from Yorktown Heights New York it's the queue coverings IBM cloud innovation be brought to you by IBM hi I'm Peter Burris and we have wrapped our the cubes coverage of IBM innovation day here at the Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights now for anybody that's been in the industry for a while you know that this is one of the mecca's of the computing industry this is where an enormous number of innovations have taken place innovations about relating to semiconductor processes and you know CPU architectures innovations relating to middleware and innovations relating to database management and very importantly innovations relating to how customers and companies engage to be more successful with technology and in many respects that's really what's happening with the overall drive to cloud is to bring closer together that invention that takes place and pushes forward what technology can do and then a delivery model that's focused on ensuring the customers can actually more easily do it and IBM is absolutely part of that conversation we'll be going forward especially as we think about how those high-value legacy applications are going to be employed within a cloud context to further drive transaction capabilities with event capabilities in the cloud we've had some great conversations we've heard for example from Hilary hunter who's a CTO here at cloud infrastructure about the new role that opend plays within innovation how IBM is trying to further leverage that with the Red Hat acquisition we've had great conversations with Jason McGee talking about how the developer mindsets evolving in response to some new innovations with cloud we've heard from a number of other individuals I won't list them all but if I were trying to summarize the three points that I think kept coming through it's number one the cloud does force changes to the way you think about business problems and methods tooling and approaches for doing that are starting to mature very rapidly Micro services for an example for example is not just a technology it's also an approach to thinking about a problem and that informs everything I did the second thing that we've heard is that can't just talk about greenfield applications we've had this enormous investment in applications have been running businesses for a long time of those applications tend to be very stateful they tend to be very database driven they tend to be very operational in nature those applications have to move forward if nothing more from at least from a management standpoint how can we bring a management mindset an operating model of the cloud to start to channel or structure change and evolve how we manage those applications but ultimately bring new classes of services to those applications I think the last one that we've heard over and over and over it that this really is gonna require a strong community we have to take a community approach to invention you have to take a community approach to innovation and the social change is required to take advantage of technology and achieve the business outcomes that we want and if one thing has come through loud and clear through all the conversations is that that this year IBM think or I didn't think 2019 San Francisco is gonna be a great place to be able to get together with peers and have those conversations and think about the outcomes that enterprises want to achieve and then talk to people that can actually help you get there and one of the things that I find interesting about think this year is that the industry's changing we're seeing new rules or evolution of roles and an evolution of how those roles work together and think is actually starting to reflect that it's manifesting itself itself there's a couple of campuses one that's focused more on data and AI a very very natural binding or combining and one that's focused more on infrastructure and cloud again very natural so I hope to see be able to carry on and continue these conversations we've had today at IBM think and hope to see you there as well so once again this is Peter Burris Ricky bond the cube from the IBM from the from the illustrious from the vaunted Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights thanks very much for watching the cube today [Music]

>> From Yorktown Heights New York It's theCUBE, covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome theCUBE. We're broadcasting today from IBM innovation day at the Thomas J. Watson research labs in Yorktown New York. Having a number of great conversations about what's going on with the industry, what's going on with the cloud, and to bring that further, Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz Associates, longtime analyst. Judith, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. Great to be here. So, Judith, I'll just open it up. What do you think are the two or three most important things that people should be thinking about right now? >> Well, I think as we look at the maturation of cloud and computing and the changes that we see, I think one of the most important things is the movement towards open and standards, because what customers really want is computing. They don't really care if you tell them "Well, that service runs over there and this one runs over here." They don't care about that. What they care about all of the workloads, all of the applications they need to get their jobs done just work. So if a workload needs to move, it should be able to move because it's less expensive or more efficient or it handles a workload better in terms of performance or security. Customers want the freedom to be able to do what they want when they want it, and not to be locked in. So openness is really becoming the battlecry for the cloud. >> You're talking about two things there. Let me parse them out. You're talking about the breaking of the natural relationship between where the resources are and where the value of the work is provided. >> Yes. >> And there is a degree of openness to that, but then there's also this notion of openness which is how fast innovation, what model are we going to use? Let's break those apart. Let's start with the idea of the cloud breaking the traditional mold of this workload here, that workload there. How is cloud doing that and what's the future for that flexibility look like? >> I think if we were having this conversation ten years from now we wouldn't be talking about cloud. We would be talking about the elasticity and the way we do computing so it really meets the needs of whatever business change you're experiencing. What's held companies back and what's held IT back is the idea that you're stuck with the platform or the application or the technology that you've always been using, and it makes change really hard. So, the more flexibility you can have, and the cloud in terms of elasticity, the way you can create new workloads using cloud native and microservices and leveraging containers, all of these techniques will lead us into a world where you can create a bunch of services and choose and pick the ones you want to get your job done and it really adds a level of innovation and speed that we've never seen before with IT. >> So let's build on that. One of the things we tell our clients is to focus on what we call plasticity. It's a physics term. Elasticity is a single workload, scale it up and down. Plasticity is new workload changes, transforms, leads, perturbs the infrastructure, the infrastructure reforms around it. One of the reasons why that concept becomes so important is precisely because of the rate of increase in innovation, as you said. So now tie open back to that. What is it about open, that's not just about making sure we have system software standards, but is actually doing a better job of turning business into software at a higher level. >> In a sense, it's what I would call service as software. If you can take the business process or how you want to interact with your customers, and you can turn those into software services that are malleable, that you can change and innovate on without having to go from top to bottom and recode everything, which is what's held companies back for probably 40 or 50 years. As you modularize things, you can, for example, simple idea like the way you would calculate a 30 year mortgage. In most companies over the years there were 30 different ways you could do that and each application had its own way. What if you could have a single service that did that that you could apply it no matter what the use case and what the business case was, apply that same concept to any business logic or any business strategy, that's where you get what you're calling- something that's very plastic, very malleable, and allows you to change, because in the past we've always written applications or written systems as though they were based on how we do business right now. And when you do that, you can't change. >> So one of the ways, again, if I were to describe some of the big changes and let me test this on you, is that I say for the first 50 years of computing it was known process unknown technology. We knew we were going to do accounting, we knew we were going to exchange titles, became supply chain, et cetera, we knew we were going to do HR. But we didn't know if it was going to run