(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. We are on day three, I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube. My cohost is John Troyer. We're very excited to be welcoming a Cube alumni, the CEO of Zadara storage Nelson Nahum, welcome back to the Cube, Nelson. >> Hi, thank you Lisa, how are you? >> Good, good to have you here. So Nelson, from your website you say scalable, elastic, cost-effective enterprise storage as a service. What is this, how does this make Zadara unique? >> Yeah, we are unique because of what we provide as a cluster solution that has all the capability of an enterprise storage. The security, performance insulation, fully management by the customer, block, file, object storage, all these as a service at the customer's size. So we are the only one company that can send all the equipment to the customer data center and the customer don't pay for anything, only for what they use. If we ship 200 drives and they start using ten, they pay for ten, and then they start using another ten, they will pay for 20. And if they want at some point to shrink, they shrink so it's totally elastic, in the sense of the agility for the provisioning, but at the same time, it's elastic in the price so the customer pays only for what they use. >> So this your fifth or sixth time at VMworld, with Zadara, you guys have a booth here on your website you're inviting people, hey, come by our booth. Talk to us about the Zadara storage cloud. What is the Zadara storage cloud. How do VMware users benefit from it? >> Yeah so VMware users, as you know, they use a lot of storage and enterprise storage capability, performance is very important, reliability is very important. This show is the most popular storage show, I would say, because of the need of enterprise storage in a VMware environment. But the reason why they are coming to our booth is because they want to move to a OpEx model even if they want to have this in their own data center we provide that. OpEx model is not only the financing of the equipment, it's also the fact that we manage the equipment remotely so customers don't need to use their own ingenious to manage and learn new equipment and so on and if there's a failure we cover with a team that can do everything remotely and immediately act on a issue. As well, one of the important things that happen with this new model is that customer is not locked with the technology. We as a service provider have the incentive to have the best technology the best price performance for the customer at any time. >> Well let me jump in there and let's talk about hardware for a second. The one thing about storage is it keeps advancing, it keeps getting cheaper. A lot of people out there still spinning discs, Flash and now NVMe. The generations are changing, the densities are getting higher, you have to invest now to get the next generation of performance out of it for your workloads. Talk a little bit about how you, as the service provider, who basically takes on the hardware costs, how are you looking at this, where we are on the curve, are there shortages in production, what is that doing to pricing? What is the risk model both for you and for the enterprise then in this equation as we move more to Flash? >> Yeah, really good question. So actually this is basically we take out from the customer not only the risk, the fact that very quickly the system becomes obsolete. So Flash is a good example, right there all the time, new innovations out on Flash, people predicted a few years ago that Flash would be extremely cheap, actually it's going up, the price. So people that buy today, an all-Flash array, and they calculate the loi over five to seven years they are overspending because at some point the Flash will go down and there is a new technology and higher capacity drives, et cetera, et cetera, that they are paying today for what this cost today. So our customers for example rely on us. So they say okay, Zadara is my storage expert and storage outsourcing and what we do is we provide because we are as a service and our incentive is to have the customer forever with us it's not a three years lease or forty year lease, it's a day to day, working together with the customer and being their provider forever so we have the incentive to provide the best technology at the right price to the customer. A good example I can tell you last year at our company summit we used to have Asustek, krpm drive, were the Enterprise drives, and people that have our systems with those drives may started two years ago, maybe started one year ago, maybe six months ago, or even three months ago, at some point we say, you know what, we will provide Flash at lower cost per gigabyte than spinning disc, and not only that, we will do the data migration online, the customer will not feel anything and at the end of the migration, the customer will have higher performance Flash and guess what, the next invoice will go down. And this is the kind of thing that we do that when you buy Capex you can not do. >> Well Nelson talk a little bit about maybe about to the customer is this consumption model, as a service, OpEx, that translates very well to the cloud cloud consumption models. You partner with all the major clouds, you could have data up there as well. You're customer base, do you see people adopting the hybrid model, where are we in that journey, to the public cloud, where are people keeping their eggs in which basket, these days? >> So yeah, as you know our system can be on premise and can be consumed from the major public cloud, Amazon, Azure, Google, we will announce next month another one-- >> There are more than just the three, yeah, yeah. >> There is another one. So they can consume as in both. I will say until two years ago the market was divided between the people that want to be all cloud or private cloud or inside a data center. Today a hundred percent of our customers have both really, except for the very small startup that may start in the cloud. Even after the ones getting bigger they have portable environments so I would say today the landscape is that people have both because they are seeing that it's better to be in the public cloud for bursting and for scalability. But they are seeing that it's better to be on premise or, it's no longer a private versus public, it's hybrid, I guess. >> And speaking of that, and you mentioned that Zadara partners with some big cloud providers, Amazon, Google, Azure, and then there's a to-be-announced-soon, what have the announcements that you've heard at VMworld this year, what have those meant to you with the VCF on AWS that was announced Monday, then we heard yesterday about the pivotal container service, with Google, what does that signify to you, in terms of the market trends, is it in line with what you expected? >> Yeah, so actually we were I guess the first company to partner with Amazon and cross-connect to Amazon, first storage company, okay, not the first company, the first storage company, and people would say, why you will do that it is better to sell the box and thing like that, so our product was built with cross-connectivity and integration with Amazon and Google and the Azure cloud immediately, right, so we are multi-tenant that is necessary for the cloud but the main thing that we do is that we do a really good job of separating the tenants between them that is unique and this is why Enterprisers prefer to use our storage even in the cloud. So customer in fact has, they get the drive, they get the controller, they get the networking even and can attach the cloud storage solution to their own active directory and cover all this capabilities that they would have on-premise. So we started in this way, and I think that now we see more and more even VMware and NetApp and those that they were classical on-premise that they were going in the same direction. It's actually very good for us. >> I'm a little interested in the container story, here, right, lot of talk about containers here at the show. On prem, even the hyper-converge story, talk about containers, you're running workloads and storage, containers super-useful for that, obviously in the cloud. What's the Zadara service with containers and how does that work? >> Yeah, definitely, so we launch it two years ago, a very unique service that allow a customer to run a Linux container inside the storage so inside the cloud storage solution they can run their own core. Why we did that, there were many customers that have millions of files, and they're reading and writing from a VM outside the storage, introduce latency, one of our customer have billion files and billion files if every time you cut one millisecond it translate into long period of time. The other thing that is interesting with