>> From The Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data driven insights from The Cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Despite it's faster growth and infrastructure as a service, relative to AWS and Azure, Google Cloud platform remains a third wheel in the race for cloud dominance. Google begins its Cloud Next online event starting July fourteenth in a series of nine rolling sessions that go through early September. Ahead of that, we want to update you on our most current data on Google's cloud business. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube insights, powered by ETR. In this session, we'll review the current state of cloud, and Google's position in the market. We'll drill into the ETR data and share fresh insights from our partner and the Cube community. So let's get right into it. You know, Google, if you think about it, was actually very early into the cloud game. Google's 2004 IPO was a milestone event for the tech industry, and in you know many ways, it really marked the end of the post-dotcom malaise. It signaled the beginning of a new era of innovation. During this time, Google was busy building out its massive, global cloud infrastructure, probably the largest in the world, with undersea cables, global data centers, and tools like the Google file system, and of course Bigtable. But it took many years for Google to pull its head out of its ad serving butt and realize the opportunity to sell its cloud services to global enterprises. Bigtable, Google's no-sequel database, for example, was released in 2005, but it wasn't until 2015 that Google made this service available to its customers. That was the same year Google brought in VMware founder, Diane Greene to begin its enterprise journey in earnest. Now Google, they have a dizzying array of services in compute, storage, database, networking, IT ops, dev tools, machine learning, AI, analytics, big data, security, on and on and on. Name a category and it's likely that Google has something in it as a cloud service. But Google, to this day, still hasn't figured out how to sell to the enterprise. It really struggles to find the right formula. So, as you know, Google brought in Thomas Kurian from Oracle, to figure this out. Of course Kurian is, he's going to go with Google's strengths like analytics and database, but it has to have differentiation, so it comes up with unique pricing models like sustained discounts, which automatically apply discount for heavy usage, as opposed to forcing users to buy reserved instances such as what AWS does. You know Google is more aggressive partnering around multi-cloud, for instance, with Anthos, and it's smartly open-sourced Kubernetes really to minimize the importance of, physically, where workloads run. The bottom-line, however, is that these moves are necessary for Google to compete because it lags behind the leaders. And it has a long way to go before it's going to be satisfied with its cloud business. Let's look at the IaaS market in context. Now, I don't want to say it's all gloom and doom for Google. Far from it. Earnings for Q2, they're going to start rolling out later this month, but this chart shows our latest estimates of IaaS and PaaS for the big three cloud players. Now, I got to caution you, as I did before, other than AWS, which reports very clean numbers each quarter on IaaS and PaaS, we have to estimate Azure and GCP revenue because they bundle in other things. I'll give an example. Google reports its overall cloud numbers which include G Suite. Microsoft reports a category they call intelligent cloud. Now that includes public, private clouds, hybrid, sequel server, Windows server, system center, GitHub, enterprise support and consulting services. And Azure, the IaaS and PaaS numbers are also in there too. So what we have to do is to squint through the earnings reports and the 10 Ks and try to get a clean IaaS and PaaS figure for these players, and that's what we show here. Now there's really two points that we want to stress with this data. First, on a trailing 12 month basis, the big three cloud players now account for nearly 60 billion dollars in IaaS and PaaS revenue. And this 60 billion dollars, on a weighted average basis, is growing in the mid 40% range. So well on its way to being a 100 billion dollar business. Just for these three firms. And as we've reported, that's eating directly into the on-premises infrastructure install base, which is a flat to declining market. And that trend is going to play out in a big way this decade. We've predicted that public cloud is going to out pace on-prem infrastructure by more that 1800 basis points over the next 10 years, from a spending standpoint. Now the second point that I want to make relates to Google IaaS and PaaS growth. We peg it at greater than 70%, based on public statements, reading the 10 Ks and ETR data, which we'll discuss in a moment. So, very healthy growth, but from a much smaller install base than, or base than AWS and Azure. But in our view it's not enough, because AWS and Azure are so large and strong still, growth wise, that we feel Google is going to remain a distant third, really indefinitely. Nonetheless, a lot of companies would be thrilled to have a four billion dollar cloud business and there's certainly good news in the data for Google. So let's look at some of that survey data. Now, as we've reported in the past, Google pushes G Suite very hard, as part of its cloud story, and it leads often times with G Suite in its messaging. You know, but to us that's never really been that compelling. So let me start with some anecdotal data from ETR. ETR runs a regular program, they call it VENN, and in the VENN they invite clients into a private session to listen to named CIOs talk about their experience with vendors and overall spending intentions. It's a facilitated session. And we've had ETR's Eric Bradley on as a guest who directs the VENN program, and does much of the facilitation, and here's a statement from a recent VENN session quoting a CIO at a midsize Telco, that I think sums it up nicely. He says Google's G Suite