(Gentle music) >> Hello and welcome to the Cube here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier here, joined by Platform nine, Amelia Bell the Chief Revenue Officer, really digging into the conversation around Kubernetes Cloud native and the journey this next generation cloud. Amelia, thanks for coming in and joining me today. >> Thank you, thank you. Great pleasure to be here. >> So, CRO, chief Revenue Officer. So you're mainly in charge of serving the customers, making sure they're they're happy with the solution you guys have. >> That's right. >> And this market must be pretty exciting. >> Oh, it's very exciting and we are seeing a lot of new use cases coming up all the time. So part of my job is to obtain new customers but then of course, service our existing customers and then there's a constant evolution. Nothing is standing still right now. >> We've had all your co-founders on, on the show here and we've kind of talked about the trends and where you guys have come from, where you guys are going now. And it's interesting, if you look at the cloud native market, the scale is still huge. You seeing now this next wave of AI coming on, which I call that's the real web three in my mind in terms of like the next experiences really still points to data infrastructure scale. These next gen apps are coming. And so that's being built on the previous generation of DevSecOps. >> Right >> And so a lot of enterprises are having to grow up really, really fast >> Right. >> And figure out, okay, I got to have scale I got large scale data, I got horizontal scalability I got to apply machine learning now the new software engineering practice. And then, oh, by the way I got the Kubernetes clusters I got to manage >> Right. >> I got what's containers weather, the security problems. This is a really complicated but important area of build out right now in the marketplace. >> Right. What are you seeing? >> So it's, it's really important that the infrastructure is not the hindrance in these cases. And we, one of our customers is in fact a large AI company and we, I met with them yesterday and asked them, you know, why are you giving that to us? You've got really smart engineers. They can run and create the infrastructure, you know in a custom way that you want it. And they said, we've got to be core to our business. There's plenty of work to do just on delivering the AI capabilities, and there's plenty of work to do. We can't get bogged down in the infrastructure. We don't want to have people running the engine we want them driving the car. We want them creating value on top of that. so they can't have the infrastructure being the bottleneck for them. >> It's interesting, the AI companies, that's their value proposition to their customers is that they don't want the technical talent. >> Right. >> Working on, you know, non-differentiated heavy lifting things. >> Right. >> And automate those and scale it up. Can you talk about the problem that you guys are solving? Because there's a lot going on here. >> Yeah. >> You can look at all aspects of the DevOps scale. There's a lot of little problems, some big problems. What are you guys focusing on? What's the bullseye for Platform known? >> Okay, so the bullseye is that Kubernetes infrastructure is really hard, right? It's really hard to create and run. So we introduce a time to market efficiency, let's get this up and running and let's get you into production and and producing results for your customers fast. But at the same time, let's reduce your cost and complexity and increase reliability. So, >> And what are some of the things that they're having problems with that are breaking? Is it more of updates on code? Is it size of the, I mean clusters they have, what what is it more operational? What are the, what are some of the things that are that kind of get them to call you guys up? What's the main thing? >> It's the operations. It's all operations. So what, what happens is that if you have a look at Kubernetes platform it's made up of many, many components. And that's where it gets complex. It's not just Kubernetes. There's load balances, networking, there's observability. All these things have to operate together. And all the piece parts have to be upgraded and maintained. The integrations need to work, you need to have probes into the system to predict where problems can be coming. So the operational part of it is complex. So you need to be observing not only your clusters in the health of the clusters and the nodes and so on but the health of the platform itself. >> We're going to get Peter Frey in on here after I talk about some of the technical issues on deployments. But what's the, what's the big decision for the customer? Because there's kind of, there's two schools of thought. One is, I'm going to build my own and have my team build it or I'm going to go with a partner >> Right. >> Say platform nine, what's the trade offs there? Because it seems to me that, that there's a there's a certain area of where it's core competency but I can outsource it or partner with it and, and work with platform nine versus trying to take it all on internally >> Right. >> Of which requires more costs. So there's a, there's a line where you kind of like figure out that customers have to figure out that, that piece >> Right >> What do, what's your view on that? Because I'm hearing that more people are saying, hey I want to, I want to focus my people on solutions. The app side, not so much the ops >> Right. >> What's the trade off? How do you talk about? >> It's a really interesting question because most companies think they have two options. It's either a DIY option and they love that engineers love playing with the new and on the latest. And then they think the other option is going to cloud, public cloud and have it semi managed by them. And you get very different out of those. So in the DIY you get flexibility coz you get to choose your infrastructure but then you've got all the complexities of the DIY piece. You've got to not only choose all your components but you've got to keep them working. Now if you go to public cloud option, you lose flexibility because a lot of those choices are made for you but you gain agility because quite frankly it's really easy to spin up clusters. So what we are, is that in the middle we bring the agility and the flexibility because we bring the control plane that allows you to spin up clusters and and lifecycle manage them very quickly. So the agility's there but you can do it on the infrastructure of your choice. And in the DIY culture, one of the hardest things to do actually is to convince them they don't have to do it themselves. They can focus on higher value activities, which are more focused on delivering outcomes to their customers. >> So you provide the solution that allows them to feel like they're billing it themselves. >> Correct. >> And get these scale and speed and the efficiencies of the op side. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. It's not a full outsource. >> Right, right. >> You're bringing them in to make their jobs easier >> Right, That's right. So they get choices. >> Yeah. >> We, we, they get choices on how they build it and then we run and operate it for them. But they, they have all the observability. The benefit is that if we are managing their operations and most of our customers choose the managed operations piece of it, then they don't. If something goes wrong, we fix that and they, they they get told, oh, by the way, you had a problem. We've dealt with it. But in the other model is they've got to create all that observability themselves and they've got to get ahead of the issues themselves, and then they've got to raise tickets to whoever they need to raise tickets to. Whereas we have things like auto ticket generation and so on where, look, just drive the car let us worry about the engine and all of that. Let us deal with that. And you can choose whatever you want about the engine but let us manage it for you. So >> What do you, what do you say to folks out there that are may have a need for platform nine? What's the signals inside their company that they should be calling you guys up and, and leaning in with platform nine? >> Right. >> Is it more sprawl on on clusters? Is it more errors? Is it more tickets? Is it more hassle? What are some of the signs? If someone's watching this say, hey I have, I have an issue with this. >> I would say, if there's operational inefficiencies you can't get things to market fast enough because you are building this and it's just taking too long you're spending way too much time operationally on the infrastructure, then you are, you are not using your resources where they should best be used. And, and that is delivering services to the customer. >> Ed me Hora on for International Women's Day. And she was talking about how they love to solve complex problems on the engineering team at Platform nine. It's going to get pretty complex with the edge emerging >> Indeed >> and cloud native on-premises distributed computing. >> Indeed. >> essentially is what it is. That's kind of the core DNA of the team. >> Yeah. >> What, how does that translate to the customers? Because IT seems to be, okay, I have virtual machines were great, now I got to scale up and and convert over a transform to containers, Kubernetes >> Right. >> And then large scale app, app applications. >> Right, so when it comes to Edge it gets complex pretty fast because it's highly distributed. So how do you have standardization and governance across all the different edge locations? So what we bring into play is an ability to, um, at each edge, location eh, provision from bare metal up all the way up to the application. So let's say you have thousands of stores and you want to modernize those stores, you know rather than having a server being sent somewhere to have an image loaded up and then sent that and then you've got to send a technical guide to the store and you've got to implement it all there. Forget all that. That's just, that's just a ridiculous waste of time. So what we've done is we've created the ability where the server can just be sent to the store. You can get your barista or your chef just to plug it in, right? You don't need to send any technical person over there. As long as we have access to it, we get access to it and we provision the whole thing from bare metal up and then we can maintain it according to the standards that are needed and upgrade accordingly. And that gives standardization across all your stores or edge locations or 5G towers or whatever it is, distribution centers. And we can create nice governance and good standardization which allows them to innovate fast as well. >> So this is a real opportunity for you guys. >> Yeah. >> This is an advantage from your expertise. >> Yes. >> The edge piece, dropping in a box, self-provisioning. >> That's right. So yeah. >> Can people do that? What's the, >> No, actually it, it's, it's very difficult to do. I I, from my understanding, we're the only people that can provision it from bare metal up, right? So if anyone has a different story, I'd love to hear about that. But that's my understanding today. >> That's a good value purpose. So talk about the value of the customer. What kind of scope do you got? Can you scope some of the customer environments you have from >> Sure. >> From, you know, small to the large, how give us an idea of the order of magnitude of the >> Yeah, so, so small customers may have 20 clusters or something like that. 20 nodes, I beg your pardon. Our large customers, like we're we are scaling one particular distributed environment from 2200 nodes to 10,000 nodes by the end of this year and 26,000 nodes next year. We have another customer that's scaling up to 10,000 nodes this year as well. So we have some very large scale, but some smaller ones too. And we're, we're happy to work with either end. >> Okay, so pretend I'm a customer. I'm really, I got pain and Kubernetes like I want to, I can't hire enough people. I want to have my all focus. What's the pitch? >> Okay. So skill shortage is something that that everyone is facing right now. And if, if you've got skill shortage it's going to be really hard to hire if you are competing against really, you know, high salary you know, offering companies that are out there. So the pitch is, let us do it for you. We have, we have a team of excellent probably the best Kubernetes engineers on the planet. We will create your environment for you. We will get it up and running. We will allow you to, you know, run your applica, just consume the platform, we'll run it for you. We'll have SLAs and up times guaranteed and you can just focus on delivering the software and the value needed to your customers. >> What are some of the testimonials that you get from people? Just anecdotally, what do they say? Oh my god, you guys save. >> Yeah. >> Our butts. >> Yeah. >> This is amazing. We just shipped our code out much faster. >> Yeah. >> What are some of the things that you hear? >> So, so the number one thing I hear is it just works right? It's, we don't have to worry about it, it just works. So that, that's a really great feedback that we get. The other thing I hear is if we do have issues that your team are amazing, they they fix things, they're proactive, you know, they're we really enjoy working with you. So from, from that perspective, that's great. But the other side of it is we hear things like if we were to do that ourselves we would've taken six to 12 months to build that. And you guys have just saved us six to 12 months. The other thing that we hear is with the same two engineers we started on, you know, a hundred nodes we're now running thousands of nodes. We have not had to increase the size of the team and expand and scale exponentially. >> Awesome. What's next for you guys? What's on your, your plate? >> Yeah. >> With CRO, what's some of the goals you have? >> Yeah, so growth of course as a CRO, you don't get away from that. We've got some very exciting, actually, initiatives coming up. One of the things that we are seeing a lot of demand for and is, is in the area of virtualization bringing virtual machine, virtual virtual containers, sorry I'm saying that all wrong. Bringing virtual machine, the virtual machines onto the cloud native infrastructure using Kubernetes technology. So that provides a, an excellent stepping stone for those guys who are in the virtualization world. And they can't move to containers, they can't refactor their applications and workloads fast enough. So just bring your virtual machine and put it onto the container infrastructure. So we're seeing a lot of demand for that, because it provides an excellent stepping stone. Why not use Kubernetes to orchestrate virtual the virtual world? And then we've got some really interesting cost optimization. >> So a lot of migration kind of thinking around VMs and >> Oh, tremendous. The, the VM world is just massively bigger than the container world right now. So you can't ignore that. So we are providing basically the evolution, the the journey for the customers to utilize the greatest of technologies without having to do that in a, in a in a way that just breaks the bank and they can't get there fast enough. So we provide those stepping stones for them. Yeah. >> Amelia thank you for coming on. Sharing. >> Thank you. >> The update on platform nine. Congratulations on your big accounts you have and >> thank you. >> And the world could get more complex, which Means >> indeed >> have more customers. >> Thank you, thank you John. Appreciate that. Thank you. >> I'm John Furry. You're watching Platform nine and the Cube Conversations here. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got a great remote guest coming in. Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow hot startup in AI, computer vision. Really interesting topic in this wave of AI next gen hitting. Joseph, thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, I love the startup tsunami that's happening here in this wave. RoboFlow, you're in the middle of it. Exciting opportunities, you guys are in the cutting edge. I think computer vision's been talked about more as just as much as the large language models and these foundational models are merging. You're in the middle of it. What's it like right now as a startup and growing in this new wave hitting? >> It's kind of funny, it's, you know, I kind of describe it like sometimes you're in a garden of gnomes. It's like we feel like we've got this giant headstart with hundreds of thousands of people building with computer vision, training their own models, but that's a fraction of what it's going to be in six months, 12 months, 24 months. So, as you described it, a wave is a good way to think about it. And the wave is still building before it gets to its full size. So it's a ton of fun. >> Yeah, I think it's one of the most exciting areas in computer science. I wish I was in my twenties again, because I would be all over this. It's the intersection, there's so many disciplines, right? It's not just tech computer science, it's computer science, it's systems, it's software, it's data. There's so much aperture of things going on around your world. So, I mean, you got to be batting all the students away kind of trying to get hired in there, probably. I can only imagine you're hiring regiment. I'll ask that later, but first talk about what the company is that you're doing. How it's positioned, what's the market you're going after, and what's the origination story? How did you guys get here? How did you just say, hey, want to do this? What was the origination story? What do you do and how did you start the company? >> Yeah, yeah. I'll give you the what we do today and then I'll shift into the origin. RoboFlow builds tools for making the world programmable. Like anything that you see should be read write access if you think about it with a programmer's mind or legible. And computer vision is a technology that enables software to be added to these real world objects that we see. And so any sort of interface, any sort of object, any sort of scene, we can interact with it, we can make it more efficient, we can make it more entertaining by adding the ability for the tools that we use and the software that we write to understand those objects. And at RoboFlow, we've empowered a little over a hundred thousand developers, including those in half the Fortune 100 so far in that mission. Whether that's Walmart understanding the retail in their stores, Cardinal Health understanding the ways that they're helping their patients, or even electric vehicle manufacturers ensuring that they're making the right stuff at the right time. As you mentioned, it's early. Like I think maybe computer vision has touched one, maybe 2% of the whole economy and it'll be like everything in a very short period of time. And so we're focused on enabling that transformation. I think it's it, as far as I think about it, I've been fortunate to start companies before, start, sell these sorts of things. This is the last company I ever wanted to start and I think it will be, should we do it right, the world's largest in riding the wave of bringing together the disparate pieces of that technology. >> What was the motivating point of the formation? Was it, you know, you guys were hanging around? Was there some catalyst? What was the moment where it all kind of came together for you? >> You know what's funny is my co-founder, Brad and I, we were making computer vision apps for making board games more fun to play. So in 2017, Apple released AR kit, augmented reality kit for building augmented reality applications. And Brad and I are both sort of like hacker persona types. We feel like we don't really understand the technology until we build something with it and so we decided that we should make an app that if you point your phone at a Sudoku puzzle, it understands the state of the board and then it kind of magically fills in that experience with all the digits in real time, which totally ruins the game of Sudoku to be clear. But it also just creates this like aha moment of like, oh wow, like the ability for our pocket devices to understand and see the world as good or better than we can is possible. And so, you know, we actually did that as I mentioned in 2017, and the app went viral. It was, you know, top of some subreddits, top of Injure, Reddit, the hacker community as well as Product Hunt really liked it. So it actually won Product Hunt AR app of the year, which was the same year that the Tesla model three won the product of the year. So we joked that we share an award with Elon our shared (indistinct) But frankly, so that was 2017. RoboFlow wasn't incorporated as a business until 2019. And so, you know, when we made Magic Sudoku, I was running a different company at the time, Brad was running a different company at the time, and we kind of just put it out there and were excited by how many people liked it. And we assumed that other curious developers would see this inevitable future of, oh wow, you know. This is much more than just a pedestrian point your phone at a board game. This is everything can be seen and understood and rewritten in a different way. Things like, you know, maybe your fridge. Knowing what ingredients you have and suggesting recipes or auto ordering for you, or we were talking about some retail use cases of automated checkout. Like anything can be seen and observed and we presume that that would kick off a Cambrian explosion of applications. It didn't. So you fast forward to 2019, we said, well we might as well be the guys to start to tackle this sort of problem. And because of our success with board games before, we returned to making more board game solving applications. So we made one that solves Boggle, you know, the four by four word game, we made one that solves chess, you point your phone at a chess board and it understands the state of the board and then can make move recommendations. And each additional board game that we added, we realized that the tooling was really immature. The process of collecting images, knowing which images are actually going to be useful for improving model performance, training those models, deploying those models. And if we really wanted to make the world programmable, developers waiting for us to make an app for their thing of interest is a lot less efficient, less impactful than taking our tool chain and releasing that externally. And so, that's what RoboFlow became. RoboFlow became the internal tools that we used to make these game changing applications readily available. And as you know, when you give developers new tools, they create new billion dollar industries, let alone all sorts of fun hobbyist projects along the way. >> I love that story. Curious, inventive, little radical. Let's break the rules, see how we can push the envelope on the board games. That's how companies get started. It's a great story. I got to ask you, okay, what happens next? Now, okay, you realize this new tooling, but this is like how companies get built. Like they solve their own problem that they had 'cause they realized there's one, but then there has to be a market for it. So you actually guys knew that this was coming around the corner. So okay, you got your hacker mentality, you did that thing, you got the award and now you're like, okay, wow. Were you guys conscious of the wave coming? Was it one of those things where you said, look, if we do this, we solve our own problem, this will be big for everybody. Did you have that moment? Was that in 2019 or was that more of like, it kind of was obvious to you guys? >> Absolutely. I mean Brad puts this pretty effectively where he describes how we lived through the initial internet revolution, but we were kind of too young to really recognize and comprehend what was happening at the time. And then mobile happened and we were working on different companies that were not in the mobile space. And computer vision feels like the wave that we've caught. Like, this is a technology and capability that rewrites how we interact with the world, how everyone will interact with the world. And so we feel we've been kind of lucky this time, right place, right time of every enterprise will have the ability to improve their operations with computer vision. And so we've been very cognizant of the fact that computer vision is one of those groundbreaking technologies that every company will have as a part of their products and services and offerings, and we can provide the tooling to accelerate that future. >> Yeah, and the developer angle, by the way, I love that because I think, you know, as we've been saying in theCUBE all the time, developer's the new defacto standard bodies because what they adopt is pure, you know, meritocracy. And they pick the best. If it's sell service and it's good and it's got open source community around it, its all in. And they'll vote. They'll vote with their code and that is clear. Now I got to ask you, as you look at the market, we were just having this conversation on theCUBE in Barcelona at recent Mobile World Congress, now called MWC, around 5G versus wifi. And the debate was specifically computer vision, like facial recognition. We were talking about how the Cleveland Browns were using facial recognition for people coming into the stadium they were using it for ships in international ports. So the question was 5G versus wifi. My question is what infrastructure or what are the areas that need to be in place to make computer vision work? If you have developers building apps, apps got to run on stuff. So how do you sort that out in your mind? What's your reaction to that? >> A lot of the times when we see applications that need to run in real time and on video, they'll actually run at the edge without internet. And so a lot of our users will actually take their models and run it in a fully offline environment. Now to act on that information, you'll often need to have internet signal at some point 'cause you'll need to know how many people were in the stadium or what shipping crates are in my port at this point in time. You'll need to relay that information somewhere else, which will require connectivity. But actually using the model and creating the insights at the edge does not require internet. I mean we have users that deploy models on underwater submarines just as much as in outer space actually. And those are not very friendly environments to internet, let alone 5g. And so what you do is you use an edge device, like an Nvidia Jetson is common, mobile devices are common. Intel has some strong edge devices, the Movidius family of chips for example. And you use that compute that runs completely offline in real time to process those signals. Now again, what you do with those signals may require connectivity and that becomes a question of the problem you're solving of how soon you need to relay that information to another place. >> So, that's an architectural issue on the infrastructure. If you're a tactical edge war fighter for instance, you might want to have highly available and maybe high availability. I mean, these are words that mean something. You got storage, but it's not at the edge in real time. But you can trickle it back and pull it down. That's management. So that's more of a business by business decision or environment, right? >> That's right, that's right. Yeah. So I mean we can talk through some specifics. So for example, the RoboFlow actually powers the broadcaster that does the tennis ball tracking at Wimbledon. That runs completely at the edge in real time in, you know, technically to track the tennis ball and point the camera, you actually don't need internet. Now they do have internet of course to do the broadcasting and relay the signal and feeds and these sorts of things. And so that's a case where you have both edge deployment of running the model and high availability act on that model. We have other instances where customers will run their models on drones and the drone will go and do a flight and it'll say, you know, this many residential homes are in this given area, or this many cargo containers are in this given shipping yard. Or maybe we saw these environmental considerations of soil erosion along this riverbank. The model in that case can run on the drone during flight without internet, but then you only need internet once the drone lands and you're going to act on that information because for example, if you're doing like a study of soil erosion, you don't need to be real time. You just need to be able to process and make use of that information once the drone finishes its flight. >> Well I can imagine a zillion use cases. I heard of a use case interview at a company that does computer vision to help people see if anyone's jumping the fence on their company. Like, they know what a body looks like climbing a fence and they can spot it. Pretty easy use case compared to probably some of the other things, but this is the horizontal use cases, its so many use cases. So how do you guys talk to the marketplace when you say, hey, we have generative AI for commuter vision. You might know language models that's completely different animal because vision's like the world, right? So you got a lot more to do. What's the difference? How do you explain that to customers? What can I build and what's their reaction? >> Because we're such a developer centric company, developers are usually creative and show you the ways that they want to take advantage of new technologies. I mean, we've had people use things for identifying conveyor belt debris, doing gas leak detection, measuring the size of fish, airplane maintenance. We even had someone that like a hobby use case where they did like a specific sushi identifier. I dunno if you know this, but there's a specific type of whitefish that if you grew up in the western hemisphere and you eat it in the eastern hemisphere, you get very sick. And so there was someone that made an app that tells you if you happen to have that fish in the sushi that you're eating. But security camera analysis, transportation flows, plant disease detection, really, you know, smarter cities. We have people that are doing curb management identifying, and a lot of these use cases, the fantastic thing about building tools for developers is they're a creative bunch and they have these ideas that if you and I sat down for 15 minutes and said, let's guess every way computer vision can be used, we would need weeks to list all the example use cases. >> We'd miss everything. >> And we'd miss. And so having the community show us the ways that they're using computer vision is impactful. Now that said, there are of course commercial industries that have discovered the value and been able to be out of the gate. And that's where we have the Fortune 100 customers, like we do. Like the retail customers in the Walmart sector, healthcare providers like Medtronic, or vehicle manufacturers like Rivian who all have very difficult either supply chain, quality assurance, in stock, out of stock, anti-theft protection considerations that require successfully making sense of the real world. >> Let me ask you a question. This is maybe a little bit in the weeds, but it's more developer focused. What are some of the developer profiles that you're seeing right now in terms of low-hanging fruit applications? And can you talk about the academic impact? Because I imagine if I was in school right now, I'd be all over it. Are you seeing Master's thesis' being worked on with some of your stuff? Is the uptake in both areas of younger pre-graduates? And then inside the workforce, What are some of the devs like? Can you share just either what their makeup is, what they work on, give a little insight into the devs you're working with. >> Leading developers that want to be on state-of-the-art technology build with RoboFlow because they know they can use the best in class open source. They know that they can get the most out of their data. They know that they can deploy extremely quickly. That's true among students as you mentioned, just as much as as industries. So we welcome students and I mean, we have research grants that will regularly support for people to publish. I mean we actually have a channel inside our internal slack where every day, more student publications that cite building with RoboFlow pop up. And so, that helps inspire some of the use cases. Now what's interesting is that the use case is relatively, you know, useful or applicable for the business or the student. In other words, if a student does a thesis on how to do, we'll say like shingle damage detection from satellite imagery and they're just doing that as a master's thesis, in fact most insurance businesses would be interested in that sort of application. So, that's kind of how we see uptick and adoption both among researchers who want to be on the cutting edge and publish, both with RoboFlow and making use of open source tools in tandem with the tool that we provide, just as much as industry. And you know, I'm a big believer in the philosophy that kind of like what the hackers are doing nights and weekends, the Fortune 500 are doing in a pretty short order period of time and we're experiencing that transition. Computer vision used to be, you know, kind of like a PhD, multi-year investment endeavor. And now with some of the tooling that we're working on in open source technologies and the compute that's available, these science fiction ideas are possible in an afternoon. And so you have this idea of maybe doing asset management or the aerial observation of your shingles or things like this. You have a few hundred images and you can de-risk whether that's possible for your business today. So there's pretty broad-based adoption among both researchers that want to be on the state of the art, as much as companies that want to reduce the time to value. >> You know, Joseph, you guys and your partner have got a great front row seat, ground floor, presented creation wave here. I'm seeing a pattern emerging from all my conversations on theCUBE with founders that are successful, like yourselves, that there's two kind of real things going on. You got the enterprises grabbing the products and retrofitting into their legacy and rebuilding their business. And then you have startups coming out of the woodwork. Young, seeing greenfield or pick a specific niche or focus and making that the signature lever to move the market. >> That's right. >> So can you share your thoughts on the startup scene, other founders out there and talk about that? And then I have a couple questions for like the enterprises, the old school, the existing legacy. Little slower, but the startups are moving fast. What are some of the things you're seeing as startups are emerging in this field? >> I think you make a great point that independent of RoboFlow, very successful, especially developer focused businesses, kind of have three customer types. You have the startups and maybe like series A, series B startups that you're building a product as fast as you can to keep up with them, and they're really moving just as fast as as you are and pulling the product out at you for things that they need. The second segment that you have might be, call it SMB but not enterprise, who are able to purchase and aren't, you know, as fast of moving, but are stable and getting value and able to get to production. And then the third type is enterprise, and that's where you have typically larger contract value sizes, slower moving in terms of adoption and feedback for your product. And I think what you see is that successful companies balance having those three customer personas because you have the small startups, small fast moving upstarts that are discerning buyers who know the market and elect to build on tooling that is best in class. And so you basically kind of pass the smell test of companies who are quite discerning in their purchases, plus are moving so quick they're pulling their product out of you. Concurrently, you have a product that's enterprise ready to service the scalability, availability, and trust of enterprise buyers. And that's ultimately where a lot of companies will see tremendous commercial success. I mean I remember seeing the Twilio IPO, Uber being like a full 20% of their revenue, right? And so there's this very common pattern where you have the ability to find some of those upstarts that you make bets on, like the next Ubers of the world, the smaller companies that continue to get developed with the product and then the enterprise whom allows you to really fund the commercial success of the business, and validate the size of the opportunity in market that's being creative. >> It's interesting, there's so many things happening there. It's like, in a way it's a new category, but it's not a new category. It becomes a new category because of the capabilities, right? So, it's really interesting, 'cause that's what you're talking about is a category, creating. >> I think developer tools. So people often talk about B to B and B to C businesses. I think developer tools are in some ways a third way. I mean ultimately they're B to B, you're selling to other businesses and that's where your revenue's coming from. However, you look kind of like a B to C company in the ways that you measure product adoption and kind of go to market. In other words, you know, we're often tracking the leading indicators of commercial success in the form of usage, adoption, retention. Really consumer app, traditionally based metrics of how to know you're building the right stuff, and that's what product led growth companies do. And then you ultimately have commercial traction in a B to B way. And I think that that actually kind of looks like a third thing, right? Like you can do these sort of funny zany marketing examples that you might see historically from consumer businesses, but yet you ultimately make your money from the enterprise who has these de-risked high value problems you can solve for them. And I selfishly think that that's the best of both worlds because I don't have to be like Evan Spiegel, guessing the next consumer trend or maybe creating the next consumer trend and catching lightning in a bottle over and over again on the consumer side. But I still get to have fun in our marketing and make sort of fun, like we're launching the world's largest game of rock paper scissors being played with computer vision, right? Like that's sort of like a fun thing you can do, but then you can concurrently have the commercial validation and customers telling you the things that they need to be built for them next to solve commercial pain points for them. So I really do think that you're right by calling this a new category and it really is the best of both worlds. >> It's a great call out, it's a great call out. In fact, I always juggle with the VC. I'm like, it's so easy. Your job is so easy to pick the winners. What are you talking about its so easy? I go, just watch what the developers jump on. And it's not about who started, it could be someone in the dorm room to the boardroom person. You don't know because that B to C, the C, it's B to D you know? You know it's developer 'cause that's a human right? That's a consumer of the tool which influences the business that never was there before. So I think this direct business model evolution, whether it's media going direct or going direct to the developers rather than going to a gatekeeper, this is the reality. >> That's right. >> Well I got to ask you while we got some time left to describe, I want to get into this topic of multi-modality, okay? And can you describe what that means in computer vision? And what's the state of the growth of that portion of this piece? >> Multi modality refers to using multiple traditionally siloed problem types, meaning text, image, video, audio. So you could treat an audio problem as only processing audio signal. That is not multimodal, but you could use the audio signal at the same time as a video feed. Now you're talking about multi modality. In computer vision, multi modality is predominantly happening with images and text. And one of the biggest releases in this space is actually two years old now, was clip, contrastive language image pre-training, which took 400 million image text pairs and basically instead of previously when you do classification, you basically map every single image to a single class, right? Like here's a bunch of images of chairs, here's a bunch of images of dogs. What clip did is used, you can think about it like, the class for an image being the Instagram caption for the image. So it's not one single thing. And by training on understanding the corpora, you basically see which words, which concepts are associated with which pixels. And this opens up the aperture for the types of problems and generalizability of models. So what does this mean? This means that you can get to value more quickly from an existing trained model, or at least validate that what you want to tackle with a computer vision, you can get there more quickly. It also opens up the, I mean. Clip has been the bedrock of some of the generative image techniques that have come to bear, just as much as some of the LLMs. And increasingly we're going to see more and more of multi modality being a theme simply because at its core, you're including more context into what you're trying to understand about the world. I mean, in its most basic sense, you could ask yourself, if I have an image, can I know more about that image with just the pixels? Or if I have the image and the sound of when that image was captured or it had someone describe what they see in that image when the image was captured, which one's going to be able to get you more signal? And so multi modality helps expand the ability for us to understand signal processing. >> Awesome. And can you just real quick, define clip for the folks that don't know what that means? >> Yeah. Clip is a model architecture, it's an acronym for contrastive language image pre-training and like, you know, model architectures that have come before it captures the almost like, models are kind of like brands. So I guess it's a brand of a model where you've done these 400 million image text pairs to match up which visual concepts are associated with which text concepts. And there have been new releases of clip, just at bigger sizes of bigger encoding's, of longer strings of texture, or larger image windows. But it's been a really exciting advancement that OpenAI released in January, 2021. >> All right, well great stuff. We got a couple minutes left. Just I want to get into more of a company-specific question around culture. All startups have, you know, some sort of cultural vibe. You know, Intel has Moore's law doubles every whatever, six months. What's your culture like at RoboFlow? I mean, if you had to describe that culture, obviously love the hacking story, you and your partner with the games going number one on Product Hunt next to Elon and Tesla and then hey, we should start a company two years later. That's kind of like a curious, inventing, building, hard charging, but laid back. That's my take. How would you describe the culture? >> I think that you're right. The culture that we have is one of shipping, making things. So every week each team shares what they did for our customers on a weekly basis. And we have such a strong emphasis on being better week over week that those sorts of things compound. So one big emphasis in our culture is getting things done, shipping, doing things for our customers. The second is we're an incredibly transparent place to work. For example, how we think about giving decisions, where we're progressing against our goals, what problems are biggest and most important for the company is all open information for those that are inside the company to know and progress against. The third thing that I'd use to describe our culture is one that thrives with autonomy. So RoboFlow has a number of individuals who have founded companies before, some of which have sold their businesses for a hundred million plus upon exit. And the way that we've been able to attract talent like that is because the problems that we're tackling are so immense, yet individuals are able to charge at it with the way that they think is best. And this is what pairs well with transparency. If you have a strong sense of what the company's goals are, how we're progressing against it, and you have this ownership mentality of what can I do to change or drive progress against that given outcome, then you create a really healthy pairing of, okay cool, here's where the company's progressing. Here's where things are going really well, here's the places that we most need to improve and work on. And if you're inside that company as someone who has a preponderance to be a self-starter and even a history of building entire functions or companies yourself, then you're going to be a place where you can really thrive. You have the inputs of the things where we need to work on to progress the company's goals. And you have the background of someone that is just necessarily a fast moving and ambitious type of individual. So I think the best way to describe it is a transparent place with autonomy and an emphasis on getting things done. >> Getting shit done as they say. Getting stuff done. Great stuff. Hey, final question. Put a plug out there for the company. What are you going to hire? What's your pipeline look like for people? What jobs are open? I'm sure you got hiring all around. Give a quick plug for the company what you're looking for. >> I appreciate you asking. Basically you're either building the product or helping customers be successful with the product. So in the building product category, we have platform engineering roles, machine learning engineering roles, and we're solving some of the hardest and most impactful problems of bringing such a groundbreaking technology to the masses. And so it's a great place to be where you can kind of be your own user as an engineer. And then if you're enabling people to be successful with the products, I mean you're working in a place where there's already such a strong community around it and you can help shape, foster, cultivate, activate, and drive commercial success in that community. So those are roles that tend themselves to being those that build the product for developer advocacy, those that are account executives that are enabling our customers to realize commercial success, and even hybrid roles like we call it field engineering, where you are a technical resource to drive success within customer accounts. And so all this is listed on roboflow.com/careers. And one thing that I actually kind of want to mention John that's kind of novel about the thing that's working at RoboFlow. So there's been a lot of discussion around remote companies and there's been a lot of discussion around in-person companies and do you need to be in the office? And one thing that we've kind of recognized is you can actually chart a third way. You can create a third way which we call satellite, which basically means people can work from where they most like to work and there's clusters of people, regular onsite's. And at RoboFlow everyone gets, for example, $2,500 a year that they can use to spend on visiting coworkers. And so what's sort of organically happened is team numbers have started to pull together these resources and rent out like, lavish Airbnbs for like a week and then everyone kind of like descends in and works together for a week and makes and creates things. And we call this lighthouses because you know, a lighthouse kind of brings ships into harbor and we have an emphasis on shipping. >> Yeah, quality people that are creative and doers and builders. You give 'em some cash and let the self-governing begin, you know? And like, creativity goes through the roof. It's a great story. I think that sums up the culture right there, Joseph. Thanks for sharing that and thanks for this great conversation. I really appreciate it and it's very inspiring. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, John. >> Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow. Hot company, great culture in the right place in a hot area, computer vision. This is going to explode in value. The edge is exploding. More use cases, more development, and developers are driving the change. Check out RoboFlow. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(soft electronic music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation as part of the AWS Startup Showcase, season three, episode one, featuring Astronomer. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm in the CUBE's Palo Alto Studios, and today excited to be joined by a couple of guests, a couple of co-founders from Astronomer. Viraj Parekh is with us, as is Paola Peraza-Calderon. Thanks guys so much for joining us. Excited to dig into Astronomer. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Yeah, and we're going to be talking about the role of data orchestration. Paola, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience that understanding, that context about Astronomer and what it is that you guys do. >> Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. So, Astronomer is a, you know, we're a technology and software company for modern data orchestration, as you said, and we're the driving force behind Apache Airflow. The Open Source Workflow Management tool that's since been adopted by thousands and thousands of users, and we'll dig into this a little bit more. But, by data orchestration, we mean data pipeline, so generally speaking, getting data from one place to another, transforming it, running it on a schedule, and overall just building a central system that tangibly connects your entire ecosystem of data services, right. So what, that's Redshift, Snowflake, DVT, et cetera. And so tangibly, we build, we at Astronomer here build products powered by Apache Airflow for data teams and for data practitioners, so that they don't have to. So, we sell to data engineers, data scientists, data admins, and we really spend our time doing three things. So, the first is that we build Astro, our flagship cloud service that we'll talk more on. But here, we're really building experiences that make it easier for data practitioners to author, run, and scale their data pipeline footprint on the cloud. And then, we also contribute to Apache Airflow as an open source project and community. So, we cultivate the community of humans, and we also put out open source developer tools that actually make it easier for individual data practitioners to be productive in their day-to-day jobs, whether or not they actually use our product and and pay us money or not. And then of course, we also have professional services and education and all of these things around our commercial products that enable folks to use our products and use Airflow as effectively as possible. So yeah, super, super happy with everything we've done and hopefully that gives you an idea of where we're starting. >> Awesome, so when you're talking with those, Paola, those data engineers, those data scientists, how do you define data orchestration and what does it mean to them? >> Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. So, you know, if you Google data orchestration you're going to get something about an automated process for organizing silo data and making it accessible for processing and analysis. But, to your question, what does that actually mean, you know? So, if you look at it from a customer's perspective, we can share a little bit about how we at Astronomer actually do data orchestration ourselves and the problems that it solves for us. So, as many other companies out in the world do, we at Astronomer need to monitor how our own customers use our products, right? And so, we have a weekly meeting, for example, that goes through a dashboard and a dashboarding tool called Sigma where we see the number of monthly customers and how they're engaging with our product. But, to actually do that, you know, we have to use data from our application database, for example, that has behavioral data on what they're actually doing in our product. We also have data from third party API tools, like Salesforce and HubSpot, and other ways in which our customer, we actually engage with our customers and their behavior. And so, our data team internally at Astronomer uses a bunch of tools to transform and use that data, right? So, we use FiveTran, for example, to ingest. We use Snowflake as our data warehouse. We use other tools for data transformations. And even, if we at Astronomer don't do this, you can imagine a data team also using tools like, Monte Carlo for data quality, or Hightouch for Reverse ETL, or things like that. And, I think the point here is that data teams, you know, that are building data-driven organizations have a plethora of tooling to both ingest the right data and come up with the right interfaces to transform and actually, interact with that data. And so, that movement and sort of synchronization of data across your ecosystem is exactly what data orchestration is responsible for. Historically, I think, and Raj will talk more about this, historically, schedulers like KRON and Oozie or Control-M have taken a role here, but we think that Apache Airflow has sort of risen over the past few years as the defacto industry standard for writing data pipelines that do tasks, that do data jobs that interact with that ecosystem of tools in your organization. And so, beyond that sort of data pipeline unit, I think where we see it is that data acquisition is not only writing those data pipelines that move your data, but it's also all the things around it, right, so, CI/CD tool and Secrets Management, et cetera. So, a long-winded answer here, but I think that's how we talk about it here at Astronomer and how we're building our products. >> Excellent. Great context, Paola. Thank you. Viraj, let's bring you into the conversation. Every company these days has to be a data company, right? They've got to be a software company- >> Mm-hmm. >> whether it's my bank or my grocery store. So, how are companies actually doing data orchestration today, Viraj? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So, I think one thing to think about is like, on one hand, you know, data orchestration is kind of a new category that we're helping define, but on the other hand, it's something that companies have been doing forever, right? You need to get data moving to use it, you know. You've got it all in place, aggregate it, cleaning it, et cetera. So, when you look at what companies out there are doing, right. Sometimes, if you're a more kind of born in the cloud company, as we say, you'll adopt all these cloud native tooling things your cloud provider gives you. If you're a bank or another sort of institution like that, you know, you're probably juggling an even wider variety of tools. You're thinking about a cloud migration. You might have things like Kron running in one place, Uzi running somewhere else, Informatics running somewhere else, while you're also trying to move all your workloads to the cloud. So, there's quite a large spectrum of what the current state is for companies. And then, kind of like Paola was saying, Apache Airflow started in 2014, and it was actually started by Airbnb, and they put out this blog post that was like, "Hey here's how we use Apache Airflow to orchestrate our data across all their sources." And really since then, right, it's almost been a decade since then, Airflow emerged as the open source standard, and there's companies of all sorts using it. And, it's really used to tie all these tools together, especially as that number of tools increases, companies move to hybrid cloud, hybrid multi-cloud strategies, and so on and so forth. But you know, what we found is that if you go to any company, especially a larger one and you say like, "Hey, how are you doing data orchestration?" They'll probably say something like, "Well, I have five data teams, so I have eight different ways I do data orchestration." Right. This idea of data orchestration's been there but the right way to do it, kind of all the abstractions you need, the way your teams need to work together, and so on and so forth, hasn't really emerged just yet, right? It's such a quick moving space that companies have to combine what they were doing before with what their new business initiatives are today. So, you know, what we really believe here at Astronomer is Airflow is the core of how you solve data orchestration for any sort of use case, but it's not everything. You know, it needs a little more. And, that's really where our commercial product, Astro comes in, where we've built, not only the most tried and tested airflow experience out there. We do employ a majority of the Airflow Core Committers, right? So, we're kind of really deep in the project. We've also built the right things around developer tooling, observability, and reliability for customers to really rely on Astro as the heart of the way they do data orchestration, and kind of think of it as the foundational layer that helps tie together all the different tools, practices and teams large companies have to do today. >> That foundational layer is absolutely critical. You've both mentioned open source software. Paola, I want to go back to you, and just give the audience an understanding of how open source really plays into Astronomer's mission as a company, and into the technologies like Astro. >> Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, so we at Astronomers started using Airflow and actually building our products because Airflow is open source and we were our own customers at the beginning of our company journey. And, I think the open source community is at the core of everything we do. You know, without that open source community and culture, I think, you know, we have less of a business, and so, we're super invested in continuing to cultivate and grow that. And, I think there's a couple sort of concrete ways in which we do this that personally make me really excited to do my own job. You know, for one, we do things like we organize meetups and we sponsor the Airflow Summit and there's these sort of baseline community efforts that I think are really important and that reminds you, hey, there just humans trying to do their jobs and learn and use both our technology and things that are out there and contribute to it. So, making it easier to contribute to Airflow, for example, is another one of our efforts. As Viraj mentioned, we also employ, you know, engineers internally who are on our team whose full-time job is to make the open source project better. Again, regardless of whether or not you're a customer of ours or not, we want to make sure that we continue to cultivate the Airflow project in and of itself. And, we're also building developer tooling that might not be a part of the Apache Open Source project, but is still open source. So, we have repositories in our own sort of GitHub organization, for example, with tools that individual data practitioners, again customers are not, can use to make them be more productive in their day-to-day jobs with Airflow writing Dags for the most common use cases out there. The last thing I'll say is how important I think we've found it to build sort of educational resources and documentation and best practices. Airflow can be complex. It's been around for a long time. There's a lot of really, really rich feature sets. And so, how do we enable folks to actually use those? And that comes in, you know, things like webinars, and best practices, and courses and curriculum that are free and accessible and open to the community are just some of the ways in which I think we're continuing to invest in that open source community over the next year and beyond. >> That's awesome. It sounds like open source is really core, not only to the mission, but really to the heart of the organization. Viraj, I want to go back to you and really try to understand how does Astronomer fit into the wider modern data stack and ecosystem? Like what does that look like for customers? >> Yeah, yeah. So, both in the open source and with our commercial customers, right? Folks everywhere are trying to tie together a huge variety of tools in order to start making sense of their data. And you know, I kind of think of it almost like as like a pyramid, right? At the base level, you need things like data reliability, data, sorry, data freshness, data availability, and so on and so forth, right? You just need your data to be there. (coughs) I'm sorry. You just need your data to be there, and you need to make it predictable when it's going to be there. You need to make sure it's kind of correct at the highest level, some quality checks, and so on and so forth. And oftentimes, that kind of takes the case of ELT or ETL use cases, right? Taking data from somewhere and moving it somewhere else, usually into some sort of analytics destination. And, that's really what businesses can do to just power the core parts of getting insights into how their business is going, right? How much revenue did I had? What's in my pipeline, salesforce, and so on and so forth. Once that kind of base foundation is there and people can get the data they need, how they need it, it really opens up a lot for what customers can do. You know, I think one of the trendier things out there right now is MLOps, and how do companies actually put machine learning into production? Well, when you think about it you kind of have to squint at it, right? Like, machine learning pipelines are really just any other data pipeline. They just have a certain set of needs that might not not be applicable to ELT pipelines. And, when you kind of have a common layer to tie together all the ways data can move through your organization, that's really what we're trying to make it so companies can do. And, that happens in financial services where, you know, we have some customers who take app data coming from their mobile apps, and actually run it through their fraud detection services to make sure that all the activity is not fraudulent. We have customers that will run sports betting models on our platform where they'll take data from a bunch of public APIs around different sporting events that are happening, transform all of that in a way their data scientist can build models with it, and then actually bet on sports based on that output. You know, one of my favorite use cases I like to talk about that we saw in the open source is we had there was one company whose their business was to deliver blood transfusions via drone into remote parts of the world. And, it was really cool because they took all this data from all sorts of places, right? Kind of orchestrated all the aggregation and cleaning and analysis that happened had to happen via airflow and the end product would be a drone being shot out into a real remote part of the world to actually give somebody blood who needed it there. Because it turns out for certain parts of the world, the easiest way to deliver blood to them is via drone and not via some other, some other thing. So, these kind of, all the things people do with the modern data stack is absolutely incredible, right? Like you were saying, every company's trying to be a data-driven company. What really energizes me is knowing that like, for all those best, super great tools out there that power a business, we get to be the connective tissue, or the, almost like the electricity that kind of ropes them all together and makes so people can actually do what they need to do. >> Right. Phenomenal use cases that you just described, Raj. I mean, just the variety alone of what you guys are able to do and impact is so cool. So Paola, when you're with those data engineers, those data scientists, and customer conversations, what's your pitch? Why use Astro? >> Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. And honestly, to piggyback off of Viraj, there's so many. I think what keeps me so energized is how mission critical both our product and data orchestration is, and those use cases really are incredible and we work with customers of all shapes and sizes. But, to answer your question, right, so why use Astra? Why use our commercial products? There's so many people using open source, why pay for something more than that? So, you know, the baseline for our business really is that Airflow has grown exponentially over the last five years, and like we said has become an industry standard that we're confident there's a huge opportunity for us as a company and as a team. But, we also strongly believe that being great at running Airflow, you know, doesn't make you a successful company at what you do. What makes you a successful company at what you do is building great products and solving problems and solving pin points of your own customers, right? And, that differentiating value isn't being amazing at running Airflow. That should be our job. And so, we want to abstract those customers from meaning to do things like manage Kubernetes infrastructure that you need to run Airflow, and then hiring someone full-time to go do that. Which can be hard, but again doesn't add differentiating value to your team, or to your product, or to your customers. So, folks to get away from managing that infrastructure sort of a base, a base layer. Folks who are looking for differentiating features that make their team more productive and allows them to spend less time tweaking Airflow configurations and more time working with the data that they're getting from their business. For help, getting, staying up with Airflow releases. There's a ton of, we've actually been pretty quick to come out with new Airflow features and releases, and actually just keeping up with that feature set and working strategically with a partner to help you make the most out of those feature sets is a key part of it. And, really it's, especially if you're an organization who currently is committed to using Airflow, you likely have a lot of Airflow environments across your organization. And, being able to see those Airflow environments in a single place and being able to enable your data practitioners to create Airflow environments with a click of a button, and then use, for example, our command line to develop your Airflow Dags locally and push them up to our product, and use all of the sort of testing and monitoring and observability that we have on top of our product is such a key. It sounds so simple, especially if you use Airflow, but really those things are, you know, baseline value props that we have for the customers that continue to be excited to work with us. And of course, I think we can go beyond that and there's, we have ambitions to add whole, a whole bunch of features and expand into different types of personas. >> Right? >> But really our main value prop is for companies who are committed to Airflow and want to abstract themselves and make use of some of the differentiating features that we now have at Astronomer. >> Got it. Awesome. >> Thank you. One thing, one thing I'll add to that, Paola, and I think you did a good job of saying is because every company's trying to be a data company, companies are at different parts of their journey along that, right? And we want to meet customers where they are, and take them through it to where they want to go. So, on one end you have folks who are like, "Hey, we're just building a data team here. We have a new initiative. We heard about Airflow. How do you help us out?" On the farther end, you know, we have some customers that have been using Airflow for five plus years and they're like, "Hey, this is awesome. We have 10 more teams we want to bring on. How can you help with this? How can we do more stuff in the open source with you? How can we tell our story together?" And, it's all about kind of taking this vast community of data users everywhere, seeing where they're at, and saying like, "Hey, Astro and Airflow can take you to the next place that you want to go." >> Which is incredibly- >> Mm-hmm. >> and you bring up a great point, Viraj, that every company is somewhere in a different place on that journey. And it's, and it's complex. But it sounds to me like a lot of what you're doing is really stripping away a lot of the complexity, really enabling folks to use their data as quickly as possible, so that it's relevant and they can serve up, you know, the right products and services to whoever wants what. Really incredibly important. We're almost out of time, but I'd love to get both of your perspectives on what's next for Astronomer. You give us a a great overview of what the company's doing, the value in it for customers. Paola, from your lens as one of the co-founders, what's next? >> Yeah, I mean, I think we'll continue to, I think cultivate in that open source community. I think we'll continue to build products that are open sourced as part of our ecosystem. I also think that we'll continue to build products that actually make Airflow, and getting started with Airflow, more accessible. So, sort of lowering that barrier to entry to our products, whether that's price wise or infrastructure requirement wise. I think making it easier for folks to get started and get their hands on our product is super important for us this year. And really it's about, I think, you know, for us, it's really about focused execution this year and all of the sort of core principles that we've been talking about. And continuing to invest in all of the things around our product that again, enable teams to use Airflow more effectively and efficiently. >> And that efficiency piece is, everybody needs that. Last question, Viraj, for you. What do you see in terms of the next year for Astronomer and for your role? >> Yeah, you know, I think Paola did a really good job of laying it out. So it's, it's really hard to disagree with her on anything, right? I think executing is definitely the most important thing. My own personal bias on that is I think more than ever it's important to really galvanize the community around airflow. So, we're going to be focusing on that a lot. We want to make it easier for our users to get get our product into their hands, be that open source users or commercial users. And last, but certainly not least, is we're also really excited about Data Lineage and this other open source project in our umbrella called Open Lineage to make it so that there's a standard way for users to get lineage out of different systems that they use. When we think about what's in store for data lineage and needing to audit the way automated decisions are being made. You know, I think that's just such an important thing that companies are really just starting with, and I don't think there's a solution that's emerged that kind of ties it all together. So, we think that as we kind of grow the role of Airflow, right, we can also make it so that we're helping solve, we're helping customers solve their lineage problems all in Astro, which is our kind of the best of both worlds for us. >> Awesome. I can definitely feel and hear the enthusiasm and the passion that you both bring to Astronomer, to your customers, to your team. I love it. We could keep talking more and more, so you're going to have to come back. (laughing) Viraj, Paola, thank you so much for joining me today on this showcase conversation. We really appreciate your insights and all the context that you provided about Astronomer. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube conversation. (soft electronic music)

(bright music) >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, welcome back to Supercloud 2. Last August, at the first Supercloud event, we invited the broader community to help further define Supercloud, we assessed its viability, and identified the critical elements and deployment models of the concept. The objectives here at Supercloud too are, first of all, to continue to tighten and test the concept, the second is, we want to get real world input from practitioners on the problems that they're facing and the viability of Supercloud in terms of applying it to their business. So on the program, we got companies like Walmart, Sachs, Western Union, Ionis Pharmaceuticals, NASDAQ, and others. And the third thing that we want to do is we want to drill into the intersection of cloud and data to project what the future looks like in the context of Supercloud. So in this segment, we want to explore the concept of data architectures and what's going to be required for Supercloud. And I'm pleased to welcome one of our Supercloud sponsors, ChaosSearch, Ed Walsh is the CEO of the company, with Thomas Hazel, who's the Founder, CTO, and Chief Scientist. Guys, good to see you again, thanks for coming into our Marlborough studio. >> Always great. >> Great to be here. >> Okay, so there's a little debate, I'm going to put you right in the spot. (Ed chuckling) A little debate going on in the community started by Bob Muglia, a former CEO of Snowflake, and he was at Microsoft for a long time, and he looked at the Supercloud definition, said, "I think you need to tighten it up a little bit." So, here's what he came up with. He said, "A Supercloud is a platform that provides a programmatically consistent set of services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So he's calling it a platform, not an architecture, which was kind of interesting. And so presumably the platform owner is going to be responsible for the architecture, but Dr. Nelu Mihai, who's a computer scientist behind the Cloud of Clouds Project, he chimed in and responded with the following. He said, "Cloud is a programming paradigm supporting the entire lifecycle of applications with data and logic natively distributed. Supercloud is an open architecture that integrates heterogeneous clouds in an agnostic manner." So, Ed, words matter. Is this an architecture or is it a platform? >> Put us on the spot. So, I'm sure you have concepts, I would say it's an architectural or design principle. Listen, I look at Supercloud as a mega trend, just like cloud, just like data analytics. And some companies are using the principle, design principles, to literally get dramatically ahead of everyone else. I mean, things you couldn't possibly do if you didn't use cloud principles, right? So I think it's a Supercloud effect, you're able to do things you're not able to. So I think it's more a design principle, but if you do it right, you get dramatic effect as far as customer value. >> So the conversation that we were having with Muglia, and Tristan Handy of dbt Labs, was, I'll set it up as the following, and, Thomas, would love to get your thoughts, if you have a CRM, think about applications today, it's all about forms and codifying business processes, you type a bunch of stuff into Salesforce, and all the salespeople do it, and this machine generates a forecast. What if you have this new type of data app that pulls data from the transaction system, the e-commerce, the supply chain, the partner ecosystem, et cetera, and then, without humans, actually comes up with a plan. That's their vision. And Muglia was saying, in order to do that, you need to rethink data architectures and database architectures specifically, you need to get down to the level of how the data is stored on the disc. What are your thoughts on that? Well, first of all, I'm going to cop out, I think it's actually both. I do think it's a design principle, I think it's not open technology, but open APIs, open access, and you can build a platform on that design principle architecture. Now, I'm a database person, I love solving the database problems. >> I'm waited for you to launch into this. >> Yeah, so I mean, you know, Snowflake is a database, right? It's a distributed database. And we wanted to crack those codes, because, multi-region, multi-cloud, customers wanted access to their data, and their data is in a variety of forms, all these services that you're talked about. And so what I saw as a core principle was cloud object storage, everyone streams their data to cloud object storage. From there we said, well, how about we rethink database architecture, rethink file format, so that we can take each one of these services and bring them together, whether distributively or centrally, such that customers can access and get answers, whether it's operational data, whether it's business data, AKA search, or SQL, complex distributed joins. But we had to rethink the architecture. I like to say we're not a first generation, or a second, we're a third generation distributed database on pure, pure cloud storage, no caching, no SSDs. Why? Because all that availability, the cost of time, is a struggle, and cloud object storage, we think, is the answer. >> So when you're saying no caching, so when I think about how companies are solving some, you know, pretty hairy problems, take MySQL Heatwave, everybody thought Oracle was going to just forget about MySQL, well, they come out with Heatwave. And the way they solve problems, and you see their benchmarks against Amazon, "Oh, we crush everybody," is they put it all in memory. So you said no caching? You're not getting performance through caching? How is that true, and how are you getting performance? >> Well, so five, six years ago, right? When you realize that cloud object storage is going to be everywhere, and it's going to be a core foundational, if you will, fabric, what would you do? Well, a lot of times the second generation say, "We'll take it out of cloud storage, put in SSDs or something, and put into cache." And that adds a lot of time, adds a lot of costs. But I said, what if, what if we could actually make the first read hot, the first read distributed joins and searching? And so what we went out to do was said, we can't cache, because that's adds time, that adds cost. We have to make cloud object storage high performance, like it feels like a caching SSD. That's where our patents are, that's where our technology is, and we've spent many years working towards this. So, to me, if you can crack that code, a lot of these issues we're talking about, multi-region, multicloud, different services, everybody wants to send their data to the data lake, but then they move it out, we said, "Keep it right there." >> You nailed it, the data gravity. So, Bob's right, the data's coming in, and you need to get the data from everywhere, but you need an environment that you can deal with all that different schema, all the different type of technology, but also at scale. Bob's right, you cannot use memory or SSDs to cache that, that doesn't scale, it doesn't scale cost effectively. But if you could, and what you did, is you made object storage, S3 first, but object storage, the only persistence by doing that. And then we get performance, we should talk about it, it's literally, you know, hundreds of terabytes of queries, and it's done in seconds, it's done without memory caching. We have concepts of caching, but the only caching, the only persistence, is actually when we're doing caching, we're just keeping another side-eye track of things on the S3 itself. So we're using, actually, the object storage to be a database, which is kind of where Bob was saying, we agree, but that's what you started at, people thought you were crazy. >> And maybe make it live. Don't think of it as archival or temporary space, make it live, real time streaming, operational data. What we do is make it smart, we see the data coming in, we uniquely index it such that you can get your use cases, that are search, observability, security, or backend operational. But we don't have to have this, I dunno, static, fixed, siloed type of architecture technologies that were traditionally built prior to Supercloud thinking. >> And you don't have to move everything, essentially, you can do it wherever the data lands, whatever cloud across the globe, you're able to bring it together, you get the cost effectiveness, because the only persistence is the cheapest storage persistent layer you can buy. But the key thing is you cracked the code. >> We had to crack the code, right? That was the key thing. >> That's where the plans are. >> And then once you do that, then everything else gets easier to scale, your architecture, across regions, across cloud. >> Now, it's a general purpose database, as Bob was saying, but we use that database to solve a particular issue, which is around operational data, right? So, we agree with Bob's. >> Interesting. So this brings me to this concept of data, Jimata Gan is one of our speakers, you know, we talk about data fabric, which is a NetApp, originally NetApp concept, Gartner's kind of co-opted it. But so, the basic concept is, data lives everywhere, whether it's an S3 bucket, or a SQL database, or a data lake, it's just a node on the data mesh. So in your view, how does this fit in with Supercloud? Ed, you've said that you've built, essentially, an enabler for that, for the data mesh, I think you're an enabler for the Supercloud-like principles. This is a big, chewy opportunity, and it requires, you know, a team approach. There's got to be an ecosystem, there's not going to be one Supercloud to rule them all, so where does the ecosystem fit into the discussion, and where do you fit into the ecosystem? >> Right, so we agree completely, there's not one Supercloud in effect, but we use Supercloud principles to build our platform, and then, you know, the ecosystem's going to be built on leveraging what everyone else's secret powers are, right? So our power, our superpower, based upon what we built is, we deal with, if you're having any scale, or cost effective scale issues, with data, machine generated data, like business observability or security data, we are your force multiplier, we will take that in singularly, just let it, simply put it in your object storage wherever it sits, and we give you uniformity access to that using OpenAPI access, SQL, or you know, Elasticsearch API. So, that's what we do, that's our superpower. So I'll play it into data mesh, that's a perfect, we are a node on a data mesh, but I'll play it in the soup about how, the ecosystem, we see it kind of playing, and we talked about it in just in the last couple days, how we see this kind of possibly. Short term, our superpowers, we deal with this data that's coming at these environments, people, customers, building out observability or security environments, or vendors that are selling their own Supercloud, I do observability, the Datadogs of the world, dot dot dot, the Splunks of the world, dot dot dot, and security. So what we do is we fit in naturally. What we do is a cost effective scale, just land it anywhere in the world, we deal with ingest, and it's a cost effective, an order of magnitude, or two or three order magnitudes more cost effective. Allows them, their customers are asking them to do the impossible, "Give me fast monitoring alerting. I want it snappy, but I want it to keep two years of data, (laughs) and I want it cost effective." It doesn't work. They're good at the fast monitoring alerting, we're good at the long-term retention. And yet there's some gray area between those two, but one to one is actually cheaper, so we would partner. So the first ecosystem plays, who wants to have the ability to, really, all the data's in those same environments, the security observability players, they can literally, just through API, drag our data into their point to grab. We can make it seamless for customers. Right now, we make it helpful to customers. Your Datadog, we make a button, easy go from Datadog to us for logs, save you money. Same thing with Grafana. But you can also look at ecosystem, those same vendors, it used to be a year ago it was, you know, its all about how can you grow, like it's growth at all costs, now it's about cogs. So literally we can go an environment, you supply what your customer wants, but we can help with cogs. And one-on one in a partnership is better than you trying to build on your own. >> Thomas, you were saying you make the first read fast, so you think about Snowflake. Everybody wants to talk about Snowflake and Databricks. So, Snowflake, great, but you got to get the data in there. All right, so that's, can you help with that problem? >> I mean we want simple in, right? And if you have to have structure in, you're not simple. So the idea that you have a simple in, data lake, schema read type philosophy, but schema right type performance. And so what I wanted to do, what we have done, is have that simple lake, and stream that data real time, and those access points of Search or SQL, to go after whatever business case you need, security observability, warehouse integration. But the key thing is, how do I make that click, click, click answer, and do it quickly? And so what we want to do is, that first read has to be fast. Why? 