>> Okay. We're back here. theCube and all the action here in Mobile World Congress, cloud city, I'm John ferry, host of the cube. We've got a great remote interviews. Of course, it's a hybrid event here in the cube. And of course, cloud city's bringing all the physical face-to-face and we're going to get the remote interviews. Peter Adderton, founder, chairman, CEO of Mobile X Global. Nicholas Gerrard, founder and CEO of OxyGo. Gentlemen, thank you for coming in remotely onto the cube here in the middle of cloud city. You missed Bon Jovi last night, he was awesome. The little acoustic unplugged and all the action. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right, Peter and Nicholas, if you don't mind, just take a quick 30 seconds to set the table on what you guys do, your business and your focus here at Mobile World Congress. >> So I'll jump in quickly. Being the Australian, I'll go first, but just quick by way of background, I founded a company called Boost Mobile, which is one of the, is now the fourth largest mobile brand in, in America. And I spent a lot of time managing effort in that, in that space and now launching Mobile X, which is kind of the first cloud AI platform that we're going to build for mobile. >> Awesome. Nicholas. >> So I'm a founder of a company called, Ox Fuel where we do is basically a telecommunity service platform for brands to basically incorporate telecom as part of their services and learn from their customers through what we call a telecom business intelligence. So basically making sense of the telecom data to improve their business across retail, financial services or in-demand economy. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for the setup. Peter, I want to ask you first, if you don't mind, the business models in the telecom area is really becoming, not just operate, but build and build new software enabled software defined just cloud-based software. And this has been a change in mindset, not so much a change so much in the actual topologies per se, or the actual investments, but as a change in personnel. What's your take on this whole cloud powering the change in the future of telco? >> Well, I think you've got to look at where the telcos have come from in order to understand where they're going in the future. And where they've come from is basically using other people's technology to try to create a differentiation. And I think that that's the struggle that they're going to have. They talk about wanting to convert themselves from telcos into techcos. I just think it's a leap too far for the carriers to do that. So I think we're going to see, you know, them pushing 5G, which you see they're doing out there right now. Then they start talking about open rand and cloud and, and at the end of the day, all they want to do is basically sell you a plan, give you a phone attached to that and try to make as much money out of you as they possibly can. And they disguise that basically in the whole technology 5G open rand discussion, but they really, I don't think care. And at the end of the day, I don't think the consumers care, their model isn't built around technology. The model is built around selling your data and, and that's their fundamental principle and how they do that. And I've seen them go through from 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. Every G we see come out has a promise of something new and incredible. But what we basically get is a data plan with the minutes. Right? >> Yeah, yeah I totally right on. And I think we're going to get into the whole edge piece of what that's going to open up when you start thinking about what, what the capabilities are and this new stakeholders who are going to have an interest in the trillions of dollars on the table right now, up for grabs. But Nicholas wanted to get to you on this whole digital-first thing, because one of the things we've been saying on theCube and interviewing folks and riffing on is: If digital drives more value and there's new use cases that are going to bring on, that's going to enabled by software. There's now new stakeholders coming and saying, Hey, you know what? I need more than just a pipe. I need more than just the network. I need to actually run healthcare. I need to run education on the edge. These are now industrial and consumer related use cases. I mean, this is software. This is where software and apps shine. So cloud native can enable that. So what's your take on the industry as they start to wake up and say, holy shit, this is going to be pretty massive when you look at what's coming. Not so much what's going to be replatformed, but what's coming. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's where I kind join Peter on this. There's been pretty significant, heavy innovation on the carrier side for, you know, if you think about it 30 years or so of like just reselling plans effectively, which is a virtual slice of the network that built. And all of a sudden they started competing against, you know, the heavyweights on the internet. We had, putting the bar really high in terms of, you know, latency in terms of expectation, in terms of APIs, right? We've we've heard about telecom APIs for 15 years, right? It's- nothing comes close to what you could get if you start building on top of a Stripe or a Google. So I think, it's going to be hard for a lot of those companies. What we do with our show is we try to bridge that gap. Right, we try to build on top of their infrastructure to be able to expose modern APIs, to be able to open up a programmatic interface so that innovators like Peter's are able to actually really take the user experience forward and start, building those specialized businesses across healthcare, financial services, and whatnot. >> Yeah, David Blanca and I were on the, on theCube yesterday talking about how Snowflake, a company that basically sits on top of Amazon built almost nothing on the infrastructure. Built on top of it and was successful. Peter, this is a growth thing. One of the things I want to get your thoughts on is you've had experiences in growing companies. How do you look at the growth coming into this market, Peter, because you know, you got to have new opportunities coming in. It's a growth play too. It's not just take share from someone. It's net new capabilities. >> Yeah. Here's the issue you've got with the wireless industry is that there's only a very few amount of them that actually have that last mile covered. So if you're going to build something on top of it, you're going to have to deal with the carrier, and the carrier as out of like a duopoly slash monopoly, because without their access to their network, you're not going to be able to do these incredible things. So I think we've got a real challenge there where you're going to have to get the carriers to innovate. Now you've got the CEO of Deutsche Telekom coming out yesterday saying that the OTT players aren't paying their fair share. Right, and I sit back and go, well, hang on. You're selling data to customers who basically are using that data to use apps and OTT. And now he's saying, well, they should pay as well. So not only the consumer pay, but now the OTT players should pay. It's a mixed message. So what you're going to have to do, and what we're going to have to do as a, as a growth industry is we're going to have to allow it to grow. And the only way to do that is that the carriers are going to have to have better access, allow more access to their networks, as Nico said, let the APIs has become more available. I just think that that's a leap too far. So I think we're going to be handicapped in our growth based on these carriers. And it's going to take regulators and it's going to take innovation and consumers demanding carriers, do it, otherwise, you know, you're still going to deal with the three carriers in your world. >> Yeah, That's interesting about- I was just talking to Danielle Royce, the DR here at TelcoDR. And she said, I was talking about ORAN and there's more infrastructure than needed. She said, oh, it's more software. I don't disagree with her. I do agree with it. But I also think that the ORAN points to, Nicholas, kind of this idea that there's more surface area to be had on the scale side. So standardizing hardware creates a lower fixed cost, so you can get some cost reduction. And then with standardized software, you get more enablement for hardened openness. I mean, open source is already proven. You can still be secure. And obviously Cloud was once said, could never be secure and most, is probably more secure than anything. What's your take on this whole ORAN commodity standardization mission- efforts? >> I think it's a, I mean, it goes along to the second phase, right? Of what the differentiation in telecom was, you know. Early on, specialized boxes that are very expensive. You know, that you, you, you, you get from a few vendors, then you have the transition over to a software. We lower the price, as you were mentioning. It can run on off the shelf hardware. And then we're in the transition, which is what Danielle is, is evangelizing, right. Transition towards the cloud and specifically the public cloud, because there's no such thing as a private cloud really. And, and so up and running is just another, another piece where you can make the Legos connect better effectively and just have more flexibility. And generally the, the, the game here is to also break the agenda when you- from, from the vendors, right? Because now you have a standard, so you don't necessarily need to buy the entire stack from, from the same vendors. You have a lot more flexibility. You know, you've probably followed the same debate that we've all seen, right. With a push against Huawei, for instance. Th-this is extremely hard for an operator, to start ripping out an entire vendor, because most of the time, they, they own the entire stack. But something like ORAN, now you can start mixing and matching with different vendors, but generally this is also a trend that's going to accelerate the move towards the public cloud. >> That's awesome. Peter, I want to get your thoughts because you're basically building on the cloud. And if you don't mind chime it in to kind of end the segment on this one point. People are trying to really get their minds around what refactoring means. And we've been saying, and talking about, you know, the three phases of, of waking up to the world. Reset your business, or reboot. Replatform to the cloud, and then refactor, which means take advantage of cloud enabled things, whether it's AI and other things. But first get on the platform, understand the economics, and then replatform. So the question, Peter, we'll start with you. What does refactoring actually mean and look like in a successful future execution or playbook? Can you share your thoughts, because this is what people want to get to because that's where the value will come from. That's where the iteration gets you. What's your take on this refactoring? >> Yeah, yeah. So I always, I mean, we're in the consumer business, so I'm always about what is the difference going to make for the consumer? So, whether you're, and when you look at refactoring and you look at what's happening in the space. Is what is the difference that's going to, what are the consumers going to see that's different and are they willing to pay for that? And so we can strip away the technical layers and we all get caught up in the industry with these buzzwords and terms, and we get, and at the end of the day, when it moves to the consumer, the consumer just sits there and says, so what's the value? How much am I paying? And so what we're trying to do at MobileX is, we're trying to use the cloud and we're trying to use kind of innovation into create a better experience for the consumer. One way to do that is to basically help the customer, understand their usage patents. You know, right now today, they don't understand that. Right if I asked you how much you paid for your mobile bill, you will tell me my cell phone bill is $150, but I'm going to ask you the next question How much data do you use? You go, I don't know, right? >> John: unlimited. >> And then I'd say why am I started- well you'd say limited, right. I will go. I'd go, I don't know. So I sit back and go, most customers are like you. You're basically paying for a service that you have no clear, no idea what you're getting. And it's designed by the carriers to scare you into thinking you need it. So I think we've got to get away from the buzzwords that we use as an industry and just dumb that down to what, what does that mean for a consumer? And I think that the cloud is going to allow us to create some very unique ways for consumers to interact with their device and their usage of that device. And I think that that's the holy grail for me. >> Yeah. That's a great point. And it's worth calling out because I think if the cloud can get you a 10X value at, at a reduction in costs compared to the competition, that's one benefit that people will pay for. And the other one is just, Hey, that's really cool. I want I'll, I value that, that's a valuable thing. I'll pay for it. So it's interesting that the cloud scale there, it's just a good mindset. >> Yeah. So it's always, I always like say to people, you know, I've spoken a lot to the Dish guys about what open rand is going to do and I keep saying to them, so what's the value that I'm going to get from a consumer. And they'll say, oh it's flexible pricing plans. They're now starting to talk about, okay, what the end product is of this technology. You look at ECM, right? ECM has been around for a long time. It's only now that we're to see ECM technology, get enabled. The carriers fought that for a long, long time. So there's a monumental shift that needs to take place. And it's in the four or five carriers in our counties. >> Awesome. Nicholas, what's your take on refactoring? Obviously, you know, you've got APIs, you've got all this cool software enabled. How do you get to refactoring and how do you execute through that? >> I mean, it's a little bit of a, what Peter was saying as well, right? There's the, the advantage of that point is to be, you know, all our stuff basically lives in the cloud, right. So it's opportunity to, to get that closer, you know, just having better latency, making sure that, you know, you're not losing your, your photos and your data as you lose your phone and yep. Just bet- better access in general. I, I think ultimately like the, the push to the cloud right now is it's mostly just a cost reduction. The back tick, as far as the carriers are concerned, right. They don't necessarily see how they can build that break. And then from there start interacting with the rest of the OTT world and, and, you know, Netflix is built on Amazon and companies like that, right? Like, so as you're able to get closer as a carrier to that cloud where the data lives, this is also just empowering better digital experience. >> Yeah I think that's where the that's, the proof point will be there, as they say, that's where the rubber will meet the road or proof is in the pudding, whatever expression. Once they get to that cost reduction, if they can wake up to that, whoa we can actually do something better here and make m- or if they don't someone else will. Right. That's the whole point. So, final question as we wrap up, ecosystem changeover. Lot more ecosystem action. I mean, there's a lot of vendors here at Mobile Congress, but real quick, Peter, Nicholas, your take on the future of ecosystem around this new telco. Peter, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I look, I mean, it, it, again, it keeps coming back to, to, to where I say that consumers have driven all the ecosystems that have ever existed. And when I say consumers also to IOT as well, right? So it's not just the B to C it's also B to B. So look to the consumer and look to the business to see what pain points you can solve. And that will create the ecosystems. None of us bet on Uber, none of us bet on Airbnb. Otherwise we'd all be a lot richer than we are today. So none of us took that platform- and by the way, we've been in mobile and wireless and any kind of that space smartphone space for a long time. And we will miss those applications. And if you ask a CEO today of a telco, what's the 5G killer application, that's going to send 5G into the next atmosphere, they can't answer the question. They'll talk about drones and robotic surgeries and all things that basically will never have any value to a consumer at the end of the day. So I think we've got to go back to the consumer and that's where my focus is and say, how do we make their lives better? And that will create the ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, they go for the low hanging fruit. Low latency and, and whatnot. But yeah, let's, it's going to be, it's going to be, we'll see what happens. Nicolas your take on ecosystems as they develop. A lot more integrations and not customization. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think so too. I mean, I think going back to, you know, again like 20- 20 years ago, the network was the product conductivity to the product. Today it's a, it's a building block, right? Something that you integrate that's part of your experience. So the same way we're seeing like conversions between telecom and financial services. Right? You see a lot of telcos trying to be banks. Banks and fintechs trying to be telcos. It's, it's a blending of that, right? So it, at the end of the day, it's like, why, what is the experience? What is the above and beyond the conductivity? Because customers, at this point, it's just not differentiated based on conductivity, kind of become just a busy commodity. So even as you look at what Peter is building, right, this, what is the experience above and beyond just buying a plan that I get out of it, or if you are a media company, you know, how do I pair my content or resolve real problems? Like for instance, we work a lot to the NBA and TikTok. They get into markets where, you know, having a video product at the end and people not being well-connected, that's a problem, right? So it's an opportunity for them to bring the building block into their ecosystem and start offering solutions that are a different shape. >> Awesome. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Both of you, both experienced entrepreneurs and executives riding the wave on the right side of history, I believe. Thanks for coming on theCube, I appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> If you're not riding the wave the right way, you're driftwood. And we're going to toss it back to the studio. Adam and the team, take it from here.

>>My name is Dave Volonte, and with me are two world class technologists, visionaries and entrepreneurs. And Wa Dodgeville is the he co founded Snowflake, and he's now the president of the product division. And Florian Duetto is the co founder and CEO of Data Aiko. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube to first timers. Love it. >>Great to be here >>now, Florian you and Ben Wa You have a number of customers in common. And I have said many times on the Cube that you know, the first era of cloud was really about infrastructure, making it more agile, taking out costs. And the next generation of innovation is really coming from the application of machine intelligence to data with the cloud is really the scale platform. So is that premise your relevant to you? Do you buy that? And and why do you think snowflake and data ICU make a good match for customers? >>I think that because it's our values that are aligned when it's all about actually today allowing complexity for customers. So you close the gap or the democratizing access to data access to technology. It's not only about data data is important, but it's also about the impact of data. Who can you make the best out of data as fast as possible as easily as possible within an organization. And another value is about just the openness of the platform building the future together? Uh, I think a platform that is not just about the platform but also full ecosystem of partners around it, bringing the level off accessibility and flexibility you need for the 10 years away. >>Yeah, so that's key. But it's not just data. It's turning data into insights. Have been why you came out of the world of very powerful but highly complex databases. And we know we all know that you and the snowflake team you get very high marks for really radically simplifying customers lives. But can you talk specifically about the types of challenges that your customers air using snowflake to solve? >>Yeah, so So the really the challenge, you know, be four. Snowflake. I would say waas really? To put all the data, you know, in one place and run all the computers, all the workloads that you wanted to run, You know, against that data and off course, you know, existing legacy platforms. We're not able to support. You know that level of concurrency, Many workload. You know, we we talk about machine learning that a science that are engendering, you know, that our house big data were closed or running in one place didn't make sense at all. And therefore, you know what customers did is to create silos, silos of data everywhere, you know, with different system having a subset of the data. And of course, now you cannot analyze this data in one place. So, snowflake, we really solve that problem by creating a single, you know, architectural where you can put all the data in the cloud. So it's a really cloud native we really thought about You know how to solve that problem, how to create, you know, leverage, Cloud and the lessee cc off cloud to really put all the die in one place, but at the same time not run all workload at the same place. So each workload that runs in Snowflake that is dedicated, You know, computer resource is to run, and that makes it very Ajai, right? You know, Floyd and talk about, you know, data scientists having to run analysis, so they need you know a lot of compute resources, but only for, you know, a few hours on. Do you know, with snowflake they can run these new work lord at this workload to the system, get the compute resources that they need to run this workload. And when it's over, they can shut down. You know that their system, it will be automatically shut down. Therefore, they would not pay for the resources that they don't use. So it's a very Ajai system where you can do this, analyzes when you need, and you have all the power to run all this workload at the same time. >>Well, it's profound what you guys built to me. I mean, of course, everybody's trying to copy it now. It was like, remember that bringing the notion of bringing compute to the data and the Hadoop days, and I think that that Asai say everybody is sort of following your suit now are trying to Florian I gotta say the first data scientist I ever interviewed on the Cube was amazing. Hilary Mason, right after she started a bit Lee. And, you know, she made data science that sounds so compelling. But data science is hard. So same same question for you. What do you see is the biggest challenges for customers that they're facing with data science. >>The biggest challenge, from my perspective, is that owns you solve the issue of the data. Seidel with snowflake, you don't want to bring another Seidel, which would be a side off skills. Essentially, there is to the talent gap between the talented label of the market, or are it is to actually find recruits trained data scientist on what needs to be done. And so you need actually to simplify the access to technologies such as every organization can make it, whatever the talent, by bridging that gap and to get there, there is a need of actually breaking up the silos. And in a collaborative approach where technologists and business work together and actually put some their hands into those data projects together, >>it makes sense for flooring. Let's stay with you for a minute. If I can your observation spaces, you know it's pretty, pretty global, and and so you have a unique perspective on how companies around the world might be using data and data science. Are you seeing any trends may be differences between regions or maybe within different industries. What are you seeing? >>Yes. Yeah, definitely. I do see trends that are not geographic that much, but much more in terms of maturity of certain industries and certain sectors, which are that certain industries invested a lot in terms of data, data access, ability to start data in the last few years and no age, a level of maturity where they can invest more and get to the next steps. And it's really rely on the ability of certain medial certain organization actually to have built this long term strategy a few years ago and no start raping up the benefits. >>You know, a decade ago, Florian Hal Varian, we, you know, famously said that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And then everybody sort of change that to data scientists and then everybody. All the statisticians became data scientists, and they got a raise. But data science requires more than just statistics acumen. What what skills >>do >>you see as critical for the next generation of data science? >>Yeah, it's a good question because I think the first generation of the patient is became the licenses because they could done some pipe and quickly on be flexible. And I think that the skills or the next generation of data sentences will definitely be different. It will be first about being able to speak the language of the business, meaning, oh, you translate data inside predictive modeling all of this into actionable insight or business impact. And it would be about you collaborate with the rest of the business. It's not just a farce. You can build something off fast. You can do a notebook in python or your credit models off themselves. It's about, oh, you actually build this bridge with the business. And obviously those things are important. But we also has become the center of the fact that technology will evolve in the future. There will be new tools and technologies, and they will still need to keep this level of flexibility and get to understand quickly, quickly. What are the next tools they need to use the new languages or whatever to get there. >>As you look back on 2020 what are you thinking? What are you telling people as we head into next year? >>Yeah, I I think it's Zaveri interesting, right? We did this crisis, as has told us that the world really can change from one day to the next. And this has, you know, dramatic, you know, and perform the, you know, aspect. For example, companies all the sudden, you know, So their revenue line, you know, dropping. And they had to do less meat data. Some of the companies was the reverse, right? All the sudden, you know, they were online, like in stock out, for example, and their business, you know, completely, you know, change, you know, from one day to the other. So this GT off, You know, I, you know, adjusting the resource is that you have tow the task a need that can change, you know, using solution like snowflakes, you know, really has that. And we saw, you know, both in in our customers some customers from one day to the to do the next where, you know, growing like big time because they benefited, you know, from from from from co vid and their business benefited, but also, as you know, had to drop. And what is nice with with with cloud, it allows to, you know, I just compute resources toe, you know, to your business needs, you know, and really adjusted, you know, in our, uh, the the other aspect is is understanding what is happening, right? You need to analyze the we saw all these all our customers basically wanted to understand. What is that going to be the impact on my business? How can I adapt? How can I adjust? And and for that, they needed to analyze data. And, of course, a lot of data which are not necessarily data about, you know, their business, but also data from the outside. You know, for example, coffee data, You know, where is the States? You know, what is the impact? You know, geographic impact from covitz, You know, all the time and access to this data is critical. So this is, you know, the promise off the data crowd, right? You know, having one single place where you can put all the data off the world. So our customers, all the Children you know, started to consume the cov data from our that our marketplace and and we had the literally thousands of customers looking at this data analyzing this data, uh, to make good decisions So this agility and and and this, you know, adapt adapting, you know, from from one hour to the next is really critical. And that goes, you know, with data with crowding adjusting, resource is on and that's, you know, doesn't exist on premise. So So So indeed, I think the lesson learned is is we are living in a world which machines changing all the time and we have for understanding We have to adjust and and And that's why cloud, you know, somewhere it's great. >>Excellent. Thank you. You know the kid we like to talk about disruption, of course. Who doesn't on And also, I mean, you look at a I and and the impact that is beginning to have and kind of pre co vid. You look at some of the industries that were getting disrupted by, you know, we talked about digital transformation and you had on the one end of the spectrum industries like publishing which are highly disrupted or taxis. And you could say Okay, well, that's, you know, bits versus Adam, the old Negroponte thing. But then the flip side of that look at financial services that hadn't been dramatically disrupted. Certainly healthcare, which is ripe for disruption Defense. So the number number of industries that really hadn't leaned into digital transformation If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Not on my watch. There was this complacency and then, >>of >>course, co vid broke everything. So, florian, I wonder if you could comment? You know what industry or industries do you think you're gonna be most impacted by data science and what I call machine intelligence or a I in the coming years and decades? >>Honestly, I think it's all of them artist, most of them because for some industries, the impact is very visible because we're talking about brand new products, drones like cars or whatever that are very visible for us. But for others, we are talking about sport from changes in the way you operate as an organization, even if financial industry itself doesn't seems to be so impacted when you look it