>>Hey everyone, and welcome back to Las Vegas. Viva Las Vegas, baby. This is the Cube live at AWS Reinvent 2022 with tens of thousands of people. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave, we've had some great conversations. This is day one of four days of wall to wall coverage on the cube. We've been talking data. Every company is a data company. Data protection, data resiliency, absolutely table stakes for organizations to, >>And I think ecosystem is the other big theme. And that really came to life last year. You know, we came out of the pandemic and it was like, wow, we are entering a new era. People no longer was the ecosystem worried about it, AWS competing with them. They were more worried about innovating and building on top of AWS and building their own value. And that's really, I think, the theme of the 2020s within the ecosystem. >>And we're gonna be talking about building on top of aws. Two guests join us, two alumni join us. Stephen Manley is here, the CTO of Druva. Welcome back. Jason crat as well is here. CIO and CTO of Summit Carbon Solutions. Guys, great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you. >>Let's start with you giving the audience an understanding of the company. What do you guys do? What do you deliver value for customers? All that good >>Stuff. Yeah, no, for sure. So Summit Carbon is the world's largest carbon capture and sequestration company capturing close to 15 million tons of carbon every year. So it doesn't go into the atmosphere. >>Wow, fantastic. Steven, the, the risk landscape today is crazy, right? There's, there's been massive changes. We've talked about this many times. What are some of the things, you know, ransomware is a, is, I know as you say, this is a, it's not a, if it's gonna happen, it's when it's how frequent, it's what's gonna be the damage. What are some of the challenges and concerns that you're hearing from customers out there today? >>Yeah, you know, it really comes down to three things. And, and everybody is, is terrified of ransomware and justifiably so. So, so the first thing that comes up is, how do I keep up? Because I have so much data in so many places, and the threats are evolving so quickly. I don't have enough money, I don't have enough people, I don't have enough skilled resources to be able to keep up. The second thing, and this ties in with what Dave said, is, is ecosystem. You know, it used to be that your, your backup was siloed, right? They'd sit in the basement and, and you wouldn't see, see them. But now they're saying, I've gotta work with my security team. So rather than hoping the security team stays away from me, how do I integrate with them? How do I tie together? And then the third one, which is on everybody's mind, is when that attack happens, and like you said, it's win and, and the bell rings and they come to me and they say, all right, it's time for you to recover. It's time for, for all this investment we've put in. Am I gonna be ready? Am I going to be able to execute? Because a ransom or recovery is so different than any other recovery they've ever done. So it's those three things that really are top of mind for >>How, so what is the, what are the key differences, if you could summarize? I mean, I >>Know it's so, so the first one is you can't trust the environment you're restoring into. Even with a disaster, it would finish and you'd say, okay, I'm gonna get my data center set up again and I'm gonna get things working. You know, when I try to recover, I don't know if everything's clean yet. I'm trying to recover while I'm still going through incident response. So that's one big difference. A second big difference is I'm not sure if the thing I'm recovering is good, I've gotta scan it. I've gotta make sure what's inside it is, is, is alright. And then the third thing is what we're seeing is the targets are usually not necessarily the crown jewels because those tend to be more protected. And so they're running into this, I need to recover a massive amount of what we might call tier two, tier three apps that I wasn't ready for because I've always been prepared for that tier one disaster. And so, so those three things they go, it's stuff I'm not prepared or covering. It's a flow. I'm not used to having to check things and I'm not sure where I'm gonna recover too when the, when the time comes. >>Yeah, just go ahead. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think for me, the biggest concern is the blind spots of where did I actually back it up or not. You know, what did I get it? Cuz you, we always protect our e r p, we always protect these sort of classes of tiers of systems, but then it's like, oh, that user's email box didn't get it. Oh, that, you know, that one drive didn't get it. You know, or, or, or whatever it is. You know, the infrastructure behind it all. I forgot to back that up. That to me the blind spots are the scariest part of a ransomware attack. >>And, and if you think about it, some of the most high profile attacks, you know, on the, on the colonial pipeline, they didn't go after the core assets. They went after billing. That's right. But billing brought everything down so they're smart enough to say, right, I'm not gonna take the, the castle head on. Is there is they're that. Exactly. >>And so how do you, I get, I mean you can air gap and do things like that in terms of protecting the, the, the data, the corrupt data. How do you protect the corrupt environment? Like that's, that's a really challenging issue. Is >>It? I don't know. I mean, I'll, I'll you can go second here. I think that what's interesting to me about is that's what cloud's for. You can build as many environments as you want. You only pay for what you use, right? And so you have an opportunity to just reconstruct it. That's why things, everything is code matters. That's why having a cloud partner like Druva matters. So you can just go restore wherever you need to in a totally clean environment. >>So the answer is you gotta do it in the cloud. Yeah. What if it's on prem? >>So if it's on prem, what we see people do is, and, and, and this is where testing and, and where cloud can still be an asset, is you can look and say a lot of those assets I'm running in the data center, I could still recover in the cloud. And so you can go through DR testing and you can start to define what's in your on-prem so that you could make it, you know, so you can make it cloud recoverable. Now, a lot of the people that do that then say, well actually why am I even running this on prem anymore in the first place? I should just move this to the cloud now. But, but, but there are people in that interim step. But, but, but it's really important because you, you're gonna need a clean environment to play in. And it's so hard to have a clean environment set up in a data center cuz it basically means I'm not touching this, I'm just paying for something to sit idle. Whereas cloud, I can spin that up, right? Get a, a cloud foundation suite and, and just again, infrastructures code, spin things up, test it, spin it down. It doesn't cost me money on a daily basis. >>Jason, talk a little bit about how you are using Druva. Why Druva and give us a kind of a landscape of your IT environment with Druva. >>Yeah. You know, so when we first started, you know, we did have a competitor solution and, and, and it was only backing up, you know, we were a startup. It was only backing up our email. And so as you pointed out, the ecosystem really matters because we grew out of email pretty quick as a startup. And we had to have real use cases to protect and the legacy product just wouldn't support us. And so our whole direction, or my direction to my team is back it up wherever it is, you know, go get it. And so we needed somebody in the field, literally in the middle of Nebraska or Iowa to have their laptop backed up. We needed our infrastructure, our data center backed up and we needed our, our SaaS solutions backed up. We needed it all. And so we needed a partner like Druva to help us go get it wherever it's at. >>Talk about the value in, with Druva being cloud native. >>Yeah. To us it's a big deal, right? There's all sorts of products you could go by to go just do endpoint laptop protection or just do SAS backups. For us, the value is in learning one tool and mastering it and then taking it to wherever the data is. To me, we see a lot of value for that because we can have one team focus on one product, get good at it, and drive the value. >>That consolidation theme is big right now, you know, the economic headwinds and so forth. What was the catalyst for you? Was it, is that something you started, you know, years ago? Just it's good practice to do that? What's, >>Well, no, I mean luckily I'm in a very good position as a startup to do define it, you know, but I've been in those legacy organizations where we've got a lot of tech debt and then how do you consolidate your portfolio so that you can gain more value, right? Cause you only get one budget a year, right? And so I'm lucky in, in the learnings I've had in other enterprises to deal with this head on right now as we grow, don't add tech debt, put it in right. Today. >>Talk to us a little bit about the SaaS applications that you're backing up. You know, we, we talk a lot with customers, the shared, the shared responsibility model that a lot of customers aren't aware of. Where are you using that competing solution to protect SaaS applications before driven and talk about Yeah. The, the value in that going, the data protection is our responsibility and not the SA vendor. >>No, absolutely. I mean, and it is funny to go to, you know, it's like Office 365 applications and go to our, our CFO and a leadership and be like, no, we really gotta back it up to a third party. And they're like, but why? >>It's >>In the cloud, right? And so there's a lot of instruction I have to provide to my peers and, and, and my users to help them understand why these things matter. And, and, and it works out really well because we can show value really quick when anything happens. And now we get, I mean, even in SharePoint, people will come to us to restore things when they're fully empowered to do it. But my team's faster. And so we can just get it done for them. And so it's an extra from me, it's an extra SLA or never service level I can provide to my internal customers that, that gives them more faith and trust in my organization. >>How, how are the SEC op teams and the data protection teams, the backup teams, how are they coming together? Is is, is data protection backup just morphing into security? Is it more of an adjacency? What's that dynamic like? >>So I'd say right now, and, and I'll be curious to hear Jason's organization, but certainly what we see broadly is, you know, the, the teams are starting to work together, but I wouldn't say they're merging, right? Because, you know, you think of it in a couple of ways. The first is you've got a production environment and that needs to be secured. And then you've got a protection environment. And that protection environment also has to be secured. So the first conversation for a lot of backup teams is, alright, I need to actually work with the security team to make sure that, that my, my my backup environment, it's air gapped, it's encrypted, it's secured. Then I think the, the then I think you start to see people come together, especially as they go through, say, tabletop exercises for ransomware recovery, where it's, alright, where, where can the backup team add value here? >>Because certainly recovery, that's the basics. But as there log information you can provide, are there detection pieces that you can offer? So, so I think, you know, you start to see a partnership, but, but the reality is, you know, the, the two are still separate, right? Because, you know, my job as a a protection resiliency company is I wanna make sure that when you need your data, it's gonna be there for you. And I certainly want to, to to follow best secure practices and I wanna offer value to the security team, but there's a whole lot of the security ecosystem that I want to plug into. I'm not trying to replace them again. I want to be part of that broader ecosystem. >>So how, how do you guys approach it? Yeah, >>That's interesting. Yeah. So in my organization, we, we are one team and, and not to be too cheesy or you know, whatever, but as Amazon would say, security is job one. And so we treat it as if this is it. And so we never push something into production until we are ready. And ready to us means it's got a security package on it, it's backed up, the users have tested it, we are ready to go. It's not that we're ready just be to provide the service or the thing. It's that we are actually ready to productionize this. And so it's ready for production data and that slows us down in some cases. But that's where DevOps and this idea of just merging everything together into a central, how do we get this done together, has worked out really well for us. So, >>So it's really the DevOps team's responsibility. It's not a separate data protection function. >>Nope. Nope. We have specialists of course, right? Yeah, yeah. Because you need the extra level, the CISSPs and those people Yeah, yeah. To really know what they're doing, but they're just part of the team. Yeah. >>Talk about some of the business outcomes that you're achieving with Druva so far. >>Yeah. The business outcomes for me are, you know, I meet my SLAs that's promising. I can communicate that I feel more secure in the cloud and, and all of my workloads because I can restore it. And, and that to me helps everybody in my organization sleep well, sleep better. We are, we transport a lot of the carbon in a pipeline like Colonial. And so to us, we are, we are potential victims of, of a pipe, a non pipeline group, right? Attacking us, but it's carbon, you know, we're trying to get it outta atmosphere. And so by protecting it, no matter where it is, as long as we've got internet access, we can back it up. That provides tons of value to my team because we have hundreds of people in the field working for us every day who collect data and generate it. >>What would you say to a customer who's maybe on the fence looking at different technologies, why dva? >>You know, I think, you know, do the research in my mind, it'll win if you just do the research, right? I mean, there might be vendors that'll buy you nice dinners or whatever, and those are, those are nice things, but the, the reality is you have to protect your data no matter where it is. If it's in a SaaS application, if it's in a cloud provider, if it's infrastructure, wherever it is, you need it. And if you just go look at the facts, there it is, right? And so I, I'd say be objective. Look at the facts, it'll prove itself. >>Look at the data. There you go. Steven Druva recently announced a data resiliency guarantee with a big whopping financial sum. Talk to us a little bit about that, the value in it for your customers and for prospects, >>Right? So, so basically there's, there's really two parts to this guarantee. The first is, you know, across five different SLAs, and I'll talk about those, you know, if we violate those, the customers can get a payout of up to 10 million, right? So again, putting, putting our money where our mouth is in a pretty large amount. But, but for me, the exciting part, and this is, this is where Jason went, is it's about the SLAs, right? You know, one of Drew's goals is to say, look, we do the job for you, we do the service for you so you can offer that service to your company. And so the SLAs aren't just about ransomware, some of them certainly are, you know, that, that you're going to be able to recover your data in the event of a ransomware attack, that your data won't get exfiltrated as part of a ransomware attack. >>But also things like backup success rates, because as much as recovery matters a lot more than backup, you do need a backup if you're gonna be able to get that recovery done. There's also an SLA to say that, you know, if 10 years down the road you need to recover your data, it's still recoverable, right? So, so that kind of durability piece. And then of course the availability of the service because what's the point of a service if it's not there for you when you need it? And so, so having that breadth of coverage, I think really reflects who Druva is, which is we're doing this job for you, right? We want to make this this service available so you can focus on offering other value inside your business. And >>The insurance underwriters, if they threw holy water on >>That, they, they, they were okay with it. The legal people blessed it, you know, it, you know, the CEO signed off on it, the board of directors. So, you know, it, and it, it's all there in print, it's all there on the web. If you wanna look, you know, make sure, one of the things we wanted to be very clear on is that this isn't just a marketing gimmick that we're, we're putting, that we're putting substance behind it because a lot of these were already in our contracts anyway, because as a SAS vendor, you're signing up for service level agreements anyway. >>Yeah. But most of the service level agreements and SaaS vendors are crap. They're like, you know, hey, you know, if something bad happens, you know, we'll, we'll give you a credit, >>Right? >>For, you know, for when you were down. I mean, it's not, you never get into business impact. I mean, even aws, sorry, I mean, it's true. We're a customer. I read define print, I know what I'm signing up for. But, so that's, >>We read it a lot and we will not, we don't really care about the credits at all. We care about is it their force? Is it a partner? We trust, we fight that every day in our SLAs with our vendors >>In the end, right? I mean this, we are the last line of defense. We are the thing that keeps the business up and running. So if your business, you know, can't get to his data and can't operate, me coming to you and saying, Dave, I've got some credits for you after you, you know, after you declare bankruptcy, it'll be great. Yeah, that's not a win. >>It's no value, >>Not helpful. The goal's gotta be, your business is up and running cuz that's when we're both successful. So, so, so, you know, we view this as we're in it together, right? We wanna make sure your business succeeds. Again, it's not about slight of hand, it's not about, you know, just, just putting fine print in the contract. It's about standing up and delivering. Because if you can't do that, why are we here? Right? The number one thing we hear from our customers is Dr. Just works. And that's the thing I think I'm most proud of is Druva just works. >>So, speaking of Juva, just working, if there's a billboard in Santa Clara near the new offices about Druva, what's, what's the bumper sticker? What's the tagline? >>I, I, I think, I think that's it. I think Druva just works. Keeps your data safe. Simple as that. Safe and secure. Druva works to keep your data safe and secure. >>Saved me. >>Yeah. >>Truva just works. Guys, thanks so much for joining. David, me on the program. Great to have you back on the cube. Thank you. Talking about how you're working together, what Druva is doing to really putting, its its best foot forward. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thanks guys. It's great to see you guys. Likewise >>The show for our guests and Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Live on the floor in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here for the next two days getting all the action back in person. We're at AWS re:Invent, a few months ago. Now we're back, events are coming back and we're happy to be here with theCUBE. Bring all the action, also virtual, we have a hybrid cube. Check out theCUBE.net, siliconangle.com for all the coverage. After the event we've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, Director of Solutions Architecture with Innovation Solutions, the booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, I'm glad to be here. >> So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee, we were chatting before you came on camera. It's great that be back to events. >> It's amazing, this is the first summit I've been to in what two, three years. >> It's awesome, we'll be at the AWS Summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going, distributed computing you got on-premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything, Dev sec Ops, everyone kind of sees that, you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out, and the edge is with the action is. You guys are number one premier partner at SMB for edge. >> That's right. >> Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and what you do. >> That's right, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around especially the edge public cloud. For us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. We are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it-- >> Give an example. >> Example would be Panama. We have a customer there that needs to deploy some financial tech, data and compute is legally required to be in Panama but they love AWS, and they want to deploy AWS services in region. So they've taken EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and snowball in region, inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >> You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering AWS since 2013 with theCUBE about their events, and we watched the progression. Andy Jassy was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam Slepsky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't want to say trying to avoid. Of course Amazon listens to customers, they work backwards from the customers, we all know that. But the real issue is they're bread and butters, EC2 and S3. And then now they got tons of services, and the cloud is obviously successful, and we're seeing that. But the edge brings up a whole nother level. >> It does. >> Computing. >> It does. >> That's not set centralized in the public cloud. Now they got regions, so what is the issue with the edge? What's driving the behavior? Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, operational technologies and IT merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got 5G, so it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS? >> Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best Outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers, on location or in the field like with media companies. >> Outpost is interesting, we always used to rip on theCUBE 'cause it's basically Amazon in a box pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff. But now cloud native operations are becoming the standard. You're starting to see some standard, Deepak Singh's group is doing some amazing work with opensource, Raul's team on the AI side. Obviously you got Swam who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, Outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did Outpost do its job? 'Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say Outpost? >> Yeah, I think Outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at Outpost really consider, do I want to invest in this hardware? Do I want to have this Outpost in my data center? Do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were not a good fit for Outposts, they weren't a good fit in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're going to meet you where you are with 5G. We're going to meet you where you are with wavelength. We're going to meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about Outposts and it's really increased, we can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up Outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption for sure. >> All right so you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative as that, you have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and doing that outside of the availability zone and regions for AWS. Customers in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, they want to have modernization, modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI all part of that. What's the main product or gap that you're filling for AWS outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key? Is it they don't have a footprint? Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap, why are you so successful? >> So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They want to focus on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS you take the infrastructure you take some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware, that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >> So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges? >> Matthew: Correct. >> For companies. >> Matthew: Correct. >> Mainly because the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's low latency type requirements, and then they still work with the regions, it's all tied together, is that how it works? >> And our customers, even the ones in the edge they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone because we're always going to have a failback scenario. If we're going to deploy FinTech in the Caribbean we're going to talk about hurricanes. And we're going to talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >> All right so I got to ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, now, I won't say underserved but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that requirement. It makes total sense, we're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's an outlier, it's actually growing. >> Matthew: Yeah. >> There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama. And you mentioned FinTech in the islands, there are a lot of web three happening. What's your view on the web three world right now relative? >> We have some customers actually deploying crypto especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's top of my mind right now, we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. So it's up and coming. I have some personal views that crypto is still searching for a use case. And I think it's searching a lot and we're there to help customers search for that use case. But crypto as a to technology lives really well on the AWS edge. And we're having more and more people talk to us about that. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and putting them out there on-- >> It's interesting. I mean, first of all we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little projects going on. But if you go talk to all the crypto people they say, look we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's a lot of overhead. It's not really very technical already but it's a cultural shift but there's underserved use cases around use of money but they're all using the blockchain just for smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. They all, don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened if decentralized? >> Yeah, and that's a conversation. >> It's a performance issue. >> Yeah and it's a cost issue and it's a development issue. So I think more and more as some of these currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on AWS and what does it look like to build decentralized applications but with AWS hardware and services. >> All right so take me through a use case of a customer, Matthew, around the edge. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Hey, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my app. And I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I want to migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer? >> Yeah big thing is industrial manufacturing. That's one of the best use cases. Inside industrial manufacturing we can pull in many of the AWS edge services, we can bring in private 5G so that all the equipment inside that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5G. It's better than wifi for the industrial space. When we take computing down to that industrial area because we want to do pre-processing on the data. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with regular commercially available hardware, running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the robotics depending on what we're manufacturing, right? And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back to the AWS availability zone, the standard-- >> John: For data lake, or whatever. >> To the data lake, yeah data lake house, whatever it might be. And we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. But a lot of that just in time business decisions, just in time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's one of the best use cases that we're seeing. >> And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on theCUBE for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. But also compute, going to the data that saves that cost on the data transfer but also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching, don't move the data unless you have to, but there's new things are developing. So I want to ask you what new are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything, right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. But now what does that change in the core cloud? There's a system element here, what's the new pattern? >> There's actually an organizational element as well. Because once you have to start making the decision do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. So not only are you changing your architecture you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. So now you say, okay, this can take place here. And maybe this decision can wait. And then how do I visualize that? >> By the way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You got observability going right. But you got to change the database architecture in the backs. There's new things developing. You've got more benefit. >> There are, there are. And we have more and more people that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about, customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. For the past maybe decade, it's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. >> I mean, this is a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps. Actually is not the case. You look at Databrick, Snowflake and other successes out there. And even Time Series Data which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. >> Matthew: Yep. >> So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did, a whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training, things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business benefits. There's all kinds of new scale. >> There are. And we have many customers that are running petabyte level. They're essentially data factories on premises, right? They're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay we could analyze this in the cloud. We could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud or we can run computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data, transition those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS, run 'em through machine learning. And we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >> So I got to end the segment on a kind of a fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, AWS cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What does this mean? You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out? >> Kind of, so I was-- >> You jumped out? >> I was teaching skydiving before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a skydiving instructor. I was teaching skydiving. And I heard out of the corner of my ear a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, hey, this is what I went to school for. I'd love to, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So I started and the first day there we had a discussion, EC2 had just come out and-- >> This is amazing. >> Yeah and so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And that totally revolutionized that business, that led to, that guy actually still owns skydiving airport. But through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud. And now it feels like almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and apply those lessons in those services to on premises. >> It's such a great story, is going to, the whole growth mindset, pack your own parachute. >> Matthew: Exactly. >> The cloud in the early days was pretty much will the chute open? >> Matthew: Yeah. >> It was pretty much you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you jump out a plane you got to make sure that parachute is going to open. >> And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was still, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. But it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when-- >> It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. But a lot of this cutting edge stuff is like jumping out of an airplane. You got the right equipment. You got to do the right things. >> Exactly. >> John: Matthew, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. >> Thanks for having me, thank you. >> Okay theCUBE's here live in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We'll be at AWS Summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all theCUBE action at theCUBE.