(cheerful music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021, with Red Hat. Topic of this power panel is the future of automation, we've got a great lineup of CUBE alumni, Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, general manager of the Red Hat business unit, thanks for coming on, Tom Anderson, vice president, product manager of Red Hat, and Alessandro Perilli, the senior director of product market at Red, all good CUBE alumni. Distinct power panel, Joe we'll start out with you, what have you seen in automation game right now, 'cause it continues to evolve. I mean you can't go to an event, a virtual event, or read anything online without hearing AI automation, automation hybrid, automation hybrid hybrid hybrid hybrid, I mean automation is the top conversation in almost all verticals. What do you see happening right now? >> Yeah, it's sort of amazing, you know? Automation is quite fashionable these days, as you pointed out. Automation's always been on the radar of a lot of enterprises, and I think it was always perceived as sort of like that, an efficiency, a task model thing, that people did. Now automation is, if you believe some of the analysts, it's up to a board room imperative in some cases. So we are seeing with our customers that the level of complexity they're dealing with, particularly exaggerated by what's gone past year and a half in the world, is putting a tremendous amount of pressure, attention and importance on automation. So automation's definitely one of the busiest places to be right now. >> What's the big change this year, though? I mean we love the automation conversation, we had it last year a lot too, as well. What's the change, what's the trend right now that's driving this next level automation conversation with customers? >> Well, I'll ask my colleagues to comment on that in a second, but, the challenges here with automation, is people are constrained now, they can't access facilities as easy as they used to be able to. They still need to go fast, some businesses have had to expand dramatically, and introduce new services to handle all sorts of new scenarios, they've had to deploy things faster. Security, not a week goes by you don't read about something going on regarding security and breaches and hacking and things like that, so they're trying to secure things as fast as possible, right, and deploy critical fixes and patches and things like that. So there's just tremendous amount of activity, that's really been exaggerated by what's gone on over the past year. >> And all of this is being compounded with a nature of increasing complexity, that we're seeing in the architecture, explosion microservices, the adoption en masse of containers, and the adoption of multiple clouds for most customers around the world. So really, the extension of the IT environment, especially for large enterprises, enormous for any team, no matter how big it is, so how scale it is, to really go after and look for all the systems, and then the complexity of the architectures, is enormous within that IT environment. It is impossible to scale the applications and to scale the infrastructure, and not scale the IT operations. And so automation becomes really a way to scale IT operations, rather than just keep repeating the same steps over and over, in an attempt to simplify, or to reduce costs. It's well beyond that at this point. >> That's a great point. Tom, what's your reaction to this, because Alessandro brings up a good point, developers are going faster than ever before. The changes of speed and complexity have gone up, so the demand for the IT and/or security groups, or anyone, to be faster, not weeks, minutes. We're talking about a complete time shift here. >> Yeah, so I talk to a lot of customers, and what I keep hearing again and again from them is kind of two things, which is, a need for skills, and reskilling existing staff. When Alessandro talks about the complexity and the scale, think about all the different new tools, new environments, new platforms that these employees and these associates are being exposed to and expected to be able to handle. So, a real, not a skill shortage, but a stress on the skills of the organization. And then secondly, really, our customers are talking to us about the culture in the environment itself, the culture of collaboration, the culture of automation, and the kind of impact that has in our organization, the way teams are now expected to work together, to share information, to share automation, to push, you know, we talk about shifting left in a lot of things now in IT, automation is now shifting left, pushing automation and access to subsystems, IT subsystems and resources, into the hands of people who traditionally haven't had direct access to those resources. So really kind of shift in skills, and a shift in culture I see. >> Ah, the culture. (indistinct), I want to come back to that culture thing, but I want to ask you specifically on that point, do you think automation users still view automation as just repeating and simplifying processes that they already are doing? You've heard the term, "Done it three times, automate it." Is that definition changing and evolving, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, IT is really changing, going from the traditional, "I'm a network engineer and I use a command line to update my devices I'm responsible for, the config devices, and then I decide to write a playbook using a really cool product like Ansible to drive automation into my daily tasks." And then it comes up to exposing, again, exposing that subsystem I'm responsible for, whatever it is, storage, network, compute, whatever it is, exposing that op so other people can consume it without me being involved, right? So that's a real change in a mindset, and tooling, and approach, that I'm going to expose that op to a set of workflows, business workflows, that drive automation throughout an organization. So that's a real kind of evolution of automation, (indistinct) first, and that's usually focused mostly on day zero, provisioning of a new service. Now we see a lot more focus, or a lot of additional focus on day two operations. How do I automate my day two operations to make them a lot more efficient, as my scale and complexity grows? How do I take the human element out of operating this on a day to day basis? >> So you're saying basically, if I understand you correctly, the system's architecture view, or mindset, around automation, it moves from "Hey, I'm going to use," and Ansible by the way is great for "Hey, I want to automate something, I'm doing a lot," that's cool. But you're looking at it differently. If I understand you correctly, you're saying the automation has to be a system view, meaning you create the rules of the road so that automation can happen at the front lines of the CICD pipeline. You mentioned shift left, is that the difference, is that kind of what's happening here, that's beyond just doing automation, because you can automate it, so you've done that, this is like the next level, is that what you're getting at? >> It is, and we joke about it a little bit, crushing silos, right? Breaking down silos, and again, I keep talking about culture, it really is important, tools are important and technology's important, but the culture's super important, and trying to think of that thing from a systems mindset, of sort of workflows and orchestration of a business process that touches IT components, and how do I automate that and expose that to that workflow, without a human having to touch it, right? Yet still enforce my security protocols, my performance expectations, my compliance stuff, all of that stuff still needs to be enforced, and that's where repeatable automation comes in, of being able to expose this stuff up into these system-level workflows. >> And then there is another element to this (indistinct), I think it's really important to attach to this, the element of speed. We talk about complexity, we talk about scale, but then there is this emerging third dimension, as I call it, that is the speed. And the speed has a number of different articulation, it's the speed