from the consumer side or the outside. In fact, internally, it's probably impacted just because the way you use data on developer for flexibility, you need the kind off cost gay you can get by leveraging the latest technologies is just enormous, and so it will actually transform the industry that also and overall, I think that 2020 is only a where, from the perspective of a I and analytics, we understood this idea of maturity and resilience, maturity, meaning that when you've got a crisis, you actually need data and ai more than before. You need to actually call the people from data in the room to take better decisions and look for a while and not background. And I think that's a very important learning from 2020 that will tell things about 2021 and the resilience it's like, Yeah, Data Analytics today is a function consuming every industries and is so important that it's something that needs to work. So the infrastructure is to work in frustration in super resilient. So probably not on prime on a fully and prime at some point and the kind of residence where you need to be able to plan for literally anything like no hypothesis in terms of behaviors can be taken for granted. And that's something that is new and which is just signaling that we're just getting to the next step for the analytics. >>I wonder, Benoit, if you have anything to add to that. I mean, I often wonder, you know, winter machine's gonna be able to make better diagnoses than doctors. Some people say already, you know? Well, the financial services traditional banks lose control of payment systems. Uh, you know what's gonna happen to big retail stores? I mean, maybe bring us home with maybe some of your final thoughts. >>Yeah, I would say, you know, I I don't see that as a negative, right? The human being will always be involved very closely, but the machine and the data can really have, you know, see, Coalition, you know, in the data that that would be impossible for for for human being alone, you know, you know, to to discover so So I think it's going to be a compliment, not a replacement on. Do you know everything that has made us you know faster, you know, doesn't mean that that we have less work to do. It means that we can doom or and and we have so much, you know, to do, uh, that that I would not be worried about, You know, the effect off being more efficient and and and better at at our you know, work. And indeed, you know, I fundamentally think that that data, you know, processing off images and doing, you know, I ai on on on these images and discovering, you know, patterns and and potentially flagging, you know, disease, where all year that then it was possible is going toe have a huge impact in in health care, Onda and And as as as Ryan was saying, every you know, every industry is going to be impacted by by that technology. So So, yeah, I'm very optimistic. >>Great guys. I wish we had more time. I gotta leave it there. But so thanks so much for coming on. The Cube was really a pleasure having you.

>> My name is Dave Vellante. And with me are two world-class technologists, visionaries and entrepreneurs. Benoit Dageville, he co-founded Snowflake and he's now the President of the Product Division, and Florian Douetteau is the Co-founder and CEO of Dataiku. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube to first timers, love it. >> Yup, great to be here. >> Now Florian you and Benoit, you have a number of customers in common, and I've said many times on theCUBE, that the first era of cloud was really about infrastructure, making it more agile, taking out costs. And the next generation of innovation, is really coming from the application of machine intelligence to data with the cloud, is really the scale platform. So is that premise relevant to you, do you buy that? And why do you think Snowflake, and Dataiku make a good match for customers? >> I think that because it's our values that aligned, when it gets all about actually today, and knowing complexity of our customers, so you close the gap. Where we need to commoditize the access to data, the access to technology, it's not only about data. Data is important, but it's also about the impacts of data. How can you make the best out of data as fast as possible, as easily as possible, within an organization. And another value is about just the openness of the platform, building a future together. Having a platform that is not just about the platform, but also for the ecosystem of partners around it, bringing the level of accessibility, and flexibility you need for the 10 years of that. >> Yeah, so that's key, that it's not just data. It's turning data into insights. Now Benoit, you came out of the world of very powerful, but highly complex databases. And we know we all know that you and the Snowflake team, you get very high marks for really radically simplifying customers' lives. But can you talk specifically about the types of challenges that your customers are using Snowflake to solve? >> Yeah, so the challenge before snowflake, I would say, was really to put all the data in one place, and run all the computes, all the workloads that you wanted to run against that data. And of course existing legacy platforms were not able to support that level of concurrency, many workload, we talk about machine learning, data science, data engineering, data warehouse, big data workloads, all running in one place didn't make sense at all. And therefore be what customers did this to create silos, silos of data everywhere, with different system, having a subset of the data. And of course now, you cannot analyze this data in one place. So Snowflake, we really solved that problem by creating a single architecture where you can put all the data into cloud. So it's a really cloud native. We really thought about how solve that problem, how to create, leverage cloud, and the elasticity of cloud to really put all the data in one place. But at the same time, not run all workload at the same place. So each workload that runs in Snowflake, at its dedicated compute resources to run. And that makes it agile, right? Florian talked about data scientist having to run analysis, so they need a lot of compute resources, but only for a few hours. And with Snowflake, they can run these new workload, add this workload to the system, get the compute resources that they need to run this workload. And then when it's over, they can shut down their system, it will automatically shut down. Therefore they would not pay for the resources that they don't use. So it's a very agile system, where you can do this analysis when you need, and you have all the power to run all these workload at the same time. >> Well, it's profound what you guys built. I mean to me, I mean of course everybody's trying to copy it now, it was like, I remember that bringing the notion of bringing compute to the data, in the Hadoop days. And I think that, as I say, everybody is sort of following your suit now or trying to. Florian, I got to say the first data scientist I ever interviewed on theCUBE, it was the amazing Hillary Mason, right after she started at Bitly, and she made data sciences sounds so compelling, but data science is a hard. So same question for you, what do you see as the biggest challenges for customers that they're facing with data science? >> The biggest challenge from my perspective, is that once you solve the issue of the data silo, with Snowflake, you don't want to bring another silo, which will be a silo of skills. And essentially, thanks to the talent gap, between the talent available to the markets, or are released to actually find recruits, train data scientists, and what needs to be done. And so you need actually to simplify the access to technologies such as, every organization can make it, whatever the talent, by bridging that gap. And to get there, there's a need of actually backing up the silos. Having a collaborative approach, where technologies and business work together, and actually all puts up their ends into those data projects together. >> It makes sense, Florain let's stay with you for a minute, if I can. Your observation space, it's pretty, pretty global. And so you have a unique perspective on how can companies around the world might be using data, and data science. Are you seeing any trends, maybe differences between regions, or maybe within different industries? What are you seeing? >> Yeah, definitely I do see trends that are not geographic, that much, but much more in terms of maturity of certain industries and certain sectors. Which are, that certain industries invested a lot, in terms of data, data access, ability to store data. As well as experience, and know region level of maturity, where they can invest more, and get to the next steps. And it's really relying on the ability of certain leaders, certain organizations, actually, to have built these long-term data strategy, a few years ago when no stats reaping of the benefits. >> A decade ago, Florian, Hal Varian famously said that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And then everybody sort of changed that to data scientist. And then everybody, all the statisticians became data scientists, and they got a raise. But data science requires more than just statistics acumen. What skills do you see as critical for the next generation of data science? >> Yeah, it's a great question because I think the first generation of data scientists, became data scientists because they could have done some Python quickly, and be flexible. And I think that the skills of the next generation of data scientists will definitely be different. It will be, first of all, being able to speak the language of the business, meaning how you translates data insight, predictive modeling, all of this into actionable insights of business impact. And it would be about how you collaborate with the rest of the business. It's not just how fast you can build something, how fast you can do a notebook in Python, or do predictive models of some sorts. It's about how you actually build this bridge with the business, and obviously those things are important, but we also must be cognizant of the fact that technology will evolve in the future. There will be new tools, new technologies, and they will still need to keep this level of flexibility to understand quickly what are the next tools they need to use a new languages, or whatever to get there. >> As you look back on 2020, what are you thinking? What are you telling people as we head into next year? >> Yeah, I think it's very interesting, right? This crises has told us that the world really can change from one day to the next. And this has dramatic and perform the aspects. For example companies all of a sudden, show their revenue line dropping, and they had to do less with data. And some other companies was the reverse, right? All of a sudden, they were online like Instacart, for example, and their business completely changed from one day to the other. So this agility of adjusting the resources that you have to do the task, and need that can change, using solution like Snowflake really helps that. Then we saw both in our customers. Some customers from one day to the next, were growing like big time, because they benefited from COVID, and their business benefited. But others had to drop. And what is nice with cloud, it allows you to adjust compute resources to your business needs, and really address it in house. The other aspect is understanding what happening, right? You need to analyze. We saw all our customers basically, wanted to understand what is the going to be the impact on my business? How can I adapt? How can I adjust? And for that, they needed to analyze data. And of course, a lot of data which are not necessarily data about their business, but also they are from the outside. For example, COVID data, where is the States, what is the impact, geographic impact on COVID, the time. And access to this data is critical. So this is the premise of the data cloud, right? Having one single place, where you can put all the data of the world. So our customer obviously then, started to consume the COVID data from that our data marketplace. And we had delete already thousand customers looking at this data, analyzing these data, and to make good decisions. So this agility and this, adapting from one hour to the next is really critical. And that goes with data, with cloud, with interesting resources, and that doesn't exist on premise. So indeed I think the lesson learned is we are living in a world, which is changing all the time, and we have to understand it. We have to adjust, and that's why cloud some ways is great. >> Excellent thank you. In theCUBE we like to talk about disruption, of course, who doesn't? And also, I mean, you look at AI, and the impact that it's beginning to have, and kind of pre-COVID. You look at some of the industries that were getting disrupted by, everyone talks about digital transformation. And you had on the one end of the spectrum, industries like publishing, which are highly disrupted, or taxis. And you can say, okay, well that's Bits versus Adam, the old Negroponte thing. But then the flip side of, you say look at financial services that hadn't been dramatically disrupted, certainly healthcare, which is ripe for disruption, defense. So there a number of industries that really hadn't leaned into digital transformation, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Not on my watch. There was this complacency. And then of course COVID broke everything. So Florian I wonder if you could comment, what industry or industries do you think are going to be most impacted by data science, and what I call machine intelligence, or AI, in the coming years and decade? >> Honestly, I think it's all of them, or at least most of them, because for some industries, the impact is very visible, because we have talking about brand new products, drones, flying cars, or whatever that are very visible for us. But for others, we are talking about a part from changes in the way you operate as an organization. Even if financial industry itself doesn't seem to be so impacted, when you look at it from the consumer side, or the outside insights in Germany, it's probably impacted just because the way you use data (mumbles) for flexibility you need. Is there kind of the cost gain you can get by leveraging the latest technologies, is just the numbers. And so it's will actually comes from the industry that also. And overall, I think that 2020, is a year where, from the perspective of AI and analytics, we understood this idea of maturity and resilience, maturity meaning that when you've got to crisis you actually need data and AI more than before, you need to actually call the people from data in the room to take better decisions, and look for one and a backlog. And I think that's a very important learning from 2020, that will tell things about 2021. And the resilience, it's like, data analytics today is a function transforming every industries, and is so important that it's something that needs to work. So the infrastructure needs to work, the infrastructure needs to be super resilient, so probably not on prem or not fully on prem, at some point. And the kind of resilience where you need to be able to blend for literally anything, like no hypothesis in terms of BLOs, can be taken for granted. And that's something that is new, and which is just signaling that we are just getting to a next step for data analytics. >> I wonder Benoir if you have anything to add to that. I mean, I often wonder, when are machines going to be able to make better diagnoses than doctors, some people say already. Will the financial services, traditional banks lose control of payment systems? What's going to happen to big retail stores? I mean, maybe bring us home with maybe some of your finals thoughts. >> Yeah, I would say I don't see that as a negative, right? The human being will always be involved very closely, but then the machine, and the data can really help, see correlation in the data that would be impossible for human being alone to discover. So I think it's going to be a compliment not a replacement. And everything that has made us faster, doesn't mean that we have less work to do. It means that we can do more. And we have so much to do, that I will not be worried about the effect of being more efficient, and bare at our work. And indeed, I fundamentally think that data, processing of images, and doing AI on these images, and discovering patterns, and potentially flagging disease way earlier than it was possible. It is going to have a huge impact in health care. And as Florian was saying, every industry is going to be impacted by that technology. So, yeah, I'm very optimistic. >> Great, guys, I wish we had more time. I've got to leave it there, but so thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really a pleasure having you.