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. 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>>Everyone. Welcome to the cube here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. We're live we're back with events. Also we're a virtual, we got hybrid all kinds of events this year, of course, summit in New York city happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John, again, John host of the queue. Got a great guest here, Justin Colby, owner and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. Yeah. >><laugh> so elevator pitch is we are, are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to mid-size businesses that are moving to the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is. Now. We have offices down in Austin, Texas, up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And yeah, it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demand coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, it's a small to midsize business. They're all trying to understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most cut customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spent a lot of time with small to mid-size businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. And they want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off it's happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more, I O T devices, what's that like right now from a channel engine problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>In the SMB space? The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I tell, yeah, they're like, listen, at the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? >>It does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time in the cloud. If you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing forward. >>Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early, not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own >>It. Exactly. And >>They get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water, as we used to say, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talk to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy Jessey announce or Adam, you know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They did huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just product. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are what's >>What's the values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to mid-size business, leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we, the market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the out, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all of those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our manage services. Meaning they know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say your high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attacks. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own, it would cost them a fortune. If >>The training alone would be insane, a risk factor not mean the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 28 team. When, uh, when we made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement. It still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. >>It's amazing. But I'll tell >>You what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get the right >>People involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and businesses in general, small and large, it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were a provisioning top of rack switches. Right? First of all. And so if you're a business is also the, I call the buildout, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one and the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are like >>Critical issues. This is >>Just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this. So >>That's, that's what at least a million in loading, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side though. No. And then remind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that. Exactly. An it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's right, >>Right. Our old vendor. I like it. >><laugh> but that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around the, at is, is very important. And it's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Business. So just, I wanna get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things a good tell your, your story. What's your journey. >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportu with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months than I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got a long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy into the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> well, so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be had built this company to this point? Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where a lot of our small to mid-size business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration, the, the Microsoft suite to the cloud and that a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew interest structure was around the corner. Yeah. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is it the app? Modernization is the data. What's the hot product and then put a plugin for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migration. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance classic in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their >>Journey. And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and doubling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much for having me. Okay. >>This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit tour 22. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we just covered some of the critical aspects from Infinidat recent announcement and the importance of cyber resilience and fast recovery. Eric Hertzog is back and joining us is Stan Wysocki, who's president of Mark Three Systems. Stan, welcome to the Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> Tell us about Mark Three Systems. You specialize in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. It says in your website. I'd love to hear more about your business. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, I think we're a little bit unique in our industry, right? There've been business partners resellers around for, we've been around for 26 years. And in 26 years, we've supported some of largest enterprise customers in the Southeast, with server storage networking virtualization. We have VCP number 94, so we've been doing that from the very beginning. But about six years ago, we realized that IT was changing, that business was changing, that the demands of the customers was changing and we needed to create the full stack message and a full-stack practice. So we hired data scientists and developers in DevOps, MLOps and gave them the environments and the tools that they could use to build experience around AI, ML deep learning. So now when we engage with our customers, not only can we handle the entire enterprise stack that they have, but we can help accelerate them on their adoption of open-source technologies, cloud native development and AI and integrating that into their business processes. >> I love it. You got to keep moving. You've been around for a long time, but you're not just sitting still. I wonder if you could comment in an Eric, I want you to comment as well. From your customer's perspective Stan, what are the big trends that you see that are impacting their business and the challenges that they're facing? >> Yeah, that's great. So kind of ties into what I just said. Today we live in a data-driven society. Everything that we do is really driven by how the customer wants to engage. And that's both an internal customer and your end user customers, on how they want to engage, how they want to consume and how they want to interact with everything out there in the world, right? So the real trends is really around engaging with the customer, but that means that you need to be data-driven, you need to adopt AI platforms, you need to adopt a more holistic view of what you're doing with your customers. That drives up the importance of the data that you have in your shop, right? So then cybersecurity becomes extremely important, not just because of the technical skills of the hacker is getting better and better, but because we're becoming more reliant on the data that we have moving forward and we're proud to partner with Infinidat in leveraging InfiniGuard and Infinni safe to really protect our customer's data. >> Great. Eric, thinking about the trends and some of the issues that Stan just mentioned, when you think about the launch and the announcement that you just made, how do you see it fitting in to Stan's business? How's how it's going to help the end customers? >> Well, I think there's one key aspect. As noted in the fortune survey of CEOs in 2021. The number one concern of CEOs of the fortune 500, was cybersecurity and they saw that as biggest threat to their business. As Stan pointed out, that becomes of the importance of the digital data, that all companies generate, of all types, financial services, healthcare, government institutions, manufacturing, you name it. So one of the key things you've got to do, is make sure that your storage estate, fits into an overall cybersecurity strategy. And with InfiniGuard, or Ifini safe technologies, we can ensure that Stan's customers and customers of our other business partners all over the world, can make sure that the data is safe, protected and can help them form a malware or ransomware attack, against that valuable data set. >> Well then you know, one of you guys could come with, I mean, we talked to CSOs and they've told us that there be could in part due to the pandemic, largely actually, their whole strategy has changed. Their spending strategies changed, no longer than just sort of putting up hardware firewalls. They're shifting their focus to two different areas, obviously endpoint, you know, cloud security is a big deal, identity access management, but ransomware, is just top of mind for everybody. And as we talked about earlier, the exposure, now the weak links, whether you're working from home, or Stan you mentioned greater sophistication of hacker. So what are you hearing from customers in this regard, Stan? >> Well, you know I think you have that, right? But then you always have, we've been doing this for 26 years. I've never heard of an IT budget that that's gone up, in any year, right? So, with the sophistication of these hackers that are coming out and the different angles that they're using to get in, it is extremely important for our customers to be very efficient and choose their security strategy and products very wisely, right? I think I read an article a year or so ago that the average enterprise had like something like 27 different security products and imagine a CSO and his team, who is struggling with their budget to manage that. So for us to be able to leverage InfiniGuard and Infini safe and to be able to provide, you know the immutable snapshots. The logical air gas, the physical air backs and offense network for recovery. That's all extremely easy to manage. I mean I talked to my customers on why they have chosen Infinidat, you know through us, right? And one of the things that they always talk about is how easy and how amazing the support is. How easy it is to install, how easy it is to manage. And normally when you have a simple product, right, you think you can sell that to an unsophisticated customers. But my most technical customers really appreciate this, because of the way Infinidat manages itself and provides the tools saying, just for example, the host tools, right? It does it in the way that they do it, so they trust it, so that they can focus on the more important tasks, rather than the tier and feeding other storage environment. >> Yeah, thank you and then when you talk to CSOs, you ask them what's the number one problem, they'll tell you lack of talent and you just nailed it. You've got on average 27 different tools, new tools coming out every day, you're getting billion dollar, VC investments and more and more companies are getting into it. It just adds to that confusion. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about, specifically InfiniGuard, how it fits into your stack like where and how you're applying it? Maybe you could talk about some specific use cases. >> Oh yeah definitely, you know we have customers in pretty much every vertical, that we're supporting their stores environments and Infinidat plays and all of those verticals with all of our customers. One in particular a healthcare account, one of our very first Infinidat customers and over the years, is become the de facto standard, stores platform that they have. And they also now have InfiniGuard as the backup target for commovault. And this is one of those examples of the very technical discerning customer, that really demands excellence, right? So they love, you know, the three controller setup versus a dual controller set up, they love the availability and the resiliency, but then when it comes to the cybersecurity, before they moved on to this platform, they did have some ransomware attacks and they did have to pay out and it was very public. And, you know, since they've gone onto this platform, they feel much more comfortable. >> Excellent. So Eric, I want to bring you in. So let's talk through some of the options that customers have. You and I were talking earlier about, you know, the local air gap, what is that? You know, the logical air gap if you will and then the physical labor, what patterns are you seeing with customers to really try to protect themselves against some of this ransomware? How are they approaching it? >> Well, first of all, obviously, we with the InfiniGuard, has a purpose built backup appliance can work with all the various backup vendors. But because backup, is one of the first things these sophisticated ransomware, or malware it entity is going to attack. right? Otherwise the CIO will just call up say, hey, do we have a good backup? Let's recover from that. So secondary storage, AK their backup estate, is exactly the first thing they're going to target. And they do it certain viciously of course. So what are the key things we do, is we allow them to take those backup datasets, commvault for example and in Stan's example, or Vain or veritas or IBM Spectrum Protector, many other packages, even directly with databases like with Oracle Armin and allow them to create a mutable snapshots. Can't delete them, can't change them, can alter them. And then we air gap them locally, from the management framework. So in an InfiniGuard, we have a technology known as our day-to-day dupe engines ODDES. Those are really the management scanner for the entire solution. So when we create an immutable snapshots, we create a logical air gap, with ODDES, cannot alter the immutability characteristics, they cannot shorten them, they can not lengthen them, in short we take that management scheme away and create this separation. But we also allow them to replicate those backup datasets to a remote InfiniGuard box. You would set up the exact same parameters, I want to make an immutable snap every day, every 12 hours, every six hours and then you've got the duplicate. Remember the average length, from breach to closure on a cyber attack is 287 days. So once the attack starts, you don't know until they ask you for the ransom, it could be going on for 50 days, a hundred days, 150 days. And it's all done, if you will on the download, hidden. So if by the way, you happen to have a data center fire, or you happen to have a tornado or an earthquake, or some other natural disaster, you still want that data replicated to a secondary site, but then you still want the capability of the cyber resilience, as Stan pointed out. So you can do that. We can create a then a isolated fence network and we can do that on one InfiniGarden. Most of our competitors require two data protection appliances and it's public it's right on their websites. So we save you on some CapEx there and then we can do this near instantaneous recovery. And that's not just of the dataset. Some of the cyber reasons, technology you'll see out there, including on primary storage, only recovers the dataset. We can recover the entire backup data set and all the surrounding environment. So to second that Vain or Veritas, IBM spectrum protect commvault, backup is available. The backup admins or the storage admins, could immediately restored, it's ready to go. And we can do that in 15 to 30 minutes. Now that is being fast to react to a problem. >> So thank you for that. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about the best practice Eric was just sharing, the local air gap and then the secondary, is that really in the case of a disaster, or is it also to isolate the network? What are you seeing as the gold standard that customers are applying with your advice? >> Yeah, definitely the gold standard would be three sites. We do have a lot of our customers. The one healthcare customer in particular is splits it between two sides and they are actually working with us right now to architect the third site. Just for that fact, we are down in Texas, hurricanes can come in 60, 70, 80 miles on in land. And then there's, you know, hurricane Harvey, right with all the flooding and stuff like that. So they do want to set up a third side. I think that gives them the peace of mind. And you know the whole thing about it is right. You know, having an environment like this means the CSO and his team can focus on preventing attacks, while they're very confident that their infrastructure team, can handle anything that slips by them. >> Okay, great. Thank you. We're about out of time but Eric, I wonder if you could kind of bring us home, give us a summary of, how you see InfiniGuard impacting customers, you know where's that value that business case for them. I wonder if you could just tie that note for us. >> Sure. We want to make sure that we tie everything back, normally technical value, as Stan very eloquently did with several different customers, but what we can do from a business value perspective. So as an example, one of our infiniGuard customers, is a global financial services company and they were using a solution from a different purpose-built backup appliance provider. They switched to us, not only they're able to increase the number of daily backups, from 30,000 to 90,000. So they get better data protection, but on top of that, they cut 40% of their costs. So you want to make sure that while you're doing this, you're doing things like consolidation. One of our other customers, which is in EMEA, in the European area, they had 14 purpose-built backup appliances, seven in one data center and set seven and a second data center. Now they've got two, one in one data center, one of the other, they of course do the local backups right then and there. And then they replicate, from one data center to the other data center. As both data centers are both active data centers, but differ for the other data center. So from their perspective, dramatic reduction of OPEX and CapEx, 14 physical boxes down to two. And of course the associated management of both the manpower side, but why I love to call the watch slots, power and floor. All of those things that go into an OPEX budget, they were cut dramatically, 'cause there's only two systems now, to power cool, et cetera et cetera. Floor space, Rackspace from 14. So wow, did they save money. So I think, it's not only providing that data protection and cyber resilience technology, but doing it in a cost-effective way. And as Stan pointed out, in a highly automated way, that cuts back on the manpower they need to manage these systems, because they're overworked and they need to focus on as Stan pointed out, their AI infrastructure, where they're doing for AI applications, don't have time to deal with it. So the more we automate, the better it is for them and the easier it is for everyone from the end-user perspective, as well as up in through their entire IT chain of command. >> Okay, if you want more information, you can go to infinidatguard.com or it's markiisis.com and check it out, learn about their full stack solution. A little bit about AI. Gentlemen, thanks so much for the conversation today, great to have you. >> Thank you, Dave. Now in a moment, I'm going to have some closing thoughts on the market and what we heard today. Thank you for watching the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(gentle music) >> High profile cyber attacks like the SolarWinds hack, the JBS meat and the Florida municipality breach, have heightened awareness of how exposed, critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4j vulnerability, that's yet another example, of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt, in an effort to hold companies hostage, in a ransomware attack. Now in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities, and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, the Cube is hosting this special presentation InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime Solutions. And we're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wysocki who is the president of Mark III Systems who is either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to the Cube, hello, Eric. >> Great, Dave, thank you very much, always love talking to you and the Cube, about leading edge technology solutions for end users. >> Alright let's do it. So, first we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat. New CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing obviously, Phil Bullinger is really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision, and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat, you just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us, and give us the business update? >> Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. What a very, very strong year. What a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68%. And over 25% of the fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our InfiniBox, or InfiniBox SSA, all flash array, or our Infiniguard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today, on February 9th. >> Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th, and why it's important. >> Well, what we've done is we've got a high end enterprise purpose-built backup appliance, the InfiniGuard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets, of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots, to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup dataset could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then, on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster, for a traditional backup workload. >> So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe, and specifically, Eric I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions, don't make me a liar, I had said, you guys always kind of take nonconventional approaches so tell us, add a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? >> Sure, well Infinisafe incorporates as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, the immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots can not be deleted, they cannot be altered, you cannot accelerate the rate, you can set the rate of immutable stuff, do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So the inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data dedupe appliance, and that data dedupe engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology, to that back up data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE has kind of access of giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE, and of course the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology, you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A, to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot, and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose, and then of course it'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So, if the Cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up, off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover, a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fence network in which to perform that forensic analysis, to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single InfiniBox. Some of our competitors, right on their websites say, you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances, to do cyber resilience. Meaning, twice the CapEx and twice the OpEx, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then lastly is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time, the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their Commvault, their Veeam, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, or whatever their backup software is, to do recovery from the InfiniGuard box, back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original dataset with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at, whether it be purpose-built backup competitors, or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery, and the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment. We are ready to go, and the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, Veeam or Veritas, they could immediately start the backup, as soon as we did our recovery, which again, takes between 15 and 30 minutes, independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes, it could be a petabyte, it could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course, the backup admin can restore from that backup dataset. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. >> Whilst the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like the bank vault, because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus that's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good. But there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? >> Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour, now we're 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster. So that of course minimizes the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient, from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers, and primary storage. >> So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion. The impact that InfiniGuard, this announcement, that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. >> Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer, in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEX, compared to the previous vendor that they had. And, they used to be able to do 30,000 backup per day, now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of InfiniGuard, not the version we just announced on the 9th. One of our other customers, which is in AMEA and they happened to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from the other vendor, and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one, and seven in data center two. With InfiniGuard, they've got one in data center one, and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures, where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now, they've had zero recovers, zero recovery failures, whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So, one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that probably talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again were able to take those two systems out, and use one InfiniGuard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure, two going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one InfiniGuard versus two of the other guys appliances. Those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space, and one a global fortune 500 financial services company. Just some real world examples. And all those by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe, and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of InfiniGuard on February 9th. >> So like I'm just kind of sketching out the business case, you know, put my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs cause you're consolidating, so that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I could do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time, so that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere, recovery, you know, is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery, all this lowers my risk, and then I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss, and then what that means to my business. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it be your manufacturing system, every time you turn on that backup, to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real-world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify. But you are taking the impact of backup, and basically reducing it, if you will shrinking the backup window, so their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup while they're still trying to run that SAP, that Oracle or that SQL workload. >> And you're not a backup software vendor, so I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular, you know. >> Absolutely, so Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned, as you were talking about the end-users, they use two different backup packages, two of 'em. So, two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So, we're very flexible, the user picks what they want from a backup software perspective, and we can work with anything. So, whatever they want to use, is fine with us. We integrate with all of them, we have integration, for example, also with VMware, for vVols and other aspects in container integration, so you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, InfiniGuard, or what we do with the InfiniBox, we always make sure we integrate with the surrounding environment. 'Cause storage is not an island, storage needs to exist in your data center, or your hybrid cloud data center, or what you're doing for containers. So we make sure we have integration with our InfiniBox, our InfiniBox SSA, all flash. And of course the product we're enhancing today, the InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions, they're busy. (laughs) They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. >> Great, thank you very much Dave. Always love talking to the Cube. >> Okay, in a moment Stan Wysocki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's going to join us for a drill down on how InfiniGuard is impacting customers. You're watching the Cube, your global leader, in enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to theCUBEs continuing coverage of AWS re:invent 2021 live in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, with David Nicholson. We are running one of the industry's largest, most important hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its enormous ecosystem of partners. We've been talking yesterday and today about the next decade and cloud innovation. We're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Alan Henson, the Vice President of Pariveda Solutions. Welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So talk to us about what's going on at Pariveda. What are some of the things that you're focused on in the energy space? >> So for us, specifically, we're looking at energy as it's redefining itself, right? It's no longer just oil and gas. It's no longer just coal. It's renewable energies, it's carbon capture, it's retail energy, it's power generation. We're trying to understand as this energy industry redefines itself, how companies are starting to participate in there and how technologies are really helping them as they redefine their business models and go through their digital transformations. >> I was doing some reading that Amazon is already the largest purchaser of renewable energy in the world and will be 100% renewable energy by 2025. Talk to me about the partnership with AWS. >> So our partnership goes back quite a while. We were one of their early partners. We saw the early potential of AWS, jumped in both feet in the deep end, and we've had a wonderful partnership ever since. More recently over the last couple of three years, as they've really matured their definition of energy, we've been right there with them, partnering with them on a number of different projects across multiple industries and really getting excited about how they define their journey going forward in the energy industry. >> We're in such a state of flux right now. We have been for quite a while, but talk about the energy transition. What is that? Why now? Are we all ready? >> Ooh, great question. So the energy transition is really about us as a society, looking to new sources of energy over fossil fuels. 83% of the world's energy today comes from fossil fuels, about 30% from coal, a little over 50% from oil and gas itself. We as a world are looking at this as this is energy that can't continue to be our primary source. It has been a pivot-able source of energy getting us here. It is cheap, it is reliable, it is abundant. It's very good at what it does today. However, it's causing harm. So we need to address that. So what we're doing looking forward is helping companies understand what does it mean to be net zero? What does it mean to monitor and capture your carbon? What does it mean to transition your business model from a pure oil and gas play to one that's looking at new energies like carbon capture, like wind, like solar. So we're helping all of these companies go through that journey as they figure out those next steps. >> So where does Pariveda come into the picture? Take this down to the level of an engagement with an energy company. Who are the people that you parachute in? >> Sure. >> To engage with the customer? Well let's talk about oil and gas first. The most near-term best solution that we're seeing is really about operational excellence. How can I better run my business so I reduce my footprint? Am I having better maintenance to reduce accidental spills? Am I controlling my unexpected emissions, like flaring? How can I use technology to help me run my business better? Then we have companies in the retail energy, who are looking at their customer base who are purchasing large amounts of energy, who they themselves are striving to be net zero by 2050, 2060 and creating solutions for them so they can begin to capture their carbon solutions. So we typically parachute in a couple of different types of groups. Pariveda is both an advisory services firm and a technology services firm. So based upon where a company is in their journey, we may start more in the strategy space, working with the C-Suite. What does it mean to build and structure an organization to strategically go after this new energy space or perhaps they're focusing more on operational excellence. They're trying to figure out how to leverage technology and process, to run their business better, more cost effectively. More importantly, more ESG friendly. >> ESG is a big buzzword these days. You were talking about conversations at the C-Suite level? Has it always been there or is that something that with climate change and all the things going on, you think of, you know, Hurricane Ida, the drought in California and the fires, the flooding in Washington, is that something that is now more of a focus of the C-suite level? >> I think it has to be. Global warming first became mainstream back in the seventies, when we first started realizing there was going to be an impact from our use of fossil fuels. Originally, it wasn't quite sure the scientific data wasn't there necessarily to support it. But now we're starting to see that there is a climate change. Whether or not it's caused by fossil fuels is a debate for another day. But we are starting to see that. As a result, we're also starting to see a lot of pressures coming from various different areas of our world, the financial industry, wanting to become a lot more transparent about their investment holdings. Which means they're looking at their portfolio and choosing whether or not to put investment into capital projects, which is the heart of oil and gas companies. We're seeing social pressers, not just with campaigns and protests, but where people are choosing to work, the products they're choosing to buy, the brand that they're using to associate their identity. And that's also creating pressures for the C-Suite to start to pay attention because that impacts their whole pipeline of talent. So I think we're starting to see that because of those impacts becoming much more far reaching than just some scientific publications. >> Well, the focus on people is critical. You know, we talk about often people process technology, but the people focus is critical, especially since this has such, from an optics perspective, global visibility. >> Yes, people is critically important, not just from a talent acquisition, but also from a talent development perspective. These organizations are going to be going through some pretty dramatic changes. They're going to be leveraging technology they're already familiar with, perhaps some processes they're already familiar with, but they're ultimately moving into new industries, new competitive markets. So you need to not only be able to recruit the top talent by promoting an image that people can align to, but also be able to build that talent internally so that you can make them effective as you go through these business model transformations. >> You know, there's been a theme that we've seen just in the first full day today here at AWS re:invent. And that theme is that the AWS ecosystem is thriving and critical to the success of what AWS is developing. You've given a great example of an organization, your organization, that connects or bridges the divide between technology and the value that technology can bring. You said it at the outset, you're not going in and talking technology first, typically. It's, let's talk about strategy. Let's talk about people and culture, and then let's find the tools that are best suited to leverage to achieve the goals. Because you started talking about energy, and it's like, well, so which compute instance do I need for that, exactly? Somebody has to connect those dots. >> Absolutely. That's what I love about AWS. They offer a broad suite of services in their overall cloud infrastructure that allow you to start in multiple areas. Let's start with one of the very first projects that we got into that really focused on operational excellence and improving how the organization ran its business. This is a public reference, I'm going to go ahead and say it, we did work with AWS, partnering with them at ExxonMobil to help them redefine how they collaborate with their engineering procurement and construction companies. So this was a cloud platform that allowed them to change the way they interface with those vendors as they took on these large capital projects. We were able to take time out of the system, help that organization run more profitably, which allows them to invest in that new energy technology. Then we moved to retail energy where we've been looking at a large adoption in IOT technologies. That IOT capability of AWS allows organizations to monitor their infrastructure, understand how their equipment is performing, where carbon emissions might be occurring, or other greenhouse gases might be occurring, and bringing that in. Then you bring in the AL and ML stack capabilities. One of the leading ways of detecting emissions right now is image machine learning around emissions, looking at satellite photos to see if there are changes in the atmosphere where there might be a methane leak. So all these technologies work together to help us derive better answers for how to be a better energy company and how to be a more environmentally friendly corporation. >> What's the customer flywheel like? You know, often we talk with AWS there, they talk about really-- we start backwards. We start from the customer, we work forward, our customer obsession. We saw the NASCAR slides this morning of all the logos and I'm sure many more that didn't fit. But talk to me about the alignment between Pariveda, your focus on the customers, how they help you guys innovate and create new solutions, I imagine similar culturally to AWS. >> That's one of my favorite aspects about being a premier partner with AWS is the cultural alignment. We have a process that we call right to left faking. It's beginning with business outcomes before we ever look at the technology, ever start to design the solution, ever start to build that solution. Are we meeting the end user's needs, and where that culturally aligns with AWS is it aligns with their working backwards process where they sit with their primary end users and pick some point in the future and say, if I were to do a press release today, announcing the solution that we just built, what would it say? And then if I had questions, I wanted people to be able to find answers to the frequently asked questions. What would be in those frequently asked questions and what would those answers look like? So those two approaches to starting with the right to left business outcome focus helps us begin with the most important thing that we call "jobs to be done". So we're not working on a symptom, we're working on the actual problem. And that's where we've really aligned with AWS and our cultures have helped us focus on the most critical issues at hand. >> So we've talked a lot about energy and your affiliation with AWS in these efforts, but tell us a little more about Pariveda in terms of in a more broad sense. What's the history? >> Sure. >> Give us the pitch. >> Yeah, absolutely. Pariveda has been around for over 18 years. It started with a vision that our mission should be about developing people to their fullest potential. Start there and everything else will come. Since then, we've developed into both a strategy services firm and a technology services firm where we want to bring together what we consider to be the three primary components of an enterprise architecture. Basically business, product, technology, all wrapped around strategy. And so we want to focus on those areas when we use those to help deliver projects. So whether it's technology, whether we're helping travel and hospitality companies that you probably would recognize, or we're working with sports leagues to help rebrand, we're working in the agricultural industry to change how they capture data from equipment in the field. To working in the medical industry, redefining the way that doctors work with your patients by capturing your entire conversation for them. So they're spending less time translating their notes and instead evaluating their notes to ensure top quality health care, to working energy. So we're based in North America. We have ten offices in the U.S., one in Toronto. We're about 750 strong. And we are really focused on deliberate growth versus just exponential growth. >> Well the outcomes focus is absolutely critical, as you talked about earlier. For every organization, you know, one of the things that we learned during the last 22 months is that real-time data access is no longer a "nice to have". It's absolutely essential. But we're also seeing every company's becoming a data company, but they have to learn how. How can we work with technology partners like AWS, like Pariveda, to be able to capture the value that it -- unlock it quickly so that we can iterate and be able to deliver, especially in this interesting climate that we're in and pivot and pivot and pivot. So that outcomes focus that Pariveda has, is really critical for enabling businesses in every industry to be able to survive and thrive these days. >> You said it well, we agree with you completely. What we've designed at Pariveda is what we call the modern data enterprise, where it looks at the holistic vision of becoming a data company, everything from governance to technology choices, to how I structure my organization to have the right roles, the right leadership, the right executive support, and thinking about the full picture of delivering a successful data platform so that we can really focus on something that one of my mentees calls "data liquidity". It's the ability of a company to convert their data to value as quickly as possible. In order to do that, you have to come at it from multiple angles. >> You do, and that's a competitive differentiator these days. >> Yes, absolutely. It's more than just "Let me bring you a data link and hookup some data pipelines". Again, if that's where you start, you're probably not starting in the right place. We want to start with the end users. What questions are they answering? What jobs they trying to get done? And then moving back and say, well, what data do we need? And what form do we need and how do we present it to them so they can do their job extremely well and create their own competitive differentiation. >> Right. That's really critical. Last question is -- we have just a few seconds left here, Alan -- is so much announced today alone. This is, like David said, the first full day of coverage at re:invent, but from a visionary perspective, what are some of the things that we can expect to see from Pariveda as we finish the year 2021 and enter 2022? >> So let me speak a little selfishly to the energy. What you are going to see is us as an organization are going to work side-by-side with AWS energy to help shape the picture. What does it mean to be an energy company? As these industries start to converge, we're going to build more holistic platforms and more holistic approaches so organizations can figure out "How do I still do the business I need to do today to fund the business I need to so tomorrow?" And you're going to start to see us bringing better messaging to that on both strategy, technology, and product approaches. >> Awesome. Alan, thank you for joining David and me, talking about what's going on with power data, awesome approach. I love the people focus. Great stuff. >> Lisa, David, thank you for having me. >> Oh, our pleasure. For David Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Okay. We're here with Vasanth Kumar who's the Principal Solutions Architect for MongoDB. Vasanth, welcome to "theCube." >> Thanks Dave. >> Hey, listen, I feel like you were born to be an architect in technology. I mean, you've worked for big SIs, you've worked with many customers, you have experience in financial services and banking. Tell us, the audience, a little bit more about yourself, and what you're up to these days. >> Yeah. Hi, thanks for the for inviting me for this discussion. I'm based out of Bangalore, India, having around 18 years experience in IT industry, building enterprise products for different domains, verticals, finance built and enterprise banking applications, IOT platforms, digital experience solutions. Now being with MongoDB nearly two years, been working in a partner team as a principal solutions architect, especially working with ISBs to build the best practices of handling the data and embed the right database as part of their product. I also worked with technology partners to integrate the compatible technology compliance with MongoDB. And also worked with the private cloud providers to provide a database as a service. >> Got it. So, you know, I have to Vasanth, I think Mongo, you kind of nailed it. They were early on with the trends of managing unstructured data, making it really simple. There was always a developer appeal, which has lasted and then doing so with an architecture that scales out, and back in the early days when Mongo was founded, I remember those days, I mean, digital transformation, wasn't a thing, it wasn't a buzz word, but it just so happens that Mongo's approach, it dovetails very nicely with a digital business. So I wonder if you could talk about that, talk about the fit and how MongoDB thinks about accelerating digital transformation and why you're different from like a traditional RDBMS. >> Sure, exactly, yeah. You had a right understanding, let me elaborate it. So we all know that the customer expectation changes day by day, because of the business agility functionality changes, how they want to experience the applications, or in apps that changes okay. And obviously this yields to the agility of the information which transforms between the multiple systems or layers. And to achieve this, obviously the way of architecting or developing the product as completely a different shift, might be moving from the monolith to microservices or event-based architecture and so on. And obviously the database has to be opt for these environment to adopt these changes, to adopt the scale of load and the other thing. Okay. And also like we see that the common, the protocol for the information exchange is JSON, and something like you, you adopt it. The database adopts it natively to that is a perfect fit. Okay. So that's where the MongoDB fits perfectly for billing or transforming the modern applications, because it's a general purpose database which accepts the JSON as a payload and stores it in a BSON format. You don't need to be, suppose like to develop any particular application or to transfer an existing application, typically they see the what is the effort required and how much, what is the cost involved in it, and how quickly I can do that. That's main important thing without disturbing the functionality here where, since it is a multimodal database in a JSON format, you don't easily build an application. Okay? Don't need a lot of transformation in case of an RDBMS, you get the JSON payload, you transform into a tabular structure or a different format, and then probably you build an ORM layer and then map it and save it. There are lot of work involved in it. There are a lot of components need to be written in between. But in case of MongoDB, what they can do is you get the information from the multiple sources. And as is, you can put it in a DB based on where, or you can transform it based on the access patterns. And then you can store it quickly. >> Dave: Got it. And I tell Dave, because today you haven't context data, which has a selected set of information. Probably tomorrow the particular customer has more information to put it. So how do you capture that? In case of an RDBMS, you need to change the schema. Once you scheme change the schema, your application breaks down. But here it magically adopts it. Like you pass the extra information, it's open for extension. It adopts it easily. You don't need to redeploy or change the schema or do something like that. >> Right. That's the genius of Mongo. And then of course, you know, in the early days people say, oh, you know, Mongo, it won't scale. And then of course we, through the cloud. And I follow very closely Atlas. I look at the numbers every quarter. I mean, overall cloud adoption is increasing like crazy, you know, our Wiki Bon analyst team. We got the big four cloud vendors just in IAS growing beyond a 115 billion this year. That's 35% on top of, you know, 80-90 billion last year. So talk more about how MongoDB fits with the cloud and how it helps with the whole migration story. 'Cause you're killing it in that space. >> Yeah. Sure. Just to add one more point on the previous question. So for continuously, for past four to five years, we have been the number one in the wanted database. >> Dave: Right Okay. That that's how like the popularity is getting done. That's how the adoption has happened. >> Dave: Right. >> I'm coming back to your question- >> Yeah let's talk about the cloud and database as a service, you guys actually have packaged that very nicely I have to say. >> Yeah. So we have spent lot of effort and time in developing Atlas, our managed database as a service, which typically gives the customer the way of just concentrating on their application rather than maintaining and managing the whole set of database or how to scale infrastructure. All those things on work is taken care. You don't need to be an expert of DB, like when you are using an Atlas. So we provide the managed database in three major cloud providers, AWS, GCP, and Azure, and also it's a purely a multicloud, you know, like you can have a primary in AWS and you have the replicated nodes in GCP or Azure. It's a purely multicloud. So that like, you don't have a cloud blocking. You feel that, okay, your business is, I mean, if this is the right for your business you are choosing the model, you think that I need to move to GCP. You don't need to bother, you easily migrate this to GCP. Okay. No vendor lock in, no cloud lock in this particular- >> So Vasanth, maybe you could talk a little bit more about Atlas and some of the differentiable features and things that you can do with Atlas that maybe people don't know about. >> Yeah, sure Dave like, Atlas is not just a manage database as a service, you know, like it's a complete data platform and it provides many features. Like for example, you build an application and probably down the line of three years, the data which you captured three years back might be an old data. Like how do you do it? Like there's no need for you to manually purge or do thing. Like we do have an online archival where you configure the data. So that like the data, which is older than two years, just purge it. So automatically this is taken care. So that like you have hot data kept in Atlas cluster and the cold data moved up to an ARKit. And also like we have a data lake where you can run a federated queries . For example, you've done an archival, but what if people want to access the data? So with data lake, what it can do is, on a single connection, you can fire a- you can run a federated queries both on the active and the archival data. That's the beauty, like you archive the data, but still you can able to query it. And we do also have a charts where like, you can build in visualization on top of the data, what you have captured. You can build in graphs or you can build in graphs and also embed these graphs as part of your application, or you can collaborate to the customers, to the CXOs and other theme. >> Dave: Got it. >> It's a complete data platform. >> Okay. Well, speaking of data platform, let's talk about Io-Tahoe's data RPA platform, and coupling that with Mongo DB. So maybe you could help us understand how you're helping with process automation, which is a very hot topic and just this whole notion of a modern application development. >> Sure. See, the process automation is more with respect to the data and how you manage this data and what to derive and build a business process on top of it. I see there are two parts into it. Like one is the source of data. How do you identify, how do you discover the data? How do you enrich the context or transform it, give a business context to it. And then you build a business rules or act on it, and then you store the data or you derive the insights or enrich it and store it into DB. The first part is completely taken by Io-Tahoe, where you can tag the data for the multiple data sources. For example, if we take an customer 360 view, you can grab the data from multiple data sources using Io-Tahoe and you discover this data, you can tag it, you can label it and you build a view of the complete customer context, and use a realm web book and then the data is ingested back to Mongo. So that's all like more sort of like server-less fashion. You can build this particular customer 360 view for example. And just to talk about the realm I spoke, right? The realm web book, realm is a backend APA that you can create on top of the data on Mongo cluster, which is available in addclass. Okay. Then once you run, the APS are ready. Data as a service, you build it as a data as a service, and you fully secure APIs, which are available. These APS can be integrated within a mobile app or an web application to build in a built in modern application. But what left out is like, just build a UI artifacts and integrate these APIs. >> Yeah, I mean we live in this API economy companies. People throw that out as sort of a buzz phrase, but Mongo lives that. I mean, that's why developers really like the Mongo. So what's your take on DevOps? Maybe you could talk a little bit about, you know, your perspective there, how you help Devs and data engineers build faster pipelines. >> Yeah, sure. Like, okay, this is the most favorite topic. Like, no, and it's a buzzword along, like all the DevOps moving out from the traditional deployment, what I learned online. So like we do support like the deployment automation in multiple ways okay, and also provide the diagnostic under the hood. We have two options in Mongo DB. One is an enterprise option, which is more on the on-prem's version. And Atlas is more with respect to the cloud one manage database service. Okay. In case of an enterprise advanced, like we do have an Ops manager and the Kubernetes operator, like a Ops manager will manage all sort of deployment automation. Upgrades, provides your diagnostics, both with respect to the hardwares, and also with respect to the MongoDB gives you a profiling, slow running queries and what you can get a context of what's working on the data using that. I'm using an enterprise operator. You can integrate with existing Kubernetes cluster, either in a different namespace on an existing namespace. And orchestrate the deployment. And in case of Atlas, we do have an Atlas-Kubernetes operator, which helps you to integrate your Kubernetes operator. And you don't need to leave your Kubernetes. And also we have worked with the cloud providers. For example, we have we haven't cloud formation templates where you can just in one click, you can just roll out an Atlas cluster with a complete platform. So that's one, like we are continuously working, evolving on the DevOps site to roll out the might be a helm chart, or we do have an operator, which has a standard (indistinct) for different types of deployments. >> You know, some really important themes here. Obviously, anytime you talk about Mongo, simplicity comes in, automation, you know, that big, big push that Io-Tahoe was making. What you said about data context was interesting because a lot of data systems, organizations, they lack context and context is very important. So auto classification and things like that. And the other thing you said about federated queries I think fits very well into the trend toward decentralized data architecture. So very important there. And of course, hybridisity. I call it hybridisity. On-prem, cloud, abstracting that complexity away and allowing people to really focus on their digital transformations. I tell ya, Vasanth, it's great stuff. It's always a pleasure chatting with Io-Tahoe partners, and really getting into the tech with folks like yourself. So thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> Thanks. Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having a nice discussion with you. >> Okay. Stay right there. We've got one more quick session that you don't want to miss.

