(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore 2022, formerly Vmworld. We've been covering this event since 2010. I'm with Dave Nicholson, my cohost. We've got two sets here, live for three days, breaking down all the action, what's going on in the news, what announcements, what are the partners doing, you got the VMware execs, you got the customers, and you got the partner ecosystem, which is booming. We got Darren Wolner, Senior Director of Product Management at Lumen, SASE and SD-WAN, in the midst of it all. The internet is SD-WAN, this is all rocking. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey. Thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciate being here. >> Well, we know the name change LUMEN from CenturyLink. You guys have been on many times on theCUBE talking about, you know, the connective tissue. You got infrastructure, platform, now SASE. Cloud's changing. We're calling it supercloud. Some people call it multicloud. But the game is still the same. You got an on-premise environment, you got edge, could be a building. And you got now cloud-native hyperscale, cloud players, now all connecting, kind of like the old branch office days, connect here. So a lot of the same kind of concepts, but done differently. Give us the quick update from Lumen. What are you guys seeing? What are some of the big trends? >> So the quick update from Lumen is that we just launched a new service called SASE that we're extremely excited about. And this new service from Lumen takes advantage of a lot of the infrastructure that you just mentioned. So we're able to take advantage of our cloud edge 60 plus nodes to help customers move their applications closer to where they're doing business. Major performance boosts. So even though all these customers want to move the workloads to the cloud to improve their efficiency, improve their performance, we are acting quickly to make sure that that experience is a positive one. So as things are evolving and changing, so is Lumen, Aad we're pushing towards that evolution to technology. >> Take a minute to explain, just kind of set the table to the situation of how you guys relate to your customers. You mentioned SASE, which is a service I want to get into. Okay, got connectivity. What are some of the use cases? Where does SASE fit in? What is the use case with the customers? Where are you seeing the most traction? >> And you need to define SASE. It's always a party foul to use an acronym without defining it immediately after the first time you used it, so. >> Okay, so I have to recover from that foul. So, absolutely. So SASE, we view SASE as a convergence of network and security. And what we're doing with SASE is that we're delivering this package of services that are cloud based, that customers can pick and choose whichever ones they want. And that's Secure Access Service Edge. And that is what we're very excited to talk about. >> I mean, basically it's connectivity, it's application security, it's edge. So it's end-to-end. So we all get the acronym. Nice play there. But when reality comes to the customer, what is the use case that you guys are seeing the most on? Lift and shift I get. Is it lift and shift and then cloud native to on-prem? What is some of the things specifically that you guys are selling into? >> Specifically what we're seeing is we're seeing that customers, they want to evolve their networks and move to cloud environments, but not everybody's ready to do it all at the same time. That's part of the reason why SASE has become so popular right now. Because we're enabling customers to pick and choose the order in which they want to move to cloud enabled services, and we're allowing them to choose one or choose them all. And from a use case perspective, as we've just gone through COVID, and everybody knows work from home has become extremely important way of doing business, and that we want to give that flexibility. >> No one would've forecasted 100% work-from-home, VPN, move it under provisioned. (men laughing) So again, shock to the system. >> It is, it is, it is. It was, but with a solution like this, we're able to provide our customers with flexibility to run their businesses any way they want. They to be premise-based, we can support them. They want to be remote, we can support them. That is a huge use case right now. >> I mean, all joking aside, the forcing function, necessity's the mother of invention, and the pandemic really kind of changed the game. How do you guys see security evolving? Because as you look at the security, you got FourNet out there. I know you guys have a relationship with them. You got VMware. There's a lot of different tools and platforms emerging. We hear every CSO we talk to is like, hey, I want to take my 35 tools down to 24, and more platforms, and much more defensibility, not just point security. How do you discuss that with customers around the security conversation? >> So we're finding that our customers want a little bit more simplicity. You had mentioned that they want to bring down their numbers to something that's a little bit more manageable. With the service that we've just launched, we have single vendor solutions, and we're looking to simplify that path for the customer. And it's about simplicity, but it's also about optionality. We want to make sure that we can say yes to our customers. And whatever path that they want to go to, from a software perspective, we're able to support them. And the flexibility of our platform allows that to happen. >> You know, networking, Dave, we always talk about the three major pillars: networking, compute, storage. They never go away. >> No. >> They'll always be around. Networking is now front and center, especially with the abstractions going on. You're starting to see supercloud discussions. You see companies buying more cloud native, like with AWS, to take that CapEx off, but now are putting all that energy into modern application development. Which now puts pressure on, okay, well about network policies? So networking is into the fold again. It's always been there, it never left, but it's becoming different. How do you see the different conversations happening with the network component, with cloud native trend that we're seeing here? >> Well, I think the network component is really table stakes. And what's happening is, as everybody is interested in moving to the cloud, services are becoming instant, right? Digitized. But you have the network that customers are still looking for that level of support from a company like Lumen, and they know that we have a vast infrastructure. So the network conversation doesn't go away. It just evolves. What's happening is customers want to understand how they can better secure those networks. And then what's also happening is people want to use any device, anywhere, anytime. So the conversation about the network is important, but when you think about security, it's starting to move away from the network. It already has. >> There's no more perimeter. >> Exactly. So we need to be able to secure our customers wherever they are, however they want to use their devices. And for us, that path was SASE. >> So go into a little more depth in terms of how this is deployed. What is this thing that is SASE? >> Absolutely. >> Is this software living on the edge on people's servers? Does it include some sort of physical components and wizardry? >> Well... (laughs) >> Peel back-- >> Is it self-service? Is it installable? Does it need professional services? >> So, there is a little bit of wizardry. And what we put together is really an awesome digital platform where customers have the ability to go into the Lumen marketplace, and in five simple steps, purchase a SASE solution based on a few discreet choices that they need to make. And once they've provisioned that, once they've purchased that service, now they have those entitlements. We've created an all new application from the ground up called the Lumen SASE Manager where they're able to go in, take their entitlements, design, build, manage their network. So the customer can go through this journey, and it's relatively quick. And they have tons of flexibility to do that. However, if a customer prefers a seller-led journey, we're still going to help them do that as well. So really the spirit of SASE for us was to give ultimate flexibility to the customer. Consume exactly what you want, consume it the way you want to, but the simplicity factor with our digital approach I think is something that we feel is pretty game changing. >> So when one of those customers, let's say you have a campaign, thank you SASE. What are those customers thanking you for? Give me an example of what a delighted customer would point to as, "I'm really glad we made the decision to do this with Lumen." Why would they be happy? >> Why would they be happy? Because the advantage of doing this with Lumen is not only that simplified digital approach, but we're selling them essentially a cookie, right? And that cookie has two layers, and it has cream filling. And what's going on is-- >> Tastes great. >> Definitely, definitely. But everybody has different tastes, and we'll get to that in a second. But the top layer is the infrastructure that Lumen provides. And we have a vast infrastructure, 450,000 route miles of fiber, 60 plus cloud edge nodes to bring compute closer to the customer. So that's a very important layer that we're providing. And then the other layer of the cookie is the management. Different customers have different needs. Not every business looks alike. So you're going to have some businesses who have invested in their security apparatus, and they may not need enough as much help from us. So we're offering customers different levels of managed service wrapper so they can buy exactly what they need, no more, no less. So let's get to the cream filling. Everybody likes the cream filling, but not everybody likes the same kind. Every time you go down the supermarket aisle and you look at your favorite cream cookie, there's different types of flavors that are introduced from time to time. So what we want to do is to be able to say yes to our customers and give them as much variety as the cream flavors as possible. And that's where the software comes in. If you have dedicated a lot of expertise to a certain platform, we want to be able to support that software platform. And I think the flexibility of the Lumen platform and the flexibility of Lumen SASE solutions allows us to give that flexibility back. >> So you putting that wizardry at the edge, so the customer's environment, whatever they have flexes with the connectivity? >> It does, yes. >> That's what you're getting at. I mean, at the end of the day, we need the network. Everybody wants more bandwidth. >> Its not going away. >> Faster, faster, faster. >> That's right. >> We need more bandwidth. >> That's right. >> But it could be smarter. But that also implements some potential overhead. So you got to understand the end to end. That's where I think the SD-WAN interesting tie-in comes in. How do you talk to customers about that piece? Is it simply you can have your cake and eat it too, and you lose weight with Lumen? I stole that line from Victoria from VMware. I want my cake and eat it too, and I want to lose weight. >> I mean, wouldn't that be a wonderful world if we could do that? Have our cake and lose weight. >> I want to make sure. Yeah. >> But when it comes to SD-WAN, especially under our SASE umbrella, what we're looking to do is go down the road of simplicity and try to work out the amount of compute that a customer needs, and the amount of storage, I'm sorry, not storage, the amount of throughput that a customer needs. And we're getting these customers to make these decisions. They know what they have. They know what they want to run. We will consult with them. Whether they go through our digital experience, whether they go through our seller-led experience, there's always off ramps and a way to talk to a human being and make choices. So we're giving the customer enough information to make an informed decision, and we're here to support them if they need more. >> So you're customer-centric. You guys are good there. I mean, that's solid. Great track record there. I guess my final two questions are: one, how do I consume? I'm the customer. How do I consume? And what's on the roadmap going forward? I mean, look at the project management. You got the keys to the kingdom on the roadmap. And you can share if you want, but maybe you can't share some things. But what's the consumption model? Where do I find it? Is it the marketplace? Is it through channel partners and service providers? And then what's on the roadmap? >> Sure, absolutely. So you can consume this on dotcom through the Lumen marketplace. You could interact with the learn and the buy experience. And then once you've gone through that experience, you're going to consume it through the SASE manager. That's how you're going to use and interact with the service. That's how you're going to consume it. And then you're going to continue to utilize the SASE manager for reporting, access to portals, so forth and so on. You need to make a change to your service, not a problem. It's simple. You go back into the SASE manager, you add more seats to your ZTNA solution. You want to add another site, you go back into the SASE manager, you could purchase another site. We'll take care of all of it. Everything is automated. >> If you're a VMware customer, what's in it for them? >> This is great for VMware. It's the automation of the complete security stack. It's the automation of the SD-WAN portion. And we think that this total package is something that's going to be very appealing to VMware fans, VMware customers, and most importantly, when a VMware customer comes to us and says, "I have a ton of experience with VMware, and I don't want to move away from it, but I can really use the management and the infrastructure that you guys have," I'm able to say yes. >> And then you got the Aria coming out, now you got the cross-cloud, going to be very interesting. Okay, what's on the roadmap? Tell us what's the secret sauce. Reveal some secrets. >> Reveal some secrets. I dunno, there's a lot of people watching. >> They're shaking their head over there, "Don't say it! Don't say it!" (laughs) >> We have a lot of exciting things on the roadmap. I will tell you this because I think it's very important. The way we are developing services today has shifted. No longer can companies afford to roll out one product a year and wait. It takes you a year to roll that product out, and it's stale by the time it comes out, and then it takes you another year to fix it. We have moved to continuous development cycles. We are keeping track of what's going on in the market, what the hot trends are, what the hot services are, and as SASE continues to evolve, we will be able to quickly evolve. So while we do have some ideas of where we want to go on the roadmap, and I'm sure they're shaking their heads over there, what I love is we now have the ability to listen to what our customers want and act quickly. >> I call it the holy trinity. Network storage, compute, get that software intelligence at the edge which is going to be really popular. You guys are in a really perfect position. Thanks for coming on, sharing on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, thank you. >> Okay, Darren's here on theCUBE breaking it down for Lumen, formerly CenturyLink, rebranded a few years ago. Connectivity is the key. You still got to connect, network, compute, storage, and you got the data center now, the cloud hybrid, now multicloud. This is the super CUBE, covering supercloud here at VMware Explore 2022. We'll be right back after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of splunk.com virtual this year. I'm John ferry, host of the cube. And one of the great reasons of great reasons of being on site with the team here is we have to bring remote guests in real guests from all no stories, too small. We bring people into the cube to have the right conversations. We've got Brooke Cunningham area, VP of global partner marketing experience. Brooke, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, thank you, John. This is my sixth dot conflict, but this is actually my first time being on the cube. So I'm delighted. >>Great to have you on these new hybrid events. We can bring people in. You don't have to be here. All the execs are here, the partners are here. Great news is happening all around the world. You guys just announced a new partner program for the cloud called partner verse program. This is kind of, you know, mostly partner news is okay. Okay. Partner news partner ecosystem. But I think this is an important story because Splunk is kind of going to the next level of scale. That's to me is my observations walking away from the keynote, a lot of the partners, great technology, great platform, a lot of growth with cloud. We had formula one on you guys have a growing ecosystem. What is the new announcement partner versus about? >>Yes. Thanks, John. And you are spot on. We are growing for scale and Splunk's partner ecosystem is 2200 strong and we were so delighted to have so much partner success highlighted today on the keynotes. And specifically we have announced an all new spunk Splunk partner program called the Splunk partner verse. So we're taking it to new frontiers for our partners, really built for the cloud to help our partners lean into those cloud transformations with their customer. >>Great. Fro can you walk me through some of the numbers inside the numbers for a second? How many partners do you have and what is this program about specifically? >>Yeah, so 2200 partners that we featured some amazing stories in the keynotes today, around some of the momentum we have with partners like AWS, a center blue buoyant, a partner that just recently rearchitected all of their managed services from Splunk enterprise to Splunk cloud, because as they put it, Splunk is the only solution that can truly offer that hybrid solution for their customers. So all new goodness for our partners to help them lean in, to get enabled around all of the Splunk products, as well as to differentiate, differentiate their offerings with a new badging system. And we're going to help our partners really take that to the market by extending and expanding our marketing and creating an all new solutions catalog for our partners to differentiate themselves to their customers. >>You mentioned a couple things I want to double down on this badging thing, get in some of the nuances, but I want to just point out that, you know, and get your reaction to this when you see growth. And I saw this early on with AWS early on, when they performing, when you start to see the ecosystem grow like this, you start to see more enablement. You see more, money-making going on more, more, um, custom solutions, more agility you. So you started to see these things develop around you guys. So what does all this badging mean? How what's in it for me as a partner? Like how do I win on this? >>Yeah, great question. So first of all, John partner listening is a big part of what we do here at Splunk. And it's specifically a major part of what I do in my role. So we create a lot of forums to get that real deal partner feedback. What do they need to be successful with their customers? Especially as Splunk continues to expand our portfolio. And we heard some really clear feedback from our partners. Number one, they need more enablement faster, especially all those new products. They really want to get enabled around new product areas like observability, their customers are asking for it. They secondly told us that being able to differentiate themselves to customers was key. And that showing that they had core expertise around specific solution areas, types of services, as well as specializations. For example, some of our partners that are authorized learning partners, they really want it to be able to showcase these skills and differentiate that to their customers in the market. And it's not a role for us at Splunk to really help them do that. And so we took that feedback and really incorporated it into this new program, badging specifically will help to address some of those things I mentioned. So for example, a lot of badging around those use case areas, security, observability, AOD migrations, as well as specializations. Like I mentioned, for things like, uh, partners that are doing, uh, learning specific partners that are really helping us extend our reach in, in different international markets and so on. >>Okay. Let me just ask a question on the badge if you don't mind. Um, so you mentioned, you mentioned almost like you were going through like verticals is badging to be much more about discovery from a client customer, uh, end user customer standpoint. Are you looking to create kind of much more categorical differentiation is what's the, what, what's the purpose of the badge? Cause I noticed it was like different verticals. I heard security and >>Yeah, so I would say it's think of it as both. So for example, our partners go to market with us in many different ways. Some of them are selling servicing building. So there'll be partner motion badges to really differentiate the different ways that they're supporting customers from a go-to-market approach and then additional badging to help really identify some of those specialization areas around whether that's clunky use cases, specializations and more, uh, for example, a specific badge that we're rolling out right here at.com is around cloud migrations and partners will be able to get started to get engaged on that badge in preparation for our full-scale launch in February, we'll, they'll start to be able to take advantage of learning pathways, get their teams skilled up, and that will then unlock some new incentives as well as, uh, benefits that they can take advantage of things like accessing or of the Splunk's I've experience and the proof of concept platform and really giving their teams more, uh, capability. And, >>You know, I such a recent cross in the hallway here at dot confidence. She was, she and I were talking about how AI and data is enabling a lot of people to create these solutions. So, you know, you got kind of this almost like Amazon web services dynamic, where it's growing really fast and we're hearing stories, how data is driving value. We had formula one on the cube, the keynotes were giving some examples as you start to see this momentum kind of scaling up to the next level, if you're enabling customers, which you are with data, the monetization or the economic shifts, right? So it's healthy ecosystems, the partners create solutions, they deal with the customer, they're making some money, right? So, so can you share your vision on the unit on the economic equation of how partners are tapping into this? Because I almost imagine, um, a thousand flowers are blooming and then you start to see more value being created and Splunk also gets a cut of it, but there's, there should be that kind of deck. And you can talk about that. >>Yeah, absolutely. In fact, one of the things that I have the opportunity to do with our partners is study our partners, success and profitability. And some of the things that we learned from those studies with our partners is that what's really helping our partners to grow their practices with Blanca and their profitability with that business is really the stickiness that they have with their customers, being able to deliver solutions and services and really be those subject matter experts for their customers. And we know that our most successful and profitable partners are servicing their customers across the Splunk cases. So for example, many of our partners came from a security background and they are super deep, super knowledgeable around security, and they are trusted by their customers as the, you know, subject matter experts around security. And so many of them are starting to lean in on some of the new, additional use cases. Observability is a hot topic with our partners right now it's a new and emerging use cases case for them to transition some of the same sets of data that they are addressing in their current appointments with our customers and bring new value with those new use cases. But that's where we're seeing partner profitability growth. >>I love the channel dynamic. There we go, indirect and real and value creation. I got to ask you about the day-to-day dynamic. Of course we all know about the mark injuries and story. Software's eating the world, okay. Software ate the world. Okay. Now that's done. Now we're data is continuing to drive the value proposition. And so that's going to have an impact on how customer your partners serve their customers, ultimately your customer at the end of the day. How, how is that happening? And from a success standpoint, how would you talk to, uh, where people are on the progress of bringing the most innovative solutions? What, where's the headroom, where do you see that going Brook >>There's? I would say there's just endless opportunity here. And we just see so much innovation in our partner ecosystem to create purpose built solutions for their customers business problems. And that's where I think the value of the data comes to life. Really turning that data into doing as is really the Matic for all the things that we're talking about here, uh, at.com 21, that our partners really see these opportunities and then can replicate some of those same solutions for other customers in the same spaces. So for example, you know, really specialized solutions for healthcare where they're, uh, providing, you know, access to all the data across the hospital, or, um, you heard in guard's keynote about unlocking the value of SAP data. This is just a huge opportunity accessing all that data and really turning that data into doing. And we'll be talking even more about the new SAP relationship and the value for the partner ecosystem to go address those FP data sets in their customers. We'll be talking more about that on our partner feature session, which is tomorrow in day two of dotcom. >>Well, you guys to have a nice mix of business in the partner ecosystem from, you know, small boutiques to high-end system integrators and everything in between, I noticed you're doing a lot with censure. Could you talk about how you guys are partnering with the large global system integrators because they're becoming their own clouds. So, you know, as Jerry Chen at Greylock says, are these castles being built in the cloud with real competitive advantage with data? Again, this is a new phenomenon in the past really two years, you're starting to see explosion of, of scale and refactoring business models with data. What's your, what's your reaction to that? >>Absolutely. In fact, we are really leading in with some of these global systems integrators, and you've heard this exciting news in Theresa Carlson's portion of the keynote earlier today, where we've announced a partner, a center partner business group together. And we're so excited about the center and Splunk partner business group. It's going to elevate the Splunk and essential partnership eCenter has invested in thousands and thousands of joint professionals that are skilled up on flunk. They are building a purpose patients. We have so many amazing examples where Splunk and essential work together to solve real life problems. For example, there's a joint solution that helps address anti-human trafficking. Uh, there's a joint solution that helped with vaccine tracking. I mean, just really powerful examples that are just really extending value to customers and solving real life, data problems. >>Well, you guys have a lot of momentum, bro. Congratulations on the success and partner versus we're going to follow it again. It was built for the cloud. I know it's in the headline. It says flunked launches, new partner program for the cloud. Was there a partner program for the on premises and what's different about on the cloud? Was it kind of new, everything is cloud what's that? What does that mean? That statement? Yeah, >>Absolutely. So we, you know, as we've all seen, customers are leaning into the class that growth to the movement, to the cloud, just accelerated during COVID. And so part of that feedback that I referenced earlier that we heard from our partners, they said, we need help. We need help moving faster. And so that's really the underpinning of the all-new Splunk partner vers program is to really that acceleration to skill up our partners and give them the tools to be successful. And so with that, we did want to rebrand and reinvigorate it to really signal this newness. And as it was mentioning earlier, when we were talking about the badges, it's really about making sure we're providing the partners the right enablement so that they can be ready and able to support their customers on this journey, to the cloud, as well as the access, the resources, the support and the marketing so that they can be successful and really featured their expertise and value in the market. >>Well, Brooke, I want to get one final question before we go. Cause I know you have a lot of experience in the partner ecosystems and over your career. And we just interviewed the formula one CEO, uh, Zach brown, and, and they've been very popular with the, with the Netflix series driving to survive. And I was joking with him driving value with data as channel partners and your partners look to the post pandemic survive and thrive trend that people are going through right now. What should they be thinking about when they look at partner versus, and how Splunk can help them drive an advantage, not only just survive, but to actually drive to an advantage. >>I, I just see this as an opportunity for partners that haven't already leaned into the cloud and helping their customers migrate to the cloud now is the time rapid five acceleration is just essential for organizations to reach their most critical missions and their outcomes. And this one partner versus program is a significant move forward for Splunk partners. And we want to pursue a massive market opportunity focused on the cloud with our partners, for our customers. So I just really encourage our partners to engage, participate and join us on this journey. >>Well, it's a lot of evidence to support this vision. Uh, with pandemic, we saw refab replatforming and refactoring the businesses in the cloud at speeds, that unprecedented deployments. So, uh, cloud can, can bring that scale and speed to the table. It's really incredible. So thank you very much for coming on the cube remotely. Thanks have you had, >>Thank you. This was a delight. Really appreciate the time, John and very excited to have my first opportunity to be a >>Okay. You're a cube alumni. We are here in the studios, Splunk studios for their virtual event here with all the top executives and partners bringing in guests remotely. It's a virtual event. So we'll be back in person. I'm Jennifer, the cube. Thanks for watching.