when you're thinking about how quickly you need to deliver the application. If you're in a very competitive environment, think about web scale startups for example, or companies in an emerging market, and then you have the speed in terms of reacting to a cybersecurity attack, which Tom just mentioned. And then you have the third kind of speed I'm thinking about right now, which is the increasing amount of artificial intelligence, so an algorithmic kind of operation that is taking place in the organization. For now it's still very limited, but it's not unthinkable that going forward, the operations will be driven, or at least assisted by artificial intelligence. This speed, just like the scale and the complexity we mentioned before, are impossible to be addressed by a single team, and so automation becomes indispensable. >> Yeah, that's a great point, I want to just double click on that, I mean both Tom and Joe were just talking about system, they used the word system. In a subsystem, if one is going faster than the other, to your point, there's a bottleneck there. So if the IT group or security groups are going to take time to approve things, they're not putting rules to the road together to automate and help developers be faster, because look, it's clear, we've been reporting on this in theCUBE, cloud developers are fast. They're moving really fast with code. And so what happens is, if they're going to shift left, that means they're going to be at the point of coding to set policies on security. So, that's going to put pressure on the other subsystems to go faster, so they have to then expose rules of the road, or I'm just making that up, but policy base, or have some systems thinking. They can't just be the old way of saying "No, slow it down." So this is a cultural thing, I think Joe, you brought up culture, Alessandro, you brought up culture. Is that still there? That speed, fast team here and a slow team here? Is that still around, or people getting faster on both sides? And I'm kind of talking about IT, generally speaking, they tend to be slower than the developers. >> Well, just a couple comments, first of all, you heard silos, you heard complexity, you heard speed, talked about shift left. Let me sort of maybe tie those together, right? What's happened to date is every silo has their own set of tooling, right? And so one silo might move very fast, with a very private set of tools, or network management, or security, or whatever, right? And if you think about it, one of the number one skills gaps right now is for automation people. But if an automation person has to learn 17 different tools, 'cause I'm running on three public clouds, I'm on-premise, edge, and I'm doing things to move network storage, compute, security, all sorts of different systems, the tooling is so complicated, right, that I end up with a bunch of specialists. Which can only do one or two things, because they don't know the other domains and they don't know the skills. One of the things we've seen from our customers, I think this is a fundamental shift in automation, is that what we've done with Ansible in particular is, we actually adopted Ansible because of its simplicity. It's actually human-readable, you don't have to be a hardcore programmer to write automation. So that allows the emergence of citizen creators of automation. There's not like a group in some ivory tower that now can make automation and they do it for the masses. Individuals can now use Ansible to create automation. Going cross-domain, Ansible automation touches networks, security, storage, compute, cloud, edge, Linux, Windows, containers, traditional, ITSM, it touches so many systems, that basically what you have is you have a set of power tooling, in Ansible, that allows you now to share automation across teams, 'cause they speak the same language, right? And that's how you go faster. If every silo is fast, but when you have to go inter-silo you slow down, or have to open a ticket, or have some (indistinct) mismatch, it causes delays, errors, and exposures. >> I think that is a very key point, I mean that delay of opening up tickets, not being responsive, Alessandro, you put up machine learning and AI, I mean if you think about what that could do from an automation standpoint, if you can publish the HIPAA rules for your healthcare, you can just traverse that with a bot, right? I mean this is the new... This just saves so much time, why even open up a ticket? So if you can shift left and do the security, and there's kind of rules there, this is a trend, how do you make that happen, how do you bust the silos, and I guess that's the question I'd love to get everyone to react to, because that implies some sort of horizontally scalable control plane. How does someone do that in an architectural way, that doesn't really kind of, maybe break everything, or make the (indistinct) go into a cultural sideways situation? >> Maybe I can jump in, and grab this one, and then maybe ask Alessandro to weigh in afterwards, but, what we've seen and what you'll see some of the speakers at AnsibleFest this year talk about, from a cultural perspective is bringing teams together across automation guilds, JPMC calls it a community of practice, where they're bringing hundreds and thousands of individuals in the organization together virtually, into these teams that share best practices, and processes and automation that they've created. Secondly, and this is a little bit of a shameless plug for Ansible, which is having a common language, a common automation language across these teams, so that sharing becomes obviously a lot easier when you're using the same language. And then thirdly, what we see a lot now is people treating automation as code. Storing that, and get version managing and version controlling and checking in, checking out, really thinking of automation differently from an individual writing a script, to this being infrastructure or whatever my subsystem is, managed it and automated it as code, and thinking of themselves as people responsible for code. >> These are all great points. I think that on top of all these things, there is an additional element which is change management. You cannot count on technology alone to change something that is purely cultural, as we kept saying during this video right now. So, I believe that a key element to win, to succeed in an automation project, is to couple the technology, great technology, easy to understand, able to become the common language as Tom just said, with an effort in change management that starts from the top. It's something you don't see very often because a technology vendor rarely works with a more consulting firm, but it's definitely an area that I think would be very interesting to explore for our customers. >> That's a great point on the change management, but let me ask you, what do you think it needs to make automation more frictionless for users, what do you see that needs to happen, Alessandro? >> I think there are at least a couple of elements that need to change. The first one is that, the effort that we're seeing right now in the industry, to further democratize the capability to automate has to go one notch further. And by that I mean, implementing cell service provisioning portals and ways for automatically execute an automation workflow that already exists, so that an end user, somebody that works in the line of business, and doesn't understand necessarily what the automation workflow, the script is doing, still able to use it, to consume it when it, she or he needs to use it. This is the first element, and then the second element that is definitely more ambitious, is about the language, about how do I actually write the automation workflow? This is a key problem. It's true that some automation engines and some workflows have done, historically speaking, a better job than others, in simplifying the way we write automation workflows, and definitely this is much simpler than writing code with a programming language, and it's simpler than writing automation compared to a tool that we use 10, 15 years ago. But still, there is a certain amount of complexity, because