'Cause then you're going to do all this siloing, layers, complexity. If your first read's not fast, you're at a disadvantage, particularly in cost. And nobody says I want less data, but everyone has to, whether they say we're going to shorten the window, we're going to use AI to choose, but in a security moment, when you don't have that answer, you're in trouble. And that's why we are this service, this Supercloud service, if you will, providing access, well-known search, well-known SQL type access, that if you just have one access point, you're at a disadvantage. >> We actually talked about Snowflake and BigQuery, and a different platform, Data Bricks. That's kind of where we see the phase two of ecosystem. One is easy, the low-hanging fruit is observability and security firms. But the next one is, what we do, our super power is dealing with this messy data that schema is changing like night and day. Pipelines are tough, and it's changing all the time, but you want these things fast, and it's big data around the world. That's the next point, just use us alongside, or inside, one of their platforms, and now we get the best of both worlds. Our superpower is keeping this messy data as a streaming, okay, not a batch thing, allow you to do that. So, that's the second one. And then to be honest, the third one, which plays you to Supercloud, it also plays perfectly in the data mesh, is if you really go to the ultimate thing, what we have done is made object storage, S3, GCS, and blob storage, we made it a database. Put, get, complex query with big joins. You know, so back to your original thing, and Muglia teed it up perfectly, we've done that. Now imagine if that's an ecosystem, who would want that? If it's, again, it's uniform available across all the regions, across all the clouds, and it's right next to where you are building a service, or a client's trying, that's where the ecosystem, I think people are going to use Superclouds for their superpowers. We're really good at this, allows that short term. I think the Snowflakes and the Data Bricks are the medium term, you know? And then I think eventually gets to, hey, listen if you can make object storage fast, you can just go after it with simple SQL queries, or elastic. Who would want that? I think that's where people are going to leverage it. It's not going to be one Supercloud, and we leverage the super clouds. >> Our viewpoint is smart object storage can be programmable, and so we agree with Bob, but we're not saying do it here, do it here. This core, fundamental layer across regions, across clouds, that everyone has? Simple in. Right now, it's hard to get data in for access for analysis. So we said, simply, we'll automate the entire process, give you API access across regions, across clouds. And again, how do you do a distributed join that's fast? How do you do a distributed join that doesn't cost you an arm or a leg? And how do you do it at scale? And that's where we've been focused. >> So prior, the cloud object store was a niche. >> Yeah. >> S3 obviously changed that. How standard is, essentially, object store across the different cloud platforms? Is that a problem for you? Is that an easy thing to solve? >> Well, let's talk about it. I mean we've fundamentally, yeah we've extracted it, but fundamentally, cloud object storage, put, get, and list. That's why it's so scalable, 'cause it doesn't have all these other components. That complexity is where we have moved up, and provide direct analytical API access. So because of its simplicity, and costs, and security, and reliability, it can scale naturally. I mean, really, distributed object storage is easy, it's put-get anywhere, now what we've done is we put a layer of intelligence, you know, call it smart object storage, where access is simple. So whether it's multi-region, do a query across, or multicloud, do a query across, or hunting, searching. >> We've had clients doing Amazon and Google, we have some Azure, but we see Amazon and Google more, and it's a consistent service across all of them. Just literally put your data in the bucket of choice, or folder of choice, click a couple buttons, literally click that to say "that's hot," and after that, it's hot, you can see it. But we're not moving data, the data gravity issue, that's the other. That it's already natively flowing to these pools of object storage across different regions and clouds. We don't move it, we index it right there, we're spinning up stateless compute, back to the Supercloud concept. But now that allows us to do all these other things, right? >> And it's no longer just cheap and deep object storage. Right? >> Yeah, we make it the same, like you have an analytic platform regardless of where you're at, you don't have to worry about that. Yeah, we deal with that, we deal with a stateless compute coming up -- >> And make it programmable. Be able to say, "I want this bucket to provide these answers." Right, that's really the hope, the vision. And the complexity to build the entire stack, and then connect them together, we said, the fabric is cloud storage, we just provide the intelligence on top. >> Let's bring it back to the customers, and one of the things we're exploring in Supercloud too is, you know, is Supercloud a solution looking for a problem? Is a multicloud really a problem? I mean, you hear, you know, a lot of the vendor marketing says, "Oh, it's a disaster, because it's all different across the clouds." And I talked to a lot of customers even as part of Supercloud too, they're like, "Well, I solved that problem by just going mono cloud." Well, but then you're not able to take advantage of a lot of the capabilities and the primitives that, you know, like Google's data, or you like Microsoft's simplicity, their RPA, whatever it is. So what are customers telling you, what are their near term problems that they're trying to solve today, and how are they thinking about the future? >> Listen, it's a real problem. I think it started, I think this is a a mega trend, just like cloud. Just, cloud data, and I always add, analytics, are the mega trends. If you're looking at those, if you're not considering using the Supercloud principles, in other words, leveraging what I have, abstracting it out, and getting the most out of that, and then build value on top, I think you're not going to be able to keep up, In fact, no way you're going to keep up with this data volume. It's a geometric challenge, and you're trying to do linear things. So clients aren't necessarily asking, hey, for Supercloud, but they're really saying, I need to have a better mechanism to simplify this and get value across it, and how do you abstract that out to do that? And that's where they're obviously, our conversations are more amazed what we're able to do, and what they're able to do with our platform, because if you think of what we've done, the S3, or GCS, or object storage, is they can't imagine the ingest, they can't imagine how easy, time to glass, one minute, no matter where it lands in the world, querying this in seconds for hundreds of terabytes squared. People are amazed, but that's kind of, so they're not asking for that, but they are amazed. And then when you start talking on it, if you're an enterprise person, you're building a big cloud data platform, or doing data or analytics, if you're not trying to leverage the public clouds, and somehow leverage all of them, and then build on top, then I think you're missing it. So they might not be asking for it, but they're doing it. >> And they're looking for a lens, you mentioned all these different services, how do I bring those together quickly? You know, our viewpoint, our service, is I have all these streams of data, create a lens where they want to go after it via search, go after via SQL, bring them together instantly, no e-tailing out, no define this table, put into this database. We said, let's have a service that creates a lens across all these streams, and then make those connections. I want to take my CRM with my Google AdWords, and maybe my Salesforce, how do I do analysis? Maybe I want to hunt first, maybe I want to join, maybe I want to add another stream to it. And so our viewpoint is, it's so natural to get into these lake platforms and then provide lenses to get that access. >> And they don't want it separate, they don't want something different here, and different there. They want it basically -- >> So this is our industry, right? If something new comes out, remember virtualization came out, "Oh my God, this is so great, it's going to solve all these problems." And all of a sudden it just got to be this big, more complex thing. Same thing with cloud, you know? It started out with S3, and then EC2, and now hundreds and hundreds of different services. So, it's a complex matter for a lot of people, and this creates problems for customers, especially when you got divisions that are using different clouds, and you're saying that the solution, or a solution for the part of the problem, is to really allow the data to stay in place on S3, use that standard, super simple, but then give it what, Ed, you've called superpower a couple of times, to make it fast, make it inexpensive, and allow you to do that across clouds. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I'll give you guys the last word on that. >> No, listen, I think, we think Supercloud allows you to do a lot more. And for us, data, everyone says more data, more problems, more budget issue, everyone knows more data is better, and we show you how to do it cost effectively at scale. And we couldn't have done it without the design principles of we're leveraging the Supercloud to get capabilities, and because we use super, just the object storage, we're able to get these capabilities of ingest, scale, cost effectiveness, and then we built on top of this. In the end, a database is a data platform that allows you to go after everything distributed, and to get one platform for analytics, no matter where it lands, that's where we think the Supercloud concepts are perfect, that's where our clients are seeing it, and we're kind of excited about it. >> Yeah a third generation database, Supercloud database, however we want to phrase it, and make it simple, but provide the value, and make it instant. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming into the studio today, I really thank you for your support of theCUBE, and theCUBE community, it allows us to provide events like this and free content. I really appreciate it. >> Oh, thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, this is Dave Vellante for John Furrier in theCUBE community, thanks for being with us today. You're watching Supercloud 2, keep it right there for more thought provoking discussions around the future of cloud and data. (bright music)

(gentle synth music) (music ends) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2, an open industry collaboration between technologists, consultants, analysts, and of course practitioners to help shape the future of cloud. At this event, one of the key areas we're exploring is the intersection of cloud and data. And how building value on top of hyperscale clouds and across clouds is evolving, a concept of course we call "Supercloud". And we're pleased to welcome our friends from Enterprise Technology research, Erik Bradley and Darren Brabham. Guys, thanks for joining us, great to see you. we love to bring the data into these conversations. >> Thank you for having us, Dave, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks. >> You bet. And so, let me do the setup on what is Supercloud. It's a concept that we've floated, Before re:Invent 2021, based on the idea that cloud infrastructure is becoming ubiquitous, incredibly powerful, but there's a lack of standards across the big three clouds. That creates friction. So we defined over the period of time, you know, better part of a year, a set of essential elements, deployment models for so-called supercloud, which create this common experience for specific cloud services that, of course, again, span multiple clouds and even on-premise data. So Erik, with that as background, I wonder if you could add your general thoughts on the term supercloud, maybe play proxy for the CIO community, 'cause you do these round tables, you talk to these guys all the time, you gather a lot of amazing information from senior IT DMs that compliment your survey. So what are your thoughts on the term and the concept? >> Yeah, sure. I'll even go back to last year when you and I did our predictions panel, right? And we threw it out there. And to your point, you know, there's some haters. Anytime you throw out a new term, "Is it marketing buzz? Is it worth it? Why are you even doing it?" But you know, from my own perspective, and then also speaking to the IT DMs that we interview on a regular basis, this is just a natural evolution. It's something that's inevitable in enterprise tech, right? The internet was not built for what it has become. It was never intended to be the underlying infrastructure of our daily lives and work. The cloud also was not built to be what it's become. But where we're at now is, we have to figure out what the cloud is and what it needs to be to be scalable, resilient, secure, and have the governance wrapped around it. And to me that's what supercloud is. It's a way to define operantly, what the next generation, the continued iteration and evolution of the cloud and what its needs to be. And that's what the supercloud means to me. And what depends, if you want to call it metacloud, supercloud, it doesn't matter. The point is that we're trying to define the next layer, the next future of work, which is inevitable in enterprise tech. Now, from the IT DM perspective, I have two interesting call outs. One is from basically a senior developer IT architecture and DevSecOps who says he uses the term all the time. And the reason he uses the term, is that because multi-cloud has a stigma attached to it, when he is talking to his business executives. (David chuckles) the stigma is because it's complex and it's expensive. So he switched to supercloud to better explain to his business executives and his CFO and his CIO what he's trying to do. And we can get into more later about what it means to him. But the inverse of that, of course, is a good CSO friend of mine for a very large enterprise says the concern with Supercloud is the reduction of complexity. And I'll explain, he believes anything that takes the requirement of specific expertise out of the equation, even a little bit, as a CSO worries him. So as you said, David, always two sides to the coin, but I do believe supercloud is a relevant term, and it is necessary because the cloud is continuing to be defined. >> You know, that's really interesting too, 'cause you know, Darren, we use Snowflake a lot as an example, sort of early supercloud, and you think from a security standpoint, we've always pushed Amazon and, "Are you ever going to kind of abstract the complexity away from all these primitives?" and their position has always been, "Look, if we produce these primitives, and offer these primitives, we we can move as the market moves. When you abstract, then it becomes harder to peel the layers." But Darren, from a data standpoint, like I say, we use Snowflake a lot. I think of like Tim Burners-Lee when Web 2.0 came out, he said, "Well this is what the internet was always supposed to be." So in a way, you know, supercloud is maybe what multi-cloud was supposed to be. But I mean, you think about data sharing, Darren, across clouds, it's always been a challenge. Snowflake always, you know, obviously trying to solve that problem, as are others. But what are your thoughts on the concept? >> Yeah, I think the concept fits, right? It is reflective of, it's a paradigm shift, right? Things, as a pendulum have swung back and forth between needing to piece together a bunch of different tools that have specific unique use cases and they're best in breed in what they do. And then focusing on the duct tape that holds 'em all together and all the engineering complexity and skill, it shifted from that end of the pendulum all the way back to, "Let's streamline this, let's simplify it. Maybe we have budget crunches and we need to consolidate tools or eliminate tools." And so then you kind of see this back and forth over time. And with data and analytics for instance, a lot of organizations were trying to bring the data closer to the business. That's where we saw self-service analytics coming in. And tools like Snowflake, what they did was they helped point to different databases, they helped unify data, and organize it in a single place that was, you know, in a sense neutral, away from a single cloud vendor or a single database, and allowed the business to kind of be more flexible in how it brought stuff together and provided it out to the business units. So Snowflake was an example of one of those times where we pulled back from the granular, multiple points of the spear, back to a simple way to do things. And I think Snowflake has continued to kind of keep that mantle to a degree, and we see other tools trying to do that, but that's all it is. It's a paradigm shift back to this kind of meta abstraction layer that kind of simplifies what is the reality, that you need a complex multi-use case, multi-region way of doing business. And it sort of reflects the reality of that. >> And you know, to me it's a spectrum. As part of Supercloud 2, we're talking to a number of of practitioners, Ionis Pharmaceuticals, US West, we got Walmart. And it's a spectrum, right? In some cases the practitioner's saying, "You know, the way I solve multi-cloud complexity is mono-cloud, I just do one cloud." (laughs) Others like Walmart are saying, "Hey, you know, we actually are building an abstraction layer ourselves, take advantage of it." So my general question to both of you is, is this a concept, is the lack of standards across clouds, you know, really a problem, you know, or is supercloud a solution looking for a problem? Or do you hear from practitioners that "No, this is really an issue, we have to bring together a set of standards to sort of unify our cloud estates." >> Allow me to answer that at a higher level, and then we're going to hand it over to Dr. Brabham because he is a little bit more detailed on the realtime streaming analytics use cases, which I think is where we're going to get to. But to answer that question, it really depends on the size and the complexity of your business. At the very large enterprise, Dave, Yes, a hundred percent. This needs to happen. There is complexity, there is not only complexity in the compute and actually deploying the applications, but the governance and the security around them. But for lower end or, you know, business use cases, and for smaller businesses, it's a little less necessary. You certainly don't need to have all of these. Some of the things that come into mind from the interviews that Darren and I have done are, you know, financial services, if you're doing real-time trading, anything that has real-time data metrics involved in your transactions, is going to be necessary. And another use case that we hear about is in online travel agencies. So I think it is very relevant, the complexity does need to be solved, and I'll allow Darren to explain a little bit more about how that's used from an analytics perspective. >> Yeah, go for it. >> Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think any modern, you know, multinational company that's going to have a footprint in the US and Europe, in China, or works in different areas like manufacturing, where you're probably going to have on-prem instances that will stay on-prem forever, for various performance reasons. You have these complicated governance and security and regulatory issues. So inherently, I think, large multinational companies and or companies that are in certain areas like finance or in, you know, online e-commerce, or things that need real-time data, they inherently are going to have a very complex environment that's going to need to be managed in some kind of cleaner way. You know, they're looking for one door to open, one pane of glass to look at, one thing to do to manage these multi points. And, streaming's a good example of that. I mean, not every organization has a real-time streaming use case, and may not ever, but a lot of organizations do, a lot of industries do. And so there's this need to use, you know, they want to use open-source tools, they want to use Apache Kafka for instance. They want to use different megacloud vendors offerings, like Google Pub/Sub or you know, Amazon Kinesis Firehose. They have all these different pieces they want to use for different use cases at different stages of maturity or proof of concept, you name it. They're going to have to have this complexity. And I think that's why we're seeing this need, to have sort of this supercloud concept, to juggle all this, to wrangle all of it. 'Cause the reality is, it's complex and you have to simplify it somehow. >> Great, thanks you guys. All right, let's bring up the graphic, and take a look. Anybody who follows the breaking analysis, which is co-branded with ETR Cube Insights powered by ETR, knows we like to bring data to the table. ETR does amazing survey work every quarter, 1200 plus 1500 practitioners that that answer a number of questions. The vertical axis here is net score, which is ETR's proprietary methodology, which is a measure of spending momentum, spending velocity. And the horizontal axis here is overlap, but it's the presence pervasiveness, and the dataset, the ends, that table insert on the bottom right shows you how the dots are plotted, the net score and then the ends in the survey. And what we've done is we've plotted a bunch of the so-called supercloud suspects, let's start in the upper right, the cloud platforms. Without these hyperscale clouds, you can't have a supercloud. And as always, Azure and AWS, up and to the right, it's amazing we're talking about, you know, 80 plus billion dollar company in AWS. Azure's business is, if you just look at the IaaS is in the 50 billion range, I mean it's just amazing to me the net scores here. Anything above 40% we consider highly elevated. And you got Azure and you got Snowflake, Databricks, HashiCorp, we'll get to them. And you got AWS, you know, right up there at that size, it's quite amazing. With really big ends as well, you know, 700 plus ends in the survey. So, you know, kind of half the survey actually has these platforms. So my question to you guys is, what are you seeing in terms of cloud adoption within the big three cloud players? I wonder if you could could comment, maybe Erik, you could start. >> Yeah, sure. Now we're talking data, now I'm happy. So yeah, we'll get into some of it. Right now, the January, 2023 TSIS is approaching 1500 survey respondents. One caveat, it's not closed yet, it will close on Friday, but with an end that big we are over statistically significant. We also recently did a cloud survey, and there's a couple of key points on that I want to get into before we get into individual vendors. What we're seeing here, is that annual spend on cloud infrastructure is expected to grow at almost a 70% CAGR over the next three years. The percentage of those workloads for cloud infrastructure are expected to grow over 70% as three years as well. And as you mentioned, Azure and AWS are still dominant. However, we're seeing some share shift spreading around a little bit. Now to get into the individual vendors you mentioned about, yes, Azure is still number one, AWS is number two. What we're seeing, which is incredibly interesting, CloudFlare is number three. It's actually beating GCP. That's the first time we've seen it. What I do want to state, is this is on net score only, which is our measure of spending intentions. When you talk about actual pervasion in the enterprise, it's not even close. But from a spending velocity intention point of view, CloudFlare is now number three above GCP, and even Salesforce is creeping up to be at GCPs level. So what we're seeing here, is a continued domination by Azure and AWS, but some of these other players that maybe might fit into your moniker. And I definitely want to talk about CloudFlare more in a bit, but I'm going to stop there. But what we're seeing is some of these other players that fit into your Supercloud moniker, are starting to creep up, Dave. >> Yeah, I just want to clarify. So as you also know, we track IaaS and PaaS revenue and we try to extract, so AWS reports in its quarterly earnings, you know, they're just IaaS and PaaS, they don't have a SaaS play, a little bit maybe, whereas Microsoft and Google include their applications and so we extract those out and if you do that, AWS is bigger, but in the surveys, you know, customers, they see cloud, SaaS to them as cloud. So that's one of the reasons why you see, you know, Microsoft as larger in pervasion. If you bring up that survey again, Alex, the survey results, you see them further to the right and they have higher spending momentum, which is consistent with what you see in the earnings calls. Now, interesting about CloudFlare because the CEO of CloudFlare actually, and CloudFlare itself uses the term supercloud basically saying, "Hey, we're building a new type of internet." So what are your thoughts? Do you have additional information on CloudFlare, Erik that you want to share? I mean, you've seen them pop up. I mean this is a really interesting company that is pretty forward thinking and vocal about how it's disrupting the industry. >> Sure, we've been tracking 'em for a long time, and even from the disruption of just a traditional CDN where they took down Akamai and what they're doing. But for me, the definition of a true supercloud provider can't just be one instance. You have to have multiple. So it's not just the cloud, it's networking aspect on top of it, it's also security. And to me, CloudFlare is the only one that has all of it. That they actually have the ability to offer all of those things. Whereas you look at some of the other names, they're still piggybacking on the infrastructure or platform as a service of the hyperscalers. CloudFlare does not need to, they actually have the cloud, the networking, and the security all themselves. So to me that lends credibility to their own internal usage of that moniker Supercloud. And also, again, just what we're seeing right here that their net score is now creeping above AGCP really does state it. And then just one real last thing, one of the other things we do in our surveys is we track adoption and replacement reasoning. And when you look at Cloudflare's adoption rate, which is extremely high, it's based on technical capabilities, the breadth of their feature set, it's also based on what we call the ability to avoid stack alignment. So those are again, really supporting reasons that makes CloudFlare a top candidate for your moniker of supercloud. >> And they've also announced an object store (chuckles) and a database. So, you know, that's going to be, it takes a while as you well know, to get database adoption going, but you know, they're ambitious and going for it. All right, let's bring the chart back up, and I want to focus Darren in on the ecosystem now, and really, we've identified Snowflake and Databricks, it's always fun to talk about those guys, and there are a number of other, you know, data platforms out there, but we use those too as really proxies for leaders. We got a bunch of the backup guys, the data protection folks, Rubric, Cohesity, and Veeam. They're sort of in a cluster, although Rubric, you know, ahead of those guys in terms of spending momentum. And then VMware, Tanzu and Red Hat as sort of the cross cloud platform. But I want to focus, Darren, on the data piece of it. We're seeing a lot of activity around data sharing, governed data sharing. Databricks is using Delta Sharing as their sort of place, Snowflakes is sort of this walled garden like the app store. What are your thoughts on, you know, in the context of Supercloud, cross cloud capabilities for the data platforms? >> Yeah, good question. You know, I think Databricks is an interesting player because they sort of have made some interesting moves, with their Data Lakehouse technology. So they're trying to kind of complicate, or not complicate, they're trying to take away the complications of, you know, the downsides of data warehousing and data lakes, and trying to find that middle ground, where you have the benefits of a managed, governed, you know, data warehouse environment, but you have sort of the lower cost, you know, capability of a data lake. And so, you know, Databricks has become really attractive, especially by data scientists, right? We've been tracking them in the AI machine learning sector for quite some time here at ETR, attractive for a data scientist because it looks and acts like a lake, but can have some managed capabilities like a warehouse. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. So in some ways I think you've seen sort of a data science driver for the adoption of Databricks that has now become a little bit more mainstream across the business. Snowflake, maybe the other direction, you know, it's a cloud data warehouse that you know, is starting to expand its capabilities and add on new things like Streamlit is a good example in the analytics space, with apps. So you see these tools starting to branch and creep out a bit, but they offer that sort of neutrality, right? We heard one IT decision maker we recently interviewed that referred to Snowflake and Databricks as the quote unquote Switzerland of what they do. And so there's this desirability from an organization to find these tools that can solve the complex multi-headed use-case of data and analytics, which every business unit needs in different ways. And figure out a way to do that, an elegant way that's governed and centrally managed, that federated kind of best of both worlds that you get by bringing the data close to the business while having a central governed instance. So these tools are incredibly powerful and I think there's only going to be room for growth, for those two especially. I think they're going to expand and do different things and maybe, you know, join forces with others and a lot of the power of what they do well is trying to define these connections and find these partnerships with other vendors, and try to be seen as the nice add-on to your existing environment that plays nicely with everyone. So I think that's where those two tools are going, but they certainly fit this sort of label of, you know, trying to be that supercloud neutral, you know, layer that unites everything. >> Yeah, and if you bring the graphic back up, please, there's obviously big data plays in each of the cloud platforms, you know, Microsoft, big database player, AWS is, you know, 11, 12, 15, data stores. And of course, you know, BigQuery and other, you know, data platforms within Google. But you know, I'm not sure the big cloud guys are going to go hard after so-called supercloud, cross-cloud services. Although, we see Oracle getting in bed with Microsoft and Azure, with a database service that is cross-cloud, certainly Google with Anthos and you know, you never say never with with AWS. I guess what I would say guys, and I'll I'll leave you with this is that, you know, just like all players today are cloud players, I feel like anybody in the business or most companies are going to be so-called supercloud players. In other words, they're going to have a cross-cloud strategy, they're going to try to build connections if they're coming from on-prem like a Dell or an HPE, you know, or Pure or you know, many of these other companies, Cohesity is another one. They're going to try to connect to their on-premise states, of course, and create a consistent experience. It's natural that they're going to have sort of some consistency across clouds. You know, the big question is, what's that spectrum look like? I think on the one hand you're going to have some, you know, maybe some rudimentary, you know, instances of supercloud or maybe they just run on the individual clouds versus where Snowflake and others and even beyond that are trying to go with a single global instance, basically building out what I would think of as their own cloud, and importantly their own ecosystem. I'll give you guys the last thought. Maybe you could each give us, you know, closing thoughts. Maybe Darren, you could start and Erik, you could bring us home on just this entire topic, the future of cloud and data. >> Yeah, I mean I think, you know, two points to make on that is, this question of these, I guess what we'll call legacy on-prem players. These, mega vendors that have been around a long time, have big on-prem footprints and a lot of people have them for that reason. I think it's foolish to assume that a company, especially a large, mature, multinational company that's been around a long time, it's foolish to think that they can just uproot and leave on-premises entirely full scale. There will almost always be an on-prem footprint from any company that was not, you know, natively born in the cloud after 2010, right? I just don't think that's reasonable anytime soon. I think there's some industries that need on-prem, things like, you know, industrial manufacturing and so on. So I don't think on-prem is going away, and I think vendors that are going to, you know, go very cloud forward, very big on the cloud, if they neglect having at least decent connectors to on-prem legacy vendors, they're going to miss out. So I think that's something that these players need to keep in mind is that they continue to reach back to some of these players that have big footprints on-prem, and make sure that those integrations are seamless and work well, or else their customers will always have a multi-cloud or hybrid experience. And then I think a second point here about the future is, you know, we talk about the three big, you know, cloud providers, the Google, Microsoft, AWS as sort of the opposite of, or different from this new supercloud paradigm that's emerging. But I want to kind of point out that, they will always try to make a play to become that and I think, you know, we'll certainly see someone like Microsoft trying to expand their licensing and expand how they play in order to become that super cloud provider for folks. So also don't want to downplay them. I think you're going to see those three big players continue to move, and take over what players like CloudFlare are doing and try to, you know, cut them off before they get too big. So, keep an eye on them as well. >> Great points, I mean, I think you're right, the first point, if you're Dell, HPE, Cisco, IBM, your strategy should be to make your on-premise state as cloud-like as possible and you know, make those differences as minimal as possible. And you know, if you're a customer, then the business case is going to be low for you to move off of that. And I think you're right. I think the cloud guys, if this is a real problem, the cloud guys are going to play in there, and they're going to make some money at it. Erik, bring us home please. >> Yeah, I'm going to revert back to our data and this on the macro side. So to kind of support this concept of a supercloud right now, you know Dave, you and I know, we check overall spending and what we're seeing right now is total year spent is expected to only be 4.6%. We ended 2022 at 5% even though it began at almost eight and a half. So this is clearly declining and in that environment, we're seeing the top two strategies to reduce spend are actually vendor consolidation with 36% of our respondents saying they're actively seeking a way to reduce their number of vendors, and consolidate into one. That's obviously supporting a supercloud type of play. Number two is reducing excess cloud resources. So when I look at both of those combined, with a drop in the overall spending reduction, I think you're on the right thread here, Dave. You know, the overall macro view that we're seeing in the data supports this happening. And if I can real quick, couple of names we did not touch on that I do think deserve to be in this conversation, one is HashiCorp. HashiCorp is the number one player in our infrastructure sector, with a 56% net score. It does multiple things within infrastructure and it is completely agnostic to your environment. And if we're also speaking about something that's just a singular feature, we would look at Rubric for data, backup, storage, recovery. They're not going to offer you your full cloud or your networking of course, but if you are looking for your backup, recovery, and storage Rubric, also number one in that sector with a 53% net score. Two other names that deserve to be in this conversation as we watch it move and evolve. >> Great, thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, we had both of those guys in the chart and I failed to focus in on HashiCorp. And clearly a Supercloud enabler. All right guys, we got to go. Thank you so much for joining us, appreciate it. Let's keep this conversation going. >> Always enjoy talking to you Dave, thanks. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there for more content from Supercloud 2. This is Dave Valente for John Ferg and the entire Cube team. We'll be right back. (gentle synth music) (music fades)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here. We're exploring all the new Supercloud trends around multiple clouds, hyper scale gaps in their systems, new innovations, new applications, new companies, new products, new brands emerging from this big inflection point. Got a great guest who's going to unpack it with me today, Ramesh Prabagaran, who's the co-founder and CEO of Prosimo, CUBE alumni. Ramesh, legend in the industry, you've been around. You've seen many cycles. Welcome to Supercloud2. >> Thank you. You're being too kind. >> Well, you know, you guys have been a technical, great technical founding team, multiple ventures, multiple times around the track as they say, but now we're seeing something completely different. This is our second event, kind of we're doing to start the the ball rolling around unpacking this idea of Supercloud which evolved from a riff with me and Dave to now a working group paper, multiple definitions. People are saying they're Supercloud. CloudFlare says this is their version. Someone says there over there. Fitzi over there in the blog is always, you know, challenging us on our definitions, but it's, the consensus is though something's happening. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> And what's your take on this kind of big inflection point? >> Absolutely, so if you just look at kind of this in layers right, so you have hyper scalers that are innovating really quickly on underlying capabilities, and then you have enterprises adopting these technologies, right, there is a layer in the middle that I would say is largely missing, right? And one that addresses the gaps introduced by these new capabilities, by the hyper scalers. At the same time, one that actually spans, let's say multiple regions, multiple clouds and so forth. So that to me is kind of the Supercloud layer of sorts. One that helps enterprises adopt the underlying hyper scaler capabilities a lot faster, and at the same time brings a certain level of consistency and homogeneity also. >> What do you think the big driver of Supercloud is? Is it the industry growing up or is it the demand for new kinds of capabilities or both? Or just evolution? What's your take? >> I would say largely it depends on kind of who the entity is that you're talking about, right? And so I would say both. So if you look at one cohort here, it's adoption, right? If I have a externally facing digital presence, for example, then I'm going to scale that up and get to as many subscribers and users no matter what, right? And at that time it's a different set of problems. If you're looking at kind of traditional enterprise inward that are bringing apps into the cloud and so forth, it's a different set of care abouts, right? So both are, I would say, equally important problems to solve for. >> Well, one reality that we're definitely tracking, and it's not really a debate anymore, is hybrid. >> Ramesh: Yep >> Hybrid happened. It happened faster than most people thought. But, you know, we were talking about this in 2015 when it first got kicked around, but now you see hybrid in the cloud, on premises and the edge. This kind of forms that distributed computing paradigm that we've always been predicting. And so if that continues to play out the way it is, you're now going to have a completely distributed, connected internet and sets of systems, intra and external within companies. So again, the world is connected 100%. Everything's changing, right? >> And that introduces. >> It wasn't your grandfather's networking anymore or storage. The game is still the same, but the play, the components are acting differently. What's your take on this? >> Absolutely. No, absolutely. That's a very key important point, and it's one that we always ask our customers right at the front end, right? Because your starting assumptions matter. If you have workloads of workloads in the cloud and data center is something that you want to connect into, then you'll make decisions kind of keeping cloud in the center and then kind of bolt on technologies for what that means to extend it to the data center. If your center of gravity is in the data center, and then cloud is let's say 10% right now, but you see that growing, then what choices do you have? Right, do you want to bring your data center technologies into the cloud because you want that consistency in operations? Or do you want to start off fresh, right? So this is a really key, important question, and one that many of our customers are actually are grappling with, right? They have this notion that going cloud native is the right approach, but at the same time that means I have a bifurcation in kind of how do I operate my data center versus my cloud, right? Two different operating models, and slowly it'll shift over to one. But you're going to have to deal with dual reality for a while. >> I was talking to an old friend of mine, CIO, very experienced CIO. Big time company, large deployment, a lot of IT. I said, so what's the big trend everyone's telling me about IT's going. He goes no, not really. IT's not going away for me. It's going everywhere in the company. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> So I need to scale my IT-like capabilities everywhere and then make it invisible. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> Which is essentially code words for saying it's going to be completely cloud native everywhere. This is what is happening. Do you agree? >> Absolutely right, and so if you look at what do enterprises care about it? The reason to go to the cloud is to get speed of operations, and it's apps, apps, apps, right? Do you ever have a conversation on networking and infrastructure first? No, that kind of gets brought into the conversation because you want to deal with users, applications and services, right? And so the end goal is essentially how do users communicate with apps and get the right experience, security and whatnot, and how do apps talk to each other and make sure that you get all of the connectivity and security requirements? Underneath the covers, what does this mean for infrastructure, networking, security and whatnot? It's actually going to be someone else's job, right? And you shouldn't have to think too much about it. So this whole notion of kind of making that transparent is real actually, right? But at the same time, us and all the guys that we talk to on the customer side, that's their job, right? Like we have to work towards making that transparent. Some are going to be in the form of capability, some are going to be driven by data, but that's really where the two worlds are going to come together. >> Lots of debates going on. We just heard from Bob Muglia here on Supercloud2. He said Supercloud's a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So the question that's being debated is is Supercloud a platform or an architecture in your view? >> Okay, that's a tough one actually. I'm going to side on the side on kind of the platform side right, and the reason for that is architectural choices are things that you make ahead of time. And you, once you're in, there really isn't a fork in the road, right? Platforms continue to evolve. You can iterate, innovate and so on and so forth. And so I'm thinking Supercloud is more of a platform because you do have a choice. Hey, am I going AWS, Azure, GCP. You make that choice. What is my center of gravity? You make that choice. That's kind of an architectural decision, right? Once you make that, then how do I make things work consistently across like two or three clouds? That's a platform choice. >> So who's responsible for the architecture as the platform, the vendor serving the platform or is the platform vendor agnostic? >> You know, this is where you have to kind of peel the onion in layers, right? If you talk about applications, you can't go to a developer team or an app team and say I want you to operate on Google or AWS. They're like I'll pick the cloud that I want, right? Now who are we talking to? The infrastructure guys and the networking guys, right? They want to make sure that it's not bifurcated. It's like, hey, I want to make sure whatever I build for AWS I can equally use that on Azure. I can equally use that on GCP. So if you're talking to more of the application centric teams who really want infrastructure to be transparent, they'll say, okay, I want to make this choice of whether this is AWS, Azure, GCP, and stick to that. And if you come kind of down the layers of the stack into infrastructure, they are thinking a little more holistically, a little more Supercloud, a little more multicloud, and that. >> That's a good point. So that brings up the deployment question. >> Ramesh: Exactly! >> I want to ask you the next question, okay, what is the preferred deployment in your opinion for a Supercloud narrative? Is it single instance, spread it around everywhere? What's the, do you have a single global instance or do you have everything synchronized? >> So I would say first layer of that Supercloud really kind of fix the holes that have been introduced as a result of kind of adopting the hyper scaler technologies, right? So each, the hyper scalers have been really good at innovating and providing really massive scale elastic capabilities, right? But once you start to build capabilities on top of that to help serve the application, there's a few holes start to show up. So first job of Supercloud really is to plug those holes, right? Second is can I get to an operating model, so that I can replicate this not just in a single region, but across multiple regions, same cloud, and then across multiple clouds, right? And so both of those need to be solved for in order to be (cross talking). >> So is that multiple instantiations of the stack or? >> Yeah, so this again depends on kind of the capability, right? So if you take a more solution view, and so I can speak for kind of networking security combined right? There you always take a solution view. You don't ever look at, you know, what does this mean for a single instance in a single region. You take a macro view, and then you then break it down into what does this mean for region, what does it mean for instance, what does this mean for AZs? And so on and so forth. So you kind of have to go top to bottom. >> Okay, welcome you down into the trap now. Okay, synchronizing the data, latency, these are all questions. So what does the network Supercloud look like to you? Because networking is big here. >> Ramesh: Yes, absolutely. >> This is what you guys do. >> Exactly, yeah. So the different set of problems as you go up the stack, right? So if you have hundreds of workloads in a single region, the set of problems you're dealing with there are kind of app native connectivity, how do I go from kind of east/west, all of those fun things, right? Which are usually bound in terms of latency. You don't have those challenges as much, but can you build your entire enterprise application architecture in one region? No, you're going to have to create multiple instances, right? So my data lake is invariably going to be in one place. My business logic is going to be spread across a few places. What does that bring in? I need to go across regions. Am I going to put those two regions right next to each other? No, I'm not going to, right? I'm going to have places in Europe. I'm going to have APAC, and I'm going to have a North American presence, and I need to bring all these things together. So this is where, back to your point, latency really matters, right? Because I need to be able to find out not just best path but also how do I reduce the millisecond, microseconds that my application cares about, which brings in a layer of optimization and then so on and so on and so forth. So this is what we call kind of to borrow the Prosimo language full stack networking, right? Because I'm not just dealing with how do I go from one region to another because that's laws of physics. I can only control so much. But there are a few elements up the application stack in software that you can tweak to actually bring these things closer and closer. >> And on that point, you're seeing security being talked a lot more at the network layer. So how do you secure the Supercloud at the network layer? What's that look like? >> Yeah, we've been grappling with essentially is security kind of foundational, and then is the network on top. And then we had an alternative viewpoint which is kind of network and then security on top. And the answer is actually it's neither, right? It's almost like a meshed up sandwich of sorts. So you need to have networking security work really well together, right? Case in point, I mean we were talking to a customer yesterday. He said, hey, I have my data lake in one region that needs to talk to an analytics service in a completely different region of a different cloud. These two things just need to be able to talk to each other, which means I need to bring elements of networking. I need to bring elements of security, secure access, app segmentation, all of those things. Very simple, I have an analytics service that needs to contact a data lake. That's what he starts with, but then before you know it, it actually brings up a whole stack underneath, so that's. >> VMware calls that cloud chaos. >> Ramesh: Yes, exactly. >> And then that's the halfway point between cloud smart. Cloud first, cloud chaos, cloud smart, and the next thing, you can skip that whole step. But again, again, it's pick your strategy right? Again, this comes back down to your earlier point. I want to ask you from a customer standpoint, you got the hyper scalers doing very, very well. >> Ramesh: Yep, absolutely. >> And I love what their Amazon's doing. I think Microsoft again though they had a little bit of downgrade are catching up fast, and they have their installed base. So you got the land of the installed bases. >> Correct. >> First and greater, better cloud. Install base getting better, almost as good, almost as good is a gift, but close. Now you have them specializing. Silicon, special silicon. So there's gaps for other services. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsky's a open book saying, hey, we want our ecosystem to pick up these gaps and build on them. Go ahead, go to town. >> So this is where I think choices are tough, right? Because if you had one choice, you would work with it, and you would work around it, right? Now I have five different choices. Now what do I do? Our viewpoint is there are a bunch of things that say AWS does really, really well. Use that as a foundational layer, right? Like don't reinvent the wheel on those things. Transit gateways, global accelerators and whatnot, they exist for a reason. Billions of dollars have gone into building those things. Use that foundational layer, right? But what you want to build on top of that is actually driven by the application. The requirements of a lambda application that's serverless, it's very different than a packaged application that's responding for transactions, right? Like it's just completely very, very different. And so bring in the right set of capabilities required for those set of applications, and then you go based on that. This is also where I think whether something is a regional construct versus an overall global construct really, really matters, right? Because if you start with the assumption that everything is going to be built regionally, then it's someone else's job to make sure that all of these things are connected. But if you start with kind of the global purview, then the rest of them start to (cross talking). >> What are some of the things that the enterprises might want that are gaps that are going to be filled by the, by startups like you guys and the ecosystem because we're seeing the ecosystem form into two big camps. >> Ramesh: Yep. >> ISVs, which is an old school definition of independent software vendor, aka someone who writes software. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> SaaS app. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And then ecosystem software players that were once ISVs now have people building on top of them. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> They're building on top of the cloud. So you have that new hyper scale effect going on. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got ISVs, which is software developers, software vendors. >> Ramesh: Correct. >> And ecosystems. >> Yep. >> What's that impact of that? Cause it's a new dynamic. >> Exactly, so if you take kind of enterprises, want to make sure that that their apps and the data center migrate to the cloud, new apps are developed the right way in the cloud, right? So that's kind of table stakes. So now what choices do they have? They listen to AWS and say, okay, I have all these cloud native services. I want to be able to instantiate all that. Now comes the interesting choice that they have to make. Do I go hire a whole bunch of people and do it myself or do I go there on the platform route, right? Because I made an architectural choice. Now I have to decide whether I want to do this myself or the platform choice. DIY works great for some, but you don't know what you're getting into, and it's people involved, right? People, process, all those fun things involved, right? So we show up there and say, you don't know what you don't know, right? Like because that's the nature of it. Why don't you invest in a platform like what what we provide, and then you actually build on top of it. We will, it's our job to make sure that we keep up with the innovation happening underneath the covers. And at the same time, this is not a closed ended system. You can actually build on top of our platform, right? And so that actually gives you a good mix. Now the care abouts are interesting. Some apps care about experience. Some apps care about latency. Some apps are extremely charty and extremely data intensive, but nobody wants to pay for it, right? And so it's a interesting Jenga that you have to play between experience versus security versus cost, right? And that makes kind of head of infrastructure and cloud platform teams' life really, really, really interesting. >> And this is why I love your background, and Stu Miniman, when he was with theCUBE, and now he's at Red Hat, we used to riff about the network and how network folks are now, those concepts are now up the top of the stack because the cloud is one big network effect. >> Ramesh: Exactly, correct. >> It's a computer. >> Yep, absolutely. No, and case in point, right, like say we're in let's say in San Jose here or or Palo Alto here, and let's say my application is sitting in London, right? The cloud gives you different express lanes. I can go down to my closest pop location provided by AWS and then I can go ride that all the way up to up to London. It's going to give me better performance, low latency, but I'm going to have to incur some costs associated with it. Or I can go all the wild internet all the way from Palo Alta up to kind of the ingress point into London and then go access, but I'm spending time on the wild internet, which means all kinds of fun things happen, right? But I'm not paying much, but my experience is not going to be so great. So, and there are various degrees of shade in them, of gray in the middle, right? So how do you pick what? It all kind of is driven by the applications. >> Well, we certainly want you back for Supercloud3, our next version of this virtual/live event here in our Palo Alto studios. Really appreciate you coming on. >> Absolutely. >> While you're here, give a quick plug for the company. Next minute, we can take a minute to talk about the success of the company. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> I know you got a fresh financing this past year. Plenty of money in the bank, going to ride this new wave, Supercloud wave. Give us a quick plug. >> Absolutely, yeah. So three years going on to four this calendar year. So it's an interesting time for the company. We have proven that our technology, product and our initial customers are quite happy with it. Now comes essentially more of those and scale and so forth. That's kind of the interesting phase that we are in. Also heartened to see quite a few of kind of really large and dominant players in the market, partners, channels and so forth, invest in us to take this to the next set of customers. I would say there's been a dramatic shift in the conversation with our customers. The first couple of years or so of the company, we are about three years old right now, was really about us educating them. This is what you need. This is what you need. Now actually it's a lot of just pull, right? We've seen a good indication, as much as a hate RFIs, a good indication is the number of RFIs that show up at our door saying we want you to participate in this because we want to understand more, right? And so as a, I think we are at an interesting point of the, of that shift. >> RFIs always like do all this work and hope for the best. Pray for a deal. You know, you guys on the right side of history. If a customer asks with respect to Supercloud, multicloud, is that your focus? Is that the direction you guys are going into? >> Yeah, so I would say we are kind of both, right? Supercloud and multicloud because we, our customers are hybrid, multiple clouds, all of the above, right? Our main pitch and kind of value back to the customers is go embrace cloud native because that's the right approach, right? It doesn't make sense to go reinvent the wheel on that one, but then make a really good choice about whether you want to do this yourself or invest in a platform to make your life easy. Because we have seen this story play out with many many enterprises, right? They pick the right technologies. They do a simple POC overnight, and they say, yeah, I can make this work for two apps, right? And then they say, yes, I can make this work for 100. You go down a certain path. You hit a wall. You hit a wall, and it's a hard wall. It's like, no, there isn't a thing that you can go around it. >> A lot of dead bodies laying around. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> Dead wall. >> And then they have to unravel around that, and then they come talk to us, and they say, okay, now what? Like help me, help me through this journey. So I would say to the extent that you can do this diligence ahead of time, do that, and then, and then pick the right platform. >> You've got to have the talent. And you got to be geared up. You got to know what you're getting into. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> You got to have the staff to do this. >> And cloud talent and skillset in particular, I mean there's lots available but it's in pockets right? And if you look at kind of web three companies, they've gone and kind of amassed all those guys, right? So enterprises are not left with the cream of the crop. >> John: They might be coming back. >> Exactly, exactly, so. >> With this downturn. Ramesh, great to see you and thanks for contributing to Supercloud2, and again, love your team. Very technical team, and you're in the right side of history in this one. Congratulations. >> Ramesh: No, and thank you, thank you very much. >> Okay, this is Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here from the studios in the CUBE in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're featuring a startup, Astronomer. Astronomer.io is the URL, check it out. And we're going to have a great conversation around one of the most important topics hitting the industry, and that is the future of machine learning and AI, and the data that powers it underneath it. There's a lot of things that need to get done, and we're excited to have some of the co-founders of Astronomer here. Viraj Parekh, who is co-founder of Astronomer, and Paola Peraza Calderon, another co-founder, both with Astronomer. Thanks for coming on. First of all, how many co-founders do you guys have? >> You know, I think the answer's around six or seven. I forget the exact, but there's really been a lot of people around the table who've worked very hard to get this company to the point that it's at. We have long ways to go, right? But there's been a lot of people involved that have been absolutely necessary for the path we've been on so far. >> Thanks for that, Viraj, appreciate that. The first question I want to get out on the table, and then we'll get into some of the details, is take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. How did you guys get here? Obviously, multiple co-founders, sounds like a great project. The timing couldn't have been better. ChatGPT has essentially done so much public relations for the AI industry to kind of highlight this shift that's happening. It's real, we've been chronicalizing, take a minute to explain what you guys do. >> Yeah, sure, we can get started. So, yeah, when Viraj and I joined Astronomer in 2017, we really wanted to build a business around data, and we were using an open source project called Apache Airflow that we were just using sort of as customers ourselves. And over time, we realized that there was actually a market for companies who use Apache Airflow, which is a data pipeline management tool, which we'll get into, and that running Airflow is actually quite challenging, and that there's a big opportunity for us to create a set of commercial products and an opportunity to grow that open source community and actually build a company around that. So the crux of what we do is help companies run data pipelines with Apache Airflow. And certainly we've grown in our ambitions beyond that, but that's sort of the crux of what we do for folks. >> You know, data orchestration, data management has always been a big item in the old classic data infrastructure. But with AI, you're seeing a lot more emphasis on scale, tuning, training. Data orchestration is the center of the value proposition, when you're looking at coordinating resources, it's one of the most important things. Can you guys explain what data orchestration entails? What does it mean? Take us through the definition of what data orchestration entails. >> Yeah, for sure. I can take this one, and Viraj, feel free to jump in. So if you google data orchestration, here's what you're going to get. You're going to get something that says, "Data orchestration is the automated process" "for organizing silo data from numerous" "data storage points, standardizing it," "and making it accessible and prepared for data analysis." And you say, "Okay, but what does that actually mean," right, and so let's give sort of an an example. So let's say you're a business and you have sort of the following basic asks of your data team, right? Okay, give me a dashboard in Sigma, for example, for the number of customers or monthly active users, and then make sure that that gets updated on an hourly basis. And then number two, a consistent list of active customers that I have in HubSpot so that I can send them a monthly product newsletter, right? Two very basic asks for all sorts of companies and organizations. And when that data team, which has data engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, data analysts get that request, they're looking at an ecosystem of data sources that can help them get there, right? And that includes application databases, for example, that actually have in product user behavior and third party APIs from tools that the company uses that also has different attributes and qualities of those customers or users. And that data team needs to use tools like Fivetran to ingest data, a data warehouse, like Snowflake or Databricks to actually store that data and do analysis on top of it, a tool like DBT to do transformations and make sure that data is standardized in the way that it needs to be, a tool like Hightouch for reverse ETL. I mean, we could go on and on. There's so many partners of ours in this industry that are doing really, really exciting and critical things for those data movements. And the whole point here is that data teams have this plethora of tooling that they use to both ingest the right data and come up with the right interfaces to transform and interact with that data. And data orchestration, in our view, is really the heartbeat of all of those processes, right? And tangibly the unit of data orchestration is a data pipeline, a set of tasks or jobs that each do something with data over time and eventually run that on a schedule to make sure that those things are happening continuously as time moves on and the company advances. And so, for us, we're building a business around Apache Airflow, which is a workflow management tool that allows you to author, run, and monitor data pipelines. And so when we talk about data orchestration, we talk about sort of two things. One is that crux of data pipelines that, like I said, connect that large ecosystem of data tooling in your company. But number two, it's not just that data pipeline that needs to run every day, right? And Viraj will probably touch on this as we talk more about Astronomer and our value prop on top of Airflow. But then it's all the things that you need to actually run data and production and make sure that it's trustworthy, right? So it's actually not just that you're running things on a schedule, but it's also things like CICD tooling, secure secrets management, user permissions, monitoring, data lineage, documentation, things that enable other personas in your data team to actually use those tools. So long-winded way of saying that it's the heartbeat, we think, of of the data ecosystem, and certainly goes beyond scheduling, but again, data pipelines are really at the center of it. >> One of the things that jumped out, Viraj, if you can get into this, I'd like to hear more about how you guys look at all those little tools that are out. You mentioned a variety of things. You look at the data infrastructure, it's not just one stack. You've got an analytic stack, you've got a realtime stack, you've got a data lake stack, you got an AI stack potentially. I mean you have these stacks now emerging in the data world that are fundamental, that were once served by either a full package, old school software, and then a bunch of point solution. You mentioned Fivetran there, I would say in the analytics stack. Then you got S3, they're on the data lake stack. So all these things are kind of munged together. >> Yeah. >> How do you guys fit into that world? You make it easier, or like, what's the deal? >> Great question, right? And you know, I think that one of the biggest things we've found in working with customers over the last however many years is that if a data team is using a bunch of tools to get what they need done, and the number of tools they're using is growing exponentially and they're kind of roping things together here and there, that's actually a sign of a productive team, not a bad thing, right? It's because that team is moving fast. They have needs that are very specific to them, and they're trying to make something that's exactly tailored to their business. So a lot of times what we find is that customers have some sort of base layer, right? That's kind of like, it might be they're running most of the things in AWS, right? And then on top of that, they'll be using some of the things AWS offers, things like SageMaker, Redshift, whatever, but they also might need things that their cloud can't provide. Something like Fivetran, or Hightouch, those are other tools. And where data orchestration really shines, and something that we've had the pleasure of helping our customers build, is how do you take all those requirements, all those different tools and whip them together into something that fulfills a business need? So that somebody can read a dashboard and trust the number that it says, or somebody can make sure that the right emails go out to their customers. And Airflow serves as this amazing kind of glue between that data stack, right? It's to make it so that for any use case, be it ELT pipelines, or machine learning, or whatever, you need different things to do them, and Airflow helps tie them together in a way that's really specific for a individual business' needs. >> Take a step back and share the journey of what you guys went through as a company startup. So you mentioned Apache, open source. I was just having an interview with a VC, we were talking about foundational models. You got a lot of proprietary and open source development going on. It's almost the iPhone/Android moment in this whole generative space and foundational side. This is kind of important, the open source piece of it. Can you share how you guys started? And I can imagine your customers probably have their hair on fire and are probably building stuff on their own. Are you guys helping them? Take us through, 'cause you guys are on the front end of a big, big wave, and that is to make sense of the chaos, rain it in. Take us through your journey and why this is important. >> Yeah, Paola, I can take a crack at this, then I'll kind of hand it over to you to fill in whatever I miss in details. But you know, like Paola is saying, the heart of our company is open source, because we started using Airflow as an end user and started to say like, "Hey wait a second," "more and more people need this." Airflow, for background, started at Airbnb, and they were actually using that as a foundation for their whole data stack. Kind of how they made it so that they could give you recommendations, and predictions, and all of the processes that needed orchestrated. Airbnb created Airflow, gave it away to the public, and then fast forward a couple years and we're building a company around it, and we're really excited about that. >> That's a beautiful thing. That's exactly why open source is so great. >> Yeah, yeah. And for us, it's really been about watching the community and our customers take these problems, find a solution to those problems, standardize those solutions, and then building on top of that, right? So we're reaching to a point where a lot of our earlier customers who started to just using Airflow to get the base of their BI stack down and their reporting in their ELP infrastructure, they've solved that problem and now they're moving on to things like doing machine learning with their data, because now that they've built that foundation, all the connective tissue for their data arriving on time and being orchestrated correctly is happening, they can build a layer on top of that. And it's just been really, really exciting kind of watching what customers do once they're empowered to pick all the tools that they need, tie them together in the way they need to, and really deliver real value to their business. >> Can you share some of the use cases of these customers? Because I think that's where you're starting to see the innovation. What are some of the companies that you're working with, what are they doing? >> Viraj, I'll let you take that one too. (group laughs) >> So you know, a lot of it is... It goes across the gamut, right? Because it doesn't matter what you are, what you're doing with data, it needs to be orchestrated. So there's a lot of customers using us for their ETL and ELT reporting, right? Just getting data from other disparate sources into one place and then building on top of that. Be it building dashboards, answering questions for the business, building other data products and so on and so forth. From there, these use cases evolve a lot. You do see folks doing things like fraud detection, because Airflow's orchestrating how transactions go, transactions get analyzed. They do things like analyzing marketing spend to see where your highest ROI is. And then you kind of can't not talk about all of the machine learning that goes on, right? Where customers are taking data about their own customers, kind of analyze and aggregating that at scale, and trying to automate decision making processes. So it goes from your most basic, what we call data plumbing, right? Just to make sure data's moving as needed, all the ways to your more exciting expansive use cases around automated decision making and machine learning. >> And I'd say, I mean, I'd say that's one of the things that I think gets me most excited about our future, is how critical Airflow is to all of those processes, and I think when you know a tool is valuable is when something goes wrong and one of those critical processes doesn't work. And we know that our system is so mission critical to answering basic questions about your business and the growth of your company for so many organizations that we work with. So it's, I think, one of the things that gets Viraj and I and the rest of our company up every single morning is knowing how important the work that we do for all of those use cases across industries, across company sizes, and it's really quite energizing. >> It was such a big focus this year at AWS re:Invent, the role of data. And I think one of the things that's exciting about the open AI and all the movement towards large language models is that you can integrate data into these models from outside. So you're starting to see the integration easier to deal with. Still a lot of plumbing issues. So a lot of things happening. So I have to ask you guys, what is the state of the data orchestration area? Is it ready for disruption? Has it already been disrupted? Would you categorize it as a new first inning kind of opportunity, or what's the state of the data orchestration area right now? Both technically and from a business model standpoint. How would you guys describe that state of the market? >> Yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of ways, in some ways I think we're category creating. Schedulers have been around for a long time. I released a data presentation sort of on the evolution of going from something like Kron, which I think was built in like the 1970s out of Carnegie Mellon. And that's a long time ago, that's 50 years ago. So sort of like the basic need to schedule and do something with your data on a schedule is not a new concept. But to our point earlier, I think everything that you need around your ecosystem, first of all, the number of data tools and developer tooling that has come out industry has 5X'd over the last 10 years. And so obviously as that ecosystem grows, and grows, and grows, and grows, the need for orchestration only increases. And I think, as Astronomer, I think we... And we work with so many different types of companies, companies that have been around for 50 years, and companies that got started not even 12 months ago. And so I think for us it's trying to, in a ways, category create and adjust sort of what we sell and the value that we can provide for companies all across that journey. There are folks who are just getting started with orchestration, and then there's folks who have such advanced use case, 'cause they're hitting sort of a ceiling and only want to go up from there. And so I think we, as a company, care about both ends of that spectrum, and certainly want to build and continue building products for companies of all sorts, regardless of where they are on the maturity curve of data orchestration. >> That's a really good point, Paola. And I think the other thing to really take into account is it's the companies themselves, but also individuals who have to do their jobs. If you rewind the clock like 5 or 10 years ago, data engineers would be the ones responsible for orchestrating data through their org. But when we look at our customers today, it's not just data engineers anymore. There's data analysts who sit a lot closer to the business, and the data scientists who want to automate things around their models. So this idea that orchestration is this new category is right on the money. And what we're finding is the need for it is spreading to all parts of the data team, naturally where Airflow's emerged as an open source standard and we're hoping to take things to the next level. >> That's awesome. We've been up saying that the data market's kind of like the SRE with servers, right? You're going to need one person to deal with a lot of data, and that's data engineering, and then you're got to have the practitioners, the democratization. Clearly that's coming in what you're seeing. So I have to ask, how do you guys fit in from a value proposition standpoint? What's the pitch that you have to customers, or is it more inbound coming into you guys? Are you guys doing a lot of outreach, customer engagements? I'm sure they're getting a lot of great requirements from customers. What's the current value proposition? How do you guys engage? >> Yeah, I mean, there's so many... Sorry, Viraj, you can jump in. So there's so many companies using Airflow, right? So the baseline is that the open source project that is Airflow that came out of Airbnb, over five years ago at this point, has grown exponentially in users and continues to grow. And so the folks that we sell to primarily are folks who are already committed to using Apache Airflow, need data orchestration in their organization, and just want to do it better, want to do it more efficiently, want to do it without managing that infrastructure. And so our baseline proposition is for those organizations. Now to Viraj's point, obviously I think our ambitions go beyond that, both in terms of the personas that we addressed and going beyond that data engineer, but really it's to start at the baseline, as we continue to grow our our company, it's really making sure that we're adding value to folks using Airflow and help them do so in a better way, in a larger way, in a more efficient way, and that's really the crux of who we sell to. And so to answer your question on, we get a lot of inbound because they're... >> You have a built in audience. (laughs) >> The world that use it. Those are the folks who we talk to and come to our website and chat with us and get value from our content. I mean, the power of the opensource community is really just so, so big, and I think that's also one of the things that makes this job fun. >> And you guys are in a great position. Viraj, you can comment a little, get your reaction. There's been a big successful business model to starting a company around these big projects for a lot of reasons. One is open source is continuing to be great, but there's also supply chain challenges in there. There's also we want to continue more innovation and more code and keeping it free and and flowing. And then there's the commercialization of productizing it, operationalizing it. This is a huge new dynamic, I mean, in the past 5 or so years, 10 years, it's been happening all on CNCF from other areas like Apache, Linux Foundation, they're all implementing this. This is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to do this. >> Yeah, yeah. Open source is always going to be core to what we do, because we wouldn't exist without the open source community around us. They are huge in numbers. Oftentimes they're nameless people who are working on making something better in a way that everybody benefits from it. But open source is really hard, especially if you're a company whose core competency is running a business, right? Maybe you're running an e-commerce business, or maybe you're running, I don't know, some sort of like, any sort of business, especially if you're a company running a business, you don't really want to spend your time figuring out how to run open source software. You just want to use it, you want to use the best of it, you want to use the community around it, you want to be able to google something and get answers for it, you want the benefits of open source. You don't have the time or the resources to invest in becoming an expert in open source, right? And I think that dynamic is really what's given companies like us an ability to kind of form businesses around that in the sense that we'll make it so people get the best of both worlds. You'll get this vast open ecosystem that you can build on top of, that you can benefit from, that you can learn from. But you won't have to spend your time doing undifferentiated heavy lifting. You can do things that are just specific to your business. >> It's always been great to see that business model evolve. We used a debate 10 years ago, can there be another Red Hat? And we said, not really the same, but there'll be a lot of little ones that'll grow up to be big soon. Great stuff. Final question, can you guys share the history of the company? The milestones of Astromer's journey in data orchestration? >> Yeah, we could. So yeah, I mean, I think, so Viraj and I have obviously been at Astronomer along with our other founding team and leadership folks for over five years now. And it's been such an incredible journey of learning, of hiring really amazing people, solving, again, mission critical problems for so many types of organizations. We've had some funding that has allowed us to invest in the team that we have and in the software that we have, and that's been really phenomenal. And so that investment, I think, keeps us confident, even despite these sort of macroeconomic conditions that we're finding ourselves in. And so honestly, the milestones for us are focusing on our product, focusing on our customers over the next year, focusing on that market for us that we know can get valuable out of what we do, and making developers' lives better, and growing the open source community and making sure that everything that we're doing makes it easier for folks to get started, to contribute to the project and to feel a part of the community that we're cultivating here. >> You guys raised a little bit of money. How much have you guys raised? >> Don't know what the total is, but it's in the ballpark over $200 million. It feels good to... >> A little bit of capital. Got a little bit of cap to work with there. Great success. I know as a Series C Financing, you guys have been down. So you're up and running, what's next? What are you guys looking to do? What's the big horizon look like for you from a vision standpoint, more hiring, more product, what is some of the key things you're looking at doing? >> Yeah, it's really a little of all of the above, right? Kind of one of the best and worst things about working at earlier stage startups is there's always so much to do and you often have to just kind of figure out a way to get everything done. But really investing our product over the next, at least over the course of our company lifetime. And there's a lot of ways we want to make it more accessible to users, easier to get started with, easier to use, kind of on all areas there. And really, we really want to do more for the community, right, like I was saying, we wouldn't be anything without the large open source community around us. And we want to figure out ways to give back more in more creative ways, in more code driven ways, in more kind of events and everything else that we can keep those folks galvanized and just keep them happy using Airflow. >> Paola, any final words as we close out? >> No, I mean, I'm super excited. I think we'll keep growing the team this year. We've got a couple of offices in the the US, which we're excited about, and a fully global team that will only continue to grow. So Viraj and I are both here in New York, and we're excited to be engaging with our coworkers in person finally, after years of not doing so. We've got a bustling office in San Francisco as well. So growing those teams and continuing to hire all over the world, and really focusing on our product and the open source community is where our heads are at this year. So, excited. >> Congratulations. 200 million in funding, plus. Good runway, put that money in the bank, squirrel it away. It's a good time to kind of get some good interest on it, but still grow. Congratulations on all the work you guys do. We appreciate you and the open source community does, and good luck with the venture, continue to be successful, and we'll see you at the Startup Showcase. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thanks so much, John. Appreciate it. >> Okay, that's the CUBE Conversation featuring astronomer.io, that's the website. Astronomer is doing well. Multiple rounds of funding, over 200 million in funding. Open source continues to lead the way in innovation. Great business model, good solution for the next gen cloud scale data operations, data stacks that are emerging. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (soft upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this Cube conversation here from the studios of theCube in Palo Alto, California. John Furrier, your host. We're featuring a startup, Astronomer, astronomer.io is the url. Check it out. And we're going to have a great conversation around one of the most important topics hitting the industry, and that is the future of machine learning and AI and the data that powers it underneath it. There's a lot of things that need to get done, and we're excited to have some of the co-founders of Astronomer here. Viraj Parekh, who is co-founder and Paola Peraza Calderon, another co-founder, both with Astronomer. Thanks for coming on. First of all, how many co-founders do you guys have? >> You know, I think the answer's around six or seven. I forget the exact, but there's really been a lot of people around the table, who've worked very hard to get this company to the point that it's at. And we have long ways to go, right? But there's been a lot of people involved that are, have been absolutely necessary for the path we've been on so far. >> Thanks for that, Viraj, appreciate that. The first question I want to get out on the table, and then we'll get into some of the details, is take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. How did you guys get here? Obviously, multiple co-founders sounds like a great project. The timing couldn't have been better. ChatGPT has essentially done so much public relations for the AI industry. Kind of highlight this shift that's happening. It's real. We've been chronologicalizing, take a minute to explain what you guys do. >> Yeah, sure. We can get started. So yeah, when Astronomer, when Viraj and I joined Astronomer in 2017, we really wanted to build a business around data and we were using an open source project called Apache Airflow, that we were just using sort of as customers ourselves. And over time, we realized that there was actually a market for companies who use Apache Airflow, which is a data pipeline management tool, which we'll get into. And that running Airflow is actually quite challenging and that there's a lot of, a big opportunity for us to create a set of commercial products and opportunity to grow that open source community and actually build a company around that. So the crux of what we do is help companies run data pipelines with Apache Airflow. And certainly we've grown in our ambitions beyond that, but that's sort of the crux of what we do for folks. >> You know, data orchestration, data management has always been a big item, you know, in the old classic data infrastructure. But with AI you're seeing a lot more emphasis on scale, tuning, training. You know, data orchestration is the center of the value proposition when you're looking at coordinating resources, it's one of the most important things. Could you guys explain what data orchestration entails? What does it mean? Take us through the definition of what data orchestration entails. >> Yeah, for sure. I can take this one and Viraj feel free to jump in. So if you google data orchestration, you know, here's what you're going to get. You're going to get something that says, data orchestration is the automated process for organizing silo data from numerous data storage points to organizing it and making it accessible and prepared for data analysis. And you say, okay, but what does that actually mean, right? And so let's give sort of an example. So let's say you're a business and you have sort of the following basic asks of your data team, right? Hey, give me a dashboard in Sigma, for example, for the number of customers or monthly active users and then make sure that that gets updated on an hourly basis. And then number two, a consistent list of active customers that I have in HubSpot so that I can send them a monthly product newsletter, right? Two very basic asks for all sorts of companies and organizations. And when that data team, which has data engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, data analysts get that request, they're looking at an ecosystem of data sources that can help them get there, right? And that includes application databases, for example, that actually have end product user behavior and third party APIs from tools that the company uses that also has different attributes and qualities of those customers or users. And that data team needs to use tools like Fivetran, to ingest data, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Databricks to actually store that data and do analysis on top of it, a tool like DBT to do transformations and make sure that that data is standardized in the way that it needs to be, a tool like Hightouch for reverse ETL. I mean, we could go on and on. There's so many partners of ours in this industry that are doing really, really exciting and critical things for those data movements. And the whole point here is that, you know, data teams have this plethora of tooling that they use to both ingest the right data and come up with the right interfaces to transform and interact with that data. And data orchestration in our view is really the heartbeat of all of those processes, right? And tangibly the unit of data orchestration, you know, is a data pipeline, a set of tasks or jobs that each do something with data over time and eventually run that on a schedule to make sure that those things are happening continuously as time moves on. And, you know, the company advances. And so, you know, for us, we're building a business around Apache Airflow, which is a workflow management tool that allows you to author, run and monitor data pipelines. And so when we talk about data orchestration, we talk about sort of two things. One is that crux of data pipelines that, like I said, connect that large ecosystem of data tooling in your company. But number two, it's not just that data pipeline that needs to run every day, right? And Viraj will probably touch on this as we talk more about Astronomer and our value prop on top of Airflow. But then it's all the things that you need to actually run data and production and make sure that it's trustworthy, right? So it's actually not just that you're running things on a schedule, but it's also things like CI/CD tooling, right? Secure secrets management, user permissions, monitoring, data lineage, documentation, things that enable other personas in your data team to actually use those tools. So long-winded way of saying that, it's the heartbeat that we think of the data ecosystem and certainly goes beyond scheduling, but again, data pipelines are really at the center of it. >> You know, one of the things that jumped out Viraj, if you can get into this, I'd like to hear more about how you guys look at all those little tools that are out there. You mentioned a variety of things. You know, if you look at the data infrastructure, it's not just one stack. You've got an analytic stack, you've got a realtime stack, you've got a data lake stack, you got an AI stack potentially. I mean you have these stacks now emerging in the data world that are >> Yeah. - >> fundamental, but we're once served by either a full package, old school software, and then a bunch of point solution. You mentioned Fivetran there, I would say in the analytics stack. Then you got, you know, S3, they're on the data lake stack. So all these things are kind of munged together. >> Yeah. >> How do you guys fit into that world? You make it easier or like, what's the deal? >> Great question, right? And you know, I think that one of the biggest things we've found in working with customers over, you know, the last however many years, is that like if a data team is using a bunch of tools to get what they need done and the number of tools they're using is growing exponentially and they're kind of roping things together here and there, that's actually a sign of a productive team, not a bad thing, right? It's because that team is moving fast. They have needs that are very specific to them and they're trying to make something that's exactly tailored to their business. So a lot of times what we find is that customers have like some sort of base layer, right? That's kind of like, you know, it might be they're running most of the things in AWS, right? And then on top of that, they'll be using some of the things AWS offers, you know, things like SageMaker, Redshift, whatever. But they also might need things that their Cloud can't provide, you know, something like Fivetran or Hightouch or anything of those other tools and where data orchestration really shines, right? And something that we've had the pleasure of helping our customers build, is how do you take all those requirements, all those different tools and whip them together into something that fulfills a business need, right? Something that makes it so that somebody can read a dashboard and trust the number that it says or somebody can make sure that the right emails go out to their customers. And Airflow serves as this amazing kind of glue between that data stack, right? It's to make it so that for any use case, be it ELT pipelines or machine learning or whatever, you need different things to do them and Airflow helps tie them together in a way that's really specific for a individual business's needs. >> Take a step back and share the journey of what your guys went through as a company startup. So you mentioned Apache open source, you know, we were just, I was just having an interview with the VC, we were talking about foundational models. You got a lot of proprietary and open source development going on. It's almost the iPhone, Android moment in this whole generative space and foundational side. This is kind of important, the open source piece of it. Can you share how you guys started? And I can imagine your customers probably have their hair on fire and are probably building stuff on their own. How do you guys, are you guys helping them? Take us through, 'cuz you guys are on the front end of a big, big wave and that is to make sense of the chaos, reigning it in. Take us through your journey and why this is important. >> Yeah Paola, I can take a crack at this and then I'll kind of hand it over to you to fill in whatever I miss in details. But you know, like Paola is saying, the heart of our company is open source because we started using Airflow as an end user and started to say like, "Hey wait a second". Like more and more people need this. Airflow, for background, started at Airbnb and they were actually using that as the foundation for their whole data stack. Kind of how they made it so that they could give you recommendations and predictions and all of the processes that need to be or needed to be orchestrated. Airbnb created Airflow, gave it away to the public and then, you know, fast forward a couple years and you know, we're building a company around it and we're really excited about that. >> That's a beautiful thing. That's exactly why open source is so great. >> Yeah, yeah. And for us it's really been about like watching the community and our customers take these problems, find solution to those problems, build standardized solutions, and then building on top of that, right? So we're reaching to a point where a lot of our earlier customers who started to just using Airflow to get the base of their BI stack down and their reporting and their ELP infrastructure, you know, they've solved that problem and now they're moving onto things like doing machine learning with their data, right? Because now that they've built that foundation, all the connective tissue for their data arriving on time and being orchestrated correctly is happening, they can build the layer on top of that. And it's just been really, really exciting kind of watching what customers do once they're empowered to pick all the tools that they need, tie them together in the way they need to, and really deliver real value to their business. >> Can you share some of the use cases of these customers? Because I think that's where you're starting to see the innovation. What are some of the companies that you're working with, what are they doing? >> Raj, I'll let you take that one too. (all laughing) >> Yeah. (all laughing) So you know, a lot of it is, it goes across the gamut, right? Because all doesn't matter what you are, what you're doing with data, it needs to be orchestrated. So there's a lot of customers using us for their ETL and ELT reporting, right? Just getting data from all the disparate sources into one place and then building on top of that, be it building dashboards, answering questions for the business, building other data products and so on and so forth. From there, these use cases evolve a lot. You do see folks doing things like fraud detection because Airflow's orchestrating how transactions go. Transactions get analyzed, they do things like analyzing marketing spend to see where your highest ROI is. And then, you know, you kind of can't not talk about all of the machine learning that goes on, right? Where customers are taking data about their own customers kind of analyze and aggregating that at scale and trying to automate decision making processes. So it goes from your most basic, what we call like data plumbing, right? Just to make sure data's moving as needed. All the ways to your more exciting and sexy use cases around like automated decision making and machine learning. >> And I'd say, I mean, I'd say that's one of the things that I think gets me most excited about our future is how critical Airflow is to all of those processes, you know? And I think when, you know, you know a tool is valuable is when something goes wrong and one of those critical processes doesn't work. And we know that our system is so mission critical to answering basic, you know, questions about your business and the growth of your company for so many organizations that we work with. So it's, I think one of the things that gets Viraj and I, and the rest of our company up every single morning, is knowing how important the work that we do for all of those use cases across industries, across company sizes. And it's really quite energizing. >> It was such a big focus this year at AWS re:Invent, the role of data. And I think one of the things that's exciting about the open AI and all the movement towards large language models, is that you can integrate data into these models, right? From outside, right? So you're starting to see the integration easier to deal with, still a lot of plumbing issues. So a lot of things happening. So I have to ask you guys, what is the state of the data orchestration area? Is it ready for disruption? Is it already been disrupted? Would you categorize it as a new first inning kind of opportunity or what's the state of the data orchestration area right now? Both, you know, technically and from a business model standpoint, how would you guys describe that state of the market? >> Yeah, I mean I think, I think in a lot of ways we're, in some ways I think we're categoric rating, you know, schedulers have been around for a long time. I recently did a presentation sort of on the evolution of going from, you know, something like KRON, which I think was built in like the 1970s out of Carnegie Mellon. And you know, that's a long time ago. That's 50 years ago. So it's sort of like the basic need to schedule and do something with your data on a schedule is not a new concept. But to our point earlier, I think everything that you need around your ecosystem, first of all, the number of data tools and developer tooling that has come out the industry has, you know, has some 5X over the last 10 years. And so obviously as that ecosystem grows and grows and grows and grows, the need for orchestration only increases. And I think, you know, as Astronomer, I think we, and there's, we work with so many different types of companies, companies that have been around for 50 years and companies that got started, you know, not even 12 months ago. And so I think for us, it's trying to always category create and adjust sort of what we sell and the value that we can provide for companies all across that journey. There are folks who are just getting started with orchestration and then there's folks who have such advanced use case 'cuz they're hitting sort of a ceiling and only want to go up from there. And so I think we as a company, care about both ends of that spectrum and certainly have want to build and continue building products for companies of all sorts, regardless of where they are on the maturity curve of data orchestration. >> That's a really good point Paola. And I think the other thing to really take into account is it's the companies themselves, but also individuals who have to do their jobs. You know, if you rewind the clock like five or 10 years ago, data engineers would be the ones responsible for orchestrating data through their org. But when we look at our customers today, it's not just data engineers anymore. There's data analysts who sit a lot closer to the business and the data scientists who want to automate things around their models. So this idea that orchestration is this new category is spot on, is right on the money. And what we're finding is it's spreading, the need for it, is spreading to all parts of the data team naturally where Airflows have emerged as an open source standard and we're hoping to take things to the next level. >> That's awesome. You know, we've been up saying that the data market's kind of like the SRE with servers, right? You're going to need one person to deal with a lot of data and that's data engineering and then you're going to have the practitioners, the democratization. Clearly that's coming in what you're seeing. So I got to ask, how do you guys fit in from a value proposition standpoint? What's the pitch that you have to customers or is it more inbound coming into you guys? Are you guys doing a lot of outreach, customer engagements? I'm sure they're getting a lot of great requirements from customers. What's the current value proposition? How do you guys engage? >> Yeah, I mean we've, there's so many, there's so many. Sorry Raj, you can jump in. - >> It's okay. So there's so many companies using Airflow, right? So our, the baseline is that the open source project that is Airflow that was, that came out of Airbnb, you know, over five years ago at this point, has grown exponentially in users and continues to grow. And so the folks that we sell to primarily are folks who are already committed to using Apache Airflow, need data orchestration in the organization and just want to do it better, want to do it more efficiently, want to do it without managing that infrastructure. And so our baseline proposition is for those organizations. Now to Raj's point, obviously I think our ambitions go beyond that, both in terms of the personas that we addressed and going beyond that data engineer, but really it's for, to start at the baseline. You know, as we continue to grow our company, it's really making sure that we're adding value to folks using Airflow and help them do so in a better way, in a larger way and a more efficient way. And that's really the crux of who we sell to. And so to answer your question on, we actually, we get a lot of inbound because they're are so many - >> A built-in audience. >> In the world that use it, that those are the folks who we talk to and come to our website and chat with us and get value from our content. I mean the power of the open source community is really just so, so big. And I think that's also one of the things that makes this job fun, so. >> And you guys are in a great position, Viraj, you can comment, to get your reaction. There's been a big successful business model to starting a company around these big projects for a lot of reasons. One is open source is continuing to be great, but there's also supply chain challenges in there. There's also, you know, we want to continue more innovation and more code and keeping it free and and flowing. And then there's the commercialization of product-izing it, operationalizing it. This is a huge new dynamic. I mean, in the past, you know, five or so years, 10 years, it's been happening all on CNCF from other areas like Apache, Linux Foundation, they're all implementing this. This is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to do this. >> Yeah, yeah. Open source is always going to be core to what we do because, you know, we wouldn't exist without the open source community around us. They are huge in numbers. Oftentimes they're nameless people who are working on making something better in a way that everybody benefits from it. But open source is really hard, especially if you're a company whose core competency is running a business, right? Maybe you're running e-commerce business or maybe you're running, I don't know, some sort of like any sort of business, especially if you're a company running a business, you don't really want to spend your time figuring out how to run open source software. You just want to use it, you want to use the best of it, you want to use the community around it. You want to take, you want to be able to google something and get answers for it. You want the benefits of open source. You don't want to have, you don't have the time or the resources to invest in becoming an expert in open source, right? And I think that dynamic is really what's given companies like us an ability to kind of form businesses around that, in the sense that we'll make it so people get the best of both worlds. You'll get this vast open ecosystem that you can build on top of, you can benefit from, that you can learn from, but you won't have to spend your time doing undifferentiated heavy lifting. You can do things that are just specific to your business. >> It's always been great to see that business model evolved. We used to debate 10 years ago, can there be another red hat? And we said, not really the same, but there'll be a lot of little ones that'll grow up to be big soon. Great stuff. Final question, can you guys share the history of the company, the milestones of the Astronomer's journey in data orchestration? >> Yeah, we could. So yeah, I mean, I think, so Raj and I have obviously been at astronomer along with our other founding team and leadership folks, for over five years now. And it's been such an incredible journey of learning, of hiring really amazing people. Solving again, mission critical problems for so many types of organizations. You know, we've had some funding that has allowed us to invest in the team that we have and in the software that we have. And that's been really phenomenal. And so that investment, I think, keeps us confident even despite these sort of macroeconomic conditions that we're finding ourselves in. And so honestly, the milestones for us are focusing on our product, focusing on our customers over the next year, focusing on that market for us, that we know can get value out of what we do. And making developers' lives better and growing the open source community, you know, and making sure that everything that we're doing makes it easier for folks to get started to contribute to the project and to feel a part of the community that we're cultivating here. >> You guys raised a little bit of money. How much have you guys raised? >> I forget what the total is, but it's in the ballpark of 200, over $200 million. So it feels good - >> A little bit of capital. Got a little bit of cash to work with there. Great success. I know it's a Series C financing, you guys been down, so you're up and running. What's next? What are you guys looking to do? What's the big horizon look like for you? And from a vision standpoint, more hiring, more product, what is some of the key things you're looking at doing? >> Yeah, it's really a little of all of the above, right? Like, kind of one of the best and worst things about working at earlier stage startups is there's always so much to do and you often have to just kind of figure out a way to get everything done, but really invest in our product over the next, at least the next, over the course of our company lifetime. And there's a lot of ways we wanting to just make it more accessible to users, easier to get started with, easier to use all kind of on all areas there. And really, we really want to do more for the community, right? Like I was saying, we wouldn't be anything without the large open source community around us. And we want to figure out ways to give back more in more creative ways, in more code driven ways and more kind of events and everything else that we can do to keep those folks galvanized and just keeping them happy using Airflow. >> Paola, any final words as we close out? >> No, I mean, I'm super excited. You know, I think we'll keep growing the team this year. We've got a couple of offices in the US which we're excited about, and a fully global team that will only continue to grow. So Viraj and I are both here in New York and we're excited to be engaging with our coworkers in person. Finally, after years of not doing so, we've got a bustling office in San Francisco as well. So growing those teams and continuing to hire all over the world and really focusing on our product and the open source community is where our heads are at this year, so. >> Congratulations. - >> Excited. 200 million in funding plus good runway. Put that money in the bank, squirrel it away. You know, it's good to kind of get some good interest on it, but still grow. Congratulations on all the work you guys do. We appreciate you and the open sourced community does and good luck with the venture. Continue to be successful and we'll see you at the Startup Showcase. >> Thank you. - >> Yeah, thanks so much, John. Appreciate it. - >> It's theCube conversation, featuring astronomer.io, that's the website. Astronomer is doing well. Multiple rounds of funding, over 200 million in funding. Open source continues to lead the way in innovation. Great business model. Good solution for the next gen, Cloud, scale, data operations, data stacks that are emerging. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

(techno intro music) >> Hey everyone, good afternoon from sin city. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in full swing of theCUBE's four days of coverage of AWS re:invent 2022. North of 50,000 people are here. We're nearing hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been, this is a great event. We've had great conversations. We're going to be having more conversations. One of the things we love talking about on theCUBE is AWS and its ecosystem of partners, and we are going to do just that right now. Brian Henderson joins us, Director of Marketing at Dell Technologies. Marc Trimuschat, Director of Worldwide Storage Specialists at AWS is also here. Guys, it's great to have you. >> Great to be here. >> Great to be here, yeah. Feeling the energy of the show. >> Isn't it great? >> Mark: I know, amazing. >> It's amazing. It started out high and it has not dropped since Monday night. Brian, talk a little bit about Dell, what you're doing with customers on their Cloud journeys. Every customer, every industry is on one at different points in their journey, but what's Dell helping out with there? >> What we're here to talk about is the progression that we've seen, right, Cloud has changed a lot over the years and Dell has really put out a strategy to help people with their Cloud journey, kind of wherever they are. So a lot of people have moved full shift. A lot of people see that as another location, and what we're showing at the booth is the idea of taking these enterprise capabilities that people know and trust from Dell, courting them to the Cloud. In some cases not courting, but just delivering that software in the Cloud, as well as taking some of the Kubernetes integrations, EKS Anywhere, bringing that on-prem. So we've got some storage, data protection, and our Kubernetes integration to talk about at the show. >> Awesome, Mark, talk about the role from Amazon's point of view that third party vendors like Dell Technologies plays in AWS's expanding vision of Cloud. >> Great, well, we're really excited to be partnering with Dell. What we see that historically is, you know, AWS is focused on builders, people, and really the developer community who are building those components themselves, putting together really resilient infrastructure and applications. What we're seeing today is a shift also to the type of customers that we're seeing, more traditional enterprise customers, who are demanding really performance, the scalability, also the resiliency of what they had on-premises, and they want that on the Cloud as well. So with Dell, and we've got some great solutions that we're partnering on, including Dell PowerFlex that provides that linear scalability and some of the high performance capabilities that customers are demanding. And also, another big trend that we're seeing is customers being affected by things like unfortunately malware events, right, and data protection. So Dell provides some great solutions in both those areas that allow enterprise customers to really experience that mission critical capability and resiliency that they have on-premises in the Cloud. >> You know, Brian, we've been at this a long time. >> Brian: Oh yeah, great to see you again. >> And I've been hearing my whole career that storage is going to get commoditized. And I guess if you're talking about spinning discs or flash drives, it's probably true, but as Mark was just saying if you want resilient storage and things that are recoverable, that don't go down all the time, they're not commodities. >> Brian: Yeah. >> It's real engineering. And you built the stack up, so talk about how that connection, what value you bring to the Cloud and your customers. >> Yeah, so what we see is people are always looking out for enterprise grade capabilities. So there's going to be a set of offerings, and AWS has a fantastic foundation for building on top of with the marketplace. So what we're able to do is really bring, in some cases, decades worth of investment in software engineering and put these advanced capabilities, whether it be PowerFlex with its linear scale. We'll have a file offering very soon. These products have been built from the ground up to do a very unique purpose. Giving that to people in the Cloud is just another location for us, AWS being the market leader. We're the market leader in storage. So us working together for the benefit of customers is really where it's at. >> Can you double click on that, Brian, what Dell and AWS? Give us all those juicy details. >> Sure, sure, sure, so what we've done right before this show is we put a product called PowerFlex, if you go back to 2018 scale IO, and you're taking this really linear scaling software defined architecture, and you're putting that in the Cloud. What that allows you to do is get that really advanced linear scale performance. You can even span clusters across AWS regions, as well as zones. So it's a really unique capability that allows us to be able to check in and do that. And in the data protection space, it's a whole separate category. We've been at this actually quite a while. We've got about 14 exo bytes of data that's already being protected on the AWS Cloud. So we've been at that for quite a while. And the two levels are really, do you want to back that up? Do you want to take a traditional back up application, maybe it's a lift and shift, and I want to back it up the way I used to, and you can do that in the Cloud now. Or we're seeing cyber resiliency come up a lot more, and we were just talking right before, it's a question of when, not if, and so we have to give our customers the option to not only detect that failure event early, but also to separate that copy with a logical air gap. >> The cyber resiliency is a topic we are talking more and more about. It's absolutely critical. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years. To your point, Brian, it's no longer, when we think of ransomware, it's no longer are we going to get hit? It's when, it's how often. What's the damage going to be? I think I saw a stat recently that there's one ransomware attack every 11 seconds. The average cost of reaches is in the millions, so what you're doing together on cyber resiliency for businesses in any industry is table stakes. >> Yeah, we just saw a survey that, it was done earlier this year survey, 66% unfortunately of corporations have experienced a malware attack. And that's an 80% increase from last year. >> Lisa: Wow. >> So again, I think that's an opportunity. It's a threat, but an opportunity, and so the partnership with Dell really helps bridge that and helps our customers, our mutual customers, recover from those incidents. >> A lot of people might say, this is interesting. A storage guy from Amazon, a storage guy from Dell, two leaders. And one might think, why didn't they just throw in a dash three, right, but you guys are both customer driven, customer obsessed. In the field, what are customers saying to you in terms of how they want you to work together? >> Well I think there's a place for everything. When you say throw in to S3, so S3 today, one of the big trends when you're looking here is just the amount of data, you know, we hear that rhetoric, you know, we've been in storage for many years, and the data has all increased up and to the right. But, you know, AWSI, S3 today, we have over 280 trillion objects in our, driving a hundred million transactions per second right now, so that's scale. So there's always a place for those really, we have hundreds of thousands of customers running their data links, so that's always going to be that really, you know, highly reliable, highly durable, high available solution for data links. But customers, there's a lot of different applications out there. So where customers are asking are those enterpise. So we have EBS, for example, which is our great, you know, scalable block search, elastic block store. We introduced some new volume types, like GP2, GP2, and IO2VX, which will have that performance. But there's still single availability zone. So what customers have done historically is they maybe the application layer, they put an application layer replication or resiliency across, but customers on-prem, they've relied on storage layers to do that work for them. So, with PowerFlex, that'll stand either using instant storage or EBS, building on that really strong foundation, but provide that additional layer to make it easy for customers to get that resiliency and that scalability that Brian talked about. >> Yep, yep. >> Anything you can add to that? >> Yeah, I mean to your question, how do we work together is really, it's all customer driven. So we see customers that are shifting workloads in the Cloud for the first time. And it might make sense to take an object, like PowerFlex or another storage technology, maybe you want to compress it a little bit before you send it to the Cloud. Maybe you don't want to lift and shift everything. So we have a team of people that works very closely with AWS to be able to determine how are you going to shift that workload out there? Does this make the right sense for you? So it's a very collaborative relationship. And it's all very customer driven because our customers are saying, I've got assets in the public Cloud, and I want them to be managed in a similar fashion to how I'm doing that on-prem. >> So customer obsession is clearly on both sides there. We know that. >> It's where it starts. >> Exactly, exactly. Going back to PowerFlex for a second, Brian, and I'd love to get an example of a joint customer that really is showing the value of what Dell and AWS are doing together. The question for you on PowerFlex, talk about the value that it offers to the public Cloud. And why should customers start there if they are early in this journey? >> All right, yeah, so the two angles are basically, are you coming from PowerFlex or you're coming from Cloud. If you're Cloud native, the advantage would be things like a really, really advanced block file system that has been built from the ground up to be software defined and pretty much Cloud native. What you're getting is that really linear scale up to about 1,000 nodes. You can span that across regions, across availability zones, so it's highly resilient. So if there's a node failure in one site, you're going to rebuild really fast, depending on the size of that cluster. So it's a very advanced architecture that's been built to run, you know, we didn't have to change a single line of code to run this product in the Cloud because it was Cloud native by default, so. >> Well that's the thing. We also see, and you've seen that with some of the other solutions, but customers really want that. Enterprise customers are, they want us to make sure those mission critical applications are working and stay up. So they also want to use the same environment. So we were talking before, we also see use cases where maybe they're using PowerFlex on-premises today and they want to be able to replicate that to PowerFlex that's in the Cloud. So we're seeing those, and the familiarity with that infrastructure really is that easy path, if you will, for those more conservative mission critical customers. >> We've learned a lot over the years from AWS's entry into the marketplace. Two recent teams working backwards. We talk about customer obsession. And also the Cloud experience. It brings me to APEX. >> Oh yeah. >> Dave: How does APEX fit in here? >> Yeah, so APEX is the categorization for all the things that we're doing around a modern Cloud experience for Dell customers. So we're taking them also on a journey, kind of as a service model. There's a do-it-yourself model. And anything that we do that touches Cloud is now being kind of put under that APEX moniker. So everything that we're doing around Project Alpine, enterprise software capabilities in the Cloud. Do you want someone else to manage it for you? Do you want it in a polo? That might be the right fit for you. It's all under that APEX umbrella and journey. So we're kind of still just getting started there, but we're seeing a lot of great traction. People want to pay as they go, you know, it's a very popular model that AWS has pretty much set the foundation for. So pay as you go, utility based pricing, this is all things our customers have been asking for. >> Yeah, so APEX, you basically set a baseline. You can dial it up, dial it down, very much pay by the drink. >> Absolutely. >> And, you know, like you said, it's early days. >> Brian: Yeah. >> But that's, again, AWS has influenced the business in a lot of different ways. >> Again, with the Dell, you know, the trust customers that Dell has built over the years and having those customers come in. We obviously are getting, again, it's an accelerated option for financial services to healthcare and all these customers that have relied on Dell for years, moving to the Cloud, having that trusted name and also that infrastructure that's similar and familiar to them. And then the resilience of the foundation that we have at AWS, I think it works really well together for those customers. >> I think it underscores to the majority of both AWS and in a lot of ways Dell, right. In the early days of Cloud, it was like uh oh, and now it's like oh, actually big market. Customers are demanding this. There's new value that we can create working together. Let's do it. >> Yeah, I mean, it didn't take us that long to get to it, but I'd say we had little fits and starts over the years, and now we've recognized like, this is where the future is. It's going to be Cloud, it's going to be on-prem, it's going to be Edge, it's going to be everything. It's going to be an and world. And so just doing the right thing for customers I think is exactly where we landed. It's a great partnership. >> Do you have a favorite customer story that you think really shines the light on the value of the Dell AWS partnership in terms of the business impact they're making? >> We have several large customers that I can't always like drop the names, but one of them is a very large video game production company. And we do a lot of work together where they're rendering maybe in house, they're sending to a shared location. They're copying data over to S3. They're able to let all their editors access that. They bring it back when it's compressed down a little bit and deliver that. We're also doing a lot of work with, I think I can say this, Amazon Thursday night football games. So what they've done there, it's a partner of ours working with AWS. All the details inside of that roaming truck that they drive around, there's a lot of Dell gear within there, and then everything connects back to AWS for that exact same kind of model. We need to get to the editors on a nightly basis. They're also streaming directly form that truck while they're enabling the editors to access a shared copy of it, so it's really powerful stuff. >> Thursday night prime is pretty cool. You know, some people are complaining cause I can't just switch channels during the commercials. It's like, first of all, you can. Second of all, the stats are unbelievable, right. You can just do your own replay when you want to. There's some cool innovations there. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> Very cool innovations. I've got one more question for each of you before we wrap. Marc, a question for you, we're making a fun Instagram reel. So think about a sizzle reel of if you were to summarize the show so far, what is AWS's message to its massive audience this year? >> Well, that's a big question. Because we have such a wide, as we mentioned, such a wide ranging audience. I really see a couple key trends that we're trying to address. One is, again don't forget, I'm a storage guy, so it's going to come from an angle from data, right. So, I think it's just this volume of data and that customers are bringing into the Cloud, either moving in from enterprises today or organically, just growing. You know, a couple years ago, megabytes were a lot, and now, you know, we're talking about petabytes every day. Soon it's going to be exo bytes are going to become the norm. So the big, I'd say, point one is the trend that I see is just the volume of data. And so what we're doing to address that is obviously we talked a little bit about S3 and being able to manage volumes of data, but also things like DataZone that we introduced because customers are looking to make sure that the right governance and controls to be able to access that data. So I think that's one big thing that I see the theme for the show today. The second thing is around, as I said, really these enterprise customers really wanted to move in these mission critical applications into the Cloud, and having that infrastructure to be able to support that easily from what they're doing today and move in quickly. The third area is around data protection, making sure the data protection and malware recovery, that's the theme that we see is really unfortunately that's today. But being able to recover quickly, both having native services and native offerings just built in resiliency into the core platforms, like S3 with object application, et cetera. And also partnering with Dell with cyber recovery and some of the solutions with Dell. >> Excellent, and Brian, last question for you. A bumper sticker that succinctly and powerfully describes why Dell and AWS are such awesome partners for customer issues. >> Best of both worlds, right? >> Lisa: Mic drop. >> Mic drop, done. >> That's awesome. You said that a lot more succinctly. (people laughing) >> Enterprise in Cloud, Cloud comin' to enterprise. >> Yeah, leader meets leader, right? >> Yeah, right. >> Love it, leader meets leader. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE. We appreciate hearing the latest from AWS and Dell from a storage perspective and from a Cloud perspective and how you're helping customers manage the explosion of data that's not going to slow down. We really appreciate you coming by the set. >> Thank you. >> Great, thanks so much, appreciate it. >> My pleasure. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (techno music)

