>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everybody and welcome to this week's CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. It is Breaking Analysis, but first I'm coming to you from the floor of Cisco Live in Barcelona, and I want to talk about storage. Storage continues to be soft but there are some bright spots. I've been reporting on this for awhile now and I want to dig in and share with you some of the reasons why, maybe give you some forecasts as to what I think is going to happen in the coming months. And of course, we want to look into some of the ETR spending data, and try to parse through that and understand who's winning, who's losing, who's got the momentum, where are the tailwinds and headwinds. So the first thing I want to show you is let's get right into it. What this slide is showing here is a storage spending snapshot of net score. Now remember, net score in the ETR parlance is an indicator of momentum or spending velocity. Essentially every quarter, what ETR does is they go out to, in this case, 1100 respondents out of the 4500 dataset, and they ask them are you spending more or are you spending less. Essentially they subtract the less from the more and that constitutes net score. It's not that simple but for this purpose, that's what we're showing. Now you can see here on the left hand side, I'm showing all respondents out of 1161. You see the January survey net scores. You've got Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, and Pure, and VMware vSAN are the top five. So Rubrik and Cohesity, very strong, and interesting, Rubrik was very strong last quarter. Cohesity not as strong but really shooting up. It kind of surprised me last quarter, Cohesity being a little low but they were early into the dataset and now they're starting to show what I think is really happening in the marketplace. That's a good indicator. But you can see 75 percent, 72 percent. Nutanix still very strong at 56 percent, driving that hyperconverge piece. You see Pure Storage at 44 percent, down a little bit, talk a little bit more about that in a moment. VMware vSAN, Veeam, et cetera, down the list. The thing about the left hand side and storage in general, you can see the softness. Only about one third of the suppliers are in the green, and that's a problem. If you compare this to security, probably three quarters are in the green. It's a much hotter segment. Now, look on the right hand side. The right hand side is showing what ETR calls GPP, giant, public, and private. You can see there's an N of 403. These are the largest, the very largest public and private companies, private company being a company like Mars Candy. And they say that they are the best indicators of spending momentum in the dataset. So really isolating on some of the large companies. Look what happens here. You can see Rubrik gets even stronger as does Cohesity, they're into the 80 percent range. That's really rarefied air, so very strong. You can see Nutanix drops down. It does better in the smaller companies, it appears. They drop down to 41 percent. Pure gets stronger in the GPP at 68 percent. You can see VMware's vSAN uptick to 45 percent. Nimble gets better, HPE's Nimble, to 54 percent. Dell drops down to 4.8 percent. HPE goes up to 33 percent. HPE was red in the left hand side. You can see Veeam drops, not surprising, Veeam in the biggest companies is not going to be as prevalent. We talked about that in our Breaking Analysis segment after the acquisition of Veeam. You can see NetApp bumps up a little bit but it's still kind of in that red zone. I also want to call your attention to Actifio. They're way down on the bottom in the left hand side, which kind of surprised me. And then I started digging into it because I know Actifio does better in the larger companies. In the right hand side, they pop up to 33 percent. It's only an N of three, but what I'm seeing in the marketplace is Actifio solving some really hard problems in database and copy data management. You're starting to see those results as well. But generally speaking, this picture is not great for storage, with the exception of a few players like Rubrik and Cohesity, Pure, Nutanix. And I'm going to get into that a little bit and try to explain what's going on here. The market's bifurcated. Primary storage has been on the back burner for awhile now, and I've been talking about that. The one exception to that is really been Pure. Little bit for Dell EMC coming back, we'll dig into that a little bit more but Pure has been the stand-out. They're even moderating lately, I'll talk about that some more. Secondary storage is where the market momentum is and you can see that with Rubrik and Cohesity. Again, we'll talk about that some more. Let me dig into the primary side. Cloud, as I've talked about in many Breaking Analysis segments is siphoning off demand from on-prem spend. The second big factor in storage has been there was such an injection of flash into the marketplace, it added headroom. Customers used to buy spindles to get performance, and they don't need to do that so much anymore because so much flash was pushed into the system. The third thing is you're still seeing in primary the consolidation dynamics play out with hyperconverge. So hyperconverge is the software defined bringing together of storage, compute, and networking into a single logical managed unit. That is taking share away from traditional primary storage. You're also seeing tactical NAND pricing be problematic for storage suppliers. You saw that with Pure again this past quarter. NAND pricing comes down, which you'd think would be a good thing from a component standpoint, which it is, but it also lowers prices of the systems. So that hurt Pure's revenue. Their unit volume was pretty good but you're seeing that sort of put pressure on prices, so ASPs are down, average system prices. Let's turn our attention to the secondary market for a moment. Huge injection of venture capital, like a billion dollars, half a billion dollars over the last year, and then another five billion just spent on the acquisition of Veeam. A lot of action going on there. You're seeing big TAM expansions where companies like Rubrik and Cohesity, who have garnered much of that VC spending, are really expanding the notion of data protection from back-up into data management, into analytics, into security, and things of that nature, so a much bigger emphasis on TAM expansion, of course as I talked about the M and A. Let's dig into each of these segments. The chart that I'm showing now really digs into primary storage. You can see here the big players, Pure, Dell EMC, HPE, NetApp, and IBM. And lookit, there's only company in the green, Pure. You can see they're trending down just a little bit from previous quarters but still far and away the company with most spending momentum. Again, here I'm showing net score measure of spending velocity back to the January '18 survey. You can see Dell EMC sort of fell and then is slowly coming back up. NetApp hanging in there, Dell EMC, HP, and NetApp kind of converging, and you can see IBM. IBM announced last quarter about three percent growth. I talked about that actually in September. I predicted that IBM storage would have growth because they synchronized their DS8000 high-end mainframe announcement to the z15, so you saw a little bit of uptick in IBM. Pure, as I said, 15 percent growth. I mean, if you're flat in this market or growing at three percent, you're doing pretty well, you're probably a share gainer. We'll see what happens in February when Dell EMC, HPE, and NetApp announce earnings. We'll update you at that time. So that's what you're seeing now. Same story, Pure outpacing the others, everybody else fighting for share. Let's turn our attention now to secondary storage. What I'm showing here is net score for the secondary storage players. I can't isolate on a drill down for secondary storage, last slide I could do on storage overall, but what I can show is pure plays. What's showing here is Rubrik, Cohesity, Veeam, Commvault, and Veritas. Five pure play, you can argue Veritas isn't a pure play, but I consider it a pure play data protection vendor. Look at Rubrik and Cohesity really shooting up to the right, 75 percent and 72 percent net scores, respectively. You see Veeam hanging in there. This is again, all respondents, the full 1100 dataset. Commvault announced last quarter it beat earnings but it's not growing. You can see some pressure there, and you can see Veritas under some pressure as well. You can see a net score really deep in the red, so that's cause for some concern. We'll keep watching that, maybe dig into some of the larger accounts to see how they're doing there. But you can see clear standouts with Rubrik and Cohesity. I want to look at hyperconverge now. Again, I can't drill into hyperconverge but what I can do is show some of the pure plays. So what this slide shows is the net score for some of the pure play hyperconverge vendors led by Nutanix. The relative newcomer here is vSAN with VMware. You can see Dell EMC, VxRail, and Simplivity. I would say this. A lot of the marketing push that you hear out of Dell and out of VMware says Nutanix is in big trouble, they're dying and so forth. Our data definitely shows something different. The one caution is, you can see Nutanix and larger accounts, not as strong. And you can see both vSAN and Dell EMC stronger in those larger accounts. Maybe that's kind of their bias and their observation space, but it's something that we've got to watch. But you can see the net scores here. Everybody's in the green because overall, this is a strong market. Everybody is winning. It's taking share as I said from primary. We're watching that very closely. Nutanix continues to be strong. Watching very carefully that competitive dynamic and the dynamics within those larger companies which are a bellwether. Now the big question that I want to ask here is can storage reverse the ten-year trend of the big cloud sucking sound that we have heard for the past decade. I've been reporting with data on how cloud generally has hurt that storage spend on-prem. So what I'm showing here in this slide is the net score for the cloud spenders. Many hundreds of cloud spenders in the dataset. What we're showing here is the net score, the spending velocity over the last 10 years for the leaders. You can see Dell EMC, the number one. NetApp, right there in terms of market share, IBM as well. I didn't show HPE because the slide got too busy but they'd be up there as well. So these are the big spenders, big on-prem players and you can see, well, it's up and down. The highs are lower and the lows tend to be lower. You can see on the latest surveys, maybe there's some upticks here in some of the companies. But generally speaking, the trend has been down. That siphoning away of demand from the cloud guys. Can that be reversed, and that's something that we're going to watch, so keeping an eye on that. Let me kind of summarize and I'll make some other comments here. One of the things we're going to watch here is Dell EMC, NetApp, and HPE earnings announcements in February. That's going to be a clear indicator. We'll look for what's happening with overall demand, what the growth trajectory looks like, and very importantly, what NAND pricing looks like. As a corollary to that, we're going to be watching elasticity. I firmly believe as prices go down, that more storage is going to bought. That's always been the case. Flash is still only about 20, 25, 30 percent of the market, about 30 percent of the spending, about 20 percent of the terabytes. But as prices come down, expect people to buy more. That's always been the case. If there's an elasticity of demand, it hasn't shown up in the earning statements, and that's a bit of a concern. But we'll keep an eye on that. We're also going to watch the cloud siphoning demand from on-prem spend. Can the big players and guys like Pure and others, new start-ups maybe, reverse that trend. Multi-cloud, there's an opportunity for these guys. Multi-cloud management, TAM expansion into new areas. Actually delivering services in the cloud. You saw Pure announce block storage in the cloud. So that's kind of interesting that we'll watch. Other players may be getting into the data protection space, but as it relates to the cloud, one of the things I'm watching very closely is the TAM expansion of the cloud players. What do I mean by that. Late last year, Amazon announced a broader set of products or services really in its portfolio. Let's watch for Amazon's moves and other big cloud players into the storage space. I fully expect they're going to want to get a bigger piece of that pie. Remember, much if not most of Amazon's revenue comes from compute. They really haven't awakened to the great storage opportunity that's out there. Why is that important. You saw this play out on-prem. Servers became a really tough market. Intel made all the money. Amazon is a huge customer of Intel, and Intel's getting a big piece of Amazon's EC2 business. That's why you see, in part, Amazon getting into its own chip design. I mean, in the server business, you're talking about low gross margin business. If you're in the 20s or low 30s, you're thrilled. Pure last quarter had 70 plus percent gross margins. It's been a 60 plus percent gross margin business consistently. You're going to see the cloud guys wake up to that and try to grab even more share. It's going to be interesting to see how the traditional on-prem vendors respond to that. Coming into last decade, you saw tons of start-ups but only two companies really reached escape velocity: Nutanix and Pure. At the beginning of the century, you saw Data Domain, Isilon, Compellent, 3PAR all went public. EqualLogic and LeftHand got taken out. There are a bunch of other companies that got acquired. Storage was really a great market. Coming into this decade, mid part of the decade, you had lots of VC opportunity here. You had Fusion and Violin, Intentury went public. They all flamed out. You had a big acquisition with SolidFire, almost a billion dollars, but really Pure and Nutanix were the only ones to make it, so the question is, are you going to see anyone reach escape velocity in the next decade, and where's that going to come from. The likely players today would be Cohesity and Rubrik. Those unicorns would be the opportunity. You could argue Veeam, I guess reached it, but hard to tell because Veeam's a private company. By escape velocity, we're talking large companies who go public, have a big exit in the public market and become transparent so we really know what's going on there. Will it come from a cloud or a cloud native play. We'll see. Are there others that might emerge, like a Nebulon or a Clumio. A company like Infinidat's doing well, will they hit escape velocity and do an IPO and again, become more transparent. That's again something that we're watching, but you're clearly seeing moves up the stack where there's a lot more emphasis in spending on cloud, cloud native. We clearly saw it with hyperconverge consolidation but up the stack towards the apps, really driving digital transformations. People want to spend less on heavy lifting like storage. They're always going to need storage. But is it going to be the same type of market it has been for the last 30 or 40 years, of great investment opportunities. We're starting to see that wane but we'll keep track of it. Thank you for watching this Breaking Analysis, this is CUBE Insights powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Kubecon and CloudNativeCon brought to you by Redhat, a CloudNative computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are here in San Diego where we are keeping CloudNative classy. I'm Stu Miniman, and my cohost is John Troyer, and we are happy to welcome back to the program, our host, Dan Kohn, who is the executive director of the CloudNative computing foundation, or the CNCF. Dan, thank you so much for having us. >> Thrilled to be back again. >> All right, and, yeah, so our fourth year doing this show, the big shows-- >> Dan: Nothing's really changed. You just tear right along the same level. One year to the next, you can just confuse them pretty easily.. >> So, you know, Dan, we actually did a prediction show yesterday, and I said, maybe it's my math background, but I look back two years ago, it was four thousand, then eight thousand, now twelve thousand, so I predict Boston must be sixteen thousand because I was used to those standardized tests, but with the growth, you never know, and it is very difficult, you know, we talk about planning, we've talked, this facility was booked before-- >> Dan: Two years ago. >> --the curve really started taking off. So, help us set the stage a little bit, we're getting towards the end of the event, but you know, tons of day zero things, so many sessions, so many people, there were pre-show events I heard that started like the end of last week, so, it's a small city in this community in so many pieces, and the CNCF helps enable all of it. >> It does, and what's fun for us is just that, the community is out there adopting these technologies and contributing to it and growing, and being able to come together, this is always our biggest event in North America but also in Europe and China. It's just a really nice snapshot of the point of time, in saying, okay, where are things, how many companies are interested in having sponsor booths, how many developers are there, how many track, but, I think maybe my favorite anecdote from Kubecon CloudNativeCon San Diego is that there was a, so we offer, a CFP track, a call for proposals that's extremely competitive, only 12% of the talks get accepted. And then we have a maintainer track, where the different providers can have either an intro, a deep-dive, or both. So the deep dive for the project Helm, which is not even a graduated project yet, I mean, it's very widely used, package manager for Kubernetes, but the deep dive for Helm had more than 1600 people inside their session, which is more than we had at all of attending Kubecon 2015 and 2016 combined. >> So, Dan, one of the words that gets mentioned a lot in this space, and it has lots of different meanings, is "scale". You know, we talk about Kubernetes built for big scale, we're talking about Edge computing which goes to small scale. This event, you look at the ecosystem. There's a thirty foot banner with all of the logos there, you look at the landscape-- >> Dan: They're not that big, either. >> --there are so many logos on there. Actually, I really thought you had an enjoyable yet useful analogy in your opening keynote. You talk about Minecraft. I've got a boy, he plays Xbox, I've seen Minecraft, so when he pulls up the little chart and there's like, you know, all of these little things on the side, my son can tell you how they're used and what you can build with them, I would be completely daunted looking at that, much like many of the people coming to this show, and they look around and they're like, I don't even know where to start. >> And that was fun keynote for me to put together, because I did need to make sure, both on the Minecraft part, that all the formulas were correct, I didn't want anyone... But then I drew the analogy to Kubernetes and how it is based on a set of building blocks, hundreds of them, that have evolved over time, and for that, I actually did some software archeology of reaching out to the people who created the original IPFW, Linux firewall 20 years ago based on PSD and then the evolution since then, made sure that they were comfortable with my description of it. But now, bringing it out to Kubecon, CNCF, we have a lot of projects now, so we're up to 43. When we met in Seattle four years ago, it was 2. And so it's definitely incumbent on CNCF to do a good job, and we can probably do an even better one on trying to draw this trail map, this recommended path through understanding the technologies, deciding on which ones people might want to adopt. >> Yeah, I think that would be really interesting. In fact, the words trail map kind of came up on Twitter, today, I saw. And one of the things that struck me was how the first rule of Kubecon is, well, Kubernetes is not maybe in the center of everything, it's underneath everything, but, like you said, 42 projects in the CNCF, many more projects, open-source projects, of course, from different vendors, from different coalitions, that you can see here on the show floor as well, if not in a session, so, without giving a maybe a CNCF 101, what does the path forward look like in terms of that, the growth of projects within the CNCF umbrella, the prominence of Kubecon, are we headed towards CloudNativeCon? >> Well, we've always been calling it Kubecon CloudNativeCon, and we could reverse the names, but I don't see any particular drive to do that. But I would really emphasize, and give credit to Craig McLuckie and some of the other people who originally set up CNCF, where Google had this technology, if they'd come to the Linux Foundation and said, we want to call it the Kubernetes Foundation, we probably would've said yes to that. But the impact, then, would be that all of these other technologies and approaches would have come in and said, we need to become part of the Kubernetes project, and instead, there was a vision of an ecosystem, and the reality is that Kubernetes is still by far the largest project. I mean, if you look at the total number of contributors, I believe it's approximately the same between Kubernetes and our other 42 projects combined. So, and of course, there's overlap. But in that sense, in some ways, Kubernetes sort of represents the sun, and the other projects are orbiting around it, but from the beginning, the whole idea was to say that we wanted to allow a diversity of different approaches, and CNCF has had this very clear philosophy that we're not king makers, that if you look at our landscape document, where we look at different functions like key management or container run times or databases or others, there can be multiple CNCF hosted projects in each box. And so far at least, that approach seems to be working quite well. >> Yeah, Dan, having been to a number of these, the maturity and progress is obvious. Something we've said is Kubernetes is really table sticks at this point, no matter where I go, there is going to be Kubernetes, and therefore, I've seen it some over the last year or so, but very prominent on this show, we're talking about work loads, we're talking about applications, you know, it's defining and explaining that CloudNative piece of it, and the tough thing is, you know, modern applications and building applications and that AppDev community. So, you know, speak a little bit-- You've got a very diverse audience here, talk about the personas you have to communicate with, and who you're attracting to this. I know they put out lots of metrics as to the surveys and who's coming and who's participating. >> Well, we do, and we'll be publishing those, and I love the fact. I think some people misunderstand in the thinking that Kubecon CloudNativeCon is all infrastructure engineers, and something like a third or more of the attendees are application developers, and so I do think there's this natural move, particularly towards AppDev. The difference is that on the infrastructure side, there's just a really strong consensus about Kubernetes, as you're saying, where on the application development side, it's still very early days. And I mean, if anything, I think really the only area that there is consensus on is that the abstractions that Kubernetes provides are not the ones that we want to have regular application developers at most enterprises working with, that they shouldn't actually need to build their own container and then write the YAML in order to configure it. Brian Liles hit that point nicely with his keynote today around Rails. But so we can agree that what we have isn't the right outcome, we can agree that whatever are the winning solutions are very likely underneath going to be building those containers and writing the YAML. But there are so many different approaches right now, at a high layer on what that right interface is. >> Yeah, I mean, just, one example I have, I had the opportunity to interview Bloomberg for the second time. And a year ago, we had talked very much about the infrastructure, and this year we talked about really, they've built internally that PaaS layer, so that their AppDevs, they might know that there's Kubernetes, but they don't have to interface with that at all. I've had a number of the CNCF end user members participate, maybe, speak to that, the community of end users participating, and end user usage overall. >> Yeah, so when we first met in Seattle four years ago, we had three members of our end user community. We appreciated them joining early, but that was a tough call. But to be up to 124 now, representing almost every industry, all around the world, just a huge number of brand names, has been fantastic. What is interesting is, if you go talk to them, almost all of them are using Kubernetes as the underlying layer for their own internal PaaS, and so the regular developers in their organizations can often just want to type get push, and then have the continuous integration run and the things built and then deployed out and everything. But it's somewhat surprising there hasn't yet been a level of consensus on what that sort of common PaaS, the common set of abstractions on top should be. There's a ton of our members and developers and others are all working to sort of build that winning solution, but I don't have a prediction for you yet. >> And of course, skill interoperability and skill transferability is going to be key in growing this ecosystem, but I thought the stats on you know, the searches you can do on the number of job openings for Kubernetes is incredible. >> Yeah, so on the interoperability, we were very pleased to announce Tuesday that we've now passed 100 certified vendors, and of all the things that CNCF does, probably even including Kubecon, I might say that that certified Kubernetes program is the one that's had the biggest impact. To have implementations from over 100 different organizations that you can take the same workloads and move them across and have the confidence, those APIs will be supported, it's just a huge accomplishment, and in some ways, up there with WiFi or Bluetooth or some of the best interoperability standards. And then you mentioned the job support, which is another-- >> Yeah, I want to transfer engineers too, as well as workloads. >> --area that we're thrilled, and we just launched that, but we now have a couple hundred jobs listed on it and a bunch of people applying, and it's just a perfect example of the kind of ecosystem development that we're thrilled to do, and in particular the fact that we're not charging either the employers or the applicants, so it's jobs.CNCF.io to get access to that. >> Great. Dan, you also mentioned in your keynote, Kubernetes has crossed the chasm. That changes the challenges that you have when you start talking about you know, the early or mid majority environment, so I know you've been flying around the globe, there's not only the three big events, but many small events, talk about how CNCF6 mission helps you know, educate and push, I guess not push, but educate and further innovation. >> Yeah, and just enable. So, one of the other programs we have is the Kubernetes Certified service provider, these are organizations, essentially consulting firms, that have a deep expertise that have had at least three of their engineers pass our certified Kubernetes administrator exam, and it is amazing now that we've passed 100 of those, but they're in over 30 different countries. So we're just thrilled to see businesses all around the world be able to take advantage of that. And I do get to go to a lot of events around the world; we're actually, CNCF is hosting our first ever events in Seoul and in Sydney in two weeks, that I'm quite excited for, and then in February, we're going to be back in India, and we're going to be in Bengaluru, where we had a very successful event in March. We'll be there in February 2020 and then our first one in New Delhi, those are both in the third week of February. And I think it does just speak to the number of people who are really eager for these to soak this up, but one of the cool things about it is we're combining both local experts, half of our speakers are local, half are international, and then we do a beginner track and an advanced track. >> Yeah, Dan, you know, I'd just love a little bit of insight from you as to, there's a little bit of uncontrolled chaos when you talk about open source. Many of the things that we're talking about this year, a year ago, we would've been, oh my gosh, I would've never thought of that. So give us what it's like to be kind of at the eye of the hurricane, if you would. >> A lot of criticism, to be honest. An amazing number of people like to point out the things that we're not quite doing correctly. But you know, the huge challenge for an organization like CNCF, where, we're a non-profit, these events are actually spinning off money that we're then able to reinvest directly into the projects, so doing things like a quarter million dollars for a security audit for Kubernetes that we were able to publish. Or a Jepson testing for NCD, or improving documentation and such. So a big part of it is trying to create those positive feedback loops, and have that, and then another huge part is just, given all the different competing interests and the fact that we literally have every big technology company in the world on our board and then all of the, I mean, hundreds of start ups that tend to be very competitive, it's just really important that we treat organizations similarly. So that all of our platinum members are treated the same, all our gold, all our silver, and then within the projects, that all the graduated projects are treated similarly, incubating, sandbox, and people really notice. I have kids, and it's a little bit there, where they're sort of always believing that the other kid is getting extra attention. >> Yeah, right, you can't be the king maker, if it will, you're letting it out. Look out a little bit, Dan, and you know, we still have more growth to go in the community, obviously the event has room for growth. What do you see looking forward to 2020 and beyond? >> Yeah, I would love to predict some sort of amazing discontinuity where everyone adopts these technologies and then CNCF is not necessary anymore, something like that. But the reality is, I mean, I love that crossing the chasm metaphor, and I do think it's very powerful, and we really do say 2018 was the year that Kubernetes crossed the chasm from the early adopters to the early majority, but I would emphasize the fact that it's only the early majority. We haven't reached in to the entire second half of the curve, the late majority and the laggards. And so there are a ton of organizations here at the event who are just getting up to speed on this and realizing, oh, we really need to invest and start understanding it. And so, I mean, I don't, we also talk about there will be some point of peak Kubecon, just like peak Loyal, and I don't yet see any signs of it being 2019 or 2020, but it's something that we're very cognizant of and working hard to try and ensure that the event remains useful for people and that they're seeing value from it. I mean, there was a real question when we went from one thousand Seattle four years ago to four thousand in Austin three years ago, oh, is this event even still useful, can developers still interact, do you still have conversations, is the hallway track still valuable? And thankfully, I'm able to chat with a lot of the core developers, where this is their fifth North American Kubecon and they're saying, no, I'm still getting value out of it. Now, what we tend to hear from them is, "but I didn't get to go to any sessions," or "I have so many hallway tracks and private meetings and interactions and such," but the great thing there is that we actually get all of these sessions up on YouTube within 48 or 72 hours, and so, people ask me, "oh, there's 18 different tracks, how do I decide which one to go to?" And I always say, "go to the one where you want to interact with the speaker afterwards, or ask a question," because the other ones, you can watch later. But there isn't really a substitute for being here on the ground. >> Well, there's so much content there, Dan, I think if they start watching now, by the time you get to Amsterdam, they'll have dented a little bit. >> I'll give a quick pitch for my favorite Chrome extension, it's called Video Speed Player. And you can speed people up to 120, 125%, get a little bit of that time back. >> Yeah, absolutely, we have at the backend of ours, there is YouTube, so you can adjust the speed and it does help most of the time, and you can back up a few seconds if needed. Dan, look, congratulations, we know you have a tough role, you and the CNCF, we really appreciate the partnership. We love our community, it has had a phenomenal time this week at the show, and look forward to 2020 and beyond. >> I do as well, I really want to thank you for being with us through this whole way, and I think it is just an important part of the ecosystem. >> And I know John Furrier also says thank you and looks forward to seeing you next year. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Dan, thank you so much. John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end of our three days, wall-to-wall coverage here in sunny San Diego, California, thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Today is November 8, 2019 and I'd like to address one of the most important topics in the minds of a lot of executives. I'm talking about CEOs, CIOs, Chief Information Security Officers, Boards of Directors, governments and virtually every business around the world. And that's the topic of cyber security. The state of cyber security has changed really dramatically over the last 10 years. I mean, as a cyber security observer I've always been obsessed with Stuxnet, which the broader community discovered the same year that theCUBE started in 2010. It was that milestone that opened my eyes. Think about this. It's estimated that Stuxnet cost a million dollars to create. That's it. Compare that to an F-35 fighter jet. It costs about $85-$100 million to build one. And that's on top of many billions of dollars in R&D. So Stuxnet, I mean, it hit me like a ton of bricks. That the future of war was all about cyber, not about tanks. And the barriers to entry were very, very low. Here's my point. We've gone from an era where thwarting hacktivists was our biggest cyber challenge to one where we're now fighting nation states and highly skilled organized criminals. And of course, cyber crime and monetary theft is the number one objective behind most of these security breaches that we see in the press everyday. It's estimated that by 2021 cyber crime is going to cost society $6 trillion in theft, lost productivity, recovery costs. I mean, that's just a staggeringly large number. It's even hard to fathom. Now, the other C-change is how organizations have had to respond to the bad guys. It used to be pretty simple. I got a castle and the queen is inside. We need to protect her, so what do we do? We built a mote, put it around the perimeter. Now, think of the queen as data. Well, what's happened? The queen has cloned herself a zillion times. She's left the castle. She's gone up to the sky with the clouds. She's gone to the edge of the kingdom and beyond. She's also making visits to machines and the factories and hanging out with the commoners. She's totally exposed. Listen, by 2020, there's going to be hundreds of billions of IP addresses. These are going to be endpoints and phones, TVs, cameras, tablets, automobiles, factory machines, and all these represent opportunities for the bad guys to infiltrate. This explosion of endpoints that I'm talking about is created massive exposures, and we're seeing it manifest itself in the form of phishing, malware, and of course the weaponization of social media. You know, if you think that 2016 was nuts, wait 'til you see how the 2020 presidential election plays out. And of course, there's always the threat of ransomware. It's on everybody's minds these days. So I want to try to put some of this in context and share with you some insights that we've learned from the experts on theCUBE. And then let's drill into some of the ETR data and assess the state of security, the spending patterns. We're going to try to identify some of those companies with momentum and maybe some of those that are a little bit exposed. Let me start with the macro and the challenged faced by organization and that's complexity. Here's Robert Herjavec on theCUBE. Now, you know him from the Shark Tank, but he's also a security industry executive. Herjavec told me in 2017 at the Splunk.com Conference that he thought the industry was overly complex. Let's take a look and listen. >> I think that the industry continues to be extremely complicated. There's a lot of vendors. There's a lot of products. The average Fortune 500 company has 72 security products. There's a stat that RSA this year, that there's 1500 new security start-ups every year. Every single year. How are they going to survive? And which ones do you have to buy because they're critical and provide valuable insights? And which ones are going to be around for a year or two and you're never going to hear about again? So it's a extremely challenging complex environment. >> So it's that complexity that had led people like Pat Gelsinger to say security is a do-over, and that cyber security is broken. He told me this years ago on theCUBE. And this past VM World we talked to Pat Gelsinger and remember, VMware bought Carbon Black, which is an endpoint security specialist, for $2.1 billion. And he said that he's basically creating a cloud security division to be run by Patrick Morley, who is the Carbon Black CEO. Now, many have sort of questioned and been skeptical about VMware's entrance into the space. But here's a clip that Pat Gelsinger shared with us on theCUBE this past VM World. Let's listen and we'll come back and talk about it. >> And this move in security, I am just passionate about this, and as I've said to my team, if this is the last I do in my career is I want to change security. We just not are satisfying our customers. They shouldn't put more stuff on our platforms. >> National defense issues, huge problems. >> It's just terrible. And I said, if it kills me, right, I'm going to get this done. And they says, "It might kill you, Pat." >> So this brings forth an interesting dynamic in the industry today. Specifically, Steven Smith, the CISO of AWS, at this year's Reinforce, which is their security conference, Amazon's big cloud security conference, said that this narrative that security is broken, it's just not true, he said. It's destructive and it's counterproductive. His and AWS's perspective is that the state of cloud security is actually strong. Kind of reminded me of a heavily messaged State of the Union address by the President of the United States. At the same time, in many ways, AWS is doing security over. It's coming at it from the standpoint of a clean slate called cloud and infrastructure as a surface. Here's my take. The state of security in this union is not good. Every year we spend more, we lose more, and we feel less safe. So why does AWS, the security czar, see if differently? Well, Amazon uses this notion of a shared responsibility security model. In other words, they secure the S3 buckets, maybe the EC2 infrastructure, not maybe, the EC2 infrastructure. But it's up to the customer to make sure that she is enforcing the policies and configuring systems that adhere to the EDIX of the corporation. So I think the shared security model is a bit misunderstood by a lot of people. What do I mean by that? I think sometimes people feel like well, my data's in the cloud, and AWS has better security than I do. Here I go, I'm good. Well, AWS probably does have better security than you do. Here's the problem with that. You still have all these endpoints and databases and file servers that you're managing, and that you have to make sure comply with your security policies. Even if you're all on the cloud, ultimately, you are responsible for securing your data. Let's take a listen to Katie Jenkins, the CISO of Liberty Mutual, on this topic and we'll come back. >> Yeah, so the shared responsibility model is, I think that's an important speaking point to this whole ecosystem. At the end of the day, Liberty Mutual, our duty is to protect policyholder data. It doesn't matter if it's in the cloud, if it's in our data centers, we have that duty to protect. >> It's on you. >> All right, so there you have it from a leading security practitioner. The cloud is not a silver bullet. Bad user behavior is going to trump good security every time. So unfortunately the battle goes on. And here's where it gets tricky. Security practitioners are drowning in a sea of incidents. They have to prioritize and respond to, and as you heard Robert Herjavec say, the average large company has 75 security products installed. Now, we recently talked to another CISO, Brian Lozada, and asked him what's the number one challenge for security pros. Here's what he said. >> Lack of talent. I mean, we're starving for talent. Cyber security's the only field in the world with negative unemployment. We just don't have the actual bodies to actually fill the gaps that we have. And in that lack of talent CISOs are starving. We're looking for the right things or tools to actually patch these holes and we just don't have it. Again, we have to force the industry to patch all of those resource gaps with innovation and automation. I think CISOs really need to start asking for more automation and innovation within their programs. >> So bottom line is we can't keep throwing humans at the problem. Can't keep throwing tools at the problem. Automation is the only way in which we're going to be able to keep up. All right, so let's pivot and dig in to some of the ETR data. First, I want to share with you what ETR is saying overall, what their narrative looks like around spending. So in the overall security space, it's pretty interesting what ETR says, and it dovetails into some of the macro trends that I've just shared with you. Let's talk about CIOs and CISOs. ETR is right on when they tell me that these executives no longer have a blank check to spend on security. They realize they can't keep throwing tools and people at the problem. They don't have the bodies, and as we heard from Brian Lozada. And so what you're seeing is a slowdown in the growth, somewhat of a slowdown, in security spending. It's still a priority. But there's less redundancy. In other words, less experimentation with new vendors and less running systems in parallel with legacy products. So there's a slowdown adoption of new tools and more replacement of legacy stuff is what we're seeing. As a result, ETR has identified this bifurcation between those vendors that are very well positioned and those that are losing wallet share. Let me just mention a few that have the momentum, and we're going to dig into this data in more detail. Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Okta, which does identity management, Cisco, who's coming at the problem from its networking strength. Microsoft, which recently announced Sentinel for Azure. These are the players, and some of them that are best positioned, I'll mention some others, from the standpoint spending momentum in the ETR dataset. Now, here's a few of those that are losing momentum. Checkpoint, SonicWall, ArcSight, Dell EMC, which is RSA, is kind of mixed. We'll talk about that a little bit. IBM, Symantec, even FireEye is seeing somewhat higher citations of decreased spending in the ETR surveys and dataset. So there's a little bit of a cause for concern. Now, let's remember the methodology here. Every quarter ETR asks are you green, meaning adopting this vendor as new or spending more? Are you neutral, which is gray, are you spending the same? Or are you red, meaning that you're spending less or retiring? You subtract the red from the green and you get what's called a net score. The higher the net score, the better. So here's a chart that shows a ranking of security players and their net scores. The bars show survey data from October '18, July '19, and October '19. In here, you see strength from CrowdStrike, Okta, Twistlock, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks. You see Elastic, Microsoft, Illumio, the core, Palo Alto Classic, Splunk looking strong, Cisco, Fortinet, Zscaler is starting to show somewhat slowing net score momentum. Look at Carbon Black. Carbon Black is showing a meaningful drop in net score. So VMware has some work to do. But generally, the companies to the left are showing spending momentum in the ETR dataset. And I'll show another view on net score in a moment. But I want to show a chart here that shows replacement spending and decreased spending citations. Notice the yellow. That's the ETR October '19 survey of spending intentions. And the bigger the yellow bar, the more negative. So Sagar, the director of research at ETR, pointed this out to me, that, look at this. There are about a dozen companies where 20%, a fifth of the customer base is decreasing spend or ripping them out heading into the year end. So you can see SonicWall, CA, ArcSight, Symantec, Carbon Black, again, a big negative jump. IBM, same thing. Dell EMC, which is RSA, slight uptick. That's a bit of a concern. So you can see this bifurcation that ETR has been talking about for awhile. Now, here's a really interesting kind of net score. What I'm showing here is the ETR data sorted by net score, again, higher is better, and shared N, which is the number of shared accounts in the survey, essentially the number of mentions in that October survey with 1,336 IT buyers responded. So how many of that 1,300 identified these companies? So essentially it's a proxy for the size of the install base. So showing up on both charts is really good. So look, CrowdStrike has a 62% net score with a 133 shared account. So a fairly sizable install base and a very high net score. Okta, similar. Palo Alto Networks and Splunk, both large, continue to show strength. They got net scores of 44% and 313 shared N. Fortinet shows up in both. Proofpoint. Look at Microsoft and Cisco. With 521 and 385 respectively on the right hand side. So big install bases with very solid net scores. Now look at the flip side. Go down to the bottom right to IBM. 132 shared accounts with a 14.4% net score. That's very low. Check Point similarly. Same with Symantec. Again, bifurcation that ETR has been citing. Really stark in this chart. All right, so I want to wrap. In some respects from a practitioner perspective, the sky erectus is falling. You got increased attack surface. You've got exploding number of IP addresses. You got data distributed all over the place, tool creep. You got sloppy user behavior, overwork security op staff, and a scarcity of skills. And oh, by the way, we're all turning into a digital business, which is all about data. So it's a very, very dangerous time for companies. And it's somewhat chaotic. Now, chaos, of course, can mean cash for cyber security companies and investors. This is still a very vibrant space. So just by the way of comparison and looking at some of the ETR data, check this out. What I'm showing is companies in two sectors, security and storage, which I've said in previous episodes of breaking analysis, storage, and especially traditional storage disk arrays are on the back burner spending wise for many, many shops. This chart shows the number of companies in the ETR dataset with a net score greater than a specific target. So look, security has seven companies with a 49% net score or higher. Storage has one. Security has 18 above 39%. Storage has five. Security has 31 companies in the ETR dataset with a net score higher than 30%. Storage only has nine. And I like to think of 30% as kind of that the point at which you want to be above that 30%. So as you can see, relatively speaking, security is an extremely vibrant space. But in many ways it is broken. Pat Gelsinger called it a do-over and is affecting a strategy to fix it. Personally, I don't think one company can solve this problem. Certainly not VMware, or even AWS, or even Microsoft. It's too complicated, it's moving too fast. It's so lucrative for the bad guys with very low barriers to entry, as I mentioned, and as the saying goes, the good guys have to win every single day. The bad guys, they only have to win once. And those are just impossible odds. So in my view, Brian Lozada, the CISO that we interviewed, nailed it. The focus really has to be on automation. You know, we can't just keep using brute force and throwing tools at the problem. Machine intelligence and analytics are definitely going to be part of the answer. But the reality is AI is still really complicated too. How do you operationalize AI? Talk to companies trying to do that. It's very, very tricky. Talk about lack of skills, that's one area that is a real challenge. So I predict the more things change the more you're going to see this industry remain a game of perpetual whack a mole. There's certainly going to be continued consolidation, and unquestionably M&A is going to be robust in this space. So I would expect to see continued storage in the trade press of breaches. And you're going to hear scare tactics by the vendor community that want to take advantage of the train wrecks. Now, I wish I had better news for practitioners. But frankly, this is great news for investors if they can follow the trends and find the right opportunities. This is Dave Vellante for Cube Insights powered by ETR. Connect with me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com, or @dvellante on Twitter, or please comment on what you're seeing in the marketplace in my LinkedIn post. Thanks for watching. Thank you for watching this breaking analysis. We'll see you next time. (energetic music)

>> from Bahrain. It's the Q covering AWS Public sector Bahrain brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Welcome back. It runs the cube coverage for Amazon whips were summoned by rain and Middle East jump for cloud computing. Our startup panel at two great guests. So, Abdullah, who's with Flat Labs? Flat? Six Labs Incubator Investor. Same dull bet with sink. Sorry. So sorry They got that wrong with little glare on my spring there. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Guys, start up. Scene here is robust. Last year from this year, More energy, more deployed capital because you're deploying capital. You're building a company. Give us the update start. >> Yeah, I would say over the past year, just our Bahrain location alone. We've already hit 23 startups that we've invested in, and we're looking to increase that number by about 68 start ups every six months. Um, as you've seen over the past year and Amina region and the GCC, there's rapid growth in the startup scene. Um and we're slowly starting to see each vertical fill up with the relevant startups and get more saturated. I think for a while we were one of the regions that were a lot less saturated when it came to our local startup because systems and the rest of the world The good thing is, now that we've gotta love the financial infrastructure into place, flat six Labs is one of them. And I think that's where we really um, we're lacking support before on DSO were signed to feel see players come into every stage of the startup growth be ableto help the stops raise their seed funds. Siri's a Series B >> and your role here is outreach building out my rain. Yet where the Economic Development Board trying to figure out that put together an entrepreneur strategy and not figure it out. We know what it is. You get money? Yeah, yeah. Party together, >> Yes. So what we're trying to do is there's two main things. One is that we're trying Thio finally be the first kind of financial investor that can help people going from a full time job in tow. You know, full time entrepreneurship rolls on to give them access to three of the biggest barriers that they usually will face, which is a business development network mentorship on Capitol andan. Everything that we're doing is weed. So personally, What I take care of is that I go to a lot of the international events around the globe, would start up because systems and try and find very early stage founders and educate them on the market. The region see where people would fit, where the gaps are in the market on dumb kind of raise awareness of old advantages that we have here in Bahrain. >> What makes you guys different? What's the differentiation >> as a country or as flat six labs? Both. So I'd say, as a country behinds in a very unique position where we have, ah, cultural mindset that is very easy for a lot of foreigners and expatriates to adapt to, Um, I think we've even been ranked number one in the world as a place for expect us to live several times on DA number. Thing is that we have a very high skilled workforce. Um, overhead costs are lower. So, for example, when it comes to the cost of rent when it comes to hiring a team, you also have subsidies that come into place like Tom Keen, uh, which Sam has also benefited from where if you go and you hire fresh graduate Bahrainis, you'll get >> ah, >> large margin of that subsidized by the government. So you're looking at, ah, mix where you have a high quality of life. But at the same time, it's the best starting point for a lot of start ups. Because you can extend your runway. You have, ah, much lower cash burn, and at the same time you've got one of the biggest market places right next door, which is Saudi Arabia, is the 30 minute drive across the bridge. So we've kind of got the best of all worlds over here, and and because we're a small country, we have a government that's incredibly reactive. So the regulatory authorities are very close with the startup ecosystem, for example, were always involved in the economic development board round table meetings on the ministries, all working closely together to try and make this as friendly and atmosphere is possible for the startup >> and they're authentic. That's interesting and see government authentically aligning. >> Yeah, it's in the interest of entrepreneur, I would say. One thing we really have going on is it's really an nationwide initiative from the founders to the private entities and investors like us and to the governmental agencies where we all are really dedicated towards making this start up >> san talk about your company. What do you guys do and what's your situation? >> Right? So my company's name is sinking. We're software as a service company that helps businesses manage the really hard aspects of managing their employees like things like timesheets scheduling. Job safety is a big one for us and job costing, and our target market is actually us small businesses and way were early stage company, and we met Salar and Flat six Labs, and they convinced us to come sit up here in Bahrain and never looked back. But the access to talent here is just amazing the cost of very low and were able to do a lot of a very small amount of money. And so far we've got to a total of four and 1/2 1000 U. S. Businesses using the platform. And we've done that all here from Bahrain, >> so very low, low cost leverage, a model, and that's because of the substance of just talent >> as a >> mixer, so it's a little bit cheaper to hire. People have more access to tell him it's a number of things. It's both of those things. >> Yeah, the university programs were interesting there. Got a degree in cloud Computing. They announced that we heard that news today. I mean, that's compelling. I mean, have you want to make the market just teach it? Yeah, exact. This is good, I think. >> I think the good thing is that everyone's come to an understanding that all parties have to get actively involved to make it the right atmosphere. So the universities are also working very closely with us hand in hand. And I've seen Percy a gigantic improvement over the past year where their senior projects of the universities are turning out where they got legitimate startup. It's Dex on Dhe. Some of them are even ready to go straight into acceleration, which was not the case a few years ago. So everybody's really on board. >> That's one of things we met last year in the economic Dillman for that round table. Lotte. I won't say complaints but concerns, and they're very listening to the whiteboards out their charts. How are they doing? Checking the boxes? They are checking the items off, moving these blockers and what's remaining in your mind in terms of things to make it frictionless. >> Yeah, I'd say like there's so far. We've done a great start andan the space of a year. We've accomplished a lot. But of course there's still shifting the whole mentality to understand the startup scene and also, you know, to get people to be less as, ah, cultural mentality, risk averse and start letting people feel that failure is an okay thing. It's okay to go straight out of university and give it a shot and try and start your own startup, Um, and also educating people of all the tools that are available to them. So although we do a lot of outreach and roadshows, still, there's, ah, a lot of people that need to be educated on how exploration works, how the VC side of it works. And I'd say another thing. We need Thio See coming is bridge funds. So we've got people that are ready to come in at Siri's a that precede that seed. But then there's usually these gaps where we need to kind of help Fila's well to keep people on target towards seriously >> like a bullpen. Capital kind of model. Like Paul Martinez Company? Yeah, sass coming that are in between being Air B or B and C just need that little bridge. Yeah, exactly. That. Just >> that extra runway so that they can hit the targets that the later stage investors want us. >> Guys, give it plug for your reference. What you working on? Now? What do you quit your to do? Item? What's, uh what's the plan? Give a pitch for the company. >> Looks way No. The first company to attack time tendons. And we won't be the last. But where we think that we can win his job costing and job tracking, which is something that the customers that we talked to it really screaming out, too. So we've been building a really complex but simple to use system for managing jobs the last 3 to 6 months, and we're about to deploy that to our users in a few weeks. We're very excited about that. And that's really our secret source. We just a lot of guys doing the time in attendance. We're doing it very well, but we want to be the best of jobs. And we also want to stay laser focused throughout our particular users, which is actually employers with 1 to 20 employees in the states. And that's actually that actually makes up 89% of all employers in the States. And it's very hard to historically to find these guys. But we'll be having a smart phone in their pocket. It's actually becoming easier and easier for us, and we find it. >> And those coming need the most help, too, because they're the ones that could grow to 50 employees next. Exactly. So what's the U. R L? Our website and app Tick and download. What's the head of someone contact U S. >> So they will go to sync dot business and they can use the Web version there. But we also have to mobile app so we could be found in the APP store and on the place. >> Awesome. Congratulations and updates for you guys. What's next for you here by rain in general? >> Well, in Bahrain and Demeanor Region, we're continuing to expand their several locations that we're gonna launch again as accelerator programs on dhe. Locally, over here, we're always accepting applications from international startups. We're actually having our demo day tomorrow So you should drop by if you're gonna be here. Yes. Did I would be great if you come down and a CZ that happens. We're accepting applications to the next cycle on dhe. They can just log onto flat six labs, bahrain dot com All the information's over there. And if they want to get in touch with me, they can just put my name into Lincoln. So >> I beat him up into a system, and when they're ready to accelerate, they go. Good to go. Congratulates. Good job, guys. Thanks for the update. Startup scene is robust here by rain. The Cube coverage for our second year covering Amazon Web service is summit. I'm Jumper Stevens for more coverage after this short break.

