and so, I think the timing's right right now. Obviously, the folks in the hyperscaler class have proved out that this is something that's working. I think for us, the big thing that's really resonating with the customers is they want the operational model and they want the consumption model that they're getting from that as a service experience, but they still are going to run a number of their workloads on-prem and that's the best place to do it for them economically and we've proved that out. So I think the time is here to have that bifurcated experience from operational and financial perspective and in the past, the technology wasn't there and the ability to deliver that for the customers in a manner that was useful wasn't there. So I think the timing's perfect right now to provide them. >> As you know, theCUBE has had a presence at HPE Discover. Previous, even HP Discover and same with Veeam. But we got a long history with HP/HPE. When Hewlett Packard split into two companies, we made the observation, Wow, this opens up a whole new ecosystem opportunity for HPE generally, in storage business specifically, especially in data protection and backup, and the Veeam relationship, the ink wasn't dry and all of a sudden you guys were partnering, throwing joint activities, and so talk about how that relationship has evolved. >> From my perspective, we've always been a big partnering company, both on the route to market side, so our distributors and partners, and we work with them in big channel business. And then on the software partnership side, that's always evolving and growing. We're a very open ecosystem and we like to provide choice for our customers and I think, at the end of the day, we've got a lot of things that we work on jointly, so we have a great value prop. First phase of that relationship was partnering, we've got a full boat of product integrations that we do for customers. The second was a lot of special sauce that we do for our customers for co-integration and co-development. We had a huge session today with Rick Vanover and Frederico on our team here to talk about ransomware. We have big customers suffering from this plague right now and we've done a lot together on the engineering side to provide a very, very well-engineered, well thought out process to help avoid some of these things. And so that wave, too, of how do we do a ton of co-innovation together to really delight our customers and help them run their businesses, and I think the evolution of where we're going now, we have a lot of things that are very similar, strategically, in terms of, we all talk about data services and outcomes for our customers. So at the end of the day, when we think about GreenLake, like our virtual machine backup as a service or disaster recovery, it's all about what workloads are you running, what are the most important ones, where do you need help protecting that data? And essentially, how can we provide that outcome to you and you pay it as an outcome. And so we have a lot of things that we're working on together in that space. >> Let's take a little bit of a closer look at that. First of all, I'm from California, so I'm having a really hard time understanding what either of you were saying. Your accents are so thick. >> We could talk in Boston. >> Your accents are so thick. (Dave laughing) I could barely, but I know I heard you say something about Veaam at one point. Take a closer look at that. What does that look like from a ransomware perspective in terms of this concept of air gaping or immutable, immutable volumes and just as an aside, it seems like Veeam is a perfect partnership for you since customers obviously are going to be in hybrid mode for a long time and Veeam overlays that nicely. But what does it look like specifically? Immutable, air gap, some of the things we've been hearing a lot about. >> I'm exec sponsor for a number of big HPE customers and I'll give you an example. One of our customers, they have their own cloud service for time management and essentially they're exploited and they're not able to provide their service. It has huge ripple effect, if you think about, on inability to do their service and then how that affects their customers and their customers' employees and all that. It's a disaster, no pun intended. And the thing is, we learn from that and we can put together a really good architectures and best practices. So we're talking today about 3-2-1-1, so having three copies of your data, two different types of media, having an offline copy, an offsite copy and an offline copy. And now we're thinking about all the things you need to do to mitigate against all the different ways that people are going to exploit you. We've seen it all. You have keys that are erased, primary storage that is compromised and encrypted, people that come in and delete your backup catalog, they delete your backups, they delete your snapshots. So they get it down to essentially, "I'm either going to have one set of data, it's encrypted, I'm going to make you pay for it," and 40 percent of the time they pay and they get the data back, 60 percent of the time they pay and they get maybe some of the data back. But for the most part, you're not getting your data back. The best thing that we can do for our customers that come with a very prescriptive set of T-shirt configuration sizes, standardization, best practices on how they can take this entire ecosystem together and make it really easy for the customers to implement. But I wouldn't say, it's never bulletproof, but essentially, do as much as you can to avoid having to pay that ransomware. >> So 3-2-1-1, three copies, meaning local. >> Patrick: Yeah. >> So you can do fast recovery if you need to. Two different types of media, so tape fits in here? Not necessarily flashing and spinning disks. Could it be tape? >> A lot of times we have customers that have almost four different types. So they are running their production on flash. We have Alletras with HPE networking and servers running specific workloads, high performance. We have secondary storage on-prem for fast recovery and then we have some form of offsite and offline. Offsite could be object storage in the cloud and then offline would be an actual tape backup. The tape is out of the tape library in a vault so no one can actually access it through the network and so it's a physical copy that's offline. So you always have something to restore. >> Patrick, where's the momentum today, specifically, we're at VeeamON, but with regard to the Veeam partnership, is it security and ransomware, which is a new thing for this world. The last two years, it's really come to the top. Is it cloud migration? Is it data services and data management? Where's the momentum, all of the above, but maybe you could help us parse that. >> What we're seeing here at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, especially through GreenLake, is just an overall focus on data services. So what we're doing is we've got great platforms, we always had. HPE is known as an engineering company. We have fantastic products and solutions that customers love. What we're doing right now is taking, essentially, a lot of the beauty of those products and elevating them into an operational experience in the cloud, so you have a set of platforms that you want to run, you have machine critical platform, business critical, secondary storage, archival, data analytics and I want to be able to manage those from the cloud. So fleet management, HCI management, protocol management, block service, what have you, and then I want a set of abstracted data services that are on top of it and that's essentially things like disaster recovery, backup, data immutability, data vision, understanding what kind of data you have, and so we'll be able to provide those services that are essentially abstracted from the platforms themselves that run across multiple types of platforms. We can charge them on outcome based. They're based on consumption, so you think about something like DR, you have a small set of VMs that you want to protect with a very tight RPO, you can pay for those 100 VMs that are the most important that you have. So for us driving that operational experience and then the cloud data service experience into GreenLake gives customers a really, gives them a cloud experience. >> So have you heard the term super cloud? >> Patrick: Yeah. (chuckles) >> Have you? >> Patrick: Absolutely. >> It's term that we kind of coined, but I want to ask you about it specifically, in terms of how it fits into your strategy. So the idea is, and you kind of just described it, I think, whether your data is on-prem, it's in the cloud, multiple clouds, we'll talk about the edge later, but you're hiding the underlying complexities of the cloud's APIs and primitives, you're taking care of that for your customers, irrespective of physical location. It's the common experience across all those platforms. Is that a reasonable vision, maybe, even from a technical standpoint, is it part of HPE strategy and what does it take to actually do that, 'cause it sounds nice, but it's probably pretty intense? >> So the proof's in the pudding for us. We have a number of platforms that are providing, whether it's compute or networking or storage, running those workloads that they plum up into the cloud, they have an operational experience in the cloud and now they have data services that are running in the cloud for us in GreenLake. So it's a reality. We have a number of platforms that support that. We're going to have a set of big announcements coming up at HPE Discover. So we led with Alletra and we have a block service, we have VM backup as a service and DR On top of that. That's something that we're providing today. GreenLake has over, I think, it's actually over 60 services right now that we're providing in the GreenLake platform itself. Everything from security, single sign on, customer IDs, everything, so it's real. We have the proof point for it. >> So, GreenLake is essentially, I've said it, it's the HPE cloud. Is that a fair statement? >> A hundred percent. >> You're redefining cloud. And one of the hallmarks of cloud is ecosystem. Roughly, and I want to talk more about you got to grow that ecosystem to be successful in cloud, no question about it. And HPE's got the chops to do that. What percent of those services are HPE versus ecosystem partners and how do you see that evolving over time? >> We have a good number of services that are based on HPE, our tried and true intellectual property. >> You got good tech. >> Absolutely, so a number of that. And then we have partners in GreenLake today. We have a pretty big ecosystem and it's evolving, too. So we have customers and partners that are focused, our customers want our focus on data services. We have a number of opportunities and partnerships around data analytics. As you know, that's a really dynamic space. A lot of folks providing support on open source, analytics and that's a fast moving ecosystem, so we want to support that. We've seen a lot of interest in security. Being able to bring in security companies that are focused on data security. Data analytics to understand what's in your data from a customer perspective, how to secure that. So we have a pretty big ecosystem there. Just like our path at HPE, we've always had a really strong partnership with tons of software companies and we're going to continue to do that with GreenLake. >> You guys have been partner-friendly, I'll give you that. I'm going to ask Antonio this at Discover in a couple of weeks, but I want to ask you, when you think about, again, to go back to AWS as the prototypical cloud, you look at a Snowflake and a Redshift. The Redshift guys probably hate Snowflake, but the EC2 guys love them, sell a lot of compute. Now you as a business unit manager, do you ever see the day where you're side by side with one of your competitors? I'm guessing Antonio would say absolutely. Culturally, how does that play inside of HPE? I'm testing your partner-friendliness. How would you- >> Who will you- >> How do you think about that? >> At the end of the day, for us, the opportunity for us is to delight our customers. So we've always talked about customer choice and how to provide that best outcome. I think the big thing for us is that, from a cost perspective, we've seen a lot of customers coming back to HPE repatriation, from a repatriation perspective for a certain class of workloads. From my perspective, we're providing the best infrastructure and the best operational services at the best price at scale for these costumers. >> Really? It definitely, culturally, HPE has to, I think you would agree, it has to open up. You might not, you're going to go compete, based on the merit- >> Absolutely. >> of your product and technology. The repatriation thing is interesting. 