is fine and dandy, but I don't see that truly as an enterprise solution. And frankly, it's still not of the quality of an Office application, talking about Microsoft. All in all I really like the infrastructure-as-a-service and the platform-as-a-service components that GCP had. And I thought they were coming along very very well in that space. Now, the reason that I share this is because the IT buyers that we speak with, you know they're very serious about exploring Google. They want options other than Azure and AWS and they see Google as having great tech and as a viable alternative. So let's talk about GCP and the enterprise. We looking, when we look into the ETR data for the most recent survey, which ran in June and early July, GCP is showing strength in one really important bellwether category, the giant public and private companies. These are the largest firms in the ETR dataset and often point to secular trends. Now, before we get into that, let's look at the picture for GCP using ETR's net score up methodology. This is fundamental to the ETR approach, and remember, each quarter ETR goes out and asks its respondents, are you planning to spend more or less? In its July survey, ETR focuses on second half spending. The next chart captures results across Google's entire portfolio. So here's the breakdown for, for Google across all sectors. 14% of the respondents are adopting new, that's the lime green. 39% plan to increase spending in the second half versus the first half, that's the forest green. Then there's a big fat middle, that's flat, and you see that in the gray area. And the 7% are spending less, with 2% replacing, that's the pinkish and dark red, respectively. So, I would say this result is mixed, in my opinion. Yeah, it's not bad, don't get me wrong, and we've, we'll see once ETR comes out of its quite period, how this compares to Azure and AWR, so remember, I can only share limited data until ETR clients get the data and have time to act on it. But this calculates out to a net score of 44%, which is respectable, but frankly not overly inspiring. So let's look across the GCP portfolio using the ETR taxonomy and see what it looks like. This chart shows the net score comparisons across three different surveys, October 19, April 20, and July 20. So reading the bars left to right, you can see Google's strong suit really is machine learning and AI. Container platforms are also very strong, as are functions, or server-less, and databases, very solid, we'll talk more about that in a minute. You know, video conferencing was just added by ETR and sure it pops up with the work from home. Cloud is actually holding firm when compared to October of last year. But surprisingly, analytics is looking a bit softer. And ETR for the first time added G Suite with, it shows a 26% net score, first time out, which is pretty tepid. I mean not very impressive at all. But overall, the picture looks pretty good for Google. So let's dig further into the giant public and private sector, that bellwether I talked about. And let's peal the onion a bit and look closer at the results from the largest companies in the dataset. So this chart shows the giant public, plus private organizations. So it would include like monster public companies but also large companies like a Cargill or a Coke Industries, if in fact they responded in this survey. And you can see, in that all important sector, it's a story of a lot of green with hardly any red, so quite a positive sign for Google within those bellwethers. Here's what I think is happening here. Is these large, and often far flung organizations, have realized that they have multiple cloud vendors, and they're asking their senior IT leadership to bring some consistency and sanity to their cloud strategies. So they look at the big three and say, okay, what's the best strategic fit for each workload? So they might say for instance let's use AWS for core IaaS, let's use Azure for productivity workloads, and we'll sprinkle some Google in for machine learning and related projects. So we do see some real strength in some of the larger strongholds for Google, although interestingly ETR sort of tells me that there's softness in the midsize and smaller companies that have powered AWS for so many years. And of course this, with Google's base, but compare that to AWS and AWS is much stronger in those smaller companies, start-ups and the like, and of course COVID's the wild car in all this. You know, we have to take that into account, and we will with Sagar Kadakia, who's ETR's director of research in the coming weeks. But I want to look at Google in the all important database category. So before we wrap, let's look at database. You remember, Google's playing catch up in the cloud and its marketing takes a more open posture around partners and things like multi-cloud and you know you can contrast that with AWS for example, but look, make no mistake, Google wants you data in their cloud, and that's why database is so strategic and so important. Look, it's the mother of all lock specs. All you got to do is look at Oracle and their success. Now, as we've reported many times, there's a new workload emerging in the cloud around this idea of the modern data warehouse. I mean I don't even like that term anymore, data warehouse, because it sounds just so static. But anyway, any rate, I'm talking about workloads that bring database, machine learning, AI, data science, compute and storage along with visualization tools to deliver real-time insights and operational analytics. Database is at the heart of everything here. Win the database and everything else falls into place. Now, Google has six or seven database products and one of the most impressive, in my opinion, is BigQuery. I mean, for those who have followed me over the years you know I love the technology behind Google's banner, but BigQuery is where much of the action is around this new workload that I'm talking about. So, let's look at, deeper at Google's position in database. This chart shows one of my favorite views. On the Y axis is the net score, or spending momentum, and on