(upbeat sparkling music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of AWS re:Invent. We are live from the show floor here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, here with my cohost John Furrier on theCUBE. John, end of day three. You're smiling. >> Yeah. >> You're still radiating energy. Is it, is it the community that's keeping your, your level up? >> It's just all the action. We've got a great special guest joining us for the first time on theCUBE. It's going to be great and Serverless wave is hitting. More and more Serverless embedded into the like, things like analytics, are going to make things tightly integrated. You can see a lot more kind of tightly coupled but yet still cohesive elements together being kind of end-to-end, and again, the, the zero-ELT vision is soon to be here. That and security, major news here at Amazon. Of course, this next segment is going to be awesome, about the modernization journey. We're going to hear a lot about that. >> Yeah, we are, and our next guest is also an extraordinarily adventurous one. Please welcome Joe from Arc XP. Thank you so much for being here. >> Thanks for having me. >> Savannah: How this show going for you? >> It's been great and you know, it's the end of the day but there's so much great energy at the show this year. >> Savannah: There really is. >> It's great walking the halls, seeing the great engineers, the thought leaders, including this session. So, it's been really a stimulating time. >> What do you do at Arc, what do you, what's your role? >> So, I'm Vice President of Technology and Product Development. I recently joined Arc to lead all the product development teams. We're an experience platform, so, in that platform we have content tools, we have delivery tools, we have subscription tools. It's a really exciting time in all those spaces. >> John: And your customer base is? >> Our customers today started with publishers. So, Arc XP was built for the Washington Post's internal needs many years ago and word got out about how great it was, built on top of the AWS tech stack and other publishers came and started licensing the software. We've moved from there to B2C commerce as well as enterprise scenarios. >> I think that's really interesting and I want to touch on your background a little bit here. You just mentioned the Washington Post. You have a background in broadcast. What was it, since you, since you are fresh, what was it that attracted you to Arc? What made you say yes? >> Yeah, so I spent a little under 10 years building the Associated Press Broadcast Newsroom Tools, some of them that you have used for many years, and you know, one of the things that was really exciting about joining ARC, was they were cloud native and they were cloud native from the start and so that really gave them a leg up with how quickly they could innovate, and now we see developers here at re:Invent be able to do custom Lambdas and new extensibility points in a way that, really, no one else can do in the CMS space >> Which, which is very exciting. Let's talk a little bit about your team and the development cycle. We've touched a lot on the economic uncertainty right now. How are things internally? What's the culture pulse? >> Yeah, so the return to work has been a thing for us, just like- >> Savannah: Are you back in office? >> All of them. We actually have a globally distributed team, and so, if you happen to be lucky enough to be in Washington, DC or Chicago or some of our other centers, there's an opportunity to be in the office, but most of our engineers work remotely. One of the exciting things we did earlier this year was ARC week. We brought everyone to DC to see each other face-to-face, and that same energy you see at re:Invent, was there in person with our engineers. >> I believe that. So, I'm a marketer by trade. I love that you're all about the digital experience. Are you creating digital- I mean everyone needs some sort of digital experience. >> Joe: Yes. >> Every company is a technology company now. Do you work across verticals? You see more niche or industry specific? >> Yeah, so we began with a very large vertical of media and broadcast. >> Savannah: There's a couple companies in that category. >> There's a couple big ones out there. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And actually their challenges are really high volume production of great digital storytelling, and so, solving their problems has enabled us to have a platform that works for anyone that needs to tell a story digitally, whether it's a commerce site, corporate HR department. >> Savannah: Which is everyone, right? >> Virtually everyone needs to get their story out today. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And so we have gone to a bunch of other verticals and we've seen the benefits of having that strong, cloud-based platform offer the scale that all storytellers need. >> What are some of the challenges today that aren't, that weren't there a decade ago or even five years ago? We see a lot of media companies looking at the business model innovations, changing landscapes omnichannel distribution, different formats. What's some of the challenges that's going on in content? >> So, you know, content challenges include both production of content and delivery of that content through a great experience. So different parts of ARC focus on those problems and you got to monetize it as well, but what I'd say is unique to Arc and the challenge we talk to our customers about a lot is multi-format production. So, it's not just about one channel. >> Savannah: Right. It's about telling a story and having it go across multi-channels, multi-sites, and having the infrastructure both technically and in the workflow tools, is super critical for our customers and it is a challenge that we receive well. >> A lot of AI is coming into the conversation here. Data, AI, publishing, video, user generated content. It's all data. >> Absolutely, yep. >> It's all data. >> Joe: It's an immense amount of data. >> How do you look at the data plane or the data layer, the data aspect of the platform and what are some of the customers leaning into or are kicking the tires around? What are some of the trends, and what are some of the core issues you see? >> Yeah, so I've spent a lot of time in data ML and analytics looking at giant data sets, and you know, when you look at CMS systems and experience platforms, the first class that it's in, is really the, the documents themselves. What is the story you're saying? But where the rich data is that we can analyze is user behaviors, global distribution of content, how we optimize our CDN and really give a personal experience to the reader, but beyond that, we see a lot of advantages in our digital asset management platform, which is for video, audio, photos, all kinds of media formats, and applying AIML to do detection, suggest photos that might be appropriate based on what a journalist or a marketer is writing in their story. So, there's a lot of opportunities around that sort of data. >> What are some of the business model changes that you're seeing? 'Cause remember we're in digital, Page view advertising has gone down, subscription firewalls on blogs. You got things like Substack emerging. Journalists are kind of like changing. I've seen companies go out of business, some of the media companies or change, some of the small ones go out of business, the bigger ones are evolving. What are some of the business model enablements that you guys see coming, that a platform could deliver, so that a company can value their content, and their talent? >> For sure. I mean this is a perennial question in the media space, right? It's been going on for two decades. >> I was going to say we're- >> Right. >> So it's like- >> Joe: Right, and so we've seen that play out- >> John: Little softball for you. >> Really for almost every format. It's a softball, but- >> It's day three. >> How are we addressing that? You know what, first and foremost, you got to do great storytelling, so, we have tools for that, but then presenting that story, and a great experience no matter what device you're on, that's going to be critical no matter how you're monetizing it, and so, you know, we have customers that go very ad heavy. We also have a subscription platform that can do that built into our infrastructure. >> 50 million plus registered users, correct? >> Yeah, it's unbelievable to scale. Really, Arc is a growth story, and so we went from serving the Washington Post needs, to over 2000 sites today, across 25 countries. >> Very- >> How do we get to that? How do we get that audience if we want to? Can we join that network? Is it a network of people? >> I love that question. >> Of people that are using Arc XP? >> Yeah. >> Actually, we recently launched a new effort around our community, so I think they actually had a meeting yesterday, and so that's one way to get involved, but as you said, everyone needs to have a site and tell great stories. >> Yeah. >> So, we see a wide appeal for our platform, and what's unique about ARC, is it's truly a SaaS model. This is delivered via SaaS, where we take care of all of the services, over a hundred Amazon services, behind the scenes- >> Wow. >> Built into Arc. We manage all of that for our customers, including the CDN. So, it's not as though as our customers have to be making sure the site is up, we've got teams to take care of that 24/7 >> Great value proposition and a lot of need for this, people doing their own media systems themselves. What's the secret sauce to your success? If you had to kind of look at the technology? I see serverless is a big part of it on the EDB stack. What's the, what's the secret sauce? >> I think the secret sauce comes from the roots that Arc has in the Washington Post >> You understand it. >> And some of the most challenging content production workflows anywhere in the world, and I've spent a lot of time, in many newsrooms. So, I think that knowledge, the urgency of what it takes to get a story out, the zero tolerance for the site going down. That DNA really enables our engineers to do great solutions. >> Talk about understanding your user. I mean that that's, and drinking the Kool-Aid, but in a totally amazing way. One of the other things that stuck out to me in doing my research is not only are you a service used, now, by 50 million subscribers, but beyond that, you pride yourself on being a turnkey solution. Folks can get Arc up and running quite quickly. Correct? >> For sure. So, one of the things we built into Arc XP is something called Themes, which has a bunch of pre-built blocks, that our customers don't have to end up with a custom codebase when they've developed a new experience platform. That's not a good solution, of every site be a custom codebase. We're a product with extensibility hooks. >> Savannah: Right. >> That really enables someone to get started very quickly, and that also includes bringing in content from other platforms into Arc, itself. So that journey of migrating a site is really smooth with our toolset. >> What's the history of the company? Is it, did it come from the Washington Post or was that it's original customer? What's the DNA of the firm? >> Yeah, so it was originally built by the Washington Post for the Washington Post. So, designed by digital storytellers, for storytelling. >> Savannah: And one of the largest media outlets out there. >> So, that's that "DNA", the "special sauce". >> Yeah, yeah. >> So that's where that connection is. >> That really is where it comes through. >> John: Awesome. Congratulations on- >> Now today, you know, those roots are still apparent, but we've been very responsive to other needs in the markets around commerce. There's a whole other set of DNA we've brought in, experts in understanding different systems for inventory management, so we can do a great experience on top of some of those legacy platforms. >> My final question, before we go to the challenge- >> Savannah: To the challenge. >> Is, what's next? What's on the roadmap as you look at the technology and the teams that you're managing? What's some of the next milestone or priorities for your business? >> So, it is really about growth and that's the story of Arc XP, which has driven our technology decisions. So, our choice to go serverless was driven by growth and need to make sure we had exceptional experience but most importantly that our engineers could be focused on product development and responding to what the market needed. So, that's why I'd say next year is about, it's enabling our engineers to keep up with the scaling business but still provide great value on the roadmap. >> And it's not like there's ever going to be a shortage of content or stories that need to be told. So I suspect there's a lot of resilience in what you're doing. >> And we hope to be inspired with new ways of telling stories. >> Yeah. >> So if you're in the Washington Post or other media outlets. >> John: Or theCUBE. >> Joe: Or theCUBE. >> Savannah: I know, I was just- >> There's just great formats out there. >> Best dev meeting, let's chat after, for sure. >> Exactly, that's what I've been thinking the whole time. I'm sure the wheels are turning over on this side- >> So great to have you on. >> In a lot of different ways. So, we have a new tradition here at re:Invent, where we are providing you with an opportunity for quite a sizzle reel, Instagram video, 30 second, thought leadership soundbite. What is your hot take, key theme or most important thing that you are thinking about since we're here at this year's show? >> I would say it's the energy that's building in the industry, getting back together, the collaboration, and how that's resulting in us using new technologies. You know, the conversation's no longer about shifting to the cloud. We all have huge infrastructure, the conversation's about observability, how do we know what's going in? How do we make sure we're getting the most value for our customers with those, that technology set. So, I think the energy around that is super exciting. I've always loved building products. So, next year think it's going to be a great year with that, putting together these new technologies. >> I think you nailed it. The energy really is the story and the collaboration. Joe, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story. Arc is lucky to have you and we'll close with one personal anecdote. Favorite place to sail? >> Favorite place to sail. So, I lived in the Caribbean for many years, as we were talking about earlier >> None of us are jealous up here at all. >> And so my favorite place to sail would be in the British Virgin Islands, which was closed during Covid but is now back open, so, if any you've had a chance to go to the BVI, make some time, hop on Catamaran, there's some great spots. >> Well, I think you just gave us a catalyst for our next vacation, maybe a team off-site. >> Bucket list item, of course. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, Let's bring everyone together. >> Here we go. I love it. Well Joe, thanks so much again for being on the show. We hope to have you back on theCUBE again sometime soon, and thank all of you for tuning in to this scintillating coverage that we have here, live from the AWS re:Invent show floor in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furrier. I'm Savannah Peterson. This is theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of HPE's big customer event. Of course, the virtual edition and we're going to dig into transformations, the role of technology and the role of senior technology leadership. Look, let's face it, HPE has gone through a pretty dramatic transformation itself in the past few years so it makes a great example in case study and with me is Rashmi Kumar who is the senior vice president and CIO at HPE, Rashmi welcome come on inside theCUBE. >> Hi Dave nice to be here. >> Well it's been almost a year since COVID you know changed the world as we know it. How would you say the role of the CIO specifically in generally IT has changed? I mean you got digital, zero trust has gone from buzzword to mandate, digital, everybody was you know complacent about digital in many ways and now it's really accelerated, remote work, hybrid, how do you see it? >> Absolutely, as I said in the last Discover that COVID has been the biggest reason to accelerate digital transformation in the companies. I see CIO's role has changed tremendously in the last 15 months. It's no more just keep the operations running, that's become a table stake. Our roles have become not only to create digital customer experience, engage with our customers in different ways, but also to transform the company operations from inside out to be able to give that digital experience from beginning to end of the customer engagement going forward. We have also become responsible for switching our strategies around the companies as the COVID hit in different parts of the world at different times and how companies structured their operations to go from one region to another, a global company like HPE had to look into its supply chain differently, had to look into strategies to mitigate the risk that was created because of the supply chain disruptions, as well as you go to taking care of our employees. How do you create this digital collaboration experience where teams can still come together and make the work happen for our end customers? How do we think about future employee engagement when people are not coming into these big buildings and offices and working together, but how do you create the same level of collaboration, coordination, as well as delivery of faster, good and services which is enabled by technology going forward. So CIO and IT's role has gone from giving a different level of customer experience to different level of employee experience, as well as enabling day-to-day operations of the companies. CEOs have realized that digital is the way to go forward, it does not matter what industry you are in and now CIOs have their seat at the table to define what the future of every company now which is a technology company irrespective you are in oil and gas, or mining, or a technical product, or a car or a mobility company, end of the day you have to act and behave like a technology company. >> So I want to ask you about that because you've been a CIO at a leading technology provider now for the last three years and you've had previous roles and were, you know non-technical, technology, you know, selling to IT companies and as you point out those worlds are coming together. Everybody's a technology company today. How do you think that changes the role of the CIO because it would always seem to me that there was a difference between a CIO at a tech company you know what I mean by that and a CIO at sort of every other company is, are those two worlds converging? >> Absolutely and it's interesting you pointed out that I have worked in many different industries from healthcare and pharma, to entertainment, to utilities and now at a technology company. End of the day the issues that IT deals with are pretty similar across the organization. What is different here is now my customers are people like me in other industries and I have little bit of an advantage because just having the experience across various ecosystem even that HPE look I was fortunate at HPE because of Antonio's leadership we had top-down mandate to transform how we did business and I talked about my NextGEN IT program in last year's CUBE interview. But at the same time while we were changing our customer, partner's experience from ordering, to order processing, to supply chain, to finance, we decided this pivot of becoming as a service company. And if you think about that pivot, it's pretty common. If it was a technology company or non-technology company. At HPE we were very used to selling a product and coming back three years later at the time of refresh of infrastructure or hardware. That's no more true for us. Now we are becoming an as a service or a subscription company and IT played a major role to enable that quote-to-cash experience which is very different than the traditional experience, around how we stay connected with our customer, how we proactively understand their behavior. I always talk about this term digital exhaust which results into data, which can result into better insight and you can not only upsell, cross-sell because now you have more data about your product usage, but first and foremost give what your customer wants in a much better way because you can proactively understand their needs and wants because you are providing a digital product versus a physical product. So this is the change that most of the companies are now going through. If you look at Domino's transition, they are pizza sellers but they did better because they had better digital experience. If you look at Chipotle, these are food service companies. Ikea which is a furniture manufacturer, across the board we have helped our customers and industries to understand how to become a more digital provider. And remember when HPE says edge to cloud platform as a service, edge is the product, the customers is what we deal with and how do we get that, help them get that data, understand how the product is behaving and then get the information to cloud for further analysis and understanding from the data that comes out of the products that they sell. >> I think you've been at HPE now I think around three years and I've been watching of course for decades, you know HPE, well HP then HPE is, I feel like it's entering now that sort of third phase of its transformation, your phase one was okay we got to figure out how to deal or operate as separate companies, okay, that took some time and then it was okay, now how do we align our resources? And you know what are the waves that we're going to ride? And how do we take our human capital, our investments and what bets do we place? And you're all in on as a service and now it's like okay, you know how do we deliver on all those promises? So pretty massive transformations. You talked about edge to cloud as a service so you've got this huge pivot in your business. What's the technology strategy to support that transformation? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So as I mentioned first, your second phase which was becoming a stand-alone company was the NextGEN IT program where we brought in S4 and 60 related ecosystem application where even in the traditional business there was a realization that we were 120 billion company, we are a 30 billion company, we need different types of technologies as well as more integrated across our product line, across the globe and we, I'm very happy to report that we are the last leg of NextGEN IT transformation. Where we have brought in new customer experience through low-touch or no-touch order processing, a very strong S4 capabilities where we are now able to run all global orders across all our hardware and services business together and I'm happy to report that we have been able to successfully run through the transformation which a typical company of our size would take five or six years to do in around close to three years. But at the same time while we were building this foundation and the capabilities to be able to do order management supply chain and data and analytics platforms, we also made the pivot to go to as a service. Now for as a service and subscription selling, it needs a very different quote-to-cash experience for our customers. And that's where we had bring in platforms like BRIM to do subscription billing, convergent charging and a whole different way to address. But we were lucky to have this transformation completed on which we could bolt on this new capability and we had the data analytics platform built which now these as a service products can also use to drive better insight into our customer behavior as well as how they're using our product real time for our operations teams. >> Well they say follow the money, in theCUBE we love to say follow the data. I mean data is obviously a crucial component of competitive advantage, business value, so talk a little bit more about the role of data, I'm interested in where IT fits. You know a lot of companies they'll have a chief data officer, or a CIO, sometimes they're separate sometimes they work, you know for each other, or CDO works for CIO, how do you guys approach the whole data conversation? >> Yeah that's a great question and has been top of the mind of a lot of CEOs, CIOs, chief digital officers in many different companies. The way we have set it up here is we do have a chief data officer and we do have a head of technology and platform and data lake within IT. Look the way I see is that I call the term data torture. If they have multiple data lakes, if they have multiple data locations and the data is not coming together at one place at the first time that it comes out to the source system, we end up with data swamps and it's very difficult to drive insights, it's very difficult to have single version of truth. So HPE had two-pronged approach. First one was as part of this NextGEN IT transformation we embarked upon the journey first of all to define our customers and products in a very uniform way across the globe. It's called entity master data and product master data program. These were very, very difficult program. We are now happy to report that we can understand the customer from cold stage to servicing stage beginning to end across all our system. It's been a tough journey but it was effort well spent. At the same time while we were building this master data capability we also invested time in our analytics platform. Because we are generating so much data now globally as one footprint, how do we link our data lake to our SAP and Salesforce and all these systems where our customer data flows through and create analytics and insight from it from our customers or our operations team. At the same time we also created a chief data officer role where the responsibility is really to drive business from understanding what decision making and analytics they need around product, around customer, around their usage around their experience to be able to drive better alignment with our customers and products going forward. So this creates efficiencies in the organization. If you have a leader who is taking care of your platforms and data, building single source of truth and you have a leader who is propagating this mature notion of handling data as enterprise data and driving that focus on understanding the metrics and the insight that the businesses need to drive better customer alignment, that's when we gain those efficiencies and behind the scenes the chief data officer and the data leader within my organization work very, very closely to understand each other needs, sometimes art of the possible, where do we need the data processing? Is it at the edge? Is it in the cloud? What's the best way to drive the technology and the platform forward? And they kind of rely on each other's knowledge and intelligence to give us superior results. And I have done data analytics in many different companies, this model works. Where you have focus on insight and analytics without, because data without insight is of no value. But at the same time you need clean data, you need efficient, fast platforms to process that insight at the functional non-functional requirement that our business partners have. And that's how we have established in here and we have seen many successes recently as of now. >> I want to ask you a kind of a harder, maybe it's not a harder question it's a weird question around single version of the truth. 'Cause it's clearly a challenge for organizations and there's many applications, workloads that require that single version of the truth, the operational systems, the transaction systems, the HR, the Salesforce and clearly you have to have a single version of the truth. I feel like, however we're on the cusp of a new era where business lines see an opportunity for whatever, their own truth to work with a partner to create some kind of new data product. And it's early days in that but I wonder, maybe not the right question for HPE but I wonder if you see it with in your ecosystems where it's yes, single version of truth is sort of one class of data and analytics got to have that nailed down, data quality, everything else. But then there's this sort of artistic version of the data where business people need more freedom, they need more latitude to create. Are you seeing that? Maybe you can help me put that into context. >> That's a great question Dave and I'm glad you asked it so. I think Tom Davenport, who is known in the data space talks about the offensive and the defensive use cases of leveraging data. I think the piece that you talked about where it's clean, it's pristine, it's quality, it's all that, most of those offer the offensive use cases where you are improving companies' operations incrementally because you have very clean data, you have very good understanding of how my territories are doing, how my customers are doing, how my products are doing, how am I meeting my SLAs or how my financials are looking, there's no room for failure in that area. The other area is though which works on the same set of data. It's not a different set of data but the need is more around finding needles in the haystack to come up with new needs, new wants in customers or new business models that we go with. The way we have done it is we do take this data, take out what's not allowed for everybody to be seen and then what we call is a private space but that's this entire data available to our business leader not real time, because the need is not as real time because they are doing more, what we call this predictive analytics to be able to leverage the same data set and run their analytics. And we work very closely with business units, we educate them, we tell them how to leverage this data set and use it and gather their feedback to understand what they need in that space to continue to run with their analytics. I think as we talk about hindsight, insight and foresight, hindsight and insight happens more from this clean data lakes where you have authenticity, you have quality and then most of the foresight happens in a different space where the users have more leverage to use data in many different ways to drive analytics and insights which is not readily available. >> Great thank you for that. That's an interesting discussion. You know digital transformation it's a journey and it's going to take you know many years. I know a lot of ways, not a lot of ways, 2020 was a forced march to digital you know. If you weren't a digital business you were out of business and so you really didn't have much time to plan. So now organizations are stepping back saying, okay, let's really lean into our strategy, the journey and along the way, there's going to be blind spots, there's bumps in the road, when you look out what are the potential disruptions that you see maybe in terms of how companies are currently approaching their digital transformations? >> That's a great question Dave and I'm going to take a little bit more longer-term view on this topic, right? And what's top of my mind recently is the whole topic of ESG, environmental, social and governance. Most of the companies have governance in place right? Because they are either public companies, or they're under some kind of scrutiny from different regulatory bodies or whatnot even if you're a startup you need to do things with our customers and whatnot. It has been there for companies, it continues to be there. We the public companies are very good at making sure that we have the right compliance, right privacy, right governance in place. Now we'll talk about cybersecurity I think that creates a whole new challenge in that governance space, however we have the setup within our companies to be able to handle that challenge. Now, when we go to social, what happened last year was really important. And now as each and every company we need to think about what are we doing from our perspective to play our part in that and not only the bigger companies, leaders at our level I would say that between last March and this year I have hired more than 400 people during pandemic which was all virtual, but me and my team have made sure that we are doing the right thing to drive inclusion and diversity which is also very big objective for HPE and Antonio himself has been very active in various round tables in US at the World Economic Forum level and I think it's really important for companies to create that opportunity, remove that disparity that's there for the underserved communities. If we want to continue to be successful in this world to create innovative product and services we need to sell it to the broader cross section of populations and to be able to do that we need to bring them in our fold and enable them to create that equal consumption