(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone, live coverage here. Re:invent 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Two sets here. We got amazing content flowing. A third set upstairs in the executive briefing area. It's kind of a final review, day three. We got a special guest for do a re:Invent review. Muddu Sudhakar CEO founder of Aisera. Former multi-exit entrepreneur. Kind of a CUBE analyst who's always watching the floor, comes in, reports on our behalf. Thank you, you're seasoned veteran. Good to see you. Thanks for coming. >> Thank you John >> We've only got five minutes. Let's get into it. What's your report? What are you seeing here at re:Invent? What's the most important story? What's happening? What should people pay attention to? >> No, a lot of things. First all, thank you for having me John. But, most important thing what Amazon has announced is AIML. How they're doubling down on AIML. Amazon Connect for Wise. Watch out all the contact center vendors. Third, is in the area of workflow, low-code, no-code, workflow automation. I see these three are three big pillars. And, the fourth is ETL and ELTs. They're offering ETL as included as a part of S3 Redshift. I see those four areas are the big buckets. >> Well, it's not no ETL to S3. It's ETL into S3 or migration. >> That's right. >> Then the other one was Zero ETL Promise. >> Muddu: That's right. >> Which there's a skeptical group out there that think that's not possible. I do. I think ultimately that'll happen, but what's your take? >> I think it's going to happen. So, it's going to happen both within that data store as well as outside the data store, data coming in. I think that area, Amazon is going to slowly encroach into the whole thing will be part offered as a part of Redshift and S3. >> Got it. What else are you seeing? Security. >> Amazon Connect Amazon Connect is a big thing. >> John: Why is that so important? It seems like they already have that. >> They have it, but what they're doing now is to automate AI bots. They want to use AI bot to automate both agent assist, AI assist, and also WiseBot automation. So, all the contact center Wise to text they're doubling down. I think it's a good competition to Microsoft with the Nuance acquisition and what Zoom is doing today. So, I think within Microsoft, Zoom, and Amazon, it's a nice competition there. >> Okay, so we had Adam's keynote, a lot of security and data, that was big. Today, we had Swami, all ML, 13 announcements. Adam did telegraph to me that he was going to to share the love. Jassy would've probably taken most of those announcements, we know that. Adam shared the love. So, Adam, props to you for sharing the love with Swami and some of those announcements. We had 13. So, good for him. >> Yes. >> And then, we had Aruba with the partners. What's your take on the partner network? A revamp? >> No, I think Aruba did a very good job in terms of partners. Look at these, one of the best stores that Amazon does. Even the companies like me, I'm a startup company. They know how to include the partners, drive more revenue with partners, sell through it, more expansion. So, Amazon is still one of the best for startup to mid-market companies to go into enterprise. So, I love their partnership angle. >> One of the things I like that she said that resonated with me 'cause, I've been working with those teams, is it's unified, clear roles, but together. But, scaling the support for partners and making money for partners. >> That's right. >> That is a huge deal. Big road ahead. She's focused on it. She says, no problem. We want to scale up the business model of the channel. >> Muddu: That's right. >> The resources, so that the ecosystem can make money and serve customers or serve customers and make money. >> Muddu: That's right. And, I think one thing that they're always good is Marketplace. Now, they're doing is outside of market with ISV, co-sell, selling through. I think Amazon really understood that adding the value so that we make money as a partners and they make money, incrementally. So, I think Aruba is doing a very good job. I really like it. >> Okay, final question. What's going on with Werner? What do you expect to hear tomorrow from a developer front? Not a lot of developer productivity conversations at this re:Invent. Not a lot of people talking about software supply chain although Snyk was on theCUBE earlier. Developer productivity. Werner's going to speak to that tomorrow we think. Or, I don't know. What do you think? >> I think he's going talk something called generative AI. Rumored the people are talking about the code will be returned by the algorithms now. I think if I'm Werner, I'm going to talk about where the technology is going, where the humans will not be writing code. So, I think AI is going to double down with Amazon more on the generative AI. He's going to try a lot about that. >> Generative AI is hot. We could have generative CUBE, no hosts. >> Muddu: Yes, that would be good. >> No code, no host >> Muddu: Have an answer, John Software. (both laugh) >> We're going to automate everything. Muddu, great to hear from you. Thanks for reporting. Anything else on the ecosystem? Any observations on the ecosystem and their opportunity? >> So, coming from my side, if I'd to provide an answer, today we have like close to thousand leads that are good. Most of them are financial, healthcare. Healthcare is still one of the largest ones I saw in this conference. Financials, and then, I'm started seeing a lot more on the manufacturing. So, I think supply chain, they were not so. I think Amazon is doing fantastic job with financial, healthcare, and supply chain. >> Where is their blind spot if you had to point that one? >> I think media and entertainment. Media and entertainment is not that big on Amazon. So, I think we should see a lot more of those. >> Yeah, I think they need to look at that. Any other observations? Hallway conversations that are notable that you would like to share with folks watching? >> I think what needs to happen is with VMware, and Citrix desktop, and Endpoint Management. That's their blind spot. So far, nobody's really talking about the Endpoints. Your workstation, laptop, desktop. Remember, that was big with VMware. Nope, that's not a thought of conversation in email right now. So, I think that area is left behind by Amazon. Somebody needs to go after that white space. >> John: And, the audience here is over 50,000. Big numbers. >> Huge. One of the best shows, right? I mean after Covid. It's by far the best show I've seen in this year. >> All right, if you'd do a sizzle reel, what would it be? >> Sizzle reel. I think it's going to be a lot more on, as I said, generative to AI is the key word to watch. And, more than that, low-code no-code workflow automation. How do you automate the workflows? Which is where ServiceNow is fairly strong. I think you'll see Amazon and ServiceNow playing in the workflow automation. >> Muddu, thank you so much for coming on theCube sharing. That's a wrap up for day three here in theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante for Lisa Martin, Savannah Peterson, all working on Paul Gillan and John Walls and the whole team. Thanks for all your support. Wrapping it up to the end of the day. Pulling the plug. We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music)

>>In late 2009 when the industry was just beginning to offer so-called converged infrastructure, CI Nutanix was skating to the puck, so to speak, meaning unlike conversion infrastructure, which essentially bolted together compute and networking and storage into a single skew that was very hardware centric. Nutanix was focused on creating HCI hyperconverged infrastructure, which was a software led architecture that unified the key elements of data center infrastructure. Now, while both approaches saved time and money, HCI took the concept to new heights of cost savings and simplicity. Hyperconverged infrastructure became a staple of private clouds creating a cloudlike experience. OnPrem. As the public cloud evolved and grew, more and more customers are now taking a cloud first approach to it. So the challenge becomes how do you remodel your IT house so that you can connect your on-prem workloads to the cloud, to both simplify cloud migration, while at the same time creating an identical experience across your estate? >>Hello, and welcome to this special program, Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft Made Possible by By Nutanix and produced by the Cube. I'm Dave Ante, one of your hosts today. Now, in this session, we'll hear how Nutanix is evolving its initial vision of simplifying infrastructure, deployment and management to support modern applications by partnering with Microsoft to enable that consistent experience that we talked about earlier, to extend hybrid cloud to Microsoft Azure and take advantage of cloud native tooling. Now, what's really important to stress here, and you'll hear this in our second segment, substantive engineering work has gone into this partnership. A lot of partnerships are sealed with a press release. We sometimes call it a Barney deal. You know, I love you, you love me. Like Barney, the once popular children's dinosaur character. We dig into the critical engineering aspects that enable that seamless connection between on-prem infrastructure and the public cloud. >>Now, in our first segment, Lisa Martin talks to Alro Salise, who is the vice president of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chica, who is the vice president of business development for the cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Now, after that, Lisa will kick it back to me in our Boston studios to speak with Eric Lockard, who is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure specialized, along with Thomas Cornell, who is the senior vice president of products at Nutanix. And Indu Carey, who's the senior vice president of of engineering for NCI and NNC two at Nutanix. And we'll dig deeper into the announcement and it's salient features. Thanks for being with us. We hope you enjoy the program. Over to Lisa. >>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alva Salise, the Vice President of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chika, VP of Business Development Cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Looking forward, >>Yeah, so let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? >>Oh, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. The the ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at their own pace, and more important to be sure that every one of them, as they transform themselves, have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living. >>Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Ava was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? >>Ah, great question. Thank you. When you think about it, we wanna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and, and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less using Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in the, the business context has changed so much, they have different imperative, different different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help? How can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and our Microsoft ISV partner ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. I, the Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security, and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and this type of announcements will be a big part of what we doing. Ignite, >>Exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Talk to us about that from Nutanix's perspective and also gimme a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. >>Yeah, sure, absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership couple years ago, so we've been working on this solution quite a while, but really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as mentioned, you know, in the current macroeconomic conditions, really our customers really care about, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments in technology skill sets and leverage the most out of that. So the things like, for example, cost to operations and keeping those things consistent, cost on premises and the cloud are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they wanna implement. And of course, going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale and modernizing their apps. >>And of course, as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an on on footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons for business or other technical reasons. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together, I really do see our US together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy but secure and really seamless. And really, I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So Nutanix, of course, is known in the past versus hyperconverge infrastructure and really breaking down those silos between networking, compute, storage, and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products and our, our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure, at Microsoft, they're truly best in class cloud infrastructure with cutting edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right, that's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications and whether they're on or even, and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're to offer customers. >>Let's dig into that uniqueness of our, bringing you back into the conversation. You guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure, in in the cloud. Talk to me about, from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the, the preview was oversubscribed, so the demand from your joint customers is clear. >>Thank you, Lisa. Michael, personally, I'm very proud and at the company we're very proud of the world that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them, opening more opportunities is, is, is extremely inspiring. And of course the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity, and the range of services with the reality of companies that might have hundreds or even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that every one is gonna take can be simplified, you can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tones of value. >>And that's what a customers are asking us today. Either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure, or they're bringing their, you know, a enable ordinate services and cluster and data services on premise to a Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once and done, this is not that we building, we forget it. It's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution sales alliances that go to market seems to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to make, to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. >>Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta, as we mentioned, Alva, the, the preview was oversubscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers in beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry, but what, what were some of the, the key things they came to these two companies looking to, to solve, get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that from a, they're able to do more with less? >>Maybe I could take that one out of our abital lines. It did. It means, but yeah, so like, like we, like you mentioned Lisa, you know, we've had a great preview oversubscribe, we had lots of, of cu not only customers, but also partners battle testing the solution. And you know, we're obviously very pleased now to have GN offered to everyone else, but one of our customers, Camper J was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage Ncq and Azure to, like I mentioned, reduce that work workload, my, my migration and a risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications, maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure. But there's others where we wanna lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCs and Citrix where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix provides that superior customer experience where whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC two on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the, the work that we've done together. >>So this really kind of highlights the power of that Alva, the power of the ISV ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. >>A absolutely, look, I mean, we strongly believe that when you partner properly with an V you get to the, to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you are combining superpowers and you are solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have, and Michael did a great job framing some of them, and the difference that they have now by having NC to on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our partner ecosystem because at the same time, making our partners more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us. >>Abar, can you comment a little bit on the go to market? Like how, how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? >>You know, when you think about the go to market, a lot of that is we have, you know, teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There is marketing and demand generation that will be done, that will be also work on enjoying opportunities that we will manage as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't wanna go into too much detail, but I will like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience, which the, the development teams are done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. >>Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what Albar said, you know, it's not just about the product integration or it's really the full end to end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineering teams, but also how do we go and talk to customers with value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually been worked on how do we have a single joint support for our customers. So it doesn't really matter how the customer engages, they really see this as an end to end single solution across two companies. >>And that's so critical given just the, the natural challenges that that organizations face and the dynamics of the macro economic environment that we're living in. For them, for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction, they want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud. But from an engagement perspective that you're, what sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Avaro is, is goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from, you know, the sales and marketing folks down to engineering, down to support? >>Yeah, I think honestly that was, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a long alignment from day one. Of course, you know, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience, not just within the products, but again, through the entire life cycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's no different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience and that we're also focusing on solving real world customer problems, right? And really focusing on the biggest problems that customers have. So really culturally it felt, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's, you know, two bar organizations working together, but I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on, on solving customer problems together. >>Yeah, >>Let, go ahead. >>No, I would say, well say Michael, the, the one element that we complement, the, I think the answer was super complete, is the, the fact that we work together from the outside in, look at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and inspire, as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls in part on its its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and, you know, doing what we do best, which is combining over superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that, you know, I, I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring he's been. And again, the, the response for the previous is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. >>And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment and I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers in every industry. Last question guys, I wanna get both your perspectives on Michael, we'll start with you and then Lvra will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these, these two superheroes together, Michael? >>Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adopt, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC two and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate, like, you know, we mentioned obviously we have, we announced the ga that's J in Americas, but kind of the next more immediate step over the next few months look for us to continue expanding beyond Americas and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, you know, again, as of our mentioned, it's working from kind of the s backwards. So we're, we're not, no, we're not waiting for ega. We're already working on the next set of solutions saying what are other problems that customer facing, especially across, they're running their workload cross on premises and public cloud, and what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for. >>It sounds really strongly that, that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft, it's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at this center. I think you've both done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Our last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? >>Well, thank you Lisa. Michael, I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know you're generating value, you know, you're making a difference, especially in these complex times when the, the partnership gets tested where the, the right, you know, relationship gets built. We're being there for customers is extremely inspiring. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game, being sure that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge TA task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way with the right quality. Every word, which is a, is never as small fist as you may imagine. You know, the, the world is a big place, but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer driven to keep and, and raise the bar on how, how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep in innovating at their own pace, in their own terms. >>Absolutely that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the announcement Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure of our Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. >>Thank you for having Lisa and thank you AAR for joining >>Me. Thank you Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic. I looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah, stay >>Tuned. Thanks to the audience. Exactly. And stay tuned. There's more to come. We have coming up next, a deeper conversation on the announcement with Dave and product execs from both Microsoft. You won't wanna.

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alva Salise, the Vice President of Global ISV Commercial Solutions at Microsoft. And Michael Luka, VP of Business Development Cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Looking forward, >>Yeah, so a, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? >>Well, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. So the, the ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at the own pace, and more important to ensure that every one of them as they transform themselves, have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living in. >>Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Ava was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? >>Ah, great question. Thank you. When you think about it, we wanna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and, and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less using Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in the, the business context has changed so much. They have different imperative, different different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help, how can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and or Microsoft ISV power ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. The Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and this type of announcements will be a big part of what we doing. Ignite >>Then exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Sure. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Talk to us about that from Nutanix's perspective and also gimme a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. >>Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership couple years ago, so we've been working on this quite a while. But really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as I mentioned, you know, in the current macroeconomic conditions, really our customers really care about growing their top line, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments in technology skill and leverage the most that, So the things like, for example, cost to operations and keeping those things cost on premises and are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they wanna implement. And of course going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale and modernizing in their apps. >>And of course as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons for business or other technic for reasons. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together, I really do see our US together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy but secure and really seamless. And really, I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So Nutanix, of course, is known in the past versus hyperconverge infrastructure and really breaking down those silos between networking, compute, storage, and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products and our, our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure, at Microsoft, they're truly best in class cloud infrastructure with cutting edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right, that's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications and whether they're on pre the cloud or even the edge and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're able to offer our joint customers. >>Let's into that uniqueness of our, bringing you back into the conversation, you guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure, in in the cloud. Talk to me about, from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the, the preview was oversubscribed, so the demand from your joint customers is clear. >>Thank you, Lisa. Michael, personally, I'm very proud and at the company we're very proud of the world that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them, opening more opportunities is, is is extremely inspiring. And of course the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity, and the range of services with the reality of companies that might have hundreds of even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that every one is gonna take can be simplified, you can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tons of value. >>And that's what a customers are asking us today. Either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure, or they're bringing their, you know, a enable services and cluster and data services on premise to the Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once and done, this is not that we building, we forget it, it's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution sales alliances that go to market seems to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to make, to, to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. >>And can you comment a little bit further, maybe both of you, of our, starting with you and then Michael, what are some of those business outcomes that customers are coming to Microsoft and Nutanix saying, help us, we've gotta be more competitive, we've gotta get, we've gotta be able to get solutions to market faster, et cetera. What are those key outcomes that these two powerhouse companies are helping customers to unlock? >>Yeah, I will say, look, the range of imperative of customers varies greatly depending on the industry, depending on the positioning. I think that the fundamental question is given your imperative, do we have the ability to empower you to achieve the outcome that you want? And these days, of course, the tons of companies, given the the business context that are being very conscious on cost and efficiency, how do you do more with less? How do I keep innovating? Because innovation will be at the heart of the solutions, but I do that on my own pace with my own priorities. That higher level answer is the one that we're enabling through partnership, like the one we're we're sharing today to the market with Nutanix. >>Yeah, I think >>From you, >>Go ahead. I was just gonna comment ON'S pump as well is that absolutely really depends on the customer and what they're trying to achieve, right? As they think about the next set of innovation that they're trying to develop. But for example, we take a, a web, a use case that we've seen with some of the customers is like migration to the cloud, right? And you know, a lot of companies, they embark on that migration. We see there's a lot of data that says basically, you know, it's much harder than it looks, right? And a lot of these projects become years behind schedule and millions and millions of dollars over budget, right? So reducing that risk and saying, Hey, how do I, can I land in Azure? And then bit by bit start thinking, how do I continue to innovate to get, since now I have easy and secure access while I'm in Azure with, and seek with Nutanix Nutanix clusters on Azure to continue my innovation by taking advantage of Azure native services, right? But again, like Aaro said, it's, it really depends on what the customer goals are. >>Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta, as we mentioned, Alva, the, the preview was oversubscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers and beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry, but what, what were some of the, the key things they came to these two companies looking to, to solve, get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that from a, they're able to do more with less? >>Maybe I could take that one out of our rebuttal lines. It does means, but yeah, so like, like, like you mentioned, Lisa, you know, we've had a great preview oversubscribe, we had lots of CU not only s but also partners battle solution. And you know, we're obviously very pleased now to have offered to everyone else, but one of our customers Camp Day was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage Nstitute and Azure to, like I mentioned, reduce that work workload, migration and risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure. But there's others where we wanna lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCs and Citrix where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix provides that superior customer experience where whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC two on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the, the work that we've done together. >>So this really kind of highlights the power of that Ava, the power of the ISB ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. >>A absolutely, look, I mean, we strongly believe that when you partner properly with an isv, you get to the, to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you are combining superpowers and you are solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have, and Michael did a great job framing some of them, and the difference that they have now by having NC to on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our power ecosystem. Because at the same time, making our powers more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us >>Of, Can you comment a little bit on the go to market? Like how, how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? >>You know, when you think about the go to market, a lot of that is we have, you know, teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There's marketing and demand generation that will be done, that will be also work on joy opportunities that we will manage as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't wanna talk, go into too much detail, but I would like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience, which the, the development teams are done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. >>Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what all Borrow said, you know, it's not just about the product integration area, it's really the full end to end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineering teams, but also how do we go and talk to customers with value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually even worked on how do we have a single joint support for our customer. So it doesn't really matter how the customer engages, they really see this as an end to end single solution across two companies. >>And that's so critical given just the, the natural challenges that that organizations face and the dynamics of the macro economic environment that we're living in. For them, for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction, they want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud. But from an engagement perspective that you're, what sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Avaro is, is goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from, you know, the sales and marketing folks down to engineering, down to support? >>Yeah, I think honestly that was, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a lot alignment from day one. Of course, you know, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience, not just within the products, but again, through the entire life cycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's no different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience and that we're also focusing on solving real world customer problems, right? And really focus on the biggest problems the customers have. So really culturally it felt, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's, you know, two bar drug organizations working together, but I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on, on solving customer problems together. >>Yeah. >>Let me, Go ahead. >>No, I will say, well say Michael, I think that the, the one element that we complement, I think the answer was super complete, is the, the fact that we work together from the outside in, look at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and far as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls in part on its its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and, you know, doing what we do best, which is combining over superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that, you know, I i, I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring he's been. And again, the, the response for the previous is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. >>Yeah. And, and you know, with every hard problem there's challenges along the way, right? And so I'm actually really proud of both of the teams that stepped up and, you know, figure it out. How do we go solve some of these technical problems? How do we go solve, making sure we continue to provide world class support for sports organizations? And, you know, these weren't easy things to solve and, and you know, everyone really stepped up the challenge >>And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment and I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers and every industry. Last question guys, I wanna get both your perspectives on Michael, we'll start with you and then Lvra will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these, these two superheroes together, Michael? >>Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adopt, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC two and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate, like, you know, we mentioned obviously we have, we announced the GA that's J in Americas kind of the next more immediate step over the next few months. Look for us to continue expanding beyond Americas and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, you know, again, as of our mentioned is working from kind of the customers backwards. So we're, we're not, no, we're not waiting for the ga, we're already working on the next set of solutions saying what are other problems that customer facing, especially across as they're running their workloads cross on premises and public cloud, and what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for them. >>It sounds really strongly that, that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft. It's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at this center. I think you've do both, done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Of our last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? >>Well, thank you Lisa. Michael, I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know, you're generating value, you know, you're making a difference, especially in this complex times when the, the partnership gets tested where the, the right, you know, relationship gets built. We're being there for customers is extremely inspired. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game so that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way with the right quality. Every word, which is a, is never a small fist as you may imagine. You know, the, the world is a big place, but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer driven to keep and, and raise the bar on how, how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep in innovating at their own pace, in their own terms. >>Absolutely that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the announcement, Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure of our Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. >>Thank you for having Lisa and thank you Avara for joining me. >>Thank you, Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic and looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah, stay >>Tuned. Exactly. Thanks to the audience. >>Exactly. >>And stay tuned. There's more to come. We have coming up next, a deeper conversation on the announcement with Dave Valante and product execs from both and Microsoft. You won't wanna miss it.

