>>Yeah. Welcome back to a W s reinvent 20 twenty-one. This is the live. In addition, the last year, of course, it was virtual. This is probably the most important hybrid event of the year. Over 20,000 people. We have two sets here at the Cube. My name is David. I'm really excited to have Caroline see more on the vice president of product marketing at Serato, which is now an H p e company. And Daniel, who is the director of worldwide partner Essays at A W s. Folks, welcome to the good to see you. >>Yeah, great to be here. So, >>Caroline, you got some news. Why don't we start their hard news? We always like to start with that. >>First of all, I think I just like to talk a little bit about the acquisition because it has been acquired by H. P. And in September, we announced, um, disaster recovery as a service is part of the Green Lake platform. And so that's really exciting. Both from, uh, customers as well is also H B customers. But the innovation continues here at a W s reinvent, we are announcing a new solution 02 in cloud, which is a disaster recovery for Amazon. Easy to, um, and if I think about the value that it brings to the customers, it's delivering orchestrated disaster. Recovery is delivering that simplicity at scale and scale is very important aspect because it will deliver that from tends to thousands of work clothes and as well, it's helping organizations to drive more operational efficiencies around their processes. So that's sort of a nutshell of the news. The cloud for a W s >>great. Thank you for that. So I wanna ask you, obviously, in lock down, people look to the cloud. Uh, and you know, data protection used to be just back up, and then people realize that recovery is important, but it used to be a bolt on an afterthought. You sort of launch the application of the service. And so we got to protect this thing and whatever and throw it on there that that's unacceptable. Today, if you're not going to run your digital business with a bolt on, So what? Our customers telling you in terms of what they want to see from their data protection portfolios and how are you seeing the ecosystem and a W s helping them to integrate that >>absolutely well to your point, the pandemic has absolutely accelerated a lot of businesses movement into the cloud. So companies that hadn't formerly thought about using cloud technologies are now doing that. And for them, in order to have a very simple and easy and scalable data protection solution, is critical for them to feel comfortable into moving into a W s. And so that's what we're seeing from a lot of customers. Um, and of course, back to your point about recovery with the challenges around ransomware, Um, that is definitely an area where a lot of companies have just done their back up. But they're also testing it and making sure that it's something that they know that they can rely on, um, as they moved there, workloads into the club. >>And speaking of ransomware, I mean, it's just front and center. Anybody can be a ransomware. Today they go in the dark web by ransomware service. They put a stick into a server and then bad things happen. Hopefully that that individual ends up in handcuffs, but not always so when we've seen Ransom's getting paid $40 million ransom's multi-million dollar. And we all know about the fact that our front and center So what are you seeing in terms of the customer base? How How h b n z two helping and where does a W s fit? Maybe you could start off Caroline. >>Great question, because I think from the perspective, we look at it from the need for recovery. Uh, strategy as part of your overarching, um, security and prevention is is one aspect that you always need two prevention. But to us, it's a matter of not if you're going to be attacked. It's when and when that gets through your firewall. And so you need to be able to have a recovery strategy in place that allows you to recover in minutes to set to within seconds of when that when an attack actually happens. And, um, I can give a case in, for example, for there's a company 10 Carter Protective fabric, textiles manufacturing company, MULTI-MILLION business. And they suffered to to a tax crypto attack first time, and they were using more traditional, um, back up to take. And it took him two weeks to recover having been attacked, and they suffered significant data loss, and then they deployed photo photo. Um, unfortunately, a little while later, they were attacked a second time with more sophisticated case of So it continues. Um, but this time the recovery was very different. What happened was that they were able to recover within minutes and they had seconds of data loss. And that is because of r c d p technology C D. P. Being continuous data protection. And that is with our replication and a unique journaling capability that allows you to, uh, set up the different checkpoint. So you have thousands of recovery points and you can recover to a specific recovery point with within seconds of that attack. Very, very powerful. >>I wanna ask you a question and what Caroline was just talking about with the classic metrics in this business r P O R T r P o recovery point objective. Always say, how much data do you want to lose? And people say none. Okay, how much? What kind of budget do you have? So that's always been the trade-off, although, as you mentioned, it's getting a little bit more cost-effective and then recovery time objective. How long does it take you to get back up. Absolutely. So so. Those are some of the concepts that you were talking about. I wanna ask you, Daniel, it feels like an Caroline. You feel like data protection is now becoming. It's certainly a tight adjacent to overall security. It's not security per se sick of it, so but it's but it's becoming. The lines are blurring. How do you see that you have a shared responsibility model? Where does this whole topic fit in? >>Well, I think lots of companies are really finding a lot of value in their data, right. Whereas, you know, perhaps years ago it was less. It was easy to hang on to it, to actually make it valuable to do metrics and analytics on it to do machine learning, perhaps on it. And so, by having, um, products such as the product, you know, they're now able to hang on to that data and make sure that they have it in perpetuity so that they can do what they need to do on it. So, yes, we're seeing, you know, companies that were traditionally storage cos thinking about security, security cos thinking about data, so yes, all of those lines are being blurred for sure. And I think that, you know, as far as the short security model we think of the you know, we think of our partners and ourselves, obviously as extensions. And we're really looking to have the best customer experience that we can >>can I think every company security company, Obviously you impact enterprise care a lot about security A W s. I don't know any company because I don't really care about security. That's that's not my swim land out of business. If you If you had that attitude now. So from from your standpoint, where does it fit inside of you know, you're you're thinking, How are you guys thinking about security and data protection? Back up and recovery? Is it all just coming together or they still kind of separate entities? >>No, you're absolutely right. It is coming together, and what we're seeing is we're having a lot more conversations with ISO's, um so the more the security offices of organizations and I think what's happening is that's where the budget is to. And so you're saying they're sort of the working together on the I T and also the Office of Security to um so we're having more conversations there, and we see that, as I mentioned before, the recovery strategy is a key element of our focus. And what we can do is part of the overarching strategy of an organization. >>So what? How should we think about the cloud? Is it another layer of protection? Um, is it a replacement for tape? Maybe not, but we need as much protection as possible. So how should we think about the cloud in the context of data protection? >>Well, the cloud, Yeah, absolutely. Um can provide an alternative to tape or, um disc, for example, of this year. We also added support for a mutability preserved for A W S. With so we are ensuring in the fact that you know you can be changed so that that's absolutely critical. >>So that's a a right once read only technology. That's a service that you tap. So your integrating zero was integrating with that capability. So that's another layer of protection. That's another layer of protection. And then, of course, you know there's there's gaps, is another part of the strategy. So let's talk strategy for a minute. What's the I know it's not one size fits all, but what are you seeing as best practice strategies for customers to protect themselves against traditional just human error? Cyber attacks? What's the what's the sort of prevailing approach? How should we think about that? >>Well, I mean, you're absolutely right. Those the, you know, the filed elections, the database corruptions, and so our solutions, that is, our continuous data protection. It absolutely is, um, the ability to be able to get that granular level of recovery, which you can do with backups. I'm not saying that backup isn't part of your overall strategy, but if you're actually trying to recover quickly and within seconds to whether it's an attack to whether it's a file deleted, a database corruption, you need that continuous data protection. And that's something that you need to us that we've been delivering since the day that um was formed. So >>that's your secret sauce is it is a very granular ability to dial down based on your r p o. That's requirements based on the application requirements, uh, and then bring in the cloud for things like mutability. Maybe gapping. Maybe Last resort is still the last resort. I don't know. Maybe >>there. So, um, you know, a w s to be a target for disaster recovery. So all back up. >>You talk about that? >>Yeah. So, with what we have enabled is first of all, if you want to, um, my great, your work clothes to a W s. And we're seeing an awful lot of that. We provide that capability. So the mobility aspect, if you are looking at instead of an on premises disaster recovery site, you can use a W S D R site. Um, And if you want to back up to a W s and use, um, cost efficient storage, we support that with cloud tearing and mutability. And as I say today, we're announcing cloud for a W s, which is once you've got your work clothes in a W s. We can protect them now in, um, in a W s itself. So the full spectrum. And then earlier this year, we announced for communities for US work clothes, So we're really trying to ensure that we can protect any A W s workload wherever it is. >>So I look around here pretty impressive given that we're in the second year of a pandemic here, pretty packed floor. But the ecosystem is just exploding. That's gonna make you feel good. Cos like choosing to partner with a W s leaning in writing to your cloud-native fooling. Maybe give us the update on how you see this partnership. >>Well, I mean, just to Caroline's earlier point, you can see how Xero is continuing to innovate, right? And that's really key. So, um, having a cloud-native solution and then also having a solution that works for us. We're seeing a lot of companies thinking about containers thinking about server lists. And so, you know, the best partnerships that we have are the ones in which they're innovating with us continuously. And I've known about since I started in 2014. So they've been around for a long time, and they're continuing, um, to do that. And they are working closely with us to do P O. C. D. S. And and to help our customers really get what they need, um, in the data protection space and continuing to innovate, which is >>your customers, they want that they need that your your deep into data protection. Yes. You're scale of cloud But you're not going to have the the capabilities of Stack. So that one plus one hopefully is greater than to How do you where can we find out more information about you know, the new solutions? What's the what's the call to >>action culture as well? A couple of things. We've, uh we just We just launched deserted for a W s hands-on lab. And what that does is allow in your own time in your own environment to be able to try with a W S as a target and back up. Um, so we've just launched that and that enables you to see how it works with a W S. We also have for communities, um, lab as well, so you can see how it works with a K s. Uh, coming soon, we're going to have to in cloud lab that you can actually see how to protect your workload in the cloud in a W s. So those are the really the best ways to be able to Well, for a call to action is try. The lab really is >>awesome. Guys, thanks so much for coming to the Cube. Very important topic and keep up the good work. >>Thank you. Thank you. Very well. So >>we're seeing the evolution of data protection rethinking data protection in 2020. No longer is it a Bolton cloud modernization with deep stacks. Fine granularity for your r p o. But also quick recovery protection from Ransomware. It's a whole new world, and we're here to cover it. My name is David. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. We'll be right back. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Mm, yeah.

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE! Covering ZertoCON 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is theCUBE. I'm Paul Gillin here on the ground in Boston at ZertoCON 2018, the final day of Zerto's user conference. Here in Boston and joining me now is Avi Raichel. (laughing) I hope I didn't butcher that too badly. Avi Raichel, who is Chief Information Officer at Zerto, and welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, Paul. >> CIO at a software company is a bit of an unusual position, right? Because you're a user of the product, so you have to give unvarnished feedback to your developers, but you also have input into how the product is built. How does a CIO interact with the product side of the business? >> Yeah, you're spot-on Paul. As the CIO I've got a unique point of view within the management team of the company, because I have the same role as the customers we're trying to sell to. So yeah, the product team and the marketing team and the sales team can use me as a sounding board to see that we're taking the product to the right direction. And of course we use it, so we can give honest feedback on how it is working. >> Do you see CIOs becoming increasingly involved in the resilience issue? Is this becoming a C-level issue? >> Yeah, I believe it is, and this because of the digital transformation. Because almost any organization in the world is going through a digital transformation, one way of another I.T is becoming more and more critical part of the business. So once so much relies on I.T, I.T resilience becomes a significant issue because, let's say your health care provider now, a lot of your operations are digitalized. Can you really afford the down time? What does it mean? So this is become a strategic risk for organisation. You can talk about significant revenue leakage, about huge brand, reputation if you have problems. So, I.T resilience is become massive, every organization needs to have. >> A lot at stake. Talk about your own internal I.T infrastructure. Your use of clouds, and where are your data centers located? >> So, like most organizations, we are in this landscape of hybrid-multi cloud I.T infrastructure. We have few data centers, we have small data center that is on-prem. We have the Colo data center, and of course we use the public clouds and modern, one of them, and I think this will be the reality going forward. I think once the hype of the cloud settled down, everybody understands that you don't put everything in one single cloud. And I.T needs to enter this hybrid reality, and part of I.T resiliency is this workload mobility, and having the option to move workloads between the data centers. >> So what is the business case that you would make for going multi-cloud? >> I think there are a couple of reasons. One, is one of the barriers to going in to the cloud, the public cloud, one of the concerns is the locking. I think organization needs to worry that the putting all the eggs in one basket, and when you craft cloud strategy, one of the things you need to pay attention to is do you have an exit strategy? What happens if tomorrow, prices are not to your liking, or, you don't feel you're getting the right operational level? So you need to be able to move, and make sure this is not a one-way journey that leaves you in doubt. Without options. That is one aspect. The second aspect is, in the end, you will find that many workloads are optimized for a specific cloud. Some things can run better on the dual, some things can run better on the beleur, so, or on Google, so by natural evolvement, you will find yourself with several clouds. And of course, there are workloads that in the end, shouldn't go to the cloud. That's part of the hype, is over, that not everything is cloud-ready, and sometimes you should leave some workloads on-prem or in a Colo data center. That creates this hybrid reality. >> Are you able to dynamically shift workloads between cloud providers, or do you pretty much assign a workload to a specific provider and leave it there? >> You can. You can move them. That's one of the nice things that a Zerto product has not between all the providers in the world, but with the Zerto product, you can actually mobilize from your data center, or to a Dual or AWSM between them. So this is something that, you definitely can do. And I really feel that the next few years we will see more and more of that, as you will start to have smart placement of clouds, depending on commercials, quotas, and optimization. >> Of course, you're a user of your company's product. What features do you find most useful in running the I.T operations at Zerto? >> So, I think that the product started of course from V.R with continuous data protection. And that is the basic usage, and for that this is a great product that can give you the peace of mind that your infrastructure is resilient, and in case something happens, you can recover within, I feel, seconds, within few minutes, which is great. But I also find this workload mobility feature very useful. Just last month, we've mobilized about 50 workloads from our on-premise data center to the Colo data center, and it was just a few hours of work, with the Zerto product and without any downtime, which is fantastic. >> We're just two days out as we record this, two days out from the implementation of the general data protection regulation in Europe, which you do a lot of business in Europe, how has that impacted your role as a CIO? >> I think as a CIO, all these regulations are something that you must address, and you must have an honest look at at all the data flows within the organization, and make sure that you're complying with this regulation, so this is an initiative we took on in the last few months, together with our legal department, to map everything, and make sure that once the regulations go live, we are ready. >> One of that tiny percentage who expects to be ready in time? >> I think at this stage nobody can really say exactly what ready means, because this is new, but we're making an honest effort to complete the mapping, and to make sure that the way we understand, and what our consultants tell us, that the regulations means, that we are complying, with, we feel we are relatively in a good place. This is not something organizations should ignore. >> Right. So as you talk to your peers, to other CIOs and other organizations, what do you see as being the principal priorities they have, over the next 12 months or so? >> So, I think that CIOs, still like I said, with digital transformation, where technology is the engine, driving force will be the customer experience, employee experience. I think everybody is still early-on with the journey to the cloud, and this is something that will still take few years, until everybody completes the journey. Cyber is, of course, strategic risk for companies, so almost all CIOs deal with developing and building security program that tackles not only predict and protect, but also the detect and response capabilities that the organization require. I think finding ways to leverage the data assets within the organization is a great opportunity for I.T. And I think there is a number of technologies that are reaching their maturity stage, things like Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, blockchain and I.O.T. So, CIOs should find a way, the right use case, to implement those technology for the organization. Not for the sake of implementating cool technologies, but because they really bring disruptive innovation that can generate significant business value. >> Very exciting time and also a risky time. >> Yup, of course. >> Avi Raichel, thankyou for joining us on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> We'll be right back. From ZertoCON in Boston, I'm Paul Gillin, this is theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is The Cube, I'm Paul Gillin. We're here at ZertoCon in Boston, the final day of ZertoCon. Beautiful day in Boston and a large crowd still here for the event, Zerto's user event. With me is Ziv Kedem the CEO of Zerto and the founder of Zerto. This must be a thrill to you, being here with all these customers, having seen this from the ground up. What are you taking back from the experiences this week? >> This experience is great because it gives us and opportunity to directly interact with our customers, give them a lot of content, educate them and get feedback. Which is important. So I really enjoyed, we had an advisory board with really good attendance. Several companies in the large, high part of the Fortune 500. I seen at one of the things, this is our third event this year, so they were saying is it like the sum of our announcements this year or the things that we discussed in the advisory board of last year and the year before that. So we like to listen because at the end of the day, our customers know their needs much better than we can. >> They come here and they see their feedback to you come to fruition in your latest products. So what are you taking away? Are there one or two big issues that you're taking away from your interactions this week? >> One thing that we're seeing is that everyone is going through the transformation. We've started talking about it this year, and that's exactly what they're doing. All the customers are going through a transformation. Digital transformation, business transformation, IT transformation. So these things are really top of mind for now. And they're all trying to figure out how to do it. They are trying to figure out how to adopt clouds, they all have cloud initiatives, they all know that they are under-utilizing the public cloud. They also realize that they need a hybrid approach, it's not a one size fits all. So we are really hearing that from many customers and how that can relate to their needs of what's in each day, but also into their plans of their of the things they are building over the next two, three, four, five years. >> And what role do you see Zerto playing and enabling this digital transformation? >> So really one of the things that you need to transform is resilience. One of our big announcements is the IT resilience platform. You need your IT to be resilient, because it goes beyond what you choose to be. When people were thinking about resilience's as okay, when something external hits me, it I am hit by a hurricane or an airs quay. But now they also have other bad things like ransomware, like all the security things. >> Right. >> But what we've really figured out, is if their IT is not resilient, then when they try to disrupt themselves, when they are trying to transform, they have new business models, new competition, new technologies. So everyone is transforming and they have to reinvent themselves, and IT is playing a very clear roll in that. Especially in the world today with the so high customer expectations. Customer expectations are getting higher and higher, so they need to supply that to their customers, they need to transform. If your IT is not resilient, that stops you. Everything just stays in place because you know that anything that you remove, will break something else. And when you want to go and move more into things like cloud, like new technologies, you want to change, we see tons of merchant acquisitions. That drives a lot of consolidations, data center consolidations, migrations. They really understand now that if their IT is resilient enough, then they can do these things. They can just decide to do these things and follow where the business wants them and so they can deliver this job and customer experience, increase their revenue and deliver bottom-line savings for their companies. And if not, then they're always the ones that people are waiting for. So there are higher expectations from IT. IT is expected to be in the front seat, driving the customer experience, not in the back seat getting orders and always saying okay, we cannot do that, we have to wait. So they the expectations, it's a great opportunity for IT. They can do much more strategically in their business, but they need to build a very resilient infrastructure. We see Zerto as a tool enabling them, this is a platform they can build their resilience. So really that announcement was that they have one platform that is simple, scalable and covers all of their resilience needs. There's no need to have different tools, this one for DR, this one for back up, this one for migration, this one for information, no. Everything comes in one platform, fully API, fully automated, so they know they are protected. They can focus on generating business, not handholding infrastructure. >> And you've been focusing a lot on convergence I know over the last year. How is that coming to fruition in the latest version of Zerto? >> So this is something we're implementing in every version, we're putting more of the convergence up. But we made a very big announcement of what we call Zerto 7. We're on 6 now. That version will be available in Q1 of 2019. This version will take care of the entire lifespan of the data. So if you need something to be available, if you're had a problem and now you want to recover something from seconds ago, seven seconds ago, but if you now have some discover request coming from your legal department, and you need to be able to recover the things years ago. So this is our messaging on Zerto 7, whether seven seconds or seven years, all in one platform. It's really putting this continuous thing that we've already been afraid of. Like continuous data production, Zerto is practically the world's leading product at that. Now also take it on the back end and how do you retain this data for a very long time in efficient ways, how you can use it, put it on a much cheaper storage so you don't need, because cost reduction is top priority for every CIO today. >> As you look forward, it seems there is a lot of activity right now in information governance and data catalogs. Company's are really getting a handle on what information they have, partially driven by regulations. How do you see Zerto's role evolving in that aspect of helping organizations just understanding what their data landscape is? >> This is exactly what we're talking about, it's all about cataloging when they have it, how long they have it, and giving them the right tool to have it all in one place. The real problem is not that they don't know any specific detail, it's just that it's scattered across different applications, different tools, different systems. The systems don't talk to each other, and when they do this is sort of, when you lump a bunch of tools together, it always looks like a bunch of tools lumped together. Right, you cannot hide this. And putting it all in one simple thing that solves their needs. To talk about what they need rather than the concepts they had before with DR, backup, migrational information, separate tools. So it really messes up everything, where this relates that you have a workload, you know to predict it, you can control how long you retain this data. Because it's just as important as it is for organizations to keep their data, it's also important for them to know, okay once I don't need it, if this is data for three years, I do not want to have this data after five or four years. Because they need to know where it is, otherwise they're in a scope, having data that they don't know about. So they want to have very clear rules and have something that they'll know, this is exactly what to have, not less, but also not more. >> As you look forward, one of the jobs of the CEO is to define a vision. Where is Zerto going? When you look out over the next three years or so, where is Zerto going? >> So we have defined in Zerto our mission statement, as building a wall of uninterrupted IT, or technology, because IT is the center of this technology. And this has been with us for many years, and that is still where we're driving. When we're looking out two, three years, it's all about a convergence of all the IT resilience, into this one platform. This is what we hear from our customers, our customers are excited to get this all together because no one likes managing tools. I've just been in a meeting with an extremely large customer, and they're building, okay we need to see how that maps into my business objectives. I have just made a huge acquisition, we've got another one on the way and everything, I want to have something which I know how that goes. So I can go to my board and say this is what we have, this is how we're protected, this is my risk assessment, and I am absolutely confident that anything there won't leave me desolate. I'm not depending on 500 people to be doing disparaging things and I say if all of them do the right thing, then we will be resilient. So we need to know, okay we're doing this, and it will work. That is the definition of resilience for us. >> Would you say the resilience message that the customers have internalized this, do they understand it well, and are they ready to take it back to their business? >> Absolutely. Absolutely, this is, I wouldn't say that they internalize it, I think that we internalized that, right. We got that from the customers, so following it right to resilience, this is something Gartner part of it, and how did they get it? By talking to customers. If you look at the concepts, these were already things that the customers needed. It's just when we say, alright this is exactly the initiative that we have, and this is what we need to do. We're trying to figure out how to do. We've got all these high level initiatives, and now we need to see how we can actually take them in to action. So this message is, we're seeing it very well aligned with our customers. >> It's a clear mission, clearly defined. Ziv Kedem, thanks very much for joining us on The Cube. >> Thank you very much! >> We're here at ZertoCon 2018 in Boston. I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering ZertoCON 2018, brought to you by Zerto. >> This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillin, we're on the ground here in Boston for ZertoCON 2018 The third ZertoCON, and with me is a gentleman who has been to all the ZertoCONs as well as many years before that, Gil Levonai, the Chief Marketing Officer at Zerto, welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me here. >> You were one of the first people at Zerto I understand, way back in the day >> Yeah, yeah I'm kind of like ground zero type person here in Zerto, I managed back then the product team and the marketing team. Then we grew bigger and bigger And now I own all of the marketing for Zerto. >> So how do you feel coming to a conference like this with all these people here, you've got big name keynote speakers, having joined the company as one of the earliest employees, what does that feel like? >> It's like, I have three teenagers, so I know what it means to be proud of your child, it's a very proud moment, okay. Because really, I think the caliber of customers we see here in the conference, first there's the quantity of customers, et cetera, but also the caliber of customers, the caliber of discussion that's happening here, is really, it really makes me proud. And knowing that this company started a few years ago from, just like any other startup, a very small company, and now we're really making a dent in the industry, and changing and making customers successful, is really really proud. >> Your first user conference is a milestone of sorts isn't it? >> Yeah, two years ago it was really like having a child now it's like we've gotten into a rhythm we know what we're doing now, we know what the conference looks like and we know what it means. But, just like with children, the older they get, the bigger the challenges. Same thing, the bigger the conference gets, different challenges, and it's a always hectic few weeks. >> But very valuable because you come here and you have a chance to talk to customers nonstop really for three days, what are you hearing from them? What are the trends that are emerging to you from the