(lively pop music) >> Live from Mountain View, California. It's the Cube covering DevNet Create 2019. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we're here at day two coverage live of coverage at Mountain View, Cube coverage of Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier, your host, where all the action is in the creation side of two communities, DevNet, Cisco developers and then the open cloud native world entrepreneurship coming together to create products. Our next guest is Nik Kalyani, co-founder of WhenHub and TryCrypto. He's a builder, he's a creator, he's an entrepreneur. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on >> John, thanks for having me. >> You just gave a long talk so I'll let you breathe a little bit. You're an entrepreneur, you're an inventor, you see things early. You got a lot of your hands on lots of good stuff here. This is the perfect place for you to be giving talks and hanging out. >> Absolutely I love the fact that people are here to learn. They're here to find out about the new innovative things that they can experience hands-on. I just gave a workshop on smart contracts, on the blockchain and I loved the questions I got and the energy that's there. >> What sort of questions were you getting? What was the interest? Where are people going at it? Because networking's a supply chain problem you can almost imagine applying blockchain to networking constructs. >> Yeah absolutely, you know blockchain is one of those technologies that is misunderstood quite a bit and some of the questions I got really helped me, help reinforce that. Ultimately, what I was trying to do is make sure that people understand that blockchain is not a solution for everything. There are certain things where there are scenarios where there are multiple un-trusted parties where blockchain is great, but otherwise it's just a slow database. So you want to make sure that you use it in the right scenarios and supply chain is a very common example where it's used, especially private blockchains. >> If latency's not a concern blockchain might be a solution if other things line up. Great point, I'm glad you brought that up. I want to just ask you because your profile as a person you're a visionary, you see things early. The part of the show here that's interesting is it's not like there's this research kind of thinking, although researchers tends to think about the waves coming. It's about what's here and now and what's coming but it's also making things real and creating. So a lot of the conversations are fun, exploratory, discovery orientated but also there's a lot of reality kind of grounded in it. You know entrepreneurs make some mistakes if you're too early, you're misunderstood for a long time. It's got to be a little bit early at the right time, timing's everything. Talk about the dynamic of timing and building and creating with big waves that are coming. You got cloud, you got blockchain, you got AI, you got machine learning. Talk about this dynamic. >> Absolutely, yeah so timing is so important, especially when you have start-ups right? You could have the greatest technology and maybe the market's not ready for it and so yeah it fails. My first start up was like that. I created something that the market was not ready for but fortunately the stuff I'm working on the market is ready for. So I think one of the things that developers, engineers can do is really look at how not necessarily how a technology is being marketed but what the adoption rate is. If there are more people jumping on it, and a good way to look at that is to look at GitHub and see how many people are creating samples, boilerplates, how many people are writing blog posts et cetera. That I think is a better indicator of whether a technology is ready for prime time or if it's just all vaporware. >> Tell about what you're working on now you're working on some very interesting projects. Where are they? What's the status, size of the team, collaborative open source. What's going on? >> So I have two start-ups I'm working on. the first one is called WhenHub. So we have a product called Interface that allows anyone to be an expert on any topic, and promote themselves through the platform. And allows anyone who's looking for expertise on any topic to find them and then pay for them and do a video call, get their questions answered and the whole transaction is handled via blockchain with either our cryptocurrency or you can use Apple Pay or Google Pay. So we launched a few months ago, we have about 75,000 users, it's growing very fast. We are just at the point right now where we are trying to scale-up. Our crypto token is called WHEN token. It's listed on five different exchanges. So that's one thing. While building that product one thing became very clear to me. Mainstream users have a very challenging time with using anything blockchain or cryptocurrency related. And it's through no fault of theirs, the ecosystem has been created for developers by developers and the tools lack empathy for the users. And that lead me to create an open source project called TryCrypto. The mission is to create free open source content and tools to make blockchain and cryptocurrency more accessible to users. >> To mainstream not the killer dorks and the guys coding. >> Yeah we want it to be like non-technical folks >> Is it the wallet that's the problem or is it just overall too techy? >> You know what John, the very word wallet is the problem. (John laughs) Because it gives this idea that there's something within it. As we were talking earlier, you know about blockchain, there's nothing in a wallet. It's just a placeholder for all of your addresses, right? So in fact, I'm trying to solve that problem with a new tool I've created called Photoblock, where I use a photo and emoji's to replace that. Yes, wallets are problems. The fact that it requires you to have all these parts in place before you can do anything useful, that's a big problem also. People really need to step back and look at the user experience and say what are the friction points and how can we eliminate them and that needs to happen before blockchain and cryptocurrency can have mass adoption. >> Talk about the choice of smart contract language used. Ethereum which was the hottest development oriented the most traction. A lot of ICOs kind of watered that down, it's still under 300. Other ones are emerging, NEO, EO, a bunch of other ones. It seems to be kind of like a NASCAR race, one's in the lead, someone's coming up. How do you look at that marketplace as other developers start to kick the tires? As people start building these real-world apps is that important to have a selector? Does it matter? What's your thoughts on selection? >> That's a great question. I think going back to what I said about how to evaluate a technology. You can see that Ethereum is still continues to be the leader, by far. So while EO and other blockchains have what appears to be a lot of momentum, if you dig down below the surface you don't find as much. So I continue to remain a big fan of Ethereum. Which doesn't mean I don't care for the other blockchains but I find that right now Serenity and Ethereum are a good way to move forward. I think EO is also a good platform to build on but I think their developing tools need to reach some level of maturity. On Ethereum, the folks that have created the truffle stack, the truffle and ganache package, have done a great service for developers because they make them so simple and easy. Something like that needs to evolve. >> Yeah and your point earlier I think it's important to know for the developers out there don't confuse the protocol and the token selection on smart contracts with blockchain. Again, you don't have to anything on blockchain 'cause it's a slow database. You're doing smart contracts which doesn't really require a lot of overhead. I mean it's a contract, it does. You want to have it reliable, but you're not doing zillions of contracts per second. The IOPs are not that high. >> Yeah, actually smart contracts is also a very misunderstood term. In fact, someone asked me is it legal contracts or medical contracts, what is it? A smart contract is really just an application. A programming code that runs on the virtual machines on blockchain. They call it a contract because once it's out there it's immutable. Which means the rules are defined, known and fixed and can't be changed. So when you create a smart contract, really what you're doing is handling a very small amount of data that you want to persist forever that runs with some rules. >> And in a decentralized world, as we call it in our community, it's a digital handshake. You agreed that we would do this, there it is, it's un-hackable. What are the cool things you're working on? What else you got? Opensource project's awesome. You got a lot going on. Life's good. >> Life is good. As I mentioned, Photoblock is the thing that I'm really excited about. Another app that we are building is called Public Record. The problem we are solving there is that in areas where there is strife, or maybe there's dictators et cetera, sometimes when you have people who have photos of some crime occurring or some event occurring, they are reluctant to share it because it could be traced back and have adverse consequences. With Public Record we are building a smart contract driven blockchain app. Where you can just take a photo and it will push that photo on to IPFS. Which stands for the InterPlanetary File System, which is a decentralized file system. It will anonymize the photo. It will strip all the stuff that your camera puts on there like GPS, the camera model et cetera. It'll manipulate that photo and it will then put a hash of that on the blockchain and make it available by location. So you can go to any location look at all the photos that people have taken there that are completely anonymous and impossible to track back to the >> And what about tampering proof? You have origination data, you strip out the real origination data, that's really important for some of these countries where people get killed for sharing or trying to get the backdoor out of the country for political revolution or just simply I don't want anybody to know. How about tamper proof? >> It is, it's on IPFS, which is immutable file system. What we also do is we manipulate the colors and tones of the photo a little bit so it's impossible to even use AI to go back and reverse engineer and figure out who created the photo. The location, the time and the actual content of the photo is not tampered. So Public Record will do that. >> Just a little quick Q and A on your company. Did you do an ICO, did you finance it yourself? >> With WhenHub we did do an ICO, but it was at a time when the market was at its bare things so our ICO was moderately successful. In addition to the ICO funds, we are primarily funded by one of my co-founders, Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. We are doing quite well. >> He's a cool guy to hang out with, huh? >> He is. >> Never a dull moment? >> Never a dull moment, I learn quite a bit. >> Congratulations. How do people find out how to hang out with you? You got some good things going on here. Where do you hang out? What do you do for fun? What events do you go to? What's going on with you? >> I'm on Twitter quite a bit. >> Say your Twitter handle. >> It's @techbubble. I'm there. I like to blog. on TryCrypto and also my own personal blog. I go to meet-up events here in Silicon Valley and I do make an effort to speak at least five to six conferences each year. >> Aim it forward. >> Yep. >> A lot more action going on in crypto and token economics not just from an ICO standpoint always been some negative scams out there and global fraud, but generally, blockchain and token economics is real and getting more traction and soon I think it will be clearer. Your thoughts on that, if you could share your perspective in terms of the opportunities around those two areas. >> Like any other new and exciting technology goes through the hype cycle, they've gone through that now. I think there's really two types of people in this ecosystem. The ones that are focused on the cryptocurrency and the pricing around it et cetera. But I'd really like to separate that from the blockchain aspect of it. Blockchain is a very real technology, it's a really different technology that the world has never seen before. Yes, it's very true that not everything is a good candidate for the blockchain. But there are many, many scenarios where there are multiple un-trusted parties that are excellent for blockchain. I think what needs to happen is persons in leadership position need to really evaluate: what are the scenarios where there are un-trusted entities involved? And limit their blockchain involvement, test pilots, all of that they're more likely to see more success. Versus just throwing blockchain into it, replace the database, 'cause that's guaranteed to be a fail. >> Nik, great to have you on. I totally agree with you. The team here we were in Puerto Rico, we've been in the Bahamas, we've been Toronto we've been to all the blockchain events. Consensus is coming up in New York. We might be there, May 14th. Patrick, getting ready to head down to New York. Maybe go down there. Great to have your perspective. Great to see the blockchain conversation coming in here as the emerging tech and the creation here at DevNet Create continues. Thanks for coming out. >> Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me here. >> More Cube coverage here coming live here at Mountain View after this short break. (pop music plays)

>> Live, from Stanford University, it's theCUBE! Covering Global Women in Data Science Conference, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the CUBE, continuing coverage of the forth annual Women in Data Science Conference or WiDS, I am Lisa Martin, we are live at Stanford University but WiDS is going on at a 150 plus regional events in more than 50 countries. In fact there are 20 thousand people expected to be engaging with our livestream today. Joining us on the program is Kristina Draper, the chief technology officer at Wells Fargo, Wells Fargo, one of the sponsors, Kristina welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you so much Lisa, it's a real pleasure to be here. >> So this is the forth annual WiDS, and as I was mentioning some of the numbers, it's incredible, the momentum that this event has generated, we'd like to call it a movement. Tell a little bit about your involvement in WiDS, as well as Wells Fargo's involvement as a sponsor. >> Yes, um, so we are really honored to be able to be a part of WiDS. I was introduced to WiDS from an employee of mine, Catherine Lee, she joined our team just about a year ago, and she's been part of WiDS since the Inception. So working with Margo and the team and we believe so strongly that in the consumer bank space we have a tremendous opportunity and responsibility to understand how our customers interact with Wells Fargo and that will require a discipline around data science and so we had an opportunity, and had asked this year to be an executive sponsor and we jumped at it and I think we'll continue to be here at that sponsor level in future years. >> So you've been in Wells Fargo for a long time, tell me a little bit about your background of rising to become the chief technology officer. >> Sure, thank you so much for the question. It's been an interesting journey, I haven't always been at Well. So I did a few start ups here in the Silicon Valley. Um, kind of middle of my career and I came back to Wells Fargo. Most recently, I have a responsibility for the consumer bank technology space, that's the majority of branch technology. It's all of the ATMs, the point of sale network for customers. It also is a lot of business services, so how we think about services oriented architecture to ensure that we're always thinking about our customer and their accounts, in a consistent way regardless of how customers interact with Wells Fargo. So, all channels consistently trusted, so that data set's really important. And then, I also have the customer feedback and customer complaints so the idea that from survey all the way through complaints are being able to understand how our customers are interacting with us. >> And data is an interesting topic, because it's to broad. And I think so many people now across generations understand data privacy, to some degree you can think of you know, the baby-boomers that were affected by the Facebook information and things being shared. From a financial perspective, tell as a little bit about the discipline of data science, not just from the technology background and understanding that your team needs to have, but also other skills such as empathy, communication, negotiation, how are all of those contribute to what your team is delivering? >> Yeah, I would tell you we are in the business of trust. And three years ago, after sales practice came into Wells Fargo, was a very interesting time for our company. We kind of lost our way. And the opportunity with data science is an opportunity to reestablish trust with our customers. And so, you've seen a lot of the rebranding that Wells Fargo is doing in about... We were invented in 1852, but we're reinventing ourselves now. And we have to understand our customers, we have to know our responsibilities to be that trusted advisor to really care for our customers in every interaction. And so, I would think empathy, absolutely. Trust is all about every interaction consistent every time. And so, you think about even just a personal relationship and how you establish trust. It's very hard to reestablish trust, and so for us right now, the commitment to data science is about that reestablishing trust and to really thinking about every interaction with every customer and ensuring we're getting it right. >> You've been there a long time as I've mentioned, I'd love to understand your, some of the things that you've seen along the way as technology changes in terms of more females becoming interested, as we know that there was you know, from where we were in the 80s, where it has been a downwards spiral but you were recently named one of the 50 most powerful women in technology. What are some of the things as you think of how technology in Wells Fargo is re-imagining data and trust? What are the things that you've seen in terms of the evolution of females in technology and in leadership roles? >> Sure, absolutely. Thank you so much. You know think about industry recognition, and I think about how important it is to recognize women's value in the industry. So the recognition women in technology and most powerful women for me, it's an opportunity to really demonstrate that we should be very confident in the value that we bring as leaders, and that confidence as a woman is hard to come by. I think of my own personal career and the way that doors were opened for me along the way often we are our own worst enemies we second guess ourselves, we second guess our value, and we have to really work for that seat at the table. There's certainly been, I wouldn't have come back to Wells if I didn't believed that I had the right sponsors and the right mentors that were not only willing to help me kind of see the doors to walk through but to walk through those doors. And so my coming back to Wells was really about a opportunity as a leader in technology. I just had two start ups here in Silicon Valley, and so I was invited to come back and it was really the leaders and the leadership that brought me back to Wells. I felt I could make a real impact and I think that there's, when I think about the couple of jobs I've had since my second return to Wells Fargo it's really been about impact and recognizing my voice and starting to step into that accountability. When I think about what we can do as women leaders in technology and in data science a lot of it is owning that accountability to leadership and to really kind of paving the way for leaders behind us. There comes a part in a career certainly mine, where you no longer thinking about the next job for yourself and you know, I'm really fortunate that I've been able to get to a CTO level a tech division executive level, I have, you know the recognition on most powerful woman. But I don't do that alone. I do that with a team of women and men who've helped to really create value in the space that we're in. And we're in a consumer banking space and financial services and so there's certainly a lot of places to innovate, there's a lot of places to think about how technology can help to serve a Wells Fargo customer and if you think about when you need your bank you need your bank throughout your entire life. And whether you are thinking about a home purchase, an auto purchase, college for your children, retirement, there's so many big markers in life and that's where I get excited about, not only the leadership role that I have now, but I have the opportunity to bring a team with me to contribute real value. And so that's for me what really brought me back was an opportunity to have that impact to think about data science and technology in a way that there's true visible value being added to the market place to the industry. >> So it's almost like can we have pay it forward added to, how are you using that to expand your team with the right skills and the right people regardless of gender, regardless of any of that, to continue this big movement, this re-imagination that Wells Fargo is a business in undergoing. >> Yeah, well I would tell you WiDS is one way. WiDS is certainly a tremendous network opportunity if you think about the breadth and the reach across countries, across landscapes, across geographies, this is just one example of how I think about that. There's real power in relationships. There's real power in ability to establish not only a strong industry network a strong personal brand, but also a personal network. Even in the last couple of hours, WiDS started today, so inspired by the keynote speaker, so inspired about how they're turning data science and really thinking about different problems, different ways that we can improve, not only our lives, but the lives of future generations to come. I think part of how I think about it is finding that inspiration, because we have to inspire future generations of leaders, of women, and of men to really tackle the problem and have the right skills and confidence to be able to jump into that space. >> I agree with you. I think one of my favorite things in this, theCUBE has been covering WiDS since the beginning for four years and I always love coming here because you walk in and you immediately feel inspired. But you also feel that sense of collaboration, you talked about how important that is, not just for people that are in academia but in industry as well, you know I can't do what I do, you can't be a successful CTO at anywhere, at Wells Fargo let alone, any organization, without that collaborative spirit and I think I always feel that very strongly every time I walked in the door at a WiDS event, that people, they really do live up to their mission statement which is to inspire and educate women in data science and people in data science in general. >> Yeah, and I would offer that there's a lot of magic in the empty space, so the space in between and the way I would describe that is that so you come in to WidS data conference and certainly I come from a financial services background that the primary, you know, my primary professional background has been in financial services and technology, but the problems that our future generations will face can't be solved with just one lens. You can't solve problems with just a financial services expertise or just a technical expertise. You need to really look for how do you... It's the AND, and sometimes the space in between and bringing art and science. It's an ability to bring to think across industry and to apply solutions and innovation that have been brought forward through other industries, through other companies, through other academia and thinking about how that could apply in solving the problems that we're faced with in the financial services space. And so, to me coming to WiDS conference or spending time with the women that we'll meet in the room or the men that we'll meet in the room it's really about listening to their stories, listening to their passions, thinking about the problems they're solving and stepping back and identifying well, gosh if I really turned some of the problems that we're faced with upside down and thought about it with that perspective of with that lens, and maybe invited some people to your point, the collaboration to help solve problems with us, we might come up with a better answer, it's the space that's in between that might have called the difference. >> I like that! The space in between, there's so much applicability, I mean there's 2.5 quintillion data generated everyday across every industry. Whether it's you know, personal banking information or what we eat or where we travel, we do everything through mobile these days, and companies like Wells Fargo have such potential to be able to utilize that data to you know, create solutions that helps so many people. But you're right it's what can, how can financial services and the data that you deal with and to help customers and that sense, with the opportunity to influence all these other disciplines. I think that's one of the things that excites me about data science, it's how broad and symbiotic this discipline really is. >> Totally agree with you. And I have a new leader, Jason Strle, who just came in to Wells Fargo, just over a year ago, and he talks about a vision where we are 100 percent transparent in our data with our customers, so think about that value proposition in financial services, where there's a 100 percent data symmetry. What we know, you know. What you know, we know, when you want us to know it. And that can be so powerful, and that's really how we're thinking about the transformation around technology, the investment that we're going to make in data science, an AI and machine learning, because that 100 percent data symmetry comes back to trust. If we're a 100 percent transparent with everyone of our customers about what we know think about how that establishes trust. I mean that is a rock solid foundation for trust in the future, and I think that's really something that can be very powerful if we capitalize it, but we can't to it alone, we're going to need partners. We're going to need partners like so many of the companies in the academics that are in this room today. And we'll have to reach even broader because some of the solutions won't be found if we just look internal to Wells Fargo. >> Exactly. That diversity in so many ways is so impactful. Kristina, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with us some of the things that you're doing, how you've ascended to the CTO at Wells Fargo and how Wells Fargo is sponsoring in contributing to this WiDS movement, we appreciate your time. >> It's a real honor, thank you so much Lisa. >> Thank you! >> Pleasure! >> We want to thank you for watching the CUBE live at Stanford University, from the forth annual Women in Data Science Conference. I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around, my next guest will be here momentarily. (upbeat music)