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE here in Barcelona, Spain. It's KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, and my cohost for two days wall-to-wall coverage is Corey Quinn. And we're always thrilled when we get to speak to a user, and not just any user but Fernando Alvarez, who is a cloud architect at X by Orange. Fernando, muchas gracias for joining us, Sir. >> It's a pleasure. >> So Orange, we are familiar and many people are. X by Orange though, maybe you could explain to our audience a little bit what this group is, inside of a large global brand. >> X by Orange is a subsidiary from Orange Spain, and from a Orange telecom group in France, and what we try to do is to reinvent the way that telco companies operates. Going more natural of a way than the traditional way. So it's more or less what we're trying to do, and we started operations in September of last year, just with a different proposal, to see if it could make it viable for the small and medium businesses in Spain. >> Yeah, so digital transformation, you know, many people talk about it, but I've had some really good conversations with customers in the last year or so. Data is so important to businesses these days. Being data-driven, and being software at the core of what you do. So, it's sometimes overstated that every company will be a software company some time in the future. But you have done these transformations before, and that's what brought you into X by Orange. So, tell us a little a bit, your role as a cloud architect, what's your mission and what's your role in the org? >> Well, my mission is to make all the different pieces inside the whole IT stack to work together, especially in a cloud environment. So from the designing from the whole ecosystem that supports the platform, and at the same time supports the whole company as a tech operator, or multiple tech operators. What my role is to make sure that everything fits together. We're trying to accomplish it and we're very happy to have it in a cloud environment, in public cloud and using Kubernetes, as our continuing orchestration engine. >> So, can you lay out are you in one public cloud? Many public clouds, data centers? What is your-- >> We are now in one public cloud in AWS but having this cloud orchestration layer allows us to move to, or to go multicloud or hybrid cloud as soon as we want to do it. But I think that we have to keep it simple from the beginning. Having a tight schedule to start operations is key to (stuttering) have our value proposal into the market and to do so we have to do it in a simple way so going first in one public cloud, going public cloud first because it's not a logical movement in a big company even though we are in Spain now but normally, big enterprises want to do in their own way in a private data center so what we want is to be very fast and to do so the election is clearly logical to go public cloud and to have an orchestration engine like Kubernetes to do everything, no? >> Do you find that making decisions that enable portability in the future if you want to move to alternate clouds or go hybrid, is in any way constraining what you're able to do or the speed you're able to innovate with? >> Yeah, but I think benefits are way better than the drawbacks of that. Normally every single decision you have to make about the architecture of NEPs, one of the key aspects is to see if it involves vendor blocking for any of the components on the stack for example in the public cloud. But I think it's worth the effort because most things that you can design as an engineer or as an architect can be solved not only using (stuttering) A specific solution from a specific cloud provider but using a more generic way. In this way then you can assure that you can move more or less easier to other cloud or to other infrastructure. >> All right, so I guess it begs the question, you said it's AWS today and Kubernetes, it's OpenShift yes? >> Yes. >> That is the, the Kubernetes platform? How did you come about choosing that and you know, obviously Red Hat, one of their strengths is working in lots of different environments so as you go to that hybrided multicloud was that the driver for them? Or were you a Red Hat customer? How did you end up with OpenShift? >> Yeah, that was one of the drivers. And the other was the support for the platform. We were in a really tight schedule and we knew Kubernetes well enough but we weren't sure if our knowledge were enough to be in operations in only nine months. So for that we get Red Hat on board, to have all their knowledge in terms of support and the professional services to help us to define how to do things with their platform on OpenShift and because OpenShift is like Kubernetes distribution we were sure enough that we share the Kubernetes way of doing things so that for us was a logical election. >> What was it that drove your move to the public cloud in the first place? And I guess your entire digital transformation by extension? >> Did you say what, sorry? >> What drove your entire decision to first go to the public cloud and secondly, to go I guess as part of your larger digital transformation? >> The main reason probably was the speed. At the beginning the whole company was started thinking that we were going to build our platform on a private cloud, but once we made the numbers and see that that needed one more year to start operations, with zero value to the customer, the decision was pretty easy. Let's go public cloud and let's think about this, if it really adds value in the future. >> All right. So Fernando if I heard you right you said nine months from you know, >> Yeah. >> when you went to deployment. Big companies aren't necessarily known for their speed of change. >> (laughing) Yeah. >> Talk a little bit about the organizational dynamics. How much internal ramp up there was versus relying on your partners and your vendors to be able to help you meet those schedules. >> The good news is that we had the full Orange support to start a new company and we started as a separate company recently because we wanted to be very fast. So instead of having all the processes from the big company to do something that maybe it will fail, or maybe it will affect the brand, we decided to start a new company from scratch, with Orange in its name because we have all the (stuttering) well-known, All the brand is well-known in the world, but at the same time we wanted to start from scratch. That's why we started with a little people, with most of them were coming from, some were industry instead of the telco industry and we started to build from scratch the whole company and that we were 20 in February 2018 and now we are more than 200 and we started operations in nine months from January 2018. So I think it was a really completely success in terms of speed. >> If you were going to do it all again starting over, what would you do differently? >> That's a really good question. Probably I will put even more effort in transmitting the right culture because when you grow a lot you have to be very carefully in transmitting the right culture to the new commerce. Because it's very easy to let dissipate the culture that you create at the beginning when you are only 10 or 20 people and it's very difficult to maintain it when you are 200. And then if you are 200 with a wrong culture you are transforming yourself in a big company with a small revenue so, that's something that needs to be taken into account. >> Okay, so what's the road map from here? Does the 200 then help infuse into the rest of the company? How do things work going forward? >> Well, what are we doing now is to, we build up a completely new IT stack, that was from the beginning multi tenant to host multiple telco operators and now we are hosting our second telco operator. That's Orange Spain branch for small and medium enterprises, that is now coming to our stack, so this is in our run up for this year, what we are doing is integrating all the stack from Orange Spain to the new one. And at the same time, trying to complete our portfolio with new products. And these new products could be managed and commercialized by X by Orange as a telco provider and also by Orange Spain as another telco provider. >> Right. When people look this show there are so many projects going on and so many different pieces. We sometimes hear "There's a lot of choices, how do I make them?" How did X by Orange, how did you figure out what pieces of the stack was Red Hat, mostly prescriptive as to how you do, or were you choosing the service mesh and all the other various pieces and what can you tell us about your stack? >> Well what I can tell you is that we put a lot of effort on designing the stack by ourselves, not having any turnkey solutions, because we think that this is key for the success of the company. Because normally telco operators put a lot of effort in their core network but they don't put so much effort in the software technology, but now things are changing a lot and we really think that the software layer is as much as important as it was the network. And here is the real perceived value from the customer now resides in the software pack, so we designed each part individually and we selected the right partners for starting the development of each part and then make altogether to work. Instead of going of a full stack provided by a unique company. >> Perfect. As you've gone down this path have you started to look down the serverless environment at all? Or are you strictly in a more container based approach? Let me broaden that a bit. Are you looking into functions as a service and other serverless technologies? Or are you mostly keeping it to more commonplace things that are half a step back? >> Well, in telco industry what is traditionally the vendor, the traditional vendor for the telco industry are the network vendors that are more in their way of virtualization instead of their continuation on not even to mention the deploying serverless. So we are putting a lot of effort on making them to understand and some of them they are understanding it really, really well, that it's key to have their products be able to make an extreme automation. So it's a pity that we don't have enough time (stuttering) to use technologies like serverless. We use them for little operations in our internal stack but we are not at the point of using it in products that we have because what we are doing is trying to, for example, to move the management part of the network services to the containers and now our efforts are in that place. >> And to be very clear, that's absolutely the right answer. You have to meet your customers where they are with things that are appropriate fits for the problems that they have. And average gating for a technology stack because, oh, it seemed like the right answer when I polled a bunch of people on stack overflow or something, is never the right answer to solve those problems, unless "How do I make people "on stack overflow happy?" is the question. Spoiler, you can't. >> Yeah, that's completely true, yeah. >> So Fernando one last question I had for you is here at a big show, what are you looking to get out of the show? What excited you to bring you to the event? And any other things around your experience so far, what you're hoping to do that you could share? >> I think that the most important thing when we're talking about the internal structural transformation for any sized company is the people and the mentality of the people. So I can never say enough times that we really need to invest time with people to embrace the change, to embrace the kind of culture that is behind... The CloudNative mentality because if not, if we don't do so, what we are doing is just transporting our old stack to a new technology without changing anything. So put in that effort, talk with people, make this change happen together with people that is working already in big companies is key for the success of any story. >> All right, well Fernando Alvarez, really appreciate you sharing your story. Congratulations on the progress so far. >> Thank you very much. >> And best of luck in the future. >> Thank you. >> All right. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering theCUBE New York City 2018. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome back. I'm your host Sonia Tagare with my cohost Dave Vellante, and we're here at theCUBE NYC covering everything big data, AI, and the cloud. And this week is also New York Fashion Week, and with us today we have a guest who intersects both of those technologies, so Billie Whitehouse, CEO of Wearable X, thank you so much for being on. >> It's a pleasure, thank you for having me. >> Great to see you. >> Thank you. >> So your company Wearable X, which intersects fashion and technology, tell us more about that. >> So Wearable X started five years ago. And we started by building clothes that had integrated haptic feedback, which is just vibrational feedback on the body. And we really believe that we can empower clothing with technology to do far more than it ever has for you before, and to really give you control back of your life. >> That's amazing. So can you tell us more about the haptic, how it works and what the technology is about? >> Absolutely. So the haptics are integrated with accelerometers and they're paired through conductive pathways around the body, and specifically this is built for yoga in a line called NadiX. And Nadi is spelled N-A-D-I. I know that I have a funny accent so sometimes it helps to spell things out. They connect and understand your body orientation and then from understanding your body orientation we pair that back with your smartphone and then the app guides you with audio, how to move into each yoga pose, step by step. And at the end we ask you to address whether you made it into the pose or not by reading the accelerometer values, and then we give you vibrational feedback where to focus. >> And the accelerometer is what exactly? It's just a tiny device... Does it protrude or is it just...? >> I mean it's as invisibly integrated as we can get it so that we can make it washable and tumble-dryable. >> So I know I rented a car recently, big SUV with the family and when I started backing up or when I get close to another car, it started vibrating. So is it that kind of sensation? It was sort of a weird warning but then after a while I got used to it. It was kind of training me. Is that-- >> Precisely. >> Sort of the same thing? And it's just the pants or the leggings, or is it the top as well? >> So it's built in through the ankles, behind the knees and in the hip of the yoga pants, and then we will release upper body work as well. >> Alright, so let's double click on this. So if I'm in a crescent pose and I'm leaning too far forward, will it sort of correct me or hit me in the calf and say, "Put your heel down," or how would that work? >> Exactly. So the audio instructions will give you exactly the kind of instructions you would get if you were in a class. And then similarly to what you would get if you had a personal instructor, the vibrations will show you where to isolate and where to ground down, or where to lift up, or where to rotate, and then at the end of the pose, the accelerometer values are read and we understand whether you made it into the pose or whether you didn't quite get there, and whether you're overextended or not. And then we ask you to either go back and work on the pose again or move forward and move on to the next pose. >> That is amazing. I usually have to ask my daughters or my wife, "Is this right?" And then they'll just shake their heads. Now what do you do with the data? Do you collect the data and can I review and improve, feed it back? How does that all work? >> So the base level membership, which is free, is you don't see your progress tracking as yet. But we're about to release our membership, where you pay $10 a month, and with that you get progress tracking as a customer. Us on the back end, we can see how often people make it into particular poses. We can also see which ones they don't make it into very well, but we don't necessarily share that. >> And so presumably it tracks other things besides, like frequency, duration of the yoga? >> Exactly. Minutes of yoga, precisely right. >> Different body parts, or not necessarily? >> So the accelerometers are just giving us an individual value, and then we determine what pose you're in, so I don't know what you mean by different body parts? >> In other words, which parts of my body I'm working out or maybe need to work on? >> Oh precisely. Yeah if you're overextending a particular knee or an ankle, we can eventually tell you that very detailed. >> And how long have you been doing this? >> It's five years. >> Okay. And so what have you learned so far from all this data that you've collected? >> Well I mean, I'm going to start from a human learning first, and then I'll give you the data learnings. The human learning for me is equally as interesting. The language on the body and how people respond to vibration was learning number one. And we even did tests many years ago with a particular product, an upper body product, with kids, so aged between eight and 13, and I played a game of memory with them to see if they could learn and understand different vibrational sequences and what they meant. And it was astounding. They would get it every single time without fail. They would understand what the vibrations meant and they would remember it. For us, we are then trying to replicate that for yoga. And that has been a really interesting learning, to see how people need and understand and want to have audio cues with their vibrational feedback. From a data perspective, the biggest learning for us is that people are actually spending between 13 to 18 minutes inside the app. So they don't necessarily want an hour and a half class, which is what we originally thought. They want short, quick, easy-to-digest kind of flows. And that for me was very much a learning. They're also using it at really interesting times of the day. So it's before seven AM, in the middle of the day between 11 and three, and then after nine PM. And that just so happens to be when studios are shut. So it makes sense that they want to use something that's quick and easy for them, whether it's early morning when they have a big, full day, or late night 'cause they need to relax. >> Sounds like such a great social impact. Can you tell us more about why you decided to make this? >> Yeah, for me there was a personal problem. I was paying an extraordinary amount to go to classes, I was often in a class with another 50 people and not really getting any of the attention that I guess I thought I deserved, so I was frustrated. I was frustrated that I was paying so much money to go into class and not getting the attention, had been working with haptic feedback for quite some time at that point, realized that there was this language on the body that was being really underutilized, and then had this opportunity to start looking at how we could do it for yoga. Don't get me wrong, I had several engineers tell me this wasn't possible about three and a half years ago, and look at us now, we're shipping product and we're in retail and it's all working, but it took some time. >> So you're not an engineer, I take it? >> I am not an engineer. >> You certainly don't dress like an engineer, but you never know. What's your background? >> My background is in design. And I truly think that design, for us, has always come first. And I hope that it continues to be that way. I believe that designers have an ability to solve problems in, dare I say, in a horizontal way. We can understand pockets of things that are going on, whether it's the problem, whether it's ways to solve the solutions, and we can combine the two. It's not just about individual problem solving on a minute level; it's very much a macro view. And I hope that more and more designers go into this space because I truly believe that they have an ability to solve really interesting problems by asking empathetic questions. >> And how does the tech work? I mean, what do you need besides the clothing and the accelerometers to make this work? >> So we have a little device called the pulse. And the pulse has our Bluetooth module and our battery and our PCB, and that clips just behind the left knee. Now that's also the one spot on the body that during yoga doesn't get in the way, and we have tested that on every body shape you can imagine across five different continents, because we wanted to make sure that the algorithms that we built to understand the poses were going to be fair for everybody. So in doing that, that little pulse, you un-clip when you want to wash and dry. >> And is that connected to the app as well? >> Exactly, that's connected via Bluetooth to your app. >> That's great. So you have all your data in your hand and you know exactly what kind of yoga poses you're doing, where you need to strengthen up. >> Exactly. >> That's great. >> And is it a full program? In other words, are there different yoga programs I can do, or am I on my own for that? How does that work? >> So with the base level membership, you can choose different yoga instructors around New York that you'd like to follow, and then you can get progress tracking, you can get recommendations, and they are timed between that 10 to 20 minutes. If you want to pay the slightly more premium membership, you can actually build your own playlists, and that's something that our customers have said they're really interested in. It means that you can build a sequence of poses that is really defined by you, that is good for your body. So that means instead of going to a class where you end up getting a terrible teacher, or music that you don't like, you can actually build your own class and then share that with your friends as well. >> Is it a Spotify-like model, where the teachers get compensation at the back end, or how does that all work? >> Exactly. Yes, precisely. >> And what do you charge for this? >> So the pants are $250, and then the base level membership is $10 a month, and then the slightly more premium is $30 a month. >> If you think about how much you would spend for a yoga class, that actually seems like a pretty good deal. >> And trust me, when you start calculating, when you go to yoga at least once a week, and it's $20 a week and then you're like, "Oh, and I went every week this year," you realize that it racks up very quickly. >> Well plus the convenience of doing it... I love having... To be able to do it at six a.m. without having to go to a class, especially where I live in Boston, when it's cold in the winter, you don't even want to go out. (all laughing) >> So what do you think the future of the wearable industry is? >> This is a space that I get really excited about. I believe in a version of the future, which has been titled "enchanted objects." And the reason I sort of put it in inverted commas is I think that often has sometimes a magical element to it that people think is a little too far forward. But for me, I really believe that this is possible. So not only do I believe that we will have our own body area network, which I like to call an app store for the body, but I believe every object will have this. And there was a beautiful Wired article last month that actually described why the Japanese culture are adopting robotics and automation in a way that western culture often isn't. And that is because the Shinto religion is the predominant religion in Japan, and they believe that every object has a soul. And if in believing that, you're designing for that object to have a soul and a personality and an ecosystem, and dare we call it, a body area network for each object, then that area network can interface with yours or mine or whoever's, and you can create this really interesting communication that is enchanted and delightful, and not about domination. It's not about screens taking over the world and being in charge of you, and us being dominated by them, as often we see in culture now. It's about having this really beautiful interface between technology and objects. And I really believe that's going to be the version of the future. >> And looking good while you do it. >> Precisely. >> You've got visions to take this beyond yoga, is that right? Other sports, perhaps cycling and swimming and skiing, I can think of so many examples. >> Exactly. Well for us, we're focused on yoga to start with. And certainly areas that I would say are in the gaps. I like to think of our products as being very touch-focused and staying in areas of athleisure or sports that are around touch. So where you would get a natural adjustment from a coach or a teacher, our products can naturally fit into that space. So whether it is squats or whether it is Pilates, they're certainly in our pipeline. But in the immediate future, we're certainly looking at the upper body and in meditation, and how we can remind you to roll your shoulders back and down, and everyone sits up straight. And then longer term, we're looking at how we can move this into physiotherapy, and so as you mentioned, you can enter in that you have a left knee injury, and we'll be able to adjust what you should be working on because of that. >> Is there a possibility of a breathing component, or is that perhaps there today? Such an important part of yoga is breathing. >> 100%. That is very much part of what we're working on. I would say more silently, but very much will launch soon. >> Well it sounds like it's going to have such a positive impact on so many people and that it's going to be in so many different industries. >> I hope so. Yeah that's the plan. >> Well Billie Whitehouse, thank you so much for being on theCUBE, and Dave, thank you. We're here at theCUBE NYC, and stay tuned, don't go anywhere, we'll be back. (inquisitive electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to The Cube's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. Day 2, lots of stuff going on. I'm Lisa Martin with my esteemed colleague Dave Vellante. >> Hey hey. >> Hey hey! I'm excited to welcome an old friend, Eric Herzog, the CMO of IBM, as well as Sam Warner offering management IBM software-defined storage. Welcome, guys! >> Well thanks, we always love to be on The Cube, always. >> Dave: Love the shirt. >> Thank you, I'm glad I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt again. >> Dave: Thank you for making sure you wore that, yeah. >> I think it's like my 25th time on The Cube with a Hawaiian shirt. >> Lisa: Oh you're like the Alec Baldwin of The Cube. (laughs) >> Lisa: Alright guys, so here we are- >> Dave: If we have the record, that is the same shirt you wore last year, isn't it? >> Yes, but I did clean it, Dave. (laughs) >> He wears it once a year. >> I've never had to ask anyone about dry cleaning on The Cube but there's a first time for everything. Alright guys, so here we are at VMworld. What's new with IBM and VMware? Kind of talk to us, Eric, from a marketing perspective. What's going on there? >> Sure, well the big thing is IBM and VMware have a very strong alliance across our entire portfolio. The Cloud Division has a big agreement with VMware that was announced with Pat Gelsinger and the head of the division last year, the Storage Division has all kinds of heavy duty integration with our VersaStack product, as well as in all of our all-flash arrays, and then Sam's team brought out a new backup and recovery product, Spectrum Tech Plus, which is optimized for VMware and hypervisor and cloud environments. >> Excellent. And that's one of the things actually thematically that we heard yesterday is that, you know, backup is hot. So tell us a little bit more about that hotness and how you guys are working with VMware to dial that- >> Dial that heat. >> Yeah, dial that heat up. >> Sam: Well it's actually, it's more than backup, right, it's about data availability, and ensuring your data's safe, data's the bloodline of your company now, right? Everything's moving toward cognitive and AI, you can't do that without data. Most of your data's trapped as a backup. And what we're trying to do now is make it really easy for people to get at that data and use it for other purposes. So first of all, making sure you're safe from things like ransomware, but also making sure you can get some value out of that data. Make it very easy to recover that data. >> So, lots of topics that we could cover there, I wonder, did you have one more and I want to jump in. >> I did. Just, Eric from a, as the CMO, from a messaging perspective now we've heard backup is hot, you've just kind of articulated that a little bit more, same with storage. From a conversation perspective, and you talked about the importance of data, Michael Dell talked about that this morning, that the data conversation is a CEO agenda. How is the conversation changing, and the position of IBM changing when you guys are talking