the X axis is market share or pervasiveness in the ETR dataset. The chart plots various database companies and their position within the all important giant public plus private sector. So these are the companies in the ETR survey that are the largest, and oftentimes, again, are a bellwether. And you can see Microsoft and Oracle and AWS have very strong presence on the horizontal axis. Mongo, MongoDB looms large, MemSQL, they just raised 50 million dollars this past May, MariaDB just raised another 25 million this month. You can see Couchbase and Redis, they show up, and they're on my radar. I'm learning more about those companies. Folks, database is hot. VC's are pouring money in and it's something that's very important to the Cube community to look at. And of course you see Google in the chart, with a strong net score, you know, but not the type of market presence that you see from the other big cloud players. In fact, they've pulled back a little somewhat in this last ETR survey. So despite some bright spots in the enterprise in terms of spending momentum, just not quite enough presence yet. Oh, by the way, look who's right there with Google. I know I sound like a broken record, but Snowflake is everywhere. You'll find them in AWS, you'll find them in Azure and on GCP. Now remember, Snowflake is only about one tenth the size of Google's IaaS and PaaS business. But it has stronger spending momentum than all the big guys, and it continues to creep its way to the right in terms of market share or presence. You know, but Google has great database tech and BigQuery is at the heart of its strategy to support analytics at scale, and automate the data pipeline. BigQuery's very well designed, it started as a cloud native database, it's based on server-less, it's highly scalable, and it's very cost-effective. In fact, ESG, enterprise strategy group, wrote a report comparing the TCO of the cloud databases. Let me pull that up and show you. Now the report was commissioned by Google, so I got to caution you there. But it was very well done in my opinion by a guy named Aviv Kaufmann, and you can see here it compares BigQuery with the other cloud databases, and of course, you know, BigQuery wins, got the lowest TCO, but again I thought the report was really detailed and well researched. I have no doubt that Snowflake has an answer for the big brown bar, which is on-demand cloud cost. I think ESG was making certain assumptions, maybe worst case assumptions, about the need to over-provision resources for Snowflake, which I'm sure ESG can defend, but I'll bet dollars to donuts that Snowflake, you know, has an answer to that or a comeback. I'm going to ask them. But the point I want to make here is that BigQuery was designed from day one, again, as a cloud-native database. We've been talking about that a lot. It's very efficient and is going to be competitive. So you can see, there are some bright spots in the enterprise, for Google. Okay, let's wrap up. Now, having called out some of the positives, and there are many, Google is still not getting it done in the enterprise, in my opinion. I certainly would not say too little too late, but I would say they spotted the competition a huge lead, and the only reason is Google just didn't act on the opportunity staring them in the face, within the enterprise, fast enough, and they finally woke up. But enterprise sales are, they're really hard. Thomas Kurian, for all his experience, is coming from way, way behind with regard to the enterprise go to market, systems and processes, pricing, partnerships, special deals for the enterprise. Google's still learning how to sell the business outcomes and is relying far too much on its technology chops, which, while impressive, are not going to win the day without better enterprise sales, marketing, and ecosystem integration. Now I feel like for years, Google has said to the enterprise market, give me heat and I'll add the wood. Meaning we have the best tech, go ahead and use it. That strategy just doesn't work in the enterprise. Kurian knows it and I suspect that's why Google's showing some strength within these large, giant public and private companies. They're probably applying focused sales resources to nail customer success with some of its top accounts where they have a presence, and then once they nail that they'll broaden to the market. But they got to move fast. We'll learn more about Google's intentions and its progress over the next few, next few months as they try their online event experiment, and of course we'll be there providing our wall to wall coverage. Remember, these Breaking Analysis episodes, they're all available as podcasts. ETR is shortly exiting its quiet period, this week, and will be rolling out the data, so check out etr.plus. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siloconeangle.com and as always please comment on my LinkedIn posts, I really appreciate the feedback. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everyone. We'll see you next time.

(bright upbeat melody) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, here at theCUBE in Palo Alto, California, for our live stage performance all day for Supercloud2. Unpacking this next generation movement in cloud computing. Dave, Supercloud1 was in August. We had great response and acceleration of that momentum. We had some haters too. We had some folks out there throwing shade on this. But at the same time, a lot of leaders came out of the woodwork, a lot of practitioners. And this Supercloud2 event I think will expose and illustrate some of the examples of what's happening in the industry and more importantly, kind of where it's going. >> Well it's great to be back in our studios in Palo Alto, John. Seems like just yesterday was August 9th, where the community was really refining the definition of Super Cloud. We were identifying the essential characteristics, with some of the leading technologists in Silicon Valley. We were digging into the deployment models. Whereas this Supercloud, Supercloud2 is really taking a practitioner view. We're going to hear from Walmart