conversations you're having out there? >> So with, going back to why I was hired to Zerto, as one of the first few people, is actually a good example of that. Because I was hired because I was actually a marketing and product management guy, hired in Zerto before we actually wrote our first line of code. Why? Because we want to make sure that we talk to customers and we get their feedback and we get our guidelines in what we should be doing, back in that day. So from that point on, we always are doing the same thing, we're listening to our customers. that's kind of like a key DNA for Zerto. So this conference is an amazing place to do that, to really hear from our customers what are there challenges, we had our Customer Advisor Board, we had our Partner Advisor Board here, but also everybody hallway conversation with the customers is the same thing. What do you need to do, what are you trying to do that you're not capable of doing? And that's where we actually understand the trends and the marketing. We have John and people like that, that analyze, are amazing but there's nothing like an unbiased conversation with a customer and understanding their needs. And what we see, is really two major aspects. And kind of like as you've mentioned in the skin. One, the delays are totally different. It's really, really, really unacceptable to be down, or to lose data, done. No industry can do that, no type of customer, no size of customer, it doesn't matter if you're retail, if you're airline, or if you're banking. >> Paul: Five nines isn't enough anymore. >> People, we all have phones, we used to always on, and everything needs to be always on. So that drives the whole narrative of guys, I can't tell you hey I'm going to recover from two hours ago, it's not enough anymore, okay. The second thing is they are all facing a lot of complexities in kind of like the changing infrastructure. They all want to move to cloud, we hear about continuing, we hear about the cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud. And it's all really coming from the right reasons, it's coming from trying to change their business models. It's coming from trying to change their cost structure. But it introduce so much complexity, so between these two, they just need to really rethink the way they're doing what they're doing. In terms of data protection, mobility, et cetera, and that's where we came to this kind of like high-resilience platform concept, from the needs of the market. >> So we see customers, they want more flexibility, they want to use multiple clouds, they want hybrid clouds, they want to shift workloads around seamlessly, all of this has risk, and resilience in an environment like that is challenging. What is Zerto going to do to make that more seamless for them? >> I think resilience is double challenging. It's challenging because, really to be successful, you can't only be kind of resilient to hey how am I addressing bad things have happened. You need to be resilient to the fact that, you changing your business is part of your business now, okay. And how am I effectively change my business, run forward, run fast, while I'm not leaving behind any gaps, or anything that hey, I might get struck by some bad luck, or intentional cyber thing, okay and lose my business, and that happens also. You'll see major companies that have big impacts on their business because of events like that. So, the key to doing that, is really, to A, simplify the way you protect everything, and really move to what we call continuous protection, and that's from a product perspective, but think about it from a meta doz perspective. You need to have the ability to always recover anytime, anywhere, whatever you need, realistically, whenever you need it. It's the only way possible, and only technologies that are, we started from, we're coming from the high-end of the market to this much wider market. Because we're coming from protecting huge Oracle databases, with huge change rates, which seconds of our bills, okay. That's our DNA, that's what we know to now take that into entire kind of like IT, say you need that IT to be available wherever you need it, and you need to be able to protect it at any point in time, and move everything around between clouds as you say, and that's where our contacts are messaging the market. You need to be able to do that, our platform is the way to do that. But that's the only way you can actually, not only survive what's going on, but also thrive in this environment. >> Now that's because you have a converged platform, and the time is right, I hear Zerto executives saying the time is right for convergence, why is that? >> It's when you see the market, look today at any player in the back of the R-space website, all say the same thing. Why are all, everybody's saying the same thing. Everybody's saying the same thing, because everybody's trying to sell the same thing. Everybody's trying to set all of these business cases okay. And some don't fully converge, or they do it doesn't matter, the fact of the matter is, from a customer perspective, if you look at any vendor today in this space, all of them are trying to provide all of these services. So that's where we see, hey, this is what's happening. And the customers are also telling us, guys, we are using, we just heard it on stage now, we are using Zerto instead of our backup. Why? Because in the short-term retention you're giving us a much better solution. So we see from the customers that they're saying hey, I want less systems, I want one place where I go, and I can mobilize, I can protect, I can recover, I have compliance, I have ransomware protection, all of that in one place, so the market is really telling us convergence is happening right there. And that's where I kind of like, we believe we have the best DNA in the base for technology to provide that converged solution, because eventually it's about the atomic engine of how are you doing your protection, and I think we have the best avenue there. But if you look at, everybody's the same, talking the convergence game. >> Well so where is backup going long-term, does eventually does backup disappear, or does everything become continuous? >> Not in a million years, literally, okay no pun intended. Because everybody, the legal holds, the compliance >> Paul: Retention schedules. >> The act of backing up your data, your application, that's not going away, that's going to stay. We believe that there is a shift that needs to take place in the market that we're leading is, what do I, what does short-term backup mean, okay. 'Cause short-term backup is really, kind of like the same thing today as recovering from once more, it's the same thing as mobilizing an application. And that needs to be continuous, and then you need one platform that can also take care of your long-term, you know months years, depending on what industry you're in, regulated backups. I just talked to a large customer of ours last night, in our break party, he said, hey I'm doing 14 days, and I don't care about anything after that. I'm in an unregulated industry, and I do what's good for my business, and for my business, 14 days is good. I don't really need anything, I sometime have some more copies later, but that's it. So the actual uses of backup depends on the industry. But it's not going away, there's no question that the use case of backup is staying, we think that the way technology, the technology that drives that should change. >> As we're talking today, we 're two days out from the implementation of GDPR in the European Union, does this have an impact on your business? >> Oh a major impact, first of all, we're a company, number one, I don't know if you know but, >> International company. >> Yes, and we work globally, we have offices and places in Europe, and customers in Europe, and operations in Europe, so all of that. We're marketing, you know our marketing guy, we're marketing in Europe. We actually had a session here in the conference, a joint session by our corporate council, and some customers talking about the GDPR, because it's actually a joint project in Zerto, from all sides, to say okay, what do we do with the GDPR. So us as a company, that's number one. Second thing is for our customers. There's a number of things, that you know, for example, take a look at knowing where your data is. Which is part of GDPR, we had helped by identifying exactly where is your data, where is your back up data, where is your application data, et cetera. There's lots of kind of like, we believe there's going to be more and less compliance kind of like related things that we converge for GDPR, but also you know there's like the rights to be forgotten, what does that mean about backups. Do I need to now go open all my backups >> Paul: Still open. >> So if you can see, and again, not me but we have people that go down, for example, the right to be forgotten is one of the less stronger rights. Because I think even the regulator understood, it's a bit hard to forget someone from you know, do I need to open my backup from like five years, and delete something, that's going to be a huge cost. So there's definitely going to be implications, and I think time will tell where this is going, in terms of like what are the bigger implications. >> No shortage of agendas for Zerto going forward, that's for sure. >> Gil: Oh no shortage, no. >> Gil Levonai thank you very much for joining us, Chief Marketing Officer at Zerto. >> Thank you very very much, >> We will be right back, I'm Paul Gillin, this is theCUBE. >> Gil: Thank you very much. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston Massachusetts it's theCUBE covering ZertoCON 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillin. We're here in Boston for ZertoCON and with me is Rob Strechay. He's the Senior Vice President of Product for Zerto and Rob, I understand here you have one of the big items of news is Zerto 7 is being announced. Tell us about what's new in Zerto 7. >> Yeah, so we're announcing Zerto 7, it'll be out in Q1 of 2019. We're real excited because really it's the first time that the IT Resiliance Platform that we've put out will also include in the convergence of backup, disaster recovery and cloud mobility all into one singular platform. We've been building upon this platform for years. People have come to know us for continuous data protection and our journal-based data protection. And now we're extending that over time to give people a better view and better resiliancy across near-term and the long-term. >> Alright now I think of back up as being kind of table stakes in the resiliance game, but the backup features are actually new for you in this release. Is that right? >> Absolutely. What we've done is enhance what we had. We had some backup features in there already. We already got used for recovering for things like ransom-ware used in our journal level file recovery where people can go back like a DVR, a few seconds before they got hit. Be able to pull the file, folder, or entire virtual machine back and pull that out like if you were using a backup. In fact, much quicker our customers tell us than Legacy Backup. But table stakes is having enhanced indexing and search capabilities across all of your different platforms. Having dedicated workflows that are integrated into the current recovery workflows. Things of that nature, that really are in Zerto 7 that would take us to the next level. >> Now backup is a fairly painful process for most IT Admins though, what is Zerto doing to make that simpler? >> Yeah, I think the great thing is we have over 6,000 customers already that utilize us and trust us for data protection on a daily basis. We're extending those workflows to say okay, I need a weekly, a monthly, a quarterly, or a daily even and I want to keep that for a certain amount of time. Right now they would see maybe one day to 30 days back in what we call our Journal. And now we're extending that so they see the points in time beyond that and helps to simplify those workflows for those customers. Because, really the complexity comes from I have a media server, I have single points of failure, I have to worry about did I get that backup or not. The journal technology we have actually alleviates that. Plus, we've been doing this at scale for many years with many thousands of customers and we know that that's been one of the pain points for our customers around backup too. We didn't take this lightly to go further into this market. We thought that, really, the market was ripe for convergence of these products. >> Alright, now go one layer deeper on journaling. I mean that's a technology that's been around for a long time, but really not so much in the backup space. What are you doing that's different with your approach to journaling? >> Yeah, so we actually brought this out back in 2011, so we've been doing it for about seven years now. And we took a different approach to disaster recovery. Allows for a lot more granular recovery in seconds. So you have recovery point objectives that are very near and then you get quicker recovery time objectives, as well. So, a lot of this journaling technology was how do you have the right order fidelity of all of these systems as an application? Now doing that and saying okay I want to take a point in time and I want to keep it as my gold copy for three months because I have a business or a corporate mandate that says this is the retention periods that I have. Really brings together what we've been doing in journaling for years as we went from being the first to put out a hypervisor-based replication and journaling system. Then we took it to what they call the DR as a surface market when we took customers to public cloud in 2014 and back from public cloud in 2016 and now we really have any-to-any technology across those different platforms all using that same underlying journaling technology. But it does it in different ways in clouds versus say VMware's hypervisor. >> Now how do you coordinate the complexity of that environment? You've got customers who have some backup on prims, some backup in the cloud that maybe have multiple clouds. How do you coordinate all that backup? >> Yeah, I think it's been really one of the things we've been working on for some amount of time already. So they're starting to see the fruits of our labor about how you have a distributed, scalable system that automatically does that. So, we're not just a replication engine or just a journaling system, we actually embed the orchestration in automation into the system. That way it's wrapped in. It's kind of like having an engine and having the steering wheel at the same time. Then we wrap a nav system, which is our analytics product, around that to give people guidance on how to utilize it. So, to your point, we try to make it easy. In fact one of our pillars is it better be simple, like real simple, otherwise we don't ship it. >> There are a lot of vendors in the various aspects backup, DR market, how is Zerto differentiating itself? >> Yeah, I think that we're not doing backup. We're doing a completely different way of taking this. Backup has been done typically either with agents or with snapshot technology. Maybe you go back four hours in time if you get hit with ransom-ware. Because we already have and can see that data, in the journal, seconds of granularity. So say somebody's loading a database on a Friday night and doing an ETL into the database, of a terabyte of data. We'll see that terabyte go in and all those changes happen. You could actually utilize the journal after you've actually done the load so you can take a pre and a post copy of that. So I have before I made the changes and after I made the changes which really helps customers in a unique way. >> You get into some very large file sizes, I would imagine, when you're doing that many copies of data How do you manage the volumes? >> Yeah, we have some technology inside the product that is space efficient, uses things such as compression and other types of technology. For doing the backup and in Zerto 7 for long-term retention or secondary storage we're partnering with people like HPE and their StoreOnce product set. We have other partners of ours like Exit Grid here and their NFS enabled secondary storage. Plus we'll use some of the typical S3, SMB, as well as cloud-based as targets because we think that they have some of that built-in hardware and built-in technology that really does a better job of doing the compaction. We're not trying to be a purpose built appliance for everybody, we look at being a software company and leveraging those really good secondary storage devices and clouds as the targets. >> One of the themes of the conference we heard John Morency of Gartner talking about this morning was resilience and really moving beyond backup and disaster recovery to business resilience. How well are your customers taking to that message? >> It's amazing, I think that when I go out and talk to our customer CIOs and VPs of Infrastructure or even just to Sys Admins, they're looking for resiliancy. They're looking for a single product that can bring together backup, disaster recovery and that cloud mobility. I think, you heard one of our customers up on stage with Morency, Jamie from Takata, that really has embraced that. They're actually, kind of, I would say pushing the cutting edge of seven different cloud providers and utilizing us as that platform. >> Paul: By design seven different cloud providers. >> Yeah, by design and part of that is if you look at GVPR and all the different regulations across the world they have to deal with, it's easier for them. But they know that they utilizes us as an IT Resilience platform that enables them to go those different places. >> You mentioned ransom-ware earlier, have you seen the growth of ransom-ware continue or is that now slowing down finally being displaced by crypto-mining and some other. >> I think that it's always there. I think that it flares up from time to time. And it's not a, as Ziv, our CEO and Founder, said yesterday, it's not if you're going to get hit by ransom-ware, it's when. And I think that being resilient and having a resiliency in depth type of approach really is important for that as well. >> So, in the time that we've got left talk about the future. What's the road map for Zerto going forward the next couple of years? >> Yeah, so this year we're laying out the IT Resilience platform, building it out and continuing to build upon what we've done as we see and where we see a lot of our customers going. Containers are a big thing and we see that infusion of containers in our customer base is growing rapidly. So we'll be looking at some new approaches to that. And we think we're uniquely positioned based on our underlying technology to take advantage of that. Cloud-born apps are a big one, as well. But because we're already in the cloud working with Azure as one of our key partners and Amazon, as well, we get to see how these all come together. And we have a unique seat at the table for going forward. >> Rob, I can't let you go without asking you to stand up please and show the camera the official Zerto colors. If anyone is walking the walk here it's Rob Strechay wearing pants of the official Zerto color. Where do you find pants of that color? >> You can find them, the great thing is being in Massachusetts there's a lot of different companies that make Nantucket Red, which is not really Nantucket Red, it's more like a Fire Engine Red, but these in particular I had made for me for this conference this week, so. >> I figure you can find anything in the Boston area. >> Absolutely. >> Rob Strechay, thank you very much for joining us. >> Rob: Much appreciate it, thanks for having me on. >> I'm Paul Gillin, this is theCUBE. (tech music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018 presented by siliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is siliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. It's the 12th year of the event, the fifth year we've actually had theCUBE here. Dave Vellante, my boss, was here the first year. Every other year, I've been kind of manning it solo. Great community here, I talked to a lot of users and really looking at, you know, some of the transitions that are happening in the industry. This event is all about virtualization and Cloud, and to help me put an exclamation point on everything we've been looking at here, and what's happening in the industry, happen to welcome back to the program Rob Strechay who is the SVP of product at Zerto, someone I've known for longer than I even realize, and you know, been on the program many times, But first time since you've been at Zerto. >> Yeah, first time since I was at Hewlett-Packer Enterprise. So, I'm glad to join you guys here, and great event, glad to be able to get down here today. >> You know, Zerto, company we've known for many years. I happen to know one of the earliest investors in the company, and you know, when I look at two of the biggest industry shows, when you talk about Virtualization and Cloud, it's VMworld and it's Amazon's Reinvent show. >> Right. And, I remember like the first or second year we did Amazon Reinvent, the Zerto booth was like right behind us, and so your company that really spans that gammon, helping customers with that, so I want to get your viewpoint, you talked about why people come here, but what are you hearing from the users? What are some of the big challenges they're facing, and how are they looking to manage some of those transitions? >> Yeah, I think it's really critical to have events like this that are, you know, a lot of different vendors that are here because I think when we see a number of companies going out and looking, and I was with a customer down in New York City yesterday, the software for FinTac. And what they were looking at is, how do we leverage multi-cloud? It becomes very important. They're looking at, it's not going to just be Amazon, it's not just going to be Azure, it's not going to be VMC on AWUS, they're looking at how they're going to have a multi-cloud strategy. And I think that when, what we're hearing from customers is there's a lot of confusion in the market, and I think that's why this program and others are really great at cutting through what is real, what's not real, how do you look for the ability to have that data mobility between clouds but with security. Especially today's like Privacy Day, you know, on the 25th, so, you know, you start to look at it and go, hey, security's a big thing, and a big theme from what people were saying here today too. >> Yeah, and one of the user interviews I really loved today talked about one of the biggest challenges he saw, he said, gosh, security, think about the Intel discussion there, what's that going to mean? And he actually said, performance issue actually doesn't fit, isn't a big deal for him from an architectural standpoint. Security? Oh my gosh, he's in healthcare. (laughs) If he's in violation, or if patient information gets out there, you know, this is the kind of things that put companies out of business. >> Absolutely, yeah, and I think that's what we're hearing. I mean, especially yesterday, it was okay, how do you layer encryption on top of your solution? How do you utilize the different types of secure transfers? How do you make sure the data is secure? There's a lot about that resiliency of the data, and making sure you can get it back, and it's immutable for that matter. >> Yeah, one of the things when we talk to customers, it's funny, in the industry we're always arguing as to what's the right terminology? It's like, I still get to have a company that said they had a convergence problem that they were trying to fix, and also it's like, hyper-cloud, multi-cloud, no, they have a Cloud strategy. And yes, they're using sass, yes, they're using public Cloud, and yes, almost everybody's got something in their data center. How do we get our arms around it? How do I have the services that work with me wherever I am, whether that's data protection, security, replications. So where's Zetro fit in that discussion, and how are customers doing at getting their arms around these challenges? >> So I think a lot of when I'm out talking to the CIO's and the VP's of infrastructure and having those conversations, a lot of what we help them understand is here's where you need to go, and here's the choices you need to make. Are you going to use Azure? Do you have an EA with Microsoft? Because you've probably been paying for Azure credits that you're not using, so start there. It's simple, it cost you nothing extra. Get your feet wet, dip your feet in there. We see a lot of customers of ours that use DR's as a service as the first stepping stone to getting into the Cloud. It's a nice, easy way in, they can get their feet wet, they can test out the performance, the security, they can do user acceptance testing without actually having to go there. They can also get a realistic view of the cost. I think that was talked about earlier today too. With some of the Amazon stuff is that really, you have to understand the cost. It's not the same as owning it on Prime. But then again you're not having the on Prime anymore, so if you can get away with that, when we see people taking strategies, a lot of it is data center consolidation, but maybe now I'm down from six data centers to two. And I still need to have that third copy. Where do I put that third copy? Do I put it at another data center? Do I go to a manage service provider, cloud service provider, or do I go to the public cloud? So, what we try to do is offer them a platform, the Zerto platform, that can actually take them to all those different places. We can take them there and bring them back. Yes, people use use for DR, but really that data mobility and the data flexibility really helps them stay away from the vendor lock-in as well. >> What are you hearing from customers when they talk about vendor lock in? There's very few companies out there that do a good job at being, it's like, oh, the VM ware, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, we can actually help you across the board there. >> Rob: Yeah. >> How much is lock-in a concern, and how do you as a software company stay agnostic and still fit into all of those environments? >> Yeah, the staying agnostic is really tough because some people are nicer than others, you know, to work with, and you know you try to not pick your favorites, but a the same time, we let our customers drive us to where they are going. I think that when we started to look at the bigger picture, people start out, you know, Amazon's the 800 pound gorilla in the space, everyone tries Amazon first. Maybe they didn't like or have the experience they thought they would, it was a lot more work than they thought it was going to be, so they start to look at other options. So when we started out, in 2014 we've been shipping our to Amazon, DR to Amazon part of our platform. Now, over the last year, we've added in the go-to and go-back from Azure, and we'll soon release the next iteration of that next month that will take even further among and across those different platforms. And I think to your point, it's a how can we give our customers choice? If you want to use a manage service provider, such as an IBM where they're based on Cloud foundation from VMWare, you can use that. If you want to then go from there to Amazon, our product will actually enable you to do that. And I think that's what we can do is look at our customers, and they've, luckily enough, driven us to this heterogeneous cloud environment. >> I want to get your comment on something. When people talk about compute moving to a more utility model, but it's not the way utility was where if I'm getting energy, as a consumer, from one place or another, I don't care whether it's wind, solar, or coal, nuclear, because I'm just getting it. When I look at Cloud computing, even infrastructure's a service. There's things that need to happen. When I talk to most software companies, it's yes, I'm going to support across the board, but there's special integration. There's things that I can do to make Amazon better, Azure better, Google better, and it's all a little bit different, and even with things like cooper netties, it's not homonogizing IT. The big problem we see out there is IT is a heterogeneous mess. There's never killing anything, it's all add this and add this, and now we've got a bad episode of Hoarders. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Is what we got, so I'm curious from a customer standpoint and from a product standpoint, maybe you know you could talk a little bit about that. >> I think our customers have been very clear to us that's simplicity, and I think that's what you're getting at is that simplicity is job one for us. If we're not being simple about what we do, and we're not really trying to make it all that one platform, we're not doing our job. We're doing a disservice our customers. So our Azure product looks identical to our AWS looks identical to our IBM looks identical to one of my other cloud service provider's products. Looks the same as your on Prime VMWare to VMWare or VMWare to HyperV for that matter. I think that part of it is that we've taken an approach that, exactly that. We got to be heterogeneous, but we've got to make it all look the same and be the same user experience. So, I think what we as an industry can do better is really focusing on user experience and single platform to help across these because like you said, we have a customer, he uses both AWS and Azure. And he was on of our first customers on AWS and one of our first customers using our Azure product. He said that certain Linux systems actually run better on Azure than they did on Amazon, and that surprised him. But he was able to go up and test them out, put them up there, felt them over, and do them in a test bubble, and see how well they ran, and I think to your exact point it's that was a surprise to him, and I think it's that your mileage will vary with the different clouds, and being able to go there and test on them is very important 'cause you're going to find that, like he did, he's a smaller company, it's a refabrics manufacturer, TenCate, they really focused on having that multicloud strategy because for them, they didn't want to have all their eggs in one basket either, but they found that certain applications ran better on Azure, certain ran better on AWS, so they're going to have that multicloud strategy. >> Alright, Rob, help bring us home. What brings Zerto to an event like this, kind of user groups in general, to VTUG specifically? >> Yeah, so the VTUG, we've been a long term supporter of this, I think since pretty much the founding of the founding of the company, so one of the reasons is a lot of out customers come to... So, we want to support them getting more knowledge out there, obviously we get to reach more customers and more potential customers, but at the same time, it's about the community and building that community. We look for more, in fact, we're starting to do even local user groups of our own. We've seen that the user groups have fallen off, and in particular around disaster recovery, in the IT resiliency, there's really no place to go. You had ISACA, you had different organizations for certifications, but really, that community where I can go and understand what are my peers doing, and get that group learning is so important, and that's why we've been a long term supporter of this. >> Alright, well Rob Strechay, really appreciate you helping me wrap up, put an exclamation point on what's going on here at the show as well as in the industry are all the major changes happening, virtualization and Cloud. Make sure to check out TheCUBE.net for all of our coverage. We have a huge line up of 2018 events. Feel free to reach out to the team. As always, I'm really to get on Twitter, I'm just @stu, @-S-T-U, and thank you so much of watching, I'm Stu Miniman, and you've been watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave ante coast of the hub. We're two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. Our 12 year covering VMware's annual conference day, formerly world. Now VMware Explorer. We're kicking off day tube, no Sharma director of product management at Google cloud GCP. No Thankss for coming on the cube. Good to see you. >>Yeah. Very nice to see you as well. >>It's been a while. Google next cloud. Next is your event. We haven't been there cuz of the pandemic. Now you got an event coming up in October. You wanna give that plug out there in October 11th, UHS gonna be kind of a hybrid show. You guys with GCP, doing great. Getting up, coming up on in, in the rear with third place, Amazon Azure GCP, you guys have really nailed the developer and the AI and the data piece in the cloud. And now with VMware, with multicloud, you guys are in the mix in the universal program that they got here had been, been a partnership. Talk about the Google VMware relationship real quick. >>Yeah, no, I wanna first address, you know, us being in third place. I think when, when customers think about cloud transformation, you know, they, they, for them, it's all about how you can extract value from the data, you know, how you can transform your business with AI. And as far as that's concerned, we are in first place. Now coming to the VMware partnership, what we observed was, you know, you know, first of all, like there's a lot of data gravity built over the past, you know, 20 years in it, you know, and you know, VMware has, you know, really standardized it platforms. And when it comes to the data gravity, what we found was that, you know, customers want to extract the value that, you know, lives in that data as I was just talking about, but they find it hard to change architectures and, you know, bring those architectures into, you know, the cloud native world, you know, with microservices and so forth. >>Especially when, you know, these applications have been built over the last 20 years with off the shelf, you know, commercial off the shelf in, you know, systems you don't even know who wrote the code. You don't know what the IP address configuration is. And it's, you know, if you change anything, it can break your production. But at the same time, they want to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. You know, the self-service the elasticity, you know, the, the economies of scale efficiencies of operation. So we wanted to, you know, bring CU, you know, bring the cloud to where the customer is with this service. And, you know, with, like I said, you know, VMware was the defacto it platform. So it was a no brainer for us to say, you know what, we'll give VMware in a native manner yeah. For our customers and bring all the benefits of the cloud into it to help them transform and take advantage of the cloud. >>It's interesting. And you called out that the, the advantages of Google cloud, one of the things that we've observed is, you know, VMware trying to be much more cloud native in their messaging and their positioning. They're trying to connect into that developer world for cloud native. I mean, Google, I mean, you guys have been cloud native literally from day one, just as a company. Yeah. Infrastructure wise, I mean, DevOps was an infrastructures code was Google's DNA. I, you had Borg, which became Kubernetes. Everyone kind of knows that in the history, if you, if you're in, in the, inside the ropes. Yeah. So as you guys have that core competency of essentially infrastructures code, which is basically cloud, how are you guys bringing that into the enterprise with the VMware, because that's where the puck is going. Right. That's where the use cases are. Okay. You got data clearly an advantage there, developers, you guys do really well with developers. We see that at say Coon and CNCF. Where's the use cases as the enterprise start to really figure out that this is now happening with hybrid and they gotta be more cloud native. Are they ramping up certain use cases? Can you share and connect the dots between what you guys had as your core competency and where the enterprise use cases are? >>Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think transformation means a lot of things, especially when you get into the cloud, you want to be not only efficient, but you also wanna make sure you're secure, right. And that you can manage and maintain your infrastructure in a way that you can reason about it. When, you know, when things go wrong, we took a very unique approach with Google cloud VMware engine. When we brought it to the cloud to Google cloud, what we did was we, we took like a cloud native approach. You know, it would seem like, you know, we are to say that, okay, VMware is cloud native, but in fact that's what we've done with this service from the ground up. One of the things we wanted to do was make sure we meet all the enterprise needs availability. We are the only service that gives four nines of SLA in a single site. >>We are the only service that has fully redundant networking so that, you know, some of the pets that you run on the VMware platform with your operational databases and the keys to the kingdom, you know, they can be run in a efficient manner and in a, in a, in a stable manner and, and, you know, in a highly available fashion, but we also paid attention to performance. One of our customers Mitel runs a unified communication service. And what they found was, you know, the high performance infrastructure, low latency infrastructure actually helps them deliver, you know, highly reliable, you know, communication experience to their customers. Right. And so, you know, we, you know, while, you know, so we developed the service from the ground up, making sure we meet the needs of these enterprise applications, but also wanted to make sure it's positioned for the future. >>Well, integrated into Google cloud VPC, networking, billing, identities, access control, you know, support all of that with a one stop shop. Right? And so this completely changes the game for, for enterprises on the outset, but what's more like we also have built in integration to cloud operations, you know, a single pane of glass for managing all your cloud infrastructure. You know, you have the ability to easily ELT into BigQuery and, you know, get a data transformation going that way from your operational databases. So, so I think we took a very like clean room ground from the ground of approach to make sure we get the best of both worlds to our customers. So >>Essentially made the VMware stack of first class citizen connecting to all the go Google tool. Did you build a bare metal instance to be able to support >>That? We, we actually have a very customized infrastructure to make sure that, you know, the experience that customers looking for in the VMware context is what we can deliver to them. And, and like I said, you know, being able to manage the pets in, in addition to the cattle that, that we are, we are getting with the modern containerized workloads. >>And, and it's not likely you did that as a one off, I, I would presume that other partners can potentially take advantage of that, that approach as well. Is that >>True? Absolutely. So one of our other examples is, is SAP, you know, our SAP infrastructure runs on very similar kind of, you know, highly redundant infrastructure, some, some parts of it. And, and then, you know, we also have in the same context partners such as NetApp. So, so customers want to, you know, truly, so, so there's two parts to it, right? One is to meet customers where they already are, but also take them to the future. And partner NetApp has delivered a cloud service that is well integrated into the platform, serves use cases like VDI serves use cases for, you know, tier two data protection scenarios, Dr. And also high performance context that customers are looking for, explain >>To people because think a lot of times people understand say, oh, NetApp, but doesn't Google have storage. Yeah. So explain that relationship and why that, that is complimentary. Yeah. And not just some kind of divergence from your strategy. >>Yeah. Yeah. No. So I think the, the idea here is NetApp, the NetApp platform living on-prem, you know, for, for so many years, it's, it's built a lot of capabilities that customers take advantage of. Right. So for example, it has the sta snap mirror capabilities that enable, you know, instant Dr. Of between locations and customers. When they think of the cloud, they are also thinking of heterogeneous context where some of the infrastructure is still needs to live on prem. So, you know, they have the Dr going on from the on-prem side using snap mirror, into Google cloud. And so, you know, it enables that entry point into the cloud. And so we believe, you know, partnering with NetApp kind of enables these high performance, you know, high, you know, reliability and also enables the customers to meet regulatory needs for, you know, the Dr. And data protection that they're looking for. And, >>And NetApp, obviously a big VMware partner as well. So I can take that partnership with VMware and NetApp into the Google cloud. >>Correct. Yeah. Yeah. It's all about leverage. Like I said, you know, meeting customers where they already are and ensuring that we smoothen their journey into the future rather than making it like a single step, you know, quantum leap. So to speak between two words, you know, I think, you know, I like to say like for the, for the longest time the cloud was being presented as a false choice between, you know, the infrastructure as of, of the past and the infrastructure of the future, like the red pill and the blue pill. Right. And, you know, we've, I like to say, like, I've, you know, we've brought, brought into the, into this context, the purple pill. Right. Which gives you really the best of both tools. >>Yeah. And this is a tailwind for you guys now, and I wanna get your thoughts on this and your differentiation around multi-cloud that's around the corner. Yeah. I mean, everyone now recognizes at least multi clouds of reality. People have workloads on AWS, Azure and GCP. That is technically multi-cloud. Yeah. Now the notion of spanning applications across clouds is coming certainly hybrid cloud is a steady state, which essentially DevOps on prem or edge in the cloud. So, so you have, now the recognition that's here, you guys are positioned well for this. How is that evolving and how are you positioning yourself with, and how you're differentiating around as clients start thinking, Hey, you know what, I can start running things on AWS and GCP. Yeah. And OnPrem in a really kind of a distributed way. Yeah. With abstractions and these things that people are talking about super cloud, what we call it. And, and this is really the conversations. Okay. What does that next future around the corner architecture look like? And how do you guys fit in, because this is an opportunity for you guys. It's almost, it's almost, it's like Wayne Gretsky, the puck is coming to you. Yeah. Yeah. It seems that way to me. What, how do you respond to >>That? Yeah, no, I think, you know, Raghu said, yes, I did yesterday. Right. It's all about being cloud smart in this new heterogeneous world. I think Google cloud has always been the most open and the most customer oriented cloud. And the reason I say that is because, you know, looking at like our Kubernetes platform, right. What we've enabled with Kubernetes and Antho is the ability for a customer to run containerized infrastructure in the same consistent manner, no matter what the platform. So while, you know, Kubernetes runs on GKE, you can run using Anthos on the VMware platform and you can run using Anthos on any other cloud on the planet in including AWS Azure. And, and so it's, you know, we, we take a very open, we've taken an open approach with Kubernetes to begin with, but, you know, the, the fact that, you know, with Anthos and this multicloud management experience that we can provide customers, we are, we are letting customers get the full freedom of an advantage of what multicloud has to has to offer. And I like to say, you know, VMware is the ES of ISAs, right. Cause cuz if you think about it, it's the only hypervisor that you can run in the same consistent manner, take the same image and run it on any of the providers. Right. And you can, you know, link it, you know, with the L two extensions and create a fabric that spans the world and, and, and multiple >>Products with, with almost every company using VMware. >>That's pretty much that's right. It's the largest, like the VMware network of, of infrastructure is the largest network on the planet. Right. And so, so it's, it's truly about enabling customer choice. We believe that every cloud, you know, brings its advantages and, you know, at the end of their day, the technology of, you know, capabilities of the provider, the differentiation of the provider need to stand on its merit. And so, you know, we truly embrace this notion of money. Those ops guys >>Have to connect to opportunities to connect to you, you guys in yeah. In, in the cloud. >>Yeah. Absolutely >>Like to ask you a question sort of about database philosophy and maybe, maybe futures a little bit, there seems to be two camps. I mean, you've got multiple databases, you got span for, you know, kind of global distributed database. You've got big query for analytics. There seems to be a trend in the industry for some providers to say, okay, let's, let's converge the transactions and analytics and kind of maybe eliminate the need to do a lot of Elting and others are saying, no, no, we want to be, be, you know, really precise and distinct with our capabilities and, and, and have be spoke set of capability, right. Tool for the right job. Let's call it. What's Google's philosophy in that regard. And, and how do you think about database in the future? >>So, so I think, you know, when it comes to, you know, something as general and as complex as data, right, you know, data lives in all ships and forms, it, it moves at various velocities that moves at various scale. And so, you know, we truly believe that, you know, customers should have the flexibility and freedom to put things together using, you know, these various contexts and, and, you know, build the right set of outcomes for themselves. So, you know, we, we provide cloud SQL, right, where customers can run their own, you know, dedicated infrastructure, fully managed and operated by Google at a high level of SLA compared to any other way of doing it. We have a database born in the cloud, a data warehouse born in the cloud BigQuery, which enables zero ops, you know, zero touch, you know, instant, you know, know high performance analytics at scale, you know, span gives customers high levels of reliability and redundancy in, in, in a worldwide context. So with, with, with extreme levels of innovation coming from, you know, the, the, the NTP, you know, that happen across different instances. Right? So I, you know, I, we, we do think that, you know, data moves a different scale and, and different velocity and, and, you know, customers have a complex set of needs. And, and so our portfolio of database services put together can truly address all ends of the spectrum. >>Yeah. And we've certainly been following you guys at CNCF and the work that Google cloud's doing extremely strong technical people. Yeah. Really open source focused, great products, technology. You guys do a great job. And I, I would imagine, and it's clear that VMware is an opportunity for you guys, given the DNA of their customer base. The installed base is huge. You guys have that nice potential connection where these customers are kind of going where its puck is going. You guys are there now for the next couple minutes, give a, give a plug for Google cloud to the VMware customer base out there. Yeah. Why Google cloud, why now what's in it for them? What's the, what's the value parts? Give the, give the plug for Google cloud to the VMware community. >>Absolutely. So, so I think, you know, especially with VMware engine, what we've built, you know, is truly like a cloud native next generation enterprise platform. Right. And it does three specific things, right? It gives you a cloud optimized experience, right? Like the, the idea being, you know, self-service efficiencies, economies, you know, operational benefits, you get that from the platform and a customer like Mitel was able to take advantage of that. Being able to use the same platform that they were running in their co-located context and migrate more than a thousand VMs in less than 90 days, something that they weren't able to do for, for over two years. The second aspect of our, you know, our transformation journey that we enable with this service is cloud integration. What that means is the same VPC experience that you get in the, the, the networking global networking that Google cloud has to offer. >>The VMware platform is fully integrated into that. And so the benefits of, you know, having a subnet that can live anywhere in the world, you know, having multi VPC, but more importantly, the benefits of having these Google cloud services like BigQuery and span and cloud operations management at your fingertips in the same layer, three domain, you know, just make an IP call and your data is transformed into BigQuery from your operational databases and car four. The retailer in Europe actually was able to do that with our service. And not only that, you know, do do the operational transform into BigQuery, you know, from their, the data gravity living in VMware on, on VMware engine, but they were able to do it in, you know, cost effective, a manner. They, they saved, you know, over 40% compared to the, the current context and also lower the co increase the agility of operations at the same time. >>Right. And so for them, this was extremely transf transformative. And lastly, we believe in the context of being open, we are also a very partner friendly cloud. And so, you know, customers come bring VMware platform because of all the, it, you know, ecosystem that comes along with it, right. You've got your VM or your Zerto or your rubric, or your capacity for data protection and, and backup. You've got security from Forex, tha fortunate, you know, you've got, you know, like we'd already talked about NetApp storage. So we, you know, we are open in that technology context, ISVs, you know, fully supported >>Integrations key. Yeah, >>Yeah, exactly. And, and, you know, that's how you build a platform, right? Yeah. And so, so we enable that, but, but, you know, we also enable customers getting into the future, going into the future, through their AI, through the AI capabilities and services that are once again available at, at their fingertips. >>Soo, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. And, you know, as super clouds, we call it, our multi-cloud comes around the corner, you got the edge exploding, you guys do a great job in networking and security, which is well known. What's your view of this super cloud multi-cloud world. What's different about it? Why isn't it just sass on cloud what's, what's this next gen cloud really about it. You had to kind of kind explain that to, to business folks and technical folks out there. Is it, is it something unique? Do you see a, a refactoring? Is it something that does something different? Yeah. What, what doesn't make it just SAS. >>Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that, you know, there's, there's different use cases that customers have have in mind when they, when they think about multi-cloud. I think the first thing is they don't want to have, you know, all eggs in a single basket. Right. And, and so, you know, it, it helps diversify their risk. I mean, and it's a real problem. Like you, you see outages in, you know, in, in availability zones that take out entire businesses. So customers do wanna make sure that they're not, they're, they're able to increase their availability, increase their resiliency through the use of multiple providers, but I think so, so that's like getting the same thing in different contexts, but at the same time, the context is shifting right. There is some, there's some data sources that originate, you know, elsewhere and there, the scale and the velocity of those sources is so vast, you know, you might be producing video from retail stores and, you know, you wanna make sure, you know, this, this security and there's, you know, information awareness built about those sources. >>And so you want to process that data, add the source and take instant decisions with that proximity. And that's why we believe with the GC and, you know, with, with both, both the edge versions and the hosted versions, GDC stands for Google, Google distributed cloud, where we bring the benefit and value of Google cloud to different locations on the edge, as well as on-prem. And so I think, you know, those kinds of contexts become important. And so I think, you know, we, you know, we are not only do we need to be open and pervasive, you know, but we also need to be compatible and, and, and also have the proximity to where information lives and value lives. >>Minish. Thanks for coming on the cube here at VMware Explorer, formerly world. Thanks for your time. Thank >>You so much. Okay. >>This is the cube. I'm John for Dave ante live day two coverage here on Moscone west lobby for VMware Explorer. We'll be right back with more after the short break.

>> From the theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Well, it looks like hybrid cloud is finally here. We've seen a decade of posturing, marchitecture, slideware and narrow examples of hybrid cloud, but there's little question that the definition of cloud is expanding to include on-premises workloads in hybrid models. Now depending on which numbers you choose to represent IT spending, public cloud only accounts for actually less than 5% of the total pie. So the big question is, how will this now evolve? Customers want control, they want governance, they want security, flexibility and a feature-rich set of services to build their digital businesses. It's unlikely that they can buy all that, so they're going to have to build it with partners, specifically vendors, SI's, consultancies and their own developers. The tug of war to win the new cloud day has finally started in earnest between the hyperscalers and the largest enterprise tech companies in the world. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll walk you through how we see the battle for hybrid cloud, how we got here, where we are and where it's headed. First, I want to go back to 2009, in a blog post by a man named Chuck Hollis. Chuck Hollis, at the time, was a CTO and marketing guru inside of EMC who, remember, owned VMware. Chuck was kind of this hybrid, multi-tool player, pun intended. EMC at the time had a big stake, a lot at stake, as the ascendancy of AWS was threatening the historical models, which had defined enterprise IT. Now around that time, NIST published its first draft of a cloud computing definition which, as I recall, included language, something to the effect of accessing remote services over the public network, i.e., public IP networks. Now, NIST has essentially or since evolved that definition, but the original draft was very favorable to the public cloud. And the vendor community, the traditional vendor community, said hang on, we're in this game too. So that was 2009 when Chuck Hollis published this slide. He termed it Private Cloud, a term which he saw buried inside of a Gartner research post or research note that was not really fleshed out and defined. The idea was pretty compelling. The definition of cloud centered on control, where you, as the customer, had on-prem workloads that could span public and on-prem clouds, if you will, with federated security and a data plan that spanned the states. Essentially, you had an internal and an external cloud with a single point of control. This is basically what the hybrid cloud vision has become. An abstraction layer that spans on-prem and public clouds and we can extend that across clouds and out to the edge, where a customer has a single point of control and federated governance and security. Now we know this is still aspirational, but we're now seeing vendor offerings that put forth this promise and a roadmap to get there from different points of view, that we're going to talk about today. The NIST definition now reads cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, e.g., network server storage, applications and services, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. So there you have it, that is inclusive of on-prem, but it took the industry a decade plus to actually get where we are today. And they did so by essentially going to school with the public cloud offerings. Now in 2018, AWS announced Outposts and that was another wake up call to the on-prem community. Externally, they pointed to the validation that hybrid cloud was real. Hey, AWS is doing it so clearly they've capitulated, but most on-prem vendors at the time didn't have a coherent offering for hybrid, but the point is the on-prem vendors responded as they saw AWS moving past the demilitarized zone into enemy lines. And here's what the competitive landscape of hybrid offerings looks like today. All three US-based hyperscalers have an offering or multiple offerings in various forms, Outposts from Amazon and other services that they offer, Google Anthos and Azure Arc, they're all so prominent, but the real action today is coming from the on-prem vendors. Every major company has an offering. Now most of these stemmed from services-led and finance-led initiatives, but they're evolving to true Azure Service models. HPE GreenLake is prominent and the company's CEO, Antonio Neri, is putting the whole company behind Azure Service. HPE claims to be the first, it uses that in its marketing, with such an Azure Service offering, but actually Oracle was their first with Cloud@Customer. You know, possibly Microsoft could make a claim to being early as well, but it really doesn't matter. Let's see, Dell has responded with Apex and is going hard after this opportunity. Cisco has Cisco Plus and Lenovo has TruScale. IBM also has a long services and finance-led history and has announced pockets of Azure Service in areas like storage. And Pure Storage is an example that we chose of a segment player, of course within storage, that has a strong Azure Service offering, and there are others like that. So the landscape is getting very busy. And so, let's break this down a bit. AWS is bringing its programmable infrastructure model and its own hardware to what it calls the edge. And it looks at on-prem data centers as just another edge node. So that's how they're de-positioning the on-prem crowd, but the fact is, when you really look at what Outposts can do today, it's limited, but AWS will move quickly so expect a continued rapid evolution of their model and the services that are supported on Outposts. Azure gets its hardware from partners and has relationships with virtually everyone that matters. Anthos is, as well, a software layer and Google created Kubernetes as the great equalizer in cloud. And it was a nice open source gift to the industry and has obviously taken off. So the cloud guys have the advantage of owning a cloud. The pure on-prem players, they don't, but the on-prem crowd has rich stacks, much richer and more mature in a lot of areas, as it relates to supporting on-premises workloads and much more so than the cloud players, but they don't have mature cloud stacks. They're kind of just getting started with things like subscription billing and API-based microservices offerings. They got to figure out Salesforce compensation and just the overall Azure service mentality versus the historical product box mentality, and that takes time. And they're each coming at this from their respective different points of view and points of strength. HPE is doing a very good job of marketing and go-to market. It probably has the cleanest model, enabled by the company's split from HP, but it has some gaps that it's needed to fill and it's doing so through acquisitions. Ezmeral, for example, is it's new data play. It just bought Zerto to facilitate backup as a service. And it's expanded partnerships to fill gaps in the portfolio. Some partnerships, which they couldn't do before because it created conflicts inside of HPE or HP. Dell is all about the portfolio, the breadth of the portfolio, the go-to-market prowess and its supply chain advantage. It's very serious about Azure Service with Apex and it's driving hard to win that day. Cisco comes at this from a huge portfolio and of course, a point of strength and networking, which maybe is a bit tougher to offer as a service, but Cisco has a large and fast growing subscription business in collaborations, security and other areas, so it's cloud-like in that regard. And Oracle, of course, has the huge advantage of an extremely rich functional stack and it owns a cloud, which has dramatically improved in the past few years, but Oracle is narrow to the red stack, at least today. Oracle, if it wanted to, we think, could dominate the database cloud, it could be the database cloud, especially if it decided to open its cloud to competitive database offerings and run them in the Oracle cloud. Hmm. Wonder if Oracle will ever move in that direction. Now a big part of this shift is the appeal of OPEX versus CAPEX. Let's take a look at some ETR data that digs a bit deeper into this topic. This data is from an August ETR drill down, asking CIOs and IT buyers how their budgets are split between OPEX and CAPEX. The mid point of the yellow line shows where we are today, 57% OPEX, expecting to grow to 63% one year from now. That's not a huge difference, there's not a huge difference when you drill into global 2000, which kind of surprised me. I thought global 2000 would be heavier CAPEX, but they seem to be accelerating the shift to OPEX slightly faster than the overall base, but not really in a meaningful way. So I didn't really discern big differences there. Now, when you dig further into industries and look at subscription versus consumption models for OPEX, you see about 60/40 favoring subscription models, with most industry slowly moving toward consumption or usage based models over time. There are a couple of outliers, but generally speaking, that's the trend. What's perhaps more interesting is when you drill into subscription versus usage based models by product area, and that's what this chart shows. It shows by tech segment, the percent subscription, that's the blue, versus consumption or usage based, that's the gray bars, yellow being indifferent or maybe it's I don't know. What stands out are two areas that are more usage heavy, consumption heavy. That's database, data warehousing, and IS. So database is surely weighted by companies like Snowflake and offerings like Redshift and other cloud databases from Azure and Google and other managed services, but the IS piece, while not surprising, is, we think, relevant because most of the legacy vendor Azure Service offerings are borrowing from a SaaS-oriented subscription model with a hardware twist. In other words, as a customer, you're committing to a term and a minimum spend over the life of that term. You're locked in for a year or three years, whatever it is, to account for the hardware and headroom the vendor has to install because they want to allow you to increase your usage. So that's the usage based model. See, you're then paying by the drink for that consumption above that minimum threshold. So it's a hybrid subscription consumption model, which is actually quite interesting. And we've been saying, what would really be cool is if one of the on-prem penguins on the iceberg would actually jump in and offer a true consumption model right out of the box, as a disruptive move to the industry and to the cloud players, and take that risk. And I think that might happen once they feel comfortable with the financial model and they have nailed the product market fit, but right now, the model is what it is. And even AWS without post requires a threshold and a minimum commitment. So we'd love to see someone take that chance and offer true cloud consumption pricing to facilitate more experimentation and lower risk for the customer entry points. Now let's take a look at some of these players and see what kind of spending momentum they have. This is our popular XY chart-view that plots net score or spending velocity on the x-axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data set on the... Oh, sorry, net score or spending momentum on the y-axis and pervasiveness or market share on the x-axis. Now this is cut by cloud computing vendors, as defined by the customers responding. There were nearly 1500 respondents in the ETR survey, so a couple of points here. Note the red line is the elevated line. In other words, anything above that is considered really robust momentum. And no surprise, Azure, AWS and Google are above that line. Azure and AWS always battle it out for top share of voice in the x-axis in this survey. Now this, remember, is the July survey, but ETR, they gave me a sneak peek at the October results that they're going to be releasing in the coming week and Dell cloud and VMware cloud, which is VCF and maybe some other components, not VMware cloud and AWS, that's a separate beast, but those two are moving up in the y-axis. So they're demonstrating spending momentum. IBM is moving down and Oracle is at a respectable 20% on the y-axis. Now, interestingly, HPE and Lenovo don't show up in the cloud taxonomy, in that cloud cut, and neither does Cisco. I believe I'm correct in that this is an open-ended question, i.e., who are your cloud suppliers? So the customers are not resonating with that messaging yet, but I'm going to double check on that. Now to widen the aperture a bit, we said let's do a cut of the on-prem and cloud players within cloud accounts, so we can include HPE and Cisco and see how they're doing inside of cloud accounts. So that's what this chart does. It's a filter on 975 customers who identify themselves as cloud accounts. So here we were able to add in Cisco and HPE. Now, Lenovo still doesn't show up on the data. It shows up in laptops and desktops, but not as prominent in the enterprise, not prominent at all, but HPE Ezmeral did show up and it's moving forward in the October survey, again, part of the sneak peek. Ezmeral is HPE's data platform that they've introduced, combining the assets of MapR, BlueData and some other organic development. Now, as