on a mainframe or how to run on a mainframe, or client server or the internet or whatever else it was. We're entering into a world now where it's unknown process, relatively known computing, or technology. We know it's going to be a cloud or cloudlike thing. When we think about that unknown process, more data first applications, data driven applications, where do you foresee some of these magnificent changes that are on the horizon? >> So, I think one of the most important changes is that we start leading with data rather than process, because if you lead with process, that's the past. If you lead with data, data will lead you to process. So if we have data driven organizations where the data, using it in a predictive analytics way, really using machine learning, algorithms, and some of the emerging AI techniques, we can begin to have data drive us to process. >> So, Judith, I know you've gone to IBM Think every year for a number of years now. Probably almost as long as I have. If you step back and say San Francisco, 2019, February, 30,000 plus people, what are you looking to get out of Think this year that builds upon what you've gotten out of it in the past? >> Well, what I really like about Think and about IBM events is that it brings together so many people, both IBMs fantastic technical leadership with business leadership, and it brings together the programmers. It brings together the IT leaders with business leaders, so it's a really coming together of the minds across business organizations, really collaborating together to really get to the heart of key business problems. >> Excellent. Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz and Associates, thanks for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And this is Peter Burris, we'll be back with more of theCUBE from IBM Innovation Day in a few minutes. (upbeat techno music)

>> From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris from Wikibon, and you're watching theCUBE being broadcast from IBM Innovation Day at the Thomas J. Watson Research Lab in beautiful Yorktown, New York. And we've had a number of great conversations thus far, we've got some more on the horizon, stay with us. Now, we've got Jim Comfort. Jim Comfort is the General Manager of Hybrid Cloud Services at IBM. Jim, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter, glad to be here. >> So, Jim, what does Hybrid Cloud Services as a group do? >> Actually, we run infrastructure for clients. That's our business, but we help you advise, build and manage private cloud. Advise, build and manage consumption of public cloud, Azure, Google, IBM, and we help you manage and stitch all of that together. >> So a lot of people think of cloud and they think of this monolithic thing. "If I go to the cloud, suddenly my business has changed." But there's more to it than that. There's a number of different things that a business has to be successful at to succeed at getting to the cloud. What is your perspective on that? >> Well, I completely agree. And this is kind of my first conversation with clients is, you need a business strategy, but to execute that strategy you have to realize it will touch most everything in your business. It'll touch infrastructure, it'll touch applications, it'll touch your dev ops, or your development process morph to dev ops. It'll touch your operations very profoundly, this whole SRE thought, and it will test your data governance and management as well as your security and compliance. So that's the scope that you have to comprehend. >> But most people, they start with perhaps the infrastructure first and end up with the data last. Is that the right way to think about this? >> I agree, many do, and actually I have not seen many build-it-they-will-come strategies succeed. And so what I really look for is, do you understand the business drivers? Top-line revenue growth, new markets, new insights, new data, and from that can you derive a technology strategy? What I've seen happen in many cases is, if you start from the bottom up you'll be trapped in what I call the religious wars of technology that never end. >> And most people, a lot of folks start from the bottom up, because they start from the technology side of the business. >> Correct. >> Are you seeing more business people getting engaged, and conceptualizing what the strategy needs to be? >> I am, and it starts on both sides. The business people will say, "I need to move faster than you can move, so I'm going to do something different," and the IT people will say, "I can do that for you, here's what you need." The two signatures of the most successful transformations are does the line of business and the IT have the relationship to collaborate so they actually learn together? And then if they have that, have they actually created a team that understands the new as well as they understand the existing or the old, so they can actually understand what's real, what's not, where's the hype, what really happens. And then they get into the rational, real planning decision. >> So as you think about some of the assessment challenges, because you said you go through the assessment process, what are some of the key questions that a client should start with as they think about undertaking this journey? >> Well, number one is start with the business driver. I said that already, but you have to start with understanding what you're trying to accomplish so you can make choices. And the other is, start small enough and get to the end of something so that you know what the reality is, and that's where our, this is where we bring in our methods. When you hear us talk about the garage method, you hear us talk about MVPs and all the language everyone wants to use. We like to start with something, and start that iterative cycle of learning. That's the key. >> So with an iterative cycle of learning, in many respects this whole notion of agility is predicated on this idea of being agile or iterative. But it's also empirical, knowing what the data is, knowing what the data says, and being opportunistic. How does a customer balance that as they get going, say early on in the cloud journey? >> I think, again, most of what we're talking about in digital transformations is new insights that will help your business. That could be from data that you had, it could be new data. And if they think about it, what insights am I looking for? What new experience am I trying to create, and what do I need to do that? Then you start to get people to step back and think, well, what are all the possibilities? And now, how do we tackle that? So it starts from realizing, what insight am I looking for? >> So there's a lot of invention happening in the industry. >> Oh, yeah. >> And enormous new things being created. Customers are being overwhelmed at trying to adopt them. The innovation side, the social side of effecting a change in the business. You mentioned some of the markers for success and putting together the strategy. Go forward a little bit. What are some of the companies that have successfully gotten to that end stage maturity doing differently? >> We have a number of very good ones. I mean, a very clear one in my mind is American Airlines, where they were really trying to change the experience. They had three distinct things that had grown up over time, the mobile experience, the kiosk experience and the Web experience. Three completely different things. They brought it together, converged it, modernized it, and now completely changed the experience and the speed with which they can now act on what they see for their clients or for their customers, all of us. But also as they get new ideas, the speed and the velocity that they can bring those in is phenomenal. >> And that improves their ecosystem, their ability to work with a lot of others as well. >> Their ecosystem, how to work with others, how to bring in new ideas. And this is all, for them it's all about client satisfaction and service to their end client, to the end user. That's what it was. It had a lot of technology dimensions, but they were very clear the experience they were trying to attack. >> So next February, IBM Think, 30-plus thousand people descending upon San Francisco. You guys are taking it over. What kind of conversations are going to be on your agenda as you work with customers and partners to get this message out? >> Well, it's really two things. I often joke the blessing and curse of IBM is the breadth of our portfolio. It's a very large place, but we actually have a very simple, clear way to talk to, advise, move, build and manage. Those are the steps you need in your journey. Now, which journey for you, which type of thing. But that, we have clarity on that, and I think you'll see that displayed at Think and get to understand it. The other thing is that we have a lot of experiential and real practical, we've made this happen for many large clients at scale, and I think that what we want people to understand is we can help you that same way. It's really pretty simple. >> Jim Comfort, General Manager Hybrid Cloud Services at IBM. Thanks for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And we'll be back momentarily with more from theCUBE at IBM Innovation Day here at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York.