today. They've built a Supercloud. They called it the Walmart Cloud native platform. We're going to hear from other data practitioners, like Saks. We're going to hear from Western Union. They've got 200 locations around the world, how they're dealing with data sovereignty. And of course we've got some local technologists and practitioners coming in, analysts, consultants, theCUBE community. I'm really excited to be here. >> And we've got some great keynotes from executives at VMware. We're going to expose some of the things that they're working on around cross cloud services, which leads into multicloud. I think the practitioner angle highlights my favorite part of this program, 'cause you're starting to see the builders, a term coined by Andy Jassy, early days of AWS. That builder movement has been continuing to go. And you're seeing the enterprise, global enterprises adopt this builder mentality with Cloud Native. This is going to power the next generation global economy. And I think the role of the cloud computing vendors like AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba are going to be the source engine of innovation. And what gets built on top of and with the clouds will be a big significant market value for all businesses and their business models. So I think the market wants the supercloud, the business models are pointing to Supercloud. The technology needs supercloud. And society, from an economic standpoint and from a use case standpoint, needs supercloud. You're seeing it today. Everyone's talking about chat GPT. This is an example of what will come out of this next generation and it's just getting started. So to me, you're either on the supercloud side of the camp or you're on the old school, hugging onto the old school mentality of wait a minute, that's cloud computing. So I think if you're not on the super cloud wave, you're going to be driftwood. And that's a term coined by Pat Gelsinger. And this is really the reality. Are you on the super cloud side? Or are you on the old huggin' the old model? And that's going to be a determinant. And you're going to see who's going to be the players on that, Dave. This is going to be a real big year. >> Everybody's heard the phrase follow the money. Well, my philosophy is follow the data. And that's a big part of what Supercloud2 is, because the data is where the money is across the clouds. And people want more simplicity, or greater simplicity across the clouds. So it's really, there's two forces here. You've got the ecosystem that's saying, hey the hyperscalers, they've done a great job but there's problems that they're not solving. So we're going to lean in and solve those problems. At the same time, you have the practitioners saying we have multicloud, we have to deal with this, help us. It's got to be simpler. Because we want to share data across clouds. We want to build data products, we want to monetize and drive revenue and cut costs. >> This is the key thing. The builder movement is hitting a wall, and that wall will be broken down because the business models of the companies themselves are demanding that the value from the data with security has to be embedded. So I think you're going to see a big year this next year or so where the builders will accelerate through this next generation, supercloud wave, will be a builder's wave for business. And I think that's going to be the nuance here. And all the people that are on the side of Supercloud are all pro-business, pro-technology. The ones that aren't are like, wait a minute I used to do things differently. They're stuck. And so I think this is going to be a question of are we stuck? Are builders accelerating? Will the business models develop around it? That's digital transformation. At the end of the day, the market's speaking, Dave. The market wants more. Chat GPT, you're seeing AI starting to flourish, powered by data. It's unstoppable, supercloud's unstoppable. >> One of our headliners today is Zhamak Dehghani, the creator of Data Mesh. We've got some news around her. She's going to be live in studio. Super excited about that. Kit Colbert in Supercloud, the first Supercloud in last August, laid out an initial architecture for Supercloud. He's going to advance that today, tell us what's changed, and really dig into and really talk about the meat on the bone, if you will. And we've got some other technologists that are coming in saying, Hey, is it a platform? Is it an architecture? What's the right model here? So we're going to debate that a little bit today. >> And before we close, I'll just say look at the guests, look at the talk tracks. You're seeing a diversity of startups doing cloud networking, you're seeing big practitioners building their own thing, being builders for business value and business model advantages. And you got companies like VMware, who have been on the wave of virtualization. So the, everyone who's involved in super cloud, they're seeing it, they're on the front lines. They're seeing the trend. They are riding that wave. And they have, they're bringing data to the table. So to me, you look at who's involved and you judge it that way. To me, that's the way I look at this. And because we're making it open, Supercloud is going to continue to be debated. But more importantly, the results are going to come in. The market supports it, the business needs it, tech's there, and will it happen? So I think the builders movement, Dave, is going to be big to watch. And then ultimately how that business transformation kicks in, and I think those are the two variables that I would watch on Supercloud. >> Our mission has always been around free content, giving back to the community. So I really want to thank our sponsors today. We've had a great partnership with VMware, who's not only contributed some financial support, but also great content. Alkira, ChaosSearch, prosimo, all phenomenal, allowing us to achieve our mission of serving our audiences and really trying to give more than we take from. >> Free content, that's our mission. Dave, great to kick it off. Kickin' off Supercloud2 all day, we've got some great programs here. We've got VMware coming up next. We have Victoria Viering, who's been on before. He's got a great vision for cross cloud service. We're getting also a keynote with Kit Colbert, who's going to lay out the fragmentation and the benefits that that solves, from solvent fragmentation and silos, breaking down the silos and bringing multicloud future to the table via Super Cloud. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. (bright upbeat music) (music fades)