you need to understand how to write in a way that the automation framework understands, and you need even before that, you need to express what you want to achieve, and in a way that the automation engine understands. So, I'm thinking that going forward we'll start to see artificial intelligence being applied to this problem, in a way that's very similar to what OpenAI Microsoft are doing with Codex, the capability that is a model that allows a person to write in plain English through a comment in code, to translate that comment into actual code, taken from GitHub or through the machine learning process that's been done. I'm really thinking that going forward, we will start to see some effort in the same direction, but applied to automation. What if the AI could assist us, not replace us, in writing the automation workflow so that more people are capable to translating what they want to achieve, in a way that is automatable? >> So you're saying the language, making it easy to program, or write, or create. Being a creator of automation. And then having that be available as code, with other code, so there's kind of this new paradigm of automating the automation. >> In a sense, this is absolutely true, yes. >> In addition to that, John, I think there's another dimension here which is often overlooked, which we do spend a lot of time on. It's one thing to have things like Alessandro mentioned, that are front edge in terms of helping you write code, but you want to know something? In big organizations, a lot of times what we find is, someone's already written the code that you need. You know what the problem is? You don't know about it, you can't find it, you can't share it and you can't collaborate on it, so the best code is something that somebody's already invested the time to write, test, burn in, certify, what if they could share it, and what if people could find it, and then reuse it? Right, everybody's talking about low code, no code, well, reuse is the best, right? Because you've already invested expertise into doing it. So we've spent a lot of time working with our customers based on their feedback, on building the tools necessary for them to share automation, to collaborate on it, certify it, and also to create that supply chain from partners who create integrations and interfaces to their systems, and to be able to share that content through the supply chain out to our customers and have them be able to share automation across very large globally distributed organizations. Very powerful. >> That's a powerful point, I mean reuse, leverage there, is phenomenal. Discovery engine's got to be built. You got to know, I mean someone's got to build a search engine for the code. "Hey code, who's written some code?" But just a whole 'nother mindset, so this brings up my next question for you guys, 'cause this is really, we're teasing out the biggest things coming next in automation. These are all great points, they're all about the future, where will the puck be, let's skate to where the puck will be, but it's computer science and automation that's being democratized and opened up more, so it's, what do you guys think is the biggest thing coming next for automation? >> Joe, you want to go next? >> Sure. Sure. Yeah, I'll take it. So we're getting a glimpse of that with a number of customers right now that we're working with that are doing things around concepts like self-healing infrastructures. Well what the heck is that? Basically, it's tying event systems, and AI, which is looking at what's going on in an environment, and deciding that something is broken, sub-optimal, spending too much, there's some issue that needs to be dealt with. In the old days, it was, that system would stop with opening a ticket, dispatch some people who were either manually or semi-automated go fix their whatever. Now people are connecting these systems and saying "Wait a minute. I've got all this rich data coming through my eventing systems. I can make some sense out of it with AI or machine learning. Then I can drive automation, I just eliminated a whole bunch of people, time, exposure, cost, everything else." So I think that, sort of a ventureman automation is going to be huge. I'm going to argue that every single system in the world that uses AI, the result of that's going to be, I want to go do something, I want to change, optimize my move, secure, stop, start, relocate, how's that going to get done? It's going to get done with automation. >> And what Joe just said is really highly successful in the consumer space. If you think about solutions like If This Then That, or Zapier for example, those are examples of event-driven automation. They've been in the consumer space for a long time, and they are wildly popular to the point that there are dozens of clones and competitors. The enterprise space, it didn't adopt the same approach so far, but we start to see event bridges, and event hubs that can really help with this. And this really connects to the previous point, at this point I'm a broken record, which is about the speed and the complexity. If the environment is so spread out, so complex, and it goes all the way to the edge, and all these events take place at a neck-breaking pace, the only way for you is to tie the automation workflows that you have written, to a trigger, an event that takes place at some point, according to your logic. >> Tom, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, last but not least on that kind of thread, which is sort of the architectures as we get out to the edge, what does it take to automate things at the edge? We thought there was a big jump from data center to cloud, and now when you start extending that out to the edge, am I going to need a new automation platform to handle those edge devices? Will I need a new language, will I need a new team, or can I connect these things together using a common platform to develop the automate at the edge? And I think that's where we see some of our customers moving now, which is automating those edge environments which have become critical to their business. >> Awesome, I want to ask one final question while I've got you guys here in this power panel, great insights here. Operational complexity was mentioned, skills gap was mentioned earlier, I want to ask you guys about the organizational behavior and dynamic going on with this change. Automation, hybrid, multi-cloud, all happening. When you start getting into speed of application development for the modern app, opensource where things are opening up and things are going to be democratized with automation and code and writing automation, and scaling that, you're going to have a cultural battle that's happening, and we're kind of seeing it play out in real time. DevOps has kind of gone and been successful, and we're seeing cloud-native bring new innovation, people are refactoring their business models with cloud technologies, now the edge is here, so this idea of speed, shifting left, from a developer standpoint, is putting pressure on the old, incumbent systems, like the security group, or the IT group that's still holding onto their ticketing system, and they're slower, they're getting requests, and the developer's like "Okay, go faster, I want this done faster." So we're seeing departments reorganizing. What do you guys see, 'cause Red Hat, you guys have been in there, all these big accounts for the generation of this modern era. What's the cultural dynamics happening, and what can companies do to be successful, to get to the next level? >> So I think for us, John, we certainly see it and we experience it, across thousands of customers, and what we've done as an organization is put together adoption journeys, a consulting engagement for our customers around an automation adoption journey, and that isn't just about the technology, it's all throughout that technology, it's about those cultural things, thinking differently about the way I automate and the way I share, and the way I do these tasks. So it's as much about cultural and process as it is about technology. And our customers are asking us for that help. Red Hat, you have thousands of customers