>> From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day, brought to you by IBM. >> I'm Peter Burris of Wikibon. Welcome back to IBM Innovation Day, covered by theCUBE, from beautiful Yorktown Heights, New York, Thomas J. Watson Research Center. A lot of great conversations about the journey to the cloud and what it means, and we're going to have another one here with Denis Kennelly, who is the General Manager of Cloud Integration in IBM. Denis, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter, and welcome to Yorktown also. >> I love it here. So, very quickly, what does the GM of Cloud Integration do? >> Yeah, so, I suppose we start from the beginning, right? So I am responsible for a lot of what we call the traditional IBM middleware. So these are brands that are known to the industry and to our customers, things like WebSphere, Message Queue, or MQ, as we know it, which is kind of the core foundation stones for a lot of IT today that's out there in the industry. And it's not just about, you know, sometimes people talk about this legacy, but this is what all the systems run on today. And also, I'm involved in the whole journey of moving that middleware to the cloud and enabling customers to get on that journey to cloud. And it's not just to a cloud, because your typical enterprise today has probably on average about five different clouds, and clouds, as we know them as the IS players of the past, but also when we talk about cloud, we also think about things like SaaS properties and applications of that regard. So it's helping customers go from that traditional IT infrastructure and on their journey to the cloud. That's what I do. >> So utilizing these enterprise-ready technologies that have driven the enterprise, bringing them to the cloud as services, but also making sure that the stuff that's currently installed can engage and integrate the cloud from a management service standpoint as well. >> Absolutely, because customers have made a huge investment in this middleware, and a lot of the transactions, and a lot of the security, and a lot of the risks set in these systems, and they have served us very well for many decades. Now, as we start to move to the cloud, it isn't a binary switch. It's going to be a transition over time, and today, I think we're about 20% into that journey. I would say we've done some of the easier parts. Now we're getting into some of the more complex and some of the more difficult problems. And kind of one of the underlying pieces of technology we're using to enable customers to do that is container technology. So we've made the decision to use containers right across our middleware, our software. So what I mean by that is we've taken all our software and it's running on containers today, and that's a key enabler to make this happen, because containers give you that flexibility and that openness to run on different targeted environments and be able to run on different clouds at the end of the day. >> The model by which developers thought about integration would be through a transaction. Generally pretty stateful. So, I'll put something in a queue, I'll wait for a response, guaranteed delivery. Now we're moving to a world, containers, a lot more reliance on stateless interactions. It means we're being driven mainly by events. I'm thinking in terms of events. Talk about how that is changing the way we think about the role of middleware or the role of integration amongst all these different possible services. >> Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, so if you think about containers, we think about stateless, and we think about microservices, and we talk about event-based applications, so a lot of those front ends are on that today and building on those technologies. So you've got to enable the new developers to build in that way. Now, how do you integrate that with that backend, right? Because at the end of the day, these transactions are running in the backend, and you really want to enable, as part of the transformation, you want to open up those backends to those new developers and to those new customer insights, because what is digital transformation? It's about putting the customer at the middle and enable insights on those customers, and enable rapid development of those applications. So at the core of that is integration, and integration is not just message-based integration. It's being able to take those backend transactions and surface them up through APIs, not just the standard APIs as we think of maybe as web services, but event-based probability models, and event-based APIs also, and doing that in a consistent and a secure manner, because if you have all these complex transactional systems, who has access to that data? Who has access to make those transactions? Who can, at certain levels, et cetera, and we really have to do that in a secure and a consistent manner across these environments is critical to what we do. >> So, can you give us some examples of some customers that are successfully transitioning their backend systems to these new technologies in a way that protects the backend system, makes it economical to do so, in other words, doesn't force change, but can utilize some of these new integration technologies to make both the new investments more valuable but also the backends more valuable too. >> Yeah, I mean, if you think of, I'll give you an example of a customer, American Airlines, in the airline industry, right? So, if you think about travel and airline travel in times past, you know, you made a reservation maybe through an agent and you booked the flight from A to B. Today, you have your cellphone, you get regular updates on your flights. If you're delayed, you're possibly offered re-routing options, et cetera, right, so there's a classic example of how digital has transformed the airline industry and the airline booking industry. If your flight, you know, if there's weather patterns, et cetera, how you can get real time updates on your flights. So, okay, that's all happening on the front end, on your cellphone, or your tablet, or whatever, but the backend booking system is still a transactional-based system that says, Peter is on this flight going from A to B at this time, et cetera. So, that's an example of how we have modernized an application and we have worked with American Airlines to make that happen, to give you that kind of 360 view as a customer, where you bring in together flight information, weather information, rating information, because we'll offer you different alternatives in terms of if you need to rebook in the event of something going on, and at the backend, there's still a transaction that says, book Peter on this flight from A to B, and that's a real life example of a transformation, how we've integrated those two worlds there. >> So if we go back five or six, or more than that, say 10, 15 years, in the days of MQ, for example, the people who were developing, and setting up those systems, and administering and managing those systems were a relatively specialized group. Today, the whole concept of DevOps in many respects is borrowing from much of the stuff that those folks did many, many years ago as infrastructure builders, or developers, as I call them. How does that group move into this new world of integration in the cloud? >> Yeah, so, I think first of all, the rate and pace has multiplied, right, so the rate and pace of which we make changes to the system has multiplied. I mean, maybe traditionally, we run in changes maybe once a month. We have things like change control windows. Things were very well controlled, et cetera, right? But at the end of the day, it doesn't meet the needs of today and what we need to do in a digital world. So today, we're running in changes on the hour. So now, you're faced with a challenge, right? So when you make changes, how do you know that the system is still performing, is still operating at the level you need it to operate on? You start to think about security and you start to think about, okay, I've made a change, have I introduced vulnerabilities into the system? You've got to, you know, in the past, these were all separate groups and almost islands within the operation center, where you have the developer, who kind of over to all the code, and then operations looked at it and see how it's performed, and security checked for compliance, et cetera, and they were kind of three different islands of personas or groups within the organization. Today, that's really collapsing into one organization. The developer is responsible for making sure the change gets in, for making sure the change performs, and is also security compliant. And we call this the role of the SRE, or the systems reliability engineer, and really bringing those two worlds together into one persona, and it's not just one persona but having the systems on the inside to make that happen. And that's critical in how management is changing and the management of these systems is changing, and how the skill level is needed in this new world. >> So Denis, one more question. In a few months, IBM Think is going to take over San Francisco, February 2019, >> Looking forward to it. >> 3,000 people. Talk to us a little bit about what gets you excited about Think, and what kind of conversations you hope to be having while you're there. >> Yeah, well, you know, this is the one time of the year where all of IBM comes together, and it's new this year that we're going to San Francisco, and in particular, in our cloud business, which I'll talk about, which really encompasses everything we're talking about here, which is our middleware business and also how we move customers to the cloud, and really engaging with customers in those conversations. And this is the one time of the year where all of IBM comes together, and where you can see the full breadth of our capabilities all the ways from our systems, and the hardware, down at that level, at the chip level, right through to the middleware and the software to our cloud, and actually engaging with customers, and really understanding what the customer needs are, and making sure that what we are working on is meeting those customer needs, and of course, if we need to adapt or change, and take that feedback back into the organization, so we do that in real time. It's a very exciting time for us. It's a week in the year that I really look forward to, because that's where all of IBM comes together, including our services, et cetera, and where we actually have conversations with key customers and partners and really understanding what's going on in the industry and how we can help people on this journey to the cloud that I talked about. >> Denis Kennelly, IBM General Manager of Cloud Integration, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. And once again, this is Peter Burris. We're signing off from the IBM Innovation Day, here at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. Thank you very much for watching. Let's carry on these conversations about cloud and the future of computing.