>>Well, hello everybody at John Wallace here on the Cube, and glad to have you along here for day two of our coverage here at AWS Reinvent 22. We're up in the global startup program, which is part of AWS's Startup Showcase, and I've got Kevin Farley with me. He is the director of Strategic Alliances with Maria Day db. And Kevin, good to see you this morning. Good to see you, John. Thanks for joining us. Thank >>You. >>Appreciate it. Yeah. First off, tell us about Maria db. Sure. Obviously data's your thing. Yep. But to share that with some folks at home who might not be familiar with your offering. >>Yeah. So Maria DB's been around as a corporate entity for 10 plus years, and we have a massive customer base. You know, there's a billion downloads from Docker Hub, 75% of the Fortune 500. We have an enormous sea of really happy users. But what we realize is that all of these users are really thinking about what do we, what does it mean to transform it? What does cloud modernization mean? And how do we build a strategy on something we really love to drive it into the cloud and take it to the future. So what we launched about two years ago, two and a half years ago, is Skye. It's our database as a service. It leverages all the best elements, what we provide on the enterprise platform. It marries to the AWS cloud, and it really provides the best of both worlds for our >>Customers. So in your thought then, what, what problem is that solving? >>I think what you see in the overall database market is that many people have been using what we would call legacy technology. There's been lots of sort of stratification and mixes of different database solutions. All of them come with some promise, and all of 'em come with a lot of compromise. So I think what the market is really looking for is something that can take what they know and love, can bring it to the cloud and can survive the port drive the performance and scale. That completely changes the landscape, especially as you think about what modern data needs look like, right? What people did 10 years ago with the exponential scale of data no longer works. And what they need is something that not only can really deliver against their core business values and their core business deliverables, but gets 'em to the future. How do we drive something new? How do we innovate? How do we change the game? And I think what we built with AWS really delivers what we call cloud scale. It's taking something that is the best technology, and I as a V can build, marrying it to, you know, Kubernetes layer, marrying it to global availability, thinking about having true global high availability across all of your environments and really delivering that to customers through an integrated partnership. >>Could we see this coming? I mean, because you know data, right? I mean, yeah, we, we, everybody talked about the tsunami of growth, you know, >>Back 10 >>Sure. 11 years ago. But, but maybe the headlights didn't go far enough or, or, but, but you could see that there was going to be crunch time. >>There's no doubt. And I think that this has been a, there's, there's been these sort of pocket solutions, right? So if you think at the entire no sequel world, right? People said, oh, I need scale, I can get it, but what do I have to give up asset compliance? So I have to change the way I think about what data is and how I, I can govern it. So there's been these things that deliver on half the promise, but there's never been something that comes together and really drives what we deliver through CIQ is something called expand. So distributed SQL really tied to the SQL Query language, having that asset data. So having everything you need without the compromise built on the cloud allows you to scale out and allows you to think about, I can actually do exponential layers of, of data, data modeling, data querying, complete read, write, driving that forward. And I think it gives us a whole nother dynamic that we can deliver on in a way that hasn't been before. And I think that's kind of the holy grail of what people are looking for is how am I building modern applications and how do I have a database in the cloud that's really gonna support >>It? You know, you talk about distributed, you know, sequel and, and I mean, there's a little mystery behind it, isn't there? Or at least maybe not mystery. There's a little, I guess, confusion or, or just misunderstanding. I mean, I, how, nail that down a little bit. I >>Would say the best way to say it, honestly, this is the great thing, is it people believe it's too good to be true. And I think what we see over and over >>Again, you know, what they say about that. >>But this is the great part is, you know, you know, we've just had two taste studies recently with aws, with HIT labs and Certified power, both on expand, both proof in the pudding. They did the POCs, they're like, oh my God, this works. If you watch the keynote yesterday, you know, Adam had a slide that was, you know, as big as the entire room and it highlighted Samsung and they said, you know, we're doing 80,000 requests per second. So the, you know, the story there is that AWS is able as, as an entity with their scale and their breadth to handle that kind of workload. But guess what that is? That's MariaDB expand underneath there driving all of that utilization. So it's already there, it's already married, it's already in the cloud, and now we're taking it to a completely different level with a fully managed database solution. Right? >>How impressive is that? Right? I mean, you would think that somebody out there who, I mean that that volume, that kind of capacity is, is mind blowing. >>I mean, to your kind of previous point, it's like one of those things, do I see what's coming and it's here, right? You know, it's, is it actually ever gonna be possible? And now we're showing that it really is on a daily basis for some of the biggest brands in the world. We're also seeing companies moving off not only transitioning from, you know, MariaDB or myse, but all of the big licensed, you know, conversions as well. So you think about Oracle DBS Bank is one of our biggest customers, one of the largest Oracle conversions in the world onto MariaDB. And now thinking about what is the promise of connecting that to the cloud? How do you take things that you're currently doing, OnPrem delivering a hybrid model that also then starts to say, Hey, here's my path to cloud modernization. Skye gives me that bridge. And then you take it one layer farther and you think about multi-cloud, right? That's one of the things that's critical that ISVs can really only deliver in a meaningful way, is how can we have a solution for a customer that we can take to any availability zone. We can have performance, proximity, cost, proximity. We're always able to have that total data dexterity across any environment we need and we can build on that for the future. >>So if, if we're talking about cloud database and there's so many good things going forward here. You're talking about easy use and scalability and all that. But as with ever have you talked about this, there's some push and there's some pull. Yeah. So, so what's the, what's the other side that's still, you know, you that you think has to be >>Addressed? And I think that's a great question. So there's, we see that there's poll, right? We've seen these deals, this pipeline growth, this, there's great adoption. But what I think we're still not at the point of massive hockey stick adoption is that customers still don't fully understand the capabilities distributed SQL and the power they can actually deliver. So the more we drive case studies, the more we drive POCs, the more we prove the model, I think you're gonna see just a massive adoption scale. And I also think customers are tired of doing lots of different things in lots of different pockets. So neither one of the key elements of Sky SQL is we can do both transactional and analytical data out of the same database driven by the same proxy. So what, instead of having DBAs and developers try to figure out, okay, I'm gonna pull from this database here. >>Yeah. That there, it's, it's this big spaghetti wire concept that is super expensive and super time intensive. So the ability to write modern applications and pull data from both pockets and really be able to have that as a seamless entity and deliver that to customers is massive. I mean, another part of the keynote yesterday was a new deliverable, like kind of no etl. Adam talked about Aurora and Redshift and the massive complexity of what used to exist for getting data back and forth. You also have to pay for two different databases. It's super expensive. So I think the idea that you can take the real focus of AWS and US is customer value. How do you deliver that next thing that changes the game? Always utilizes AWS delivers on that promise, but then takes a net new technology that really starts to think about how do we bring things together? How do we make it more simple? How do we make it more powerful? And how do we deliver more customer value as we go forward? >>But you know, if, if I'm, I'm still an on-prim guy, just pretend I'm not saying I am. Just pretend I just for the sake of the discussion here, it's like I just can't let it go. Yeah. Right. I, I still, you know, there's control, there's the known versus the unknown. The uncertain. Yeah. So twist my arm just a little bit more and get me over the hum. >>Well, first of all, you don't have to, right? And there's gonna be some industries and some verticals that will always have elements of their business that will be OnPrem. Guess what? We make the best based in the world. It can be MariaDB, but there's those that then say, these, these elements of our business are gonna be far more effective moving to the cloud. So we give you Skye, there's a natural symbiotic bridge between everything we do and how we deliver it. Where you can be hybrid and it's great. You can adopt the cloud as your business needs grow. And you can have multi-cloud. This is that, that idea that you can, can have your cake and eat it too, right? You can literally have all these elements of your business met without these big pressure to say, you gotta throw that away. You gotta move to this. It's really, how do you kind of gracefully adopt the cloud in a way that makes sense for your business? Where are you trying to drive your business? Is it time to value, right? Is it governance? Is it is there's different elements of what matters the most to individual businesses. You know, we wanna address those and we can address >>Those. So you're saying you don't have to dive >>In, you don't have to dive >>In. You, you can, you can go ankle deep, knee deep, whatever you wanna >>Do. Absolutely. And you know, some of the largest MariaDB users still have massive, massive on-prem implementations. And that's okay. But there's elements that are starting to fall behind. There's cost savings, there's things that they need to do in the cloud that they can't do. OnPrem. And that's where expand Skye really says, okay, here is your platform. Grow as you want to, migrate as you want to. And we're there every step along the way. We, we also provide a whole Sky DBA team. Some guys just say, I wanna get outta the database world at all. This is, this is expensive, it's costly and it's difficult to be an expert. So you can bring in our DBA team and they'll man and run, they'll, they'll run your entire environment. They'll optimize it, you know, they'll troubleshoot it, they'll bug fix, they'll do everything for you. So you can just say, I just wanna focus on building phenomenal applications for my customers. And the database game as we knew it is not something that I know I want to invest in anymore. Right. I wanna make that transition >>That makes that really, yeah. You know, I mean really attractive to a lot of people because you are, you talk about a lot of headache there. Yeah. So let's talk about AWS before Sure. I let you go just about that relationship. Okay. You've talked about the platform that it provides you and, and obviously the benefits, but just talk about how you've worked with AWS over the years Yep. And, and how you see that relationship allowing you to expand your services, no pun intended. >>For sure. So, I mean, I would start with the way we even contemplated architecture. You know, we worked with the satisfactory team. We made sure that the things that we built were optimized in their environment. You know, I think it was a lot of collaboration on how does this combined entity really make the most value for our customers? How does it make the most sense for our developers as we build it out? Then we work in the, in the global startup team. So the strategic element of who we are, not all startups are created equal, right? We have, right, we have 75% of the Fortune 100, we've got over a billion downloads. So, you know, we come in with promise. And the reason this partnership is so valuable and the reason there's so much investment going forward is cuz what really, what do the cloud guys care about? >>The very, very most, they want all of these mission critical, big workloads that are on prem to land in their cloud. What do we have a massive, massive TAM sitting out there, these customers that could go to aws. So we both see, like if we can deliver incredible value to that customer base, these big workloads will end up in aws. They'll use other AWS services. And as we scale and grow, you know, we have that platform that's already built for it. So I think that when you go back to like the tenants, the core principles of aws, the one that always stands out, the one that we always kind of lean back on is, are we delivering customer value? Is this the best thing for the customer? Because we do have some competition just like many other, other partners do, right? So there is Aurora and there is rds and there is times when that's a great service for a customer. But when people are really thinking about where do I need my database to go? Where do I really need to be set for the future growth? Where am I gonna get the kind of ROI I need going forward? That's where you can go, Hey, sky sql, expand distributed sql. This is the best game in town. It's built on aws and collectively, you know, we're gonna present that to a customer. I'm >>Sold. Done. >>I love it. Right? >>Maria db, check 'em out, they're on the show floor. Great traffic. I know at at the, at the booth. They're here at AWS Reinvent. So check 'em out. Maria db. Thanks >>Kevin. Hey, thanks John. Appreciate your >>Time. Appreciate Great. That was great. Right back with more, you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are here on the show floor at AWS re:Invent. We are theCUBE. I am Savannah Peterson, joined with John Furrier. John, afternoon, day two, we are in full swing. >> Yes. >> What's got you most excited? >> Just got lunch, got the food kicking in. No, we don't get coffee. (Savannah laughing) >> Way to bring the hype there, John. >> No, there's so many people here just in Amazon. We're back to 2019 levels of crowd. The interest levels are high. Next gen, cloud security, big part of the keynote. This next segment, I am super excited about. CUBE Alumni, going back to 2013, 10 years ago he was on theCUBE. Now, 10 years later we're at re:Invent, looking forward to this guest and it's about security, great topic. >> I don't want to delay us anymore, please welcome Mark. Mark, thank you so much for being here with us. Massive day for you and the team. I know you oversee three different units at Amazon, Inspector, Detective, and the most recently announced, Security Lake. Tell us about Amazon Security Lake. >> Well, thanks Savannah. Thanks John for having me. Well, Security Lake has been in the works for a little bit of time and it got announced today at the keynote as you heard from Adam. We're super excited because there's a couple components that are really unique and valuable to our customers within Security Lake. First and foremost, the foundation of Security Lake is an open source project we call OCFS, Open Cybersecurity Framework Schema. And what that allows is us to work with the vendor community at large in the security space and develop a language where we can all communicate around security data. And that's the language that we put into Security Data Lake. We have 60 vendors participating in developing that language and partnering within Security Lake. But it's a communal lake where customers can bring all of their security data in one place, whether it's generated in AWS, they're on-prem, or SaaS offerings or other clouds, all in one location in a language that allows analytics to take advantage of that analytics and give better outcomes for our customers. >> So Adams Selipsky big keynote, he spent all the bulk of his time on data and security. Obviously they go well together, we've talked about this in the past on theCUBE. Data is part of security, but this security's a little bit different in the sense that the global footprint of AWS makes it uniquely positioned to manage some security threats, EKS protection, a very interesting announcement, runtime layer, but looking inside and outside the containers, probably gives extra telemetry on some of those supply chains vulnerabilities. This is actually a very nuanced point. You got Guard Duty kind of taking its role. What does it mean for customers 'cause there's a lot of things in this announcement that he didn't have time to go into detail. Unpack all the specifics around what the security announcement means for customers. >> Yeah, so we announced four items in Adam's keynote today within my team. So I'll start with Guard Duty for EKS runtime. It's complimenting our existing capabilities for EKS support. So today Inspector does vulnerability assessment on EKS or container images in general. Guard Duty does detections of EKS workloads based on log data. Detective does investigation and analysis based on that log data as well. With the announcement today, we go inside the container workloads. We have more telemetry, more fine grain telemetry and ultimately we can provide better detections for our customers to analyze risks within their container workload. So we're super excited about that one. Additionally, we announced Inspector for Lambda. So Inspector, we released last year at re:Invent and we focused mostly on EKS container workloads and EC2 workloads. Single click automatically assess your environment, start generating assessments around vulnerabilities. We've added Lambda to that capability for our customers. The third announcement we made was Macy sampling. So Macy has been around for a while in delivering a lot of value for customers providing information around their sensitive data within S3 buckets. What we found is many customers want to go and characterize all of the data in their buckets, but some just want to know is there any sensitive data in my bucket? And the sampling feature allows the customer to find out their sensitive data in the bucket, but we don't have to go through and do all of the analysis to tell you exactly what's in there. >> Unstructured and structured data. Any data? >> Correct, yeah. >> And the fourth? >> The fourth, Security Data Lake? (John and Savannah laughing) Yes. >> Okay, ocean theme. data lake. >> Very complimentary to all of our services, but the unique value in the data lake is that we put the information in the customer's control. It's in their S3 bucket, they get to decide who gets access to it. We've heard from customers over the years that really have two options around gathering large scale data for security analysis. One is we roll our own and we're security engineers, we're not data engineers. It's really hard for them to build these distributed systems at scale. The second one is we can pick a vendor or a partner, but we're locked in and it's in their schemer and their format and we're there for a long period of time. With Security Data Lake, they get the best of both worlds. We run the infrastructure at scale for them, put the data in their control and they get to decide what use case, what partner, what tool gives them the most value on top of their data. >> Is that always a good thing to give the customers too much control? 'Cause you know the old expression, you give 'em a knife they play with and they they can cut themselves, I mean. But no, seriously, 'cause what's the provisions around that? Because control was big part of the governance, how do you manage the security? How does the customer worry about, if I have too much control, someone makes a mistake? >> Well, what we finding out today is that many customers have realized that some of their data has been replicated seven times, 10 times, not necessarily maliciously, but because they have multiple vendors that utilize that data to give them different use cases and outcomes. It becomes costly and unwieldy to figure out where all that data is. So by centralizing it, the control is really around who has access to the data. Now, ultimately customers want to make those decisions and we've made it simple to aggregate this data in a single place. They can develop a home region if they want, where all the data flows into one region, they can distribute it globally. >> They're in charge. >> They're in charge. But the controls are mostly in the hands of the data governance person in the company, not the security analyst. >> So I'm really curious, you mentioned there's 60 AWS partner companies that have collaborated on the Security lake. Can you tell us a little bit about the process? How long does it take? Are people self-selecting to contribute to these projects? Are you cherry picking? What does that look like? >> It's a great question. There's three levels of collaboration. One is around the open source project that we announced at Black Hat early in this year called OCSF. And that collaboration is we've asked the vendor community to work with us to build a schema that is universally acceptable to security practitioners, not vendor specific and we've asked. >> Savannah: I'm sorry to interrupt you, but is this a first of its kind? >> There's multiple schemes out there developed by multiple parties. They've been around for multiple years, but they've been built by a single vendor. >> Yeah, that's what I'm drill in on a little bit. It sounds like the first we had this level of collaboration. >> There's been collaborations around them, but in a handful of companies. We've really gone to a broad set of collaborators to really get it right. And they're focused around areas of expertise that they have knowledge in. So the EDR vendors, they're focused around the scheme around EDR. The firewall vendors are focused around that area. Certainly the cloud vendors are in their scope. So that's level one of collaboration and that gets us the level playing field and the language in which we'll communicate. >> Savannah: Which is so important. >> Super foundational. Then the second area is around producers and subscribers. So many companies generate valuable security data from the tools that they run. And we call those producers the publishers and they publish the data into Security Lake within that OCSF format. Some of them are in the form of findings, many of them in the form of raw telemetry. Then the second one is in the subscriber side and those are usually analytic vendors, SIM vendors, XDR vendors that take advantage of the logs in one place and generate analytic driven outcomes on top of that, use cases, if you will, that highlight security risks or issues for customers. >> Savannah: Yeah, cool. >> What's the big customer focus when you start looking at Security Lakes? How do you see that planning out? You said there's a collaboration, love the open source vibe on that piece, what data goes in there? What's sharing? 'Cause a big part of the keynote I heard today was, I heard clean rooms, I've cut my antenna up. I'd love to hear that. That means there's an implied sharing aspect. The security industry's been sharing data for a while. What kind of data's in that lake? Give us an example, take us through. >> Well, this a number of sources within AWS, as customers run their workloads in AWS. We've identified somewhere around 25 sources that will be natively single click into Amazon Security Lake. We were announcing nine of them. They're traditional network logs, BBC flow, cloud trail logs, firewall logs, findings that are generated across AWS, EKS audit logs, RDS data logs. So anything that customers run workloads on will be available in data lake. But that's not limited to AWS. Customers run their environments hybridly, they have SaaS applications, they use other clouds in some instances. So it's open to bring all that data in. Customers can vector it all into this one single location if they decide, we make it pretty simple for them to do that. Again, in the same format where outcomes can be generated quickly and easily. >> Can you use the data lake off on premise or it has to be in an S3 in Amazon Cloud? >> Today it's in S3 in Amazon. If we hear customers looking to do something different, as you guys know, we tend to focus on our customers and what they want us to do, but they've been pretty happy about what we've decided to do in this first iteration. >> So we got a story about Silicon Angle. Obviously the ingestion is a big part of it. The reporters are jumping in, but the 53rd party sources is a pretty big number. Is that coming from the OCSF or is that just in general? Who's involved? >> Yeah, OCSF is the big part of that and we have a list of probably 50 more that want to join in part of this. >> The other big names are there, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Peloton Networks, all the big dogs are in there. >> All big partners of AWS, anyway, so it was an easy conversation and in most cases when we started having the conversation, they were like, "Wow, this has really been needed for a long time." And given our breadth of partners and where we sit from our customers perspective in the center of their cloud journey that they've looked at us and said, "You guys, we applaud you for driving this." >> So Mark, take us through the conversations you're having with the customers at re:Inforce. We saw a lot of meetings happening. It was great to be back face to face. You guys have been doing a lot of customer conversation, security Data Lake came out of that. What was the driving force behind it? What were some of the key concerns? What were the challenges and what's now the opportunity that's different? >> We heard from our customers in general. One, it's too hard for us to get all the data we need in a single place, whether through AWS, the industry in general, it's just too hard. We don't have those resources to data wrangle that data. We don't know how to pick schema. There's multiple ones out there. Tell us how we would do that. So these three challenges came out front and center for every customer. And mostly what they said is our resources are limited and we want to focus those resources on security outcomes and we have security engines. We don't want to focus them on data wrangling and large scale distributed systems. Can you help us solve that problem? And it came out loud and clear from almost every customer conversation we had. And that's where we took the challenge. We said, "Okay, let's build this data layer." And then on top of that we have services like Detective and Guard Duty, we'll take advantage of it as well. But we also have a myriad of ISV third parties that will also sit on top of that data and render out. >> What's interesting, I want to get your reaction. I know we don't have much time left, but I want to get your thoughts. When I see Security Data Lake, which is awesome by the way, love the focus, love how you guys put that together. It makes me realize the big thing in re:Invent this year is this idea of specialized solutions. You got instances for this and that, use cases that require certain kind of performance. You got the data pillars that Adam laid out. Are we going to start seeing more specialized data lakes? I mean, we have a video data lake. Is there going to be a FinTech data lake? Is there going to be, I mean, you got the Great Lakes kind of going on here, what is going on with these lakes? I mean, is that a trend that Amazon sees or customers are aligning to? >> Yeah, we have a couple lakes already. We have a healthcare lake and a financial lake and now we have a security lake. Foundationally we have Lake Formation, which is the tool that anyone can build a lake. And most of our lakes run on top of Lake Foundation, but specialize. And the specialization is in the data aggregation, normalization, enridgement, that is unique for those use cases. And I think you'll see more and more. >> John: So that's a feature, not a bug. >> It's a feature, it's a big feature. The customers have ask for it. >> So they want roll their own specialized, purpose-built data thing, lake? They can do it. >> And customer don't want to combine healthcare information with security information. They have different use cases and segmentation of the information that they care about. So I think you'll see more. Now, I also think that you'll see where there are adjacencies that those lakes will expand into other use cases in some cases too. >> And that's where the right tools comes in, as he was talking about this ETL zero, ETL feature. >> It be like an 80, 20 rule. So if 80% of the data is shared for different use cases, you can see how those lakes would expand to fulfill multiple use cases. >> All right, you think he's ready for the challenge? Look, we were on the same page. >> Okay, we have a new challenge, go ahead. >> So think of it as an Instagram Reel, sort of your hot take, your thought leadership moment, the clip we're going to come back to and reference your brilliance 10 years down the road. I mean, you've been a CUBE veteran, now CUBE alumni for almost 10 years, in just a few weeks it'll be that. What do you think is, and I suspect, I think I might know your answer to this, so feel free to be robust in this. But what do you think is the biggest story, key takeaway from the show this year? >> We're democratizing security data within Security Data Lake for sure. >> Well said, you are our shortest answer so far on theCUBE and I absolutely love and respect that. Mark, it has been a pleasure chatting with you and congratulations, again, on the huge announcement. This is such an exciting day for you all. >> Thank you Savannah, thank you John, pleasure to be here. >> John: Thank you, great to have you. >> We look forward to 10 more years of having you. >> Well, maybe we don't have to wait 10 years. (laughs) >> Well, more years, in another time. >> I have a feeling it'll be a lot of security content this year. >> Yeah, pretty hot theme >> Very hot theme. >> Pretty odd theme for us. >> Of course, re:Inforce will be there this year again, coming up 2023. >> All the res. >> Yep, all the res. >> Love that. >> We look forward to see you there. >> All right, thanks, Mark. >> Speaking of res, you're the reason we are here. Thank you all for tuning in to today's live coverage from AWS re:Invent. We are in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. We are theCUBE and we are the leading source for high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everybody. John Walls here, as we continue our coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. And today we're going to go talk about the edge. What's out there on the edge, and how do we make sense of it? How do we use that data, and put it to work, and how do we keep it secure? Big questions, a lot of questions, and at the end of the day, what's the value prop for you, the customer, to make it all work? With me to talk about that is the Executive Vice President and GM of HPE GreenLake, Keith White. Keith, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. >> John, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity, and excited to have a conversation today. >> Yeah, good. Well, let's just jump right in. First off, about the edge. There was a time, not so long ago, that it was kind of the Wild, Wild West out there, right? And we were trying to corral this fantastic reservoir of data that was streaming in from every which point, to the point now where we've realized how to refine that, how to develop that, how to reduce that complexity, to make that actionable. Talk about that journey a little bit, about where we were with edge technology maybe five, six years ago, and how we've migrated to the point we are now, where GreenLake is doing the great work that it is. >> You know, it's really a great question, John, cause I think there's a lot of different definitions of the edge, and what does "the edge" actually mean. And you're right, you know, there's been a pretty big transformation over the last few years, especially as we think about things like IoT, and just being able to engage with edge scenarios. But today what you're seeing is a lot of digital transformations happening with companies around three big megatrends. Cloud, meaning hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, data, and how you analyze that data to make decisions. And of course the edge, like we're talking through. And you know, frankly, with the edge, this is where we see the connectivity and security requirements really connect, because that edge information is so important, so critical to stay secure, but also it's creating that tremendous amount of data, as you mentioned. And so folks want to pull that into their cloud environment, and then make decisions and analyze that data, and plug it into the systems that they have overall. And you know, you're seeing companies like Auckland Transport, right? They basically do an AI-enhanced video feed to optimize their transport routes. And as you think about supply chain and the big challenges that we're seeing today, or you think about public transportation, and, you know, really providing information with respect to customers, but how do you take and get all that information pulled together, to then make decisions from these various edge points throughout? Or a company like ABB, who's been building the factory of the future, and doing, basically, you know, robotics-as-a-service, if you will, in order to really get that precision required at the edge in order to manufacture what they need to. So, massive uses around the edge, massive data getting created, and HPE GreenLake's a great spot for folks to help, you know, really take and leverage that data, to make those those decisions that are required. >> You know, one example in terms of case studies, or in terms of your client base that you talk about, you know, the automotive sector. >> Yeah. >> And I think about what's going on in terms of, with that technology, and I can't even imagine the kind of mechanics that are happening, right? In real time, at 60, 70 miles an hour, through all kinds of environmental conditions. So maybe just touch base, too, about what you're doing that's in terms of automotive, and what's going to be- >> No, it's great, John, yeah. >> (indistinct) then? >> Yeah, no, it's an awesome question, because, you know, we're working closely with a lot of the car manufacturers, as well as their sort of subsidiaries, if you will. So you look at autonomous driving, which is a great example. All that data has to come in and get analyzed. And if you look at a company like Volvo, they use a third party called Zenseact, who basically uses our high-performance compute to deliver it as a service through HPE GreenLake. They get all this massive parallel computing, modeling and simulations happening, with all this data coming in. And so what we've done with GreenLake is we give them that ability to easily scale up, to grow capacity, to get access to that hundreds of petabytes of data that you just mentioned. And then, you know, really basically take and make analytics and AI models and machine learning capabilities out of that, in order to really direct and fuel their mission to develop that next-generation software to support that autonomous driving capability. And so you're seeing that with a ton of different car manufacturers, as well as a lot of different other scenarios as well. So you're spot on. Automotive is a key place for that. >> You know, and too, the similarities here, the common thread, I think, threads, actually, plural, are very common. We think about access, right? We think about security, we think about control, we think about data, we think about analytics, so I mean, all these things are factoring in, in this extraordinarily dynamic environment. So is there a batting order, or a pecking order, in terms of addressing those areas of concern, or what kind of, I guess, learning curve have we had on that front? >> Well, I think you're, I think the key is, as I mentioned earlier, so you have this connectivity piece, and you've got to be able to connect and be available as required. That might be through SD-WAN, that might be Wi-Fi, that might be through a network access point, et cetera. But the key is that security piece of it as well. Customers need to know that that data and that edge device is very, very secure. And then you've got to have that connectivity back into your environment. And so what we've learned with HPE GreenLake, which, really what that does, is that brings that cloud experience, that public cloud experience, to customers in their data center, on-premise, in their colo, or at the edge, like we're talking about now, because there's a lot of need to keep that data secure, private, to make sure that it's not out in the public cloud and accessible, or those types of scenarios. So as I think about that piece of it, then it turns into, okay, how do we take all that data and do the analytics and the AI modeling that we talked about before? So it's a really interesting flow that has to happen. But what's happening is, people are really transforming their business, transforming their business models, as we just talked about. Factory of the future, you know, transportation needs. We're seeing it in different environments as well. Automotive, as you mentioned. But it's exciting, it's an exciting time, with all of this opportunity to really change not only how a business can run, but how we as consumers interact and engage with that. >> And then ultimately for the company, the value prop's got to be there. And you've already cited a number of areas. Is there one key metric that you look at, or one key deliverable that you look at here, in terms of what the ultimate value proposition is for a customer? >> You bet. I think the biggest thing is, you know, our customers and their satisfaction. And so, to date, you know, we have well over 60,000 customers on the platform. We have a retention rate of 96%, so a very, very small number that haven't stayed on the platform itself. And that means that they're satisfied. And what we're seeing also is a continued growth in usage for new environments, new workloads, new solutions that a customer is trying to drive as well. And so those are some of the key metrics we look at, with respect to our customer satisfaction, with their retention rate, with their usage capabilities, and then how we're growing that piece. And the interesting thing, John, is what we've learned is that HPE, as a company, traditionally was very hardware focused, it was a hardware vendor, transacting, responding to RFPs for compute, storage, and networking. With GreenLake now moving into the cloud services realm, we're now having conversations with customers as their partner. How do we solve this problem? How do we transform our business? How do we accelerate our growth? And that's been very exciting for us as a company, to really make that significant transformation and shift to being part of our customer's environments in a partnership type way. >> Yeah. And now you're talking about ecosystem, right? And what you're developing, not only in your partners, but also maybe what lessons you're learning in one respect you can apply to others. What's happening in that respect, in terms of the kind of universe that you're developing, and how applicable, maybe, one experience is to another client's needs? >> Yeah, no, it's a great question, because in essence, what happens is, we're sort of the tip of the spear, and we're partnering with customers to really go in deep, and understand how to utilize that. We can take that learning, and then push that out to our ecosystem, so that they can scale and they can work with more customers with respect to that piece of it. The second is, is that we're really driving into these more solution-oriented partners, right? The ISVs, the system integrators, the managed service providers, the colos, and even the hyperscalers, as we've talked about, and why we're here with our friends at AWS, is, customers are requiring a hybrid environment. They want to leverage tools up in the public cloud, but they also want the on-prem capabilities, and they need those to work together. And so this ecosystem becomes very dynamic with respect to, hey, what are we learning, and how do we solve our customer's problems together? I always talk about the ecosystem being 1 + 1 = 3 for our customers. It has to be that way, and frankly, our customers are expecting that. And that's why we're excited to be here today with our, as I said, our friends at AWS. >> And how does open play in all this too, right? Because, I mean, that provides, I assume, the kind of flexibility that people are looking for, you know, they, you know, having that open environment and making an opportunity available to them is a pretty big attractive element. >> It's huge, right? Yeah, as you know, people don't want to get locked in to a single technology. They don't want to get locked in to a single cloud. They don't want to have to, they want to be able to utilize the best of the best. And so maybe there's some tools in the public cloud that can really help from an analytics standpoint, but we can store and we can process it locally in our data center, at the edge, or in a colo. And so that best of both worlds is there, but it has to be an open platform. I have to be able to choose my container, my virtual machine, my AI tools, my, you know, capabilities, my ISV application, so that I have that flexibility. And so it's been fantastic for us to move into this open platform environment, to be able to have customers leverage the best and what's going to work best for them, and then partnering with those folks closely to, again, deliver those solutions that are required. >> You know, this is, I mean, it appears, as I'm hearing you talk about this, in terms of the partnerships you're creating, the ecosystem that you're developing, how that's evolving, lessons that you've learned, the attention you've paid to security and data analytics. I get the feeling that you've got a lot of momentum, right? A lot of things are happening here. You've got big mo on your side right now. (Keith laughs) Would you characterize it that way? >> Yeah, you know, there's a ton of momentum. I think what we're finding is, customers are requiring that cloud experience on-prem. You know, they're getting it from AWS and some of the other hyperscalers, but they want that same capability on-prem. And so what we've seen is just a dramatic increase with respect to usage, customers. We're adding hundreds of customers every quarter. We're growing in the triple digits, three of the last four quarters. And so, yeah, we're seeing tremendous momentum, but as I said, what's been most important is that relationship with the customer. We've really flipped it to becoming that partner with them. And again, bringing that ecosystem to bear, so that we can have the best of all worlds. And it's been fantastic to see, and frankly, the momentum's been tremendous. And we're in a quiet period right now, but you'll see what our earnings are here in the next couple weeks, and we can talk more details on that, but in the past, as we talked about, we've grown, you know, triple digits three of the last four quarters, and, you know, well over $3 billion, well over $8 billion of total contract value that we've implemented to date. And, you know, the momentum is there, but, again, most importantly is, we're solving our customers' problems together, and we're helping them accelerate their business and their transformation. >> I know you mentioned earnings, the report's a few weeks away. I saw your smile, that big old, you know, grin, so I have a feeling the news is pretty good from the HPE GreenLake side. >> It is. We're excited about it. And you know, again, this really is just a testament to the transformation we've made as a company in order to move towards those cloud services. And you know, you'll hear us talk about it as the core of what we're doing as a company, holistically, again, because this is what customers are requiring, this is what our ecosystem is moving towards. And it's been really fun, it's been a great, great ride. >> Excellent. Keith, appreciate the time, and keep up the good work, and I'm going to look for that earnings report here in a few weeks. >> Awesome. Thanks so much, John. Take good care. Appreciate it. >> You bet, you too. Keith White joining us here, talking about HPE GreenLake, and defining what they're doing in terms of bringing the edge back into the primary systems for a lot of companies. So, good work there. We'll continue our coverage here in theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent. And I'm John Walls. (lively music)