you can see, HPE and Cisco, they show up on the chart, as I said, and you can see the rope in the tug of war is starting to get a little bit more taut. The cloud guys have momentum and big account presence, but the on-prem folks also have big footprints, rich stacks and many have strong services arms, and a lot of customer affinity. So let's wrap with some comments about how this will shake out and what's some of the markers we can watch. Now, the first thing I'll say is we're starting to hear the right language come out of the vendor community. The idea that they're investing in a layer to abstract the underlying complexity of the clouds and on-prem infrastructure and turning the world into, essentially, a programmable interface to resources. The question is, what about giving access through that layer to underlying primitives in the public cloud? VMware has been very clear on this. They will facilitate that access. I believe Red Hat as well. So watch to the degree in which the large on-prem players are enabling that access for developers. We believe this is the right direction overall, but it's also very hard and it's going to require lots of resources and R & D. I would say at this point that each company has its respective strengths and weaknesses. I see HPE mostly focused today on making its on-prem offerings work like a cloud, whereas some of the others, VMware, Dell and Cisco, are stressing to a greater degree, in my view, enabling multi-cloud and edge connections, cross connections. Not that HPE isn't open to that when you ask them about it, but its marketing is more on-prem leaning, in my opinion. Now all of the traditional vendors, in my view, are still defensive about the cloud, although I would say much less so each day. Increasingly, they look at the public cloud as an opportunity to build value on top of that abstraction layer, if you will. As I said earlier, these on-prem guys, they all have ways to go. They're in the early stages of figuring out what a cloud operating model looks like, how it works, what services to offer, how to pay sellers and partners, but the public cloud vendors, they're miles ahead in that regard, but at the same time, they're navigating into on-prem territory. And they're very immature, in most cases. So how do they service all this stuff? How do they establish partnerships and so forth? And how do they build stacks on prem that are as rich as they are in the cloud? And what's their motivation to do that? Are they getting pulled, digging their heels in? Or are they really serious about it? Now, in some respects, Oracle is in the best position here in terms of hybrid maturity, but again, it's narrowly focused on the Red Stack. I would say the same for Pure Storage, more mature as a service, but narrowly focused, of course, on storage. Let's talk marketplace and ecosystems. One of the hallmarks of public clouds is optionality of tooling. Just all you do is go to the AWS Marketplace and you'll see what I mean. It's got this endless bevy of choices. It's got one of everything in there and you can buy directly from your AWS Console. So watch how the hybrid cloud plays out in terms of partner inclusion and ease of doing business, that's another sign of maturity. Let's talk developers and edge. This is by far the most important and biggest hole in the hybrid portfolios, outside the public cloud players. If you're going to build infrastructure as code, who do you expect to code it? How are the on-prem players cultivating developer communities? IBM paid 34 billion to buy its way in. Actually, in today's valuation terms, you might say that's looking like a good play, but still, that cash outlay is equal to one third of IBM's revenue. So big, big bet on OpenShift, but IBM's infrastructure strategy is fragmented and its cloud business, as IBM reports in its financial statements, is a services-heavy, kitchen sink set of offerings. It's very confusing. So they got to still do some clean up there, but they're serious about the architectural battle for hybrid cloud, as Arvind Krishna calls it. Now VMware, by cobbling together the misfit developer toys of the remnants from the EMC Federation, including Pivotal, is trying to get there. You know, but when you talk to customers, they're still not all in on VMware's developer affinity. Now Cisco has DevNet, but that's basically CCIE's and other trained networking engineers learning to code in languages like Python. It's not necessarily true devs, although they're upskilling. It's a start and they're investing, Cisco, that is, investing in the community, leveraging their champions, and I would say Dell could do the same with, for example, the numerous EMC storage admins that are out there. Now Oracle bought Sun to get Java, and that's a large community of developers, but even so, when you compare AWS and Microsoft ecosystems to the others, it's not even close in terms of developer affinity. So lots of work to be done there. One other point is Pure's acquisition of Portworx, again, while narrowly focused, is a good move and instructive of the changes going on in infrastructure. Now how does this all relate to the edge? Well, I'm not going to talk much about that today, but suffice to say, developers, in our view, will win the edge. And right now, they're coding in the cloud. Now they're often coding in the cloud and moving work on prem, wrapping them in containers, but watch how sticky that model is for the respective players. The other thing to watch is cadence of offerings. Another hallmark of cloud is a rapid expansion of features. The public cloud players don't appear to be slowing down and the on-prem folks seem to be accelerating. I've been watching HPE and GreenLake and their cadence of offerings, and watch how quickly the newbies of Azure Service can add functionality, I have no doubt Dell is going to be right there as well, as is Cisco and others. Also pay attention to financial metrics, watch how Azure Service impacts the income statements and how the companies deal with that because as you shift to deferred revenue models, it's going to hurt profitability. And I'm not worried about that at all because it won't hurt cashflow, or at least it shouldn't. As long as the companies communicate to Wall Street and they're transparent, i.e., they don't shift reporting definitions every year and a half or two years, but watch for metrics around retention and churn, RPO or Remaining Performance Obligations, billing versus bookings, increased average contract values, cohort selling, the impact on both gross margin and operating margin. These are the things you watch with SaaS companies and essentially, these big hardware players are becoming Azure Service slash SaaS companies. These are going to be the key indicators of success and the proof in the pudding of the transition to Azure Service. It should be positive for these companies, assuming they get the product market fit right, and can create a flywheel effect with their respective ecosystems and partner channels. Now I'm sure you can think of other important factors to watch, but I'm going to leave it here for now. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and please subscribe, check out ETR's website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me, email david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante. You can comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, everybody, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>>Earlier this week, Oracle announced the new X nine M generation of exit data platforms for its cloud at customer and legacy on prem deployments. And the company made some enhancements to its zero data loss, recovery appliance. CLRA something we've covered quite often since its announcement. We had a video exclusive with one Louisa who was the executive vice president of mission critical database technologies. At Oracle. We did that on the day of the announcement who got his take on it. And I asked Oracle, Hey, can we get some subject matter experts, some technical gurus to dig deeper and get more details on the architecture because we want to better understand some of the performance claims that Oracle is making. And with me today is Susan. Who's the vice president of product management for exit data database machine. Bob tome is the vice president of product management for exit data cloud at customer. And Tim chin is the senior director of product management for DRA folks. Welcome to this power panel and welcome to the cube. >>Thank you, Dave. >>Can we start with you? Um, Juan and I, we talked about the X nine M a that Oracle just launched a couple of days ago. Maybe you could give us a recap, some of the, what do we need to know? The, especially I'm interested in the big numbers once more so we can just understand the claims you're making around this announcement. We can dig into that. >>Absolutely. They've very excited to do that. In a nutshell, we have the world's fastest database machine for both LTP and analytics, and we made that even faster, not just simply faster, but for all LPP we made it 70% faster and we took the oil PPV ops all the way up to 27.6 million read IOPS and mind you, this is being measured at the sequel layer for analytics. We did pretty much the same thing, an 87% increase in analytics. And we broke through that one terabyte per second barrier, absolutely phenomenal stuff. Now, while all those numbers by themselves are fascinating, here's something that's even more fascinating in my mind, 80% of the product development work for extra data, X nine M was done during COVID, which means all of us were remote. And what that meant was extreme levels of teamwork between the development teams, manufacturing teams, procurement teams, software teams, the works. I mean, everybody coming together as one to deliver this product, I think it's kudos to everybody who touched this product in one way or the other extremely proud of it. >>Thank you for making that point. And I'm laughing because it's like you the same bolt of a mission-critical OLT T O LTP performance. You had the world record, and now you're saying, adding on top of that. Um, but, okay. But, so there are customers that still, you know, build the builder and they're trying to build their own exit data. What they do is they buy their own servers and storage and networking components. And I do that when I talk to them, they'll say, look, they want to maintain their independence. They don't want to get locked in Oracle, or maybe they believe it's cheaper. You know, maybe they're sort of focused on the, the, the CapEx the CFO has him in the headlock, or they might, sometimes they talk about, they want a platform that can support, you know, horizontal, uh, apps, maybe not Oracle stuff, or, or maybe they're just trying to preserve their job. I don't know, but why shouldn't these customers roll their own and why can't they get similar results just using standard off the shelf technologies? >>Great question. It's going to require a little involved answer, but let's just look at the statistics to begin with. Oracle's exit data was first productized in Delaware to the market in 2008. And at that point in time itself, we had industry leadership across a number of metrics. Today, we are at the 11th generation of exit data, and we are way far ahead than the competition, like 50 X, faster hundred X faster, right? I mean, we are talking orders of magnitude faster. How did we achieve this? And I think the answer to your question is going to lie in what are we doing at the engineering level to make these magical numbers come to, uh, for right first, it starts with the hardware. Oracle has its own hardware server design team, where we are embedding in capabilities towards increasing performance, reliability, security, and scalability down at the hardware level, the database, which is a user level process talks to the hardware directly. >>The only reason we can do this is because we own the source code for pretty much everything in between, starting with the database, going into the operating system, the hypervisor. And as I, as I just mentioned the hardware, and then we also worked with the former elements on this entire thing, the key to making extra data, the best Oracle database machine lies in that engineering, where we take the operating system, make it fit like tongue and groove into, uh, a bit with the opera, with the hardware, and then do the same with the database. And because we have got this deep insight into what are the workloads that are, that are running at any given point in time on the compute side of extra data, we can then do micromanagement at the software layers of how traffic flows are flowing through the entire system and do things like, you know, prioritize all PP transactions on a very specific, uh, you know, queue on the RDMA. >>We'll converse Ethan at be able to do smart scan, use the compute elements in the storage tier to be able to offload SQL processing. They call them the longer I used formats of data, extend them into flash, just a whole bunch of things that we've been doing over the last 12 years, because we have this deep engineering, you can try to cobble a system together, which sort of looks like an extra data. It's got a network and it's got storage, tiering compute here, but you're not going to be able to achieve anything close to what we are doing. The biggest deal in my mind, apart from the performance and the high availability is the security, because we are testing the stack top to bottom. When you're trying to build your own best of breed kind of stuff. You're not going to be able to do that because it depended on the server that had to do something and HP to do something else or Dell to do something else and a Brocade switch to do something it's not possible. We can do this, we've done it. We've proven it. We've delivered it for over a decade. End of story. For as far as I'm concerned, >>I mean, you know, at this fine, remember when Oracle purchased Sohn and I know a big part of that purchase was to get Java, but I remember saying at the time it was a brilliant acquisition. I was looking at it from a financial standpoint. I think you paid seven and a half billion for it. And it automatically, when you're, when Safra was able to get back to sort of pre acquisition margins, you got the Oracle uplift in terms of revenue multiples. So then that standpoint, it was a no brainer, but the other thing is back in the Unix days, it was like HP. Oracle was the standard. And, and in terms of all the benchmarks and performance, but even then, I'm sure you work closely with HP, but it was like to get the stuff to work together, you know, make sure that it was going to be able to recover according to your standards, but you couldn't actually do that deep engineering that you just described now earlier, Subin you, you, you, you stated that the X sign now in M you get, oh, LTP IO, IOP reads at 27 million IOPS. Uh, you got 19 microseconds latency, so pretty impressive stuff, impressive numbers. And you kind of just went there. Um, but how are you measuring these numbers versus other performance claims from your competitors? What what's, you know, are you, are you stacking the deck? Can you give you share with us there? >>Sure. So Shada incidents, we are mentioning it at the sequel layer. This is not some kind of an ion meter or a micro benchmark. That's looking at just a flash subsystem or just a persistent memory subsystem. This is measured at the compute, not doing an entire set of transactions. And how many times can you finish that? Right? So that's how it's being measured. Now. Most people cannot measure it like that because of the disparity and the number of vendors that are involved in that particular solution, right? You've got servers from vendor a and storage from vendor B, the storage network from vendor C, the operating system from vendor D. How do you tune all of these things on your own? You cannot write. I mean, there's only certain bells and whistles and knobs that are available for you to tune, but so that's how we are measuring the 19 microseconds is at the sequel layer. >>What that means is this a real world customer running a real world. Workload is guaranteed to get that kind of a latency. None of the other suppliers can make that claim. This is the real world capability. Now let's take a look at that 19 microseconds we boast and we say, Hey, we had an order of magnitude two orders of magnitude faster than everybody else. When it comes down to latency. And one things that this is we'll do our magic while it is magical. The magic is really grounded in deep engineering and deep physics and science. The way we implement this is we, first of all, put the persistent memory tier in the storage. And that way it's shared across all of the database instances that are running on the compute tier. Then we have this ultra fast hundred gigabit ethernet RDMA over converged ethernet fabric. >>With this, what we have been able to do is at the hardware level between two network interface guides that are resident on that fabric, we create paths that enable high priority low-latency communication between any two end points on that fabric. And then given the fact that we implemented persistent memory in the storage tier, what that means is with that persistent memory, sitting on the memory bus of the processor in the storage tier, we can perform it remote direct memory access operation from the compute tier to memory address spaces in the persistent memory of the storage tier, without the involvement of the operating system on either end, no context, switches, knowing processing latencies and all of that. So it's hardware to hardware, communication with security built in, which is immutable, right? So all of this is built into the hardware itself. So there's no software involved. You perform a read, the data comes back 19 microseconds, boom. End of story. >>Yeah. So that's key to my next topic, which is security because if you're not getting the OSTP involved and that's, you know, very oftentimes if I can get access to the OSTP, I get privileged. Like I can really take advantage of that as a hacker. But so, but, but before I go there, like Oracle talks about, it's got a huge percentage of the Gayety 7% of the fortune 100 companies run their mission, critical workloads on exit data. But so that's not only important to the companies, but they're serving consumer me, right. I'm going to my ATM or I'm swiping my credit card. And Juan mentioned that you use a layered security model. I just sort of inferred anyway, that, that having this stuff in hardware and not have to involve access to the OS actually contributes to better security. But can you describe this in a bit more detail? >>So yeah, what Brian was talking about was this layered security set differently. It is defense in depth, and that's been our mantra and philosophy for several years now. So what does that entail? As I mentioned earlier, we designed our own servers. We do this for performance. We also do it for security. We've got a number of features that are built into the hardware that make sure that we've got immutable areas of form where we, for instance, let me give you this example. If you take an article x86 server, just a standard x86 server, not even express in the form of an extra data system, even if you had super user privileges sitting on top of an operating system, you cannot modify the bias as a user, as a super user that has to be done through the system management network. So we put gates and protection modes, et cetera, right in the hardware itself. >>Now, of course the security of that hardware goes all the way back to the fact that we own the design. We've got a global supply chain, but we are making sure that our supply chain is protected monitored. And, uh, we also protect the last mile of the supply chain, which is we can detect if there's been any tampering of form where that's been, uh, that's occurred in the hardware while the hardware shipped from our factory to the customers, uh, docks. Right? So we, we know that something's been tampered with the moment it comes back up on the customer. So that's on the hardware. Let's take a look at the operating system, Oracle Linux, we own article the next, the entire source code. And what shipping on exit data is the unbreakable enterprise Connell, the carnal and the operating system itself have been reduced in terms of eliminating all unnecessary packages from that operating system bundle. >>When we deliver it in the form of the data, let's put some real numbers on that. A standard Oracle Linux or a standard Linux distribution has got about 5,000 plus packages. These things include like print servers, web servers, a whole bunch of stuff that you're not absolutely going to use at all on exit data. Why ship those? Because the moment you ship more stuff than you need, you are increasing the, uh, the target, uh, that attackers can get to. So on AXA data, there are only 701 packages. So compare this 5,413 packages on a standard Linux, 701 and exit data. So we reduced the attack surface another aspect on this, when we, we do our own STIG, uh, ASCAP benchmarking. If you take a standard Linux and you run that ASCAP benchmark, you'll get about a 30% pass score on exit data. It's 90 plus percent. >>So which means we are doing the heavy lifting of doing the security checks on the operating system before it even goes out to the factory. And then you layer on Oracle database, transparent data encryption. We've got all kinds of protection capabilities, data reduction, being able to do an authentication on a user ID basis, being able to log it, being able to track it, being able to determine who access the system when and log back. So it's basically defend at every single layer. And then of course the customer's responsibility. It doesn't just stop by getting this high secure, uh, environment. They have to do their own job of them securing their network perimeters, securing who has physical access to the system and everything else. So it's a giant responsibility. And as you mentioned, you know, you as a consumer going to an ATM machine and withdrawing money, you would do 200. You don't want to see 5,000 deducted from your account. And so all of this is made possible with exited and the amount of security focus that we have on the system >>And the bank doesn't want to see it the other way. So I'm geeking out here in the cube, but I got one more question for you. Juan talked about X nine M best system for database consolidation. So I, I kinda, you know, it was built to handle all LTP analytics, et cetera. So I want to push you a little bit on this because I can make an argument that, that this is kind of a Swiss army knife versus the best screwdriver or the best knife. How do you respond to that concern and how, how do you respond to the concern that you're putting too many eggs in one basket? Like, what do you tell people to fear you're consolidating workloads to save money, but you're also narrowing the blast radius. Isn't that a problem? >>Very good question there. So, yes. So this is an interesting problem, and it is a balancing act. As you correctly pointed out, you want to have the economies of scale that you get when you consolidate more and more databases, but at the same time, when something happens when hardware fails or there's an attack, you want to make sure that you have business continuity. So what we are doing on exit data, first of all, as I mentioned, we are designing our own hardware and a building in reliability into the system and at the hardware layer, that means having redundancy, redundancy for fans, power supplies. We even have the ability to isolate faulty cores on the processor. And we've got this a tremendous amount of sweeping that's going on by the system management stack, looking for problem areas and trying to contain them as much as possible within the hardware itself. >>Then you take it up to the software layer. We used our reliability to then build high availability. What that implies is, and that's fundamental to the exited architecture is this entire scale out model, our based system, you cannot go smaller than having two database nodes and three storage cells. Why is that? That's because you want to have high availability of your database instances. So if something happens to one server hardware, software, whatever you got another server that's ready to take on that load. And then with real application clusters, you can then switch over between these two, why three storage cells. We want to make sure that when you have got duplicate copies of data, because you at least want to have one additional copy of your data in case something happens to the disc that has got that only that one copy, right? So the reason we have got three is because then you can Stripe data across these three different servers and deliver high availability. >>Now you take that up to the rack level. A lot of things happen. Now, when you're really talking about the blast radius, you want to make sure that if something physically happens to this data center, that you have infrastructure that's available for it to function for business continuity, we maintain, which is why we have the maximum availability architecture. So with components like golden gate and active data guard, and other ways by which we can keep to this distant systems in sync is extremely critical for us to deliver these high availability paths that make, uh, the whole equation about how many eggs in one basket versus containing the containment of the blast radius. A lot easier to grapple with because business continuity is something which is paramount to us. I mean, Oracle, the enterprise is running on Xcel data. Our high value cloud customers are running on extra data. And I'm sure Bob's going to talk a lot more about the cloud piece of it. So I think we have all the tools in place to, to go after that optimization on how many eggs in one basket was his blast radius. It's a question of working through the solution and the criticalities of that particular instance. >>Okay, great. Thank you for that detailed soup. We're going to give you a break. You go take a breath, get a, get a drink of water. Maybe we'll come back to you. If we have time, let's go to Bob, Bob, Bob tome, X data cloud at customer X nine M earlier this week, Juan said kinda, kinda cocky. What we're bothering, comparing exit data against your cloud, a customer against outpost or Azure stack. Can you elaborate on, on why that is? >>Sure. Or you, you know, first of all, I want to say, I love, I love baby. We go south posts. You know why it affirms everything that we've been doing for the past four and a half years with clouded customer. It affirms that cloud is running that running cloud services in customers' data center is a large and important market, large and important enough that AWS felt that the need provide these, um, you know, these customers with an AWS option, even if it only supports a sliver of the functionality that they provide in the public cloud. And that's what they're doing. They're giving it a sliver and they're not exactly leading with the best they could offer. So for that reason, you know, that reason alone, there's really nothing to compare. And so we, we give them the benefit of the doubt and we actually are using their public cloud solutions. >>Another point most customers are looking to deploy to Oracle cloud, a customer they're looking for a per performance, scalable, secure, and highly available platform to deploy. What's offered their most critical databases. Most often they are Oracle databases does outposts for an Oracle database. No. Does outpost run a comparable database? Not really does outposts run Amazon's top OTP and analytics database services, the ones that are top in their cloud public cloud. No, that we couldn't find anything that runs outposts that's worth comparing against X data clouded customer, which is why the comparisons are against their public cloud products. And even with that still we're looking at numbers like 50 times a hundred times slower, right? So then there's the Azure stack. One of the key benefits to, um, you know, that customers love about the cloud that I think is really under, appreciated it under appreciated is really that it's a single vendor solution, right? You have a problem with cloud service could be I as pass SAS doesn't matter. And there's a single vendor responsible for fixing your issue as your stack is missing big here, because they're a multi-vendor cloud solution like AWS outposts. Also, they don't exactly offer the same services in the cloud that they offer on prem. And from what I hear, it can be a management nightmare requiring specialized administrators to keep that beast running. >>Okay. So, well, thanks for that. I'll I'll grant you that, first of all, granted that Oracle was the first with that same, same vision. I always tell people that, you know, if they say, well, we were first I'm like, well, actually, no, Oracle's first having said that, Bob and I hear you that, that right now, outpost is a one Datto version. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but neither did your cloud when you first launched your cloud. So let's, let's let it bake for a while and we'll come back in a couple of years and see how things compare. So if you're up for it. Yeah. >>Just remember that we're still in the oven too. Right. >>Okay. All right. Good. I love it. I love the, the chutzpah. One also talked about Deutsche bank. Um, and that, I, I mean, I saw that Deutsche bank announcement, how they're working with Oracle, they're modernizing their infrastructure around database. They're building other services around that and kind of building their own sort of version of a cloud for their customers. How does exit data cloud a customer fit in to that whole Deutsche bank deal? Is, is this solution unique to Deutsche bank? Do you see other organizations adopting clouded customer for similar reasons and use cases? >>Yeah, I'll start with that. First. I want to say that I don't think Georgia bank is unique. They want what all customers want. They want to be able to run their most important workloads. The ones today running their data center on exit eight as a non other high-end systems in a cloud environment where they can benefit from things like cloud economics, cloud operations, cloud automations, but they can't move to public cloud. They need to maintain the service levels, the performance, the scalability of the security and the availability that their business has. It has come to depend on most clouds can't provide that. Although actually Oracle's cloud can our public cloud Ken, because our public cloud does run exit data, but still even with that, they can't do it because as a bank, they're subject to lots of rules and regulations, they cannot move their 40 petabytes of data to a point outside the control of their data center. >>They have thousands of interconnected databases, right? And applications. It's like a rat's nest, right? And this is similar many large customers have this problem. How do you move that to the cloud? You can move it piecemeal. Uh, I'm going to move these apps and, you know, not move those apps. Um, but suddenly ended up with these things where some pieces are up here. Some pieces are down here. The thing just dies because of the long latency over a land connection, it just doesn't work. Right. So you can also shut it down. Let's shut it down on, on Friday and move everything all at once. Unfortunately, when you're looking at it, a state decides that most customers have, you're not going to be able to, you're going to be down for a month, right? Who can, who can tolerate that? So it's a big challenge and exited cloud a customer let's then move to the cloud without losing control of their data. >>And without unhappy having to untangle that thousands of interconnected databases. So, you know, that's why these customers are choosing X data, clouded customer. More importantly, it sets them up for the future with exited cloud at customer, they can run not just in their data center, but they could also run in public cloud, adjacent sites, giving them a path to moving some work out of the data center and ultimately into the public cloud. You know, as I said, they're not unique. Other banks are watching and some are acting and it's not just banks. Just last week. Telefonica telco in Spain announced their intent to migrate the bulk of their Oracle databases to excavate a cloud at customer. This will be the key cloud platform running. They're running in their data center to support both new services, as well as mission critical and operational systems. And one last important point exited cloud a customer can also run autonomous database. Even if customers aren't today ready to adopt this. A lot of them are interested in it. They see it as a key piece of the puzzle moving forward in the future and customers know that they can easily start to migrate to autonomous in the future as they're ready. And this of course is going to drive additional efficiencies and additional cost savings. >>So, Bob, I got a question for you because you know, Oracle's playing both sides, right? You've got a cloud, you know, you've got a true public cloud now. And, and obviously you have a huge on-premise state. When I talk to companies that don't own a cloud, uh, whether it's Dell or HPE, Cisco, et cetera, they have made, they make the point. And I agree with them by the way that the world is hybrid, not everything's going into the, to the cloud. However, I had a lot of respect for folks at Amazon as well. And they believed long-term, they'll say this, they've got them on record of saying this, that they believe long-term ultimately all workloads are going to be running in the cloud. Now, I guess it depends on how you define the cloud. The cloud is expanding and all that other stuff. But my question to you, because again, you kind of on both sides, here are our hybrid solutions like cloud at customer. Do you see them as a stepping stone to the cloud, or is cloud in your data center, sort of a continuous sort of permanent, you know, essential play >>That. That's a great question. As I recall, people debated this a few years back when we first introduced clouded customer. And at that point, some people I'm talking about even internal Oracle, right? Some people saw this as a stop gap measure to let people leverage cloud benefits until they're really ready for the public cloud. But I think over the past four and a half years, the changing the thinking has changed a little bit on this. And everyone kind of agrees that clouded customer may be a stepping stone for some customers, but others see that as the end game, right? Not every workload can run in the public cloud, not at least not given the, um, you know, today's regulations and the issues that are faced by many of these regulated industries. These industries move very, very slowly and customers are content to, and in many cases required to retain complete control of their data and they will be running under their control. They'll be running with that data under their control and the data center for the foreseeable future. >>Oh, I got another question for kind of just, if I could take a little tangent, cause the other thing I hear from the, on the, the, the on-prem don't own, the cloud folks is it's actually cheaper to run in on-prem, uh, because they're getting better at automation, et cetera. When you get the exact opposite from the cloud guys, they roll their eyes. Are you kidding me? It's way cheaper to run it in the cloud, which is more cost-effective is it one of those? It depends, Bob. >>Um, you know, the great thing about numbers is you can make, you can, you can kind of twist them to show anything that you want, right? That's a have spreadsheet. Can I, can, I can sell you on anything? Um, I think that there's, there's customers who look at it and they say, oh, on-premise sheet is cheaper. And there's customers who look at it and say, the cloud is cheaper. If you, um, you know, there's a lot of ways that you may incur savings in the cloud. A lot of it has to do with the cloud economics, the ability to pay for what you're using and only what you're using. If you were to kind of, you know, if you, if you size something for your peak workload and then, you know, on prem, you probably put a little bit of a buffer in it, right? >>If you size everything for that, you're gonna find that you're paying, you know, this much, right? All the time you're paying for peak workload all the time with the cloud, of course, we support scaling up, scaling down. We supply, we support you're paying for what you use and you can scale up and scale down. That's where the big savings is now. There's also additional savings associated with you. Don't have the cloud vendors like work. Well, we manage that infrastructure for you. You no longer have to worry about it. Um, we have a lot of automation, things that you use to either, you know, probably what used to happen is you used to have to spend hours and hours or years or whatever, scripting these things yourselves. We now have this automation to do it. We have, um, you eyes that make things ad hoc things, as simple as point and click and, uh, you know, that eliminates errors. And, and it's often difficult to put a cost on those things. And I think the more enlightened customers can put a cost on all of those. So the people that were saying it's cheaper to run on prem, uh, they, they either, you know, have a very stable workload that never changes and their environment never changes, um, or more likely. They just really haven't thought through the, all the hidden costs out there. >>All right, you got some new features. Thank you for that. By the way, you got some new features in, in cloud, a customer, a what are those? Do I have to upgrade to X nine M to, to get >>All right. So, you know, we're always introducing new features for clouded customer, but two significant things that we've rolled out recently are operator access control and elastic storage expansion. As we discussed, many organizations are using Axeda cloud a customer they're attracting the cloud economics, the operational benefits, but they're required by regulations to retain control and visibility of their data, as well as any infrastructure that sits inside their data center with operator access control, enabled cloud operations, staff members must request access to a customer system, a customer, it team grants, a designated person, specific access to a specific component for a specific period of time with specific privileges, they can then kind of view audit controls in real time. And if they see something they don't like, you know, Hey, what's this guy doing? It looks like he's, he's stealing my data or doing something I don't like, boom. >>They can kill that operators, access the session, the connections, everything right away. And this gives everyone, especially customers that need to, you know, regulate remote access to their infrastructure. It gives them the confidence that they need to use exit data cloud, uh, conduct, customer service. And, and the other thing that's new is, um, elastic storage expansion. Customers could out add additional service to their system either at initial deployment or after the fact. And this really provides two important benefits. The first is that they can right size their configuration if they need only the minimum compute capacity, but they don't need the maximum number of storage servers to get that capacity. They don't need to subscribe to kind of a fixed shape. We used to have fixed shapes, I guess, with hundreds of unnecessary database cores, just to get the storage capacity, they can select a smaller system. >>And then incrementally add on that storage. The second benefit is the, is kind of key for many customers. You are at a storage, guess what you can add more. And that way, when you're out of storage, that's really important. Now they'll get to your last part of that question. Do you need a deck, a new, uh, exit aquatic customer XIM system to get these features? No they're available for all gen two exited clouded customer systems. That's really one of the best things about cloud. The service you subscribed to today just keeps getting better and better. And unless there's some technical limitation that, you know, we, and it, which is rare, most new features are available even for the oldest cloud customer systems. >>Cool. And you can bring that in on from my, my last question for you, Bob is a, another one on security. Obviously, again, we talked to Susan about this. It's a big deal. How can customer data be secure if it's in the cloud, if somebody, other than the, their own vetted employees are managing the underlying infrastructure, is is that a concern you hear a lot and how do you handle that? >>You know, it's, it's only something because a lot of these customers, they have big, you know, security people and it's their job to be concerned about that kind of stuff. And security. However, is one of the biggest, but least appreciate appreciated benefits of cloud cloud vendors, such as Oracle hire the best and brightest security experts to ensure that their clouds are secure. Something that only the largest customers can afford to do. You're a small, small shop. You're not going to be able to, you know, hire some of this expertise. So you're better off being in the cloud. Customers who are running in the Oracle cloud can also use articles, data, safe tool, which we provide, which basically lets you inspect your databases, insurance. Sure that everything is locked down and secure and your data is secure. But your question is actually a little bit different. >>It was about potential internal threats to company's data. Given the cloud vendor, not the customer's employees have access to the infrastructure that sits beneath the databases and really the first and most important thing we do to protect customers' data is we encrypt that database by default. Actually Subin listed a whole laundry list of things, but that's the one thing I want to point out. We encrypt your database. It's, you know, it's, it's encrypted. Yes. It sits on our infrastructure. Yes. Our operations persons can actually see those data files sitting on the infrastructure, but guess what? They can't see the data. The data is encrypted. All they see as kind of a big encrypted blob. Um, so they can't access the data themselves. And you know, as you'd expect, we have very tight controls over operations access to the infrastructure. They need to securely log in using mechanisms by stuff to present, prevent unauthorized access. >>And then all access is logged and suspicious. Activities are investigated, but that still may not be enough for some customers, especially the ones I mentioned earlier, the regulated industries. And that's why we offer app operator access control. As I mentioned, that gives customers complete control over the access to the infrastructure. The, when the, what ops can do, how long can they do it? Customers can monitor in real time. And if they see something they don't like they stop it immediately. Lastly, I just want to mention Oracle's data ball feature. This prevents administrators from accessing data, protecting data from road operators, robot, world operations, whether they be from Oracle or from the customer's own it staff, this database option. A lot of ball is sorry. Database ball data vault is included when running a license included service on exited clouded customer. So basically to get it with the service. Got it. >>Hi Tom. Thank you so much. It's unbelievable, Bob. I mean, we've got a lot to unpack there, but uh, we're going to give you a break now and go to Tim, Tim chin, zero data loss, recovery appliance. We always love that name. The big guy we think named it, but nobody will tell us, but we've been talking about security. There's been a lot of news around ransomware attacks. Every industry around the globe, any knucklehead with, uh, with a high school diploma could become a ransomware attack or go in the dark web, get, get ransomware as a service stick, a, put a stick in and take a piece of the VIG and hopefully get arrested. Um, with, when you think about database, how do you deal with the ransomware challenge? >>Yeah, Dave, um, that's an extremely important and timely question. Um, we are hearing this from our customers. We just talk about ha and backup strategies and ransomware, um, has been coming up more and more. Um, and the unfortunate thing that these ransoms are actually paid, um, uh, in the hope of the re you know, the, uh, the ability to access the data again. So what that means it tells me is that today's recovery solutions and processes are not sufficient to get these systems back in a reliable and timely manner. Um, and so you have to pay the ransom, right, to get, uh, to get the, even a hope of getting the data back now for databases. This can have a huge impact because we're talking about transactional workloads. And so even a compromise of just a few minutes, a blip, um, can affect hundreds or even thousands of transactions. This can literally represent hundreds of lost orders, right? If you're a big manufacturing company or even like millions of dollars worth of, uh, financial transactions in a bank. Right. Um, and that's why protecting databases at a transaction level is especially critical, um, for ransomware. And that's a huge contrast to traditional backup approaches. Okay. >>So how do you approach that? What do you, what do you do specifically for ransomware protection for the database? >>Yeah, so we have the zero data loss recovery appliance, which we announced the X nine M generation. Um, it is really the only solution in the market, which offers that transaction level of protection, which allows all transactions to be recovered with zero RPO, zero again, and this is only possible because Oracle has very innovative and unique technology called real-time redo, which captures all the transactional changes from the databases by the appliance, and then stored as well by the appliance, moreover, the appliance validates all these backups and reading. So you want to make sure that you can recover them after you've sent them, right? So it's not just a file level integrity check on a file system. That's actual database level of validation that the Oracle blocks and the redo that I mentioned can be restored and recovered as a usable database, any kind of, um, malicious attack or modification of that backup data and transmit that, or if it's even stored on the appliance and it was compromised would be immediately detected and reported by that validation. >>So this allows administrators to take action. This is removing that system from the network. And so it's a huge leap in terms of what customers can get today. The last thing I just want to point out is we call our cyber vault deployment, right? Um, a lot of customers in the industry are creating what we call air gapped environments, where they have a separate location where their backup copies are stored physically network separated from the production systems. And so this prevents ransomware for possibly infiltrating that last good copy of backups. So you can deploy recovery appliance in a cyber vault and have it synchronized at random times when the network's available, uh, to, to keep it in sync. Right. Um, so that combined with our transaction level zero data loss validation, it's a nice package and really a game changer in protecting and recovering your databases from modern day cyber threats. >>Okay, great. Thank you for clarifying that air gap piece. Cause I, there was some confusion about that. Every data protection and backup company that I know as a ransomware solution, it's like the hottest topic going, you got newer players in, in, in recovery and backup like rubric Cohesity. They raised a ton of dough. Dell has got solutions, HPE just acquired Zerto to deal with this problem. And other things IBM has got stuff. Veem seems to be doing pretty well. Veritas got a range of, of recovery solutions. They're sort of all out there. What's your take on these and their strategy and how do you differentiate? >>Yeah, it's a pretty crowded market, like you said. Um, I think the first thing you really have to keep in mind and understand that these vendors, these new and up and coming, um, uh, uh, vendors start in the copy data management, we call CDN space and they're not traditional backup recovery designed are purpose built for the purpose of CDM products is to provide these fast point in time copies for test dev non-production use, and that's a viable problem and it needs a solution. So you create these one time copy and then you create snapshots. Um, after you apply these incremental changes to that copy, and then the snapshot can be quickly restored and presented as like it's a fully populated, uh, file. And this is all done through the underlying storage of block pointers. So all of this kind of sounds really cool and modern, right? It's like new and upcoming and lots of people in the market doing this. Well, it's really not that modern because we've, we know storage, snapshot technologies has been around for years. Right. Um, what these new vendors have been doing is essentially repackaging the old technology for backup and recovery use cases and having sort of an easier to use automation interface wrapped around it. >>Yeah. So you mentioned a copy data management, uh, last year, active FIO. Uh, they started that whole space from what I recall at one point there, they value more than a billion dollars. They were acquired by Google. Uh, and as I say, they kind of created that, that category. So fast forward a little bit, nine months a year, whatever it's been, do you see that Google active FIO offer in, in, in customer engagements? Is that something that you run into? >>We really don't. Um, yeah, it was really popular and known some years ago, but we really don't hear about it anymore. Um, after the acquisition, you look at all the collateral and the marketing, they are really a CDM and backup solution exclusively for Google cloud use cases. And they're not being positioned as for on premises or any other use cases outside of Google cloud. That's what, 90, 90 plus percent of your market there that isn't addressable now by Activia. So really we don't see them in any of our engagements at this time. >>I want to come back and push it a little bit, uh, on some of the tech that you said, it's kind of really not that modern. Uh, I mean it's, if they certainly position it as modern, a lot of the engineers who are building there's new sort of backup and recovery capabilities came from the hyperscalers, whether it's copy data management, you know, the bot mock quote, unquote modern backup recovery, it's kind of a data management, sort of this nice all in one solution seems pretty compelling. How does recovery clients specifically stack up? You know, a lot of people think it's a niche product for, for really high end use cases. Is that fair? How do you see a town? >>Yeah. Yeah. So it's, I think it's so important to just, you know, understand, again, the fundamental use of this technology is to create data copies for test W's right. Um, and that's really different than operational backup recovery in which you must have this ability to do full and point in time recoverability in any production outage or Dr. Situation. Um, and then more importantly, after you recover and your applications are back in business, that performance must continue to meet servers levels as before. And when you look at a CDM product, um, and you restore a snapshot and you say with that product and the application is brought up on that restored snapshot, what happens or your production application is now running on actual read rideable snapshots on backup storage. Remember they don't restore all the data back to the production, uh, level stores. They're restoring it as a snapshot okay. >>Onto their storage. And so you have a huge difference in performance. Now running these applications where they instantly recovered, if you will database. So to meet these true operational requirements, you have to fully restore the files to production storage period. And so recovery appliance was first and foremost designed to accomplish this. It's an operational recovery solution, right? We accomplish that. Like I mentioned, with this real-time transaction protection, we have incremental forever backup strategies. So that you're just taking just the changes every day. And you, you can create these virtual full backups that are quickly restored, fully restored, if you will, at 24 terabytes an hour. And we validate and document that performance very clearly in our website. And of course we provide that continuous recovery validation for all the backups that are stored on the system. So it's, um, it's a very nice, complete solution. >>It scales to meet your demands, hundreds of thousands of databases, you know, it's, um, you know, these CDM products might seem great and they work well for a few databases, but then you put a real enterprise load and these hundreds of databases, and we've seen a lot of times where it just buckles, you know, it can't handle that kind of load in that, uh, in that scale. Uh, and, and this is important because customers read their marketing and read the collateral like, Hey, instant recovery. Why wouldn't I want that? Well, it's, you know, nicer than it looks, you know, it always sounds better. Right. Um, and so we have to educate them and about exactly what that means for the database, especially backup recovery use cases. And they're not really handled well, um, with their products. >>I know I'm like way over. I had a lot of questions on this announcement and I was gonna, I was gonna let you go, Tim, but you just mentioned something that, that gave me one more question if I may. So you talked about, uh, supporting hundreds of thousands of databases. You petabytes, you have real world use cases that, that actually leverage the, the appliance in these types of environments. Where does it really shine? >>Yeah. Let me just give you just two real quick ones. You know, we have a company energy transfer, the major natural gas and pipeline operator in the U S so they are a big part of our country's critical infrastructure services. We know ransomware, and these kinds of threats are, you know, are very much viable. We saw the colonial pipeline incident that happened, right? And so the attack, right, critical services while energy transfer was running, lots of databases and their legacy backup environments just couldn't keep up with their enterprise needs. They had backups taking like, well, over a day, they had restores taking several hours. Um, and so they had problems and they couldn't meet their SLS. They moved to the recovery appliance and now they're seeing backwards complete with that incremental forever in just 15 minutes. So that's like a 48 times improvement in backup time. >>And they're also seeing restores completing in about 30 minutes, right. Versus several hours. So it's a, it's a huge difference for them. And they also get that nice recovery validation and monitoring by the system. They know the health of their enterprise at their fingertips. The second quick one is just a global financial services customer. Um, and they have like over 10,000 databases globally and they, they really couldn't find a solution other than throw more hardware kind of approach to, uh, to fix their backups. Well, this, uh, not that the failures and not as the issues. So they moved to recovery appliance and they saw their failed backup rates go down for Matta plea. They saw four times better backup and restore performance. Um, and they have also a very nice centralized way to monitor and manage the system. Uh, real-time view if you will, that data protection health for their entire environment. Uh, and they can show this to the executive management and auditing teams. This is great for compliance reporting. Um, and so they finally done that. They have north of 50 plus, um, recovery appliances a day across that on global enterprise. >>Love it. Thank you for that. Um, uh, guys, great power panel. We have a lot of Oracle customers in our community and the best way to, to help them is to, I get to ask you a bunch of questions and get the experts to answer. So I wonder if you could bring us home, maybe you could just sort of give us the, the top takeaways that you want to your customers to remember in our audience to remember from this announcement. >>Sure, sorry. Uh, I want to actually pick up from where Tim left off and talk about a real customer use case. This is hot off the press. One of the largest banks in the United States, they decided to, that they needed to update. So performance software update on 3000 of their database instances, which are spanning 68, exited a clusters, massive undertaking, correct. They finished the entire task in three hours, three hours to update 3000 databases and 68 exited a clusters. Talk about availability, try doing this on any other infrastructure, no way anyone's going to be able to achieve this. So that's on terms of the availability, right? We are engineering in all of the aspects of database management, performance, security availability, being able to provide redundancy at every single level is all part of the design philosophy and how we are engineering this product. And as far as we are concerned, the, the goal is for forever. >>We are just going to continue to go down this path of increasing performance, increasing the security aspect of the, uh, of the infrastructure, as well as our Oracle database and keep going on this. You know, this, while these have been great results that we've delivered with extra data X nine M the, the journey is on and to our customers. The biggest advantage that you're going to get from the kind of performance metrics that we are driving with extra data is consolidation consolidate more, move, more database instances onto the extended platform, gain the benefits from that consolidation, reduce your operational expenses, reduce your capital expenses. They use your management expenses, all of those, bring it down to accelerator. Your total cost of ownership is guaranteed to go down. Those are my key takeaways, Dave >>Guys, you've been really generous with your time. Uh Subin uh, uh, uh, Bob, Tim, I appreciate you taking my questions and we'll willingness to go toe to toe, really? Thanks for your time. >>You're welcome, David. Thank you. Thank you. >>And thank you for watching this video exclusive from the cube. This is Dave Volante, and we'll see you next time. Be well.

(intro music) >> We're back on theCUBE unpacking HPE's GreenLake announcements. I'm here with Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Keith, always awesome to see you, man. >> Good to be back on theCUBE. >> So, let's talk about these announcements. Let's break it down. Where do you want to start? >> So-- >> Cloud services? >> Cloud services, one of the things that we've gone back and forth with HPE over the past few years is that I don't understand GreenLake. Like, is it a financial scheme? Is it a cloud services? And I think data services, the data services announcement around Zirdle and Marketplace really elevates GreenLake to a cloud service. Kind of on par with some of the hyperscalers on how they think about architectures around data centers and, and fabrics and services to enterprise customers. >> When you say on, par in what regard? >> So, one of the things I didn't get, separate to the GreenLake announcement, we've heard a lot about HPE's containers services, Ezmeral, and they have a data fabric and it does things that the storage solutions does. Okay. That seems like a marketplace upon itself. And then the data services with the Zirdle acquisition, completely different marketplace? No, HPE is bringing all of that together, logically. So a cloud architect, similar to how they could go to AWS's console, select some services, deploy those services in their AWS VPC. Now, I can conceptually do that with HPE. I can go to HPE's GreenLake console, choose the services I need to build my app, and deploy it. That is something new within all these traditional OEM providers. >> Because of the cloud nativeness on-prem, bringing that capability. >> So, bringing the Aruba Central concepts, you know, Aruba Central, I think I read a stat, a hundred thousand customers on Aruba Central with a million interactions an hour. So this scale is hyperscale scale. This base to have a centralized marketplace and have those on those cloud-like services, but on-premises or in Niccolo, I think puts HPE near the top, if not the top for building private cloud services on-premises. >> Lets say you're a CTO at an organization that's an HPE customer or an architect. You're all in, on HPE, been working with the company for a long, long time. Wouldn't you want a view of your estate, your applications and workloads, where you could manage on-prem, Cloud, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, take advantage of the cloud native, go across cloud, abstract all that complexity away, maybe eventually go out to the edge. Is that what you want? >> That's what I want, it's aspirational. No one between Microsoft to HPE, no one is able to give me that today. So as a CTO, I'm looking at platforms and seeing is the building blocks there. We talked to the HP storage team of how they're building the abstractions, that they can take anything from their ProLiant line, build the necessary storage underlay, and then abstract that away with a GreenLake. You can do that with AWS EBC, Azure storage. It really doesn't matter because they're building that abstractions. So, aspirationally they're there, they have the right vision. It's about excecution. >> Okay, so that is the right direction in your view, you, I mean, I think that that is clearly where customers want to go. >> A lot of work >> Keith: A lot of work. to get there, and it's a race, right? I mean, that's, you know, I feel as though, as a service is good starting point, but there's, there's a long way to go. And, so how do you feel about HPE's chances there, how they're positioning relative to not only the, there other sort of on-prem competitors, but public cloud players. >> So they're asking the right questions. They're asking the right questions of the right players. It's about relationships. Dave, you know this more than anyone that if you don't have the right relationships inside of the customers, you're not going to get there. And I think that's HPE's number one struggle. The, no slant to the VP of operations, but the VP of operations doesn't want to change his operations. He doesn't want disruption. What COO was coming to you and saying, "I want to be disruptive." Same thing in VP of operations, IT operations, they don't want disruption, but this has been HPE's traditional customer. HPE needs to get into the chief data officers, the chief marketing officers' office, and have these very difficult conversations in sales so that they can eventually show that they can't execute. I think that's the one of their primary challenges. >> So, okay that's good. I'm glad you brought that up because I think Ezmeral starts to go in that direction, it feels as though the first phase is let's pick off analytics. Let's make analytics on-prem as attractive and simple as it is in the cloud. And then, beyond that, let's support this notion of decentralized data and federated governance. And that is aspirational today. But no, as to your point, nobody really has that. AWS really, you know, they're not going after that, across clouds at this point in time, Microsoft is with arc, I guess, and Google kind of has Anthos and they're kind of doing it, but, but yeah, I'm not sure you're going to trust your cloud provider to be that player. So it's kind of like jump ball here, isn't it? >> You know, AWS make a strategic partnership with one of HP's primary competitors, because there was a gap. We know Andy Jassy, former president and CEO of AWS, doesn't typically partner with traditional OEMs, unless there's a real gap in his portfolio that he needed to do and he did it with VMware and he did it with HPE's primary competitor in storage and one of their primary competitors in storage. HPE sees the opportunity. The question is, do they have the workforce? Do they have the field teams, the field CTOs, the solution architects that can go and talk the talk to these customers and this new audience that they need to convince that HPE is just as, as respected a snowflake in these, in this data area. >> Can partners fill that gap? >> Partners definitely can fill that gap, but HPE still has the same challenge for partners: transforming partners from speaking boxes to solutions. I've spent a short stint at VMware. I was surprised at how rigid the channel is and these large organizations and making that transition. >> The other thing, when you think about it as a service that at least that I look for when, if you could comment is the pace, you know, we all would go to, we go to these events, go to re-invent and it's just this fire hose of announcements. We're seeing HPE on a cadence. You know, it's not like a once a year dealio with GreenLake. We're seeing, you know, some stuff with HPC. We're seeing the acquisition of Zerto of the, the DR services, the data protection as a service, Ezmeral. Do you feel like that pace is accelerating? And is it fast enough? >> You know what, I famously said on theCUBE that VMware moves at the pace of the CIO. HPE needs to move a little bit faster than the CIO because the CIO isn't their only customer. They have the opportunity to get customers outside of the CIO and I think they're moving fast enough. This is really hard stuff. Especially when you start to deal with data and the most valuable asset of an organization. Can you move too fast? You absolutely can. One of the other analysts said that you don't want to become the, the forgotten about data services company of the other, of the two thousands. You don't want to make that mistake in the twenties. So I, right now, I think I feel as if HPE is making the right cadence, bringing along their old customers, new customers. Challenge of all of the big OEMs is how do you not erode your base customer base and, but still move fast enough to satisfy the move fast break stuff crowd. >> Keep close to your customers. Keith, we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> I'd love to have you back. >> As always, Dave, great time. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content from HPE GreenLake announcements. You're watching theCUBE.