(upbeat music) >> Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explore. John and I are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni, Muddu Sudhakar, the CEO of AISERA. Welcome to the program, Muddu. It's great to meet you. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for having me. Thank you, John. >> Great to see you again. You're like an industry analyst coming on "theCUBE". You should be like a guest analyst, breaking down. I know you got your own company to run, and by the way, the recent funding you had, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> In a market that's not getting a lot of funding. You get an up around. Congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> Business is good? >> Very good, thank you. Look, Goldman Sachs Investing, along with Zoom and Thoma Bravo, it was great for us. >> Great stuff. Well, I'm glad we could get you in. This day three, Lisa and I and Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson have all been talking to everyone for two days here at VMware Explore, formerly VMworld, our 12th year covering their annual conference, as you know, and we've been telling the executives, but day three is more of, we're going to mix it up. We're going to bring people in and get their opinions about Supercloud, does VMware go post-Broadcom? Obviously, that's going to happen. Looks like nothing's going to stop that from happening. What's next? What's the impact? Who wins? Who loses? VMware certainly not acting like they're going to get gutted. They're all full throttle ahead. They're laying down some announcements, vSphere 8, you got vSAN 8, they got cloud-native, they're talking multi-cloud. VMware's not looking like they're flinching. What's going on, in your view, outside of the bubble that we're here in San Francisco, out in the real world, in the trenches. What are people talking about? What do you see? >> Lot to unpack. (all laugh) >> Start at wherever you want. >> Yes. You know, I was a VMware alumni too. >> Yes >> You sold the company to VMware. You know the inside. Okay, So then, even then- >> I worked with Paul and Pat and Raghu. It's great to be back at VMware now. I think there's a lot going on in VMware. VMware is here to stay. The brand will stay. The VMware customers will stay for years to come. I think Broadcom and VMware, I think it's a great industry consolidation, the way in which I see it. And it is going to help all the customers too, right? Broadcom, having such a large foot play into both CA, the software business, the hardware business. I think what will happen is that Broadcom will try to create a hybrid cloud of their own with VMware. So there'll be a fourth player in the cloud industry. And then back to John, your Supercloud. The Supercloud by definition, there'll be private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds. I think Broadcom with VMware will help your vision of the Supercloud and what your customers are asking. >> Yeah, one of the things I want to get your thoughts on, Lisa and I were talking yesterday with the executives, AJ Patel in particular, he's a middleware guy. >> Right. >> So what he did was Oracle. He did a lot of the fusion stuff at Oracle. He now runs Modern Apps. And you came in at the time, I think, when they were just getting that app vision going, and Paul Moritz actually had it early with his 2010 vision, but too early on the app side. But that ended up happening too. So the question is, is Broadcom going to be this middleware layer, and treat the cloud like hardware. And then, apps or apps. Companies are apps. In a digital transformation, technology is the company. >> Right >> So the company is the app. >> That's right, >> Is an application. So apps and hardware, middle, a middleware model emerging. Do you think they're going for that? Or am I just making this up in my head? >> No, I think to me, I see Broadcom as much more, they're like a peer company at the high level. So they're funded by- >> Like a private equity company. >> Private equity company. >> You mean from a dollar standpoint. >> From a dollar standpoint. So Broadcom is going to fund companies. They're going to buy companies. They bought CA, they bought all the other assets. So Broadcom will have always hardware. The middle level could be VMware, but they also have CA, right? They have a bunch of apps here. So I see the Broadcom is also using VMware to run applications. So the consolidation will be they'll create a Supercloud using VMware. They're going to own their own apps. I don't think Broadcom's story is stopped. Its journey to come. They're going to buy more acquisitions, more apps companies. I won't be surprised, in the future, they buy Zendesk. I won't be surprised, in the future, they buy other apps companies, SaaS companies and cloud enterprise companies. Right? So that's where the P is coming. So the broad conversion is, I need a base middleware, like you're saying. There's no other middleware on top of hardware better than VMware. >> So do you think that they'll keep the stuff that's coming out of the other? 