>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube Covering CloudNow 7th Annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. >> Lisa Martin on the ground with the Cube at Facebook Headquarters. We are here for the 7th Annual CloudNow Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Welcoming to the Cube for the first time, one of tonight's winners, we have Charu Sharma, the Founder and CEO of Nextplay.ai. Charu, it's great to have you on the Cube. >> Thanks Lisa, I'm really excited to be talking to you. >> And congratulations on your award. Your pedigree, when I looked you up on LinkedIn, I thought wow, where do I even start, the things you've accomplished in such a short time period are pretty impressive. I want to share a few with our guests. You've built, in college, in your spare time, two award-winning start-up companies out of your dorm room before you got napped up by LinkedIn to grow their talent solutions revenue. You've won awards by Grace Hopper. We mention tonight you're here with CloudNow, one of the top women entrepreneurs in cloud innovation. Tell us about, I'd love to get your story of what inspired you to go off and found Nextplay.ai, the inspiration, also the chutzpah to say, "You know what I want to do this, "and I need to go get funding" which is really challenging for women in technical roles to do. Tell us about that. >> Yeah, so tonight I'll be giving a talk next to Sheryl Sandberg and that's nothing short of a miracle for me because I grew up in a family in India where women were not allowed to work, and so growing up it was important for me to have access to economic opportunities and that's how I came to the US for a scholarship, and I'm here today because a lot of mentors serendipitously came in my life and opened doors for me. So, to pay it forward, when I worked at LinkedIn before, I built a mentoring program for women at LinkedIn specifically cuz I think in the workplace especially women, minorities, and introverts suffer in finding a sponsor in helping open doors for you and mentors at your company can specially help you navigate the political landscape and help you grow your career at the company which helps the companies with retention as well. Exactly two years ago I started Nextplay.ai to be able to do this at scale, so today we work with companies from Coca Cola to Lyft to Splunk, and we not only connect their employees internally for mentorship, we also have robust analytics to show the ROI on retention. >> I was looking at some of your stats, I was telling you before we went live, I geek out on stats, that really show that your technology can make significant business impact for, you mention Coca Cola, Lyft, Splunk, etcetera but you obviously saw a gap a few years ago when you got into tech yourself saying not only do we know the numbers and the stats of women in technical roles as being quite low, but one of the things that you saw is one of the things we need to do to help increase those numbers is start internally and mentoring these women. To your point, of not just helping them establish confidence to stay but navigate that political landscape. I think that's a really unique opportunity, when you pitched this idea to these Cs, what was their response? >> Yeah, so mentorship is not an established product category, and on top of that, I inserted gender, race, accent, age, etcetera, and so frankly I got mixed opinions, but I chose to focus on the people who saw the big vision and who cared about the story and the impact something like this could have, so LinkedIn's executives, 500 Start-ups, TechCrunch's former CEO, who's a woman, they're some of the earliest investors who put their bets on us. Today we have shown success stories at every scale, so after six months of working with us employees are 25% more likely to recommend working at their company which actually when you do the math, it's huge. It saves millions of dollars for companies. There was a woman at a company who became the first woman at her company to get promoted while away on mat leave, that's huge. >> Wow, that is huge. >> A new product manager was able to, because of us, connect with somebody who they otherwise wouldn't know, and they were able to help identify a multi-million dollar market opportunity for the company, so there are definitely these case studies which is now creating a movement and now we have over 300 companies who want to work with us. They're on a waiting list. >> A waiting list? >> Mmhhm So we're definitely creating this momentum. >> And we talk about groundswell and momentum, especially at an event like tonight where there's over 300 attendees, 1o winners, one of them being yourself, and there was no advertising to buy tickets because the groundswell is growing so much. The trajectory that Nextplay.ai is on, in two years is pretty steep, you got some exciting things coming up in March, tell us about that. >> Yes, thank you, so when ai play and we sell to enterprise companies to do their mentoring and sponsorship programs internally for talent retention, that said, we started the company to help level the playing field so now that we're relatively stable and are a strong robust team with decent traction, this March we want to give a give back, so we're launching a social impact campaign where around the world we're going to help 100,000 women get mentored. So, if you want to host events at your company, if you want to get involved as a mentor or a mentee, please e-mail me at charu@nextplay.ai. >> And people can also go to the website to find out more information about that? >> Not about that campaign specifically yet, but they'll find my contact information, so it's nextplay.ai. >> And even at your Twitter handle which is probably in the lower third here. >> Yes >> Excellent, so congratulations on the award. The amount of work that you have done in such a short period of time is incredible. I can see it in your attitude and your smile and your energy, congratulations on getting to present to Sheryl Sandberg tonight and for seeing this opportunity in the market to help with that retention from within. What a great opportunity and thanks again. >> Thank you Lisa. >> We want to thank you for watching the Cube. I am Lisa Martin on the ground at Facebook headquarters, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hello Rod, we are here live in Las Vegas where Amazon Web Services' AWS re:Invent 2018. It's our sixth year covering re:Invent. We've been there from the beginning, as a customer using EC2 when it first launched in 2006, one of my first start-ups. What a scene it is here. Everyone in the industry is here full on, it's a Super Bowl of technology, Amazon is leading in the cloud game, and we're breaking it down for you in theCUBE. Our next guest is Holland Barry, Senior Vice President in Cybersecurity for Cyxtera, a hot company. Welcome to theCube, thanks for joining me. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, it's great to have a senior people, start-ups, technical people on theCube. Kind of extracting, kind of squint through the volume of data that's being announced here at the show. Huge set of announcements already out the door. More coming. I'm expecting to hear a big connectivity announcement at 11:30 involving satellite and remote coverage for IoT devices, VM containers, micro VMs, all this massive amount of tech. Putting it into reality is critical. This is what customers want to do, they want to lower their costs, they want more performance, lower cost, more capability. Ushering in a true programing model for DevOps. How do you guys fit here? What's your story? Why are you here? What's the value proposition? >> So we're really focused, especially at this show around the DevOps community, and enabling agility for those folks. Ten years ago, the word DevOps and the term DevOps came to life, and there was this tug-o-war going on between the development teams and the operations team. Where development team wanting to move fast, and have all the agility. And the operations team wanted to have stability, and then all these things. They came together in a matrimony, and 10 years later we're highly automated, everything looks great from a DevOpps perspective, but what we're seeing now is security, being a bit of a speed bump. They're having a hard time catching up with that. That's our focus on the show is unleashing the DevOps folks >> and letting security move at the speed of DevOps. >> Lets drill down on security. Obvious cyber security is a global issue. It's also a national security issue in the United States, but other countries too. It's a global policy thing. There's tech involved, right? Cyber warfare all those, we hear about the news. But for a basic enterprise, the perimeter's no longer there with cloud. You got to think differently around how you're going to secure things. Amazon is now seeing security, not a blocker. Used to be no cloud implementation, it's not secure at all. Now you're hearing people saying, it's actually pretty secure, but there's more things going on keep raising the bar on capabilities that are needed. Could you share your expert opinion on, state of security of the cloud. What are the key areas? Where are they kind of leveled out? What's the baseline now? How acceptable is that? And what are the gaps, what are people working on? >> I think we're seeing a lot more security components, move into that infrastructure as code conversations. Amazon is fantastic about launching stacks, via cloud formation template, or maybe using TerraForm And now we're seeing the need for security components to move into that as an extension, of that infrastructure type deployment. That's another are of deep focus for us. >> Is there a tech trend that's a tail win for this? Is there anything helping? Or is there more headwins then tailwins? What's the big focus? >> I think one of the big trends we're seeing, and we're getting a lot of analyst conformations on this trend too is, the whole thing around software to find perimeters. So a new approach to describing access, for the users, kind of getting away from the VPN model, where you have a central concentration entry point. And then having the traverse complicated, to maintain back haul lines right? We're seeing software define perimeter, allow users and DevOps professionals access multiple environments simultaneously, without the need of these more archaic architectures if you will. >> Now the way it works braided to VP is absolutely great. Very secure malware transmission to the inpoint. >> Absolutely, I mean you think about the old style of connectivity, and you've got a user, that has nearly unfettered access wants that VPN connection isn't created. They have way more access, they have way more ability to spread malware laterally, with a VPN connection. Software to find perimeter, greatly reduces that attack surface, by giving those users only access to those items, within the perpend infrastructure, that they're vetted to have access to, and nothing more. >> So hold on, I got to ask you a question around cloud architects, the hottest area that we're seeing from an educational, learning, progressionary, knowledge seeking area, what is a cloud architect? And what are the things that make up, how would you describe and ideal cloud architecture? So I'm enterprise, I realize I've got to straighten my data center down, I'm using the cloud, lot of great things about the cloud, lot of great things about having something around perimeters of low latency. Now we've got IOT Edge, I'm going to want to power that with power, and then have connectivity now, that's over the top. How do I architect this? 'Cause data is going to live there, human computes can move around from Amazon, that's the direction that they're going. How do I lay it all out? What's your view on Cloud architect these days, and how they should be thinking? >> Well the Cloud architect role I think has evolved a lot, So start off with right? It's no longer just being an infrastructure person, you've got to be sort of an expert on security, some of an expert on networking, and a lot of storage all these other components. I think it's different, the organization, I think there's a series of best practices. I think AWS does a fantastic job of delivering templatized best practices to folks who are looking to adopt a cloud architecture. I think that's a great guide post to go by. Is the recommendations. >> How about staffing? What are you seeing in the makeup of the kind of, you know, I don't want to sound....Ninja or pirate, or whatever metaphor you want to use. You see kind of a new bread of, DevOps engineering, >> Absolutely. >> Mixed with app developer emerging. >> Yeah I think you got it, I think that matrimony that happened between the develop and the operations team has continued to evolve, and we're seeing this new kind of combined specialty. Where you've got great programming chopped, You're a python or JavaScript ninja, and you also know a lot more about the infrastructure than traditionally, your development role would of necessitated in the past. >> What are the top security conversations are you having in a DevOps environment, because there's some really great DevOps shops, and DevOps thinking in a lot of companies. And then you've got the people who're now learning DevOps they're kind of getting cloud native. They see Kubernetes around the corner. They see.. they put containers around things. I could keep my work loads on premises. Okay I got some cloud. What is some of the thinking around that? What's your view on all this? >> So I think access is a big piece, I think, you know developers needing to get to heterogeneous set of hybrid environments. They might have some legacy, or new stuff on prem. They might have a couple of clouds they're working with, how do you have a single unified policy contract that talks about how it's users can interact with it. And we're also hearing a lot about DevSecOps to moving that detection of vulnerabilities, and code imperfections earlier on in that development cycle. And we're enabling a big compliment to that, we're not DevSecOps ourselves, but we're involved in that conversation from an access perspective. >> Can't you explain what you guys do I want to get that out there because board. What do you guys actually do? How do you make money? What's your business model? What's the product? >> Yeah, so Cyxtera is a cyber security company, that also happens to have a colocation data center footprint in 29 markets. We've got 50+ data centers. We're here focused on, once of our access products called Appgte STP Appgate is a secure access solution, that was really built with developers in mind, that allows that simultaneous secure access, to a multitude of environments. So if you're a native U.S customer, and you've got 20 or 30 accounts, we can seamlessly allow that connectivity with a very robust policy structure, to allow all those developers, those users, to interact with those environments, without having to do that VPN switching that we discussed earlier. A real real clean in sophisticated way to connect your users into your internal and sensitive infrastructure. >> And what're the...who's the buyer of the product? And why are they using you guys? >> It's typically going to be the security team, sometime we'll have the networking in the cloud, infrastructure teams involved in the conversations, but this is a security product. This is secured access product. And this is really a evolution, of what people are using for the VPN, and jumpboxes and things like that for these days. >> How dead is the VP if you had to put it on a scale? One being on life support, 10 being still state of the art. I mean VP is still around, people are using VPNs a lot. >> Totally. >> There's a role for VPNs. Is it a rip and replace? Or is it more of a functional, some spots VPNs are great, some spots they're not. What's the role of VPN? >> We're seeing them, and I think Gartner has a statistic, that 60% of VPNs will be dead by 2021, or something like that. We're seeing that evolution occur. Looking simple environment, A VPN might be a really appropriate approach. But when you have cloud workloads everywhere, you got on premise data, you've got your users everywhere. It simply can't keep up. That's really the problem space part of it. >> Where's the action for security in terms of good developing trends? Is it at the network layer? Is it the virtualization layer? The identity layer? Where are you seeing, security really advancing and excelling with cloud? What specifically, where's the action happening? >> I think it's at all airs. I mean, we've seen the identity access management, identity provider market explode. We're seeing great new technologies around, container security, virtual machine security. I can't pick any one category, I just wouldn't. I would argue though, that this access category in the software to find perimeter trend, is something. We're tuned into it obviously, maybe a little more than most. But we are seeing a huge uptake. >> Well what's the alternative? I mean most IT guys, obviously they're scared. I mean they're not... They're kind of running scared. They've been doing perimeter based security for years. Firewalls, routers, all classic all lock down. Now in comes API economy, and now they're like, "Okay." I got to figure out, buy them everything in the planet to figure it out. What are they doing now? What's state of the art for people who are moving off the perimeter completely? >> I think the adoption of, more cloud native controls. A lot folks right now, are very familiar with traditional firewall vendor, and they'll tend to take that, and implement a software version of that hardware box up in the cloud. And we're not arguing that, you need to get away from something, like a next generation firewall. This traffic exception is does a lot of things, that our solution specifically doesn't do on a lot of the SDP soluntions don't. Taking that layer approach, and seeking out the solutions that are, that are cloud native. Forcing an uptech on that, and it's really changing the way people think about the architecture in their environments too. We're familiar with one thing from OnFarm We try to shoehorn that, that methodology in the cloud >> So single sign on is critical >> SSO is critical, we're seeing a huge check up on that. Absolutely. >> How do I handle the sprawl of new environments, with IOT Edgefor instance, you'll see a lot more things connect in. How do you do that? Is it manual, was there any animation or machine learning? How are you guys bringing that to scale? Because that's a big challenge we hear a lot. >> Absolutely. One of the things we're doing, at Cyxtera, is allowing you to templatize what secured access should look like for these new environments. So just like you're deploying that infrastructure as code, we're just a secured access piece of that. All the connectivity has already been described, by the security team. So back to the comment about DevOps Where operations team needing to move fast. Thinking that would deploy a brand new environment, with that access me and you >> So you're splitting up the auto building, you're standing it up quickly. >> Yeah >> All built in a preconfigured policy just goes out. >> Absolutely. Data dog, one of our reg AWS customers a great example of someone who is highly automated everything. They don't even touch our UI They use APIs for everything. They've codeified all the elements of our platform, and so when they spin up a new environment, you know they'll actually check out, a configuration from their, whatever, get hub get lab they're using. And inject that into the spin up of the new environment. Super sophisticated, high level of automation. Really at the end of the day, what's it helping them do? Why are we doing any of this? Why are we doing DevOps? We can move faster to the live product and services, quicker to our customers. >> So you guys are basically DevOps version of security, you're instrumenting everything DevO.. Data Ghost is a great example. They're instrumenting every, all the application areas. You guys are taking the sim.... Devops approach to security. Is that your approach? >> DevOps approach to security and user access, yeah, very much so. >> And what's the big conversation you're having here, at reInvent? Obviously a lot going on, what's most exciting for you here? Every event. >> I think it's everything that we just talked about, we're hearing people finally get ready for this, message you know, we're practitioners and users of this platform ourselves, and the SDP speck. I use it everyday. I flip up my laptop in the morning, I get instantly connected from anywhere to seven and 10, what we call sites right? We're familiar with the power, we're leveraging the power internally. Now seeing other people come over, what people like Data Dog and Voicebase or tour AWS clients, seeing what they've done, seeing their story, and having them say, "Hey how did they do that, we want to do that too." >> And how 'about a global scale, you guys are agnostic on geography, so they play into it. >> Completely neutral to the underlying infrastructure, the geography our solution acts the same. It doesn't matter public, private, cloud, bare metal, it's a unified policy framework that allows you to, to whatever level of granularity you want. Just grab access from the user, even including, ingredient from a third party system. For instance, I may have a developer that's assigned to a task, or a story, or an epic. Inside a Jira project for instance. Popular development tool. I can dictate, his or her access, to the infrastructure. And the projects are working on, based on an API called the Jira saying, "Okay this person has access to these things." Now I have a conditional response to, should someone have access to this resource. It's well, it depends, are they working on this project? Are they in the office? Is there a machine patched? Who are they and the identity provider? All these things should feed in to.. >> And they're automated too. They're automating in? >> This is all completely automated, and all these checks that I just described, are actually done our system, preauthentication. So you're vetted first, and then you're handed an access passport, we call Live Entitlement. And that gets you to the infrastructure, and only the infrastructure and applications you're vetted to do. Based on that evaluation that happened preautentication >> How agile are you guys when new things have to change? There's a security threat, or something on the landscape or surface area changes. How do you guys respond to it from aj Jilly standpoint? >> Yeah so, our system can take hints VN and API as well, so if you have a, you know, a threat system or something giving you signals that something might be going on. You could come into our system for instance, and revoke everyone's accces, you could prompt someone, maybe for a step up authentication, to make the reprove who they are, they got a one time password. So lot of options. We want to take hints from third party systems, we're designed that way. We can adjust, network access and program the network, based on other things that are happening. >> Final question before we wrap up here. Let get a plug in for the company. How old is the company? How many people... So how about some of your customers? Give the plug for Cyxtera. >> 1500 employees, I think I mentioned, 50+ data centers across 29 markets, hundred and hundreds of customers on the security access product that I talk about. You know, many thousands of customers in our data center. >> So business is good? >> Business is good. Yeah. In terms of like focus areas for next year, we're all in on DevOps, we're investing heavily in this area. Expect to hear more about a richer API set. More prebundled integrations, and also a bigger focus on containers. >> Well I think you guys are a great example of, success with using cloud. Lot more work to do. >> Yep. >> I mean you've got, Global, you've got all kinds of new landscapes changes. Final question, What's the one problem you saw, summarize it in a sound bite, why do people buy Cyxtera? Why do they use you? >> For network platform access for your user with a single security contract. I can't stress that. It's a huge competitive differentiation, versus some of the web application proxys that are out there. I invite everyone to dig into the details about what we provide. You can go to appgateforaws.com if you want to test dive the product. Get a feel for the admin UI, the client setup all that stuff. It's really simple and I give ya real good taste. And please come by the booth and see a demo as well. >> Tell th em Johnathan, you get a 10% discount. Only kidding. Hey, thanks for sharing your insight on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> We're here at reInvent, lot of action happening. Obviously a crowd of great people. Lot of great networking, but more importantly than industry continues to power forward, with cloud, on premise, in the world. It's cute bringing all the action her in Las Vegas. We'll be back with more after this short break.