that are using this product, surely you can come and tell us how we can achieve more with automation, how can we break down these silos, how can we move faster, and so we've put together these offerings, both directly as well as with our partners, to try and help these customers kind of get over that cultural hump. >> Awesome. Anyone else want to react to the cultural shift and dynamics and how it can play out in a positive way? >> Yeah, I think that it's a huge issue. We always talk about people, processes, and technology. Well the people issue's a really big deal here. We're seeing customers, huge organizations, with really capable teams building apps and services and infrastructures, saying "Help me think about automation in a new way." The old days, it was "Hey, I'm thinking about it as a cost savings thing." Yeah, there's still cost savings in there. To your point, John, now they're talking about speed, and security, and things like that. How fast, zero day exploits, now it's like zero hour exploits. How fast can I think about securing something? You know, time to heal, time to secure, time to optimize, so people are asking us, "What are the best practices? What is the best way to look at what I've got, my automation deficits," used to have tech deficits, now you got automation deficits, right? "What do I need to do culturally?" It's very similar to what happened with DevOps, right? Getting teams to get together and think about it differently and holistically, that same sort of transition is happening, and we're helping customers do that, 'cause we're talking to a lot of them where you've got the scholars have been through it. >> Awesome. Alessandro, your thoughts on this issue. >> I think that what Tom and Joe just said is going to further aggravate, it's going to happen more and more going forward, and there is a reason for that. And this connects back with the skill problem, that we discussed before. In the last 10 years, I've seen growing demand for developers to become experts in a lot of areas that have nothing to do with development, code development. They had to become experts in cloud infrastructures, they had to become experts in security because, you've probably heard this many times, security's everybody's responsibility. Now they've been asked to become experts in artificial intelligence, transforming their title into something like ML engineer. The amount of skills and disciplines that they need to master, alone, by themself, would require a lifetime of work. And we're asking human beings to get better and better at all of these things, and all of the best practice. It's absolutely impossible. And so the only way for them, yeah, five jobs in one, six jobs in one, right? Probably for the same seller, and the only way that these people can execute the best practice, enforce the best practice, if the best practices are encoded in automation workflow, not necessarily written by them, but by somebody else, and execute them at the right time, the right context, and for the right reason. >> It's like the five tool player in baseball, you got to do five different things, I mean this is, you got to do AI, you got to do machine learning, you got to have access to all the data, you got to do all these different things. This is the future of automation, and automation's critical. I've never heard that term, automation deficit or automation debt, we used to talk about tech debt, but I think automation is so important because the only way to go fast is to have automation, kind of at the center of it. This is a huge, huge topic. Thank you very much for coming on, power panel on the future of automation, Joe, Tom, Alessandro from Red Hat, thanks for coming on, everyone, really appreciate the insight, great conversation. >> Thanks, John. >> 'Kay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (calm music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome everyone to the cube live and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. It's good to have you. I'm your host Rebecca Knight today, we are joined by Mira Vaidhyanathan. She is the product leader for Amazon honey code at AWS. Thank you so much for coming on the cube Mira, my question to be here. So tell our viewers a little bit about Amazon honey code. This was a product that was announced in June of this year. What was the impetus for it? What were you hearing from customers that made you realize there was a need for this? >>Yeah, so Amazon honey code is a fully managed service that allows customers to build powerful mobile and web applications without the need for any programming. So customer has to, they have a growing need, uh, to manage data over time, manage workflows that involve multiple people that facilitate complex business processes. And today we're doing this through spreadsheets and mailing, these spreadsheets via email. And what ends up happening is you have a whole lot of spreadsheets with different data, and it usually falls to one person to consolidate all the information and create a source of truth, um, organizations that have the resources to build custom applications do so, but quite often, these applications just don't get built. And, um, employees in these businesses are managing with these, uh, band-aids set of tools that I just discussed. And, um, so what we wanted to do was to build a, uh, no code, uh, app building platform that customers can use their existing skills to build the apps that they need for their day-to-day lives. So no programming required. You bring the skills, you have to just, uh, you know, those of using spreadsheets to be able to build, uh, apps to manage, um, all of your productivity and collaboration needs. So we tried to do with honeycomb. >>What has the reception been since you launched back in Sharon, what are, what are you hearing from developers about how it's changed the way they're doing their business? >>Customers are very excited that AWS now has a solution in this space. And from the very first day, from the day of launch, we've just seen a lot of interests from organizations of all sizes, both domestic and international and customers have been building apps to solve various problems. In fact, the very first app that a customer has shared with us was, uh, a COVID tracking app for HL care center in New Hampshire, where, uh, you know, parents had been standing in line for tens of minutes waiting to drop off their children and filling out a form at the entry point. And, um, this, uh, customer built an app over a weekend, uh, and was able to it reducing the drop-off time two minutes. Um, we've also seen a great deal of activity in our community forum, where customers are exchanging ideas and learning from each other. And what they really like about honeycomb is how easy it is to spin up an application without needing to think about databases or servers or deployments. And they also like that by building just one app it's immediately available in both web and in mobile. And, um, of course the best of all is the fact that all of the data is up-to-date and they're able to make informed decisions based on the data in these apps. Um, customers have also been very forthcoming about, uh, feature ideas and requests, and that is continually feeding into our roadmap. >>So I want to talk about some other use cases. You mentioned the childcare center in New Hampshire, which sounds as though you helped save these parents a lot of time and alleviate some of their stress. What other kinds of use cases are you here? >>Sure. Uh, the types of apps that we've heard about include, uh, like leave and vacation requests and organizations, um, a team has built a hotel management, a booking system, contracts management for an unemployment center, sales opportunity tracking, um, status reporting across distributed teams, which is a reality that we're all living today. Um, more specifically we, uh, uh, we know of a customer who has a 6,000 person team, um, and they built an app to manage service costs requests. So this is a systems integrator and they're using this app across 10 partner teams, uh, across the world. Um, we've also heard about a coffee trader who