'Cause we've been speculating on "theCUBE" this week. They have the core business, but there's all this stuff that's kind of coming out of the oven that's not EBITDA-oriented yet. Do you think they keep that or they let it go? >> I think that's a great question to hang their CEO of Broadcom. But to me, I think, knowing them, they're going to keep, and if you look at Symantec, they kept parts of Symantec, this whole parts of it. So I think all options are on the table for them, right? They'll do whatever it is. But I think it has to be the ones that high growth companies they may give it. It all goes back to is it a profitability to it or not? But his vision is very good. I want to own the middleware, right? He will own the middleware using VMware to your vision, create a Supercloud and own the apps. So I think you'll see Broadcom is the fourth vendor in the cloud race. You have Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Broadcom is actually going to compete with this four. >> So you think there'll be a hyper scale? They'll be in the top three or four. >> There'll be top four. >> Okay. >> Along with Oracle. So now, we are talking about the five vendors will be Amazon, Azure, Google, Oracle, and Broadcom. >> We had Amazon guy on, Steve Jones. I should have asked him that question. I just don't see that happening yet. They have to have the full hardware side. How do you see that coming in? 'Cause Amazon's innovating at the atom level and they're working on stuff that's physical, transit, physics stuff, like down to the root level. >> I think Broadcom figure, look, they own the chips out right, at the end of the day. They also have a lot of chips such to supply to both mobile and this. So if there's anybody who can figure out the hardware, it will be Broadcom. That is their core of area. They didn't have the core in the software and the middleware. VMware is going to give them the OS, the Kubernetes, the VMs. Once you have that layer, I think you can innovate both up and below, right? So I think, John, I think Broadcom VMware will be a force to reckon with and I think these guys are going to get into healthcare space though. So if you see the way they battle, you and me are talking Lisa, like Microsoft bought new ones, Oracle bought Cerner. So they all paid 30 billion each. So the next battle ground will be, they'll start in the healthcare industry. Somebody's going to go look at the healthcare apps like Epic, right? They're going to look at how we can do the hospitals. They're going to look at hospital healthcare professionals. That area will be disrupted a lot in the same. >> What other industries do you think, besides healthcare, are ripe for disruption with Broadcom VMware? >> I think endpoint management, like remember VMware bought AirWatch when I was there back then, right? That whole area is called digital experience management. So that endpoint mainly will be disrupted. So Broadcom with VMware will go again into endpoint. I'm talking endpoint could be the servers, desktops, VMware Max, right? Virtual Desktop VDI. So that whole management of mobile devices to desktop, that whole industry will be disrupted. A lot of players are there trying to do more consulting services. I think VMware is a great assets and tools. If I'm Broadcom, my chip sets are going into the endpoint. So that area will be disrupted a lot with Broadcom in VMware. >> Yeah, one of the things that VMware, people have been talking about, is that the CA acquisition that Broadcom did was the playbooks public. Everyone saw what they did. They killed sales and market and they killed all the execs, metaphorically speaking. They fired them. VMware's got a different vibe here. I'm feeling like it could go one way or the other. I think they should keep them, personally. But you don't know. If they're a PE company, they EBIDA driven, maybe it's just simply numbers. >> Right. >> If that's the case, then I'm worried. But VMware's got pride, they got mojo, and they've got expertise in software. Maybe a little bit different circumstance? What's take on this? Or do you think it's going to be black and white to the numbers? >> I think, knowing Hank's playbook, if he knows what he's going to do, right? His playbook will be consistent with Symantec. >> You think he already knows what he wants to do? >> I think so. I think at that level, both with Simulink and Broadcom, they already know the playbook. At this stage the games, people already know their game. It's like a chess move. They already know. They'll look at VMware and see which assets to keep, which one not to keep, which organization, but I think Hank is a master at this one. To me, I'm personally excited with the VMware Broadcom combination. It's a great thing for the industry. It's great for VMware and VMware customers and partners. >> Well, John, you and Dave had a chance to sit down with Raghu. What were some of the things that he unpacked about the Broadcom acquisition? >> He was on talking points. He was on message. He was saying the things that any CEO was going to make a lot of cash on this deal. And he's proud. I think it wasn't about the money for him. I sensed that he's certainly going to make a lot of cash on this deal as an executive, but he's a long time VMware employee and a well loved and revered person. He's done a lot of great work, technically set the agenda. So I think their mindset is we're going to just continue to do an amazing job as VMware as we are and then let Broadcom, let the chips fall where they may, and hopefully, if they do a good job, maybe they'll either refactor some of their base plans or they laid it all out in the field, so to speak. So that's my vibe. Now specifically, he made some comments, like, "Yeah, we're really proud." And he staying technical. He's still like, "This is really happening." So I think he's going to, essentially, to the very end, be like, "Cross cloud and hybrid cloud. This is our third generation." So there he's hanging onto the VMware third act that they're saying, and he hopes that it comes home. And I think he's going to just deal with it. He didn't seem flustered and he didn't seem overly confident. >> Okay. >> I guess that's my opinion. What do you think? >> Personally worked with Raghu, worked for Raghu, so I think of him as the greatest CEO for VMware ever could have, right? It's a journey. It was Paul Maritz, then Pat Gelsinger, now Raghu. I think he's in the right place, right time to lead VMware, and Raghu's doing a fantastic job. And personally, getting these two companies married, I think Raghu did the right partnership with Broadcom. >> Well, I think if this event's any indication