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe. Of course the event this year was supposed to be in the Netherlands, I know I was very much looking forward to going to Amsterdam. This year of course it's going to be virtual, I'm really excited theCUBE's coverage, we've got some great members of the CNCF, we've got a bunch of end users, we've got some good thought leaders, and I'm also bringing a little bit of the Netherlands to help me bring in and start this keynote analysis, happy to welcome back to the program my cohost for the show, Joep Piscaer, who is an industry analyst with TLA. Thank you, Joep, so much for joining us, and we wish we could be with you in person, and check out your beautiful country. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me Stu, and I'm still a little disappointed we cannot eat the (indistinct foreign term) rijsttafel together this year. >> Oh, yeah, can we just have a segment to explain to people the wonder that is the fusion of Indonesian food and the display that you get only in the Netherlands? Rijsttafel, I seriously had checked all over the US and Canada, when I was younger, to find an equivalent, but one of my favorite culinary delights in the world, but we'll have to put a pin in that. You've had some warm weather in the Netherlands recently, and so many of the Europeans take quite a lot of time off in July and August, but we're going to talk about some hardcore tech, KubeCon, a show we love doing, the European show brings good diversity of experiences and customers from across the globe. So, let's start, the keynote, Priyanka Sharma, the new general manager of the CNCF, of course, just some really smart people that come out and talk about a lot of things. And since it's a foundation show, there's some news in there, but it's more about how they're helping corral all of these projects, of course, a theme we've talked about for a while is KubeCon was the big discussion for many years about Kubernetes, still important, and we'll talk about that, but so many different projects and everything from the sandbox, their incubation, through when they become fully, generally available, so, I guess I'll let you start and step back and say when you look at this broad ecosystem, you work with vendors, you've been from the customer side, what's top of mind for you, what's catching your attention? >> So, I guess from a cloud-native perspective, looking at the CNCF, I think you hit the nail on the head. This is not about any individual technology, isn't about just Kubernetes or just Prometheus, or just service mesh. I think the added value of the CNCF, and the way I look at it at least, looking back at my customer perspective, I would've loved to have a organization curate the technology world around me, for me. To help me out with the decisions on a technology perspective that I needed to make to kind of move forward with my IT stack, and with the requirements my customer had, or my organization had, to kind of move that into the next phase. That is where I see the CNCF come in and do their job really well, to help organizations, both on the vendor side as well as on the customer side, take that next step, see around the corner, what's new, what's coming, and also make sure that between different, maybe even competing standards, the right ones surface up and become the de facto standard for organizations to use. >> Yeah, a lot of good thoughts there, Joep, I want to walk through that stack a little bit, but before we do, big statement that Priyanka made, I thought it was a nice umbrella for her keynote, it's a foundation of doers powering end user driven open-source, so as I mentioned, you worked at a service provider, you've done strategies for some other large organizations, what's your thought on the role of how the end users engage with and contribute to open-source? One of the great findings I saw a couple years ago, as you said, it went from open-source being something that people did on the weekend to the sides, to many end users, and of course lots of vendors, have full-time people that their jobs are to contribute and participate in the open-source communities. >> Yeah, I guess that kind of signals a maturity in the market to me, where organizations are investing in open-source because they know they're going to get something out of it. So back in the day, it was not necessarily certain that if you put a lot of effort into an open-source project, for your own gain, for your own purposes, that that would work out, and that with the backing of the CNCF, as well as so many member organizations and end user organizations, I think participating in open-source becomes easier, because there's more of a guarantee that what you put in will kind of circulate, and come out and have value for you, in a different way. Because if you're working on a service mesh, some other organization might be working on Prometheus, or Kubernetes, or another project, and some organizations are now kind of helping each other with the CNCF as the gatekeeper, to move all of those technology stacks forward, instead of everyone doing it for themselves. Maybe even being forced to reinvent the wheel for some of those technology components. >> So let's walk through the stack a little bit, and the layers that are out there, so let's start with Kubernetes, the discussion has been Kubernetes won the container orchestration battles, but whose Kubernetes am I going to use? For a while it was would it be distributions, we've seen every platform basically has at least one Kubernetes option built into it, so doesn't mean you're necessarily using this, before AWS had their own flavor of Kubernetes, there was at least 15 different ways that you could run Kubernetes on top of it, but now they have ECS, they have EKS, even things like Fargate now work with EKS, so interesting innovation and adoption there. But VMware baked Kubernetes into vSphere 7. Red Hat of course, with OpenShift, has thousands of customers and has great momentum, we saw SUSE buy Rancher to help them move along and make sure that they get embedded there. One of the startups you've worked with, Spectro Cloud, helps play into the mix there, so there is no shortage of options, and then from a management standpoint, companies like Microsoft, Google, VMware, Red Hat, all, how do I manage across clusters, because it's not going to just be one Kubernetes that you're going to use, we're expecting that you're going to have multiple options out there, so it sure doesn't sound boring to me yet, or reached full maturity, Joep. What's your take, what advice do you give to people out there when they say "Hey, okay, I'm going to use Kubernetes," I've got hybrid cloud, or I probably have a couple things, how should they be approaching that and thinking about how they engage with Kubernetes? >> So that's a difficult one, because it can go so many different ways, just because, like you said, the market is maturing. Which means, we're kind of back at where we left off virtualization a couple years ago, where we had managers of managers, managing across different data centers, doing the multicloud thing before it was a cloud thing. We have automation doing day two operations, I saw one of the announcements for this week will be a vendor coming out with day two operations automation, to kind of help simplify that stack of Kubernetes in production. And so the best advice I think I have is, don't try to do it all yourself, right, so Kubernetes is still maturing, it is still fairly open, in a sense that you can change everything, which makes it fairly complex to use and configure. So don't try and do that part yourself, necessarily, either use a managed service, which there are a bunch of, Spectro Cloud, for example, as well as Platform9, even the bigger players are now having those platforms. Because in the end, Kubernetes is kind of the foundation of what you're going to do on top of it. Kubernetes itself doesn't have business value in that sense, so spending a lot of time, especially at the beginning of a project, figuring that part out, I don't think makes sense, especially if the risk and the impact of making mistakes is fairly large. Like, make a mistake in a monitoring product, and you'll be able to fix that problem more easily. But make a mistake in a Kubernetes platform, and that's much more difficult, especially because I see organizations build one cluster to rule them all, instead of leveraging what the cloud offers, which is just spin up another cluster. Even spin it up somewhere else, because we can now do the multicloud thing, we can now manage applications across Kubernetes clusters, we can manage many different clusters from a single pane of glass, so there's really no reason anymore to see that Kubernetes thing as something really difficult that you have to do yourself, hence just do it once. Instead, my recommendation would be to look at your processes and figure out, how can I figure out how to have a Kubernetes cluster for everything I do, maybe that's per team, maybe that's per application or per environment, per cloud, and they kind of work from that, because, again, Kubernetes is not the holy grail, it's not the end state, it is a means to an end, to get where we're going with applications, with developing new functionality for customers. >> Well, I think you hit on a really important point, if you look out in the social discussion, sometimes Kubernetes and multicloud get attacked, because when I talk to customers, they shouldn't have a Kubernetes strategy. They have their business strategy, and there are certain things that they're trying to, "How do I make sure everything's secure," and I'm looking at DevSecOps, I need to really have an edge computing strategy because that's going to help my business objectives, and when I look at some of the tools that are going to help and get me there, well, Kubernetes, the service meshes, some of the other tools in the CNCF are going to help me get there, and as you said, I've got managed services, cloud providers, integrators are going to help me build those solutions without me having to spend years to understand how to do that. So yeah, I'd love to hear any interesting projects you're hearing about, edge computing, the security space has gone from super important to even more important if that's possible in 2020. What are you hearing? >> Yeah, so the most interesting part for me is definitely the DevSecOps movement, where we're basically not even allowed to call it DevOps anymore. Security has finally gained a foothold, they're finally able to shift lift the security practices into the realm of developers, simplifying it in a way, and automating it in a way that, it's no longer a trivial task to integrate security. And there's a lot of companies supporting that, even from a Kubernetes perspective, integrating with Kubernetes or integrating with networking products on top of Kubernetes. And I think we finally have reached a moment in time where security is no longer something that we really need to think about. Again, because CNCF is kind of helping us select the right projects, helping us in the right direction, so that making choices in the security realm becomes easier, and becomes a no-brainer for teams, special security teams, as well as the application development teams, to integrate security. >> Well, Joep, I'm glad to hear we've solved security, we can all go home now. That's awesome. But no, in all seriousness, such an important piece, lots of companies spending time on there, and it does feel that we are starting to get the process and organization around, so that we can attack these challenges a little bit more head-on. How 'about service mesh, it's one of those things that's been a little bit contentious the last couple of years, of course ahead of the show, Google is not donating Istio to the foundation, instead, the trademark's open. I'm going to have an interview with Liz Rice to dig into that piece, in the chess moves, Microsoft is now putting out a service mesh, so as Corey Quinn says, the plural of service mesh must be service meeshes, so, it feels like Mr. Meeseeks, for any Rick and Morty fans, we just keep pressing the button and more of them appear, which may cause us more trouble, but, what's your take, do you have a service mesh coming out, Kelsey Hightower had a fun little thing on Twitter about it, what's the state of the state? >> Yeah, so I won't be publishing a service mesh, maybe I'll try and rickroll someone, but we'll see what happens. But service meshes are, they're still a hot topic, it's still one of the spaces where most discussion is kind of geared towards. There is yet to form a single standard, there is yet a single block of companies creating a front to solve that service mesh issue, and I think that's because in the end, service meshes are, from a complexity perspective, they're not mature enough to be able to commoditize into a standard. I think we still need a little while, and maybe ask me this question next year again, and we'll see what happens. But we'll still need a little while to kind of let this market shift and let this market innovate, because I don't think we've reached the end state with service meshes. Also kind of gauging from customer interest and actual production implementations, I don't think this has trickled down from the largest companies that have the most requirements into the smaller companies, the smaller markets, which is something that we do usually see, now Kubernetes is definitely doing that. So in terms of service meshes, I don't think the innovation has reached that endpoint yet, and I think we'll still need a little while, which will mean for the upcoming period, that we'll kind of see this head to head from different companies, trying to gain a foothold, trying to lead a market, introduce their own products. And I think that's okay, and I think the CNCF will continue to kind of curate that experience, up to a point where maybe somewhere in the future we will have a noncompeting standard to finally have something that's commoditized and easy to implement. >> Yeah, it's an interesting piece, one of the things I've always enjoyed when I go to the show is just wander, and the things you bump into are like "Oh my gosh, wow, look at all of these cool little projects." I don't think we are going to stop that Cambrian explosion of innovation and ideas. When you go walk around there's usually over 200 vendors there, and a lot of them are opensource projects. I would say many of them, when you have a discussion with them, I'm not sure that there's necessarily a business behind that project, and that's where you also see maturity in spaces. A year or so ago, in the observability space, open tracing helped pull together a couple of pieces. Storage is starting to mature. Doesn't mean we're going to get down to one standard, there's still a couple of storage engines out there, I have some really good discussions this week to go into that, but it goes from, "Boy, storage is a mess," to "Oh, okay, we have a couple of uses," and just like storage in the data center, there's not a box or a protocol to do anything, it's what's your use case, what performance, what clouds, what environments are you living on, and therefore you can do that. So it's good to see lots of new things added, but then they mature out and they consolidate, and as you said, the CNCF is help giving those roadmaps, those maps, the landscapes, which boy, if you go online, they have some really good tools. Go to CNCF, the website, and you can look through, Cheryl Hung put one, I'm trying to remember which, it's basically a bullseye of the ones that, here's the one that's fully baked, and here's the ones that are making its way through, and the customer feedback, and they're going to do more of those to help give guidance, because no one solution is going to fit everybody's needs, and you have these spectrums of offerings. Wild card for you, are there any interesting projects out there, new things that you're hearing about, what areas should people be poking around that might not be the top level big things? >> So, I guess for me, that's really personal because I'm still kind of an infrastructure geek in that sense. So one of the things that really surprised me was a more traditional vendor, Zerto in this case, with a fantastic solution, finally, they're doing data protection for Kubernetes. And my recommendation would be to look at companies like Zerto in the data protection space, finally making that move into containers, because even though we've completed the discussion, stateful versus stateless, there's still a lot to be said for thinking about data protection, if you're going to go all-in into containers and into Kubernetes, so that was one that really provoked my thoughts, I really was interested in seeing, "Okay, what's Zerto doing in this list of CNCF members?" And for that matter, I think other vendors like VMware, like Red Hat, like other companies that are moving into this space, with a regained trust in their solutions, is something that I think is really interesting, and absolutely worth exploring during the event, to see what those more traditional companies, to use the term, are doing to innovate with their solutions, and kind of helping the CNCF and the cloud data world, become more enterprise-ready, and that's kind of the point I'm trying to make, where for the longest time, we've had this cloud-native versus traditional, but I always thought of it like cloud-native versus enterprise-ready, or proven technology. This is kind of for the developers doing a new thing, this is for the IT operations teams, and we're kind of seeing those two groups, at least from a technology perspective, being fused into one new blood group, making their way forward and innovating with those technologies. So, I think it's interesting to look at the existing vendors and the CNCF members to see where they're innovating. >> Well, Joep, you connected a dotted line between the cloud-native insights program that I've been doing, you were actually my first guest on that. We've got a couple of months worth of episodes out there, and it is closing that gap between what the developers are doing and what the enterprise was, so absolutely, there's architectural pieces, Joep, like you, I'm an infrastructure geek, so I come from those pieces, and there was that gap between, I'm going to use VMs, and now I'm using containers, and I'm looking at things like serverless too, how do we built applications, and is it that bottom-up versus top-down, and what a company's needs, they need to be able to react fast, they need to be able to change along the way, they need to be able to take advantage of the innovation that ecosystems like this have, so, I love the emphasis CNCF has, making sure that the end users are going to have a strong voice, because as you said, the big companies have come in, not just VMware and Red Hat, but, IBM and Dell are behind those two companies, and HPE, Cisco, many others out there that the behemoths out there, not to mention of course the big hyperscale clouds that helped start this, we wouldn't have a lot of this without Google kicking off with Kubernetes, AWS front and center, and an active participant here, and if you talk to the customers, they're all leveraging it, and of course Microsoft, so it is a robust, big ecosystem, Joep, thank you so much for helping us dig into it, definitely hope we can have events back in the Netherlands in the near future, and great to see you as always. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, stay tuned, we have, as I said, full spectrum of interviews from theCUBE, they'll be broadcasting during the three days, and of course go to theCUBE.net to catch all of what we've done this year at the show, as well as all the back history. Feel free to reach out to me, I'm @Stu on Twitter, and thank you, as always, for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to bright and sunny San Francisco. Gorgeous day here in the City on the Bay. Dave Vellante, John Walls. We continue our coverage here on theCUBE VMworld 2019 with Doc D'Errico from Infodant, CMO. Doc, good to see you again, sir! >> Infinidat. >> Oh Infinidat! Sorry, sorry, sorry. (Doc laughs) But, good to see you! >> I missed my opportunity but thanks, Dave, yeah, it's good to be back. >> John: You bet. Marc Creviere, who is principle systems engineer at US Signal. Good to see you again, Marc here. You were here just last year, right? >> Yeah, I'm an alumni now. >> We'll touch base on that in just a little bit. Doc, first off, let's just talk about the show from your perspective. What you're doing here, explain to our viewers at home what it's all about and what you find the vibe that's going on this year. What kind of sense do you get? >> The vibe is fantastic The sense is great. Coming back to San Francisco, I'm not sure what we were really expecting but it's a really good tempo, a lot of great people, lot of great feedback on our recent launch. A lot of people looking at what're we doing, especially with VMware and availability. Lots of new use cases for snapshot technologies which is fantastic. The 100% availability, it's great getting people come up to you who say "Hey, this is incredible. "You guys actually put some teeth behind your guarantees," "you know, you're not just promising "some future discounts or something. "In the VMworld environment where I've got my VMs, "I need that kind of guarantee, I need that support. "I need to know that my systems "are going to be there when I need them, "because that's my business," right? It's just an incredible vibe. >> And had your party last night? >> We had our party last night. And guess who was there? (laughs) >> I did stop by, it was a very cool venue. The San Francisco Mint, which is, it was kind of awesome. >> Yeah, it was a great, great environment. It was great having people like Dave there, and some of the other industry luminaries talk to our customers. >> I didn't get the tour of the Vault. >> Doc: I'll get you a picture. (laughing) >> So, Marc, I mentioned in the intro, we had you on last year. So, let's look back at the last 12 months for you. US Signal, and what's been going on with you, and what are you seeing here and kind of feeling here in terms of business? >> Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's been another great year at US Signal. We are planning on opening a new data center in the Detroit Metro area, coming up online Q1 of 2020, so that's exciting for us. Purpose built, wholly owned and operated by us, so that's great. It's going to add to our capabilities in that region. We've had a heavy focus on DR technologies, DR as a Service technologies in the past year. Seeing a lot of success, a lot of really good conversations with customers and developing their plans, and bringing our new capabilities to be able to service those needs. >> So, tell us more about the DR as a Service. I mean, that's obviously one of the early sort of cloud-use cases? >> Marc: Yeah. >> Add some color, what is it all about, how does it relate to some of the other DR solutions that are out there and what role do these guys play? >> Yeah, well we conducted a survey of a little over 100 of companies in our region, a little over 100 respondents, and three out of four respondents told us that their biggest concerns were either distributed denial of service or ransomware. Obviously, we've got these bad actors out there. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad actor, it could be something force of nature making data unavailable, right? It doesn't matter how great the equipment is if either a bad actor or nature takes it out for you. So, having that protection, we're able to have replication technology. We actually have three separate technologies that we use now. We enhanced our Zerto-based offering to include multi-cloud so we can now have customers replicate to either multiple cloud destinations, us being one of them, or they can replicate to one of their sites and us as a tertiary site, so that's new. They're able to bring their existing licensing. One thing that's exciting to me, near and dear to my heart, is drafts for VMware based on the vCloud availability platform. So, we're a big VM, vCloud shop, big consumer of VMware technologies, that's why we're out here, and that's really exciting to me because it uses built in VMware replication technologies. There's not a lot of learning curve, there's not a lot of extra components. Super simple to get up and running and get RPOs as low as 5 minutes, and it's easy, and it's relatively cheap on an OPX-type platform, where you're paying for storage and per VM and that's it. And then we've also spun up a replication for Veeam, Cloud replication for Veeam based on that ecosystem. So, we've got a lot of entry points, a lot of different ways that we can protect that data and bring it in and get a copy in our data center, so in the event that it becomes unavailable at the source, it's either managed or customer managed. We can get it up and running in a short time frame on our infrastructure. >> And Infinidat is the primary storage underneath all this? >> Marc: Yeah. >> So, explain more about... So, Doc, you and I have had these conversations. The state of the art, whatever, 15 years ago, was three-site data centers, very complex, extremely expensive. I'm interested in how we're attacking that problem today. You obviously, with multi cloud, it's multi-site, but how are we attacking the cost problem, the complexity problem, the "I can't test because I can fail over "but I'm afraid to fail back" problem? >> Well, you know, there's so many different ways to cover all of these. We're talking just about ransomware, you know, ransomware are immutable snaps, become an important play and we have Snap Rotator which will allow you to build a certain number of snaps and have them just rotate through so you're not just creating an infinite number, you're not wasting time and space. And, by the way, time and space, our snapshots are zero-overhead. There's zero performance penalty, unless you want to crash consistent copy, and there's really zero data overhead because it's only the incremental data that you write. So, by creating this, you can do it every couple seconds, and then create some immutable copies of that. You know, make them time out, so they can't be modified, 30 days, 60 days, whatever you decide administratively. So that's great. If you're looking for the DRaaS, the DR as a Service-type capabilities, whether it's single site or multi site, going to cloud service providers makes a lot of sense. 'Cause now, even if it's on premises to a cloud service provider, now you're not having to worry about that second set of infrastructure, you're not having to worry about the management of it, you're not having to worry about the systems integration of it, or even go CSP to CSP, right? Go from one data center within your favorite cloud service provider, hopefully US Signal, to another or any one of our great partners would be super, too. And then, of course, InfiniSync, where if you really want that longer distance capability, why bother with a bunker site? Why bother with all that complexity and that cost and overhead? Put in an InfiniSync appliance in with a VM, and you've got the recoverability. You can go asynchronous distances, and have a zero RPO. >> For way, way less. >> Oh, a fraction of the cost. It'll cost you less for the InfiniSync appliance than it'll cost you for the telecoms equipment that you need for a bunker site. >> If I don't want to build another data center... Go ahead. >> What I'm curious about; I heard a number yesterday in one of the interviews we had, about ransomware. The number kind of blew me away, and I thought about one out of every three companies will be a victim of, or at least a ransomware attack within the next two years, which means everyone, over the next six, if you extrapolate that out. Does that sound about right from what you're seeing? That the intrusions are reaching that kind of frequency? >> I'm surprised it's that low, but I'll let Marc try and answer that. >> We've done some events where we actually demo how easy it is, like, through a phishing attack, to get that in there. So, it's not just about having those protections in place, it's your user training; that's a huge area, training those users what to look for in those emails to avoid that sort of thing, but it's not perfect. People are imperfect. >> Dave: And yeah, you got to have both the protection on the front end, the training for the people, and those recovery options in the event it does get in. In our survey, the average monetary damage was over $150,000 per incident. And that means that some people got off a little lighter and some people paid a lot more, if that was the average. >> Should you pay the ransom? >> Uh, not if you've got a good plan in place that can test it. (laughs) >> But it is, it's a reasonable question. >> Huge quandary. Some are, some aren't, right? Atlanta says "no, we're going to pay a boatload "to protect against it, but we're not going to pay that," what was it, 55,000 or whatever it was? >> Let's negotiate. >> Yeah, I think I said last time I was here that until you've tested your plan, you don't really have one. You know, it rings just as true today. >> What's your business worth? I mean, it's a great question, really. What is your business worth to you? Your business is probably worth a lot more, and they probably throw these numbers out there, thinking "Well...", then becomes a no-brainer for you to pay, and that's the whole point. Because what is ransomware? It's malware that's recoverable, maybe. You're not even sure of that. >> Is it usually, is it operator error? Is it human error that allows that to work more often than not? Or, is it a mixture of technical chops, or just...? >> It's a mixture; you've got to know what vulnerabilities are out there on your infrastructure, you got to make sure you're staying up to date on patching those vulnerabilities, paying attention to any compliance practices, if you're a compliant organization. You know, HIPAA, PCI, our entire infrastructure footprint is actually HIPAA and PCI compliant at the levels that we control. So, it's a heavy lift. You got to stick with it. >> But just to kind of bring it full circle to the comment about the ransom and paying it, you know Marc said something really important, "Have a good plan." I would argue, have a good partner. If you don't have a CISO who's got the chops to be dealing with these types of problems, that's when you need a partner like US Signal to really step in and take you through what's involved in a realistic plan, something that's not going to break the bank, something that's really going to protect your business going forward, because these things are very real. >> One of the concerns I have in this topic is that things happen really fast these days. So, if there are problems, they replicate very, very quickly. How do you address that problem? Is it architecture, analytics, I'm sure process, maybe you could add some color to that. >> All of the above. Having those controls in place, those segregations, we've got, obviously, clear segregation between our management and customer data plans. And each of our customer data plans are separate from each other. It's secure multi-tenancy, not just multi-tenancy. So yeah, it's important to keep those delineations, user access, making sure that people only have access to what they need, and a lot of that, again, is covered by those compliance practices and paying close attention to what they have. There are reasons they have these guidelines and these rules and these audits. It's to help, in large part to protect against that. >> You mentioned before, Marc, you're a heavy VMware user, Infinidat, it's kind of the new kid on the block. People said "Oh, they'll never be--" >> Marc: Not for us. >> What's that? >> Not for us. >> Not for you, right, but for the storage industry. Doc and I have been in the storage industry a while. But, I'm curious as to what you want from a supplier like Infinidat, why you chose Infinidat? How're they doing with regard to VMware affinity, all those things people tend to talk about as important. >> Marc: All right, well-- >> What do you think is important? >> Well, in the Infinidat experience, the company experience, the support experience, it is the benchmark by which we judge all other vendors now. It's that good. The working with us whenever we need equipment, obviously they've got, the price per terabyte is hard to beat with the way they're able to leverage that technology. The responsiveness, if we've needed something in a hurry they've been able to get it to us in a hurry, It ties in extremely well with our infrastructure because we scale so quickly, right? Trends are very hard with us, because there's all these hockey sticks. It's going, going, going, we get a big order and it goes up really fast. I think the theme right now is scale to win? >> Yep. >> So that resonates with us because by having that in place and having that scale ready to go, we don't even need to anticipate those hockey sticks because it's already there. >> Great. Well, gentlemen, thanks for the time. We appreciate that. Doc, Infinidat. (laughs) >> Thank you very much it's great to see you both again. >> John: Look forward to see you in 2020, right? >> I'll be back. >> Yeah, it's become an annual thing. >> Michael said we'll be celebrating our 20th year, so I'm looking forward to seeing-- >> And this is our 10th year here, so anniversaries all across the board. >> Congratulations. >> Congratulations. >> Have a good rest of the show, we appreciate the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Back with more VMworld 2019, we continue our coverage live here on theCUBE. We're at Moscone Center North in San Francisco. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering Actifio 2019 Data Driven. (upbeat techno music) Brought to you by Actifio. >> Hello everyone and welcome to Boston and theCUBE's special coverage of Actifio Data Driven 19. I'm Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. We've got a special guest, John Furrier is in the house from from Palo Alto. Guys, theCUBE we love to go out on the ground, you know, we go deep. We're here at this data theme, right? We were there in the early days, John, you called me up and say, "Get your butt here, we're going to cover the first of Doop World". And since then things have moved quite fast. Everybody thought, you know, Hadoop Big Data was going to take over the world. Nobody even uses that term anymore, right? It's kind of, now it's AI, and machine intelligence, and block chain, and everything else. So what do you think is happening? Did the early Big Data days fail? You know, Frank Genus this morning called it The experimentation phase. >> I mean, I don't really think Frank has a good handle on what's going on in my opinion, cause I think it's not an experimentation, it's real. That was a wave that was essentially the beginning of, not an experimentation, of realization and reality that data, unstructured data in particular was real and relevant. Hadoop looked good off the tee, mill the fairway as we say, but the thing about the Hadoop ecosystem is that validated big data. Every financial institution jumped on it. Everyone who knew anything about data or had data issues or had a lot of data, knew the value. It's just that the apparatus to build via Hadoop was too expensive. In comes Cloud computing at scale, so, as Cloud was accelerating, you look at the Amazon Web Services Revenue Chart you can almost see the D mark where the inflection point is on the hockey stick of Amazon's revenue numbers. And that is the point in time where Hadoop was on the declining of failure. Hortonworks sold the Cloudera. Cloudera's earnings are at an all-time low. A lot of speculation of their entire strategy, and their venture back company went public, but bet the ranch to be the next data warehouse. That wasn't the business model. The data business was a completely new industry, completely being re-transformed, and, far from experimentation, it is real and definitely growing like a weed, but changing because of the underpinning infrastructure dynamics of Cloud Native, Microservices, and that's only going to get highly accelerated and the people who talk about context of industry like Frank, are going to be off. Their predictions will be off because they don't really see the new picture clear enough, in my opinion, >> So, >> I think he's off. >> So it's not so much of a structural change like it was when we went from, you know, mainframes to PCs, it's more of a sort of flow, evolution into this new area which is being driven, powered by new technologies, we talk about block chain machine intelligence and other things. >> Well, I mean, the make up of companies that were building quote, "Big Data Solutions", were trying to build an apparatus or mechanisms to solve big data problems, but none of them actually had the big data problem. None of them were full of data. None of them had a lot of data. The ones that had problems were the financial institutions, the credit card companies, the people who were doing a lot of large scale, um, with Google, Facebook, and some of the hyperscalers. They were actually dealing with the data tsunami themselves, so the practitioners ended up driving it. You guys at Wikibomb, we pointed this out on theCUBE many times, that the value was going to come from the practitioners not the suppliers of so called technology. So, you know, the Clouderas of the world who thought Hadoop would be relevant and growing as a technology were right on one side, on the other side of the coin was the Cloud decimation of that sector. The Cloud computer just completely blew away that Hadoop market because you didn't have to hire a PhD, you didn't have to hire specialty skills to stand up Hadoop clusters. You could actually throw it in the Cloud and get agile quickly, and get value out of data very very quickly. That has been real, it has not been an experiment. There's been new case studies, new companies born, new brands, so it's not an experiment, it is reality, and it's only going to get more real every day. >> And I add of course now you've got, you mentioned Cloudera and Hortenworks, you also got Matt Bar reeling Stu. Let's talk about Actifio. So they coined the term Copy Data Management, they created the category, of course they do a lot of backup, I mean, everybody in this space does a lot of backup. And then you saw the Silicon Valley companies come in. Particularly Cohesity and Rubric, you know, to a lesser extent he got some other guys like Zerto and Durva, but it was really those two companies, Cohesity and Rubric, they raised more money in their D round than Actifio has since inception. But yet Actifio keeps, you know, plodding along, growing, you know, word is they're profitable, you know, they're not like this really sectioned very East Coast versus kind of West Coast mentality. What's your take on what's going on? >> Yeah, so, Dave right, you look at the early days of Actifio and you say great, Copy Data Management, I have all these copies of data, how do I reduce my cost, get greater utilization than I have and leverage the data? I love the title of the show here, Data Driven. You know, we know at the center of digital transformation if you can't become data driven, like the CMO Brian Regan got up on stage talk about that industrialization of data. How am I going along that journey being this, I collected data versus now, you know, data, you know, is the reason that I make decisions, how I make decisions, I get smarter. The Cloud of course is a huge enabler of this, there's all these services that I can instantly access to be able to get greater insight, and move along with that environment, and if you look underneath all of these backup companies, it's really how I can change that data into business value and drive my business, the metadata underneath and all those pieces, not just the wonky storage and technical solutions that make things better, and I get a faster ROI. It's that data at the core of what we do and how do I get that as a business to accelerate. Because we know IT needs to be able to respond back to the business and data needs to be that rocket fuel. >> Is it the case of data haves and data have-nots? I mean, Amazon has data >> I mean, you're right-- >> and Facebook has data. >> We're talking about Actifio, you brought that up, okay, on this segment, on the inside segment, which is cool, they're here at the event, but they have a good opportunity but they also, they got some challenges. I mean, the thing about Actifio is, to my earlier point, which side of the wave are they on? Are they out too much out front with virtualization and Amazon, the Cloud will take them away, or are they riding the Cloud wave, making that an enabler? And I think what really I like about Actifio is because they have a lot of virtualization capabilities, the question is can they scale that Stu, to containers and microservices, because, the real opportunity in this market, in my opinion, is going to build on the virtualization trend, and make container aware, microservices capabilities because if they don't, then that would be a tell sign. Now either way it's a hot M&A market right now, so I think being in the market, horse on the track as you say. You look at the tableau sales force deal monster numbers we are in clearly a hot IPO market and a major roll up market on the M&A side. I think clearly there's two types of companies, old and new, and that is really what people are looking at, are they part of the old guard, are they the new guard. So, you know, this to me is going to be a tell sign of what they do next, can they make the data driven value proposition, you articulated Stu, actually a reality It's going to come from the technology underneath. >> Well I think it's a really interesting point you're making because, Stu as you probably know, that Amazon announced the Amazon backup service right, and you talked about the backup guys and they're like, "Ah yeah it's backup, but it really doesn't do recovery, it's really not that robust". It's part of me says, "Uh oh"... >> Watch out. >> You better move fast", because Amazon has stated, "Hey if you don't move fast we're going to just keep gobbling", and you've seen Amazon do this. What are your thoughts on that? Can these specialists, can they survive, John's talking about M&A. Can the market support all these guys along with the big, you know, traditional guys like Veritas, and Dell EMC, and IBM and Combol? >> Right, well so Actifio started very much in the data center. They were before this Could wave really took off. It's really only in the last year that they've been sassifying their product. So the question is, does that underlying IP, which wasn't tied to hardware, but, you know, sat at really more of, you know, reminded us of that storage virtualization battles that we talked about for years, Dave, but now they are going in the Cloud. They've got all the partnerships in the Cloud, but they are competing against those new vendors that you talked about like Cohesity and Rubric out there, and there's big money chasing this environment. So, you know, I want to talk to the customers here and find out, you know, where they are using them, and especially some of those first customers using this--. >> Well they clearly need a Cloud play cause that's clearly where the action is. But if you look at what's going on with Amazon, Azure, and Google you see a lot of on premises, Stu, because that's where the customers are. So just because the customers are currently not migrating their existing workloads to the Cloud doesn't mean it's not going to happen. So I think there's an opportunity for any company like Actifio, who may or may not be on the curve on the tech side, one little misfire on a tech bet could cripple the company and also make the company. There's a lot of high risk, reward ratio. How they handle containers. How they build on virtualizations. Virtualization going to to be part of the future with Cloud. These are the kind of the dynamics that are going to be in play, and they got some time on their hands because the on premises growth is because the clients are trying to figure out what to do and they're not going to be migrating, lifting, and shifting workloads all off to the Cloud. New will be Cloud based, but enterprises have proven why we are in multi-Cloud and hybrid-Cloud conversation, that... The enterprise on premises is not going away anytime soon. >> I want to ask you guys, John you specifically, about this sort of new Silicon Valley growth model and how companies are achieving escape velocity. When you and I made our first trip to Barcelona, I was having dinner with David Scott who was the CEO of 3PAR and he said to me, When I came to 3PAR the board said, "Hey we're willing to invest 30 million dollars in this company". And David Scott said to them, "I need way more, I need 80 million dollars". Today 80 million dollars is nothing. You saw, you know, Pure Storage hit escape velocity, was just throwing money, and growing at the problem. You're seeing Cohesity-- >> Well you can debate that. I mean, If you have to build a rocket ship, hit critical mass and you want to fund that, you're going to to need an enterprise. However, there's arguments on the south side that you can actually get fly wheel effect going early with less capital. So again, that's 3PAR-- >> But so that's my point. >> Well so that's 3PAR, that was 2009. >> So, yeah that was early days so that's ancient history. But software is generally supposed to be a capital efficient market, yet these companies are raising many hundreds and hundreds of millions, you know, half a billion dollar raises and they are putting it largely in promotion. Is that the new model, is that sustainable, in your view? >> Well I think you're conflating capital market dynamics with viable companies to invest in. I think there's a robust seed in series A market but the series A market and Silicon Valley is you know, 15 to 25 million, it used to be 3 to 5. So the dynamics are changing on funding. There's just not enough companies, horses on the track, to deploy capital at tranches of 30, 50, 80 million. So the capital markets are clearly going to have the money available so it's a market for the startups and the broke companies. That's separate from actually winning. So you've got slacks going public this weeks, you have other companies who have built business on a sass fly wheel, and then everything else is gravy in terms of the go to market, they got a couple hundred million. I think slack got close to a billion dollars in cash that they've raised. So they're flooded with cash, they'll never spend it all. So there are some companies that can achieve success like that. Others have to buy market share, they got to push and build out a sales force, and it's going to be a function of the role of customer, customization, specialism, and whatnot. But with AI machine leaning there's more efficiencies coming in so I think the modern company can do more with less. >> What do you think of the ride sharing on IPOs, Uber and Lift, do you abol? Do you like 'em or do you think it's just, they're losing too money and can't sustain it? >> I was thinking about that this morning after looking at the article in the Wall Street Journal in our coverage on Silicon angle. You look at Zoom communications, I like models that actually can take a simple concept and an existing mature market and disrupt it by being Cloud efficient and completely sass and data driven. That is an example of success. That to me, Zoom Communications and Zscaler, another company that we talk to, these are companies that were built with a specific value proposition that made the product and they were targeting mature markets with leaders in it. Video conferencing, Webex, Citrix, Zoom came out of nowhere, optimized on simple value proposition, used Cloud scale and data, and crushed it. Uber, Lift, little bit different issue. They're losing money but I would bet on the long term that that is going to be the used case for how people will have transportation. I think that's the long game and I think that without regulatory kind of pressure, without, there's regulatory issues that's really the big risk. But I believe that Uber and Lift absolutely will be long brands and just like Facebook was early on, although they threw off a lot of cash, those guys are building for penetration, and that's where the funding matters. Penetration is critical. Now they're the standard, and people really don't take taxis anymore, but they're really using the ride sharing. And you get the scooters, you get the bikes, they're all sequencing into these adjacent markets which drains more cash but builds the brand, builds the footprint. >> Well that's what I want to ask you. So people compare the early Uber, Lift, Taxi, Ride sharing to Amazon selling books, but there's all these other adjacencies. You have a thought on this? >> Well, just, you know, right, Uber Eats is a huge opportunity for that environment and autonomous vehicles everybody talks about, but it's still quite a ways out. So there are a lot of different- >> Scooters are the same, we're in San Diego, there are 8 gazillion scooters. >> San Diego had fun, you know, going around on their electronic scooters, boy, talk about the gig economy, they pay people at the night, to like go pay by the recharge you do on that, what is the future of work, >> Yeah, that's a great point. >> and how can we have that-- >> Uber going to look a lot like Amazon. You subsidize the front end retail side of the business, but look at the data that they throw up. Uber's data that they're gathering on, not only customer behavior, but just mapping services, 3-D mapping is going to be huge, so you've got these cars that are essentially bots on the road, providing massive mapping and traffic analysis. So you're going to start to see data driven, like Actifio slogan here, be a big part of all design decisions and value proposition from any company out there. And if they're not data driven I think they're going to be toast. >> Probably could because there's that data and that machine learning underneath, that can optimize, you know, where the people are, how I use the system, such a huge wave that we're watching. >> How about one last topic which is heavily data driven, it's Facebook. Facebook is obviously a data driven company, the Facebook crypto play, I love it, I love Facebook. I'm a bull on Facebook, I think it's been beat up. I think, two billion users is hard to replicate, but what's your thoughts on their crypto play? >> Well it's kind of a middle finger to the United States of America but it's a great catalyst for the international market because crypto needed a whale to come in and bring all those users in. Bad timing, in my mind, for Facebook, because given all the anti-trust and regulatory conversations, what better way to show your threat to the world order when you say we're going to run a banking system with a collection of international companies. I think the US is going to look at this and say, "Oh my God! They can't even be trusted to handle personal information and we're going to now let them run a banking system? Run monetary, basically World Bank equivalent infrastructure?" No frickin way! I think this is going to to be a major road to home. I think Facebook has to really make this an ecosystem play if they want to make it work, that's their telegraphic move they're saying, "Hey we want to do for the community but we got our own wallet and we got our own network". But they bring a lot to the table so it's going to be a really interesting dynamic to see the coalescing around Facebook because they could make the market. Look what Instagram did to Snapchat. They literally killed the company, took all their users. That is what's going to happen in the digital money economy when Facebook brings billions of users user experience with money. What happened with Snapchat with Instagram is going to happen to the World Bank if this continues. >> Where do you stand on the government breaking up big tech? >> So Dave, you know, you look in these companies, it's not easy to pull those apart. I don't think our government understands how most of big tech works. You know, take Amazon and AWS, that's one company underneath it. You know, Facebook, Microsoft. You know, Microsoft went through all these issues. Question Dave, we've had lots of debates on Twitter you know, are they breaking the law, are they not doing trust? I have some trust issues with Facebook myself, but most of the big companies up there I don't think the anti-trust kicks in, I don't think it makes sense to pull them apart. >> Stu, the Facebook story and the YouTube story are simply this, they have been hiding under the platform rules, of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and they are an editing platform so you can't sue them. Okay, once they become a publisher they could be sued. Just like CNN, Fox News, and everybody else. And we're publishers. So they've been hiding behind the platform. That gig is up. They're going to have to address are you a platform or are you a publisher? You're making editing decisions around what users can see with software, you are essentially editing the feed, that is a publisher role, with that becomes responsibility, and then obviously regulartory. >> Well Facebook is conflicted right now. They're trying to figure out which side of the fence to go on. >> No no no! They want one side! The platform side! They're make billions of dollars! >> Yeah but so they're making decisions about you know, which content to show and whether they monetize it. And when it's controversial content, they'll turn down the ads a little bit but they won't completely eliminate it sometimes. >> So, Dave, the only thing that the partisans in politics seem to agree on though is that big tech has too much power. You know, What's your take on that? >> Well so I think that if they are breaking the law then they should be moderated. But I don't think the answer is to go hard after Elizabeth Warren. Hard after them and break them up. I think you got to start with okay, because you break these companies up what's going to happen is they're going to be worth more, it's going to be AT&T all over again. >> While you guys were at Sysco Live, we covered this at Amazon Web Service and Public Sector Summit. The real issue in government, Stu, is there's too much tech for bad on the PR side, and there's not enough tech for good. Tech is not bad, tech is good. There's not enough promotion around the apps around there. There's real venture funds being created to promote tech for good. That's going to where the tide will turn. When does the tech industry start doing good stuff, not bad stuff. >> All right we've got to wrap. John, thanks for sitting in. Thank you for watching. Be right back, we're here at Actifio Data Driven 2019. From Boston this is theCUBE, be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering veeAMON 2019. Brought to you by veeAM. >> Welcome back to veeAMON 2019, in Miami. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Justin Warren as my co-host. Simon Robinson here is the Senior Vice President, 451 Research, Simon it's great to see you, thanks for coming to the cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So is this your, is this right, your first veeAMON. >> It is, it is, first veeAMON, the first time in Miami, first time on theCUBE. So kind of bucket list check. >> Hey, got to give you a sticker here then, so here you go, thank you for coming on. And of course you've got the veeAM party tonight, which you may have been to some other veeAM parties at other shows, but-- >> Simon: I know them by reputation. >> Yeah, they're good. So looking forward to that. Two days, what have you learned here in the last couple of days, what are your impressions? >> Yeah, my impressions are that this is a conference that reflects the type of company that I think veeAM is, and veeAM's a little atypical for a technology company in this space, they didn't go down the traditional route, they had a very kind of different model right from the get-go, but what I see is real grass roots innovation, and veeAM has always been short on rhetoric, short on hype, and long on actually delivering the products and the capabilities that customers want, and it's been great to see examples of how that's playing out at the show, and we heard Ratmir talking about innovation, and 451 Research, we're an analyst firm focused on understanding the impacts of innovation, we provide data and insight around the technology innovation lifecycle, and it's always been, we've covered veeAM from pretty much day one, and it's always been clear to us that veeAM is a pretty special company, not just you have to be in the right place at the right time with the right product, but you also have to do it in a way that, they're kind of table stakes, you've got to do it in a way that actually engages and empathizes with what a customer is looking to achieve, and I think they've got that at the grassroots level, the veeAM admin level, a decade or more ago, and really have doubled down on that, so it's been awesome to see some of the examples of that at the conference this last couple of days, to have a general session with the eight demos. (laughing) >> And they all worked. >> They all worked. >> All of the eight!. >> I was terrified when they wheeled out the tub of water and it was like, they were dropping a laptop in there. Hey, you know, it was awesome and I think Ratmir is talking around, this being Act Two of veeAM's journey and veeAM's story. But firstly, lets kind of pay tribute to what they did in Act One. I think for any company to build a billion dollar revenue business software is a phenomenal achievement. But to do it in the data protection space? It's even more so. >> It's on backup, possibly the most boring thing ever, and they've kind of made it exciting. >> They used to say that backup was, well they used to say two things about backup. Firstly it's an insurance policy. And secondly, it was the one part of the IT environment that even storage people found boring. (laughing) But I mean, just see the kind of energy, enthusiasm, passion, of the folks here. That really isn't the case. >> That's true. It's been one of those boring but important factors. And then, veeAM's ascendancy, I've said this many times, has coincided with the birth of virtualization. We were consolidating physical servers because they were under-utilized, but then the backup had to be completely rethought because you didn't have enough band-width in the servers, and the capacity to run a backup job, and here comes veeAM, and it's just perfect fit, boom. Takes off. Now you've got Act Two, which is cloud. And I feel like it's jump balled, to use a U.S. basketball analogy, for you-- >> Simon: No idea what that means. >> --folks who don't follow basketball. (laughing) But it's "start over," right? And so, everybody's going after cloud, multi-cloud hybrid. And so, do you feel as though veeAM can replicate a success in what Ratmir's calling "Act Two" and draft from "Act One"? And one of the key factors, what's the tail wind for them, and what are some of the head winds. Certainly competition, we're going to' talk about that, but what are some of the other things that you guys see in your research? >> Yeah, so I think, I mean, first off, I think the hybrid cloud is a reality. Our research tells us that 60% of organizations are looking to, or characterize their strategy as being hybrid cloud strategy. But they're really struggling with actually enacting that and doing that in a processed, organized, deliberate way. We got a lot going on in the multi-cloud world, but multi-cloud is often an accident rather than something deliberate. It just turns out that they've got all these assets across all these different-- >> Dave: Multi-vendor, "Oh, I've got all these clouds!" >> That's right, that's right. Again, go back a decade, and how relatively straight forward the data and application environment seemed, right? I mean you had your application, it was probably on-prem, it really on a server that was connected to this bit of tin, and-- >> Little did we know at the time, right? >> Yeah, and fast forward to today, and data is just everywhere. So I think the tailwind for a company like veeAM is that, obviously, there's always going to be a need for backup, but I think that the conversation is evolving from one around data backup into one of data management, because you can only manage the data in your environment if you understand where it is, what its value is, what the potential exposures are, and I think that's why we see a big opportunity in managing data across this much more diverse and broader environment. >> So given that, do you think customers are better able to manage their data environment now than they used to be, or is it actually getting worse because now it's a much more dynamic and disparate environment. People weren't that great at it beforehand, have they gotten better, or not? >> It's hard to generalize. I think, in the main, customers acknowledge that they do a pretty bad job of managing it on a holistic basis. And I think we are seeing many organizations do it on a piece by piece basis. I think things like GDPR have been a wake-up call that, "Hey, your data is your responsibility!" And whether that data is on your facilities or it's in somebody else's, that doesn't matter. It's still your responsibility. So that was kind of a little bit of a wake-up call for organizations, certainly in Europe, and I think we're going to' see that replicated across the region also. >> We had the rise of Ransomware as well, which was actually the best advertisement for backup that you could ever have had. >> No doubt. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> These, we talk about the shared responsibility model, I mean, to your point, Simon, I mean, it's like security, right? I mean, somebody misconfigures an Amazon EC2-- >> Simon: That's right. >> -okay, it's not Amazon, it's the shared responsibility, and the same thing with the GDPR, malware. >> It really is, but I think, when we think about what the major challenges that just about every business faces, it's how do they scale their operations in a way that's going to' allow them to really take advantage of this thing we're calling "Digital Transformation," I know it's an over-used term, but-- >> Dave: But it's real. >> It is real, it is real. And I'll research, we asked a question in a survey recently, which is, "What is your organization's single biggest barrier?" And it's, "We don't respond quickly enough to the business." It's the biggest objective, but it's also the most difficult barrier to overcome. And I think we're only going to start to address this if we can fundamentally have a different look at how we scale operations, and that's across the application estate, across the infrastructure, it's also across data, right? And it's modernized, and it's transforming the way we think about managing data, and it's, we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past and end up with a zillion silos that all have a person that needs managing that silo, that environment. We've done that. We don't want to, as we move to multi-cloud, and we acknowledge that data and applications are going to' be in a greater diversity of locations, we have to have a model that scales to managing across those environments. And it's that kind of consistency of approach that I think the industry is lacking, but there's definitely an awareness that we need to address though. >> Yeah, so given that there's that awareness and there's a need there for the market, there has been a refresh in data protection in that part of the industry. Nothing much was happening for probably a good 10 years. David LaMein was kind of the last big disrupter that we had in that marketplace. And then it feels like overnight, everything changed. And suddenly there were a whole bunch of competitors all trying to go after this data-protection market, and veeAM being one of them. So with that challenge for customers happening, and this dynamic market, how do you see the market dynamics evolving as we go through what veeAM calls its "Act Two," and people start moving to this hybrid cloud. What does that look like from your research? >> I think from a customer's perspective, it is often actually just perplexing. I mean, where do you start? How do you think about this on a strategic basis? And again, some of our research has pointed out, highlighted that, again, it's kind of obvious, but, how do we get better alignment between IT and the business? And when we asked about that in the context of digital transformation, it was the businesses, it was the respondents that said, "Yes, our IT strategy is being developed in lock-step with the business," right? Those are the companies that feel like they can, that they have a good handle on this digital transformation. Data transformation. And we do see a bit of a, almost kind of a schism opening up. There is a kind of digital leaders, and there are definitely digital laggards that are really, really struggling with this. And I think that, to me, means opportunity. I mean, there's opportunity for vendors to come here, to come in here and address it. I think with data protection specifically, if you'd have said 10 years ago that there was almost kind of a Cambrian explosion of start-ups and new companies in backup recovery, and data protection, DR. That sounded like madness a decade ago. You know, we've seen absolute explosion, huge number of companies coming together, coming to market with real innovation, which ultimately, I think, is going to' be good for customers. I think there's probably too many for the market to sustain at this point, 'cause all these new entrants, none of the incumbents are going away. But I think it's going to' be very much a partner-centric kind of success. There's a realization I think from, certainly from the hyperscale cloud providers that they're not going to be able to do this on their own, right? They're going to' have to work with "legacy" incumbents. These guys definitely have a role to play. I mean, I was just in a session earlier today talking about VTL in the cloud. >> Dave: Yeah. >> I mean (laughing) VTL?! In the cloud?! (laughing) >> Legacy processes, they're hard to kill. >> But the more this evolves, the more it seems like the public cloud is starting to resemble kind of the on-prem world in some ways. >> Well that's interesting. You know I was in London a couple of weeks ago for the AWS summit and Matt Garman, who's the AWS exec, I think he's the guy who first launched EC2, he was the product manager at the time. Now he's the senior executive. He said, "We believe the vast majority of customers will eventually migrate all workloads into the cloud." And then it was, "But," and this is the "but" that they wouldn't have acknowledged two years ago, we realize that its a hybrid world-- >> We can't do this ourselves. >> And then they talked about snowball, and outpost, and all these other things that they're doing. And Microsoft has always had a different posture. Of course it has a huge on-premise state. But let's talk a little bit about the horses on the track. So you were mentioning some of the legacy backup guys, all the start-ups coming in. There's been over a billion and a half raised for data protection. So you've got Veritas, Dell EMC, IBM with its Tivoli business, it's done some stuff with Catalogic. And then you've got Cohesity and Rubrik trying to get escape velocity, so they got tons of cash, having big parties, trying to replicate that marketing momentum. And you've got veeAM, has, to your point, Simon, built a billion dollar software business, okay. And is now saying, "Okay, we're going into the next wave." >> And profitable! I was speaking with Ratmir this morning, and they were actually cash-flow positive and on gap-basis as well, they're making money! >> There's nothing more atypical than-- >> I know! >> --a start-up type company that's making money. >> And you've got specialists. You've got Drover in there and Zerto-- >> Simon: Yeah, you've got Zerto, you got, >> --you know, a lot of guys, Amantis just got taken out by Cohesity, so. How do you guys see that competitive market shaking out, Dave Russel did the bubble chart, Ratmir showed it yesterday, 15 billion. Is the tam big enough to support all these guys? What do they have to do to get return for their investors? We're talking IPO's in the future before the window closes. It's getting hairy. >> It is, and you know, certainly some of those incumbents are not without having their challenges. I think it's incumbent on them to listen to what customers are asking for. Customers are moving to the cloud, right? They're going to' do that with or without the legacy guys. So they have to get on-board with that and help manage that process for customers. I think what I like about some of the newer guys, the Rubrik's, the Cohesity's, is they are talking about this bigger picture, this issue that, we said at the start, that many organizations acknowledges is a real challenge, and that's having an overall view into their data estate, their data assets. But for many different reasons, it's always been very, very difficult to crack that on a holistic basis. These guys are putting together some compelling stories, some compelling products to do that, and customers are definitely buying it. Now it's not on the scale that they're buying Veeam on a very tactical basis, so I think the challenge for Veeam is to evolve their own proposition from being pretty tactical, important, absolutely, but to kind of move up the value chain from there. And I think we are starting to see many examples of how that is coming into play with some of the announcements we've had at the show today. >> Yeah, I mean, to your point. A billion dollars profitable, 350,000 customers, and a modern sort of approach. >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We've heard simplicity so many times over the last couple of days, but to me when we talk about if the challenge is operational scale, you can't do that without simplicity. And I think the fact that they acknowledge that from a very early date, we speak to a lot of, you know, customers overall, but lots of veeAM customers. Every single one says, "I love the simplicity." It works, it just works. You know, it's these kinds of things that they really do matter, because, not just because it just sounds great, but actually it lets, it either lets the administrator do other things, it's freeing up their time, or it allows a different part, maybe a less experienced or different type of professional to come in and manage the environment and not have to have a PhD in storage and backup and all those things that made this such a human capital-intensive process in the past. >> Easy and simple, they're easy, things to claim, and many companies actually try to claim that they're either easy or simple. It's really difficult to actually deliver on. >> That's right. >> But when you have customers coming back to you and telling you, "You are simple and easy to use," That's when you know that you've got it right. >> What I like about veeAM's messaging is, I've heard it a lot this week, is it's, start with backup. It actually is all about the backup, and you don't hear that from a lot of the upstarts, they're like, "No, no, no, backup. It's all about the data management." It's this sort of vision, these guys used the term "aspirational," almost as a pejorative. >> Right. >> So it's kind of interesting to see that competitive battle and then you've got the legacy guys trying to hang onto their install base, maybe making some announcements, I mean, Dell EMC just made a bunch of announcements, and kind of came out and admitted, "Hey, we took our eye off the ball." Obviously Veritas has a huge install base that everybody's trying to attack. IBM with Tivoli. >> There's a new CEO at Commvault. >> Yeah, and Commvault. We, I don't want to leave them out of the equation, right? They're doing their enterprise piece. And they've always had a little different angle on this space, so, there's a lot of action going on here. 15 billion, half of that is probably backup. >> The challenge is that this isn't a homogenous market, right? >> Dave: Right, very fragmented. >> There are just so many different things that we need to protect. There are so many different ways we can protect them, that soon just started getting into the details, that's when it starts, the market starts to stratify. >> And with cloud and new programming-- >> And people keep creating new ones, you know, object storage comes up, and then we've got no sequel databases that are now happening. >> Microservices, kubernetes, protection-- >> The whole container thing which we haven't really heard an awful lot about this week, I think. I mean, I'm looking forward to seein' how veeAM's story evolves there, but if we do accept that containers, kubernetes is going to be the new middleware that connects a new breed of infrastructure to a new application paradigm, if you like, then that's going to' need protecting. So I think we talk about it, backup, as being tactical, but actually it is a start of a journey, and also, I think one thing that's come out from this last couple of days is the importance of DR, and that's absolutely reflected in our research when we ask about, "What are big challenges in the storage and data arena, DR is a top two challenge every single time. It's too expensive. It's too difficult to run, to build, to test. I've been hearing that for 15, 20 years, right? And we're still not there. >> You can't automate the testing, it's too dangerous to fail over and fail back, so we don't do it, and we don't test it, so we clearly haven't cracked this one as an industry, and there is massive latent demand, I think, and I think, as we think, I mean who can tolerate any sort of down time for any sort of application, right? It just becomes a prerequisite to have applications always on-line. You know, that prerequisite for effective DR is going to' continue. >> Okay, guys, we got to' go. Thanks very much, Simon, for coming on theCUBE. >> Simon: Hey, great! Great to be here! >> Great to have you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest, you're watching theCUBE, live, from veeAMON, 2019, Miami. We'll be right back. (theme music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're here in theCUBE Studios in Marlborough, Massachusetts. We're gonna talk about storage and some of the trends that are going on in storage, and things have changed quite dramatically. It's not just about what media you're using today, you've got a lot of other considerations. Cloud, on-prem, in comes the edge, and it really drives new considerations for customers. Sundip Arora is here. He's the director of North America Storage and Big Data Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. He's gonna talk to me about some of these trends, the customer point of view, and what HPE is doing to solve some of these problems. Sundip, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Dave, thanks for having me, I'm super excited. >> So you heard my little narrative upfront about some of the big picture trends, what do you see as some of the tectonic shifts in the storage marketplace? >> Yeah, Dave. So listen, we've traveled around the continent here and I spend a lot of time with customers in North America, and what I hear from customers is their center of universe revolves around being able to map with their cloud journey and what does that mean for their data. Now, I look at our cloud operating model and I map that to HPE's own point of view. Our point of view is bringing the intelligent data platform to our customers. And when we talk about mapping the cloud operating model to our customer, what does that really mean for us? When I talk to customers, they tell me three things. It means that you have extreme cost efficiency, you've got super ease of use, and you've got resource optimization, how to utilize them in the best manner. >> So, let me ask you on that. Big Data is in your title, and one of the things that we observed early on in the big data days was it was about bringing five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data. Well, that sounded great and it was great, but it also caused problems because you're pushing, now, storage is everywhere. I mentioned the edge. So, I'm sure you're seeing that with customers. There is no more perimeter. Storage is just everywhere, wherever you want it to be. So when you talk about the cloud operating model, are you talking about bringing that experience to your data wherever that data lives? >> That's a great question. It used to be that you had an accounting system and that had a database, and that was delivering you a ton of data that you could analyze and store and read and write. And now, you've got data that's being produced at the edge, you've got point of sales systems, you've got autonomous vehicles, you've got data that's being produced on the cloud itself, and you've got data that's being produced at the core. So, what we are talking about is not just the automation of bringing that data in, but also how that data is being utilized. And to us, the way we map that challenge is through intelligence. >> Let's break down those three things: cost efficiency, ease of use, and resource optimization. Let's start with cost-efficiency. So, obviously, there's TCO. There's also the way in which I consume. The people, I presume, are looking for a different pricing model. Are you hearing that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, as part of the cost of running their business and being able to operate like a cloud, everybody's looking at a variety of different procurement and utilization models. One of the ways HPE provides utilization model that can map to their cloud journey, a public cloud journey, is through GreenLake. The ability to use and consume data on demand, consume compute on demand, across the entire portfolio of products HPE has, essentially is what a GreenLake journey looks like. >> Let's go into ease of use. So, what do you mean by that? I mean, people, they think cloud, they think swipe the credit card and start deploying machines. What do you mean by ease of use? >> For us, ease of use translates back to how do you map to a simpler operating and support model. For us, the support model is the key for customers to be able to realize the benefits of going to the cloud. To get to a simpler support model, we use AIOps. And for us, AIOps means using a product called InfoSight. InfoSight is a product that uses deep learning and machine learning algorithms to look at a wide net of call-home data from physical resources out there and then be able to take that data and make it actionable. And the action behind that is predictiveness, the prescriptiveness of creating automated support tickets, and closing automated support tickets without anybody ever having to pick up a phone and call IT support. That InfoSight model now is being expanded across the board to all HPE products. It started with Nimble. Now InfoSight is available on 3PAR it's available on Synergy, and a recent announcement said it's also on ProLiants. And we expect that InfoSight becomes the glue, the automation AI glue, that goes across the entire portfolio of HPE products. >> So this is a great example of applying AI to data, so it's like call home taking to a whole level, isn't it? >> Yeah, it absolutely is. And in fact, what it does is it uses the call-home data that we've had for a long time with products like 3PAR, which essentially was amazing data but not being actioned on in an automated fashion. It takes that data and now, it creates an automation task around it. And many times, that automation task leads to much simpler support experience. >> Okay, the third item you mentioned was resource optimization. Let's drill down into that. I infer from that there are performance implications, there's maybe governance compliance, physical placement, can you elaborate, add some color to that? >> I think it's all of the above that you just talked about. It's definitely about applying the right performance level to the right set of applications. We call this application-aware storage. The ability to be able to understand which application is creating the data allows us to understand how that data needs to be accessed which in turn means we know where it needs to reside. One of the things that HPE is doing in the storage domain is creating a common storage fabric with the cloud. We call that the fabric for the cloud. The idea there is that we have a single layer between the on-premises and off-premises resources that allows us to move data as needed depending on the application needs and depending on the user needs. >> Okay, so that brings me to multi-cloud. It's the hot buzzword now. Some people don't like it but it's reality. And so, you've got data on-prem, you want to look like the cloud operating model, you got data in the cloud, the edge confuses things even more. And so, what is your perspective on multi-cloud, and then I have a follow-up for you. >> For us, multicloud means the ability to be able to run your business whether it's on-premises or off-premises based on the needs or the requirements of the application and the business user. We don't want to force a model down our customer's throat. We want them to have optimization across both models. The way we do that is using a couple of different products. We've got a product known as Cloud Bank, which maps to StoreOnce. StoreOnce is our purpose-built backup appliance where our customer can store a copy, a backup copy of the data on-premises, and then a backup copy of that on a public cloud like Azure, AWS, or Google. Similarly, we've got products with Nimble and 3PAR that allows to have tight integration with both public and private cloud domains. And in the future, the idea is to bring all of that together where the automation and the orchestration allows customers not to worry about what product they're using but more about what are the requirements of the application. >> Okay, because sometimes you gonna wanna bring data back, whether it's, pick and, yeah, I wanna put it in the cloud for bursting, I wanna bring it back for more control, whatever it is, when it comes back, I wanna have that cloud operating model, that's where the AIOps fits in that you were just describing. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Okay, and so, let's get into, more specifically, what HPE is doing. You've referenced some of the things that you and your partners are doing, but what specifically are you doing from the standpoint of products, you mentioned what I call data plan and control plan. What do you have there that we can actually buy and employ? >> What we have, as I talked about earlier from an AIOps point of view, is our product called InfoSight, and InfoSight is available to all customers that today use 3PAR, Nimble, or ProLiant servers. As long as you have a valid support contract, it comes available to them. >> So I remember when HPE acquired Nimble, you said one of the things you're gonna do is take that technology and push it across the portfolio, so that's something that you've really done in a pretty short timeframe. >> We have, and what it does, it gives us the opportunity now not just to look at call-home data from storage, but then also look at call-home data from the compute side. And then what we can do is correlate the data coming back to have better predictability and outcomes on your data center operations as opposed to doing it at the layer of infrastructure. >> And you also said about the vision of this orchestration layer, can you talk more about that? Are we talking about across all clouds, whether it's on-prem or at the edge or the public cloud? >> Yeah, we are. We're talking about making it as simple as possible where the customers are not necessarily picking and choosing. It allows them to have a strategy that allows them to go across the data center, whether it's a public cloud, building their own private infrastructure, or running on a traditional on-premises SAN structure. So this vision for us, Cloud Fabric vision for us, allows for customers to do that. >> And what about software-defined storage? Where does that fit into this whole equation? >> I'm glad you mentioned that because that was the third tenet of what HPE truly brings to our customers. Software-defined is something that allows us to maximize the utilization of the existing resources that our customers have. So, what we've done is we've partnered with a great deal of really strong software-defined vendors, such us Commvault, Cohesity, Qumulo, Datera. We work very closely with the likes of Veeam, Zerto. And the goal there is to provide our customers with a whole range of options to drive building a software-defined infrastructure built off the Apollo Series of products. Apollo servers, our storage products for us, are extremely dense storage products that allow for both cost and resource optimization. >> What's the nature of these technology partners, partnerships? Are you doing engineering integration or is it just kind of going to market together? >> We bundle our partners into three main categories. We've got a set of complete partners. These complete partners are relationship where we do joint reference architecture. We create joint pricing list and we bring them in to the family. We've got a set of partners that's part of the Pathfinder program. The Pathfinder program are partners that we've made strategic, HPE has made strategic investments in. And then the third set is partners that we resell through HPE. So, depending on which partner it is, they fall into a different bucket, and we have all sets of resources, including engineering collaboration to make sure that the customer's buying a solution as opposed to a product. >> That's great, Sundip, thank you. Thank you for watching. But before we go, how do people learn more? >> The way you learn more is make sure you contact your partner and make sure you come to Discover. So, we'll hopefully see you at the Discover. (upbeat music)

(bright, peppy music) >> Announcer: From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Chicago. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Day. Veritas, last year, had the Veritas Vision Conference and they brought together all their customers. This year they decided to go around the world, I think they have six or seven of these across the globe. And we just were in New York a few weeks ago at Tavern on the Green. We're here at the Palmer House in Chicago. Iconic hotel. About 60 to 70 customers here. Of course Chicago's a big opportunity for companies like Veritas because there's such a good customer base here. But what I want to do now is set up what's going on in the data protection business. According to a number of sources, Gartner, IDC Data, other survey data, certainly anecdotally when we talk to customers, about half of the customers that we talk to are going to replace their data protection platform within the next five years. Why is that? Well, there are a number of factors that are affecting that and I want to talk about the reasons why, the implications to the market, and what that means for customers. So if you look back 10 years ago, there was a similar dynamic going on catalyzed by the ascendancy of virtualization. What was happening is that you had all these servers that were underutilized and so the brilliance of virtualization was we're going to consolidate those servers, virtualize the compute power, dramatically increase the utilization and reduce the physical capacity that's on the floor. So you can get rid of stuff. Get rid of servers, spend less, and get more value out of that asset. Because you had all these underutilized hardware assets. Data protection backup in particular was the one workload that actually could use all that compute power. Why, because at the end of the day, you're backing up this huge stream of data. And so as a result, when you had to do a full backup, you didn't have the physical resources. So people had to rethink how they architected backup because of virtualization. So you now have a similar dynamic, but for different reasons. Some of the big trends that are going on here. The first one is of course digital. So digital means data and it's all about how you get value out of your data because data is increasingly an important asset. People are realizing that protecting that data is more and more important. As a result, people are rethinking just the definition of recovery. Recovery has to be faster, you've got to be always on in this digital world. So digital transformation is critical. You can't just bolt on backup as you have for the last 20, 30, 40 years really. Backup has been a bolt on. You've also got cloud. Everybody wants cloud-like. So you're seeing a shift from improving or dealing with resource utilization and allocation, as I explained in the virtualization world, now to automation. Why automation? Because people want a cloud-like experience. They realize they can't just shove all their data into the public cloud. There's data all over the place, and I'll talk about that in a moment in terms of distributed data, but specifically people want a cloud-like experience. What does that mean? That means they want pay-as-you-go, they want simple deployment, they want fast seamless recovery, and they want a lot of automation. While the price of technology comes down year after year, the price of people doesn't. And you can't just keep throwing people at the infrastructure problem, because it's so complex, you have to automate. And you want to shift resources toward higher value activities. Digital transformation, dev opps, application development. So this distributed data world, this multi-cloud world, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment when I discuss the Edge, it's becoming a forcing function. Multi-cloud is a forcing function to rethink your backup. Because you've got different infrastructures, a service providers, you've got SAS providers, you've got all kinds of clouds that are popping up all over the lines of business and within your own data centers. As a result, you need to think about how do I catalog all that data, how do I protect that data, how do I govern that data, how do I deal with things like GDPR and make sure that I'm in compliance. So it becomes a much more complicated equation, and the variables are distinct. For example, I don't really understand what point in time means anymore. If you have distributed data, what does it mean to have a point in time copy? Point in what time? Who's the master? So you need some kind of controls in that multi-cloud world. That's a forcing function to rethink your backup. The other thing is platform. Platform beats products. I'll talk about that in a moment. People for years have looked at backup as purely insurance. Everybody hates buying insurance, we all know that, so you're seeing people trying to get more out of their backup and recovery platforms. For instance, integrating disaster recovery. So that's becoming an integral part of people's strategies. You're also seeing analytics becoming more and more important. People are trying to, because all the data sits in the corpus of the backup, people are saying why don't we analyze that data and get more out of it. Why don't we take snapshots of that data and make it available to dev opps. And what about ransomware, which again I'll talk about in a moment. Could I maybe look at anomalies in that data to determine if there are some problems. Many, many use cases emerging. Data classification, governance, I mentioned GDPR before, so you're seeing backup shift from pure insurance to a higher value business opportunity. And then of course, there's security, there's compliance, there's governance, ransomware is critical. Organizations are creating air gaps, meaning disconnecting from the internet, so that if they get hit with a ransomware attack they can isolate their data, but just even that is not enough. People can get through air gaps by physically putting in, whatever. Sticks or malware et cetera. So you still have to be able to use analytics to look at that corpus of backup data and identify anomalies. But again, because of those security risks and because of the importance of digital transformation and data people are rethinking how they do data protection. And finally, there's the Edge. We are living in a distributed world, it's a multi-cloud world, as I said before it's a forcing function, and the Edge is one of those clouds, if you will, which changes the way in which you think about backup. How does it change. Locality of the recovery data. If you've got Edge data, if you've got multi-cloud, you've, as I said before, got to have a global catalog and recover that data locally. Another thing to think about is SLAs. In a cloud world, you, the customer, are responsible for the recovery. Well, the cloud vendor can get the light back on on the disc system, or the computer, or the compute system, you are responsible for the people and the process to recover your business. That is not the cloud vendor's responsibility so you need to think about that. And think about recovery as recovery at the business level, not just recovery of the data, but recovery, getting your business back online. There's also the three laws of the cloud. We learned this from Pat Gelsinger this August at VMworld. The laws of physics, the laws of economics, and the law of the land. Those will dictate where you put data and how you back up that data. So all of this has created a new landscape in the data protection business. Let's run down that landscape. Who are the leaders. You've got Dell EMC, you've got Veritas, you've got Convault, and you've got IBM. Those guys comprise probably 2/3 or more of the marketplace. And you have startups like Cohesity and Rubrik who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars going after them and challenging them. You've got a whole new set of players that are taking new approaches. Actifio, for example, got the whole copy data management thing going. Datrium is creating end to end, both primary storage and data protection backup in the same platform with a software-based cloud-like, SAS-like offering. You've got companies like Zerto and Imanis Data that are specialists. You've got companies like WANdisco, again, taking new approaches. And then you have Oracle, with the Oracle recovery appliance, which is totally changing the way in which backup worked for Oracle databases exclusively. Taking a database-led approach to backup. And then of course you've got the storage players that are part of the ecosystem even though they're not directly competing with backup software vendors. Guys like Pure, NetApp, InfiniteApp. They're partnering with backup vendors. And then of course, there's the cloud guys. AWS, Azure, Google. The thing to think about as customers, really three things. Platform versus product. What's the platform look like? Is it an API-based platform? Because you want to program to that platform infrastructurer's code, you want to support your dev opps infrastructure. The second is cloud-like pricing, and cloud-like deployment. You want a cloud-based operating model to simplify your operations and lower your IT labor costs and shift those costs to more strategic efforts and initiatives such as digital transformation and application development. And the third is ecosystem alignment. Make sure that your backup software vendor and you backup solution vendors are all, their ecosystem is aligned with your ecosystem. Because you're going to get more facile integration and problem-solving and flexibility if those systems align. So take a look at that as well. Couple of things I want to mention and emphasize. New application development models. Cloud Native, Kubernetes. Function, you know people call it server-less, but function-based programming. Really to support dev opps and infrastructure as a code. That is going to have implications on how you protect data. And finally AI. How can you talk about anything today without talking about AI. Anticipatory staging of data for recovery, as in the example. Predicting where problems are going to occur. Machine intelligence will increasingly play a role in this whole landscape. So, as you can see, there's a lot going on. This is why data protection is such a hot space. That's why the VCs are getting in. It's why the incumbents like Veritas, Dell EMC, IBM, Convault, those that I mentioned are trying to re-platform and hang on to their large install bases and ultimately grow them. And it's why companies in the startup and the niche spaces, are tucking in and identifying new opportunities to participate. So that's a quick overview of what's going on here at the Veritas Vision Solution Day from Chicago. We'll be here all day talking to customers, talking to practitioners, technologists, and executives. So keep it right there, you're watching theCUBE. I'm Dave Vellante. Be right back. (bright music)