capabilities across different sets of people. HPE has taken many initiatives and so are many companies. I feel like the momentum that companies have now created around the topic of equality is very important. I'm also very excited to see that a lot of startups are now coming up to serve that 99% versus just the shiny ones as you know in the Bay Area to create better delivery methods of food or products right? But the third piece which is environmental is extremely important as well. As we have seen recently in many companies and where even the dollar or the economic value is flowing are around the companies which are serious about environmental. HPE recently published it's a Living Progress Report, we have been in the forefront of innovation to reduce carbon emissions, we help our customers through those processes. Again, if we don't, if our planet is on fire none of us will exist right? So we all have to do that every little part to be able to do better. And I'm happy to report I myself as a person solar panels, battery, electric cars, whatever I can do. But I think something more needs to happen right? Where as an individual I need to pitch in but maybe utilities will be so green in the future that I don't need to put panels on my roof which again creates a different kind of race going forward. So when you ask me about disruptions, I personally feel that successful company like ours have to have ESG top of their mind and think of product and services from that perspective, which creates equal opportunity for people, which creates better environment sustainability going forward and you know our customers, our investors are very interested in seeing what we are doing to be able to serve that cause for bigger cross section of companies. And I'm most of the time very happy to share with my CIO cohort around how our HPEFS capabilities creates or feeds into the circular economy, how much e-waste we have recycled or kept it off of landfills, our green lake capabilities, how it reduces the e-waste going forward, as well as our sustainability initiatives which can help other CIOs to be more carbon neutral going forward as well. >> You know that's a great answer Rashmi thank you for that 'cause I got to tell you I hear a lot of mumbo jumbo about ESG but that was a very substantive, thoughtful response that I think tech companies in particular are, have to lead and are leading in this area. So I really appreciate that sentiment. I want to end with a very important topic which is cyber it's, obviously you know escalated in the news the last several months, it's always in the news but, you know 10 or 15 years ago there was this mentality of failure equals fire. And now we realize, hey they're going to get in, it's how you handle it. Cyber has become a board-level topic. You know years ago there was a lot of discussion, oh you can't have the SecOps team working for the CIO because that's like the fox watching the hen house that's changed. It's been a real awakening, a kind of a rude awakening so the world is now more virtual, you've got a secure physical assets. I mean any knucklehead can now become a ransomware attacker, they can buy ransomware as a service in the dark web so that's something we've never seen before. You're seeing supply chains get hacked and self-forming malware I mean it's a really scary time. So you've got these intellectual assets it's a top priority for organizations. Are you seeing a convergence of the CISO role, the CIO role, the line of business roles relative to sort of prior years in terms of driving security throughout organizations? >> Yeah this is a great question and this was a big discussion at my public board meeting a couple of days ago. It's, as I talk about many topics, if you think digital, if you think data, if you think ESG, it's no more one organization's business, it's now everybody's responsibility. I saw a Wall Street Journal article a couple of days ago where somebody has compared cyber to 9/11 type scenario that if it happens for a company that's the level of impact you feel on your operations. So, you know all models are going to change where CISO reports to CIO, at HPE we are also into product security and that's why CISO is a peer of mine who I work with very closely, who also worked with product teams where we are saving our customers from lot of pain in this space going forward and HPE itself is investing enormous amount of efforts and time in coming out of products which are secure and are not vulnerable to these types of attacks. The way I see it is CISO role has become extremely critical in every company and a big part of that role is to make people understand that cybersecurity is also everybody's responsibility. That's why an IT we propagate DevSecOps, as we talk about it we are very, very careful about picking the right products and services. This is one area where companies cannot shy away from investing. You have to continuously looking at cybersecurity architecture, you have to continuously look at and understand where the gaps are and how do we switch our product or service that we use from the providers to make sure our companies stay secure. The training not only for individual employees around anti-phishing or what does cybersecurity mean, but also to the executive committee and to the board around what cyber security means, what zero trust means, but at the same time doing drive-ins. We did it for business continuity and disaster recovery before, now it is time we do it for a ransomware attack and stay prepared. As you mentioned and we all say in tech community, it's always if not when. No company can take them their chest and say, "oh we are fully secure," because something can happen going forward. But what is the readiness for something that can happen? It has to be handled at the same risk level as a pandemic, or a earthquake, or a natural disaster and assume that it's going to happen and how as a company we will behave when something like this happens. So I'm huge believer in the framework of protect, detect, govern and respond as these things happen. So we need to have exercises within the company to ensure that everybody's aware of the part that they play day to day but at the same time when some event happen and making sure we do very periodic reviews of IT and cyber practices across the company, there is no more differentiation between IT and OT. That was 10 years ago. I remember working with different industries where OT was totally out of reach of IT and guess what happened? WannaCry and Petya and XP machines were still running your supply chains and they were not protected. So, if it's a technology it needs to be protected. That's the mindset people need to go with. Invest in education, training, awareness of your employees, your management committee, your board and do frequent exercises to understand how to respond when something like this happen. See it's a big responsibility to protect our customer data, our customer's operations and we all need to be responsible and accountable to be able to provide all our product and services to our customers when something unforeseen like this happens. >> Rashmi you're very generous with your time thank you so much for coming back in theCUBE it was great to have you again. >> Thank you Dave, it was really nice chatting with you. >> And thanks for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover '21. This is Dave Vellante you're watching the virtual CUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage we'll be right back. (bright music)

>>Welcome back to HP discover 2021 My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes, virtual coverage of H. P. S. Big customer event. Of course, the virtual edition, we're gonna dig into transformations the role of technology in the role of senior technology leadership. Look, let's face it, H P. E. Has gone through a pretty dramatic transformation itself in the past few years. So it makes a great example in case study and with me is rashmi kumari who is the senior vice president and C. I. O. At HP rashmi welcome come on inside the cube. >>Dave Nice to be here. >>Well, it's been almost a year since Covid changed the world as we know it. How would you say the role of the CEO specifically and generally it has changed. I mean you got digital Zero Trust has gone from buzzword to >>mandate >>digital. Everybody was complacent about digital in many ways and now it's really accelerated remote work hybrid. How do you see it? >>Absolutely. As I said in the last discover that Covid has been the biggest reason to accelerate digital transformation in the company's I. C. C. I O. S role has changed tremendously in the last 15 months. It's no more just keep the operations running that's become a table stick. Our roles have become not only to create digital customer experience engaged with our customers in different ways, but also to transform the company operations from inside out to be able to give that digital experience from beginning to end off the customer engagement going forward. We have also become responsible for switching our strategies around the companies as the Covid. Covid hit in different parts of the world at different times and how companies structured their operations to go from one region to another. A global company like H. B had to look into its supply chain differently. Had to look into strategies to mitigate the risk that was created because of the supply chain disruptions as well as you go to taking care of our employees. How do you create this digital collaboration experience where teams can still come together and make the work happen for our end customers? How do we think about future employee engagement when people are not coming into these big buildings and offices and working together, But how to create the same level of collaboration coordination as well as delivery or faster uh goods and services which is enabled by technology going forward. So see I. O. And I. T. S. Role has gone from giving a different level of customer experience to a different level of employee experience as well as enabling day to day operations of the company's. Ceos have realized that digital is the way to go forward. It does not matter what industry you are in and now see a as have their seat at the table to define what the future of every company now, which is a technology company respective you are in oil and gas or mining or a technical product or a card or a mobility company. End of the day you have to act and behave like a technology company. >>So I want to ask you about that because you've you've been a Ceo and uh you know, leading technology provider now for the last three years and you've had previous roles and where you know non technical technology, you know, selling to I. T. Companies and as you point out those worlds are coming together, everybody is a technology company today. How do you think that changes the role of the C. I. O. Because it would always seem to me that there was a difference between A C. I. O. And a tech company. You know what I mean by that? And the C. I. O. It's sort of every other company is those two worlds converging. >>Absolutely. And it's interesting you pointed out that I have worked in many different industries from healthcare and pharma to entertainment to utilities. Um And now at a technology company end of the day um The issues that I. T. Deals with are pretty similar across the organization. What is different here is now my customers are people like me in other industries and I have a little bit of an advantage because just having the experience across various ecosystem. Even at H. B. Look I was fortunate um at H. B. Because of Antonio's leadership, we have topped out mandate to transform how we did business. And I talked about my next gen IT program in last year's cube interview. But at the same time while we were changing our customer partners experience from ordering to order processing to supply chain to finance. Uh We decided this pivot of becoming as a service company. And if you think about that pivot it's pretty common if it was a technology company or non technology company at HP. We were very used to selling a product and coming back three years later at the time of refresh of infrastructure or hardware. That's no more true for us now we are becoming as a service or a subscription company and I. T. Played a major role to enable that quote to cash experience. Which is very different than the traditional experience around how we stay connected with our customer, how we proactively understand their behavior. I always talk about this term. Um Digital exhaust which results into data which can result into better insight and you can not only Upsell cross l because now you have more data about your product usage, but first and the foremost give what your customer wants in a much better way because you can proactively understand their needs and wants because you are providing a digital product versus a physical product. So this is the change that most of the companies are now going through. If you look at Domino's transition, there are pills a sellers but they did better because they had better digital experience. If you look at Chipotle, these are food service companies I. K which is a furniture manufacturer across the board. We have helped our customers and industries to understand how to become a more digital provider. And and remember when uh hp says edge to cloud platform as a service edges the product, the customers who we deal with and how do we get that? Help them get their data to understand how the product is behaving and then get the information to cloud for further analysis. Um and understanding from the data that comes out of the products that gets up, >>I think you've been HP now think around three years and I've been watching of course for decades. Hp. Hp then HP is I feel like it's entering now the sort of third phase of its transformation, your phase one was okay, we gotta figure out how to deal or or operate as a separate companies. Okay. That took some time and then it was okay. Now how do we align our resources and you know, what are the waves that we're gonna ride? And how do we how do we take our human capital, our investments and what bets do we place and and all in on as a service. And now it's like okay how do we deliver on all those promises? So pretty massive transformations. You talked about edge to cloud as a service so you've got this huge pivot in your in your business. What's the technology strategy to support that transformation? >>Yeah that's a that's a great question. So as I mentioned first your second phase which was becoming a stand alone company was the next N. I. T. Program very broad and um S. Four and 60 related ecosystem application. We're even in the traditional business there was a realization that we were 100 20 billion company. We are 30 billion company. We need different types of technologies as well as more integrated across our product line across the globe. And um we I'm very happy to report that we are the last leg of next in I. T. Transformation where we have brought in new customer experience through low touch or not touch order pressing. A very strong as four capabilities. Where we are now able to run all global orders across all our hardware and services business together. And I'm happy to report that we have been able to successfully run through the transformation which a typical company of our size would take five or six years to do in around close to three years. But at the same time while we were building this foundation and the capabilities to be able to do other management, supply chain and data and analytics platforms. We also made the pivot to go to as a service now for as a service and subscription selling. It needs a very different quote to Kazakh cash experience for our customers and that's where we had to bring in um platforms like brim to do um subscription building, convergent charging and a whole different way to address. But we were lucky to have this transformation completed on which we could bolt on this new capability and we had the data and another X platform built which now these as a service products can also use to drive better insight into our customer behavior um as well as how they're using our product a real time for our operations teams. >>Well they say follow the money in the cube. We love to say follow the day to day is obviously a crucial component of competitive advantage business value. So you talk a little bit more about the role of data. I'm interested I'm interested in where I. T. Fits uh you know a lot of companies that have a Chief data officer or Ceo sometimes they're separate. Sometimes they they work you know for each other or Cdo works for C. I. O. How do you guys approach the whole data conversation? >>Yeah that's a that's a great question and has been top of the mind of a lot of C E O C I O S. Chief digital officers in many different companies. The way we have set it up here is do we do have a chief data officer and we do have a head of uh technology and platform and data within I. T. Look. The way I see is that I call the term data torture if we have multiple data lakes, if we have multiple data locations and the data is not coming together at one place at the first time that it comes out of the source system, we end up with data swamps and it's very difficult to drive insights. It's very difficult to have a single version of truth. So HP had two pronged approach. First one was as part of this next gen i. T. Transformation we embarked upon the journey first of all to define our customers and products in a very uniform way across the globe. It's called entity Master Data and Product Master Data Program. These were very very difficult program. We are now happy to report that we can understand the customer from code stage to servicing stage beginning to end across all our system. It's been a tough journey but it was a effort well spent at the same time while we were building this message capability, we also invest the time in our analytics platform because we are generating so much data now globally as one footprint. How do we link our data link to R. S. A. P. And Salesforce and all these systems where our customer data flows through and create analytics and insight from it from our customers or our operations team. At the same time, we also created a chief data officer role where the responsibility is really to drive business from understanding what decision making an analytics they need around product, around customer, around their usage, around their experience to be able to drive better alignment with our customers and products going forward. So this creates efficiencies in the organization. If you have a leader who is taking care of your platforms and data building single source of truth and you have a leader who is propagating this mature notion of handling data as enterprise data and driving that focus on understanding the metrics and the insight that the businesses need to drive better customer alignment. That's when we gain those efficiencies and behind the scenes, the chief data officer and the data leader within my organization worked very, very closely to understand each other needs sometimes out of the possible where do we need the data processing? Is it at the edge? Is it in the cloud? What's the best way to drive the technology and the platform forward? And they kind of rely on each other's knowledge and intelligence to give us give us superior results. And I have done data analytics in many different companies. This model works where you have focused on insight and analytics without because data without insight is of no value, but at the same time you need clean data. You need efficient, fast platforms to process that insight at the functional nonfunctional requirements that are business partners have and that's how we have established in here and we have seen many successes recently. As of now, >>I want to ask you a kind of a harder maybe it's not harder question. It's a weird question around single version of the truth because it's clearly a challenge for organizations and there's many applications workloads that require that single version of the truth. The operational systems, the transaction systems, the HR the salesforce. Clearly you have to have a single version of the truth. I feel like however we're on the cusp of a new era where business lines see an opportunity for whatever their own truth to work with a partner to create some kind of new data product. And it's early days in that. But I want to and maybe not the right question for HP. But I wonder if you see it with in your ecosystems where where it's it's yes, single version of truth is sort of one class of data and analytics gotta have that nail down data quality, everything else. But then there's this sort of artistic version of the data where business people need more freedom. They need more latitude to create. Are you seeing that? And maybe you can help me put that into context. >>Uh, that's a great question. David. I'm glad you asked it. So I think tom Davenport who is known in the data space talks about the offensive and the defensive use cases of leveraging data. I think the piece that you talked about where it's clean, it's pristine, it's quality. It's all that most of those offer the offensive use cases where you are improving company's operations incrementally because you have very clean that I have very good understanding of how my territories are doing, how my customers are doing how my products are doing. How am I meeting my sls or how my financials are looking? There's no room for failure in that area. The other area is though, which works on the same set of data. It's not a different set of data, but the need is more around finding needles in the haystack to come up with new needs, new ones and customers or new business models that we go with. The way we have done it is we do take this data take out what's not allowed for everybody to be seen and then what we call is a private space. But that's this entire data available to our business leader, not real time because the need is not as real time because they're doing more what we call this predictive analytics to be able to leverage the same data set and run their analytics. And we work very closely with business in its we educate them. We tell them how to leverage this data set and use it and gather their feedback to understand what they need in that space to continue to run with their with their analytics. I think as we talk about hindsight insight and foresight hindsight and insight happens more from this clean data lakes where you have authenticity, you have quality and then most of the foresight happens in a different space where the users have more leverage to use data in many different ways to drive analytics and insights which is not readily available. >>Thank you for that. That's interesting discussion. You know digital transformation. It's a journey and it's going to take many years. A lot of ways, not a lot of ways 2020 was a forced March to digital. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business and you really didn't have much time to plan. So now organizations are stepping back saying, okay let's really lean into our strategy the journey and along the way there's gonna be blind spots, there's bumps in the road when you look out what are the potential disruptions that you see maybe in terms of how companies are currently approaching their digital transformations? That's a great question. >>Dave and I'm going to take a little bit more longer term view on this topic. Right in what's top of my mind um recently is the whole topic of E. S. G. Environmental, social and governance. Most of the companies have governance in place, right? Because they are either public companies or they're under some kind of uh scrutiny from different regulatory bodies or what not. Even if you're a startup, you need to do things with our customers and what not. It has been there for companies. It continues to be there. We the public companies are very good at making sure that we have the right compliance, right privacy, right governance in in in place. Now we'll talk about cyber security. I think that creates a whole new challenge in that governance space. However, we have the set up within our companies to be able to handle that challenge. Now, when we go to social, what happened last year was really important. And now as each and every company, we need to think about what are we doing from our perspective to play our part in that. And not only the bigger companies leaders at our level, I would say that Between last March and this year, I have hired more than 400 people during pandemic, which was all virtual, but me and my team have made sure that we are doing the right thing to drive inclusion and diversity, which is also very big objective for h P E. And Antonio himself has been very active in various round tables in us at the world Economic forum level and I think it's really important for companies to create that opportunity, remove that disparity that's there for the underserved communities. If we want to continue to be successful in this world too, create innovative products and services, we need to sell it to the broader cross section of populations and to be able to do that, we need to bring them in our fold and enable them to create that um, equal consumption capabilities across different sets of people. Hp has taken many initiatives and so are many companies. I feel like uh, The momentum that companies have now created around the topic of equality is very important. I'm also very excited to see that a lot of startups are now coming up to serve that 99% versus just the shiny ones, as you know, in the bay area to create better delivery methods of food or products. Right. The third piece, which is environmental, is extremely important as well as we have seen recently in many companies and where even the dollar or the economic value is flowing are around the companies which are serious about environmental HP recently published its living Progress report. We have been in the forefront of innovation to reduce carbon emissions, we help our customers, um, through those processes. Again, if we do, if our planet is on fire, none of us will exist, right. So we all have to do that every little part to be able to do better. And I'm happy to report, I myself as a person, solar panels, battery electric cars, whatever I can do, but I think something more needs to happen right where as an individual I need to pitch in, but maybe utilities will be so green in the future that I don't need to put panels on my roof, which again creates a different kind of uh waste going forward. So when you ask me about disruptions, I personally feel that successful company like ours have to have E. S. G. Top of their mind and think of products and services from that perspective, which creates equal opportunity for people, which creates better environment sustainability going forward. And, you know, our customers are investors are very interested in seeing what we are doing to be able to serve that cause uh for for bigger cross section of companies, and I'm most of the time very happy to share with my C I. O cohort around how are H. P E F s capabilities creates or feeds into the circular economy, how much e waste we have recycled or kept it off of landfills are green capabilities, How it reduces the evils going forward as well as our sustainability initiatives, which can help other, see IOS to be more um carbon neutral going forward as well. >>You know, that's a great answer, rashmi, thank you for that because I gotta tell you hear a lot of mumbo jumbo about E S G. But that was a very substantive, thoughtful response that I think, I think tech companies in particular are have to lead in our leading in this area. So I really appreciate that sentiment. I want to end with a very important topic which is cyber. It's obviously, you know, escalated in, in the news the last several months. It's always in the news, but You know, 10 or 15 years ago there was this mentality of failure equals fire. Now we realize, hey, they're gonna get in, it's how you handle it. Cyber has become a board level topic, you know? Years ago there was a lot of discussion, oh, you can't have the sec ops team working for the C. I. O. Because that's like the Fox watching the Henhouse, that's changed. Uh it's been a real awakening, a kind of a rude awakening. So the world is now more virtual, you've gotta secure physical uh assets. I mean, any knucklehead can now become a ransomware attack, er they can, they can, they can buy ransomware as a services in the dark, dark web. So that's something we've never seen before. You're seeing supply chains get hacked and self forming malware. I mean, it's a really scary time. So you've got these intellectual assets, it's a top priority for organizations. Are you seeing a convergence of the sea? So roll the C. I. O. Roll the line of business roles relative to sort of prior years in terms of driving security throughout organizations. >>This is a great question. And this was a big discussion at my public board meeting a couple of days ago. It's as as I talk about many topics, if you think digital, if you think data, if you think is you, it's no more one organizations, business, it's now everybody's responsibility. I saw a Wall Street Journal article a couple of days ago where Somebody has compared cyber to 9-11-type scenario that if it happens for a company, that's the level of impact you feel on your on your operations. So, you know, all models are going to change where C so reports to see IO at H P E. We are also into products or security and that's why I see. So is a peer of mine who I worked with very closely who also worked with product teams where we are saving our customers from a lot of pain in this space going forward. And H. B. E. Itself is investing enormous amount of efforts in time in coming out of products which are which are secured and are not vulnerable to these types of attacks. The way I see it is see So role has become extremely critical in every company and the big part of that role is to make people understand that cybersecurity is also everybody's responsibility. That's why in I. T. V. Propagate def sec ups. Um As we talk about it, we are very very careful about picking the right products and services. This is one area where companies cannot shy away from investing. You have to continuously looking at cyber security architecture, you have to continuously look at and understand where the gaps are and how do we switch our product or service that we use from the providers to make sure our companies stay secure The training, not only for individual employees around anti phishing or what does cybersecurity mean, but also to the executive committee and to the board around what cybersecurity means, what zero trust means, but at the same time doing drive ins, we did it for business continuity and disaster recovery. Before now at this time we do it for a ransomware attack and stay prepared as you mentioned. And we all say in tech community, it's always if not when no company can them their chest and say, oh, we are fully secured because something can happen going forward. But what is the readiness for something that can happen? It has to be handled at the same risk level as a pandemic or earthquake or a natural disaster. And assume that it's going to happen and how as a company we will behave when when something like this happen. So I'm here's believer in the framework of uh protect, detect, govern and respond um as these things happen. So we need to have exercises within the company to ensure that everybody is aware of the part that they play day today but at the same time when some event happen and making sure we do very periodic reviews of I. T. And cyber practices across the company. There is no more differentiation between I. T. And O. T. That was 10 years ago. I remember working with different industries where OT was totally out of reach of I. T. And guess what happened? Wanna cry and Petra and XP machines were still running your supply chains and they were not protected. So if it's a technology it needs to be protected. That's the mindset. People need to go with invest in education, training, um awareness of your employees, your management committee, your board and do frequent exercises to understand how to respond when something like this happen. See it's a big responsibility to protect our customer data, our customers operations and we all need to be responsible and accountable to be able to provide all our products and services to our customers when something unforeseen like this happens, >>Russian, very generous with your time. Thank you so much for coming back in the CUBA is great to have you again. >>Thank you. Dave was really nice chatting with you. Thanks >>for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HP discover 21 This is Dave Volonte, you're watching the virtual cube, the leader in digital tech coverage. Be right back. >>Mm hmm, mm.