'Cause I've always been a repatriation skeptic. Are you actually starting to see that in a meaningful way? Do you think you'll see it in the macro numbers? I mean, cloud doesn't seem to be slowing down, the public cloud growth, I mean, the 35, 40 percent a year. >> We're seeing it in our numbers. We're seeing it in the new logo and existing customer acquisition within GreenLake. So it's real for us. >> And they're telling you? Pure cost? >> Cost. >> So it's that's simple. >> Cost. >> So, they get the cloud bill, you do, too. I'd get the email from my CFO, "Why the cloud bill so high this month?" Part of that is it's consumption-based and it's not predictable. >> And also, too, one of the things that you said around unlocking a lot of the customer's ability from a resourcing perspective, so if we can take care of all the stuff underneath, the under cloud for the customer, the platform, so the stores, the serving, the networking, the automation, the provisioning, the health. As you guys know, we have hundreds of thousands of customers on the Aruba platform. We've got hundreds of thousands of customers calling home through InfoSight. So we can provide a very rich set of analytics, automated environment, automated health checking, and a very good experience that's going to help them move away from managing boxes to doing operational services with GreenLake. >> We talk about repatriation often. There was a time when I think a lot of us would've agreed that no one who was born in the cloud will ever do anything other than grow in the cloud. Are you seeing organizations that were born in the cloud realizing, "Hey, we know what our 80 percent steady state is and we've modeled this. Why rent it when we can own it? Or why rent it here when we can have it as operational cost there?" Are you seeing those? >> We're seeing some of that. We're certainly seeing folks that have a big part of their native or their digital business. It's a cost factor and so I think, one of the other areas, too, that we're seeing is there's a big transformation going on for our partners as well, too, on the sell-through side. So you're starting to see more niche SaaS offerings. You're starting to see more vertically focused offerings from our service provider partners or MSPs. So it's not just in either-or type of situation. You're starting to see now some really, really specific things going on in either verticals, customer segmentation, specific SaaS or data services and for us, it's a really good ecosystem, because we work with our SP partners, our MSP partners, they use our tech, they use our services, they provide services to our joint customers. For example, I know you guys have talked to iland here in the past. It's a great example for us for customers that are looking for DR as a service, backup as a service hosting, so it's a nice triangle for us to be able to please those customers. >> They're coming on to tomorrow. They're on 11/11. I think you're right on. The one, I think, obvious place where this repatriation could happen, it's the Sarah Wong and Martin Casano scenario where a SaaS companies cost a good sold become dominated by cloud costs. And they say, "Okay, well, maybe, I'm not going to build my own data centers. That's probably not going to happen, but I can go to Equinix and do a colo and I'm going to save a ton of dough, managing my own infrastructure with automation or outsourcing it." So Patrick, got to go. I could talk with you forever. Thank you so much for coming back in theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> Go, Celts. How you feeling about the, we always talk sports here in VeeamON. How are you feeling about the Celts today? >> My original call today was Celtics in six, but we'll see what happens. >> Stephen, you like Celtics? Celtics six. >> Stephen: Celtics six. >> Even though tonight, they got a little- >> Stephen: Still believe, you got to believe. >> All right, I believe. >> It'd be better than the Miami's Mickey Mouse run there, in the bubble, a lot of astronauts attached to that. (Dave laughing) >> I love it. You got to believe here on theCUBE. All right, keep it right- >> I don't care. >> Keep it right there. You don't care, 'cause you're not from a sports town. Where are you in California? >> We have no sports. >> All right, keep it right there. This is theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022. Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back. (digital music)

(upbeat music playing) >> 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 to theCUBE, here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego, I am Stu Miniman John Troyer is my co-host and joining us is one of our esteemed Cube alumni multi-time guests. Steve Herrod who is the managing director at General Catalyst. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. Always great to see you. >> It's good to see you again. >> Stu: All right I'm having >> And John. >> A flashback meeting with the two of you at a certain campus in Palo Alto and the like. But, you know it's interesting Steve, before we get into this technology, we kicked off this morning talking about a company, Docker. We knew Docker from the early on. I said, look Docker had the opportunity to be this generation's VM-ware. It has had a huge impact on the market. You know, we wouldn't have 12 thousand people here if it wasn't for them. Give us your take kind of as to, you know, this wave of technology and we'll start there. >> Yeah, well I guess I'll start with Docker the company. I mean, it just shows you boy, it's hard to build big companies these days and I think there will be plenty of people talking about why that didn't work out or did work out. Maybe there was too much stuff given to open source. Maybe not enough, maybe there isn't enough community. But I do think, I think that's the tale of just how hard it is to be out in this world. But on the flip side they certainly moved for the idea of containers and got things going. We always have a saying in the venture business, actually in the startup business, which is it's sometimes the second mouse that gets the cheese. Someone's got to break a little glass and then sometimes someone else comes in afterwards and gets some of the reward for it. >> Well Steve this is a sprawling ecosystem. We went from 8 thousand people last year, 4 thousand the year before to over 12 thousand, and this ecosystem keeps growing. You've got a portfolio company that launched this week. You're checking out the show floor. Maybe let's start with the new one coming out from your side. >> Yeah you know I have several startups that are here but I think what's been interesting is the opportunity to create new companies. If you look at the, I'm sure you've covered a lot of them. But if you look at the sponsor sheets here, there's literally hundreds of booths that you can go see and many of which are in similar areas, many of which are open source. So it's really a challenge, like as you all trained interviewers and me trained looking at the space. Think how complex it is to a customer right now. Do that, think about like which service mesh do I pull together with this and that and which command line and which API tool, so I think that's both the challenge and the opportunity you often see this early on. One company that we just had coming out is called Render and their idea is to build an application platform service kind of on top of all this and just to hide it all from the user which I think is, I think that's what always happens in these ecosystems. You get so many players and then someone will be the bundler and make a suite out of it. Or someone will write a service on top of it all and take it away from you. So I think it's sort of a healthy part of a rapidly changing ecosystem. And Render will be doing some interesting things, but they talk to Application developers, not to infrastructure people. App developers don't want to know about any of this. >> Well we're sitting here at KubeCon in the midst of kind of, right at that margin, right at that boundary between from one perspective it looks very developer-y, But from another perspective, this seems very operator-y here. How do you see, in the market in the place, with the buyers, the CIOs or the technical buyers out there. I mean how are you looking at infrastructure versus developers and cloud et cetera? >> It's funny, you know we're all infrastructure people for the most part. What I often say, I know you all know that as well, like at the end of the day infrastructure is only there to run applications. It has no other purpose in life except to be a great place to run applications. But it's also accountable for doing a lot of the things you need. It has to make it run fairly at a certain performance. It has to make sure it's safe from attack. It needs to make sure the data is backed up. So I always just try to think about that when I'm looking at these startups, and we were just talking about this before the show. When I go up to one of the booths and I ask, I usually ask, how do you make someone's life better? Sometimes you get someone who's not the most senior person at the company and they'll quickly go into the technology on how it's this or that. But if you can't frame it in the context of how some enterprises' applications are better, faster, safer then it's really not that interesting, I think, to a CIO that has all these decision making. So, anyway I keep coming back to that with what ever infrastructure or application companies out there and try to wonder what's going on. >> Yeah, no I do really like that as we often frame it, it's what is the business value? It's, you know, nobody really has a problem that I need to rub Kubernetes on. Yes, I need agility, I need you know, the result of what having a distributed architecture drives from my business is what I need. Not the niggling little details there. Um, so I love that piece of what you do better for a company. The other thing, I walk around and I talk to some of these companies and some of them, I scratch my head a little bit as to the oh well I created a cool project, and we've open sourced it and that's my business. And as you know we've talked about the cautionary tale of Docker. Where are we with open source and business model and what's your latest take on that? >> Boy, that is ever evolving. It's funny though, if you look at even just the last ten years since you've been covering things. The go to model for most open source companies has shifted from maybe supportive subscription to really, some of them are open core meaning that parts of it are closed source. But, more and more that the really well to do ones are running them as a service. So that tends to be what we look for now is, whether you're running it directly, or you're doing something with a Microsoft, Google, Amazon where you get some of the revenue from it, which is a big, a big if. That seems to be one of the better ways to consume it and the people who have control over the software should be the best at operationalizing it. So that's kind of the change that we've seen as of late. >> Yeah, quick follow up on that, when we look at the hyper scale, the public clouds. Their marketplaces are getting more and more, you