our service is that storage, by definition, you can write or read data. You cannot get an occurrence notification hey, a file was changed. But if you run a application a Linux container inside of this storage, then we can provide this type of notification and say each time that a new file jpeg come to the file system, we will notify the Linux container and the customer can trigger many application or many service that will do something with the data. At zero latency, so zero latency, nothing to manage, they don't need external VM's, and also they get the capability of notifications from inside the file system. >> On the container front, I'm glad you brought that up John, are you seeing any industries in particular that are early adopters of this, or are coming to Zadara saying hey, we want to go the container direction, we want some advice here. You talked about a customer with billions of files, are you seeing any sort of industry specificity or is it more size of company where container technology's work would be leading. >> Yeah, most of our customer that use container they use for a specific service, they will not run out full-blown application in a container, they'll still run VM's but there are some services that benefit from zero latency and from having this notification that they can run in our side. So I think that it's not per industry, but more per type of service within the industry. That they need to do. >> Okay. Another thing that I saw on your website is that Zadara was chosen as a 2017 Red Herring top 100 North American winner. You join fellow winners Google, Skype, Twitter, innovation, it's a really not topic, so I'm sure that was pretty cool. Michael Dell talked about innovation yesterday and how important it is to innovate with customers. Tell us a little bit as we close up here about how Zadara is innovating together with your customers. >> Yeah, great question. So we started, I am an engineer from my background, so I like to innovate and have a new product so I'm also a firm believer that specially a company like us that is not the big companies, we need to really differentiate the product. We don't want to compete on the cheapest thing and we found out some for example. We need to provide really high value. So in order to provide high value we need to innovate. I believe that as the time goes on the more important it is for innovation and this is what you keep seeing with new stuff that's coming along because it's a non-stop journey and getting the best value for the customer. Nothing is more rewarding when you have an idea and people start developing that and suddenly customers are using it and they like that. This is the best reward that we can have. >> And it's probably rewarding for them I would imagine that they are able to be influencing to you. >> In our case because we are a smaller company we do summits every year, we invite customers a little bit lower among the VMworld but we invite customers and we have interaction with the customers and they can strongly influence the roadmap. We typically ask about what are the problems? What are the main issues and we try to innovate in this way. It's a good thing to have a really good roster of, we have worldwide customers today and everywhere in the world and when you put everybody together it's a really good experience. >> So as we wrap here, where can folks go I imagine the Zadara website to learn more in about a month of this new announcement that Zadara's going to be making. >> Yeah Zadarastorage.com is the place. >> Zadarastorage.com >> Yes. >> Excellent. >> And you know, we offer free trials and the nice thing about our service is that we're very easy to try you just go register and there's no moving parts it's just, we have a one week free trial and you like, you stay, you don't like you don't stay. >> Fantastic, well Nelson thanks so much for coming back to the Cube and sharing with us some of the great things that are going on. >> Thank you very much, it was a pleasure again. >> And we'll be watching to see what comes out in about a month's time Zadarastorage.com. >> Definitely. It will be very important. >> All right, you heard it here first. (guest laughing) All right from my cohost, John Troyer, for our guest, Nelson Nahum, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube, live continuing coverage from VMworld 2017. Stick around we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> And who we are today as a country, as a universe. >> Announcer: Congratulations, Reggie Jackson. You are Cube alumni. (gentle music) Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Google Cloud Next '17. (techno music) >> Hi, and welcome back to theCube's coverage of Google Next 2017. We're at the heart of Silicon Valley in our great studio in Palo Alto. We've got a team of reporters and analysts up in San Francisco with the 10,000 people attending, really, Google's enterprise show. It's got Cloud, it's got G Suite. It's got a little bit of the devices. I'm happy to welcome back to the program, someone we've had on many times, Nelson Nahum, the CEO of Zadara Storage. Really a company that's in there, understanding this cloud transition from, kind of, how the enterprise gets in multicloud and all those pieces. Nelson, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, sir, how are you? >> All right, it's good. So, you know, you and I last time we talked was at another cloud show, a little bigger cloud show, one that's been going on for a number of years, but let's start talking about Google. What's, you know, we think a lot of progress over the last couple of years. I mean, Diane Green definitely has put her stamp on this company. A ton of people that have been brought in, many of them, those of us in the industry, we know these people. We've seen them grow these businesses, understand how to talk to the enterprise, so, what's your take on the show so far and how Google's doing as a company? And we'll get into how they are as a partner soon, too. >> So this is our first Google Cloud show for us, for Zadara. We've been in, I think, since 2011, in Amazon Prime event, and we like it. This is going very well. We have a lot of conversations. We saw that there are many, many customers looking to have multicloud strategy. That actually works very well for us, because we can provide storage that can be accessible at the same time concurrently from Amazon, and from Google and Azure and others. So, yeah, it's a good trend. I think most of the people we found, they're either already on Amazon and looking to expand to Google or some on-premise to Google, and so on. >> Can you help unpack that multicloud a bit for us? So you know, maybe some of our audience might not know, you guys sit in some of those mega-datacenters, like the Equinixes of the world, and direct connect to the public cloud. >> Exactly, exactly. >> So, I've got, kind of, my storage being Zadara, and there actually is, you know, physical storage there, and then that, you know, plugs into the Cloud resources, of course. We know AWS's Direct Connect. Amazon has, you know, their equivalent, and Google has the same, so, can you have, you know, it's a single solution that, does it just get fibers to all three of them? Is there software that takes care of it? >> Yeah, actually- >> How does that work? >> Yeah, great question. So we sit in Equinix data centers with our cloud, and from there, in many cases, we use Equinix Cloud Exchange, that is, basically, like a networking inside Equinix, and can be connected to many different potential targets, so, currently we are cross-connected to Amazon, Google and Azure. So our customer, at first, can create a storage and mount with NFS or ZFS, or Block, and can mount the storage, especially if it is file storage, then you can share data. You can mount the same storage to virtual machines in Google, and to virtual machines in Amazon, and at the same time, they see the same files. >> Yeah, and what's the use case, why are they doing that? Is that for redundancy or certain features? You know, there was a certain cloud outage a week ago, were your customers riding through that, based on what they're doing? >> Yeah, so, the measured cloud outage that Amazon had last week, S3 ... it caused my people to rethink (laughs), I guess. Fortunately, for us, all our customers that sit in our storage, wasn't impacted, because they sit in our storage and they don't use, we don't use Amazon infrastructure, so they could continue- >> Stu: No S3 for your customers, right? >> Right, so we are doing the Block and the file storage for our customers. I think that, what is important here is not the outage, but what is important is people start recognizing that you need to have the data in two locations in order to be safe. >> Yeah, it's ... People