>> From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Cloud Analyst Summit, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, I'm Wikibon's Peter Burris. Welcome back to theCUBE coverage of IBM Innovation Day, here at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Great series of conversations, and this next one also is going to be a great conversation, with Jason McGee, who's an IBM Fellow, VP and CTO of Cloud Platform here at IBM. Jason, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, we've had a lot of great conversations about what does open mean, where is the cloud going, what is the role of developers in this whole thing, but I want to dig a little bit deeper into this kind of core question. The cloud suggests a new model for computing. I would also think that would mean that there's a new model for development on the horizon. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Can you talk to us a little bit about that? >> Yeah, sure, I mean, I think that's absolutely true. I think one of the core things that people are trying to get out of cloud these days is development velocity, you know. For many years, of course, one of the key pressures in IT has been how do I do stuff more quickly, and that's gone through many iterations over time, but I think cloud today, people are really trying to figure out how to leverage cloud as a platform for speed of development, and the combination of services on cloud, and new development models like microservices, and new technologies like containers are all kind of contributing elements in helping people solve this problem, how do I build stuff more quickly. >> So, with all that new technology, is a new mindset required? Does somebody think about the problem differently, does somebody break the problem down differently? How do you start with that notion of looking at a business requirement or business outcome, and translate it into the technology? We used to just create code. Now we're doing something different. >> Yeah, I think the first thing you have to do is think about how to organize people. You know, software development at the end of the day is a sport amongst people and you have to think about how to break up the problem, and so, like microservices, a lot of us think of microservices as a technology. It's not really a technology, it's really a philosophy about how to attack a problem with a group of people, it's about how to organize, and its fundamental idea is break it into independent parts, and allow a small team of people to not only develop that part but to own it end-to-end, you know, like the old development model was development, test, production, hand it over the wall to operations. The new model is break it into small problems and then have a team own the whole thing end-to-end, and with that new organizational philosophy comes new architectures for apps, new technologies to help you do that, and new platforms to run things on. >> So, as we think about that, that suggests that the approach to software from a licensing standpoint, from what are you buying, what are you installing is also going to change. How do you foresee, and what is IBM preparing customers for in this kind of new world where software is a service coming from a lot of different places as opposed to a license with, you know, 800 million lines of code or eight billion lines of code behind it? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think these new ideas are enabled by things like cloud. Part of the reason that cloud has enabled this new model to be feasible is because you get, for example, consumption-based pricing. You can use a wide variety of technologies, you can pick the right tool for the job, you can pay for just what you use, and therefore, the old models of static software licensing and big platforms can start to fade away as these small teams are able to kind of pick the right tool for the job, and that wouldn't be possible in a world without like, as a service delivery, and meter pricing, and things like that, because you would have to consolidate to fewer choices and buy bigger chunks of things. >> As you said, microservices is more of a philosophical approach to how you think about software, and it's also predicated on that wonderful notion of REST. A great paper was written a number of years ago on APIs. IBM has kind of an interesting role in the industry, though. IBM has got to bring a whole bunch of customers with highly stateful applications forward into the cloud. Kubernetes, great for stateful. How are we going to address that tension between the stateless world of greenfield applications and the stateful legacy that has to move into this new world? >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, I think a lot of times new trends emerge and it's easy to ignore the past, but the lesson I've learnt in over 20 years in IT is like, nothing ever goes away, right, and so you have to not only define the future, but you have to figure out how to help people get there. I actually think part of the reason technologies like Kubernetes are so dominant right now is because they actually do a reasonable job at both. You know, Kubernetes and containers are a great platform for the kind of new architectures and for adopting these new methodologies we're talking about, but they can also accommodate the existing apps, and you can move existing apps into these new platforms, and so, that helps give people a path. They can move something they have and then slowly re-factor it, or they can move something they have and build new things around it, and they could do all that with platforms like Kubernetes as an enabler, right? And it's been interesting to watch. Like, at IBM, we obviously make Kubernetes available, both in our public and private clouds, but we're also big users, and we run all of our cloud services on that platform. Stateful databases, AI and machine learning workloads, analytics platforms, stateless web apps, like, the whole lot, we've been able to run on a platform like that. >> Talk to me a little bit about this notion of cloud operating model and how we manage that, because it seems to me as though the user adoption of a lot of these new technologies are going to be facilitated if we can put forward a management platform that uses those technologies to manage those technologies. What's the relationship there between the evolution of management? Is that a leading edge of how we are going to see people adopt some of these technologies? >> It's certainly a very kind of critical component of the story. I mean, if you really believe in the idea that where we want to move to is this kind of microservice model of small teams that run things themselves, then you get into the question of, all right, well, if you have eight people whose job is to run something in production, they need to be able to do that efficiently, right? You can't have complex operational processes, you need a lot of really good tools, it needs to be really easy for them, 'cause you're asking people to have a really vast set of knowledge, and so, it's driving the evolution of management philosophies. You're seeing new technologies, like SDO, for example, emerge, which are allowing like an application person to define policy about security, and access, and networking that normally would've required like a network expert to go to. >> And more, which makes it a very powerful platform. >> Powerful platform, right, but I think it's coming out of this realization that like, if that small team of people ever want to sleep, and when they have to run things, they're going to need tools to help them do that. So it's been interesting to watch that kind of circular evolution of these different domains. >> So, 20 years of experience from web-sphere forward. Let's think about the next five years. Where is the biggest innovation going to happen in software? >> Well, I mean, there's the obvious stuff around the application of AI, but the part that I'm most excited about is I think we've been on an arc over the last 20 years, to make the application the center of IT. You know, historically, infrastructure has been the center of IT. You start a project, you buy a server, you install an operating system, you set up management tools. >> That's