if they're just sitting back and waiting, they're not, and this event was well done, it was pulled off. The branding's amazing. I thought they did a good job with the name change. And then in light of all the Broadcom issues, the execution was great. It was not a bad show here. It was a good show. It wasn't terrible at all. People were excited. I think the ecosystem also felt that Broadcom, like an electronic shock to the system, like something's going to happen. Let's wait and see. I'm going to go to the event to see if it's going to be around and kind of getting a feel first party, in person, what's happening. Again, remember VMware didn't have an event since 2019. This is a community that thrives on physical, face to face camaraderie, community. And so, I think the show was a success. And I think that's a result of Raghu and his team. >> Because we have a booth there for AISERA, my company, we have a booth. We are offering coffee and donuts. You guys should come by and tell people. You'll get a free coffee and a donut, but it's one of the best shows I've seen. Well, I think people after pandemic are back, people are interacting. We have 500 people in one day at our booth. So for a startup company like us, getting that much crowd is unheard of. So it's great. We're very excited. >> The vibe from the partner community, I had a chance to talk with a lot of partners, AWS, NetApp, Rackspace, really seems like the partnerships side of VMware is very, very strong and the partners are excited about what's next for VMware. Did you have a chance to talk with any of the partners? >> Actually, look. I'm actually meeting with Karen. So Karen Egan is my contact at VMware too, and Sumit, (indistinct) a bunch of the customer success organization. We talk to people in their digital experience management team. We are very excited to be partner with both VMware's customer, partner, and all experts, right? I'll need the VMware ecosystem for my company to thrive. So for us, VMware customers are my customers and leveraging VMware APIs into VMware, that's that's important for us. >> Lisa, that's a great question because that brings us to the question of, okay, clearly this show also proves to us from our conversations and exploring the floor, the wave is coming. This next cloud wave is here. We're calling it Supercloud, whatever you want to call it, it's coming and it's real, and people know it. And also the lines of sight into economics around where people can fit in this next level ecosystem is becoming clear. So I think people kind of know what's the right side of the street to be on in this next shift. So that's coming. That's independent of Broadcom. So the floor represents to me the excitement for not only the VMware workload powering software, with or without Broadcom, but the next wave. So the question is if Broadcom goes down their path and Hank does what he does, who wins and who loses on where things flow? Because this energy is going to flow somewhere. Is it going to flow to AWS? Is it going to flow to Microsoft? Is it going to flow to HPE with Green Lake getting some great traction? NetApp's doing great. We just heard from them. So the partners aren't hurting. It's only going to get better. re:Invent's right around the corner. That's a packed house. Their ecosystem's growing like a weed. Who wins? 'Cause the customers at VMware are enterprise customers. They're used to being serviced. They have sales reps from Microsoft, they got sales reps from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, real senior enterprise stakeholders there. So someone's going to end up filling in as VMware settles into their broad composition. Who wins and who loses, in your mind? >> A Very good question. So my thing is, I think it's... Well, I put Microsoft and Amazon the winners. In that way, actually mean Microsoft will win because in a true Supercloud, your vision, back to hybrid cloud on-prem and public cloud, VMware disruption with Broadcom, as if there's any bridge in the market, Microsoft will take advantage of it. Azure, right? Amazon VMware is there. Then, you have Google and VMware. So I think Azure will probably try to take advantage of this, but very next will be Amazon, right away there. That leaves you with Google Cloud, right? Google Cloud is the one. So they're the people that are able to figure out what to do in this equation. And then, obviously, the other one is Oracle. Oracle has no hearts in this game. So to me, the people who are going to probably lose impact model will be Oracle if the Broadcom and VMware will happen. So it's Azure, Amazon winning the race, probably Google is right behind them. Oracle will be distinct. Other side is Dell. Actually, Dell has no game in this. Our Broadcom and VMware, Dell should be the one. >> Dell might have a little secret sauce on the table with Michael Dell. >> That's true. >> If he convert his shares, he might be the largest shareholder at Broadcom. >> That's true. >> He could end up owning all the back. >> So he may be the winner all the time. (all laugh) >> Don't count him out. Well, this is a good question. I want to just double click on this. So you get customer dynamic. Where do they go? You get the community, which is a big force multiplier in this world, and if you had to bet on community between Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, Amazon trumps Microsoft on force multiplier community. Ecosystem, AWS beats Microsoft on that one. So it's interesting because it's now multiple dimensions we're talking about here. It's customers. That's the top order, right? The customers. But also, you got community, the people who put on sessions, the people in the community that are the influencers that are leading the trends, and developers are very trending, relative to what kind of code they use, what's their environments? So the developers is changing that landscape and, ultimately, the ecosystem of partners, right? 