>> Hello. My name is Ron Kafka, and I'm the senior director for Partner Scale Initiatives for HBE Ezmeral. Thanks for joining us today at Analytics Unleashed. By now, you've heard a lot about the Ezmeral portfolio and how it can help you accomplish objectives around big data analytics and containerization. I want to shift gears a bit and then discuss our Ezmeral Technology Partner Program. I've got two great guest speakers here with me today. And together, We're going to discuss how jointly we are solving data analytic challenges for our customers. Before I introduce them, I want to take a minute to talk to provide a little bit more insight into our ecosystem program. We've created a program with a realization based on customer feedback that even the most mature organizations are struggling with their data-driven transformation efforts. It turns out this is largely due to the pace of innovation with application vendors or ICS supporting data science and advanced analytic workloads. Their advancements are simply outpacing organization's ability to move workloads into production rapidly. Bottom line, organizations want a unified experience across environments where their entire application portfolio in essence provide a comprehensive application stack and not piece parts. So, let's talk about how our ecosystem program helps solve for this. For starters, we were leveraging HPEs long track record of forging technology partnerships and it created a best in class ISB partner program specific for the Ezmeral portfolio. We were doing this by developing an open concept marketplace where customers and partners can explore, learn, engage and collaborate with our strategic technology partners. This enables our customers to adopt, deploy validated applications from industry leading software vendors on HPE Ezmeral with a high degree of confidence. Also, it provides a very deep bench of leading ISVs for other groups inside of HPE to leverage for their solutioning efforts. Speaking of industry leading ISV, it's about time and introduce you to two of those industry leaders right now. Let me welcome Daniel Hladky from Dataiku, and Omri Geller from Run:AI. So I'd like to introduce Daniel Hladky. Daniel is with Dataiku. He's a great partner for HPE. Daniel, welcome. >> Thank you for having me here. >> That's great. Hey, would you mind just talking a bit about how your partnership journey has been with HPE? >> Yes, pleasure. So the journey started about five years ago and in 2018 we signed a worldwide reseller agreement with HPE. And in 2020, we actually started to work jointly on the integration between the Dataiku Data Science Studio called DSS and integrated that with the Ezmeral Container platform, and was a great success. And it was on behalf of some clear customer projects. >> It's been a long partnership journey with you for sure with HPE. And we welcome your partnership extremely well. Just a brief question about the Container Platform and really what that's meant for Dataiku. >> Yes, Ron. Thanks. So, basically I'd like the quote here Florian Douetteau, which is the CEO of Dataiku, who said that the combination of Dataiku with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform will help the customers to successfully scale and put machine learning projects into production. And this basically is going to deliver real impact for their business. So, the combination of the two of us is a great success. >> That's great. Can you talk about what Dataiku is doing and how HPE Ezmeral Container Platform fits in a solution offering a bit more? >> Great. So basically Dataiku DSS is our product which is a end to end data science platform, and basically brings value to the project of customers on their past enterprise AI. In simple ways, we can say it could be as simple as building data pipelines, but it could be also very complex by having machine and deep learning models at scale. So the fast track to value is by having collaboration, orchestration online technologies and the models in production. So, all of that is part of the Data Science Studio and Ezmeral fits perfectly into the part where we design and then basically put at scale those project and put it into product. >> That's perfect. Can you be a bit more specific about how you see HPE and Dataiku really tightening up a customer outcome and value proposition? >> Yes. So what we see is also the challenge of the market that probably about 80% of the use cases really never make it to production. And this is of course a big challenge and we need to change that. And I think the combination of the two of us is actually addressing exactly this need. What we can say is part of the MLOps approach, Dataiku and the Ezmeral Container Platform will provide a frictionless approach, which means without scripting and coding, customers can put all those projects into the productive environment and don't have to worry any more and be more business oriented. >> That's great. So you mentioned you're seeing customers be a lot more mature with their AI workloads and deployment. What do you suggest for the other customers out there that are just starting this journey or just thinking about how to get started? >> Yeah. That's a very good question, Ron. So what we see there is actually the challenge that people need to go on a pass of maturity. And this starts with a simple data pipelines, et cetera, and then basically move up the ladder and basically build large complex project. And here I see a very interesting offer coming now from HPE which is called D3S, which is the data science startup pack. That's something I discussed together with HPE back in early 2020. And basically, it solves the three stages, which is explore, experiment and evolve and builds quickly MVPs for the customers. By doing so, basically you addressed business objectives, lay out in the proper architecture and also setting up the proper organization around it. So, this is a great combination by HPE and Dataiku through the D3S. >> And it's a perfect example of what I mentioned earlier about leveraging the ecosystem program that we built to do deeper solutioning efforts inside of HPE in this case with our AI business unit. So, congratulations on that and thanks for joining us today. I'm going to shift gears. I'm going to bring in Omri Geller from Run:AI. Omri, welcome. It's great to have you. You guys are killing it out there in the market today. And I just thought we could spend a few minutes talking about what is so unique and differentiated from your offerings. >> Thank you, Ron. It's a pleasure to be here. Run:AI creates a virtualization and orchestration layer for AI infrastructure. We help organizations to gain visibility and control over their GPO resources and help them deliver AI solutions to market faster. And we do that by managing granular scheduling, prioritization, allocation of compute power, together with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform. >> That's great. And your partnership with HPE is a bit newer than Daniel's, right? Maybe about the last year or so we've been working together a lot more closely. Can you just talk about the HPE partnership, what it's meant for you and how do you see it impacting your business? >> Sure. First of all, Run:AI is excited to partner with HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and help customers manage appeals for their AI workloads. We chose HPE since HPE has years of experience partnering with AI use cases and outcomes with vendors who have strong footprint in this markets. HPE works with many partners that are complimentary for our use case such as Nvidia, and HPE Container Platform together with Run:AI and Nvidia deliver a world class solutions for AI accelerated workloads. And as you can understand, for AI speed is critical. Companies want to gather important AI initiatives into production as soon as they can. And the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, running IGP orchestration solution enables that by enabling dynamic provisioning of GPU so that resources can be easily shared, efficiently orchestrated and optimal used. >> That's great. And you talked a lot about the efficiency of the solution. What about from a customer perspective? What is the real benefit that our customers are going to be able to gain from an HPE and Run:AI offering? >> So first, it is important to understand how data scientists and AI researchers actually build solution. They do it by running experiments. And if a data scientist is able to run more experiments per given time, they will get to the solution faster. With HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, Run:AI and users such as data scientists can actually do that and seamlessly and efficiently consume large amounts of GPU resources, run more experiments or given time and therefore accelerate their research. Together, we actually saw a customer that is running almost 7,000 jobs in parallel over GPUs with efficient utilization of those GPUs. And by running more experiments, those customers can be much more effective and efficient when it comes to bringing solutions to market >> Couldn't agree more. And I think we're starting to see a lot of joint success together as we go out and talk to the story. Hey, I want to thank you both one last time for being here with me today. It was very enlightening for our team to have you as part of the program. And I'm excited to extend this customer value proposition out to the rest of our communities. With that, I'd like to close today's session. I appreciate everyone's time. And keep an eye out on our ISP marketplace for Ezmeral We're continuing to expand and add new capabilities and new partners to our marketplace. We're excited to do a lot of great things and help you guys all be successful. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you, Ron. >> What a great panel discussion. And these partners they really do have a good understanding of the possibilities, working on the platform, and I hope and expect we'll see this ecosystem continue to grow. That concludes the main program, which means you can now pick one of three live demos to attend and chat live with experts. Now those three include day in the life of IT Admin, day in the life of a data scientist, and even a day in the life of the HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric, where you can see the many ways the data fabric is used in your life today. Wish you could attend all three, no worries. The recordings will be available on demand for you and your teams. Moreover, the show doesn't stop here, HPE has a growing and thriving tech community, you should check it out. It's really a solid starting point for learning more, talking to smart people about great ideas and seeing how Ezmeral can be part of your own data journey. Again, thanks very much to all of you for joining, until next time, keep unleashing the power of your data.

>> Hello. My name is Ron Kafka, and I'm the senior director for Partner Scale Initiatives for HBE Ezmeral. Thanks for joining us today at Analytics Unleashed. By now, you've heard a lot about the Ezmeral portfolio and how it can help you accomplish objectives around big data analytics and containerization. I want to shift gears a bit and then discuss our Ezmeral Technology Partner Program. I've got two great guest speakers here with me today. And together, We're going to discuss how jointly we are solving data analytic challenges for our customers. Before I introduce them, I want to take a minute to talk to provide a little bit more insight into our ecosystem program. We've created a program with a realization based on customer feedback that even the most mature organizations are struggling with their data-driven transformation efforts. It turns out this is largely due to the pace of innovation with application vendors or ICS supporting data science and advanced analytic workloads. Their advancements are simply outpacing organization's ability to move workloads into production rapidly. Bottom line, organizations want a unified experience across environments where their entire application portfolio in essence provide a comprehensive application stack and not piece parts. So, let's talk about how our ecosystem program helps solve for this. For starters, we were leveraging HPEs long track record of forging technology partnerships and it created a best in class ISB partner program specific for the Ezmeral portfolio. We were doing this by developing an open concept marketplace where customers and partners can explore, learn, engage and collaborate with our strategic technology partners. This enables our customers to adopt, deploy validated applications from industry leading software vendors on HPE Ezmeral with a high degree of confidence. Also, it provides a very deep bench of leading ISVs for other groups inside of HPE to leverage for their solutioning efforts. Speaking of industry leading ISV, it's about time and introduce you to two of those industry leaders right now. Let me welcome Daniel Hladky from Dataiku, and Omri Geller from Run:AI. So I'd like to introduce Daniel Hladky. Daniel is with Dataiku. He's a great partner for HPE. Daniel, welcome. >> Thank you for having me here. >> That's great. Hey, would you mind just talking a bit about how your partnership journey has been with HPE? >> Yes, pleasure. So the journey started about five years ago and in 2018 we signed a worldwide reseller agreement with HPE. And in 2020, we actually started to work jointly on the integration between the Dataiku Data Science Studio called DSS and integrated that with the Ezmeral Container platform, and was a great success. And it was on behalf of some clear customer projects. >> It's been a long partnership journey with you for sure with HPE. And we welcome your partnership extremely well. Just a brief question about the Container Platform and really what that's meant for Dataiku. >> Yes, Ron. Thanks. So, basically I like the quote here Florian Douetteau, which is the CEO of Dataiku, who said that the combination of Dataiku with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform will help the customers to successfully scale and put machine learning projects into production. And this basically is going to deliver real impact for their business. So, the combination of the two of us is a great success. >> That's great. Can you talk about what Dataiku is doing and how HPE Ezmeral Container Platform fits in a solution offering a bit more? >> Great. So basically Dataiku DSS is our product which is a end to end data science platform, and basically brings value to the project of customers on their past enterprise AI. In simple ways, we can say it could be as simple as building data pipelines, but it could be also very complex by having machine and deep learning models at scale. So the fast track to value is by having collaboration, orchestration online technologies and the models in production. So, all of that is part of the Data Science Studio and Ezmeral fits perfectly into the part where we design and then basically put at scale those project and put it into product. >> That's perfect. Can you be a bit more specific about how you see HPE and Dataiku really tightening up a customer outcome and value proposition? >> Yes. So what we see is also the challenge of the market that probably about 80% of the use cases really never make it to production. And this is of course a big challenge and we need to change that. And I think the combination of the two of us is actually addressing exactly this need. What we can say is part of the MLOps approach, Dataiku and the Ezmeral Container Platform will provide a frictionless approach, which means without scripting and coding, customers can put all those projects into the productive environment and don't have to worry any more and be more business oriented. >> That's great. So you mentioned you're seeing customers be a lot more mature with their AI workloads and deployment. What do you suggest for the other customers out there that are just starting this journey or just thinking about how to get started? >> Yeah. That's a very good question, Ron. So what we see there is actually the challenge that people need to go on a pass of maturity. And this starts with a simple data pipelines, et cetera, and then basically move up the ladder and basically build large complex project. And here I see a very interesting offer coming now from HPE which is called D3S, which is the data science startup pack. That's something I discussed together with HPE back in early 2020. And basically, it solves the three stages, which is explore, experiment and evolve and builds quickly MVPs for the customers. By doing so, basically you addressed business objectives, lay out in the proper architecture and also setting up the proper organization around it. So, this is a great combination by HPE and Dataiku through the D3S. >> And it's a perfect example of what I mentioned earlier about leveraging the ecosystem program that we built to do deeper solutioning efforts inside of HPE in this case with our AI business unit. So, congratulations on that and thanks for joining us today. I'm going to shift gears. I'm going to bring in Omri Geller from Run:AI. Omri, welcome. It's great to have you. You guys are killing it out there in the market today. And I just thought we could spend a few minutes talking about what is so unique and differentiated from your offerings. >> Thank you, Ron. It's a pleasure to be here. Run:AI creates a virtualization and orchestration layer for AI infrastructure. We help organizations to gain visibility and control over their GPO resources and help them deliver AI solutions to market faster. And we do that by managing granular scheduling, prioritization, allocation of compute power, together with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform. >> That's great. And your partnership with HPE is a bit newer than Daniel's, right? Maybe about the last year or so we've been working together a lot more closely. Can you just talk about the HPE partnership, what it's meant for you and how do you see it impacting your business? >> Sure. First of all, Run:AI is excited to partner with HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and help customers manage appeals for their AI workloads. We chose HPE since HPE has years of experience partnering with AI use cases and outcomes with vendors who have strong footprint in this markets. HPE works with many partners that are complimentary for our use case such as Nvidia, and HPE Ezmeral Container Platform together with Run:AI and Nvidia deliver a word about solution for AI accelerated workloads. And as you can understand, for AI speed is critical. Companies want to gather important AI initiatives into production as soon as they can. And the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, running IGP orchestration solution enables that by enabling dynamic provisioning of GPU so that resources can be easily shared, efficiently orchestrated and optimal used. >> That's great. And you talked a lot about the efficiency of the solution. What about from a customer perspective? What is the real benefit that our customers are going to be able to gain from an HPE and Run:AI offering? >> So first, it is important to understand how data scientists and AI researchers actually build solution. They do it by running experiments. And if a data scientist is able to run more experiments per given time, they will get to the solution faster. With HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, Run:AI and users such as data scientists can actually do that and seamlessly and efficiently consume large amounts of GPU resources, run more experiments or given time and therefore accelerate their research. Together, we actually saw a customer that is running almost 7,000 jobs in parallel over GPUs with efficient utilization of those GPUs. And by running more experiments, those customers can be much more effective and efficient when it comes to bringing solutions to market >> Couldn't agree more. And I think we're starting to see a lot of joint success together as we go out and talk to the story. Hey, I want to thank you both one last time for being here with me today. It was very enlightening for our team to have you as part of the program. And I'm excited to extend this customer value proposition out to the rest of our communities. With that, I'd like to close today's session. I appreciate everyone's time. And keep an eye out on our ISP marketplace for Ezmeral We're continuing to expand and add new capabilities and new partners to our marketplace. We're excited to do a lot of great things and help you guys all be successful. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you, Ron. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with our leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE and the special IBM Brocade panel. I'm Lisa Martin. And I'm having a great opportunity here to sit down for the next 20 minutes with three gentlemen please welcome Brian Sherman a distinguished engineer from IBM, Brian, great to have you joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> And Matt key here. Flash systems SME from IBM, Matt, happy Friday. >> Happy Friday, Lisa. Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. And AIG Customer solution here from Brocade is here. AJ welcome. >> Thanks for having me along. >> AJ we're going to stick with you, IBM and Brocade have had a very long you said about 22 year strategic partnership. There's some new news. And in terms of the evolution of that talk to us about what's going on with with Brocade IBM and what is new in the storage industry? >> Yeah, so the the newest thing for us at the moment is that IBM just in mid-October launched our Gen seven platforms. So this is think about the stresses that are going on in the IT environments. This is our attempt to keep pace with with the performance levels that the IBM teams are now putting into their storage environments the All-Flash Data Centers and the new technologies around non-volatile memory express. So that's really, what's driving this along with the desire to say, "You know what people aren't allowed "to be in the data center." And so if they can't be in the data center then the fabrics actually have to be able to figure out what's going on and basically provide a lot of the automation pieces. So something we're referring to as the autonomous SAM. >> And we're going to dig into NBME of our fabrics in a second but I do want to AJ continue with you in terms of industries, financial services, healthcare airlines there's the biggest users, biggest need. >> Pretty much across the board. So if you look at the global 2000 as an example, something on the order of about 96, 97% of the global 2000 make use of fiber channel environments and in portions of their world generally tends to be a lot of the high end financial guys, a lot of the pharmaceutical guys, the automotive, the telcos, pretty much if the data matters, and it's something that's critical whether we talk about payment card information or healthcare environments, data that absolutely has to be retained, has to get there, has to perform then it's this combination that we're bringing together today around the new storage elements and the functionalities they have there. And then our ability in the fabric. So the concept of a 64 gig environment to help basically not be the bottleneck in the application demands, 'cause one thing I can promise you after 40 years in this industry is the software guys always figure out how to all the performance that the hardware guys put on the shelf, right? Every single time. >> Well there's gauntlet thrown down there. Matt, let's go to you. I want to get IBM's perspective on this. Again, as we said, a 22 year strategic partnership, as we look at things like not being able to get into the data center during these unprecedented times and also the need to be able to remove some of those bottlenecks how does IBM view this? >> Yeah, totally. It's certainly a case of raising the bar, right? So we have to as a vendor continue to evolve in terms of performance, in terms of capacity, cost density, escalating simplicity, because it's not just a case of not be able to touch the rates, but there's fewer people not being able to adjust the rates, right? It's a case where our operational density continues to have to evolve being able to raise the bar on the network and be able to still saturate those line rates and be able to provide that simply a cost efficiency that gets us to a utilization that raises the bar from our per capita ratio from not just talking about 200, 300 terabytes per admin but going beyond the petabyte scale per admin. And we can't do that unless people have access to the data. And we have to provide the resiliency. We have to provide the simplicity of presentation and automation from our side. And then this collaboration that we do with our network brother like Brocade here continued to stay out of the discussion when it comes to talking about networks and who threw the ball next. So we truly appreciate this Gen seven launch that they're doing we're happy to come in and fill that pipe on the flash side for them. >> Excellent and Brian as a distinguished engineer and let me get your perspectives on the evolution of the technology over this 22 year partnership. >> Thanks Lisa. It certainly has been a longstanding, a great relationship, great partnership all the way from inventing joint things, to developing, to testing and deploying to different technologies through the course of time. And it's been one of those that where we are today, like AJ had talked about being able to sustain what the applications require today in this always on time type of environment. And as Matt said, bringing together the density and operational simplicity to make that happen 'cause we have to make it easier from the storage side for operations to be able to manage this volume of data that we have coming out and our due diligence is to be able to serve the data up as fast as we can and as resilient as we can. >> And so sticking with you, Brian that simplicity is key because as we know as we get more and more advances in technology the IT environment is only becoming more complex. So really truly enabling organizations in any industry to simplify is absolute table stakes. >> Yeah, it definitely is. And that's core to what we're focused on and how do we make the storage environment simple. It's been one those through the years and historically, we've had entry-level us and the industry as a whole, is that an entry-level product mid range level products, high-end level products. And earlier this year, we said enough, enough of that it's one product portfolio. So it's the same software stack it's just, okay. Small, medium and large in terms of the appliances that get delivered. Again, building on what Matt said, from a density perspective where we can have a petabyte of uncompressed and data reduced storage in a two Enclosure. So it becomes from a overall administration perspective, again, one software stake, one automation stack, one way to do point in time copies, replication. So in focusing on how to make that as simple for the operations as we possibly can. >> I think we'd all take a little bit of that right now. Matt, let's go to you and then AJ view, let's talk a little bit more, dig into the IBM storage arrays. I mean, we're talking about advances in flash, we're talking about NBME as a forcing function for applications to change and evolve with the storage. Matt, give us your thoughts on that. >> We saw a monumental leap in where we take some simplicity pieces from how we deliver our arrays but also the technology within the arrays. About nine months ago, in February we launched into the latest generation of non technology and with that born the story of simplicity one of the pieces that we've been happily essentially negating of value prop is storage level tiering and be able to say, "Hey, well we still support the idea of going down "to near line SaaS and enterprise disc