been a big asset. >> The center has been the infrastructure and you build your way up. And I think as velocity has become dominant, we've been trying to flip it and say, I'm building an app. Let me focus on the app, and focus on what the app needs, and drive the requirements down, and I don't think we're done yet. I think there's a lot more to do there, but that's the path we're on. I think over the next five years, we'll really get there, where as an app team, I don't really have to think about infrastructure, and I can have the system adapt to the needs of the application. >> Do you foresee a point where the data and the application are increasingly and further broken apart? >> The data and the application? I don't know that they're going to be further broken apart, but I think we'll see more kind of intelligent scheduling and combinations of those things, like there are cases where the data needs to be king, and the application needs to come to the data, and vice versa, and historically, the data world and the app world have been pretty separate, right, and you know, again, if we think teams are going to run their things, then just like they're doing ops and dev, they're going to have to do apps and data, right, and so, there's an opportunity there to bring those worlds closer. I see some of it, but, you know, Kubernetes as an example, as a common operational platform for both kinds of systems, but there's more, for sure. >> So bring it together when it makes the most amount of sense, keep it separate when other people need to use the data. >> Stop assuming you have specialists in every technology, and assume you have a multi-disciplinary team that has to run it all. >> All right, Jason, one more question. February, San Francisco, IBM takes it over with IBM Think. A lot of users, a lot of new questions being raised, a lot of opportunity for learning, a lot of opportunity for networking. What are you hoping to accomplish? What conversations do you want to have at Think? >> Yeah, I'm really excited, I think, to have conversations with clients about how they're actually adapting to this new world. I think sometimes the biggest challenge is not technology, but how organizations assimilate these ideas, and so, I'm excited for the conversations with customers about what problems they're solving, sharing those experiences with each other, and also practitioners. I think we've moved into a world where IT is dominated by the people who actually do the work, by the practitioners, and I really hope to see a lot of them show up at Think in February and share with us what they're doing. >> Jason McGee, IBM Fellow, VP, CTO, Cloud Platform here at IBM. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And once again, this is Peter Burris from the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. You've been watching theCUBE. Stay tuned. (techno music)

(technological music) >> From Yorktown Heights, New York, it's theCUBE covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and we are broadcasting theCUBE from IBM Innovation Day at the Thomas J. Watson Research Lab in Yorktown, New York. We've got a great number of guests to talk about. We're going to start with Hillery Hunter, who's the CTO and vice-president of cloud infrastructure at IBM. Hillery, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. >> So, you're relatively new in your role. Tell us about some of the things that you're focusing on as the CTO of cloud infrastructure here at IBM. >> As CTO for cloud infrastructure, I'm focused on making our cloud the best possible place that it can be for people to bring their data, bring their applications, and overall, come into that modernization journey with us, the process of transforming to become a digital enterprise. >> So, one of the things that people talk about all the time is how fast data's being generated. Nobody seems to be talking about how fast software is being generated, and yet, that seems to be one of the advantages and potentially the liabilities of doing cloud wrong. Talk to us a little bit about how IBM sees the world of software changing as we move forward with the cloud. >> [Hillery] There are parts that are consistent with what we've seen for about the past 20 years in open source, and there are parts that certainly, we feel like are accelerating and changing. With regard to the pace of software and its change today, open source is clearly this innovation space. It's this playground where lots of people can go and can contribute. We can take... We're here at the IBM research facility. We can take the latest in innovations and math that helps us accomplish great AI and AI insights. We can take that into open source. We can take microservice integration capabilities and take it into open source and work there collaboratively with people across the industry. What we see, therefore, is a tremendous rate and pace in change of software and the capability of software and its ability to analyze data and bring insights to data and realize the promises of big data, of getting insight out of that data, is just really on a tremendous growth rate. When you move to cloud, you're not just doing what they used to say of converting capital expense on premises into opex and renting a server in the cloud. You're bringing your overall workload and modernizing it and bringing it into this era where you're able to apply through microservices and cloud-based programming methodology, you're able to bring the latest of software capability to your data and get more insights out of it. >> You're really able to alter the operating model of how not only your technology group works, but also how your business works. >> Absolutely. >> How does Red Hat play a role in this? >> We have shared principles with Red Hat. We both have been active in the open source communities. IBM famously had billion dollars of investment in LINUX going back 20 years ago, and Red Hat is a prominent name in open source. We have a shared understanding of the value of open source and the value of rate and pace of innovation that's commensurate with what open source provides. We have a shared value around what enterprises need and a shared client-centric view that you need support on your software, that you need certifications, that you expect security, those kind of things. There's tremendous amount of shared value proposition in what we see as the rate and pace of innovation as well as then moving that into an enterprise context. Enterprises make these choices very carefully. As consumers of enterprise capabilities, we expect them to guard our data, we expect them to do things on our data in a secure way, and there are many foundational elements in philosophy that are similar between the two of us. >> You mentioned that cloud started out as this notion of capex to opex, move all your data to a single place, let somebody else deal with it. Increasingly, enterprise is starting to recognize that their data may sometimes have to remain in place. We start talking about innovation, open source, these new classes of services. What is it going to mean to bring the cloud experience to the data from IBM's perspective? >> We really see that the data today exists in multiple places, that largely because of that, people are partway through their journey to overall modernization. They're partway through their journey to the cloud. We really think that the world is going to be hybrid, meaning that... Or, the world is hybrid, I guess I would say, meaning that there is data and there is cloud function needed on premises and in public clouds. There's a need for private, dedicated environments in the public cloud as well. There's a significant amount of IT that is currently traditional in that people are in the process of modernizing, and that may initially be through a private cloud context on the journey to overall workload modernization. We also see that the world is multi-cloud. People are using upwards of 9 clouds or more in many cases, and that, in a lot of cases, has to do with this intersection of function and data residency and being able to bring together all of those pieces of where the data needs to be or where the data currently is, and then bring software function to the data is something that we