know, it's just a big force in the marketplace. Especially AWS, but Azure's pushing that way and Google to some extent there. Do you give any advice to your portfolio customers? How they should think about their relationships with the big cloud players? >> Well yeah, I mean that's one of the biggest discussions, not even just for our tech companies, but our commerce companies and everywhere else. But I do think what's kind of interesting, in many cases we're seeing the companies talk about maybe Amazon or someone is running that software as a service and it's maybe it's a little older version or maybe it's not all the bells and whistles. So there's certainly a case where good enough is good enough and it kind of crushes the startup, but you also hear a fair amount of tales of where it introduces them to this concept for the first time and then they're going to move over to perhaps the best of breed case, so obviously getting that right is a big job for the founder as well as for an investor. But, um I really see it as a mixed bag. The notion of being introduced to a customer at a lower cost than ever before matters a lot if they then switch to you. >> Well Steve, another boundary that you're sitting at is the boundary between all these technology providers and the customer. Any particular observations on trends over in the customer side? Are people looking to save money, are people feeling good, are the techies really leading the adoption? Is CIO down? Digital transformation? I mean, you're sitting right there in the middle. >> Yeah I mean the good news for I think all startups are that software matters and the digital transformation that's been going on for many, many years continues in a broad way. I would say at the end of the day though, the one question that I almost ask just back to your point on business value. I ask any startup, tell me why you are at least 10 times better than everyone else in this space. And because it is, the bad news of so many startups and so many cool ideas is how's anyone to choose? So if you ask any of your CIOs, they're just massively confused. They try to look for a bigger vendor who could possibly bundle it all together and make it a suite. That's super enticing as you know to all these guys. But when you have this much churn and change going on, you know someone has to step into that role, so I would just say that the ideal thing is you have smaller number of vendors, that never works with a lot of rapid innovation so somewhere in the middle you need to have startups that are really good at bundling in with other folks and fitting into APIs and doing that. >> Alright, so Steve, we've had an interesting view on what's going on in the security industry this week and I know you've got a perspective on it. Our team did the AWS reinforce show in Boston and it was generally upbeat, talking about all the great things that cloud's doing and you know, modernize everything we're doing. Pat Gelsinger from VMware, you know, banging on the table at VMware saying you know, we need a do-over, we need to start over with security. Here at this show, if some people are very cautiously optimistic that we've solved a bunch of the problems of security. You know, where in your view are we, and where are we going? >> I think we'll never be done with security. However, I do think we've reached a maturity level, if you, well, you were here. A couple years ago, there were so many security companies just for containers and I think, you know that's interesting to some extent, but, every CIO is going to have a mixed environment. And so I think what you see this year and what you saw with Palo Alto's acquisitions, so my companies Alumio I know you've talked to. It's really saying let's have one master policy and have it actually then go out and talk to Amazon, talk to my local infrastructure, talk to containers, talk to server lists. That will be the next wave of things going on. But, um, I think whenever you see a maturing of a company like this, the management tools and the security tools that have to inter operate start to really make a showing. And I actually see that quite a bit in this show, so that's a sign of a little bit of maturity going on here. >> Okay, last thing, Steve, I guess, what's catching your eye? Anything interesting or spaces there that you'd call out that we haven't already touched on? >> Well, I spend a lot of time these days actually on, and I hesitate to say it, but on AI. And I mean specifically it is such a hyped term and it's used in many ways like cloud used to be used, so it's just sort of a marketing term in many ways. But specifically, the picks and shovels that are enabling that, many of which show up here too because it is being deployed in containers, that sort of thing. So certainly the tools, but more importantly the vertical applications that can have a meaningful benefit from it. And I'll say, same thing as with infrastructure. AI is a means to an end, it's not the actual thing you're trying to do. But there's real, there's been a real advance there and so I'm really enjoying watching where you get these 10x improvements because you're using the data and AI there. So I continue to love infrastructure and developer tools and I think especially as they get applied to some of these new areas, like AI. That's where I'm excited about what we'll be seeing. >> Well, Steve, really appreciate you coming by. Congrats to the Demon Render, definitely look to catch up there if we don't catch him this week, we'll get him to our Palo Alto studios sometime. >> Yeah, Render is cool. You can go try it out. Render.com >> All right. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Getting towards the end of day 1 of 3 days. Wall to wall coverage. Check out theCUBE.net for all of the coverage, and as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music playing)

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering Comcast Innovation Day. Brought to you by Comcast. >> Hey welcome back, get ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center, here in Sunnyvale, California. They had a really cool thing today, it was a customer experience day, brought a bunch of Comcast executives and a bunch of thought leaders in the customer experience base. We're excited to come down and sit in and talk to some of the guests, and really excited about our next guest, 'cause he's an anthropologist, he's Brian Solis, digital analyst, author, analyst, anthropologist, futurist, Brian, you've got it all going on, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day. >> Course, this is a really great conversation, so, I'm happy to be here. >> So first off, just kind of impressions of the conversation earlier today, talking about customer experience, the expectation, consumerization of IT is something we talk a lot about, where people's expectations of the way this stuff is supposed to work, change, all the time, and what was magical and almost impossible, like talking on a cell phone in your car, suddenly becomes expected and the norm, so how do you think of this, as you look at these big, sweeping changes that we're going through? >> Well today's conversation I think has been sort of, a spotlight on what's most important, which is innovation not for the sake of innovation, but innovation for the sake of pushing the customer experience forward, changing customer behaviors in a way that's going to create a new standard for experiences, and that way you become the leader in engagement. Everybody else has to catch up to you, and what was so important is that we're here at a company with all the love that wasn't the best in customer experience several years ago, and now they're sort of one of the pioneers in what customer experience needs to be, from a technological standpoint, a customer service standpoint, and an overall experience standpoint, right? >> I want to jump into the voice capability specifically, because I don't think there's really enough accolades as to what Comcast has achieved with the voice remote, I think if you don't have it you don't know it's there, and the ability to migrate across hundreds or thousands of channels, multiple services, to find the show that you want with just the ask of your voice is amazing. What's even more amazing is trying to teach people to actually navigate that way, so changing people's behavior in the way they interact with devices is not a simple thing. >> So, it's come up, and it's an expression shared in many UI and UX circles, which is the best interface is no interface, and in many ways, voice was the next frontier, that's a frontier that was pioneered, I think at a mass level by Amazon and Alexa, Apple and Siri, Google and Ok Google, we're really starting to see that voice as a UI is much more natural, what makes it so complex is all of the back end, I think Comcast has done a really nice job in the simplistic linguistic engagement of saying the name of a TV show or a genre of shows or movies, and then the back end to be reimagined in order to bring you something that's not just this long list of stuff, that is much more intuitive and helps you get to what they call time to joy, much faster. That's game changing, right, but that isn't just something that Comcast looked, for example, to just Alexa, or anything specifically, it looked, and also, especially not to other cable companies. They looked to the best-in-class experiences in every area, to pick those parts and build something altogether new that becomes the new standard, and I think voice, one of the things that you and I were talking about, Jeff, earlier, was kids, there was a time when they would walk up to a screen and they still do to some regard, where they want to do this, but I have a three year old at home who has a toy remote control, and I had to record video from afar of just watching her talk into her toy remote, "Mickey Mouse Club, Mickey Mouse Club," and just sitting there, with all the patience in the world, nothing was happening but expecting that something was going to happen. And it's just a new standard. The other thing, though, is that we're not done, we now live in an era of AI, machine learning, automation, so personalization now is really going to start to build upon voice experiences where it's just simply turning on the TV is going to give you instant options of all of the things you're most likely going to want to watch all on one nav. >> Right, it's just, we say that and yet we still have qwerty keyboards, right, which were specifically designed to slow people down and yet now we're not using arm typewriters anymore, and we still have qwerty keyboards, so changing people's behavior is not easy, and it's interesting to see kind of these generational shifts based on the devices in which they grew up using, kind of define the way in which they expect everything else to work. But it's, I still get the email, maybe, or even, they talked about here at Comcast, where instead of just saying NCAA Football, it knows I like to watch Stanford football, it suggests, maybe you should just say Stanford football, so there's still kind of a lot of education, surprising amount of education that has to happen. >> Yes and no, if you think about the conversation, I often talk about it in terms of iteration and innovation, iteration is doing the same things better, innovation is creating new value, and if you look at the evolution of the remote control, I mean just go back 50 years, it has gotten progressively worse over time, in fact on average, today's remote control has 70 buttons on it, and if you think about iteration in that regard, we've completely started to fail in the user interface, I don't know that anybody has mastered their relationship with the remote control except for some geeks, so I think if anything, voice is going to change the game for the better. >> Yeah, I was in the business for a long time, and now I know what killed the VCR, right, was the flashing 12, nobody could ever get their flashing 12, and for all the young people, look it up on the internet, you'll