(upbeat techno music) >> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we are here in Bahrain for exclusive coverage for AWS Summit, part of Amazon's new region being launched here in the Middle East. I'm John Furrier, your host, we have two great guests from C5 Accelerator in Washington D.C., now kicking it out in Bahrain. Hadyah Fathalla, executive director C5 Accelerate and Eva Dimitriadis, good to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Chief operating officer. >> Great to be here. >> Guys, congratulations. Bahrain, D.C. >> The world. >> The world, it's global. >> Thank you, yeah. >> C5 Global. >> It's great to be here. >> It's an exciting time. I mean, I got to ask you Eva, because we had previously met, talked about interviews in D.C. Smart people that known Amazon, because Teresa and Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos always say, "We're going to be misunderstood for a while." Come on, that's not true. (laughing) A region in this area is going to explode the entrepreneurial scene. What's your take? >> I think that's absolutely true. As we see today at the Summit, there's just such a growing number of entrepreneurs and people who are excited to embrace digital innovation. Three years ago I think the story would have been different but ever since we set up the accelerator here, which was the first once in Bahrain, we've just seen an explosion of interest and not just from Bahrain but from around the GCC. Even start ups from abroad coming and setting up here as their Middle East practice. >> Talk about C5 for a second. Let's take a minute, to explain what you guys do. I jumped ahead a little bit because I'm excited because I just love the entrepreneurial energy. This is a really important thing happening and you guys are playing a role. Talk about C5 Accelerate, what are you guys doin'? What's your business model? Just take a minute to explain as a set up. >> So I'll let Eva talk maybe more about our global operations but really C5 Accelerate a few years ago, branch the business which was largely an investment business, including innovation business and we built Bahrain's first and one the regions, in fact, first cloud enabled accelerators and Bahrain's very first technology accelerator and we did that in partnership with the Economic Development Board, the labor firm Tamkeen and obviously with AWS. Really we benefited from the first mover advantage and the thinking around that was that as Amazon grows it's geographic footprint there is great opportunity to build on the cloud in places like the Middle East where the ecosystem is nascent and there is an amazing first mover advantage. >> Yeah. >> So when we partnered with the government to build this, we realized as we do that, we also need to contribute to building a healthy ecosystem so we built this first accelerator and we have felt-- >> When was that, by the way? >> 2016. >> Great, thank you. >> Actually September marks our two year. We've since graduated five cohorts. We're gearing up for six and we have 34 start ups under our belt. Our first cohort was an all Bahraini cohort and today we're very proud to say that actually half of the start ups that have graduated from this program that is based out of Bahrain are international start ups. That's what we're doing locally. Maybe Eva can tell you a little bit more about what we're doing on a global scale. >> You know and that's important. I want to make sure you got that out about having a bunch of start ups under your belt because when I went to the start up Bahrain session yesterday I was really, really impressed by two things. One is, just the smart energy, the smart people who like understand entrepreneurship. Either went to school for it or have learned through the scar tissue of trial and tribulations like myself. And then the entrepreneurs were there themselves. >> Mm-hmm. >> And you know a healthy entrepreneurial community when they start bitchin' and moanin', they're all chirping away, they're hungry. There's a hungry appetite for entrepreneurship here and creating but it's not fake entrepreneurship. They're really hungry. They're, where's the cash? Where's the capital? So this is really a positive sign. >> It is and I want to add something really quick before Eva jumps in, I think in the past two years what's great about a small ecosystem and the ability to pivot and build fast is you actually see the impact that you can have as an individual and as a company and as a community really on the landscape. But also regionally we've had great collaborative efforts across the GCC and in the region with partners in Saudi and Kuwait and Egypt and in Jordan so I think there's a lot of momentum that we're riding on now, and I think it's a great time to be building in the tech space. >> Well Eva, before you get to your comments. I just want to follow up on the comment around Saudi and different regions because this is a trend that has been happening for a while in Silicon Valley, as you know. People have been leaving Silicon Valley, because it's cost to live there, but people have been putting engineering teams outside of Silicon Valley. I mean, 20 years ago, you only went outside of Silicon Valley or the US to outsource which is not really product development, it's just coding. Then the trend became real engineering and product development, real chops outside. We just had Abdul on from Saudi and he was talking about his shape of his team, the psychology, the make up of the people, it's just not in Saudi Arabia. It's in China, it's all over the world. As developers are working across the world, this is a really big deal. I mean this is the new dynamic. >> Yep. >> Diverse teams, geo located, no borders, this is going to change the political landscape. It's a cultural shift. >> Definitely, I mean I think it's a while before we have here the same secret sauce that exists in Silicon Valley or that has existed there for the past decade or so. But the emphasis on training and upscaling is huge and as we've heard a number of times today, there are so many incentives to do so for free so you can actually learn to code, you can become a certified AWS coder for free in Bahrain. Which is a phenomenal advantage and step up. I mean, no one would pay me to do that in the UK. I think that, along with a number of other initiatives are really going to leap frog the development here. And in terms of what you talk about, the sort of the landscape and geo location, it goes in so many different directions now. There's no single focus so we had a Swiss company last year come and incorporate in Bahrain, and hire developers here to grow their business. It can go in so many different directions. >> Yeah, the winner take all business model is an old business model and now it's everyone's winning so it's a little bit of flattening of the wealth and the opportunities but the pie is getting bigger. >> Yes. >> I think this is the dynamic that cloud and Amazon continues to demonstrate that the Oracles, for instance, of the world, we got to win it all, lock everyone in and we got to own it. That ethos is not, that dog's not hunting, as they say. This is changing the entrepreneurial landscape and the other thing I observe is the younger generation. Leveling up is very easy to them. It's like a video game, right? Leveling up is AI, blockchain, I think one of your companies I talked to, oh we're doing a blockchain implementation. They will eat up the cloud. >> Mm. >> I mean it's going to be like, pretty fast. >> You mentioned-- >> So I'm expecting some accelerated. >> Definitely. I mean you mentioned hungry but they're also fearless. The entrepreneurs that we work with have that perfect mix of a super smart idea and an understanding of a niche sector of the market but also this resilience and recklessness that you need to embrace the opportunity. And all the scary stuff that comes with it. >> And I think adding to that, I think what's great with Amazon coming to Bahrain, with us working across the globe, it's a cross pollination that happens because whether we like it or not, like Eva said, we are not Silicon Valley yet and maybe we don't aspire to be specifically Silicon Valley and we want to build our own unique ecosystem but the lessons learned from the likes of Silicon Valley and London and Singapore and China and everywhere else in the world. >> Yeah. >> Really helps build, not just the skills required but the grit that could otherwise be absent. >> The grit's key, yeah. >> And it can engender the kind of cultural shift that's necessary so you need, so you can develop these robust and resilient qualities that are necessary for a founder. >> Well, that's a really great point. I moved from the east coast in the US to California with my first start up because that's where the action was and I can tell ya, I've been there 20 years and I've been an entrepreneur doing things ever since. And there's a fallacy of trying to emulate Silicon Valley. Every i dotted, t crossed and trying to take the playbook. There's no direct match, however, there's some consistencies in there. That's grit, creativity, openness, capital markets and community and this is something that you guys kind of have in place. And then adapting that to your culture. Now I will say that my impression here is it feels a little bit Silicon Valley because it's a little bit more open and loose. People like to go fast. Fast and loose is the Silicon Valley way. Dubai's a little bit more like New York to me. So I can feel more, valley-like here. I'm not saying that Dubai's bad, I'm just saying it's different cultures. Bigger, its more ... >> There's definitely a lot of agility here. I think one of the other advantages which leads back into what C5 is as a whole, we're primarily an investment business. We have a venture capital fund based in the UK. What we're really looking for is investible, scalable business models where we're de risking the cost of capital with cloud computing because that is how ultimately these start ups scale. Another benefit that we really see in this market is value for money. If you're a start up in Silicon Valley and you get to the stage that some of our start ups get to when they finish their program, your valuation is pretty much always triple what we would see here, so valuation's a very sensitive subject. Our start ups hate talking about it. We structure our deals with them in a way that generally avoids having a valuation. >> It's very easy to do business here. You just keep on increasing the valuation, all the stars will come dropping to your doorstep. >> It's a nuanced area. >> Yeah. >> But that being said, you can get really good value for money businesses but more importantly you're investing in the teams and the entrepreneurs and there's no shortage of that here. >> Let's talk about the ecosystem here and then let's talk about the women in tech because one of the things that blew me away yesterday was Teresa Carlson held a women breakfast and for the first time I got kicked off a table because they wanted to make room for the workshop. >> Sorry about that. (laughing) >> I'm like, wait a minute. This is not an inclusive environment. Sorry, no, we need the table. Okay, I know, I was happy to tap out. But I wasn't expecting that and the energy and the, just really, again, this event, they had to lock the doors for the keynote so there's really a big interest across the board. Talk about the ecosystem and then the women in tech situation. >> So I think the ecosystem is an interesting question because, I mean, we work very collaboratively. Like I said, even though this initiative largely was kind of envisioned by the government and mainly by the Economic Development Board and I'm sure you got a chance to speak to Khalid Humaidan, he might have given you a bit of an idea of how this started off but really the EBD threw this idea of start up Bahrain to the community and said, "Look, you guys lead on it." And it took a little bit of time for the community to figure out what that really means and what it's going to look like but it really made the community and ourselves also think pragmatically about what we want this ecosystem to look like. So even though it's not as mature, like I said, as other ecosystems further away and especially in the west, it is coming together very nicely because it's coming together as a collaborative effort. You see a very good continuous consultative work between private sector, public sector, the start ups and then the other stakeholders, including ourselves, and academia. We still have a long way to go, I think specially in areas and this is something that I always emphasize, is to shift the culture you really need to start at a much younger age so at schools, at universities. We engage with them and are keen to do more on that front but I think we are laying the foundation for what I hope in the next five, 10 years will be a pretty competitive entrepreneurial and start up-- >> It might be sooner. >> Hopefully sooner. >> Yeah. >> I think we have the right recipe now to build a robust ecosystem. >> Yeah, I can say I can attest to that after what I saw yesterday. Your thoughts? >> Yeah I mean our team in Bahrain is 100% Bahraini. I'm based in London, but Hadyah here leads a phenomenal team who are all Bahraini citizens. Being the island that it is, we know everybody so Hadyah's done an excellent job of engaging with everyone from schools to universities to post grads to public sector, private sector. So really all the stakeholders in the ecosystem are engaged and everyone from the oil and gas industry to the finance sphere are thinking about how innovation can advance their businesses so that they don't get left behind at the train station. >> Yeah. >> It's really top of mind and top of agenda which is a very invigorating scenario. I think, going back to some of the initiatives, from bankruptcy laws to having a fintech bay with the Central Bank of Bahrain, there's just so much, like they're constantly pushing the envelope to make this a friendly environment for entrepreneurs to come and do business. >> And I want to add one thing. There's always this question of, does government have a role to drive innovation and create an ecosystem? >> They do. >> I think Bahrain is a good example for others in the region and even beyond to say actually government does have an important role. >> They do. >> If you look at Bahrain, it's government that has been very flexible and nimble in terms of moving to accommodate. Whether it's the new bankruptcy laws or allowing for the fintech sandbox and a cloud first policy and shaping the start up Bahrain. The government has taken the lead on a lot of these initiatives so it's a good example of how there can be a top down approach to building an entrepreneurial landscape but also where the bottom needs to come and meet the top so I think Bahrain a good example. >> Just to reiterate, my observation is that they know how to get things going and sponsor but they're also listening and self aware and even on theCUBE here, we heard comments like, we'll get out of the way. >> Mm-hmm. >> Now that's the difference between good judgment. >> Mm-hmm. >> You know? And, no, no I funded you, I own you, I mean I've seen that in the public sector or, we're going to fund you as an NGO and then I kind of own you so come to my receptions and be my show horse-- >> Mascot. >> Show all of my people how good I am, donating money. So there's a little bit of a balance between enabling. >> Yep. >> But at the end of the day, this is going to be a fast pace and that's where I think the speed, knowing when to get out of the way and letting the community go. I mean, people like speed here. Cars are driving fast, you got a Formula 1 race track up at 14 months. >> They like speed but sometimes things are surprisingly slow. >> Yes. >> So it's incredible that we are where we are. You asked about women in tech and I think there's something there that we're really proud of. C5 globally, 43% of the start up founders that we've supported through our accelerators are women. In terms of diversity, we're thrilled about that statistic. We'd like it be 50%. >> Yep. >> And I think that the Middle East, we're seeing so much hunger from women entrepreneurs and women who want to learn to code to be founders and we want to do everything in our power to enable that. >> Computer science degrees coming out of the university? >> Absolutely. Hadyah here had this fantastic idea a year ago to found what we call C5 Nebula. I'll let Hadyah talk about why we came up with that name and how it relates to our business but this is now a new stream of our business which really it's a membership platform where all women globally are invited to join and we provide education, upscaling, jogs, connectivity, mentorships and through this network we are allowing a complete globalization of the talent and skills that we have. >> Yeah. >> So you can be a student in D.C. wanting to come and volunteer to work for a company here and we will make that match happen. I think it's a very exciting phase for us and we've seen so much demand for this program. Maybe Hadyah can talk about why we came up with this name? >> Yeah, so like Eva said, we, I'm Bahraini, we've always had, we've been lucky to have been pioneering and have work very closely men and have had really equal opportunity but in industries like tech, globally, women's representation is lower than that of men and there are areas where there's still work to be done. >> A lot of work to be done, yeah. >> So last year, actually, with the first AWS Summit, when Teresa was out here, we figured we do a women in tech breakfast. When we were curating that guest list we couldn't find that many women and we didn't know if wasn't that we didn't know them or that they didn't exist and we realized really we need to put together something to bring all the women together and work more closely so we built Nebula, really to, like Eva said, do three things and a little more. One is the connectivity side of things and then the upscaling but also to raise awareness and appreciation. >> What is Nebula? >> What is? >> What is Nebula? >> So Nebula, scientifically it's an astrological, astronomical phenomenon-- >> But it's your network group, is that what it's called? >> It's a platform. >> Okay. >> So it's actually been officially launched three weeks ago, you can go online and visit it and it's a platform that allows you to become a member of Nebula and gives you access to mentorship, to opportunities to upscale and train but also to raise awareness and appreciation for the amazing opportunities for women in the tech space. >> Is there a URL? >> There is a URL, it's-- >> We've been debating what is is today. (laughing) >> It's www.c5nebula.com. >> Okay, I'll put it up, publish it with the video. >> And what it means, it's the Latin word for cloud and it's where stars are born. >> Yeah. It's also, what's important, is it's a compilation of a bunch of different clouds and electrons and it's a mess, it's a bit of a mess but it's a lot of forces working together and I guess the moral of the story is, we can create stars in the space but we all have to work together and it all has to come together to-- >> And it's powerful when you work together. >> Only 10% of VC funding worldwide goes to women founder companies and 1% of that goes to women of color so there's some staggering statistics there. Globally, this is not a Middle East problem, this is globally a real big area of disparity that we're trying to help address. >> Well you guys know our door's open in California and Boston, and certainly the women in tech, we got a big network, we can merge them into the Nebula connect our networks. >> We would love that. >> We would love that. >> We're open and anything you guys have to share with us we love co-creating with the communities, that's what we do at theCUBE. Thanks for coming on and sharing. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, John. It's been a pleasure. >> You got a great mission. Big supporter. C5 Accelerate, they're the ones on the ground, making things happen, gettin' those sparks of entrepreneurship and helping them capture them into one community, create some energy and some momentum and help people create value and also capture the value, that's what it's all about here. You got Amazon Web Services' region in the Middle East, CUBE coverage continues after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering DataWorks Summit 2018, brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of DataWorks here in San Jose, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, James Kobielus. We have with us Eric Herzog. He is the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Global Channels at the IBM Storage Division. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE once again, Eric. >> Well, thank you. We always love to be on theCUBE and talk to all of theCUBE analysts about various topics, data, storage, multi-cloud, all the works. >> And before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about how you might be the biggest CUBE alum in the sense of you've been on theCUBE more times than anyone else. >> I know I'm in the top five, but I may be number one, I have to check with Dave Vellante and crew and see. >> Exactly and often wearing a Hawaiian shirt. >> Yes. >> Yes, I was on theCUBE last week from CISCO Live. I was not wearing a Hawaiian shirt. And Stu and John gave me a hard time about why was not I wearing a Hawaiian shirt? So I make sure I showed up to the DataWorks show- >> Stu, Dave, get a load. >> You're in California with a tan, so it fits, it's good. >> So we were talking a little bit before the cameras were rolling and you were saying one of the points that is sort of central to your professional life is it's not just about the storage, it's about the data. So riff on that a little bit. >> Sure, so at IBM we believe everything is data driven and in fact we would argue that data is more valuable than oil or diamonds or plutonium or platinum or silver to anything else. It is the most viable asset, whether you be a global Fortune 500, whether you be a midsize company or whether you be Herzogs Bar and Grill. So data is what you use with your suppliers, with your customers, with your partners. Literally everything around your company is really built around the data so most effectively managing it and make sure, A, it's always performant because when it's not performant they go away. As you probably know, Google did a survey that one, two, after one, two they go off your website, they click somewhere else so has to be performant. Obviously in today's 365, 7 by 24 company it needs to always be resilient and reliable and it always needs to be available, otherwise if the storage goes down, guess what? Your AI doesn't work, your Cloud doesn't work, whatever workload, if you're more traditional, your Oracle, Sequel, you know SAP, none of those workloads work if you don't have a solid storage foundation underneath your data driven enterprise. >> So with that ethos in mind, talk about the products that you are launching, that you newly launched and also your product roadmap going forward. >> Sure, so for us everything really is that storage is this critical foundation for the data driven, multi Cloud enterprise. And as I've said before on theCube, all of our storage software's now Cloud-ified so if you need to automatically tier out to IBM Cloud or Amazon or Azure, we automatically will move the data placement around from one premise out to a Cloud and for certain customers who may be multi Cloud, in this case using multiple private Cloud providers, which happens due to either legal reasons or procurement reasons or geographic reasons for the larger enterprises, we can handle that as well. That's part of it, second thing is we just announced earlier today an artificial intelligence, an AI reference architecture, that incorporates a full stack from the very bottom, both servers and storage, all the way up through the top layer, then the applications on top, so we just launched that today. >> AI for storage management or AI for run a range of applications? >> Regular AI, artificial intelligence from an application perspective. So we announced that reference architecture today. Basically think of the reference architecture as your recipe, your blueprint, of how to put it all together. Some of the components are from IBM, such as Spectrum Scale and Spectrum Computing from my division, our servers from our Cloud division. Some are opensource, Tensor, Caffe, things like that. Basic gives you what the stack needs to be, and what you need to do in various AI workloads, applications and use cases. >> I believe you have distributed deep learning as an IBM capability, that's part of that stack, is that correct? >> That is part of the stack, it's like in the middle of the stack. >> Is it, correct me if I'm wrong, that's containerization of AI functionality? >> Right. >> For distributed deployment? >> Right. >> In an orchestrated Kubernetes fabric, is that correct? >> Yeah, so when you look at it from an IBM perspective, while we clearly support the virtualized world, the VM wares, the hyper V's, the KVMs and the OVMs, and we will continue to do that, we're also heavily invested in the container environment. For example, one of our other divisions, the IBM Cloud Private division, has announced a solution that's all about private Clouds, you can either get it hosted at IBM or literally buy our stack- >> Rob Thomas in fact demoed it this morning, here. >> Right, exactly. And you could create- >> At DataWorks. >> Private Cloud initiative, and there are companies that, whether it be for security purposes or whether it be for legal reasons or other reasons, don't want to use public Cloud providers, be it IBM, Amazon, Azure, Google or any of the big public Cloud providers, they want a private Cloud and IBM either A, will host it or B, with IBM Cloud Private. All of that infrastructure is built around a containerized environment. We support the older world, the virtualized world, and the newer world, the container world. In fact, our storage, allows you to have persistent storage in a container's environment, Dockers and Kubernetes, and that works on all of our block storage and that's a freebie, by the way, we don't charge for that. >> You've worked in the data storage industry for a long time, can you talk a little bit about how the marketing message has changed and evolved since you first began in this industry and in terms of what customers want to hear and what assuages their fears? >> Sure, so nobody cares about speeds and feeds, okay? Except me, because I've been doing storage for 32 years. >> And him, he might care. (laughs) >> But when you look at it, the decision makers today, the CIOs, in 32 years, including seven start ups, IBM and EMC, I've never, ever, ever, met a CIO who used to be a storage guy, ever. So, they don't care. They know that they need storage and the other infrastructure, including servers and networking, but think about it, when the app is slow, who do they blame? Usually they blame the storage guy first, secondarily they blame the server guy, thirdly they blame the networking guy. They never look to see that their code stack is improperly done. Really what you have to do is talk applications, workloads and use cases which is what the AI reference architecture does. What my team does in non AI workloads, it's all about, again, data driven, multi Cloud infrastructure. They want to know how you're going to make a new workload fast AI. How you're going to make their Cloud resilient whether it's private or hybrid. In fact, IBM storage sells a ton of technology to large public Cloud providers that do not have the initials IBM. We sell gobs of storage to other public Cloud providers, both big, medium and small. It's really all about the applications, workloads and use cases, and that's what gets people excited. You basically need a position, just like I talked about with the AI foundations, storage is the critical foundation. We happen to be, knocking on wood, let's hope there's no earthquake, since I've lived here my whole life, and I've been in earthquakes, I was in the '89 quake. Literally fell down a bunch of stairs in the '89 quake. If there's an earthquake as great as IBM storage is, or any other storage or servers, it's crushed. Boom, you're done! Okay, well you need to make sure that your infrastructure, really your data, is covered by the right infrastructure and that