see as critically important. >> Without being too specific in the use of the word binding, today, the idea is you bring your data to a cloud supplier and then, you can run the services of that cloud supplier supplies on that data. Do you and IBM foresee a world in which the customer's going to be able to control their own data and then acquire the services from the cloud and bring it to their data? Is that the direction you think it's going to go? >> Not only do we see that it will be possible, we think that it is possible and we're putting things in market already today that enable people to bring cloud function to their data. The IBM Cloud private offerings and IBM Cloud private for data enable people to, in their environment, where their data resides, bring sophisticated data, warehousing data analytics and AI capabilities. Fundamentally, that process of workload modernization is a set of steps and it starts with data and it starts with modernization of that environment and it matures then into being able to get deep insights through the power of AI on that data. >> Let me ask you one more question. In February, IBM's going to host 30,000+ people in San Francisco. Unbelievable opportunity for networking, learning, and IBM Think. What kind of conversations do you expect that you're going to be having in Think in 2019? >> I think you hit at the heart of the conversations that we're going to be having at Think and our positioning of the hybrid multi-cloud environment. Our other core tenets there are open and open source and keeping up with the rate and pace of open source as an innovation stream, providing choice in how folks are deploying cloud and deploying systems. We also are going to be having conversations around security. That's a core enterprise value proposition and ultimately, management. You want to not just declare that the world is hybrid and multi-cloud, but provide solutions to that and we believe we have strong answers to how to bring these pieces together and enable people to successfully move at the rate and pace of innovation that they need, yet in a secure context, and leverage the ability to deploy cloud capabilities where their data currently is, be that on private or public context. >> Hillery Hunter, CTO and vice president of cloud infrastructure at IBM, thanks for talking to theCUBE here today at the IBM Innovation Day. >> Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. >> And, we will be back momentarily with more conversations at IBM Innovation Day.

(digital music) >> From Yorktown Heights, New York It's theCUBE! Covering IBM Cloud Innovation Day. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, it's Wikibon's Peter Burris again. We're broadcasting on The Cube from IBM Innovation Day at the Thomas J Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York. Have a number of great conversations, and we got a great one right now. Rob Thomas, who's the General Manager of IBM Analytics, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thanks Peter, great to see you. Thanks for coming out here to the woods. >> Oh, well it's not that bad. I actually live not to far from here. Interesting Rob, I was driving up the Taconic Parkway and I realized I hadn't been on it in 40 years, so. >> Is that right? (laugh) >> Very exciting. So Rob let's talk IBM analytics and some of the changes that are taking place. Specifically, how are customers thinking about achieving their AI outcomes. What's that ladder look like? >> Yeah. We call it the AI ladder. Which is basically all the steps that a client has to take to get to get to an AI future, is the best way I would describe it. From how you collect data, to how you organize your data. How you analyze your data, start to put machine learning into motion. How you infuse your data, meaning you can take any insights, infuse it into other applications. Those are the basic building blocks of this laddered AI. 81 percent of clients that start to do something with AI, they realize their first issue is a data issue. They can't find the data, they don't have the data. The AI ladder's about taking care of the data problem so you can focus on where the value is, the AI pieces. >> So, AI is a pretty broad, hairy topic today. What are customers learning about AI? What kind of experience are they gaining? How is it sharpening their thoughts and their pencils, as they think about what kind of outcomes they want to achieve? >> You know, its... For some reason, it's a bit of a mystical topic, but to me AI is actually quite simple. I'd like to say AI is not magic. Some people think it's a magical black box. You just, you know, put a few inputs in, you sit around and magic happens. It's not that, it's real work, it's real computer science. It's about how do I put, you know, how do I build models? Put models into production? Most models, when they go into production, are not that good, so how do I continually train and retrain those models? Then the AI aspect is about how do I bring human features to that? How do I integrate that with natural language, or with speech recognition, or with image recognition. So, when you get under the covers, it's actually not that mystical. It's about basic building blocks that help you start to achieve business outcomes. >> It's got to be very practical, otherwise the business has a hard time ultimately adopting it, but you mentioned a number of different... I especially like the 'add the human features' to it of the natural language. It also suggests that the skill set of AI starts to evolve as companies mature up this ladder. How is that starting to change? >> That's still one of the biggest gaps, I would say. Skill sets around the modern languages of data science that lead to AI: Python, AR, Scala, as an example of a few. That's still a bit of a gap. Our focus has been how do we make tools that anybody can use. So if you've grown up doing SPSS or SaaS, something like that, how do you adopt those skills for the open world of data science? That can make a big difference. On the human features point, we've actually built applications to try to make that piece easy. Great example is with Royal Bank of Scotland where we've created a solution called Watson Assistant which is basically how do we arm their call center representatives to be much more intelligent and engaging with clients, predicting what clients may do. Those types of applications package up the human features and the components I talked about, makes it really easy to get AI into production. >> Now many years ago, the genius Turing, noted the notion of the Turing machine where you couldn't tell the difference between the human and a machine from an engagement standpoint. We're actually starting to see that happen in some important ways. You mentioned the call center. >> Yep. >> How are technologies and agency coming together? By that I mean, the rate at which businesses are actually applying AI to act as an agent for them in front of customers? >> I think it's slow. What I encourage clients to do is, you have to do a massive number of experiments. So don't talk to me about the one or two AI projects you're doing, I'm thinking like hundreds. I was with a bank last week in Japan, and they're comment was in the last year they've done a hundred different AI projects. These are not one year long projects with hundreds of people. It's like, let's do a bunch of small experiments. You have to be comfortable that probably half of your experiments are going to fail, that's okay. The goal is how do you increase your win rate. Do you learn from the ones that work, and from the ones that don't work, so that you can apply those. This is all, to me at this stage, is about experimentation. Any enterprise right now, has to be thinking in terms of hundreds of experiments, not one, not two or 'Hey, should we do that project?' Think in terms of hundreds of experiments. You're going to learn a lot when you do that. >> But as you said earlier, AI is not magic and it's grounded in something, and it's increasingly obvious that it's grounded in analytics. So what is the relationship between AI analytics, and what types of analytics are capable of creating value independent of AI? >> So if you think about how I kind of decomposed AI, talked about human