figure out what a VCR and a flashing 12 is. So you talk about something called Generation C, what is Generation C, why should we be paying attention? >> Look, I think voice is a good example of Generation C, so anybody who uses, you mentioned qwerty, right, I don't know that I've actually even used qwerty in a sentence in a really long time, but I'm old enough to, I trained on a manual typewriter back in the day, so it doesn't mean that I don't get it, it means that my behaviors and my expectations as a human being have changed, because of my relationship, my personal relationship, so for example, in consumerization of technology and IT, my personal relationship has changed with technology, and so what I had found in my research over the years was especially when it comes to customer experience, if you study a customer journey, and you look at demographics of these personas that we've created, you can see specifically that people who live a mobile-first lifestyle, regardless of age, will make decisions the same way, they're increasingly impatient, they're demanding, they're self-centered, I call 'em accidental narcissists, they, time, convenience are really important, they want personalization, their standards are much different than the personas that we've developed in the past, and so I gave it a name, which is Generation C, because it wasn't one, where C stood for connected, it wasn't one bound by age, or traditional demographics, education, income, it was defined by shared interests, behaviors, and shared outcomes, and it was a game changer for all things, if you're going to point innovation or customer experience or whatever it is, and you're going to aim at that growing customer segment, then they're going to have a different set of needs than your traditional customer, right? >> But it's so bizarre, again, how quickly the novel becomes expected baseline, and how the great search algorithm that we get out of Google, which is based on lots and lots and lots and lots of data, and a bunch of smart people and a whole bunch of hardware and software, suddenly now we expect that same search result if we're searching on, pick some random retailer or some other random website, when in fact, that is special, but we have this crazy sliding scale of what's expected and how can companies stay out in front of that, at least chase close behind, 'cause it's a very different world in how fast the expectations change. >> I'm sorry, I totally spaced out 'cause my attention span went away. I'm just kidding, I'm kidding. >> Well I didn't even get to the attention economy question yet. >> It's, you're competing at a much different level today, and I think that's what so disruptive for companies, is that they're still thinking that momentum and progress and experience and performance and success, I have to say that success is the worse teacher when it comes to innovation because you're basing your decisions on the future based on things that you did in the past. So what do companies need to get, is that the customers change, I'll give you an example. I think in many ways, companies compete against Uber, right, because Uber has changed the game for what it takes to get a service brought to you, and to give it to you and take you where you need to go, where time and convenience are big factors of that. So for example, one of the things I studied was how long is too long to wait for an Uber before you open Lyft in certain markets, and the reason that I wanted to do that was I wanted to show that the number went down every single year. Now, for example, Uber will advertise in Sydney that the average pickup time is three minutes and 39 seconds, because it knows it adds a competitive advantage over everybody else, because it's important, because once that experience happens to you and you get something your way fast, you're not going to suddenly realize, when you're at the Department of Motor Vehicles, that "Well, I understand that this isn't Uber, "and therefore I shouldn't expect "to have things done at a much more efficient "and personal manner." You take that mindset subconsciously to everything you do, so while it's a threat, it's also an opportunity, but you got to break that executive mindset to say, "How can we take "best-in-class experiences across the board, "and how can we apply it to what we do?" >> Yeah, again, an interesting concept in the conversation earlier today, where there was a question about ROI, and you threw it back as ROE, return on experience, so how should people start to adjust their thinking, because the thing on, return on investment implies almost a very small kind of direct impact, kind of one to one benefit, where really, return on experience implies a much broader, kind of accidental benefits, benefits across a lot of parameters that you may or may not necessarily be measuring, it's a very, a much better way to measure your investment. >> Look, it's almost impossible to get away from the ROI conversation, it's important, executives have to make decisions based on what they know the outcomes are going to be, a lot of this is, you don't know what you don't know, and so if you can tie some types of rudimentary metrics that are going to show progress and also return, it helps, but at the same time, I always say, what happens in the ROI equation if I equals ignorance, what's the return of ignorance? What's the return of not doing something, and so what I tried to demonstrate in a book I wrote about experience design, which was called X, it was, let's break it down to what we're actually trying to do, the word experience actually means an emotional reaction to a moment, and so for example, in a high sales pitch situation like a dealership for an automobile, that's not a good experience. If you have to call customer service, you've probably not had a good experience, and all of those things are emotional, so if you can design for emotional outcomes, where people are going to feel great in the moment and feel great afterwards, that is a metric that you can have a before and after state. The likelihood of attaching that emotion to things like loyalty, customer lifetime value, growth, then you can get to your ROI in a different way, but you have to first do it with intention. >> Yeah, Brian, fascinating conversation, we could go all day, but unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, but thanks for joining today, and thanks for spending a few minutes with us. >> Thank you, thank you, it was a pleasure. >> Absolutely, he's Brian, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Comcast Innovation Center in Sunnyvale, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (techno music)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nation's capital, Washington DC. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, John Furrier. We are joined by Daniel Castro. He is the Vice President Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank based here in town. Welcome, Daniel. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, the theme of this conference is all about modernizing government IT. I want to just start by asking a think tank analyst, how do you define IT modernization, particularly as it relates to the public sector? >> Yeah, I mean, I think a lot about how we've had this evolution, and how we do egovernment, right? And we've talked about the stages of egovernment before, for a long time, and it used to be that you had this very basic model. You put some information online, and then you had the transactional model, so you have some communication. Then you'd have something that was a little more interactive. So, maybe you get some more back and forth there. And now I think we're getting into this new model of egovernment. This next stage where we can possibly start automating a lot of more. We can start using AI. We can use IoT, and I think that's where there's a lot of excitement now because there's so much possibility with what we can do with government that didn't exist before, even five years ago. And so, to me, it's exciting to see things like where you can ask Alexa to do something with government, and you can start seeing this next wave that didn't exist even a few years ago. >> What kind of efficiencies do you see, because that seems to be a theme, using data, undifferienciated heavy-lifting tasks, where do you see the use cases in government for being more efficient with cloud and data? >> Well, I have a little bit of experience in government. I used to work in government, and one thing that a lot of people will tell you is that there's a lot of really boring things that you have to do when you're in government. There's a lot of really exciting things, really great things you can do when you're in government that's what attracts, I think, great people. But what I see is the possibility to take a lot of those boring activities out of government. The paperwork associated with your leave, and filing a claim, or all these things that people don't like, to me, that's the possibility. Can we get rid of the boring part of government and just have the really value-added part. And with data, I think that's where we're moving 'cause it's not about moving papers around and tracking. Government has a big information problem, it's can we really get to the core problem, which is the analytics, the decision-making, the problem solving. And that to me, you see so many companies on the floor that are saying, we'll take care of the security problem for you. We'll take care of the storage problem for you. we'll take care of the applications, and leave you to do that you actually wanted to do when you came to government. >> Get rid of the manual tasks, and leaving more room for the creative. And as you said, the analytical, the problem-solving. >> Right. >> Well the thing I want to ask you is that I'm old enough to see the original internet wave. And the US did a great job under the Department of Commerce when the internet came out, the domain name system. They worked internationally with ICANN, variety of other organizations, and so you had this nice growth of the internet. Now it just seems like it's highly accelerated, you got Facebook, you got YouTube. You got all these things going on. You have Amazon, these big whales of tech companies. There's a huge tech-lash going on. There's a lot of tech for good as well. So, we were just talking in our last segment, the pile for tech for good opportunities is a lot higher than the tech for bad, but everyone's focused on the bad actors right now. These are private companies. These aren't public entities, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon so they can't arrest anyone. They can't, they do what they do, right? >> Right. >> So where's the new way to get this under control? What's the think tank's perspectve? What's the community perspective in DC around this? >> What strikes me is the level of optism we see around technology has changed significantly, and part of that's driven by the tech-lash. If you go back to the '90s, people were excited about the potential of the internet, and what it could mean. We've done some analysis looking at even just the reporting in the media. We did sentiment anaylysis of how technology's being described, not just IT, but technology overall and innovation overall. You see a downward trend in the last 20 years. It's been steady, and it's been faster in the last 10 years. That affects, I think, the ability to get the public on board with new technology. It affects the ability of government to say, we're using technology for these new purposes. And it affects the policies. When you mentioned ICANN, the Departmemt of Commerce said We're going to do something fundamentally different with the internet, we're going to help create it, but keep our hands off it That idea was radical and new and exciting and innovative. Now we have all these new technologies like whether it's Jones or IoT or AI, but we don't have government necessarily saying, this is exciting and new and maybe we should do things