>>Hello, everybody. Welcome to Von 2022, the live version. Yes, we're finally back live. Last time we did Von was 2019 live. Of course we did two subsequent years, uh, virtual. My name is Dave Valante and we've got two days of wall to wall coverage of VEON. As usual Veeam has brought together a number of customers, but it's really doing something different this year. Like many, uh, companies that you see, they have a big hybrid event. It's close to 40,000 people online and that's sort of driving the actual program where the content is actually different for the, the, the virtual viewers versus the onsite onsite. There's the, the V I P event going on, they got the keynotes. VM is a company who's a ancy occurred during the, the VMware rise. They brought in a new way of doing data protection. They didn't use agents. They, they protected at the hypervisor level. >>That changed the way that people did things. They're now doing it again in cloud, in SAS, in containers and ransomware. And so we're gonna dig into that. My cohost is Dave Nicholson this week, and we've got a special guest Zs Carava who is the principal at ZK research. He's an extraordinary analyst Zs. Great to see you, David. Thanks for coming out. Absolutely good to see you Beon. Great to be here. Yeah, we've done. Von act, live things have changed so dramatically. Uh, I mean the focus ransomware, it's now a whole new Tam, uh, the adjacency to security data protection. It's just a Zs. It's a whole new ballgame, isn't it? >>Well, it is. And, and in fact, um, during the keynote, they, they mentioned that they've, they're now tied at number one in, for, you know, back of a recovery, which is, I think it's safe to say Veeam. Does that really well? >>I think from a that's tied with Dell. Yes. Right. They didn't, I don't think they met Dell as >>Keto. And, uh, but I, you know, they've been rising Dell, EMC's been falling. And so I think >>It's somebody said 10 points that Dell lost and sharing the I data. >>It's not a big surprise. I mean, they haven't really invested a whole lot, >>I think anyway, >>Anyways, but I think from a Veeam perspective, the question is now that they've kind of hit that number one spot or close to it, what do they do next? This company, they mentioned, I was talking the CTO yesterday. You mentioned they're holding X bite of customer data. That is a lot of data. Right. And so they, they do back recovery really well. They do it arguably better than anybody. And so how do they take that data and then move into other adjacent markets to go create, not just a back recovery company, but a true data management platform company that has relevancy in cyber and analytics and artificial intelligence and data warehousing. Right? All those other areas I think are, are really open territory for this company right now. >>You know, Dave, you were a CTO at, at EMC when you, when you saw a lot of the acquisitions that the company made, uh, you, you know, they really never had a singular focus on data protection. They had a big data protection business, but that's the differentiator with Veeam. That's all it does. And you see that shine through from a, from a CTO's perspective. How do you see this market changing, evolving? And what's your sense as to how Vema is doing here? >>I think a lot of it's being driven by kind of, uh, unfortunately evil genius, uh, out in the market space. Yeah. I know we're gonna be hearing a lot about ransomware, uh, a lot about some concepts that we didn't really talk about outside of maybe the defense industry, air gaping, logical air gaping, um, Zs, you mentioned, you know, this, this, this question of what do you do when you have so many petabytes of data under management exabytes now exabytes, I'm sorry. Yeah, I see there I'm I'm already falling behind. One thing you could do is you could encrypt it all and then ask for Bitcoin in exchange for access to that data. >>Yes. That is what happens a >>Lot of them. So we're, we're getting, we're getting so much of the evil genius stuff headed our way. You start, you start thinking in those ways, but yet to, to your point, uh, dedicated backup products, don't address the scale and scope and variety of threats, not just from operational, uh, uh, you know, mishaps, uh, but now from so many bad actors coming in from the outside, it it's a whole new world. >>See us as analysts. We get inundated with ransomware solutions. Everybody's talking about it across the spectrum. The thing that interested me about what's happening here at VEON is they're, they're sort of trotting out this study that they do Veeam does some serious research, you know, thousands of customers that got hit by ransomware that they dug into. And then a, a larger study of all companies, many of whom didn't realize or said they hadn't been hit by ransomware, but they're really trying to inject thought leadership into the equation. You saw some of that in the analyst session this morning, it's now public. Uh, so we could talk about it. What were your thoughts on that data? >>Yeah, that was, uh, really fascinating data cuz it shows the ransomware industry, the response to it is largely reactive, right? We wait to get breach. We wait to, to uh, to get held at ransom I suppose. And then we, a lot of companies paid out. In fact, I thought there's one hospital in Florida, they're buying lots and lots of Bitcoin simply to pay out ransomware attacks. They didn't even really argue with them. They just pay it out. And I think Veeam's trying to change that mentality a little bit. You know, if you have the right strategy in place to be more preventative, you can do that. You can protect your data and then restore it right when you want to. So you don't have to be in that big bucket of companies that frankly pay and actually don't get their data back. Right. >>And like a third, I think roughly >>It's shocking amount of companies that get hit by that. And for a lot of companies, that's the end of their business. >>You know, a lot of the recovery process is manual is again a technologist. You understand that that's not the ideal way to go. In fact, it's probably a, a way to fail. >>Well, recovery's always the problem when I was in corporate, it used to joke that we were the best at backup, terrible at recovery. Well, you know, that's not atypical. >>My Fred Fred Moore, who was the vice president of strategy at a company called storage tech storage technology, corpor of storage tech. He had a great, uh, saying, he said, backup is one thing. Recovery is everything. And he started, he said that 30 years ago, but, but orchestration and automating that orchestration is, is really vital. We saw in the study, a lot of organizations are using scripts and scripts are fragile here they break. Right? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, unfortunately the idea of the red run book on the shelf is still with us. Uh, uh, you know, scripting does not equal automation necessarily in every case, there's still gonna be a lot of manual steps in the process. Um, but you know, what I hope we get to talk about during the next couple of days is, you know, some of the factors that go into this, we've got day zero exploits that have already been uncovered that are stockpiled, uh, and tucked away. And it's inevitable that they're gonna hit. Yeah. So whether it's a manual recovery process or some level of automation, um, if you don't have something that is air gapped and cut off from the rest of the world in a physical or logical way, you can't guarantee >>That the, the problem with manual processes and scripting is even if you can set it up today, the environment changes so fast, right? With shadow it and business units buying their own services and users storing things and you know, wherever, um, you, you can't keep up with scripts in manual. Automation must be the way and I've been, and I don't care what part of it. You work in, whether it's this area in networking, communications, whatever automation must be the way I think prior to the pandemic, I saw a lot of resistance from it pros in the area of mission. Since the pandemic, I've seen a lot of warming up to it because I think it pros, I just realized they can't do their job without it. So, so you >>Don't, you don't think that edge devices, uh, lend themselves to manual >>Recovery, no process. In fact, I think that's one of the things they didn't talk about. What's that is, is edge. Edge is gonna be huge. More, every retailer, I talk to oil and gas, company's been using it for a long time. I've, you know, manufacturing organizations are looking at edge as a way to put more data in more places to improve experiences. Cuz you're moving the data closer, but we're creating a world where the fragmentation of data, you think it's bad now just wait a couple of years until the edge is a little more, you know, uh, to life here. And I think you ain't see nothing yet. This is this world of data. Everywhere is truly becoming that. And the thing with edge is there's no one definition, edge, you got IOT edge cellular edge, campus edge, right? Um, you know, you look at hotels, they have their own edge. I talked to major league baseball, right? They have every, stadium's got its own edge server in it. So we're moving into a world. We're putting more data in more places it's more fragmented than ever. And we need better ways of managing Of securing that data. But then also being able to recover for when >>Things happen. I was having that Danny Allen, he used the term that we coined called super cloud. He used that in the analyst meeting today. And, and that's a metaphor for this new layer of cloud. That's developing to your point, whether it's on-prem in a hybrid across clouds, not just running on the cloud, but actually abstracting away the complexity of the underlying primitives and APIs. And then eventually to your point, going out to the edge, I don't know if anyone who has an aggressive edge strategy Veeam to its credit, you know, has gone well beyond just virtualization and gone to bare metal into cloud. They were the containers. There was first at SAS. They acquired Caston who was a partner of theirs and they tried to acquire them earlier, but there was some government things and you know, that whole thing that got cleaned up and now they've, they own Caston. And I think the edge is next. I mean, it's gotta be, there's gonna be so much data at the edge. I guess the question is where is it today? How much of that is actually persisted? How much goes back to the cloud? I don't think people really have a good answer for that yet. >>No. In fact, a lot of edge services will be very ephemeral in nature. So it's not like with cloud where we'll take data and we'll store it there forever with the edge, we're gonna take data, we'll store it there for the time, point in time we need it. But I think one of the interesting things about Veeam is because they're decoupled from the airline hardware, they can run virtual machines and containers, porting Veeam to whatever platform you have next actually isn't all that difficult. Right? And so then if you need to be able to go back to a certain point in time, they can do that instantly. It's, it's a fascinating way to do backup. Are >>You you' point about it? I mean, you remember the signs up and down, you know, near the EMC facility, right outside of Southborough no hardware agenda that that was Jeremy Burton when he was running Verto of course they've got a little hardware agenda. So, but Veeam doesn't Veeam is, you know, they they're friendly with all the hardware players of pure play software, couple other stats on them. So they're a billion dollar company. They've now started to talk about their ARR growth. They grew, uh, 27% last year in, in, in annual recurring revenue, uh, 25%, uh, in the most recent quarter. And so they're in, in the vast majority of their business is subscription. I think they said, uh, 73% is now subscription based. So they really trans transitioned that business. The other thing about vem is they they've come up with a licensing model that's very friendly. >>Um, and they sort of removed that friction early on in the process. I remember talking to TIR about this. He said, we are gonna incent our partners and make it transparent to them, whether it's, you know, that when we shift from, you know, the, the, the, the crack of, of perpetual license to a subscription model, we're gonna make that transparent to partners. We'll take care of that. Essentially. They funded that transition. So that's worked very well. So they do stand out, I think from some of the larger companies at these big portfolios, although the big portfolio companies, you know, they get board level contacts and they can elbow their ways in your thoughts on that sort of selling dynamic. >>So navigating that transition to a subscription model is always fraught with danger. Everybody wants you to be there, but they want you to be there now. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, they don't like the transition that happens over 1824 months to get there. Um, >>As a private company, they're somewhat shielded from what they would've been if they were appli. Sure, >>Exactly. But, but that, but that bodes well from a, from a, a Veeam perspective. Um, the other interesting thing is that they sit where customers sit today in the real world, a hybrid world, not everything is in the cloud or a single cloud, uh, still a lot of on-prem things to take care of. And, >>And there will be for >>A long time exactly. Back to this idea. Yeah. There's a very long tail on that. So it's, it's, it's well enough to have a niche product that addresses a certain segment of the market, but to be able to go in and say all data everywhere, it doesn't matter where it lives. We have you covered. Um, that's a powerful message. And we were talking earlier. I think they, they stand a really good shot at taking market share, you know, on an ongoing basis. >>Yeah. The interesting thing about this market, Dave is they're, you know, although, you know, they're tied to number one with Dell now, they're, it's 12%, right? This reminds me of the security industry five, six years ago, where it's so fragmented. There's so many vendors, no one really stood out right. Then what happened in security? It's a little company called Palo Alto networks came around, they created a platform story. They moved into adjacent markets like SDWAN, they did a lot of smart acquisitions and they took off. I think vem is at that similar point where they've now, you know, that 12% number they've got some capital. Now they could go do some acquisitions that they want do. There's lots of adjacent markets as they talk about this company could be the Palo Alto of the data management market, if you know, and based on good execution. But there's certainly the opportunities there with all the data that they're holding. >>That's a really interesting point. I wanna stay that in a second. So there's obviously, there's, there's backup, there's recovery, there's data protection, there's ransomware protection, there's SAS data protection. And now all of a sudden you're seeing even a company like Rubrik is kind of repositioning as a security play. Yeah. Which I'm not sure that's the right move for a company that's really been focused on, on backup to really dive into that fragmented market. But it's clearly an adjacency and we heard Anan the new CEO today in the analyst segment, you know, we asked him, what's your kinda legacy gonna look like? And he said, I want to, I want to, defragment this market he's looking at. Yeah. He wants 25 to 45% of the market, which I think is really ambitious. I love that goal now to your point, agree, he, he sure. But that doubles yeah. >>From today or more, and he gets there to your point, possibly through acquisitions, they've made some really interesting tuck-ins with Castin. They certainly bought an AWS, uh, cloud play years ago. But my, my so, uh, Veeam was purchased by, uh, private equity inside capital inside capital in January of 2020, just before COVID for 5 billion. And at the time, then COVID hit right after you were like uhoh. And then of course the market took off so great acquisition by insight. But I think an IPO is in their future and that's, uh, Zs when they can start picking up some of these adjacent markets through every day. >>And I think one of the challenges for them is now that the Holden XAB bited data, they need to be able to tell customers things they, the customer doesn't know. Right. And that's where a lot of the work they're doing in artificial intelligence machine learning comes into play. Right. And, and nobody does that better than AWS, right? AWS is always looking at your data and telling you things you don't know, which makes you buy more. And so I think from a Veeam perspective, they need to now take all this, this huge asset they have and, and find a way to monetize it. And that's by revealing these key insights to customers that the customers don't even know they have. And >>They've got that monitor monitoring layer. Um, it's if you called it, Danny, didn't like to use the term, but he called it an AI. It's really machine learning that monitors. And then I think makes recommendations. I want to dig into that a little bit with it. >>Well, you can see the platform story starting to build here. Right. And >>Here's a really good point. Yeah. Because they really have been historically a point product company. This notion of super cloud is really a platform play. >>Right. And if you look in the software industry, look across any, any segment of the software industry, those companies that were niche that became big became platforms, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle. Right. And, and they find a way to allow others to build on their platform. You know, companies, they think like a Citrix, they never did that. Yeah. And they kind of taped, you know, petered out at a certain level of growth and had to, you know, change. They're still changing their business model, in fact. But I think that's Veeam's at that inflection point, right. They either build a platform story, enable others to do more on their platform or they stagnate >>HP software is another good example. They never were able to get that platform. And we're not able bunch of spoke with it, a non used to work there. Why is it so important Dave, to have a platform over a product? >>Well, cynical, Dave says, uh, you have a platform because it attracts investment and it makes you look cooler than maybe you really are. Um, but, uh, but really for longevity, you have, you, you, you have to be a platform. So what's >>The difference. How do you know when you have platform versus it? APIs? Is it, yeah. Brett, is it ecosystem? >>Some of it is. Some of it is semantics. Look at when, when I'm worried about my critical assets, my data, um, I think of a platform, a portfolio of point solutions for backing up edge data stuff. That's in the cloud stuff that exists in SAS. I see that holistically. And I think guys, you're doing enough. This is good. Don't, don't dilute your efforts. Just keep focusing on making sure that you can back up my data wherever it lives and we'll both win together. So whenever I hear a platform, I get a little bit, a little bit sketchy, >>Well platform, beats products, doesn't >>It? Yeah. To me, it's a last word. You said ecosystem. Yes. When you think of the big platform players, everybody B in the customer, uh, experience space builds to build for Salesforce. First, if you're a small security vendor, you build for Palo Alto first, right? Right. If you're in the database, you build for Oracle first and when you're that de facto platform, you create an ecosystem around you that you no longer have to fund and build yourself. It just becomes self-fulfilling. And that drives a level of stickiness that can't be replicated through product. >>Well, look at the ecosystem that, that these guys are forming. I mean, it's clear. Yeah. So are they becoming in your view >>Of platform? I think they are becoming a platform and I think that's one of the reasons they brought on and in, I think he's got some good experience doing that. You could argue that ring kind of became that. Right. The, when, you know, when he was ring central. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. And, uh, so I think some, some of his experiences and then moving into adjacencies, I think is really the reason they brought him in to lead this company to the next level. >>Excellent guys, thanks so much for setting up VEON 20, 22, 2 days of coverage on the cube. We're here at the area. It's a, it's a great venue. I >>Love the area. >>Yeah. It's nice. It's a nice intimate spot. A lot of customers here. Of course, there's gonna be a big Veeam party. They're famous for their parties, but, uh, we'll, we'll be here to cover it and, uh, keep it right there. We'll be back with the next segment. You're watching the cube VEON 20, 22 from Las Vegas.

(upbeat ambient music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got NETSCOUT guests here with me today. Eileen Haggerty joins us, the AVP of product and solutions marketing and Jason Chaffee as well, senior product manager. We're going to be talking about gaps in edge visibility. Guys, great to have you on theCube. >> Yeah, thanks Lisa, I really appreciate it. I appreciate the time to be able to talk with everyone. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. All right, Eileen, we're going to start with you. Oh, what a last two years we have had, COVID, digital transformation massively accelerated, it also both changed networking dynamics over the last couple of years. How has that changed? >> Yeah, and that's the absolute truth. I think we've really seen it in the huge swings where people are performing their jobs right now. You know, I think when people went home two years ago to do their jobs, no one ever expected we where we would be two years later, right? There's really been a variety of different stages from totally working at home to now where you see an awful lot of hybrid work. People splitting their time between the offices and home. That's really where we're at right now. And in fact, some of the studies that we've been reading up on and seeing, majority of workers actually really prefer a hybrid work model, I can understand that. (chuckles) As well the managers believe they are going to have some of their employees that work from a remote location on a regular basis going forward too. So that becomes one of the biggest issues that we have to support them from an IT perspective and a corporate of going forward. One aspect was interesting, two thirds of high revenue growth companies are really embracing hybrid work. This is going to require a couple of things though. Business continuity has depended on this model now, remote workers have been a part of it and we need applications in the network to support that as well as it used to when they were all based in one set of buildings, right? So one of the things that we find IT executives lamenting, some think that they have a lot of confidence in being able to troubleshoot problems when employees are having them remotely, others are actually not quite so confident. So we're going to have to look at this as an industry and help them assure IT infrastructure and services are performing flawlessly so that the hybrid workforce can be successful. >> Yeah, that hybrid environment, it's kind of like must embrace at this point. But Jason, there brings some network complexity to this. The digital transformation was absolutely essential, right, the last couple of years for businesses to first survive and then to thrive, but network complexity has increased. Jason, walk us through what the communications path looks like in today's hybrid environment. >> Yeah, Lisa, it really has. It's just become more complex, you know, in today's hybrid environment and the whole digital transformation, there's really three areas of visibility or three location types if you will that they really need to have to focus on. And one is sort of that data center, cloud services edge and then there's the network edge. And now the ever expanding and growing client edge and really what's common about all of these different edges is this is where the traffic gets altered and crosses across those two domains or those multiple domains really. And so what happens there is those are areas where problems can occur and these are possibly, if not probably blind spots for IT. So when you think about these different edges, like the service edge, just as your private data center or the cloud where applications that are actually hosted or the network edge are going through colocations and WANs and through the internet and your typical kind of network throughout the whole organization. And then lastly is the client edge. And the client edge is again, just continues to grow. And this, people now working from home as Eileen was just talking about and remote offices or their home one day and a remote office the next day and whatever that might be and heck, they might be working in coffee shops or in the corporate headquarters. So it's just really added complexity. And as we get further away from the data center, we start to lose all of that infrastructure that we own and can control. And so it makes it difficult to really manage and understand that. In fact, I think that's probably one of the biggest consequences or challenges of this whole digital transformation. You know, it's made it real easy for those of us to work from home and all these new systems, and it's real simple to work from literally anywhere, but it's just made it that much more complex and challenging for the IT organization to really be able to manage and kind of provide that ubiquitous end user experience regardless of where the users are. You know, kind of last point, I was just thinking about this is, when you think about an organization that maybe has 30,000 employees and if 80,000 of those sudden, or 80% of those suddenly got sent home and had to work during COVID and the whole pandemic, and maybe they're hybrid now, well, that's 24 to 25,000 employees that are really key to your revenue and customer satisfaction. So IT organizations just simply can't afford not to invest in all of this and really try and to understand these complexities and make sure that everything's working the way it should for productivity for the company. >> That's a great point, Jason, as consumers, we are so demanding. That's I think one of the things in COVID that went away was patients and maybe it's slowly coming back but the customer satisfaction, the brand reputation, those are all things that are dependent on solid networking. And of course IT challenges, IT is challenged to to really smooth out those challenges. But Eileen, as employees and end users, we've faced a lot of challenges. I know I have in the last couple of years. Walk us through some of those main pain points that the employees and the end users have been through in the last two years. >> You couldn't be more on spot there. So we really haven't. The irony is all of us on this call have been amongst the ones who have probably suffered from some of these issues as well. You know, one of the things that we found during this period is all of us were coming in over VPN or on video desktop interfaces like Citrix and others. And we were connecting to data center applications and software as service apps for everything. You know, it could be customer order processing, customer records, emails, and in any time or place that we were accessing, we could have slow responsiveness, we could have log issues, we had timeouts. I think one of the interesting ones was communications apps that became huge overnight, Teams, Zoom, WebEx, and those have had issues for us too. They had connection issues, poor quality voice, terrible video. So it became a very frustrating period of time in many cases for employees, they're there to deliver customer care, protect the corporate revenue. But networks and application disruptions counter that. So leading to productivity loss, that's a big issue and a concern. And certainly one of the bigger worries is customer dissatisfaction. But I'd say, you know what's fascinating here too is IT staffs were equally frustrated but for different reasons during this period. They were combating network and application issues for these employees. And usually, they were used to everybody being in one location or to a few buildings and they had total control if you will. Now they're managing 100s and sometimes 1000s of locations known as homes and those staff members we've heard them say things like, they felt like they were losing sight of the remote workforce or simply losing control. And hybrid work models, as they become the norm for many of these organizations, groups of IT professionals still have to ensure the quality of service performance for those employees wherever they do their jobs, home, remote offices or headquarters, and for any application wherever it happens to be hosted. So this is a big challenge. >> Big challenge for IT. You talked about that customer satisfaction. Reminded me of one time I was on the phone with a contact center and I heard a dog barking in the background and I first I thought was that my dog and I thought, no, that customer contact center person is also stuck working from home. Talk about losing control of your environment. But Jason, next question is actually for both of you and Jason, I'll start with you, how does IT assure performance? I mean, it's hard to manage, talk to us about that. >> Well, yeah, Lisa, really kind of as Eileen just said, we used to all sort of be in the same common area in the headquarters. And so people, you know, the IT organization was looking at things like the data center or server farms or internet links just going into and out of the headquarters or off to the data center itself. And so, but that's just not really the case anymore. And as people continue again, as I said before, work from literally anywhere, it's just made the ecosystem that much more challenging and much more complex and bigger frankly to try to manage. And so I think what you really need to do is you see something where it's challenging because the old adage is you just can't manage what you can't see. And so that's become that challenge. And I think what you need is visibility at every edge including up to the client edge that we've been talking about so that you can do things like track and trend volumes and bandwidth and capacity and application utilization and all the different things that make up that end user experience. You need that visibility from all of those locations to really understand and see what's going on from there. >> Eileen, what's your take? >> Well, Jason makes a bunch of valid points. I think what triggers in my mind as he was speaking was that there are other enterprises that have very specific remote locations which present themselves a very different kind of importance for value of the performance assurance. There's banks. They have financial transactions that are going on there, which are instantaneous in nature or need to be for a variety of different reasons, right? Factory plants they've been now wirelessly or WiFi driven production lines. And as a result, any disruption in that production line could have it turned off for 20 minutes an hour. And that has a deep impact to the business as well. Retail stores and distribution centers. This one rings probably for everybody, 'cause during this period of time, we were all online and we were ordering things, right? And so any issues with disruptions, slow downs from those types of remote locations for touchless pickup for the ability to go to a store or get something picked up that day, this was critical. And we all know those services broke down for one reason or another and it created a bit of a problem if you didn't have the right snack for the four year old today. >> Right, definitely the four year old losing control or losing patients, the poor parent. Jason, you talked about visibility and you said something really poignant, you can't manage what you can't see, what is needed for IT to have that visibility as this environment just scattered, what's needed to effectively manage it? >> Yeah. Lisa, you know I think as you just said, and as I said earlier, I think the real key is visibility at every edge and all of the different edges that we've talked about including the home user and it's really been impractical and expensive to instrument at every one of those, especially at all the home locations which are now everybody's home work office. And you just really can't get a view into it. And of course there's some solutions out there that sort of gives you a view of what's going on, what's that end user experience. And, but it doesn't really tell you why. And I think that's one of the key components of that. So as I think about this large new hybrid ecosystem, I think there's really three main things that you need in order to do that. And the first of all, again, is that complete visibility at every edge. And to me that means a combination of both passive and active synthetic based monitoring. So you're passive monitoring where you're actually looking at the real user traffic, and detecting trends and being able to understand what's going on there. But then you also do need, there's a time and a place for that synthetic active testing where we're getting an understanding and a baseline where we're testing continuously and automatically to understand what that end user experience is and understand what performance should look like. But as I mentioned, I think that's just not necessarily enough to do just do synthetics from those synthetic locations. I think it's really key to be able to get deep down into the wire day or the packets of that to really understand why something is happening. You know, for instance, today there might be an issue and you can say, well, I see it's a DNS issue. Hey, DNS guy, go off and try to fix this and figure out what's going on. Well, again, I think you need that visibility, you need a solution that can pull the packets back and give you that combination of both of those things. The next thing I think. >> So. >> Oh, sorry, go ahead. >> Go ahead. >> Well, the next thing I was going to say that I think that's really critical and key is tools that can manage the complexity as you go across all of these. I mean, there's just so many tools out there that are, SaaS and Ucast, your WebEx, Zoom teams, all of those. And it's just frankly, almost impossible to be an expert on all of those different solutions that you might have. And of course they have their own management platform forms that make it, so you can kind of see what's going on but being able to understand and see how to fix WebEx for instance, doesn't really help you when one of your users happens to be having a problem with teams. And so I think again, you need a solution that can go across all of those different applications to be able to see what's going on. And then thirdly, I think is the key, one of the key components is service and application collaboration. And what I mean by this is you need a tool that can give you the ability to have proof and evidence that you can share with your service providers, your application providers because they're very complex, right? They all have dozens of servers in different parts of the world, in different parts of the country. And frankly, they're going to probably blame you first, they're going to say, no, this is something on your end. And it really adds to the time of troubleshooting and get resolution. But if you can actually have that data to say, hey, I can see exactly what's going on. And it's this server at this data center and it's causing high retransmissions or latency. That just makes again more of a collaborative effort but allows you to sort of put all of those things together and stop the finger pointing and blame game and be able to solve those solutions much more quickly. So again, I think it's really a combination of active and passive together all in one console or one solution that really gives you that visibility across all of the different environments that we might have today. >> All those different environments, and there still are so many. Eileen, how have you seen this? How has NETSCOUT seen this actually in practice and how have the tool that you and talked about, how is it actually helping to give the visibility, to reduce the complexity and to ensure that ultimately the end users and the employees are productive so that the customers can be happy? >> Yeah, and you know, it's interesting as he was talking, I was thinking one of the accounts that I've talked to, an organization that's based in software development and they literally have offices all over the world. The hybrid workforce model is their choice going forward. And most of those worldwide employees are part of the sales and support organization for local prospects and customers. So one of the biggest things that's critical to them is communications. And that has to be top of their concerns for quality. The other business related applications are equally important because as you're talking to them, you're pulling those services up and they are in fact using solutions for looking at those edges, the WAN links are key for visibility. They're able to look at the inbound and outbound traffic at those locations. And then what they're able to do is to do two things, one, like Jason was talking about, collaborate, work with those local WAN providers. They're all different over the world. So you really need to build a relationship with them, you have to have some evidence and they're able to do that now. It helps them cost effectively and proactively plan bandwidth changes, and that's really important too. They're also using the synthetic testing that Jason referred to. These locations have the buildings able to test for different applications that are going to be important to the business that's at that location. They do it over ethernet, so for the people with hardwired desks, they can see what the traffic experience is. And then for those that are in open spaces or conference rooms on using WiFi, they're measuring there as well. They want to make sure that no matter where you sit in the office and how you connect, the quality is the same and that's important. Bottom line, they're being able to reduce dramatically the time it's taken to troubleshoot and resolve issues as they emerge. It's great. >> That is great. And of course, as we all have that patience limitation, that speed is key there. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking about not just the gaps in edge visibility but the ways that they can be remedied and fixed so that ultimately customer satisfaction, employee productivity, all things are harmonious. We appreciate your insights. >> Absolutely, thank you. >> Thank you. >> For Eileen Haggerty and Jason Chaffee I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching a CUBE Conversation. 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hello and welcome to this special cube conversation i'm dave nicholson and this is part of our continuing coverage of google cloud next 2021 i have two very special guests with me and we are going to talk about the topic of security uh i have sunil potti who is vice president and general manager of google cloud security uh who in a previous life had senior leadership roles at nutanix and citrix along with lior div who is the ceo and co-founder of cyber reason lior was formerly a commander in the much famed unit 8200 uh part of the israeli defense forces uh where he was actually a medal of honor recipient uh very uh honored to have him here this morning sunil and lior welcome to the cube sunil welcome back to the cube yeah great to be here david and and to be in the presence of a medal of honor recipient by the way a good friend of mine leor so be here well good to have both of you here so uh i'm the kind of person who likes my dessert before my uh before my entree so why don't we just get right to it you're the two of you are here to announce something very very significant uh in the field of security uh sunil do you want to start us out what are we here to talk about yeah i mean i think maybe uh you know just to set this context um as as many of you know about a decade ago a nation's sponsored attack you know actually got into google plus a whole bunch of tech companies you know the project aurora was quite uh you know infamous for a certain period of time and actually google realized almost a decade ago that look you know security can't just be a side thing it has to be the primary thing including one of the co-founders becoming for lack of a better word the chief security officer for a while but one of the key takeaways from that whole incident was that look you have to be able to detect everything and trust nothing and and the underpinning for at least one of them led to this whole zero trust architectures that everybody now knows about but the other part which is not as popular at least in industry vernacular but in many ways equally important and some ways more important is the fact that you need to be able to detect everything so that you can actually respond and that led to the formation of you know a project internal to google to actually say that look let's democratize uh storage and make sure that nobody has to pay for capturing security events and that led to the formation of this uh new industry concept called a security data lake in chronicle was born and then as we started evolving that over into the enterprise segment partnering with you know cyber reason on one hand created a one plus one equals three synergy between say the presence around what do you detect from the end point but also generally just so happens that as lior will tell you the cyber reason technology happens to start with endpoint but it's actually the core tech is around detecting events but doing it in a smart way to actually respond to them in much more of a contextual manner but beyond just that you know synergy between uh you know a world-class planet scale you know security data like forming the foundation and integrating you know in a much more cohesive way with uh cyber reasons detection response offering the spirit was actually that this is the first step of a long journey to really hit the reset button in terms of going from reactive mode of security to a proactive mode of security especially in a nation-state-sponsored attack vector so maybe leo you can speak a few minutes on that as well absolutely so um as you said i'm coming from a background of uh nation state hacking so for us at cyberism it's uh not is foreign uh what the chinese are doing uh on a daily basis and the growing uh ransomware cartel that's happening right now in russia um when we looked at it we said then uh cyberism is very famous by our endpoint detection and response capability but when we establish cyber reason we establish the cyberism on a core or almost fundamental idea of finding malicious operation we call it the male idea so basically instead of looking for alerts or instead of looking for just pieces of data we want to find the hackers we want to find the attack we want to be able to tell basically the full story of what's going on uh in order to do that we build the inside cyberism basically from day one the ability to analyze any data in real time in order to stitch it into the story of the male the malicious operation but what we realize very quickly that while our solution can process more than 27 trillion events a week we cannot feed it fast enough just from end point and we are kind of blind when it comes to the rest of the attack surface so we were looking uh to be honest quite a while for the best technology that can feed this engine and to as sunil said the one plus one equal three or four or five to be able to fight against those hackers so in this journey uh we we found basically chronicle and the combination of the scale that chronicle bringing the ability to feed the engine and together basically to be able to find those hackers in real time and real time is very very important and then to response to those type of attack so basically what is uh exciting here we created a solution that is five times faster than any solution that exists right now in the market and most importantly it enables us to reverse the atmospheric advantage and basically to find them and to push them out so we're moving from hey just to tell you a story to actually prevent hackers to being in your environment so leor can you i want to double click on that just just a little bit um can you give give us a kind of a concrete example of this difference between simply receiving alerts and uh and actually um you know taking taking uh uh correlating creating correlations and uh and actually creating actionable proactive intelligence can you give us an example of that working in in the real world yeah absolutely we can start from a simple example of ransomware by the time that i will tell you that there is a ransomware your environment and i will send an alert uh it will be five computers that are encrypted and by the time that you gonna look at the alert it's gonna be five thousand uh basically machines that are encrypted and by the time that you will do something it's going to be already too little too late and this is just a simple example so preventing that thing from happening this is critical and very timely manner in order to prevent the damage of ransomware but if you go aside from ransomware and you look for example of the attack like solarwind basically the purpose of this attack was not to create damage it was espionage the russian wanted to collect data on our government and this is kind of uh the main purpose that they did this attack so the ability to be able to say hey right now there is a penetration this is the step that they are doing and there is five ways to push them out of the environment and actually doing it this is something that today it's done manually and with the power of chronicle and cyberism we can do it automatically and that's the massive difference sunil are there specific industries that should be really interested in this or is this a is this a broad set of folks that should be impacted no you know in some ways uh you know the the the saying these days to learn's point on ransomware is that you know if if a customer or an enterprise has a reasonable top-line revenue you're a target you know you're a target to some extent so in that sense especially given that this has moved from pure espionage or you know whether it be you know government oriented or industrial espionage to a financial fraud then at that point in time it applies to pretty much a wide gamut of industries not just financial services or you know critical infrastructure companies like oil and gas pipeline or whatever it could be like any company that has any sort of ip that they feel drives their top line business is now a target for such attacks so when you talk about the idea of partnership and creating something out of a collaboration what's the meat behind this what what what do you what are you guys doing beyond saying you know hey sunil lior these guys really like each other and they respect what the other is doing what's going on behind the scenes what are you actually implementing here moving forward so every partnership is starting with love so it's good [Laughter] but then it need to translate to to really kind of pure value to our customers and pure value coming from a deep integration when it's come to the product so basically uh what will happen is every piece of data that we can collect at cyber is in uh from endpoint any piece of data that the chronicle can collect from any log that exists in the world so basically this is kind of covering the whole attack surface so first we have access to every piece of information across the full attack surface then the main question is okay once you collect all this data what you're gonna do with it and most of companies or all the companies today they don't have an answer they're saying oh we're gonna issue an alert and we hope that there is a smart person behind the keyboard that can understand what just happened and make a decision and with this partnership and with this integration basically we're not asking and outsourcing the question what to do to the user we're giving them the answer we're telling them hey this is the story of the attack this is all the pieces that's going on right now and in most cases we're gonna say hey and by the way we just stopped it so you can prevent it from the future when will people be able to leverage this capability in an integrated way and and and by the way restate how this is going to market as an integrated solution what is what is the what is what are we going to call this moving forward so basically this is the cyber reason xdr uh powered by chronicle and we are very very um uh happy about it yeah and i think just to add to that i would say look the the meta strategy here and the way it'll manifest is in this offering that comes out in early 2022 um is that if you think about it today you know a classical quote-unquote security pipeline is to detect you know analyze and then respond obviously you know just just doing those three in a good way is hard doing it in real time at scale is even harder so just that itself was where cyber reason and chronicle would add real value where we are able to collect a lot of events react in real time but a couple of things that i think that you know to your original point of why this is probably going to be a little for game changer in the years to come is we're trying to change that from detect analyze respond to detect understand and anticipate so because ultimately that's really how we can change you know the profile from being reactive in a world of ransomware or anything else to being proactive against a nation sponsored or nation's influenced attacks because they're not going to stop right so the only way to do this is to rather than just go back up the hatches is just really you know change change the profile of how you'll actually anticipate what they were probably going to do in 6 months or 12 months and so the the graph technology that powers the heart of you know cyber reason is going to be intricately woven in with the contextual information that chronicle can get so that the intermediate step is not just about analysis but it's about truly understanding the overall strategy that has been employed in the past to predict what could happen in the future so therefore then actions could be taken downstream that you can now say hey most likely this these five buckets have this kind of personal information data there's a reasonable chance that you know if they're exposed to the internet then as you create more such buckets in that project you're going to be susceptible to more ransomware attacks or some other attacks right and that's the the the kind of thinking or the transformation that we're trying to bring out with this joint office so lior uh this this concept of uh of mallops and uh cyber reason itself you weren't just born yesterday you've been you've been uh you have thousands of customers around the globe he does look like he was born i i know i know i know well you you know it used to be that the ideal candidate for ceo of a startup company was someone who dropped out of stanford i think it's getting to the point where it's people who refused admission to stanford so uh the the dawn of the 14 year old ceo it's just it's just around the corner but uh but lior do you get frustrated when you see um you know when you become aware of circumstances that would not have happened had they implemented your technology as it exists today yeah we have a for this year it was a really frustrating year that starting with solarwind if you analyze the code of solarwind and we did it but other did it as well basically the russians were checking if cyberism is installed on the machine and if we were installed on the machine they decided to stop the attack this is something that first it was a great compliment for us from you know our not friend from the other side that decided to stop the attack but on a serious note it's like we were pissed because if people were using this technology we know that they are not going to be attacked when we analyze it we realize that we have three different ways to find the solar wind hackers in a three different way so this is just one example and then the next example in the colonial pipeline hack we were the one that found darkseid as a group that we were hacking we were the first one that released a research on them and we showed how we can prevent the basically what they are doing with our technology so when you see kind of those type of just two examples and we have many of them on a daily basis we just know that we have the technology in order to do that now when we're combining uh the chronicle technology into the the technology that we already have we basically can reverse the adversary advantage this is something that you're not doing in a single day but this is something that really give power to the defenders to the communities of siso that exist kind of across the us um and i believe that if we're going to join forces and lean into this community and and basically push the solution out the ability for us to fight against those cartels specifically the ransomware cartels is going to be massive sunil this time next year when we are in uh google cloud next 2022 um are you guys going to come back on and offer up the we told you so awards because once this is actually out there and readily available the combination of chronicle and cyber reasons technology um it's going to be hard for some csos to have an excuse uh it may be it may be a uncomfortable to know that uh they could have kept the door secure uh but didn't yeah where's that bad business is that bad business to uh hand out awards for doing dumb things i don't know about uh you know a version of darwin awards probably don't make sense but but but generally speaking so i do think uh you know we're all like as citizens in this right because you know we talk about customers i mean you know alphabet and google is a customer in some ways cyber reason is a customer the cube is a customer right so i think i think the robot hitting the road a year from now will be we should we should do this where i don't know if the cube does more than two folks at the same time david but we should i mean i'm sure we'll have enough to have at least a half a dozen in in the room to kind of talk about the solution because i think the the you know as you can imagine this thing didn't materialize i mean it's been being cooked for a while between your team and our team and in fact it was inspired by feedback from some joint customers out in the market and all that good stuff so so a year from now i think the best thing would be not just having customers to talk about the solution but to really talk about that transformation from respond to anticipate and do they feel better on their security posture in a world that they know like and leo should probably spend a few minutes on this is i think we're on the tip of the sphere of this nation-state era and what we've just seen in the last few years is what maybe the nation-states have seen over two decades ago and they're going to run those playbooks on the enterprise for the next decade or so yeah leor talk about that for a minute yeah it's it's really you know just to continue the sunil thought it's it's really about finding the unknown because what's happening on the other side it's like specifically china and russia and lately we saw iran starting to gain uh power um basically their job is to become better and better and to basically innovate and create a new type of attack on a daily basis as technology has evolved so basically there is a very simple equation as we're using more technology and relying more on technology the other side is going to exploit it in order to gain more power espionage and create financial damage but it's important to say that this evolution it's not going to stop this is just the beginning and a lot of the data that was belong just to government against government fight basically linked in the past few years now criminals starting to use it as well so in a sense if you think about it what's happening right now there is basically a cold war that nobody is talking about it between kind of the giant that everybody is hacking everybody and in the crossfire we see all of those enterprises across the world it was not a surprise that um you know after the biden and putin uh meeting suddenly it was a quiet it was no ransomware for six weeks and after something changing the politics suddenly we can see a a groin kind of attack when it's come to ransomware that we know that was directed from russia in order to create pressure on the u.s economy sunil wrap us up what are your f what are what are your final thoughts and uh what's what's the what's the big takeaway here no i think you know i i think the key thing for everyone to know is look i think we are going into an era of state-sponsored uh not espionage as much as threat vectors that affect every business and so in many ways the chiefs the chief information security officer the chief risk officer in many ways the ceo and the board now have to pay attention to this topic much like they paid attention to mobile 15 years ago as a transformation thing or maybe cloud 10 years ago i think cyber has been one of those it's sort of like the wireless error david like it existed in the 90s but didn't really break around until iphone hit or the world of consumerization really took off right and i think we're at the tip of the spear of that cyber really becoming like the era of mobile for 15 years ago and so i think that's the if there's like a big takeaway i think yes there's lots of solutions the good news is great innovations are coming through companies like cyber reason working with you know proven providers like google and so forth and so there's a lot of like support in the ecosystem but i think if there was one takeaway that was that everybody should just be ready internalized we don't have to be paranoid about it but we anticipate that this is going to be a long game that we'll have to play together well with that uh taking off my journalist hat for a moment and putting on my citizen hat uh it's reassuring to know that we have really smart people working on this uh because when we talk about critical infrastructure control systems and things like that being under threat um that's more significant than simply having your social security number stolen in a in a data breach so um with that uh i'd like to thank you sunil leor thank you so much for joining us on this special cube conversation this is dave nicholson signing off from our continuing coverage of google cloud next 2021 [Music] you

(soft techno music) >> Good evening. Welcome back to the Kube. Live in Los Angeles. We are at KubeCon Cloud Native Con 2021. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson, rounding out our day. We're going to introduce you to a new company, a new company that's new to us. I should say, log DNA. Peter Choi joins us the VP of product. Peter, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me. >> (Lisa) Talk to us about log DNA. Who are you guys? What do you do? >> So, you know, log DNA is a log medicine platform. Traditionally, we've been focused on, you know, offering log analysis, log management capabilities to dev ops teams. So your classic kind of troubleshooting, debugging, getting into your systems. More recently, maybe in like the last year or so we've been focused on a lot of control functionality around log medicine. So what I mean by that is a lot of people typically think of kind of the analysis or the dashboards, but with the pandemic, we noticed that you see this kind of surge of data because all of the services are being used, but you also see a downward pressure on cost, right? Because all of a sudden you don't want to be spending two X on those digital experiences. So we've been focused really on kind of tamping down kind of controls on the volume of log data coming in and making sure that they have a higher kind of signal and noise ratio. And then, you know, I'll talk about it a little bit, but we've really been honing in on how can we take those capabilities and kind of form them more in a pipeline. So log management, dev ops, you know, focusing on log data, but moving forward really focused on that flow of data. >> (Dave) So, when you talk about the flow of data and logs that are being read, make this a little more real, bring it up, bring it up just to level in terms of data, from what? >> Yeah. >> What kind of logs? What things are generating logs? What's the relevant information that's being. Kept track of? >> Yeah, I mean, so from our perspective, we're actually agnostic to data source. So we have an assist log integration. We have kind of basic API's. We have, you know, agents for any sort of operating system. Funny enough people actually use those agents to install, log DNA on robots, right? And so we have a customer they're, you know, one of the largest E-commerce platforms on, in the, in the world and they have a warehouse robots division and they installed the agent on every single one of those robots. They're, you know, they're running like arm 64 processors and they will send the log data directly to us. Right? So to us, it's no different. A robot is no different from a server is no different from an application is no different from a router. We take in all that data. Traditionally though, to answer your question, I guess, in the simplest way, mostly applications, servers, firewalls, all the traditional stuff you'd expect kind of going into a log platform. >> So you mentioned a big name customer. I've got a guess as to who that is. I won't, I won't say, but talk to us about the observability pipeline. What is that? What are the benefits in it for customers? >> (Peter) Sure. So, like if we zoom out again, you know, you think about logs traditionally. I think a lot of folks say, okay, we'll ingest the logs. We'll analyze them. What we noticed is that there's a lot of value in the step before that. So I think in the earlier days it was really novel to say, Hey, we're going to get logs and we're going to put it into a system. We're going to analyze it. We're going to centralize. Right. And that had its merits. But I think over time it got a little chaotic. And so you saw a lot of the vendors over the last three years consolidating and doing more of a single pane of glass, all the pillars of observability and whatnot. But then the downside of that is you're seeing a lot of the teams that are using that then saying being constrained by single vendor for all the ways that you can access that data. So we decided that the control point being on the analysis side on, on the very far right side was constricting. So we said, okay, let's move the control point up into a pipeline where the logs are coming to a single point of ingress. And then what we'll do is we will offer views, but also allow you to stream into other systems. So we'll allow you to stream into like a SIM or a data warehouse or something, something like that. Right? So, and you know, we're still trying to like nail down the messaging. I'm sure our marketing person's going to roast me after this. But the simplest way to think of observability pipeline is it's the step before the analysis part, that kind of ingest processes and routes the data. >> (Dave) Yeah. This is the Kube, by the way, neither one of us is a weather reporter. (laughing) So, so the technical stuff is good with us. >> Yes. It is. What are, and talk to us about some of the key features and capabilities and maybe anything that's newly announced are going to be announced. >> Yeah. For sure. So what we recently announced early access on is our streaming capabilities. So it's something that we built in conjunction with IBM and with a couple of, you know, large major institutions that we were working with on the IBM cloud. And basically we realized as we were ingesting a log data, some of those consumers wanted to access subsets of that data and other systems such as Q radar or, you know, a security product. So we ended up taking, we filtered down a subset of that data and we stream it out into those systems. And so we're taking those capabilities and then bringing it into our direct product, you know, whatever you access via logging.com. That is what's essentially going to be the seed for the kind of observability pipeline moving forward. So when you start thinking about it, all of this stuff that I mentioned, where we say, we're focusing on control, like allowing you to exclude logs, allowing you to transform logs, you take those processing capabilities, you take the streaming capabilities, you put them together and all of a sudden that's the pipeline, right? So that's the biggest focus for us now. And then we also have supporting features such as, you know, control API's. We have index rate alerting so that you can get notified if you see aberrations in the amount of flow of data. We have things like variable retention. So when a certain subset of logs come in, if you want it store it for seven days or 30 days, you can go ahead and do that because we know that a large block of logs is going to have many different use cases and many different associated values, right? >> So let's pretend for a moment that a user, somebody who has spent their money on log DNA is putting together a Yelp review and they've given you five stars. >> Yup. >> What do they say about log DNA? Why did they give you that five star rating? >> Yeah. Absolutely. I think, you know, the most common one and it's funny it's Yelp because we actually religiously mine, our G2 crowd reviews. (all laughing) And so the thing that we hear most often is, it's ease of use, right? A lot of these tools. I mean, I'm sure, you know, you're talking to founders and product leaders every day with developers. Like the, the bar, the baseline is so low, you know, a lot of, a lot of organizations where like, we'll give them the, you know, their coders, they'll figure it out. We'll just give them docs and they'll figure it out. But we, we went a little bit extra in terms of like, how can we smooth that experience so that when you go to your computer and you type in QTPL, blah, blah, blah, two lines, and all of a sudden all your logs are shipping from your cluster to log DNA. So that's the constant theme for us in all of our views is, Hey, I showed up, I signed up and within 30 minutes I had everything going that I needed to get. >> (Lisa) So fast time to value. >> Yes. >> Which is critical these days. >> Absolutely. >> Talk to me. So here we are at, at KubeCon, the CNCF community is huge. I think I, the number I saw yesterday was 138,000 contributors. Lots of activity, because we're in person, which is great. We can have those hallway networking conversations that we haven't been able to have in a year and a half. What are some of the things that you guys have heard at the booth in terms of being able to engage with the community again? >> You know, the thing that we've heard most often is just like having a finger on the pulse. It's so hard to do that because you know, when we're all at our computers, we just go from zoom to zoom. And so it, it like, unless it punches you in the face, you're not aware of it. Right. But when you come here, you look around, you go, you can start to identify trends, you hear the conversations in the hallway, you see the sessions. It's just that, that sense of, it's almost like a Phantom limb that, that sense of community and being kind of connected. I think that's the thing that we've heard most often that people are excited. And, you know, I think a lot of us are just kind of treating this like a dry run. Like we're kind of easing our way back in. And so it, you know, it felt good to be back. >> Well, they've done a great job here, right? I mean, you have to show your proof of vaccination. They're doing temperature checks, or you can show your clear health pass. So they're making it. We were talking to the executive director of CNCF earlier today and you're making it, it's not rocket science. We have enough data to know that this can be done carefully and safely. >> (David) Don't forget the wristbands. >> That's right. And, and did you see the wristbands? >> (Peter) Oh yeah. >> Yeah, yeah that's great. >> Yep, it is great. >> I was, I was on the fence by the way. I was like, I was a green or yellow, depending on the person. >> (both) Yeah. >> Yeah. But giving, giving everybody the opportunity to socialize again and to have those, those conversations that you just can't have by zoom, because you have somebody you've seen someone and it jogs your memory and also the control of do I want to shake someone's hand or do I not. They've done a great job. And I think hopefully this is a good