(calm electronic music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation with Fortinet. I'm Lisa Martin. John Madison joins me, the CMO and EVP of products. John, welcome back to the program. >> Thanks Lisa. Good to be here. >> Good to see you. So, so much has changed since I last saw you. The move to remote work caused by the pandemic led so many organizations to invest in modern networking and security technologies. And we see, you know, the rise in the threat landscape that protecting digital assets is becoming even more and more urgent because the threats are continuing to escalate. Talk to me about some of the things that you're seeing with this current threat landscape. >> Yeah. Well, it keeps changing that's for sure. You saw some recent surveys where, you know, now companies are seeing, in terms of where employees are located, you know, 25% expecting to be in the office, 25% expected to be permanently in the home. And then there's this big 50% of hybrid, which we think will move a bit more towards the office as people get back in the office. But that's going to take some time. We're actually starting to move back in the office here in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale. but it's very different in every region in the U.S and regulations and laws around the world. And so we think it's going to be very much work from anywhere. There's a bit of travel starting as well. And so this work from anywhere concept is going to be very important to customers going forward. And the ability to change the dynamics of that ratio as they go forward. >> (indistinct) This work from anywhere that over- last year overnight sort of became an absolute essential. But now, as you said, we're going to have this hybrid model of some going back, some staying home and the security and the perimeter is dissolving. When you look at supporting customers and their remote work from anywhere, their new work from anywhere model, what are some of the things that are top of mind that you're hearing from customers? >> Well, I, you know, I sometimes hear this premise is disappearing. I think in some ways it's moving to the user and the devices. And there's this concept called zero trust network access which I've said in many occasions should be zero trust application access, but they named it that way which is going to be an important technology because as I said, it kind of moves that premise then to that user and previous technology that we had VPN technology was good technology. And in fact, a lot of companies, if you go back to when the pandemic started last year, put a lot of people on the VPN technology as quick as possible and it was reasonably robust. But as we go forward, what we're going to have to do is make sure that perimeter- at that perimeter, that users only get access to the applications they're using rather than the whole network. Eventually when they're on the network you need to make sure that it's segmented so they can't go everywhere as well. And so this zero trust network access or zero trust or zero trust access, there's lots of kind of different versions of it, is going to be very important concept for users. The other piece of it, I think, is also that it needs to be more intuitive to use, as anything you kind of have users do like the VPN where you had to kind of dial in and- or bring up- you're bringing up your connection and your IPsec connection, et cetera, et cetera means that people tend not to use it. And so to make it intuitive and automatic is going to be really important. >> Intuitive and automatic. One of the things that we also saw was this massive rise in digital transformation last year, right? SAS adoption, these SAS applications keeping many of us in collaboration. So I'm thinking, you know, in that sense with the perimeter changing and the work from anywhere, this consistent, secure internet connection among users at the branch or the branch of one has to be there to keep organizations productive and safe. How is the Fortinet enabling the ZTNA- this evolution of VPN? >> Yeah. That's another piece of it. So not only are users on and off the network or traveling so that- or both, so the applications are moving. So a lot of them are moved from data centers to public cloud in the form of infrastructure or SAS. We're now seeing customers actually move some applications towards the building or building compute or edge compute. So the applications keep moving which also causes this problem. And so another function of zero trust access or ZTNA is to not care where the application is. You rely on some technology and it's called proxy technology, which allows the proxy to track where the applications are. And for us, that sits inside of our firewalls. And that makes it very flexible. And so we've been able to kind of just ramp up that proxy against the policy engine, whether it be in the data center or in the cloud, or even on your premise. Even integrated inside a branch or something like that. That's going to be very important because, as you just said, those applications will just keep moving into different areas and different zones as you go forward. >> (Lisa) And that's probably going to be permanent for a lot of organizations. So it- so they haven't renamed it zero trust application access, like you think it should be. But when organizations are looking into zero trust network access, what should- what are some of the key things that they need to be looking for and mindful of? >> Yeah, (indistinct) And so it's probably the, you know, the number one conversation they've had over the last six months. I think people initially just had to get something working. Now they're looking seriously at a longer term architecture for their access, their user access and device access. I think what I find is that something like zero trust network access is more of a use case across multiple components. And so if you look inside it, you need a client component endpoint; you need a proxy that in front of the cloud capabilities; you need a policy engine; you need to use identity-based systems. If you haven't got- if you can't get an agent on the device, you may need a NAC system. And so usually what customers find is I've got four or five current- different vendors in those areas. And cybersecurity vendors are not the best at working together, which they were, because then we do better for customers. And so trying to get two vendors to work is hard enough, trying to get five or six is really hard. And so what they're looking at over time is to say, maybe I get the minimum basic ZTNA working. And then as I go forward, for example, what they really want is this continuing posture assessment. Well, you can do that with some EDR technology, but is that EDR technology integrated into your policy engine? No. So I think what customers are saying is, let me start with the base ZTNA with maybe two vendors. And then as I go forward implement a, you know, a fabric or a platform approach to get everything working together. 'Cause it's just too hard with five or six vendors. >> Right. Is there, I'm curious if there's a shared responsibility model with customers working with different vendors; what actions and security responsibilities fall on the customer that they need to be aware of? >> Well, and it also comes back to this, you know, there's convergence of networking and security. And I've said a few times I'm definitely seeing CIOs and CSOs, security teams, and networking teams working much more closely. And especially when you've got a use case now that goes across security items and networking items and networking, the proxy has always been in the control of the networking team. Endpoint security is always been in the- you know, the security team. It's just forcing this convergence not just of the technologies itself but of the organizations inside enterprises. >> (Lisa) Well, and that's a challenging one for every organization is getting, you know, if you're talking about it in general, the business folks, the IT folks. Now this is not just a security problem. This is a problem for the entire corporation, as we just saw with the Colonial Pipeline. Ransomware is now becoming a household name. These are business-critical board-level discussions I imagine on the security side. How is Fortinet helping customers kind of bridge that gap between the biz folks and the IT folks where security is concerned? >> Yeah. You know, ransomware has been around quite a while. I think two years ago, we saw a lot of it in the schools. K-12 schools in the U.S. I think they're picking some richer targets now. The colonial one, I think there was a 4 million ransom. I think that they managed to get some of that money back. But, you know, instead of, you know, demanding $5,000 or $10,000 from a small business or a school they're obviously demanding millions from these larger companies. And you know, one of the problems with ransomware is, you know, it still relies heavily on social engineering. I don't think you can eliminate that people clicking on stuff, you know, a very small percentage still. I think what it means is you have to put some more proactive things in place, like the zero trust, like micro-segmentation, like web application file warning. All these capabilities to try and make your systems as strong as possible. So then put in detection and response systems to assume that someone's clicking on something somewhere just to help. But it's definitely the environment. You know, the threat environment. It's not really gotten more sophisticated; yes, there are still advanced threats. I fear more about those weaponized APTs and state sponsored, but there's definitely a huge volume of ransomware now going after, you know, not only, you know, meat processing factories, but pipelines and critical infrastructure as we go forward. That's the more worrying. >> (Lisa) Right. You bring up a good point about, sort of, people being one of the biggest challenges from a security perspective. Clicking on links, not checking to see if a link is bogus or legitimate. So, help me understand a little bit more how is zero trust can help maybe take some of that human error out of the equation? >> Well, because I think before, you know, when you got access, when you're off the network and you've got access to the network, you've got access to everything, okay. So once you're on the network, and I think the Colonial Pipeline was a good example where traditionally, operational technology networks, physical networks sort of separate from the IT network and they had something called an air gap. And that air gap meant you really couldn't get to it. Now when people had to be remote because of the pandemic, they started taking these air gaps. And so now we had remote access. And so again, when you- when they got that remote access and they got into the network, they could- the network was very flat and you could see everything you can go anywhere. And so that's what zero trust does. It kind of says, I kind of did the zero trust approach to you that I'm only going to allow you access to this application. And I'm going to keep checking on you to make sure you are you are who you say you are on a continuous basis. And that really provides a bit more safety. Now, I still- we still think you need to put things like segmentation in place and some other capabilities and monitoring everything else, but it just narrows the attack surface down from this giant network approach to a specific application >> Narrowing that is the right direction. How do organizations, when you're working with customers, how do they go- How do they evolve from a traditional VPN to zero trust? What are some of the steps involved in that? >> Well, I think it's, you know, what's interesting is customers still have data centers. In fact, you know, some of the customers who have legacy applications will have a data center for a long time. And in fact, what I find is even if you've implemented zero trust to a certain population, employee population, they still have VPNs in place. And sometimes they use them for the IT folks. Sometimes they use them for a specialized developers and stuff like that. And so I think it's going to be like everything, everything goes a hundred percent this way and it stays this way. And so it's going to be hybrid for a while where we see VPN technology and zero trust together. You know- our approach is that you can have both together and it's both on the same platform and it'll just gradually evolve as you go forward. >> What are some of the things you're looking forward to in the next year as this hybrid environment continues, but hopefully things start to open up more? What are some of the things that we can expect to hear and see from Fortinet? >> Well, I'm looking forward to getting out of my home office, that's for sure. >> (Lisa laughing) >> It's like I've been imprisoned here for eighteen months. >> I agree with you on that! So we'll try that. And, you know, I always thought I traveled too much before and now I'm contemplating on the travel piece. But from, you know, Fortinet's perspective, you know, our goal is to make sure that, you know, our customers can increase. We'll make sure they can protect themselves. And so we want to help them and keep working with them such that they put best practices in place and they start architecting longer-term to implement things like zero trust or sassy or some of these other capabilities. And so, you know, I think the- we've had a lot of interest with customers on these virtual sessions. I'm really looking forward to getting them back in our new building, our new executive briefing center, which we're opening up in the next few weeks. You may have more of those face-to-face and white boarding conversations with customers. >> Oh, that sounds so exciting. I agree with you on the travel front, but going from traveling a ton to none was a big challenge. But also, I imagined it'll be great to actually get to collaborate with customers again, and partners. You know, you can only do so much by Zoom. Talk to me a little bit about some of the things on the partnership front that we might be seeing. >> Yeah, our partners, you know, we're a hundred percent partner-driven company and partners are very important to us. And, you know, and that's why we always, when we introduce new technology, we work with the partners to make sure that they understand it. So for example, we provide free what they call an NSE training to all our partners. And then we also work with them very closely to put systems in their labs and the demos and make sure they can architect. And so partners are really important to us and, you know, making sure that they can provide value as part of a solution set to our customers, because customers trust them. And so we want to make sure that we work with our partners closely so they can help the customer implementing architect solutions as they go forward. >> That trust is critical. Right? I mean, we can talk about that at every event, every CUBE Conversation, the trust that an a customer has in you, the trust that you have in a partner and vice versa. That whole trust circle kind of goes along the lines with what we're talking about in terms of being able to establish that trust. So that threat landscape that's probably only going to continue to get bigger is in the trusted hands of folks like Fortinet and your partners to be able to enable those customers to narrow that threat landscape. >> Yeah, yeah. And so it could be the smallest partner to the largest service provider. We don't mind. We want to make sure that we're working with them to provide that implementation from the customers. And again, the word trust is sometimes overused, but that's what customers are looking for. >> (Lisa) So, John, point me to when our audience is some of the information that they can find on Dotcom about zero trust. What are some of the things that you think are great calls to action for the audience? >> Yeah. I mean, it depends. I think it depends on what level you want to get into where we have a bunch of assets, videos, and training but start at the very highest level, you know, why is zero trust something you need to implement? And then it goes down into more details and then even the architecture, long-term architecture and connectivity and implementation. So there's a lot of assets on Fortinet.com If you go on our training sessions, there's- all our training's free to our customers. And so you can go in all those NSE levels and look at the capabilities. So yeah, definitely it's a- it's an area of high interest from our customers. But as I say to them, it's more of a journey. Yes, you can implement something today really quickly, but will that work for you over the long-term in making sure you can take all the information from the, like I said, you know, how is the voice, the posture of that device? What is the device with an agent doing, you know, as my contextual engine integrated as well? So it's a journey for customers and, but you can start with something simple but you need to have that plan for that journey in place. >> I imagine though, John, it's a journey that is either accelerating, or with the threat landscape and some of the things that we've already talked about, is becoming an absolutely board-critical conversation. So, and on that journey, does Fortinet work with customers to accelerate certain parts of it? Because you know, these businesses have been pivoting so much in the last year and they've got to not just survive, but now thrive in this new landscape, this new hybrid work from home, work from anywhere environment and also with more threats. >> Yeah, no, it's a good point. And so, you know, even those internally are implementing it starting the most critical assets first. So let's say, you know, I've got somebody working on source code, they should be the first ones to get the zero trust implementation. I've got somebody asking from the internet to search for stuff. Maybe they're okay for now, but yeah. So you kind of prioritize your assets and users against, you know, the threat and then implement. That's why I'm saying you can roll it out across everyone as, you know, a certain version of it. But I think it's better to prioritize first the most important assets in IP and then roll it out that way. >> (Lisa) Great advice. >> Because some of- a lot of those assets are still sitting in the data center. >> Right. >> So they're not sitting in the cloud. >> Right. John, great advice. Thank you so much for joining me. Good to see you, glad all is well and that you will be able to get out of your home office. You're just days away from that. I'm sure that's going to feel great. >> Certainly is. And thank you, Lisa. >> Nice to see you. For John Madison, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation. (calm electronic music with piano)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. And when we kicked off this program, Cloud Native Insights, we wanted to talk about the innovation and agility that's happening, not just Cloud as a location. We're going to draw down a little bit into one of the very important pieces of a company and that's their websites and their applications, that live in that environment. And of course, that comes from a lot of changes over the years. Any of us that have been in tech for a couple of decades have worked from the early days, to of course today's multimedia globally distributed environment and everyone during the global pandemic, of course, has been (indistinct) straining their use of the internet. So really excited to welcome to the program the two co-founders of Netlify. I have Matt Biilmann, who is the CEO, and his co-founder Christian Bach, who is the president both of Netlify really the company behind Jamstack, which we're going to explain and talk about a bit. Matt and Chris, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us >> All right so, let's start with just some of the basics. I expect that some of our audience is not familiar with Jamstack. You do a quick Google search and it's JavaScript, its APIs, its markup. And you say, okay, I understand what a bunch of that means. But, yeah, if you could give us kind of a compare contrast to what web development was before and how Jamstack's really helping to revolutionize what's happening in this space. >> Yes, so for many years, we built websites and web applications with an application based architecture, where every website or every application would be this monolithic application with typically like a load balancer, a set of web servers, application servers, and that database and every request through a page would go through this whole stack it would pass through the application layer, talk to the database, fetch template, merge data and template, build HTML on the fly and send it back to the user. And basically what we saw happening and what's been happening with the Jamstack is this decoupling of the actual front-end presentation layer of the websites and web applications and then the back-end layer. And the advantages there is that if you can really pre-build the front-end application layer, you can take the actual HTML, or an application shell and distribute it across a globally distributed network, you can get it into the hands of the user's browser very quickly. And then the back end, what we've seen happening there is that it's split up to all these different APIs and services you no longer have your one monolithic back end you have all these different services. Where some of your own but a lot of them are other people's services like Stripe or Twilio or Algolia or Contentful. So we've seen this shift to this architecture, where we're considered in a way that the stack has moved up a little from the old tooling where something like the LAMP stack would be common in really naming the programming language, the specific web server, the Linux server, the operating system, and so on right? And then up to a level where it's really about getting an application into the browser, using JavaScript as the runtime and talking to this whole new economy of APIs and services. >> Yeah, Chris I wonder if you could bring us inside your customers and the companies that you talk to. I think about for the longest time it was, maybe I just outsource my web development, but website is one of those key components that I share my value, I share what's going on, I want to be able to change it pretty often and there's so much more that I can do today than I could have done 10 years ago. We've watched that mark. So, help us understand, what skill sets do people need to have? what type of companies are using Jamstack? And, bring in if you can, Netlify. How is this a business and not just, an open source standards movement, that's helping to revolutionize what's happening? >> Absolutely, I mean, First of all, people using this and companies use this is extremely wide. Wide vertical, right? Its very horizontal. This is anyone with a digital property basically, right? I think what we've seen all the time is that, that we have a lot more channels than we used to have, right? So we started off just maybe having the one dot com, right? With limited functionality. And today, you have a multiple channels, right? You have the landing pages, you have the domains, you have lots of activities online. You have mobile apps and commerce is often a big part of it, and I would say especially the last few months, there's a lot of people that had the digital convergence points as one of many. And now it's the only ones, right? So I think it's become extremely important. I also think that when you look at your web infrastructure in general, it has been very complex, right? And you need a lot of different people, right? And you need to maintain staging environments, production lines, development environments. You need to, have a wide set of skills to maintain these things, right? And if a web developer wanted to do a lot of things, right? They have to go and tap DevOps and so on on the shoulder, right? And I think what the Jamstack is about saying, hey, you can get so much further as a web developer. Now, if you take the modern built tools, you can take the Git workflows, and you wrap around the browser that has become a full-fledged operating system and the API economy as Matt was just talking about. You have these workflows, or you potentially have these workflows, where you can get so much further, right? And that's very much Netlify submission. So Netlify saw this opportunity of decoupling the front end from the back end of the building from the hosting of creating an approach to making websites that would be many times faster, 'cause you have multiple points of origin and you don't feel fredurous. It's many times safer. There's not that huge surface area of attack. It's much more scalable, and so on. It was sort of a win-win-win. But the problem was, there was no viable workflow. If you take a traditional CDN, and you put it in, it doesn't matter really, if it's one or the other. As good as they (indistinct) services, they're all meant to sit in front of an origin, right? They're meant to buffer something. And if you have the gems, there's no origin in that way, right? The network in itself has to be an origin so it has to be architectured quite differently. And then there's a lot of things around CDCI and how you server lists and so on. That all had to be sort of re-merged . And Netlify is that glue, it is that platform that takes you from local development all the way out to edge nodes. But allows you to mix and match any tool. So it's not program independent. So you can say, well, we use a build tool, and that's PHP or Ruby or JavaScript, the react or Next or whatever it might be, right? And we use these APIs for this server, for this property. Over here we have a commerce site. Over here, we have a dotcom, that needs a huge enterprise CMS with tons of stakeholders. But the thing is that all of those now becomes something that plugs into your website. Rather than have to drive the website itself. And that's sort of frees up the silos. So when we see people using Netlify, we have companies using Netlify. Big Fitness Company, for example, that own fitness company that uses us for developer documentation, or their marketing sites, but also for their dotcom. But even if you go to the equipment that people have at home, and you log in, that's actually using some very nifty identity and remote based access control for Netlify and if you watch the video there, it's also going through a Netlify player, all right? We have fast food chains that has their dotcom and their marketing sites, but also the kiosks down in the store like the menus, the screens there. Rather than being an old Windows NT server running some .NET application in a dusty corner, why not have it like that? And so, both the category but also Netlify sort of brings in a solution and because it's decoupled from all those architectural choices, that means that you can now use the solution in a much, much wider setting. And we were sort of first to market doing this. They get serverless approach where you just push your serverless functions to get better Netlify. First Feature Deploy Previews Were invented by us and so on. So the Jamstack is an extremely wide fundamental architectural approach that matches basically anyone that wants to build web properties. Netlify is the segnostic wide platform that just makes it possible. >> Yeah, good Chris actually, I saw the Peloton use case up on the website and you're right, a very different experience rather than I bring my device, is it synced? Does it work with it? Really integrates those solutions. And you just brought up serverless, which is actually how I got connected to talk in Netlify. So, Matt, sorry, I think you wanted to jump in there but I was wondering if you could help us. I've looked at serverless and what the promise of serverless of course, is that I don't need to think about that underlying infrastructure. I just like developers build our applications. Well, feels like that's really the same mission that you have. And they're serverless is a piece of your story. So, maybe explain (indistinct) that out a little for us. >> Absolutely, I think it ties in, right? Basically, what we saw just from a architectural perspective was this approach of really decoupling front end and back end and so on and working in a new way that gave a lot of benefits to the inducers in performance and security and so on right? But on the other hand, early on, what we saw was that to adopt that approach, like developers had to deal with lot of different moving pieces like CICD, CDN. What to do about the API endpoints that didn't need to be dynamic, and so on. And as Netlify, what we saw was that we could give one intro and workflow for all of this and make it extremely easy for developers to work with this thing. And serverless plays a really important piece there, right? Because when Amazon pioneered AWS Lambda and took it to the world, right? I think the promise also for the front-end web developers of being able to simply write code and then not have to worry at all about where is it actually running? How are we scaling it? How are we operating it and so on, right? That's a really powerful promise, right? But at the same time, in the same way, what we saw earlier on was that for a front-end team to actually adopt serverless functions as part of the Jamstack, it introduced another level of complexity of now having to manage your serverless functions independent from your front end figuring out API Gateway endpoints for every one of them. And how about deployment pipeline for your functions layer versus deployment pipelines for the actual front end layer that's supposed to talk to those front ends. How about staging environments versus to production environments? How do you manage all that, right? So we saw that there was this inherent incredible potential, but also a lot of complexity, right? And as Netlify we saw that if we could give front end developers a web developers in general, an ene-to-end workflow, where they can work both with the front-end framework, write the code that will get deployed into the browser, but also just have a folder where they can write this serverless functions and then know that Netlify will take care of all of the wiring, right? When you open a pull request and get with new function we'll give you a URL on our globally distributed CDN where you can view both the whole front end, but also the function and sidestep sort of all of the complexities of linking together API Gateways, to functions of managing CICD pipelines and test environments and so on. And in the end, the serverless functions starts becoming a really important part of this Jamstack approach, right? Because you have this world where you have a front end that's often talking to many different APIs and services where again, some of your own and some other people's services. But really often you need some place to glue those together or to build your own custom API endpoint that talks to a couple of them and it has access to server site secrets and so on, right? And this idea of not having to suddenly operate and manage a whole set of servers and infrastructure just for that part of it, but simply just writing the code and then knowing, that you don't have to worry about the operation scalability or anything around that code. That's a really powerful paradigm. >> Yeah, that's one of the real challenges of the Cloud as you talk about the Paradox of Choice. There's so many ways to do things. Not necessarily... It's simple anybody... I was a blogger for many years and it was like, well, I'll just use the self-hosted WordPress, because I don't want to have to worry about that piece of it. Matt, I watched it you did a presentation talking about if I wanted to do WordPress hosted in a AWS that absolutely is not simple. I heard a podcast from one of your board members, Tom Preston Werner, talking about we need to be more opinionated. We need to be able to give more guidance to developers, maybe Chris if you could, how are we when the proliferation of choice, keeps increasing, making sure that people can... How do I make that decision tree? And how do we try to keep it simple? >> Absolutely, I mean, and I actually think that, that's a super relevant question, because you have a lot of choice as a web developer today. Front-end developers used to cut out Photoshop files and turn them into HTML, right? Now with the new advanced markup, and they have all these frameworks and flavors of JavaScript to choose between and there's these powerful build tools, And all those workflows and the browser can do everything you can imagine, right? And so yeah, there is a lot of choice out there, right? And I think, for Netlify what's extremely important is that we are opinionated in the right places. And so when it comes to, for example, a front-end tool and built tools and these things that web developers often face with having to choose between. Our role is to make it as simple as possible to use any of them. But also give you the opportunity of saying, well, this new paradigm allows you to actually mix and match, right? It allows you to use this tool for this property and this tool for this property and gives you a ton of flexibility. But still, come under one roof of a platform like Netlify. And I think that is very powerful. And so we also don't want to choose for you, we want to inform your choices and we want to make it as easy as possible to go and say, hey, these are my needs, what direction should I be going? And of course, we work with enterprise clients, so on migration services, and so on, right? And where we help them a lot with that. But if we locked down on a single flavor, or a single bill tool or a single front end framework, then we also limit the application of what we bring to market and we want to remain a little more open-ended there. But I think there's a lot complexity, a platform like Netlify is all about simplification. So all that wiring that Matt just mentioned, that at least goes, right? You don't spend hours configuring bondage caching and trying to find those edge cases, it just works. And that's a huge game changer for a lot of people, right? But there's definitely parts of the ecosystem that has a lot of choice. And we do our best to inform. And I think, under hand holding part, adjacent to that is the story of, well, do we then start using content management systems? Is this a whole new? Is it out with the old and in with the new? And I would say, you still have a lot of those needs, right? You still have non-technical people, for example, that needs to be able to update and create moves and content, and so on, right? And create content. And so you very often will need and an E-commerce solution or content management systems and so on. But what we're seeing there, is that we're speaking basically with every single major CMS out there. That are saying we're working on a headless system, or we already have a headless version, or we just gone full headless, that means that we work decoupled. So we don't no longer need to build the site. But we just provide like an independent source of content. And then it plugs into a platform like Netlify. So that can bring a lot of simplicity. And now you just have to maintain your content, but you don't have to worry about all the different environments and what is up to date and how does some of the infrastructure look like you press a button that commits to get a default preview, and it looks the same everywhere. >> I'm curious, what impact the current global pandemic has had on Netlify, and your customers. I saw you've got a COVID tracking project that you've done. But also now just there's different considerations when I think about what services I need to access from the web and what kind of connectivity the ultimate end user would have. So, what learnings have you had? What's involved there? >> In, obviously we, it depends a lot on, as Chris mentioned, right? The game circus is adopted horizontally across all kinds of areas and businesses and so on, right? So, we've of course seen businesses in sectors that are having a hard time and on the other hand, we've seen businesses and sectors that are exploding, right? We did immediately when the lockdown started happening and the pandemic started happening we set aside like a free plan for projects working in the space of tackling the information sharing around COVID and finding solutions and so on. And that was really interesting to see you mention the COVID tracking project, right? Which was a project like built a short time by small group of distributed incredibly talented front end developers and scientists and so on, right? And I think it was interesting to see that, how the Jamstack and our tooling and so on also really made it possible for them to build as a small distributed team the set of data information and tooling to a global audience, right? Seeing huge traffic peaks at time and just knowing that their architecture and our infrastructure could handle it for them. >> All right. Chris, I've got one, a little bit off to the side here. When I look at what Netlify is doing, you talk about having an open and independent web. And while we are fully supportive of that, we're a little concerned sometimes. If you look at what's happening across the globe, there's a lot of discussions. Will the internet actually fragment? Will certain countries wall off certain environments? Any concerns there? What do you look at? What are you hearing from your customers when you talk about that mission? >> It's one of the big challenges of all time, right? I think we all maybe took for given the Internet as the standard it became right? The