different this time. We should think about a creative way of ensuring that we are not in the way of innovation. That we're putting in good guard rails to protect people, and instead they want to do kind of the old model, of let's regulate the technology, or focus on how it can go wrong instead of really focusing on how it might go right. >> Well, I got to say, we need more think tanks like what you guys are doing because my personal feeling, not being a very political person, and being from California, is you can't regulate what you don't understand. So if you don't understand it, then get out of the way, and a lot of people that I see in DC, certainly in elected official sides, they really don't know what they're talking about. They're mostly either lawyers or not tech savvy. And the ones that are tech savvy seem to be kind of oppressed, like where are they? Where's the revolution? >> So what's the answer then? I mean they... (laughs) >> Well, I think we have to educate more about what the potential is. When you see people start to understand, here's the technology, here's the benefits. But these are the 10 things we need to do to get there. They understand they need to do more. The problem is, some of the technology, it is kind of confusing to policy makers. Do you try to explain what machine learning is to a 70 year old elected official, and not all of them are familiar with it. Some of them are, but you look at the, Congress has an AI caucus. Congress also has a blockchain caucus, which do you think is bigger? >> Blockchain. >> Blockchain, of course, right? Because people think there's money there, it's immutable. But AI's going to be the one-- >> Infrastructure dynamic around supply chain. >> Yeah. >> Which is a data challenge because now you got encryption, and you have all kinds of immutability. So again, this is an exciting time but what do you do? Do you jump in? Nurture it? Regulate it? >> I think government, what traditionally people think about government is the lag around technology. What I like about this conference is, I think it'll show that government can be the leader in technology. When government's the leader in technology, it de-risks it for both the private sector and the rest of government. So it can say, we're going to be on the cutting edge. We're going to show how it can be done, and by being an early adopter, we can also help shape the technology. So when people are concerned about bias in AI or something, if government's an early adopter, they can help address some of those problems whether it's by making their own data sets available or showing-- >> When government is experimenting with the algorithms and then makes some mistakes, it builds more bias into it. It has more consequences, it feels like that at least. >> I think that's true, but I think the difference is nobody expects the private sector to necessarily put citizen's interest first, but that is government's role. Government's role is to say, how can we make our community better? So when it has a primary seat at the table, it can help shape the technology to get to those types of concerns. Now, of course you have to have a good government. So it's also important that we elect people who are excited about technology and protecting all people. The CIA, and now the DoD with Jedi, and a variety of other contracts going on, I think can be that leader again. If you look at the CIA is done, I think that is a great use case example, a leader gestating since 2013. DoD now on it. My friend, John Markoff, former New York Times columnist, wrote a book, What the Door Mouse Said. It's about how the hippy counter culture created the computer revolution, really from the build-up of technology around government funding to institutions and academic institutions. The counterculture developed, aka, the computer revolution. So I see a similar thing kind of happening now. It feels like you have all this tech out there. You've got this counterculture of people saying, why is there all this red tape? Why can't we use this data? Why is LinkedIn a site load of data? Why is Facebook doing what they're doing? So, I think the question should be asked, the question is, how should we take that position as the government to foster innovation, curb the bad, accelerate good, reward good. So the incentives could be digital I'd love to get your reaction to that. >> Yeah, I think that's a good point. What I see, we had a panel this morning on open data, and one of the big themes there was around the idea of collaboration. It's about partnerships between government and industry whether it's government providing the data, or industry providing the data, and also focusing on specific problems. I think that's how you get out of the siloed approach which is the concern that you have one federal agency, for example, focusing on, this is my problem. And I have the blinders on and not looking how it affects everyone else, and arguably that's the critique that a lot of people have about companies, that they're focused on one problem. They're not looking at the effects they have on the rest of the economy or society. I think you have collaberation on specific problems whether it's the opioid crisis or health care, or energy, then you start getting people from lots of different backgrounds saying, here's the resources we can bring to bear on these problems, and here's how we're going to fix it, and here's how we're going to do things differently. A lot of that gets to, do you have data that you can share? Do you have IT infrastructure that's interoperable? And do you have just kind of an organizational structure, that allows and encourages that type of collaboration? So I think when you keep kind of pushing it then, saying this is the future we want. These are the problems we're going to solve. Then it forces, even governments that are traditionally rigid to start re-orienting around new ways of solving problems. >> Well you know, open source software really could be an indicator of where this could go because you look at the generations of evolution in open source software. Collaberation that come out of that could be applied to data. >> Absolutely, and it forced second government agencies to rethink how they operate. It forced them to say, well maybe this traditional procurement model doesn't work. How else can we do things? How can we move to more service support? Those types of changes came about from a change in licensing the software. (laughs) >> Exactly. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a pleasure, and we look forward to having you on again soon. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming on. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, we will have much more from AWS Public Sector Summit, here on theCUBE Teresa Carlson is coming up next. Stay tuned.

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCube! Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, And their ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, live here, in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services AWS re:Invent 2018. 52,000 people here. Two days. Second day of three days of wall to wall coverage here at theCUBE. I'm John, with Dave Vellante. Dave, six years, we've been doing theCUBE. We've been to all re:Invents except for the first year. We've been a customer, we've been following these guys. >> Plus the summits! >> Plus the summits. Great ecosystem. And VMware and VMworld, similar dynamic. I want to talk about that now, obviously the new announcement, on-premise, is huge. Want to dig in to it with our guest, Sanjay Poonen, who's the Chief Operating Officer of VMware. Sanjay, great to see you. Cube alumni, many times, thanks for coming back again. >> John and Dave, pleasure to be on your show. >> Thanks for coming on, great to see you. >> Congratulations on all this success, you've got a wonderful booth and presence here, and I think this is becoming like the Mecca of all IT events. >> You know, we have our new video cloud service on AWS, we're ingesting over 110 videos, we'll have 500 short video clips behind it. Tons of blog posts, tons of coverage. There's an insatiable appetite for Amazon Web Services content as Andy pointed out in my interview with him. And it's just the beginning. You guys at VMware really, I mean, talk about a seminal moment in the history of the computer industry, and VMware was, when you guys recognized the sea change of operators on IT and cloud developers coming together, you guys were very proactive two years ago. Raghu, yourself, and the team, Pat. We're going to, hey you know what? Let's just align. Culture's a fit with Amazon. Let's co-develop. Let's ride the wave together, and let's see where the chips fall. Which is basically, I'm oversimplifying, but that's kind of what's happened. So much has happened. I saw Raghu last night at the Greylock partner event. This is a historic moment. Good outcome so far, deep partnership, meaningful partnership. A lot of resonance in the marketplace, you guys are iterating and raising the bar. That's Amazon talk for success. How do you feel? >> Yeah, no, I think it's, absolutely, John. We, if you think about how this has evolved, you know five years ago when I joined VMware, I felt like cloud and containers, the two C's, were our big headwinds. We've turned those headwinds now into tailwinds, but it took some catharsis from us. We had vCloud Air, our own public cloud. We had to divest that. And I think the Amazon VMware coming together, when we announced it two and a half years ago, was like a Berlin Wall moment, where you had the US and the Soviet Union getting together. That was good for world peace. People were surprised, because these are two purported enemies now, and it really built trust. And step by step, launching VMware on AWS, announcing RDS on VMware, the beginning of on-premise, and then today, announcing Outposts, it's just an example of not just the validity of VMware as a hybrid cloud leader, but the strength of this partnership. We have a very special relationship with Andy, Pat, myself, Raghu, spent a lot of time together. Often, you can't tell, when our engineering teams meet, when an Amazon engineer and a VMware apart from each other. They're like finishing each other's sentences. That, we don't do, like, Mickey Mouse, Barney, you know press releases. It's real stuff. >> And the culture of, the engineering culture of VMware, which has been a core, cultural thing, the DNA of VMware is technical. Very community oriented. Amazon, technical, very operationally efficient, good community. This is good fit there. I got to get your perspective, though, on how that is going to evolve, specifically around on-premise. Because certainly Andy Jassy validates on-premises with the announcement that VMworld, which you guys covered, Pat Gelsinger uses words like dial tone, Kubernetes, you mentioned containers. Andy, when I asked him, "Andy, you know you told me "in theCUBE, five years ago, "that everything's going to the public cloud. "Change of tune? "You mind if I pin you down?" "No, John, you can pin me down all you want." He says good leaders are self-aware. He said "Our customers wanted this." And he's cool to it. And the partnership with VMware highlights that this is not going to happen overnight, he recognizes the duration, the role of on-premise. And then he also says that the data center's like a big Edge. So, if everything's cloud, what you guys basically announced with Outpost is, cloud, public cloud everywhere. So, just, there's no public, private, it's just cloud. This is a game changer, because-- >> Absolutely. >> Just, why wouldn't I want to buy this product? >> I mean, first off, congratulations on scoring that interview. Not many people have access to Andy that way, and you guys have built a very good relationship. I thought that interview you did with him was phenomenal. There was a special point in that, John, where you tried to get him to talk about Outposts, this was before he announced it, which is will Amazon go on-premise. So