in different flavors "of solid state whether it's tier one short usage "the tier zero high performance, high usage, "all the way up to storage class memory." While we support those technologies and the automated tiering, this elegance of what we've done as latest generation technology that we launched nine months ago has been able to essentially homogenize the environments to we're able to deliver that petabyte per rack unit ratio that Brian was mentioning be able to deliver over into all tier zero solution that doesn't have to go through woes of software managed data reduction or any kind of software managed hearing just to be always fast, always essentially available from a 100% data availability guaranteed that we offer through a technology called hyper swap, but it's really kind of highlighting what we take in from that simplicity story, by going into that extra mile and meeting the market in technology refresh. I mean, if you say the words IBM over the Thanksgiving table, you're kind of thinking, how big blue, big mainframe, old iron stuff but it's very happy to say over in distributed systems that we are in fact leading this pack by multiple months not just the fact that, "Hey, we announced sooner." But actually coming to delivering on-prem the actual solution itself nine, 10 months prior to anybody else and when that gets us into new density flavors gets us into new efficiency offerings. Not just talk about, "Hey, I can do this petabyte scale "a couple of rack units but with the likes of Brocade." That actually equates to a terabyte per second and a floor tile, what's that do for your analytics story? And the fact that we're now leveraging NBME to undercut the value prop of spinning disc in your HBC analytics environments by five X, that's huge. So now let's take near line SaaS off the table for anything that's actually per data of an angle of value to us. So in simplicity elements, what we're doing now will be able to make our own flash we've been deriving from the tech memory systems acquisition eight years ago and then integrating that into some essentially industry proven software solutions that we do with the bird flies. That appliance form factor has been absolutely monumental for us in the distributed systems. >> And thanks for giving us a topic to discuss at our socially distant Thanksgiving table. We'll talk about IBM. I know now I have great, great conversation. AJ over to you lot of advances here also in such a dynamic times, I want to get Brocade's perspective on how you're taking advantage of these latest technologies with IBM and also from a customer's perspective, what are they feeling and really being able to embrace and utilize that simplicity that Matt talked about. >> So there's a couple of things that fall into that to be honest, one of which is that similar to what you heard Brian described across the IBM portfolio for storage in our SaaS infrastructure. It's a single operating system up and down the line. So from the most entry-level platform we have to the largest platform we have it's a single software up and down. It's a single management environment up and down and it's also intended to be extremely reliable and extremely performance because here's part of the challenge when Matt's talking about multiple petabytes in a two U rack height, but the conversation you want to flip on its head there a little bit is "Okay exactly how many virtual machines "and how many applications are you going to be driving "out of that?" Because it's going to be thousands like between six and 10,000 potentially out of that, right? So imagine then if you have some sort of little hiccup in the connectivity to the data store for 6,000 to 10,000 applications, that's not the kind of thing that people get forgiving about. When we're all home like this. When your healthcare, when your finance, when your entertainment, when everything is coming to you across the network and remotely in this version and it's all application driven, the one thing that you want to make sure of is that network doesn't hiccup because humans have a lot of really good characteristics. Patience would not be one of those. And so you want to make sure that everything is in fact in play and running. And that's as one of the things that we work very hard with our friends at IBM to make sure of is that the kinds of analytics that Matt was just describing are things that you can readily get done. Speed is the new currency of business is a phrase you hear from... A quote you hear from Marc Benioff at Salesforce, right. And he's right if you can get data out of intelligence out of the data you've been collecting, that's really cool. But one of the other sort of flip sides on the people not being able to be in the data center and then to Matt's point, not as many people around either is how are humans fast enough when you look... Honestly when you look at the performance of the platforms, these folks are putting up how is human response time going to be good enough? And we all sort of have this headset of a network operations center where you've got a couple dozen people in a half lit room staring at massive screens on the thing to pop. Okay, if the first time a red light pops the human begins the investigation at what point is that going to be good enough? And so our argument for the autonomy piece of of what we're doing in the fabrics is you can't wait on the humans. You need to augment it. I get that people still want to be in charge and that's good. Humans are still smarter than the Silicon. We're not as repeatable, but we're still so far smarter about it. And so we needed to be able to do that measurement. We need to be able to figure out what normal looks like. We need to be able to highlight to the storage platform and to the application admins, when things go sideways because the demand from the applications isn't going to slow down. The demands from your environment whether you want to think about take the next steps with not just your home entertainment home entertainment systems but learning augmented reality, right. Virtual reality environments for kids, right? How do you make them feel like they're part and parcel of the classroom, for as long as we have to continue living a modified world and perhaps past it, right? If you can take a grade school from your local area and give them a virtual walkthrough of the loop where everybody's got a perfect view and it all looks incredibly real to them those are cool things, right? Those are cool applications, right? If you can figure out a new vaccine faster, right. Not a bad thing, right. If we can model better, not a bad thing. So we need to enable those things we need to not be the bottleneck, which is you get Matt and Brian over an adult beverage at some point and ask them about the cycle time for the Silicon they're playing with. We've never had Moore's law applied to external storage before never in the history of external storage. Has that been true until now. And so their cycle times, Matt, right? >> Yeah you struck a nerve there AJ, cause it's pretty simple for us to follow the linear increase in capacity and computational horsepower, right. We just ride the X86 bandwagon, ride the Silicon bandwagon. But what we have to do in order to maintain But what we have to do in order to maintain the simplicity story is followed more important one is the resiliency factor, right? 'Cause as we increased the capacity as we increased the essentially the amount of data responsible for each admin we have to literally log rhythmically increase the resiliency of these boxes because we're going to talk about petabyte scale systems and hosting them really 10,000 virtual machines in the two U form factor. I need to be able to accommodate that to make sure things don't blip. I need resilient networks, right. Have redundancy and access. I need to have protection schemes at every single layer of the stack. And so we're quite happy to be able to provide that as we leapfrog the industry and go in literally situations that are three times the competitive density that we you see out there and other distributed systems that are still bound by the commercial offerings, then, hey we also have to own that risk from a vendor side we have to make these things is actually rate six protection scheme equivalent from a drive standpoint and act back from controllers everywhere. Be able to supply the performance and consistency of that service throughout even the bad situations. >> And to that point, one of the things that you talked about, that's interesting to me that I'd kind of like you to highlight is your recovery times, because bad things will happen. And so you guys do something very, very different about that. That's critical to a lot of my customers because they know that Murphy will show up one day. So, I mean 'cause it happens, so then what. >> Well, speaking of that, then what Brian I want to go over to you. You mentioned Matt mentioned resiliency. And if we think of the situation that we're in in 2020 many companies are used to DR and BC plans for natural disasters, pandemics. So as we look at the shift and then the the volume of ransomware, that's going up one ransomware attack every 11 seconds this year, right now. How Brian what's that change that businesses need to make from from cyber security to cyber resiliency? >> Yeah, it's a good point in, and I try to hammer that home with our clients that, you're used to having your business continuity disaster recovery this whole cyber resiliency thing is a completely separate practice that we have to set up and think about and go through the same thought process that you did for your DR What are you going to do? What are you going to pretest? How are you going to test it? How are you going to detect whether or not you've got ransomware? So I spent a lot of time with our clients on that theme of you have to think about and build your cyber resiliency plan 'cause it's going to happen. It's not like a DR plan where it's a pure insurance policy and went and like you said, every 11 seconds there's an event that takes place. It's going to be a win not then. Yeah and then we have to work with our customers to put in a place for cyber resiliency and then we spent a lot of discussion on, okay what does that mean for my critical applications, from a restore time of backup and mutability. What do we need for those types of services, right? In terms of quick restore, which are my tier zero applications that I need to get back as fast as possible, what other ones can I they'll stick out on tape or virtual tape in and do things like that. So again, there's a wide range of technology that we have available in the in the portfolio for helping our clients from cyber resiliency. And then we try to distinguish that cyber resiliency versus cyber security. So how do we help to keep every, everybody out from a cybersecurity view? And then what can we do from the cyber resiliency, from a storage perspective to help them once once it gets to us, that's a bad thing. So how can we help? How help our folks recover? Well, and that's the point that you're making Brian is that now it's not a matter of, could this happen to us? It's going to, how much can we tolerate? But ultimately we have to be able to recover. We can't restore that data and one of those things when you talk about ransomware and things, we go to that people as the weakest link insecurity AJ talked about that, there's the people. Yeah there's probably quite a bit of lack of patients going on right now. But as we look as I want to go back over to you to kind of look at, from a data center perspective and these storage solutions, being able to utilize things to help the people, AI and Machine Learning. You talked about AR VR. Talk to me a little bit more about that as you see, say in the next 12 months or so as moving forward, these trends these new solutions that are simplified. >> Yeah, so a couple of things around that one of which is iteration of technology the storage platforms the Silicon they're making use of Matt I think you told me 14 months is the roughly the Silicon cycle that you guys are seeing, right? So performance levels are going to continue to go up the speeds. The speeds are going to continue to go up. The scale is going to is going to continue to shift. And one of the things that does for a lot of the application owners is it lets them think broader. It lets them think bigger. And I wish I could tell you that I knew what the next big application was going to be but then we'd be having a conversation about which Island in the Pacific I was going to be retiring too. But they're going to come and they're going to consume this performance because if you look at the applications that you're dealing with in your everyday life, right. They continue to get broader. The scope of them continues to scale out, right. There's things that we do. I saw I think it was an MIT development recently where they're talking about being able to and they were originally doing it for Alzheimer's and dementia, but they're talking about being able to use the microphones in your smartphone to listen to the way you cough and use that as a predictor for people who have COVID that are not symptomatic yet. So asymptomatic COVID people, right? So when we start talking about where this, where this kind of technology can go and where it can lead us, right. There's sort of this unending possibility for it. But what that on, in part is that the infrastructure has to be extremely sound, right? The foundation has to be there. We have to have the resilience, the reliability and one of the points that Brian was just making is extremely key. We talk about disaster tolerance business continuous, so business continuance is how do you recover? Cyber resilience is the same conversation, right? So you have the protection side of it. Here's my defenses. Now what happens when they actually get in. And let's be honest, right? Humans are frequently that weak link, right. For a variety of behaviors that the humans that humans have. And so when that happens, where's the software in the storage that tells you, "Hey, wait there's an odd traffic behavior here "where data is being copied "at rates and to locations that that are not normal." And so that's part of when we talk about what we're doing in our side of the automation is how do you know what normal looks like? And once you know what normal looks like you can figure out where the outliers are. And that's one of the things that people use a lot for trying to determine whether or not ransomware is going on is, "Hey, this is a traffic pattern, that's new. "This is a traffic pattern. "That's different." Are they doing this because they're copying the dataset from here to here and encrypting it as they go, right? 'Cause that's one of the challenges you got to, you got to watch for. So I think you're going to see a lot of advancement in the application space. And not just the MIT stuff, which is great. The fact that people are actually able to or I may have misspoken, maybe Johns Hopkins. And I apologize to the Johns Hopkins folks that kind of scenario, right. There's no knowing what they can make use of here in terms of the data sets, right. Because we're gathering so much data, the internet of things is an overused phrase but the sheer volume of data that's being generated outside of the data center, but manipulated analyzed and stored internally. 'Cause you got to have it someplace secure. Right and that's one of the things that we look at from our side is we've got to be that as close to unbreakable as we can be. And then when things do break able to figure out exactly what happened as rapidly as possible and then the recovery cycle as well. >> Excellent and I want to finish with you. We just have a few seconds left, but as AJ was talking about this massive evolution and applications, for example when we talk about simplicity and we talk about resiliency and being able to recover when something happens, how did these new technologies that we've been unpacking today? How did these help the admin folks deal with all of the dynamics that are happening today? >> Yeah so I think the biggest the drop, the mic thing we can say right now is that we're delivering 100% tier zero in Vme without data reduction value props on top of it at a cost that undercuts off-prem S3 storage. So if you look at what you can do from an off-prem solution for air gap and from cyber resiliency you can put your data somewhere else. And it's going to take whatever long time to transfer that data back on prem, to read get back to your recover point. But when you work at economics that we're doing right now in the distributed systems, hey, you're DR side, your copies of data do not have to wait for that. Off-prem bandwidth to restore. You can actually literally restore it in place. And you couple that with all of the the technology on the software side that integrates with it I get incremental point in time. Recovery is either it's on the primary side of DRS side, wherever, but the fact that we get to approach this thing from a cost value then by all means I can naturally absorb a lot of the cyber resiliency value in that too. And because it's all getting all the same orchestrated capabilities, regardless of the big, small, medium, all that stuff, it's the same skillsets. And so I don't need to really learn new platforms or new solutions to providing cyber resiliency. It's just part of my day-to-day activity because fundamentally all of us have to wear that cyber resiliency hat. But as, as our job, as a vendor is to make that simple make it cost elegance, and be able to provide a essentially a homogenous solutions overall. So, hey, as your business grows, your risk gets averted on your recovery means also get the thwarted essentially by your incumbent solutions and architecture. So it's pretty cool stuff that we're doing, right. >> It is pretty cool. And I'd say a lot of folks would say, that's the Nirvana but I think the message that the three of you have given in the last 20 minutes or so is that IBM and Brocade together. This is a reality. You guys are a cornucopia of knowledge. Brian, Matt, AJ, thank you so much for joining me on this panel I really enjoyed our conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you again Lisa. >> My pleasure. From my guests I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching this IBM Brocade panel on theCUBE.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of workplace next made possible by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >>Hello, everyone. We're here covering workplace next on the Cube For years, you know, we've talked about new ways to work, and it was great thought exercise. And then overnight the pandemic heightened the challenges of creating an effective work force. Most of the executives that we talked to in our survey say that productivity actually has improved since the work from Home Mandate was initiative. But, you know, we're talking not just about productivity, but the well being of our associates and managing the unknown. We're going to shift gears a little bit now. We've heard some interesting real world examples of how organizations are dealing with the rapid change in workplace, and we've heard about some lessons to take into the future. But now we're going to get more practical and look at some of the tools that are available to help you navigate. The changes that we've been discussing and with me to talk about these trends related to the future of work are are are Qadoura, who's the vice president of worldwide sales and go to market for Green Lake at HP Sadat Malik is the VP of I O t and Intelligent Edge at HP and Satish Yarra Valley is the global cloud and infrastructure practice Head at Whip Probe guys welcomes. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having us. >>You're very welcome. Let me start with Sadat. You're coming from Austin, Texas here. So thank you. Stay crazy. As they say in Austin, for the uninitiated, maybe you could talk a little bit about h p E point. Next. It's a strategic component of H p. E. And maybe tell us a little bit about those services. >>Thank you so much for taking the time today. Appreciate everybody's participation here. So absolutely so point Next is HP Services on. This is the 23,000 strong organization globally spread out, and we have a very strong ecosystem of partners that be leveraged to deliver services to our customers. Um, our organization differentiates itself in the market by focusing on digital digital transformation journeys for our customers. For customers looking toe move to a different way off, engaging with its customers, transforming the way its employees work, figuring out a different way off producing the products that it sells to. His customers are changing the way it operationalize these things. For example, moving to the cloud going to a hybrid model, we help them achieve any of these four transformation outcomes. So point next job is toe point. What is next in this digital transformation journey and then partner with our customers to make that happen? So that's what we do. >>Thank you for that. I mean, obviously, you're gonna be seeing a lot of activity around workplace with shift from work from home, changes in the network changes in security. I mean the whole deal. What are some of your top takeaways that you can share with our audience? >>Yeah, they're >>so a lot has been happening in the workplace arena lately. So this is not new, right? This is not something that all of a sudden side happening when Kobe 19 hit, uh, the digital workplace was already transforming before over 19 happened. What over 19 has done is that it has massively accelerated the pace at which this change was happening. So, for example, right remote work was already there before over 19. But now everybody is working remotely so, in many ways, the solution that we have for remote work. They have been strained to appoint, never seen before. Networks that support these remote work environments have been pushed to their limits. Security was already there, right? So security was a critical piece off any off the thinking, any of the frameworks that we had. But now security is pivotal and central. Any discussion that we're having about the workplace environment data is being generated all across the all across the environment that we operated, right? So it's no longer being generated. One place being stored. Another. It's all over the place now. So what Kobe, 19 has done is that the transformation that was already underway in the digital workplace, it has taken that and accelerated it massive. The key take away for me is right that we have to make sure that when we're working with our customers, our clients, we don't just look at the technology aspect of things. We have to look at all the other aspect as well the people in the process aspect off this environment. It is critical that we don't assume that just because the technology is there to address these challenges that I just mentioned. Our people and our processes would be able to handle that as well. We need to bring everybody along. Everybody has different needs, and we need to be able to cater to those needs effectively. So that's my biggest take away. Make sure that the process and the people aspect of things was hand in glove with the technology that we were able to bring to bear here. >>Got it. Thank you. So, ah, let's go to San Francisco, bringing our war to the conversation. You're one of your areas of focus is is HP Green Lake. You guys were early on with the as a service model. Clearly, we've seen Mawr interest in cloud and cloud like models. I wonder if you could just start by sharing. What's Green Lake all about? Where does it fit into this whole workplace? Next, Uh, conversation that we're having? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um HP Green lake effectively is the cloud that comes to your data center to your Coehlo or to your edge, right? We saw with Public Cloud. The public cloud brought a ton of innovations, um, into the sort of hyper scale model. Now, with HP. What we've done is we've said, Look, customers need this level of innovation and this level of, you know, pay as you go economics the, you know, management layer the automation layer not just in a public cloud environment, but also in our customers data center or to the other potential edges or Coehlo scenarios. And what we've done is we've brought together Asada just mentioned the best of our point next services our software management layer as well as H. P. E s rich portfolio of hardware to come together to create that cloud experience. Um, of course, we can't do this without the rich ecosystem around us as well. And so everything from you know, some of our big S I partners like we bro, who also have the virtual desktop expertise or virtual desk that then come together to start helping us launch some of these new workloads supported cloud services such as D. D i eso for my perspective, v. D. I is the most important topic for a lot of our customers right now, especially in sectors like financial services, um, advanced engineering scenarios and health care where they need access to those, uh to their data centers in a very secure way and in a highly cost optimized way as well. >>Well, okay. Thank you. And then let's let's bring in, uh, petition talk a little bit about the ecosystem. I mean, we're pro. That's really kind of your wheelhouse. We've been talking a lot on the cube about moving from an industry of point products to platforms and now ecosystem innovation, Uh, are are mentioned VD I we saw that exploding eso teach. Maybe you could weigh in here and and share with us what you're seeing in the market and specifically around ecosystem. >>As we all know, the pandemic has redefined the way we collaborate to support this collaboration. We have set up huge campuses and office infrastructure In summary, our industry has centralized approach. Now, the very premise of the centralization bringing people together for work has changed. This evolving workspace dynamics have triggered the agency to reimagine the workspace strategy. CEO, CEO S and C H R ose are all coming together to redefine the business process and find new ways off engaging with customers and employees as organizations embrace work from home for the foreseeable future. Customer need to create secure by design workspaces for remote working environments. With the pro virtual disk platform, we can help create such seamless distal workspaces and enable customers to connect, collaborate and communicate with ease from anywhere securely. They're consistent user experience. Through this platform led approach, we are able to utter the market demands which are focused on business outcomes. >>Okay, and this is the specifics of this hard news that you're talking about Video on demand and Citrix coming together with your ecosystem. H p E were pro and again, the many partners that you work with is that correct? >>Well, actually, Dave, we see a strong playoff ecosystem partners coming together to achieve transformative business outcomes. As Arbor said earlier, HP and Wipro have long standing partnership, and today's announcement around HP Green Lake is an extension off this collaboration, where we provide leverage HP Green Leg Andre Pro, which elders platform to offer video as a service in a paper user model. Our aim is to enable customers fast track there. It is still works based transformation efforts by eliminating the need to support upfront capital investments and old provisioning costs while allowing customers to enjoy the benefit off compromise, control, security and compliance. Together, we have implemented our solution across various industry segments and deliver exceptional customer experiences by helping customer businesses in their workspace. Transformation journeys by defining their workspace strategy with an intelligent, platform led approach that enables responsiveness, scalability and resilience. It's known that Wipro is recognized as a global leader in the