it's always resilient, it's always performing and is always available. And that's what IBM drives is about, that's the message, not about how many gigabytes per second in bandwidth or what's the- Not that we can't spew that stuff when we talk to the right person but in general people don't care about it. What they want to know is, "Oh that SAP workload took 30 hours and now it takes 30 minutes?" We have public references that will say that. "Oh, you mean I can use eight to ten times less storage for the same money?" Yes, and we have public references that will say that. So that's what it's really about, so storage is really more from really a speeds and feeds Nuremberger sort of thing, and now all the Nurembergers are doing AI and Caffe and TensorFlow and all of that, they're all hackers, right? It used to be storage guys who used to do that and to a lesser extent server guys and definitely networking guys. That's all shifted to the software side so you got to talk the languages. What can we do with Hortonworks? By the way we were named in Q1 of 2018 as the Hortonworks infrastructure partner of the year. We work with Hortonworks all time, at all levels, whether it be with our channel partners, whether it be with our direct end users, however the customer wants to consume, we work with Hortonworks very closely and other providers as well in that big data analytics and the AI infrastructure world, that's what we do. >> So the containerizations side of the IBM AI stack, then the containerization capabilities in Hortonworks Data Platform 3.0, can you give us a sense for how you plan to, or do you plan at IBM, to work with Hortonworks to bring these capabilities, your reference architecture, into more, or bring their environment for that matter, into more of an alignment with what you're offering? >> So we haven't an exact decision of how we're going to do it, but we interface with Hortonworks on a continual basis. >> Yeah. >> We're working to figure out what's the right solution, whether that be an integrated solution of some type, whether that be something that we do through an adjunct to our reference architecture or some reference architecture that they have but we always make sure, again, we are their partner of the year for infrastructure named in Q1, and that's because we work very tightly with Hortonworks and make sure that what we do ties out with them, hits the right applications, workloads and use cases, the big data world, the analytic world and the AI world so that we're tied off, you know, together to make sure that we deliver the right solutions to the end user because that's what matters most is what gets the end users fired up, not what gets Hortonworks or IBM fired up, it's what gets the end users fired up. >> When you're trying to get into the head space of the CIO, and get your message out there, I mean what is it, what would you say is it that keeps them up at night? What are their biggest pain points and then how do you come in and solve them? >> I'd say the number one pain point for most CIOs is application delivery, okay? Whether that be to the line of business, put it this way, let's take an old workload, okay? Let's take that SAP example, that CIO was under pressure because they were trying, in this case it was a giant retailer who was shipping stuff every night, all over the world. Well guess what? The green undershirts in the wrong size, went to Paducah, Kentucky and then one of the other stores, in Singapore, which needed those green shirts, they ended up with shoes and the reason is, they couldn't run that SAP workload in a couple hours. Now they run it in 30 minutes. It used to take 30 hours. So since they're shipping every night, you're basically missing a cycle, essentially and you're not delivering the right thing from a retail infrastructure perspective to each of their nodes, if you will, to their retail locations. So they care about what do they need to do to deliver to the business the right applications, workloads and use cases on the right timeframe and they can't go down, people get fired for that at the CIO level, right? If something goes down, the CIO is gone and obviously for certain companies that are more in the modern mode, okay? People who are delivering stuff and their primary transactional vehicle is the internet, not retail, not through partners, not through people like IBM, but their primary transactional vehicle is a website, if that website is not resilient, performant and always reliable, then guess what? They are shut down and they're not selling anything to anybody, which is to true if you're Nordstroms, right? Someone can always go into the store and buy something, right, and figure it out? Almost all old retailers have not only a connection to core but they literally have a server and storage in every retail location so if the core goes down, guess what, they can transact. In the era of the internet, you don't do that anymore. Right? If you're shipping only on the internet, you're shipping on the internet so whether it be a new workload, okay? An old workload if you're doing the whole IOT thing. For example, I know a company that I was working with, it's a giant, private mining company. They have those giant, like three story dump trucks you see on the Discovery Channel. Those things cost them a hundred million dollars, so they have five thousand sensors on every dump truck. It's a fricking dump truck but guess what, they got five thousand sensors on there so they can monitor and make sure they take proactive action because if that goes down, whether these be diamond mines or these be Uranium mines or whatever it is, it costs them hundreds of millions of dollars to have a thing go down. That's, if you will, trying to take it out of the traditional, high tech area, which we all talk about, whether it be Apple or Google, or IBM, okay great, now let's put it to some other workload. In this case, this is the use of IOT, in a big data analytics environment with AI based infrastructure, to manage dump trucks. >> I think you're talking about what's called, "digital twins" in a networked environment for materials management, supply chain management and so forth. Are those requirements growing in terms of industrial IOT requirements of that sort and how does that effect the amount of data that needs to be stored, the sophistication of the AI and the stream competing that needs to be provisioned? Can you talk to that? >> The amount of data is growing exponentially. It's growing at yottabytes and zettabytes a year now, not at just exabytes anymore. In fact, everybody on their iPhone or their laptop, I've got a 10GB phone, okay? My laptop, which happens to be a Power Book, is two terabytes of flash, on a laptop. So just imagine how much data's being generated if you're doing in a giant factory, whether you be in the warehouse space, whether you be in healthcare, whether you be in government, whether you be in the financial sector and now all those additional regulations, such as GDPR in Europe and other regulations across the world about what you have to do with your healthcare data, what you have to do with your finance data, the amount of data being stored. And then on top of it, quite honestly, from an AI big data analytics perspective, the more data you have, the more valuable it is, the more you can mine it or the more oil, it's as if the world was just oil, forget the pollution side, let's assume oil didn't cause pollution. Okay, great, then guess what? You would be using oil everywhere and you wouldn't be using solar, you'd be using oil and by the way you need more and more and more, and how much oil you have and how you control that would be the power. That right now is the power of data and if anything it's getting more and more and more. So again, you always have to be able to be resilient with that data, you always have to interact with things, like we do with Hortonworks or other application workloads. Our AI reference architecture is another perfect example of the things you need to do to provide, you know, at the base infrastructure, the right foundation. If you have the wrong foundation to a building, it falls over. Whether it be your house, a hotel, this convention center, if it had the wrong foundation, it falls over. >> Actually to follow the oil analogy just a little bit further, the more of this data you have, the more PII there is and it usually, and the more the workloads need to scale up, especially for things like data masking. >> Right. >> When you have compliance requirements like GDPR, so you want to process the data but you need to mask it first, therefore you need clusters that conceivably are optimized for high volume, highly scalable masking in real time, to drive the downstream app, to feed the downstream applications and to feed the data scientist, you know, data lakes, whatever, and so forth and so on? >> That's why you need things like Incredible Compute which IBM offers with the Power Platform. And why you need storage that, again, can scale up. >> Yeah. >> Can get as big as you need it to be, for example in our reference architecture, we use both what we call Spectrum Scale, which is a big data analytics workload performance engine, it has multiple threaded, multi tasking. In fact one of the largest banks in the world, if you happen to bank with them, your credit card fraud is being done on our stuff, okay? But at the same time we have what's called IBM Cloud Object Storage which is an object store, you want to take every one of those searches for fraud and when they find out that no one stole my MasterCard or the Visa, you still want to put it in there because then you mine it later and see patterns of how people are trying to steal stuff because it's all being done digitally anyway. You want to be able to do that. So you A, want to handle it very quickly and resiliently but then you want to be able to mine it later, as you said, mining the data. >> Or do high value anomaly detection in the moment to be able to tag the more anomalous data that you can then sift through later or maybe in the moment for realtime litigation. >> Well that's highly compute intensive, it's AI intensive and it's highly storage intensive on a performance side and then what happens is you store it all for, lets say, further analysis so you can tell people, "When you get your Am Ex card, do this and they won't steal it." Well the only way to do that, is you use AI on this ocean of data, where you're analyzing all this fraud that has happened, to look at patterns and then you tell me, as a consumer, what to do. Whether it be in the financial business, in this case the credit card business, healthcare, government, manufacturing. One of our resellers actually developed an AI based tool that can scan boxes and cans for faults on an assembly line and actually have sold it to a beer company and to a soda company that instead of people looking at the cans, like you see on the Food Channel, to pull it off, guess what? It's all automatically done. There's no people pulling the can off, "Oh, that can is damaged" and they're looking at it and by the way, sometimes they slip through. Now, using cameras and this AI based infrastructure from IBM, with our storage underneath the hood, they're able to do this. >> Great. Well Eric thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's always been a lot of fun talking to you. >> Great, well thank you very much. We love being on theCUBE and appreciate it and hope everyone enjoys the DataWorks conference. >> We will have more from DataWorks just after this. (techno beat music)

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE conversation. Today we're going to talk about a really interesting topic. At least it's interesting to me. And that is, if we go back, and the old adage that when you automate bad process or bad business, you just get more bad business at scale. And, when we think about customer service over the last number of years or customer engagement over the last number of years, in many respects we've done a great job of automating really bad practices. And all that has led to is an increased frustration amongst consumers who are trying to utilize an engagement form if they want, more digital engagement, but end up being even more frustrated because it still takes the same amount of time and it still has the same failure rates. And to discuss that today, we've got Mahesh Ram, who's the founding partner of Solvvy, to talk a bit about some of these transformations that are taking place in terms of how digital engagement's going to change the way that businesses interact with consumers. Mahesh, welcome to theCUBE. >> Oh, it's great to be here. I'm a fan of theCube and honored to be here. So, Mahesh, let's start. Tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about Solvvy. Sure, my background is in technology and I've built two successful start-ups in the past. The last one was a company that was acquired by Pearson in 2012, focused on automation for non-native English speakers. But my entire career has been spent really thinking about ways in which we can use technology to make people's lives better and improve existing workflows and processes. And so, it's why Solvvy attracted me, why it's so exciting, and I think that this is the most interesting thing I've ever done in my career, so I'm excited about that. >> Now Solvvy has a pretty decent reputation as being a thought we are in this domain of not just cutting the cost of engagement, but actually improving the quality of engagement. How does it do that? >> I think it's a great question. It starts with the mission of the company, I think. That's the easiest way to say it. Our mission is to enable every interaction between consumers and business to be effortless. Anywhere, any time, and any channel. So if you start with that mission, you really start to focus in on what's most important. What's most important is to deliver that amazing experience for that end user or that consumer, and at the same time, drive down the operational cost for the business, i.e. improve their efficiency. And so our vision for the company, is to take our intelligent AI and machine learning automation technology which is world-class and is better than anything else on the market and apply it to deliver on a vision which is we want these interactions between the consumer and the business to be successfully completed in five minutes or less. >> Five minutes? >> Yes, and today it's measure in hours, eight hours, 12 hours, 24 hours. That's the vision and we're well on the way to accomplishing that. >> Alright, so as a thought leader, give us an example of how business is doing that, and then we'll get into some of the technology questions. But, first off, what is the competitive advantage of being able to complete a client engagement under five minutes versus eight hours? >> Well, first of all, I think, again, if we put the end-user, the consumer, at the focal point, we're talking about a fundamental change in what they expect from business. They expect immediacy, they expect accuracy, they want you to respect their time. In fact, I think some of the latest analyst reports says that valuing consumer's time is the single biggest driver to brand loyalty. So if you've got that situation, you've got an obligation to the consumer to deliver what they want. Well, now put yourself in the shoes of the consumer, which we all are. I'm a consumer, I come to a business, I'm asking you a question about a product, a service, a defect, anything, an order that's missing. I expect to get an answer very quickly because my time is precious and I know that someone like me has asked that question in the past. Why has it not been possible in the past for me as a consumer to get that answer right away, leveraging the expertise that has already happened in an enterprise? And when I do that, when Solvvy is able to enable that for the business, there's multiple benefits. The consumer is happier, their CSAT goes up, their customer satisfaction goes way up. Their time is respected, they get their answer in a minute or less, as opposed to hours. The business is happy because there's no ticket created, there's no need for a human agent to go back and forth with you, ask you a bunch of things, and maybe come back to you six hours later and now you're upset. Maybe you switched brands in the meanwhile because you're so angry of having to wait. So, the benefit is, I sometimes say to our customers, "It's the magic X", the CSAT goes up, and the cost goes down and that's never been possible before Solvvy. >> How does it work? >> How it works is very simple. The first thing we do is we engage with the business. So, the business is our customer, right? They buy the product or they buy our SATS platform. It's a SATS platform built on AI and machine learning technology that was developed by my two co-founders during their PHD work at Carnegie Mellon. So, at it's core, is the ability to understand natural language expressions of issues, by the end user, by the consumer. So typically people give us their life story, but they're asking for a refund. The ability to parcel that in that conversation and say I think you want a refund, let me help you get that is a very powerful piece of IP. So we go to companies and we say, "Just tell us where all of your knowledge assets are." You don't have to touch it, don't create anything new, don't build a new silo because they already have the silo, and we simply go out and index it all, learn from it, and start building a knowledge graph for that business. It's specific to how that business handles resolutions, but it also learns how customers have asked questions in the past, and how agents have answered it. So again, your best expertise is captured and used in that knowledge graph. We then say, "In less than an hour, "in one line of java scripts, here's a model "you can put in front of your consumer." You can put it anywhere you want, and it says when you need help, click on it, pops up, on mobile you can speak the question, and tells the consumer, "Just tell me what your issue is." It understands the intension of that question or the issue, and then goes in the knowledge graph, and says, "Hmmm, can I find an answer "in this knowledge graph that can help you help yourself?" And if so, it matches it. And it's actually giving you a specific resolution. It's not making you wade through pages of material. It's saying, "Here's the three steps you need to do "to reset your account." Now that is instant and immediate for the consumer. They don't have to hunt, they don't have to search. And it says, "Have I helped you?" And we're putting the power in the hands in the consumer. We're saying, "We don't want it to be false fiction." We're saying, you the consumer can say, "Nope, this didin't help me," and now the company can then guide you to the right flow. They can get you on a chat, if you're a V.I.P. user, maybe they get you on a phone call, whatever it might be. But, by putting the consumer at the center, by delivering real value to them, we've accomplished both sides, right? CSATS higher, the cost goes down, because we are actually self-serving anywhere from 15 to 40% of the tickets or issues that used to cost the business money, being self-served now, and so that's a pretty miraculous transformation for the business and for the consumer. >> Well, in today's world, attention is everything. Every, as you said, every experience, every engagement has to be a source of value to the customer. And so, not only do you get a better customer, but you presumably also get a richer set of interactions because the customer now believes that the system actually is helpful, is useful. Does that data then go back into the system, so that it becomes even knowledgeable about the nature of the problems, the nature of the resolutions, anticipatory about how to improve things, and maybe product people can get visibility in this stuff? Is that kind of where all this goes? >> It's a very organic system and it learns constantly. It think that's the really powerful thing about it. So, it learns many things. So it learns when you ask me questions. It learns if I have not given you a good answer. It actually learns from the negative. I still passed you to the agent because then it follows it all the way through and says, "How did the agent answer?" And, it learns from that interaction. And so because we know we can't self-serve every question that a consumer has, but we're getting better, better, and better. In fact, our self-service rates have doubled just in the last 12 months, because of the machine learning and the ability to learn. And we actually learn across all the businesses we do business with. We learn things for example that consumer review show more than a paragraph of text, they don't engage in self-service. We show bullets, they are much more likely to interact. Those are implicit learnings that system uses to more accurately to give you responses. But there's another flip side to this which is when we see 100% of the conversations between the consumer and your business, we're now able to go to business and give them categorical views of what's actually going on once their product or service is shipped to the consumer, which they've never had before. We're now able to say to them, "We think that payment "page that people are using to renew might be broken "because there seems to be a lot "more issues associated with that." Now that's something that the engineer who built that page may not know, or if the person said, "That's broken," they'd say, "How do you know? "Show me the data." And now you can actually go with a data driven model and say, "We can tell you. "This is 14% of the issues this week, "and two weeks ago, it was two percent. "Can you tell me what's changed?" Or you can put a dollar value on it. "This product seems to be defective "and it's costing us money "because we keep having to do returns. "Here's the number of situations where that's happened "in the last week, it's costing us "two million dollars a year, fix it." That's the kind of incite that the vps of customer experience or customer support have had to spend hundreds of hours to try to massage and get, and it doesn't give them a seat at the table with the strategy with product and marketing. >> But every company has been talking about the need to build their community, where basically a community is defined by folks who have something in common and are taking common actions. But one of the challenges has been, is how do I provide value so that I get that type of interaction? Let me ask you a question. Are we ultimately suggesting, we all seem to be getting to a point where the quality of engagement is such, and while it keeps costs low, that it might actually catalyze even greater engagement with the customer base so that you learn not just initially, you not only learn something about a product, or for example, you might actually learn things about how to facilitate adoption, because customers are willing to engage more often and more deeply as a consequence of a good experience in using Solvvy related type technologies? >> It is the opportunity to use that customer engagement when they're contacting your business about an issue or problem, the opportunity is first I have to take care of your issue. You won't listen to me if I don't take care of your issue well, but if I do that, I have an enormous opportunity to educate you. How can you do better with the product or service I sold you" Perhaps you need something that's on top of that. Maybe you're a free user and by subscribing to the premium product, you'd get all the benefits that you're frustrated about. And maybe that's an time to give you an offer. So, I think that notion of personalized recommendation is something that is actually never been possible before with the old systems. The idea was that support was kind of a backwater in many ways, which it should never have been. And in fact, the leading brands like Zappos realized quickly that by winning on that basis, you could actually dominate the market. But, it was often the case that the people in support felt like goal keepers. Just keep the issues away, but in fact, now in an integrated world, it's very difficult with subscription based businesses for example, to know when you're buying and when you're asking for support. It's subscription service, I could cancel at any time. So now I'm engaging with your brand. I'm asking a question, "Hey how do I get "more of x,y,z shipped to my house?" It's an enormous opportunity to not only answer my question, but then suggest things, recommend things, play books, so if you think about that experience, how would I enhance the consumer experience, that interactive conversational flow is the perfectplace to do it. >> I would think it would also allow you to envision other types of engagement, because as long as the consumer finds it valuable, to have that conversation, then they'll be willing to enter into that conversation. Well, so let me step back, where does this all go? Because we've been talking about being able to do this for a number of years, and as I said in the preamble, in many respects, all we did was digitize bad process, but now we're talking about bringing technology to bear and dramatically improving the process. Five minute resolution, pretty good. As a consumer, I'd like that, so where does this go? What's the limit of utilizing these technologies to incorporate or enhance engagement? >> So, let me illustrate with an example that I think is very compelling of the power of how this is going to change our world. So, one of our customers is Eero, the smart wifi system. You're probably familiar with it. One of the most innovative products on the planet. Now, we've been working with Eero for well over a year, and they just published a case study of what we've accomplished with them. So, we have self-served 45% of the issues that would have come into them, that have conversations that come into them regarding issues, and that's a fantastic number. They had never seen anything close to it. And that's a great outcome for the business and the consumer. Under one minute is the average time for resolution for those 45%. Imagine again, how much time I've saved you, me, all of us as consumers of Eero. But the better story that I like is two weeks ago, we got a call from the CEO of one of the leading mid-western electronics distributors in the world, and he had said, "I'm going to have my support team, "customer experience team contact you guys, "because I was at home, I bought an Eero smart wifi system, "I went home and tried to install it, and I had trouble. "And I went on, and Solvvy gave me the exact steps "it took to solve the issue, "and I never had to contact them, "and I was able to get the wifi up and running in minutes, "and I was on my way. "And I'm delighted with my Eero system, "and it was because of this interface." And he said, "I think my company should be using it too." And, that was one of many, many catalytic events for us, that realized, wow, we're touching over 200 million consumers with our service. We're reaching all the way out, and we're extending these brand's promise into the consumers' homes, into their devices. _ Two hundred million? >> Two hundred million. >> So that's literally 10% of the population that's online. >> If you're talking about the world leading brands, so we're working with the leading brands that are reaching these people, so by extension Solvvy is as well. And so, you're talking about companies, leading gaming companies, on-demand companies, consumer electronics. These are all companies that self-service automation. And it's intelligent automation, right? It doesn't require a lot of work from the business. As I said, we implement in less than an hour. With one line of java script, we've developed very powerful, unsupervised machine learning models, that can just take all that transcript date from all the past conversations that consumers have had with your business, automatically learn the best stuff from it, and then be able to show the users the right issues. So the customer journey is where we're so focused, right? Because the customer journey is opportunity for the brand to really create a market-leading position and we're enhancing that conversation. >> Fantastic. >> Mahesh Ram, founding CEO of Solvvy, thank you very much for coming on theCube. It's been a great a great conversation about the evolution of customer service, and where it goes. >> It's