a couple of months ago, when Andy called us, and Matt Garman, to talk about this project under NDA, it was a continuation of those RDS type discussions where we basically said, if you want to do anything on-premise, you should do it with VMware, because you're going to have to go through this door called VMware. We are the de facto king of the on-premise private cloud world. Many of these customers are used to our tooling, vSphere, vMotion. They want anything to run on VMware. So from that became a sequence of discussions that really really evolved very quickly, and well, so we can announce this together. I mean, you know, Andy had three guests on stage, and only one partner, and that was VMware. And that's an indication of the strength of this partnership. Vice versa, of the 50,000 people here, probably all of them have VMware on-premise. So if Amazon's going to do more on premise, why not do it with the leader in that area, VMware. And we want to be in the software industry. The de facto standard for software-defined infrastructure. Right? And that's a special space that we can fill. >> Well, the amazing thing to me, is, here's VMware, no public cloud, Amazon wouldn't even say the word hybrid, or private cloud, doesn't use private cloud, but it wouldn't say hybrid before. You've now emerged as the tandem, de facto leader in hybrid cloud. Overnight. With an ecosystem that all wants to connect and partner with VMware and all wants to partner with AWS. Overnight. I mean, it feels that way anyway, 24 months. >> I think that's absolutely right. I mean, we were the first to start using the term hybrid, three or four years ago. As we did, then it took a while, because I think a lot of customers, and some of the public cloud vendors, felt it was going to be binary, all public cloud and no private cloud, but they began to realize you need both. But your point on the ecosystem, also surrounding, I just came back from meeting one of the top SIs in the world. They're betting big with us because they see this as the place for both of them, and they're also betting big with AWS. The System Integrators are all over this. The security vendors, all over this. Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, want to see. Often, many of these companies come to us and say, "You have cracked something special "in your relationship with Amazon. "How did you do that and how can we follow that model?" We're happy to share our playbook of how we think about ecosystems. So, we want to create a platform, just like Amazon's a platform, where everybody, SIs, tech vendors, software vendors, can all plug in to. >> And the other observation I make is, you know, previously the distance between infrastructure players and the guys who really are driving application value, the application developers, was quite a distance. And now it's closing, with infrastructure as code. And it's just so transformative for organizations. >> I think, and one of the things that's making that is microservices and containers. And as you know, since we last talked, we acquired Heptio. If you think about Heptio, they are the founders of Kubernetes, okay? They left Google, started their own company, Craig and Joe, and we're excited about that. That platform will augment PKS, which was our big bet in containers, and become something that could run on-premise, or in a public cloud environment like this. We acquired CloudHealth. CloudHealth is a multi-cloud management tool for costing resource management. That becomes something that could send, a lot of Amazon reps actually refer CloudHealth as the preferred way to get your insights. So we're beginning to see this now a lot more clearly than we did two years ago, thanks to this partnership. >> So, Sanjay, I know that Outposts, super exciting, it's been covered on Silicon Angle, there's a zillion stories on our site on this whole event. But, it's not going to be shipping for about a year. But you guys already have some working products now. What's the current track to that shipping because when that comes out, that'll be a game changer. Why would anyone want to buy hardware again? Michael Dell wins either way because he's got VMware. But others who sell hardware, this is a real, it could be a killer blow. But, I don't want to (laughs), you can comment on that if you want, but what's in-between that one year, you've got a product now, how do customers move along? >> Yeah, I think there's some very tangible things that, first off, VMware Cloud on AWS is, as you've described Dave, the best hybrid cloud option. You get the best of the on-premise world and the public cloud. You know, we announced hundreds of customers, we have a goal to get to thousands of customers, and then tens of thousands of customers. We're going to continue down that march. I want to have a significant number, over 500,000 customers. If Amazon has 40, 50 percent market share, based on some of the numbers that Andy shared today, a significant number of our customers have Amazon, we should get them onto VMC. VMware Cloud and AWS. Secondly, we do have, we announced Project Dimension, some Edge computing capabilities running on existing hardware players, so we are beginning this journey ourselves, in terms of cloud managed on-premise environment. Right? Project Dimension was announced before this, and that will run on Dell and Lenovo hardware, and that's well and good to go. They will have Edge IOT use cases. And then when Amazon comes and gets us ready, we would have learned a lot about this market. Which is really kind of this Edge computing market, cloud-managed. So we're not going to be, we're going to plan and do the other pieces. Much of the software components that VMware is building is not completely from scratch code. We're taking NSX. One of the most important components that VMware is adding to Outposts is NSX. We're not rewriting NSX, we're taking the NSX and applying this now, to a use case that's very much like that because we've adapted NSX now to be container-friendly, cloud-friendly. We've added NSX into the branch, VeloCloud. So those are the things that we're, you know, there's no rest for the weary anymore. >> And that gives you a consistent networking model, which is not trivial, as we've talked about. >> One of the things that I'm excited by, intrigued by, is, I know it's nuanced, but I see it as a key point, containers sometimes don't meet the security boundary issue. So, you guys can run a VM around a container, and run it under the covers. With Lambda. At super lightning speeds. It's not like a ten second instance to stand up. So that means there's more opportunities to create more abstractions around Kubernetes. And maintain security. There's so many benefits from this integrated kind of concept of consistency of operations for the software developer. >> John, you're absolutely right. Part of what we're trying to do is that word you talked about. Consistent infrastructure and operations. Consistent infrastructure and operations. And the container, if you've been seeing some of the ads in the San Francisco airport, we have some in London, and a few of the airports in New York, you'll see an ad that says "Containerware." It's playing on the word "ware", VMware. We want to be everyWARE, W-A-R-E. And if you think about the container being as pervasive as the vm in the future, I'm not going to say we're going to change the name of the company to be Containerware, but we want to be as pervasive as vm has been in VMware. So we have tens of millions of vms, in the twenty years we've had, maybe there'll be ten times as many containers. We want to become that de facto platform and containerware starts to take over. Right? What is that? Kubernetes-based. And we'll partner with the best. We've partnered with Google, we've partnered with Pivotal. Some of it would land on AWS, some of it will land on Azure. And you get a lot of the flexibility you have with that microservices platform. >> So, since you guys are on more of the software side, obviously Amazon's got software, but you guys actually are going to be much more broader, multiple clouds, as Amazon moves up the stack, I would imagine that as customers, I'm not going to buy in to only one cloud, there's other clouds out there, you guys should become a real strategic, traversal between clouds. So, we were debating, will customers have certain instances in, say, different clouds for specific, unique things, but yet run still horizontally, scalable on-premises, with VMware across multiple clouds. >> I think, you know John, it's going to be a lot like the hardware market was 20 years ago. It started to evolve into two or three major players. What's today Dell, HPE, Lenovo, at the time it was IBM, they divested to Lenovo, Cisco. In the storage place, two or three. I think the public cloud is not going to be three, five, ten. It's going to be two or three. Maybe four. And then maybe, in like China, Alibaba. So already, we have certain tools. Like CloudHealth's proposition is to manage costs and resources across multiple clouds. So we began to be already thinking about what is a multi-cloud world do? That said, in areas like this, which is a data center offer, we felt it was good for us to focus and get VMware Cloud and AWS to be the best hybrid cloud option. Give that a couple years, rather than trying to do everything and do it poorly, when you peanut butter your approach and try to do a lot of things with various different, so this is why we put a lot of special attention on VMware Cloud and AWS. We have an offering with IBM. We announced something with Alibaba. In due course VMware will need to have multiple cloud offerings. But I feel like this partnership and the specialness of this has really benefited both sides. >> Well, it's going to be very interesting, because IBM just made a 34 billion dollar validation of multi-cloud, so, and we talk about competition all the time. And it's evolving. >> We have a very good relationship with IBM. And listen, you have to be reasonably nuanced in your partnerships. So we're going to partner very heavily with IBM Global Services. We're going to partner very well with IBM Cloud. We're going to compete really hard with Red Hat! That's okay! Well, we'll compliment Linux. The bulk of their revenue's Linux. >> Of course, yeah. >> But make no mistake, we're going to compete hard with OpenShift. That's okay! That doesn't mean our IBM relationship is competitive. There's one piece of that, a very small part of the Red Hat revenue, OpenShift, that we overlap. The rest of it is complementary. We can be nuanced. It's sort of like walking and chewing gum. We can do both. And that's how we play. >> Before you wrap, now you know what we think of you, we think very highly of you, you're a superstar in our minds. However, you got to interview Sushmita, in India-- >> You know who Sushmita is? >> a true Bollywood superstar. Yes, an amazing actress, beautiful, talented. That must have been quite an experience. >> Well I got to tell ya, I was very intimidated. I opened-- >> I'll bet. >> Cause somehow I get assigned all these interviews to do. Malala, I'm usually on the opposite end. Your end. Malala, and Condoleezza Rice, and I told her I was really intimidated by her, and she said "Why?" I said, it's the first time that, I'm usually not tongue tied, but I did not know how to explain to my wife that I was going to be interviewing Ms. Universe. Okay, and she's like "What do you guys do at VMware? What the heck does Sushmita Sen have to do" But it was a good interview, I mean listen, for the India audience, we were celebrating our 20 year anniversary. She is an amazing woman who has achieved something that very few Indians have. And we wanted our Indian audience there to see that women can be successful. She's a big supporter of more women in business, fairness, equality, no prejudice, equal pay, all those things that we stand for. Which is part of our values. And if it weren't for the India audience she probably, I don't know if she would have worked at a Vmworld. We had Malala there, we had Condoleezza Rice at our last sales kickoff. We do these because we want to both teach our employees something, but also inspire them. And sometimes these speakers help with that cause. >> Sanjay, great to see you, thanks for coming on. I know you got to catch a flight. Big day today for you guys at VMware, congratulations. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Thanks for all your support, great to see you. Great commentary, great insight. Sanjay Poonen, COO at VMware breaking down the announcement of Outposts, its relevance and impact on the market, and more importantly, the VMware AWS relationship. This is theCUBE bringing you all the action, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets, hundreds of video assets coming, tons of posts on siliconangle.com, where all the coverage is. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to the special cube conversations here in Palo Alto cube studios I'm John Ferrier the founder of Silicon angle in the cube we're here with divest cargoes the founder and CEO of arcus Inc our curse com ar-are see us calm and Steve Herod General Partner at at General Catalyst VCU's funded him congratulations on your launch these guys launched on Monday a hot new product software OS for networking powering white boxes in a whole new generation of potentially cloud computing welcome to this cube conversation congratulations on your >> launch thank you John >> so today I should talk about this this >> startup when do you guys were founded let's get to the specifics date you were founded some of the people on the team and the funding and we were formally incorporated in February of 2016 we really got going in earnest in August of 2016 and have you know chosen to stay in stealth the the founding team consists of myself a gentleman by the name of Kop tell he's our CTO we also have a gentleman by the name of Derek Young he's our chief architect and our backgrounds are a combination of the semiconductor industry I spent a lot of time in the semiconductor industry most recently I was president of easy chip and we sold that company to Mellanox and Kher and Derek our networking protocol experts spent 20 plus years at places like Cisco and arguably some of the best protocol guys in the world so the three of us got together and basically saw an opportunity to to bring some of the insights and and architectural innovation you know we had in mind to the Mobius a pedigree in there some some top talent absolutely some of the things that they've done in the past from some notable yeah I mean you know some if you if you'd like some just high-level numbers we have 600 plus years of experience of deep networking expertise within the company our collective team has shipped over 400 products to production we have over 200 IETF RFC papers that have been filed by the team as well as 150 plus patents so we really can do something on the pedigree for sure yeah we absolutely focused on getting the best talent in the world because we felt that it would be a significant differentiation to be able to start from a clean sheet of paper and so really having people who have that expertise allowed us to kind of take a step back and you know reimagine what could be possible with an operating system and gave us the benefit of being able to you know choose >> best-in-class approaches so what's the >> cap the point that this all came >> together what was the guiding vision was it network os's are going to be cloud-based was it going to be more I owe t what was the some of the founding principles that really got this going because clearly we see a trend where you know Intel's been dominating we see what NVIDIA is doing competitively certainly on the GPU side you're seeing the white box has become a trend Google makes their own stuff apples big making their own silicon seeking the that's kind of a whole big scale world out there that has got a lot of hardware experience what was the catalyst for you guys when you found this kinda was the guiding principle yeah I would say there were three John and you hit you hit on a couple of them in your reference to Intel and NVIDIA with some of the innovation but if I start at the top level the market the networking market is a large market and it's also very strategic and foundational in a hyper-connected world that market is also dominated by a few people and there's essentially three vertically integrated OEM so that dominate that market and when you have that type of dominance it leads to ultimately high prices and muted innovations so we felt number one the market was going through tremendous change but at the same time it had been tightly controlled by a few people the other part of it was that there was a tremendous amount of innovation that was happening at the silicon component level coming from the semiconductor industry I was early at Broadcom very you know involved in some of the networking things that happened in the early stages of the company we saw tremendous amounts of innovation feature velocity that was happening at the silicon component level that in turn led to a lot of system hardware people coming into the market and producing systems based on this wide variety of choices for you know for the silicon but the missing link was really an operating system that would unleash all that innovation so Silicon Valley is back Steve you you know you're a VC now but you were the CTO at VMware one of the companies that actually changed how data centers operate certainly as it certainly as a pretext and cloud computing was seeing with micro services and the growth of cloud silicon's hot IT operations is certainly being decimated as we old knew it in the past everything's being automated away you need more function now there's a demand this is this penny how you see I mean you always see things are a little early as of technologist now VC what got you excited about these guys what's the what's the bottom line yeah maybe two points on that which so one silicon is is definitely become interesting again if you will in the in the Silicon Valley area and I think that's partly because cloud scale and web scale allows these environments where you can afford to put in new hardware and really take advantage of it I was a semiconductor I first austerity too so it's exciting for me to see that but um you know is the fish that it's kind of a straightforward story you know especially in a world of whether it's cloud or IOT or everything networking is you know like literally the core to all of us working going forward and the opportunity to rethink it in a new design and in software first mentality felt kind of perfect right now I think I I think device even sell the team a little short even is with all the numbers that are there kr for instance this co-founder was sort of everyone you talk to will call him mister BGP which is one of the main routing protocols in the internet so just a ridiculously deep team trying to take this on and there been a few companies trying to do something kind of like this and I think what do they say that the second Mouse gets the cheese and I think I think we've seen some things that didn't work the first time around and we can really I think improve on them and have a >> chance to make a major impact on the networking market you know just to kind of go on a tangent here for a second >> because you know as you're talking kind of my brain is kind of firing away because you know one of things I've been talking about on the cube a lot is ageism and if you look at the movement of the cloud that's brought us systems mindset back you look at all the best successes out there right now it's almost a old guys and gals but it's really systems people people who understand networking and systems because the cloud is an operating system you have an operating system for networking so you're seeing that trend certainly happened that's awesome the question I have for you device is what is the difference what's the impact of this new network OS because I'm almost envisioning if I think through my mind's eye you got servers and server list certainly big train seeing and cloud it's one resource pools one operating system and that needs to have cohesiveness and connectedness through services so is this how you guys are thinking about how are you guys think about the network os what's different about what you guys are doing with ARC OS versus what's out there today now that's a great question John so in terms of in terms of what we've done the the third piece you know of the puzzle so to speak when we were talking about our team I talked a little bit about the market opportunity I talked a little bit about the innovation that was happening at the semiconductor and systems level and said the missing link was on the OS and so as I said at the onset we had the benefit of hiring some of the best people in the world and what that gave us the opportunity was to look at the twenty plus years of development that had happened on the operating system side for networking and basically identify those things that really made sense so we had the benefit of being able to adopt what worked and then augment that with those things that were needed for a modern day networking infrastructure environment and so we set about producing a product we call it our Co s and the the characteristics of it that are unique are that its first of all its best-in-class protocols we have minimal dependency on open source protocols and the reason for that is that no serious network operator is going to put an open source networking protocol in the core of their network they're just not going to risk their business and the efficacy and performance of their network for something like that so we start with best-in-class protocols and then we captured them in a very open modular Services microservices based architecture and that allows us the flexibility and the extensibility to be able to compose it in a manner that's consistent with what the end-use case is going to be so it's designed from the onset to be very scalable and very versatile in terms of where it can be deployed we can deploy it you know in a physical environment we can deploy it visa via a container or we could deploy it in the cloud so we're agnostic to all of those use case scenarios and then in addition to that we knew that we had to make it usable it makes no sense to have the best-in-class protocols if our end customers can't use them so what we've done is we've adopted open config yang based models and we have programmable api's so in any environment people can leverage their existing tools their existing applications and they can relatively easily and efficiently integrate our Co s into their networking environment and then similarly we did the same thing on the hardware side we have something that we call D pal it's a data plane adaptation layer it's an intelligent how and what that allows us to do is be Hardware agnostic so we're indifferent to what the underlying hardware is and what we want to do is be able to take advantage of the advancements in the silicon component level as well as at the system level and be able to deploy our go S anywhere it's let's take a step back so you guys so the protocols that's awesome what's the value proposition for our Co S and who's the target audience you mentioned data centers in the past is a data center operators is it developers is it service providers who was your target customer yeah so so the the piece of the puzzle that wraps everything together is we wanted to do it at massive scale and so we have the ability to support internet scale with deep routing capabilities within our Co s and as a byproduct of that and all the other things that we've done architectural II were the world's first operating system that's been ported to the high-end Broadcom strata DNX family that product is called jericho plus in the marketplace and as a byproduct of that we can ingest a full internet routing table and as a byproduct of that we can be used in the highest