that have done architecture and understand infrastructure is, you know, I need to be thoughtful as to how I architect things, so either I need to make sure I have the availability zones and the services and can take care of that, or perhaps even multicloud to be able to take care of that. >> So, multicloud and you're completely independent to each other. So, we have an array of many customers using us and Amazon and, again, because our storage can be cross-connected to multiple clouds, it's very easy to access from virtual machines in any cloud at the same time. So, people that are using that, it's either for a, kind of, these are tolerant solutions or more robust solutions. As well, in some cases for migration. Each cloud provider has the places or the attributes that it has. You can run applications better in that particular cloud, so, for example, in Microsoft Azure, anything that is related to Windows, they are the best, and, Oracle Cloud, if you run Oracle, probably is the best way to start. So, I will say that the multicloud is not only the disaster recovery type, but people want to use the best cloud for the particular application they have, and they have multiple applications, so use multiple clouds. >> I'm curious, do you get visibility, as to, you know, why are customers choosing Google? Are there, do you have customers that are using Google that aren't using the other public clouds, is it primarily your customers are using it as a secondary source, any data you've got or anecdotes would be helpful. >> So, we have two types of customers, the ones that are multicloud and the others that are going from on-premise to the cloud. As you know, we have an on-premise business, and we make it very easy, from on-premise, to move to the cloud. We just launched it, here in Google Cloud, a service called cloud iteratation, that basically, we allow a customer to move their entire infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud with zero, or minimal, downtime. So, we will ship all the storage to the on-premise facilities, the customer will pay per use, we will start doing replication to the cloud, or in some cases, if it is multiple petabytes, we will ship the equipment to the cloud, and, in the meantime, we can do replication and, at the end, we can switch and fail over, and the customer can continue from the cloud. >> Cloud hydration, >> Cloud hydration, yes. >> is that service. Does that support all the services, all the clouds? >> Yeah, so today, we are doing this for many customers, and the good use case is when a customer wants to move a lot of data to the cloud, but they don't want to have downtime. Because, Amazon Snowball and all these boxes, you need to copy the data, and then ship, and then restore. >> Stu: So, it's not a truck that takes three months >> Yeah, exactly. >> sitting on your location. >> This is what we do, we ship double amount of equipment to the customer, they start doing the copy, and then, half of it, we ship to the cloud. We connect to the cloud, and resume the connection, and, all the time, the customer continues to run, okay? And, at the last moment, they do the fail over. So, it's minimum downtime, even if you need to ship one petabyte of storage. >> Yeah. I'm curious, we've been going through such tremendous changes in the storage industry, do you guys sell, you know, is it the storage person, who do you sell to, and where is their mind at when they think about storage today? >> Yeah. Yeah, we sell storage, so the storage person is the one that's buying- >> Yeah, you know, a lot of people, if they're buying Google, or even if they're putting in AWS services, the storage person is, a lot of time, kind of shoved out of the mix, you're a little bit- >> Shoved out of the mix until they have a problem that they need to bring back the storage- >> Wait, are you saying that could be a problem? (laughs) >> So, what happen is that, and this is, I think, how the cloud started, is cloud storage is, "Ah, storage is just storage," until you start running real applications and you need the performance, and you need the reliability, and so on. So, this is why you need the storage guy to architect the solution, and this is where we, we come in and actually act as a really good outsourcing team of storage experts to the customer, and we help them with this transition from on-premise to the cloud and, in many cases, back and forth, if the customer wants to have a leg in the cloud, a leg on-premise, and move data easily back and forth. >> So, Google made a good push at the show, talking about building the ecosystem, how they want to work with partners. They had companies, like you know, PwC's all over the place, SAP, very strong partnership. How have you found it to work with Google? Any things you'd say to them as to how they can accelerate and move things faster to, you know, build up the ecosystem? >> Yeah, so far, our experience with Google was extremely good. The people are very dynamic, they have the Google dynamism that is very good, and, for us, it was really good to have a close relationship with the Google product managers and sales people, and so on, so we enjoy, have a really good relationship with Google Cloud. >> All right, well, Nelson, I want to give you the final word. You know, things you've learned this week, any cool customer conversation you've had, give us the final takeaway. >> Yeah, so, the ... I guess my summary is that, here in Google Cloud, we have a big advantage because we have ... NAS, NFS, ZFS, we've architected their integration and all the snapshot capabilities that enterprises need. And, you know that Google doesn't have a EFS type of functionality, and our functionality's actually higher than EFS. So, this is what we are talking to customers, here in Google Cloud, anybody that needs NFS and ZFS, and NAS and multicloud, and on-premise to the cloud, they talk to us and we are ready to go. >> All right, Nelson Nahum, really appreciate you coming to the studio here to share what's happening at the Google event. Be sure to check out wikibon.com for our cloud research and, of course, siliconangle.tv to see all the shows we're going to be at, as well as the replays from this and lots of other cloud infrastructure, IoT and big data shows. We'll be back with lots more coverage here, day two of two, covering Google Cloud. From the SiliconANGLE media studio in Palo Alto, you're watching The Cube. (techno music)

hi Jeff I here with the cube we are in the studio and Palo Alto the cube studio offices for a cute conversation talking about storage enterprise storage cloud and all the things that are keeping us up at night in the excitement that we see every day out in the field so we're really excited to be joined by gnomes and are who comes in all the time for sadara storage and you brought in a special gates dave elliott global product lead storage google cloud platform welcome Dave thanks for having me so we'll get right into it big announcement don't tell us all about it sure we're super excited to announce that we're now connected up to the Google cloud platform our customers know already that we've connected to the other two major providers amazon web services in microsoft azure and we've been working diligently on what we think is the most exciting addition to that and that's google cloud platform it's available right now it's immediately available it means that any customer of google cloud platform can take advantage of our award-winning enterprise storage as a service connected directly to virtual machines at google cloud so it clearly you know completes the the try fact at which wich we know you know that is the power right now in the public cloud but what's special about google cloud platform that you can get that the other providers don't offer to your customers google cloud is special because we all know google the search engine company and because google has been doing this for so long they have the existing infrastructure so google has global data centers with the networks connecting those global data centers such that customers wherever they are I can connect through hundreds of edge locations for low-latency access to the clap so whereas with the other major clouds the customer has to be physically close to the actual cloud location for optimal latency google cloud customers have far more flexibility in terms of location and we think this will do even more to get more people on board cloud with our enterprise applications okay so Dave what I want to know is are you going to paint as the Darra rack colors I think you got a google bike out front the yellow the green or red right so what does this mean free for for google obviously you guys have storage you have massive amounts towards we all have lots of stuff on on our Google