way that you can publish without permission is pretty magnificent, right? And it would be indescribably painful for civilization if we lost that, right? And I think fragmentation is something that we all have to sort of worry around. From the way we see it, is that the web, the traditional monolithic approach, right? To which led to as a web that wasn't secure enough and wasn't scalable enough and wasn't performing enough and that's, for example, what opened the door for mobile applications, right? Where it just didn't make sense to pull in the UI every time you turn the page. So we ended up with a form that's it. We prebuilt the application, you download it, and then you speak to service for anything then atmosphere come up with it, right. And that makes perfect sense. That's basically the same architecture that we're bringing to the web a very large scale. Of course, the problem is that now there are gatekeepers there, right? There people, you have to ask for permission to publish and so on. And, and there are other attempts to say, "Hey, we need a performing web." And there's a very big players out there that say, "Let's come over and just..." Do we even need to call it the Internet? Can we just call it our company website? I'm not going to name any names here, right? But leading down, it's what we've called walled gardens, that are great for absolutely no one except for the company. And what we believe is that if you have a web that is secure and is scalable, and it's performant enough to justify at least the architecture maintaining and not having to run into any walled gardens and still say no, you don't need to use a handful of commercial platforms if you want to be heard rather than have your own web properties on your own custom domains, right? I think that's the part of the open independent viable web that we're fighting for. Basically, one that adopts and keeps adopting an architecture that is something that levels the playing field. And then they would also say, why Netlify? I mean, a few years before we started, like, try configuring your own CDN. And like that was reserved for the very, very large tech players. Now you can comment, you can literally click a button on Netlify, you get custom domain and ACS post process site that's globally distributed, automatically integrated into get. And that's on the premium plan. And so as a startup, you can level set together with everyone else and be available widely across the globe without performance issues, immediately. And so in that way, I'm also seeing that's a democrat sensation of performance, right? That means that, that's great. And for places where you see developing economies, where you often have brownouts, where you often can't depend on having viable services and is locally and so on, this idea of having he cover that and having something that's just automatically, you know what, don't even worry about it, because it's already ready to go in all these packets all around the world. That's a huge game changer. That's actually what we see a lot of adoption of the gems they can never find in those places as well. Guess that's just such a promise to the architecture. So, I hear what you're saying and I'm also very concerned about a fragmented web for political reasons as well across the globe. And from our angle, the way we fight for this is to make sure that it retains using an architecture that makes it accessible for me. >> Yeah, I heard many years ago, a friend of mine said, if you're a technologist it means that in general you are a technology optimist, which I definitely try to be. So, I love Chris how you've just brought in some of the potential opportunity Matt, I want to give you just... People out there they hear like oh, 5G is coming, it's going to completely change the world. Anything that you're seeing on your side as to real opportunities that we will see, just a step function in what your company is using. Jamstack, partnering with Netlify in your ecosystem. What are some of the early things that you see that are exciting you down the line for this? >> Part of it is simply like the whole ecosystem around the gem stalk growing up and the tooling, the APIs, the frameworks available around it, and the level of innovation that's triggered. And especially how it's triggering in... Especially how we're seeing like the potential for small, distributed teams to work together and build things with a global impact in a short time. And I remember a couple of years ago, we did a hackathon with together with freeCodeCamp. And of course, like since it was with freeCodeCamp, it was mostly like teams were mostly fairly new to programming and so on, right? It was pretty amazing to see what over a weekend with this architecture and with this tooling, with the vendors that were present there and helping out and so on, what the small teams could actually get done in a weekend, right? Like I remember the winning team had an app where the whole room would see an image on the main stage screen and then on their phone, try to place that image on the map and you would real time see how people ranked, how close they got and get a winner and so on, right? And that was all just from combining APIs and tooling, like history, like Netlify, like Honor Bee, like Google Maps, and so on, right? And I think, in some way we shouldn't forget just how much this kind of ecosystem of readily available APIs and services around this front end stake. It's allowing people to build things that years ago would have taken a very big team probably like a year to build, and suddenly you can have a relatively small group of relatively new programmers built something really impressive, right? So I think that's a trend we'll see continue accelerating And me and Chris are personally involved in advising and helping out a lot of these new startups in the space that are trying to bring new tooling to the world that makes more and more of these things possible and accessible. >> Well, Chris and Matt, I really appreciate you both joining such an exciting space. Talk about the cloud, agility and innovation, such a robust ecosystem. Thank you so much for joining. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> And I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for joining and look forward to hearing more about your CUBE insight. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. (smooth music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome. As you know, I've been interviewing a number of CEOs throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm really excited to have Alan Trefler here. He's the founder and CEO of Pegasystems. Alan, thanks for being part of the program. >> Oh, thanks for having me, Dave. >> So let's get into it. I mean when you were 27 years old, 37 years ago, 1983, you started Pega. Now you've seen a lot of cycles. Never seen anything like this, I know, but certainly there was the '87 crash. You saw, you know, the banking crisis in the late '80s, early '90s, the dotcom bubble, 2008, 2009, and now this. I want to ask you sort of how have you responded to crises in the past? I mean the hallmark of your company, the book you wrote is being able to manage through change. How did you manage through this one? What was your first move? >> Well, you know, what I'll tell you is from the inception we've always been a scrappy company. You know, we never took any venture capital. We bootstrapped this firm. I went public in the late '90s, and you know, we've now got a firm that will do over a billion in revenue this year and has 5,400 staff. So we've built, I think, a cohesive team around a set of principles that really have matched the way the software and technology have evolved, but has still taken a pretty radically different approach to how it should be used by businesses and business users. >> Well, so talk about some of the big waves that you've been riding over the years. I mean you set out to help business people really communicate better with IT. You laid out in your book some of the challenges there, and as you've pointed out many, many times, it gets more complex, people try to understand the customer better with terminology like customer relationship management. People don't necessarily want a relationship, right? Talk about some of the observations that you've made around customer behavior and channels, and how you've approached things a little bit differently as an entrepreneur. >> So I think organizations, when they think about how they want to engage with their customers, typically make a couple of serious mistakes. One is they say they want to do a good job for their clients, but especially if they're a big company they then devolve into actually doing the work in their channel. I mean they have a mobile group that builds the mobile app, which is different than the group that handles the call center, which is different than the group that handles the website, and all this business logic, it's baked into that. And that just destroys their ability to implement change rapidly, which particularly in this COVID era is so important for the organizations that are going to be successful. Now on the other side sometimes they get overly focused on their backend system. They're worrying about how they're going to put in the perfect ERP system or accounting system, that that will somehow support customer engagement better, but frankly it never does. We think you need to think about your business from the center out. How do I apply AI to what I want to do for and with my client? And then how do I apply workflow and work management capability to ensure that those decisions are done optimally and effectively? That's what Pega worked on from our inception, and now as we've gone into our fifth complete generation of software I think we've really crossed some boundaries that are pretty remarkable. >> So I mean, well what you've built is actually quite amazing. Since you've written your book the stock's exploded. I don't know if that's cause and effect, but nonetheless some of the things that you talk about again in the book, you talk about, you know, people looking at data the wrong way. What's impressed me is you've always taken a systems view. You're not trying to optimize, to your point, on one little either technology or maybe optimizing on cost. If you look at the whole system and think about outcomes, that is going to, you know, yield ultimately better businesses. And so I want to ask you-- >> Well, thinking about an end to end way of understanding how the technology should be applied is exactly what we've always believed, but the key is to be able to do this incrementally, iteratively, not monolithically, because no businesses can afford to rip out things. So you need to be able to do this what we call, say, "One microjourney at a time." One set of things that are good for a customer. In today's era it might send, as we do with many of our clients now under stress, we help them help their customers around things like loan forbearing. How do you give people a payment plan because they just don't have the money to pay their loan today. >> Right. >> And how do you do that while you keep them as customers, as opposed to, well, situations that could be far worse. >> Let's talk a little bit about machine intelligence. When you started Pega it was the same year I started in the industry at IDC, and AI was all the rage, and then, you know, it just never happened. You had the very long AI winter, but now it's, you know, starting to come back. You're seeing, you know, obviously there are certain technical capabilities, the amount of data, the processing power, et cetera, and the cost are much more aligned. You're seeing trends like AI. You're seeing things like RPA, you know, which you've brought in to your platform. Talk a little bit about that sort of incremental change that you're adding in to your platform and how you go about doing that. And I want to ask you about some of your thoughts on those trends. >> Certainly. Well, AI has been, from our point of view, a really big thing for the last decade. There was a set of false starts, and we actually saw that they were false starts, so we didn't get sucked into it, but come around 2010 we made an enormous push to bring machine learning and decisioning into our work management platform, and it's in there beautifully and it's doing amazing things. You know, I just saw one of our customers, Commonwealth Bank in Australia, their CEO in his quarterly earnings announcement led by talking about what the Pegasystem, what our system, which they call a customer engagement engine, is doing for them. During the fires that earlier this year were ravaging Australia, they used that to send personalized, not just messages, but also relief to people whose homes were burned out, so they weren't going to be able to pay their credit card bill. They didn't have to call the contact center. We reached out through the brilliant work that they did using our technology, reached out to preemptively make those customers feel great, and now with the COVID epidemic that organization is doing the same types of things, which really both endears them with their customers but also gets tied into that efficiency layer because you stop doing needless work because you're being smart as a result of using AI to figure out what to do, and to learn from the outcomes that come from that. >> So we've seen, you know, the playbook of you see, you know, startups, they get out, they're well-funded, and they point to the large established companies and they say, "Oh, that's an old stack." They can't respond, innovator's dilemma, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things about Pega is you've been able to transform yourselves over the years. You know, build for change, I guess. An example, for instance, going from perpetual to an ARR type of model, which you very successfully have done, and now, you know, as I said, bringing in RPA, but I want to ask you about RPA. A lot of competitors out there, big valuations kind of pointing at you guys as the incumbent. You have RPA, but what do you see within that space specifically? >> I see a lot of delusional behavior. The ability to put robots in to do little pieces of task work can make sense in some situations, particularly if you don't have a good API, a good application programming interface, to get data in and out. A robot in that sort of situation can be a very, very helpful stopgap, but you really need an engine driven by AI and driven by process, process automation, that has to be at the heart. That's the dog to the robotic process automation tail, and a lot of these RPA vendors are running around saying, "You know, all you need's the tail." I'll tell you that in the last week two of the "biggest leaders" have both had massive layoffs. A little google work you can find out exactly who they are, and it's because their stuff isn't working well. >> I want to ask you about entrepreneurship during and coming out of a pandemic. Is it a good time to do a startup? Not that you're thinking about doing a startup, but you know, advice to entrepreneurs. >> Well, I think it's a terrific time to have a startup mentality. You know, part of why I think we've been able to reinvent our technology literally five times over our years is that we're always prepared to look from a new angle and apply that sort of entrepreneurial thinking and scrappiness. However, in terms of starting something right now, it's a very uncertain time. It's uncertain as to when customers will be back in the market. It's uncertain as to exactly how hard certain industry segments would be hit. And so whereas I think that even during recessions it can be a fine time to launch a startup, and in fact that's when I launched Pega was during a time when the economy was not doing that great, I would wait a little bit right now to see exactly when things are going to stabilize. I think that it's just a little too uncertain, but that time will emerge again. >> So I want to ask you, so again, in your book you talked about big data, big problems. I always joke to my friends who have little kids, little kids, little problems, (chuckling) and so little companies, little problems. You're now a billion dollar company, and you're bringing in new talent. You've set your sights on becoming a multibillion dollar company. You've got a great track record. I want you to talk about sort of how you see the future and what your aspirations are. You don't have to give specific numbers, but just frame that for us. >> Well, first of all, just to be clear the numbers in terms of a billion, that's an actual revenue number, as opposed to some of these valuations which we've seen with companies like WeWork might be a little bit tentative. What we see as being central to our growth and value prop are a couple of things. First, we've made our software tremendously easier to use, particularly our last release, which came out about six months ago, really, really straightforward for business people even to take ownership of their projects and work really collaboratively with IT. So that's one aspect of how we grow and want to accelerate the growth. The second aspect is Pega Cloud. Last year Pega Cloud grew enormously. It's now more than half our business, and for people to come on Pega Cloud where we do all of the database work, we do all the heavy lifting for them from a technology point of view, also provides a route to growth, though we also support what we call client cloud, which is where one of our customers wants to run it on their own cloud. And I think the third thing that we're doing that we're hoping is going to allow us to accelerate our growth is to broaden our go-to-market function, make our go-to-market function just larger by continuing to hire, and by the way, this is a great time for a company with a half a billion dollars of cash in the bank to be out looking to hire talent. Looking to hire and broaden and deepen our go-to-market and how we work, especially with those awesome customers, some of whom are suffering but are going to come back, and they're going to increasingly need to change their digital infrastructure. Their digital transformation, we think, is going to benefit from platforms like ours in unique ways. >> Well, Alan, I love the story. As you just pointed out, you just tapped the credit market. You've got a fantastic balance sheet. You've got a lot of tailwinds, you know, despite this pandemic, and as we often say, you've got a founder as the CEO and we've seen how that really culturally makes huge differences at companies. Alan, thanks so much for coming on our CEO series. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. It's been a real pleasure. >> All right. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (smooth music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE here live in Barcelona Spain for Cisco Live 2020. This is our first CUBE event for the year. Next 10 years of CUBE history, we look back 10 years since we've been around, for 10 years, we have another 10 more we're looking forward to. And this is the first event for 2020 Cisco Live at Barcelona. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Dave Vellante, Stuart Miniman, extracting the signal from the noise. The cloud business is noisy, the networking business is under siege and changing, Dave and Stu we're pre gaming, Cisco Live, kicking off the show, end of the first kind of pre day, Tomorrow's the big keynotes. David Geckler, Verizon exec is preparing to announce rumor has it some insights into what Cisco's position will be vis a vis cloudification, that's going to change their portfolio and probably identify some opportunities, and also some potential gaps in their strategy and what they can do to be competitive. The number one leader in networking, they got a great market position. But cloud is changing the game with networking. >> Yeah, john, it's funny, I heard you talking about, the 10 years and everything. 10 years ago, if I thought about Cisco, I'd be looking at the I pattern of getting the jitter out of the network and trying to tweak everything. And today, what are we talking about with Cisco? We're talking about software, we're talking about cloud. We're talking about developers. Yeah, they're a networking company at its core, but Cisco has been going through a significant transformation, it's been an interesting one to watch. Dave, you wrote a little bit about, Cisco is one of the four horsemen of the internet era, of course the dotcom, they were one of the ones that actually survived and thrived after the dotcom burst, but Cisco is a very different company today far from the $500 billion market cap that they had a few years back, they were at about $200 billion, but still dominant in switching and routing. But there are threats from a number of environments and a lot of changes as to what you need to think about when it comes to Cisco. >> Well, sometimes it's instructive to look back and see how we got here. Cisco made three big bets during its ascendancy, the first one was it bet on IP, I mean, John, you've talked about this a lot, it decimated the mini computer industry by connecting distributed computing and client server, the underlying plumbing there. The second big bet it made was it trained a bunch of engineers, the Cisco certified engineers CCIEs, and they used that as a lever and created a whole army of people that were Cisco advocates, and that was just a brilliant move. And the third was under the leadership of John Chambers, They did about 180 acquisitions, and they were quite good at acquisitions and what that did for them is it continued to fuel growth, it filled in gaps and it kept them relevant with customers. Now, part of that, too, was, Chambers had dozens and dozens of adjacent businesses, remember, he said they were all going to be a billion dollars. Well, most of them, didn't pan out. So they had to cut and burn, and so but now under the leadership of Roberts, they're a much more focused company, kind of getting back to basics, trying to bet on sure things and so let's talk about what some of those sure things are and how Cisco's performing. >> Well it's clear you said lever, they're got to pull a lever at some point and turn the boat that is Cisco, aircraft carrier, what do you want to call it? In the right direction? That's been something that, we've been covering Cisco for decades Stu as you just pointed out, and while we've been close to all the action, I think Cisco knows what's going on. It's clear to me that they kind of understand the landscape. They understand their opportunities in the future, but they're a massive business, Dave, you pointed it out. The combination of all those mergers. The thing that got my attention was as they understood the unification many, many years ago in the compute side, you saw Cisco clearly understands the unification. They know cloud is here, they know that do not make a move, that's cloud friendly, they were going to get swept away and be adrift with the next wave, which is cloud 3.0, whatever we call it. So to me, that's the big story with Cisco. What is the impact of the company when you cloudify business? That's not public cloud, that's hybrid public, economics are changing, the compute capabilities are changing, the network capabilities are changing, got the edge. I think Cisco will be defined by their actions over the next two to three years. What they announce, how they position it, and what they bring value to the customers because you got Silicon One chip, good move, got cloud position, got App D on the on the top of the stack, you got cloud center, they're trying to get to the cloud, but you can't do that until you have the subscription business, until you, can't do pricing by usage unless you have that model. So I think it's a brick by brick, but slowly they're doing it. We have to hear some things next year on Cisco, on how they're going to be true, cloud enabled? >> Well, software is a huge play for them, right? I mean, they've got it, because Cisco's been the dominant player in networking with two thirds of the market, I mean, they've sustained that for a decade plus, and it has allowed them to drive 60 plus percent gross margins for years and years and years, huge operating margin. So how are they going to continue that? Software is the key. And as you say, John, subscriptions is the cloud model that is critical for Cisco. Now they talk about 70% of their software business is subscriptions and annual recurring revenue, it's unclear really how big their software business is, they give hints, I'd peg it at about seven to eight billion last year, maybe growing to 10, 12 billion this year. So pretty sizable, but that's critical in terms of them driving the margins that they need to throw off free cash flow so they can invest in things like stock buybacks and dividends which prop up the stock. >> Well, the problem is you start chasing your tail on the stock price and or product TAMS and product revenue, you might actually miss the boat on the new product. So it's a balance between cannibalizing your own before you can bring in the new, and this is going to be the challenge with Cisco, when do they bite the bullet and say, "Okay, we got to get a position on this piece here "or that piece there, ultimately, "it's going to be about customers." And what do we know, public cloud succeeded with one data, hybrid cloud is a reality and people are executing specific technologies to do an operating model that's cloud And to me, the big wave for Cisco, in my opinion, is multi cloud, because that's not a technology. That's just, that's a value proposition, it's not so much a technology. >> Yeah, Dave, you mentioned a lot of the acquisitions that Cisco has done. In many ways, though, some of the areas where Cisco can be defined is the acquisitions that they didn't do. Cisco did not buy VMware, and were behind in the virtualization wave. And then they created UCS and that actually was a great tailwind for them, created their data center business. They did not end up buying Nicira, and yet, Nicira's done very well. But if you talk to most customers well, even if you're deploying NSX, whose hardware do you tend to have? Well, yes, sure, it might be Arista, might be somebody else's but Cisco still doing good, going well, so they haven't had, there hasn't been a silver bullet to kill Cisco's dominant, but how are they going to do without cloudification? The data center group has gone through a lot of challenges. If you look at they fumbled along with OpenStack, like many other companies did, they went through just as VMware really failed with VCloud Air, the cloud group inside of Cisco had, they had this large Cisco offering that for a couple of years, everybody's looking, I don't know, are you enabling service providers? What are you doing? Now they have management pieces, they're partnering with Google, Amazon, Azure, across the environments, they are heavily involved in Kubernetes and the service meshes. So it remains to be seen where Cisco will find that next Tam expansion to kind of take them to the next wave. >> But Stu, acquisition is a good piece. And what I think they got to do some M&A clearly and organic but the question is would Nicira have been successful at Cisco versus VMware. Look at the timing of that, I think VMware being bought would have been a home run. But Nicira, I don't think that succeeds at Cisco. I think that would be a bunch of knife fights internally. And Nicira would have been shifted up because what it was then and what it is now and VMware are two different things because VMware took it, and shaped it, that I don't think Cisco could have done it at that time, >> The success would have been a defensive move to keep VMware out. That would have been the nature of the success, but I think you're right, the infighting would have been brutal, but VMware wouldn't have Nicira. >> VMware, What they did when they bought Nicira is they spent the first three or four years just making it an extension of VMware. Now it's starting to become their multi Cloud Interconnect. And that's where we need to see Cisco be involved. Cisco's bought many companies that have promised to be multicloud management or that interconnecting fabric and they have not yet panned out. >> Well, security is the linchpin though here, they've made a bunch of acquisitions in security. And I've always said that they've got a position, their networking is the most cost effective, the highest performance and the most secure to connect multiple clouds to hybrid on-prem. And they're in a good position to do that. >> Well, I think I've always said this from day one, you guys know I'm harping on this, Stu and I, we High Five each other all the time when we say this, but back in the days in IT days, the heyday, if you were a network operator, network designer, network architect, you were the king, king or queen. So you had the keys to the kingdom. VMware is a legitimate threat to Cisco. They compete, and they talk about that all the time. But the question is, which community has the keys to the kingdom? Rhetorical question. >> Yeah, well John one point I made earlier, (John laughing) >> Okay, go ahead. >> I remember Pat Gelsinger got on stage and he's like, "Hey, here's the largest collection of network admins" and everybody's looking at him, what are you talking about Pat? When I talk to customers that are deploying NSX, it is mostly not the network team, it is the virtualization team, and they're still often fighting with the network team. But to your point, where I've seen some of the really smart network architects, and people building stuff, Amazon, Azure, Google all have phenomenal people, and they're building environment back Cisco needs to make sure they partner and are embedded there. >> If you, Dave mentioned the leverage. Cisco's got to pull that lever or, turn the boat around and one shift move now, or otherwise, they'll lose that leverage. They have more power than they think in my opinion, they probably do know, but they have the network. And I think the network guys trump the operating guys, because you always swap in operating staff, but you got the network, and the network runs the business. No one could swap out Cisco boxes for a Synopsis years ago, so or Bay, whatever it turned into, so they have that nested position. If they lose that they're done. >> Yeah, and I agree with you, John, there's a lot of, Stu, you pointed out this, people buy NSX and Cisco ACI, but my question is, okay, how long will that redundancy last? I think, to your rhetorical question, Cisco is sitting in the catbird seat and they know networking, they're investing in it. I don't think they're going to lose sight of that. Yeah, wrist is, common Adam and Juniper, but Cisco, they know how to manage that business and maintain its leadership. I guess my question is, have they lost that acquisition formula? Are they as good at acquisitions as they used to be? >> I think their old model's flawed for the modern era. I think the acquisition's got to come in and integrate and I think VMware has proven that they can do acquisitions right. I think that comes from the EMC kind of concept where it's got to fit in beautifully and have synergies right away. I think what Pat Gelsinger is doing I think he's smart and I think that's why VMware is so successful. They got great technical talent, they know the right waves to be on and they execute. So I think Cisco has got to get out of these siloed acquisitions, this business unit mindset and have things come in, if they work, in line with the strategy and the execution. It has to from day one, I've got it. You got to be fitting perfectly in. >> The portfolio is still pretty complicated. You got the core networking. You got things like WebEx, right? I mean, would you want to be going up against Microsoft Teams? But they're in it, Cisco's in it to win it, and they got to they got to talk about-- >> Don't count out Zoom. >> Talking about, no, Zoom's right there too in the mix. And so Cisco's got some work to do, expect some enhancements coming there, in HCI, they've got to walk a fine line Stu, you made this point. On the one hand, they've got, IBM and NetApp with UCS and conversion infrastructure, but then they buy Springpath, which is designed to replace converged infrastructure. So they've got to walk that fine line. >> All right, what are you guys going to hear this week? Let's just wrap this up by going down the line on thoughts and predictions as the keynote kicks off tomorrow, I took some notes, I was doing some, going around the floor trying to get inside people's heads and ask them probing questions. And here's what I got out of it. I think Cisco is going to recognize cloud and absolutely throw the holy water on the fact that it's part of their strategy. I think we'll hear a little bit about Silicon One and how it relates to the portfolio, but I think the big story will be how tying the application environment together with networking, not end to end but really as one seamless solution for customers. I think it's going to be a top story that's been teased out by some of the booths that I saw, connecting things as one holistic thing with application development focus with DevOps. >> Yeah, so John, ACI was application centric infrastructure. And it was critical back in back in the day there is like, well, the application owner really doesn't have much connection there. If you look at what Cisco has been doing the last few years, it is tying together more that application owner, the DevNet group that, we're sitting here in the DevNet zone, that connection between the developer and making enabling them as part of the business absolutely is a wave that Cisco needs to drive. I don't think we're going to see a ton of the Silicon One, 5G and that kind of stuff, if for no other reason then in about a month, they're going to be sitting here with 100,000 people from Mobile World Congress and that's where they keep their dry powder to make sure that they push that piece of it. But that is super important, so and yeah. >> I think, software and security, I mean, I, as you were talking about, Zoom, Teams, so they better focus on collaboration and I want to hear some stuff there, security, IoT and the edge. They've got a very strong position there. Their security, Cisco security business grew 22% last quarter, it's really doing well. So I want to hear more about that. And I think data center, what they're doing in the data center, what they're doing with their switching business, their HCI stuff and converged infrastructure, hyper converged and, three important areas that we'll hear about this week. >> And Dave, I'll emphasise on what you were saying. Edge edge edge, absolutely, if Cisco is going to maintain a dominant player in the network, they need to deliver on that edge. And I've heard a couple of messaging strategies in the past, there was fog computing and all this other stuff, but I think Cisco is in a position today between Meraki that they have between their core product, >> Dave: Devnet. >> To really be able to enable-- >> And those are really-- >> Well, I want to see more progress, I'm looking forward to see, I'm going to drill them on the interviews we do here. They spent millions, billions of dollars satisfying and creating a subscription model with the cloud. We're going to dig into it, we're going to extract the signal from the noise, theCUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain. First show of 2020, Cisco Live 2020, I'm John Furrier, Stuart Miniman, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Las Vegas, you covering splunk.com 19 brought to you by Splunk.. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. That's the cubes live coverage in Las Vegas for Splunk's dot com user conference 10 years is their anniversary. It's cubes seventh year. I'm John Farah, your host with a great guest here. Joe Partlow, CTO of rely AQuESTT recently on the heels of vying thread care and Marcus, Carrie and team. Congratulations. They'd come on. Yeah. Yeah. It's been a been a fun month. So obviously security. We love it. Let's take a minute to talk about what you guys do. Talk about what your company does that I've got some questions for you. Yeah. So you know, obviously with the increasing cyber threats, uh, you know, uh, security companies had a lot or customers had a lot of tools. Uh, it's easy to get overwhelmed, um, really causes a lot of confusion. So really what we're trying to do is we have a platform called gray matter that is really kind of how we deliver security model management, which what that means is that's bringing together people, process technology in a way that's easy to kind of make sense of all the noise. >>Um, yeah, there's, there a, a lot of features in there that would help monitor the health, uh, the incident response, the hunt, um, any kind of features that you would need from a security. So you guys are a managed service, you said four? >> Yeah. Yeah, a different, a little different than a traditional MSSP. We um, you'll work very close with, uh, the customers. Uh, we work in their environment, we're working side by side with them, uh, in their tools and we're really maturing and getting better visibility in their environment to get that MSSP for newer. >> Right. That's where you guys are. M S S VP >> on steroids. A little bit different. >> Alright. Well you guys got some things going on. You got a partnership with Splunk for the dotcom sock. Oh yeah. Talk about that with set up out here. And what's it showing? Yeah, that's been a great experience. >>Uh, we, we work very close with the Splunk, uh, team. Uh, we monitored Splunk corporate, uh, from a work with skirt team monitoring them. Uh, so when.call came around, it was kind of a natural progression of Hey, uh, you know, Joel and team on their side said, Hey, how do we kind of build up the team and do a little bit extra and I'll see any way that we can help secure.com. Uh, it was really cool. I give credit to the team, both teams, uh, standing up a, uh, new Splunk install, getting everything stood up really in the last few weeks, uh, making sure that every, uh, everybody at the pavilion and the conference in general is protected and we're watching for any kind of threat. >> So it's, it's been great working with the Splunk team. So is that normal procedure that the bad guys want to target? >>The security congresses? This is gonna make a state visit more of graffiti kind of mentality. It's an act kind of lift, fun, malicious endpoints that they want to get out of here. Oh yeah. There's, there's a little bit of a, you know, let's do it for fun and mess with the conference a little bit. So we'll want to make sure that, that that's what happened. So is my end point protected here? My end points, my phone and my laptop. Uh, not the user specific but any of the conference provided demo stations. Okay. So or structure for the equipment, not me personally. You are not monitoring your personal okay. I give up my privacy years ago. Yes. This is a interesting thing to talk about working with spunk because you know, I hear all the time and again we're looking at this from an industry wide perspective. >>I hear we've got a sock, they got a slot. So these socks are popping up yesterday. Operation centers. What is, what is the state of the art for that now? Is it best practice to have a mega Monster's sock or is it distributed, is it decentralized? What's the current thinking around how to deploy Sox surgery operations center or centers? Yeah, we certainly grow with a decentralized model. We need to follow the sun. So we've got operations centers here in Vegas, Tampa and Dublin. Uh, really making sure that we've got the full coverage. Uh, but it is working very close with the Splunk socks. So they've got a phenomenal team and we work with them side by side. Uh, obviously we are providing a lot of the, uh, the tier one, tier two heavy lift, and then we escalate to Splunk team. They're obviously gonna know Splunk corporate better than we will. >>So, uh, we work very close hand in hand. So you guys acquired threat care and Marcus carries now in the office of CTO, which you're running. Yes. How is that going to shape rely a quest and the Europe business? >> Yeah, the acquisition has been extremely, uh, you know, uh, exciting for us. Uh, you know, after meeting Marcus, uh, I've known of Marcus, he's a very positive influence in the community, uh, but having worked with him, the vision for threat care and the vision for Lioncrest really closely aligned. So where we want to take, uh, the future of security testing, testing controls, making sure upstream controls are working, uh, where threats they're wanting to go for. That was very much with what we aligned more so it made sense to partner up. So, uh, very excited about that and I think we will roll that into our gray matter platform has another capability. >>Uh, gray matter, love the name by the way. I mean, first of all, the security companies have the best names or mission control gray matter, you know, red Canary, Canary in the coal mine. All good stuff. All fun. But you know, you guys work hard so I know the price gotta be good. I gotta ask you around the product vision around the customers and how they're looking at security because you know, it's all fun games. They'll, someone's hacking their business trash or this ransomware going on. Data protection has become a big part of it. What are customers telling you right now in terms of their, their fears and aspirations? What do they need? What's on the agenda? Guests for customers right now? Yeah. I think kind of the two biggest fears, um, and then the problems that we're trying to address is one, just a lack of visibility. >>Uh, customers have so many things on their network, a lot of mergers and acquisitions. So, uh, unfortunately with a lot of times the security team is the last one to know when something pops up. Uh, so anything that we can do to increase visibility and that and that, a lot of times we work very closely with Splunk or send that they have out to make sure that it happens. And then the other thing I think is, you know, most people want to get more proactive. Uh, you know, salmon logging by nature is very reactive. So when he tried to get out in front of those threats a little bit more, so anything that we can do to try to get more proactive, uh, may certainly going to be on their, their top of mind. Well, the machine learning toolkits, getting a lot of buzz here at the show, that's a really big deal. >>I think the other thing that I'm seeing I to get your reaction to is this concept of diverse data. That's my word, not Splunk's, but the idea of bringing in more data sets actually helps machine learning that's pretty much known by data geeks, but in making data addressable because data seems to be the one thing that is all doing a lot of the automation that's takes that headway heavy lift and also provides heavy lifting capabilities to set data up to look at stuff. So data is pretty critical. Data addressability data diversity, you got to have the data and it's gotta be addressable in real time and through tools like fabric search and other things. What's your reaction to that and thoughts around that? No, I agree 100%. Uh, you know, obviously most enterprise customers have a diverse set of data. So trying to search across those data sets, normalize that data, it's, it's a huge task. >>Um, but to get the visibility that we need, we really need to be able to search these multiple data sets and bring those into make sense. Whether you're doing threat hunting or responding to alerts. Um, or you need it from a compliance standpoint, being able to deal with those diverse data sets, uh, is is a key key issue. You know, the other thing I wanna get your thoughts on this one that we've been kind of commenting, I've kind of said a ticket position on this gonna from an opinion standpoint, but it's kind of obvious but it's not necessarily true. But my point is with the data volume going up so massive, that puts the tips, the scales and the advantage for the adversaries. Ransomware's a great example of it and you know, as little ransomware now is towns and cities, these ransomware attacks just one little vector, but with the data volume data is the surface area, not just devices. >>Oh yeah. So how is the data piece of it and the adversarial advantage, you think that that makes them stronger, more surface area? Yeah, definitely. And that's something that where we're leaning on machine learning for a lot is if you really kind of make sense of that data, a lot of times you want to baseline that environment and just find it what's normal in the environment, what's not normal. And once you to find that out, then we can start saying, all right, is this malicious or not? Uh, you know, some things that uh, yeah, maybe PowerShell or something and one environment is a huge red flag that Hey, we've been compromised in another one. Hey, that's just a good administrator automating his job. So making sense of that. Um, and then also just the sheer volume of data that we, that we see customers dealing with. >>Very easy to hide in if you're doing an attack, uh, from an adversary standpoint. So being able to see across that and make sure that you can at scale SyFy that data and find actionable event. You guys, I was just talking with a friend that I've known from the cloud, world, cloud native world. We're talking about dev ops versus the security operations and those worlds are coming together. There are more operational things than developer things, but yet CSOs that we talked to are fully investing in developer teams. So it's not so much dev ops dogma, if you will. But we gotta do dev ops, right? You know, see the CIC D pipeline. Okay, I get that. But developers play a critical role in this feature security architecture, but at the end of the day, it's still operations. So this is the new dev ops or sec ops or whatever it's called these days. >>What's your, how, how do customers solve this problem? Because it is operational, whether it's industrial IOT or IOT or cloud native microservices to on premise security practices with end points. I mean, I, the thing we see that, that kind of gets those teams the most success is making sure they're working with those teams. So having security siloed off by itself. Um, I think we've kind of proven in the past that doesn't work right? So get them involved with their development teams, get them involved with their net ops or, or, you know, sec ops teams, making sure they're working together so that security teams can be an enabler. Uh, they don't want to be the, uh, the team that says no to everything. Um, but at the end of the day, you know, most companies are not in the business of security. They're in the business of making widgets or selling widgets or whatever it is. >>So making sure that the security, yeah, yeah, that's an app issue. Exactly. Making sure that they're kind of involved in that life cycle so that, not that they can, you know, define what that needs to be, but at least be aware of, Hey, this is something we need to watch out for or get visibility into and, and keep the process moving. All right. Let's talk about Splunk. Let's set up their role in the enterprise. I'll see enterprise suite 6.0 is a shipping general availability. How are you guys deploying and optimizing Splunk for customers? What are some of the killer use cases that's there and new ones emerging? Yeah, we've, we provide, you know, really kind of three core areas. First one customers, you're one is obviously making sure that the platform is healthy. So a lot of times we'll go into a, a customer that, uh, you know, maybe they, they, there's one team has turned over or they rapidly expanded and, and in a quickly, you kind of overwhelming the system that's there. >>So making sure that the, the architecture is correct, maintained, patched, upgraded, and they're, they're really taking advantage of the power of Splunk. Uh, from an engineering standpoint. Uh, also another key area is building content. So as we were discussing earlier, making sure that we've got the visibility and all that data coming in, we've got to make sure that, okay, are we pursuing that data correctly? Are we creating the appropriate alerts and dashboards and reports and we can see what's going on. Um, and then the last piece is actually taking, you know, see you taking action on that. So, uh, from an incident response standpoint, watching those alerts and watching that content flyer and making sure that we're escalating and working with the customer security team, they'd love to get your thoughts. Final question on the, um, first of all, great, great insight. They'll, I love that. >>As customers who have personal Splunk, we buy our data is number one third party app for blogs work an app, work app workloads, and in cloud as well as more clients than you have rely more on cloud. AWS for instance, they have security hub, they're deploying some of this to lean on cloud providers, hyperscale cloud providers for security, but that doesn't diminish the roles flung place. So there's a lot of people that are debating, well, the cloud is going to eat Splunk's lunch. And so I don't think that's the case. I want to get your thoughts of it because they're symbionic. Oh yeah. So what's your thoughts on the relationship to the cloud providers, to the Splunk customer who's also going to potentially moves to the cloud and have a hybrid cloud environment? Yeah, and now I would agree there's, you know, there are going to exist side by side for a long time. >>Uh, most environments that we see are hybrid environments. While most organizations do have a cloud first initiative, there's still a lot of on premise stuff. So Splunk is still going to be a, a key cornerstone of just getting that data. Where I do see is maybe a, you know, in those platforms, um, kind of stretching the reach of Splunk of, Hey, let's, let's filter and parse this stuff maybe closer to the source and make sure that we're getting the actionable things into our Splunk ES dashboards and things like that so that we can really make sure that we're getting the good stuff. And maybe, you know, the stuff that's not actionable, we're, we've up in our AWS environment. Um, and that's, that's a lot of the technology that Splunk's coming out with. It's able to search those other environments is going to be really key I think for that where you don't have to kind of use up all your licensing and bring that non-actionable data in, but you still able to search across. >>But that doesn't sound like core Splunk services more. That's more of an operational choice there. Less of a core thing. You mentioned that you think splints to sit side by side for the clouds. What, what gives you that insight? What's, what's, uh, what's telling you that that's gonna happen? What's the, yeah, you still need the core functionality of Splunk running with spark provides is a, you know, it's a great way to bring data and it parses it, uh, extremely well. Um, having those, uh, you know, correlate in correlation engines and searches. Um, that's, that's very nice to have that prepackaged doing that from scratch. Uh, you can certainly, there's other tools that can bring data in, but that's a heavy riff to try to recreate the wheel so to speak. We're here with Joe Parlo, CTO, really a quest, a pardon with Splunk setting up this dotcom SOC for the exhibits and all the infrastructure. >>Um, final question, what's the coolest thing going on at dotcom this year? What's, what should customers or geeks look at that's cool and relevant that you think should be top line? Top couple of things. Yeah, I, I, uh, one of the things I like the most out of the keynote was, uh, the whole, uh, Porsche use case with that. The AR augmentation on my pet bear was really, really cool. Um, and then obviously the new features are coming out with, with VFS and some of another pricing model. So definitely exciting time to be a partner of Splunk. Alright, Joe, thanks for them. John furrier here with the cube live in Las Vegas day two of three days of coverage.com. Their 10th year anniversary, our seventh year covering the Silicon angle, the cube. I'm Sean furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering splunk.com 19 brought to you by Splunk. >>Okay. Welcome back. Everyone live in Las Vegas. We're here for Splunk's dot com I'm John ferry with the Q, this our seventh year covering.com but.com 10th year of their end user conference, their customer conference. That's been exciting to watch the evolution of Splunk and how a lot of it's because of their great products. We have our next guest Pang, senior director of product line management for Splunk business flow. Welcome to the cube. Well I'm glad to have you. One of the successes of Splunk has been great products. They never deviate off the core, kept building on it a year in the senior director of product land for you know, business flows, analytics. All I see everywhere is dashboards and visualizations. It looks so easy. Tell us about what your products are doing. >>Yeah, definitely and you know, I think one of the places to start is just how we moved into this area and start the new product. A lot of people know us for it and security use cases, but a lot of our customers are also using it to address business needs. So what they really saw was the value of Splunk to pull data from across different silos. Um, so in a business sense it could be, I have different systems for maybe my leads sales and closing the books, right? Those are all disparate. It's really hard to pull it together. And so they came to us saying like, we'd love a way to stitch this together and be able to visualize it. And that was really where Splunk business flow was born from. So we actually simplify it by connecting all these disparate data points, creating a full journey view or a process view that you can graphically see what's happening and then point and click and drill in. So it's really opening up a whole new set of users for us with that. And a whole new set of use cases that way. Surely. Yes. So if you think about, we have tons of data, it's tens of events. If you know a common thread like a user and how they might go to the store and then do something online and really understand the customer experience. If you could actually thread that all together, who would knows so much more about their customer experience and that's what we're able to do and we do it seamlessly for them. >>Well the database guy in me from the old eighties college saying, I gotta write a schema for that. I got to store the data. I mean in the old way it was really hard to compare like the pain or even capability >>we're hitting. Exactly the pain point. Right. That's why it's been so hard to do that because it was so rigid. The beauty of Splunk is the scheme on raid aspect of it. So because we store all the data and then we can distract it as needed, we do the search on demand and that's how we're able to actually stitch it together. Yeah. Yeah. And I think like one of the things has been the struggle of, well people have made a lot of probably more conservative decisions earlier on in their data and that's why they weren't able to get the information. And so part the main pain point we always heard was I got one piece of data, but now that I look into it, crap, I need to know what else there is. And then you have, it's another three week cycle, right, to pull that data in, bring it all in. Well now that's all in Splunk. You can just pull it as you need it on. >>It's a use case. Then from an operations standpoint, they're pretty comfortable with handling slug. They know what it means to Splunk, the data. >>Exactly. And we really see it as a partnership between the Splunk admin as well as the business users. The Splunk admin helps to get it all set up and then the business user can actually investigate on their own and they don't need to know SPL or anything like that to be able to use the product. Exactly. That's a great question. So it's a premium solution. So you do need Splunk enterprise or Splunk cloud. And then this is stacks essentially on top of it. Um, and so it uses the underlying Splunk data, but then it's also doing the additional work of doing the correlation across it, stitching it together, providing the visualizations. And then from there you can do things like AB comparison mode. You can see conversion rates, you can drag it, you can drill down all the way into the actual event. So the beauty of it is being able to see the holistic picture but then go down into the individual Avenger. >>It's definitely the business analyst and I think there is some crossover with it and security as well. So we actually had a session here where our own it internal it use focus flow to monitor their ticketing system and look for black hole tickets. So have you, I don't know if you've ever, you know, submit an it ticket. You never hear anything back because it's gotten lost. But yeah, exactly. But what are those, what are those? Zachary, you're very fortunate, but it was one of those problems where you hear a lot of it departments, you know, you might've, because you're outsourcing certain portions, you lose some of those tickets. You don't know what happened. So they were actually able to use the product to see that. But it also applies to people within. Um, one example we have, sorry, I'm thinking of some public customers that we have. So Domino's is a public customer. Um, that was a beta customer that used it for payment processing on, on, um, Superbowl. So like that's another great, >>yeah, the obviously scale is huge there. The data. So I gotta ask the cloud question. Since we brought up cloud, is this service cloud enabled in the sense of, is it on an on premise thing or is it, does the workflow kicked into the analytics? How's the cloud play? >>Yes. So it sits on top of both. Um, so it works either with the Splunk enterprise or Splunk cloud enterprise license essentially. And then the actual architecture of it is a hybrid environment. So we have a hybrid component that's in our own host of cloud that feeds the UI. And the great thing about that is that we're able to update the product very quickly and push out updates to the customers very easily though. So, um, we first announced it back in may of this year and have added additional functionality as part of COF and it did come out of customers and then seeing the opportunity with the machine data. So, um, there are a lot of great stories that we've had historically. I think Dubai airports, you can see some different stories of for pupil piece, the journey together. And so out of those conversations bore was the idea was >>every product line has a list that didn't make the cut on the product is called the roadmap is also new things. What are some of the things that you see big picture areas that you're going to focus in on to extend out the capabilities and value of the product? >>You really see the product evolving the same way that you see a lot of the portfolio for all. So Doug has talked a lot about investigate, monitoring and analyzing and act, right. And so those same concepts apply into how you think about a process as well. So right now we're really helping the investigation and monitoring, but we'll also continue to extend across that spectrum of time. Yeah, definitely in how we've built the product. But also, um, I think it can sit alongside some of the other things that you're also seeing in that realm. >>Final question for you. For people that are watching that couldn't make the conference, what's the biggest, biggest story here for dotcom this year? How would you, >>I mean overall I really think it is our data to everything message that we're discussing. Um, I think today you can really see how we apply in all of these vast areas and really the power of being able to have access and make that data actionable and do something with it. Thank you so much. It's so nice to be with you today. >>John Barry here in the cube coverage here in Las Vegas with dotcom Splunk's annual conference. It's their 10th year, March 7th year covering them. We'll be right back with more day to coverage after this show. >>Right.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering splunk.com 19 brought to you by Splunk. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's the cubes coverage here in Las Vegas for Splunk's dot com I'm John, the host of the cube. This is Splunk's 10th year user conference is the cube seventh year. We've been riding on the same wave with Splunk over the years and just watching the phenomenal growth and changes at the level of data at scale we've been covering. We can remember I said from day one data at the center of this, not just log files is now gone. Beyond that, we're here with Carrie Pailin, the CMO, chief marketing officer for Splunk. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. The folks that know us know about spunk. Notice the color changes in the background, the popping kink, burning yellow, orange underneath, new branding. You're new to Splunk story, career in technology. Um, this is exciting. And then portfolio, there's all the news is a phenomenal good news flow. >>Very relevant, right on Mark. Data is now creating value and datas like software. It's enabling value. Splunk software and solution platform has done that and this new new grounds to take. But you're now setting the agenda for the brand and the company tell us, I mean, it's a marketer's dream. What can I say? It's a, you know, I joined nine months ago and when I was interviewing for the role, I remember Doug Merritt saying to me, Hey, you know, we might be the only $2 billion enterprise software company that nobody's ever heard of. Amy said, I want to go solve for that. Right? Like the folks who know Splunk and our customers, they love us, our product is awesome and our culture is awesome, but the world doesn't know about us yet and we haven't invested there. So I want to go take the brand to the next level. >>And I want the world to understand what data use cases are out there that are so broad and so vast. And we believe that every problem ultimately can be solved through data or almost every problem. And we wanted to set the stage for that with this new brand campaign. Yeah. Just on a personal note. And following the journey of Splunk, a scrappy startup goes public and growth modes. When you're a growth Moe is hard to kind of lay down foundational things like branding and whatnot. But now sponsor leader, we did a poll within our community and for cloud and on premise security, Splunk's the number one supplier for just laws with workloads. And then now cloud security is kicking in. So the relationship to Amazon, Google cloud platform and Azure is a critical part of Splunk is now the leader. So leaders have to do things like make sure that their brand's good. >>This is what you're doing. Take us behind the scenes of the branding, the things you chose and data for everything. Yeah. D the little small nuance data to everything. Um, and the reason behind that was we believe you can bring and we can enable our customers to bring data to every question, every decision and every action to create meaningful outcomes. And the use cases are vast and enormous. We talked about some of them before the show started, but helping look at global law enforcement, get ahead of human trafficking through SPOHNC and spelunking. What's going on across all sorts of data sources, right? Helping zone Haven, which is our first investment from Splunk ventures, which startup that's actually helping firefighters figure out burn burn patterns with fire wildfires. But also when temperatures and humidity change where sensors are, they can alert firefighters 30 to 45 minutes earlier than they would usually do that. >>And then they can also help influence evacuation patterns. I mean it's, it's remarkable what folks are doing with data today and it's really at the, at the core of solving some of the world's biggest issues. It's hard to tell a story for a company that solves some of the use cases. Yes. Because depending on who you talk to, that's the company. This is what we should be telling them. I know you do this over here, so when you're horizontally creating this kind of value, yeah, it's hard to kind of brand that because it will get a lot of opinions because you're doing a lot of different things. There's not like one vertical. That's right. So this is the challenge that most B to B marketers will fall on the trip. We do this because we have a lot of customers in this one segment. But yes, you guys are hitting so much more. >>How did you deal with that? Ha, we had a lot of talks about it, a lot of discussions, a lot of debate and I love diversity of thought. It usually drives the right outcomes, but we had a lot of this, this is not an easy answer. If it had been, it would have been done years ago and we really talked about setting the stage for where, you know, I love the Wayne Gretzky quote about skate to where the puck is going and that's what he always did and that's why he was so good. We believe there will ultimately be a data platform of platforms and we believe Splunk is that platform, right? And so that's where the industry's going. We wanted to cast a net that would take us there so that this is the beginning of a brand evolution for us and not a total rebrand, but it's setting the stage for a category creation that we believe is coming in the industry. >>A few. You guys are smart and I think my observation would be looking at some of our 10 years of reporting and sharing some on digital is that all the conversations around data is impacting the real world. Yes. You see Mark Zuckerberg and on Capitol Hill having the answer to the date of debacles, he has cybersecurity attacks, national security, um, ransomware taking down cities and towns. This is a real impact. Forest fires disrupting rolling blackouts. So technology's impacting real world lives. That's right. This is really new to tech. I mean usually behind the scenes, you know, coding, but not anymore. We're the front lines of real societal, global. Yes. Jade is at the forefront and it's really exciting. It's also frightening, right? Because we believe data presents the greatest opportunity for humanity, but also some of the greatest threats. And so hence our ability to really dig in on data security. >>It's important to do that while we're actually also surfacing data to solve real world issues. You've been in the industry for a while and when you came to Splunk, boasts a couple of things that surprised you as you, you had some thoughts going in, you knew Splunk. Yes. What are some of the things that surprised you when you got here? Oh, I mean, in such a good way. A few things, you know. Well, here's the story. Three days into being at Splunk, my dad got very ill and I wasted him to Austin for heart surgery and he actually didn't make it. Um, and so it's been a rough year to say the least. And uh, the way that Splunk's culture, I knew about it before I came, but the way that this company treated me, like I had been here 10 years, uh, when I'd really only been an employee three days was something I'll never forget. >>And it's, it's special. Um, and so I believe that companies are successful if they are smart and healthy and in Splunk has the healthy and droves and not just the compassion and the empathy, but you know, a very transparent culture. We debate things, we talk about things, we support each other. We are accountable. And I believe that's a big part of why we've grown so fast because our culture is incredibly healthy and very, um, collaborative as a team. I'm sorry for your loss. Thank you. Um, you mentioned the culture is a big part of Splunk. Yes. In talking to some of the folks that spoke over the years, there's no, I will, I'll totally say this. There's no shortage of opinions, so have not volunteered. These are robustness. Yes. Diversity of thoughts, very actionable communities. How do you, um, how do you look at that? Because that's a, could be a force, a force multiplier. >>Yes. For the brand. How are you going to tie in to everything with the community? How are you going to harness that energy? Yeah. So it's coming and the reality is data to everything is actually a set up to tell the stories of everyone who is using data today. And so the community is going to be one of the first places we go to surface. Some of those amazing stories. Um, and some of the things you see here at the show are actually showcasing that in the keynote today we heard from zone Haman and Porsche and so many others around their use cases. But the community is where it all begins and that's the lifeblood of our sort of spunkiness and a something that we don't take for granted once. One second. Sorry about the Barack Obama. Yeah. Directions with him and his interest in Splunk. Yeah. So we had our big re rebrand a reveal last month we had an event and it was for C suite type of folks. >>That was a very intimate event and we wanted somebody to keynote that and headline that that really brought to life the whole notion that you can bring data to everything. And president Obama was the first POTUS that actually use data in his campaign strategy. He's very open about that. He's the first president to appoint a chief data scientist to the white house. He's actually exceptionally geeky and very data-driven. And so when we asked him to come and headline this, he actually was really excited about it. Um, and you know, in, in great fashion, his communications team was really strict on curating the questions that we had for him. And he was so cute. He showed up to the event and he said, look, um, I'm so thrilled to be here. I love what you guys are doing and you can ask me anything. It's just like ready to go. >>And he was so wonderful and teed up this, this notion of day bringing data to everything so brilliantly. He's kicking, dig and be ad live all the time. He's very colorful as well as personality. Yes. He's kind of nerdy and you know, he was very open and OpenGov too. One of the things that I remember and when big data really started rolling into the scene around 2009, 2010 yes. You saw that opening up data registries from cities and towns and actually created innovation from health care medical supplies? Yes. Yes. So this has been a big part of it. Huge. You guys are doing some things out here and I see the exhibits we're using the day you're doing demos. How do you see you guys helping society with that? Because if you get to the next level, you've got some great use cases. Yes, the public sector is a big part of some news here. >>Fed ramp is one little technicality, but you got some certification, but government's modernizing now. So you know post Obama, you're seeing modernization of procurement roll with cloud, certainly cyber security. Amazon with the CIA, department of defense, role of data in the military and public sector. Yes, education. This is going to be a disruptive enabler for faults on the public impact. I mean, look, there's, you know, Doug touched on this a little bit this morning, the reality in our press conference, but the reality is if you do it right, opening up datasets to communities of people that can do better together and you can get this collective momentum going. For instance, in healthcare, I mean I'm a little bit of a health care nerd and I don't know if you've watched the PBS special on the Mayo clinic, it's spectacular. But one of the reasons the Mayo has been amazing for years is because their doctors all work off the same systems in every discipline in that facility and they can learn more holistically about a patient. >>And I think about the impact that data could have if we could open up those data sets across every health provider for one person or the same illness with every major institution across the U S collaborating and sharing and what we could actually do to make real impact and strides against some of the diseases that are really crippling society today. So I think that the good that we can do with data, if we open up those data sets and do it in a way that, that it's safe. It's remarkable the progress we can make. You know, one of the from machine learning has been a big success story. Machine learning toolkit. Customers are raving about it. Opening up the data creates better machine learning. AI creates better business value. That's right. That's that part of how you guys see things rolling out. Sure. I mean, as a marketer we use AI today and it's really more machine learning. >>It's sad pattern recognition. But we use, uh, you know, my last stand as a CMO, the last company I was at, we use an AI bot to augment our sales headcount for following up on leads. And it looked like a human being. I mean, same thing for Splunk. I mean, the more we can see pattern recognition, proffer up insights, the better off we are to help out our customers. And so Tim Teles team is driving that hard and fast into our innovation curve with everything that we do. Innovation culture, big time here, right? Huge, huge and one of the reasons I came to Splunk is when I interviewed with Tim and I said, Hey, how are you doing on recruiting engineers in the Valley? We all know that that is liquid gold, and he said that he had hired 370 odd engineers in less than a year and from really big brands like Airbnb and I thought, all right, there's some really cool innovation going on here. >>If some of the best engineers in the Valley really want to come work here and they want to work for a great leader, and Tim and his team are that. so.com is 10 years now this year has been riding the wave together. It's been fun. Your first, my very first dotcom. Yes. Your thoughts on this, on this community, this event. Share your, your thoughts. I mean I'm blown away and this is a team sport. I'm so proud of the events team, the creative team, the sales teams, everybody who's come together to make this event so spectacular. It's just sort of mind numbing that a company of our size can put on such an experience for our user community, but I'm also thrilled with the engagement. We have over 300 sessions this week and most of them are user and customer use, case driven and the stories they are telling are magnificent. >>They're doing this all with Splunk, so it's pretty special. And the ecosystem and the app showcase is pretty hot here. You're seeing real applications, people writing code on top of Splunk? Yes, it's, it's, I'm sorry I don't use this word often. I'm 48 but it's rad. It's so cool. Yes. Harry, thanks so much for coming on the cube and sharing your insights. Absolutely. Final thoughts for the people who aren't here at the event, watching on camera, what, how would you encapsulate.com this year? What's the top story that needs to be told? I mean, look, the reality is that we are bringing data to way more than just security and it ops, which has been our core use cases forever, and they will continue to be, but folks are that are not incredibly data literate or through Splunk bringing data to everything and solving some big gnarly issues in the world. And it's pretty exciting stuff. So check us out. All right. Thanks. Gnarly red. Cool. I need a surf board, Jerry. Thanks for coming on Friday. Thank you so much. Coverage here@thetenth.com I'm Jennifer with the cube, bringing you all the action here in Las Vegas. Three days of cubed wall to wall coverage. We've got one more after this short break.