to customers that, is backup, is storage a conversation around data that you're having with the C-suite of your customers? >> So, a couple things, and I've done storage for 32 years. EMC, IBM twice, seven startups, and the C-suite hates storage, including the CIO, but they do love their data. So they all know they need storage but when you talk about data, data availability, the resiliency of the data, the data always needs to be there, you don't even use things like data resiliency 'cause the CEO doesn't know what that is, so you need to say, so how'd you like it if you were in Star Trek, and Bones wanded you with a new healthcare wand, and it came back with no answer? (laughs) That's 'cause your storage is not resilient and it's not fast enough. So the data has to be available and it has to be fast. So we're moving to this world where everything is AI and everything is immediate. If your storage goes down and you're in dark trading, you just lost ten million bucks per second. So, but it's all about the data. So basically what we're doing is getting out of the storage conversation and talking about the data conversation. How data is used to optimize their business, and then you weave the storage in underneath as, well as you know if you've got a bad foundation to your building and the earthquake hits, boom. You building falls down. So data is that building, and storage is the foundation on which your data rests. >> I love this conversation, and I think you're right on. The C-suite, they hate storage because it's to them, it's just an expense, but I want to pick up on something that was one of my favorite interviews thus far this year. Believe it or not, it was the interview that you and Burris and Ed Walsh did in our studio in Palo Alto. And I wonder if you could add some color, and then Sam I want you to chime in. What I loved about that interview is you guys talked about digital business and digital business being all about data and how you leverage data. And you said something there, and I want to unpack it a little bit. Storage should not be just a dumb target that is unintelligent. it should be an active element of your data and digital strategy. >> Eric: Right. >> So what did you mean by that and how does IBM make it, storage, an active element of a data strategy? >> So the first thing you want to do is you want to make it all automated. You want to make it transparent to the user. So, whether it's in the healthcare space, I don't care what your business, Herzog's bar and grill? My storage is transparent. Okay I'm running a bar and grill, I don't have time to fool around with the storage. I need it automated, I need it fast, I need to see who's drinking what, how many cigars I can sell, I don't have time to fart around. Right? Storage can make that happen. So you've got certain CPU that's done on the server level or in the virtual machines, and then you've got to have storage that's intelligent. So, we're working on some products we're not ready to announce yet, but we've got some products that have built-in AI into the storage themselves. So things like, you can search in the storage instead of search on the server. How do like, be able to look at metadata and have the storage actually fetch the data not the server fetch the data, so the server's crunching, crunching, crunching, and the storage is smart enough to go grab the data on its own and then bring it to the server. Versus the server having to do that work. So all that's about making data more available, more resilient, and again, having smart storage not dumb storage. >> So Sam, when we were talking about backup it's how you say, it's not just backup, it's more than that. >> Sam: Right. >> Pick up on what Eric just said. How is Spectrum Protect more than just backup and playing into what Eric just talked about? >> Well a lot of things Eric was just talking about you don't necessarily, you're not necessarily going to be able to do all this analysis reporting, analytics on your production data, you don't want to get in the way of your critical workloads, so how can we make copies off to the side where you can do things like analytics, where you can do dev test, quickly build new applications, so we give the ability to have access to that data in a way that's not going to jeopardize your core applications as well. And of course, that data, you can't lose it, right? I mean, you've got to make sure it's protected. So we also offer you a very simple way to protect it, and very rapidly restore it. >> So, let's go through an example or use case. You mentioned ransomware before. >> Yeah. >> So a lot of people think okay I'll create an air gap, but air gap, in and of itself, you know, you watch these Black Hat shows, and they go, "Air gap is a joke. It's easy for me to get through an air gap." >> Sam: Right. >> So how do you deal with that problem? Presumably, you have insights and analytics that can help you identify anomalies, but I wonder if you can address what's the conversation like with your customers and how are you solving a problem like that? >> Well I think there's a lot of stages that would solve it. First of all, there's simple things you can do like have copies that are immutable, so they can't be changed, encryption can't go and encrypt a read-only volume, there is air gapping, which like you said there are ways around that, but then there's also, Eric touched on some of the metadata analysis. If you can find anomalies and changes in the metadata that are unexpected, you can take action and alert an administrator and let them know that something doesn't seem right, so there's a lot more work we're doing to introduce cognitive capabilities that can also detect that. >> One of the things actually that Pat Gelsinger said this morning, and this may have put a smile on your face when you said there's something you can't quite talk to yet is, companies have to integrate AI into their products. And machine learning. >> Eric: So, that's the plan at IBM, and we've already done some of that, we have some products that we've hinted at, that's product code name Harmony, and we've already done a public blog on that, a statement of direction, and that is our first step in implementing AI technology directly into the storage, again it's part of what I talked about a couple weeks ago when I filmed at your Palo Alto office, storage is not dumb anymore. I may be dumb, but storage is not. Storage is smart, storage is intelligent, storage is active not passive, and in the old worlds, when I started doing storage a long time ago, storage was just passive. Just a big brick. It's no longer a brick. It's a brain, and it thinks and it acts, and it relieves the CPU, and the other areas of your IT infrastructure from having to do the work, which is part of the metadata action that Sam talked about that we're working on and also this project Harmony that we talked about, is adding AI intelligence, things like Watson for example, maybe, but I can't quote me on that yet, but maybe we might put Watson inside of our storage, since we happen to own Watson, the dominant AI platform on the planet, we could probably put that into our storage. Maybe we will. >> So there's still a... okay why not? There's still a lot of dumb storage out there though. >> Yes. >> Huge install base. You actually probably sold a lot of it back in the day, so fixing the problem that you created, that's smart marketing. (laughs) But when you talk about the technical debt that exists, how do you go from point A to point B, going from that dumb storage to that active element? What's that conversation like with customers? >> So, it's actually pretty easy. First of all, storage refreshes every three to five years anyway. So now you can say, "Well you know the storage you had only did this, how about if we could do this, this, this or this, and really raise the bar?" The other thing of course is that IBM is the number one storage software company in the world, so anything we do is going to be integrated into the software side of our business, not just embedded in the storage systems we sell. And that software works with everyone's arrays. So that, if you will, artificial intelligence that we can bring to bear in an IBM Storwize or flash systems would also work on an EMC VNX2, would also work on a Dell Compellent, would also work on an HP 3PAR, would also work on this guy, that guy, and the other guy, because we are the number one storage software company in the world, for the guys that track the numbers, and all of this is being implemented into the software layer, which means it'll work with the other guys' gear. So we can take the old stuff I used to do at the evil machine company and make that stuff smart. >> What do you mean when you say you're the number one software company, because when you worked for that company you guys would always tell me, us as analysts, "Look, we don't really have any hardware engineers any more, we spend all our time on software, so we're a software company." You're talking about something different today, you guys leaned in to software to find, you've put your chips in, you did your billion dollar Steve Mills bet, what does it mean today to be a software company in storage? >> So for us, let's take all of our storage systems for example, FlashSystem V9 comes with Spectrum virtualized software, which works with over 400 arrays that aren't IBM logo. That software comes on that system. FlashSystem A9000 comes with Spectrum Accelerate, which is a scale-out block infrastructure that works both on-premise and in the cloud. Again, not just with our own gear. So we basically decided that, do we want to sell the full system solution? Sure we do. But if we sell the software only, that's fine with us, and remember, most of the big shops in IBM is exceedingly strong, enterprise to the Global Fortune 1000, and the Global Fortune 1000 down to those sort of, you know, one billion dollar company and up, most of them are heterogeneous anyway, so you're, if you're smart, and we think we are at IBM, to this effect, we made sure our software works with everybody else's gear. Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus will back up any storage from any vendor, old or new, will go to any tape drive, will go to any cloud, we can automatically back up to the cloud, will automatically go to an object store, not just to our own object store, but other object stores. Will automatically go to disk or flash, so we've made it completely heterogeneous and, if you will, media and technology independent. And we're doing that across the board with all the IBM storage software. >> So that compatibility matrix, if I can call it that, is very important, has always been important in the storage business, but I feel like it's insufficient in today's cloud world. And let me tell you, explain what I mean and get your reaction. I'll start with Sam. So we've been talking all week about the imperative to not try to reform your business and bring it to the cloud, but rather to shape the cloud and bring cloud services to your data. And that's the right model, and now part of that, a big part of that, a huge part of that is simplicity. So we're here at VMworld, we're talking about backup and data protection, simplicity is fundamental. What are you guys doing in that regard, generally and specifically with regard to Spectrum Protect? >> Yeah, I think what you want is a very simple way to do data protection, and a methodology to do data protection that's consistent between your applications that you're running in your own data center and what you're running in the cloud. So you don't want to find out that, yeah your traditional applications that you've been you know, running in your data center for years are all protected, but it turns out all the new applications being built out on the cloud don't have the same rigor, aren't following the same standards, you're breaking your governance models, and you're at risk. So what you want is a simple way to manage both sides, you want a simple dashboard that gives you visibility to the entire environment in one space, so you know I've got 2,000 VMs, 1,800 of them are backed up, two of them aren't backed up, oh those are in the cloud, somebody didn't set it up correctly. You want to be able to see it very easily on a simple dashboard, and that's what we're bringing with Spectrum Protect Plus. >> Speaking of simple, Eric, last question to you, as the CMO, how do you make this message simple for a C-suite to comprehend and understand and help take them to the next level for them? >> Well for us, we don't even talk storage anymore. We just talk data, applications, their workloads and their use cases. That's it, and then you bring storage up underneath it, again it's the foundation of your data infrastructure, your data is the primary building, but if you don't have a solid foundation and, being from Silicon Valley and being from the '89 earthquake, when the earthquake hits, if you have a solid foundation, the building stays up, if you don't the building falls down. So, we lead with data, data, data, ease of use, simplicity, but really focus on what's your application, what's the workload you're trying to accomplish, what's the use case you need. And when you do it that way, you take the discussion away from being, "You're a storage guy." It's, "You're the data guy. You're the business guy." And that's how you have to pitch it. >> I like that. Hashtag data data data you heard it here first. (laughs) Eric and Sam, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube, I wish you best of luck and we'll be keeping our eyes and ears open for what's coming with AI and machine learning. Thank you for watching The Cube, continuing coverage live from VMworld 2017 Day 2, I'm Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante. Stick around, we've got more great conversations coming right back up. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Chad: Thank you. >> Welcome back to VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Burris. This is Day 2. Chad Sakac is here. He's the president of Dell EMC, long-time CUBE guest, CUBE alumn. Chad, we were talking about eight years >> Yeah, it's crazy, man, it's been great. >> Dave: And you were one of the first. >> It's been great. I was thinking about it. What I love is it's always a great events where there's great things happening. And you guys ask killer, right to the point questions, and I always try to give killer, right to the point answers. >> Dave: All right, well let's get into it. Your ascendancy, personally, kind of coincided with VMware's explosion. You are down and dirty with the customers. So, first of all, congratulations on-- >> Thanks, dude. >> Dave: that role and being the president at Dell EMC. Awesome. >> I have a passion for it, Dave. Passion is the key, right? >> Okay, so we're all talking about cloud, right? Cloud first is something that you hear from customers all the time. I want to be cloud first. What does that mean to you, to Dell EMC, VMware? >> I think the first thing is is that to all of us, cloud is much more about an operating model than a place. And people have started to internalize that it's about changing the way that they operate their business, both for some of their traditional apps, as well as how they build cloud-native apps. That's the first thing. Operating model, not place. The second thing is, I think I'm seeing the customers in the market get a little more, I don't how to say this without sounding pejorative, but a little more mature in their view that the answer is going to have to be a hybrid model based on data and data gravity, based on elasticity of workloads, based on governance factors, that lead to hybrid being the answer. And if you think about what we've seen just in the last two days, VMware on AWS, Google partnering with VMware and Pivotal around Pivotal Container Services. Those are all about hybridizing both traditional IT and how people build new cloud applications. So operating model, not place. Hybrid is the answer. And the third thing is that it's multi. I still occasionally encounter somebody that says, "It's all going to be one cloud." And I'm like, "Okay, just out of curiosity, "does your definition of cloud include SalesForce.com?" "Well, yeah." "Does it include Office 365?" "Well, yeah." "Does it include AWS?" "Well, yeah." "Does it include your own private cloud?" "Well, yeah." "So, what are you talking about?" >> Peter: Where's the one? (laughs) >> Where's the one, right? And I think that there's a... Things start to matter once they move out of hyperbole and into pragmatism. >> Well, and when you paid attention, let's say four or five years ago, when you listened to Andy Jassy speak, the notion of hybrid cloud, or hybrid IT, or private cloud was not in his lexicon. And then yesterday, we saw him up on stage with Pat Gelsinger. They were talking about hybrid and private cloud. >> Chad: Well, by the way, I don't want to throw the dart at Andy. I think if you talked to Vmware or Dell EMC four or five years ago, public cloud wasn't in our-- >> Dave: Absolutely. >> (laughs) in our vernacular either. >> Dave: Absolutely, so those worlds have come together with the customer reality that says, "Well there isn't just one cloud. "And I can't just bring my business, "reform my business for the cloud." So what do you make of the fact that we've evolved as an industry and as a vendor community? >> I think it's time to get on to the brass tacks of solving the problems for the customers, ma'am. And I see actually that happening in the industry more and more. People are solving problems that they can't solve in their private clouds using public clouds. They're figuring out that the best place to put a dollar is to rebuild their applications using cloud-native principles. But they're also realizing that sometimes that it's not even a legitimate choice or option. And they're trying to figure out also, at the same time, "How do I support some of those "more traditional application stacks "and make them more automated and cloud-like, "even if they're not going to be cloud-native maybe ever." >> Peter: Let me jump in here for a minute. >> Dave: So this gets to the promise that you've got to make. And please jump in. >> Yeah, because in many respects, what we're really saying, let me test this with you, Pat, is that, ultimately, it may be one cloud, but that one cloud is going to be defined by the business and not by a particular vendor. >> Chad: It's a higher-order function. >> Peter: That's right. So what we like to say is we like to say, "You're not going to take your business to the cloud. "You're going to bring the cloud to your business." And your business attributes and your business characteristics, where you operate, how you operate, how you use data, who your customers are, how are you going to reach them, all those different things, the physical realities, the legal realities, the IP realities, all that's going to shape the architectural choices that you make regarding cloud. And you have to have a strategy for that becoming consistent and coherent for your business. So a lot of piece parts, but it becomes your cloud. Does that make sense to you? >> It makes sense to me. It means that it's an answer that involves a little more sophistication and nuance for the customer, because they've got to think about what it means for them. And the answer is not the same for every single customer. However, there are common base elements in that formula. Number one, digital transformation always starts with applications that are written using cloud-native principles, often using data fabrics that are modern distributed data fabrics. That's one piece. There's a consistent piece that says, "I'm going to leverage public and private cloud models." And the definition of which workload goes to one or another, like you said, is very much driven by data gravity. Compute tends to co-locate with the data against which it's computing. Governance rules, which is not security. Public and private clouds are equivalent. In some cases, one or the other is more secure than the other. But those are common elements. There's one other common element that I've learned over the last four years of being on the journey myself with many of our customers, which is that the only way that the on-premises part of cloud stacks work is through radical simplification and deploying their on-premises infrastructure using design and automation principles that look a lot more like the public cloud than they look like their most traditional IT. >> No, you're absolutely right. And I think that's a crucial point, that ultimately the physics of all this. >> Chad: Mm-hmm. >> And I agree, cloud is not a We like to say the cloud is not a place, it's a time. >> Chad: Yeah. >> Because at the end of the day, all this is defined by the realities of your data. >> Chad: Yep. >> And if your data can't If you don't have time to move the data or it's too expensive to move the data, that's going to dictate where the process actually runs. And I like the way you've redefined, I'll say redefined data gravity. Most people think data gravity, "Oh, once you put data in place, "it's going to accrete more gravity." And you're saying, "No, that's not the way to think about it. "It's going to accrete more function." >> Chad: Right. >> 100% agreement. And I don't think a lot of people are talking about things that way. >> By the way, the linkage to physics, I don't know how many of the viewers basically were physics majors, but it's actually related to quantum physics and mechanics. Information inherently can't simultaneously be in two places at once. That's a law of physics, right? >> Data, okay, keep going, keep going. >> If any bit, any information, basically, is connected between two points at the speed of light, that's not a function of vendor technology until someone-- >> Well, let me we get into quantum entanglement, nano >> Yeah. >> But I think where you are, where you're absolutely correct is that ultimately, that there is a cost to moving data. >> Chad: Bingo. Bingo >> And we have to start When we think about digital transformation, our approach is the difference between a digital business and a business is a digital business treats data as an asset and builds strategic capabilities to treat data as an asset and apply data as an asset. And one of the beauties of what you were saying earlier with simplification, is for example, the idea that if I build around data, >> Chad: Yup. >> then I can use hyper-converged, I can use converged, I can use Flash, I can use VC, and I can use all these different things to treat my data differently. >> And do it as simple as possible. The thing that I think I'll give you an example from this morning. I was meeting with a customer that's in the finance and insurance vertical, right? And they're pretty advanced down there, use of both public and private clouds. They've got a software-defined data center. And they're trying to basically redefine how they're using mobile apps and customer intelligence. They provide a ton of services. They're a great, great customer and a partner. But again, to highlight that cloud is a place, or a time, to use your vernacular, as they build their mobile app, sets of assets are running in a public cloud, the data was born in the public cloud, the compute is running in the public cloud, it's built around a cloud-native app principle using PCF and Kubernetes. Great! When that person is using that application, there's a moment when they go in and do a transaction where literally it's hitting a mainframe running DB2 in their core data center. >> And there's nothing wrong with that. >> And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that pattern is universal, right? And so it highlights basically that you've got to be a little practical about how you do this stuff. >> Okay, so in the limited time we have remaining, give us the the quick why Dell EMC, Dell EMC, VMware, why you guys Maybe talk a little bit about the portfolio. >> So if you look at this week, the one thing that jumps out, at least to me, I'm probably a little close to it, Dave, but I hope it jumps out to the viewers, right, is while we maintain an open ecosystem, Dell EMC has its open ecosystem, VMware has its ecosystem, Pivotal has its ecosystem, we're becoming much more opinionated, right? And that matters because customers want clarity. So I'll give you clarity. Clarity that jumped out on stage and it came out of the mouth of Pat, not me, was the easiest way to deploy VSAN is on VxRail. The easiest way to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation is on VxRack SDDC. Period, full stop. Now, why are we saying that so emphatically? It's because if you don't have a good foundation for an SDS and SDC, or SDC, SDS, and SDN, so software-defined network and compute and storage, in the case of VMware Cloud Foundation and VxRack SDDC, then your whole underpinning is just way too complex, right? So there's a very clear opinionated point of view that says hyper-converged infrastructure that's being built by the combined team is the way forward for customers who have standardized on vSphere. >> Well, and you nailed it earlier. If you're going to bring the cloud model to on-prem, to the data, it's got to be simple. >> Chad: Mm-hmm. >> Peter: That's the cloud model. >> That is the cloud model, right? And and without it, you can't fulfill that promise. With it, you can. >> I'll give you a second example. For the last four years, we've been supporting our customers with the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. We've learned more about what does it take to lifecycle, manage, and deploy vRealize Suite on top of HCI, where we own the lifecycle, right? At the same time, VMware has been learning about, "What does it take to take vRealize and run it "in the VMware cloud on AWS, not as software, "but as a service?" And that's all about simplification and lifecycle management. What we're doing between VMware and Dell EMC is taking that knowledge and saying, "HCI is the foundation, and on top of that, "here's how you build your IaaS "for your traditional applications, "and the foundation for what's coming next." And then the last part that we saw today loud and clear is a strongly opinionated point of view that says PCF, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, is the best structured PaaS in the market, and a full embrace of Kubernetes, Pivotal Kubernetes Services, Pivotal Container Services using Kubernetes, is going to be the best way to build container as a service. How do you deploy it best? On vRealize. How do you deploy it best? On top of VxRack SDDC. It's pretty clear. >> Covered all the bases, we could go all day with you, but we're out of time. >> Yeah. >> Chad, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE yet again. Really appreciate it. >> It's my pleasure, guys, thank you. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of the Global .NEXT Digital Experience brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT Digital Experience. We've got two of the c-suite here to really dig into some of the strategy and partnerships talked at their annual user conference. Happy to welcome back to the program two of our CUBE alumni first of all, we have Tarkan Maner. He is the Chief Customer Officer at Nutanix and joining us also Rajiv Mirani, he is the Chief Technology Officer, CTO. Rajiv, Tarkan, great to see you both. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Great to be back. >> Good to see you. >> All right. So Tarkan talk about a number of announcements. You had some big partner executives up on stage. As I just talked with Monica about, Scott Guthrie wearing the signature red polo, you had Kirk Skaugen from Lenovo of course, a real growing partnership with Nutanix, a bunch of others and even my understanding the partner program for how you go to market has gone through a lot. So a whole lot of stuff to go into, partnerships, don't need to tackle it all here upfront, but give us some of the highlights from your standpoint. >> I'll tell this to my dear friend Rajiv and I've been really busy, last few months and last 12 months have been super, super busy for us. And as you know, the latest announcements we made the new $750 million investment from Bain capital, amazing if by 20 results, Q4, big results. And obviously in the last few months big announcements with AWS as part of our hybrid multicloud vision and obviously Rajiv and I, we're making sale announcements, product announcements, partner announcements at .NEXT. So at a high level, I know Rajiv is going to cover this a little bit more in detail, but we covered everything under these three premises. Run better, run faster and run anywhere. Without stealing the thunder from Rajiv, but I just want to give you at a high level a little bit. What excites us a lot is obviously the customer partner intimacy and all this new IP innovation and announcement also very strong, very tight operational results and operational execution makes the company really special as a independent software vendor in this multicloud era. Obviously, we are the only true independent software vendor to do not run a business in a sense with fast growth. Timed to that announcement chain we make this big announcement with Azure partnership, our Nutanix portfolio under the Nutanix cluster ran now available as Bare-Metal Service on Azure after AWS. The partnership is new with Azure. We just announced the first angle of it. Limited access customers are taking it to look at the service. We're going to have a public preview in a few months, and more to come. And obviously we're not going to stop there. We have tons of work going on with other cloud providers, as well. Tying that, obviously, big focus with our Citrix partnership globally around our end user computing business as Rajiv will outline further, our portfolio on top of our digital infrastructure, tying the data center services, DevOps services, and you user computing services, Citrix partnership becomes a big one, and obviously you're tying the Lenovo and HP partnership to these things as the core platforms to run that business. It's creating tons of opportunity and I'll cover a little bit more further in a bit more detail, but one other partnership we are also focusing on, our Google partnership and on desktop as a service. So these are all coming to get around data center, DevOps, and user competent services on top of that amazing infrastructure Rajiv and team built over the past 10 years. I see Rajiv as one of our