on our personal Google storage as well as are you know little the cube storage so what does this mean for your customers so so really it to put it in context as enterprises move to the cloud there there are different requirements from maybe pure-play startups so we've had fantastic success we've been in the cloud business now for I think nine years but as we mature as a business and as customers mature and and make it clear that they want to move more and more workloads to the cloud their requirements though still look significantly in many cases like the requirements from the old days right from the legacy vendors I'm a storage guy and I know there are certain there are certain requirements around s la's performance ability to to move between clouds from on-prem to the cloud and so as Google matures as our customers ask for these type this type of functionality we are able to meet those requirements by working with sadara so this really gives you that yes we have that check box when you're getting into a hardcore enterprise guys may be new to the cloud or you know you wants that comfort level right he's going to have all the stuff you had before but now exact it's gonna be sitting in your guys so it's structure it's it's two use cases right it's the traditional customer consumer customer enterprise customer who has today their workloads running on primer and private their own private data centers or kolos and it's the customers today that are running on our compute instances who love our compute instances but perhaps are holding back from moving some of those more delicate workloads to the clouds lizard to general use case right because that's that's really the point it's not just about storage for the customer the storage is an enabler for his applications all right so this really opens up a whole another set of applications for the other Google services that doesn't really compete directly with the storage exactly exactly that's it so as customers move you know the really interesting things happen is customers move those we're close to the cloud they could then take advantage of you know layered on other services like like data analytics and learning and things like that and so it's really about really everything I think about this relationship is about helping enterprises move migrate more and more workloads to the cloud in a more seamless way right so it's kind of a good news bad news for you know you know the good news is now you're partnering with Google the bad news is they got a lot of they have a lot of reach and distribution are you guys ready you know what's the impact on your business now having this humongous partner distribution network potential new client network you guys ready support that what kind of new challenges does that present to you guys it'll present growth challenges but we're we're ready so what we've done is made sure that we have the support infrastructure in place and also the sales infrastructure in place so if customers need help prior to the sale during the Sailor after the sale we have different teams that handle this and we have partners as well that's a big change for us in the last couple of years switching from a fully direct model to a model that's now sixty percent partner driven in that number is growing those partners are helping us with especially with integration the customer may need storage but also they may need to deploy other applications in google cloud those partners put it all together and provide a single let's use the positive expression is a single back to pass a single bat de facto sort the choker yes your own champagne as they like to say exact and one of the things we've talked about not fair for we turn on the cameras is is that you were excited about is really the distribution of Google and specifically google access points because latency is real as Grace Hopper said you know the speed of light is just too damn slow so you really need those access points to get to the compute and the store to make cloud work the way you want it to work exactly for example a common request is to connect remote clients to central storage repository so with the with with most clouds that's limited by a public network and the Layton sees and the hops that come along with that with Google's peering capabilities pretty much everybody is closer to the compute that Google than other than other clots and we know this because when we do the search and we get the answer back in point 0 0 1 2 seconds right a big a big piece of that is is the latency between us and whatever Google location is doing that search for us the compute benefits from that the clout the Google cloud benefits from that and therefore our customers due to right and David and I presume this is just one of a number of steps within Google clouds you know kind of pursuit of the enterprise and moving the more you know can enterprise customers enterprise workloads into the Google cloud platform yeah that's that's a one hundred percent accurate I mean we continue to build out the organization we build out part we're building our partnership and of course the products to better meet the needs of larger enterprises that that have just unique needs I will I will thank you for pointing out that the differentiator on the network it's something that I think people intuitively understand but you know the the the depth and breadth of our network networking expertise has been unbelievable as opposed to most cloud vendors we want to get the data we want to get the bits on to our network as quickly as possible because we keep it on our network because we're so efficient and be able to move the bits from point A to point B and and I think that's really the big the big differentiator why you see you know such better response such such lower latency and it's not just about the latency it's also about the predictability of Joseph and so just to clarify so once it gets into the Google Network wherever that point of access is then it's contained within the Google that right right so we write we've innovated around networking for four since our early days things like open flow and software-defined networking are things that have you know great genesis inside of inside of Google and so for us to move that data onto our network is just more again faster and more reliable for our customers and for our own data right we able to leverage our own infrastructure for own services I think we have seven services now with over a billion customers and just out of sheer necessity we've had to innovate in and around networking right we've done a couple piers shows where you know just reinforces the fact you want to get off the public backbone as quickly as you can depending on how ever you need to communicate with either your own internal stuff or with somebody else and then it's just kind of a signal that you guys will be bringing in other products obviously not necessarily a competing software software defined product but just other kind of enterprise e-type solutions to offer your customers in pursuit of this kind of ongoing Enterprise path yeah I think I think that there are a lot of simulator similarities if I would drive the draw the Venn diagram between what a high-performance successful customer like snapchat one of one of our larger customers or Spotify what they require and what what some of the larger enterprises or even smaller enterprises with just very very large you know compute-intensive storage intensive requirements are so there is a Venn diagram there's a lot of overlap and we continue to to leverage our own internal investments and things like live migration of compute instances things around innovative pricing to really drive home the the low cost of cloud and the agility of cloud things like customizable VMs so you only get the the actual machine that you need so we're going to continue to innovate around that and be able to make sure that both enterprise customers and our you know sort of the the high-flying startups still have the ability to to take advantage of right right and is that new information for you guys that you can leverage because clearly like a snapchat which uses massive amount of data you have massive growth rates I mean you have these we talk a lot about the consumerization of IT in terms of the experience of interacting with an application on your phone that you want to be like when you interact with snapchat although I can never figure snapchat outer left swipe right but where you can start to use some of those lessons that you guys have learned in your broader application experience to bring to bear with your solution as well as for your customers exactly so we have two goals in this relationship one is one is to help the existing customers of the Google cloud platform