features, I talked about, it kind of starts with a model, you train the model. The model is only as good as the data that you feed it. So, that assumes that one, that your data's not locked into a bunch of different silos. It assumes that your data is actually governed. You have a data catalog or that type of capability. If you have those basics in place, once you have a single instantiation of your data, it becomes very easy to train models, and you can find that the more that you feed it, the better the model's going to get, the better your business outcomes are going to get. That's our whole strategy around IBM Cloud Private for Data. Basically, one environment, a console for all your data, build a model here, train it in all your data, no matter where it is, it's pretty powerful. >> Let me pick up on that where it is, 'cause it's becoming increasingly obvious, at least to us and our clients, that the world is not going to move all the data over to a central location. The data is going to be increasingly distributed closer to the sources, closer to where the action is. How does AI and that notion of increasing distributed data going to work together for clients. >> So we've just released what's called IBM Data Virtualization this month, and it is a leapfrog in terms of data virtualization technology. So the idea is leave your data where ever it is, it could be in a data center, it could be on a different data center, it could be on an automobile if you're an automobile manufacturer. We can federate data from anywhere, take advantage of processing power on the edge. So we're breaking down that problem. Which is, the initial analytics problem was before I do this I've got to bring all my data to one place. It's not a good use of money. It's a lot of time and it's a lot of money. So we're saying leave your data where it is, we will virtualize your data from wherever it may be. >> That's really cool. What was it called again? >> IBM Data Virtualization and it's part of IBM Cloud Private for Data. It's a feature in that. >> Excellent, so one last question Rob. February's coming up, IBM Think San Francisco thirty plus thousand people, what kind of conversations do you anticipate having with you customers, your partners, as they try to learn, experiment, take away actions that they can take to achieve their outcomes? >> I want to have this AI experimentation discussion. I will be encouraging every client, let's talk about hundreds of experiments not 5. Let's talk about what we can get started on now. Technology's incredibly cheap to get started and do something, and it's all about rate and pace, and trying a bunch of things. That's what I'm going to be encouraging. The clients that you're going to see on stage there are the ones that have adopted this mentality in the last year and they've got some great successes to show. >> Rob Thomas, general manager IBM Analytics, thanks again for being on theCUBE. >> Thanks Peter. >> Once again this is Peter Buriss of Wikibon, from IBM Innovation Day, Thomas J Watson Research Center. We'll be back in a moment. (techno beat)

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference 2017 Europe brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. So there's a lot of executives from Nutanix we've had on the program many times. People who've been in job for quite a long time. So Lou Attanasio is the Chief Revenue Officer of Nutanix, and might hold the record for the shortest time in a new job before coming on theCUBE. I love it. Lou, it's like less than a week, right? It's less, five days. Five days? This is the fifth day. All right, so thank you so much for joining us. >> Lou: Nah, it's my pleasure, actually. So for our audience, give us a little bit about your background-- Sure. What brought you to Nutanix? That's a good question. The new IPO company. So I've been in the IT industry quite a long time. To give you a little history, started out actually at IBM, at their Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. I had a great span. I was everything from research to a systems engineer to, in sales for a long time. Had many positions, and was there for 38 years at IBM. It was a good run. My last job at IBM was the GM for their cloud software business, and I also had mainframe software reporting to me, and it was a great team. Then, you know, it was time. There was some things that, you always want to see how you could do outside IBM, outside the mothership. I still have blue in my blood, but I went to another company,, an enterprise cloud data management company, Informatica, and had an incredibly good run there. Quite frankly, I wasn't looking for a job. You can probably tell, I'm not a job hopper, and an opportunity came about. And I'll answer your second, why Nutanix. Someone reached and said, hey, a CEO of an incredible company wants to just have a conversation with you. Frankly, I said no, (Stu laughs) and I have to be real honest with you, Dheeraj was pretty persistent, and we had a meeting. It was on a Sunday, and we spent four hours together. There was something very interesting about that meeting and it really kind of got my head spinned a little bit. In the four hours, we spent probably about two and half hours talking about family, but it wasn't just biological family. He talked about his team and the employees as his family, and then, that wasn't enough, then he talked about his clients and how they were family, and once I started realizing that, that's the kind of company that I was used to, that really cared about its people, that great products don't make great companies, great people make great companies. It was instantaneous, I realized that this is a company that was pretty special. Dheeraj was very special, and that's the reason why I came. Yeah, I think back to Dheerj's first keynote at the Nutanix show in Miami, the first one. I've been at all five of the Nutanix .NEXT events, and he got up on stage and spent time, I think he called it his constituencies. There's the employees, there's the partners, customers, of course, very important, and then he said, you know, not too distant future I'll have a new constituency, kind of alluding to going public eventually, and of course, we're there. So as Chief Revenue Officer, paint us a picture as to which of these constituencies do you actually interact with and-- It would really be all. Yeah. I mean, listen, the growth path that Nutanix is on right now is incredibly steep. I've been fortunate to have some very large teams and some big responsibilities in the past, and so my job is to do two things. One is obviously continue the growth, but also make sure that the foundation upon which this growth I going is solid. You need a good foundation, you know? So that's where I'm going to be first focusing. I'm not coming in here with any preconceived notion, and I've told my team this, is that, I'm not coming in here and saying, ah, we got to change everything. They're doin' pretty damn good on their own. They don't need me to change things. But what they do need is to make sure that that growth can continue, and that we put infrastructure and things in place to continue to help with that, and that's really what I'm spending time with. So my first week has been listening to the field teams and gettin' to know them and getting them to know me, but also probably the most important is I've been listening to clients, and I've never been part of any company where I've seen more clients who have more passion for the products that Nutanix has. It surprised me, and I shouldn't have been surprised, in what was told to me, but everything that has been told to me has come to fruition. So one of the things that you talk about, change, Nutanix is making some of their own changes themselves with how they're putting together, their expanding the product line, some of the go-to market pieces. Just had a conversation with Sudheesh yesterday, had a conversation with Dheeraj on theCUBE. Talked about how the goal for Nutanix has become an iconic software company. Right. And there's been things out in the financial news talking about, okay, does Nutanix become a software only company? So if, hypothetically that happened, what does that mean from a revenue, margin, growth, sales, I