>>Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the cube covering Nutanix dot. Next 2019 brought to you by Nutanix. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Nutanix. Dot. Next we are here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with Stu minimun. We are joined by Nicola Bosun awic. He is the VP GM desktop services at Newtanics. Thanks so much for coming on the show. And also you piss Carr who is an industry analyst and and the many time guest on the cube. That's right. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So you are actually the founder of frame and frame was bought by Nutanix a about a year ago. So tell us a little bit about the acquisition, how its acquisitions are challenging. How has it has, how has it been going? >>It's mayor great year. Uh, there's no better place than a tannics to do end user computing in VDI. And that's what frame was all about. How we make it simple. Uh, that was also all about Newtanics. How do you make computing simple, fast, delightful, and um, we've done, uh, so many things to really bridge that world of on prem and cloud off traditional legacy VDI, like Citrix and VMware on hyperconverged infrastructure and now new broker like frame. And we are really looking at that as one end user computing team and just do what's right for the customers. So it's been a blast. Yeah. Nicola, you know, last year when we had you on, we talked a lot about frame, so you've got a broader mandate now to do the whole desktop services. Give us your view of the landscape a little bit out there as you know, definitely. >>I understand, you know, VDI traditionally, boy was it complicated building that stack, the infrastructure and the software pieces. Um, you know, where are your customers today and you know, how's the industry doing it a whole on that modernization journey. >> Uh, it, as I said, it's been a great 12 months. If you're in VDI. A lot of people who are in the traditional VDI world with brokers like Citrix and VMware are looking to modernize their data centers and there is no better options than uh, hyperconverged and Newtanics to have bite size and linearly, um, scaled infrastructure, run VDI. We continue to innovate, we continue to work closely with um, the vendors, especially Citrix. Um, and at the same time as the focus is shifting to the public clouds, uh, we are, um, having our own opinion and how the broker in the public cloud should look like with frame and then mixing and matching where the desktops really are and really looking at very, um, industry and vertical specific use cases. We're seeing lot of new adoption in healthcare and financial services and with frame, we're seeing a lot of new use cases in education and public sector as well. Right. >>Is this, is this jiving with what you see as the terms of the way they're positioning themselves and what you're hearing from your sources in the market? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, um, you know, given the trend that, you know, applications are going into the cloud, um, it makes sense to kind of pick up those, you know, those applications that are harder to virtualize, harder to move to the cloud and you know, find a way to bring them to the cloud as well. To bring that, I don't know, that cloud like experience for the older applications as well. Um, and then the other hand there's, you know, the simplicity of running the, um, the older desktops. Uh, the traditional VDI just likes to set, I mean, it's difficult to set up that whole environment to manage it, to make sure it continues to operate and then to have something that kind of replaces that with a simple solution. I mean, that's what customers are looking for. Yup. >>Nicola, I know some of the conversations I had years ago was, you know, it's not even desktop. It's, it's about my applications, it's about my users. It's about how things, things are changing. They're in today's world where have many customers who are trying to do SAS first. You know, how, how do you, I guess, reframe that conversation of, you know, what was, you know, we spent over a decade with that VDI discussion. Look, I think we're going to end up, when it comes to infrastructure and when it comes to virtualization, we're going to come ups where some somewhere in the middle where not everything's going to be public cloud and that everything's going to be on prem. It's going to be somewhere in the middle of when it comes to application delivery versus full desktops. It started obviously with app virtualization, but more and more people are looking at delivering full desktop solutions. >>There is a great benefit to it, consistent performance, um, you know, isolation and security or some things that come to mind and we are now able to deliver great performance. Look at windows 10, which is a big migration. We can deliver great windows 10 performance using Citrix or using frame and um, for example, some of the innovation that NVIDIA's bringing to market with a virtualizing GPS. So for the longest time it was a niche and as becoming more of a mainstream, if you just want your desktop to be scrolling smoothly, you'll probably need your GPU. So I think that's where a VDI and a simplicity of VDI, um, really takes over. >>So you are talking about speed and security. What about design? How does that play into it? >>Well, kind of Newtanics is all about, you know, data delivery, design and delight. And a, I think with end user computing, uh, it's end user for a reason. It's experienced by a user, it's experienced by an administrator, and at the end of the day, best user experience is going to win. So for administrators, if they can install their applications and manage them in one click, that's a great benefit. Then that's what we bring with combination of hybrid converged and a frame. Same goes for end user experience, um, as opposed to, let's say 10 years ago when everybody was in a wired network. Uh, these days people work from anywhere. They work from Starbucks, they work over and allows a seller a. So it's very important to have that user experience. Um, you know, uh, be delightful. And, um, that's something that we're very focused on. Yeah. I think I've had so many discussions this year about kind of the CX, the customer experience as well as the employee experience. So, you know, I would think that this whole EUC discussion ties it. What, what are you hearing from them and seeing out there? >>So, you know, the, the whole, the whole discussion about experience. Um, I think it's really important. I mean, employees have to do their job. They are given the tools to do the job, but sometimes the tools that are given or you know, slightly older, um, they may not be modern, they may not be web-based, they may not be performant or, so the issue is how do you, you know, in a very specific niche and a very specific use case, how do you make sure that the older application will actually continue running? Right? Um, how do you bring that, you know, windows application into a, um, into a framework where you can actually work with it everywhere on any device? Right. And that's, that's of where, where I see the, um, um, the wish for a good employee experience cannot be broken down by the technical technical limitations of what applications can do. Right. Um, and the issue is, you know, not every application is cloud native, not every, every application runs in the cloud. So you have to have something that kind of bridges that gap between, you know, on the one hand what you want to offer to the employee and the other hand what you're kind of forced to use in specific use cases. Um, there's just no other way than, you know, w using that old windows application. Yeah. >>Nicola, once again, I think back to some of the years of talking about VDI deployments and it was like up, well, organizationally, we're now off to have the desktop team versus the server team and the storage people need to get involved. And you brought a customer to come talk to the analyst yesterday and they didn't, they were like, we don't want to worry about any of this. We want to worry about our application, what's going on. So help, help explain a little bit, kind of some of the transformational potential of the new model. It's almost the same way we can hyper converged compute within storage and hypervisor. We're hyper converging all these different roles from the storage role to the it role to the business for all where to be honest, you don't need three separate people or three separate teams to do it. Um, solutions like, um, frame for example, make it possible to do that from a single pane of glass and to manage it all. So the customer that we had yesterday is doing that thing. Exactly. And it's not going even to there. It, um, in some cases, um, like, Oh customer we're going to have tomorrow Vodafone, uh, that is, they're on a hyperconverged still has lot more than what I'd call a legacy. It's 5,000 applications delivered to 50,000 concurrent users and they're just doing a new refresh shot. It's here to stay. VDI is here to stay. Yeah. What are >>you see as some of the biggest challenges facing companies like Nutanix? Um, particularly in this space? >>So, I mean, the biggest challenge is going to be integration, right? I mean Nutanix is becoming a big company. It's up to you, I don't know, 5,500 people. I think it's a big company. It's a lot of products that, you know, the portfolio is expanding. And so making sure that all of those solutions fit into the portfolio. And again, coming back to that experience, right? Um, so can candidates annex deliver a solution for many different problems within the data center and Indiana briars cloud without it seeming to be, you know, different products that are not integrated where the user experience is bad. I mean, we've all been there where you try to run a data center and you got bogged down with all of the details simply because the products that you use are not integrated. Um, so I think, you know, from, from any tannics perspective, making sure that everything's integrated and worked well with all of the other products in a portfolio, that's going to be the big challenge for the next year. You know, Nicola, we had Dera John this morning and he talked about those experiences. You know, customers shouldn't have >>Oh my gosh. You know, I looked on the slide and there's 30 different Nutanix products and I can't even spell all of them. Um, you know, uh, so, uh, tell us a little bit about, uh, you know, integrating frame through and making sure a desktop just becomes a, you know, a piece of that experience. The big switch for us as being thinking about solutions, not products for that same reason because there's so many products right now in a portfolio and end user computing or VDI has been one of the key solutions that we are focusing on in the next 12 and 24 mods. So would, that really means is that all the products are designed to work seamlessly. So it starts with your, um, hyper-converged, um, widths, um, Citrix as a broker, horizon as a broker, a frame as a broker, but it extends way beyond that. >>So talking about files, you obviously need your enterprise file server that is very, very seamlessly integrated with the end user computing solution. Same goes for flow. You can now have boundaries of who can access VMs or now we have identity based micro segmentation. Um, and then, uh, things like beam where you can seamlessly again have one-click integration and now how much is something costing you right now and how much the same workload would cost you if you ran it on prem or in a different cloud. So I think all of these things are designed to work seamlessly and we spend a ton of time, I mean literally a ton of time to get together with all the teams and to make sure that that user experience is as seamless as possible. >>So I want to go deeper into your past when at the age of 22, you helped lead a revolution that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic. I want to know the lessons that you learned as a revolutionary and how and how you apply them to the technology industry today. I mean because there is a lot of, you know, move fast and break, which is what you were doing then. Yeah. >>Now also like, ah, I, I spoke to a group of executive last night and mentioned, um, uh, those times in the 90s. I grew up in Serbia where the rest of the world was going for dotcom. Boom. We were dealing with, um, um, basically Yugoslavia breaking apart and in 96, from, um, um, pretty anonymous student in the, in a crowds after Milosevic's stolen election, um, I became the leader of what was a very, uh, uh, natural, but also very attentive, um, movement. Uh, within four weeks I was sitting with him just like this, negotiating and negotiating with about a hundred thousand people yelling and screaming under his window, and he had to, um, reverse the results of his election fraud. It took another couple of years. Then we got rid of him. The lesson that I learned at a very young age and just, you know, things just happen was that if you do things in an authentic way, if you speak with conviction ed the right time, you know, there, there are no things that you can do. >>And that was probably the revolutionary spirit that Newtanics shares when I met Dhiraj that, uh, you know, everything's possible that incumbencies not are insurmountable. And that's what led me to move to the U S um, go to my grad school, get BHD start gobbling companies. And looking back, I'm in my mid forties right now. It's pretty crazy to looking at the odds and they'll, what it takes to build a company, make it successful and how risky that is. Just going through some of these experiences when I was in my early twenties, certainly helped me. And, um, I think we'll live in the day and age where the risk is probably overestimated and that we should probably all take more risk. Uh, in modern day and age, the gain is potentially very large and the risk is relatively small. >>Those are that, that's great. But then the timing is everything too >>thing. And I know there was, um, a fall of two 96 20 cup, 20 something years ago. And I remember, um, you know, the biggest lesson that I've learned, if we've done exactly the same thing and we've done it 10 times better six months before or six months after, it wouldn't happen. It was really the right moment and the right wave of underlying energy that if you serve that way the right way, you can move mountains. But it's really important to have a krill clear message to do it with conviction and to do it the right time. >>Right. So it's a little bit of luck, but then also the willingness to take a risk. Absolutely. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. You've and Nicola. Thank you. It was a pleasure talking to you both. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more coming up tomorrow from nutanix.next.

>> Announcer: From Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. (bright electronic music) >> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We're here at Sand Hill Road at Mayfield Fund. This is theCUBE, co-creation of the People First Network content series. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Our next guest, Yuvi Kochar, who's the Data-centric Digital Transformation Strategist at GameStop. Variety of stints in the industry, going in cutting-edge problems around data, Washington Post, comScore, among others. You've got your own practice. From Washington, DC, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for hosting me. >> This is a awesome conversation. We were just talking before we came on camera about data and the roles you've had over your career have been very interesting, and this seems to be the theme for some of the innovators that I've been interviewing and were on the People First is they see an advantage with technology, and they help companies, they grow companies, and they assist. You did a lot of different things, most notably that I recognized was the Washington Post, which is on the mainstream conversations now as a rebooted media company with a storied, historic experience from the Graham family. Jeff Bezos purchased them for a song, with my opinion, and now growing still, with the monetization, with subscriber base growing. I think they're number one in subscribers, I don't believe, I believe so. Interesting time for media and data. You've been there for what, how many years were you at the Washington Post? >> I spent about 13 years in the corporate office. So the Washington Post company was a conglomerate. They'd owned a lot of businesses. Not very well known to have owned Kaplan, education company. We owned Slate, we owned Newsweek, we owned TV stations and now they're into buying all kinds of stuff. So I was involved with a lot of varied businesses, but obviously, we were in the same building with the Washington Post, and I had front row seat to see the digital transformation of the media industry. >> John: Yeah, we-- >> And how we responded. >> Yeah, I want to dig into that because I think that illustrates kind of a lot what's happening now, we're seeing with cloud computing. Obviously, Cloud 1.0 and the rise of Amazon public cloud. Clearly, check, done that, a lot of companies, startups go there. Why would you provision a data center? You're a startup, you're crazy, but at some point, you can have a data center. Now, hybrid cloud's important. Devops, the application development market, building your own stack, is shifting now. It seems like the old days, but upside down. It's flipped around, where applications are in charge, data's critical for the application, infrastructure's now elastic. Unlike the old days of here's your infrastructure. You're limited to what you can run on it based on the infrastructure. >> Right. >> What's your thoughts on that? >> My thoughts are that, I'm a very, as my title suggests, data-centric person. So I think about everything data first. We were in a time when cloud-first is becoming old, and we are now moving into data-first because what's happening in the marketplace is the ability, the capability, of data analytics has reached a point where prediction, in any aspect of a business, has become really inexpensive. So empowering employees with prediction machines, whether you call them bots, or you call them analytics, or you call them machine learning, or AI, has become really inexpensive, and so I'm thinking more of applications, which are built data-out instead of data-in, which is you build process and you capture data, and then you decide, oh, maybe I should build some reporting. That's what we used to do. Now, you need to start with what's the data I have got? What's the data I need? What's the data I can get? We were just talking about, everybody needs a data monetization strategy. People don't realize how much asset is sitting in their data and where to monetize it and how to use it. >> It's interesting. I mean, I got my computer science degree in the 80s and one of the tracks I got a degree in was database, and let's just say that my main one was operating system. Database was kind of the throwaway at that time. It wasn't considered a big field. Database wasn't sexy at all. It was like, database, like. Now, if you're a database, you're a data guru, you're a rock star. The world has changed, but also databases are changing. It used to be one centralized database rules the world. Oracle made a lot of money with that, bought all their competitors. Now you have open source came into the realm, so the world of data is also limited by where the data's stored, how the data is retrieved, how the data moves around the network. This is a new dynamic. How do you look at that because, again, lagging in business has a lot to do with the data, whether it's in an application, that's one thing, but also having data available, not necessarily in real time, but if I'm going to work on something, I want the data set handy, which means I can download it or maybe get real-time. What's your thoughts on data as an element in all that moving around? >> So I think what you're talking about is still data analytics. How do I get insights about my business? How do I make decisions using data in a better way? What flexibility do I need? So you talk about open source, you think about MongoDB and those kind of databases. They give you a lot of flexibility. You can develop interesting insights very quickly, but I think that is still very much thinking about data in an old-school kind of way. I think what's happening now is we're teaching algorithms with data. So data is actually the software, right? So you get an open source algorithm. I mean Google and everybody else is happy to open source their algorithms. They're all available for free. But what, the asset is now the data, which means how you train your algorithm with your data, and then now, moving towards deploying it on the edge, which is you take an algorithm, you train it, then you deploy it on the edge in an IoT kind of environment, and now you're doing decision-making, whether it's self-driving cars, I mean those are great examples, but I think it's going down into very interesting spaces in enterprise, which is, so we have to all think about software differently because, actually, data is a software. >> That's an interesting take on it, and I love that. I mean I wrote a blog post in 2007 when we first started playing with the, in looking at the network effects on social media and those platforms was, I wrote a post, it was called Data is the New Development Kit. Development kit was what people did back then. They had a development kit and they would download stuff and then code, but the idea was is that data has to be part of the runtime and the compilation of, as software acts, data needs to be resident, not just here's a database, access it, pull it out, use it, present it, where data is much more of a key ingredient into the development. Is that kind of what you're getting at? >> Yes. >> Notion of-- >> And I think we're moving from the age of arithmetic-based machines, which is we put arithmetic onto chips, and we then made general-purpose chips, which were used to solve a huge amount of problems in the world. We're talking about, now, prediction machines on a chip, so you think about algorithms that are trained using data, which are going to be available on chips. And now you can do very interesting algorithmic work right on the edge devices, and so I think a lot of businesses, and I've seen that recently at GameStop, I think business leaders have a hard time understanding the change because we have moved from process-centric, process automation, how can I do it better? How can I be more productive? How can I make better decisions? We have trained our business partners on that kind of thinking, and now we are starting to say, no, no, no, we've got something that's going to help you make those decisions. >> It's interesting, you mentioned GameStop. Obviously, well-known, my sons are all gamers. I used to be a gamer back before I had kids, but then, can't keep up anymore. Got to be on that for so long, but GameStop was a retail giant in gaming. Okay, when they had physical displays, but now, with online, they're under pressure, and I had interviewed, again, at an Amazon event, this Best Buy CIO, and he says, "We don't compete with price anymore. "If they want to buy from Amazon, no problem, "but our store traffic is off the charts. "We personalize 50,000 emails a day." So personalization became their strategy, it was a data strategy. This is a user experience, not a purchase decision. Is this how you guys are thinking about it at GameStop? >> I think retail, if you look at the segment per se, personalization, Amazon obviously led the way, but it's obvious that personalization is key to attract the customer. If I don't know what games you play, or if I don't know what video you watched a little while ago, about which game, then I'm not offering you the product that you are most prone or are looking for or what you want to buy, and I think that's why personalization is key. I think that's-- >> John: And data drives that, and data drives that. >> Data drives that, and for personalization, if you look at retail, there's customer information. You need to know the customer. You need to know, understand the customer preferences, but then there's the product, and you need to marry the two. And that's where personalization comes into play. >> So I'll get your thoughts. You have, obviously, a great perspective on how tech has been built and now working on some real cutting-edge, clear view on what the future looks like. Totally agree with you, by the way, on the data. There's kind of an old guard/new guard, kind of two sides of the street, the winners and the losers, but hey, look, I think the old guard, if they don't innovate and become fresh and new and adopt the modern things that need to attract the new expectations and new experiences from their customers, are going to die. That being said, what is the success formula, because some people might say, hey, I'm data-driven. I'm doing it, look at me, I'm data. Well, not really. Well, how do you tell if someone's really data-driven or data-centric? What's the difference? Is there a tell sign? >> I think when you say the old guard, you're talking about companies that have large assets, that have been very successful in a business model that maybe they even innovated, like GameStop came up with pre-owned games, and for the longest of times, we've made huge amount of revenue and profit from that segment of our business. So yes, that's becoming old now, but I think the most important thing for large enterprises at least, to battle the incumbent, the new upstarts, is to develop strategies which are leveraging the new technologies, but are building on their existing capability, and that's what I drive at GameStop. >> And also the startups too, that they were here in a venture capital firm, we're at Mayfield Fund, doing this program, startups want to come and take a big market down, or come in on a narrow entry and get a position and then eat away at an incumbent. They could do it fast if they're data-centric. >> And I think it's speed is what you're talking about. I think the biggest challenge large companies have is an ability to to play the field at the speed of the new upstarts and the firms that Mayfield and others are investing in. That's the big challenge because you see this, you see an opportunity, but you're, and I saw that at the Washington Post. Everybody went to meetings and said, yes, we need to be digital, but they went-- >> They were talking. >> They went back to their desk and they had to print a paper, and so yes, so we'll be digital tomorrow, and that's very hard because, finally, the paper had to come out. >> Let's take us through the journey. You were the CTO, VP of Technology, Graham Holdings, Washington Post, they sold it to Jeff Bezos, well-documented, historic moment, but what a storied company, Washington Post, local paper, was the movie about it, all the historic things they've done from a reporting and journalism standpoint. We admire that. Then they hit, the media business starts changing, gets bloated, not making any money, online classifieds are dying, search engine marketing is growing, they have to adjust. You were there. What was the big, take us through that journey. >> I think the transformation was occurring really fast. The new opportunities were coming up fast. We were one of the first companies to set up a website, but we were not allowed to use the brand on the website because there was a lot of concern in the newsroom that we are going to use or put the brand on this misunderstood, nearly misunderstood opportunity. So I think it started there, and then-- >> John: This is classic old guard mentality. >> Yes, and it continued down because people had seen downturns. It's not like media companies hadn't been through downturns. They had, because the market crashes and we have a recession and there's a downturn, but it always came back because-- >> But this was a wave. I mean the thing is, downturns are economic and there's business that happens there, advertisers, consumption changes. This was a shift in their user base based upon a technology wave, and they didn't see it coming. >> And they hadn't ever experienced it. So they were experiencing it as it was happening, and I think it's very hard to respond to a transformation of that kind in a very old-- >> As a leader, how did you handle that? Give us an example of what you did, how you make your mark, how do you get them to move? What were some of the things that were notable moments? >> I think the main thing that happened there was that we spun out washingtonpost.com. So it became an independent business. It was actually running across the river. It moved out of the corporate offices. It went to a separate place. >> The renegades. >> And they were given-- >> John: Like Steve Jobs and the Macintosh team, they go into separate building. >> And we were given, I was the CTO of the dotcom for some time while we were turning over our CTO there, and we were given a lot of flexibility. We were not held accountable to the same level. We used the, obviously, we used-- >> John: You were running fast and loose. >> And we were, yes, we had a lot of flexibility and we were doing things differently. We were giving away the content in some way. On the online side, there was no pay wall. We started with a pay wall, but advertising kind of was so much more lucrative in the beginning, that the pay wall was shut down, and so I think we experimented a lot, and I think where we missed, and a lot of large companies miss, is that you need to leave your existing business behind and scale your new business, and I think that's very hard to do, which is, okay, we're going to, it's happening at GameStop. We're no longer completely have a control of the market where we are the primary source of where, you talk about your kids, where they go to get their games. They can get the games online and I think-- >> It's interesting, people are afraid to let go because they're so used to operating their business, and now it has to pivot to a new operating model and grow. Two different dynamics, growth, operation, operating and growing. Not all managers