do more so that means I take the existing applications and maybe they can benefit in terms of better performance reliability so do more also need to bring new applications into the Google cloud platform maybe the customer moved some early applications over into the cloud but left others on Prem we'd like to see those move into the cloud as well and then the remaining goal is to move customers who are not at all in the cloud into Google Cloud in the end by providing these capabilities we think that's that's the last impediment the customer may sit there and say yes the compute capabilities are fantastic I trust them and network capabilities we just talked about them they're there world-leading storage I'm not sure I have what I need I know if I have the I apps that I need I don't have the uptime that I need or even protocol support or features disaster recovery snapchat snap shots etc but now they're there so there's no reason not to go yeah it's exciting time so congratulations um really a big announcement obviously tremendous infrastructure by partnering with google it mean i don't know that there's anything quite like it developed over all these years I talked to school the other day my own you right good logic 65,000 like wow it's not the little startup that we that we think of over in in Mountain View anymore it and congratulations day to to really make an aggressive move on the enterprise with really putting a flag in the in the ground if you will well we're just I think we're just at the beginning I think in X the next several years in fact next decade or so it's gonna be pretty exciting time all right well thanks for stopping by the palatal offices I think you could see it thank you to thank you right dave elliott gnome send our Jeff Rick you're watching the cube will catch you next time thanks for watching

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2018! Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's the Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas, at AWS re:Invent 2018. I'm John Furrier, here with Lauren Cooney. Host of the Cube: Amazon web services. There are maybe 2,000 people here at their event, re:Invent annual conference, breaking it all down. Storage, computer networking, part of the main infrastructures involving changing very rapidly and spawning new use cases, new value propositions, it's creating a great ecosystem dynamic. We're here with Erik Kaulburg, who is the vice president of Infinidat, Cube alumni, great to see you again. >> Nice to see you as well. >> Been on the Cube multiple times. I think last time it was at VMWorld, or a studio? >> At, actually, our product launch for the cloud storage solution, as well. >> So, you guys got a great reputation. Take a minute, just, for the folks who might now know Infinidad, explain what you guys do, and your disruptive innovation. >> So, for Infinidad, we're all about tier-one environments, and it's the data piece of that environment, today, although that may not be forever. And, it's consumed through a couple of different modalities, so one of our big pieces of news earlier this year was that we were going beyond just the InfiniBox solution, which we shipped over four exabytes of to enterprises all around the world today, and broadening that to address the secondary storage market with InfiniGuard and Neutrix Cloud, which is a way to consume our capabilities completely as an iAd service in conjunction with other public clouds. >> Let's get that in a second, I want to get to the product in a second, but I want to first get your take on the market conditions, cloud storage, you're seeing pure storage had a big announcement of now they're doing a device, now doing software on premise, Amazon's going to have a device on premise, it's up for the cloud. Like, what the hell is going on? Storage is certainly growing like crazy. What does the market look like? Obviously, API, microservices, these are important things. Data still is the number one opportunity, but still a challenge. You guys are the center of it, what's the market look like to you? >> Absolutely, I couldn't agree more with the idea that data is at the middle of everything, and the lines are getting blurry between on-prem and public cloud environments as well. So, what I'm seeing in general is that companies which used to sell boxes, or primarily sell boxes today, are trying to figure out ways to play in the public cloud environments, and they're taking one of two paths. One is to develop a solution that's kind of leveraging the built-in infrastructure from the major public clouds, and the other is to build alongside it and enable those major public clouds, and potentially do so in a slightly less captive manner. So, that's what I'm kind of seeing across the industry, with regards to the public cloud. >> What's the role of storage here at re:Invent, because, like I said, Holy Trinity is of infrastructures, computer storage, and networking, and as that evolves, with each one having its new capabilities with Cloudify, is enabling new opportunities. What is the storage role now in the modern era of cloud as it is today? What's your view on that? >> Well, part of it is just providing excellent data services that are at the core of so many of these emerging environments. Like, we were listening to Monday Night Live yesterday, and one of the distinguished folks on there from the machine learning team was talking about the importance of getting more training data, so that you can run these more advanced machine learning workflows, and get things done quicker. We use less PHP type resources to get a problem solved, so I think that category of solutions, where you're using more storage capabilities as an enabler for more business value, or more value in the end application, is a trend that's going to absolutely continue for quite a while. >> What's the hottest area in Amazon cloud native world for storage that you see a lot of customers gravitating to? What's the number one? >> Well, I think, in general if you look at the adoption patterns of their block, file, and objects storage offerings, object is still dominating the vast majority of those kinds of use cases, and it comes from the perspective of applications that were written with cloud native services in mind. However, we think, I think, that there's a whole opportunity there, outside of the traditional, traditional cloud native object architectures, in the block and file arena, which has largely been untapped by the data and storage services, and that's an area where we and others in the industry are looking to augment. >> What is the competition? What's, like, NetApp doing? Let me ask, everyone's got to be on mobile clouds. Amazon, clearly the leader. They're making the market, so unless, say Kubernetes doesn't intermediate their services, for the most part, that's the market leader, but you got to play on a lot of clouds, because customers aren't going to have one cloud, they're going to certainly be hybrid on premises and cloud, but certainly be on multiple clouds. What's, like, NetApp and these guys doing? What's the competition doing? >> So, what I see NetApp doing is taking that kind of cloud captive approach, to be honest, what I see is they've got tied immigration, which is very impressive, with several major public cloud vendors. However, the challenge is, when you want cross those silos, you have a little bit more complexity that arises with that approach. >> Like what? >> So, you may have to spin up a separate set of data in Azure. Let's say, if you want to have an application cross the boundaries between AWS and Azure. >> Okay, let's get back to your storage solution. Neutrix Cloud, what is this about? Explain the product at a high level, we drill into it. >> So on a fundamental level, we believe in flexibility of Infinidad, and that's extended through all sorts of aspects of our product portfolio, but specifically, with regards to cloud storage, Neutrix delivers flexibility of having an outside set of infrastructure that's still tightly integrated with the major public clouds, including AWS, of course, and it delivers high resiliency, the five nines SLA, which we've talked about, which we believe is best in class, as well as enterprise-grade capabilities that previously you really had to look to an on-prem array to be able to achieve. Large-scale snapshot operations, asynchronous and synchronous replication natively built in, all these kinds of things, which make it easier to take tier one applications from an on-prem environment and bring those to the public cloud environments. >> And what's the core problem that you solved with this product? >> It's, you can't get tier one cloud storage today. What we would argue, anyway, and our customers are telling us that the