>>Welcome to this cube conversation that is a part of the AWS startup showcase. I'm lisa martin I've got with me now the ceo of amazon john Vitaly john welcome to the cube >>lisa. It's a pleasure to be here. Nice to see you. >>Likewise give our audience in a real liaison and what it is that you guys do specifically in pharma and life sciences. >>Well, you can find that in our, the name of the company is on uh, we think of us as leading uh, customers to the horizon of AI and pharmaceutical, biological manufacturing. And uh, we're all about helping our customers take The step into Pharma 40 and really realized the value of leveraging, machine learning and artificial intelligence in the manufacturing process so they can get higher yields and predictability and ultimately better outcomes for their patients. >>Is your technology built on AWS? >>Absolutely. From the ground up. We leverage, yeah, we leveraged as much as we can from AWS innovation and, you know, a few years ago, when our founders envisioned the future of manufacturing in this industry and where it needs to go first thought was go with a leader to build the solutions and of course A W. S. Is by far the largest provider of this type of technology. And we're happy to say that we're helping and partnering with A W. S. Two to advance the science of artificial intelligence in life sciences. And uh it's just a natural fit for us to continue to leverage the platform on behalf of our customers. >>I like that. The Ai horizon. Excellent. So talk to me a little bit about, you know, the last year has been presented many challenges and also opportunities for people in every industry. I'm just wondering what are some of the changes that we've seen? Farm and life sciences companies have become household names for example, but talk to me about some of the the key initiatives in smart manufacturing and what pharma companies require. >>Well sure, you know farmer companies and biotech companies like look into the lessons from other industries where ai has been widely adopted. If you look at uh manufacturing and other industries has been widely adopted for a number of years. Tesla is a great example of how to use A. I. And robotics and and data science uh to advance uh the efficiency of manufacturing globally. Uh that's exactly what we're trying to achieve here in in life sciences. So um you know, a lot of the leading innovators in this space have been working in their labs with data science teams to you know find new ways to collect data uh to cleanse that data, make it data that's useful across the enterprise. Um but they haven't really tackled, you know, continuous processing in manufacturing yet. There are a number of leaders that are mapping out strategies and they've begun to go down this path. Um But most are really looking at how first to bring the data together in a way that it could be democratized and anonymous in some cases and used across the enterprise. Uh There's a model that we've adopted in terms of our product strategy and how we engage customers and that's the uh the the pharmaceutical maturity model which was developed by the bio forum. This maturity models is a great way for companies and vendors alike innovators to look at how to help Advance their capabilities from one level to the next. And so we help customers understand where they are in that journey and we look for the areas where they can get traction more quickly. They can see value sooner and therefore the adoption would would be accelerating across across their their sites. And in different ways of use. >>Is that maturity model? That farm of maturity model? Is it is it built on or based on digital transformation? >>Absolutely. It's all about digital transformation. And so the model really begins with pre digital and you'd be amazed to find I think the the amount of Excel spreadsheets that are still used in manufacturing today and that would be what we would consider to be pretty much pre digital because that data is not accessible. It's only used by the operator or the user. So it's really about getting from that level to uh breaking down data silos and bringing that data together and harmonizing the data and making it useful. The next level would be about the connected plant actually connecting machines and data lakes um to begin to get more value and find find more ways to improve the processes. And then you move up to using advanced analytics and AI and then ultimately have an enterprise wide adaptive manufacturing capabilities, which is really the ultimate vision, ultimate goal. Every manufacturer has. >>One of the things that we've been talking about for the last 14 plus months or so is really the acceleration in cloud adoption, digital transformation as really a survival mechanism that many industries undertook. And we saw all of us go remote or many of us and be dependent on cloud based collaboration tools. For example, I'm curious in the pharmaceutical industry again, as I said, you know, we we know that the big three and for household names that many of us have been following for the last 14 months or so. What have you seen in terms of acceleration? Informal companies going all right, we need to figure out where we are in this maturity model. We need to be able to accelerate, you know, drug discovery, be able to get access to data. Has that accelerated in the Covid era? >>Covid has been the great catalyst of all time for this industry. Ah and I think it was a wake up call for a lot of, a lot of people in the industry to recognize that uh, just because we have the highest quality standards and we have highest level of compliance requirements and um, we ultimately all think about efficacy and patient safety as our goal to achieve the highest levels of quality. Everyone agrees with that. What the realization was is that we do not have the capacity in any, any geography or with any company, um, to meet the demands that we're seeing today demands to get product to market the demand to get the supply chain right and make it work for manufacturing. The, uh, the uh, The opportunity to partner to get there was, you know, you can see that by the way companies came together to partner for COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing production. And so, um, it was a wake up call that it's time to get over the kind of cultural barriers, risk aversion and really come together to coalesce around a a smart manufacturing strategy that has to be combined with a G XP or good manufacturing compliance standards. And that has to be designed in to the technology and manufacturing processes Together. That's Pharma 4.0, >>got it. Thank you. Let's dig in more to that GSP compliance. And you guys, we talk about that in different industries. The X being, you know, X for X type of industry, talk to me about the compliance regulations and your G XP AI platform and how you guys built on top of amazon, help customers evolve their maturity and facilitate complaints. >>Absolutely. So as I alluded to earlier, one of the biggest challenges is just getting the data together in a place that you can actually manage it. And because there's so many legacy systems and on predominantly on prem technologies and use today, cloud is starting to gain a lot more traction, but it's been limited to uh kind of tier two and tier three data. Uh so now we're seeing uh you know, the recognition that uh just having a data link isn't enough. And so uh we have to overcome, you know, the biggest barrier is really a version to change and change management is really a huge part of any customer being successful. And I think with a W S and us, we were working together to help customers customers understand the type of change management that's required. It's not enough to say, well, we're going to apply the old techniques and processes and use new technology. It just doesn't work that way. If you're adding people uh, and scaling up people just to do validation, worked on a brand new platform, like AWS offers, like we offer on top of AWS, you just won't get three return on investment, you won't get the outcomes and results you're targeting. Uh you have to really have a full strategy in place. Um but you can, and start in small ways, you can start to get traction with use cases that might not have the a huge impact that you're looking for, but it's a way to get started. And uh, the AWS platform is, you know, a great way to look at um, a strategy to scale manufacturing not just in one site but across multiple sites because it's really a data management strategy uh for us using US components uh to build our data collection technology was the starting point. So how do you bring this day together and make it easy and with low overhead and begin to use Ai at the point of collection? So we built our technology with AWS components to do that it's called we call them be data feeders and those are agents that go out and collect that data and bring it together. We also because of the way at AWS innovated around data management we can use a multitude of components to continue to build capabilities on top of what we have today. So we're excited to partner to follow the AWS Roadmap but also continue to add value to what A. W. S. Does today for customers. >>Right? Seems very symbiotic but also your gives you the platform gives you the agility and flexibility that you need to turn things on a dime. I like how you said Covid was a catalyst. I've been saying that for a year now there are things that it has catalyzed for the good and one of those that we've seen repeatedly is that the need for real time data access in many industries like life sciences and pharma is no longer a nice to have but it's incredibly challenging to get real time access to high quality data. Be able to run analytics on that you know, identify where the supply chain in the manufacturing process. For example things can be optimized. Give me an example or some examples of some of the use cases that you guys are working with customers on. I imagine things like that to process optimization, anomaly detection. But what are some of those key use cases in which you really excel? >>Well, it all starts with with what we can do around predictions. There's a lot of data science work being done today, understand variability and how to reduce deviations and how to get more um of predictions to know what is expected to happen. Uh But a lot of that doesn't get applied to the processes. It's not applied as a change the process because that requires revalidation of that entire process. Our platform brings huge value to customers and partners because we do the qualification and validation on the platform in real time. And so that eliminates the needs to go back out and deploy people and uh track and re document uh and re validate what's going on in the process. So that that just takes a huge uh responsibility in some cases liabilities off off of the operators and uh the folks analyzing the data. So that's that's really to get to real time. You have to think carefully about how to apply apply ai because a I was developed in a scientific way but you also have to apply it in a scientific way to to these critical processes in manufacturing. And so that's that's only done uh on a platform, you can't do it on a kind of a stand alone basis. You have to leverage a platform because you're analysing changes to the data and to the code being used to collect and analyze the data that all has to be documented. And that's that's done by our capabilities are using to audit or create audit trails uh to any changes that are happening in the process. And so that's a critical critical process monitoring capability. That is almost impossible to do manually. Uh Some some would say it's impossible to do manually. Uh so uh the the ability to to qualify algorithms to validate in real time enables real time manufacturing and there's a F. D A. Uh I would I would say mandate but guidance called continuous process verification cPV that they will be coming out with additional guidance on that this year. That's really there to uh tell tell manufacturers that they should be getting to real time capabilities. They should be driving their investments and and types of deployments to get to real time manufacturing. That's the only way you can predict deviations and predict anomalies and deal with them in the process and track it. >>So give me give me a snapshot of a customer or two that you've worked with in the last year as they were rapidly evolving and adjusting to the changes going on. How did you help some of these customers extract more value from their pharma manufacturing processes, understand what it is that they need to do to embrace A. I. And get to that real time. >>Absolutely. So, you know, most of our customers are facing the challenge and dilemma that just adding more people and more resources and even upgrading existing technologies or adding more data scientist has a limit. They've reached the limit of improvement that they can make to these processes in the output in manufacturing. So the next natural step would be to say, okay, what science can I apply here and what technology is available To really get to that next one or two improvement in the processes. And it's really critical to look at um you know, not just one use case, but how can I address multiple problems using the same technology? So bringing multi variant uh multi variable excuse me. Um analysis capabilities um is is something that's done in every other industry um but it has not been applied here in terms of changing how manufacturing works today. We can do that, we can we can do multi variable analysis in real time, we can predict what will happen. We can actually alert the operator to make changes to the process based on uh a number of predictions of what will happen in a batch or series of matches in manufacturing. We also bring unstructured data into those calculations that wasn't possible before cloud technology came along and before a I was deployed. Um So now we can look at environmental inputs, we can look at um upstream data that can be used for improving um you know, the yield on batches. So the you know, the main um focus today is you know, how do I get, reduce my risk around asset management? How can I improve visibility into the supply chain? How can I reduce deviations in these processes? How can I get more yield? How can I optimize the yield uh in any given batch uh to improve uh you know, the entire process but also reduce costs in each step of the way. Uh So uh the good news is that when you apply our technology and our know how uh there's an immediate positive impact. There's a customer, we're working with very large customer where we walked in and they said we have this problem, we've reached a certain level of optimization and yield. We can't seem to get it to go any higher. and within six weeks we had a solution in place and we are saving them tens of millions of dollars in material loss just in that once one step in the process that's worth hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of finished product. Uh and if you apply that across multiple lines and across multiple manufacturing sites for that customer, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars of savings, um >>significant impact, significant business impact that your customers I saw on the website, you know, R. O. I. And was at six when I get this right. I had it here somewhere um quite quickly. But the key thing there is that these organizations actually are really moving their business forward. You just gave some great examples of how you can do that. And just kind of a phase one of the project. Let me ask you this in in a post Covid world, assuming we'll get there hopefully soon. Where is in your opinion? Um Ai and ml for pharma companies, is it going to be something that is is for those that adopt it and adopt all the change management needed to do that? Is it going to be kind of the factor in deciding the winners and the losers of tomorrow? Okay, >>well, I don't want to lay down predictions like that, but I would, what I would say is uh all of thought leaders out there have have openly shared and privately shared that this is exactly where the industry has to go to meet the demands. Not just of ramping up COVID-19 vaccine production on a global basis, which we have to do. It's also dealing with how do we how do we uh scale up for personalized medicine, which requires small, small batch manufacturing? How do we turn over lines of manufacturing more efficiently to get more drugs to market more different types of drugs to market, how to contract manufacturers deal with all these pressures, um, and still serve their customers and innovate. Uh, there's also the rise of generics there, you know, that's bringing on cost pressures for big pharma particularly. And so these are all moving the industry in the right direction to respond to these on an individual basis. Would would definitely require the use of Ai and Ml But when you bring it all together, there's a huge huge of push for finding and finding breakthroughs to increase capacity and quality at the same time. >>Yeah, tremendous opportunity. My last question for you, john is a bit more on the personal side. I know you're a serial entrepreneur. What drew you to a zon when you have the opportunity? I can only imagine based on some of the things that you've said. But what was it that you said? This is my next great >>opportunity. That's a great question because I asked myself that question, uh so having been in the industry for for a long time, having been with very innovative companies my whole career, uh I knew that uh manufacturing had fallen behind even further in terms of innovating using the latest cloud technologies and ai in particular, I knew that from running another company uh that focused on the use of predictive analytics. And so uh given all the vectors coming together, the market pressure that's happening on the technology, absolutely. Being a maturity level that we could we could make these things a reality for customers in the size of the challenge. And market opportunity was just overwhelming. It was it was enough to make me jump in with both feet. So I'm very happy uh to be leading such a great team and amazing, amazing talent at amazon and super excited about our partnership with a W. S and where that's going and solving very, very complex and very critical, uh, challenges that our customers are facing together as partners. >>Absolutely. Well, john, thank you for joining me today and talking to us about who is on is what you're doing, particularly in pharma and life sciences, smart manufacturing and what you're enabling in a covid catalysis sort of way. We appreciate you joining us here today. >>This has been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. >>Likewise for john Vitaly, I'm lisa martin, you're watching the cube.

>>Mhm >>Yes, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm lisa martin excited about this conversation. It's combining my background in life sciences with technology. Please welcome Mike Tarsa Lee, the chief scientific officer at Tetra Science. Mike I'm so excited to talk to you today. >>Thank you lisa and thank you very much to the cube for hosting us. >>Absolutely. So we talk about cloud and data all the time. This is going to be a very interesting conversation especially because we've seen events of the last what are we on 14 months and counting have really accelerated the need for drug discovery and really everyone's kind of focused on that. But I want you to talk with our audience about Tetra science, Who you guys are, what you do and you were founded in 2014. You just raised 80 million in series B but give us an idea of who you are and what you do. >>Got it. Tetro Science, what are we? We are digital plumbers and that may seem funny but really we are taking the world of data and we are trying to resolve it in such a way that people can actually pipe it from the data sources they have in a vendor agnostic way to the data targets in which they need to consume that data. So bringing that metaphor a little bit more to life sciences, let's say that you're a chemist and you have a mass spec and an NMR and some other piece of technology and you need all of those to speak the same language. Right? Generally speaking, all of these are going to be made by different vendors. They're all going to have different control software and they're all going to have slightly different ways of sending their data in. Petro Science takes those all in. We bring them up to the cloud or cloud native solution. We harmonize them, we extract the data first and then we actually put it into what we call our special sauce are intermediate data schema to harmonize it. So you have sort of like a picture and a diagram of what the prototypical mass spec or H P. L. C. Or cell counting data should look like. And then we build pipelines to export that data over to where you need it. So if you need it to live in an L. N. Or a limb system or in a visualization tool like spot fire tableau. We got you covered. So again we're trying to pipe things from left to right from sources to targets and we're trying to do it with scientific context. >>That was an outstanding description. Data plumbers who have secret sauce and never would have thought I would have heard that when I woke up this morning. But I'm going to unpack this more because one of the things that I read in the press release that just went out just a few weeks ago announcing the series B funding, it said that that picture science is pioneering a $300 billion dollar Greenfield data market and operating this is what got my attention without a direct cloud native and open platform competitor. Why is that? >>That's right. If you look at the way pharma data is handled today, even those that long tend to be either on prem solutions with a sort of license model or a distribution into a company and therefore maintenance costs, professional services, etcetera. Or you're looking at somebody who is maybe cloud but their cloud second, you know, they started with their on prem journey and they said we should go and build out some puppies, we should go to the cloud migrate. However, we're cloud first cloud native. So that's one first strong point. And the second is that in terms of data harmonization and in terms of looking at data in a vendor agnostic way, um many companies claim to do it. But the real hard test of this, the metal, what will say is when you can look at this with the Scientific contextual ization we offer. So yes, you can collect the data and put it on a cloud. Okay great. Yes. You may be able to do an extract, transform and load and move it to somewhere else. Okay. But can you actually do that from front to back while retaining all the context of the data while keeping all of the metadata in the right place? With veracity, with G XP readiness, with data fidelity and when it gets over to the other side can somebody say oh yeah that's all the data from all the H. P. L. C. S we control. I got it. I see where it is. I see where to go get it, I see who created it. I see the full data train and validation landscape and I can rebuild that back and I can look back to the old raw source files if I need to. Um I challenge someone to find another direct company that's doing that today. >>You talk about that context and the thing that sort of surprises me is with how incredibly important scientific discovery is and has been for since the beginning of time. Why is why has nobody come out in the last seven years and tried to facilitate this for life sciences organizations. >>Right. I would say that people have tried and I would say that there are definitely strides being made in the open source community, in the data science community and inside pharma and biotech themselves on these sort of build motif, right. If you are inside of a company and you understand your own ontology and processes while you can probably design an application or a workflow using several different tools in order to get that data there. But will it be generally useful to the bioscience community? One thing we pride ourselves on is when we product eyes a connector we call or an integration, we actually do it with a many different companies, generic cases in mind. So we say, OK, you have an h p l C problem over at this top pharma, you have an HPC problem with this biotech and you have another one of the C R. O. Okay. What are the common points between all of those? Can we actually distill that down to a workflow? Everyone's going to need, for example a compliance workflow. So everybody needs compliance. Right. So we can actually look into an empower or a unicorn operation and we can say, okay, did you sign off on that? Did it come through the right way? Was the data corrupted etcetera? That's going to be generically useful to everybody? And that's just one example of something we can do right now for anybody in bio pharma. >>Let's talk about the events of the last 14 months or so mentioned 10 X revenue growth in 2020. Covid really really highlighted the need to accelerate drug discovery and we've seen that. But talk to me about some of the things that Tetra science has seen and done to facilitate that. >>Yeah, this past 14 months. I mean um I will say that the global pandemic has been a challenge for everyone involved ourselves as well. We've basically gone to a full remote workforce. Um We have tried our very best to stay on top of it with remote collaboration tools with vera, with GIT hub with everything. However, I'll say that it's actually been some of the most successful time in our company's history because of that sort of lack of any kind of friction from the physical world. Right? We've really been able to dig down and dig deep on our integrations are connections, our business strategy. And because of that, we've actually been able to deliver a lot of value to customers because, let's be honest, we don't actually have to be on prem from what we're doing since we're not an on prem solution and we're not an original equipment manufacturer, we don't have to say, okay, we're going to go plug the thing in to the H. P. L. C. We don't have to be there to tune the specific wireless protocols or you're a W. S. Protocols, it can all be done remotely. So it's about building good relationships, building trust with our colleagues and clients and making sure we're delivering and over delivering every time. And then people say great um when I elect a Tetra solution, I know what's going right to the cloud, I know I can pick my hosting options, I know you're going to keep delivering more value to me every month. Um Thanks, >>I like that you make it sound simple and that actually you bring up a great point though that the one of the many things that was accelerated this last year Plus is the need to be remote that need to be able to still communicate, collaborate but also the need to establish and really foster those relationships that you have with existing customers and partners as everybody was navigating very, very different challenges. I want to talk now about how you're helping customers unlock the problem that is in every industry data silos and point to point integration where things can talk to each other, Talk to me about how you're helping customers like where do they start with? Touch? Where do you start that? Um kind of journey to unlock data value? >>Sure. Journey to unlock data value. Great question. So first I'll say that customers tend to come to us, it's the oddest thing and we're very lucky and very grateful for this, but they tend to have heard about what we've done with other companies and they come to us they say listen, we've heard about a deployment you've done with novo Nordisk, I can say that for example because you know, it's publicly known. Um so they'll say, you know, we hear about what you've done, we understand that you have deep expertise in chromatography or in bio process. And they'll say here's my really sticky problem. What can you do here? And invariably they're going to lay out a long list of instruments and software for us. Um we've seen lists that go up past 2000 instruments. Um and they'll say, yeah, they'll say here's all the things we need connected, here's four or five different use cases. Um we'll bring you start to finish, we'll give you 20 scientists in the room to talk through them and then we to get somewhere between two and four weeks to think about that problem and come back and say here's how we might solve that. Invariably, all of these problems are going to have a data silos somewhere, there's going to be in Oregon where the preclinical doesn't see the biology or the