has built an app to manage, uh, their coffee orders across both domestic and foreign markets. And previously they were doing this via email and, uh, through spreadsheets. So those are the different cases that we've heard about >>What kinds of internal interest are you having within AWS for honey code? I'm told that there is a great deal of interest within the organization itself. >>Absolutely. Yeah. There's been a lot of interest that at Amazon, uh, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't hear from a new team that has a use case that they need to build an app today on honeycomb. Um, and these are usually, you know, use cases that customers have been solving with spreadsheets or our internal ticketing tool, uh, because they haven't had the resources to build their own custom app. Um, there, our HR team, um, uh, one of the HR teams at Amazon, in fact, it's built an app that is consolidating across four different tools, so they can get an accurate picture of what is going on with, uh, any particular team, you know, head count, how many roles are still to be filled, et cetera. Um, another example is a marketing team that is managing all of their marketing campaigns, uh, through a Honeycutt app, so they can see how campaigns have we already executed this month. >>How many still remain, what are the results from these campaigns, all of this, uh, in one place. And, um, in fact, in the honeycomb team itself, uh, we, uh, uh, use honey good for, uh, managing all of our internal processes from our product roadmap to, uh, program management, to managing and tracking our goals. And because we're also distributed these days, um, we seem to be spending up on an app on auto practically daily basis. In fact, today the team is running a hackathon and all of the ideas for the hackathon were, um, gathered on a honeycomb app. And then later today we'll be doing demos and voting, uh, on the best time, uh, hackathon project. So it's, it's given rise to a lot of new ideas and, uh, a lot of new ways in which, uh, we're, we're able to work together collaboratively, >>Well, an app a day. I love it. Um, so it does sound like the, kind of the collaboration you're describing and the ways in, within the transparency, particularly during this, these COVID times when people, as you say, we're working, dispersed teams are remote. Um, there's a lot of isolation. It does seem like it's, it's really a revelation. What, you're, what you're doing here. >>Yeah. It's been really, uh, it's been a learning experience for us as well, you know, working remotely and trying to figure out how do we keep each other up-to-date on what we're doing. How do we make sure that, uh, you know, we, we find ways to replace those hallway conversations, those water cooler conversations as we like to call them. Uh, and, and so we find ourselves, uh, interacting via these apps a lot more, trying to keep everyone abreast of what we're doing by updating project status. And so on, in addition, of course, to, you know, uh, uh, meetings, um, online on video, uh, it has certainly helped us all stay on the same page. In fact, um, honeycomb the product launch itself was managed via a honeycomb app. And normally that's something that, you know, most of the teams either build a custom app for, or manage, uh, via a spreadsheet and probably hundreds of post-it notes. >>So the, the product is relatively new, but you had some announcements last week at AWS reinvent. Tell us a little bit about those. >>Yeah. And the last few weeks we've had a slew of new announcements and they fall into three major areas, really, um, integrations, uh, identity and app building features. Um, for the first we announced, um, integrations with Amazon app flow and Zapier to integrate with external data sources to push and pull data into and out of honeycomb. Um, we also announced the ability to set up and log in with multiple identity providers, including Okta and Google, to make it easier for our customers to, uh, manage, manage user accounts, um, as well as the first single sign on and last but not least, uh, we've announced several features to make it easier for app builders, as well as the end users of these apps. Um, not only to make the apps more functional, but also more delightful to use. And these include, uh, features like border styles, uh, conditional styling, as well as easier ways to sort and filter your data in your app screens. >>You used the word delightful, which is, which is absolutely an adjective that so many of us associate with Amazon. Tell us a little bit about how you are working to make these, uh, the, the user interface more delightful, as you say. >>Yeah. We're continually adding new features to make it easier. So, you know, every business user doesn't have to think like a UX designer. So we're, we're trying to, um, think about the ways, uh, you, you, you look at all the productivity apps today, you, you want certain sets of data to pop up in your app. Uh, for example, you know, if the status of a project is red, not only do you want it to notify the appropriate parties, but you also want that information to pop up, um, in an app. So it's very easy just using a very simple expression. You can set up the rules, the conditional rules to say, Hey, if the status is red, then, you know, make sure or status is delayed, then pop it up and, you know, bright red. So it catches my eye. The next time I look and look at an app. So we're trying to find ways to, uh, you know, thinking about all of the business use cases, trying to find ways to help customers make the information, um, pop better in their apps. So they're, uh, so they, you know, deliver more value, um, in businesses >>Up here in Amazon app flow. What are the business use cases in terms of those and what are they, what are available now? >>Yeah, so, uh, both, uh, integrations with Zapier and app flow enable customers to build even richer applications because now they're, uh, you know, previously they were building applications just based on the data that the sitting in, in honeycomb and with these integrations. Now they can bring in data from other sources, programmatically. So these include integrations to apps like Salesforce or Slack, JIRA, Amazon S3, et cetera. And, um, this makes it possible for business users to use Zapier or app flow, uh, to, to build, um, powerful integrations. So I'll give you an example. Um, let's say a sales team can use, uh, a honeycomb to build an app to process their sales inquiries. And, uh, instead of dealing with emails and spreadsheets, what they can do is use Zapier to automatically pull in requests that come into their website. Um, and this can be pulled straight into a honeycomb app, which can then generate a notification to the sales manager to approve a quote. Um, and then the quote can be generated and emailed to the customer. All of this is made possible through, um, and integration with, uh, with Zapier. And you can integrate with Amazon app flow, uh, to pull in data from Salesforce. So it makes it possible for customers to, um, use more up-to-date information and their apps making it, uh, driving better decisions and more informed decisions. And what >>Type of new templates are now available. >>Yeah. Uh, back in June, when we launched, we had about 10 templates for common use cases in businesses. And since then we've been regularly adding more to that repository. Uh, our most recent additions to the template library include, uh, the ability to run meetings virtually, which we're doing eight hours a day, these days, instant polls, a collaborative brainstorming template, um, as well as applicant tracking. And we'll continue to add more in the coming months. >>There's just no question that this is such a high growth area. Uh, Gartner estimated last year, that low-code no-code approaches will represent more than 65% of application development inside companies by 2024 foresters also projecting a $21 billion by 2024. What I want you to look into your crystal ball here and just tell us a little bit about what you're expecting in the next six to 12 months and what, and what's what you're hoping for the future for Amazon honey