distal workspace and video I, with HP being a technology leader, enabling us with high level of program ability on integration capabilities. We see tremendous potential to jointly address the industry challenges as we move forward. >>Excellent. Uh, sad. I wanna come back to you. We talk a lot about the digital business, the mandate for digital business, especially with the pandemic. Let's talk about data. Earlier this year, HP announced the number of solutions that used data to help organizations work more productively safely. You know, the gamut talk about data and the importance of data and what you guys were doing there specifically, >>Yeah, that's a great question. So that is fundamental to everything that we're doing in the workplace arena, right? So from a technology perspective that provides us with the wherewithal to be able to make all the changes that we want to make happen for the people in the process side of things. So the journey that we've been on this past year is a very interesting one. Let me share with the audience a little bit of what's been going on on the ground with our customers. Um, what's what's been happening in the field? So when the when Kobe 19 hit right, a lot of our customers were subjected to these shutdown, which were very pervasive, and they had to stop their operations. In many cases, they had to send their employees home. So at that point, HB stepped in the point. Next organization stepped in and helped these customers set up remote work out options, which allowed them to keep their businesses going while they handle these shutdowns. Fast forward. Six months and the shutdown. We're starting to get lifted and our customers were coming back to us and saying to us that Hey, we would now like to get a least a portion off our workforce back to the normal place of work. But we're concerned that if we do that, it's gonna jeopardize their safety because off the infection concerned that were there. So what we did was that we built a cities or five solutions using various types of video analytics and data analysis analysis technologies that allowed these customers to make that move. So these five solutions, uh, let me walk, walk our customers and our clients and audience through those. The first two of these solutions are touchless entry and fever detection. So this is the access control off your premise, right? So to make sure that whoever is entering the building that's in a safe manner and any infection concerned, we stop it at the very get go once the employees inside the workplace, the next thing that we have is a set of two solutions. What one is social distance tracing and tracking, and the other one is workplace alerting. What these two solutions do is that they use video analytics and data technology is to figure out if there is a concern with employees adhering to the various guidelines that are in place on alerting the employees and the employers if there is any infringement happening which could risk overall environment. Finally, we realized right that irrespective off how much technology and process we put in place. Not everybody will be able to come into the normal place of work. So what we have done is that the first solution that we have is augmented reality and visual remote guidance. This solution uses a our technologies allow. People were on site to take advantage of the expertise that resides offsite to undertake complex task task, which could be as complex as overhauling a machine on ah factory floor using augmented reality where somebody off site who's an expert in that machine is helping somebody on site data has become central to a lot of the things that we do. But as I said, technology is one aspect of things. So ultimately the people process technology continuum has to come together to make these solutions real for our customers. >>Thank you, Arwa. We just have just about 30 seconds left and I wonder if you could close on. We're talking about cloud hybrid. Uh, everybody's talking about hybrid. We're talking about the hybrid workplace. What do you see for the for the future over the next 2345 years? >>Absolutely. And I think you're right, Dave. It is, ah, hybrid world. It's a multi cloud world. Ultimately, what our customers want is the choice and the flexibility to bring in the capabilities that drive the business outcomes that they need to support. And that has multiple dimensions, right? It's making sure that they are minimizing their egress costs, right. And many of our on Prem solutions do give them that flexibility. It is the paper use economics that we talked about. It is about our collective capability as an ecosystem to come together. You know, with Citrix and NVIDIA with R s I partner we pro and the rich heritage of HP es services as well as hardware to bring together these solutions that are fully managed on behalf of our customers so that they can focus their staff their i t capabilities on the products and services they need to deliver to their customers. >>Awesome. Guys, I wish we had more time. We got to go day volonte for the cube. Keep it right there. Lots of great more content coming your way. >>Yeah,

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hi, and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here at the AWS Public Sector. Their Partner Awards, really enjoying this. We get to talk to some of the diverse ecosystem as well as they've all brought on their customers, some really phenomenal case studies. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. First of all, we have Jared Bell, he's the Chief Engineer of self response, operational readiness at T-Rex Solutions and T-Rex is the award winner for the most customer obsessed mission-based in Fed Civ. So Jared, congratulations to you and the T-Rex team and also joining him, his customer Michael Thieme, he's the Assistant Director for the Decennial Census Program systems and contracts for the US Census Bureau, thank you so much both for joining us. >> Good to be here. >> All right, Jared, if we could start with you, as I said, you're an award winner, you sit in the Fed Civ space, you've brought us to the Census Bureau, which most people understand the importance of that government program coming up on that, you know, every 10 year we've been hearing, you know, TV and radio ads talking about it, but Jared, if you could just give us a thumbnail of T-Rex and what you do in the AWS ecosystem. >> So yeah again, my name's Jared Bell and I work for T-Rex Solutions. T-Rex is a mid tier IT federal contracting company in Southern Maryland, recently graduated from hubs on status, and so T-Rex really focuses on four key areas, infrastructure in Cloud modernization, cybersecurity, and active cyber defense, big data management and analytics, and then overall enterprise system integration. And so we've been, you know, AWS partner for quite some time now and with decennial, you know, we got to really exercise a lot of the bells and whistles that are out there and really put it all to the test. >> All right, well, Michael, you know, so many people in IT, we talk about the peaks and valleys that we have, not too many companies in our organization say, well, we know exactly, you know, that 10 year spike of activity that we're going to have, I know there's lots of work that goes on beyond that, but it tells a little bit , your role inside the Census Bureau and what's under your purview. >> Yes, the Census Bureau, is actually does hundreds of surveys every year, but the decennial census is our sort of our main flagship activity. And I am the Assistant Director under our Associate Director for the IT and for the contracts for the decennial census. >> Wonderful and if you could tell us a little bit the project that you're working on, that eventually pulled T-Rex in. >> Sure. This is the 2020 census and the challenge of the 2020 census is we've done the census since 1790 in the United States. It's a pillar, a foundation of our democracy, and this was the most technologically advanced census we've ever done. Actually up until 2020, we have done our censuses mostly by pen, paper, and pencil. And this is a census where we opened up the internet for people to respond from home. We can have people respond on the phone, people can respond with an iPhone or an Android device. We tried to make it as easy as possible and as secure as possible for people to respond to the census where they were and we wanted to meet the respondent where they were. >> All right. So Jared, I'd love you to chime in here 'cause I'm here and talking about, you know, the technology adoption, you know, how much was already in plans there, where did T-Rex intersect with this census activity? >> Yeah. So, you know, census deserves a lot of credit for their kind of innovative approach with this technical integrator contract, which T-Rex was fortunate enough to win. When we came in, you know, we were just wrapping up the 2018 test. we really only had 18 months to go from start to, you know, a live operational tests to prepare for 2020. And it was really exciting to be brought in on such a large mission critical project and this is one of the largest federal IT products in the Cloud to date. And so, you know, when we came in, we had to really, you know, bring together a whole lot of solutions. I mean, the internet self response, which is what we're going to to talk about today was one of the major components. But we really had a lot of other activities that we had to engage in. You know, we had to design and prepare an IT solution to support 260 field offices, 16,000 field staff, 400,000 mobile devices and users that were going to go out and knock on doors for a numeration. So it was real6ly a big effort that we were honored to be a part of, you know, and on top of that, T-Rex actually brought to the table, a lot of its past experience with cybersecurity and active cyber defense, also, you know, because of the importance of all this data, you know, we had the role in security all throughout, and I think T-Rex was prepared for that and did a great job. And then, you know, overall I think that, not necessarily directly to your question, but I think, y6ou know, one of the things that we were able to do to make ourselves successful and to really engage with the census Bureau and be effective with our stakeholders was that we really build a culture of decennial within the technical integrator, you know, we had brown bags and working sessions to really teach the team the importance of the decennial, you know, not just as a career move, but also as a important activity for our country. And so I think that that really helped the team, you know, internalize that mission and really drove kind of our dedication to the census mission and really made us effective and again, a lot of the T-Rex leadership had a lot of experience there from past decennials and so they really brought that mindset to the team and I think it really paid off. >> Michael, if you could bring us inside a little a bit the project, you know, 18 months, obviously you have a specific deadline you need to hit, for that help us understand kind of the architectural considerations that you had there, any concerns that you had and I have to imagine that just the global activities, the impacts of COVID-19 has impacted some of the end stage, if you will, activities here in 2020. >> Absolutely. Yeah. The decennial census is, I believe a very unique IT problem. We have essentially 10 months out of the decade that we have to scale up to gigantic and then scale back down to run the rest of the Census Bureau's activities. But our project, you know, every year ending in zero, April 1st is census day. Now April 1st continued to be census day in 2020, but we also had COVID essentially taking over virtually everything in this country and in fact in the world. So, the way that we set up to do the census with the Cloud and with the IT approach and modernization that we took, actually, frankly, very luckily enabled us to kind of get through this whole thing. Now, we haven't had, Jared discussed a little bit the fact that we're here to talk about our internet self response, we haven't had one second of downtime for our response. We've taken 77 million. I think even more than 78 million responses from households, out of the 140 million households in the United States, we've gotten 77 million people to respond on our internet site without one second of downtime, a good user experience, a good supportability, but the project has always been the same. It's just this time, we're actually doing it with much more technology and hopefully the way that the Cloud has supported us will prove to be really effective for the COVID-19 situation. Because we've had changes in our plans, difference in timeframes, we are actually not even going into the field, or we're just starting to go into the field these next few weeks where we would have almost been coming out of the field at this time. So that flexibility, that expandability, that elasticity, that being in the Cloud gives all of our IT capabilities was really valuable this time. >> Well, Jared, I'm wondering if you can comment on that. All of the things that Michael just said, you know, seem like, you know, they are just the spotlight pieces that I looked at Cloud for. You know, being able to scale on demand, being able to use what I need when I need it, and then dial things down when I don't, and especially, you know, I don't want to have to, you know, I want to limit how much people actually need to get involved. So help understand a little bit, you know, what AWS services underneath, we're supporting this and anything else around the Cloud deployment. >> Sure, yeah. Michael is spot on. I mean, the cloud is tailor made for our operation and activity here. You know, I think all told, we use over 30 of the AWS FedRAMP solutions in standing up our environment across all those 52 system of systems that we were working with. You know, just to name a few, I mean, internet self response alone, you're relying heavily on auto scaling groups, elastic load balancers, you know, we relied a lot on Lambda Functions, DynamoDB. We're one of the first adopters through DynamoDB global tables, which we use for a session persistence across regions. And then on top of that, you know, the data was all flowing down into RDS databases and then from there to, you know, the census data Lake, which was built on EMR and Elasticsearch capabilities, and that's just to name a couple. I mean, you know, we had, we ran the gamut of AWS services to make all this work and they really helped us accelerate. And as Michael said, you know, we stood this up expecting to be working together in a war room, watching everything hand in hand, and because of the way we, were able to architect it in partnership with AWS, we all had to go out and stay at home, you know, the infrastructure remain rock solid. We can have to worry about, you know, being hands on with the equipment and, you know, again, the ability to automate and integrate with those solutions Cloud formation and things like that really let us keep a small agile team of, you know, DevSecOps there to handle the deployments. And we were doing full scale deployments with, you know, one or two people in the middle of the night without any problems. So it really streamlined things for us and helped us keep a tight natural, sure. >> Michael, I'm curious about what kind of training your team need to go through to take advantage of this solution. So from bringing it up to the ripple effect, as you said, you're only now starting to look at who would go into the field who uses devices and the like, so help us understand really the human aspect of undergoing this technology. >> Sure. Now, the census always has to ramp up this sort of immediate workforce. We hire, we actually process over 3 million people through, I think, 3.9 million people applied to work for the Census Bureau. And each decade we have to come up with a training program and actually training sites all over the country and the IT to support those. Now, again, modernization for the 2020 census, didn't only involve the things like our internet self response, it also involves our training. We have all online training now, we used to have what we called verbatim training, where we had individual teachers all over the country in places like libraries, essentially reading text exactly the same way to exactly over and over again to our, to the people that we trained. But now it's all electronic, it allows us to, and this goes to the COVID situation as well, it allows us to bring only three people in at a time to do training. Essentially get them started with our device that we have them use when they're knocking on doors and then go home and do the training, and then come back to work with us all with a minimal contact, human contact, sort of a model. And that, even though we designed it differently, the way that we set the technology of this time allowed us to change that design very quickly, get people trained, not essentially stop the census. We essentially had to slow it down because we weren't sure exactly when it was going to be safe to go knocking on door to door, but we were able to do the training and all of that worked and continues to work phenomenally. >> Wonderful. Jared, I wonder if you've got any lessons learned from working with the census group that might be applicable to kind of, the broader customers out there? >> Oh, sure. Well, working with the census, you know, it was really a great group to work with. I mean, one of the few groups I worked with who have such a clear vision and understanding of what they want their final outcome to be, I think again, you know, for us the internalization of the decennial mission, right? It's so big, it's so important. I think that because we adopted it early on we felt that we were true partners with census, we had a lot of credibility with our counterparts and I think that they understood that we were in it with them together and that was really important. I would also say that, you know, because we're talking about the go Cloud solutions that we worked, you know, we also engage heavily with the AWS engineering group and in partnership with them, you know, we relied on the infrastructure event management services they offer and was able to give us a lot of great insight into our architecture and our systems and monitoring to really make us feel like we were ready for the big show when the time came. So, you know, I think for me, another lesson learned there was that, you know, the Cloud providers like AWS, they're not just a vendor, they're a partner and I think that now going forward, we'll continue to engage with those partners early and often. >> Michael the question I have for you is, you know, what would you say to your peers? What lessons did you have learned and how much of what you've done for the census, do you think it will be applicable to all those other surveys that you do in between the big 10 year surveys? >> All right. I think we have actually set a good milestone for the rest of the Census Bureau, that the modernization that the 2020 census has allowed since it is our flagship really is something that we hope we can continue through the decade and into the next census, as a matter of fact. But I think one of the big lessons learned I wanted to talk about was we have always struggled with disaster recovery. And one of the things that having the Cloud and our partners in the Cloud has helped us do is essentially take advantage of the resilience of the Cloud. So there are data centers all over the country. If ever had a downtime somewhere, we knew that we were going to be able to stay up. For the decennial census, we've never had the budget to pay for a persistent disaster recovery. And the Cloud essentially gives us that kind of capability. Jared talked a lot about security. I think we have taken our security posture to a whole different level, something that allowed us to essentially, as I said before, keep our internet self response free of hacks and breaches through this whole process and through a much longer process than we even intended to keep it open. So, there's a lot here that I think we want to bring into the next decade, a lot that we want to continue, and we want the census to essentially stay as modern as it has become for 2020. >> Well, I will tell you personally Michael, I did take the census online, it was really easy to do, and I'll definitely recommend if they haven't already, everybody listening out there so important that you participate in the census so that they have complete data. So, Michael, Jared, thank you so much. Jared, congratulations to your team for winning the award and you know, such a great customer. Michael, thank you so much for what you and your team are doing. We Appreciate all that's being done, especially in these challenging times. >> Thank you and thanks for doing the census. >> All right and stay tuned for more coverage of the AWS public sector partner award I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> All right, welcome back to "the Cube's" coverage here from Palo Alto, California in our studio with remote interviews during this time of COVID-19 with our quarantine crew. I'm John Furrier, your host of "the Cube" and we have here the award winners for the best EDU solution from NorthBay Solutions, Jim Keller, the president and from Harvard Business Publishing and the University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burton, PhD and Data Privacy Officer of University of Pittsburgh IT. Thanks for coming on gentlemen, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So, Jim, we'll start with you. What is the solution that you guys had got the award for? And talk about how it all came about. >> Yeah, thank you for asking and it's been a pleasure working with Chad and the entire UPitt team. So as we entered this whole COVID situation, our team really got together and started to think about how we could help AWS customers continue their journey with AWS, but also appreciate the fact that everyone was virtual, that budgets were very tight, but nonetheless, the priorities remained the same. So we devised a solution which we called jam sessions, AWS jam sessions, and the whole principle behind the notion is that many customers go through AWS training and AWS has a number of other offerings, immersion days and boot camps and other things, but we felt it was really important that we brought forth a solution that enables customers to focus on a use case, but do it rapidly in a very concentrated way with our expert team. So we formulated what we call jam sessions, which are essentially very focused two week engagements, rapid prototyping engagements. So in the context of Chad and UPitt team, it was around a data lake and they had been, and Chad will certainly speak to this in much more detail, but the whole notion here was how does a customer get started? How does, a customer prove the efficacy of AWS, prove that they can get data out of their on premises systems, get it into AWS, make it accessible in the form, in this case, a data lake solution and have the data be consumable. So we have an entire construct that we use which includes structured education, virtual simultaneous rooms where development occurs with our joint rep prototyping teams. We come back again and do learnings, and we do all of this in the construct of the agile framework, and ideally by the time we're done with the two weeks, the customer achieves some success around achieving the goal of the jam session. But more importantly, their team members have learned a lot about AWS with hands on work, real work, learn by doing, if you will, and really marry those two concepts of education and doing, and come out of that with an opportunity then to think about the next step in that journey, which in this case would be the implementation of a data lake in a full scale project kind of initiative. >> Chad, talk about the relationship with NorthBay Solutions. Obviously you're a customer, you guys are partnering on this, so it's kind of you're partnering, but also they're helping you. Talk about the relationship and how the interactions went. >> Yeah, so I would say the challenge that I think a lot of people in my role are faced with where the demand for data is increasing and demand for more variety of data. And I'm faced with a lot of aging on premise hardware that I really don't want to invest any further in. So I know the cloud's in the future, but we are so new with the cloud that we don't even know what we don't know. So we had zeroed in on AWS and I was talking with them and I made it very clear. I said "Because of our inexperience, we have talented data engineers, but they don't have this type of experience, but I'm confident they can learn." So what I'm looking for is a partner who can help us not only prove this out that it can work, which I had high confidence that it could, but help us identify where we need to be putting our skilling up. You know, what gaps do we have? And AWS has just so many different components that we also needed help just zeroing in on for our need, what are the pieces we should really be paying attention to and developing those skills. So we got introduced to NorthBay and they introduced us to the idea of the jam session, which was perfect. It was really exactly what I was looking for. We made it very clear in the early conversations that this would be side by side development, that my priority was of course, to meet our deliverables, but also for my team to learn how to use some of this and learn what they need to dive deeper in at the end of the engagement. I think that's how it got started and then I think it was very successful engagement after that. >> Talk about the jam sessions, because I love this. First of all, this is in line with what we're seeing in the marketplace with rapid innovation, now more than ever with virtual workforces at home, given the situation. You know, rapid agile, rapid innovation, rapid development is a key kind of thing. What is a jam session? What was the approach? Jim you laid a little bit about it out, but Chad, what's your take on the jam sessions? How does it all work? >> I mean, it was great, because of large teams that NorthBay brought and the variety of skills they brought, and then they just had a playbook that worked. They broke us up into different groups, from the people who'd be making the data pipeline, to the people who then would be consuming it to develop analytics projects. So that part worked really well, and yes, this rapid iterative development. Like right now with our current kind of process and our current tool, I have a hard time telling anybody how long it will take to get that new data source online and available to our data analysts, to our data scientists, because it takes months sometimes and nobody wants that answer and I don't want to be giving that answer, so what we're really focused on is how do we tighten up our process? How do we select the right tools so that we can say, "We'll be two weeks from start to finish" and you'll be able to make those data available. So the engagement with NorthBay, the jam session scheduled like that really helped us prove that once you have the skills and you have the right people, you can do this rapid development and bring more value to our business more quickly, which is really what it's all about for us. >> Jim, I'll get your thoughts because, you know, we see time and time again with the use cases with the cloud, when you got smart people, certainly people who play with data and work with data, They're pretty savvy, right? They know limitations, but when you get the cloud, it's like if a car versus a horse, right? Got to go from point A to point B, but again, the faster is the key. How did you put this all together and what were the key learnings? >> Yeah, so John, a couple of things that are really important. One is, as Chad mentioned, really smart people on the U-PIT side that wanted to really learn and had a thirst for