features and capabilities, and even business guarantees provisions around the cloud storage offerings in the market today simply don't exist to the level that they need to be to support the last, let's say, 30% of applications that have not yet moved on to the public clouds. So, that's what we're addressing, making it easier for storage to accomplish that. >> You guys always have impressive customers, always see the big names, give some examples of some use cases. >> So, our customers have fallen into two categories, with regards to Neutrix Cloud adoption. The easy case, and the most natural for many of them, since they are buying our on-prem infrastructure at a large scale today, is, well, let's start replicating that infrastructure to the Neutrix cloud environment, maybe do it as a disaster-recovery target, things like that, and we think that there's value there. There's lots of companies which do DR as a service, to be honest, we don't see that as necessarily the core competency, but it's a stepping stone to the second use case, which is cloud adoption for these tier one applications, and bringing them the flexibility of potentially having multiple cloud platforms addressing the same data. >> We talked about the cloud guys, so we don't want to put you on the spot here, because this is the same patterns happening. Old world storage was stack up the storage, and provision the storage, stuff goes on there, block, file, that good stuff. Now, with the cloud, and Amazon, this is where I want to get the Amazon tie-in with you guys, because storage is not necessarily just a magic, quadrant-like thing. Oh, back-up and recovery, this and that, you're starting to see much more of a platform approach. And successful platforms enable things to be successful. It's not like I built it for this, purpose-built kind of storage. Do you guys see yourselves as a data platform, and if so, what does that mean, and what are those key value points that you're creating off that platform? >> I think you said it, actually, better than I did, that ultimately, we want customers to be able to consume our differentiated data services in whatever modality they prefer. So, if that's an on-prem infrastructure piece, if that's a back-up optimizing environment, if that's a public cloud service, we offer all those today, and customers can take their data from one to the other or even view it as a single, kind of, data architecture that crosses all of those traditional silos. >> So, were you looking at, you know, kind of one of the things that I'm listening to you guys chat, and one of the things that I'm thinking of is, how hard is it for a customer to actually adopt your technology and deliver it, you know, utilize it, across multiple environments? >> So, many of the traditional on-prem infrastructure players have great barriers associated with their public cloud services. We're not one of them. We took an intentionally different approach, and learned from companies like AWS on how you can get clients easily onto the solution, how they can pay for it easily, and how, ultimately, they can deploy it in a large scale public cloud environment very easily. That's a huge part of the investment that we put into developing the Neutrix Cloud service. >> Right. >> So we can have clients up and running in less than a day, from initial contact to large scale adoption, and it could be even faster than that as well. >> Now onto your relations with Amazon. What's it like, what's the details of it, what's the value, what's the connection point? >> I think we all agree that tier one applications are the last major bastion for public cloud adoption. These are things which you would have had on legacy big iron infrastructure, and so, to the extent Neutrix Cloud enables those tier one applications to move to the public cloud, to move to AWS, there's a lot of synergy there in the relationship, so we're absolutely an Amazon technology partner. We enjoy great working relationship with them, there are certainly areas where we overlap, but if we all agree on the end goal, we've been able to make some impressive business strategies. >> So, who are you competitors that you're most, kind of, focused on? Well, you shouldn't be focused on your competitors, you should be focused on what you're doing, but who are the competitors that kind of keep you up a little bit at night? >> I would say others that people would lump in this space, include NetApp Solutions in the public cloud environments, we see a couple of small start-ups, like Zadara, for example, from time to time, but to be honest, the biggest competitive kind of scenario that we see is just using the native public cloud services. And customers have to think about, well, I'm planning on replatforming my application, how am I going to design it from a storage perspective and often they don't even think that there are alternatives beyond the native offerings that could potentially add more value to their environments. So, that's when we come into the conversation, and from that point forward, generally, if we have a good enterprise type workload, the value proposition is instant and obvious. >> You know, when you guys came out, we've been following you guys since your founding, Gabe and I would always talk about Infinidat. You got good pedigree of a team. Classic storage. You have a good storage market. You guys take a different approach with this start-up. Founders did this time. How do you describe the key differentiator for you guys? What's the, you mentioned earlier, it's the tier one storage, but what's the secret sauce, what's the culture like? People want to peek inside Infinidad. What are they buying? What are they really getting, besides the product performance? What's the culture like, what's the company's view on the future world, serious insight. >> I think there's several elements to that, of course, but a lot of it comes from that founding DNA. So, Moshe Yanai, who basically defined the enterprise storage category overall back in EMC, had a succession of teams that he's built over the years, and he's really brought all of those key elements together. Three generations of storage expertise. >> Successful, by the way, three generations of exits, >> Absolutely, yeah. Building an organic business, selling a business, and now this is the business that he wants to leave to his grandchildren at some point. >> How's it going so far, how's business in general? >> Well, you know, we're private, so I can't say specifics, but I'd say we're definitely heading in the right direction. Growth has been phenomenal, the adoption of our portfolio solutions, in addition to just the core product, has really put us in a position of a very strong, long-term independence. >> Portfolios in terms of product capabilities or industries you're serving, or both? >> It's, actually, on both fronts. I was referring to the product portfolio but we've definitely broadened from our initial base in the financial services sector, which is a hard nut to crack in general, as a, you know, into a lot of different use cases, because it turns out that industries have a high demand for data across virtually every sector. So, we go where the data is. >> What's next? What's the next milestone for you guys? What're you lookin' to do next? >> Well, we did just have a major product release, so I'm glad that we've that, you know, out there, we're getting customers in the cloud space. I think the end of this year is going to be very, very strong for us from a business perspective and then next year, lots of great product announcements, and then ultimately, you know, we'll say some more on the business momentum there as well. >> All right, Erik, thanks for coming on the Cube show, thanks for the update. Infinidad, check them out, successful exit, multiple ties in the entrepreneurial team there, growing, doing great, storage has been going away, neither is networking, and neither is computing, it's only going to get better, stronger, as the cloud brings in more capabilities with machine learning and more use cases, new work loads, new capabilities. The Cube bringing it down with two sets here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier and Lauren Cooney, on set one. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here at VMworld 2017 day three wrap-up. We're going to wrap up the whole show. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, Keith Townsend. Cube, set, two sets of coverage. Guys, great job, we have Justin Warren as well, John Troyer, Lisa Martin. Great team, guys, amazing. Three days, a lot of content, wall-to-wall coverage. Double barrel shotgun of Cube content. Amazing. What's left in the tank? Let's get this done. Dave, your thoughts as VMworld comes down to a close. >> Well, so I missed VMworld last year as you know, 'cause I was doing another show. Pat was giving me a lot of grief for that. But if I go back two years ago, two years ago VMware was shrinking. Its license revenue was in decline. Its cloud strategy was in continued disarray. Customers were kind of, you know, losing a lot of faith. >> John: Ecosystem was in turmoil. >> And the world thought that Amazon was going to completely destroy this company. Fast forward two years later, license growth, you know, 12-13%, the company's growing. It's nearly eight billion dollars, three billion dollars of operating cash, big stock buybacks, clarity on the cloud and, I think, and I'd love for Keith's opinion on this, a recognition of the customers that "I can't just throw everything in the cloud." Okay, that's one thing, but what I can do is try to bring the cloud model to my data, and AW, I mean Amazon, sorry, VMware is going to be a partner in doing that. And I think those have all been tailwinds along with some product cycles and some >> John: And Dell Technologies buying out from the federation which was taking on water. Let's not forget. Let's not forget about the federation EMC owned VMware and that was bought by Dell. >> People talk about the Dell discount. I'm not seeing the Dell discount right now. >> What is a Dell discount? What does that mean? >> The Dell discount is because Dell owns VMware, just like when EMC owned VMware, it somehow shackles them and depresses the value. Michael obviously doesn't agree. >> So product focus as well has been not diminished at all. The products are front and center. They still got the sessions. Guys, on the product side, what's your view? >> Strong product offering. I really love the message they want. A lot of the response from the community was like, "Pat is feeling energized." He has this shadow of what is going to happen post-acquisition. Is there going to be a Dell discount? You know what? VMware, you know, famously, five years ago, Pat was onstage. He said he's going to double down on virtualization. He jettisoned Pivotal, and we were all wondering, "What is he doing?" Proved over the long run he was right. Last year, this year, he's doubled down, not on just virtualization, but on this concept of SDDC. And it's finally starting to pay off. We're seeing consistently this concept of VCF. VMware cloud foundation on premises, off prem, and even in AWS, ironically. You know, three or four years ago, we were like, well, is OpenStack going to eat VMware's lunch? VMware has turned the tables and become that OpenStack layer, that consistent cloud layer, at least for that legacy type of way to do IT. Taking your internal data center processes and moving them to the cloud consistently across their vCAN network in the AWS. >> So if I get this right, you're basically saying that VMware essentially went from a position where they're twisting in the wind at all levels, turmoil in every department, every, house is on fire, to pulling one major bold bet, grab it out of the hat, kicking ass, taking names, Pat Gelsinger and team made good calls. >> You know what, I'm not a fan of calling what VMware's SDDC thing a private cloud. I don't think it's true private cloud. It is valuable to the infrastructure, but it's not private cloud, but customers love the message. Take what I'm doing now, check an easy box, move it into AWS or vCAN and it's resonating. >> Well certainly, Stu just gave you the eye dagger, 'cause Stu, the true private cloud report from Wikibon, which has been going viral at the show, been the talk of the show, everyone has been talking about it, Wikibon's true private cloud report. People love that, too, because the message is simple, take care of business at home, called the on prem. Yeah, change the operating model, that's going to take some time. >> So, my thought on this is, for years, we were talking about the stack wars. Lately, we've been talking about the cloud wars, and for the last few years, when I talked to the partner ecosystem, they were shrinking their booths. They were looking for alternatives. Remember Cisco? Aw geez, flaying anything but VMware. Let's see if we can do this. You know, IBM who was a big VMware partner. Well, they got rid of X86. Where are they going to part with VMware? On and on, HPE going closer with Microsoft. Even Dell, pre-acquisition, how much deeper they going to go with Microsoft? Now, you know, John, we've been talking on theCUBE for a while. You know, there's Microsoft. Their stack, their partnerships, their application, where they're putting it. Amazon, huge elephant in the room, when they made the deal it was like, oh well, you know, Pat's on his way out the door, and he's kind of, you know, pulling one over on Dell before he leaves. Now, I think we understand a little bit better where this fits in that portfolio of the Dell family. Open source, still something we beat on Pat and EMC before that. They're not really open source. They've got a proprietary software alternative that their partners seem excited about. They've really fumbled around with their cloud strategy for a year. They've got one that seems to be going well. We'll see, 4,500 service provider partners, the Amazon thing. We will still see where revenue comes. >> Stu, that's a good point. Pat Gelsinger was kicking ass as a CEO now, but his channels on his job many times, so props to Pat. He made some good calls, stayed on course, held the line on the direction, did not cave at all, him and his team, they did it. There's been some turnover as we know in VMware. I'll see the results. I'll clear the scoreboard. They're winning. Question I'll put to you guys right now. Impact of Andy Jassy from AWS here on day one. How much of an impact was that? He made some statements. And the question I want to ask you, in addition to the impact, is he said, "This is not an optical deal." Most companies make optical illusional deals, make it look like they're all in, and they don't really deliver. So one, impact of Jassy being here and two, who was he talking about? >> Dave: Well >> Where's the Barney deal? >> Well, so okay, first thing is I saw, I've always seen that AWS deal from Andy Jassy's perspective as TAM expansion. Big part of a CEO's job is, I've got to expand my TAM, especially when you see the growth of AWS, and it's slowing down a little bit, even though it's still impressive. He's got to expand his TAM. Well, how does AWS do that? Look to 500,000 VMware customers. So that's number one. Barney deal? There are a lot of Barney deals out there. I mean, most... >> What are you referring to, 'cause Google came on the stage the next day. I was getting tweets saying "Azure?" Stu, guys, who's the deal? Who was Andy Jassy talking about when he was looking at the VMware customers saying, essentially, this is not, implying others are? >> I'm not sure that he was necessarily throwing shade at anyone specifically. What there was is there was 18 months from when this deal went through, a lot of work. This was a lot of engineering work. Talk to the cloud foundation team, talk to the VSAN team. The amount of work to actually integrate, because we know Amazon actually has an extensive engineering team. They hyper-optimize what they're doing, so this is not some white box that I just slapped VMware on and said the BIOS, you know, it works and everything where I still am a little concerned if I'm, you know, a VMware employee as customers, I talked to some customers that really excited about this, the Lighthouse customers. They say it's going to get my team that loves their vCenter. They love everything, it's going to help them move faster. Then, you're talking to, "Oh there's these services they're going to be able to use." I'm like well, how much are they going to realize oh hey, this is great, and the VMware sales reps are just going to get eaten by the lion while the customer goes off. >> And so the impact's big then, you're saying, but you won't answer the question of who he's referring to. You don't think he's referring to anyone. Keith, what do you think? >> Let's look at, I like the comment about how difficult the integration was. Last year when I read, it said something like, wait, hold on what, the AWS, who is notorious about controlling their message, what I thought was funny is that Andy didn't use the term private cloud, he didn't use the term VMware cloud, he, VMware infrastructure and AWS, which is a massive engineering effort. So from that, I question whether or not they could execute upon that, but Andy Jassy being onstage on Monday showed the commitment that we're going to make these other services work, the total addressable market of 500,000 additional customers. You don't do this for bare metal servers. >> John: VMware has 500,000 customers? >> Yeah. That's the total addressable