biology doesn't see the screening etcetera. So we say, all right, give us one scientist from each of those, hence establishing trust, establishing input from everybody. And collaboratively we'll work with, you will set up an architecture diagram, will set up a first version of a prototype connector, will set up all this stuff they need in order to get moving, we'll deliver value upfront before we've ever signed a contract and will say, is this a good way to go for you? And they'll say either no, no, thank you or they'll say yes, let's go forward, let's do a pilot a proof of concept or let's do a full production rollout. And invariably this data silos problem can usually be resolved by again, these generic size connectors are intermediate data schema, which talks and moves things into a common format. Right? And then also by organizationally, since we're already connecting all these groups in this problem statement, they tend to continue working together even when we're no longer front and center, right? They say, oh we set up that thing together. Let's keep thinking about how to make our data more available to one another. >>Interesting. So culturally, within the organization it sounds like Tetra is having significant influences their, you know, the collaboration but also data ownership. Sometimes that becomes a sticky situation where there are owners and they want to read retain that control. Right? You're laughing? You've been through this before. I'd like to understand a little bit more though about the conversation because typically we're talking about tech but we're also talking about science. Are you having these technical conversations with scientists as well as I. T. What is that actual team from the customer perspective look >>like? Oh sure. So the technical conversation and science conversation are going on sometimes in parallel and sometimes in the same threat entirely. Oftentimes the folks who reach out to us first tend to be the scientists. They say I've got a problem, you know and and my research and and I. T. Will probably hear about this later. But let's go. And then we will invariably say well let's bring in your R. And D. I. T. Counterparts because we need them to help solve it right? But yes we are usually having those conversations in parallel at first and then we unite them into one large discussion. And we have varied team members here on the Tetris side we have me from science along with multiple different other PhD holders and pharma lifers in our business who actually can look at the scientific use cases and recommend best practices for that and visualizations. We also have a lot of solutions architects and delivery engineers who can look at it from the how should the platform assemble the solution and how can we carry it through? Um And those two groups are three groups really unite together to provide a unified front and to help the customer through and the customer ends up providing the same thing as we do. So they'll give us on the one call, right? Um a technical expert, a data and QA person and a scientist all in one group and they'll say you guys work together to make sure that our orders best represented here. Um And I think that that's actually a really productive way to do this because we end up finding out things and going deeper into the connector than we would have otherwise. >>It's very collaborative, which is I bet those are such interesting conversations to be a part of it. So it's part of the conversation there helping them understand how to establish a common vision for data across their organization. >>Yes, that that tends to be a sort of further reaching conversation. I'll say in the initial sort of short term conversation, we don't usually say you three scientists or engineers are going to change the fate of the entire orig. That's maybe a little outside of our scope for now. But yes, that first group tends to describe a limited solution. We help to solve that and then go one step past and then they'll nudge somebody else in the Oregon. Say, do you see what Petra did over here? Maybe you could use it over here in your process. And so in that way we sort of get this cultural buy in and then increased collaboration inside a single company. >>Talk to me about some customers that you've worked with it. Especially love to know some of the ones that you've helped in the last year where things have been so incredibly dynamic in the market. But give us an insight into maybe some specific customers that work with you guys. >>Sure. I'd love to I'll speak to the ones that are already on our case studies. You can go anytime detector science dot com and read all of these. But we've worked with Prelude therapeutics for example. We looked at a high throughput screening cascade with them and we were able to take an instrument that was basically unloved in a corner at T. Can liquid handler, hook it up into their Ln. And their screening application and bring in and incorporate data from an external party and do all of that together and merge it so they could actually see out the other side a screening cascade and see their data in minutes as opposed to hours or days. We've also worked as you've seen the press release with novo Nordisk, we worked on automating much of their background for their chromatography fleet. Um and finally we've also worked with several smaller biotechs in looking at sort of in stan shih ation, they say well we've just started we don't have an L. N. We don't have a limbs were about to buy these 50 instruments. Um what can you do with us and we'll actually help them to scope what their initial data storage and harmonization strategy should even be. Um so so we're really man, we're at everywhere from the enterprise where its fleets of thousands of instruments and we're really giving data to a large amount of scientists worldwide, all the way down to the small biotech with 50 people who were helping add value there. >>So big range there in terms of the data conversation, I'm curious has have you seen it change in the last year plus with respect to elevating to the C suite level or the board saying we've got to be able to figure this out because as we saw, you know, the race for the Covid 19 vaccine for example. Time to value and and to discovery is so critical. Is that C suite or board involved in having conversations with you guys? >>It's funny because they are but they are a little later. Um we tend to be a scientist and user driven um solution. So at the beginning we get a power user, an engineer or a R and D I. T. Person in who really has a problem to solve. And as they are going through and developing with us, eventually they're going to need either approval for the time, the resources or the budget and then they'll go up to their VP or their CIA or someone else at the executive level and say, let's start having more of this conversation. Um, as a tandem effort, we are starting to become involved in some thought leadership exercises with some larger firms. And we are looking at the strategic aspect through conferences, through white papers etcetera to speak more directly to that C suite and to say, hey, you know, we could fit your industry for dato motif. And then one other thing you said, time to value. So I'll say that the Tetro science executive team actually looks at that as a tract metric. So we're actually looking at driving that down every single week. >>That's outstanding. That's a hard one to measure, especially in a market that is so dynamic. But that time to value for your customers is critical. Again, covid sort of surfaced a number of things and some silver linings. But that being able to get hands on the day to make sure that you can actually pull insights from it accelerate facilitate drug discovery. That time to value there is absolutely critical. >>Yeah. I'll say if you look at the companies that really, you know, went first and foremost, let's look at Moderna right? Not our customer by the way, but we'll look at Madonna quickly as an example as an example are um, everything they do is automated, right? Everything they do is cloud first. Everything they do is global collaboration networks, you know, with harmonized data etcetera. That is the model we believe Everyone's going to go to in the next 3-5 years. If you look at the fact that Madonna went from sequence to initial vaccine in what, 50, 60 days, that kind of delivery is what the market will become accustomed to. And so we're going to see many more farmers and biotechs move to that cloud first. Distributed model. All data has to go in somewhere centrally. Everyone has to be able to benefit from it. And we are happy to help them get >>Well that's that, you know, setting setting a new record for pace is key there, but it's also one of those silver linings that has come out of this to show that not only was that critical to do, but it can be done. We have the technology, we have the brain power to be able to put those all user would harmonize those together to drive this. So give me a last question. Give me an insight into some of the things that are ahead for Tetra science the rest of this year. >>Oh gosh, so many things. One of the nice parts about having funding in the bank and having a dedicated team is the ability to do more. So first of course our our enterprise pharma and BioPharma clients, there are plenty more use cases, workflows, instruments. We've just about scratch the surface but we're going to keep growing and growing our our integrations and connectors. First of all right we want to be like a netflix for connectors. You know we just want you to come and say look do they have the connector? No well don't worry. They're going to have it in a month or two. Um so that we can be basically the almost the swiss army knife for every single connector you can imagine. Then we're going to be developing a lot more data apps so things that you can use to derive value from your data out. And then again, we're going to be looking at helping to educate everybody. So how is cloud useful? Why go to the system with harmonization? How does this influence your compliance? How can you do bi directional communication? There's lots of ways you can use. Once you have harmonized centralized data, you can do things with it to influence your order and drive times down again from days and weeks, two minutes and seconds. So let's get there. And I think we're going to try doing that over the next year. >>That's awesome. Never a dull moment. And I, you should partner with your marketing folks because we talked about, you talked about data plumbing the secret sauce and becoming the netflix of connectors. These are three gems that you dropped on this this morning mike. This has been awesome. Thank you for sharing with us what teacher science is doing, how you're really helping to fast track a lot of the incredibly important research that we're all really um dependent on and helping to heal the world through data. It's been a pleasure talking with you. >>Haley says I'm a real quickly. It's a team effort. The entire Tetro science team deserves credit for this. I'm just lucky enough to be able to speak to you. So thank you very much for the opportunity. >>And she about cheers to the whole touch of science team. Keep up the great work guys. Uh for mike Roselli, I'm lisa martin. You're watching this cube conversation. >>Mhm.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 live I'm Lisa Martin. Really exciting topic coming up for you next, please. Welcome Blake shoulda, founder and CEO of boom supersonic Blake. It's great to have you on the program. Thank you for having me, Lisa, and your background gives me all the way with what we're going to talk about in the next few minutes or so, but supersonic flight has existed for quite a long time, like 50 or so years. I think those of us in certain generations remember the Concorde for example, but the technology to make it efficient and mainstream is only recently been approved by or accepted by regulators. Tell us a little bit about boom, your mission to make the world more accessible with supersonic commercial flight. Well, a supersonic flight has >> actually been around since 1949 when Chuck Yeager broke the speed barrier or sorry, the sound barrier. >>And as, as many of you know, he actually passed yesterday, uh, 97. So very, very sad to see one of the supersonic pioneers behind us. Uh, but, uh, but as I say goodbye to Jaeger, a new era of supersonic flight is here. And if you look at the history of progress and transportation, since the Dawn of the industrial revolution, uh, we used to make regular progress and speed. As we went from, uh, the horse to the iron horse, to the, the boats, to the, the early propeller airplanes that have the jet age. And what happened was every time we made transportation faster, instead of spending less time traveling, we actually spent more time traveling because there were more places to go, more people to meet. Uh, we haven't had a world war since the Dawn of the jet age. Uh, places like Hawaii have become, uh, a major tourist destination. >>Uh, but today, uh, today it's been 60 years since we've had a mainstream re uh, step forward and speed. So what we're doing here at boom is picking up where Concord left off building an aircraft that flies faster by factor to the, anything you can get a ticket on today. And yet is 75% more affordable than Concorde was. So we want to make Australia as accessible as a why yesterday. We want to enable you to cross the Atlantic, do business, be home in time, detect your kids into bed, or take a three-day business trip to Asia and let you do it in just 24 >> hours. I like the sound of all of that. Even getting on a plane right now in general. I think we all do so, so interesting that you, you want to make this more accessible. And I did see the news about Chuck Yeager last night. >>Um, designing though the first supersonic airliner overture, it's called in decades, as you said, this dates back 60 years, rolling it out goal is to roll it out in 2025 and flying more than 500 trans oceanic routes. Talk to me about how you're leveraging technology and AWS to help facilitate that. Right. Well, so one of the really fascinating things is the new generation of airplanes, uh, are getting born in the cloud and then they're going to go fly through actual clouds. And so there are, there are a bunch of revolutions in technology that have happened since Concord's time that are enabling what we're doing now, their breakthroughs and materials. We've gone from aluminum to carbon fiber they're breakthroughs and engines. We've gone from after burning turbo jets that are loud and inefficient to quiet, clean, efficient turbo fans. But one of the most interesting breakthroughs has been in a available to do design digitally and iteration digitally versus, uh, versus physically. >>So when conquer was designed as an example, they were only able to do about a dozen wind tunnel tests because they were so expensive. And so time consuming and on, uh, on our XP one aircraft, which is our prototype that rolled out in October. Um, uh, we did hundreds of iterations of the design in virtual wind tunnels, where we could spin up a, uh, a simulation and HPC cluster in AWS, often more than 500 cores. And then we'd have our airplanes flying through virtual wind tunnels, thousands of flights scenarios you can figure out which were the losers, which were the winners keep iterating on the winners. And you arrive at an aerodynamic design that is more efficient at high speed. We're going very safely, very quickly in a straight line, but also a very smooth controllable for safe takeoff and landing. And the part of the artist supersonic airplane design is to accomplish both of those things. One, one airplane, and, uh, being able to design in the cloud, the cloud allows us to start up to do what previously only governments and militaries could do. I mentioned we rolled out our XP one prototype in October. That's the first time anyone has rolled out a supersonic civil aircraft since the Soviet union did it in 1968. And we're able to do as a startup because of computing. >>That's incredible born in the cloud to fly in the cloud. So talk to me about a lot of, of opportunity that technology has really accelerated. And we've seen a lot of acceleration this year in particular digital transformation businesses that if they haven't pivoted are probably in some challenging waters. So talk to us about how you're going all in with AWS to facilitate all these things that you just mentioned, which has dramatic change over 12, uh, when tone test for the Concord and how many times did it, >>Uh, I mean for 27 years, but not that many flights, never, it never changed the way mainstream, uh, never, never district some of you and I fly. Right. Um, so, so how, how are we going all in? So we've, you know, we've been using AWS for, uh, you know, basically since the founding of the company. Uh, but what we, what we're doing now is taking things that we were doing outside of the cloud and cloud. Uh, as an example, uh, we have 525 terabytes of XP one design and test data that what used to be backed up offsite. Um, and, and what we're doing is migrating into the cloud. And then your data is next. Your compute, you can start to do these really interesting things as an example, uh, you can run machine learning models to calibrate your simulations to your wind tunnel results, which accelerates convergence allows you to run more iterations even faster, and ultimately come up with a more efficient airplane, which means it's going to be more affordable for all of us to go to go break the sound barrier. >>And that sounds like kind of one of the biggest differences that you just said is that it wasn't built for mainstream before. Now, it's going to be accessibility affordability as well. So how are you going to be leveraging the cloud, you know, design manufacturing, but also other areas like the beyond onboard experience, which I'm already really excited to be participating in in the next few years. >>Yeah. So there's so many, so many examples. We've talked about design a little bit already. Uh, it's going to manifest in the manufacturing process, uh, where the, the, the, the, the supply chain, uh, will be totally digital. The factory operations will be run out of the cloud. You know, so what that means concretely is, uh, you know, literally there'll be like a million parts of this airplane. And for any given unit goes through their production line, you'll instantly know where they all are. Um, you'll know which serial numbers went on, which airplanes, uh, you'll understand, uh, if there was a problem with one of it, how you fixed it. And as you continue to iterate and refine the airplane, this, this is one of things that's actually a big deal, uh, with, with digital in the cloud is, you know, exactly what design iteration went into, exactly which airplane and, uh, and that allows you to actually iterate faster and any given airline with any given airplane will actually know exactly what, what airplane they have, but the next one that rolls off the line might be even a little bit better. >>And so it allows you to keep track of all of that. It allows you to iterate faster, uh, it allows you to spot bottlenecks in your supply chain before they impact production. Um, and then it allows you to, uh, to do preventive maintenance later. So there's to be digital interpretation all over the airplane, it's going to update the cloud on, you know, uh, are the engines running expected temperature. So I'm gonna run a little bit hot, is something vibrating more than it should vibrate. And so you catch these things way before there's any kind of real maintenance issue. You flag it in the cloud. The next time the airplane lands, there's a tech waiting for the airplane with whatever the part is and able to install it. And you don't have any downtime, and you're never anywhere close to a safety issue. You're able to do a lot more preventively versus what you can do today. >>Wow. So you have to say that you're going to be able to, to have a hundred percent visibility into manufacturing design, everything is kind of an understatement, but you launched XQ on your prototype in October. So during the pandemic, as I mentioned, we've been talking for months now on the virtual cube about the acceleration of digital transformation. Andy, Jassy talked about it in his keynote at AWS reinventing, reinventing this year, virtual, what were some of the, the, the advantages that you got, being able to stay on track and imagine if you were on track to launch in October during a time that has been so chaotic, uh, everywhere else, including air travel. >>Well, some of it's very analog, uh, and some of it's very digital. So to start with the analog, uh, we took COVID really seriously at Bo. Uh, we went into that, the pandemic first hit, we shut the company down for a couple of weeks, so we'd kind of get our feet underneath of us. And then we sort of testing, uh, everyone who had to work on the airplane every 14 days, we were religious about wearing masks. And as a result, we haven't had anyone catch COVID within the office. Um, and I'm super proud that we're able to stay productive and stay safe during the pandemic. Um, and you do that, but kind of taking it seriously, doing common sense things. And then there's the digital effort. And, uh, and so, you know, part of the company runs digitally. What we're able to do is when there's kind of a higher alert level, we go a little bit more digital when there's a lower alert level. >>Uh, we have more people in the office cause we, we still really do value that in-person collaboration and which brings it back through to a bigger point. It's been predicted for a long time, that the advent of digital communication is going to cause us not to need to travel. And, uh, what we've seen, you know, since the Dawn of the telephone is that it's actually been the opposite. The more you can know, somebody even a little bit, uh, at distance, the hungry you are to go see them in person, whether it's a business contact or someone you're in love with, um, no matter what it is, there's still that appetite to be there in person. And so I think what we're seeing with the digitization of communication is ultimately going to be very, um, uh, it's very complimentary with supersonic because you can get to know somebody a little bit over a long distance. You can have some kinds of exchanges and then you're, and then the friction for be able to see them in person is going to drop. And that is, uh, that's a wonderful combination. >>I think everybody on the planet welcomes that for sure, given what we've all experienced in the last year, you can have a lot of conversations by zoom. Obviously this was one of them, but there is to your point, something about that in-person collaboration that really takes things can anyway, to the next level. I am curious. So you launched XB one in October, as I mentioned a minute ago, and I think I read from one of your press releases planning to launch in 2025, the overture with over 500 trans oceanic routes. What can we expect from boom and the next year or two, are you on track for that 2025? >>Yeah. Things are going, things are going great. Uh, so to give a sense of what the next few years hold. So we rolled out the assembled XB one aircraft this year, uh, next year that's going to fly. And so that will be the first civil supersonic, uh, flying aircraft ever built by an independent company. Uh, and along the way, we are building the foundation of overture. So that design efforts happening now as XB one is breaking the sound barrier. We'll be finalizing the overture design in 22, we'll break ground in the factory in 23, we'll start building the first airplane and 25, we'll roll it out. And 26 we'll start flight tests. And, uh, and then we'll go through the flight test methodically, uh, systematically as carefully as we can, uh, and then be ready to carry passengers as soon as we are convinced that safe, which will be right around the end of the decade, most likely. >>Okay. Exciting. And so it sounds like you talked about the safety protocols that you guys put in place in the office, which is great. It's great to hear that, but also that this, this time hasn't derailed because you have the massive capabilities of, to be able to do all of the work that's necessary, way more than was done with before with the Concorde. And that you can do that remotely with cloud is a big facilitator of that communication. >>Yeah. You're able to do the cloud enables a lot of computational efficiencies. And I think about the, um, many times projects are not measured in how many months or years exactly does it take you to get done, but it's actually much easier to think about in terms of number of iterations. And so every time we do an airplane iteration, we look at the aerodynamics high speed. We look at the low speed. We look at the engine, uh, we look at the, the weights. Uh, we look at stability and control. We look at pilots, light aside, et cetera, et cetera. And every time you do an iteration, you're kind of looking around all of those and saying, what can I make better? But each one of those, uh, lines up a little bit differently with the rest now, for example, uh, uh, to get the best airplane aerodynamically, doesn't have a good view for the pilot. >>And that's why Concord had that droop nose famously get the nose out of the way so we can see the runway. And so we're able to do digital systems for virtual vision to let the pilot kind of look through the nose of the runway. But even then they're, trade-offs like, how, how good of an actual window do you need? And so your ability to make progress in all of this is proportional to how quickly you can make it around that, that iteration loop, that design cycle loop. And that's, that's part of where the cloud helps us. And we've, we've got some, uh, uh, some stuff we've built in house that runs on the cloud that lets you basically press a button with a whole set of airplane parameters. And bam, it gives you a, it gives you an instant report. I'm like, Oh, was it that this is a good change or bad change, uh, based on running some pretty high fidelity simulations with a very high degree of automation. And you can actually do many of those in parallel. And so it's about, you know, at this stage of the program, it's about accelerating, accelerating your design iterations, uh, giving everyone of the team visibility into those. And then, uh, I think you get together in person as it makes sense to now we're actually hitting a major design milestone with over-treat this week and we're, COVID testing everybody and get them all in the same room. Cause sometimes that in-person collaboration, uh, is really significant, even though you can still do so much digitally. >>I totally agree. There's there's certain things that you just can't replicate. Last question since my brother is a pilot for Southwest and retired Lieutenant Colonel from the air force, any special training that pilots will have to have, or are there certain pilots that are going to be maybe lower hanging fruit, if they have military experience versus commercial flight? Just curious. >>Yeah. So our XB one aircraft is being flown by test pilots. There's one ex Navy one ex air force on our crew, but, uh, overture, uh, will be accessible to any commercial pilot. So, uh, think about it as if you're, if you're used to flying Boeing, it'd be like switching to Airbus, uh, or vice versa. So the, uh, Concord is a complicated aircraft to fly because they didn't have computers. And all the complexity, the soup of supersonic flight was right there and the pilots and an overture, all that gets extracted by software. And, uh, you know, the, the, the ways the flight controls change over speed regimes. You don't have to worry about it, but the airplane is handled beautifully, no matter what you're doing. And so, uh, and so there are many, many places to innovate, but actually pilot experience, not one of them, >>Because the more conventional you can make it for people like your brother, the easier it's going to be for them to learn the aircraft. And therefore the safer it's going to be to fly. I'll let them know, like this has been fantastic, really exciting to see what boom supersonic is doing and the opportunities to make supersonic travel accessible. And I think at a time when everybody wants the world to open up, so by 20, 26, I'm going to be looking for my ticket. Awesome. Can't wait to have you on board. Likewise for Blake shul, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the QS live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.