end applications for network operators so performance is a key value public performance as measured by internet scale as measured by convergence times as measured by the amount of control visibility and access that we provide and by virtue of being able to solve that high-end problem it's very easy for us to come down so in terms of your specific question about what are the use cases we have active discussions in data center centric applications for the leaf and spine we have active discussions for edge applications we have active discussions going on for cloud centric applications arcus can be used anywhere who's the buyer those network operator so since we can go look a variety of personas network operator large telco that's right inner person running a killer app that's you know high mission-critical high scale is that Mike right yeah you're getting you're absolutely getting it right basically anybody that has a network and has a networking infrastructure that is consuming networking equipment is a potential customer for ours now the product has the extensibility to be used anywhere in the data center at the edge or in the cloud we're very focused on some of the use cases that are in the CDN peering and IP you know route reflector IP peering use cases great Steve I want to get your thoughts because I say I know how you invest you guys a great great firm over there you're pretty finicky on investments certainly team check pedigrees they're on the team so that's a good inside market tamp big markets what's the market here for you but how do you see this market what's the bet for you guys on the market side yeah it's pretty pretty straightforward as you look at the size of the networking market with you know three major players around here and you know a longer tail owning a small piece of Haitian giant market is a great way to get started and if you believe in the and the secular trends that are going on with innovation and hardware and the ability to take advantage of them I think we have identified a few really interesting starting use cases and web-scale companies that have a lot of cost and needs in the networking side but what I would love about the software architecture it reminds me a lot of things do have kind of just even the early virtualization pieces if you if you can take advantage of movement in advantages and hardware as they improve and really bring them into a company more quickly than before then those companies are gonna be able to have you know better economics on their networking early on so get a great layer in solve a particular use case but then the trends of being able to take advantage of new hardware and to be able to provide the data and the API is to programmatic and to manage it who one would that it's creative limp limitless opportunity because with custom silicon that has you know purpose-built protocols it's easy to put a box together and in a large data center or even boxes yeah you can imagine the vendors of the advances and the chips really love that there's a good company that can take advantage of them more quickly than others can so cloud cloud service refined certainly as a target audience here large the large clouds would love it there's an app coming in Broadcom as a customer they a partner of you guys in two parts first comes a partner so we we've ported arc OS onto multiple members of the Broadcom switching family so we have five or six of their components their networking system on chip components that we've ported to including the two highest end which is the jericho plus and you got a letter in the Broadcom buying CA and that's gonna open up IT operations to you guys and volge instead of applications and me to talk about what you just said extensibility of taking what you just said about boxes and tying applique and application performance you know what's going to see that vertically integrated and i think i think eloping yeah from from a semiconductor perspective since i spent a lot of time in the industry you know one of the challenges i had founded a high court count multi processor company and one of the challenges we always had was the software and at easy chip we had the world's highest and network processor challenge with software and i think if you take all the innovation in the silicon industry and couple it with the right software the combination of those two things opens up a vast number of opportunities and we feel that with our Co s we provide you know that software piece that's going to help people take advantage of all the great innovation that's happening you mentioned earlier open source people don't want to bring open source at the core the network yet the open source communities are growing really at an exponential rate you starting to see open source be the lingua franca for all developers especially the modern software developers wine not open sourcing the core the amino acids gotta be bulletproof you need security obviously answers there but that seems difficult to the trend on open source what's the what's the answer there on why not open source in the core yeah so we we take advantage of open source where it makes sense so we take advantage of open and onl open network Linux and we have developed our protocols that run on that environment the reason we feel that the protocols being developed in-house as opposed to leveraging things from the open source community are the internet scale multi-threading of bgp integrating things like open config yang based models into that environment right well it's not only proven but our the the the capabilities that we're able to innovate on and bring unique differentiation weren't really going back to a clean sheet of paper and so we designed it ground-up to really be optimized for the needs of today Steve your old boss Palmer rich used to talk about the harden top mmm-hmm similar here right you know one really no one's really gonna care if it works great it's under the under the harden top where you use open source as a connection point for services and opportunities to grow that similar concept yes I mean at the end of the day open source is great for certain things and for community and extensibility and for visibility and then on the flip side they look to a company that's accountable and for making sure it performs and as high quality and so I think I think that modern way for especially for the mission critical infrastructure is to have a mix of both and to give back to community where it makes sense to be responsible for hardening things are building them when they don't expense so how'd you how'd you how'd you land these guys you get him early and don't sit don't talk to any other VCS how did it all come together between you guys we've actually been friends for a while which has been great in it at one point we actually decided to ask hey what do you actually do I found that I was a venture investor and he is a network engineer but now I actually have actually really liked the networking space as a whole as much as people talk about the cloud or open source or storage being tough networking is literally everywhere and will be everywhere and whatever our world looks like so I always been looking for the most interesting companies in that space and we always joke like the investment world kind of San Francisco's applications mid here's sort of operating systems and the lower you get the more technical it gets and so well there's a vaccine I mean we're a media company I think we're doing things different we're team before we came on camera but I think media is undervalued I wrote just wrote a tweet on that got some traction on that but it's shifting back to silicon you're seeing systems if you look at some of the hottest areas IT operations is being automated away AI ops you know Auto machine learning starting to see some of these high-end like home systems like that's exactly where I was gonna go it's like the vid I I especially just love very deep intellectual property that is hard to replicate and that you can you know ultimately you can charge a premium for something that is that hard to do and so that's that's really something I get drugs in the deal with in you guys you have any other syndicates in the video about soda sure you know so our initial seed investor was clear ventures gentleman by the name of Chris rust is on our board and then Steve came in and led our most recent round of funding and he also was on the board what we've done beyond that institutional money is we have a group of very strategic individual investors two people I would maybe highlight amongst the vast number of advisers we have our gentleman by the name of Pankaj Patel punka JH was the chief development officer at Cisco he was basically number two at Cisco for a number of years deep operating experience across all facets of what we would need and then there's another gentleman by the name of Amarjeet Gill I've been friends with armored teeth for 30 years he's probably one of the single most successful entrepreneurs in the he's incubated companies that have been purchased by Broadcom by Apple by Google by Facebook by Intel by EMC so we were fortunate enough to get him involved and keep him busy great pedigree great investors with that kind of electoral property and those smart mines they're a lot of pressure on you as the CEO not to screw it up right I mean come on now get all those smart man come on okay you got it look at really good you know I I welcome it actually I enjoy it you know we look when you have a great team and you have as many capable people surrounding you it really comes together and so I don't think it's about me I actually think number one it's about I was just kidding by the way I think it's about the team and I'm merely a spokesperson to represent all the great work that our team has done so I'm really proud of the guys we have and frankly it makes my job easier you've got a lot of people to tap for for advice certainly the shared experiences electively in the different areas make a lot of sense in the investors certainly yeah up to you absolutely absolutely and it's not it's not just at the at the board it's just not at the investor level it's at the adviser level and also at you know at our individual team members when we have a team that executes as well as we have you know everything falls into place well we think the software worlds change we think the economics are changing certainly when you look at cloud whether it's cloud computing or token economics with blockchain and new emerging tech around AI we think the world is certainly going to change so you guys got a great team to kind of figure it out I mean you got a-you know execute in real time you got a real technology play with IP question is what's the next step what is your priorities now that you're out there congratulations on your launch thank you in stealth mode you got some customers you've got Broadcom relationships and looking out in the landscape what's your what's your plan for the next year what's your goals really to take every facet of what you said and just scale the business you know we're actively hiring we have a lot of customer activity this week happens to be the most recent IETF conference that happened in Montreal given our company launch on Monday there's been a tremendous amount of interest in everything that we're doing so that coupled with the existing customer discussions we have is only going to expand and then we have a very robust roadmap to continue to augment and add capabilities to the baseline capabilities that we brought to the market so I I really view the next year as scaling the business in all aspects and increasingly my time is going to be focused on commercially centric activities right well congratulations got a great team we receive great investment cube conversation here I'm John furry here the hot startup here launching this week here in California in Silicon Valley where silicon is back and software is back it's the cube bringing you all the action I'm John Fourier thanks for watching [Music]