have that growth mindset. >> And I think there's also an experience thing. So most people who are in these businesses, who've been running these businesses very successfully, have not been watching what's happening in technology. And so the technology team comes out and says, look, let me show you what we can do. I think there has to be this open and very, very candid discussion around how we are going to transform-- >> How would you talk about your peer, developed peers out there, your peers and other CIOs, and even CISOs on the security side, have been dealing with the same suppliers over, and in fact, on the security side, the supplier base is getting larger. There's more tools coming out. I mean who wants another tool? So platform, tool, these are big decisions being made around companies, that if you want to be data-centric, you want to be a data-centric model, you got to understand platforms, not just buying tools. If you buy a hammer, they will look like a nail, and you have so many hammers, what version, so platform discussions come in. What's your thoughts on this? Because this is a cutting-edge topic we've been talking about with a lot of senior engineering leaders around Platform 2.0 coming, not like a classic platform to... >> Right, I think that each organization has to leverage or build their, our stack on top of commodity platforms. You talked about AWS or Azure or whatever cloud you use, and you take all their platform capability and services that they offer, but then on top of that, you structure your own platform with your vertical capabilities, which become your differentiators, which is what you take to market. You enable those for all your product lines, so that now you are building capability, which is a layer on top of, and the commodity platforms will continue to bite into your platform because they will start offering capabilities that earlier, I remember, I started at this company called BrassRing, recruitment automation. One of the first software-as-a-service companies, and I, we bought a little company, and the CTO there had built a web server. It was called, it was his name, it was called Barrett's Engine. (chuckles) And so-- >> Probably Apache with something built around it. >> So, in those days, we used to build our own web servers. But now today, you can't even find an engineer who will build a web server. >> I mean the web stack and these notions of just simple Web 1.0 building blocks of change. We've been calling it Cloud 2.0, and I want to get your thoughts on this because one of the things I've been riffing on lately is this, I remember Marc Andreessen wrote the famous article in Wall Street Journal, Software is Eating the World, which I agree with in general, no debate there, but also the 10x Engineer, you go into any forum online, talking about 10x Engineers, you get five different opinions, meaning, a 10x Engineer's an engineer who can do 10 times more work than an old school, old classical engineer. I bring this up because the notion of full stack developer used to be a real premium, but what you're talking about here with cloud is a horizontally scalable commodity layer with differentiation at the application level. That's not full stack, that's half stack. So you think the world's kind of changing. If you're going to be data-centric, the control plane is data. The software that's domain-specific is on top. That's what you're essentially letting out. >> That's what I'm talking about, but I think that also, what I'm beginning to find, and we've been working on a couple of projects, is you put the data scientists in the same room with engineers who write code, write software, and it's fascinating to see them communicate and collaborate. They do not talk the same language at all. >> John: What's it like? Give us a mental picture. >> So a data scientist-- >> Are they throwing rocks at each other? >> Well, nearly, because the data scientists come from the math side of the house. They're very math-oriented, they're very algorithm-oriented. Mathematical algorithms, whereas software engineers are much more logic-oriented, and they're thinking about scalability and a whole lot of other things, and if you think about, a data scientist develops an algorithm, it rarely scales. You have to actually then hand it to an engineer to rewrite it in a scalable form. >> I want to ask you a question on that. This is why I got you and you're an awesome guest. Thanks for your insights here, and we'll take a detour into machine learning. Machine learning really is what AI is about. AI is really nothing more than just, I love AI, it gets people excited about computer science, which is great. I mean my kids talk about AI, they don't talk about IoT, which is good that AI does that, but it's really machine learning. So there's two schools of thought on machine. I call it the Berkeley school on one end, not Berkeley per se but Berkeley talks about math, machine learning, math, math, math, and then you have other schools of thought that are on cognition, that machine learning should be more cognitive, less math-driven, spectrum of full math, full cognition, and everything in between. What's your thoughts on the relationship between math and cognition? >> Yeah, so it's interesting. You get gray hair and you kind of move up the stack, and I'm much more business-focused. These are tools. You can get passionate about either school of thought, but I think that what that does is you lose sight of what the business needs, and I think it's most important to start with what are we here trying to do, and what is the best tool? What is the approach that we should utilize to meet that need? Like the other day, we were looking at product data from GameStop, and we know that the quality of data should be better, but we found a simple algorithm that we could utilize to create product affinity. Now whether it's cognition or math, it doesn't matter. >> John: The outcome's the outcome. >> The outcome is the outcome, and so-- >> They're not mutually exclusive, and that's a good conversation debate but it really gets to your point of does it really matter as long as it's accurate and the data drives that, and this is where I think data is interesting. If you look at folks who are thinking about data, back to the cloud as an example, it's only good as what you can get access to, and cybersecurity, the transparency issue around sharing data becomes a big thing. Having access to the data's super important. How do you view that for, as CIOs, and start to think about they're re-architecting their organizations for these digital transformations. Is there a school of thought there? >> Yes, so I think data is now getting consolidated. For the longest time, we were building data warehouses, departmental data warehouses. You can go do your own analytics and just take your data and add whatever else you want to do, and so the part of data that's interesting to you becomes much more clean, much more reliable, but the rest, you don't care much about. I think given the new technologies that are available and the opportunity of the data, data is coming back together, and it's being put into a single place. >> (mumbles) Well, that's certainly a honeypot for a hacker, but we'll get that in a second. If you and I were doing a startup, we say, hey, let's, we've got a great idea, we're going to build something. How would we want to think about the data in terms of having data be a competitive advantage, being native into the architecture of the system. I'll say we use cloud unless we need some scale on premise for privacy reasons or whatever, but we would, how would we go to market, and we have an app, as apps defined, great use case, but I want to have extensibility around the data, I don't want to foreclose any future options, How should I think about my, how should we think about our data strategy? >> Yes, so there was a very interesting conversation I had just a month ago with a friend of mine who's working at a startup in New York, and they're going to build a solution, take it to market, and he said, "I want to try it only in a small market "and learn from it," and he's going very old school, focus groups, analytics, analysis, and I sat down, we sat at Grand Central Station, and we talked about how, today, he should be thinking about capturing the data and letting the data tell him what's working and what's not working, instead of trying to find focus groups and find very small data points to make big decisions. He should actually utilize the target, the POC market, to capture data and get ready for scale because if you want to go national after having run a test in... >> Des Moines, Iowa. >> Part of New York or wherever, then you need to already have built the data capability to scale that business in today's-- >> John: Is it a SaaS business? >> No, it's a service and-- >> So he can instrument it, just watch the data. >> And yes, but he's not thinking like that because most business people are still thinking the old way, and if you look at Uber and others, they have gone global at such a rapid pace because they're very data-centric, and they scale with data, and they don't scale with just let's go to that market and then let's try-- >> Yeah, ship often, get the data, then think of it as part of the life cycle of development. Don't think it as the old school, craft, launch it, and then see how it goes and watch it fail or succeed, and know six months later what happened, know immediately. >> And if you go data-centric, then you can turn the R&D crank really fast. Learn, test and learn, test and learn, test and learn at a very rapid pace. That changes the game, and I think people are beginning to realize that data needs to be thought about as the application and the service is being developed, because the data will help scale the service really fast. >> Data comes into applications. I love your line of data is the new software. That's better than the new oil, which has been said before, but data comes into the app. You also mentioned that app throws off data. >> Yuvi: Yes. >> We know that humans have personal, data exhaust all the time. Facebook made billions of dollars on our exhaust and our data. The role of data in and out of the application, the I/O of the application, is a new concept, you brought that up. I like that and I see that happening. How should we capture that data? This used to be log files. Now you got observability, all kinds of new words kind of coming into this cloud equation. How should people think about this? >> I think that has to be part of the design of your applications, because data is application, and you need to design the application with data in mind, and that needs to be thought of upfront, and not later. >> Yuvi, what's next for you? We're here in Sand Hill Road, VC firm, they're doing a lot of investments, you've got a great project with GameStop, you're advising startups, what's going on in your world? >> Yes, so I'm totally focused, as you probably are beginning to sense, on the opportunity that data is enabling, especially in the enterprise. I'm very interested in helping business understand how to leverage data, because this is another major shift that's occurring in the marketplace. Opportunities have opened up, prediction is becoming cheap and at scale, and I think any business runs on their capability to predict, what is the shirt I should buy? How many I should buy? What color should I buy? I think data is going to drive that prediction at scale. >> This is a legit way that everyone should pay attention to. All businesses, not just one-- >> All businesses, everything, because prediction is becoming cheap and automated and granular. That means you need to be able to not just, you need to empower your people with low-level prediction that comes out of the machines. >> Data is the new software. Yuvi, thanks so much for great insight. This is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here at Sand Hill Road at the Mayfield Fund, for the People First Network series. Thanks for watching. >> Yuvi: Thank you. 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>> from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering the M Wear Radio twenty nineteen brought to you by the M where >> welcome to Special Cube conversation here in San Francisco for PM wears radio event there. Top engineers air here for once a year Get together and show in the best stuff road map to get to great guests. Here we got Mike Petrillo is the senior director of Blockchain of'em were here where their journey is, where they come from and gone to today where they are up to and for Team A Gluckman Engineering leader Blockchain engine both with GM Where great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate spending the time My favorite topic block Jane our favorite topic to thanks for joining me. So, Mike, let's start with you. Take a street where you guys are now Because we talked about a year ago. Just getting the putting the team together. You were here last year radio kind of getting some core mo mentum. Where have you guys come from? And where are you now? Yeah, >> it's been quite a journey. You know, over the past five years, we've been doing a lot of research that research culminated in an open source project called Project Concorde that we announced last year. Then we wrapped some commercial offerings around it around really the operational side. How do you operate a blockchain at scale in an enterprise setting we introduced? That is Veum wear Blockchain. It's a very descriptive on the naming, and it really focuses on three core things. Enterprise grade, decentralized trust, not distributed trust but really decentralized trust. So being able to deploy it across multiple different cloud environments as well as on prim, it concentrates on robust Day two operations. How do you operate it at scale in an enterprise setting? How do you deal with stuff like GDP are the right to be forgotten? You know, data sovereignty issues, things like that, which is much different than other block Janes. And then the third thing is really being developer friendly. Last year we were fully Ethereum compatible. We had the Ethereum language sitting on top of our block chain. Since then, we've added support for Djamel from digital asset. So another language and we're adding more and more languages so the developers can develop in the framework that they're used to on the best scaleable. You know, Enterprise Supporter >> brings him Dev Ops Mojo Concepts to blockchain. Absolutely, absolutely somewhat. The demo you guys did you get on stage? I want to get too, because it's a really use case. So again, rnd concept jewel years of research started putting together making some progress on developer. So the solutions that you guys presented, we really take us through that. >> So the ocean plastics demo that we talked about a radio basically solves this problem or, you know, just the plastics polluted, polluting our oceans today. So if you look at the numbers are staggering and the BP that you actually a consume, you know, in fish it's pretty scary. The other thing is, you know, it's been predicted that we'll have mohr plastic in our oceans than fish by twenty fifty. And one of the things Dell is trying to do is clean up the environment, and they're building these reusable trays or packaging material for their Dell laptops. And so this use case was providing them that functionality. And if you look at del they you know, they have a massive supply chain. They've got hundreds and thousands of renders that you know, they use despite systems that don't actually talk to each other, they've got complicated work flows. There's also a lot off corruption in their supply chain. And one of the things that can really solve a lot of those problems is bmr blockchain. And they have an instance running on our service, which runs on VM CNW s and I walked through the devil of just going through an aggregator to getting to a manufacturer and then assembling these laptops with the trays and shipping them off to >> think this was something we covered. A del technology world. I just wanna point out for the folks watching Dell's taking recycled material from the ocean, using it as materials into their laptops as a part of sustainability. Great business. You know, Malcolm for del the supply chain pieces. Interesting. So you guys are using blockchain and track the acquisition of the plastic out of the ocean? >> Yes. To manufacturing and to end >> Yes. In tow? Yes. >> Using of'em were blocking. >> Yes. So who coded >> this up? It was actually >> del Del developers coded it up. So they quoted up. They took two weeks to code it. We had absolutely no support issues that came away, which really talks about these. A fuse of our platform. And, you know, just the applications that running. >> How does someone get involved real quick at the plug for they have someone joins the bm where? Blockchain initiative? Yes, Via more block >> change. That's ah, manage service offering from us. So it's a license, you know, product. If they're interested, they can go to the inn where dot com slash blockchain or emails? The blockchain dash info beyond where dotcom get it signed up on the beta. We have an active beta. We have lots of enterprise customers all around the planet using it today. You know, at scale >> is a free servicers are licensed paid license. >> There will >> be a paid license for it. You know, we're invader right now, so it is free, right? >> I get it. But we're gonna get you in the snow. So it is. It is a licence service. Yeah, It's Amanda's >> service offering on. That's you know, the beauty of it is that you don't have to worry about updating it, you know, keeping the nose live anything like that. We don't see the transactional data. We don't manage the nodes or anything like that. But we deploy and keep him updated. Keeping refresh. >> You know, one of the benefits Ray Farrell's on. Just how about the ape revolution? How I change the world with the Internet and the web that blockchain has that same kind of inflection point impact you mentioned GDP are that implies, Reed. You know, changing the the values on the block chain will dwell in the Ganges is immutable. How do you handle that? Because if it's already immutable on encrypted, how does Tootie pr work? >> Yeah, just doesn't take >> care of you. Why wait? If it's encrypted, no one can see it. >> Yeah, well, you know, block chains, not about encrypting the data, right? There are some block change that do encrypted data. People get confused because they associated the cryptography with it, which links the blocks together. But the data in there is still visible. Right? We're working on privacy solutions to make privacy per transaction. We're working on GDP our issues right now, because that is an issue. When you get into a regulated environment, which there isn't really a non regulated environment these days. You have to worry about these things. You know, Blockchain gives you a mutability and that gives you to trust. But really, Blockchain is about trust. It's about this decentralized trust. And when you think about it in that context, you say, Well, if I trust that I want to be able to delete that data and we reach consensus on it and we still maintain the order, right, the proper order of the bits, which is really what Blockchain is doing, is giving you trust on that order. Bits and I agree, is a consensus to delete one of those pieces out of the order bit, and we can still maintain trust of the order bits. And that's fine. Now I can't get into details on this engineering secret sauce. >> I. So one of the things I want to ask >> you guys just engineers, because I think this is one of the things that I see is that Blockchain is attractive. There's a lot of unknowns that coming down the pike, but we do know one thing. It's a distributed, decentralized kind of concept that people like it. I see a new generation of attracted the blockchain new generation of entrepreneurs, a new generation of young people, engineers who see use cases that others from old school industry might not. So you start to see. I won't say it's the hipster or cutting edge. It's just that it's attracting this kind of new generation developer for engineer. >> Why do you >> think that's the case? Why, and and is that right assumption to look at? Because, you know, when asked his blockchain, certainly state of the art. Yeah, it's not as fast as a database of I wanted to do something. Technically, that's like saying the Internet dial up was bad. But what happened after? So you know, a lot of people making these arguments, But I see it definitely resonating with young people. Yes, look at Facebook who tried looking blockchain and moving their entire a broken system. Teo blocked, Jammed. Try to fix that so you can feel these indicators. What's your thoughts? >> I think >> part of it. And I definitely saw this, you know, last Friday and Saturday, I was eighty three up in New York City, right, and it was very much that hipster crowd, and I was really attached to the crypto currency phase. Cryptocurrency allowed individuals to make investments. You know, the kind of millennials to make investments. They didn't have to go to a e trade or they didn't have to go to some broker. It wasn't caught up in anything. They could, you know, make these bets. And now they can build applications that are directly attached to that currency. They can make up their own currency. They can make up their own value system. You know, you've done some of that with a cube, right? We've launched an application that provides value around the content and token eyes. Is that value? And now it can transfer that value So it opens up the transfer of that value, the trust of that value. And I think, you know, we're in a generation of trust and transparency. That's what's powering the world right now is about trust and transparency, and that's what Blockchain gives you, gives you trust in the system that no one person or no one government owns, and >> I really like that. >> But one thing important is I mean, we just have to demystify this like we just have to say, This is not about Cryptocurrency. That's one thing, and what I am is doing is enterprise blockchain and, you know, and Mike, you've talked about this. You always say, you know, black jeans, not going toe, you know, save the world or, you know it's not going to get rid of poverty. But there's four use cases that we've drilled down to in the supply chain realm, and there's the financial services. And so those are some of the things we're tackling, and I think it's important to like talk about that. And, you know, there's these hipsters every time we go and talk anything with regarding the blockchain, we know a big chunk of people, therefore Cryptocurrency and apparently at consensus in New York, they reduce their audience from I can't remember the numbers. When >> I was >> in the two thousand >> last year were about House kicked out all the crypto >> currency people, and so it's important to make that distinction. >> I think the crypto winter probably hurt them more than taking up, because last year there was a lot of hype there, but I think the bubble was already burst around February last year. But this piece of the good point is something that we've been kind of covering on silicon angle. The Cube is there's infrastructure dynamic. The engineering goodness. I think that certainly is intoxicating to think about Blockchain as an impact. Engineering wise, the token conversation brings up utility, the decentralized crypto currency, the icy, his initial coin offerings. The fraud part or regulated part has caused a lot of problems. So to me, well, I tell people was looking the CEO kind of scams and fraud kind of put a shadow on token economics. And Blockchain is a technology so supply chain no doubt is great. Blockchain. That's where you guys are focused. That's what the enterprise want. Way start getting into tokens. Tokens is a form of measurement. Uh huh. And that's where I think the regulators to do your point earlier is it's caused a lot of problems. So you know, the says if you got a utility token and you're selling >> it, it's Zane exchanges, not kill each other. So that's you're >> called. A lot of it would call those app developers. >> Yeah, but the up developers were still out there, right? And what's nice is these app developers that are on the side building these unique little applications. They still end up working for these larger companies and driving interesting solutions through like we're doing with supply chain like we're doing financial services like what we're doing in Telco and Media. You look at the people that we're dealing with in these companies. They came from building those applications. Heck, some of our own product managers came from building unique things mining rigs and mining companies. So you still have that background. They still have that entrepreneurial, you know, asset. And that's what's changing these cos they're driving change these companies saying, Hey, look, we can use the blockchain for this really unique thing that opens up a brand new business line, you know, for this large corporation, >> you know, I showed you our check preview. We did a quick preview of'Em World last year with our block changing me with a cube coin token, kind of total experimental thing. And it was interesting time because I think you hit the nail on the head. We as entrepreneurial developers. I had this great application we want to do for the Cube community, but we were stalled by the you know, the crypto winter, and you know, we're Apple developers, so there's many use cases of such scenarios like that. That's kind of people are kind of halfway between a Z A B. What's your advice toe to us, or folks like us who were out there who want to get the project back on track? What what what should we and application will do? They should they free focus on the infrastructure peace? What's your advice for the marketplace? >> It's so early, it's It's so early to actually really comment on that. I mean, I would say Just keep at it because you never know. It's I feel like we're so early in the game that though we can solve world hunger, there's so many use cases and applications that come out of it and we just have to keep going. And I think the developer community is what's going to make this successful, you know, and even emerging standards. I think that's one thing is standards across, You know, these block chains like we don't have that right now, and that's something we really need to need to do. And >> I don't know we program in Ethereum. >> So the question is, is that a bad choice is a lot of cognitive dissonance around with the right to. >> That's what I was just going to bring up is that >> you know, you brought up the point of your an app developer and you become stalled, you know, in your project. And we see that exactly same thing happening in the enterprise. We go into account after account where they've chosen some block change solution that's out there and to become what I call a stalled pioneer. They've gone through. They develop that application. But they either hit a scale, ability issue and then, you know, throughput or the number of nodes. They hit an operations thing. You know, operations comes in and says, Whoa, how are you going to do an audit on that thing? What about data Sovereign? What about GPR? What about this one? How are we? My God, you're gonna operate it inside of my environment? You know, what's the security side? So it's really round scale ability. It's around operations. It's around security. Those are three things we hit on over and over and over again with the stalled pioneers. So those of the accounts that we go into and rescue them essentially right, we say we can provide you the scale. We can provide you the through, but we can provide you the operations. For twenty years, the Empire has been taking large, complex distributed systems and making you operate them at scale in an enterprise setting. Where the experts at it So we're doing that would block chain now and allowing your blockchain projects to succeed and >> really find that term. Yep. Yeah. Okay, So, radio. What's the feedback here? Obviously got. Got the demo. What's been some of the peer review Give us the the four one one on peer review here. People liking what's going on? >> I think the demo really talk to people. It was relatable. You're a There was a social good a demo. I think it really impacted them. Um, but some of the cool stuff we're doing is also like in the financial services side. You know, we've got Mohr interesting stuff on the supply chain, so the feedbacks been great. Ah, lot of focuses on VM are blockchain, which is also cool. We didn't quite have that last year. In radio, we had everyone running off in different directions. So now it's via more blockchain And what Mike talked about installed pioneers is you know, we were seeing scalability throughput on numbers. And, you know, we talked about it at the immoral Barcelona A numbers. They're looking really great. And, you know, we're we're optimizing pushing our platform so we could get to, you know, perhaps the papal numbers rave, and someday visa, >> you have high availability. You guys know scale. Yeah. You happy where you are right now? >> Very happy where we >> are right >> now. I mean, we've got great customers. Great feedback, you know, great solution that solving real world problems. You know, engineers like doing two things shipping code and solving stuff that's going to help the world. At least you're of'em where that's our culture, right? And And we're able to do that day in and day out and the entire block chains the cornerstone to that. That's what makes people happy. >> Mike Protein, We following your journey. Great. Teo, check in Great to hear the progress. Congratulations on the great demo reel Use cases in supply chain. We'LL be following you guys and keep in touch. Thanks for coming on the key. Absolutely. Thank you for >> the time >> chauffeur here with Lisa Martin here in San Francisco for work. You coverage of radio, the top engineering event where they all come together internally with GM, where one of a few press outlets here, the Cube bringing exclusive coverage. Thanks for watching.