my pleasure, an honor to be on theCUBE. >> So once again, this is Peter Burris, this has been a CUBE conversation, until next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. This is theCUBE live here in Barcelona for Cisco Live Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, with Stu Miniman analyst at Wikibon, covering networking storage and all infrastructure cloud. Stu Miniman, Stu. Our next guest is Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at IBM Storage Systems. Eric, CUBE alumni, he's been on so many times I can't even count. You get the special VIP badge. We're here breaking down all the top stories at Cisco Live in Europe, kicking off 2018. Although it's the European show, not the big show, certainly kicking off the year with a lot of new concepts that aren't necessarily new, but they're innovative. Eric, welcome to theCUBE again. >> Well, thank you. We always love participating in theCUBE. IBM is a strong supporter of theCUBE and all the things you do for us, so thank you very much for having us again. >> A lot of great thought leadership from IBM, really appreciate you guys' support over the years. But now we're in a sea change. IBM had their first quarter of great results, and that will be well-reported on SiliconANGLE, but the sea change is happening. You've been living this generation, you've seen couple cycles in the past. Cisco putting forth a vision of the future, which is pretty right on. They were right on Internet of Things ten years ago, they had it all right, but they're a networking company that's transformed up the stack over the years. Now on the front lines of no perimeter, okay, more security challenges, cloud big whales with no networking and storage. You're in the middle of it. Break it down. Why is Cisco Live so important now than ever before? >> Well, for us it's very important because one, we have a strategic relationship with Cisco, the Storage Division does a product with Cisco called the VersaStack, converged infrastructure, and in fact one of our key constituents for the VersaStack are MSPs and CSPs, which is a key constituent of Cisco, especially with their emphasis on the cloud. Second thing for us is IBM storage has gone heavily cloud. So going heavily cloud with our software, in addition to what we do with our solutions as a foundation for CSPs and MSPs. Just what we've integrated into our software-defined storage for cloud makes Cisco Live an ideal venue for us, and Cisco an ideal partner. >> So I've got to ask you, we've had conversations on theCUBE before, they're all on youtube.com/siliconangle, just search Eric Herzog, you'll find them. But I want to recycle this one point and get your comments and reaction here in Barcelona. You guys have transformed with software at IBM big-time with storage. Okay, you're positioned well for the cloud. What's the most important thing that companies have to do, like IBM and Cisco, to play an innovator role in the cloud game as we have software at the center of the value proposition? >> Well I think the key thing is, when you look at cloud infrastructure, first of all, the cloud's got to run on something. So you need some sort of structural, infrastructure foundation. Servers, networking, and compute. So at IBM and with Cisco, we're positioning ourselves as the ideal rock-solid foundation for the cloud building, if you will. So that's item number one. Item number two, our software in particular can survive, not only on premises, but can bridge and go from on-premise to a public cloud, creating a hybrid infrastructure, and that allows us to also run cloud instantiation. Several of our products are available from IBM Cloud Division, Amazon offers some of the IBM storage software, over three hundred cloud service providers, smaller ones, offer IBM Spectrum Protect as a back-up service. So we've already morphed into storage software, either A, bridging the cloud in a hybrid config, or being used by cloud providers as some of their storage offerings for end-users and businesses. >> Eric, wanted to get to, one of the partnership areas that you've talked about with Cisco is VersaStack. We've talked with you a number of times about converged infrastructure, that partnership, Cisco UCS taking all the virtualization. The buzz in the market, there's a lot of discussion, oh it's hyper-converged, it's cloud. Why is converged infrastructure still relevant today? >> Well, when you look at the analysts that track the numbers, you can see that the overall converged market is growing and hyper-converged is viewed as a subset. When you look at those numbers, this year close to 17 billion US, about 75% of it is still standard converged versus hyper-converged. One of the other differences, it's the right tool for the right job. So customers need to go in eyes open. So when you do a hyper-converged infrastructure, by the way IBM offers a hyper-converged infrastructure currently with Nutanix, so we actually have both, the Nutanix partnership offering hyper-converged and a partnership with Cisco on standard converged. It's really, how do you size the right tool for the right job? And one of the negatives of hyper-converged, very easy to deploy, that's great, but one of the negatives is every time you need more storage, you have to add more server. Every time you need more server, you add more storage. With this traditional converged infrastructure, you can add servers only, or networking only, or storage only. So I think when you're in certain configurations, workloads, and applications, hyper-converged is the right solution, IBM's got a solution. In other situations, particularly as your middle-sized and bigger apps, regular converged is better 'cause you can basically parse and size up or down compute, networking, and the storage independent of each other, whereas in hyper-converged you have to do it at the same time. And that's a negative where you're either over-buying your storage when you don't need it, or you're over-buying your compute when you don't need it. With standard converged, you don't have that issue. You buy what you need when you need it. But I think most big companies, for sure, have certain workloads that are best with hyper-converged, and we've got that, and other workloads that are best with converged, and we have that as well. >> Okay, the other big growth area in storage for the last bunch of years has been flash. IBM's got a strong position in all-flash arrays. What's new there, how are some of the technologies changing? Any impact on the network that we should be really understanding at this show? >> Sure, so couple things. So first of all, we just brought out some very high-density all-flash arrays in Q4. We can put 220 terabytes in two rack U, which is a building block that we use in several different of our all-flash configurations, including our all-flash VersaStack. The other thing we do is we embed software-defined storage on our, software-defined storage actually on our physical all-flash arrays. Most companies don't do that, so they've got an all-flash offering and if they have a software-defined offering it's actually a different piece of software. For us it's the same, so it's easier to deploy, it's easier to train, it's easier to license, it's easier for a reseller to sell if you happen to be using a reseller. And the other thing is it's battle-hardened, because it's not only standalone software, but it's actually on the arrays as well. So from a test infrastructure quality issue, versus other vendors that have certain software that goes on their all-flash array, and then a different set of software for all software-defined. It doesn't make logical sense when you can cover it with one thing. So that's an important difference for us, and a big innovator. I think the last thing you're going to see that does impact networking is the rise of NVMe over fabrics. IBM did a statement of direction last May outlining what we're doing. We did a public demonstration of an InfiniBand fabric at the AI summit in New York in December, and we will be having an announcement around NVMe fabrics on the 20th of February. So stay tuned to hear us then. We'll be launching some more NVMe with fabric infrastructure at that time. >> Eric, I just, people that have been watching, there's been a lot of discussion about NVMe for a number of years, and NVMe over fabric more recently. How big a deal is this for the industry? You've seen many of these waves. Is this transformational or is it, you know, every storage company I talk to is working on this, so how's it going to be differentiated? What should users be looking to be able to, who do they partner with, how do they choose that solution, and when's it going to be ready? >> So first of all, I view it as an evolution, okay. If you take storage in general, arrays, you know we used to do punch cards. I'm old enough I remember using punch cards at the University of California. Then, it all went to tape. And if you look at old Schwarzenegger movies from the 80s, I love Schwarzenegger spy movies, what's there? IBM systems with big IBM tape, and not for back-up, for primary storage. Then in the late-80s, early-90s, IBM and a few other vendors came out with hard drive-based arrays that got hooked up to mainframes and then obviously into minis and to the rise of the LAN. Those have given away to all-flash arrays. From a connectivity perspective, you've had SCSI, you had ultra SCSI, you had ultra fast SCSI, ultra fast wide SCSI. Then you had fiber channel. So now as an infrastructure both in an array, as a connectivity between storage and the CPUs used in an array system, will be NVMe, and then you're going to have NVMe running over fabrics. So I view this as an evolution, right? >> John: What's the driver, performance or flexibility? >> A little bit of both. So from the in-box perspective, inside of an array solution, the major chip manufacturers are putting NVMe to increase the speed from storage going into the CPUs. So that will benefit the performance to the end-user for applications, workloads, and use cases. Then what they've done is Intel has pushed, with all the industry, IBM's a member of the NVMe consortium as well, has pushed using the NVMe protocol over fabrics, which also gives some added performance over fabric networks as well. So you've got it, but again I view this again as evolution, because punch cards, tape was faster, hard drive arrays were faster than tape, then flash arrays are faster, now you're going to have NVMe in the flash array, and also NVMe over fabric with connecting all-flash array. >> So I have to ask you the real question that's on everyone's mind that's out there, because storage is one of those areas that you never see it stopping. There's always venture back start-ups, you see new hot start-ups coming out of the woodwork, and there's been some failures lately and some blame NVMe's innovation to kind of killing some start-ups, I won't name names. But the real issue is the lines that were once blurred are now forming, and there's the wrong side of history and the right side of history. So I've got to ask you, what's going to be the right side of history in the storage architecture that people need to get onto to win in the future? >> So, there's a couple key points. One, all storage infrastructure and storage software needs to interface with cloud infrastructure. Got to be hybrid, if you have a software play like we do, where the software, such as our Spectrum Scale or our Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus, can exist as a cloud service through a service rider, that's where you want to be. You don't want to have just a standard array and that's all you sell. So you want to have an array business, you want to make sure that's highly performant, you want to make sure that's the position, and the infrastructure underneath clouds, which means not only very fast, but also incredibly resilient. And that includes both cloud configs and AI. If you're going to do real-time AI, if you're going to do dark trading on Wall Street using AI instead of human beings, A, if the storage isn't really fast you're going to miss a 10 million dollar, hundred million dollar transaction. Second thing, if it's not resilient and always available, you're really in trouble. And god forbid when they bring AI to healthcare, and I mean AI in the operating room, boy if that storage fails when I'm on the table, wow. That's not going to be good. So those are the things you got to integrate with in the future. AI and cloud, whether it's software-defined in the array space, or if you're like IBM in both markets. >> John: Performance and resilient. >> Performance and resiliency is critical. >> All right, so Eric I have a non-storage question for you. >> Eric: Absolutely. >> So you've got the CMO hat for a division of IBM. You've been CMO of a start-up, you've been in this industry for a while. What's the changing role of the CMO in today's digital world? >> So I think the key thing is digital is a critical method of the overall marketing mix. And everything needs to reinforce everything. So let's take an example. One of the large storage websites and magazines recently announced that IBM is a finalist for four product-of-the-year awards. Two for all-flash arrays and two for software-defined storage. So guess what we've done? We've amplified it over LinkedIn, over IBM Facebook, through our Twitter handle, we leverage that. We use it at trade shows. So digital is A, the first foray, right? People look on your website and look at what you're doing socially before they even decide, should I really call them up, or should I really go to their booth a trade show? >> So discovery and learning is happening online. >> Discovery and learning, but even progression. We just, I just happened to tweet and LinkedIn this morning, Clarinet, a large European cloud MSP and CSP, just selected IBM all-flash arrays, IBM Spectrum Protect, and IBM Spectrum Virtualize for their cloud infrastructure. And obviously their target, they sell to end-users and companies, right? But the key thing is we tweeted it, we linked it in, we're going to use it here at the show, we're going to use it in PR efforts. So digital is a critical element of the marketing mix, it's not a fad. It also can be a lead dog. So if you're going to a trade show, you should tweet about it and link it in, just the way you guys do. We all knew you were coming to this show, we know you're going to IBM Think, we know you're going to VM World and Oracle, all these great shows. How do we find out? We follow you on social media and on the digital market space, so it's critical. >> And video, video a big role in - >> Video is critical. We use your videos all the time, obviously. I always tweet them and link them in once I'm posted. >> Clip and stick is the new buzzword. Clip 'em and stick 'em. Our new clipper tool, you've seen that. >> (laughs) Yes, I have. So it's really critical, though, that, you can, and remember, I'm like one of the oldest guys in the storage business, I'm 60 years old, I've been doing this 32 years, seven start-ups, EMC, IBM twice, Mac store Seagate, so I've done big and small. This is a sea change transformation in marketing. The key thing is you have to make it not stand on its own, integrate everything. PR, analyst relations, digital in everything you do, digital with shows and how you integrate the whole buyer's journey, and put it together. And people are using digital more and more, in fact I saw a survey from a biz school, 75% of people are looking at you digitally before they ever even call you up or call one of your resellers if you use the channel, to talk about your products. That's a sea change. >> You guys do a great job with content marketing, hats off to you guys. All right, final question for you, take a minute to just quickly explain the relationship that IBM has with Cisco and the importance of it, specifically what you guys are doing with them, how you guys go on to market to customers, and what's the impact to the customer. >> So, first of all, we have a very broad relationship with Cisco, Obviously I'm the CMO of the Storage Division, so I focus on storage, but several other divisions of IBM have powerful relationships. The IoT group, the Collaboration group. Cisco's one of our valued partners. We don't have networking products, so our Global Technology Services Division is one of the largest resellers of Cisco in the world, whether it be networking, servers, converge, what-have-you, so it's a strong, powerful relationship. From an end-user perspective, the importance is they know that the two companies are working together hand-in-glove. Sometimes you have two companies where you buy solutions from the A and B, and A and B don't even talk to each other, and yes they both go to the PlugFest or the Compatibility Lab, but they don't really work together, and their technology doesn't work together. IBM and Cisco have gone well beyond that to make sure that we work closely together in all of the divisions, including the storage division, with our Cisco-validated designs. And then lastly, whether it's delivered through the direct sales model or through the valued business partners that IBM and Cisco share, it's critical the end-user know, and the partners know, they're getting something that works together and doesn't just have the works option. It's tightly-honed and finely-integrated, whether it be storage or the IoT Division, the Collaboration Division, Cisco is a heavy proponent of IBM Security Division. >> Product teams work together? >> Yeah, all the product teams work together, trade APIs back and forth, not just doing the, and let's go do a test, compatibility test. Which everybody does that, but we go well beyond that with IBM and Cisco together. >> And it's a key relationship for you guys? >> Key relationship for the Storage Division, as well as for many of the other divisions of IBM, it's a critical relationship with Cisco. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer for the Storage Systems group at IBM. It's theCUBE live coverage in Barcelona, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more from Barcelona Cisco Live Europe after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas, the Cube is covering exclusively the AWS re:Invent. We've got two sets. This is set one, set two behind me. We're here with a startup called Zettabytes, Rishi Yadav, Cube Alumni CEO, and Sudhir Janir, CTO. Hot new start-up, Zettabytes. Formerly, you're an entrepreneur, your other company's still going, Info Objects. Welcome back. >> Thanks for having us here. I dont know it's the seventh time, eighth time? I mean, we love Cube guys. Yes, so Info Objects is the mothership and doing really, really great, and today we are launching Zettabytes, which is our hybrid cloud, cloud integration platform. We are starting with AWS, and then it's going to have integration for the clouds. >> So start-ups are impacted, and we were talking yesterday about kind of a demarcation line between a point in time. I say 2012, maybe you can say 2014, if you were born before 2012 or 2014, you probably didn't factor the cloud as large scale as it is. But after that day, you're a new born start-up, you look at the cloud as a resource, an opportunity, so what's your perspective as an entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur, you start a company, you look at the big beast in Amazon, opportunity, challenge, what's your view? >> So actually 2014 was an inflection point for two things. Number one is that the big data, big data, it started with the hyper scale companies, and at that time, you're talking about Facebook, and Yahoo and other places, but it was not enterprise-ready. And we suddenly saw the option. John, you have been following the big data directly from the, I think the cloud data basement days, right? So in 2014 it got a better option. And the things like security and governance, which were offered not much concern earlier, it became front and center. Another thing which happened was around 2014, 2015, timeframe, the public cloud, which were for eight, nine years, essentially AWS, that was about 70 start-ups about saving money for them. That also started getting an option, and the enterprise, and when you're talking about enterprise, there you cannot tell them that if you deploy 10 servers on AWS, it's going to save you $200,000. They would say you already have $500 million spent. We have these huge data centers, so they needed some more value than that. >> How about your company Zettabytes, so you're launching a new company, what is it, what does it do, why are you starting it? Take a minute to explain what you're doing. >> Yes, absolutely. So the Zettabytes idea came from this convergence of the big data, public cloud and IOT. And market is ripe for it, and the challenge was that we talked to a lot of customers, a lot of them have already started working in the cloud, and some of them were planning to start the journey in the cloud, and the challenge was that at the same time they also wanted to build a big data link, Andy talked about it a lot today, right, assuming the largest big data lake. So now the question was that do you really want to go the old school route in which you are using Hadoup and other services around it, and then you do lift and shift to AWS? And then you transform to PAS. So you spend one and a half, two years in doing Hadoup, and then you spend another one and a half, two years, doing the PAZ, that cloud-native transformation in a better way. And then realize that whether the clients are on AWS today, or they are going to be in one year, they need the same experience, the same cloud experience, the same AWS experience which they have on their AWS, they want on-prem. Now that includes the other cloud-native APIs, but also the agility and everything else. >> So let met ask Sudhir a question. So you're the CTO. I know you're technical too, so I have both of you. So the old days, I'm a developer, I have my local host, I'm banging away code, and then I go, okay I'm done. And I say, ship to the server for QA or whatever. And even the cloud. Businesses want that same kind of functionality on premise. They want to go to the cloud, so all the developers are changing, they want that local host like feel. They don't wanna have to write code, ship it to a server, put it through the cloud, they just want instant integration to Amazon. Is that what you're doing? >> Yeah. >> Did I get it right? 'Cause that seems what I think you're doing. >> Yes, you develop that seamless experience. So you have the same set of APIs, which you normally would do on AWS, so still use the same data, still use the same data blue CLI. Use all data blue APIs, we're accepted those APIs on this platform, build a good base, based on those APIs, now using Kubernetes, you decide where this workload will go. >> So one of the challenges of AWS though is that they release services like constantly. I think we had the announcer at the keynote today, it was like another hundred or so services that they were releasing. So how do you choose which ones? Do you support all of them, or do you focus on specific ones? >> No, first we are focusing on a few specific ones, which are mostly being used. We are starting with Lexi, for example, as three. Lamda, Kenesis, Kafka, and this bargain is DFS are there from day one also. And all of these are Lexi, we are doing Lexi, today official announcement, they have launched Kubernetes Now. Container management service. We have that flexibility from day one only. So we have that in our outlines, and using that, even for example, your workload says, some of the piece should run on that, on Lexi, on permalines. Some of the P should go to the cloud, that is also possible. >> So you're selling an appliance. >> Yeah, yeah. The one million Lexi, or Kubernetes million might run on the AWS, few of the menus might run on your uplines, you can easily Lexi's do the all the container management. >> This is model, they pay for the box, or is it a service? Or they get the box as part of a service? What's the business model? >> So we do both, so it's a (mumbles) format, as well as an appliance, so the beauty of appliances is that everything is already optimized for you, so that makes it very easy. But if a customer has a chosen hardware platform, and we can definitely deploy it on that also. And adding to the hunter services thing, I think that's a great point, that AWS has so many services now that can you really go and figure out which services are most optimized for your needs? So that's where you need a partner on prem-site, and that's what we are going to be, and another thing as Sudhir mentioned, the EKS which they announced today, Kubernetes, so you have Kubernetes on-prem, AWS is supporting Kubernetes, and we are also supporting Kubernetes, so if you want closer to that level, it's completely seamless. >> And you were saying before, your target is enterprise has been good, so the appliance delivery model and the simplicity of being able to manage a lot of different services. Clearly being able to manage things at scale is something that enterprisers are crying out for because otherwise I have to, AWS is great, if you wanna hand build everything yourself, it has all of those components that you can assemble like Lego, but if I'm an enterprise, I want to be able to do that at scale. Humans don't scale very well, so I need some technology to help with that. So it sounds like you are actually providing the leverage to get enterprise humans to be able to manage AWS. Is that a fair characterization? >> Absolutely, that is definitely a very important aspect of it, and another aspect of it is that if you do not want to have some workloads on AWS for one thing or another. IOT workloads by definition cannot be on AWS. Low intensive workloads. They cannot be on AWS. In the same way the workloads in which you need some actual level of security. So within your data center, as much as beat down the data center piece, you have your own security and governance. And you can do that, and that's coming back to your question that are we going to support all hundred services, yes, but the local execution we have only going to provide for some services, which by their very nature make more sense to learn on-prem. >> Yeah, keep the core services. >> Rishi: Core services. >> All right so how do you guys gonna sell this product, take us through the start-up situation, you're here, are you talking to customers? Why are they are buy you? What's the conversations like? When do they need you? Take us through your conversations here at re:Invent. >> Yeah, so before that, the AWS has been super successful for the green field applications. The new applications, the applications which are born in the cloud, but when it comes to transforming the existing application it becomes a big, big challenge. So a lot of customers are coming to us, they are interested in how I can seamlessly transform their-- >> John: What's an example workload? >> So the example workloads for us is going to be the big data workloads. Which we have specialized in for last so many years. So one of them can IOT. Sudhir, probably you can explain what that is. >> So that example could be for example from today's keynote, if you see Expedia case, or Lexi Goldman Sachs case, they spend a lot of time in converting their code to the AWS specific-word, right? Millions of lines, or billions of lines of code. What we are doing today, if you dealing with the application, tomorrow it could be future ready for AWS. It's more convenience, we are actually modeling your experience with AWS. >> So it's making for enterprisers to make that transition from what they're doing today across the cloud, because that's a big deal for them. >> Tomorrow when you are Lexi, then you go to AWS, your data will decide whether you want to earn your workload on our plans, or AWS. >> Okay, so your market is hybrid cloud, basically. People doing hybrid cloud should talk to you guys. >> Yeah, and code would be future proof. What you you are you developing today-- >> John: All right so is the product shipping? >> Yes, so we are in the early beta stage, we already have five beta customers. And the product is going to be ready in a week's time. >> So data now. >> Yeah, yes. >> Yeah, these guys are ready already. >> Open beta, restricted beta? >> It is going to be restricted beta for now. Then it's going to be open beta, so yes, we are going to five more customers in the next two months for the beta. >> Take a minute to explain the type of customer you're looking for. Are they all field spots, any more, you have five more spots, you said? >> Yeah, we have five more spots for the beta. >> John: Who are yo looking for out there? >> Any large enterprise which is planning to move to AWS, but are struggling with all the nitty gritties, looking at the hundred services, and how do you integrate your existing applications there. So how you could take baby steps, like so we are going to not just take that baby steps, but sprint through it, so that's what Zettabytes plans is for. >> Rishi, congratulations on the new start-up, launching here, Zettabytes, open beta, five more spots left. Check 'em out, Zettabytes, if you're doing hybrid cloud or true private cloud, they have five spots available. It's The Cube, bringing all the action, the start-up action here and also the conversations at re:Invent. I'm John Furrier, Justin Warren. We're back with more after this short break. (electronic jingle)