honeycomb. >>Uh, we remained focused on, uh, you know, helping business users solve problems that were previously out of their reach because they either lacked the resources or the skills or support from it. Um, honey code apps have the scale and security that customers expect from an AWS service. And over time, uh, we expect to add more features that make it progressively easier for business users to develop without needing how to learn, how to code. And we will also expect to add features that are required by it, departments for adoption in enterprises, >>Mirror. What have you hearing from customers about what they, what they're wanting to hear from you just w I want you to close us out here and, and give us what you're hearing, and then what your best advice is for managers who are thinking about, uh, trying to adopt some of these low-code no-code approaches and are, and are interested in what they're hearing in terms of what you're saying about the collaboration and transparency that these, that these tools provide. >>Yeah. Um, the, these, these tools make it possible for, uh, anyone in any business, you know, HR marketing program managers, product managers, really, um, anyone to, uh, build applications that are very specific and tailored to your business needs. And these, because these applications don't require the typical process of, uh, you know, selecting a database, selecting the storage layer, selecting all of these things. Um, and they're deployed almost immediately, like as soon as an app is built, it's available to the end users to use it makes it possible for the applications to evolve with your needs. Um, in fact, this is, this is what I see everyday with the apps that we build for ourselves is, you know, it works this week next week. We're like, Hmm, what if we tried something slightly differently? Uh, because our, our, um, you know, we, we we've become more efficient, our techniques evolve over time. >>Uh, and th th th the situation changes as we're seeing every day, uh, uh, in COVID times. So it makes it possible to just, uh, to, to have the applications grow with you as your business grows and evolves. And, um, so that's, what's really exciting for me with a honeycomb is, um, uh, things that were, uh, you know, usually, uh, out of the reach of, of business users now, uh, you know, they're able to build these applications and they use the exact same skills that, um, they might have used with spreadsheets. So, uh, that's, what's really exciting and we're going to continue to listen to our customers. And, uh, we know that business users want to be more productive and want easier to use tools. And that's what we'll be working on >>Mira bitey enough. And thank you so much for coming on the Cuba. It was a real pleasure talking to you. Likewise, thank you so much. And thank you for tuning into the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm Rebecca Knight stay tuned.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The CUBE, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we're live here in Las Vegas. Behind me is the VM Village, this is The CUBE on the ground live at VMworld, I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. Excited to have Sanjay Poonen, Cube VIP new badge that's going out. Five or more times you get a special badge on the website Chief Operating Officer, Chief Customer Operations as well at VMware, Sanjay. >> I think I won one of your hoop madness what do you call those Cube >> John: Yeah, that's right. You did get one of those. >> One of them, so add that to the smallest. >> Came in second to the bot, next year you won. We're going to have to check the algorithm on it that's before we had machine learning, so... Sanjay, great to see you. >> Always a pleasure, John and Dave, thank you for having me here. >> So, you know, in fairness to the VMware management team I got to say, great content program. Usually you can see, kind of, maybe some things that are kind of a little futuristic on the spot big time, on the content. True private cloud, data that Wikibon reported on, you guys are right in line with that. Hybrid-cloud is where its going from multi-cloud. You talk multi-cloud, the Kubernetes orchestration vision for Cloud Native, and even you were doing some interviewing on stage. >> Trying to be Anderson Cooper. >> So, tell us, what's your perspective because you got to balance here you got the reality of the Amazon relationship front and center, delivered big time there, shipping, western region, VMware on-prem, and on-cloud and this new cloud native vector of orchestration and simplicity. >> Yeah, I think, at least from our perspective as I describe in sort of that one chart where I try to put it in Sesame Street simple terms as I like to describe. VMware is one of the most fundamental companies that had a incredible impact in the data center, taking more costs and complexity. We are the defacto backbone of almost everybody's data center, but as the data center moves to the cloud you got to ask yourself, what's the relevance, and we've now shown, same way with the desktop going to mobile, and that's the end-user stuff that we've talked about the last few shows. But let's focus on that cloud part. We really felt as people extended to the public cloud we had to change our strategy to not seek to be a public cloud ourselves, and that's the reason we divested VCloud Air, and focused on significant things we could do with the leading public cloud vendors. As you know, Andy Jassy is a classmate of mine, Pat, Raghu, myself, began the discussions with Andy two years ago, and we announced the deal last year in October. This year having him on stage was, for me, personally a dream come true, and really nice to see that announcement, but we wanted to make sure we were also relevant to some of the other clouds. So earlier this year, in February, we announced Horizon Cloud, the VDI product manager. Today, we announced Kubernetes VMware, Pivotal and Google Form in Kubernetes, IBM Cloud. So all of the top four clouds, AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM have something going with VMware being with Pivotal. That's a big statement to our multi-cloud vision. >> And what a changeover from just two years ago when the ecosystem was, kind of, like a deer in the headlights, not knowing which way to zig or zag, do they cross the street. Where are we going with this? Now the clarity's very clear, cloud, and IoT, and edge with Amazon right there, a lot of the workloads there with multi-cloud. So the question I got to have you is that, as we just talked to the Google guys, is VMware turning into an arms dealer? Because that's a nice position to be at, because you're now driving VMware into multiple clouds. >> I think, you know, when I was on your show last time I described this continent called VMware, and then bridges into them. (John laughs) Let me try another and see if this works. That was good, but it had its 12-month shelf life. Think about the top four public clouds as sort of Mount Rushmore type figures. Each at different heights, AWS, Azure, Google, IBM Cloud, in market share they're the top four. If you want to build a house on top of Mount Rushmore, okay, it could work, but you're going to have to build it on top of one president's head. The moment you want to build it, you need some concrete infrastructure that fills in all the holes between them. That's VMware. It's the infrastructure platform that can sit on top of those varied disparate levels of Mount Rushmore, and make yourself relevant from on. So that's why we fell, whether you want to call that a quintessential platform, an arms provider, whatever it is, for the 4,400 cloud providers, plus the top four or five public cloud players today, VMware has to be relevant. We weren't two or three years ago. Now, for the top three, we're very relevant. >> I call it a binding agent. You're the binding agent across clouds, that's what you're really trying to become. But I wonder if, you know, you're talking about the clarity. I mean, VMware, things are good right now. Two years ago, was looking kind of hmmm, maybe not so good, with license growth down, and now