market, but that's not where AWS is going to grow by halting physical servers, by selling more Lambda, selling more CDN, selling more PAS, is the key, and where VMware and AWS relationship his weak is in that true integration between the two hybrid IT environments. So when you say, "Where's the barney deals?" the barney deals are, I think it's across the industry. Unless you're getting fully in bed and committed to make that level of investment >> No but engineering resources, this comes back down to what, the new kind of engagement between biz dev deals look like. You need to have that kind of level. >> I have no problem pointing to the Nutanix Google deal, anything that people are doing with Azure, no one's partnered at this level. >> Okay, Azure is a good one too, because I've heard from startups that have been enticed by the dollars, 'cause Microsoft's been sprinkling some cash on, who have left to go back to AWS, because of technical reasons, reverse proxies, basically software clued just to basically make stuff work. >> Well, so, where do we, how much do we know about the IBM VMware relationship? Because I mean IBM's >> Pat brought it up today. >> Soft layer hosting, right? They've got a lot more experience with VMware, IBM has said, I think they're shipping, they've been shipping for quite some time. So there's an example of engineering that had already largely been done, that's actually delivering value for customers. Pat probably brought it up because it's a great distribution channel for him. And I think Keith's right on. AWS doesn't speak in terms of VMs. They talk in terms of cloud services, like Lambda, database services, middleware, PAS layers, that's really where they're going to hook people in this community into their platform. >> Okay, so here's a question to end the segment as we wrap up the show, because this is kind of where it's all going. To me, my big epiphany was the following. Andy Jassy, statesman, Harvard MBA, now CEO of AWS, ticking names, ticking this, huge accomplishments, he's done great in his career, he's only getting better. And then Sam Ramji, great developer chops, knows software ecosystems, not Andy Jassy in terms of the title, but in terms of status, still a solid guy. Two contrasting positions, running the biggest cloud today, to Google brainpower, okay? So you're looking at that and you're saying, "Hmm, where is this going to go?" So the question on the table is, what does it take for someone to be successful in today's IT environment? Does IT need to be smarter in business or does need to be more smarter in IT, or both, and does Google have enough IQ in IT to actually make the products fast enough or are they at risk? >> Well I'll take the customer point of view, and you know, we always talk about people, process, technology. The technology is maturing, and it's maturing pretty quickly, but maybe still not quite to the point where the true private cloud vision is where we need it to be, but what's going to slow that down is the people and process side is going to take a lot longer. Stu, you made a comment yesterday, VMware's moving at the pace of the CIO. >> It's Keith's line, he's been using all week. >> Okay, great line and Robin Matlock heard that today, course marketing CMO said, "And the CIO needs to move faster." (men laugh) Well guess what? They can't. I thought that was just a perfect testament >> But that is exactly the dilemma isn't it? >> It really is, and this stuff is hard. And cloud doesn't necessarily make it any easier, (laughs) if anything, it makes it more complex, 'cause it's a completely new business model. >> But remember the old term, forklift upgrade? Okay, you don't have forklift upgrades anymore, you have rip and replace, whatever word you want to use. >> Stu: Now we have lift and shift. >> Lift and shift, rip and replace, lift and shift. Is Google, and this is my challenge to Sam, I didn't have time to ask him this question, I'll certainly do one on one next time I see him. Is Google smart enough with IQ in IT, certainly we know they're smart enough, but do they have enough IQ in IT to really make the transformation, or are they betting on a rip and replace version of a cloud? >> So John, no doubt Google's smart, and they built amazing things that, the ripple that Google has through the industry is phenomenal. They spin off whole industries based on what they're doing. Google played a very different game than Amazon is, you know, when you talk to customers and how they're first getting onto Google, you know, data's really important, analytics of course. Couple of years ago Google was saying, "Oh, we're just going to be that data analytics cloud," now of course they're trying to be a big player. Amazon, the company, remember, Amazon isn't just AWS. Andy Jassy fits into Jeff Bazer's great plans. You know, I'd love to hear, when we go to reinvent, what's happening in Whole Foods that's impacted by AWS. They are everywhere, they are, you know, Walmart did. >> How about TAM expansion, my wife's checking Amazon even more. >> But this is really interesting right, because Walmart's now using its muscle to say, "Hey, you going to do business "with AWS" >> Absolutely >> "And Whole Foods? "You're not doing business with us." So the point being that digital business is allowing companies to traverse industries and now you're seeing it in really interesting competitive lashbacks. >> So Capital One was onstage, I say something that over the past couple of years been controversial, no one believes me, but I believe this is what needs to happen. Capital One claimed that it's a technology company, they're not a bank. Well I want to bank with a bank, that' a whole 'nother conversation. But technology is just a tool to get your job done, and just like we had bookkeepers that knew Excel and then eventually Excel just became a part of your toolkit. AI, I talked to Chuck Hollis of Oracle about this on the podcast the other day. AI is just going to be a business toolkit that a business user uses. To the question, business users will become smarter at using technology. The cloud providers that enables the business user to have the least amount of friction to use that technology, to solve business challenges will win. The question is, is that Google or Andy Jassy, who has done it with Amazon, or some other cloud provider that's eating their own dog food. >> Okay guys, let's wrap this up. Let's go around the table, one word, two words, how do you wrap up VMware's position vis a vis as they go forward? >> VMware's on fire, I think the data center's on fire, the ecosystem is reforming around the cloud. And there's a lot of momentum right now, I mean I'm wondering, okay, what's going to happen to derail this, but right now the fundamentals look very good. >> Relevant, John. >> Yeah. >> Cool and relevant again. It's right, you know, cool, we can all argue, you know, look, I like what I heard with Amazon, it was better than I was expecting coming in. You know, getting in there, they talked about serverless, they talked about edge computing, something I actually had a couple really good conversations ticking to, partners doing IoT, and customers looking at that. If they can be relevant, not just in the data center, but in the cloud, and even at the edge, VMware's going to have a good life going forward. >> Yeah, and I'll wrap it up, you stole my word relevant, so I'll say, I'll a little bit further than relevant, VMware is still the leader in enterprise infrastructure software. They're not letting that lead go. >> But just on that, the last thing, they're an infrastructure software company. I think they showed how they can be more than that in the future. >> And my take is, smart strategy playing out, now people are starting to realize the long game that Pat's been playing. It's showing up in the financial results, and there's clarity, and you can see the game playing out, you're starting to see there where they're going to position, so good job, guys, that's a wrap. Want to thank our sponsors. Without sponsors theCUBE would not be able to come for the three days of wall-to-wall coverage provided to the community. We get great support from the folks on Twitter, we get support from the folks who watch the videos, want to thank you for watching, and also the sponsors, VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Dell EMC, IBM, OVH, CenturyLink, Datrium, Densify, Druva, Hitachi, INFINIDAT, Kamarino, NetApp, Nutanix, Red Hat, Rackspace, Rubrik, Skytap, Veeam and Zadara Storage. Thanks to all the 20 sponsors that we can go out and bring our best stuff here. Really appreciate your support. Thanks for watching theCUBE. This is a wrap from VMworld, thanks guys, thanks everybody here, and that's a wrap for VMworld 2017, thanks for watching.