test in the water for others, other organizations to learn. This can be done safely because of the community. You can't replicate that on video. >> (Peter) Absolutely. And I'll tell you this one for us, this is our, this is our event. This is the event for us every single year. We, we it's the only event we care about at the end of the day. So. >> What are some of the things that you've seen in the last year, in terms of where, we were talking a lot about the, the adoption of Kubernetes, kind of, where is it in its maturation state, but we've seen so much acceleration and digital transformation in the last 18 months for every industry businesses rapidly pivoting multiple times to try to, to survive one and then figure out a new way to thrive in this, this new I'll call it the new. Now I'll borrow that from a friend at Citrix, the new now, not the new normal, the new now, what are some of the things that you've seen in the last year and a half from, from your customer base in terms of what have they been coming to you saying help? >> (Peter) You know, I think going back to the earlier point about time to value, that's the thing that a lot. So a lot of our customers are, you know, very big Kubernetes, you know, they're, they're big consumers of Kubernetes. I would say, you know, for me, when I do the, we do our, our QBRs with our top customers, I would say 80% of them are huge Kubernetes shops. Right. And the biggest bottleneck for them actually is onboarding new engineers because a lot of the, and you know, we have a customer, we have better mortgage. We have, IBM, we have Rappi is a customer of ours. They're like Latin American version of Instacart. They double their engineering base and you, you know, like 18 in 18 months. And so that's, you know, I think it was maybe from 1500 to 3000 developers or so, so their thing is like, we need to get people on board as soon as possible. We need to get them in these tools, getting access to, to, to their longs, to whatever they need. And so that's been the biggest thing that we've heard over and over again is A, how can we hire? And then B when we hire them, how do we onboard them as quickly as possible, so that they're ramped up and they're adding value. >> How do you help with that onboarding, making it faster, seamless so that they can get value faster? >> So for us, you know, we really lean in on our, our customer success teams. So they do, you know, they do trainings, they do best practices. Basically. We kind of think of ourselves given how much Kubernetes contradiction we have, we think of ourselves as cross pollinators. So a lot of the times we'll go into those decks and we'll try to learn just as much as we're trying to try to teach. And then we'll go and repeat that process through every single set of our customers. So a lot of the patterns that we'll see are, well, you know, what kinds of tools are you using for orchestration? What kind of tools are you using for deployment? How are you thinking about X, Y, and Z? And then, you know, even our own SRE teams will kind of get into the mix and, you know, provide tips and feedback. >> (Lisa) Customer centricity is key. We've heard that a lot today. We hear that from a lot of companies. It's one thing to hear it. It's another thing to see it. And it sounds like the Yelp review that you would have given, or, or what you're hearing through G2 crowd. I mean, that voice of the customer is valid. That's, that's the only validation. I think that really matters because analysts are paid. >> Yeah. >> But hearing that validation through the voice of the customer consistently lets you know, we're going in the right direction here. >> Absolutely. >> I think it's, it's interesting that ease of use comes up. You wonder if those are only anonymous reviews, you don't necessarily associate open source community with cutting edge, you know, we're the people on the pirate ship. >> (Peter) Yeah. And so when, when, when people start to finally admit, you know, some ease of use would be nice. I think that's an indication of maturity at a certain point. It's saying, okay, not everyone is going to come in and sit behind a keyboard and program things in machine language. Every time we want to do some simple tasks, let's automate, let's get some ease of use into this. >> And I'll tell you in the early days it drove me and our, our CEO talker. It drove us nuts that people would say easiest to be like, that's so shallow. It doesn't mean anything. Well, you know, all of that. However, but to your point, if we don't meet the use case, if we don't have the power behind it, the ease of use is abstracting away. It's like an iceberg, right. It's abstracting away a lot. So we can't even have the ease of use conversation unless we're able to meet the use case. So, so what we've been doing is digging into that more, be like, okay, ease of use, but what were you trying to do? What, what is it that we enabled? Because ease of use, if it's a very shallow set of use cases is not as valid as ease of use for petabytes of data for an organization like IBM. Right? >> That's a great, I'm glad that you dug into that because ease of use is one of those things that you'll see it in marketing materials, but to your point, you want to know what does this actually mean? What are we delivering? >> Right. >> And now, you know what you're delivering with Peter, thank you for sharing with us about logged in and what you guys are doing, how you're helping your community of customers and hearing the voice of the customer through G2 and others. Good work. >> Thank you. And by the way, I'll be remiss if I, if I don't say this, if you're interested in learning more about some of the stuff that we're working on, just go to logging in dot com. We've got, I think we've got a banner for the early access programs that I mentioned earlier. So, you know, at the end of the day, to your point about customer centricity, everything we prioritize is based on our customers, what they need, what they tell us about. And so, you know, whatever engagement that we get from the people at the show and prospects, like that's how we drive a roadmap. >> (Lisa) Yup. That's why we're all here. Log dna.com. Peter, thank you for joining Dave and me today. We appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> Our pleasure for Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin signing off from Los Angeles today. The Kubes coverage of KubeCon clouding of con 21 continues tomorrow. We'll see then. (soft techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube conversation sponsored by Citrix. This is the third and final installment in the Citrix launchpad series. We're going to be talking about the launchpad series for work. Lisa Martin here with Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and principal analyst at Constellation research. Dion, welcome to the program. >> No, thanks Lisa. Great to be here. >> So we have seen a tremendous amount of change in the last 18, 19 months. You know, we saw this massive scatter to work from home a year and a half ago. Now we're in this sort of distributed environment. That's been persisting for a long time. Talk to me about, we're going to be talking about some of the things that Citrix is seeing and some of the things that they're doing to help individuals and teams, but give me your lens from Constellation's perspective. What are some of the major challenges with this distributed environment that you've seen? >> Sure. Well, so we've gone from this, you know, the world of work, the way that it was now, we're all very decentralized, you know, work from anywhere. Remote work is really dominating, you know, white collar types of activities in the workplace and workplaces that in our homes for most of us even today. But that started to change. Some people are going back. Although I just recently spoke to a panel of CIOs that says they have no plans anytime soon, but they're very aware that they need to have workable plans for when we start sending people back to the office and there's this big divide. How are we going to make sure that we have one common culture? We have a collaborative organization when, you know, a good percentage of our workers are in the office, but also maybe as much as half the organization is at home. And so, how to make processes seamless, how to make people collaborate and make sure there's equity and inclusion so that the people at home aren't left out and then people in the office, maybe you don't have an unfair advantage. So those are all the conversations. And of course, because this is a technology revolution, remote work was enabled by technology. We're literally looking at it again for this hybrid work, this, you know, this divided organization that we're going to have. >> You mentioned culture that's incredibly important, but also challenging to do with this distribution. I was looking at some research that Citrix provided, asking individuals from a productivity perspective, and two thirds said, hey, for our organizations that have given us more tools for collaboration and communication, yes, we are absolutely more productive. But the kicker is, the same amount of people, about two thirds that answered the survey said, we've now got about ten tools. So complexity is more challenging. It's harder to work individually. It's harder to work in teams. And so Citrix is really coming to the table here with the launchpad series for work, saying let's help these individuals and these teams, because as we, we think, and I'm sure you have insight Dion on this as well, this hybrid model that we're starting to see emerge is going to be persistent for a while. >> Yeah. For the foreseeable future. Cause we don't know what the future holds. So we'll have to hold the hybrid model as the primary model. And we may eventually go back to the way that we were. But for the next several years, there's going to be that. And so we're trying to wrap our arms around that. And I think that we're seeing with things like the Citrix announcements, a wave of responses saying, all right, let's really design properly for these changes. You know, we kind of just adapted quickly when everyone went to remote last year and now we're actually adding features to streamline, to reduce the friction, to simplify remote work, which does use, you have to use more applications. You have to switch between different things. You have to, you know, your employee experience in the digital world is just more cluttered and complicated, but it doesn't have to be. And so I, you know, we can look to some of these announcements for last year, I think address some of that. >> Let's break some of that down because to your point, it doesn't have to be complex complicated. It shouldn't be. Initially this scatter was, let's do everything we can to ensure that our teams and our people can be productive, can communicate, can collaborate. And now, since this is going to be persistent for quite some time, to your point, let's design for this distributed environment, this hybrid workforce of the future. Talk to me about the, one of the things that Citrix is doing with Citrix workspace, the app personalization, I can imagine as an individual contributor, but also as a team leader, the ability to customize this to the way that I work best is critical. >> And it really is, especially when you know, you have workers, you know, 18 or 19 months worth of new hires that you've never met. They don't really feel like, you know, this is maybe their organization. But if you allow them to shape it a little bit, make it contextual for them. So they don't just come into this cookie cutter digital experience that actually is kind of more meaningful for them. It makes it easier for them to get their job done and things are the way that they want them and where they want them. I think that makes a lot of sense. And so the app personalization announcements is important for remote workers in particular, but all workers to say, hey, can I start tailoring, you know, parts of my employee experience? So they make more sense for me. And I feel like I belong a little bit more. I think it's significant. >> It is. Let's talk about it from a security perspective though. We've seen massive changes in the security landscape in the last year and a half. We've seen some Citrix data that I was looking at, said between 2019 and 2020, ransomware up 435%, malware up 358%. And of course the weakest link being humans. Talk to me from a Citrix workspace perspective about some of the things that they've done to ensure that those security policies can be applied. >> Well, and the part that I really liked about the launchpad announcements around work in terms of security was this much more intelligent analysis. You know, one of the most frustrating things is you're trying to get work done remotely and maybe you're you're in crunch mode and all of a sudden the security system clamps down because they think you're doing something that, you know, you might be sharing information you shouldn't be and now you can't, get your deadline met. I really liked how the analytics inside the new security features really try to make sure they're applying intelligent analysis of behavior. And only when it's clear that a bad actor is in there doing something, then they can restrict access, protect information. And so I have no doubt they'll continue to evolve the product so that it's even even more effective in terms of how it can include or exclude bad actors from doing things inside your system. And so this is the kind of intelligence security increasingly based on AI type technologies that I think that will keep our workers productive, but clamp down on the much higher rate of that activity we see out there. Because we do have so many more endpoints there's a thousand or more times more endpoints in today's organizations because of remote work. >> Right. And one of the things that we've seen with ransomware, I mentioned those numbers that Citrix was sharing. It's gotten so much more personalized, so it's harder and harder to catch these things. One of the things that I found interesting, Dion, that from a secure collaboration perspective, that Citrix is saying is that, you know, we need to go, security needs to go beyond the devices and the endpoints and the apps that an employee is using, which of which we said, there are at least 10 apps that are being used today and it needs to actually be applied at a content level, the content creation level. Talk to me about your thoughts about that. >> I think that's exactly right. So if you know the profile of that worker and the types of things they normally do, and you see unusual behavior that is uncharacteristic to that worker, because you know their patterns, the types of content, the locations of that content that they might normally have access to. And if they're just accessing things, you know, periodically, that's usually not a problem. When they suddenly access a large volume of information and appear to be downloading it, those are the types of issues and especially of content they don't normally use for their work. Then you can intervene and take more intelligent actions as opposed to just trying to limit all content for example. So that knowledge workers can actually get access to all that great information in your IT systems. You can now give them access to it, but when clearly something, something bad is happening, the system automatically does it and steps in. >> I was looking at some of the data with respect to updates to Citrix analytics that it can now auto change permissions on shared files to read only, I think you alluded to this earlier, when it detects that excess sharing is going on. >> And, inappropriate access sharing. So sometimes it's okay for a worker to access, you know, documents. But the big fear is that a bad actor gets access. They get a USB key and they download a bunch of files and they get a whole bunch of IP or important knowledge. Well, when you have a system that's continually monitoring and you know, the unblinking gaze of Citrix security capabilities are looking at the patterns, not just the content alone or just the device alone, but at the, at the usage patterns and saying, I can make this read only because that's clearly the, you know, we don't want them to be able to download this because this activity is completely out of bounds or very unusual. >> Right. One of the things also that Citrix is doing is integrating with Microsoft teams. I was listening to a fun quiz show the other day that said, what were the top two apps downloaded in 2020? And I guessed one of them correctly, Tiktok though. I still don't know how to use it. And the second one was Zoom, and I'm sure Microsoft teams is way up there. I was looking at some stats that said, I think as of the spring of 2020, there were 145 million daily users of Microsoft teams. So that, from a collaboration perspective, something that a lot of folks are dependent on during the pandemic. And now within Teams, I can access Microsoft workspace? Citrix workspace. >> Yes. Well, and it's more significant than it sounds because there's a real hunger to find a center of gravity for the employee experience. What do I put that? Where should they be spending most of their time? Where should I be training them to focus most of their attention? And obviously workers collaborate a lot and Teams as part of Office 365, is a juggernaut? You know, the rise of it during the pandemic has been incredible. And just to show this, I have a digital workplace advisory board. Its companies who are heading, are the farthest along in designing digital employee experiences, and 31% of them said, this January, they're planning on centralizing the employee experience in Teams. Now, if you're a Citrix customer, you have workspace you go, how do I, I don't want to be left out. This announcement allows you to say, you can have the goodness of teams and its capabilities and the power of Citrix workspace, and you have them in one place and really creating a true center of gravity and simplifying and streamlining the employee experience. You don't have this fragmented pieces. Everything's right there in one place, in one pane of glass. And so I like this announcement. It brings Citrix up to parody with a lot of their competitors and actually eclipses several of them as well. So I really like to see this. >> So then from within teams, I can access Citrix workspace. I can share documents with team members and collaborate as well as that kind of the idea. >> Yes. That is the idea, and of course, they'll continue to evolve that, but now you can do your work in Citrix workspace and when documents are involved and you want to bring your team in, they're already right there inside that experience. >> That ability to streamline things, so critical, given the fact that we're still in this distributed environment, I'm sure families are still dealing with some, some amount of remote learning, or there's still distractions from the, do I live at work, do I work from home environment? One of the grips I really felt for when this happened, Dion, was the contact center. I thought these poor people, more people now with shorter and shorter fuses trying to get updates on whatever it was that they were, if they had something ordered and of course all the shipping delays. And the contact center of course went (blowing sound) scattered as well. And we've got people working from home, trying to do their jobs. Talk to me about some of those things that Citrix is doing to enable with Google, those contact center workers to have a good experience so that ultimately the employee experience is good, so is the customer experience? >> The contact center worker has the toughest of all of the different employee profiles I've seen, they have the most they have to learn, the most number of applications. They're typically not highly skilled workers. So they might only just have a, you know, high school education. Yet, they're being asked to cram all of these technologies, each one with a different employee experience, and they don't stay very long as a result of that. You might train them for two months before they're effective and they only stay for six months on average. And so, both businesses really want to be able to streamline onboarding and provisioning a and getting them set up and effective. And they want it too, if you want happy contact center workers making your customers happy and staying around. And so this announcements really allows you to deploy pre-configured Citrix workspaces on, on Chrome OS so that, you know, if you need to field a whole bunch of workers or you have a big dose say you're a relief company and you have a lot of disaster care workers. You can certainly this issue that these devices very easily, they're ready to go with their employee experience and all the right things in place so they can be effective with the least amount of effort. So I guess, it's a big step forward for a worker that is often neglected and underserved. >> Right. Definitely often neglected. And you, you brought up a good point there. And one of the things that, that peaked in my mind, as you talked about, you know, the onboarding experience, the retention, well, these contact center folks are the front lines to the customer. So from a brand reputation perspective, that's on the line, for companies in every industry where people with short fuses are dealing with contact center folks. So the ability to onboard them to give them a much more seamless experience is critical for the brand reputation, customer retention for every industry, I would imagine. >> Absolutely. Especially when you're setting up a contact center or you have a new product launching and you want, you know, you've got to bring, onboard all these new workers, you can do it, and they are going to have the least challenges. They're going to be ready to go right out of the box, be able to receive their package, with their device and their Citrix employee experience, ready to go. You know, just turn the machine on and they're off to the races. And that's the vision and that's the right one. So I was glad to see that as well. >> Yeah. Fantastic. One of the things also that Citrix did, the Citrix workspace app builder, so that Citrix workspace can now be a system of record for certain things like collaboration, surveys, maybe even COVID-19 information, that system of record. Talk to me about why that's so critical for the distributed worker. >> So we've had this, this longstanding challenge in that we've had our systems of record, you know, these are CRM systems, ERP, things like that, which we use to run our business. And then we've had our collaboration tools and they're separate, even though we're collaborating on sales deals and we're collaborating on our supply chain. And so like, the team's announcement was in the same game. We can say, let's close that gap between our systems of record and our collaboration tools. Well, this announcement says, all right, well, we still have these isolated systems of record. How can we streamline them to build and start connecting together a little bit so that we have processes that might cross all of those things, right? It's still going to order comes in from the CRM system. Then you can complete it in the, in the ERP system, you know, ordering that product for them. So they actually get it. You know, and that's probably overkill, that scenario for this particular example. But for example, collecting data from workers saying, let's build some forms and collect some data and then feed it to this process, or this system record. You can do it much more easily than before, before you would have to hire a development team or a contractor to develop another system that would integrate, you know, CRM or ERP or whatever. Now you can do it very quickly inside that builder. First simple, basic applications, and get a lot of the low hanging fruit off your plate and more automated inside of your Citrix workspace. >> And automation has been one of the keys that we've seen to streamlining worker productivity in the last 18 months. Another thing that I was looking at is, you know, the fact that we have so many different apps and we're constantly switching apps, context is constantly changing. Is this sort of system of record going to allow or reduce the amount of context switching that employees have to do? >> Yep. Almost all of these announcements have some flavor to that saying, can we start bringing more systems together in one place? So you're not switching between applications. You don't have different and disconnected sets of data that if you need to, and if they are disconnected, you can connect them, right. That's what the app builder announcement again is about saying, all right, if you're already, always using these three applications to do something, and you're switching between them, maybe you can just build something that connect them into one experience and, you know, maybe a low level of IT person, or even a business user can do that. That's the big trend right now. >> That's so important for that continued productivity, as things will continue to be a little bit unstable, I guess, for awhile. One more thing that I saw that Citrix is announcing is integrations with, Wrike I've been a Wrike user myself. I like to have program project management tools that I can utilize to keep track of projects, but they've done a number of integrations, one of them with Wrike Signature, which I thought was really cool. So for, to secure e-signature within Wrike, based on a program or a project that you're working on. Talk to me about some of the boosts to Wrike that they've done and how you think that's going to be influential in the employee experience. >> Well, first let's just say that the Wrike acquisition was a really important one for Citrix to go above just the basic digital workplace and simple systems of record. This is a really a mass collaboration tool for managing work itself. And so they're, this is taking Citrix up the stack in the more sophisticated work scenarios. And, and when you, we are in more sophisticated work scenarios, you want to be able to pull in different data sets. So, you know, they have the Citrix ShareFile support. You want to be able to bring in really important things like, you know, signing contracts or signing sales deals or mortgage applications, or all sorts of exciting things that actually run in your business. And so, Wrike Signatures, support's really important so that when you have key processes that involve people putting signatures on documents, you can just build collaborative work management flows that, that take all that into account without having to leave the experience. Everything's in one place as much as possible. And this is the big push and we need to have all these different systems. We don't have too many apps. What we have is too many touchpoints, so lets start combining some of these. And so the Wrike integrations, really help you do that. >> Well, and ultimately it seems like what Citrix is doing with the work launchpad series. All the announcements here is really helping workers to work how and where they want to work. Which is very similar to what we say when we're talking about the end user customer experience. When tech companies like Citrix say, we have to meet our customers where they are, it sounds like that's the same thing that's happening here. >> It is. And I would just add on top of that and to make it all safe. So you can bring all these systems together, work from anywhere, and you can feel confident that you're going to do so securely and safely. And it's that whole package I think that's really critical here. >> You're right, I'm glad you brought up that security. All right, Dion take out your crystal ball for me. As we wrap things up, you're saying, you know, going into the future, we're going to be moving from this distributed workforce to this hybrid. What are some of the things that you see as really critical happening in the next six to nine months? >> Well, there's a real push to say, we need to bring in all the workers that we've hired over the last year. Maybe not bringing them in, in person, but can we use these collaborative tools and technologies to bring them, hold them closer so they get to know us. And so, you know, things like, having Microsoft teams integrated right into your Citrix workspace makes it easier for you to collaborate with remote workers and inside any process wherever you are. So whether you're in the office or not, it should bring workers closer, especially those remote ones that are at risk of being left out as they move to hybrid work. And then it's really important. And so the things like the app builder are going to also allow building those connections. And I think that workers and businesses are really going to try and build those bridges, because the number one thing I'm hearing from business leaders and IT leaders is, is it, you know, we're worried about splitting into two different organizations, the ones that are remote and the ones that are in the office and any way that we can bring all of them together in an easy way, in a natural way, situate the digital employee experience so that we really back or back to one company, one common culture, everybody has equal access and equity to the employee experience. That's going to be really important. And I think that Citrix launchpad announcements around work really are a step, a major step in the right direction for that. There's still more things that have to be done and all, all vendors are working on that. But it's nice to see. I really liked what Citrix is doing here to move the ball forward towards where we're all going. >> It is nice to see, and those connections are critically important. I happen to be at an in-person event last week, and several folks had just had been hired during the pandemic and just got to meet some of their teams. So in terms of, of getting that cultural alignment, once again, this is a great step towards that. Dion thank you for joining me on the program, talking about the Citrix launchpad series for work, all the great new things that they're announcing and sharing with us as some of the things that you see coming down the pike. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks Lisa, for having me. >> For Dion Hinchcliffe. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube conversation. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson and we are recapping the Citrix launchpad series. This series presents announcements on LinkedIn live on a variety of subjects, specifically cloud, security, and work. Three topics that I think all of us are keenly aware of going through the last 18 months of the pandemic. Citrix has taken time to sort of regroup and look at ways that security can be improved so that it isn't a hindrance for members of staff, but instead offers a unified integrated way of dealing with security across all of the variety of situations we find ourselves in today. Everything from a mobile device in a cafe through actually working back in the office when we get the opportunity to, to accessing information on a company issued laptop in a home office, secured networks, unsecured networks, secured browsers, unsecured browsers, the permutations are nearly endless. So Citrix has taken an interesting point of view, starting from the perspective of zero trust, meaning everything must be authenticated. They apply contextualism to their strategies. So the context and the posture of the access, the device, the location, all of those matter so that security protocols are tailored to help enhance productivity and security instead of, again, being a hindrance. So I highly recommend you go to the Citrix launchpad site dedicated to security. Two senior Citrix execs, Tim and Joe, will go through great detail on the announcements, but let's recap a little bit from an overview perspective. The first is this idea of secure private access. You combine that with secure internet access, and now you have a package that allows this contextual security posture that can change and adapt based upon varying conditions. Additionally, they have announced a partnership with Google where all of these capabilities are built into the Chrome OS. So now you have a device level native support for these protocols. They're also talking about bot management as something that is critical to security, moving forward. Bots out fishing, you want to kill them. You don't want them getting into your system, but there are some bots that are okay that have poking around in your environment. So again, go into the details with Tim and Joe. Having said that, I am delighted to have a very special guest here. Friend of theCUBE, veteran of theCUBE, author, advisor, author of the book, Cyber Minds and Tech Executive, Shira Rubinoff, is going to join us in just a moment. (upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are recapping the Citrix launchpad series with a focus on the topic of security. Now, whenever we're going to talk security on theCUBE, we have a CUBE veteran and smartest person on cybersecurity that we know, Shira Rubinoff. She's a cybersecurity executive author and advisor, specifically author of the excellent book on the subject, Cyber Minds. Shira, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Pleasure to be here. >> How are you today? >> Doing great, always great to be on theCUBE and talk to you folks and certainly be part of something from Citrix. >> Well, that might be the last pleasant thing that we say, because we are surrounded by security threats. So are you ready to get serious? >> Oh, always with a smile, serious with a smile. >> So, one kind of overriding question that a lot of people have now, if you're an IT executive, you've experienced a complete change in the world from so many different angles, but how has the pandemic changed the way you think of security? What are the dynamics at play, things that are different now that we couldn't have anticipated maybe two or three years ago? >> Interesting question. Certainly, if we look at the scope and the ecosystem of the way that organizations operated, it was pretty much in the high 90% of people being in the office with just the few percentage being working from home. And that had to shift literally overnight to literally the flip side of it, having the multitude of the organization work from home, work remotely, and maybe the few people that had to be in the office were there. So all of a sudden organizations were left with this, how do we secure down our organization? How do we keep our employees safe? How do we keep our organization safe? How do we connect to the outside world? What do we do to maintain the proper cyber? That's call it cyber hygiene within an organization. And that's a topic that I talk about quite frequently. When you look at cybersecurity as a whole, we look at the cyber posture of an organization. We also have to break it down and say, what does an organization need to do to be fully cyber secure? So of course, the ongoing training and that had to shift as well. We have now training for the organization and employees, but also think about the consumers and who else is interacting with organizations. We have to switch how that is done. And that has to be ongoing in the global awareness, the cybersecurity of course is at top of mind. And then that would lead to us to zero trust. Zero trust is a massive, massive piece of cybersecurity need for organizations. We think about it as who needs the data is king. Whoever has the data, they rule the world. They own the organization, they do what they need to do. Zero trust, limited access, knowledge of who gets in, why they get in, the need to get in, and the need for that within organization. So zero trust is a very key component and Citrix is very focused on as well. We talk about updated security and patching and all that has to happen, think about remotely. So not only are we thinking about all these topics, we have to think about them going at warp speed with people that might be working remote, who also have other things they have to take care of. Maybe they're taking care of elderly parents, maybe they're having to watch their kids on zoom, making sure they're staying on zoom, and all sorts of things with school, and other maybe roommates who are working for other organizations, not having important information in the backgrounds of their zoom while they're having these important conversations with organizations. But also think about the multiple devices people are using. They may have an area that's set up properly in order to do their work, but then again, they have to be in another room at the same time. Oh, let me just grab my device. So the whole area of the multiple devices, the warp speed of working and not, let's call this pause. And this is one of the key elements that I would tell all organizations to stop and pause, to think about what you're doing before you do it. Give the headaches, but that was not interplayed when the height of the pandemic. The height of the pandemic, we were worried about what's going on? Need knowledge of information, where we're getting this information, downloading it, clicking on links. Then we're working at the same time, taking care of people. So all these things are happening simultaneously, leaving these open vectors for the tax surface to be that much more heightened for the bad actors to get in. >> So, you advise some of the largest companies in the world on this subject, and obviously you're not going to reveal any names or specifics, but as a general overall view from your perspective, how are we doing right now? Is the average large organization now sort of back on cruise control, having figured everything out for this new reality? On a scale of 1 to 10, how well are we executing against all of these changes? >> That's a great question. Let me talk about the global whole. I think organizations are actually doing really well. I think there was a quick ramp up to figure out how to get it done, but because of also the shift of sharing of information that some of these largest companies across the world, they came together to share information with bad actors, to share information about the tax, to share information about what to do if something happens, who's out there and buying together almost like a whole. So it wasn't each finger on its own. It's a hand as a whole looking at it from a stronger perspective. So I think that shift coupled with the fact of the knowledge and understanding of what companies needed to do in terms of locking down the organization, but also allowing and helping their employees, empowering them to get their work done, but get it done in a secure safe fashion. And I believe now, obviously, we all know, they obviously, but the ransomware attacks are now prevalent and they're becoming even more intense with the rise of 5G, a way that attacks could happen, the warp speed. We're now having to understand that being reactive is not enough, being proactive is something that is wonderful to see organizations are doing as well. It used to be okay, let's be reactive. If something happens, what do we do? Let's have a plan in place. But that's not good enough and we've seen that happen because these attacks are coming a warp speed. So the proactivity of these organizations that they've taken is applaudable in general. I can't talk for all the companies, but the ones that I've been consulting to and have interactions with, I'm pleasantly surprised and not surprised as well, that the way that they've taken their cyber posture so seriously, and where they focus in, not only on the organization as a whole, but their employees as individuals, what their needs are and being able to give them what they need to do their jobs well. >> Yeah, that makes sense. You can almost think of it like cybersecurity is a team sport and to the extent that all of that proactive work that an organization can do can be absolutely undermined if we don't do our parts as endpoints, as endpoint people. And when someone reads Cyber Minds, I think there's an undercurrent that I definitely sensed. And then when I looked more closely into your background, I realized that, yes, in fact, you do have a background in psychology. I want to shift to a question along that line, if you don't mind. Thinking about the psychology of people who have lived through the pandemic, this concept of our personal hygiene and our personal security has been in the forefront of our mind. As you leave the house, and there's hand sanitizer and masks and maybe gloves, we're very, very aware of this. How has that affected us from a cybersecurity team sport perspective? Has that made us better players on the field? What are your thoughts in that regard? >> I actually love that question. As we saw the pandemic heightened, everyone became hyper aware of their own personal, what's called cleanliness. And in terms of where they are, what they're doing, if they're masking, if they're putting on gloves, the sanitizers are everywhere, six feet apart. Everybody's thinking about that. It's a forefront. It became a way of life. And if you then do you shift that and you're saying, okay, let's look at the technology or the cybersecurity part of it, your own personal safety, your own personal cybersecurity. I think we failed a lot in that area. I think because of the fact, if you think about the human psychology and the pieces that people needed to know information, everybody was hungry for the latest and greatest information. What's going on? What are the stats? How many people? Just terrible, terrible pandemic with so many people getting sick. So many people dying and wanting to know, what is going on? what are the latest rule sets? What can I do? What else can I do to protect myself? What is my business doing? So we also had bad actors sending out the phishing attacks, heightened tremendously. There is information being sent out, click here for the latest here. This is Dr. Fauchi, his latest report. Everything going out there was not necessarily to help us, but to hurt us. And because of people's human psychology of thinking, I need to protect myself, so I need the information. The stop and pause is, is this the right information? Is this a safe place to go? But then there's also the other flip side of, if I'm not interacting, I'm not there. Think about the different generational people we have going on. Gen Z, millennials, all sorts of it. Everybody's all over social media. And everybody needs to and wants to have a presence there, certainly in this world. So putting out lots of information and being present was very critical 'cause people weren't in-person anymore. So people were interacting online, whether it being on social, whether it being telling people where they're going, what they're doing, what they're eating, what their favorite animal is, all sorts of things that they were doing. But they were giving over personal information that made have be utilized as passwords or ways to get to know somebody, to either do a spear phishing attack or any types of attacks to gather information to hurt, not just a personal to steal money or to steal someone's identity or to come in and hurt the company, but information was everywhere. So we were taking care of our personal cleanliness, but our cyber hygiene with our psychologies aspect of cybersecurity itself, I think took a big dive. And I think that people started becoming aware as these attack surfaces grew. There were also different types of attacks that were happening where phone calls were coming in and saying, somebody is breaking into your bank account. Just verify yourself, give me the last four digits. I need to know who you are. So playing on the human psyche of fear, somebody is trying to get you nervous. So what are you going to do? You're going to act quickly without thinking. Or all sorts of, I think we were talking earlier about extended warranties for different things. That also grew extensively, but how did they do that? They were gathering information, personal information to give you something you want. So if you're playing again on the human psychology of people, when people get what they want, they're more likely to give over something they may not give to somebody else anyway. And one of my biggest example or a strong example is back in the day with Candy Crush. If you think about that game, before you sign up for that game, you literally have to give over your kidney. You're giving over access to your camera, to your contacts. If you look back at the permissions you are giving, it's really unbelievable that everybody was clicking yes, because they wanted to play a game. So take that example and transfer that into real life. We were doing the same thing. So the importance of brushing up on that personal cyber hygiene and really understanding what people needed to do to heighten their own security themselves, less sharing on social, not giving over information that they shouldn't, not allowing a trusted source who isn't really a trusted source into it. Having strong zero trust, not just organizations, but for yourself was very important. >> Yeah now, did we, Chuck. Chuck's my producer. Did we get Shira's social security number and her date of birth? Shira, can you give us that? >> Sure, it's 555-55-5555. >> Excellent Aha, phishing attack. >> There you go, go for it. (laughs) >> So you think there could be a little bit of security fatigue that might come into play when we're thinking of living up to our responsibilities as those end points? >> I think there was just fatigue in general and people were tired of being locked in the house. People were tired of having everybody under the same roof all the time, 24/7. Trying to get work done, trying to get school done, taking care of people, what they needed to do, having groceries delivered, going into groceries, all the thoughts that they had to do that was just a way of life before that we all took for granted during the pandemic. It was just a whole shift. People were just antsy, jumpy. We needed to connect and we need to connect in any way we could. So all these open vectors became a problem that ended up hurting us rather than helping us. So this has been something that was a big mind shift as a pandemic continued. People started realizing what was going on and organizations took a good stand on educating the population and telling them, look, these are the things that are happening. This is what we need to do. Certainly a lot of the companies I'm working with did such a great job with that. Giving their employees the wherewithal of wanting to connect, but doing in a secure manner. Giving them the tools of what they needed to do personal, only also in their personal lives, not just for their work lives. So that was helpful too. And as we're coming out of it, hopefully continue to come completely out of it, we'll see the shift back into, let's take that stop and pause. Let's think what we're doing. >> Yeah, well, we are all looking back to whatever resemblance of normal we can get to. Shira, I can spend hours picking your brain on a variety of subjects. Unfortunately, we are coming to the end of our time together. Do you promise to come back? >> Certainly, a big fan of theCUBE. >> Well, fantastic. Shira Rubinoff, thank you so much for your time. This is Dave Nicholson with a very special CUBE conversation, signing out. Thanks for watching. >> Shira: Thank you too. (gentle music)

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the queue covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>We'll go back to the cubes coverage of UI paths forward for big customer event. You know, this company has always bucked the trend and they're doing it again. They're having a live event, physical event. There are customers here, partners, technologists. I'm here with Lisa Martin, my co-host for the show. And we're going to talk about testing. It's a new market for UI path. If anybody knows anything about testing, it's kind of this mundane, repetitive process ripe for automation geared vice-chairs. Here's the senior vice president of testing products at UI path and Matt Elisa. Who's the product marketing lead at UI path. Gents. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us feminists. Explain to us how you guys think about testing both from an internal perspective and how you're going to market. >>Yeah, well, testing has been around for a long time, right? 25 years or so when, when I came to UI pass, the first thing I looked at was like, how do our customers test RPA? And it's quite interesting. We did a survey actually with 1500 people and, uh, 27% said that they wouldn't test at all. And I thought that's really interesting. RPA is a business critical software that runs in your production environment and you probably have to test. So we came up with this idea that we create the test suite we're using, you know, proven technology from UI pass. And, and we built this offering and brought this into the market for RPA testing and for application testing. So we do both. And of course we use it internally as well. I mean, that will be, you know, eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne, I guess. Yeah. >>Well, think about it. If you, if you automate, if you, if there's an ROI to automate a process, there's gotta be an ROI to verify that it's going to work before it goes into production too. And so it's amazing that a lot of companies are not doing this and they're doing it manually, um, today. >>So, so, but so, but parts of testing have been automated, haven't they with regression testing. So can, can you guys take us through kind of the before and after and how you're approaching it versus the traditional way? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like I said, testing is not new, right? Um, but still when you look at the customers, they're not out to meeting more than I would say, 30, 40% of the manual tests. So still a lot of Stan manually, which I think, and we talked about this right manual testing is the, the original RPA. It's a tedious, repetitive tasks that you should not do manually. Right? And so what we are trying to bring in is now we're talking about this new role, it's called a digital tester. The digital tester is an empowered. We could call a manual tester, who's able to build automation and we believe that this will truly increase the automation, even in the existing testing market. And it's going to be, I don't want to use the word game-changer, but it's gonna change. Uh, the way testing is done. Yeah. >>And we're, we're applying, um, all the capabilities of UI path and delivering those testers, just like we would for HR team or a, or a, a finance and accounting team. But testing even has they understand this more, they've been doing this for 20 years. They understand automation and we're going to get them things like process mining so they can figure out what tests they need to run from production data. We're going to give them task mining so they can make more human-like tests test. Exactly. Like I used to be a tester, uh, and I ran a test team. And what I used to do is I have to go out to a warehouse and I'd have to go watch people as they entered orders, to make sure I was testing it the right way. So they would like click. We usually thought they were clicking things, whether you're using hotkeys, that's just an example of what they were doing. But now we can do task, task mining to get that remotely, pull that data in and do tests and make more realistic tests. >>How much of the there's so much potential there? I think you were saying that only 27% are actually doing testing. So there's so much opportunity. I'm curious, where are your conversations within the customer organization? We know that automation is a board level investor topic. Where are you? Where are those discussions with the testing folks, the RPA folks, helping them come together? >>Well, that's interesting. The question we typically, on the IP side, we talked to the cos by the people that are professionally developing those RPAs, but very easily, we get introduced to the test side of the house. And then usually there's a joint meeting where the test people are there, the RPA people are there. And that's why we are talking about this is going to convert somehow, right? They are in different departments today. But if you think about it, if five years down the road, maybe 10 years, they might be an automation discipline for the entire enterprise. So if that answered your question about, >>Yeah, >>Yeah. And we have a customer coming presenting this afternoon, Chipola and they're gonna be talking about how they, both of the teams are using a test teams and the RPA teams. And they built a reusable component library that, so when they built RPA team built their automations, they put them in a reusable library and the test team is able to recreate their tests much faster, reusing about 70% of the components. And so when the, when you think of automation, they're thinking about automating the application, not automating a process or a test so that people can use those like Lego blocks and build it if they're doing so, they could even, even it automation, if they wanted to start doing it, automation, they could pull those components out and use those. >>This is game changing is quality because so often, because in this day and age of agile, it's like move fast and break things. A lot of things break. And when we heard this morning in the keynotes, how you guys are pushing code like a couple of times a week, I mean, it's just a constant. And then you do two big releases. Okay. I get, I get it for the on-prem. But when you're pushing code that fast, you don't have time to test everything. There's a lot of stuff that's unknown. And so to the extent that you can compress all those checkboxes, now I can focus on the really important things that sometimes are architectural. How do you expect applying RPA to testing is going to affect the quality? Or maybe you got some examples. Chipotle. You just mentioned what, >>First of all, I mean, when you say we pushing code like bi-weekly or so, right. We're talking about continuous development. That's what it's called. Right? It's agile. You have sprint cycles, you continue to bring new code, new code, new code, and you test all the increments with it. So it's not that you building up a huge backlog for the testing on the RPA side. What I see is that there will be a transformation about the process, how they develop RPA at the moment. It's still done very much, I would say, in a waterfall issue, which is agree, >>A big bang waterfall. >>Yeah. It will transition. We already have partners that apply agile methodologies to their actually RPA development. And that's going to change that. >>Okay. So it's not so it's quality for those that are in testing obviously, but, but it's, but for the waterfall guys, it's, it's compressing the time to value. Oh yeah. That's going to be the big key. Yeah. That's really where it's coming. >>But he said his Chipotle is, was able to reuse 70% of the automation components. Right. That's huge. I mean, you have to think about it. 70% can be reused from testing to RPA and vice versa. That's a huge acceleration. Also on the IPA side, you can automate more processes faster. If you have components that you can trust. >>So you were a tester. Yeah. So you were a cost center. Yes, exactly. >>Unnecessary. What's the budget. >>So could you think RPA and automation can flip that mindset? Yes, >>Totally. And that's one of the things we want to do is we want to turn testing from a cost center to a value center, give testers a new career paths, even because really testers before all you could do is you could be more technical. Maybe you become a developer or you could be a manager, but you couldn't really become like an automation architect or a senior automation person. And now we're giving them a whole different career path to go down. So it's really exciting >>Because I know when I came out of college, I had a job offer and I wanted to be a developer, a programmer. We call them back then. And the only job I could get was as a tester. And I was like, oh, this is miserable. I'm not doing this, but there's a, there was a growth path there. They were like, Hey, do this for two or three years, maybe five years. I was like, forget it. I'm going into sales and marketing. But so what's the, what's the growth path today for the tester. And how do you see this >>Changing? So you want to go, you want to, I can take that one. No, you take it. I mean, I did it, so really it's, I mean, we're going to be giving these guys, the testing market has been kind of not innovating for years and years and years. And so we're going to be giving these guys some new tools to make them more powerful, make even the cause. Testing is a kind of a practice that is, you know, like, like you said, you didn't like testing. I didn't like testing either. Actually I hate testing. So I automated it. Right. So, um, and so that was the first thing I did. And so I think we're going to give these guys some new tools, some ways to grow their career and some ways to be even better testers, but like, like, like we talked about process mining, test mining, like maybe they're maybe they're testing the wrong things. Maybe they're not testing, you know, maybe, you know, there, cause there's kind of this test, everything mentality where we need to test everything and the whole release instead of like focusing in on what changed. And so I think we'll be able to help them really focus on the testing and the quality to make it more efficient as well. However, >>So T to defend the testers, right test is a very skilled people. Yes. They know their business, they know what to test and how to test in a way that nobody else knows that it's something we sometimes underestimate. They are not developers, so they don't write code or they don't build automations typically. But if we can equip them with tools that they can build out information, you have the brain and the muscle together, you know what I mean? You don't have to delegate the automation to some, whatever team that is maybe outsourced even you can do it. In-house and I think to some extent, that was also the story of Chipotle, right? Yeah. Yeah. They were in sourcing again because they're building their own >>And it saved them time because they have deal is handoffs, you know, to an external third party to do the testing for them. And so they pulled it all in made things much more streamlined and efficient. How >>Is that? It seems like a big cultural shift within any type of organization in any industry we're using as an example here, how does UI path help facilitate that cultural shift? Cause that's big and we're talking about really reducing, um, or speeding time to value. >>Right. Right. And it is a lot of the agile methodology is like, we're starting. So it's kind of like, we're going back in time, you know, and we're teaching these people, you know, the RPA community, all of the things that we learned from software development. Right. And so we're going to bring applying that to this. And so all those agile mindset, the th the agile values, you know, those are the things that are going to help them kind of come together. And that's one of the things that Julie talked about is one of the things is they had a kind of agile mindset, a can-do attitude that pulled them together. >>I think one thing that will really helps with changing the culture is empowering the people. If you give them the tools that they can do, they will do, and that will change the culture. I don't think it can come from top down. It needs to come from within and from the people. And that's what we see also with RPA, by the way, is adopted on department level and D build automations. And then at some point it becomes maybe an enterprise wide initiative, right. But somebody in HR had this idea and started >>The other thing too, is Matt, you mentioned this, you could go to a third party. So what years ago? In the early two thousands, we had a software company. We would use a company called agile on. They were us. I don't know if you ever heard of them. They're basically, we're a job shop. And we would throw our code over the very waterfall, throw the code over the fence. It was a black box and it was very asynchronous. And it would come back, you know, weeks later. And they say, I fix this, fix this, but we didn't have the analytics we didn't have. There was no transparency. Had we had that. We would have maybe come up with new ideas or a way to improve it because we knew the product way better. And so if you can bring that, in-house now you've got much better visibility. So what, what analytics are analytics a piece of this? >>Is that something that is so, I mean, I'll give you an example, SAP systems, right? When you have SAP systems, customers apply transports like five or 10 a day. Every transport can change the system in a way that you might break the automation. We have the possibility to actually not only understand what's going on in this system with process mining, but we also have the possibility to do change, impact, money, and change impact. Mining tells me with every process, every transport I apply, what has changed, and we can pinpoint the test cases that you need to run. So instead of running a thousand test cases, every time we pinpoint 50 of them and you know exactly what has changed. Yeah. >>That's right. Cause a lot of times you don't know what you don't know. And you're saying the machine is basically saying focus on these areas that are going to give you the biggest, that's kind of Amdahl's law, isn't it focus on the areas that are going to get the most return. Yeah. So this is a new business for UI path. You guys are targeting this as a market segment. Can you tell us more about that? >>We joined about two years ago. It takes some time to build something, right. There was a lot of proven technology there. And then we lounged, uh, I think it wasn't July last year, which was more like a, uh, private lounge. We, we didn't make much noise around it and it's gaining a lot of traction. So it's several hundred customers have already jumped on their test bandwagon, if you can call it this way. And yeah, this, this year we were pushing full speed into the testing market as well, because we see the benefits that customers get when they use both like the story from Chipotle. It has other customers like Cisco and, and more, when you hear the stories, what they were able to achieve. I mean, that's a no-brainer I think for any customer who wants to improve the automation. Yeah. >>Well, and also we're taking production grade automation and giving it to the testers and we're giving them this advanced AI so they can automate things. They weren't able to automate before, like Citrix virtual virtualized machines, point of sale systems, like 12 layer, any other business would have, they can automate all those things now that they couldn't do before, as well as everything else. And then they can also the testing tools, they talked about fragmentation this morning. That's another problem is there's a tool for mobile. There's a tool for this. There's a tool for API APIs. You have all these tools, you have to learn all these languages. We're going to give them one. They can learn and use and apply to all their technologies. And it's easy to use and it's easy to use. Yeah. >>That's kind of been the mantra of UI path for very long time, easy to use making, making RPA simple. We've got 8,000 plus customers. You mentioned a few of them. We're going to have some of them on the program this week. How do you expect good question for you that stat that you mentioned from that survey in the very beginning of our conversation, how do you expect that needle to move in the next year? Because we're seeing so much acceleration because of the pandemic. >>That's a really good question because the questions that we had in the, after we had the first hundred, right? The values didn't change that much. So we have now 1500 and you would assume that is pretty stable from the data. It didn't change that much. So we're still at 27% that are not testing. And that's what we see as our mission. We want to change that no customer that has more than, I dunno, five processes in production should not like not test that's crazy and we can help. And that's our mission. So, but the data is not changing. That's the interesting part. >>I know, I know we're out of time, but, but we're how do you price this? Is it a, is it a set? Is it a subscription? Is it a usage based model? How, how do you, >>It's fully included in the UI pass tool suite. So it means it's on the cloud and on-prem the pricing is the same. We are using this. There >>It is. Yeah. >>It's the same components. Like, like we're using studio for automation, we're using orchestrator, but we're using robots. We have cloud test manager on prem test manager. It's just a part of the >>Value, add that you're putting into the platform. Yeah, yeah, >>Exactly. Yeah. There are components that are priced. Yes. But I mean, it's part of the platform, how it is delivered. >>Yeah. So I paid for that module and you turn it on and use it. So it's a subscription. It could be an annual term if I want multi-year term. I can do that. Exactly. Good. Great guys. Thanks so much for coming on the Cuban and good luck with this. Thank you. Great, great innovations. Okay. Keep it right there at Dave Volante for Lisa Martin, we'll be back with our coverage of UI path forward for, from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>We'll go back to the cubes coverage of UI paths forward for big customer event. You know, this company has always bucked the trend and they're doing it again. They're having a live event, physical event. There are customers here, partners, technologists. I'm here with Lisa Martin, my co-host for the show. And we're going to talk about testing. It's a new market for UI path. If anybody knows anything about testing, it's kind of this mundane, repetitive process ripe for automation geared vice-chairs. Here's the senior vice president of testing products at UI path and Matt Elisa. Who's the product marketing lead at UI path. Gents. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having a feminist Likert. Explain to us how you guys think about testing both from an internal perspective and how you're going to market. >>Yeah, well, testing has been around for a long time, right? 20 twenty-five years or so when, when I came to UI pass, the first thing I looked at was like, how do our customers test RPA? And it's quite interesting. We did a survey actually with 1500 people and, uh, 27% said that they wouldn't test at all. And I thought that's really interesting. RPA is a business critical software that runs in your production environment and you probably have to test. So we came up with this idea that we create the test suite. We're using, you know, proven technology from UI pass. And, and we built this offering and brought us into market for RPA testing in for application testing. So we do both. And of course we use it internally as well. I mean, that will be, you know, eat your own dog food or drink your own champagne, I guess. So >>I want to think about it. If you, if you automate, if you, if there's an ROI to automate a process, there's gotta be an ROI to verify that it's going to work before it goes into production too. And so it's amazing that a lot of companies are not doing this and they're doing it manually, um, today. >>So, so, but so, but parts of testing have been automated, haven't they with regression testing. So can, can you guys take us through kind of the before and after and how you're approaching it versus the traditional? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like I said, testing is not new, right? Um, but still when you look at the customers, they're not out to meeting more than I would say, 30, 40% of the manual tests. So still a lot of Stan manually, which I think, and we talked about this right manual testing is the, the original RPA. It's a tedious, repetitive tasks that you should not do manually. Right? And so what we are trying to bring in is now we're talking about this new role it's called the digital tester. The digital tester is an empowered. We could call a manual tester, who's able to build automation and we believe that this will truly increase the automation, even in the existing testing market. And it's going to be, I don't want to use the word game changer, but it's going change. Uh, the way testing is done. Yeah. >>And we're, we're applying, um, all the capabilities of UI path and delivering those to testers, just like we would for HR team or a, or a, a finance and accounting team. But testing even has they understand this more, they've been doing this for 20 years. They understand automation and we're going to give them things like process mining so they can figure out what tests they need to run from production data. We're going to give them task mining so they can make more human-like tests test. Exactly. Like I used to be a tester and I ran a test team. And what I used to do is I have to go out to a warehouse and I'd have to go watch people as they entered orders, to make sure I was testing it the right way. So they would like click. We usually thought they were clicking things, but they were using hotkeys. That's just an example of what they were doing. But now we can do task task mining to get that remotely, pull that data in and do tests and make more realistic tests. >>So much of the there's so much potential there. I think you were saying that only 27% are actually doing testing. So there's so much opportunity. I'm curious, where are your conversations within the customer organization? We know that automation is a board level investor topic. Where are you? Where are those discussions with the testing folks, the RPA folks, helping them come together? >>Well, that's interesting. The question, uh, we typically on the IPS, have we talked to the cos, right? The people that are professionally developing those RPAs, but very easily, we get introduced to the test side of the house. And then usually there's a joint meeting where the test people are there, the RPA people are there. And that's why we are talking about this is going to convert somehow, right? The are in different departments today. But if you think about it, five years down the road, maybe 10 years, they might be at an automation discipline for the entire enterprise. So if that answered your question about, >>Yeah. >>Going to require a cultural shift. Yeah. And we have a customer coming presenting this afternoon. and they're gonna be talking about how they, both of the teams are using a test teams and the RPA teams. And they built a reusable component library that, so when they built RPA team built their automations, they put them in a reusable library and the test team is able to recreate their test much faster reusing about 70% of the components. And so when the, when you think of automation, they're thinking about automating the application, not automating a process or a test so that people can use those like Lego blocks and build it if they're doing so, they could even, even it automation, if they wanted to start with an it automation, they could pull those components out and use those. >>I think this is game changing is quality because so often, because in this day and age of agile, it's like move fast and break things. A lot of things break. And when we heard this morning in the keynotes, how you guys are pushing code like a couple of times a week, I mean, it's just a constant. And then you do two big releases. Okay. I get, I get it for the on-prem. But when you're pushing code that fast, you don't have time to test everything. There's a lot of stuff that's unknown. And so to the extent that you can compress all those check boxes, now I can focus on the really important things that sometimes are architectural. How do you expect applying RPA to testing is going to affect the quality? Or maybe you've got some examples. Chipotle, you just mentioned, >>First of all, I mean, when you say we pushing code like bi-weekly or so, right. We're talking about continuous development. That's what it's called. Right? It's agile. You have sprint cycles, you continue to bring new code, new code, new code, and you test all the increments with it. So it's not that you building up a huge backlog for the testing on the IPA side. What I see is that there will be a transformation about the process, how they develop RPA at the moment. It's still done very much, I would say, in a waterfall way, which is agree. A big bang waterfall. Yeah. It will transition. We already have partners that apply agile methodologies to their actually RPA development. And that's going to change that. >>Okay. So it's not so it's quality for those that are in testing obviously, but, but it's, but for the waterfall guys, it's, it's compressing the time to value. Oh yeah. That's going to be the big key. That's really worth. >>I mean, what he said is Chipotle is, was able to reuse 70% of the automation components. Right. That's huge. I mean, you have to think about it. 70% can be reused from testing to RPA and vice versa. That's a huge acceleration. Also on the RPA side, you can automate more processes faster. If you have components that you can trust. >>So you were a tester. Yeah. So you were a cost center. Yes, exactly. >>Unnecessary. What's the budget. >>So could you think RPA and automation can flip that mindset? >>Yeah, totally. And that's one of the things we want to do is we want to turn testing from a cost center to a value center, give testers a new career paths, even because really testers before all you could do is you could be more technical. Maybe you become a developer or you can be a manager, but you couldn't really become like an automation architect or a senior automation person. And now we're giving them a whole different career path to go down. So it's really exciting. >>'cause I know when I came out of college, I had a job offer and I wanted to be a developer, a programmer. We called them back then. And the only job I could get was as a tester. And I was like, oh, this is miserable. I'm not doing this, but there's a, there was, there's a growth path there. They were like, Hey, do this for two or three years, maybe five years. I was like, forget it. I'm going into sales and marketing. But so what's the, what's the growth path today for the tester. And how do you see this changing? >>So you want to go, you want to, I can take that one. No, you take it. So that's a really, yeah. I mean, I did it, so really it's, I mean, we're going to be giving these guys, the testing market has been kind of not innovating for years and years and years. And so we're going to be giving these guys some new tools to make them more powerful, make even the cause. Testing is a kind of a practice that is, you know, like, like you said, you, you didn't like testing. I didn't like testing either. Actually I hate testing. So I automated it. So, um, and so that was the first thing I did. And so I think we're going to give these guys some new tools, some ways to grow their career and some ways to be even better testers, but like, like, like we've talked about process mining, test mining, like maybe they're maybe they're testing the wrong things. Maybe they're not testing, you know, maybe, you know, there, cause there's kind of this test, everything mentality we're we need to test everything and the whole release instead of like focusing in on what changed. And so I think we'll be able to help them really focus on the testing and the quality to make it more efficient as well. >>Go ahead. So do to defend the testers, right? Test is a very skilled people. Yes. They know their business, they know what to test and how to test in a way that nobody else knows that it's something we sometimes underestimate. They are not developers so that they don't write code and they don't build automations typically. But if we can equip them with tools that they can build out information, you have the brain and the muscle together, you know what I mean? You don't have to delegate the automation to some, whatever team that is maybe outsourced even you can do it. In-house and I think to some extent, that was also the story of Portland sourcing again, because they're building their own automation. Yeah. >>And it saved them time because they have deal is handoffs, you know, to an external third party to do the testing for them. And so they pulled it all in made things much more streamlined and efficient. How >>Is that? It seems like a big cultural shift within any type of organization in any industry we're using Chipola as an example here, how does your path help facilitate that cultural shift? Because that's big and we're talking about really reducing, um, or speeding time to value. >>Right. Right. And it is a lot of the agile methodologies like we're starting. So it's kind of like, we're going back in time, you know, and we're teaching these people, you know, the RPA community, all of the things that we learned from software development. Right. And so we're going to be applying that to this. And so all those agile mindset, the th the agile values, you know, those are the things that are going to help them kind of come together. And that's one of the things that Julie talked about is one of the things is they had a, kind of an agile mindset, a can-do attitude that pulled them down. >>And I think one thing that will really helps with changing the culture is empowering the people. If you give them the tools that they can do, they will do, and that will change the culture. I don't think it can come from top down. It needs to come from within and from the people. And that's what we see also with RPA, by the way, is adopted on department level and D build automations. And then at some point it becomes maybe an enterprise wide initiative, right. But somebody in HR had this idea and started >>The other thing too, is Matt, you mentioned this you'd go to a third party. So years ago in the early two thousands, we had a software company. We would use a company called agile on. They were, so I don't know if you ever heard of them. They're basically, we're a job shop. And we would throw our code over the very waterfall, throw the code over the fence. It was a black box and it was very asynchronous. And it would come back, you know, weeks later. And they say, oh, I fixed this, fixed this, but we didn't have the analytics we didn't have. There was no transparency had we had that. We would have maybe come up with new ideas or have way to improve it because we knew the product way better. And so if you can bring that, in-house now you've got much better visibility. So what, what analytics are our analytics a piece of this? And is that something? Yeah. >>Yeah. So, I mean, they'll give you an example, SAP systems, right? When you have SAP systems, customers apply transports like five or 10 a day. Every transport can change the system in a way that you might break the automation. We have the possibility to actually not only understand what's going on in this system with process mining, but we also have the possibility to do change, impact, money, and change impact. Mining tells me with every process, every transport I apply, what has changed, and we can pinpoint the test cases that you need to run. So instead of running a thousand test cases, every time we pinpoint 50 of them and you know exactly what has changed. Yeah. >>That's right. Because a lot of times you don't know what you don't know. And you're saying the machine is basically saying focus on these areas that are going to give you the biggest, that's kind of Amdahl's law. Isn't it focus on the areas that going to get the most return. Yeah. So this is a new business for UI path. You guys are targeting this as a market segment. Can you tell us more about that? >>We joined about two years ago. It takes some time to build something, right. There was a lot of proven technology there. And then we lounged, uh, I think it wasn't July last year, which was more like a private lounge. We, we didn't make much noise around it and it's gaining a lot of traction. So it's several hundred customers have already jumped on that test bandwagon, if you can call it this way. And yeah, this, this year we are pushing full speed into the testing market as well, because we see the benefits that customers get when they use both like the story from Chipotle. It has other customers like Cisco and, and more, when you hear the stories, what they were able to achieve. I mean, that's a no-brainer I think for any customer who wants to improve the automation. Yeah. >>Well, and also we're taking production grade automation and giving it to the testers and we're giving them this advanced AI so they can automate things. They weren't able to automate before, like Citrix virtual virtualized machines, point of sale systems, like 12 layer, any other business would have, they can automate all those things now that they couldn't do before, as well as everything else. And then they can also the testing tools, they talked about fragmentation this morning. That's another problem is there's a tool for mobile. There's a tool for this. There's a tool for API APIs and you have all these tools. You have to learn all these languages. We're going to give them one that they can learn and use and apply to all their technologies. And it's easy to use and it's easy to use. Yeah. >>That's kind of been the mantra of UiPath for very long time, easy to use making, making RPA simple. We've got 8,000 plus customers. You mentioned a few of them. We're going to have some of them on the program this week. How do you expect good question for you that stat that you mentioned from that survey in the very beginning of our conversation, how do you expect that needle to move in the next year? Because we're seeing so much acceleration because of the pandemic. >>A really good question, because the questions that we had in the beginning after we had the first hundred, right? The values didn't change that much. So we have now 1500 and you would assume that is pretty stable from the data. It didn't change that much. So we're still at 27% that are not testing. And that's what we see as our mission. We want to change that no customer that has more than, I dunno, five processes in production should not like not test that's crazy and we can help. And that's our mission. So, but the data is not changing. That's the interesting part. >>And I know, I know we're out of time, but, but we're how do you price this? Is it a, is it a set? Is it a subscription? Is it a usage based model? How >>It's fully included in the UI pass tool suite. So it means it's on the cloud and on-prem the pricing is the same. We are using this. There it is. Yeah. It's the same components. Like, like we're using studio for automation, we're using orchestrator, but we're using robots. We have cloud test manager on prem test manager. It's just a part of the, >>So it's a value add that you're putting into the platform. Yeah, yeah, exactly. >>Yeah. Th there are components that are priced. Yes. But I mean, it's part of the platform, how, >>But it's a module. So I paid for that module and you turn it on and then they can use it. So it's a subscription. It could be an annual term if I want multi-year term, I can do that. Exactly. Good. Great guys. Thanks so much for coming on the Cuban and good luck with this. Thank you. Great, great innovations. Okay. Keep it right there at Dave Volante for Lisa Martin, we'll be back with our coverage of UI path forward for, from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

>> Hello and welcome to this special Cube Conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are recapping the Citrix Launchpad series with a focus on the topic of security. Now, whenever we're going to talk security on The Cube, we have a Cube veteran and smartest person on cybersecurity that we know Shira Rubinoff. She's a cyber security executive author and advisor, specifically author of the excellent book on the subject, 'Cyber Mines'. Shira welcome back to The Cube. >> Thank you. Pleasure to be here. >> How are you today? >> It's been great. Always great to be on The Cube and talk to you folks, and certainly be part of something from Citrix. >> Well, that might be the last pleasant thing that we say, because we are surrounded by security threats. So are you ready to get serious? >> Oh always. With a smile, serious with a smile. >> So, you know, one over kind of overriding question that a lot of people have now. If you're an IT executive you've experienced a complete change in the world from so many different angles, but how has the pandemic changed the way you think of security? What are the dynamics at play things that have, that are different now that we couldn't have anticipated maybe two or three years ago? >> Interesting questions. Certainly if we look at the scope and the ecosystem of the way that organizations operated, it was pretty much, you know, in the high 90% of people being in the office with just the few percentage being working from home. And that had to shift literally overnight to literally the flip side of it, having the multitude of the organization work from home, work remotely, and maybe the few people that had to be in the office were there. So all of a sudden organizations were left with this. How do we secure down our organization? How do we keep our employees safe? How do we keep our organization safe? How do we connect to the outside world? What do we do to maintain the proper cyber let's call it cyber hygiene with an organization. And that's a topic that I talk about quite frequently. When you look at cybersecurity as a whole, we look at the cyber posture of an organization. We also have to break it down and say, what does an organization need to do to be fully cyber secure? So of course the ongoing training and that had to shift as well. We have now training for the organization and employees, but also think about the consumers and who else is interacting with the organizations. We have to switch how that is done. And that has to be ongoing. And the global awareness of cybersecurity, of course, a top of mind. And then that would lead to also zero trust. Zero trust is a massive, massive piece of cybersecurity need for organizations. We think about it as who needs the data is king. Whoever has the data, they rule the world, right? They own the organization, they do what they need to do. Zero trust, limited access, knowledge of who gets in, why they get in, the need to get in and the need for that with an organization. So zero trust is a very key component of Citrix is very focused on as well. We talk about updated security and patching and all that has to happen. Think about remotely. So not only are we thinking about all these topics, we have to think about them going at warp speed with people that might be working remote, who also have other things they have to take care of. Maybe they're taking care of elderly parents. Maybe they're having to watch their kids on Zoom, making sure they're staying on Zoom and all sorts of things with school and other maybe roommates who are working for other organizations, not having important information in the backgrounds of their Zoom while they're having these important conversations with organizations. But also think about the multiple devices people are using. They may have an area that's set up properly in order to do their work, but then again, they have to be in another room at the same time. Oh, let me just grab my device. So the whole area of the multiple devices, the warp speed of working and not, let's call it this pause. And this is one of the key elements that I would tell all organizations to stop and pause to think about what you're doing before you do it. It's never headaches, but that was not interplayed. When the height of the pandemic, the height of the pandemic, we were worried about what's going on need knowledge of information, where we're getting this information, downloading it, clicking on links. Then we're working at the same time, taking care of people. So all these things are happening simultaneously, leaving open these open vectors for the tax surface to be that much more heightened for the bad actors to get in. >> So you advise some of the largest companies in the world on this subject, and obviously you're not going to reveal any names or specifics, but as a general overall view, from your perspective, how are we doing right now? Are, are, is the average large organization now sort of back on cruise control, having figured everything out for this new reality on a scale of one to 10, how well are we executing against all of these changes? >> That's a great question. Let me talk about the global whole. I think organizations are actually doing really well. I think there was a quick ramp up to figure out how to get it done, but because of also the shift of sharing of information that some of these largest companies across the world, they came together to share information with bad actors, to share information about the tax, to share information about what to do if something happens who's out there and buying together almost like a whole. So it wasn't, you know, each finger on its own. It's a hand as a whole looking at it from a stronger perspective. So I think that shift coupled with the fact of the knowledge and understanding of what companies needed to do in terms of locking down the organization, but also allowing and helping their employees, empowering them to get their work done, but get it done in a secure, safe fashion. And I believe now, you know, obviously we all know they obviously, but the ransomware attacks are now prevalent and they're becoming even more intense with the rise of 5G, the way that attacks could happen, the warp speed we're now having to understand that being reactive is not enough. Being proactive is something that is wonderful to see organizations are doing as well. It used to be okay, let's be reactive. If something happens, what do we do? Let's have a plan in place, but that's not good enough. And we've seen that happen because these attacks are coming at warp speed. So the proactivity of these organizations that they've taken is applaudable, you know, in general, you know, I can't talk for all the companies, but the ones that I've been consulting to and have interactions with, I'm pleasantly surprised and not surprised as well, that the way that they've taken their cyber posture so seriously, and where they focus in not only on the organization as a whole, but their employees as individuals, what their needs are and being able to give them what they need to do their jobs well. >> Yeah, that makes sense. When you can, you can almost think of it like, you know, cybersecurity is a team sport. And to the extent that all of that proactive work that an organization can do can be absolutely undermined if we don't do our parts as endpoints, as endpoint people. And you know, when someone reads cyber minds, I think it'd be, I think it's, there's an undercurrent that I definitely sensed. And then when I looked more closely into your background, I realized that, yes, in fact, you do have a background in psychology. I want to shift to kind of a question along along that line, if you don't mind. Think about the psychology of people who have lived through the pandemic, this concept of our personal hygiene and our personal security has been in the forefront of our mind. You leave the house and there's hand sanitizer and masks and maybe gloves. We're very, very aware of this. How has that affected us from a cybersecurity team sport perspective has that, has that made us better players on the field? What are your thoughts in that regard? >> I actually love that question. You know, as we saw the pandemic heightened, everyone became hyper aware of their own personal, well cleanliness. And in terms of where they are, what they're doing, if they're masking, if they're putting on gloves, the sanitizers are everywhere, six feet apart. Everybody's thinking about that. It's a forefront. It became a way of life. And if you, then you shift that and you're saying, okay, let's look at the technology, the cybersecurity part of it, your own personal safety, your own personal cybersecurity. I think we failed a lot in that area. I think because of the fact you think about the human psychology and the pieces that people need to know information, everybody was hungry for the latest and greatest information. What's going on? What are the stats? How many people? Just terrible, terrible pandemic with so many people getting sick. So many people dying and wanting to know what is going on? What are the latest rule sets? What are, what can I do? What else can I do to protect myself? What is my business doing? So we also have bad actors sending out the phishing attacks, heightened tremendously. There is information being sent out. Click here for the latest here. This is Dr. Fauci's latest report, everything going out there was not necessarily to help us, but to hurt us. And because of people's human psychology of thinking, I need to protect myself. So I need the information. The stop and pause is, is this the right information? Is this a safe place to go? But then there's also the other flip side of, if I'm not interacting, I'm not there. Think about the different generational people we have going on. Gen Z, millennials, all sorts of it. Everybody's all over social media. And everybody needs to and wants to have a presence there certainly in this world. So putting out lots of information and being, being present was very critical because people weren't in person anymore. So people were interacting online, whether it being on social, whether it be telling people where they're going, what they're doing, what they're eating, what their favorite animal is, all sorts of things that they were doing. But they were giving over personal information that made of be utilized as passwords or ways to get to know somebody, to either do a spear phishing attack or any types of attacks to gather information to hurt. Not just a personal to steal money or to steal someone's identity or to come in and hurt the company. But information was everywhere. So we were taking care of our personal cleanliness, but our cyber hygiene with our psychology's aspect of cybersecurity itself, I think took a big dive. And I think that people started becoming aware as these attack surfaces grew. There were also different types of attacks that were happening, where phone calls were coming in saying, somebody's breaking into your bank account. Just verify yourself, give me the last four digits. I need to know who you are. So playing on the human psyche of fear. Somebody is trying to get you nervous. So what are you going to do? You're going to act quickly without thinking or all sorts of, I think we were talking earlier about extended warranties for different things. You know, that has, that also grew extensively, but how did they do that? They were gathering information, personal information to give you something you want. So if you're playing again on the human psychology of people, when people get what they want, they're more likely to give over something they may not give to somebody else anyway. And one of my biggest example of a strong example is back in the day with Candy Crush. If you think about that game before you sign up for that game, you literally have to give over your kidney. You're giving over access to your camera, to your contacts. If you look back at the permissions you're giving, it's really unbelievable that everybody was clicking yes because they wanted to play a game. So take that example and transfer that into real life. We were doing the same thing. So the importance of brushing up on that personal cyber hygiene and really understanding what people needed to do to heighten their own security themselves. Less sharing on social, not giving over information that they shouldn't. Not allowing a trusted source, who isn't really a trusted source into it. Having strong zero trust, not just for organizations, but for yourself was very important. >> Yeah. Now did we Chuck, Chuck, Chuck's my producer. Did we get Shira's social security number and her date of birth? Shira, can you give us that? >> Sure, it's 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5. >> Excellent, ha! Phishing attack. >> There you go. Go for it. (both laughing) >> So, so you think there could be a little bit of security fatigue that might come into play. When, you know, when we're thinking of living up to our responsibilities as those end points. >> I think there was just fatigue in general. >> Yeah. >> People were tired of being locked in the house. People were tired of having everybody under the same roof all the time, 24/7, trying to get work done, trying to get school done, taking care of people, what they needed to do. Having groceries delivered, going into groceries, all the thoughts that they had to do, that was just a way of life before, that we all took for granted during the pandemic. It was just a whole shift. People were just antsy, jumpy. We needed to connect and we need to connect in any way we could. So all these open vectors became a problem that ended up hurting us rather than helping us. So this has been something that was a big mind shift. As the pandemic continued, people started realizing what was going on and organizations took a good stand on educating the population and telling them, look, these are the things that are happening. This is what we need to do. Certainly a lot of the companies I'm working with did such a great job with that, giving their employees the wherewithal of wanting to connect, but doing in a secure manner, giving them the tools of what they needed to do personal only, also in their personal lives, not just for their work lives. So that was helpful too. And as we're coming out of it, hopefully continue to come completely out of it, we'll see the shift back into let's take that stop and pause. Let's think what we're doing. >> Yeah, well, we are all looking back to whatever semblance of normal we can get to. Shira I could spend hours picking your brain on a variety of subjects. Unfortunately, we are coming to the end of our time together. Do you promise to come back? >> Certainly a big fan of The Cube. >> Well, fantastic. Shira Rubinoff thank you so much for your time. This is Dave Nicholson with a very special Cube Conversation signing out. Thanks for watching. >> (Shira) Thank you, Dave. (lively music)