learning. And then couple that with the thing that they're trying to learn in an actual use case that we're trying to jointly implement. A couple of things that we've learned that are really important. One is although we have structure and we have a syllabi and we have sort of a pattern of execution, we can never lose sight of the fact that every customer is different. Every team member is different. And in fact, Chad, in this case had team members, some had more skills on AWS than others. So we had to be sensitive to that. So what we did was we sort of used our general formula for the two weeks. Week one is very structured, focused on getting folks up to speed and normalize in terms of where they are in their education of AWS, the solution we're building and then week two is really meant to sort of mold the clay together and really take this solution that we're trying to execute around and tailor it to the customer so that we're addressing the specific needs, both from their team member perspective and the institution's perspective in total. We've learned that starting the day together and ending the day with a recap of that day is really important in terms of ensuring that everyone's on the same page, that they have commonality of knowledge and then when we're addressing any concerns. You know, this stuff we move fast, right? Two weeks is not a long time to get a lot of rapid prototyping done, so if there is anxiety, or folks feel like they're falling behind, we want to make sure we knew that, we wanted to address that quickly, either that evening, or the next morning, recalibrate and then continue. The other thing that we've learned is that, and Chad and entire U-Pit team did a phenomenal job with this, was really preparation. So we have a set of preliminary set of activities that we work with our customers to sort of lay the foundation for, so that on day one of the jam session, we're ready to go. And since we're doing this virtually, we don't have the luxury of being in a physical room and having time to sort of get acclimated to the physical construct of organizing rooms and chairs and tables and all that. We're doing all that virtually. So Chad and the team were tremendous in getting all the preparatory work done Thinking about what's involved in a data lake, it's the data and security and access and things our team needed to work with their team and the prescription and the formula that we use is really three critical things. One is our team members have to be adept at educating on a virtual whiteboard, in this case. Secondly, we want to do side by side development. That's the whole goal and we want team members to build trust and relationships side by side. And then thirdly, and importantly, we want to be able to do over the shoulder mentoring, so that as Chad's team members were executing, we could guide them as we go. And really those three ingredients were really key. >> Chad, talk about the data lake and the outcome as you guys went through this. What was the results of the data Lake? How did it all turn out? >> Yeah, the result was great. It was exactly what we were looking for. The way I had structured the engagement and working with Jim to do this is I wanted to accomplish two things. I wanted to one, prove that we can do what we do today with a star schema mart model that creates a lot of reports that are important to the business, but doesn't really help us grow in our use of data. So there was a second component of it that I said, I want to show how we do something new and different that we can't do with our existing tools, so that I can go back to our executive leadership and say "Hey, by investing in this, here's all the possibilities we can do and we've got proof that we can do it." So some natural language processing was one of those and leveraging AWS comprehend was key. And the idea here was there are, unfortunately, it's not as relevant today with COVID, but there are events happening all around campus and how do students find the right events for them? You know, they're all in the calendar. Well, with a price of natural language processing using AWS comprehend and link them to a student's major, so that we can then bubble these up to a student "Hey, do you know of all these thousands of events here are the 10 you might be most interested in." We can't do that right now, but using these tools, using the skills that that NorthBay helped us develop by working side by side will help us get there. >> A beautiful thing is with these jam sessions, once you get some success, you go for the next one. This sounds like another jam session opportunity to go in there and do the virtual version. As the fall comes up, you have the new reality. And this is really kind of what I like about the story is you guys did the jam session, first of all, great project, but right in the middle of this new shift of virtual, so it's very interesting. So I want to get your thoughts, Chad, as you guys looked at this, I mean on any given Sunday, this is a great project, right? You can get people together, you go to the cloud, get more agile, get the proof points, show it, double down on it, playbook, check. But now you've got the virtual workforce. How did that all play out? Anything surprise you? Any expectations that were met, or things that were new that came out of this? 'Cause this is something that is everyone is going through right now. How do I come out of this, or deal with current COVID as it evolves? And then when I come out of it, I want to have a growth strategy, I want to have a team that's deploying and building. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, it's a good question and I was a little concerned about it at first, because when we had first begun conversations with NorthBay, we were planning on a little bit on site and a little bit virtual. Then of course COVID happened. Our campus is closed, nobody's permitted to be there and so we had to just pivot to a hundred percent virtual. I have to say, I didn't notice any problems with it. It didn't impede our progress. It didn't impede our communication. I think the playbook that NorthBay had really just worked for that. Now they may have had to adjust it and Jim can certainly talk to that, But those morning stand-ups for each group that's working, the end of day report outs, right? Those were the things I was joining in on I wasn't involved in it throughout the day, but I wanted to check in at the end of the day to make sure things are kind of moving along and the communication, the transparency that was provided was key, and because of that transparency and that kind of schedule they already had set up at North Bay, We didn't have any problems having it a fully virtual engagement. In fact, I would probably prefer to do virtual engagements moving forward because we can cut down on travel costs for everybody. >> You know, Jim, I want to get your thoughts on this, 'cause I think this is a huge point that's not just represented here and illustrated with the example of the success of the EDU solution you guys got the award for, but in a way COVID exposes all the people that have been relying on waterfall based processes. You've got to be in a room and argue things out, or have meetings set up. It takes a lot of time and when you have a virtual space and an agile process, yeah you make some adjustments, but if you're already agile, it doesn't really impact too much. Can you share your thoughts because you deployed this very successfully virtually. >> Yeah, it's certainly, you know, the key is always preparation and our team did a phenomenal job at making sure that we could deliver equal to, or better than, virtual experience than we could an on-site experience, but John you're absolutely right. What it forces you to really do is think about all the things that come natural when you're in a physical room together, but you can't take for granted virtually. Even interpersonal relationships and how those are built and the trust that's built. As much as this is a technical solution and as much as the teams did really phenomenal AWS work, foundationally it all comes down to trust and as Chad said, transparency. And it's often hard to build that into a virtual experience. So part of that preparatory work that I mentioned, we actually spend time doing that and we spent time with Chad and other team members, understanding each of their team members and understanding their strengths, understanding where they were in the education journey and the experiential journey, a little bit about them personally. So I think the reality in the in the short and near term is that everything's going to be virtual. NorthBay delivers much of their large scale projects virtually now. We have a whole methodology around that and it's proven actually it's made us better at what we do quite frankly. >> Yeah it definitely puts the pressure on getting the job done and focusing on the creativity in the building out. I want to ask you guys both the same question on this next round, because I think it's super important as people see the reality of cloud and this certainly has been around, the benefits of there, but still you have the mentality of "we have to do it ourselves", "not invented here", "It's a managed service", "It's security". There's plenty of objections. If you really want to avoid cloud, you can come up with something if you really looked for it. But the reality is is that there are benefits. For the folks out there that are now being accelerated into the cloud for the reasons with COVID and other reasons, What's your advice to them? Why cloud? What's the bet? What comes out of making a good choice with the cloud? Chad, as people sitting there going "okay, I got to get my cloud mojo going" What's your advice to those folks sitting out there watching this? >> So I would say, and Jim knows this, we at Pitt have a big vision for data, a whole universe of data where just everything is made available and I can't estimate the demand for all of that yet, right? That's going to evolve over time, so if I'm trying to scale some physical hardware solution, I'm either going to under scale it and not be able to deliver, or I'm going to invest too much money for the value I'm getting. By moving to the cloud, what that enables me to do is just grow organically and make sure that our spend and the value we're getting from the use are always aligned. And then, of course, all the questions about, scalability and extensibility, right? We can just keep growing and if we're not seeing value in one area, we can just stop and we're no longer spending on that particular area and we can direct that money to a different component of the cloud. So just not being locked in to a huge expensive product is really key, I think. >> Jim, your thoughts on why cloud and why now? Obviously it's pretty obvious reasons, but benefits for the naysayer sitting on the fence? >> Yeah, it's a really important question, John and I think Chad had a lot of important points. I think there's two others that become important. One is agility. Whether that's agility with respect to if you're in a competitive market place, Agility in terms of just retaining team members and staff in a highly competitive environment we all know we're in, particularly in the IT world. Agility from a cost perspective. So agility is a theme that comes through and through over and over and over again, and as Chad rightfully said, most companies and most organizations they don't know the entirety of what it is they're facing, or what the demands are going to be on their services, so agility is really, is really key. And the second one is, the notion has often been that you have to have it all figured out before you can start and really our mantra in the jam session was sort of born this way. It's really start by doing. Pick a use case, pick a pain point, pick an area of frustration, whatever it might be and just start the process. You'll learn as you go and not everything is the right fit for cloud. There were some things for the right reasons where alternatives might be be appropriate, but by and large, if you start by doing and in fact, through jam session, learn by doing, you'll start to better understand, enterprise will start to better understand what's most applicable to them, where they can leverage the best bang for the buck, if you will. And ultimately deliver on the value that IT is meant to deliver to the line of business, whatever that might be. And those two themes come through and through. And thirdly, I'll just add speed now. Speed of transformation, speed of cost reduction, speed of future rollout. You know, Chad has users begging for information and access to data, right? He and the team are sitting there trying to figure how to give it to them quickly. So speed of execution with quality is really paramount as well these days. >> Yeah and Chad also mentioned scale too, cause he's trying to scale up as key and again, getting the cloud muscles going for the teams and culture is critical because matching that incentives, I think the alignment is critical point. So congratulations gentlemen on a great award, best EDU solution. Chad, while I have you here, I want to just get your personal thoughts, but your industry expert PhD hat on, because one of the things we've been reporting on is in the EDU space, higher ed and other areas, with people having different education policies, the new reality is with virtualized students and faculty, alumni and community, the expectations and the data flows are different, right? So you had stuff that people used, systems, legacy systems, kind of as a good opportunity to look at cloud to build a new abstraction layer and again, create that alignment of what can we do development wise, because I'm sure you're seeing new data flows coming in. I'm sure this kind of thinking going on around "Okay, as we go forward, how do we find out what classes to attend if they're not onsite?" This is another jam session. So I see more and more things happening, pretty innovative in your world. What's your take on all this? >> My take, so when we did the pivot, we did a pivot right after spring break to be virtual for our students, like a lot of universities did. And you learn a lot when you go through a crisis kind of like that and you find all the weaknesses. And we had finished the engagement, I think, with NorthBay by that point, or were in it and seeing how if we were at our future state, you know, might end up the way I envisioned the future state, I can now point to these specific things and give specific examples about how we would have been able to more effectively respond when these new demands on data came up, when new data flows were being created very quickly and able to point out to the weaknesses of our current ecosystem and how that would be better. So that was really key and this whole thing is an opportunity. It's really accelerated a lot of things that were kind of already in the works and that's why it's exciting. It's obviously very challenging and at Pitt we're really right now trying to focus on how do we have a safe campus environment and going with a maximum flexibility and all the technology that's involved in that. And, you know, I've already got, I've had more unique data requests come to my desk since COVID than in the previous five years, you know? >> New patterns, new opportunities to write software and it's great to see you guys focused on that hierarchy of needs. I really appreciate it. I want to just share with you a funny story, not funny, but interesting story, because this highlights the creativity that's coming. I was riffing on Zoom with someone in a higher ed university out here in California and it wasn't official business, was just more riffing on the future and I said "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you had like an abstraction layer that had leveraged Canvas, Zoom and Discord?" All the kids are on Discord if they're gamers. So you go "Okay, why discord? It's a hang space." People, it's connective tissue. "Well, how do you build notifications through the different silos?" You know, Canvas doesn't support certain things and Canvas is the software that most universities use, but that's a use case that we were just riffing on, but that's the kind of ideation that's going to come out of these kinds of jam sessions. Are you guys having that kind of feeling too? I mean, how do you see this new ideation, rapid prototype? I only think it's going to get faster and accelerated. >> As Chad said, his requests are we're multiplying, I'm sure and people aren't, you know, folks are not willing to wait. We're in a hurry up, 'hurry up, I want it now' mentality these days with both college attendees as well as those of us who are trying to deliver on that promise. And I think John, I think you're absolutely right and I think that whether it be the fail fast mantra, or whether it be can we make even make this work, right? Does it have legs? Is it is even viable? And is it even cost-effective? I can tell you that we do a lot of work in Ed tech, we do a lot of work in other industries as well And what the the courseware delivery companies and the infrastructure companies are all trying to deal with as a result of COVID, is they've all had to try to innovate. So we're being asked to challenge ourselves in ways we never been asked to challenge ourselves in terms of speed of execution, speed of deployment, because these folks need answers, you know, tomorrow, today, yesterday, not six months from now. So I'll use the word legacy way of thinking is really not one that can be sustained, or tolerated any longer and I want Chad and others to be able to call us and say, "Hey, we need help. We need help quickly. How can we go work together side by side and go prove something. It may not be the most elegant, it may not be the most robust, but we need it tomorrow." And that's really the spirit of the whole notion of jam session. >> And new expectations means new solutions. Chad, we'll give you the final word. Going forward, you're on this wave right now, you got new things coming at you you're getting that foundation set. What's your mindset as you ride this wave? >> I'm optimistic. It really is, it's an exciting time to be in this role, the progress we've made in the calendar year 2020, despite the challenges we've been faced with, with COVID and budget issues, I'm optimistic. I love what I saw in the jam session. It just kind of confirmed my belief that this is really the future for the University of Pittsburgh in order to fully realize our vision of maximizing the value of data. >> Awesome! Best EDU solution award for AWS public sector. Congratulations to NorthBay Solutions. Jim Keller, president, and University of Pittsburgh, Chad Burton. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story. Great insights and again, the wave is here, new expectations, new solutions, clouds there, and you guys got a good approach. Congratulations on the jam session, thanks. >> Thank you, John. Chad, pleasure, thank you. >> Thank you. >> See you soon. >> This is "the Cube" coverage of AWS public sector partner awards. I'm John Furrier, host of "the Cube". Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>live from Denver, Colorado. It's the Q covering com vault. Go 2019. Brought to you by combo. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes. Coverage of combo go 19 from Colorado. Lisa Martin with stupid man. I got a couple of guys joining us with some really cool stuff to talk about. We've got robbed Colusa in the S V p and G m of metallic a combat venture. And we've got Michael, some principal architect from serious computer solutions. Guys, welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us. >>Yeah. So some big stuff came out yesterday. Metallic Rob, you are a convo, O g. I worked in the back, like, 10 years ago. I can't even believe it's been that long since I was there. But a lot of change in coma in the last nine months alone. Metallic came out yesterday. We're seeing a lot of momentum excitement around what come boats during strategically talk to us about metallic. What is it besides a cool name? And why is this so exciting? >>It's exciting for me for two reasons Specifically what we're doing with innovation. We've been an innovator and leader for two decades, but focusing on, things have changed. People have moved to cloud. People are looking at hybrid solutions. And with that comes SAS. So to me it's completing. I don't wanna say completing, but getting to that choice that that menu of options, the right ones not too confusing but the right ones. And so with metallic, we brought a sass portfolio to market around back in recovery aimed at some of the more common use cases. And the thing that was really exciting for me about this waas. We had this I p from the last two decades. Yet Sanjay empowered said, Look, I really want you innovate quickly. You've got all this I p put together a start up in the company marketing people working with engineering. And that's critical with the SAS offer because it's all about experience, >>right? Rob, I got all this I p We just had Sanjay on talking about all the patterns they have kind of going through my head. I'm like, Well, if you had all of these pieces we've been talking about Sascha now for you know, quite a few years. Why now? What? What has changed or what was the enabling piece other than Sanjay say and go that made metallic come to fruition now, rather that it hadn't before. >>Yeah, that's that's a good one. We've been working with partners and customers. Fact. I just talked to one, said Rob, I've wanted this for for a while. I think a lot of things came together, one putting together this start up approach to get the team's working cross functionally. That wasn't something we were accustomed to. So it wasn't just Sanjay saying Go. It was kind of doing things a little differently. I think The other thing looking at the market opportunity that we validate with our customers and an analyst. There's $1.6 billion target addressable market. Many customers are busy, Many customers are custom consuming lots of products, SAS or cloud and this just makes sense. So that's why we did it now. >>All right, well, so Michael Serious is a launch partner from metallic. My understanding. This is 100% built for the channel. Tell us what this means for your world, and your customers >>were really excited because this opens up the world of com vault toe a whole group of customers that we wouldn't focus on before with so you know, we're able to go in with our inside sales teams and with customers that maybe don't have full time employees for backup to spend, you know, multiple hours every day, Karen feeding for a larger, more advanced system. So this way you can off load a lot of that. Maybe not the ownership of back up, but at least the management of the infrastructure for you takes a lot of the overhead away they don't have to worry about. Okay, what about two sites? How did I manage that where, you know, that's a lot of complex stuff, So we're bringing in a company now that has 20 years experience. There's been a lot of new startups in the SAS area, but they don't have 20 years experience of knowing what the customers were looking for and back up and how they do it. And and to be honest, you learn a lot from your mistakes. And 20 years you made some mistakes. Everybody does, and they still have those mistakes to make, and these guys can all, you know, bring that to the customer, and then they don't have to worry about >>it. I'd liketo add to that a bit. So that's been the hardest thing is we have 20 years of innovation. We've got that. I'll call it a war chest, 812 patents. Who has that? And now it's like, Okay, Sascha, Sirs, want this unique experience? There's temptation to dip into the war chest. So we kind of moved everything out of the way and said, Let's take a fresh approach. Let's do a whole customer journey map. Let's worry about the experience. So the reason why we're able to innovate so quickly because we had this chest of patents andan enabled us to really focus on the customer and the partner experience to get it right. >>Can you talk a little bit about the combat adventures? When I saw that, that that's interesting. Is this kind of like what you're talking about? Like a startup within combo? Yes, Why was that important? >>It is important to us for two reasons. One, the brand brands about experience, right, and we needed to signal that internally, I mean, were traditionally executing really well in the enterprise space. Yes, we have mid market in some smaller customers, but we're known for handling big multi petting my customers, and we're known for maybe traditional approaches. So the brand allowed us to redefine and attach to that inexperience. The combo adventure part signaled the stability in the trust in a vendor that's been there for two decades with innovation. That's why we did that. >>Michael Being a sass offering the go to market has to be a little bit different. My understanding There's also like a 40 day, 45 day try A like, you know, full blown. You know, not just some, you know, test version of it. How will this change the way, or will it change the way you gotta market? >>It does change it quite drastically because the customer can get involved, they can start playing with it. They can ask for assistance during any time during that. But the nice thing is, after that 45 days, you don't lose what you did it it wasn't gonna download this. I'm gonna test it in my own little lab. You could be testing it with real world scenarios and then flip a switch. Your active you're going and what's nice is is is as that grows, right. I mean launch. They were recovering 90% of the workload people are doing and then immediately were growing it. But you know where they're gonna take this in the future, we'll be able to tie in to some of the old ways with the old combo and bring in the new >>Do you have no 3 65 practice of this ties into our >>we do and we actually have been. We were so excited for this because we were You know, we've been looking for a way to package not only Office 3 65 which which combo has done so well in the past, but but really touch those other customers that we weren't normally getting into with it. And everybody, especially the smaller companies, are using office 3 65 Nowadays, nobody has exchange on site. So being able to reach those and have that holistic message ease of use, the user interfaces you were saying is just it's it takes, what do we what other companies were doing? And it just makes it so much simpler >>When I saw the child at 45 days. Don't normally see that often. It's a 15 day trial and maybe you could mix it up to 30 days. And one of the things I heard during your keynote this morning was no posies talk to me about that as a differentiator. >>Yeah, maybe we'll both handle this. So there's two things one in this next six months will be learning a bit. We're gonna evolve just like a sass product does being fresh. So >>that may >>change. But what we found in our talk was many of the customers many of the other says products and they don't even have Ah, you're up in 15 minutes. That's right. It is. And some of them they have 30 day trials, but they let you extend it forever. And so what we found is many customers want to try and end a month back up, so tying it to 15 days isn't enough time to look. I think the unique differentiator, what we did because we re mapped all our business systems is of Michael has a customer that he's brought into this trial. He's gonna be informed where they are in the trial. He's going to see they did a backup. So just because it is 45 days we've got all this communication flowing back to the partner, so they can immediately say, Hey, you've already done a backup. You done to restore What else do you need? And we absolutely certainly hope that Michael or someone else's serious can close it quicker. I don't >>know too many times. People with P O sees they download the code, and they immediately get pulled into something else. So