(intro upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to our continued coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited about the conversation coming up. Not only are we joined by two brilliant minds in the cloud, one of them happens to be a CUBE alumni. Please welcome Mike from AMD and Ali from Dropbox. Ali, welcome back to the show, how you been? >> Thanks Savannah. I'm doing great and really excited to be back on theCUBE. It was great discussion last time and really excited for both re:Invent and also to see how this video turns out. >> Hey, that makes two of us and probably three of us. How are you doing today, Mike? >> Doing great. It's really nice to be getting back to in-person events again and to be out solving problems with customers and partners like Dropbox. >> I know, isn't it? We've all missed each other. Was a lonely couple of years. Mike, I'm going to open it up with you. I'm sure a lot of people are curious. What's new at AMD? >> Well, there's a lot that's new at AMD, so I'll share a subset of what's new and what we've been working on. We've expanded our global coverage in Amazon EC2 with new regions and instance types. So users can deploy any application pretty much anywhere AWS has a presence. Our partner ecosystems for solutions and services has expanded quite a bit. We're currently focused on enabling partners and solutions that focus on cloud cost optimization, modernizing infrastructure, and pushing performance to the limit, especially for HPC. But the biggest buzz, of course, is around AMD's new fourth generation of our EPYC CPU Genoa. It's the world's fastest data center CPU with transformative energy efficiency and that's a really interesting combination, highest performance and most efficient. So on launch day, AWS announced their plans to roll out AMD EPYC Genoa processor-based EC2 instances. So we're pretty excited about that and that's what we'll be working on in the near term. >> Wow, that's a big deal and certainly not a casual announcement. Obviously, power and efficiency hot topics here at re:Invent but also looking at the greater impact on the planet is a big conversation we've been having here as well. So this is exciting and timely and congratulations to you and the team on all that seems to be going on. Ali, what's going on at Dropbox? >> Yeah, thanks Savannah. The Q3 2022 was actually a very strong quarter for Dropbox during a very difficult macroeconomic backdrop. Our focus has continued to be on innovation and this is around both new products and also driving multi-product adoption which is paying a lot of dividends for us, so essentially, bringing products like Dropbox Sign, DocSend, Capture, and other exciting products to our customers. On the infra side, it's all about how do we scale our infrastructure to meet the business needs, right? How do we keep up with the accelerated growth during the pandemic and also leveraging both AMD and AWS for investments in our public cloud? >> Let's talk about the cloud a bit. You are both cloud experts and I'm glad that you brought that up. We'll keep it there with Ali. When, why, and how should users leverage public cloud? >> Yeah, so Dropbox is hybrid cloud which means we are running applications both in private and public cloud and within a unique position to leverage the best of both worlds. And Savannah, this is a decision we continue to reevaluate on a regular basis. And there are really three key factors that come into play here. First is scale and scale, are we operating at a scale where customization is cost-efficient for us? Next is uniqueness. Is our workload unique compared to what the public cloud supports? And lastly, innovation. Do we have the expertise to innovate faster than public cloud or not? So based on these three key factors, we try and balance all of them and then come up with the best option for us at Dropbox. And kind of elaborating over here, things like international storage, we're leveraging public cloud, things like AI and ML, we're leveraging public cloud, but when we talk about Magic Pocket, which is our multi-exabyte storage system, that has the scale which is why we are doing that on our own private cloud. >> Wow, I think you just gave everybody a fantastic framework for thinking about their decision matrix there if nothing else. Mike, is there anything that you'd like to add to that? Anything that AMD considers when contemplating public cloud versus private? >> Yeah, so there's really three main drivers that I see when users consider when, why, and how should they leverage public cloud. Three main drivers: establishing a global footprint, accelerating product release cycles, and efficiently rightsizing infrastructure. So customers looking to establish a global footprint often turn to public cloud deployments to quickly reach their clients in workforces around the world, most importantly with minimal capital expense. I understand Dropbox uses public cloud to establish their global presence scaling out from their core data centers in North America. And then a lot of industries have tremendous pressure to accelerate product release cycles. With public cloud, organizations can immediately deploy new applications without a long site and hardware acquisition cycle and then the associated ongoing maintenance and operational overhead. And the third thing is customers that need to rightsize and dynamically scale their infrastructure and application deployments are drawn to public cloud, for example, customers that have cyclical compute or application load peaks can efficiently deploy in the cloud without overdeploying their on-prem infrastructure for most of the year which is off-peak during those off-peak times. That infrastructure idle time is a waste of resources and OPEX. So scalable rightsizing draws a lot of users to cloud deployment. >> Yeah, wow. I think there's a lot of factors to consider but also it seems like a pretty streamlined process for navigating that or at least you two both made it sound that way. Another hot topic in the space right now is security. Mike, let's start with you a little bit. What are the most important security issues for AMD right now that you can talk about? >> Yeah, sure. So, well, first of all, AWS provides a wide variety of really good security services to protect customers that are working in the cloud. Like from a processor technology perspective, there's three main security aspects to consider, two of which are common practice today and one of which AMD brings significant differentiation and value. The first two are protecting data at rest and data in transit. And these two are part of the prevalent security models of today where AMD provides distinct value and differentiation is in protecting data in use. So EPYC Milan and Genoa processors support a function called SEV-SNP and this enables users to reside and their applications to reside within their own cryptographic context and environment with data integrity protection to accomplish what's called comprehensive confidential computing. Ethics confidential computing solution is hardware-based. So it's easy to leverage, there's no code rewrite required unlike comparable solutions that are software-based that require recoding to a proprietary SDK and come with a significant performance trade-off. So with EPYC processors, you can protect your data at rest, in transit, and most importantly, in use. >> Everybody needs to protect their data everywhere it is. So I love that. That's fantastic to hear and I'm sure gives your customers a lot of confidence. What about over at Dropbox? What security issues are you facing, Ali? >> Yeah, so the first company value at Dropbox is actually being worthy of trust, and what this really means from a security perspective is how do we keep all of our users content safe? And this means keeping everything down to all of the infrastructure hardware secure. So partnering with AMD, which is one of our strongest partners out there, the new security features that AMD have and the hardware are critical for us and we are able to take advantage of some of these best security practices within our compute infrastructure by leveraging AMD's secure ship architecture. >> How important, you just touched on it a little bit, and I want to ask, how important are partnerships like the one you have with each other as you innovate at scale? Ali, you're nodding, I'm going to go to you first. >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, the partnership with with AMD is one of the strongest that we have and it just goes beyond like a regular partnership where it's just buy and sell. We talk about technology together, we talk about innovation together, we talk about partnership together, and for us, as I look look at our hybrid cloud strategy, we would not be able to get the benefits in terms of efficiency, scale, or liability performance without having a strong partner like AMD. >> That's awesome. Mike, anything you want to add there? >> I'd reiterate some of what Ali had to say. One of my favorite parts about my job is getting together with partners and customers to figure out how to optimize their applications and deployments around the world to get the most efficient use of the cloud infrastructure for servers that are based on AMD technology. In many cases, we can find 10% or better performance or cost optimization by working closely with partners like Dropbox. And then in addition, if we keep in lock step together to look at what's coming on the roadmap, by the time the latest and greatest technology is finally deployed, our customers and our partners are ready to take advantage of it. So that's the fun part of the job and I really appreciate the Dropbox's cooperation, optimizing their infrastructure, and using AMD products >> Well, what a synergistic relationship of mutual admiration and support. We love to hear it here in the tech world. Mike, last question for you. What's next for AMD? >> Well, heading into 2023, considering the current challenge macroeconomic environment and geopolitical instability, doing more with less will be top of mind for many CFOs and CEOs in 2023. And AMD can help accomplish that. AMD's EPYC processors, leadership performance, and lower EC2 retail costs can help users reduce costs without impacting performance, or the flip side of that, they can scale capacity without increasing costs. And because of EPYC's higher core counts, really high core density, applications can be deployed with fewer servers or smaller instances that has both economic and environmental benefits that reduce usage costs as well as environmental impacts. And that allows customers to optimize their application and infrastructure spend. And then the second thing that I've seen over the last couple of years and I see this trajectory continuing is increased geographic distribution of our colleagues and workforces is here to stay, people work from everywhere. In modern cross platform, collaboration platforms, that bring teams, tools, and content together have a really important role to play to enable that new, more flexible style of working. And those tools need to be really agile and easy to use. I think Dropbox is really well positioned to enable this new style of working. AMD's really happy to work closely with Dropbox to enable these modern work styles, both on premises, hybrid, and fully in the public cloud. >> Well, it sounds like a very exciting and optimistically, bright future for you all at AMD. We love to hear that here at theCUBE. Ali, what about you? What is 2023 going to hold for Dropbox? >> Yeah, so I think we're going to continue on this journey of transformation where our focus is on new products and also multi-product adoption. And from a cloud perspective, how do we continue to evolve our hybrid cloud so that we remain a competitive advantage for our business and also for our customers? I think right now, Savannah, we're in a very unique position to utilize some of the best AMD technology that's out there and that's both on premise and in the cloud. Some of the AMD Epic processors delivered the performance that we need for our hybrid cloud and we want to continue to leverage these also in public cloud which is the EC2 instances that are powered by AMD in the long run. So overall, Dropbox is looking forward to continue to evaluate some of the AMD's Genoa CPUs that are coming out but also want to continue to grow our EC2 footprint powered by AMD in the long run. >> Fantastic. Well, it sounds like this second showing here on theCUBE is just the tee up for your third and we'll definitely have to have Mike back on for the second time around to hear how things are going. Thank you both so much for taking the time today to join me here. Mike and Ali, it was fantastic getting to chat to you and thank you to our audience for tuning into theCUBE's special coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name's Savannah Peterson and I hope we can learn together soon. (outro upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and AWS. This is the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS Showcase: Accelerating Business Transformation. Here in the Showcase at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later, we got this whole inflection point coming, you're starting to see this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you on the relationship. >> Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced. And then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware Cloud on AWS. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware. Day in, day out, as far as advancing VMware Cloud on AWS. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with the solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements. You know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right, more recently. One of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware Cloud on AWS. And even with VMware to other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware Cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware Cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint, there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >> Great stuff. Daniel, I want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly VMworld, talking about how the workloads on IT has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AIOps, you got ITOps changing a lot, you got a lot more automation, edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the relationship? >> So at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware Cloud and AWS, we are also enabling us mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. That's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware Cloud on AWS. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, security, writing code, composing. You know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing, what are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >> That's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, "Well, we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service. Recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure." That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on-premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >> Samir, talk about your perspective. I want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of the confluence of industrial IoT, software, physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code, automation, you know, "Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster." Yeah, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services, meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. Yeah, totally, right? And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware Cloud on AWS, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you want to leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's going to give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with IoT, even with utilizing Alexa, or if there's any other service that you want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology even in your business. Leaders are looking to reinvent their business, they're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy, maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. >> Okay. >> Then also- >> Oh, go ahead, finish your thought. >> No, no, no, I was going to say what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that vStor admin that's used to their on-premises environment. Now with VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent coming up, the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators, and it's like hundreds of thousands of users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put my career in the next 10 to 15 years." And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm going to be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet. Architects, is it solution architect, SRE? So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to get your thoughts, how would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity? And what's going to happen? >> So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the answer is to make digital transformation a success, we need not just to talk about technology, but also about process, people, and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware Cloud on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment, you can use the same managing and monitoring tools, if you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware Cloud on AWS. And that gives not just leaders, but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. So, okay, nothing's changed, I can still run my job, now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the customer there? >> Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware Cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud. But if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you want to utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on-premises or even in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. How does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >> So we hope to get more frequently together in-person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to Zoom conferences and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >> What's interesting, you know, as events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "What pandemic? We were more productive in the pandemic." I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in-person, they're happy to see people, but no one's really missed the beat. I mean, it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More, if anything, productivity gains. >> Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is even if you look at AWS's, and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said and meant earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in-person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology, we've been able to still communicate, work with our customers, even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot, we had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. So even with the on-premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and people can reference that, we won't get into it here. But I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >> So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node types with different ratios of compute, storage, and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP and VMware Cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements, at the upcoming events. >> Samir, what's your reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming events. But together, we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS. To Daniel's point, storage for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right? Now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware Cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's going to be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events, that's going to give us the options to even advance our own services together. >> Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships, and they do business together and they sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides, they come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise, you can do this. If you decide you want to stay with some of your services on-premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either way in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich, later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by AWS, more than 200 different services ranging from object-based storage, load balancing, and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >> We call that super cloud in the way that we generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. >> Absolutely. >> And everybody wins. >> Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with AWS, maybe more proficient with the VMware's technology. But then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud, maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are, maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware Cloud on AWS. Maybe you want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the day. >> I mean, I just think it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean you don't have to do anything. You still run it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time, they can free up resources to develop new innovations and grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what are called chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin world and whatnot, being hands-on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. >> Yeah, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So thanks for sharing that. Samir, Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the Showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the Cube special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Foer, host of the Cube. We've got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, our videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and aws. This is the customer successes with VMware cloud on AWS showcase, accelerating business transformation here in the showcase with Samir Candu Worldwide. VMware strategic alliance solution, architect leader with AWS Samir. Great to have you and Daniel Re Myer, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are, are working together. You're the key players in the re relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. >>Great to have you guys both on, As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Geling, then CEO and then then CEO AWS at Andy Chasy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success. OFM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since, and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later we got this whole inflection point coming. You're starting to see, you know, this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side. More automation, more serverless, I mean, and a, I mean it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kinda a whole nother level. Where are we, Samir? Let's start with you on, on the relationship. >>Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced, and then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware cloud on aws. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware day in, day out. As far as advancing VMware cloud on aws. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with a solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements, you know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right? More recently, one of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. >>And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware cloud on aws, and even with VMware's, other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >>Great stuff. Daniel, I wanna get to you in a second. Upon this principal architect position you have in your title, you're the global a synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly world, talking about how the, the workloads on it has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AI ops, you got it. Ops changing a lot, you got a lot more automation edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the >>Relationship? So at at, at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. We are also enabling US mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembled globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers, that's, that's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the, the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. And over the time we, we really have involved the solution. As Samia mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware cloud on aws. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of, of workload. So for example, we just added the I four I host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as you mentioned it, AI workloads. >>Yeah. So I wanna guess just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation. You know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in the queue in the past couple weeks in a big way that the OPS teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds OP a little bit weird, but operation IT operations is now part of the, a lot more data ops, security writing code composing, you know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing? What are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >>That, that's a great point because originally VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people at customers. So for example, aws very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the IT ops area. And usually these are very different, very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's, it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customers, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, well we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service, recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure. That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >>Samir, talk about your perspective. I wanna get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS remar of, actually it was Amazon res machine learning automation, robotics and space. It was really kinda the confluence of industrial IOT software physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code automation, you know, Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on, on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >>Yeah, totally. Right. And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware cloud on aws, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's gonna give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with iot, even with utilizing Alexa or if there's any other service that you wanna utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings. Right off the top though, with digital transformation, right? You, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology. Even in your business leaders are looking to reinvent their business. They're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy. Maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. Okay. Then also, Oh, >>Go ahead, finish >>Your thought. No, no, I was gonna say, what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that VS four admin that's used to their on-premises at environment. Now with VMware cloud on aws, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, yeah. You still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware cloud on AWS two. >>Danielle, I wanna get your thoughts on this because at at explore and, and, and after the event, now as we prep for Cuban and reinvent coming up the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators and it's like hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of users and millions of people talking about and and peaked on VM we're interested in v VMware. The common thread was one's one, one person said, I'm trying to figure out where I'm gonna put my career in the next 10 to 15 years. And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm gonna be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet architects, is it Solution architect sre. So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are gonna try to make these career decisions, like how, what am I gonna work on? And it's, and that was kind of fuzzy, but I wanna get your thoughts. How would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity and what's gonna happen? >>So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means in, in to to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills? And, and trainings is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the, the answer is to make digital transformation a success. We need not just to talk about technology, but also about process people and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware cloud on a, on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment. You can use the same managing and monitoring tools. If you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of, of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware cloud on aws. And that gives not just leaders, but but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in, in such a complex project, >>The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go and, and then now that once they're confident they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because you know, on your side you've got higher level services, you got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, lot improvement. So, okay, nothing's changed. I can still run my job now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the, for the, for the customer there? >>Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud, but if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you wanna utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on premises or even in VMware cloud on aws, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you wanna expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >>Great stuff. I love, love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, cuz people wanna know what's goes on in behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationship? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? You guys just have a zoom meeting, Do you guys fly out, you write go do you ship thing? I mean I'm making it up, but you get the idea, what's the, what's, how does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >>So we hope to get more frequently together in person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to zoom conferences and and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if we are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have reg regular assembled now also in person geo based. So for emia, for the Americas, for aj. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >>What's interesting, you know, as, as events are coming back to here, before you get, you weigh in, I'll comment, as the cube's been going back out to events, we are hearing comments like what, what pandemic we were more productive in the pandemic. I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in person, they're happy to see people, but there's no one's, no one's really missed the beat. I mean it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More if anything, productivity gains. >>Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, even if you look at AWS's and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said met earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation and VMware cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there have been, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology we've been able to still communicate work with our customers. Even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot. We had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware cloud on AWS outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware cloud on AWS outposts. So even with the on premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >>And our last segment we did here on the, on this showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean go, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and, and people can reference that. We won't get into it here, but I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Cuz again, I think right now we're in at a, an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with reinvent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >>So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked us for over the last years. Whenever, whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware cloud on aws, you have to add additional notes. Now we have three different note types with different ratios of compute, storage and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS six one, NetApp onap, and VMware cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements at the upcoming events. >>Samir, what's your, what's your reaction take on the, on what's coming down on your side? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scale with their needs, right? So with VMware cloud on aws, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are gonna be announcements, innovations and whatnot with outcoming events. But together we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS to Daniel's point storage, for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's gonna be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events that's gonna give us the options to even advance our own services together. >>Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I wanna get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in, in the open conversations on the cube is in the old days it was going back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem they did best, had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships and they do business together and they, they sell to each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture cuz we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining. >>And this, you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides. They come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem, you know, interplay. What's your thoughts on this? And, and, and because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much. Innovation is only, you gotta do innovation, but when you do innovation, you gotta integrate it, you gotta connect it. So what is, how do you guys see this as a, as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >>So we are, we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even, even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware cloud on aws moving to the cloud, firstly it's, it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe it's some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise. You can do this if you decide you want to stay with some of your services on premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can mana manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead and it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on premise or the cloud. It it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both works, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware cloud on aws, by the way, in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by aws. More than 200 different services ranging from object based storage, load balancing and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >>We, we call that super cloud in, in a, in a way that we be generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is gonna where cloud is right now, you guys are, are not commodity. Amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things. Having got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. Absolutely. And everybody wins. >>Yeah. And a hundred percent agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it it, it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with aws, maybe more proficient with the viewers technology, but then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud. Maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are. Maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware cloud on aws. Maybe you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skill, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of, back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the >>Day. I mean, I just think it's, it's a, it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything. You still run the fear, the way you working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >>Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you look, not every, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we gave, we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time they can free up resources to develop new innovations and, and grow their business. >>Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Danielle, thank you for coming to Germany, Octoberfest, I know it's evening over there, your weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir final give you the final word, AWS reinvents coming up. Preparing. We're gonna have an exclusive with Adam, but Fry, we do a curtain raise, a dual preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at reinvent this year? The big show? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what I call a chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking for to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there. But if they wanna be hands on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, you know, been in CIS admin world and whatnot, being hands on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. Yeah, >>Reinvents an amazing show for the in person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at the cube. It's becoming popular. We more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media, so thanks, thanks for sharing that. Samir Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud Ons, really accelerating business transformation withs and VMware. I'm John Fur with the cube, thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to this cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware cloud on it's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred and VP of commercial services at aws and NA Ryan Bard, who's the VP and general manager of cloud solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this showcase. >>Great to be here. >>Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. You know, we, we've been covering this VMware cloud on abus since, since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's what's this mean? And depress work were, we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for a D and it continues two years later and I want just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to reinvent, which is only a couple weeks away, feels like tomorrow. But you know, as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? >>I mean, first thing I wanna say is, you know, PBO 2016 was a someon moment and the history of it, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jessey came together to announce this and I think John, you were there at the time I was there, it was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017, the year after that at VM Word back when we called it Word, I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we have learned froms also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we build a service offering now five years old, pretty remarkable journey. You know, in the first years we tried to get across all the regions, you know, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. >>In the second year we started going really on enterprise grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using VSA and NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nine s availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect transit gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. You know, along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two, two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our outposts partnership. We were up on stage at Reinvent, again with Pat Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >>That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And, and this has kind of been the theme for AWS since I can remember from day one. Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting as as, as you always say for the customers here, VMware comes on board, takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat, continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, you know, vSphere and these are, these are big workloads on aws. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >>Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the, the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on Preem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's, that's evolving quickly and, and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the, for the customer. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and, and responding to what customers want. So pretty, pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to bmc. Yeah, >>That's what great value publish. We've been talking about that in context too. Anyone building on top of the cloud, they can have their own supercloud as we call it. If you take advantage of all the CapEx and and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and, and and continues to make in performance IAS and pass all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered, what are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one. We were the earlier doctors of AWS Nitro platform, right? The reinvention of E two back five years ago. And so we have been, you know, having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software defined data center or compute storage networking on EC two, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on aws EC two global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us that customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? And this was somewhat new to VMware, but we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack, stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security batches on top. >>So we took, took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud and aws. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for j debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they put even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean these are large banks, many other customers around the world, super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >>Nora, that's a great, so that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security, you kind of teasing at it, but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera, there's more bits than ever before and, and at at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's gonna be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just, it happens. We saw one with fornet this week, this came outta the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me we see the value when we, when we talk to customers on the cube about this, you know, it was a real, real easy understanding of how, what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the aws. But the question that comes up that we wanna get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >>Well, what's interesting about this is that it's, it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like sap, we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where, where we're improving reliability in, in as a first order of, of principle between both companies. So from an availability and reliability standpoint, it's, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're gonna go help the customer resolve. That works really well >>On the VMware side. What's been the feedback there? What's the, what are some of the updates? >>Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we have a phenomenal backend relationship with aws. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues and, and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The BASKE management that we jointly do, right? All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution. Do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with VMware cloud aws, you know, we are presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >>You know, you had mentioned, I've got a list here, some of the innovations the, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the GOs working, Advanced network, disaster recovery, you know, fed, Fed ramp, public sector certifications, outposts, all good. You guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good, good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in what's on the lists this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the, the new things, the list of accomplishments, people wanna know what's next. They don't wanna see stagnant growth here, they wanna see more action, you know, as as cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications cloud native, you're seeing more and more containers, more and more, you know, more CF C I C D pipe pipelining with with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new, what's the new innovations? >>Absolutely. And I think as a five yearold service offering innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer. First of all, our new platform i four I dot metal, it's isolate based, it's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and aws. At this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally, right? And you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS Fsx, with NetApp on tap, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based, really excited about this offering as well. >>And the second storage offering for VMware cloud Flex Storage, VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware cloud Flex Compute, where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the V C P memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, talk about ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware cloud DR solution. >>A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Knot star for ability to have layer flow through layer seven, you know, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers and sort of at the heart of our office, >>The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better, faster networking, more, more options there. The flex computes. Interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the Drew screen resource defined versus hardware defined? Because this is kind of what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource defined versus hardware defined. What's the, what does that mean? >>Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software defined data centers, right? And so that's been super successful. But we, you know, customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally, right? Lower their costs even more. And so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, you know, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request for fiber machines, five containers, its size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. It's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other, they can go back to that post based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >>It's kind of cloud of flexibility right there. I like the name Fred. Let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind. Let's get into some of the ex, we have some time. I wanna unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like, feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they would start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens and because it it's in the cloud, so, So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started, and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple of use cases? >>Sure. There's a, well there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like you said, as there's more and more bits you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I four and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on a, on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The, the options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanu or with any other container and or services within aws. >>So there's, there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is, is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with tech extract or any other really cool service that has, you know, monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just can't, could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their, their current app base in, in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too, too many here. Yeah. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >>Nora, what's your perspective from the VMware sy? So, you know, you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's, you know, higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where's being rolled out? Cuz you now have a lot of hybrid too, so, so what's your, what's your take on what, what's happening in with customers? >>I mean, it's been phenomenal, the, the customer adoption of this and you know, banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so, you know, I have a couple of really good examples. S and p Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration. Now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the, with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand 1000 workloads to VMware cloud AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal. If you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B, the the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware, VMware cloud, and aws. So that's, you know, one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe that constantly entering new markets with the limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. >>Yeah, it's great to see, I mean the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. So congratulations. One >>Of other, one of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're, they're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is just a, not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is, are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there. And, and this is a big part of it here. >>It's a huge, it's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issues. Another one you see that constrains, I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security, right? I mean, I remember interviewing Stephen Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013, and you know, at that time people were saying the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot you gotta to stay current on, on the isolation there is is hard. So I think, I think the security and supply chain, Fred is, is another one. Do you agree? >>I I absolutely agree. It's, it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and, and have the resources that are available and run them, run them more efficiently. Yeah, and then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is, it is the only P one. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >>And naron your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things, it's really gonna get better. All right, final question. I really wanna thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I wanna kind of end with kind of a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a modern, a new modern shift. It's another, we're seeing another inflection point, we've been documenting it, it's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and, and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's kind of like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What are the, what's, what's changed for the better and where, what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >>I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll tackle it. You know, businesses are complex and they're often unique that that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine manage services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about that's elastic. You, you could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a, at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the, the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only gonna continue to accelerate that. That's my take. All right. >>You got a lot of platform to compete on with, got a lot to build on then you're Ryan, your side, What's your, what's your answer to that question? >>I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constant. I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly, you know, build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently. I think we, we are seeing, you know, we are at the very start of that sort of of journey. Of course we have invested in Kubernetes the means to an end, but there's so much more beyond that's happening in industry. And I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >>Yeah. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions. Whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure at, at your fingertips. Infrastructures, code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen in Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator, again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is kind of changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again, that traction with the VMware customer base and of us getting, getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives, >>I appreciate it. Thank you so >>Much. Okay, thank you John. Okay, this is the Cube and AWS VMware showcase, accelerating business transformation. VMware cloud on aws, jointly engineered solution, bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Fur, your host. Thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special cube presentation of accelerating business transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have dawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on adb. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally is on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications through cloud. Now, VMware cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their goss, bss, PLA platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months. Extremely securely. It's a VMware manage service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customers perspective. >>You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chas, the, and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, ex data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as as well customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, make decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit data centers, come to AWS using vmc or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story, because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on s addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster. And sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school, IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use a data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even, even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And we VMware cloud and AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. DNS is invested in that, right? Yes. We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it i t be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them drop data is, is, is a front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware. There's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I want just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vse platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it it literally use the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called a VMs VMware cloud on AWS using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SaaS app and, and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long these migrations take? Is it easy? Is it it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud and AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing idea operation skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently like, than what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as we cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. This is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelensky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud database and happened very swiftly. >>That's been a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean Oscar see bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day, day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing infrastructure. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, the, they were coming up on a renewal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud ands. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another Corolla to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon foot footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that meant their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the go to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. We >>Can Exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as >>Well. All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can then move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna data clouds, it's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable and then, you know, distribute it in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a, a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be our analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless applic. So list technology, they should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases, they should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them mo modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that the, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architectural list. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage lists, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecturals kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. No, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using, using our area the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through >>Actually, should actually, you're the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best paths to the cloud, right? The, the best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing the, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they wanna exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's a essential first step that we wanna help our customers with >>One director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is a showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

>>Hello everyone. My name is Savannah Peterson, coming to you live from the Kim Con Show floor on the cube here in Detroit, Michigan. The energy is pulsing big event for the Cloud Native Foundation, and I'm joined by John Furrier on my left. John. Hello. >>Great, great, great to have you on the cube. Thanks for being our new host. You look great, Great segment coming up. I'm looking forward to this. Savannah, this is a great segment. A cube alumni, an OG in the cloud, native world or cloud aati. I, as I call it, been there, done that. A lot of respect, a lot of doing some really amazing, I call it the super cloud holy grail. But we'll see >>Your favorite word, >>This favorite word, It's a really strong segment. Looking forward to hearing from this guest. >>Yes, I am very excited and I'm gonna let him tee it up a little bit. But our guest and his project were actually mentioned in the opening keynote this morning, which is very, very exciting. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Baam Tobar Baam, thanks for being here with >>Us. Thank you guys. So good to be back here on the show and, and this exciting energy around us. So it was super, super awesome to be here. >>Yeah, it feels great. So let's start with the opening keynote. Did you know you were gonna get that shout out? >>No, not at all. I, it was, it was really cool to see, you know, I think Cruz was up there talking about how they were building their own platform for autonomous cars and what's running behind it. And they mentioned all these projects and you know, we were like, Wow, that sounds super familiar. And then, then, and then they said, Okay, yeah, we we're, you know, cross plane. They mentioned cross plane, they mentioned, Upbound mentioned the work that we're doing in this space to help folks effectively run, you know, their own layer on top of cloud computing. >>And then Tom, we've known each other, >>We're gonna do a bingo super cloud. So how many times is this Super cloud? So >>Super Cloud is super services, super apps around us. He enables a lot of great things that Brian Grace had a great podcast this week on super services. So it's super, super exciting, >>Super great time on the queue. Super, >>Super >>Cloud conversation. All seriously. Now we've known each other for a long time. You've been to every cub com, you've been in open source, you've seen the seen where it's been, where it is now. Super exciting that in mainstream conversations we're talking about super cloud extractions and around interoperability. Things that were once like really hard to do back, even back on the opens stack days. Now we're at a primetime spot where the control plane, the data planes are in play as a viable architectural component of all the biggest conversations. Yeah, you're in the middle of it. What's your take on it? Give some perspective of why this is so important. >>I mean, look, the key here is to standardize, right? Get to standardization, right? And, and what we saw, like early days of cloud native, it was mostly around Kubernetes, but it was Kubernetes as a, you know, essentially a container orchestrator, the container of wars, Docker, Mesos, et cetera. And then Kubernetes emerged as a, a, the winner in containers, right? But containers is a workload, one kind of workload. It's, I run containers on it, not everything's containers, right? And the, you know, what we're seeing now is the Kubernetes API is emerging as a way to standardize on literally everything in cloud. Not just containers, but you know, VMs, serverless, Lambda, et cetera, storage databases that all using a common approach, a common API layer, a common way to do access control, a common way to do policy, all built around open source projects and you know, the cloud data of ecosystem that you were seeing around here. And that's exciting cuz we've, for the first time we're arriving at some kind of standardization. >>Every major inflection point has this defacto standard evolution, then it becomes kind of commonplace. Great. I agree with Kubernetes. The question I wanted to ask you is what's the impact to the DevOps community? DevSecOps absolutely dominated the playbook, if you will. Developers we're saying we'll run companies cuz they'll be running the applications. It's not a department anymore. Yes, it is the business. If you believe the digital transformation finds its final conclusion, which it will at some point. So more developers doing more, ask more stuff. >>Look, if you, I'd be hard pressed to find somebody that's has a title of DevOps or SRE that can't at least spell Kubernetes, if not running in production, right? And so from that perspective, I think this is a welcome change. Standardize on something that's already familiar to everyone is actually really powerful. They don't have to go, Okay, we learned Kubernetes, now you guys are taking us down a different path of standardization. Or something else has emerged. It's the same thing. It's like we have what, eight years now of cloud native roughly. And, and people in the DevOps space welcome a change where they are basically standardizing on things that are working right? They're actually working right? And they could be used in more use cases, in more scenarios than they're actually, you know, become versatile. They become, you know, ubiquitous as >>You will take a minute to just explain what you guys are selling and doing. What's the product, what's the traction, why are people using you? What's the big, big mo position value statement you guys think? >>Yeah, so, so, so the, my company's called Upbound and where the, where the folks behind the, the cross plane project and cross plane is effective, takes Kubernetes and extends it to beyond containers and to ev managing everything in cloud, right? So if you think about that, if you love the model where you're like, I, I go to Kubernetes cluster and I tell it to run a bunch of containers and it does it for me and I walk away, you can do that for the rest of the surface area of cloud, including your VMs and your storage and across cloud vendors, hybrid models, All of it works in a consistent standardized way, you know, using crossline, right? And I found >>What do you solve? What do you solve or eliminate? What happens? Why does this work? Are you replacing something? Are you extracting away something? Are you changing >>Something? I think we're layering on top of things that people have, right? So, so you'll see people are organized differently. We see a common pattern now where there's shared services teams or platform teams as you hear within enterprises that are responsible for basically managing infrastructure and offering a self-service experience to developers, right? Those teams are all about standardization. They're all about creating things that help them reduce the toil, manage things in a common way, and then offer self-service abstractions to their, you know, developers and customers. So they don't have to be in the middle of every request. Things can go faster. We're seeing a pattern now where the, these teams are standardizing on the Kubernetes API or standardizing on cross plane and standardizing on things that make their life easier, right? They don't have to replace what they're doing, they just have to layer and use it. And I layer it's probably a, an opening for you that makes it sound >>More complex, I think, than what you're actually trying to do. I mean, you as a company are all about velocity as an ethos, which I think is great. Do you think that standardization is the key in increasing velocity for teams leveraging both cross claim, Kubernetes? Anyone here? >>Look, I mean, everybody's trying to achieve the same thing. Everybody wants to go faster, they want to innovate faster. They don't want tech to be the friction to innovation, right? Right. They want, they wanna go from feature to production in minutes, right? And so, or less to that extent, standardization is a way to achieve that. It's not the only way to achieve that. It's, it's means to achieve that. And if you've standardized, that means that less people are involved. You can automate more, you can st you can centralize. And by doing that, that means you can innovate faster. And if you don't innovate these days, you're in trouble. Yeah. You're outta business. >>Do you think that, so Kubernetes has a bit of a reputation for complexity. You're obviously creating a tool that makes things easier as you apply Kubernetes outside just an orchestration and container environment. Do you, what do you see those advantages being across the spectrum of tools that people are leveraging you >>For? Yeah, I mean, look, if Kubernetes is a platform, right? To build other things on top of, and as a, as a result, it's something that's used to kind of on the back end. Like you would never, you should put something in front of Kubernetes as an application model or consumption interface of portals or Right, Yeah. To give zero teams. But you should still capture all your policies, you know, automation and compliance governance at the Kubernetes layer, right? At the, or with cross plane at that layer as well, right? Right. And so if you follow that model, you can get the best of world both worlds. You standardize, you centralize, you are able to have, you know, common controls and policies and everything else, but you can expose something that's a dev friendly experience on top of as well. So you get the both, both the best of both worlds. >>So the problem with infrastructure is code you're saying is, is that it's not this new layer to go across environments. Does that? No, >>Infrastructure is code works slightly differently. I mean, you, you can, you can write, you know, infrastructures, codes using whatever tooling you like to go across environments. The problem with is that everybody has to learn a specific language or has to work with understanding the constructs. There's the beauty of the Kubernetes based approach and the cross playing best approach is that it puts APIs first, right? It's basically saying, look, kind of like the API meant that it, that led to AWS being created, right? Teams should interact with APIs. They're super strong contracts, right? They're visionable. Yeah. And if you, if you do that and that's kind of the power of this approach, then you can actually reach a really high level of automation and a really high level of >>Innovation. And this also just not to bring in the clouds here, but this might bring up the idea that common services create interoperability, but yet the hyper scale clouds could still differentiate on value very much faster processors if it's silicon to better functions if glam, right? I mean, so there's still, it's not killing innovation. >>It is not, And in fact I, you know, this idea of building something that looks like the lowest common denominator across clouds, we don't actually see that in practice, right? People want, people want to use the best services available to them because they don't have time to go, you know, build portability layers and everything else. But they still, even in that model want to standardize on how to call these services, how to set policy on them, how to set access control, how to actually invoke them. If you can standardize on that, you can still, you get the, you get to use these services and you get the benefits of standardization. >>Well Savannah, we were talking about this, about the Berkeley paper that came out in May, which is kind of a super cloud version they call sky computing. Their argument is that if you try to standardize too much like the old kind of OSI model back in the day, you actually gonna, the work innovations gonna stunt the growth. Do you agree with that? And how do you see, because standardization is not so much a spec and it it, it e f thing. It's not an i e committee. Yeah. It's not like that's kind of standard. It's more of defacto, >>I mean look, we've had standards emerge like, you know, if you look at my S SQL for example, and the Postgres movement, like there are now lots of vendors that offer interfaces that support Postgres even though they're differentiated completely on how it's implement. So you see that if you can stick to open interfaces and use services that offer them that tons of differentiation yet still, you know, some kind of open interface if you will. But there are also differentiated services that are, don't have open interfaces and that's okay too. As long as you're able to kind of find a way to manage them in a consistent way. I think you sh and it makes sense to your business, you should use >>Them. So enterprises like this and just not to get into the business model side real quick, but like how you guys making money? You got the project, you get the cross playing project, that's community. You guys charging what's, what's the business model? >>We we're in the business of helping people adopt and run controlled lanes that do all this management service managed service services and customer support and services, the, the plethora of things that people need where we're >>Keeping the project while >>Keeping the project. >>Correct. So that's >>The key. That's correct. Yeah. You have to balance both >>And you're all over the show. I mean, outside of the keynote mention looking here, you have four events on where can people find you if they're tuning in. We're just at the beginning and there's a lot of looks here. >>Upbound at IO is the place to find Upbound and where I have a lot of talks, you'll see Crossline mention and lots of talks and a number of talks today. We have a happy hour later today we've got a booth set up. So >>I'll be there folks. Just fyi >>And everyone will be there now. Yeah. Quick update. What's up? What's new with the cross plane project? Can you share a little commercial? What's the most important stories going on there? >>So cross plane is growing obviously, and we're seeing a ton of adoption of cross plane, especially actually in large enterprise, which is really exciting cuz they're usually the slow to move and cross plane is so central, so it's now in hundreds and thousands of deployments in woohoo, which is amazing to see. And so the, the project itself is adding a ton of features, reducing friction in terms of adoption, how people ride these control planes and alter them coverage of the space. As you know, controls are only useful when you connect them to things. And the space is like the amount of things you can connect control planes to is increasing on a day to day basis and the maturity is increasing. So it's just super exciting to see all of this right >>Now. How would you categorize the landscape? We were just talking earlier in another segment, we're in Detroit Motor City, you know, it's like teaching someone how to drive a car. Kubernetes pluss, okay, switch the gears like, you know, don't hit the other guy. You know? Now once you learn how to drive, they want a sports car. How do you keep them that progression going? How do you keep people to grow continuously? Where do you see the DevOps and or folks that are doing cross playing that are API hardcore? Cause that's a good IQ that shows 'em that they're advancing. Where's the IQ level of advancement relative to the industry? Is the adoption just like, you know, getting going? Are people advancing? Yeah. Sounds like your customers are heavily down the road on >>Yeah, the way I would describe it is there's a progression happening, right? It, it DevOps was make, initially it was like how do I keep things running right? And it transitioned to how do I automate things so that I don't have to be involved when things are running, running. Right now we're seeing a next turn, which is how do I build what looks like a product that offers shared services or a platform so that people consume it like a product, right? Yeah. And now I'm now transition becomes, well I'm an, I'm a developer on a product in operations building something that looks like a product and thinking about it as a, as a has a user interface. >>Ops of the new devs. >>That's correct. Yeah. There we go. >>Talk about layers. Talk about layers on layers on >>Layers. It's not confusing at all John. >>Well, you know, when they have the architecture architectural list product that's coming. Yeah. But this is what's, I mean the Debs are got so much DevOps in the front and the C I C D pipeline, the ops teams are now retrofitting themselves to be data and security mainly. And that's just guardrails, automation policy, seeing a lot of that kind of network. Like exactly. >>Function. >>Yep. And they're, they're composing, not maybe coding a little bit, but they not, they're not >>Very much. They're in the composition, you know that as a daily thing. They're, they're writing compositions, they're building things, they're putting them together and making them work. >>How new is this in your mind? Cause you, you've watching this progress, you're in the middle of it, you're in the front wave of this. Is it adopting faster now than ever before? I mean, if we talked five years ago, we were kind of saying this might happen, but it wasn't happening today. It kind, it is, >>It's kind of, it's kind of amazing. Like, like everybody's writing these cloud services now. Everybody's authoring things that look like API services that do things on top of the structure. That move is very much, has a ton of momentum right now and it's happening mainstream. It, it's becoming mainstream. >>Speaking of momentum, but some I saw both on your LinkedIn as well as on your badge today that you are hiring. This is your opportunity to shamelessly plug. What are you looking for? What can people expect in terms of your company culture? >>Yeah, so we're obviously hiring, we're hiring both on the go to market side or we're hiring on the product and engineering side. If you want to build, well a new cloud platform, I won't say the word super cloud again, but if you want to, if you're excited about building a cloud platform that literally sits on top of, you know, the other cloud platforms and offers services on top of this, come talk to us. We're building something amazing. >>You're creating a super cloud tool kit. I'll say it >>On that note, think John Farer has now managed to get seven uses of the word super cloud into this broadcast. We sawm tomorrow. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. I can't wait to see more of you throughout the course of Cuban. My name is Savannah Peterson, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us here on the Cube where we'll be live from Detroit, Michigan all week.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and AWS. This is the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS Showcase: Accelerating Business Transformation. Here in the Showcase at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later, we got this whole inflection point coming, you're starting to see this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you on the relationship. >> Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced. And then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware Cloud on AWS. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware. You know, one of the key things... Together, day in, day out, as far as advancing VMware Cloud on AWS. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with the solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements. You know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right, more recently. One of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware Cloud on AWS. And even with VMware to other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware Cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware Cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint, there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >> Great stuff. Daniel, I want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly VMworld, talking about how the workloads on IT has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AIOps, you got ITOps changing a lot, you got a lot more automation, edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the relationship? >> So at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware Cloud and AWS, we are also enabling us mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. That's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware Cloud on AWS. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, security, writing code, composing. You know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing, what are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >> That's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, "Well, we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service. Recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure." That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on-premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >> Samir, talk about your perspective. I want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of the confluence of industrial IoT, software, physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code, automation, you know, "Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster." Yeah, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services, meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. Yeah, totally, right? And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware Cloud on AWS, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you want to leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's going to give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with IoT, even with utilizing Alexa, or if there's any other service that you want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology even in your business. Leaders are looking to reinvent their business, they're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy, maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. >> Okay. >> Then also- >> Oh, go ahead, finish your thought. >> No, no, no, I was going to say what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that vStor admin that's used to their on-premises environment. Now with VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent coming up, the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators, and it's like hundreds of thousands of users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put my career in the next 10 to 15 years." And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm going to be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet. Architects, is it solution architect, SRE? So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to get your thoughts, how would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity? And what's going to happen? >> So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the answer is to make digital transformation a success, we need not just to talk about technology, but also about process, people, and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware Cloud on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment, you can use the same managing and monitoring tools, if you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware Cloud on AWS. And that gives not just leaders, but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. So, okay, nothing's changed, I can still run my job, now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the customer there? >> Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware Cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud. But if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you want to utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on-premises or even in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. How does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >> So we hope to get more frequently together in-person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to Zoom conferences and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >> What's interesting, you know, as events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "What pandemic? We were more productive in the pandemic." I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in-person, they're happy to see people, but no one's really missed the beat. I mean, it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More, if anything, productivity gains. >> Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is even if you look at AWS's, and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said and meant earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in-person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology, we've been able to still communicate, work with our customers, even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot, we had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. So even with the on-premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and people can reference that, we won't get into it here. But I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >> So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node types with different ratios of compute, storage, and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP and VMware Cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements, at the upcoming events. >> Samir, what's your reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming events. But together, we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS. To Daniel's point, storage for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right? Now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware Cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's going to be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events, that's going to give us the options to even advance our own services together. >> Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships, and they do business together and they sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides, they come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise, you can do this. If you decide you want to stay with some of your services on-premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either way in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich, later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by AWS, more than 200 different services ranging from object-based storage, load balancing, and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >> We call that super cloud in the way that we generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. >> Absolutely. >> And everybody wins. >> Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with AWS, maybe more proficient with the VMware's technology. But then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud, maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are, maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware Cloud on AWS. Maybe you want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the day. >> I mean, I just think it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean you don't have to do anything. You still run it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time, they can free up resources to develop new innovations and grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what are called chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin world and whatnot, being hands-on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. >> Yeah, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So thanks for sharing that. Samir, Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the Showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)