co-founders and one side with the right another. So the business is obviously booming in multiple fronts. This, if by 2020 was a great starting point with all this investment, that bank capital $750 million, big execution, ACD transition, software transition. And obviously these cloud partnerships are going to make big differences moving forward. >> Yeah, so Rajiv, want to build off what Tarkan was just saying there, that really coming together, when I heard the strategy run better, run faster, run anywhere, it really pulled together some of the threads I've been watching at Nutanix the last couple of years. There's been some SaaS solutions where it was like, wait, I don't understand how that ties back to really the core of what Nutanix does. And of course, Nutanix is more than just an HCI company, it's software and that simplicity and the experience as your team has always said, trying to make things invisible, but help if you would kind of lay out, there's a lot of announcements, but architecturally, there were some significant changes from the core, as well as, if I'm reading it right, it feels like the portfolio has a little bit more cohesion than I was seeing a year or so ago. >> Yeah, actually the theme around all these announcements is the same really, it's this ability to run any application, whether it's the most demanding traditional applications, the SAP HANA, the Epics and so on, but also the more modern cloud native application, any kind of application, we want the best platform. We want a platform that's simple, seamless, and secure, but we want to be able to run every application, we want to run it with great performance. So if you look at the announcements that are being made around strengthening the core with the Block Store, adding things like virtual networking, as well as announcements we made around building Karbon platform services, essentially making it easier for developers to build applications in a new cloud native way, but still have the choice of running them on premises or in the cloud. We believe we have the best platform for all of that. And then of course you want to give customers the optionality to run these applications anywhere they want, whether that's a private cloud, their own private data centers and service providers, or in the public cloud and the hyperscalers. So we give them that whole range of choices, and you can see that all the announcements fit into that one theme: any application, anywhere, that's basically it. >> Well, I'd like you to build just a little bit more on the application piece. The developer conversation is something we've been hearing from Nutanix the last couple of years. We've seen you in the cloud native space. Of course, Karbon is your Kubernetes offering. So the line I used a couple of years ago at .NEXT was modernize the platform, then you can modernize all of your applications on top of it, so where does Nutanix touch the developer? You know, how does that, building new apps, modernizing my apps tie into the Nutanix discussion? >> Yeah great question, Stu. So last year we introduced Karbon for the first time. And if you look at Karbon, the initial offering was really targeted at an IT audience, right? So it's basically the goal was to make Kubernetes management itself very easy for the IT professional. So essentially, whether you were creating a Nutanix, sorry, a Karbon cluster, or scaling it out or upgrading Kubernetes itself. We wanted to make that part of the life cycle very, very simple for IT. For the developer we offered the Vanilla Kubernetes system. And this was something that developers asked us for again and again, don't go around mucking around with Kubernetes itself, we want Vanilla Kubernetes, we want to use our Kube Cuddle or the tools that we're used to. So don't go fork off and build the economic Kubernetes distribution. That's the last thing we want. So we had a good platform already, but then we wanted to take the next step because very few applications today are self contained in the sense that they run entirely within themselves without dependence on external services, especially when you're building in the cloud, you have access, suppose you're building an Amazon, you have access to RDS to manage your databases. Don't have to manage it yourself. Your object stores, data pipelines, all kinds of platform services available, which really can accelerate development of your own applications, right? So we took the stand said, look, this is good. This is important. We want to give developers the same kind of services, but we want to make it much more democratic in the sense that we want them to be able to run these applications anywhere, not just on AWS or not just on GCP. And that's really the genesis of Kubernetes platform services. We've taken the most common services people use in the cloud and made them available to run anywhere. Public cloud, private cloud, anywhere. So we think it's very exciting. >> Tarkan, we had, you and I had a discussion with one of your partners on how this hybrid cloud scenario is playing out at HP discover, of course, with the GreenLake solution. I'm curious from your standpoint, all the things that Rajiv was just talking about, that's a real change, if you think about kind of the traditional infrastructure people they're needing to move up the stack. You've got partnerships with the hyperscalers. So help explain a little bit the ripple effect as Nutanix helps customers simplify and modernize, how your partners and your channel can still participate. >> So perfect, look, as you heard from Rajiv, this is like all coming super nicely together. As Rajiv outlined, with the data center, operations and services, DevOps services, to enable that faster time to market capable, that Kubernetes offering and user services, our desktop services on top of that classical industry-leading, record-breaking digital infrastructure. That hybrid cloud infrastructure we call today. You play this game with devoting a little bit, as you remember, we used to call hyper-converged infrastructure. Now we call it of the hybrid cloud infrastructure, in a sense. All those pieces coming together nicely end-to-end, unlike any other vendor, and from a software only perspective, we're not owned by a hardware company which is making a huge difference. Gives us tremendous level of flexibility, democratization, and freedom of choice. Cloud to us is basically is not a destination. It's an operating model. You heard me say this before, as Rajiv also said. So in our strategy, when you look at it, Stu, we have a three pronged approach on top of our on-prem, marketplace on-prem capable. There's been 17,000+ customers, 7,000+ channel and strategic partners. Also as part of this big announcement, this new partner program we called Elevate, on the Elevate brand, bringing all the channel partners, ISEs, platform partners, hyperscalers, Telco XPSs, and our global market partners all in one bucket where we manage them, simply the incentives. It's a very simple way to execute that opposite Chris Kaddaras, our Chief Revenue Officer, as well as Christian Alvarez, our Chief Partner Officer sort of speaking on global goal, the channels, working together tightly with our organization on the product front to deliver this. So one key point I want to share with you, tying to what Rajiv said earlier on the multicloud area, obviously we realize customers are looking for freedom of choice. So we have our own cloud, Nutanix cloud, under the XI brand. X-I, XI brand, which is basically our own logistics, our own basically, serviceability, payment capability and our software, running off our portal partnerships like Equinix delivering that software as a service. We started with disaster recovery as a service, very fast growing business. Now we announced our GreenLake partnership with HPE in the backend that data center as a service might be actually HP GreenLake if the customer wants it. So that partnership creates huge opportunities for us. Obviously, on top of that, we have these Telco XSP partnerships. As we're announcing partnerships with some amazing source providers like OBH. You heard today from college Sudani in society general, they are not only using AWS and Azure and Nutanix on-prem and Nutanix clusters on Azure and AWS for their internal departments, but they also use a local service provider in France for data gravity and data security reasons. A French company dealing with French business and data centers, with that kind of data governance requirements within the country, within the borders of France. So in that context we are also the service provider partnerships coming in. We're going to announce a partnership with OVHS vault, which is a big deal for us. And tying to this, as Rajiv talked about, our clusters portfolio, our portfolio basically running on-prem on AWS and Azure. And we're not going to stop there obviously. So give choice to the customers. So as Rajiv said, basically, Nutanix can run anywhere. On top of that we announced just today with Capgemini, a new dev test environment is a service. Where Rajiv's portfolio, end-to-end, data center, DevOps, and some of the UC capabilities for dev test reasons can run as a service on Capgemini cloud. We have similar partnerships with HCL, similar partnerships with (indistinct) and we're super excited for this .NEXT in FI21 because of those reasons. >> Rajiv, one of the real challenges we've had for a long time is, I want to be able to have that optionality. I want to be able to live in any environment. I don't want to be stuck in an environment, but I want to be able to take advantage of the innovation and the functionality that's there. Can you give us a little bit of insight? How do you make sure that Nutanix can live these environments like the new Azure partnership and it has the Nutanix experience, yet I can take advantage of, whether it be AI or some other capabilities that a Google, an Amazon or a Microsoft has. How do you balance that? You have to integrate with all of these partners yet, not lock out the features that they keep adding. >> Right, absolutely, that's a great point, Stu. And that's something we pride ourselves on, that we're not taking shortcuts. We're not trying to create our own bubble in these hyperscalers, where we run in an isolated environment and can't interact with the rest of the services they offer. And that's primarily why we have spent the time and the effort to integrate closely with their virtual networking, with the services that they provide and essentially offer the best of both worlds. We take the Nutanix stack, the entire software stack, everything we build from top to bottom, make it available. So the same experience is there with upgrades and prism, the same experience is available on-prem and in the cloud. But at the same time, as you said, we want people to have full speed access to cloud services. There's things the cloud is doing that will be very difficult for anybody to do. I mean, the kind of thing that, say Google does with AI, or Azure does with databases. It's remarkable what these guys are doing, and you want to take advantage of those services. So for us, it's very, very important, that access is not constrained in any way, but also that customers have the time to make this journey, right? If they want to move to cloud today, they can do that. And then they can refactor and redevelop their applications over time and start consuming these sales. So it's not an all or nothing proposition. It's not that you have to refactor it, rewrite before you can move forward. That's been extremely important for us and it's really topical right now, especially with this pandemic. I think one thing all of IT has realized is that you have to be agile. You have to be able to react to things and timeframes you never thought you needed to, right. So it's not just disaster recovery, but the amount of effort that's gone in the last few months in enabling a distributed workforce, who thought it would happen so quickly? But it's a kind of agility that, an optionality that we are giving to customers that really makes it possible. >> Yeah, absolutely. Right now, things are moving pretty fast. So let me let both of you have the final word. Give us a little bit viewpoint, as things are moving fast, what's on the plate? What should we be expecting to see from Nutanix and your ecosystem through the rest of 2020, Tarkan? >> So look, heard from us, Stu, I know you're talking to multiple folks and you had this discussions with us, end-to-end, and look for the company to be successful, customer partner intimacy, IP innovation, and execution, and operational excellence. Obviously, all three things need to come together. So in a sense, Stu, we just need to keep moving. I give this analogy a lot, as Benjamin Franklin says, the human beings are divided in three categories, you know? The first one is those who are immovable. They never move. Second category, those who, you know, are movable, you can move them if you try hard. And obviously third category, those who just move. Not only themselves, but they move others, like in a sense, in a nice way to refer to Benjamin Franklin, with one of our key founders in the US, in a sense as the founders of this company, with folks like Rajiv and other executives, and some of the newcomers, we a culture, which just keeps moving and the last 12 months, you've seen some of these. And obviously going back to the announcement day, AWS, now Azure, the Capgemini announcement then test as a service around some of the portfolio that Rajiv talked about or a Google partnership on desktop as a service, deep focus on Citrix globally with Azure, Google, and ourselves on-prem, off-prem. And obviously some of the big moves were making with some of the customers, it's going to continue. This is just the beginning. I mean, literally Rajiv and I are doing these .NEXT conferences, announcements, and so on. We're actually doing calls right now to basically execute for the next 12 months. We're planning the next 12 months' execution. So we're super excited now with this new Bain Capital investment, and also the partnership, the product, we're ready to rock and roll. So look forward to seeing you soon, Stu, and we're going to have more news to cover with you. >> Yeah, exactly right, Tarkan. I think as Tarkan said we are at the beginning of a journey right now. I think the way hybrid cloud is now becoming seamless opens up so many possibilities for customers, things that were never possible before. Most people when they talk hybrid cloud, they're talking about fairly separate environments, some applications running in the public cloud, some running on premises. Applications that are themselves hybrid that run across, or that can burst from one to the other, or can move around with both app and data mobility. I think the possibilities are huge. And it's going to be many years before we see the full potential of this platform. >> Well Rajiv and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing all of the updates, congratulations on the progress, and absolutely look forward to catching up in the near future and watching the journey. >> Thanks, Stu. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And stay with us for more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)