>> Male's Voice: From around the globe, its theCUBE. With digital coverage of a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. (soft music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special announcement for Nutanix, about some new product releases in the public cloud. To help us kick this off for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome to the program Jordan Reizes, who's the vice president of marketing, for APJ and Nutanix. Jordan, help us introduce it. Thanks Stu. So today we're really pleased to announce Nutanix Clusters, availability in Asia Pacific and Japan, at the same time as the rest of the world. And we think this technology is really important to our geographically dispersed customers, all across the region, in terms of helping them, On-Ramp to the cloud. So, we're really excited about this launch today. And Stu, I can't wait to see the rest of the program. And make sure you stay tuned at the end, for our interview with our CTO, Justin Hurst. Who's going to be answering a bunch of questions that are really specific to the APJ region. >> All right, thank you so much Jordan, for helping us kick this off. We're now going to cut over to my interview with Monica and Tarkan, with the news. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed. And that has changed some of the priorities, for many companies out there. Acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe, or thinking about, where they were going to cloud. And of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers, and the like. So, we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening, and make sure that our workforce, and our customers are all taken care of. So, one of the front seats of this, is of course, companies working to help modernize customers out there. And, Nutanix is part of that discussion. So, I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix. I have two of our CUBE alumnus. First of all, we have Monica Kumar. She's the senior vice president of product, with Nutanix. And Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer. Second time on theCUBE, in his new role many time guests. Previously, Tarkan is the chief commercial officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right. So, Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that, IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general. But in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So, why don't you explain to us, the special cloud announcement. Tell us, what's Nutanix launching, and why it's so important today. >> So, Stu first of all, thank you. And glad to be here with Monica. And basically you and I, spend some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you, the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we never seen before. Especially with this pandemic backdrop, as we're going through. And obviously, all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously, health challenges and across the world, all the pain it creates. But also it creates some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers, and commercial customers, and in a public sector customers, in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains, and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context, Monica knows as well as she's our leader. You know, our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-class strategy as a company. As you know, is too well, Nutanix wrote the book, in digital infrastructures with its own private, (mumbles) infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level, via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions, and end user computer solutions. Now, the multicloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So, in this launch, we have our new, hybrid cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Clusters product now available in the AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms, and customers, and partners at sealable executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important, because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus what's important for them, save money for them, and making sure they streamlined their IT operation. So it's a huge launch for us. And we're super excited about it. >> Yeah. And the one thing I would add too, what Tarkan said too is, look, we talk to a lot of customers, and obviously cloud is the constant, in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation? But really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we are excited about is we're bringing, making really a hybrid cloud reality, across public and private cloud. But also making sure customers, get the cost efficiency they need, when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. >> Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed, watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HI Space and Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that, true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multicloud, simplicity is not the first thing that I think of. So, Tarkan has helped us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done, for so long now in the data center, into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu you're spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about Nutanix executive team, you're very customer-driven. And I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So, just recently I was with a senior executive, C level executive of an airline. Right before that, Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris. Right before the pandemic, we were actually traveling. Talking to, not all the CIO, the chief operating officer on one of these huge banks. And the biggest issue was, how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop with the economic stress. And obviously, now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, he was an airline executive. "Look Tarkan, in the next four months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less, in so many different ways, while I'm cutting costs." So it's a tough time. So, in that context is to... Your actually right. Multicloud is in a difficult proposition, but it's critical, for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us, is not a destination, it's a means to an ends. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is still the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures, to deliver, end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to making sure to take advantage of, these VDI decibels service topic capability. So in that context, what we are providing now to this CIOs who are going through, this difficult time is, a platform, in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud, based on their needs, with freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank. They have a workloads on AWS, they have workload on Azure, they have workloads on Google, workloads on (indistinct), the local XP, they have workloads in Germany. They have workloads providers in Asia, in Taiwan, and other locations. On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on-prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for VR. And then, this is not just in this nation. This is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use, all these operating models and move our data, and applications from cloud to cloud? In simple terms, can we get, some kind of a flexibility with commits as well as we pay credits they paid for so far? And, those are things we're working on. And I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail, as we talk to this. You are super excited, to start this journey with AWS, with this launch, but you're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just kind of discussed with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds, both on-prem and off-prem, for our customers to cut costs, and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add, to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multicloud complexity for our customers. And I can go into more detail, but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement, and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers, and how do they decide, what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud? It's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So, when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect, or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure. And as we talk to customers too, this clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to, build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud, right? In case of, a demand of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my, let's say a VDI environment. or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply, and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR, and we saw with COVID, right? Business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly, in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, of which many customers talk about is, can I lift and shift my applications as is, into the cloud? Without having to rewrite a single line of code, or without having to rewrite all of it, right? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is, how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services, that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course. But in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, right? VDI, which is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and is a computing, and also databases. More and more of our customers, don't want to invest in again having, on-premises data center assets sitting there idly. And, wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to what Tarkan was talking about, really their three key reasons, why the current hybrid cloud solutions, haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough, to actually put into real execution. You know, with Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within, under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up Nutanix Clusters, which you have on-premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon, under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan, that we offer on-prem, that now can manage your AWS Nutanix Clusters. It's that easy, right? And then, you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on-prem? Do it. If you're going to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on-prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs, making sure you know, how you're going to incur costs. How about, if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We allow the... We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing, where to place which workload. Which workload goes into public cloud, which stays on-premises. We have an amazing tool called beam, that gives the customers that ability to assess, which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this. You know, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell. You know, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand of course? You're probably going to need to anonymize. But, I'd like to understand, how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia, I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine, if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row, well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they are getting ready with now clusters, to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud, in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on-prem to AWS, and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event-driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer, who is in the insurance business. For them, DR is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry in every business. But for them, they realize that they need to be able to, transparently run the applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using non Nutanix Clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of the database applications into, AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring, their a part of the data center estate, and moving that completely to AWS, with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix Clusters as a backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity, and spin up hundreds and thousands of remote employees, using clusters into AWS cloud. Using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for the solution. Because now it's so easy to use. We have customers, really surprised going, "Wait, I now have built a whole hybrid card within an hour. And I was able to scale from, six nodes, to 60 nodes, just like that, on AWS cloud from on-prem six nodes, to 16 in AWS cloud. Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use, and how quickly they can scale, using clusters in AWS. >> Yeah. Tarkan I have to imagine that, this is a real change for the conversation you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partner with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanix, at the reinvent show. But, cloud is definitely front and center, in a lot of your customer's conversations. So, with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect, to the conversations that you can have. >> Actually Stu, as you heard from Monica too. As I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers, right? I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, there's an open end model. If it's an open end model they want to take advantage of, to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard, even in this conversation, there is many pinpoint in this. Like again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations. Again, as Monica suggested, making the apps, and the data relating those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities. All those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So we're hearing constantly, from the enterprises is small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different. Clearly they have options. They want to have the freedom of choice. Some of these workloads are going to run on-prem, some of them off prem. And off prem is going to have, tons of different radiations. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus skews to 17,000 customers around the world. It's a $2 billion software business run rate is as you know. And, a lot of those questions on-prem customers now, also coming to our own cloud services. With cloud partners, we have our own cloud services, with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities. With a credit card, you can actually, you can do DR. (mumbles) a service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS, or Azure, or to a local service provider. Sometimes it's US companies, we think US only. But think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want to DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider, within the country. Because of the new data governance, laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and us, to go outside of the boundaries of the country. In some cases, in the same continent, if you're in Switzerland, not even forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure, we give capabilities for customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, just you know Stu, you're not alone in this, we can not do this alone. We have, tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see in the new announcements. From HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing. You're partnering with Palo Alto networks for security, Azure partners, as you know we support (indistinct). We have partners like Red Hat, whose in tons of work in the Linux front. We partnered with IBM, we partner with Dell. So, the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially with this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points, to help the customers innovate the cut costs, in this difficult backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is, tremendous so to speak adoption, of this multicloud approach that you're focusing on right now. >> Yeah, and let me add, I know our partner list is long. So Tarkan also, we have the global size, of course. The WebPros, and HCL, and TCS, and Capgemini, and Zensar, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring clusters based solutions to market. And, for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yoda. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up Stu, which I forgot to mention earlier, and Tarkan reminded me is a superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers, right? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now, and work across multiple clouds. And, we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS is, it's built in native network integration. And what that means is, if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs, in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services. And we bypass any, complex and latency issues with networking, because we are exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, the Amazon credits, with the way we've architected this. And we allow for bringing your own license, by the way. That's the other true part about simplicity is, same license that our customers use on-premises today for Nutanix, can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And now of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only. But I want to point out that DVIOL is something that we are very proud of. It's truly enabling, bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move, from an appliance primarily to a software model. And, as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like, that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have, when you're talking about the cluster solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, and cloud as popular. So, customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine. Or they can bring their existing on-prem license, to AWS. Or we also have a commit model, where they commit for a certain capacity for the year, and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers. We offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring your own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah. Well, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. 'Cause you talked about all the partners that you have out there. If I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all of the hybrid solutions. So, every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So, architecture you talked a bit about. Anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand, as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd, when it comes to hybrid cloud. >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego. But really, I mean, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we, speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So, building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plan, being able to move apps and data, with one click in many cases. And last but not least, the license portability. All of that together. I think the way, (indistinct) I've talked about this as, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe they are the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Tarkan and I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So, with Monica kind of alluded to, anybody that kind of digs underneath the covers is, it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had, that enabled this, and now you're taking advantage of it. What do you feel when you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit what should we be looking for, when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond. >> Thank you Stu. Actually, is spot on question. Most companies in the space, they follow these buzzwords, right? (indistinct) multicloud. And when you killed on, you and you find out, okay, you support two cloud services, and you actually own some kind of a marketplace. And you're one of the 19,000 services. We don't see this as a multicloud. Our view is, complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government clouds success with our customers. We've got enterprise commercial and public sector customers. Also delivered to them choice, with Nutanix is own cloud as I mentioned earlier. With our own billing payment, we're just as capable starting with DR as a service, Disaster Recovery as a service. But take that to next level, the database as a service, with VDI based up as a service, and other services that we deliver. But on top of that also, as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have, with service providers, like Yoda in India, a lot going on with SoftBank in Japan, Brooklyn going on with OBH in France. And multiple countries that we are building this XSP (indistinct) telco relationships, give those international customers, choice within that own local region, in their own country, in some cases in their city, where they are, making sure the network latency is not an issue. Security, data governance, is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multilayer stool is, hyperscalers themselves like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner, working with Doug (indistinct), Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos, biggest super partners. Obviously, that bare metal service capability, is huge differentiator. And with the typical AWS simplicity. And obviously, with Nutanix simplicity coming together. But given choice to our customers as we move forward obviously, our customer set a multicloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called Silk Roads. It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout the history, those empires, those countries who have been successful, partnered well, connect the dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history. Connecting dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier. Working with companies that with Wipro. And we over deliver to the end user computer service called, best of a service door to desk. Database as a service, digital data services get that VA to other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure, as we move forward in upcoming weeks and months, you're going to see, these announcements coming up, one partner at a time. And obviously we are going to measure success, one customer at a time as we more forward with the strategy. >> All right. So Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud, in under an hour. I guess final question I have for you is, number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud. and leverage some capabilities? And, whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix Clusters? >> Absolutely. We are all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing. So if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects, and customers the ability to go try this out. Either just take a tour, or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out. They can just get spun up in the cloud completely, and then connect to on-premises if they choose to. Or just, if they choose to stay in public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say this is really, only the beginning for us as Tarkan was saying. I mean, I'm just really super excited about our future, and how we are going to enable customers, to use cloud for innovation going forward. In a really simple, manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning. So, we look forward to, talking to you, your partners, and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you Stu. Thank you, Monica. >> Hi, and welcome back. We've just heard Nutanix's announcement about Nutanix Clusters on AWS, from Monica and Tarkan, And, to help understand some of the specific implications for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome Justin Hurst, who is the CTO, for APJ with Nutanix. Justin, thanks for joining us. >> Well, thanks Stu. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So, we know Justin of course, 2020, has had a lot of changes, for everyone globally. Heard some exciting news from your team. And, wondering if you can bring us inside the APJ region. And what will the impact specifically be for your customers in your region? >> Yeah, let's say, that's a great question. And, it has been a tremendously unusual year, of course, for everyone. We're all trying, to figure out how we can adapt. And how we can take this opportunity, to not only respond to the situation, but actually build our businesses in a way, that we can be more agile going forward. So, we're very excited about this announcement. And, the new capabilities it's going to bring to our customers in the region. >> Justin, one of the things we talk about is, right now, there's actually been an acceleration of how customers are looking to On-Ramp to the cloud. So when you look at the solution, what's the operational impact of Nutanix Clusters? And that acceleration to the cloud? >> Well, sure. And I think that, is really what we're trying to accomplish here, with this new technology is to take away a lot of the pain, in onboarding to the public cloud. For many customers I talk to, the cloud is aspirational at this point. They may be experimenting. They may have a few applications they've, spun up in the cloud or using a SaaS service. But really getting those core applications, into the public cloud, has been something they've struggled with. And so, by harmonizing the control plan and the data plan, between on-premises and the public cloud, we just completely remove that barrier, and allow that mobility, that's been, something people have really been looking forward to. >> All right, well, Justin, of course, the announcement being with AWS, is the global leader in public cloud. But we've seen the cluster solution, when has been discussed in earlier days, isn't necessarily only for AWS. So, what can you tell us about your customer's adoption with AWS, and maybe what we should look at down the road for clusters with other solutions? >> Yeah, for sure. Now of course, AWS is the global market leader, which is why we're so happy to have this launch event today of clusters on AWS. But with many of our customers, depending on their region, or their regulatory requirements, they may want to work as well, with other providers. And so when we built the Nutanix cluster solution, we were careful not to lock in, to any specific provider. Which gives us options going forward, to meet our customer demands, wherever they might be. >> All right. Well, when we look at cloud, of course, the implications are one of the things we need to think about. We've seen a number of hybrid solutions out there, that haven't necessarily been the most economical. So, what are the financial considerations, when we look at this solution? >> Yeah, definitely. I think when we look at using the public cloud, it's important not to bring along, the same operational mindset, as traditional on-premise infrastructure. And that's the power of the cloud, is the elasticity. And the ability to burst workloads, to grow and to shrink as needed. And so, to really help contain those costs, we've built in this amazing ability, to hibernate workloads. So that customers can run them, when they need them. Whether it's a seasonal business, whether it's something in education, where students are coming and going, for different terms. We've built this functionality, that allows you to take traditional applications that would normally run on-premises 24/7. And give them that elasticity of the public cloud, really combining the best of both worlds. And then, building tooling and automation around that. So it's not just guesswork. We can actually tell you, when to spin up a workload, or where to place a workload, to get the best financial impact. >> All right, Justin, final question for you is, this has been the works on Nutanix working on the cluster solution world for a bit now. What's exciting you, that you're going to be able to bring this to your customers? >> Yeah. There's a lot of new capabilities, that get unlocked by this new technology. I think about a customer I was talking to recently, that's expanding their business geographically. And, what they didn't want to do, was invest capital in building up a new data center, in a new region. Because here in APJ, the region is geographically vast, and connectivity can vary tremendously. And so for this company, to be able to spin up, a new data center effectively, in any AWS region around the world, really enables them to bring the data and the applications, to where they're expanding their business, without that capital outlay. And so, that's just one capability, that we're really excited about. And we think we'll have a big impact, in how people do business. And keeping those applications and data, close to where they're doing that business. >> All right. Well, Justin, thank you so much for giving us a look inside the APJ region. And congratulations to you and the team, on the Nutanix Clusters announcement. >> Thanks so much for having me Stu. >> All right. And thank you for watching I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage, have a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed and that has changed some of the priorities for many companies out there, acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe or thinking about where they were going to the cloud and of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers and the like. So we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening and make sure that our workforce and our customers are all taken care of. So at one of the front seats of this is of course companies working to help modernize customers out there and Nutanix is part of that discussion. So I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix, I've two of our CUBE alumnis. First of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior vice President of Product with Nutanix and Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer, second time on theCUBE in his new role, many-time guest previously. Tarkan is the Chief Commercial Officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Thank you. >> All right, so Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general, but in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So why don't you explain to us the special cloud announcement, tell us what's Nutanix's launching and why it's so important today. >> So first of all, thank you. Glad to be here with Monica. Basically, you and I spent some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we've never seen before, especially with this pandemic backdrop as we're going through. And obviously all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously health challenges and across the globe, all the pain it creates, but also create some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers and infomercial customers and public sector customers in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context and Monica knows this well as she's our leader in our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-cloud strategy as a company. As you know too well, Nutanix wrote the book in digital infrastructures with its own hybrid infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions and end user computer solutions now in multi-cloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So in this launch, we have our new multi-cloud infrastructure, clusters product now available on AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms and customers and partners at senior executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus on what's important for them, save money for them and making sure they streamline their IT operations. So it's a huge launch for us and we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, and the one thing I would add to what Tarkan said too is, look, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously cloud is the constant in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation, but really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we're excited about is we're making really a hybrid cloud a reality across public and private cloud, but also making sure customers get the cost efficiency they need when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. >> Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there, AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HI space in Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multi-cloud, simplicity's not the first thing that I think of. So Tarkan, help us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done for so long now in the data center into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu, you're right on, spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about an Nutanix executive team we're very customer driven, and I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So just recently, I was with a senior executives of an airline right before that Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris, right before pandemic, we were actually traveling, talking to not only the CIO, the Chief Operating Officer on one of these huge banks, and the biggest issue was how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop that the economic stress and obviously now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, it was an airline executive, "Look, Tarkan, in the next 12 months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less in so many different ways, while I'm cutting cost." So it's a tough time. So in that context is to, you're actually right, multi-cloud is a difficult proposition, but it's critical for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us is not a destination. It's a means to an end. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is to the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures to deliver end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to make you sure to take advantage of these EDI disability service topic capability. So in that context, what we're providing now, to these CIOs who are going through this difficult time is a platform in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud based on their needs, the freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank, they have a workloads on AWS, they have workloads on Azure, they have workloads on Google, they have workloads on (mumbles), the local XP, they have workloads in Germany, they have workloads on cloud service providers in Asia, in Taiwan and other locations, On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on Prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for BR. And for them, this is not just a destination, this is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, "Look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use all these operating models and move our data and applications from cloud to cloud?" In simple terms, can we get some flexibility with commits as well as with the credits they paid for so far? And those are the things we're working on, and I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail as we talk though this. We're super excited to start this journey with AWS with this launch, but we're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just discussed it with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds both on Prem and off Prem for our customers to cut costs and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multi-cloud complexity for our customers,. And I can go into more details but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers and how do they decide what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud, it's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure, and as we talk to customer too, there's clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud. In case of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my let's say a VDI environment or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR. And we saw it with COVID, business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, which many customers talk about is can I lift and shift my applications as is into the cloud without having to rewrite a single line of code or without having to rewrite all of it? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course, but in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, VDI, which is virtual desktop infrastructure, and there's a computing and also databases. More and more of our customers don't want to invest, in again, having on premises data center assets, sitting there idlely and wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to, what Tarkan was talking about, really there're three key reasons why the current hybrid cloud solutions haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough to actually put into real execution. With Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up new data clusters which you have on premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon. Under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan that we offer on Prem that now can manage your AWS Nutanix clusters. It's that easy, right? And then you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into cloud, public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on prem? Do it. If you want to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs making sure you know how are you going to incur costs? How about if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing where to place, which workload, which workload goes into public node, which stays on premises. We have an amazing tool called beam that gives the customers that ability to assess which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had an early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand, of course, you're probably going to need to anonymize, but I'd like to understand how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia. I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row. Well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they're getting ready with our clusters to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on prem to AWS and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer who is in the insurance business. For them DR Is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry and every business, but for them they realize that they need to be able to transparently run their applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using Nutanix clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of their database applications into AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring a part of the data center estate and moving that completely to AWS with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix clusters as the backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity and spin up remote, hundreds and thousands of remote employees using clusters into AWS cloud, using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for this solution because now it's so easy to use. We have customers really surprised going, "Wait, I have built a whole hybrid cloud within an hour? And I was able to scale from six nodes to 16 nodes just like that on AWS cloud from on prem six nodes to 16 and AWS cloud? Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and how quickly they can scale using clusters in AWS. >> Yeah, Tarkan, I have to imagine that this is a real change for the conversations that you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partnering with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanics at the re:Invent show, but cloud is definitely front and center in a lot of your customer's conversations. So with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect to the conversations that you can have. >> Absolutely, Stu. As you heard from Monica too, as I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers. I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, it's an operating model. It's an operating model they want to take advantage of to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard even in this conversation, there's any pain point in this. Like, again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost-optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations, again, as Monica suggested, making the apps and the data related to those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities, all those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So what we're hearing constantly from the enterprises is, small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different, clearly they have options, they want to have the freedom of choice, some of these workloads are going to run on prem, some of them off prem and off prem is going to have tons of different reactions. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus skells to 17,000 customers around the world. There's a $2 billion software business run rate as you know and a lot of those customers, prem customers, now are also coming to our own cloud services with cloud partners we have our own cloud services with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities, fit a credit card, you can do DR it's actually come with this service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS or Azure or to a local service provider. Sometimes as US companies we think US only, but think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want a DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider within the country. Because of the new data governance laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and us to go outside of the boundaries of the country, in some cases in the same town. If you're in Switzerland, forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure we give capabilities to customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, Stu, we're not alone on this. We can not do this alone. We have tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see the announcements from HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing, we're partnering with Palo Alto Networks for security, a slew partners, as you know we support VMware is excited, We have partners like Red Hat who's done tons of work in the Linux front, we partnered with IBM, we partnered with Dell. So the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially in this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points to help the customers at of the day to cut costs in this typical backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is tremendous, so to speak, adoption of this multi-cloud approach that we're focusing on right now. >> Yeah. And let me add, I know a partner list is long. So Tarkan also, we have the global size, of course, the WebPros and FCL and TCS and Capgemini and Zinsser, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring clusters based solutions to market. And for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yoda. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up still, which I forgot to mention earlier and Tarkan reminded me, is our superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now and work across multiple clouds and we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS it's built-in native network integration. And what that means is if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services and we bypass any complex and latency issues with networking because we're exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, their Amazon credits with the way we've architected this. We allow for bringing your own license, by the way, that's the other true part about, simplicity is same license that our customers use on premises today for Nutanix can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And, of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only, but I want to point out that (indistinct) is, is something that we're very proud of. It's truly enabling bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move from an appliance primarily to a software model and as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have when you're talking about the cluster solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, on cloud it's popular. So customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine, or they can bring their existing on prem license to AWS, or we also have a commit model where they commit for a certain capacity for the year and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers, we offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah, well, and, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. 'Cause you talked about all the partners that you have out there, if I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all the hybrid solutions. So every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So architecture, you talked a bit about, anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd when it comes to hybrid cloud? >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego, but really, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plane, being able to move apps and data with one click in many cases and last but not least the license portability, all of that together, I think the way, Durage RCO sums it and Tarkan have talked about this is, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe we're the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Now, Tarkan, I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So as Monica alluded to, anybody that digs underneath the covers it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had that enabled this and now you're taking advantage of it. When you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit, what should we be looking for when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond? >> Thank you, Tsu, actually is spot on question. Most companies in this space, they follow these buzzwords like, "Oh, multi-cloud." And when you (indistinct) down and you find out, Okay, you support two cloud services and you actually own some kind of a marketplace and you're one of the 19,000 services, you don't see this as a multi-cloud. Our view is complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government cloud success with our customers, with enterprise, commercial and public sector customers also delivered to them choice with Nutanix's own cloud, as I mentioned earlier, with our own billing payment, we'll just escapable these started with DR as a service, disaster recovery as a service. But take that next level, the database as a service, VDI, desktop as a service and other services that we deliver. But on top of that, also as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have with service providers like Yoda in India, work going on with SoftBank in Japan, work going on with OVH in France and multiple countries that we're building this XSP service provider- customer relationships, give those international customers choice within their own local region in their own country, in some cases, even in their city where they are making sure the network latency is not an issue, security, data governance is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multi legged stool is hyperscalers themselves, like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner working with Hume, Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos they're just super partners, obviously that bare metal service capability is huge differentiator and typical AWS simplicity, and obviously data simplicity coming together, but giving choice to our customers has we move forward, obviously our customers have a multi-cloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called "Silk Roads." It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout history, those empires, those countries who've been successful, partnered well, connect dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history, connecting the dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier, working with companies like WebPro and we all deliver an end user company service called database service go to desk, database as a service, digital data services with MBA, few other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come up together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure as we move forward, in upcoming weeks and months, your going to see these announcements coming up one partner at a time and obviously we're going to measure success one customer at a time as we move forward with this strategy. >> All right, so Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud in under an hour, I guess final the question I have for you is number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud and leverage some capabilities and whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix clusters? >> Absolutely, we're all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing, so if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects and customers the ability to go try this out, either just take a tour or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out, they can just get spun up in the cloud completely and then connect on premises if they choose to, or if they just sustain public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say, this is really only the beginning for us as Tarkan saying. Our future, I mean, I'm just really super excited about our feature and how we're going to enable customers to use cloud for innovation going forward in a really simple manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning so we look forward to talking to you, your partners and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you, Monica. >> All right, for Tarkan and Monica, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Thank you as always for watching this special Nutanix announcement. (upbeat music)

(lively music) >> Narrator: Live, from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019! Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage in VMworld 2019. We're in San Francisco. We're in Moscone North Lobby. I'm John Frer, my co Stu Miniman, here covering all the action of VMworld, two sets for theCUBE, our tenth year, Stu. Keeping it going. Two great guests, John Fanelli, CUBE Alumni, Vice President of Product, Virtual GPUs at NVIDIA Kevin Gray, Director of Product Marketing, Dell EMC. Thanks for coming back on. Good to see you. >> Awesome. >> Good to see you guys, too. >> NVIDIA, big news, we saw your CEO up on the keynote videoing in. Two big announcements. You got some stats on some Windows stats to talk about. Let's talk about the news first, get the news out of the way. >> Sure, at this show, NVIDIA announced our new product called NVIDIA Virtual Compute Server. So for the very first time anywhere, we're able to virtualize artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, and data analytics. Of course, we did that in conjunction with our partner, VMware. This runs on top of vSphere and also in conjunction with our partner at Dell. All of this Virtual Compute Server runs on Dell VxRail, as well. >> What's the impact going to be for that? What does that mean for the customers? >> For customers, it's really going to be the on-ramp for Enterprise AI. A lot of customers, let's say they have a team of maybe eight data scientists are doing data analytics, if they want to move through GPU today, they have to buy eight GPUs. However, with our new solution, maybe they start with two GPUs and put four users on a GPU. Then as their models get bigger and their data gets bigger, they move to one user per GPU. Then ultimately, because we support multiple GPUs now as part of this, they move to a VM that has maybe four GPUs in it. We allow the enterprise to start to move on to AI and deep learning, in particular, machine learning for data analytics very easily. >> GPUs are in high demand. My son always wants the next NVIDIA, in part told me to get some GPUs from you when you came on. Ask the NVIDIA guy to get some for his gaming rig. Kidding aside, now in the enterprise, really important around some of the data crunching, this has really been a great use case. Talk about how that's changed, how people think about it, and how it's impacted traditional enterprise. >> From a data analytics perspective, the data scientists will ingest data, they'll run some machine learning on it, they'll create an inference model that they run to drive predictive business decisions. What we've done is we've GPU-accelerated the key libraries, the technologies, like PyTorch, XGBoost to use a GPU. The first announcement is about how they can now use Virtual Compute Server to do that. The second announcement is that workflow is, as I mentioned, they'll start small, and then they'll do bigger models, and eventually they want to train that scale. So what they want to do is they want to move to the cloud so they can have hundreds or thousands of GPUs. The second announcement is that NVIDIA and VMware are bringing Virtual Compute Server to VMware Cloud running on AWS with our T4 GPUs. So now I can scale virtually starting with fractional GPU to single GPU to multi GPU, and push a button with HCX and move it directly into AWS T4 accelerated cloud. >> That's the roadmap so you can get in, get the work done, scale up, that's the benefit of that. Availability, timing, when all of this is going to hit in-- >> So Virtual Compute Server is available on Friday, the 29th. We're looking at mid next year for the full suite of VMware Cloud on top of Aws T4. >> Kevin, you guys are supplier here at Dell EMC. What's the positioning there with you guys? >> We're working very closely with NVIDIA in general on all of their efforts around both AI as well as VDI too. We'll work quite a bit, most recently on the VDI front as well. We look to drive things like qualifying the devices. There's both VDI or analytics applications. >> Kevin, bring us up-to-date 'cause it's funny we were talking about this is our 10th year here at the show. I remember sitting across Howard Street here in 2010 and Dell, and HP, and IBM all claiming who had the lowest dollar per desktop as to what they were doing in VDI. It's a way different discussion here in 2019. >> Absolutely. Go ahead. >> One of the things that we've learned with NVIDIA is that it's really about the user experience. It's funny we're at a transition point now from Windows 7 to Windows 10. The last transition was Windows XP to Windows 7. What we did then is we took Windows 7, we tore everything out of it we possibly could, we made it look like XP, and we shoved it out. 10 years later, that doesn't work. Everyone's got their iPhones, their iOS devices, their Android devices. Microsoft's done a great job on Windows 10 being immersive. Now we're focused on user experience. When the VDI environment, as you move to Windows 10, you may not be aware of this, but from Windows 7 to Windows 10, it uses 50% more CPU, and you don't even get that great of a user experience. You pop a GPU in there, and you're good. Most of our customers together are working on a five-year life cycle. That means over the next five years, they're going to get 10 updates of Windows 10, and they're going to get like 60 updates of their Office applications. That means that they want to be future-proof now by putting the GPUs in to guarantee a great user experience. >> On the performance side too, obviously. In auto updates, this is the push notification world we live in. This has to built in from day one. >> Absolutely, and if you look at what Dell's doing, we really built this into both our VxRails and our VxBlocks. GPUs are just now part of it. We do these fully qualified. It stacks specifically for VDI environments as well. We're working a lot with the n-vector tools from VM which makes sure we're-- >> VDI finally made it! >> qualifying user experience. >> All these years. >> Yes, yes. In fact, we have this user experience tool called n-vector, which actually, without getting super technical for the audience, it allows you to look at the user experience based on frame-rate, latency, and image quality. We put this tool together, but Dell has really been taking a lead on testing it and promoting it to the users to really drive the cost-effectiveness. It still is about the dollar per desktop, but it's the dollar per dazzling desktop. (laughing) >> Kevin, I hear the frame-rate in there, and I've got all the remote workers, and you're saying how do I make sure that's not the gaming platform they're using because I know how important that is. >> Absolutely. There's a ton of customers that are out there that we're using. We look at folks like Guillevin as like the example of a company that's worked with us and NVIDIA to truly drive types of applications that are essential to VDI. These types of power workers doing applications like Autodesk, that user experience and that ability to support multiple users. If you look at Pat, he talked a little bit about any cloud, any application, any device. In VDI, that's really what it's about, allowing those workers to come together. >> I think the thing that the two of you mentioned, and Stu you pointed out brilliantly was that VDI is not just an IT thing anymore. It really is the expectation now that my rig, if I'm a gamer, or a young person, the younger kids, if you're under 25, if you don't have a kick-ass rig, (laughs) that's what they call it. Multiple monitors, that's the expectation, again, mobility. Work experience, workspace. >> Exactly, along those same lines, by the way. >> This is the whole category. It's not just like a VDI, this thing over here that used to be talked about as an IT thing. >> It's about the workflow. So it's how do I get my job done. We used to use words like "business worker" and "knowledge worker." It's just I'm a worker. Everybody today uses their phone that's mobile. They use their computer at home, they use their computer at work. They're all running with dual monitors. Dual monitors, sometimes dual 4K monitors. That really benefits as well from having a GPU. I know we're on TV so hopefully some of you guys are watching VDI on your GPU-accelerated. It's things like Skype, WebEX, Zoom, all the collaboration to 'em, Microsoft Teams, they all benefit from our joint solution, like the GPU. >> These new subsystems like GPUs become so critical. They're not just subsystem, they are the main part because the offload is now part of the new operating environment. >> We optimized together jointly using the n-vector tool. We optimized the server and operating environment, so that if you run into GPU, you can right-size your CPU in terms of cores, speed, etc., so that you get the best user experience at a most cost effective way. >> Also, the gaming world helps bring in the new kind of cool visualization. That's going to move into just the workflow of workers. You start to see this immersive experience, VR, ARs obviously around the corner. It's only going to get more complex, more needs for GPUs. >> Yes, in fact, we're seeing more, I think, requirements for AR and VR from business than we are actually for gaming. Don't you want to go into your auto showroom at your house and feel the fine Corinthian leather? >> We got to upgrade our CUBE game, get more GPU focused and get some tracing in there. >> Kevin, I know I've seen things from the Dell family on levering VR in the enterprise space. >> Oh, absolutely. If you look at a lot of the things that we're doing with some of the telcos around 5G. They're very interested in VR and AR. Those are areas that'll continue to use things like GPUs to help accelerate those types of applications. It really does come down to having that scalable infrastructure that's easy to manage and easy to operate. That's where I think the partnership with NVIDIA really comes together. >> Deep learning and all this stuff around data. Michael Dell always comes on theCUBE, talks about it. He sees data as the biggest opportunity and challenge. In whatever applications coming in, you got to be able to pound into that data. That's where AI's really shown... Machine learning has kind of shown that that's helping heavy lifting a lot of things that were either manual. >> Exactly. The one thing that's really great about data analytics that are GPU-accelerated is we can take a job that used to take days and bring it down to hours. Obviously, doing something faster is great, but if I take a job that used to take a week and I can do it in one day, that means I have four more days to do other things. It's almost like I'm hiring people for free because I get four more extra work days. The other thing that's really interesting as our joint solution is you can leverage that same virtual GPU technology. You can do VDI by day and at night, you run Compute. So when your users aren't at work, you migrate them off, you spin up your VMs that are doing your data analytics using our RAPIDS technology, and then you're able to get that platform running 24 by seven. >> Productivity gains just from an infrastructure. Even the user too, up and down, the productivity gains are significant. So I'll get three monitors now. I'm going to get one of those Alienware curved monitors. >> Just the difference we had, we have a suite here at the show, and just the difference, you can see such a difference when you insert the GPUs into the platform. It's just makes all the difference. >> John, I got to ask you a personal question. How many times have people asked you for a GPU? You must get that all the time? >> We do. I have a NVIDIA backpack. When I walk around, there's a lot of people that only know NVIDIA for games. So random people will always ask for that. >> I've got two sons and two daughters and they just nerd out on the GPUs. >> I think he's trying to get me to commit on camera on giving him a GPU. (laughing) I think I'm in trouble here. >> Yeah, they get the latest and greatest. Any new stuff, they're going to be happy to be the first on the block to get the GPU. It's certainly impacted on the infrastructure side, the components, the operating environment, Windows 10. Any other data you guys have to share that you think is notable around how all this is coming together working from user experience around Windows and VDI? >> I think one piece of data, again, going back to your first comment about cost per desktop. We're seeing a lot of migration to Windows 10. Customers are buying our joint solution from Dell which includes our hardware and software. They're buying that five-year life cycle, so we actually put a program in place to really drive down the cost. It's literally like $3 per month to have a GPU-accelerated virtual desktop. It's really great Value for the customers besides the great productivity. >> If you look at doing some of these workloads on premises, some of the costs can come down. We had a recent study around the VxBlock as an example. We showed that running GPUs and VDI can be up as much as 45% less on a VxBlock at scale. When you talk about the whole hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategy, there's pluses and minuses to both. Certainly, if we look at some of the ability to start small and scale out, whether you're going HCI or you're going CI, I think there's a VDI solution there that can really drive the economics. >> The intense workloads. Is there any industries that are key for you guys in terms of verticals? >> Absolutely. So we're definitely looking at a lot of the CAD/CAM industries. We just did a certification on our platforms with Dassault's CATIA system. That's an area that we'll continue to explore as we move forward. >> I think in the workstation side of things, it's all the standard, it's automotive, it's manufacturing. Architecture is interesting. Architecture is one of those companies that has kind of an S and B profile. They have lots of offices, but they have enterprise requirements for all the hard work that they do. Then with VDI, we're very strong in financial services as well as healthcare. In fact, if you haven't seen, you should come by. We have a Bloomberg demo for financial services about the impact for traders. I have a virtualized GPU desktop. >> The speed is critical for them. Final question. Take-aways from the show this year, 2019 VMworld, Stu, we got 10 years to look back, but guys, take-aways from the show that you're going to take back from this week. >> I think there's still a lot of interest and enthusiasm. Surprisingly, there's still a lot of customers that haven't finished there migration to Windows 10 and they're coming to us saying, Oh my gosh, I only have until January, what can you do to help me? (laughing) >> Get some GPUs. Thoughts from the show. >> The multi-cloud world continues to evolve, the continued partnerships that emerge as part of this is just pretty amazing in how that's changing in things like virtual GPUs and accelerators. That experience that people have come to expect from the cloud is something, for me is a take-away. >> John Fanelli, NVIDIA, thanks for coming on. Congratulations on all the success. Kevin, Dell EMC, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for the insights. Here on theCUBE, Vmworld 2019. John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. (lively music)

(upbeat theme music plays) >> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCube. Covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019, brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCube. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are live in Atlanta, Georgia for Citrix Synergy, 2019. We are pleased to welcome Jack Gold to The Cube, President and founder of Jack Gold & Associates. Jack, it's great to have you join Keith and me this afternoon. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, we had a great day. We've talked to eight or nine folks or so, lot's of really relevant exciting news from Citrix this morning. Talking about the employee experience as, and how I kind of interpreted it, as a catalyst for digital transformation, cultural transformation. You've been working with Citrix for a long time. I'd love to get your perspective on not just what you heard today from Citrix, and with Google and Microsoft, but in the last year or so since they've really kind of done a re-brand effort. What're your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, it's interesting from a Citrix perspective. Citrix, the old Citrix I guess I would put in quotes right, was always known as the VDI company. I've got, you know, the screen that will talk to the server, that will talk to whatever other apps I need it to talk to, and I can have a nice thin client sitting on my desktop and I don't have to spend a lot of money. And I also don't have to worry about if I'm going to bank people stealing stuff off the hard drive, or whatever. They've made a pretty significant transition that was the old work space, if you will. The modern work spaces which is where Citrix is really moving is one where, look we've all grown up with smart phones for the last ten or fifteen years, our kids don't know anything different. They're not going to deal with anything that's complex, anything where I have to log in and out of applications, anything where I have to switch between screens, this just doesn't make any sense for them. And so, what we're seeing Citrix do is move into an environment where, as I said, it's about the modern workspace, it's about being able to help me do my job not getting in my way of me doing my job, and that's really the transition. It's not just Citrix, the industry is moving in that direction as well, but Citrix is really at the forefront of making a lot of that work now. >> So, Jack, talk to us about the new promise of the new Citrix. The, if you remember me, it had to have be about seven years ago, I did a blog post of running Windows XP on your iPad. It was taking, you know, the then desktop solution and running it on your iPad. >> (Jack) Sure. >> And it was a cool trick. But we talked about, today, we would hope by today, that mobile technology would of forced companies to rewrite applications, for a mobile first experience. But that simply hasn't happened. So, presenting a bad application on to a mobile dot, to a mobile work station, or a mobile device, doesn't work. We end up packing in, trying it, and squeezing, and trying to get our work done, how is Citrix promising to change that experience, even versus their competitors? >> Sure. Well, first of all so two bad's don't make a good. Right. Having a bad app on a bad device doesn't make it good. >> (Keith) Right. >> Doesn't make it easy to use, doesn't help me get my job done. What we really are talking about, now, is the ability to build a workspace. Something where I sit and look at, that helps me get my job done, as opposed to getting in the way. Which means that, instead of having to punch fourteen different holes, or you know, icons and sit at my keyboard and type forty-eight different commands and do thirty-eight different log-ins as each one is different, and by the way I couldn't remember them so I just called the help desk in-between, and that's another half an hour of my time that I didn't want to, that I wasted. >> (laughs) Give me my word perfect templates. >> (Lisa laughs) >> (Jack) There you go, there you go, word perfect I remember that no so well. I remember it well not so nicely. What we're really trying to focus on now is user experience, right. What we're really trying to focus on is if, if you wanted to get your work done, I want to make it easy. Think about it as going to a grocery store. If you can't, if you've got a list of groceries and you can't find what you want in five minutes, you leave, you go somewhere else. You go to another grocery store where things are much easier to find. It's the same at work, or it should be the same at work. Now, that said, a lot of apps and organizations, especially big enterprises where they have, some can have literally thousands of apps, are not going away. The notion that everything is going to go into the modern workspace, where everything looks like a phone, it's a nice idea, it's properly not going to happen. Legacy apps will be legacy apps for a very long time, it's like mainframes are dead, guess what, they're still around. That said, that doesn't mean that you can't take some of those legacy apps and make them easier to use with the proper front-end. And that's really what Citrix is trying to do with the workspaces, and other's again, it's not just Citrix in this, we have to be fair there are lots people working in this space. But, if you can make the front-end workspace more attractive, easier to use, easier to navigate, even if I've got old, clunky stuff in the background. For me as a user, you can give me back fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes a day, an hour a day, that's really productivity. Look, if you're paying me a hundred dollars an hour, and you save me an hour a day you just made a hundred dollars every day that I'm working at that company, that sounds like a lot, but there are people who make that kind of money. Or even a fifty or twenty-five dollars, it all adds up. And so, what we're really doing is trying to move into an environment where if I can make you more productive but making things more easier for you to navigate, and getting in and our of applications more quickly, getting more information to me more quickly, which makes the overall organization more productive because I'm sharing more information with you, then that's a real win-win, and that's where I think Citrix is really trying to position itself, and doing a fairly good job at doing that. Clearly they don't have all of the components yet, but then no one does. This is an ongoing process. >> So, employee experience is table-stakes for any business, as we look at the modern workforce it's highly disrupted. >> (Jack) Yes. >> It's composed of five different generations. >> (Jack) Yes. >> Who have varying expertise with technology. It is also demanding because we're all consumers. >> (Jack) Yes. >> And so we have this expectation, or this, yeah I'd say expectation that I want to be able to go in and have this personalized experience. I don't want to have to become an expert in sales-force because I might need to understand, can I talk to that costumer and ask them to be a reference? How much time are you going to take? But this personalization is becoming more and more critical as we see this influence from the consumer side. >> Right. >> Were some of the things that you heard today from Citrix, what are your thoughts on how their going to be able to improve that more personalized employee experience? >> So people think of personalization, I think sometimes, too narrowly. For some people personalization is, you know, I've got my phone out, and I have the apps that I want on my phone and that's personalization. I think of it a little bit differently. We need to extend personalization. When I'm at work, what I want is not just the apps I want, clearly I want those, right, but also the ability, to get help with those apps as I need it, right. And so where Citrix is going is trying to put intelligence into the system, so that when I'm interacting with back-end solutions or my neighbors, or with teams collaboration, I get the assistance I need to make it easier for me to do that work. It's not just the apps, it's also help with the apps. And if we can do that, that's really what we want. We go, you know, if I have a problem with my laptop I'm going to come to you and say, hey, you did this yesterday what was the result, can you help me for five minutes? Five minutes is never five minutes, it's usually an hour and a half, but still. I'll come to you. Why can't I have an app on my desk that does the same thing? I'm having trouble. Help me. Fix it. Let me know what I'm doing wrong, or let me know how I can do it better. And that's where Citrix is trying to go with the analytics that they've got in place. Which is huge, I think they're underplaying that, because I think that the whole analytic space in making things easier for people to use, because in understanding where my problems are is huge, and that's going to pick up. The notion of having a nice pretty, pretty may not be the right word, but attractive at least, workspace for me to go in that doesn't get frustrated, frustration is a killer in productivity, as everyone knows. There are examples I've heard multiple people tell me now that they go out and hire, especially with millennials, that go out an hire twenty or thirty new employees, and half of them quit within a week because their systems are so bad that they get so frustrated that they're not going to work there. So, the notion of having a modern workspace where I get the applications that I need, I get the assistance I need, because of the analytics of that backend telling the systems what I need, and making it easier for me to do it. And then allowing me to be productive not just for myself, but for the organization, is where we all need to go and I think that Citrix is making some real progress going that way. >> (Keith) Well Jack, we're talking about products