>> [John} Hello everyone and welcome to Special Cube Presentation here in Paolo Alto, I'm John Furrier at Silicon Angle, a Special Presentation with Druva. The data protection space is being disrupted big time with a lot of venture capital investment, almost 250 million dollars invested this quarter, in data protection, it's certainly disrupting the Cloud game, we had a great line-up of experts, and thought leaders here, to talk about the news from Druva, and the impact to the industry around digital transformation and my first guest is Jaspreet Singh, who's the CEO and Founder of Druva, great to see you again. >> Good morning John, good to see you again. >> Digital transformation is accelerating, data protection is being disrupted, millions of dollars are coming in, you guys are playing a role, what is the role that Druva's playing, in the digital transformation acceleration? >> Absolutely, to think about the world, right, you think of companies like Domino's or Tesla, the thing that software companies, right, they deliver, the server they should deliver via software of, a software approach of the traditional business model, in the heart of this transformation of enterprises becoming softed and digitalized, is data at the core. And data today, will outlive most systems, and the more and more fragmented their approach to data becomes, you store data on prem, in the Cloud, everywhere in between, the data management has to become more and more centralized, so Druva is in the core of this transformation, making it a data transformation, and making sure the data architects of the future, have a better approach of manageability and protection, with the Druva platform. >> You guys had a busy month this month, you got a couple of big news we're going to be talking about today, funding and next generation platform, walk us through that. >> Absolutely, so we have two big news to announce today, the first one being 80 million dollars of capital raised, led by Riverwood Capital followed by most other investors, including Sequoia, excellent Tenaya Capital, and then the number two, being we're announcing a whole new Druva Cloud platform, which wholistically takes our entire product portfolio and puts it together in a nice, simplistic approach to manage an entire information workload in a single platform in the Cloud. >> 80 million is a lot of funding, that brings you up to 200? >> 200 our total capital raised, it's a great validation for the market, it's a great validation for the Druva product portfolio, and great validation for customers who have trusted Druva so far, to put us towards one of the top, I think, no more than 10 Start-ups have raised capital more than 200 million dollars, in our space, so it's a great place to be, to be here today. >> Talk about the data, as a service, the data management as a service that you guys are doing, on the Druva Cloud platform, how does that solve the customer problems, how does that relate to the growth and Cloud and specifically, private Cloud, or true private Cloud, wherever that you want to slice that out, this is a new segment, talk about that. >> Absolutely, so there's a lot of Cloud washing in the market, about the Cloud data management prediction, the whole nine yards, but eventually, for us, the Cloud is not a technology, it's a business model. When you service the customer, as a predictable assailer across the globe, at a predictable price point, it is consistent throughout the world, right, it's how you build your products, how you build security around it, how you think of the customer experience as the central focal point, of everything you do, and how you drive innovation with customers, you know, and then adopting the product going forward. And then also how you build your ecosystem of partners, and your resellers to sort of adopt this whole motion of servicing a customer, managing data, all in the Cloud, and the core of the innovation is the fact that the more and more data gets decentralized, the more and more centralized the data management has to be, and today Cloud solves great a pain point there by offering simplicity of data management, and offering an assailer, a predictable assailer which the world really needs for data management service, and the hardware, software part of the world, is very, very hard to deliver. >> And what do you guys do specifically that solves that problem and helps in that area? >> So today, Druva delivers a end-to-end platform, this platform you know, think of a traditional enterprise which had to buy a, you know data management was a complicated beast, you had to had a backup play, a archival play, a DR play, eDiscovery play, and for each of these technologies, the solution you had to buy a hardware, a software, a tiering solution like a tape or a cloud, or you had to buy services, and then piecemeal them together. You know, as you have more and more regulations, and you have more and more demands on the data, as data is becoming your new oil of economy, you want to put them together in a way that they talk to each other, not disturb the workflows with the department and the people involved, and managing it as the same data, so Druva does is builds a, it offers a very wholistic platform, a scalable, simple platform on the Cloud, which puts together these multiple workloads of back up DR, archival eDiscovery governance, into a single platform, purely deliver a service without any dedicated hardware or software needed to manage an entire data landscape, with end point servers or cloud data. >> 80 million is a lot of financing, congratulations, great validation to you, by the way and you guys had good funding all along the way, because of this new, fresh financing, how does that change or does it change your competitive position and how do you guys compare from the other Cloud data management companies, we hear about, I mean, there's a lot of people out there, trying to attack this area, how do you guys compare and what's the differentiation? >> I think our differentiation still goes back to the same thesis, our core thought process being that, secondary data or your data management has to live purely in the Cloud, not on appliance, not a software, and Cloud is not a graveyard, you know, where you can just dump your data, and call it Cloud, it's a way for you to store data, use it wholistically, not just for protection, but governance and even for the intelligence. This funding helps us establish ourselves even better in the marketplace, proves validates to your point, our position in the market and you know, as I think of my years being an entrepreneur, of capital is critical for growth, it doesn't replace creativity, so we still have to focus on our core innovation of global market, but funding truly helps in building a firm foot forward in the market. >> Take a minute to describe what the Druva Cloud platform is, and how that address some of these next generation challenges, that are out there. >> So think of Druva Cloud as an Amazon marketplace, an Amazon service console for data management, right, when you think of offer tips to five on Amazon, you think of an experienced to manage your productivity, or in general, enterprise IT, or on the Cloud, the build up management was a piecemeal approach of putting together a software and a hardware together and experience was broken because of so many moving parts. We deliver pure social experience on the Cloud, which not only integrates the front end of, you know, being a simple interface to look at back-up or DR for all your workload, we're also a simplistic way of searching for workloads and you'll see a demo today, in the session of how you can interact with data by simple search, to show you not just the workflow, but the documentation behind it and the whole nine yards. But wholistically, behind the you know, there's a great saying, saying that the complexes compete in, but simple is genius, right, so to make it really simple, behind the whole, the Druva console, is a consolidated or a completely integrated data platform, which lets you take a wholistic approach of storing and managing information all in the Cloud, which is wrapped around security or rather paradigms to really make sure that it's a end-to-end delivered servers and experience, versus just a software wrapped around a legacy hardware approach. >> With the Druva Cloud platform, can organizations embrace more data protection? >> Absolutely, so simplicity is still key to it, right, data management is still something which helps you take care of your data risks and which is pretty pertinent to any organization, with a simple and scalable approach, with a predictable assailer, more organizations can trust Cloud with the corporate data, and they will be more pertinent to pay as you go for a data management play than building a hardware and software story, spending all the money upfront, which we believe will increase adoption, increase trust, in their own data and the Cloud. >> When will the Druva Cloud platform be available? >> So, today we're going a technical preview, for our most important customers, they get to play with it, and give us their feedback of how they feel about it, you know, we're integrating multiple parts, and instilling the feedback around how we can involve giving them more and more control and visibility, we expect a general availability for most of our customers by end of the year. >> Congratulations on the financing, it's a great validation, we'll give you the final word on this segment, to just share with the folks that are watching, what they should squint through all the news, and what does it mean to them, what's the impact of this announcement, these announcements? >> I think a couple of years ago, there's a massive transformation on the primary storage, where you know the EMCs of the world, were vulnerable and so came re-tan excel pure, right, now the whole backlash is going to be on the secondary storage, where the bigger, much bigger market on secondary data and storage, is a lot more vulnerable by the big players, still showing a lot of weakness, and Cloud is a great story here where a very complex solution can be delivered, with the wholistic and simplistic approach, so there's a great time in the market for us to innovate, it's a great time when the customers to trust the Cloud and get a great story all from Druva or other players, purely in the Cloud, and great time for entrepreneurs like us to execute and bring a cutting edge solution to the market. >> We have a lot more to drill down on, thanks so much, and congratulations on your success. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for sharing.

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live here in Las Vegas, this is The Cube's coverage of IBM's Interconnect 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Eric Herzog, Cube alumni, Vice President of Product Market at IBM storage. Welcome back to The Cube. Good to see you with the shirt on. You got the IBM tag there, look at that. >> I do. Well, you know, I've worn a Hawaiian shirt now, I think, ten Cubes in a row, so I got to keep the streak going. >> So, pretty sunny here in Vegas, great weather. Storage is looking up as well. Give us the update. Obviously, this is never going away, we talk about it all the time, but now cloud, more than ever, a lot of action happening with storage, and data is a big part of it. >> Yeah, the big thing with us has been around hybrid cloud. So our software portfolio, the spectrum family, Spectrum Virtualize, Spectrum Protect, our backup package, Spectrum Scale, our scale out NAS, IBM Cloud Object Storage, all will move data transparently from on-premises configurations out to multiple cloud vendors, including IBM Bluemix. But also other vendors, as well. That software's embedded on our array products, including our VersaStack. And just two weeks ago, at Cisco Live in Melbourne, Australia, we did a announcement with Cisco around our VersaStack for the hybrid cloud. >> So what's the hybrid cloud equation look like for you guys right now, because it is the hottest topic. It's almost like brute force, everywhere you see, it's hybrid cloud, that's what people want. How does it change the storage configurations? What's the solutions look like? What's different now than it was a year ago? >> I think the key thing you've got to be able to do is to make sure the data can move transparently from an on-premise location, or a private cloud, you could have started as a private cloud config and then decid it's OK to use a public cloud with the right security protocols. So, whether you've got a private cloud moving to a public cloud provider, like Bluemix, or an on-premises configuration moving to a public cloud provider, like Bluemix, the idea is they can move that data back and forth. Now, with our Cisco announcement, Cisco, with their cloud center, is also providing the capability and moving applications back and forth. We move the data layer back and forth with Spectrum Virtualize or IBM's copy data management product, Spectrum Copy Data Management, and with Cloud Center, or the ECS, Enterprise Cloud Sweep, from Cisco, you can move the application layer back and forth with that configuration on our VersaStacks. >> So this whole software-defined thing starts, it started when people realized, hey, we can run our data centers kind of the way the big hyper-scalers do. IBM pivoted hard toward software-defined. What's been the impact that you've seen with customers? Are they actually, I mean, there was a big branding announcement with Spectrum and everything a while back. What's been the business impact of that shift? >> Well, for us, it's been very strong. So if you look at the last couple quarters, according to the analysts that track the numbers, from a total storage perspective, we've moved into the number two position, and have been, now for the last two years. And for software-defined storage, we're the number one provider of software-defined storage in the world, and have been for the last three years in a row. So we've been continuing to grow that business on the software-defined side. We've got scale-up block configurations, scale-out block configurations, object storage with IBM Cloud Object Storage, and scale-out NAS and file with our IBM Spectrum Scale. So if you're file, block, or object, we've got you covered. And you can use either A, our competitor's storage, we work with all our competitor's gear, or you could go with your reseller, and have them, or your distributor provide the raw infrastructure, the servers, the storage, flash or hard drives, and then use our software on top to create essentially your own arrays. >> So when you say competitor's gear, you're talking about what used to be known as the SAN Volume Controller, and now is Spectrum Virtualize, right? Did I get that right? >> Yes, well, we still sell the SAN Volume Controller. When you buy the Spectrum Virtualize, it comes as just a piece of software. When you buy the SAN Volume Controller as well as our FlashSystem V9000, and our Storwize V7 and V5000, they come with Spectrum Virtualize pre-loaded on the array. So we have three ways where the array is pre-loaded: SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystems V9000, and then the Storwiz products, so it's pre-loaded. Or, you can buy the stand-alone software Spectrum Virtualize and put it on any hardware you want, either way. >> So, I know we're at an IBM conference, and IBM hates, they don't talk about the competition directly, but I have to ask the competitive questions. You've had a lot of changes in the business. Obviously, cloud's coming in in a big way. The Dell EMC merger has dislocated things, and you still see a zillion starups in storage, which is amazing to me, alright? Everybody says, oh, storage is dead, but then all this VC money still funneling in and all this innovation. What's happening in the storage landscape from your perspective? >> Well, I think there's a couple things. So, first of all, software-defined has got its legs, now. When you look at it from a market perspective, last quarter ended up at almost 400 million, which put it on a, let's say, a 1.6 to 2 billion dollar trajectory for calendar 2017, out of a total software market of around 16 billion. So it's gone from nothing to roughly 2 billion out of 16 billion for all storage software of all various types, so that's hot. All flash arrays are still hot. You're looking at, right now, last year, all flash arrays end up at roughly 25% of all arrays shipped. They're now in price parity, so an all-flash array is not more expensive. So you see a lot of innovation around that. You're still seeing innovation around backup, right? You've got guys trying to challenge us with our SpectrumProtect with some of these other vendors trying to challenge us, even though backup is the most mature of the storage software spaces, there's people trying to challenge that. So, I'd say storage is still a white-hot space. As you know, the overall market is flat, so it is totally a drag out, knock-down fight. You know, the MMA and the UFC guys got nothing on what goes on in the storage business. So, make sure you wear your flak jacket if you're a storage guy. >> Meaning, you got to gain share to grow, right? >> Yes, and it's all about fighting it out. This Hawaiian shirt looks Hawaiian, but just so you know, this is Kevlar. Just in case there's another storage company here at the show. >> So what are the top conversations now with storage buyers? Because we saw Candy's announcement about the object store, Flex, for the cold storage. It changes the price points. It's always going to be a price sensitive market, but they're still buying storage. What are those conversations that you're having? You mentioned moving data around, do they want to move the data around? Do they want to keep it at the edge? Is it moving the application around? What are some of those key conversations that you're involved in? >> So we've done a couple innovative things. One of the things we've done is worked with our sales team to create what we call, the conversations. You know, I've been doing this storage gig now for 31 years. Seven start-ups, IBM twice, EMC, Maxtor and Seagate- >> John: You're a hardened veteran. >> I'm a storage veteran, that's why this is a Kevlar Hawaiian shirt. But no CIO's a storage guy, I've never met one, in 31 years, ever, ever, ever met a storage guy. So what we have to do is elevate the conversation when you're talking to the customer, about why it's important for their cloud, why it's important for machine learning, for cognitive, for artificial intelligence. You know, this about it, I'm a Star Trek guy. I like Star Wars, too, but in Star Trek, Bones, of course, wands the body. So guess what that is? That's the edge device going through the cloud to a big, giant server farm. If that storage is not super resilient, the guy on the table might not make it. And if the storage isn't super fast, the guys on the table might not make it. And while Watson isn't there, yet, Watson Health, they're getting there. So, in ten years from now, I expect when I go to the doctor, he's just like in Star Trek, waving the wand, and boy, you better make sure the storage that that wand is talking to better be highly resilient and high performing. >> Define resilient, in your terms. >> So, resilient means you really can't have more than 30 seconds, 50 seconds a year of down time. Because whoever's on the table when that thing goes down has got a real problem. So you've got to be up all the time, and if you take it out of the healthcare space and look at other applications, whether you look at trading applications, data is the new gold. Data is the new diamonds. It's about data. Yes, I'd love to have a mound of gold, but you know what, if you have the right amount of data, it worth way more than a mound of gold is. >> You're right about the CIO and storage. They don't want to worry about storage. They don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about it. A CIO once said to me, "I care about storage like this, "I want it to be dirt cheap, lightning fast, and rock solid." Now, the industry has done a decent job with rock solid, I would say, but up until Flash, not really that great with lightning fast, and really not that great with dirt cheap. Price has come down for the hardware, but the management has been so expensive. So, is the industry attacking that problem? And what's IBM doing? >> Yeah, so the big thing is all about automation. So when I talk about moving to the hybrid cloud, I'm talking about transparent migration, transparent movement. That's an automation play. So you want to automate as much as you can, and we've got some things that we're not willing to disclose yet that'll make our storage even more automated whether it be from a predictive analytics perspective, self-healing storage that actually will heal itself, you know, go out and grab a code load and put the new code on because it knows there's a bug in the old code, and do that transparently so the user doesn't have to do anything. It's all about automating data movement and data activity. So we've already been doing that with the Spectrum family, and that Spectrum family ships on our storage systems and on our VersaStack, but automation is the critical key in storage. >> So I wonder, does that bring up new KPIs? Like, I presume you guys dog food your own storage internally, and your own IT. >> Eric: Yes >> Are you seeing, because it used to be, OK, the light's green on the disc drive, and you know, this is our uptime or downtime, planned downtime, you know, sort of standard metrics that we've known for 30-40 years. With automation, are we seeing a new set of metrics in KPIs emerge? You know, self-healing, percentage of problems that corrected themselves, or- >> Well, and you're also seeing things like time spent. So if you go back to the downturn of seven, eight, and nine, IT was devastated, right? And, as you know, you've seen a lot of surveys that IT spend is basically back up to '08, OK, the pre-08 crash. When you open up that envelope, they're not hiring storage guys anymore, and usually not infrastructure guys. They're hiring guys to do devops and testdev, and do cloud-based applications, which means there's not a lot of guys to run the storage. So one of the metrics we're seeing is, how much guys do I have managing my storage, or, my infrastructure? I used to have 50, now I'm a big bank, can I do it with 25? Can I do it with 20? Can I do it with 15? And then, how much time do they spend between the networking, the storage, the facilities themselves. These data center guys have to manage all of that. So there are new metrics about, what is the workload that my actual human beings are doing? How much of that is storage versus something else? And there's way less guys doing storage as a full-time job, anyway, because what happened in the downturn? And, so automation is critical to a guy running a datacenter, whether he's a cloud guy, whether he's a small shop. And clearly in the Fortune, global 2500, those guys, where they've got in-house IT, they've cut back on the infrastructure team and the storage team, so it's all about automation. So, part of the KPIs are not just about the storage itself, such as uptime, cost per Gig, cost per transaction, the bandwidth, you know, those sorts of KPIs. But it's also about how much time do I really spend managing the storage? So if I've only got five guys, now, and I used to have 15 guys, those five guys are managing, usually, three, to four, to five times more storage than they did in 2008 and 2009. So now you've got to do it with five guys instead of 15, so there's a KPI, right there. >> So, what about cloud? We heard David Kinney talk today about the object store with that funny name, and then he talked about this cloud-tiering thing, and I couldn't stay. I had to get ready for theCube. How do you work with those guys? How do you sell a hybrid story, together, because cloud is eating away at the traditional infrastructure business, but it's all sort of one big, happy family, I'm sure. But how do you work with a cloud group to really drive, to make the water level higher for IBM? >> So, all of our products from the Spectrum family, not all, but almost all our products from the Spectrum family, will automatically move data to the cloud, including IBM Bluemix/SoftLayer. So our on-premises can do it. If you buy our software only, and don't buy our storage arrays, or don't buy a Storwize, or don't buy a flash system, you still can automatically move that data to the cloud, including the IBM cloud object store. Our Spectrum Scale product, for example, ScaleOut NAS, and file system, which is very highly used in big data analytics and cognitive workloads, automatically, by policy, will tier-data to IBM cloud object storage. Spectrum Protect can be set up to automatically take data and back it up from on-premises to IBM cloud object storage. So we've automated those processes between our software and our array family, and IBM cloud object storage, and Bluemix and SoftLayer. And, by the way, in all honesty, we also work with other cloud vendors, just like they work with other storage vendors. All storage vendors can put data in Bluemix. Well, guess what, we can put data in clouds that are not Bluemix, as well. Of course, we prefer Bluemix. We all have IBM employee stock purchase, so of course we want Bluemix first, but if the customer, for whatever reason, doesn't see the light and doesn't go to Bluemix and goes with something else, then we want to make sure that customer's happy. We want to get at least some of the PO, and our Spectrum family, and our VersaStack family, and all of our array family can get that part of the PO. >> You need versatility to be on any cloud. >> Eric: We can be on any cloud. >> So my question for you is, the thing that came out of our big data, Silicon Valley event last week was, Hadoop was a great example, and that's kind of been, now, a small feature of the overall data ecosystem, is that batch and real time are coming together. So that conversation you're having, that you mentioned earlier, is about more real time than there is anything else more than ever. >> Well, and real time gets back to my examples of Bones on Star Trek wanding you over healthcare. That is real time, he's got a phaser burn, a broken leg, a this and that, and then we know how to fix the guy. But if you don't get that from the wand, then that's not real time analytics. >> Speaking of Star Trek, just how much data do you think the Enterprise was throwing off, just from an IOT standpoint? >> I'm sure that they had about a hundred petabytes. All stored on IBM Flash Systems arrays, by the way. >> Eric, thanks for coming on. Real quick, in the next 30 seconds, just give the folks a quick update on why IBM storage is compelling now more than ever. >> I think the key thing is, most people don't realize, IBM is the number two storage company in the world, and it has been for the last several years. But I think the big thing is our embracing of the hybrid cloud, our capability of automating all these processes. When they've got less guys doing storage and infrastructure in their shop, they need something that's automated, that works with the cloud. And that's what IBM storage does. >> All right, Eric Herzog, here, inside theCube, Vice President of Product Market for IBM Storage. I'm John Furrier, and Dave Velante. More live coverage from IBM InterConnect after this short break. Stay with us. (tech music)