>> Produced from the Cube studios. This's strong by science, in depth conversations about science based training, sports performance and all things health and wellness. Here's your hose, Max Marzo. Thank you for being on two. Very, >> very excited about what we have going on for those of you not familiar with that Ella Keira, and I'm going to say his name incorrectly. Look here. Is that correct? Had >> the care is right. Very good. Yes. Also, >> I've practiced that about nineteen times. Oh, the other night, and I can't feel like I get it wrong and is one of the more well rounded individuals I've come across. His work is awesome. Initially learned quite a bit about him from Chase Phelps, who we had on earlier, and that came through Moore from blood flow restriction training. I've had the pleasure of reading up on quite a bit, and his background is more than unique. Well, around his understatement and really excited have on, I call him one of the most unique individuals people need to know about, especially in the sports science sylph sports science world. He really encompasses quite a bit of just about every domain you could think about. So add Thank you for being on here if you don't mind giving a little bit of background and a bio about yourself. >> Thanks so much. You know, not to. Not to warn anybody, really. But it kind of started as a front line medic in the Army. Really? You know, the emphasis back then was a get people back toe action as soon as possible. So that was my mindset. I spent about eight years in an emergency department learning and training through them. I undergo interviews and exercise physiology from University of California. Davis. I love exercise science. I love exercise physiology. Yeah, started doing athletic training because my junior year in college, I was a Division one wrestler. Tor my a c l p c l N L C E o my strength coach, chiropractor, athletic trainer all the above. Help me get back rustling within four months with a brace at a pretty high level of visual. On level on guy was like, Well, I don't want to go to med school, but what I want to do is help other people recover from injury and get back to the activities that they love. And so I was kind of investigating. Try to figure out what I wanted to do, Really want to be an athletic trainer? We didn't realize how much or how little money they make, um And so I was kind of investigating some other things. Checked out physical therapy, dentistry. But I really wanted to be in the locker room. I wanted to have my own practice. I wanted to be able to do what I wanted to do and not sit on protocols and things like that because I don't think that exists. And so I chose chiropractic school. I went to chiropractic school, learned my manual therapy, my manual techniques, diagnosis, loved it, was able to get patients off the street, didn't have tto live and die by insurance and referrals, was able only to open my own clinic. And and about four years in I realized that I didn't really know very much. I knew howto adjust people, and you had to do a little bit soft tissue. But not really. We weren't taught that I felt like my exercise background and really dropped off because I wasn't doing a lot of strength conditioning anymore. And so I went back and got a phD in sports medicine and athletic training. I had a really big goal of publishing and trying to contribute to the literature, but also understanding the literature and how it applies to the clinical science and clinical practice and try to bridge the gap really, between science and in the clinic and love treating patients. I do it every single day. A lot of people think I don't cause I write so much education, but, like I'm still in my clinic right now, twelve hours a day in the last three days, because it's what I love to dio on DH. Then just for kicks and giggles, I went out and got an MBA, too, so I worked in a lot of different environments. Va Medical System, twenty four hour Fitness Corporate I've consulted for a lot of companies like rock tape. It was their medical director. Fisma no trigger point performance. Have done some research for Sarah Gun kind of been able to do a lot with the phD, which I love, but really, my home base is in the clinic in the trenches, helping people get better. In fact, >> activity. That's awesome. Yeah, Tio coming from athletic training back on athlete. So I myself play I. Smit played small Division three basketball, and I'm a certified athletic trainer as well, and it's the initial love you kind of fall into being in that realm, and that's who you typically work with and then realizing that maybe the hours and the practice that they do isn't fit for you and finding ways you can really get a little more hands on work. I took the sports scientists route. It sounds like you're out has been just about everything and all the above. So it's great to hear that because having that well rounded profile, we weren't athlete. Now you've been in the medical side of the street condition inside even the business development side. You really see all domains from different angles. Now I know you are the educational director for smart tools with their blood flow restriction training chase. How younger? Very highly, uh, about your protocols. I've listened to some of them. If you don't mind diving into a little bit, what exactly is blood flow restriction training and what are the potential benefits of it? >> Yeah, you know it is about two thousand fourteen. I got approached by smart tools. They had developed the only FDA listed or at that point of FDA approved instrument assisted soft tissue mobilization tools other people like to call it, you know, basically grass in or whatever. Andi was really intrigued with what their philosophy wass, which was Hey, we want to make things in the US We want to create jobs in the U. S. And and we want to create the highest quality product that also is affordable for the small clinic. Whereas before the options Ray, you know, three thousand dollars here, two thousand dollars here on DH. So I wrote education for smart tools because of that, and because I just blot. I just believed so much in keeping things here in the U. S. And providing jobs and things locally. Um, so that's really where this all started. And in about two thousand fifteen, my buddy Skylar Richards up FC Dallas he has of the MLS. Yes, the the the lowest lost game days in the MLS. And yeah, I mean, when you think about that and how hard that is such a long season, it's such a grind is the longest season in professional sports. You think? Well, what is he doing there? I mean, I really respect his work up there. And so, like, you know, we were working on a project together and how I was fortunate enough to meet him. And I just really got to pick his brand on a lot of stuff and things I was doing in the clinic. And what could I do? Be doing better. And then one day it just goes, you know, have you seen this be afar stuff? And I'm like, No, I have no idea. It's your idea about it. And so, as usual at the science geek that I am, I went and I went to med sports discus. And I was like, Holy crap, man, I can't even I can't even understand how many articles are out there regarding this already. And this is back to you in two thousand fifteen, two thousand sixteen. I was so used to, you know, going and looking up kinesiology, tape research and being really bad. And you gotta kind of apply. You gotta apply a lot of these products to research. That's really not that strong. This was not the case. And so I brought it to neck the CEO of startles. And like, Dude, we've really got a look at this because really, there's only one option, and I saw the parallels between what was happening with Instrument assisted where there wasn't very many options, but they were very, very expensive and what we could do now with another thing that I thought was amazing. And it wasn't a passive modality because I was super excited about because, you know, I had to become a corrective exercise specialist because I knew I didn't have enough time with people to cause to strengthen hypertrophy. But be afar allows me to do that. And so that's really where I kind of switched. My mind went well, I really need to start investigating this and so to answer your question. VFR is the brief and in tremendous occlusion of arterial and venous blood flow, using a tourniquet while exercising at low intensities or even at rest. And so what that means is we basically use it a medical grade tourniquet and restrict the amount of oxygen or blood flow into a limb while it's exercising and totally including Venus, return back to the heart. And what this does is the way that explains my patients. Is it essentially tricks your brain into thinking you're doing high intensity exercise. But you're not and you're protecting tissue and you don't cause any muscle damage that you normally would with high intensity exercise or even low intensity exercise the failure. And so it works perfectly for those people that we can't compromise tissue like for me in a rehab center. >> Gotcha. Yeah, no, it's It's a super interesting area, and it's something that I have dove into not nearly as much as you have. But you can see the benefits really steaming back from its origins right when it was Katsu train in Japan, made for older adults who couldn't really exercise that needed a fine way to induce hypertrophy now being used to help expedite the healing process being used in season after ah, difficult gamed and prove healing, or whether it's not for whether or not it's used to actually substitute a workout. When travel becomes too demanding, toe actually load the system now with B f ar, Are you getting in regards to hypertrophy similar adaptations? Hypertrophy wise. If you were to do be a far with a low low, say, twenty percent of your one right max, compared to something moderately heavier, >> yeah, or exceeds in the time frame. You know, true hypertrophy takes according to the literature, depending on what reference you're looking at at the minimum, twelve weeks, but more likely sixteen weeks. And you've got to train at least sixty five percent. Or you've got to take low intensity loads to find his twenty to thirty five percent of one read max all the way to failure, which we know causes damage to the tissue be a farce. Starts to show hypertrophy changes that we two. So you know, my my best. My so I this It's kind of embarrassing, but it is what it is. But like, you know, I started learning mother our stuff. I'm a earlier Dr. Right? So I go right away and I go by the first product, I can. I have zero idea what I'm doing there. Zero like and a former Mr America and Mr Olympia Former Mr America champion and the one of the youngest Mr Olympia Tze Hor Olympia Mr Olympia ever compete. He competed and hey didn't stand But anyway so high level bodybuilder Okay, whatever you us. But he was definitely Mr America. He comes into my clinic when I was in Denver, It was probably a neighbour of you at the time, and he and he's like, Okay, I got this pain in my in my tryst up. It's been there for six months. I haven't been able to lift this heavy. My my arm isn't his biggest driving me crazy, right? The bodybuilder, of course, is driving him crazy, so I measure it. He's a half inch difference on his involves side versus on uninvolved side. I diagnosed him with Try some tendinitis at zero idea what I'm doing and be a far. But I said, Listen, I want you to use these cuffs. I got to go to Europe. I gotta go lecture in Europe for a couple weeks and I want you two, three times a week. I want you to do three exercise. I like to use the TRX suspension trainer. I've done a lot of work with them, and I really respect their product and I love it for re up. So I said, Listen, I want you three exercises on the suspension trainer I want to do is try to do a bicep. I want to do some, you know, compound exercise, and in that case I gave, Melo wrote, Come back in two weeks. He comes back in the clinic. I remember her is involved. Side was a quarter of an inch larger than his uninvolved type, and he's like, Do, That's two weeks. I'm like, Dude, that's two weeks And he's like, This is crazy and I go, Yeah, I agree. And since then, I've been, like, bought it like it's for hypertrophy. It is unbelievable. You get people that come in and I've had, you know, like after my injury in college rustling I my a c l I've torn it three times. Now, you know, my quad atrophy was bad. My calf was not the same size, literally. Symmetry occurs so quickly. When you start applying these principles, um, it just blows me away. >> So when you're using it, are using it more and isolated manner or are doing more compound exercises. For example, if you're doing a C l artifically assuming they're back too full function ish, Are you doing bodyweight squads or that starting off with the extensions? How do you kind of progress that up program? >> Yeah, it really just depends on where they're at. Like, you know, day with a C l's. You can pretty much start if there's no contraindications, you convey. Stay docks. Start day one. I'm right after surgery to try to prevent as much of that quad wasting that we get from re perfusion, injury and reactive oxygen species. All the other things that occur to literally day one. You can start and you'LL start isolated. You might start with an isometric. I really do like to do isometrics early on in my in my rehab. Um, and you can use the cops and you can You can fatigue out all the motor units if they're not quite air yet. Like, let's say, pre surgically, where they can't use the lamb, they're in a they're either bedridden or they're in a brace or they're a cast. You can use it with electric stim and or a Russian stem. And with that contraction, not only did you drive growth hormone, but you can also prevent atrophy by up to ninety, ninety five percent so you can start early early on, and I like to call it like phases of injury, right? Like pre surgical or pre injury, right at injury, you kind of get into the sub acute phase of inflammation. You kind of progressed isolated exercises and he goingto isolated in compound and you going to compound in any kind of move through the gamut. What's so cool about the afar is you're not having to reinvent the wheel like you use the same protocols, even use. I mean, really. I mean, if you're using lightweight with sarabande or resistance to being which I do every day, I'd be a far on it. Now, instead of your brain thinking you're not doing anything, your brain's like whoa, high intensity exercise. Let's let's help this tissue recovered because it's got to get injured. So we're gonna grow. >> That's yeah, that's pretty amazing. I've used it myself. I do have my smart tools. I'm biased. I like what you're doing. I really like the fact that there's no cords. It's quite mobile, allows us to do sled pushes, resisted marches, whole wide span and movements on DH before we're kind of hopped on air here. You're talking about some of the nutritional interventions you add to that, whether it be vitamin C college in glucose to mean. What specifically are you putting together on DH? Why're you doing that? Is that for tissue healing? >> Yeah, that's right. It's way. Have ah, in my clinic were Multidisciplinary Clinic in Dallas, Texas, and called the Body Lounge is a shameless plug, but way really believe that healing has to start from the inside, that it has to start with the micro nutrients and then the macro nutrients. And then pretty much everything can be prevented and healed with nutrition and exercise. That's what we truly believe, and that's what we try to help people with. The only thing that I use manual therapy for and I do a lot of needling and all these other things is to help people get it down there. Pain down enough so that they can do more movement. And so, from a micro nutrient standpoint, we've gotta hit the things that are going to help with college and synthesis and protein sentences, So that would be protein supplementation that would be vitamin C. We do lots of hydration because most of us were walking around dehydrated. If you look at some of the studies looking at, you know, even with a normal diet, magnesium is deficient. Vitamin C is deficient during the winter all of us are vitamin D deficient Bluetooth. I own production starts, you know, basically go to kneel. So all those things we we will supplement either through I am injection intramuscular injection or through ivy >> and you guys take coral. Someone's on that, too for some of the good Earth ion for the violent de aspects are taking precursors in a c. Are you guys taking glue to file? >> We inject glorify on either in your inner, either in your i V or in in the I am. You know, with the literature supporting that you only absorb about five to ten percent of whatever aural supplementation you take. We try to we try to push it. I am arrive. And then in between sessions, yes, they would take Coral to try to maintain their levels. We do pre, you know, lab testing, prior lab testing after to make sure we're getting the absorption rate. But a lot of our people we already know they don't absorb B twelve vitamin, and so we've got to do it. Injectable. >> Yeah, Chef makes sense with the B f r itself. And when I get a couple of questions knocked out for I go too far off topic. I'm curious about some of these cellars swelling protocols and what that specifically is what's happening physiologically and how you implement that. >> Yeah, so South Swell Protocol, where we like to call a five by five protocol way. Use the tourniquet. It's in the upper extremity at fifty percent limb occlusion pressure at eighty percent limb occlusion pressure in the lower extremity. You keep him on for five minutes, and then you rest for three minutes, meaning I deflate the cuffs. But don't take them off, and then I re inflate it same pressure for five minutes and then deflate for three minutes. You're five on three off for five rounds, justified by five protocol. What's happening is that you're basically you're creating this swelling effect because, remember, there's no Venus return, so nothing is. But you're getting a small trickle in of fluid or blood into that limb. And so what happens is the extra Seiler's extra Styler swelling occurs. Our body is just dying for Homo stasis. The pressures increase, and there's also an osmotic uh, change, and the fluid gets pushed extra. Sara Lee into the muscle cell body starts to think that you're going to break those muscle cells. I think of it as like a gay. A za water balloon is a great analogy that I've heard. So the water balloon is starting to swell that muscle cell starts to swell. Your body thinks your brain thinks that those cells need to protect themselves or otherwise. They're going to break and cause a popped oh sis or die. And so the response is this whole cascade of the Mt. Horsey one, which is basically a pathway for protein synthesis. And that's why they think that you can maintain muscle size in in inactive muscle through the South Swell Protocol and then when we do this, also protocol. I also like to add either isometrics if I can or if they're in a cast at electric stim. I like to use the power dot that's my favorite or a Russian stim unit, and then you consent. Make the setting so that you're getting muscular. Contraction with that appears to drive growth forma, and it drives it about one and a half times high intensity exercise and up to three times more so than baseline. When we have a growth hormone spurt like that and we have enough vitamin C. It allows for college and synthesis. I like to call that a pool of healing. So whether you can or cannot exercise that limb that's injured if I can create that pool of healing systemically now I've got an environment that can heal. So I have zero excuse as a provider not to get people doing something to become, you know, healing faster, basically. And are you >> typically putting that at the end? If they were training? Or is that typically beginning? We're in this session I put in assuming that that is done in conjunction with other movements. Exercises? >> Yeah, so, like, let's say I have a cast on your right leg. You've got a fracture. I failed to mention also that it appears that the Afar also helps with bone healing. There's been a couple studies, Um, so if we could get this increased bone healing and I can't use that limb that I'm going to use the other lambs and I'm going to use your cardiovascular function, um, I'm going to use you know, you Let's say with that leg, I'LL do upper body or a commoner with cuffs on in order to train their cardiovascular systems that way. Maintain aerobic capacity while they're feeling for that leg, I will do crossover exercises, so I'll hit that opposite leg because something happens when I use the cuffs on my left leg. I get a neurological response on my right leg, and I and I maintain strength and I reduced the amount of atrophy that occurs. And it's, you know, it's all in neurological. So if I had an hour with somebody and I was trying to do the cell school protocol, I would probably do it first to make sure because it's a forty minute protocol. It is a long protocol. If you add up five, five minutes on three minutes off now, during the three minutes off, I could be soft tissue work. I can do other things toe help that person. Or I could just have an athletic tournament training room on a table, and they can learn to inflate and deflate on their own. It doesn't like it's not has to be supervised the whole time, and that's usually what they do in my office is I'LL put him in the I V Lounge and i'Ll just teach them how to inflate deflate and they just keep time. Uh and there, go ahead. I mean, interrupt my bowl. No, no, no, it's okay. And then I just hit other areas. So if I do have extra time, then I might Do you know another body pushing upper body pole? I might do, you know, whatever I can with whatever time I have. If you don't have that much time, then you do the best you can with the cells for protocol. And who study just came out that if you only do two rounds of that, you don't get the protein synthesis measured through M. Dorsey long. So a lot of times, people ask me what can I just do this twice and according to the literature looks like No, it's like you have to take it two five because you've got to get enough swelling to make it to make the brain think that you're gonna explode >> those muscle cells. >> Well, let me take a step back and trap process majority of that. So essentially, what you do with the seller swelling protocol is that you initiate initiating protein synthesis by basically tripping the body that those cells themselves are going to break down. And then when you add the message of the electrical muscular stimulation, you're getting the growth hormone response, the otherwise wouldn't. Is >> that correct? That's correct. So and go ahead. So imagine after a game, I just you know, I'm Skyler Richards. I just got done with my team. Were on the bus or on the airport, our airplane. My guys have just finished a match. You know, you're Fords have run seven miles at high intensity sprint. You think we have any muscle breakdown? Probably have a little bit of damage. They gotta play again in a few days, and I want to do things to help the recovery. Now I put them on with East M. They're not doing any exercise. There's just chilling there, just hanging out. But we're getting protein synthesis. We're getting growth hormone production. I give him some vitamin C supplementation. I give him some protein supplementation, and now not only do we have protein census, but we also have growth hormone in college, in formation in the presence of vitamin C. So that's where we kind of get into the recovery, which chase is doing a >> lot of work with and how much vitamin C are supplemented with, >> you know, really depends. I try to stick to ride around in a new patient. I won't go start off three thousand and I'LL go to five thousand milligrams. It will cause a little dirty pants if I can quote some of my mentors so I try to start them light and I'll move them up I'LL go with eyes ten thousand if I need it but typically stay in the three to five thousand range >> And are you having collagen with that as well? >> I personally don't but I think it would be a good idea if he did >> with some of that. I guess I really like the idea of using the B f R a zit on the opposite lake that's injured to increase cortical drive. So we're listeners who aren't familiar when you're training one limb yet a neurological phenomenon that occurs to increase performance in the other limb. And so what ends referred to if you had one lamb that was immobilizing couldn't function. If you use BF are on the other limb, you're able to stimulate, so it's higher type to voter units able have a cortical drive that near maximal intent, which is going to help, then increase the performance of the other leg that you also say that is promoting this positive adaptation environment is kind of hormonal. Malu I per se How long does that last for the presence of growth hormone? >> It looks like that the stimulation last somewhere between forty eight and seventy two hours. And so I think that that's why when they've done studies looking at doing the afar for strength of hypertrophy, you know, five days a week, compared to two to three days a week for two to three days a week, or just essentially equal to the five days a week. So I think it is long enough that if you do it like twice a week that you're going to get enough cross over >> cash it and you're using it two for the anthologies of effect. So what do you using Be fr yu have that temporary time period of time window where a need that might be bothering your doesn't irritate as much. And are you using that window than to train other exercise and movements while they have, ah, pain for emotion. >> Yeah, absolutely. So it's and I really can't explain it. It's, um we know from the science that it doesn't matter what type of exercise that we do. There is an animal Jesus effect. And that's why I emphasized so much with provider, especially manual therapists attend to think, Hey, you know, my my hands or my needles or my laser or my ultrasound or East them or whatever it is, is the healing driver. It's not the healing driver exercises a healing driver, and I know that's my opinion and people argue with me. But it's true. My hands are not nearly as important as getting people moving because of the energies that perfect and just overall health effects. With that said, the Afar has some sort of Anil Jesus effect that I can't explain now. Of course, we all know it's in the brain. There's something that goes on where you're able to reduce the pain level for up to forty five minutes and then I can train in that window. There is an overall ability to improve people's movement even longer than that, to what I find is that once I get people moving their tenancy just like inertia. Once you get to move in, it keeps moving. Same thing with people that I work with. They tend to get moving more in my clinic. They get confidence, then they end up moving more and more and more. And they get away from, um, being >> scared. Yeah, I know that. That's a great way to put it, because you do have that hesitation to move. And when you providing a stimulus that might ease some of the pain momentarily. I know there is some research out there. Look at Tanaka Thie, the ten apathy being like knee pain, essentially the layman's term kind way to put it. And they're doing it with, like the Metrodome in the background going Ping Ping ping. They're having that external stimulus that they focus on to help disassociate the brain and the knee and the pain. And this is something I can't top what chase and how he says. Yeah, we've been using, like you alluded to Thebe fr, too. Remove the presence of pain so they can do something. These exercises that they typically associate with pain in a pain for your way. >> Yeah, And then now that they're exercising now you get the additional Anil Jesus effect of the exercise itself. Says I'm like a double like a double lang >> Gotcha. Yeah, with blood flow restriction train because it does promote such an environment that really has an intense Jane court stimulus to the body where you get this type to five or stimulated high levels of lactate high levels of metabolite accumulation. I said she had paper about the possible use of bloodflow restriction trading cognitive performance has curious if you had a chance account dive into some of that. I love to hear some of your thoughts being that you have such asshole listed view of everything. >> Yeah, definitely. I think I didn't get a chance to look at it. I appreciate you sending that to me because I have to lecture and may on reaction times, and I was trying to figure out how I'm gonna like include the afar in this lecture at some point, not be totally, you know, inauthentic. But now I can. So I totally appreciate it. I know that there is, and I know that there's an additional benefit. I've seen it. I've worked with stroke patients, other types of people that I have auto, immune, disease, different types of conditions where I've used the Afar and their functional capacity improves over what their physical capacity is doing on. And so I am not surprised at what I'm seeing with that. And I've got to learn more about what other people are thinking. It was interesting what you sent me regarding the insulin growth factor one. We know that that's driven up much higher with the Afar compared to low intensity exercise and the relationship between that and cognitive function. So I've gotta dive deeper into it. I'm not definitely not a neuroscientists, You know, I'm like a pretty much floor if I p e teacher and, you know, just trying to get people moving. And I've gotta understand them more because there is a large association between that exercise component and future >> health, not just of muscles but also a brain. Yeah, >> one of things that I do work with a neurosurgeon and he's awesome. Dr. Chat Press Mac is extremely intelligent, and he saw the blood flow restriction trade as one those means to improve cognitive performance, and I didn't find the paper after he had talked about it. Well, the things that interested me was the fact that is this huge dresser, especially in a very controlled where typically, if you're going to get that level of demand on the body, you knew something very intense. So do something that is almost no stress, Feli controlled and then allowing yourself to maybe do some sort of dual processing tasks with its reaction time and reading for use in a diner vision board. Whether if you have a laser on your head, you have to walk in a straight line while keeping that laser dot on a specific screen. I'm excited to see how be afar material or just something other domains. Whether it is, you know, motor learning or reeducation ofthe movement or vestibular therapy. I think this has a very unique place to really stress the body physiologically without meeting to do something that requires lots of equipment for having someone run up and down with a heavy sled. I'd be curious to hear some of your thoughts. I know you haven't had a huge opportunity dive into, but if I had a hand, you the the key to say Hey What do you see in the future for be fr in regards to not just the cognitive standpoint but ways you can use B a far outside of a physical training area. What kinds? Specific domains. You see it being utilised in >> we'LL definitely recovery. I love the fact of, you know, driving growth hormone and supplement incorrectly and letting people heal faster naturally. Ah, I think the ischemic preconditioning protocol is very underutilized and very not known very well, and he's skimming. Preconditioning is when we use one hundred percent occlusion either of the upper extremity or the lower extremity. We keep it on for five minutes and we do two rounds with a three minute rest in between. And I have used this to decrease pain and an athlete prior to going out and playing like a like a high level sport or doing plyometrics. We're doing other things where they're going to get muscle damage to that eye intensity exercise so you get the Anil Jesus effect around an injured tissue. But they really unique thing about the ischemic preconditioning is that it has been shown to reduce the amount of muscle damage that occurs due to the exercise. That's why they call it Preconditioning so we can utilize a prior to a game. We can use a prior to a plyometrics session. We can use it prior to a high intensity lifting session and reduce the amount of damage that occurs to the tissue. So we don't have such a long recovery time when we could continue to train at high levels. I think that that is probably the most exciting thing that I've seen. Absent of cognitive possibilities, I think it wise it on is I'd like to use with the lights. What do some lights? Teo, do some reaction time and do some, you know, memory training and things. And I love to torture my people and get them nice and tired. I think what's going to come around is all these mechanisms. They are what they are. But the true mechanism that I'm seeing is that fatigue is the primary factor. If I can fatigue you centrally and Aiken fatigue, you peripherally and the muscle that's for the adaptation occurs So although right now you know we always are on these. We have to use the specific sets and rats and weights and all these other things so true for the research, because we need to make it is homogenous as we can, but in clinic, if you're a patient, comes to me with a rotator cuff tear. I don't know what you're on, right, Max is for your external rotation. I've gotta guess. And so if I don't do exactly the right amount of weight, doesn't mean I'm not getting the benefit. Well, I'm telling you, anecdotally, that's not true. I just know that I have to take you to fatigue. And so if I'm off by a couple of wraps a big deal, I'm just not going to take you to failure. So I don't get the injury to the tissue that you normally would occur with lightweight to failure. I'm gonna get that fatigue factor. I'm going to get you to adapt, and I'm gonna get you bigger and stronger today than you were yesterday. That's the >> goal. Yeah, that's ah, that's a great way to put it because you're looking at again, you know, mechanisms in why things are occurring versus, you know, being stuck to literature. I have to use twenty percent. How do we find a way to fatigue this system and be fr being a component of that now, outside of blood flow research in train with your practice, it sounds It is quite holistic. Are there any specific areas that you see the other? That was other therapists other, You know, holistic environments could learn from outside of blood flow restriction training. What areas could they really? You know what advice such a safer that I would you give someone who's tried together holistic program to dive into outside of Sebi Afar? Is there any specific devices specific modalities supposed to specific means for a nutrition for that? >> I mean, if I was to try to put us you know what we're trying to dio. I would say that it's all about capacity versus demand. I want to try to maximize the capacity of the individual or the organism to exceed the demands that you're trying to apply to it. If we can do that, will keep you injury free will keep forming. If I allow those demands to exceed your capacity, you're going to get injured. So what can I do to maximize your capacity through nutrition, through exercise, through rest, through meditation, through prayer, through whatever that is through sleep? I think that that's really looking at the person as a whole. And if I can keep thinking about what are the demands that I'm applying? Teo, whatever tissue that is, and I can keep those demands just slightly below and try to increase the capacity, I'm going to get people better. And really, that's all I think about. Can that disk take how much pressure cannot take and what direction can I take it? Well, I'm gonna work at that direction and so we can do a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more, and I try to really make it simple for myself versus Reliant on a modality or anything else in that matter. Really, it's It's really just thinking about how much How much can they How much can they tolerate? And I'm goingto put restrictions on you so that you don't exceed that capacities That way that tissue can heal. And if it can't and you know, maybe that's referral to you know, some of the surgeons are non surgical positions that I work with is they may be fail my treatment. Most people can improve their capacity. We've seen eighty five year olds, Not just me, I'm saying in the literature. Improve their strength through resistance training. Eighty five. The body will always adapt. Ware not weak beings were not fragile, Weaken De stressed and we need to be stressed and we need to be stressed until the day that you put me in the grave. Otherwise we will get Sir Compagnia and we will degrade and our brain will become mush. And I just want to go that way. And I want help as many people that have the same philosophy, whether I'm doing it, one on one with somebody from teaching others. I want them now The same philosophy, Tio >> well, that makes total sense. I love the idea of we need to continually stress ourselves because do you feel like as we age, we have a Smith or belief that we can't do more, but we can't do more because we stopped doing more? Not because we can't. I work with an individual who are hey, hip replacement. Ninety six years old. He came back and four months later was working out again. And that alone was enough evidence for me to realize that it's not necessarily about, Oh, as I get older, I have to be this and we kind of have that thought process. As we age, we do less so we start to do left but find ways to stress the system in a way that can handle it right to the idea. What is the capacity, like you said? And what is their ability to adapt? Are there any specific ways that you assess an individual's capacity to handle load? Is that a lot of subject of understanding who they are? Further any other metrics you using whether we sleep tracking H R V for anything in that domain? >> I have not really done a lot of a lot of that. It's more about, you know what they tell me they want to do. You know you want to come in and you want a lift. Your grandkid. Well, that's That's our That's our marker. You want to come in and you want to do the cross that open. Okay, well, that's your marker. You want to come in, you want to run a marathon. That's your marker. You know, we could always find markers either of activities of daily living or they could be something out there. That's that's that. That's a goal. You know, Never don't half marathon, and I want to do that. So those were really the markers that I use haven't gotten into a lot of the other things. My environment, you >> know? I mean, I would love to have ah, >> whole performance center and a research lab and all that stuff and then, you know, maybe someday that with what I have and what I work with, it's it's more about just what the person wants to do and what is something fun for them to do to keep them active and healthy and from, and that really becomes the marker. And if it's not enough, you know, somebody had a e r physician committee as well. You know, I walk, you know, twenty or thirty minutes and then I walked, you know, at work all day. And I'm like Did It's not enough. And I sent him some articles that looking at physiological adaptation to walking and he's like, Yeah, you're right, it's not enough that I'm like, you know, we're a minimalist. Were like Okay, well, this is the vitamin C you need in order to be healthy, not the recommendations are so you don't get scurvy. A lot is a big difference between, you know, fending off disease versus optimal health. I'm out for optimal health, So let's stress the system to the point where we're not injuring ourselves. But we are pushing ourselves because I think there's such a huge physiological and but also psychological benefit to that. >> Yeah, this that's a great way to put it riff. Ending off disease, right? We're not. Our health care system is not very proactive. You have to have something go wrong for your insurance to take care of it. It's very backwards. That's unfortunate. Then we would like to be like. It's a place where let's not look at micro nutrients and you what were putting in her body as a means to what he says you avoided and scurry. Well, let's look at it from way to actually function and function relative to our own capacity in our own goals. Um, with that, are you doing blood work? I'm assuming of some sort. Maybe. >> Yeah, we do. Labs. Teo, look, att. A variety of different things. We don't currently do Hormonal therapy. We've got some partners in town that do that. We decided we wanted to stay in our lane and, you know, really kind of stick to what we do. And so we refer out any hormonal deficiencies. Whether you need some testosterone growth hormone is from other things. Estrogen, progesterone, whatever s. So we're not doing that currently, and we don't see ourselves doing that because we have some great partners that you a much better job than we would ever do. So I'm also a big believer in stay in your lane, refer out, make friends do whatever is best for the patient of the client. Um, because there's that pays way more dividends them than trying to dio everything you know all announce. Unless you have it already in the house that has a specialty. Yeah. No, that >> makes sense to find a way to facilitate and where you can excel. Um >> and I >> know you got a lot of the time crunch here. We have the wrap it up here for people listening. Where can we find more out about yourself? Where can we listen to you? What social media's are you on and one of those handles >> So instagram I'm under just my name Ed. Look, terra e d l e c a r a Facebook. Same thing. Just Ed. Look era Twitter and la Cara. Everything's just under Everclear. Really? Every Tuesday I do would be a far I call it BF our Tuesday I do kind of a lunch and learn fifteen twenty minutes on either a research article or protocol. If I got a question that was asked of me, I'll answer it on DH. That's an ongoing webinar. Every Tuesday I teach live be If our course is pretty much all over the world, you can go to my website at like keira dot com or d m e on any of the social media handles, and I'LL be happy to respond. Or you could just call my client body Launch Park City's dot com and give me a call >> and you're doing educational stuff that's on the B Afar Tuesday and your webinars well are those sign up websites for those, And if so, is it under your website and look era dot com? >> Uh, that's a great point. I really should have it home there. It's if you go on my social media you you'LL see it was all announced that I'm doing No, you know, whatever topic is I try to be on organized on it. I will put a link on my website. My website's getting redone right now, and so I put a link on there for be If our Tuesday under I have >> a whole >> be fr. It's called B F, our master class. It's my online BF our course on underneath there I'LL put a link. Tio might be a far Tuesdays >> gadget. Is there anything you wanna selfishly promote? Cause guys, that is an amazing resource. Everything he's talking about it it's pretty much goal anyway, You can hear more about where you work out any projects, anything that you'd be wanting others to get into or listen to that you're working on that you see, working on the future or anything you just want to share. >> I'm always looking at, you know, teaching you no more courses like love teaching. I love, you know, doing live courses. Esso I currently teach to be if our course I teach the instrument assist. Of course. Programming. I teach a, uh, a cupping movement assessment and Fossen course. So any of those things you can see on my website where I'm gonna be next? We're doing some cool research on recovery with a pretty well known pretty, well known uh, brand which I hope we'll be able to announce at some point. It looks like the afar Mike increased oxygenation in muscle tissue even with the cuffs on. So it looks like it looks like from preliminary studies that the body adapts to the hypoxic environment and my increased oxygenation while the cuffs are on. I'll know more about that soon, but that's pretty exciting. I'Ll release that when I when I can you know? Other than that if I can help anybody else or help a friend that's in Dallas that wants to see me while I'm here. I practiced from seven. AM almost till seven. P. M. Every night on. I'm also happy to consult either Via Skype. Er, >> um, by phone. >> Gosh. And you smart tools use a dotcom. Correct for the CFR cuffs. >> Yeah, you can either. Go toe. Yeah, you can go to my side of you connect with me. If you want to get it, I can get you. Uh, we could probably do a promotional discount. And if you want to get some cups but smart tools plus dot com is is the mother ship where we're at a Cleveland our We're promoting both our live courses and are and our material in our cups. >> I can vouch them firsthand. They're awesome. You guys do Amazing work and information you guys put out is really killer. I mean, the amount of stuff I've been able to learn from you guys and what you've been doing has helped me a ton. It's really, really awesome to see you guys promoting the education that way. And thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it. It was a blast talking Teo again. Guys, go follow him on Instagram. He's got some amazing stuff anyway. You can read about him, learn about him and what he's doing. Please do so and thank you. >> Thank you so much. I really appreciate it a lot of spreading the word and talking to like minded individuals and making friends. You know that I have kind of this ongoing theme of, you know, it's all about, You know, there's two things that we can control in our life. It's really what we put in our mouths and how much we move and people like you that air getting the word out. This information is really important that we've got to take control of our health. We're the only ones responsible. So let's do it. And then if there's other people that can help you reach out to them and and get the help you need. >> Well, that's great. All right, guys. Thank you for listening. Really Appreciate it. And thank you once again