>>Welcome back to our coverage of HBs. Green Lake announcement's gonna talk about transformation acceleration, who doesn't wanna go faster as they're transforming, right? Everybody is transforming and they want to go as fast as possible to get time to value keith White is here, he's the senior vice president and general manager of Green Lakes commercial business at HP. Michelle LaU is Green Lake cloud services solutions at HP gents. Welcome. Good to see you >>awesome to be here. Thanks so much. Great to be here. >>Dave keith, we've we've been talking virtually for >>quite some time now. >>Q three earnings beaten raise uh focusing on, you know, some real momentum uh want to understand where it's coming from. A r I've said it's headed toward a billion, I think you said 700 million was where you were at last quarter, 1100 customers, orders were up 46%,, Last quarter revenue up over 30%. Where's the momentum >>coming from? No, it's fantastic. And I think what you're seeing is, you know, the world is hybrid. So in essence customers are looking for that solution that says, hey, mere my public cloud with my on premise scenario and give me that hybrid solution and we're just seeing just tremendous momentum and interest across a variety of workloads across a variety of vertical solutions and frankly we're seeing customers basically uh lean in on really running their business on HP. Green Lake, so you know, we had a pretty exciting announcement with the s a a couple weeks back, $2 billion deal, um but again, this shows the value of what Green Lake and the on prem requirements are high level of security, high level of capability? They're doing analytics on all the data that's out there. I mean this is the number one intelligence agency in the world. Right? So super excited about that and it just validates our strategy and validates where we're going. Um the other thing that's really exciting is we're seeing a lot of customers with this whole S. A. P migration, right? Um so ongc, one of the largest oil and gas companies in India, I want to say it's one of the top five S. A. P. Implementations in the world has chosen. Green Lake is their opportunity as well, huge retailers like wal wars. Uh so worldwide we're seeing tremendous momentum. >>That's great. Congratulations on the momentum. I know you're not done uh Michelle new role for you. Awesome. Um when we covered uh discover this year in the cube, we talked about sort of new workload solutions that you guys had. Uh S. A. P. As keith was just mentioning Ml Ops V. D. I. A number of of those workloads that you were really focused on the solution side. How's that going? Give us the update there? >>No, it's coming along really well. I mean you highlighted some of the big ones there. I mean the way we are thinking about Green Lake. Right? I mean, you know, we talked about the great momentum that we've had. The question is why are we having that right? Why are missing that momentum in the market? And I think I'll kind of call out a few features of the green platform that's really making it attractive to customers. Right? What is the experience? What we're trying to do is make it a very, very seamless experience for them? Right. Quick provisioning, easy to manage, easy to monitor, kind of an automated solution. Right? So that's kind of a key element of what we're trying to offer performances. Another one. Right? I mean, the end of the day, what we're doing is we are building out our infrastructure stack and the software stack in such a way that is optimized for the performance. Right? I mean, if you take data for example, it's called the right elements to make sure that the analytics can be done in a machine learning algorithms can be run. So those are like, you know, some of the performance, I think it's a great experience is a big factor. Tco right? I mean customers are very, very focused on their cost base. Right? Especially as they are starting to run up the bills in public cloud. They're like, man, this is expensive, I need to start thinking about costs here because costs catch up pretty fast. So that's kind of another element that people are really focused on and I would say the last one being choice. Right? I mean we provide this platform which is open. Alright. So customers can use it if they want to migrate off it, they can migrate off it. We're not locking them in. So those are some of the value propositions that are really resonating in the marketplace and you're seeing that in the numbers that we just talked about. >>So keep speaking of transformation you guys are undergoing obviously a transformation your your cloud company now. Okay, so part of that is the ecosystem. The partners talk about your strategy in that regard, why you're so excited about welcoming the partners into this old Green Lake world, >>you bet and you know I'm a big fan of one plus one equals three. My seven year old daughter tells me that doesn't actually add up correctly but at the same time it's so true with what we're doing and as official just said an open platform that allows partners to really plug in so that we can leverage the power of S. A. P. Or the power of Nutanix. So the power of Citrix at the same time, all of these are solutions that require, you know deep system integration and capabilities to really be customized for that customers environment. So whether that's infosys or accenture or we pro you know that we need we need those partners as well along with our own advisory and professional services to help customers. But at the same time, you know we talked about the fact that this is really about bringing that cloud experience to the on prem world might be a data center but we're seeing a lot of customers get out of the data center management business and move into a Coehlo. And so the fact that we can partner with the ECU annexes and the Cyrus ones of the world really enable a whole new environment so that customers again can run their business and not get caught up with keeping the lights on and managing power and those types of things. And then finally I'll say, look, the channel itself is actually migrating to offer more services to their customers managed service providers, telcos, distance and resellers and now what we're providing them is that platform with which to offer their own manage services to customers in a much more cost effective cloud experience way with all the benefits of being on prem secure latency app integration and that sort of thing. So it's exciting to see the ecosystem really gate Gardner the momentum and really partner with us closely >>follow up on the partner question if I could. So partner services are part of Green Lake. It's a journey, not everything all at once. Uh but so it's essentially as simple as saying, okay, I want that service, that's my choice. Uh you've given them optionality and it's ideally as seamless as it is in HP services, that the direction that you're >>going. That's right, yeah. So the set that api set that Stalin team are building are basically saying, hey, leverage our cost analytics capabilities, leverage our capacity management, leverage the interface so that you can plug into that single control plane. And so they're making it super simple for our partner ecosystem to do that. And what I think is really important is that if you are a partner, you want to basically offer choice to the customer and if the customer decides, hey, I want to use um red hats open shift for the container platform versus rs morale offering, then they can get just as good of a first class offering with respect to that. Someone wants to use Citrix or Nutanix or VM ware for their video solution. They have that choice. And so we want to make sure we're offering customer choice for what's best for their situation, but also making sure that it's fully integrated with what we do. God thank >>You. So we see more software content of the show. I wonder if you could. I mean certainly as morale is a big piece of that. I talked earlier about margins hit record for HPE. Almost 35% gross margins. This course of software is gonna obviously push that further along um, Lighthouses, another one. How should we think about the direction that you're going >>software. Absolutely. So if you think about what we are building out here is a solution, right? This is solution that's very tightly integrated between the infrastructure stack and the soft and this software that enables it. So really there three or four components to the solution day. Right. So think about Lighthouse, which is an infrastructure stack that is optimized for what's going to run on that. Right? If it's a general purpose compute it will the infrastructure will look different. If it's a storage intensive workload, it will look different. If it's a machine learning workloads will look different. Right? So that's kind of the first component and just optimizing it for what's going to run on it. Second is, um, what we call the Green light platform, which is all about managing and orchestrating it. And what we want to do is we want to have a completely automated experience right from from the way you provisioned it to the way you run the workloads to the way you manage it, to the way you monitor it to the way partners link into it. Right to the way in the software vendors kind of sit on top of that. Right. And then we talked about escrow as well as the engine that runs it right from a container platform perspective or we spend some time talking about unified analytics today. Those are the types of data integration that power Green Lake and the last piece of software I would say is as we kind of think about the ecosystem that runs on top of Green Lake, whether it's our software or third party software. Right? They all have a place equal place on top of the green light platform. And we are very focused on building on the ecosystem. Right? So as a customer or an enterprise who wants to use you should have the choice to run you know 40 50 102 105 100 different software packages on top of Green Lake. And it should be all an automated fashion. But we have tested that in advance. There's there's commercials behind that. It becomes a very very self service provision, seamless experience from the customer's perspective. >>Great. Thank you. So keep 2020 was sort of like sometimes called the force marched to digital right? And some some customers they were already there. Uh so there's a majority now that we've been through this awful year and change, customers are kind of rethinking their digital strategies and their transformations that there can be a little bit more planned fel now you know the world didn't end and and you know I. T. Budgets kind of stabilized a bit actually, you know did better than perhaps we thought. So where are we in terms of transformations? What's the business angle? What are you seeing out there? >>Yeah. I mean customers found a lot of holes that they had in their environment because of the pandemic. I think customers are also seeing opportunities to grow pretty aggressively. You know we just announced Patrick terminals, one of the largest shipping companies in south pack and you know that whole shipping craziness that's going on right now they needed a new digital transformation in order to really make sure they could orchestrate their container ships effectively. Even we talked about Woolworth's there now, changing how they deal with their suppliers because of the Green Lake platform that they have. And so what you're seeing is, hey, you know, first phase of digital transformation public cloud was an interesting scenario. Now they're being able to be planned for like you said and say, where's the best place for me to run this for the latency required with that data, for the choice that we have from an I. S. V. Standpoint, you know, for the on prem capabilities of what we're trying to do from a security standpoint etcetera. So the nice thing is we've seen it move from, you know, hey, we're just trying to get the basic things modernized into truly modernizing data centers, monetizing the data that I have and continuing to transform that environment for their customers, partners, employees and products >>kind of a left field question a bit off topic, but certainly related edge. You guys talk about edge a lot. Hybrid is clear. I think in people's minds you've got an on prem you're connecting to a cloud maybe across clouds? Is edge an extension of hybrid or is it today sort of a bespoke opportunity that maybe we'll come back to this new version of cloud, What's happening at the edge >>that you see? Yeah. So let me just uh I mean think of the edge as it's a continuum. Right? The way at least we think about it, it's not data center or the edge. Right. Think of it as, you know, there's a data center, uh there's a hyper scale data center, there's a data center, there's a closet somewhere, right? There's a cola opportunity, Right? And then you're running something in the store. Right? So let's take the example of a retailer. They're running something in the store and what are they running? They're running? Point of service applications or they're running IOT devices. Right. And at some point they have to connect back into the cloud. Right. So we actually have, you know, something to find van capabilities that connect, you know, uh you know, the Edge devices or edge analytics back into the cloud, we actually have a small form factor kubernetes um operating system that runs on the edge. Right. So we think of all of that as kind of a distributed environment in which Edge is one place where the application runs and where the data sites but it needs to be connected back and so we provide the connectivity back, we provide the mechanism by which we run it and then there's a security model, especially around sassy that is emerging on securing that. So that's kind of how we think about it as part of the overall distributed architecture that we are building and that's where the world will be >>another node in the cloud. >>Another note in the distributed world. Exactly >>yeah. I think the other thing to think about with the edges that this is where the majority of your data is actually getting created. Right? You talked about IOT devices, you know, you'll hear from Zen's Act and what they're doing with respect to autonomous driving with vehicles. You know, we talk about folks like ab that are building the factory of the future and robotics as a service in order to be able to really make sure that that precision happens at that at that point. So a ton of data is coming from that. And so again, how do you analyze that? How do you monetize that? How do you make decisions off of it? And it's it's an exciting place for us. So it's great to have all the connectivity we talked >>about last question, maybe both could address it. Uh we've we we used to see this cadence of of products often times in the form of boxes come out from HP and HP. Now we're seeing a cadence of services, we're seeing more capabilities across this, this this this green lake uh state that you guys are building out. What should we expect in the future? What are the kinds of things that we should evaluate you on? >>Well, I'll start and then maybe you can jump in but you know, the reality is we are becoming much deeper partners with our customers right there looking to us to say help me run my data center, help me improve my data and analytics. Help me at the edge so that I can have the most effective scenario. So what you're seeing from us is this flip from hardware provider into deep partnerships with that with the open platform. I'd say the second thing that we're doing is we're helping them fuel that digital transformation because again, they're looking for that hybrid solution. And so now they're saying, hey HP come and showcase all the experience you have from point next from your advisor and professional services and help me understand what other customers are doing so that I can implement that faster, better, cheaper, easier, etcetera. And then from a product standpoint, kind of a ton of great things. >>That's exactly right. I mean uh we are taking a very, very focused customer back view as we are looking at the future of Green Lake. Right. And exactly the way kids said, right, I mean it's all about solving customer problems for us. Some customer problems are still in the data center, some of them are in close, some customer problems are in the edge. So they're all uh fair game for us as we think about, you know, what we are going to be building out and do your point earlier. Dave it's not about, you know, a server or storage is the institutions right. And the solutions have to have integrated hardware, integrated software, staff, integrated services. Right. There are partners who sell that, who service that and all that entire experience from a customer perspective has to be a seamless. Right? And it's just in our cloud platform, we kind of help the customer run it and manage it and we give them kind of the best performance at the lowest cost, which is what they're looking for. So that's kind of what you'll see us. You'll see more of a cadence of these services can come out, but it's all going in that direction in helping customers with new solutions. >>A lot of customer problems out there, which your opportunities and you know, generally the hyper scale as they are good at solutions. They don't, you know, there's not a lot of solution folks like that. That's a that's a wonderful opportunity for you to build on on top of that huge gift, that Capex gift >>at the hyper scholars have given us all. That's right. And we're seeing the momentum happen. So it's exciting. That's cool guys. Hey, thanks a lot for coming to the cube. Yeah, Yeah. All right, >>okay. And thank you for watching keep it right there more action from HP. Es Green Lake announcements, you're watching the cube. Mm. Mm

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here, remote in Washington, DC, not in Palo Alto, but we're all around the world with theCUBE as we are virtual. We're here recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerating IT modernization) announcements with CUBE alumni Kevin Jackson, Kevin L. Jackson, CEO of GC Global Net. Kevin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thank you very much, John. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. >> It's great to have. You always have great insights. But here, we're recapping the event, Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerator IT modernization). And again, we're seeing this theme constantly now, IT modernization, application modernization. People are now seeing clearly what the pandemic has shown us all that there's a lot of projects that need to be up-leveled or kill. There's a lot of things happening and going on. What's your take of what you heard? >> Well, you know, from a general point of view, organizations can no longer put off this digitalization and the modernization of their IT. Many of these projects have been on a shelf waiting for the right time or, you know, the budget to get right. But when the pandemic hit, everyone found themselves in the virtual world. And one of the most difficult things was how do you make decisions in the virtual world when you can't physically be with someone? How do you have a meeting when you can't shake someone's hand? And they all sort of, you know, stared at each other and virtually, of course, to try to figure this out. And they dusted off all of the technologies they had on the shelf that they were, you know, they were told to use years ago, but just didn't feel that it was right. And now it became necessary. It became the way of life. And the thing that really jumped at me yesterday, well, jumped at me with Launchpad, the Launchpad of the cloud is that Citrix honed in on the key issues with this virtual world. I mean, delivering applications, knowing what the internet state is so that you could select the right sources for information and data. And making security holistic. So you didn't have to, it was no longer sort of this bolted on thing. So, I mean, we are in the virtual world to stay. >> You know, good call out there. Honing in was a good way to put it. One quote I heard from Tim (Minahan) was, you know, he said one thing that's become painfully evident is a lot of companies are going through the pandemic and they're experiencing the criticality of the application experience. And he says, "Application experience is the new currency." Okay, so the pandemic, we all kind of know what's going on there. It's highlighting all the needs. But this idea of an application experience is the new currency is a very interesting comment because, I mean, you nailed it. Everyone's working from home. The whole work is shifting. And the applications, they kind of weren't designed to be this way 100%. >> Right, right. You know, the thing about the old IT was that you would build something and you would deploy it and you would use it for a period of time. You know, a year, two years, three years, and then there would be an upgrade. You would upgrade your hardware, you would upgrade your applications, and then you go through the process again, you know? What was it referred to as, it wasn't modernization, but it was refresh. You know, you would refresh everything. Well today, refresh occurs every day. Sometimes two or three times a day. And you don't even know it's occurring. Especially in the application world, right? I think I was looking at something about Chrome, and I think we're at like Chrome 95. It's like Chrome is updated constantly as a regular course of business. So you have to deploy this, understand when it's going to be deployed, and the customers and users, you can't stop their work. So this whole application delivery and security aspect is completely different than before. That's why this, you know, this intent driven solution that Citrix has come up with is so revolutionary. I mean, by being able to know the real business needs and requirements, and then translating them to real policies that can be enforced, you can really, I guess, project the needs, requirement of the organization anywhere in the world immediately with the applications and with this security platform. >> I want to get your reactions to something because that's right on point there, because when we look at the security piece and the applications you see, okay, your mind goes okay, old IT, new IT. Now with cloud, with the pandemic showing that cloud scale matters, a couple themes have come from that used to be inside the ropes concepts. Virtualization, virtual, and automation. Those two concepts are going mainstream because now automation with data and virtual, virtual work, virtual CUBE, I mean, we're doing virtual interviews. Virtualization is coming here. So building on those things. New things are happening around those two concepts. Automation is becoming much more programmable, much more real time, not just repetitive tasks. Virtual is not just doing virtual work from home. It's integrating that virtual experience into other applications. This requires a whole new organizational structure mindset. What's your thoughts on that? >> Well, one of the things is the whole concept of automation. It used to be a nice to have. Something that you could do maybe to improve your particular process, not all of the processes. And then it became the only way of reacting to reality. Humans, it was no longer possible for humans to recognize a need to change and then execute on that change within the allotted time. So that's why automation became a critical element of every business process. And then it expanded that this automated process needed to be connect and interact with that automated process and the age of the API. And then the organization grew from only relying on itself to relying on its ecosystem. Now an organization had to automate their communications, their integration, the transfer of data and information. So automation is key to business and globalization creates that requirement, or magnifies that requirement. >> One of the things we heard in the event was, obviously Citrix has the experience with virtual apps, virtual desktop, all that stuff, we know that. But as the cloud grows in, they're making a direct statement around Citrix is going to add value on top of the cloud services. Because that's the reality of the hybrid, and now soon to be multi-cloud workflows or architectures. How do you see that evolve? Is that something that's being driven by the cloud or the app experience or both? What's your take on that focus of Citrix taking their concepts and leadership to add value on top of the cloud? >> To be honest, I don't like referring to the cloud. It gives an impression that there's only a single cloud and it's the same no matter what. That couldn't be further from the truth. A typical organization will consume services from three to five cloud service providers. And these providers aren't working with each other. Their services are unique, independent. And it's up to the enterprise to determine which applications and how those applications are presented to their employees. So it's the enterprise that's responsible for the employee experience. Integrating data from one cloud service provider to another cloud service provider within this automated business process or multiple business processes. So I see Citrix is really helping the enterprise to continually monitor performance from these independent cloud service provider and to optimize that experience. You know, the things like, where is the application being consumed for? What is the latency today on the internet? What type of throughput do I need from cloud service provider A versus cloud service provider B? All of this is continually changing. So the it's the enterprise that needs to constantly monitor the performance degradation and look at outages and all of that. So I think, you know, Citrix is on point by understanding that there's no single cloud. Hybrid and multi-cloud is the cloud. It's the real world. >> You know, that's a great call. And I think it's naive for enterprises to think that, you know, Microsoft is sitting there saying hmm, let's figure out a way to really work well with AWS. And vice versa, right? I mean, and you got Google, right? They all have their own specialties. I mean, Amazon web service has got great compliance action going on there. Much back stronger than Microsoft. Microsoft's got much deeper legacy and integration to their base, and Google's doing great with developers. So they're all kind of picking their lanes, but they all exist. So the question in the enterprise is what? Do I, how do I deal with that? And again, this is an opportunity for Citrix, right? So this kind of comes down to the single pane of glass (indistinct) always talks about, or how do I manage this new environment that I need to operate in? Because I will want to take advantage of some of the Google goodness and the Azure and the AWS. But now I got my own on premises. Bare metals grow. You're seeing more bare metal deals going down now because the cloud operations has come on premises. >> Yeah, and in fact, that's hybrid IT, right? I always see that there are an enterprise, when enterprise thinks about modernizing or digitally transforming a business process, you have three options, right? You could put it in your own data center. In fact, building a data center and optimizing a data center for a particular process is the cheapest and most efficient way of executing a business process. But it's only way cheaper and efficient if that process is also stable and consistent. I'll say, but some are like that. But you can also do a managed service provider. But that is a distinctly different approach. And the third option is a cloud service provider. So this is a hybrid IT environment. It's not just cloud. It's sort of, you know, it's not smart to think everything's going to go into the cloud. >> It's distributed computing. We see (indistinct). >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, in today's paperless world, don't you still use a pen and paper and pencil? Yes. The right tool for the right job. So it's hybrid IT. Cloud is not always a perfect thing. And that's something that I believe Citrix has looked at. That interface between the enterprise and all of these choices when it comes to delivering applications, delivering the data, integrating that data, and making it secure. >> And I think that's a winning positioning to have this app experience, the currency narrative, because that ultimately is an outcome that you need to win on. And with the cloud and the cloud scale that goes on with all the multiple services now available, the company's business model is app driven, right? That's their application. So I love that, and I love that narrative. Also like this idea of app delivering security. It's kind of in the weeds a little bit, but it highlights this hybrid IT concept you were saying. So I got to ask you as the expert in the industry in this area, you know, as you have intent, what do they call it? Intent driven solution for app delivering security. Self healing, continuous optimization, et cetera, et cetera. The KPIs are changing, right? So I want to get your thoughts on that. Because now, as IT shifts to be much faster, whether it's security teams or IT teams to service that DevOps speed, shifting left everyone talks about, what's the KPIs that are changing? What is the new KPIs that the managers and people can work through as a north star or just tactically? What's your thoughts? >> Well, actually, every KPI has to relate to either the customer experience or the employee experience, and sometimes even more important, your business partner experience. That's the integration of these business processes. And one of the most important aspects that people really don't think about is the API, the application programming interface. You know, you think about software applications and you think about hardware, but how is this hardware deployed? How do you deploy and expand the number of servers based upon more usage from your customer? It's via the API. You manage the customer experience via APIs. You manage your ability to interact with your business partners through the API, their experience. You manage how efficient and effective your employees are through their experience with the IT and the applications through the API. So it's all about that, you know, that experience. Everybody yells customer experience, but it's also your employee experience and your partner experience. So that depends upon this integrated holistic approach to applications and the API security. The web app, the management of bots, and the protection of your APIs. >> Yeah, that really nailed it. I think the position is good. You know, if you can get faster app delivery, keep the security in line, and not bolt it on after the fact and reduce costs, that's a winning formula. And obviously, stitching together the service layer of app and software for all the cloud services is really key. I got to ask you though, Kevin, since you and I have riffed on theCUBE about this before, more importantly now than ever with the pandemic, look at the work edge. People working at home and what's causing the office spaces changing. The entire network architecture. I mean, I was talking to a big enterprise that said, oh yeah, we had, you know, the network for the commercial and the network for dial up now 100% provisioned for everyone at home. The radical change to the structural interface has completely changed the game. What is your view on this? I mean, give us your, where does it go? What happens next? >> So it's not what's next, it's where we are right now. And you need to be able to be, work from anywhere at any time across multiple devices. And on top of that, you have to be able to adapt to constant change in both the devices, the applications, the environment, and a business model. I did a interview with Citrix, actually, from an RV in the middle of a park, right? And it's like, we did video, we did it live. I think it was through LinkedIn live. But I mean, you need to be able to do anything from anywhere. And the enterprise needs to support that business imperative. So I think that's key. It's it's not the future, it's the today. >> I mean, the final question I have for you is, okay, is the frog in the boiling water? At what point does the CIO and the IT leaders, I mean, their minds are probably blown. I can only imagine. The conversations I've been having, it's been, you know, be agile, do it in the cloud, do it at speed, fix the security, programmable infrastructure. What? How fast can I run? This is the management challenge. How are people dealing with this when you talk to them? >> First of all, the IT professional needs to focus on the business needs, the business requirements, the business key performance indicators, not technology, and a business ROI. The CIO has to be right there in the C sweep of understanding what's needed by the business. And there also has to be an expert in being able to translate these business KPIs into IT requirements, all right? And understanding that all of this is going to be within a realm of constant change. So the CIO, the CTO, and the IT professional needs to realize their key deliverable is business performance. >> Kevin, great insight. Loved having you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate your time highlighting and recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud announcements. Accelerating IT modernization can't go fast enough. People, they want to go faster. >> Faster, faster, yes. >> So great stuff. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. I really enjoyed it. >> Okay, it's theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer a set of remote services somewhere off in the cloud, in the distance. It's expanding. It's moving to on-prem. On-prem workloads are connecting to the cloud. They're spanning clouds in a way that hides the plumbing and simplifies deployment, management, security, and governance. So hybrid multicloud is the next big thing in infrastructure, and at the recent Nutanix .NEXT conference, we got a major dose of that theme, and with me to talk about what we heard at that event, what we learned, why it matters, and what it means to customers are Monica Kumar, who's the senior vice president of marketing and cloud go-to-market at Nutanix, and Tarkan Maner, who's the chief commercial officer at Nutanix. Guys, great to see you again. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Great to be back here. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> Okay, so you just completed another .NEXT. As an analyst, I like to evaluate the messaging at an event like this, drill into the technical details to try to understand if you're actually investing in the things that you're promoting in your keynotes, and then talk to customers to see how real it is. So with that as a warning, you guys are all in on hybrid multicloud, and I have my takeaways that I'd be happy to share, but, Tarkan, what were your impressions, coming out of the event? >> Look, you had a great entry. Our goal, as Monica is going to outline, too, cloud is not a destination. It's an operating model. Our customers are basically using cloud as a business model, as an operating model. It's not just a bunch of techno mumbo-jumbo, as, kind of, you outlined. We want to make sure we make cloud invisible to the customer so they can focus on what they need to focus on as a business. So as part of that, we want to make sure the workloads, the apps, they can run anywhere the way the customer wants. So in that context, you know, our entire story was bringing customer workloads, use-cases, partner ecosystem with ISVs and cloud providers and service providers and ISPs we're working with like Citrix on end user computing, like Red Hat on cloud native, and also bringing the right products, both in terms of infrastructure capability and management capability for both operators and application developers. So bringing all these pieces together and make it simple for the customer to use the cloud as an operating model. That was the biggest goal here. >> Great, thank you. Monica, anything you'd add in terms of your takeaways? >> Well, I think Tarkan said it right. We are here to make cloud complexity invisible. This was our big event to get thousands of our customers, partners, our supporters together and unveil our product portfolio, which is much more simplified, now. It's a cloud platform. And really have a chance to show them how we are building an ecosystem around it, and really bringing to life the whole notion of hybrid multicloud computing. >> So, Monica, could you just, for our audience, just summarize the big news that came out of .NEXT? >> Yeah, we actually made four different announcements, and most of them were focused around, obviously, our product portfolio. So the first one was around enhancements to our cloud platform to help customers build modern, software-defined data centers to speed their hybrid multicloud deployments while supporting their business-critical applications, and that was really about the next version of our flagship, AOS six, availability. We announced the general availability of that, and key features really included things like built-in virtual networking, disaster recovery enhancements, security enhancements that otherwise would need a lot of specialized hardware, software, and skills are now built into our platform. And, most importantly, all of this functionality being managed through a single interface, right? Which significantly decreases the operational overhead. So that was one announcement. The second announcement was focused around data services and really making it easy for customers to simplify data management, also optimize big data and database workloads. We announced capability that now improves performances of database workloads by 2x, big data workloads by 3x, so lots of great stuff there. We also announced a new service called Nutanix Data Lens, which is a new unstructured data governance service. So, again, I don't want to go into a lot of details here. Maybe we can do it later. That was our second big announcement. The third announcement, which is really around partnerships, and we'll talk more about that, is with Microsoft. We announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure, and that's really taking our entire flagship Nutanix platform and running it on Azure. And so, now, we are in preview on that one, and we're super excited about that. And then, last but not least, and I know Tarkan is going to go into a lot more detail, is we announced a strategic partnership with Citrix around the whole future of hybrid work. So lots of big news coming out of it. I just gave you a quick summary. There's a lot more around this, as well. >> Okay. Now, I'd like to give you my honest take, if you guys don't mind, and, Tarkan, I'll steal one of your lines. Don't hate me, okay? So the first thing I'm going to say is I think, Nutanix, you have the absolute right vision. There's no question in my mind. But what you're doing is not trivial, and I think it's going to play out. It's going to take a number of years. To actually build an abstraction layer, which is where you're going, as I take it, as a platform that can exploit all the respective cloud native primitives and run virtually any workload in any cloud. And then what you're doing, as I see it, is abstracting that underlying technology complexity and bringing that same experience on-prem, across clouds, and as I say, that's hard. I will say this: the deep dives that I got at the analyst event, it convinced me that you're committed to this vision. You're spending real dollars on focused research and development on this effort, and, very importantly, you're sticking to your true heritage of making this simple. Now, you're not alone. All the non-hyperscalers are going after the multicloud opportunity, which, again, is really challenging, but my assessment is you're ahead of the game. You're certainly focused on your markets, but, from what I've seen, I believe it's one of the best examples of a true hybrid multicloud-- you're on that journey-- that I've seen to date. So I would give you high marks there. And I like the ecosystem-building piece of it. So, Tarkan, you could course-correct anything that I've said, and I'd love for you to pick up on your comments. It takes a village, you know, you're sort of invoking Hillary Clinton, to bring the right solution to customers. So maybe you could talk about some of that, as well. >> Look, actually, you hit all the right points, and I don't hate you for that. I love you for that, as you know. Look, at the end of the day, we started this journey about 10 years ago. The last two years with Monica, with the great executive team, and overall team as a whole, big push to what you just suggested. We're not necessarily, you know, passionate about cloud. Again, it's a business model. We're passionate about customer outcomes, and some of those outcomes sometimes are going to also be on-prem. That's why we focus on this terminology, hybrid multicloud. It is not multicloud, it's not just private cloud or on-prem and non-cloud. We want to make sure customers have the right outcomes. So based on that, whether those are cloud partners or platform partners like HPE, Dell, Supermicro. We just announced a partnership with Supermicro, now, we're selling our software. HPE, we run on GreenLake. Lenovo, we run on TruScale. Big support for Lenovo. Dell's still a great partner to us. On cloud partnerships, as Monica mentioned, obviously Azure. We had a big session with AWS. Lots of new work going on with Red Hat as an ISV partner. Tying that also to IBM Cloud, as we move forward, as Red Hat and IBM Cloud go hand in hand, and also tons of workarounds, as Monica mentioned. So it takes a village. We want to make sure customer outcomes deliver value. So anywhere, for any app, on any infrastructure, any cloud, regardless standards or protocols, we want to make sure we have an open system coverage, not only for operators, but also for application developers, develop those applications securely and for operators, run and manage those applications securely anywhere. So from that perspective, tons of interest, obviously, on the Citrix or the UC side, as Monica mentioned earlier, we also just announced the Red Hat partnership for cloud services. Right before that, next we highlighted that, and we are super excited about those two partnerships. >> Yeah, so, when I talked to some of your product folks and got into the technology a little bit, it's clear to me you're not wrapping your stack in containers and shoving it into the cloud and hosting it like some do. You're actually going much deeper. And, again, that's why it's hard. You could take advantage of those things, but-- So, Monica, you were on the stage at .NEXT with Eric Lockhart of Microsoft. Maybe you can share some details around the focus on Azure and what it means for customers. >> Absolutely. First of all, I'm so grateful that Eric actually flew out to the Bay Area to be live on stage with us. So very super grateful for Eric and Azure partnership there. As I said earlier, we announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure. It's a big deal. We've been working on it for a while. What this means is that a select few organizations will have an opportunity to get early access and also help shape the roadmap of our offering. And, obviously, we're looking forward to then announcing general availability soon after that. So that's number one. We're already seeing tremendous interest. We have a large number of customers who want to get their hands on early access. We are already working with them to get them set up. The second piece that Eric and I talked about really was, you know, the reason why the work that we're doing together is so important is because we do know that hybrid cloud is the preferred IT model. You know, we've heard that in spades from all different industries' research, by talking to customers, by talking to people like yourselves. However, when customers actually start deploying it, there's lots of issues that come up. There's limited skill sets, resources, and, most importantly, there's a disparity between the on-premises networking security management and the cloud networking security management. And that's what we are focused on, together as partners, is removing that barrier, the friction between on-prem and Azure cloud. So our customers can easily migrate their workloads in Azure cloud, do cloud disaster recovery, create a burst into cloud for elasticity if they need to, or even use Azure as an on-ramp to modernize applications by using the Azure cloud services. So that's one big piece. The second piece is our partnership around Kubernetes and cloud native, and that's something we've already provided to the market. It's GA with Azure and Nutanix cloud platform working together to build Kubernetes-based applications, container-based applications, and run them and manage them. So there's a lot more information on nutanix.com/azure. And I would say, for those of our listeners who want to give it a try and who want their hands on it, we also have a test drive available. You can actually experience the product by going to nutanix.com/azure and taking the test drive. >> Excellent. Now, Tarkan, we saw recently that you announced services. You've got HPE GreenLake, Lenovo, their Azure service, which is called TruScale. We saw you with Keith White at HPE Discover. I was just with Keith White this week, by the way, face to face. Awesome guy. So that's exciting. You got some investments going on there. What can you tell us about those partnerships? >> So, look, as we talked through this a little bit, the HPE relationship is a very critical relationship. One of our fastest growing partnerships. You know, our customers now can run a Nutanix software on any HPE platform. We call it DX, is the platform. But beyond that, now, if the customers want to use HPE service as-a-service, now, Nutanix software, the entire stack, it's not only hybrid multicloud platform, the database capability, EUC capability, storage capability, can run on HPE's service, GreenLake service. Same thing, by the way, same way available on Lenovo. Again, we're doing similar work with Dell and Supermicro, again, giving our customers choice. If they want to go to a public club partner like Azure, AWS, they have that choice. And also, as you know, I know Monica, you're going to talk about this, with our GSI partnerships and new service provider program, we're giving options to customers because, in some other regions, HPE might not be their choice or Azure not be choice, and a local telco might the choice in some country like Japan or India. So we give options and capability to the customers to run Nutanix software anywhere they like. >> I think that's a really important point you're making because, as I see all these infrastructure providers, who are traditionally on-prem players, introduce as-a-service, one of the things I'm looking for is, sure, they've got to have their own services, their own products available, but what other ecosystem partners are they offering? Are they truly giving the customers choice? Because that's, really, that's the hallmark of a cloud provider. You know, if we think about Amazon, you don't always have to use the Amazon product. You can use actually a competitive product, and that's the way it is. They let the customers choose. Of course, they want to sell their own, but, if you innovate fast enough, which, of course, Nutanix is all about innovation, a lot of customers are going to choose you. So that's key to these as-a-service models. So, Monica, Tarkan mentioned the GSIs. What can you tell us about the big partners there? >> Yeah, definitely. Actually, before I talk about GSIs, I do want to make sure our listeners understand we already support AWS in a public cloud, right? So Nutanix totally is available in general, generally available on AWS to use and build a hybrid cloud offering. And the reason I say that is because our philosophy from day one, even on the infrastructure side, has been freedom of choice for our customers and supporting as large a number of platforms and substrates as we can. And that's the notion that we are continuing, here, forward with. So to talk about GSIs a bit more, obviously, when you say one platform, any app, any cloud, any cloud includes on-prem, it includes hyperscalers, it includes the regional service providers, as well. So as an example, TCS is a really great partner of ours. We have a long history of working together with TCS, in global 2000 accounts across many different industries, retail, financial services, energy, and we are really focused, for example, with them, on expanding our joint business around mission critical applications deployment in our customer accounts, and specifically our databases with Nutanix Era, for example. Another great partner for us is HCL. In fact, HCL's solution SKALE DB, we showcased at .NEXT just yesterday. And SKALE DB is a fully managed database service that HCL offers which includes a Nutanix platform, including Nutanix Era, which is our database service, along with HCL services, as well as the hardware/software that customers need to actually run their business applications on it. And then, moving on to service providers, you know, we have great partnerships like with Cyxtera, who, in fact, was the service provider partner of the year. That's the award they just got. And many other service providers, including working with, you know, all of the edge cloud, Equinix. So, I can go on. We have a long list of partnerships, but what I want to say is that these are very important partnerships to us. All the way from, as Tarkan said, OEMs, hyperscalers, ISVs, you know, like Red Hat, Citrix, and, of course, our service provider, GSI partnerships. And then, last but not least, I think, Tarkan, I'd love for you to maybe comment on our channel partnerships as well, right? That's a very important part of our ecosystem. >> No, absolutely. You're absolutely right. Monica. As you suggested, our GSI program is one of the best programs in the industry in number of GSIs we support, new SP program, enterprise solution providers, service provider program, covering telcos and regional service providers, like you suggested, OVH in France, NTT in Japan, Yotta group in India, Cyxtera in the US. We have over 50 new service providers signed up in the last few months since the announcement, but tying all these things, obviously, to our overall channel ecosystem with our distributors and resellers, which is moving very nicely. We have Christian Alvarez, who is running our channel programs globally. And one last piece, Dave, I think this was important point that Monica brought up. Again, give choice to our customers. It's not about cloud by itself. It's outcomes, but cloud is an enabler to get there, especially in a hybrid multicloud fashion. And last point I would add to this is help customers regardless of the stage they're in in their cloud migration. From rehosting to replatforming, repurchasing or refactoring, rearchitecting applications or retaining applications or retiring applications, they will have different needs. And what we're trying to do, with Monica's help, with the entire team: choice. Choice in stage, choice in maturity to migrate to cloud, and choice on platform. >> So I want to close. First of all, I want to give some of my impressions. So we've been watching Nutanix since the early days. I remember vividly standing around the conference call with my colleague at the time, Stu Miniman. The state-of-the-art was converged infrastructure, at the time, bolting together storage, networking, and compute, very hardware centric. And the founding team at Nutanix told us, "We're going to have a software-led version of that." And you popularized, you kind of created the hyperconverged infrastructure market. You created what we called at the time true private cloud, scaled up as a company, and now you're really going after that multicloud, hybrid cloud opportunity. Jerry Chen and Greylock, they just wrote a piece called Castles on the Cloud, and the whole concept was, and I say this all the time, the hyperscalers, last year, just spent a hundred billion dollars on CapEx. That's a gift to companies that can add value on top of that. And that's exactly the strategy that you're taking, so I like it. You've got to move fast, and you are. So, guys, thanks for coming on, but I want you to both-- maybe, Tarkan, you can start, and Monica, you can bring us home. Give us your wrap up, your summary, and any final thoughts. >> All right, look, I'm going to go back to where I started this. Again, I know I go back. This is like a broken record, but it's so important we hear from the customers. Again, cloud is not a destination. It's a business model. We are here to support those outcomes, regardless of platform, regardless of hypervisor, cloud type or app, making sure from legacy apps to cloud native apps, we are there for the customers regardless of their stage in their migration. >> Dave: Right, thank you. Monica? >> Yeah. And I, again, you know, just the whole conversation we've been having is around this but I'll remind everybody that why we started out. Our journey was to make infrastructure invisible. We are now very well poised to helping our customers, making the cloud complexity invisible. So our customers can focus on business outcomes and innovation. And, as you can see, coming out of .NEXT, we've been firing on all cylinders to deliver this differentiated, unified hybrid multicloud platform so our customers can really run any app, anywhere, on any cloud. And with the simplicity that we are known for because, you know, our customers love us. NPS 90 plus seven years in a row. But, again, the guiding principle is simplicity, portability, choice. And, really, our compass is our customers. So that's what we are focused on. >> Well, I love not having to get on planes every Sunday and coming back every Friday, but I do miss going to events like .NEXT, where I meet a lot of those customers. And I, again, we've been following you guys since the early days. I can attest to the customer delight. I've spent a lot of time with them, driven in taxis, hung out at parties, on buses. And so, guys, listen, good luck in the next chapter of Nutanix. We'll be there reporting and really appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and, as always, we'll see you next time. (light music)

>>Hi, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin and pleased to welcome back. One of our cube alumni, Christian rowdy, the VP of technology strategy at Citrix Christian. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. And thanks for having me. Great to see you again, and we'll be virtually at this time. >>Great to see you too. It's been a couple of years and quite a few things have changed since we got to sit down at synergy a couple of years together together. Citrix has an exciting new announcement. Let's unpack that. Talk me to me about what you're announcing and what it's going to deliver. >>Sure. You know, as you said, actually, I can't believe it's been a couple of years since we last saw each other. And I think, you know, time's kind of just disappeared within the pandemic. So it actually, as a result of some of those things that we've seen, you know, people get so tired of being stuck in the same place and tired of being on this constant stream of video. And one of the things that we wanted to do was, was actually a vital Citrix launch part, which is kind of our new announcement series that will be delivered via LinkedIn live. But he's really intended to be kind of a short burst approach to providing updates to some of them really important things that we're working on at Citrix. So, uh, hopefully, uh, people would love to say a reason and get some rich information from them. >>And there's going to be a series of three launchpad programs. Now we've seen so much change since the rapid pivot to work from home. Now this worked from anywhere hybrid environment. We've seen the, the massive adoption of cloud and SAS. We've also seen the threat landscape, the attack surface, just expand and expand. Talk to me about why Citrix is doing the launch pad series and then we'll go through each of the three series. >>Yeah, absolutely. So maybe I think just to set a little bit of context, you know, we, we were working on some pretty interesting things, uh, pre pandemic, you know, uh, as a result of the, kind of the, the evolution of Citrix as an organization, but perhaps more importantly, the journey that our customers were on globally, you know, every customer that we had in, in any industry across the world, we're all at various stages of their own digital transformation. And I think what the pandemic has done apart from all the really bad things, actually, if you look at it as a, perhaps one gleaming bit of light in the whole thing was that we've given organizations, whether we realize it or not the opportunity to try this huge remote work experiment. And I think what it has done above anything else has shown that remote work actually works. >>And so as a result of that, what we've seen coming out of the pandemic is that organizations are really going to use that as a springboard. So implement some new strategies, new technologies, and really drive the next generation of that business. So with one eye on that, I think if you were to categorize the three big things that we're looking at from a Citrix perspective, it's really about how to help, we'll continue to help our customers with that accelerated it modernization to really help them understand what it takes to have secure, flexible work in this new post pandemic world. And then also to think about productivity, what does productivity mean in a world of ever more distributed teams? And so the events that we're talking about and specifically the cloud one, we'll focus on some of the new offerings from Citrix, some of the new technologies and talk about the trends that we've seen within our customers. >>So, you know, one of the big things that Citrix has always been very proud of is our market leading position in virtual application and virtual desktop delivery. And even that itself has now begun to emerge into what we call desktop as a service. And there's a ton of new innovations that we've been working on in that space as well. But also if you think about what's happening in cloud, as you talked about, you know, the evolution of applications being from traditional on premises, wills to SAS applications, what we're also seeing is things like the network services that use to support those applications when they looked slightly different, which from a deployment perspective, and now all moving to cloud services, the security that you alluded to in terms of how complicated that is, but how important it is for it, organizations, those services also moving to cloud as the applications begin to look very differently in the future. So extremely excited about the cloud launch. Patino, we're going to talk a lot about those things that we're doing both in the public cloud, in the hybrid cloud. And I think it will resonate well with customers around the world. >>I think it will as well. And you mentioned there are glimmers of hope that we've seen in the last 18 months. And one of the things that this has proved is that work from home can be productive, can be successful. Employees need to be empowered to be able to do that. Let's go ahead and talk through the first, um, program accelerating it monetization. This is Tuesday, September 28th. Let's talk about some of the, of the Citrix innovations that you're going to be announcing. >>Yeah, so I mean, as I mentioned know, we, we, we think about sort of ecstatic. I see modernization in various parts. You know, we tend to start with the classic infrastructure and we've seen over the years that lots of infrastructure, you know, he's leaving the building. And by that we mean the traditional realms of on-premise data centers or co-location facilities, this constant evolution and migration of those services, uh, to, to infrastructure as a service providers from the huge cloud companies that are out there. And we can continue to see that as a, as a huge trend. Of course. Um, one of the things that off the back of that of course is our move from the traditional world of virtual desktops, which was a very on-premise concept into desktop as a service. So really the key around desktop as a service, it's a simplification, some cost optimization and the things that it are looking at in terms of how they can really bring things to the party for their organizations going forward. >>And of course, as we move into that world of everything being delivered as a service know, things like network services, security services, they almost follow. So some of the things that you'll hear about that is really around our application, delivering security and also our move from VDI to DAS. And, you know, you'll hear a lot about what we're doing with the world's leading cloud providers to really add more Citrix value or build on what we've already done with them, but lots, lots more, uh, and really support the, the, the notion of the, every customer is on a journey to cloud one way or the other. And of course, districts will be ready to help at any stage of that journey. >>Every customer is on the journey to cloud. And we've seen that accelerate so much in the last 18 months. Talk to me a little bit about if we, if we think of desktop as a service, as an evolution of VDI, is that what you're saying? >>Yeah. You know, you think about sort of the traditional VDI scenario was that your virtual desktops, where we were using instead of physical desktops, you know, in inside the usual office location, but during the pandemic, you know, we saw so many customers rely on moving to VDI, to cloud, for reasons of scalability and reasons of security, but then also needing to still in many cases, provide access to those sort of traditional physical PCs. And of course, Citrix has had solutions for that for fundamentally many, many years. Um, but what we're also seeing is that organizations are striving for simplicity. You know, the kind of the value of the desktop is being able to deliver it on demand to the end user securely from wherever they are in the world on whatever device they're on. And as we see this sort of establishment of these new working norms, and I'm not a great fan of the phrase, the new normal, I think we have a new now and that now will evolve. You know, they almost daily as we come through the other side of the pandemic. So the real key drivers for us there obviously flexibility, reliability, security, and also cost optimization, which of course is the bread and butter of most conversations we have with CIO and CTO is around the world. >>That's critical. And I'm going to borrow that, um, the new, now, if you don't mind, I'll cite you credit. But I like that. I agree that I hope this is not the new normal, but one of the things that we've seen in the new now on the security front is we've seen this massive increase in ransomware. Everybody went to work from home almost overnight. Suddenly you have millions of devices, IOT devices connecting to corporate networks. Security became the acceleration of security, became a huge challenge for customers in any organization globally. Let's talk about now the second announcement. This is going to be Tuesday, October 5th, empowering a secure distributed workforce. >>Yeah. And I, and I think you you've hit the nail on the head there. I think the one thing that was perhaps completely staggering to everybody was the speed in which organizations were forced to lock their employees out of the physical office locations and by force. I mean, for all the right reasons that are around the health and wellbeing. I mean, if I think back to my earlier career, you know, before I joined Citrix, I was in a large organization and we would, you know, perform these fire drills every so often where we would go through our disaster recovery business continuity plans and really play scenarios out. Like the office in London was unavailable or the office in LA was unavailable, but never once do I remember is doing every office. And every location is offline from tomorrow. And there's no negotiability. If you have a device at home, please use it. >>You know, we can't provide laptops quick enough, especially with the global chip shortage now as well. So whatever device you have, we'll do our best to, to make that secure. And I think there was, uh, an expectation that the employees would sort of play nicely in that scenario. But of course, you know, if you have your home device, you probably don't update it as much as a work device. So it really does require a new set of thinking. And of course, Citrix has been at the forefront of the zero trust evolution. Now the technologies that we have in place do permit remote work and have them for many years. But I think what we're seeing now is a slightly different type of remote work, you know, with different types of, of applications and devices, as you said, different locations, you know, needing to knit all of that together in a sort of a more contextual way so that we can understand, you know, combinations of the end user, their location, the types of applications that they're using the state of their devices, and sort of bring it all that together to really understand, you know, just exactly how much security needs to be applied. >>I think the traditional challenges are still there, you know, too much security and end users will find a way around it because it's not a good user experience. And, you know, perhaps too much user experience without the security leaves, big holes and big problems for organizations. So, yeah, I think this balancing act is really key. And of course, uh, as we go through the launch funnel security, we'll talk about some of the great innovations and solutions that are coming from central. >>You're right with the fact that, uh, you know, this rapid pivot security, the changes, the things that people are saying, the workforce needs to be empowered. You know, we saw this sudden dependence on all these SAS applications to communicate and to collaborate. We also saw with that rapid PennDOT to work from home ransomware, I was doing some research recently, Christian, and that's it, it's up almost 11 X just in the first half of 2021 DDoSs is massively up. People are, are working from home in environments that are just suddenly a bit chaotic. And it's challenging from a security perspective when you have so many distractions to be able to make sure that you're following all the right steps as an employee, um, that you're not clicking on nefarious links and that you're really doing your own due diligence. So having that zero trust and help from folks like Citrix is really key to this new. Now, as you say, >>It is, you know, the unfortunate thing is that wildlife, uh, no end user, or certainly I would hope that no one user would willingly cause a problem from a security perspective. I think just by the very nature of the way that end users thing, can they interact with links in emails or the, uh, you know, interact with attachments in emails? Unfortunately, relying on the human is always going to be the weakest link in the chain. And I think that's why we have to have new approaches to how we address the use of behavior. You know, can we actually, uh, you know, guide people in different ways. There are plenty of technologies that are out there now. And then many, many from Citrix that actually allow us to what we've lovingly said is, is to save the users from themselves. You know, we can't simply rely on every user to be diligent for every single email or every single link that they see. So, you know, being able to actually understand, you know, where the threats are as it relates to the end user and the likely interaction they have, and then being able to combat those threats in the technology at a seamless way is really part of the excited evolution of, of what we're doing with Citrix. And again, lots of great things to come as we go through the security. >>And the third announcement is around worker boosting worker productivity. That's been a challenge that we've all faced in the last 18 months of having, like I said, a minute ago, you know, people that have suddenly kids learning from home spouses, working people competing for bandwidth. Talk to me about some of the things that Citrix is doing to help those workers be more engaged, be plugged in and really be able to get their jobs done from anywhere. >>Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I can give you the benefit of my experience, you know, being, uh, in a, in a home office for, for, for almost 20 months has been completely the antithesis of the opposite of the rest of my career. You know, I've, I've always been very mobile, um, you know, kind of picking up different devices and using them for different things, just purely from a, you know, the perspective of what's most convenient to me. And I think, you know, if you take that and extrapolate it to, to every employee and every organization around the world who has had to invite work into their home, you know, and another soundbite that I use quite often now is that, you know, for the last 20 months, we really haven't been working from home. We've been living at work, you know, and, and, and it's, it's a fact, you know, we've probably done more hours than ever before. >>We've run the risk of burnout more than ever before. And, you know, prior to the pandemic, I know, talked to you and I talked about this very thing, uh, at synergy, you know, w we talked about the notion of needing to focus on employee experience and employee productivity. You know, we saw plenty of examples in customers with huge initiatives around employee experience and employee productivity. You know, CIO is partnering with HR leads and really trying to figure out a map, the employee journey, you know, what is it that they do every day? You know, how can we make their life easier? And perhaps interestingly, how can we reduce some of the mundane overhead, you know, approvals or requests or things that we see in our everyday life, but actually give the employees more time to be valuable and, and do great cognitive work, which is of course, what, what humans do best. >>And so, you know, you remember, we talked about the micro apps back then. We, we we'd completed the acquisition of Sappho, uh, as you and I talked last time when we unveiled micro apps and micro workflows, as a way to really help end users interact within Citrix workspace. So the systems that they use every day, but provide a new way to do that. And just earlier this year, we completed the acquisition and integration of Reich, which was a fantastic addition to the Citrix portfolio. And so we've really begun to think about, you know, how can we actually help employees to do their best work? You know, w w what are the new capabilities that we need within Citrix workspace? What are the new capabilities that we need in Reich? How do we bring all that together with some of the other solutions that we have Citrix Podio is a really interesting suite of productivity applications that we have really aimed at that number one problem, which is how can I get people to be productive, to stay engaged, to lower the burnout and help them do their best work. And I'm really, really excited because there's some fantastic things. So we announced that the work version of the launch pod, which is on October 12th, >>All of those are so critical. You know, I I've always said employee productivity employee is directly related to the customer experience. I've used Wrike myself before, um, for different projects and being able to have productivity tools that allow the employee to engage, to be able to empower them to move projects forward, especially in a time that is still somewhat chaotic is, is critical as is to your point, ensuring that there are the proper tools to facilitate folks so that they get what they need when they need it to help reduce burnout. That's been a big challenge. You're right. That the living at work thing is real, it's persisting, and we're going to be in this hybrid environment for some TBD amount of time longer. So having the ability to be empowered and productive in a secure way, leveraging cloud capabilities is really key. And it's exciting to hear what Citrix launchpad is going to announce over those three days and deliver. >>Yeah. You know, I, I would just say, you know, in, in, in sort of summary where we're, we're really excited about the three areas now, and they really do sort of all come together in some of those challenges that we talked about, you know, specifically around how we can help organizations to address that accelerated it modernization to drive secure, flexible work in the new now, and also to really reach that goal of having extremely productive, distributed teams as we come out the other side of the pandemic. So, you know, lots going on a fantastic time to, to be here and to talk to you and to be at Citrix, of course, with so many, you know, huge customer issues that we, that we have to solve. And we're really excited for the challenge. >>Excellent. And we all are looking forward to that, the Citrix launchpad series, Christian, where can folks go to register for these different programs? >>Yeah, sure. So it's pretty simple. So if we just go to HTTP bit dot Lee, bit dot L Y forward slash Citrix launchpad, and we can sign up through that. >>Excellent. I've already signed up. I'm looking forward to these series, this series, to learn more about what you guys are doing and kind of dig in double click on some of the things that you spoke about Christian. Thank you for joining me today, talking about the launch pad series and letting folks know where they can go to register. >>Thank you. Great to be on the great to see you again. >>Likewise, for Christian Riley, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching a cube conversation.