mean, that has a pretty big ripple effect. Yeah but, I would say this, if you look at any of the companies, IBM, if you look at how they've changed from a hardware company to a services company and then a software company and now it's a cognitive company, every company has gone through, and you need to change. Any company that stays in one place for too long will get crushed in the environment that we have. The beautiful thing about this coming into more of a software business is that now we can give our clients choice. Clients don't want us to go in there and say, you must do it this way and you have to do it this way. The fact that we're givin' 'em choice on the hypervisor, on the ability to run on multiple hardware. If a company's already invested in company that already has a different set of hardware, and then all of a sudden we introduce a new hardware, that just puts more burden on them. So I think that the, and, by the way, as you probably know, software has some very good profit margins. Yeah. And I'm not here to tell you what those profit margins are, but history has shown that it's a good thing for a business as a whole, and I think that the strategy that the board and Dheeraj is on, I think it's the absolute right one. All right, Lou, what about scaling sales? Whether the software piece being a piece of it, but how do you look at that from a philosophical standpoint? We're at an international event here. I've been watching Nutanix since it was a couple dozen people, and now it's 2,800 people. How do you look at growing sales direct, indirect, and that piece of the business? Sure, so one of the things that I think is unique here is that all our business goes through partners, so there's no real channel conflict and I think that's a great thing. I mean, I will tell you that I think the team, the growth that they've been on and the amount of reps and technical teams and everyone they've hired over the last couple years, I tell you what, in my first five days here I could tell ya, they've done a really, really good job. My hat's off to the team. Our job is to continue that momentum, and one of the key things is going to be enablement. We got to make sure that the people we bring in here, you know, I have a saying, and I'll continue to use it. It's, average is no longer good enough. We can't be average, not to compete in the marketplace that we're in. So my job is to make sure that we bring in the very best people we can, both on the technical side, on the channel side, on the sales side, the leadership side. And fortunately, what an incredible good base that I have to work off of because a lot of 'em are already here. Yeah. When I think about the slice of money, there's the partners on the technology side, you've got the OEMs, you've got a pretty large ecosystem of software partners helping out here. You've got the channel and you've got Nutanix. How do you balance that? How do you look at growing that and keeping all those various constituencies-- The interesting thing is, for any company and for any ones that I've been part of, the number one reason why anyone loses, the number one reason why you lose is you're not there. So you need to have routes to market. No matter how big of a sales team I have, I'll never be able to have the reach, and more importantly, the relationships that some of these partners have had for some of their clients for years and years and years. So my job and our job is to take advantage of those relationships and to give them the technology to help solve some of their clients' problems. So I think we're well positioned, and I want to use all the different routes to market, no matter where we are in different parts of the world. Some I may use more of in some areas, and also, I don't believe in, you know, we're a US-based company but I don't believe in, oh, well this is the way we're going to do it, and then go out to all the different geographies and say, well this is how we're doin' it. I like to listen, because things that are done in Europe, in EMEA, are going to be very different than what we do in AP, and I really want to make sure that each of those geographies can work the system culturally and business-wise for their geography. I treat my field leaders as CEOs of their own business, and I'll give them the tools that they need to be successful. Yeah, how do you deal with the lumpiness of the business, especially, I think, dealing with certain partners? You kind of got the end of quarter, end of year that comes onto those-- Yeah, well it's interesting. I think most of the lumpiness in most businesses is due to ELAs. ELAs, I always say it's a drug. It's drug that's tough to get off of, because you can have one really big quarter and because you did a couple ELAs and then others. I have to admit, this company is not on a, not been doin' it. Our whole premise is, start small and you can go in and then you can grow. Where other companies, it's, we're going to get you into a big ELA, and then we're going to trap you into that ELA. You'll never be able to get out of it because the penalties will be so high. And then you have a customer who, frankly, they have your products but they don't really want your products, but they have to have your products. We'd rather have them want our products and grow small and then grow big, so I think right now, any company, by the way, will have some lumps here and there, and we'll get a big deal now and then and sometimes it's tough. But the growth that they're on, I anticipate bein' a little less of that, and my view is, get that steady growth, no lumps. I think that we're positioned to do that. Yeah. Any commentary on kind of, just global economic conditions? How that plays into things? I've had many conversations with Dheeraj about kind of the timing of the IPO and the challenging of it, and he was like, well, we're going to go out, so in the long it doesn't matter really whether it was a down month or quarter. Right. Up, or anything like that. But there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these days, so how does that impact your thinking? Yeah but I, you know what, there's always uncertainty now. I think the interesting part is, we're so well positioned that we can actually, even if economic businesses are down or economy's down, I think that some of the solutions that we have, in some cases provide such great value that they could save money, so I think we're in a much better position even in a down economy. So, listen, I've been in businesses we've done really well when economies are down and when the economy's up. You just got to keep the focus. You can't keep changing strategy every time you hear a news report. If you stay to your goal, you keep pushin' on the goal, you got great leadership, and that's how great businesses are done. Okay, so Lou, want to just give you the final word. Sure. You've been, I think, in learning and listening mode for a lot of it. Anything we should be looking for, that we should be looking differently from Nutanix kind of over the next six to 12 months? I would just say this, the best thing I could say is, you're going to get more of the same. That's great news. More of the same means we're going to continue the growth that we've been on. I think that you're going to see, that comment of average is no longer good enough, we want to make sure that everything that we do, we're the very best at it. I think we have some of the best programmers and development people in the world. I think that we have incredibly good visionaries. We've got people who are backing us, we've got momentum, both on the press, oh, with our customers, probably most important is our customers. And then I also, before I came here I looked at all the commentary that employees have about the company, so all the way around I couldn't be more honored to be part of this team, and I'm proud to be part of it and I hope to add value to the team moving forward. All right, well, Lou Attanasio, in addition to being new to Nutanix, you're now a CUBE alumni too. So thank you so much for joining us. Of course. Look forward to catching up with you again once you've dug in a little bit more. That sounds good, thank you very much. All right, so I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)