it's up, stock prices double digits, >> Stock prices almost highest >> Okay, so I want to understand the factors behind that. You mentioned the clarity around vCloud Air and the AWS agreement, clearly. The second I want to attest is, the customer reality of cloud, that I can't just ship my business to the cloud, ship my data to the cloud. I got to bring the cloud model to the data. Did that in your conversation with customers, those two factors lead to customers being more comfortable, signing longer term agreements with you guys. Is that a bit part of the tailwind? I wonder if you could discuss that. >> Yeah, Dave I think that's absolutely right. One of the things I've learned in my 25 years of IT is, you want to keep being strategic to your customers. You never want to be in a place where you're in a cul-de-sac. And I started to sense, right, not definitively, but perhaps two years ago, there was a little it of that cul-de-sac perception as our license revenue was growing, particularly on this cloud strategy. Are you trying to be a public cloud, are you not, what's your stance versus AWS as one example, and with vCloud Air, there was a little bit of that hesitation. And if you asked our sales teams, the clarifying of our cloud strategy, which last year was okay but didn't have the substance or the punch. Now you've got an AWS coming on stage, and the other cloud providers where we have substance. I think that clarifying the cloud strategy game the ability for customers to say, even while they were waiting for AWS to be shipped, the last year, three or four quarters are spending of on-premise VMware stuff has gone up, 'cause they see us as strategic. The second aspect I think is our products are now a lot more mature than they were before outside of B sphere. VMware cloud foundation, which consists of storage, networking, VSAN, NSX, and you've talked to those people on your stage, workspace one, end user computing. These have really, really helped, and I think the third factor is, we've really focused on building a very strong team, from Pat, myself, to Raghu, Rajeev, Ray, Mauricio, Robin, I think it's a world-class infrastructure, so we just added Claire Dixon as our Chief Comms Officer on eBay. This is for us now, and everyone in the rest of the organization, we want to continue building a world-class sort of warrior-style strength in numbers. >> Quick follow-up if I may, just a little Jim Kramer moment. And the financial's looking good, you just raised four billion of cheap debt, right the operating cash flow, three billion dollars, and the nice thing about the clarity around vCloud Air is, the capital expenditure, it's just a very capital-efficient model that you guys have now, and I've been saying, you can't say it, but to me the stock's undervalued. When you do the ratios and the multiples on those factors, it looks like a cheap stock to me. >> John: I would love to see you buy it because we have to disclose it, the big position in VMware. >> No, no, no. >> We don't have any stock >> I wish we did. >> We just want to keep growing and the market will fairly value us over time. >> Yeah, it will. >> Well you guys had a good team at VMware, so let's just go back and unpack that. So there was a transformation. Peter Burrows was talking about IBM over the years, had a massive transformation, so really kind of a critical moment for VMware as you're pointing out. We had this great discipline, great technology, great community folks, still there now, as you mentioned, but that transition from saying, we got to post a position, are we in cloud or not, let's make a decision and move on, and as Dave said, it's good economics behind not having a cloud, but I saw a slide that said VMware Cloud, you can still have a cloud strategy using Amazon. Okay, I get that. So the question for you is this. This is the debate that we've been having. Just like in the cryptocurrency market, you're seeing native tokens in cryptography, and then secondary tokens, just one went crazy today. With cloud, we see native cloud, and then new clouds that are going to be specialty clouds. You're seeing a huge increase the long-tail power law of cloud providers that are sitting on other clouds. We think this is a trend. How does VMware help those potential ascensior clouds, the Deloitte clouds, the farming drone cloud that's going to have unique applications? So if applications become clouds, how does VMware help that? >> That's a really good question. So first off, we have 4,400 cloud providers that built their stacks on VMware. And it could be some of these sourced. Probably the best example are companies like Rackspace, OVH, T-Systems. And we're going to continue to empower them, and I think many of them that are in country-specific areas, France, Germany, China, Asia, have laws that require data to be there, and I think they quite frankly have a long existence, and some of them like Rackspace have adapted their model to be partnering with AWS, so we're going to continue to help them, and that's our VMware cloud provider program, that's going to be great. The other phenomenon we see happening is these mini data centers starting to form at what's called the edge. So edge computing is really almost like this mobile device becoming bigger and bigger, it becomes like a refrigerator, it becomes like a mini data center, and it's not sitting in the cloud, it's actually sitting in a branch someplace or somewhere external. VMware Stack could actually become the software that powers that whole thing. So if you believe that basically cloud providers are going to be three or four or five big public clouds, a bunch of cloud providers are country-specific, or vertical-specific, again in these edge computings, VMware becomes quintessentially important to all of those, and we become, whether you call it a platform, a glue, or whatever have you, and our goal is to make sure we're pervasive in all of those. I think it's going to, world is go, going to go from mobile cloud to cloud edge, I mean the whole word of cloud and edge computing is the future. >> So you believe that there potentially could be another second coming of more CSPs exploding big time. >> Especially with edge computing, and country-specific rules. There's some countries that just won't do business with a US public cloud because of whatever reason. >> Well, many of those 4,400 would say, hey, we have to have a niche so we can compete with AWS, so we don't get AWS-ized. So what's your message to those guys now that you're sort of partnered up with AWS? >> Listen, OVH is a good example. Virtuastream's another, I'll give you two good examples. OVH, we sold vCloud Air to them. We are helping those customers be successful. I go to some of those calls jointly with them, they are based in France expending some of their presence to the US, and have got some very specific IP that makes their data centers efficient. We want to help then be successful. Some of the technology that we've built in vCloud Air, we're now licensing to them so we can them be successful. Virtustream, you know Rodney Rogers being on your show. Mission-critical apps is tough for some of the public clouds to get right. They've perfected the art, and I've known them from my SAP days. So there's going to be some of these other clouds that are going to be enormously successful in their niche, and their niche are going to get bigger and bigger. We want to make sure every one of them are successful. And I think there's a big opportunity for multiple vendors to be successful. It won't be just the top three or four public clouds. There will be some boutique usage by country or some horizontal or vertical use case. >> Good for an arms dealer. Well this is my whole point, this is what we've been getting at. We're kind of riffing in real time, little competitive strategy, we got the Harvard MBA and I'm the Babson guy, we'll arm wrestle it out here, maybe do some car karaoke together. But this brings up the question, and I've been saying for a long time on The Cube, and Dave and I have been talking about, we see a long tail, torso neck expanding, where right now it's a knife-edge, long tail, top