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of the third annual NetApp Insight, with customers, partners about 5,000 plus people here Lisa Martin with Stu Minamin and very excited to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time George Kurian the CEO of NetApp. George, thank you so much for stopping by. >> Of course, thank you for having me. >> Really enjoyed your key note this morning, first of all it was standing room only there was about 5,000 plus people here Jean English, your CMO mentioned to us a few hours ago, that this is the biggest collaboration of your partners and customers under one roof, the momentum is palpable the messages are palpable, and I really enjoyed some of the messages that you delivered in your keynote. One, I'd love to get your perspective on the data authority and how NetApp itself has transformed in recent years to become that data authority, what does that mean from your C-level perspective? >> You know, we've always been in the business of helping our customers, help make their businesses better with data. We used to do it strictly in the form of storage systems, but over the last few years we have built a much more robust portfolio of capabilities. Both technological as well as partnerships to enable customers to use our technology wherever their data sits, whether it's in the edge of the enterprise or in heart of the biggest cloud providers in the world, and we believe that the world will be a hybrid, multi-cloud world, because of the need for speed and efficiency in how IT delivers support to digital businesses. And our idea is to help our customers by using our tools to integrate all of their data for business advantage. So, we see ourselves as someone who is really knowledgeable about being, managing customers' data in a hybrid cloud world. That's what we call data authority for the hybrid cloud. >> And you talked about, this morning too, kind of early in your keynote it sounded like you were addressing, NetApp has a massive install base, to helping those customers understand those that weren't born in the digital age they have to be there now to be relevant, to compete, to identify new service models, so I thought that was a very, poignant message. But something, that Stu and I were talking about is the four, kind of, pillars of digital transformation, walk us through, for those that didn't have a chance to see your keynote, walk us through those four pillars, how NetApp is enabling customers to utilize them. >> Absolutely, we talk to our customers about if you're not a born digital business you need to transform yourself especially using your data, to compete with these born digital companies. And, there are four ideas that we shared with customers that are the cornerstones of such a transformation. The first is that, digital transformation requires IT transformation, businesses usual in IT wouldn't cut it for the digital era. The second is an idea that was created by the Boston Consulting Group, which is that, speed is the new scale. It's the hallmark of competitive differentiation and advantage in the digital world. You know, I was talking about the fact that, Fortnite, a game that was created just a year ago has now got 125 million customers or players. That wouldn't happen in the physical world. And the third is, that because of the need for speed you need to be able to take advantage of innovation sources anywhere, which creates the necessity to operate in a hybrid multi-cloud world where IT is enabling the business to access innovation everywhere. And finally, that while you're doing it you need to think about your data. The critical asset that you have, that the born digital companies don't and how to use that and you need to build a data strategy which requires you to move from thinking about data centers to data fabrics, and so those were four key principles that we're sharing with our customers. >> Yeah, George I think that's a great way to measure what's happening with digital transformation. I wonder if you can help us take a lens at NetApp itself, so, when you talk about speed, NetApp has 26 years of experience, you've got over 10,000 employees a company of this size and this heritage you have some strengths but you're competing against some of those cloud native players. You know cloud is the bar which we are all measured someone said in the keynote this morning, I believe it was you, can you speak especially to the speed aspect how you look internally, what has to change culturally, I know Jean talked to us this morning, operationally there were changes made, that's your background. >> Absolutely, you know I think that we are an example of a company that is using data to accelerate our business right, in multiple ways. The first was in product development, we have used a lot of information about how customers use our systems. How, the support organization reacts to customer situations, and have accelerated cycle times for software development, it was 20 months when I joined, it's now six months on our hardware platforms and on the cloud we're releasing new capabilities every two weeks. So, we've really become a cloud native development organization and it required a lot of changes, I will just tell you that, getting the engineers through to the other side of it, has been extraordinary, they love the new world. They would never want to go back to the old world. Another place is around our custom interface where we've invested a lot more in digital marketing capabilities our CMO Jean English, is an expert in that world and so we have had new discussions with cloud only customers entirely electronically, and on the back end in terms of support we have amassed a lot of information about our customers systems, and now we're using artificial intelligence through a capability called active-IQ to tell them proactively what they can do to bench mark themselves against the best. So we say, listen Stu, we think your system which is operating in exactly similar environment to Lisa's system, is not working as well because you've done these five things. And so there's a lot of ways where we are trying to progress our own transformation. I would tell you that the secret, there are two important lessons learned. One was we started with business led initiatives rather than an end to end transformation of the business. And the second is we structured a transformation program led by the chief transformation officer so that it would become the day to day reality of our business, not the after thought of the normal course of business. And so, those are two key practical tips that we would share with our customers about transformation. >> George, NetApp has a strong history with partnerships, when I think about channel lead, NetApp has always been there, from a technology stand point, NetApp has negotiated some challenging waters I think specifically, VMware was a big wave of course acquired by EMC, but NetApp did better in VMware environments than it did in the market as a whole. Today VMware is still a very important piece of the marketplace, but Amazon's another one that is a challenging company to partner with, everybody's always worried, okay how long do you partner with them before they take over. How do you look at that, what are the most important partnerships from a NetApp standpoint, and how do you face those today? >> We've always kept the customer at the center of a partnership. I think that the secret to our success has always been that we keep the customer interests paramount, and it allows us to partner with companies who may be part of some of our competitors. I think today, if I look at it, clearly, in terms of the customer lens we have a lot of work going on with the big cloud providers, both in North America as well as overseas. To help customers architect a truly hybrid multi-cloud, we showed some really exciting work that we've done over the last year to make that a lot more tangible and real, and it's the result of deep engineer to engineer collaboration with them. I think the second area that we're making investments in are really to build the foundation for using data alongside artificial intelligence and machine learning, specifically with training and inference models and there we've been fortunate to be able to collaborate with the leader, NVIDIA, in that market. And it's about focusing on what we bring and keeping the customer at the center of the conversation. In terms of the go to market side of things. We've also done work, for example, with Lenovo, where we are bringing complimentary skill sets into the market, they are bringing computing skills, we're bringing storage and data management skills. They have strength in certain geographies and so we feel like it's a really complimentary relationship and we respect all of our partners, what they bring to the market and we're excited to, and honored to work with them to be honest. >> So, one of the things that I've read recently and it was apparent in a lot of the messaging today is the evolution of the data fabric. It's moved, it's transformed from a vision to a legitimate architecture. Talk to us about some of the evolution in the last twelve months and how your customers have helped be able to really make that real? >> We've learnt a lot, about, real use cases of the data fabric. Today, we have hundreds of customers deployed and in production with it, and we've been fortunate to be able to iterate at cloud speed on the new capabilities, it is real today, we allow you to have data management services integrated across all of your environments, in your data center with the world's best flash we've connected and we're very excited to connect our enterprise Grade 8CI solution to it, and of course a catalog of consistent data services that cross enterprise cloud with our 8CI and the biggest public clouds, we have taken advantage of new container technology and capabilities that Kubernetes and Istio bring to the market to build a really good control plane for all of this, we've innovated around data insights using foundational technology from on command insight that gives you now visibility into where all your data sits. And you'll see us continue to bring out really exciting innovations in the data fabric. The reason that the data fabric is resonating with customers is because it helps you build a consistent set of data services in a hybrid multi-cloud world, and use your data for business advantage. That's why it's resonating. >> George, NetApp has gone through some ups and downs over the 26 years. In many ways, it's been close, or people have said it's on the brink of being gone, and it's remade itself. How has NetApp continued to do this, and why should people believe that NetApp is in the position to execute best for the future? >> I think we've always been resilient at looking at things that could have been threats, and making them opportunities. Throughout the generations there was the transition from the internet computing, the dotcom bust that affected everybody, virtualization was supposed to kill storage, the cloud was supposed to kill storage, and through every one of those transitions we have looked carefully at how could we take what could be a threat and make it an opportunity, and make it an opportunity by serving our customers best through those technology moves, and I think that's the core to our success, I would say that what we have done over the last few years, is massively upped the game on execution. We laid out the data fabric strategy four years ago, as a vision and four years later we've got customers, we've got the biggest cloud providers, we've integrated it with the world's best flash and the world's best HCI and we are delivering road maps. So, I think that's really the promise of the new NetApp, we are really, really, focused on execution. >> Another, thing, sorry Stu, that we've heard along those lines in terms of NetApp's evolution, and continuing to stay relevant, is that the NetApp on NetApp story is one that NetAppians are proud of and should be, but it's also seeming like, is that a differentiator, when you're talking with customers who have so much choice that NetApp on NetApp story, that authentic, this is how we pivoted over the last 26 years to stay relevant, to compete. Tell us little bit about how you're, as the CEO, when you're meeting with customers, how does that story resonate with them? >> Our transformation story is a topic of conversation with all C-level executives. Everything we talked about with our customers today, we are an example of. So, for example, we did not take on an end to end IT re-architecture, we prioritize the digital business initiatives in the company and said, what are the barriers in our own IT that preclude that and so we prioritized IT initiatives to support the digital business transformation of the company. We have created two data hubs in the company as we have progressed those initiatives, one a product data hub through our auto support mechanism, which is now integrated into every technology that we sell to customers, both in the data centers of our customers and the cloud and on the customer facing side we've evolved to a customer hub that so, I think that there are examples that we share both in terms of leadership, people change management, transformation of IT that are extraordinarily relevant and I think that one of the things that we are open about sharing is the mistakes we've made. I think that brings an honesty and a transparency to our relationships with our customers and they trust us because of that. >> Alright, George, it's been really interesting, people have said for years storage is going to be killed off by everything else. If you look at all of the big waves right now data's at the center of all of it. >> George: That's correct. >> What I want you to help us understand is connect the dots for us, because NetApp, most of the customers I talk to here, the first thing they'll think about is, oh, well, NetApp's my storage company. Storage versus the data and how I get value out of that, help us connect the dots as to how I go from being a storage supplier to helping customers become data visionaries, as you say. >> I think one of the really important discussions we have with customers is data is the foundation of a digital business it's sort of the oil of the digital business, and software is the engine. It operates on the data to make the business go better, the challenge that most business leaders have as they think about digitizing their businesses is that they have fragmented their data across systems and silos that were the prevailing norm in IT, not only did it fragment the data, but it made operating IT much more complicated and so two long held paradigms that we have shared are finally coming to reality, NetApp has always been a simplify your data center unlike our competitors and that's coming through for the needs of simplification. And the second is, while you're doing it build a platform that can integrate all of your data, so that you can accelerate your transformation, and I think we're well positioned for that. I think there are customers here who have never met us in the storage systems world, that have joined us on the cloud like WuXi NextCODE, the genomics company that never buys a piece of equipment from NetApp, so we're really excited about an enormous number of those new faces that we're seeing. And then there are customers that started with us, as a storage system supplier, that we are bringing to the cloud. And, so we're going to keep pushing forward. >> Just quick follow up on that, it really opened my eyes, I was at the Cisco show earlier this year and when you talk about the future, Cisco, the networking company, they said, ten years from now you won't think of us as a networking company, you'll think of us just as a software company. What's NetApp of the future? >> We will offer our intellectual property in a broad range of ways, I think we'll still be offering systems but I think the brains of those systems will really be super smart software. Software that's, digitally enhanced and software that's enhanced with machine learning capabilities. I think we'll offer them also as cloud services, and we're really going to be focused on helping our customers with their data problems we think that's an extraordinarily rich landscape and we think that it has the opportunity to propel our business to achieve everything we've wanted to achieve. So, we're excited about the momentum. We are, honored to have so many customers, partners, and technologists here, and I think this is the best insight in the three years that I've been CEO, and I'm looking forward to having an even better one next year. >> Excellent, keep moving up bar, George. Thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE, you're now an alumni so I'm going to give you a sticker so you-- >> Thank you >> Can brand yourself. Stu and I really appreciate you sharing your insights and your time with us. >> Thank you so much, it's been an honor to be here. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, we are live from NetApp Insights 2018 in Las Vegas, I am Lisa Martin for Stu Minium, stick around we'll be back with our next guest shortly. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Dotcom 2017. Brought to you by Splunk. >> And welcome back to the nation's capital. The Cube, continuing our coverage of Dotcom 2017. At Splunk's annual get together and coming to Washington D.C. for the first time. Huge success, 7,000 plus attendees, 65 countries. I forget the millions of miles. Was it three million miles traveling? >> Let's see, was it three million? It was 30 million. >> Maybe 30 million. >> Yeah. It's a big number. >> 30 million miles. Dave Vellante and John Walls here on theCUBE. I'd say off to a roaring start here, to say the least. Josh Rogers joins us, he's the CEO of Syncsort. And Josh, good to have you on theCUBE. Good to you see sir. >> Thanks sir. Thanks for having me. >> Good week for you, big week for you. Couple of announcements that you made here recently. Go ahead and share with us a little bit about those. >> Sure, so we made two announcements yesterday. The first is a new product, it's called Transaction Tracing, it's an add on to our Ironstream product. Ironstream is a solution that delivers mainframe machine data to Splunk Enterprise, and has integration points on the security and on the IT service intelligence components within Splunk. What Transaction Tracing does, the new product introduction, is it adds additional capabilities to understand and trace a transaction that could begin on a mobile device and follow it all the way through the multiple hops it will take to ultimately transact against a mainframe. And when that transaction hits the mainframe, there's several things that you want to understand. One is, you want to understand how is is performing, how is it affecting my mainframe environment. Is it causing problems in other places? And you want to be able to look at that transaction, or that application, as a service. And so you want to be able to track that whole service end to end. And so what we've done with Transaction Tracing is created an ability for Splunk customers to be able to surface all of that data, collate it together, and get a unified view of both how the service is behaving, the performance that characteristics it's delivering to the customers that are utilizing the service, and then the impacts that it's having on the mainframe. All of which are, core components of understanding how you're IT operations are performing. And kind of all about what Splunk is supporting. We're just adding on additional capabilities for Splunk customers. >> So I wonder if I could follow up on Transaction Tracing. So I remember about 20 years ago, David Floyer did a piece of research, when we were working together at a former company, and I was struck at the time by the number of subsequent transactions that had to occur just to get an outcome of a check process. >> Right, right, right. >> I mean it was like some orders of magnitude >> Right. >> greater. Add to that mobile transactions, I can't imagine with all the internet traffic and other activities going on, now add to that big data, and security, and fraud detection, and all the other things that we're doing with the data. The number of ancillary transactions >> Right. >> has got to be enormous. Hence the need presumably for Transaction Tracing. >> Absolutely. >> So maybe talk about the market need, and why Syncsort? You would think doesn't the mainframe have all this stuff integrated into it? Maybe talk about that. >> Yeah sure, so I think one of the things to understand is that the mainframe compute volumes continue to go up. I think people just tend to think about mainframes as a environment that perhaps isn't growing, but in fact, it is growing. And one of the key drivers is this new transaction workload that is driven in part my mobile, and other devices. And so what you have if you're running a mainframe is I'm experiencing increase in my transaction workloads, I need to figure out how to kind of support that. But I also have a lot more characteristics I care about, security, performance, et cetera. And so I need deeper analytics. And of course, they are difficult systems. You need to understand the mainframe, you need to understand how KICKS and DB2 interact and support a transaction. But you also need to understand kind of this next generation analytic environment, how can I leverage that to actually get the insight I want. And that's really what we call, it's an example of, a big iron to big data challenge. And so what Syncsort's been incredibly focused on is helping customers understand the very specific use cases that are included in that big iron to big data space, and providing very differentiated solutions with very deep differentiation to solve those specific use cases. And Transaction Tracing is a good example of that. It sounds fairly narrow, but it's incredibly important if you're a bank and you want to give your customers an ability to kind of check account balances, interact with you in a way that they haven't in the past. >> Well, it's one of those things that we talk about you know depth apps, in depth apps, this is a depth app. >> Right. >> Alright, okay. And then in terms of the Splunk relationship, where does that fit in, and what are the swim lanes between you and Splunk? >> Well we view Splunk as a key platform in the world today for kind of understanding IT operations and security. We view them as incredibly powerful from a platform perspective. And we also view them as a partner that we can add value to. That we can provide access to data that enrich their platform and allows their customers to get more value of it, and that we can do that in a unique way. And so we have a very close relationship with Splunk. And that's not just at a go to market level, it's also at a product management and engineering level. We work very closely to make sure that our products integrate well with Splunk. So we've got deep integration with IT service intelligence, we've got deep integration with enterprise security, and we'll continue to drive deeper integration into the Splunk platform. So when a customer comes across a scenario where they want to ingest mainframe data, they can be assured that they will get no better product on the marketplace than Syncsort Ironstream and associated modules, in terms of both how it will perform on its own, but also how it will integrate with Splunk. >> So that deep integration something that's always interesting to us on theCUBE. Lot of times you see Barney deals. Barney, I love you, you love me, let's do a press release. And so one of the ways in which we measure, or try to measure, the intensity of the integration is the engineering that's involved. So I wonder if you could, sort of double click on that. >> Sure. >> Is it kind of just making sure you're familiar with the APIs? Are you actually doing integration and engineering on both sides? Maybe you could talk about that. >> Well, so I'll talk about our integration with enterprise, security, and IT service intelligence. >> Dave: Great. >> And those are, you can think of those as specific applications to support deep analytics. And these are Splunk offerings. Deep analytics around those two areas of confidence. Such that a user can rapidly build a set of dashboards that would allow them to answer the questions you want to answer if you're focused on IT service intelligence or understanding security. Fundamentally they're data models. They've gone out and mapped what are all the data elements that you need, what's the structure that you need of that data model, to be able to answer the questions that a security minded analyst would want to answer. That allows you to, if you map the data sources into those data models, that would allow you to rapidly build those to that dashboards that support those types of roles on the enterprise. What we've done is taken the very large amount of mainframe machine data that gets produced, generally it's an SMF record, so there's 260 types of SMF records, each one has its subtype. We've mapped it into those two data models that Splunk has created. Nobody else has done that. And what that does is it allows those customers to get a complete end to end view of how can I rapidly enhance my IT service intelligence application, or my enterprise security application with mainframe data. Which just happens to run my most sensitive applications and most voluminous applications, from a transaction perspective in my enterprise. So we thing that deep integration is a really powerful capability, and it's just an example of where we like to go deeper with our partners than what we see other companies doing. >> You know when you talked about the mobile environment a little while ago, and complexities and that, I'm always just kind of curious. With everybody talk about what that does in terms of when you're harvesting data and now you're in a non-stationary environment. And that comes with it a whole different set of characteristics and challenges. I mean, what layer of complexity do you take on when you all of a sudden you can be anywhere and feeding data at any time from any machine. >> Sure, well I mean what it creates is a lot more interaction points. So I probably interact with my bank a lot more today than I did 10 years ago, 'cause I don't have to find an ATM, or go by a branch, >> John: You never walk into a branch. >> And I did this over the weekend. I had to kind of transfer some money, right. So I just transferred it and I was in Colorado hiking, and I transferred funds between accounts. And then later on the golf course I did a wire, literally. >> John: You didn't have to transfer money on the golf course for a reason, did you? >> No, no, no, those were unrelated events. >> Just making sure. >> Lost a few, Josh? >> But that type of interaction. So you get more frequent interaction, which creates an operational challenge. Particularly when you think about the mainframe and how customers pay for that, right. They pay for it based on how much CPU they use on a monthly basis. And so what we want to do is help customers run that system as efficiently as possible. It also creates a massive analytic opportunity, because now I have a lot more data that I can start to analyze to understand trends, because I have more touchpoints. But the trick is I've got to get that data into a repository and into an analytic environment that can handle that data. And that's where I think Splunk creates such an interesting opportunity. And what we're trying to do is just add value to that, make it easy for customers to leverage all of their data. Does that make sense? >> Yeah. >> It does. How 'about the government marketplace? We're here in the District. You guys have an announcement around new partners. >> Yes. >> Maybe talk about the importance of government, and what you do in there. >> Sure, so we signed a distribution relationship with Carahsoft, also a big Splunk partner. And that is going to allow government customers to more easily take advantage of Ironstream and Transaction Tracing in these used cases. The federal government is a enormous market opportunity, it's also a big mainframe environment. There's a lot of government core, government applications, that still run on mainframe environments. In fact, I would tell you most do. IRS, Social Security, CIA, and other agencies. And so we think giving ourselves an easy route to market for these customers is a great opportunity for us, it's also a good opportunity for Splunk's customers who are in the government, 'cause they can go and buy additional capabilities that are relevant to their environment through the same partners that they've been working with Splunk. >> But is there a difference with how you deal with public and private sector then? I mean, governance and compliance, and all those things. I would assume you have different hurdles. >> They're different contract vehicles, which have different kind of requirements in them. And that's one of the values that we get with the Carahsoft relationship, is just giving us access to those various contract vehicles. Yeah. >> Talk to me a little bit about life. I mean, you've always been a private company. But you're you don't have the 90 day shot clock, you have new owners, what's the objective, maybe talk about that sort of the patience of the capital, what your priorities are with regard to these owners. Maybe discuss that a little bit. >> Yeah, sure. So just to give a little background in early July we announced and in mid August we closed a transaction whereby Centerbridge Partners acquired Syncsort and another company, Vision Solutions, from our previous owner, Clearlake Capital. And we combined the companies under the Syncsort umbrella, and myself and our leadership team is going to take the company forward. So the 90 day shot clock, I would say definitely we still care about the 90 day shot clock. We are very focused on growing this business and doing that in a consistent way on a quarterly basis. I guess the difference is I get to talk to my investors every day rather than once a quarter. But they've been great partners. The Centerbridge guys have a lot of resources, they've been incredibly helpful in helping us start to think through kind of the strategies, some of the integration work we're doing with Vision. But we think there's an opportunity to build a big business. We employed a dual strategy of organic growth focused largely in the big iron to big data spaces, as described earlier, combined with MNA. And you know, over the last 24 months we've tripled the size of Syncsort. So it's grown 3X-- >> So you are growing, that was one of my questions, were you growing. >> And in revenue, >> Substantially. >> we've doubled in employees. >> So, say that again. >> We've tripled revenue. >> You've tripled revenue. Double head count. >> And double head count. >> Okay, so you've increased profitability in theory then. >> So, and we will continue to run the same play. We're seeing acceleration in our organic place, but focus on the big iron to big data market. And we also believe there are additional data management capabilities that are relevant to our customers, that we can acquire and help point towards that big iron to big data play. And so we'll continue to look at various spaces that are interesting adjacencies that are relevant to our customers. >> And some of that revenue growth obviously is through acquisition. >> Josh: Right. >> Right, and so when you think about, you know it used to be the classic private equity play was to suck all the money out of the company, leave the carcass for somebody else to deal with. It seems like there's a new thinking. Not seems like, there is a new thinking here. Invest, acquire, increase the value, the money guys are realizing wow this, there's a lot more money to be made. >> Absolutely. I definitely-- >> The technology business. >> We have an eye towards profitable growth. But we are absolutely making investments. And as you get larger scale you can make meaningful investments in these specific areas that can help deliver really great innovation to customers. And Transaction Tracing is an example of that. And certainly I can give you others. But for sure, we are trying to build value. This is not a traditional kind of private equity play. And I also think that private equity is generally understanding there's an opportunity to create value after the catch, if you will, in the tech industry. And I was looking at an analysis last week that financial investors, private equity, for the first time ever will do more deals in technology than strategics, in 2017. And so I think that's a statement that says that there's certainly an opportunity to create long term sustained value in a private equity backed kind of model. And I think to some extent, Syncsort's been pioneering that. With a dual approach on organic growth, and on additional acquisitions. >> Well, and you've seen it, coming out of the down turn, or sort of in the down turn, a lot of these public companies were struggling. >> Right. >> I mean you certainly saw with Dell, BMC, Riverbed, Infor, all examples of private equity where there's investment going on and I think a longer term vision. >> Right. >> With some, as a I call, patient capital. Syncsort is obviously part of that. Syncsort, actually interesting, when it spun out its storage business, you know as a successful company. Catalogic is doing its thing. So Syncsort was able to monetize that. And then really focus on the core knitting. >> Yeah. >> And then figure out where in the big data space that you can make money. Which, not a lot of people were making money in the big data space. So, that's good, congratulations on that. >> I like to tell folks that we've had a really good run, but it's really the first couple of innings. The Centerbridge team is going to be incredibly supportive, and I can't wait to get started on the next leg of the journey. I think there's going to be a lot more innovation to come and I'm looking forward to it. >> Dave: Great. >> So, you're in the middle of the game. We appreciate the time here. Good luck with that, the long term plan down the road. I hope the show's going well for you. >> It's going great. >> And it's good seeing you. >> Great, thanks John. >> Thanks, Josh. >> See you Dave. >> Josh Rogers from Syncsort with us today here. Syncsort, rather, here on theCUBE. Back with more Washington D.C., theCUBE live at Dotcom 2017, right after this. (upbeat music)