now we have a checks and balances we can communicate with combo. We know where they are. If some stagnating, they've had it for a couple days, they've moved on to another project. They take a week's vacation, they can come back to it. We can. We can know that we can engage with them and say, Hey, can we help out in some way? >>And is this sorry? Starting with office 3 65 is that kind of door opener to employ servers PM's for metallic for those minions. >>So right now we have three offers. I didn't cover that, so we've got three separate offers, but they're all the same thing, but you can consume VM file sequel. You can buy that separately if you want to buy Officer 65 separately, you can or metallic and point back in recovery. So we have all three of those in the suite, and we do anticipate some customers will come in and buy one. We've seen some trial activity already since launch where there's customers trying two or three. So there's a lot of incentive for them to go with multiple products in this. All right, >>So Rob Com Bold already has its core product releasing on a 90 day cadence. But bring us inside. From a development standpoint, Metallica's now is. It's as product. How's that need to change your methodology? What? What can customers expect from kind of a release cadence and gives a little bit as to what you might expect kind of over next six months? Sure. >>So I have my own engineering team. Like I said, it's a start up. So we're doing using a Dev Dev ops agile approach. We have two week sprints, and so if there is something critical that we think, see, they're gonna be a differentiator, maybe add value to the partner experience on the business system aside, or make it just that much easier for the customer that much more secure. We absolutely have worked out how to bring fresh features in that don't disrupt our customers like all modern SAS products do. So it'll be a little bit different experience with the SAS product than, say, a perpetual product, because the touch that we have into the into the product ourselves. >>You know, when you talked about the customer experience a few minutes ago, Rob in terms of even the design of comfort ventures, we can't go toe any event. Whatever technology we're talking about, customer experiences table states right and and as customers, if you're you know, 90 consumer, what not you are a consumer in your regular life. And so there's all these expectations that come from. I could go on Amazon and get anything that I wanted in 16 hours in 24 hours, and then we go into by software as business folks. The same expectation presents the user experience. I'm glad that you brought that up. That's like I said, it's table stakes for any organizations. Make or break >>right. I think for us that was like most of our focus, and I think to your point, since they can kind of go anywhere now. Then go to Amazon, try something. Then they jump in. Go to Azure. We thought it was really important to connect with the partners because of partners with ones that have usually solve what, 5 to 10 different I your business problems. And so we thought it was a smart thing to not only do that quick trial, but really go to market 100% with partners because they're the ones that helped the customer kind of make sense of it. All people get in there, they get frustrated trying 10 different things. So we kind of wanted to have that balance with this sort off. >>Well, And what we love out of this, which is so unique in the industry, is if we have that relationship with them, we know where they're consuming data and storage in the cloud. And with combo with metallic, we can bring our own storage. That customer already has. But there's a lot of customers that don't have that yet. Maybe they just have office 3 65 They're dabbling and cloud. Make it easy. I can use their storage right away. So having both those options makes our value. Add your perfect, >>Rob. Maybe you call it be called SAS. Plus, Yes, up on the keynote. So in my mind, one of the beauties of sass is I don't want to worry about anything. You know, I care about my data on everything below that in the stack. You know, it's like, you know, ordering delivery pizza. You're taking care of everything. They're so snapping a copy onto my own data center stuff leveraging storage from AWS and azure. I understand you want flexibility and choice, but, you know, how do I get concerned that, you know, while you've just added a whole level of complexity that my customers shouldn't have to worry about >>Oh, that's that's a great question. S o its ass out of the box. So all the data, all the control plane in the cloud, the option to be SAS plus, what we found in talking and hearing from hundreds of people was and >>we thought >>they'd say the same thing you did, and there were a variety of them, the dead. But if some said, Hey, I've got a physics issue. I've got 200 terabytes on Prem. I like the simplicity of this or my companies Cloud Vendor A or a cloud vendor B. I don't like having a copy in that clown. I've already got my largest. Some people are buying us for a department. They've got the enterprise on one cloud vendor. So So Back, back rolling back out of the box ass sask plus there for those unique requirements. And that's why we talk about flexible in on the customers own terms. We don't force them all of the cloud if there's compliance or other needs. GDP are whatever they can go to that use case for that workload. That makes sense. >>So yeah. So the news yesterday, just Michael from you. What? Some of the feedback within some of the customers have been doing the trial. What are some of the things that you're hearing? It's already taking in and gleaning insights from how they're using it. >>Well, to be honest, what they found with some other SAS offerings was they were kind of pigeonholed into exactly what they offered and nothing more, nothing less and having the option of having ah ah transport method on Prem having your own cloud. All of these options, they were extremely happy to have they were like, we're no longer being forced yet. It was presented in a way that they don't feel overwhelmed with the different options. A CZ you're saying by default you have the storage one button check I enter in my credentials. Now I'm using my own storage. They make it very simple, works you through the entire thing. The Wizards, the way they have really simplified the program. I was really surprised from come up because I think the command center, the U I within within traditional combo did very good on simplifying things. And they took, like, How can you make it easier? And with you I for metallic is way. It really talks to the SAS customers >>where some of the expected business outcomes I'm thinking like lower TCO, you know, eliminated or lower storage hardware costs big improvements to like FT time. What are some of the things that you're expecting? Customers t claim. >>To be honest, I think the most exciting thing that I've heard for my customers is that they're able to doom or so they weren't backing up everything that they needed to back up because they didn't have time. They didn't have the expertise, and so now they're gonna be able to protect things they've never been able to do in the past, just because of those limitations, >>and hopefully be able to actually see the data and extract insights from that. >>And I think from the value perspective, what was already mentioned. If they already have infrastructure that they want a leverage, you don't have to go buy something else. A lot of the other offers in the market kind of make you buy. Assuming you want to go there. That's one the other one is. If you look at the market, there's a lot of point products out there, so they start using one. Maybe it's not metallic. That happens, and then it has a scale issue. Then they're buying something else. So I think having a portfolio that matches a lot of use cases versus just today for launching a point product, I wouldn't be so excited. But being ableto handle the most common workloads across the market, I think that's that's goodness for them from a complex in R A Y t o type perspective, >>exciting stuff, guys. Well, congratulations on the launch and the expansion of the markets the next year you gotta bring some metallic customers that we can really dig into it with them and see what's really going on. >>Yes, we're excited about that. >>Rob. Michael, thank you for joining me on >>the show >>today. We appreciate it. First. You minimum. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from coma. Go 19.

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hi and welcome to the cube Studios for another cube conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry I'm your host Peter Buress every enterprise has to concern themselves with how they're going to go about ensuring the appropriate access to those crucial applications that run the business this is especially a key question in domains where the applications our seminal feature of the operations how can we set up IT so users see what they should see can access what they can access and that we have control over all about how these systems work and have that conversation we're here with Tony Ferguson an IT infrastructure architect at man energy solutions Tony welcome to the cube yeah thank you so Tony before we get into this crucial question about the appropriate level of visibility and the need for security between people users and applications tell us a little bit about man energy solutions yeah so we're a german-based company I'm working out of Copenhagen but we're part of the Volkswagen Group we have 16 thousand users globally across a hundred locations our company we we make large diesel entrants you also make smaller versions in our own factory and yeah in our company we have a course a lot of my irt on the actual engine and of course we have corporate IT and my job is to secure all of this infrastructure so specifically some of these big diesel engines as I understanding are being placed in locations and use cases that have an absolute requirements for security for example driving a ship is a major feature of the way that your engines are being used within the world so if I got that right yeah yeah that's correct and yeah and then the scale of this you know the number of engines and the number of vessels we need to access and the data we collect it is critical infrastructure we also have power plants so it's really important that we secure this infrastructure so it's a it's a it's a very it's an infrastructure that has very interesting physical characteristics but also has very interesting security characteristics as you went into thinking about how you're going to improve the applicability of the overall infrastructure that you use to drive your business use cases what were some of the issues that you find yourself struggling with yes so yeah a lot of issues actually one of the first things is that we wanted to authenticate the actual engineer and we wanted to make sure that the right people got to the right assets and we wanted to make sure that a thing dication was strong so like the two-factor multi-factor authentication and we wanted to show that the all the data between their engineer and the vessel was encrypted and another big problem for us is scale we need to scale the solution and one of the one of the things as these get brought for us is namespace routing we had the ability to really scale the system without using IP addresses were actually networking so this solved really a lot of problems for us and trying to get those engineers to all of the assets and the IOT on the engine now one of the things that you noted in your as you move forward was this notion of a black cloud where you could formalize the clock the types of relationships you wanted between your engineer users and other users and the Eric the applications you were running on a global scale basis to actually ensure the reliability of the product you had out in the field tell us a little bit about this notion of black cloud yeah so it ties it into a little bit around zero trust but how I see black cloud and how I would describe it is you know everything is dark right so if there's an attacker and he scans port scans of my infrastructure he won't see anything so so basically we would use their tech surface that means that there's no answer back and by doing this we we remove all these vulnerabilities all these zero-day vulnerabilities were remove this and in the same time we stall out that engineer to commit to their assets now how does that work in an environment that is as physically constrained as you know integrating or networking internet working with seagoing vessels yeah so of course a lot of this connectivity is over satellite and of course it's across the internet so it's important that we encrypt into end and it's important that we allow the right engineers to the right customers and we're able to access all these resources and to do Federation and make sure there's strong authentication for our customers we can we really tell them that this all the similar structure is completely secured dark and it's extremely difficult to to come into this black cloud so you've got a challenge the challenge that we've set up here is that you've got a use case that is constrained by the characteristics of the physical infrastructure where the security needs are absolutely paramount and still has to scale and very importantly be evolvable to allow you to be able to provide future classes of services that will further differentiate and improve your business that suggests that these decisions you had to make about the characteristics of the solution was gonna have an enormous impact ultimately on what you could achieve tell us a little bit about the thought process as you went through as you chose a set of sub technology suppliers to help you build out this black cloud and this application set yeah so we looked at a lot of different solutions but a lot of these solutions were based around the old knit work style right around VPNs around having files and around having ACLs and a lot of this is really network centric and what we were looking for is something that was more application centric something that moved up the stack and started to look at policy around what the user would want access to so putting those users and applications together and create meaningful policy based on the DNS rather than on the IP layer and this was really important for us to be able to scale and really make meaningful policy so in many respects it allowed you to not to necessarily de-emphasize but refocus your network design engineering and management efforts from device level assets and perimeter level assets to some of the assets that are really driving new classes of value the applications the users and the data that these engines are streaming and the models that you're using to assure optimal performance of them have I got that right yeah that's exactly right it's extremely important that that we don't have electrical movement you know we look today there's all sorts of were mobile malware attacks ransomware and you know you can imagine if something got into into this cloud that you wouldn't want to let remove so it's not just about the products but it's also about making sure that all these assets are designed from the ground up that that dark as well all right that even on the interns that they can't speak to each other all these very limited connectivity there Tony this has been a fascinating conversation about how you've taken this notion of a black cloud and applied it to a really crucial business case within man energy but I got to believe that this sets you up for a range of other use cases that the investments you've made here are gonna offer new classes of payback in a lot of different use cases how are you going to roll this black cloud concept using Z scalar out to the rest of the organization and the rest of the work that's being performed yeah it's a good question um so when we first looked at this technology we thought it was perfect for consultants because we could have very specific access policies and just allow them to the SS we will be required but then we also saw that there were so many other user cases here for example we are moving our applications from our data center to AWS and to Azura and as we move those applications the users need to connect to this so where would you have this black cloud and have the connectivity to it but we're not opening this to the Internet so you know as far as you're concerned I don't even have any resources or a service in AWS because it's black it's dark so there's a huge amount of security that we can add to this and then there's also a lot of other user cases like company mergers we had to buy a company so we could use this technology to to move to another company together because you don't need to worry about the network anymore you just worried about getting applications to users so I there's a number of great applications for this technology and I really see that this technology will really grow and I'm really excited about it so moving away from a physical orientation of the network to a more logical application and user oriented services or any care orientated a vision of the network has opened up a lot of strategic possibilities what's been the cost impact yes so it what's quite interesting we when you move to the cloud and move to a company like Z scalar is there a software company so forget about all the hardware you can imagine we have a hundred locations globally so we don't have to install all the hardware we don't have to have VPN concentrators we just have to have some software on the client some software the connectors in the cloud and then Z scalar do the magic so for the business they really love this technology because it is very simple it's sitting in the background they don't have to log on to the VPN all the time so it's very seamless for the user and for us we save a lot of money on buying hardware and appliances excellent Tony Ferguson I want to thank you very much for being on the cube Tony Tony Ferguson's the IT infrastructure architect at man energy solutions I'm Peter Burris once again until we have another cube conversation you [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi and welcome to the CUBE studios for another CUBE conversation, where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry, I'm your host, Peter Burris. Every enterprise has to concern themselves with how they're going to go about insuring the appropriate access to those crucial applications that run the business, this is especially a key question in domains where the applications are a seminal feature of the operations. How can we set up IT so users see what they should see, can access what they can access, and that we have control overall about how these systems work. No to have that conversation, we're here with Tony Ferguson, an IT infrastructure architect at MAN Energy solutions, Tony, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So, Tony, before we get into this crucial question about the appropriate level of visibility and the need for security between people, users, and applications, tell us a little bit about MAN Energy Solutions. >> Yeah, so we're a German-based company. I'm working out of Copenhagen, but we're a part of the Volkswagen group, we have 16,000 users globally across 100 locations. Our company, we make large diesel engines, we also make smaller versions in our German factory. In our company we have of course a lot of IoT on the actual engine, and of course we have corporate IT. My job is to secure all of this infrastructure. >> So, specifically, some of these big diesel engines as I understand it, are being placed in locations and use cases that have an absolute requirement for security. For example, driving a ship is a major feature of the way that your engines are being used within the world, have I got that right? >> Yeah, that's correct, and the scale of this, the number of engines and the number of vessels we need to access and the data we collect. It is critical infrastructure, we also have power plants, so it's really important that we secure this infrastructure. >> So it's an infrastructure that has very interesting physical characteristics but also has very interesting security characteristics. As you went into thinking about how you're going to improve the applicability of the overall infrastructure that you use to drive your business use cases, what were some of the issues that you find yourself struggling with? >> Yeah, a lot of issues actually, one of the first things is that we wanted to authenticate the actual engineer, and we wanted to make sure that right people got to the right assets, and we wanted to make sure that authentication was strong, so like the two-factor, multi-factor authentication. And we wanted to ensure that all the data between the engineer and the vessel was encrypted. And another big problem for us is scale, we need to scale the solution, and one of things that Zscaler brought for us is name-space routing, we had the ability to really scale this system without using IP addresses, or actually networking. So this solved really, a lot of problems for us in trying to get those engineers to all of the assets and IoT on the engine. >> Now one of the things that you noted as you moved forward, was this notion of a black cloud >> Yeah. >> Where you could formalize the types of relationships you wanted between your engineer users and other users, and the applications you were running on a global scalable basis to actually ensure the reliability of the product you had out in the field. Tell us a little bit about this notion of black cloud. >> Yeah, so it ties in to a little bit around zero crust, but how I see black cloud and how I sort of describe it is, everything is dark, right, so if there's an attacker and he scans, bulk scans my infrastructure he won't see anything, so basically we reduce the tech surface. That means that there's no answer back and by doing this, we remove all these vulnerabilities, all these zero day vulnerabilities, we remove this and in the same time we still allow that engineer to connect to the assets. >> Now, how does that work in an environment that is as physically constrained as integrating or inter-networking with sea-going vessels? >> Yeah, so of course a lot of this connectivity is over satellite, and of course it's across the internet, so it is important that we encrypt end to end. And it's important that we allow the right engineers to the right customers and we're able to access all these resources and to do federation and make sure there's strong authentication for our customers. We can really tell them that this, all this infrastructure is completely secured, dark, and it's extremely difficult to come into this black cloud. >> So you've got a challenge, the challenge that we've set up here is that you've got a use case that is constrained by the characteristics of the physical infrastructure, where the security needs are absolutely paramount and still has to scale, and very importantly be evolvable to allow you to be able to provide future classes of services that will further differentiate and improve your business. That suggests that these decisions you had to make about the characteristics of the solution was going to have an enormous impact ultimately on what you could achieve. Tell us little bit about the thought process you went through as you chose a set of technology suppliers to help you build out this black cloud and this application set. >> Yeah, so we looked at a lot of different solutions but a lot of these solutions were based around the old network style, around VPNs, around having firewalls, and around having ACLs. And a lot of this is really network-centric and what we were looking for is something that was more applications centric, something that moved up the stack and started to look at policy around what the user would want access to. So putting those users and applications together and creating meaningful policy based on the DNS, rather than on the IP layer, and this was really important for us, to be able to scale and really make meaningful policy. >> So in many respects, it allowed you to, not to necessarily de-emphasize, but refocus your network design, engineering, and management efforts from device-level assets and pre-liminal level assets-- >> Yes. >> To some of the assets that are really driving new classes of value, the applications of users and the data that these engines are streaming and the models that you're using to assure optimal performance of them, have I got that right? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. It's extremely important that that we don't have lateral movement, we look today, there's all sorts of wormable malware attacks, ransomware, and you can imagine if something got into this cloud that you wouldn't want it to laterally move. So it's not just about the products but it's also about making sure that all these assets are designed from the ground up, that they're dark as well, right. That even on the chance, that they can't speak to each other or there's very limited connectivity there. >> Tony this has been a fascinating conversation about how you've taken this notion of a black cloud and applied it to a really crucial business case within MAN energy, but I got to believe that this sets you up for a range of other use cases, the investments you've made here are going to offer new classes of payback in a lot of different use cases. How are you going to roll this black cloud concept using Zscaler, out to the rest of the organization and the rest of the work that's being performed? >> It's a good question, so when we first looked at this technology, we thought it was perfect for consultants because we could have very specific access policies and just allow them to the assets where we required. But then we also saw that there was so many other user cases here, for example, we are moving our applications from our data center to AWS and to Azure, and as we move those applications the users need to connect to this. So we're able to have this black cloud and have the connectivity to it, but we're not opening this to the internet. So as far as you're concerned, I don't even have any resources or servers in AWS because it's black, it's dark. So there's a huge amount of security that we can add to this, and then there's also a lot of other user cases, like company mergers. We had to buy companies so we could use this technology to merge another company together. Because you don't need to worry about the network anymore, you're just worried about getting applications to users. So I think there's a number of great applications for this technology, and I really see that this technology will really grow and I'm really excited about it. >> So moving away from a physical-orientation of the network to a more logical, application and user oriented, services orientated version of the network has opened up a lot of strategic possibilities. What's been the cost impact? >> Yeah so what's quite interesting, when you move to the cloud and move to a company like Zscaler, they're a software company, so forget about all the hardware. You can imagine we have a hundred locations globally, so we don't have to install all the hardware. We don't have to have VPN concentrators, we just have to have some software on the client, some software connectors in the cloud, then Zscaler do the magic. So for the business, they really love this technology because it is very simple, it's sitting in the background, they don't have to log on to the VPN all the time. So it's very seamless for the user, and for us, we save a lot of money on buying hardware and appliances. >> Excellent, Tony Ferguson, I want to thank you very much for being on theCUBE >> Thank you. >> Tony Ferguson's an IT infrastructure architect at MAN Energy Solutions, I'm Peter Burris, once again, until we have another Cube Conversation. (upbeat music)