native clouds and then nobody else. So I think we're going to see this expand out where specialty clouds are going to come out for your reasons. So that is going to open up the door, and those guys they're not going to want their own cloud. >> Sanjay: I agree. >> And that's a channel, an app, who knows? >> You look at an example, one, two other examples of specialty clouds, these are SAS vendors. If you look at two vertical companies, Viva and Guidewire. These are SAS companies that are in the life sciences and insurance space. They've been enormously successful in a space that you're probably maybe a Zapier Salesforce would have done, but they have been focused in a vertical market, insurance and life sciences. And I think there's going to be many providers the same way at the IS level or the PAS level, to also be successful and we welcome, this is going to be a large multi-cloud world. >> Edge cloud. You guys talking about the edge before. Pat had the slide of the pendulum swinging. >> Sanjay: Exactly. >> What is that edge cloud do to the existing business? Is it disruptive or is it evolutionary in your opinion? >> It's disruptive in the sense that, if you've taken a hardware-centric view of that, I think you're going to be disrupted. You take things like software-defined WAN, software-defined networking. So I think the beauty of software is that we're not depending on the size of the hardware that sits underneath it, whether it's a big data center or small edge of the cloud. We're building this to be an all-form factors, and I agree with Marc Andreessen in the sense the software's eating up the world. So given the fact that VMware >> And the edge. >> Yeah, our premise is if there's more computing that's moving to the edge, more software define happening at the edge, we should benefit from that. The hardware vendors will have to adapt, and that's good. But software becomes quintessential. Now I think the edge is showing a little bit of, like, you know, Peter Levine had a story about how cloud computing might be extinct if edge computing takes off. Because what's happening is this machine starts to get bigger and bigger and sits in a branch or in some local place, and it's away from the cloud. So I think it actually is a beautiful world where if you're willing to adapt quickly, which software lets you do, adapt quickly, I think there's a bright future as world moves cloud, mobile, and edge. >> Great stuff, Sanjay, and I was referencing car karaoke, you have on your Twitter >> Oh the carpool karaoke. >> The carpool karaoke. >> It was a fun little thing. Maybe we could do it together, three of us some time. (John laughs) >> I don't do karaoke. Final... >> Just sing, man Just be out there doing your thing. >> I embarrass myself on The Cube enough, I don't need karaoke to help there. >> David: I'm in. (laughs) >> All right, I'll do it. All right, final question for you. >> That's a deal. Let's do it. >> Final question, Michael Dell and we're talking, the world's upside down right now, the computer industry has been thrown up in the air, it's going to be upside down, reconfiguration. You've been in the business for a long time, you've seen many waves. Actually the waves now are pretty clear. What's the fallout going to be from this for customers, for the vendors, for how people buy and build relationships in this new world? >> I think there's a couple of fundamental principles. I talked about one, software, let's not repeat that. I think ecosystems rule. It's really important that you don't look at yourself as having to own the full stack, you know VMware's chosen to be hardware-dependent. Yes, we're owned by Dell, but you've seen us announce a HP partnership here, right? You've seen us do deals with Fujitsu. We had AWS Cloud and Google Cloud. So when you view the world, I love this line by Isaac Newton, he said, "I see clearly because I stand on the shoulders of giants." And to me, that's a very informed strategy to actually guide our ecosystem strategy. Who are the giants in our space? It's the companies that are relevant, with the biggest market caps. Apple, Google, Microsoft, you know, AWS is part of Amazon, and then you know, HP, EMC, Dell, so and so, we list them, by my SAP. If we're relevant to all of them, I'd love to see the momentum of VMworld and the momentum to reinvent start coalescing. Collectively there's probably a hundred thousand people who come to all of our VMware vForums. Andy Jassy told me he expects 40,000 at re:Invent, and maybe across all of his AWS summits, he has a hundred thousand. I was sharing with him an idea. Why don't we have these two amoebas of growing conferences start to coalesce where we mingle, maybe 20% goes to both conferences, but we'll come to your show and be the best software vendor, that hijacks your show, so to speak, (John laughs) I didn't use that word. But we become the best vendor, and we'll roll out the red carpet to you. Now we've got a collection of 200,000, we couldn't have done that on our own. That's an example of AWS and VMware partnering. Now it doesn't have to be exclusively AWS, we could do it with another partner too. Microsoft doesn't show up at the AWS re:Invent conference, we do. Similarly we could maybe do something very specific with Azure and VDI at the Microsoft event, or Kubernetes and Google. So for VMware, our strategy needs to be highly relevant to the power players in the ecosystem, and the guiding our software-defined strategy to make that work, and I think if we do that, you know, you could see this be a 10 billion and bigger company. >> Well it says it's not a zero sum game, >> Sanjay: No, everybody wins. >> And if you can stay in the game, everybody wins, right. >> And I think in the software-defined infrastructure space, we like our odds. We feel we could be the leading player in that software-defined area. >> And it changes and reimagines that relationship between how people consume or procure technology, because the cloud's a mosaic, as Sam Ramji was telling me earlier. >> Oh you had Sam on your show? Wonderful. >> I had him on earlier, and he sees the cloud as a mosaic. >> He's a fantastic thought leader in open source, we were deeply grateful to have him at our event today. >> Andy Jassy, your classmate and friend, collaborator, he was onstage, great performance that he gave. Really talking to your crowd, saying, "We got your back," basically. Not a barney deals, not a optical deal, we are in on it, we're investing, and we got your back. That's interesting. >> We want to be with all of the key leaders that are driving significant parts of the ecosystem, we want to be friends, our tent is large. If everybody. Provided there's, like you said, not a barney announcement, so provided there's value to the customer. If there is, our tent is large, right? We will have point competitors, you know, here and there, and you know me, I'm very competitive. >> John: (laughs) No! >> I've not named competitors too much in this show. >> Really, really. >> But, if anything now, my mind's a lot more focused on the ecosystem, and I want to make this tent large for as many, many players to come here and have a big presence at VMworld. >> And the ecosystem is reforming around this new cloud reality, and the edge is going to change that shape even further. >> Competing on value, competing in a new ecosystem requires a new way to think about relationships. >> If I could give you one other example, then. In the world of mobile, who would have thought that the most important company to mobile security and enterprise to Apple is VMware now, thanks to AirWatch, or to Samsung, whatever it might be, right. This is the world we live in, and we have to constantly adapt ourselves. So maybe next year we'll be talking about IoT or something different, and their ecosystem. >> Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, good friend inside The Cube, always candid. Thanks for sharing your commentary and color on the industry, VMware and your personal perspective. I'm John Furrier, Cube coverage live in Las Vegas, here on the ground floor in the VM Village. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break.