that haven't quite been released yet, so I'm trying to get a sense or, worth's the right built versus buy stage, in complexity Citrix should be? You know, I can make it apple pie by going out and picking the apple. >> (Jack laughs) Right. >> And making my own crust or, I can go buy filling, or I can just go buy any mince pie, stick it in the oven and warm it up. Three very different experiences. Three different layers of investment, and outcomes frankly. In this world, I can go hire application developers to write these many apps, to write these customizations, to write these integrations, but that's, I think that's akin to picking the apple and that just simply doesn't scale. But, also while any mince pie is okay every now and again, I want, you know, something of higher quality. Where do you think Citrix is on the kind of range of built versus buy with this intelligent experience? >> So built versus buy is a very interesting phenomenon. And it's interesting because a lot of it has to do with where you think you are right now in the world, right. You know you mention going out and getting developers and building your own, that's all well and good, it doesn't scale, and by the way in today's market you can't find them to begin with. So you often don't even have a choice. So that's number one. Number two is that there are companies out there that still think for competitive advantage that they have to do everything from scratch, like building your pie. Yes, you probably make the best pie in the world, but guess what, sometimes a good enough pie is good enough. Right, and if you're in business sometimes good enough is the only way you survive. It doesn't have to be a hundred percent perfect, ninety percent's okay too. People can deal with that. So that's the other piece. The third piece of it is, from an end-user perspective, right, if end-users are accustom to having an interaction in a certain way and the you go out and get developers that come in and do it, something completely different, which they're apt to do because each will have their own kind of flavor to it, then you just force them to learn one, two, three, four, five different interface interactions I'm not going to do that. I'm going to get frustrated as heck, and I'm going to go call the help desk or I'm going to go get my app and say go do this for me. Both of which are counterproductive to the company and to me. So, it really depends on where you are in the stage of where your company is, I would say built versus buy it's not a one or a zero. There's lots of shades of gray in between, it's also not all or nothing. So, some applications might be built internally, some you may want to buy externally, some you may have a hybrid, and the nice thing about where workspaces is going now is that you plug all of those into the same environment. That's really the ultimate goal, is to make it as easy and transparent for the organization as possible, and also for the user because the user ultimately is the end consumer. And if it's not good for the end consumer, it's not good for the company either. >> (Lisa) So delivering this great game-changing customer experience for this, as we talked about before this distributed modern work force that wants to be able to access mobile apps, Sass apps. >> (Jack) Right. >> Web apps from tablets, PC, phone, desktop. >> (Jack) Your car, your refrigerator >> Exactly. >> (Jack) Anything with a screen on it. >> Oh yeah, the refrigerators. Wherever you are, I think, okay people >> (Jack) Sure. >> We're people, and we are the biggest single security threat there is. >> (Jack laughs) >> So in your perspective, how is what Citrix is talking about balancing security as an essential component of this employee experience? >> So there are a few things, number one is a lot of companies think that if they limit the end user experience they're more secure. The truth of the matter is, yes, I mean if you don't let me get in to an app I can't steal application or information, or lose it somehow. But I also can't get my work done. So there's a balance between security and privacy which many companies don't talk about which is not exactly the same thing, there are two unique things, more and more privacy is becoming as big or bigger an issue than security, but you know we can get at that in a minute. But, the notion of security really relates to what I was talking about earlier which is analytics. If I know what you're suppose to be doing, you're here at Synergy. If someone just got your credentials and logged in from Los Angeles or New York or Chicago or Denver or wherever, I know it's not you. I can shut that thing down very quickly and not have to worry about them stealing information, also if you're, if I know you're not suppose to be in a certain version of SAP, you're not suppose to be doing some ERP system and you're in it, then again the analytics tells me that there's something going on, there's something anomalous going on that I need to investigate. So, having a system that protects because there's a kind of a front end to everything that's going on in the back end, and a realization of what's going on behind that screen gives me a much higher sense of security from a corporate perspective, it's not perfect there is no such thing as perfect security, but it's a lot better than just letting us kind of do our own thing, and loading, you know, semantic or McAfee or whatever on your PC. And that's where the industry ultimately has to go. That becomes part of the new modern workspace. It's not just about more productive it's about more secure. It's about more private. It's about not letting information escape that shouldn't be there to begin with. >> (Keith) So last question on data grabbing. Because we haven't talked about data and data is, you know, probably the most important thing in this topic. The importance of the (unintelligible) and Google announcement. You know, we, the yottabyte, the first time I've heard that term, yottabye of data that data's going to be spread across the world and this, this ideal of centralized compute and us being able to present, compute into data centers, no longer going to work, that we're going to have to, applications are going to be spread across the world. Where do you Citrix advancing that discipline of providing apps where they need to be with these relationships? >> So, it's an interesting phenomenon what we're going through right now, if you look back a couple of decades ago everything was centralized, people were centralized, they all work in one building, computing was centralized it was all in the data center, IT was centralized, it was all, you know, working around the servers. The Cloud is the opposite direction, although I would argue The Cloud isn't new, The Cloud is just time-share in a different environment, for us old people who remember the old IBM time-share computers. But everything is becoming distributed, data is distributed, people are distributed, applications are distributed, networks are distributed, you name it. The key critical factor for companies in keeping their productivity, keeping up the productivity is to make sure that the distributed environment doesn't get in the way of doing work. So you've got things like latency, if it takes me, if I'm in. (crowd cheers) >> They're having a party behind us. >> No, they agree with you! >> (Jack laughs) Yes, apparently. I, you know, if I'm here at Synergy but I have to work back at my offices near Boston, I can't wait five minutes for information to come back and forth, it's like the old days. Latency now has to be within five microseconds or people get frustrated, so that becomes a network issue, applications, same way, if I have to go to a data center, the data isn't local to my server here, it has to go to London, I'm not going to wait three minutes for it to come back like we use to, or ten minutes or an hour and a half. Or come back the next morning. You know, you want to book a flight on an airline, are you going to wait thirty minutes for them to find you a seat? You're going to go to another airline. So the whole notion of distributed means that it's very different now, even though it's distributed, everything is local. And by local, keeping it local means that you have to have latency below a certain point (crowd cheers) so that I don't realize that it's distributed, or I don't care that it's distributed. Yottabyte's of data means that we're going to have data everywhere, accessible all the time, and we're going to produce data like crazy. You know, a typical car, an autonomous car will produce a gigabyte of data every minute. Hundreds every, you know, hour. So, the amount of data is going to be fantastic that we have to deal with. Then, the big question becomes, okay so, I can't personally deal with all this data, it's impossible, I have to have the assistance, the intelligence within the system to go off and make something of that data so that I can actually interact with it in a meaningful fashion. That's where Citrix would like to go, that's where other's would like to go. They can't do it alone, because the problem is just too darn big. But, it will, we will get there, companies will get there eventually, not all of them perhaps, only the ones that are going to be successful long term are going to get there. >> Well, Jack, I wish we had more time to chat with you. This has, I just feel like going dot, dot, dot, to be continued. And I want to say, coincidence, I don't know, there were two rounds of applause when you talked about latency. (Keith laughs) >> There we go. They're just waiting for the bar to open, it's taking too long. >> (Lisa laughs) You think that's what it is? >> (Jack) Properly. >> All right well we'll get you over there, and thank-you again for joining Keith and me this afternoon. >> Thank-you very much. >> (Lisa) Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCube live from Citrix Synergy, 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat theme music plays)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Keith Townsend, the CTO Advisor. Keith, it's so great to see you. >> Lisa, good to be on the show with you again. >> So we're going to geek out the next two days. >> Oh isn't it so good? >> We've been geeking out already just coming from the keynote. This is ... >> Yeah This is, it was really good there was meat, there was announcements, there was news, partnerships. Citrix is a 30 year old company, who's done a lot in the last 12/18 months, to transform. From rebranding, product names, et cetera, lots of launches and announcements. And something that really peaked my interest as a marketer this morning, is hearing the influence of consumerization. Them talking about leveraging Citrix Workspace, and the things that they have done to beef it up which we'll talk about, to deliver a stellar employee experience, to delight the users. And those are words that we hear often in the marketing space, like customer lifetime value, they talked about the employee lifetime value because employee attraction, talent attraction and retention, is critical for every business. Really meaty stuff. What was some of your take on some of the announcements on Workspace? >> So I was really interested because as I'm coming off of SAP SAPPHIRE, where I'm accustomed to hearing terms like customer experience, employee experience, you know, the kind of X-data versus O-data conversation. We heard a lot of that here today. And it's weird coming from an infrastructure company. Citrix in the past I like to put into a box, it's about VDI, application virtualization and networking, and that's pretty much the conversation, it stayed at the IT infrastructure leader perspective. Today we heard a lot that broke out of that, and it was going into the C-Suite and delivering not just technology results, but business results. There was a lot about making transformation real. >> You're right it was about making it real, and if you think at the end of the day, I think I heard a stat the other day, that by 2020, which is literally around the corner, 50% of workers are going to be remote. You and I are great examples of that, we're on the road all the time, we have multiple devices we need to have connectivity that ... to all the apps, SAS apps, mobile apps, web, that allow us to be productive from wherever we are, done in a way that our employers, are confident there is security behind this. But delivering that exceptional employee experience is absolutely business critical. They gave some stats today about the trillions of dollars that are spent, or rather work that's lost, with employees that have so many apps each day that they're working with that really distract from their actual day to day function. >> Yeah I think one of the stats that they gave from an ambitious perspective, they want to give one day back to every employee, 20% of their time, back, I think the stat you referred to some seven trillion dollars of productivity is lost from just hunting and pecking inside of applications. Both of us work remotely, you work from your tablet, I work from a tablet or my phone a lot. Because I just, you know, it's low power to, it lasts the day, but yeah I still need to edit video, I need to sign invoices, I need to create statements that worked. I need to be just as creative on the road as I am at home. It helps me to compete against larger competitors, but more importantly, offer a different customer experience and this is what Citrix was talking about today, was more than just VDIs, about picking up any device asking basic logical questions like what is the status of the latest deal, the big deal, and getting that status from Salesforce without again hunting and pecking, from whatever device you're on. >> Which is critical, especially to have that seamless experience going from desktop to mobile. I think they also said ... there was a lot of stats this morning, which I really geek out on. But that the average person is using seven to 10 apps a day and I loved the video that they showed this morning that really brought that to life. Looking at a senior marketing manager for some enterprise company, who, as she starts her day, there's 10 minutes that goes by which is lie, oh, I forgot I got to log into Workday and request my PTO, oh, one of my employees needs me to approve an expense report, and oh, my boss wants to know about this big deal that's closed. And the time that is spent logging into different applications is really as you mentioned that number seven trillion dollars lost, what they're doing with Citrix, with the intelligent, the workspace intelligence experience is bringing all of that to the end user. So it's much more an activities focus rather than an app focus experience. And I loved what you said that they're very ambitiously aiming to give each person back one day a week, yes please. I will take that. In any organization. >> So I was at a government conference a few weeks ago and they talked very much about this CFO of GSA presented to a crowd of fellow government workers, and they were talking about eliminating waste, they were talking about automating processes, taking the PDF, taking a document and scanning it into a system, and then kicking off a real workflow. And this is done, the industry's been working on this problem for the past 10 years, it's called RPA, Robotic Process Automation. One of Citrix's partners and I guess now competitors in that space just received $560,000,000 in funding, in a single round, to enable artificial intelligence to do this. What I thought was interesting, is that Citrix didn't use the term bots, I think other than one time ... >> Lisa: That's right. ... on the stage. But these are essentially bots, that take redundant processes, automates them, to ultimately add value. I'm anxious to dive in and talk about how Citrix is taking stuff like, they mentioned Mainframe, AS/400 applications, integrating that in Salesforce without having this huge multi-million dollar project to re-write these core business applications and processes. So, you know it's a really exciting time in the industry Citrix has really stepped up in saying, you know what, we won't settle for just having a good business, and this application virtualization and network space, we're going to go all in. >> So one of the things I saw in Twitter this morning, is you and I are both tweeting during the keynote, which we just came from is you talked about PRA right away on Twitter and it's something that you heard instinctively with what they were saying. What are your thoughts as to why RPA as a term wasn't discussed? Did you think it's the type of audience that's here? Is it just not a term that resonates as well as AI and machine learning, which are buzz words at every event we go to? >> And I think a good portion of that is a mix. We're at a conference that's very IT-centric. Citrix is a you know, one of the core IT infrastructure vendors. So when you throw out a term like Robotic Process Automation you constantly, you instantly think, you know, gain of productivity from me or your level maybe, but from an IT infrastructure practitioner perspective, Robotic Processing Automation has a resonance with being equal to eliminating jobs. If, you know, you're going to automate the integration between VMware VSphere and Citrix desktop virtualization and that administration piece, which these solutions definitely can do that, what's left for me to do the work on. If you're going to automate the provisioning of DNS and IP addressing and all these mundane tasks that administrators probably spend 50-60% of their day doing, you know what, that's threatening. To say that you know what, we're going to give you the same tools that we give to make the workspace available today from an application perspective and to tackle that from the concept of this is just extending that ideal and you're a what, your job and what you do today to adding true business value, I think it was smart on their part to kind of avoid the bot conversation. >> Okay, I'm glad that you shared that insight, that makes perfect sense. So, PJ Hough was up there, the Chief Product Officer, who's going to be on tomorrow, talking about what Citrix is doing to distill apps and make this experience much more personalized. And of course he was joined on stage with a big Microsoft announcement today. I think I've been to so many shows this year I've lost count but I think Satya Nadella has either been on stage, he was at Dell Technologies World with Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger, or in a video like he was today. So the partnership with Microsoft expanding here a little bit of a teaser at Microsoft Ignite a couple of months ago. Gimme your thoughts on what Microsoft, I should say what Citrix is doing to facilitate their users being much more proficient at using Microsoft Team, which I believe the gentleman from Microsoft said there's over 300,000 active users already. Fastest growing product in Microsoft's history. >> So when you talk about collaboration, you can't collaborate without these tools, whether Teams, Slack, whatever, it's become an integral part of how we communicate, how we interact, I know a lot of friends that I have are moving from Slack to Teams, just because of the integration with Office365 they can collaborate around, and I think here on theCUBE we talk about data as being the key. You have to talk about data. One of the things that was prepared to go kind of head on with Citrix today, and tomorrow about, was about data. You know it's great to present applications, but how are you helping to help users collaborate and use and access data and the combination of RPA with the intelligent experi- intelligent, it's going to take us some time to used to this ... >> I keep wanting to say enterprise. >> Yeah enterprise >> Intelligent experience >> Experience product, with Teams, with the Azure announcement, integration with Azure and full support of the Citrix platform inside Azure will just make the employee experience at least potentially seamless, a lot more seamless, I'm super excited about, you can't tell in my voice, I haven't gotten excited about Citrix in a long time. And this is the first time they've had theCUBE at Synergy since 2011, I think it was a great time to reignite that partnership, and this coverage is going to be an interesting two days. >> It is. So we talked about digital workspace, the other two areas of Citrix's business that you touched on a little bit, security and analytics. Let's talk about the security piece first as it relates to Microsoft Teams and Azure. SD-WAN is becoming more and more absolutely critical to ensure that because as people we are the number one threat vector in any organization. Not that we're all bad actors. >> Keith: Right. >> But because we need to get things done, as frictionless or seamless, as you said, as possible, and efficiently as possible. What did you hear today with respect to security, that might really make some of those IT folks take notice? >> Well, we want to work from any device. Like, I want to be able to, ideally if I say, you know what, I want to pick up a new Surface tablet, when I go to Atlanta I don't want to pack my iPad. I want to be able to pick that up, and work. If I go to a kiosk, I want to be able to, even if it's running Windows XP, I want to be able to do my work, I want to be able to do my work from any device. This is a nightmare for system administrators to say how do I control security, while making the experience frictionless? Those two things don't seem to go together. So Citrix, whether it's with this new announcement with Microsoft with Teams, it's traditional applications around SD-WAN, enabling access from remote locations, and Citrix is kind ... this is their bread and butter, offering remote access to applications securely and fast, this is you know, Citrix is starting to formulate a really great end to end story about making applications, data and more importantly, business answers and capability available anywhere securely, so it's a great story. >> It really is. So if you're excited, you already know how excited I am. I think we're going to have a fantastic day today, and tomorrow. We've got a whole bunch of the C-Suite from Citrix on, we're also going to be talking with some partners and customers, and interestingly as a marketer this peaked my interest as well, they have the innovation awards. There are three finalists, we will be talking with all three over the next two days, and this is a customer awards program, that anybody can vote on. So I haven't seen that before, so I'm excited to understand how Citrix is enabling them to have this great employee experience which is more and more critical as the shortages and the gaps are becoming more and more prevalence. And also, how these customers are reacting to just some of the news announced today, with Microsoft, the intelligent enterprise, and how they see their employees, and attracting and retaining top talent as actually really mission critical. So we're going to have fun Keith. >> I agree. >> All right, you're watching Keith Townsend and Lisa Martin live from theCUBE, we are on the show floor at Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. Stick around, Keith and I will be right back with our first guest after a short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. (funky music) Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Windy City everybody, my name is Dave Vellante. We're here covering the Veritas Vision Solution days at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago right near the lake. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Lurlene Brown is here. She's an independent security consultant with CJJFC. Lurlene, welcome, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank You, thanks for inviting us. >> So CJJFC, what are you guys all about? >> Well, basically we're re-startup company, small, independent company. We work with SMBs and non-profits in dealing with their security issues basically. No matter how big, how small. It's the small companies that have one of those things that's, well it's not going to happen to us, or if it does happen to us, what do we do about it? Because they hear about the big breaches but it can happen to a small company as well an SMBs, especially if you have limited budgets and stuff, how do we deal with that? How do we deal with ransomware? How do we pay it off? A lot of questions and stuff like that that they are really concerned about, but a lot of them have the attitude that it's not going to happen to me, something like that, but it can happen. >> There's a lot to talk about there, so let's start with small business. Small business, there's often times not even a CEO, it's an owner, and the distance between the owner and the IT is very short. It's a flat organization. Like you said, they have so many things to worry about, the last thing they want to worry about is security. A lot of times they'll have the attitude of, well, I'm not really a target, which is, well yeah, you are. But let's hope. (chuckles) And a lot of them just clearly don't have, they don't have a SecOps team. >> That's true. >> Many of them just rely on cloud, they have a zillion different SaaS products. They'd rather not have IT. So that sort of paints a picture. >> That's true. >> How do you help them? And do they contact you, do you contact them? Both? >> Well, it goes both ways. Basically a lot of them don't even have an IT department or an IT person. They're going by somebody knows how to work a computer, turn it off and on. Make sure the stuff is backed up. (laughing) >> Fred's really good with this, ask him. >> And then turn it off at the end of the day. So you have to deal with that. You also have to deal with, if they do have an IT department, it's one person that's going to deal with a whole lot of issues. Back up, where is it going to go to? Do we have a cloud provider? If we do, who is it? What is it? Do we have anything else? Do we have on-site premise or off-sites? So it's a lot of stuff you got to do. And the main bottom line is budgeting. Do we have the money or the budget to get this stuff that we need, that we basically need in order for us to survive? Because it boils down to, if you don't have and then something happens to you, something major, a crash or whatever, do you have the backup? Do you have something viable to say to your clients, oh, we're okay, we got your data and we're secure, we can go on with business as usual; or will they just go off and find somebody else? >> So we always talk about on theCUBE people, process and technology, bad security practices by users can always trump good technology. So I presume a lot of your consulting is around people and processes. >> Mm-hmm, that's true, that's true And a lot of it is in transition, I'll give a good example. When Windows decided to go from XP to 7 and 8 and all this stuff, there was a big brouhaha about it. Some people still want to deal with XP. They don't want, because they hear about how good Windows 8 or 10 is and stuff like that. But a lot of people, it's a slow transition for a lot of people to move over from XP because it was very dependable, you didn't hear a lot of problems out of it. All of a sudden you hear, oh, Windows 10. We got some issues, we got some stuff we got to fix, and it kind of is like a panic attack mode. You're in panic modes. Do we want to go back to XP or do you want to, you know, one of our records are in XP and we want to go to 10, will they transfer over? How secure is going to be that? How secure is that? So it's like that kind of example. It takes time for people to slowly migrate from one thing to another to make sure it's safe and it's dependable. And also, it's secure enough, they can be comfortable with it so when the next phase comes up, they can be a little bit more comfortable and say, well, okay, we go to Windows 12 or something like that, and then we'll be okay from 10 to 12 and have no problems with it. >> So that's an example of just basically having core infrastructure that's kept up to date, you're up to date on patching. This is basic security hygiene. There's also the perimeter, and we always hear, well, people spend a lot of time and effort and money on the perimeter, but people are going to get through the perimeter. Phishing is a huge problem. >> Yes it is >> The threat matrix with mobile, you got a zillion mobile apps, and it's impossible to keep them up to date. So are small business owners, which I presume is your primary discussion point, how aware are they of this problem? On a scale from one to 10, is it a two? Because they have so many other things to worry about. Or is it escalating up to six, seven, eight? What do you-- >> It depends of the company. Some are twos and some are fives and sixes. One size doesn't fit all, and that's one thing they have to realize, that one can do more than the other and some can do less than the other. It all depends on the company, their attitude and it boils down to trust. Do we trust ourselves enough to go into that next phase of updating our security or updating our software and all that stuff, the patches and stuff? Do we have the equipment to do, to have that ability to do that as well too, because you got to look at your budget costs and your security. That goes hand-in-hand. >> Backup and security used to be largely two separate domains, sort of in their own little islands. They're certainly intertwined today. Why is that, and how are those two worlds coming together? >> Well, I think it was a gradual process because everybody wanted to keep things separate. But they found out there's a whole lot of commonality, a whole lot of links that they finally came to realize that it's together, dealing with security, because if you didn't have security we would have more than enough breaches than we have now. Especially with small businesses, you can't afford to have a breach because that makes or breaks your company. So you have to look at that and say, well, we need that. But like I said, within the perimeters of your business. Some can afford more, some can afford less or just stabilize what they have now. >> Mm-hmm, okay, so let's talk about ransomware a little bit. It's in the news. As a small business owner, you're like wow, oh god, I hope that never happens to me, but a lot of times they're thinking, well, that's never going to happen to me because I'm the small guy. But is could happen. >> Oh yeah! >> And so what do you advise people to do? You're trying to create air gaps. What role does backup and data protection play? >> Backup is a major thing especially if you have a lot of old data and you want to make sure you have that because once its lost, its lost. A lot of people are not really familiar with ransomware. They hear about it, they think oh, my, I have to, it's just like anything else, like if you kidnap somebody you hold them for ransom. You want this amount of money in order for them to get this person back. Ransomware is the same thing but you're using bitcoins instead of money. Well, it technically is money but a lot of them don't have that thing about it's not going to affect me. Like you was talking about earlier. Does it affect me? How will it affect me? I'll read up more about it. A lot of people have not really read up about it. They hear the word, it's like a buzz word and they say, oh ransomware, what is that? Is that a new software product? Or is that a new something like that, you know? So they have to really keep informed and keep up with what is going on, especially in small businesses. The possibility is, I think, is more greater than big businesses. Because big businesses can recover, small businesses can't. >> Big businesses, they've got the resources, they know what ransomware is, they maybe created some kind of air gap between their data center and their off-site. They've got something in the iron mountain and archived, Maybe they've got stuff on tapes. Small companies are like, they don't even think about that stuff-- >> No they don't, what resources do they have? Or do they have enough resources as well? And have they kept up with the different kind of resources that are available, especially gearing towards them? >> What's your relationship with Veritas? Why are you here? You're not a customer, you're not a big gold partner but what brought you here? >> Well, I want to see what's going on with Veritas, I've heard a lot about it. And we are here to get some information and how we're going to relate to what we're going to be dealing with future customers or present customers and stuff like that. So that's basically what we're here for. It's just to gather information, sort it out, how it will affect small business and non-profitS, and how it can help them and benefit them as much as for larger companies. >> My last question for you is could you summarize the advice that you would give to a small business owner or a non-profit, MD. What do you tell them in the context of security and data protection? >> Backup, especially backup and do your homework. A lot of them, do your due diligence because it makes or breaks you. >> And so they listen to that advice? >> Some of them do, and some of them... It's up to them. I have to say, everybody is an individual, you can't say, but just look at what happens to other people, find examples, talk to other people that you know and do your homework and backup, backup backup. >> Ignore that advice at your own peril. Lurlene, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you very much for inviting us. >> You're very welcome. Okay, you're watching theCUBE. We're here at Veritas Vision Day in Chicago, we'll be right back after this short break. (funky music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to the Embarcadero everybody here in the heart of San Francisco. Actually at the bay of San Francisco. Golden Gate Bridge is that way, financial district over there, Nob Hill right up the street. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, this is David Floyer, and we're covering the Micron Insight 2018 event. People are starting to filter in. Any minute now we're going to start the keynotes from the executives. A lot of buzz going on, Derek Dicker is here. He's the corporate vice-president and general manager of the storage business unit emerging activity within Micron, great to see you again. >> Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. >> You're very welcome, yeah, so Micron used to be just a straight memory company. We're hearing, we heard at the investor day in May how you guys are diversifying, finding new use cases, new applications, you run the storage business, and of course David Floyer was one of the first, the first, in my opinion, to predict the demise of the hard disk, spinning disk, and it's a tailwind for you guys, but Derek, take us through your business unit, your role, and let's get into it. >> Sure, that sounds great. I appreciate the opportunity again to be here. The storage business unit within Micron is actually comprised across a couple of product areas. Primarily NAND and NAND components, and then also SSDs, solid state drives. As we like to say, and we've talked a bit more about it since Sanjay's arrival, we have a pretty material focus on accelerating what we call high value solutions. It's a big focus of ours, so not only are we developing the core technology in memory and storage, but we're attempting to build more and more products that add value to our customers in the S-System space. But that's generally the storage business focus. Within the company, we have three other business units that focus on compute and networking memory as well as the embedded business unit and then the mobile business unit. >> Talk about some of the big trends that you see, I mean, we've talked about for years, the all-flash data center. We clearly see that in the customers that we work with. Some of the spinning disk guys don't necessarily fully buy into that, but even they have been investing in flash technologies. What are you seeing? >> I tell you, there is no better time, in my opinion, than to be in the memory and storage industry. When you look at what the trends are that are coming out in time. If you go and you stare at how memory and storage has evolved just going back into the 80s or the PC era, a $35 billion average size of the total market. You get into the mobile space, when mobile era started with smart phones, we were looking at a $62 billion-ish, and then in '17 we cleared $120 billion in size of the market, and we actually see a lot of secular trends that are going to continue to take us forward. A couple of things that are particularly noteworthy for us. The first one is the emergence of artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and deep learning. We're going to hear quite a bit about it here at the event. But in terms of a value driver for the consumption of both memory, DRAM, as well as storage, we see it going phenomenally up in content in every server that's purchased out in time. That's one, I think with the evolution of 5G out in time, we're also going to see that smart phone devices are going to end up having more memory to add features like facial recognition we see today, becoming mainstream, multiple cameras, that drives more DRAM content, but then also on top of that, storage is increasing. We're seeing, even today, a terabyte being put into some of the high-end phones, and we know that that's going to waterfall out in time. So I think if you look at this combination of what's happening both in the devices, you look at what's happening in the infrastructure, then you couple that with the processing that needs to happen, it's just an awesome time to be affiliated with memory and storage. >> Yeah, well, I've been following this LAN marketplace for the last, almost 10 years isn't it? More than that. And it's just broken through completely in the last two or three years. What are your thoughts about pushing compute closer and closer to that memory, adding to, for example, the SSDs, the capability of doing smart work? It's very very close to where the data is originally going to be placed? >> It's a great area of quite a bit of R&D work that's going on right now, and I actually think I view this as kind of two stages. One is there's the proliferation of solid state, as you suggested, it's been coming over time. I actually see it increasing dramatically as we look forward, and one of the key technologies that I think is going to enable that is QLC. The fact that we're now at a point where we're putting four bits per cell into devices, SSDs are starting to show up, I think that just creates even more opportunity. And I'll talk a little bit about that in just a minute, but I want to answer your direct question as to how that's changing with AnIML. But I think the ability, once solid state is prolific, to be able to architect systems where you can actually have processing take place closer to the media is a very interesting area. It's right with a ton of research going on right now. People are just starting to implement it. I think there's quite a bit of potential sitting behind it. You know, our focus, of course, is we're deploying, and as quickly as we can, on two vectors. One is, how do we proliferate more solid state into the market as an industry, and the second is how do we add value when we build those solid state drives, so I think it's definitely very viable. >> Let's talk about the significance of QLC. David, your forecasts early on were very aggressive in terms of pricing declines for flash. We kind of, maybe got caught off, a little bit surprised by the-- >> I think we were caught off by the demand. >> Well the demand, but also the supply constraints kept prices up. >> Yeah. >> Okay so, it didn't actually happen as fast. How does QLC change that, Derek, and what's the significance of it? >> Well, the thing that I think is most exciting for us as Micron is we actually ended up delivering the world's first QLC device. It put a terabit of data on a single die, which was unprecedented, but then in addition to that, what we did was we actually built a solid state drive called the 5210 ION. This is a standard drive. It's the worlds first SSD built on the technology, and by being able to develop a solution early on, it allowed us to go engage with customers and find where the right workloads were where we could add the most value. QLC technology actually is perfectly aligned for super read intensive, very read intensive environments, and if you look at what's happening in the data center, we're actually seeing more and more workloads move into more read intensive workloads, and a good chunk of that is just because there's analytics going on. The data's being collected. It's being housed in on place, but as we've talked about quite a bit here at the event, we want to be able to deliver insight out of that data, which means we're going to be reading it quite a bit, and massaging it, and performing analytics on it. And what we're now seeing is what, in the days of the past, was a four to one read to write ratio, we're seeing as high as 5,000 to one and in some cases a million to one. So we get these heavily read intensive workloads coupled with the technology that's optimized for it. It's more power efficient than what rotating media solutions offer in certain workloads, we're starting to see these tremendous values coming out of these early engagements that we're having with customers. >> And does that have implications for longevity, or do you just make an assumption that the read/write ratio is still going to be more write intensive in terms of wear leveling and things like that? How does it change the reliability, if you will, of the technology? >> Actually the beauty is, we're able to deliver an enterprise class SSD with these read/write capabilities that are affiliated with these read intensive solutions, and we can fit within the workloads and the needs that people are talking about. So the drive writes per day that are required in a machine learning infrastructure, we believe we can address with QLC. Same thing with Hadoop style clusters and Ceph clusters. We've actually, as we've gone out and engaged each of our earlier customers, we're able to crank out reference architecture documents that we're now posting to our websites, and we're describing how we can actually leverage this technology to allow us to, in some cases, we'll better optimize where an SSD was used before. But in many, many cases we're actually in the process of displacing hard disk drives. >> So what are the limits of this QLC? How many more bits can we add? How many more layers can we add? >> So, it's actually a great question, David. In terms of what does a roadmap look like. I've been asked in the recent several hours, what the longevity for NAND looks like. And what I'll tell you is this, QLC NAND is just getting its start. What comes after that in terms of bits per cell, I don't think anybody's made any broad claims on. But from a layer stacking perspective, which is kind of the dimension upon which the industry is growing, for the foreseeable future, we see nothing that encumbers us from going substantially higher and higher layer count. Which I think is going to be great for our industry because it's going to allow us to deliver more bits in a given device, and hopefully, that'll allow us to get into markets that, historically, we haven't been able to approach. If you think about the demand elasticity dynamic that occur when we start to bring more and more costs down, the number of applications open up, not unlike the machine learning workloads I just mentioned or Hadoop workloads. We're starting to see more and more thirst and interest for replacing with solid state, just because it's more power efficient, allows for a cost structure that's better, and gives better performance too. >> I'm fond of saying that data's plentiful, insights aren't. You guys are a $30 billion company now. You're making some interesting announcements today that we're going to hear about a little later on that I won't divulge right now, but you're putting your hands in a lot of different places. When you're that size of a company, you can't help but, as you mentioned before, adding more value, becoming more of a systems focus. How do you help the industry go from just raw data to insights? What's your role in that? >> Oh, it's a phenomenal question and this is a major focus of the company. Not just in our business unit, but across all of the different business units in the company. We have a huge focus on sitting down with our customers and getting closer and closer to understanding what their workload needs are, where their paying points are, and then working with them to find solutions, and the beautiful part about it is, as Micron, we're the only company in the world that can combine together a 3D XPoint set of technologies, a NAND set of technologies, a DRAM set of technologies. We go sit down and talk about these challenges with those in mind, plus the emerging memories that we're developing to go develop better and better solutions. But after we're able to come to a solution, we put together a reference architecture, and we deploy it broadly. >> We've been trying to squint through 3D Xpoint and understand the right fit. It seems to us that one of the big advantages of flash was it had the, had this behind it. (laughs) It had the consumer volumes, thank you Steve Jobs. It's unclear whether or not 3D Xpoint will have that, maybe have the same, sort of, cost advantages, but the same time, it sounds like there's new and emerging applications. Like I said, we're trying to figure out. Have you guys figured out yet? You're obviously betting big on the technology. Help us understand where the fit is. >> Sure, I think, you know, if I look back in time, just at the storage hierarchy alone, I don't think the memory hierarchy's any different. You have these portions of the market where you build out hard disk drives, and we had DRAM before, and SSDs came along, and people started asking, not unlike several years back when we talked about the early parts. Hey, how big is this going to get? Cost structures may be prohibitive. But as innovation unfurled, the more time and investment got placed into it, we found new workloads, new use cases we were able to drive costs out, and we ended up slotting in solid state drives squarely. I think this is another tier of memory and storage. That's the beauty of the 3D XP technology. There's both memory semantics and storage semantics that are available for use. I think we're still scratching the surface on the early days, but I love what we're seeing from the customer base that we're engaging and targeting in this space. >> And people will pay up for that performance capability relative to flash. They'll pay down relative to DRAM. Is it, are you seeing a gradience for like the hyperscalers, for example, or is it, maybe the industrial internet? Where are you seeing the. >> It's fair, actually I think, you know, it's probably reasonable to say that, you know, the challenges of inserting a new memory tier into a system requires new programming algorithms, new APIs and interface. There's a lot of ecosystem that needs to be there, as well as, not to mention, you've got to have an ecosystem to go put memory products into a server, for instance, or any other platform. I think we're still early days of enabling all of this. And I also believe we're going to learn more and more where the value of this sits as we put it out there in a cost effective fashion. So I would say that people who control software environments are very, very well suited for this because they can take advantage of some of those challenges without having to have a whole ecosystem in place. I think there's going to be a continued ramp in acceleration as an industry we go build out that ecosystem. >> Well it's been amazing to watch Micron the last several years, I mean, the last several decades. When you were just a pure memory manufacturer which was diversified, you know, gorilla in this space. (laughs) You guys are really an extremely well run company. I mean, your financials have born that out. You're really transparent to the street providing great guidance and congratulations on all of the success. I'm looking forward to watching in the future. >> Oh thank you so much. It's a privilege to be part of the company, and I really appreciate your time today. >> Our pleasure, thanks for coming on theCUBE. All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Micron Insight 2018. (upbeat techno music)

>> From Orlando, Florida It's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. And we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. We're at the NetApp booth and we are now talking with Gerald Pfeiffer V SUSE, VP of Products and Technology Programs. Gerald, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So thank you for bringing the SUSE Chameleon here So let's talk about open-source. What is an open-source company? What are the key hallmarks that define an open-source company? >> So when you think of open-source technically it's about the license. It's about the open-source license that the software is under. But if you want to be a real open source company there is actually, it goes beyond that. And that's where many we see many of the classic companies fail as in you take a piece of software that you've written in house you open-source it which means you put an open-source license on it. And then you throw it over the fence. You put it on an FTP server or a NetApp Server or github or somewhere and say this is an open-source project. Technically true but what open-source really is about also is how you develop the software. It's a development model. It's about the community or communities you have. And so as an open-opensource company or a true open-source company what that means is you need to change how you develop the software. And how you go about it and it involves, you need to, You need to, let go. You need to, you need to lose. Lose in a way you lose control and you need to help, if it's something that you initiated you need to make this attractive for others and easy to contribute. And so the development model the transparency collaboration, communications all that is really important for a successful open-source project. But I would argue also for a successful open-source company. >> So let's talk about the community for a little bit when it comes to open-source and especially with SUSE. SUSE's one the most successful open source companies in the world. However, your key product, SUSE Enterprise Linux you guys don't control the kernel you have to work with a community of organizations and personalities and conflicting agendas. How does SUSE organize their self that over a 25 year period you guys have consistently grown become more prominent in the industry. How have you had that when you don't even own you don't, rather, control the key technology, the kernel to your product. >> Ya, so, there is actually a trick behind it and the short answer is you cannot control but you can influence. And so how do you influence? And it's really about becoming part of the community or I usually actually when we get new employees that come from a proprietary background one of the first things I teach them is there is no such thing as the open-source community. It's actually open-source communities. There is actually many of them and even your example, the kernel there is the Linux kernel community, but inside, everyone, the group of everyone who contributes there're actually subgroups. People focusing on different aspects. And so if you want to influence that the easiest way and the hard way is you start contributing. And so you start building up rapport, you start building up credibility and that's usually not something you do overnight It's not like you can come and say Oh, I've been doing operating systems for 30 years. I'm a distinguished engineer and now I'm telling you this is how you need to do it. You start by contributing code. You start by being part of the conversations. By critiquing, constructively hopefully, other people's contributions. usually in a certain area. And then people start getting to know your name. And they start trusting you. And I've, I'm not a kernel engineer but there're a couple of open-source projects I've contributed since writing my PHD thesis And I'm still doing that usually on my weekends or evenings when I have a little time. And so there're people I've been working together for 15 years or more, who I've never met in person. And some I've met and then I realized Wait a minute, I know he's going to be at the conference and I don't know how old he is. He wrote about his children so that gives a certain or his young baby children so that may give an, an idea. But I don't know how old he is. I don't know what color of hair. What color of skin. But then you meet and because you have this relationship you actually, you know, you get together. And there is trust and once you have this trust on a personal level but also, at least as importantly or I would break both the same on a technical side. I trust your, your judgment. Then you start influencing. >> Is that what makes SUSE an open open-source company? >> Ya that's definitely one of the aspects where, when we want to we want to drive something. And I'll give you an example that's actually especially in SAP context this is really relevant is something we call live kernel patching. So you know you have this HANA system so it's lots of memories and you have all those security issues that keep popping up, now and then. And so one of the challenges is you want to apply the security update if you're an IT person but, when you do so, you need to, and it's a kernel thing, then you need to restart the server. Because other sub-systems like a web server you just restart the web server and you're down for one millisecond and nobody really notices unless you're CNN.com or whatever. But if you restart the kernel the whole machine reboots. And then you know you scan the memory and you have a HANA machine with 12 terabyte of memory or 16. So the start up takes and then why is HANA so fast? Because all it did is in memory. Now, doing that isn't, isn't fast. >> So that's really interesting as you look through, I love the integration between SAP and SUSE the in-memory, the continuous kernel, patching, the ability to integrate the two solutions. It's interesting, you guys have a partnership you have outside of SAP with these companies that not necessarily, from a licensing perspective the application is close-sourced. So there is a myth I think, in the industry that close-sourced software versus open-sourced software one is more secure, the other one's more stable Random religious arguments. What are we seeing in the... Wow, what are... How are customers embracing the SUSE relationship along with the SAP relationship. >> You know in a way (laughs) and that's a, nhat's a tricky statement to make but in a way at first approximations customers don't care whether it's open-sourced or proprietary? As a customer, I care that it works. And if I'm a SAP customer my (mumbles) workload needs to stay up. And so what I'm looking for is performance is security, is scalability, is availability, high availability. And so whatever platform gives that to me is the platform that I choose or in the case of HANA for, actually, SAP choose. So if you look at HANA, it's an interesting sample the only operating system it's available on the only platform it's available on is Linux. So SAP actually has done their research and they looked into it and said okay, we need certain characteristics what's... Where do we get the best solution? And it turns out Linux offered that. And so I don't see, when it comes to applications in particular our workloads I don't see it as much as being open-sourced or proprietary It's really what's the best technical solution and then there obviously is the question behind the question is how do you actually get to the best solution? And that's where the open-source model where it's not just one company doing that we have lots of engineers contributing to the kernel and other parts. But it's only one part. Many of our partners contribute Our competitors contribute And so in this open-source arena Things move. Just to improve, for example, the linux kernel and you get a better outcome than any proprietary vendor would actually be been able to deliver with a classic Unix system for example. >> You talked about, you know, customers not caring about the technology. It just needs to work. And it's kinda the same thing I think of when you look at a technology like ERP software that's largely invisible. Right? So is SUSE. And SAP wants to be one of the top ten most valuable global brands. And this morning during the keynote Bill McDermott said that they're now number 17. So they're getting up there to the big brands Like Apple, Coca Cola, Google who all have products that we can kinda see and touch. So when you're in a partnership with SAP how do you articulate the value of what you guys can deliver to help the customer not care about what's under the hood here but also ensure that they're actually able to deliver what they need to to their customers. What are some of those unique maybe customer examples that you have where customers with SAP on SUSE are transforming their businesses or their industries. >> Yeah so, much... Much of this transformation really comes from the SAP stack. What we contribute is really the stability of the platform. And so, Obviously, obviously at the technical level people do care do care actually about open-source because the one thing open-source provides you is the transparency. You can see an SAP engineer actually developing HANA for example. But also other things we do together They have been looking at the source code trying to understand what's going on and then optimize HANA. So when I said customers don't care that's in a first approximation because it needs to work. If it doesn't work, everything else doesn't matter. But if, so there are people who care about the technical more details. Often these days or usually when When it's like at the CLO level or an IT director level what they care more about is things like high-availability scenarios or blueprints. So it's not just one bit of technology or even how HANA runs on SUSE but they know a server is going to fail at one point. How do you-- >> When I ran a SAP environment one of the things that we did, we did a bake-off of Linux distributions for our appliances and these are appliances! In theory you get an appliance you turn it on and you install your SAP app and life goes on, no one should care about the underlying appliance but for us it was about the OS and the availability. You know, we were coming from a non-stop XP, HP, titanium shop and we were very happy with the non-stop capability but going to X86 there's a lot of thought that goes into making that non-stop Can you talk to the relationship between NetApp, SAP and, and SUSE from a community perspective because this is related to the conversation around open-source and making that happen and to your point, how do you care why would an IT director care about SUSE verses some other distribution. >> So, you know, if you look at the conversations I'm having often it's then looking at it at the solutions level So if you can point out that you have the blueprints or reference architectures or whatever you want to call it. You have customer success stories etc. Where you can say, look this is, in a scenario like this in your, in your market or in your in your vertical this is what you can do and this is how it'll be supported. So that your guys don't have to start from zero but it's actually really easy to go high availability or in fact we have a dedicated team that sits in the... That sits in the Linux lab with all the other partners you named and many more where SAP, and that's actually a really clever thing they did, creating this Linux lab and they also have a partner board where talking about communities, they have created this level of community where different vendors come together you know and you have hallway conversations and you want to do something say okay, how do you do this with the SUSE side how do you do this on the NetApp side and then at an engineering level and at a solution level you build something that actually works technically and then obviously the support relationship is really important. So that's, that's one of the challenges open-source had in the beginning compared to proprietary because if you look at some of the old full stack companies or established ones. They used to deliver hardware and then the operating system and then middleware or database and application top. So you had one phone number to call when there's a problem. And originally with open-source you know, you got this piece here and then you got the storage from from NetApp say and .. And who do you call? And then the finger pointing starts. So what's made open-source also successful is the establishment of, of really, processes, agreements and just practical workflows so that our companies work together and the customer, they can pick up the phone in fact, if you look at, let's say SAP applications what we have set up in this SAP environment is you can call SAP and that's the only phone number you ever need to call. And everything behind that happens fully transparently. So all the vendors get together. >> So, to sum up it sounds like what you're talking about that's really key for SUSE is openness, transparency, trust, collaboration. >> Yes, and at the open-source level at Linux kernel, compiler and the individual pro checks but essentially the same. Exactly what you explained. Also at the business level, what we do with partners and what we do with customers. >> And we hear that in the keynote this morning Bill McDermott really kinda was talking about trust as the new currency. So Gerald you're right in line with that. Thank you so much for joining Keith and me today. >> Thank you for having me. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering RSA North America 2018. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at RSA North America 2018 in San Francisco. 40,000 plus people talking security, enterprise security, cloud security, a lot going on. It just continues to get more and more important. And we're really excited for our next guest who's been playing in the enterprise space for as long as I can remember, which has been a little while. Mike Decesare, he's the CEO and President of ForeScout. Mike, great to see you. >> Started my career off when I was one. (Jeff laughs) So, I've been in this for a long time. >> You have been in it a long time. So you guys now you're all about, right so there's so much stuff going on in security and security is one of these things that I have to look at it as kind of like insurance. You can't put every last nickel in security, but at the same time, you have to protect yourself. The attack surfaces are only growing with IIoT and we were at an autonomous vehicle show, and 5G is just coming around the corner, and all these connected devices and APIs. So you guys have a pretty unique approach to how you top level think about security called visibility. Explain that to us. >> So visibility is the next big thing in the world of cybersecurity and the dynamic is very basic. It's, for 20 plus years, CIOs and CSOs were substantially able to control everything that was on their network. You'd buy your servers and Windows machines and Blackberries for your employees and then there was very little tolerance for other devices being on those organization's networks. And what happened 10 years ago this year, with the birth of the iPhone was that CIOs, those same CIOs now had to deal with allowing things onto their network that don't subscribe to those same philosophies and when you can't buy it and outfit it with security before you put it into the environment. And that's the gap that ForeScout closes for organizations is we have an agentless approach which means we plug into the network infrastructure itself and we give customers visibility into everything that is connected to their network. >> So that begs a question, how do you do that without an agent? I would imagine you would put a little agent on all the various devices. So what's your technique? >> We actually don't. That's the secret sauce of the company is that >> okay >> you know over 10 years ago, we recognized this IoT trend coming because that's, that's the thing in the world of IoT is unlike the first kind o' 20 years of the internet, there was a substantially smaller number of operating systems, most of them open. The different characteristic about the current internet is that many of these use cases are coming online as closed proprietary operating systems. The example I use here is like your home. You know, you get a Nest thermostat and you put in on your network and it monitors, you know, heating and cooling but the device, the operating system, the application is all one consumer device. It doesn't run Windows. You can't install antivirus on you Nest thermostat. So our approach is we plug into the network infrastructure. We integrate to all of the network vendors, the firewall vendors, the wireless controlling vendors and we pull both active and passive techniques for gathering data off those devices and we translate that into a real-time picture of not just everything connected to the network but we know what those devices are without that client having to do anything. >> So you have what you call device cloud or yeah, ForeScout device cloud. So is that, is that a directory of all potential kind of universe of devices that you're querying off of or is that the devices within the realm of control of your of your clients directly? >> It's the second. It's the, so the way that our product works is we plug into the network infrastructure so anything that requests an IP address, whether is wired and wireless in the campus environment, whether it's data center or cloud in the data center environments or even into the OT space, anything that requests an IP address pops onto our radar the second it requests that address. And that cloud that we've built, that we've had for about nine months, we already have three million devices inside, almost three and a half million devices, is a superset of all of the different devices across our entire install base just from the clients that have been willing to share that data with us already. And that gives us optimism because what that becomes is a known set of fingerprints about all known devices so the first time that we discover a Siemens camera that might be a manufacturer, the company might have ten thousand of those in the environment, the first time that we see that device, we have to understand the pattern of traffic off that device, we label that as a security camera and any other customer world-wide that's has that same device connects, we instantaneously know it's a Siemens security camera. So we need the fingerprint of those devices once. >> Right, and so you're almost going to be like the GE Predix of connected devices down the road potentially with this cloud. >> We won't go there on that. >> He won't go there, alright. We've talked to Bill Ruh a lot of times but he does an interesting concept. The nice thing 'cause you can leverage from a single device and knowledge across the other ones which is so, so important on security so you can pick up multiple patterns, repeated patterns et cetera. >> One of the best parts about ForeScout is the fact that we deployed incredibly quickly. We have clients that have almost a million devices that got live in less than three months. And the reason we're able to do that is we plug into the infrastructure, and then our product kind o' does its own thing with very little effort from the client where we compare what we have in this repository against what they have in their environment. We typically get to an 80 or 90% auto-classification meaning that we know 80 or 90% of the time, not just what's on the network but what that device is and then the other 20% is where we have the implementation where we go through and we look at unique devices. It might be a bank has some model of ATM we've never seen before or a healthcare company has beds or machines on a hospital floor that we haven't recognized before. And the first time that we see each of those devices uniquely, we have to go through the process of fingerprinting it which means that we're looking for the unique pattern of traffic that's coming off a, you know, a router, a switch and a firewall and we're ingesting that and we're tagging that device and saying anytime we see that unique pattern of traffic, that's a certain device, a security camera or what have you. >> Right. >> The reason's that useful is then we get to put a policy in place about how those devices are allowed to behave on the network. So if you take something like the Mirai Botnet which hit about a year ago, was the thing that took down a big chunk of the Northeast, you know, utilities and you know, internet, it infected, it was a bot that infected security cameras predominantly. Nobody thought twice about having security cameras in their environment, but they're the same as they are in your house where you know, you put it online, you hit network pair and it's online. >> Right. >> But that bot was simply trying to find devices that had the default password that shipped from the security manufacturer and was able to be successful millions of time. And with our product in place, that couldn't happen because when you set us up, we would know it's a security camera, we'd put a policy in place that says security camera can speak to one server in the data center called the security camera server. And if that device tries to do anything more criminal, if it tries to dial the internet, if it tries to break into your SAP backend, any of those activities, we would give the customer the ability to automatically to take that device offline in real time. >> Right, so you're... >> And that's why our clients find us to be very useful. >> Right, so you're really segregating the devices to the places they're supposed to play, not letting 'em out of the areas they're supposed to be. Which is the >> Absolutely. >> Which is the classic kind of back door way in that the bad guys are coming in. >> Our philosophy is let everything onto the network. We take a look at that traffic. We give you a picture of all those devices and we allow each customer to put an individual policy in place that fences that in. If you take the other extreme like a Windows machine in a corporate environment, our typical policy will be you know, do you have Windows 2009 or later? 'Cause most customers have policies they don't want XP in their environments anymore. But we enforce it. So if an XP device hits the network, we can block that device or we can force a new version down. If you have Symantec, has it got a dat file update? If you've got Tenable, has it had a scan recently? If you've got, you know, any of the other products that are out there that are on those machines, our job is to enforce that the device actually matches the company's policy before that device is allowed in. >> Before you let it. Alright. >> And if at any time that it's on that network, it becomes noncompliant, we would take that device offline. >> You know, with the proliferation of devices and continuation growth of IoT and then industrial IoT, I mean, you guys are really in a good space because everything is getting an IP address and as you said, most of them have proprietary operation systems or they have some other proprietary system that's not going to allow, kind o' classic IT protections to be put into place. You've really got to have something special and it's a pretty neat approach coming at it from the connectivity. >> It's the secret sauce of the company is we recognized many years ago that the the combination of not just there being very few operating systems but they were all open. Windows, Lennox, right? I mean, you can buy a Windows machine and you can install any product you want on it. But we saw this trend coming when the next wave of devices was going to be massively heterogeneous and also in many cases, very closed. And you know, you mentioned the example of the OT space and that's one of the other, the third biggest driver for us in our business is the OT space because when you looking a WanaCry or a NotPetya and you see companies like Maersk and FedEx and others that are, that are publicly talking about the impact of these breaches on their earnings calls. What those companies are waking up and realizing is they've got 25 year old systems that have run, you know, an old version of Microsoft that's been end-of-life decades ago and the bad actors have proven very adept at trying to find any entry point into an organization, right, and the great news for ForeScout is that really lends itself very much towards our age-endless approach. I mean, many of these OT companies that we're in, devices that are in their manufacturing facilities don't even have an API. There were built so long ago so there's no concept of interacting with that machine. >> Right >> So for us, allowing that device to hit the Belden switches and then be able to interrogate the traffic coming off those switches let's us do the same thing that we do in the campus world over in the OT world as well. >> Good spot to be. So RSA 2018, what are ya looking forward to for this week? >> This is just massive in size. It's like speed dating. From a customer's perspective too, I mean, I meet so many customer's that come here and able to meet with 30 or 40 vendors in a single week and it's no different, you know, for the providers themselves so. You know, we've got some really, kind o' really high profile big wins, you know, it's very coming for us to be doing deals at this point that get up over a million devices so they're very high profile so it's a great chance to reconnect with customers. You know, one of the things I didn't mention to you is that kind o' the, the whole thing that we do of identifying devices and then understanding what they are and allowing those policies to get put in places, that's fundamentally done with our own IP, and the connections into the switch and firewall vendors. But we've built this whole other ecosystem of applications in the world of orchestration that set on top of our products. We integrate the firewall vendors, the vulnerability management vendors, the EDR vendors, the AV vendors, so it's a great chance for us to reconnect with you know, those vendors as well. In fact, we're doing a dinner tonight with CrowdStrike. They're one of our newer partners. Very excited about this week. It brings a lot of optimism. >> Well, great story Mike and excited to watch it to continue to unfold. >> We appreciate you giving us some time. >> Alright, thanks for stopping by. That's Mike Decesare. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from RSA North America 2018. Thanks for watchin'. Catch you next time. (techno music)