'Cause there's a lot more overlap between AWS and VMware's ecosystem than there is between Microsoft and that. And HPE is just starting an ecosystem. So it's going to be very interesting. >> It is. It is. I think Broadcom and VMware cannot be any best time for the industry, right? As you said. HP is coming in. Oracle is coming in. And to your point, VMware and AWS are another best partners. Now, this going to create any gap for Microsoft to enter for Azure? I think that's where the market is saying that it's going to open up a hybrid cloud player for Microsoft to enter what is to be a tight relationship with VMware and Amazon. Right? So people will rethink through their apps. And more importantly, the end point to me. See, the key is, like you talk about with Supercloud, nobody's talking about Supercloud for the endpoint. >> You mean Edge or security? >> Not an Edge endpoint. Endpoint could be your devices, laptop, desktop. >> Or a building or a light bulb or whatever. >> Desktop or VDI desktop services servers, right? So we call it endpoint cloud. There's no endpoint Supercloud. John, that's an area that you should double click on. Super cloud for the servers is different from Supercloud for endpoint. >> Well, SuperCloud.World is the URL out there. If you're interested in Supercloud, we are adding tracks to that body of work. So we had our event on August 9th. It was virtual event, where Dave and I are going to add a data track, we're going to add a security track, and we should add, maybe, an endpoint workspace, work. >> That's a VMware brand, Workspace and Horizon. So that whole workspace endpoint for Supercloud is going to happen. >> Yes. >> Right. That kind of deviates from- >> Do you like Supercloud? Are you bullish on Supercloud? >> I'm very bullish on Supercloud because I, myself, is running on-prem in VPCs, public clouds, private clouds. Supercloud kind of composites it so app should be designed. 'Cause I don't want to design an app for one cloud. It's not going to work. So it's like how Java came and I can run it on any platform. The ideas you build it on Supercloud, run it, whatever you want. Right? >> That's exactly it. So what would you want to see in Supercloud as it evolves? And we were part of this open conversation. This is our point for today. We're going to have a great panel come up later today. We're going to have the influencers come on to debate what Supercloud should or shouldn't be. If you want to add to the contribution, we'll add this into the work, what should what's needed in Supercloud? What's table stakes. >> I think we need a Java compiler that will happen for Supercloud. I build it once, execute in any place I want, right? Using the Terraform, HashiCorp (indistinct) So what I don't want is keep building this thing for every cloud. I want to abstract that out. The whole idea of Supercloud is how Java gave me the abstraction for hardware 20 years back or 30 years back, we need the same abstraction for the cloud today. Otherwise, I'm customizing for VM Cloud, I'm customizing for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. We, as an application vendor, it's too hard to keep doing it. I have now thousand tuners. I don't need thousand DevOps people. I need maybe 10 DevOps people. So there's a clear abstraction complexity that industry should develop, and your concept Supercloud with everybody thinking that, and it has to start from the grassroots with ecosystem. >> What do you think about the participants in this abstraction layer? Because someone said on "theCUBE" here this week, the people in the abstraction layer shouldn't be participants in the below or above the abstraction. >> I think it should be everybody, right? It's all inclusive. You need the apps guys to come in. You need the OS players to come in. You need the cloud vendors to come in, infrastructure. So you need everybody. >> Okay, let's just say that you were the spokesperson for the Supercloud organization, Supercloud.World. How would you sell AWS on why it's important for them? >> It's because they can build it and sell it in AWS and multiple AWS Gov Cloud, AWS On-prem, VPCs. It's even important for them, their expansion, their market time upfront. If I'm (indistinct), if I'm built on Supercloud, I can increase my time share. Otherwise I'm bringing only to public cloud. >> Okay, so I'll say, I'm Amazon and we have a concept called "One Way Doors." We don't want to go through a one way door. Is Supercloud a one way door for them? What's in it for them? Do they make more? Does it help their ecosystem? And the same question from Microsoft Azure and Google cloud. >> They're make more money. They're making their apps run in multiple places. It's a natural expansion. You are solving your customer problems for Amazon and DGC, right? My job is give people choices. I give choice to Lisa. Lisa can run it on public cloud. John, you can run it on VPC, AWS. >> So you're saying, so you think customers are asking for this right now? >> Everybody's asking. >> But don't really know how to say it? >> Customers are asking. Partners are asking. All of us are asking. >> Okay, what's the ask? >> Ask is give me a one place to build applications and run it anywhere without adding the complexity. >> Okay. Done. That's Supercloud. It'll ship tomorrow. (Lisa laughs) Well done. (John laughs) All right, well done. Final question for you. Lisa and I have been talking with folks here. What advice would you give the folks that are in here? 'Cause we have a lot of activity, people with marketing their solutions and products. They're trying to put a voice out there around thought leadership and trying to figure out what side of the street they should be on relative to the next 10 years as they're here at VMware Explore, as the next gen cloud comes around. What's the right narrative? What's the right positioning for companies to be on right now to be the most relevant and in the flow? >> I don't know about 10 years, but right now we are in difficult economic times, right? Markets are down. Inflation is up. So I think the fastest cost, people should focus on cost. How can it take cost? Automation is the key, right? Whether you use AI or automation , like you and me talking, John, last week, right? That's important. Every CEO I talk to is focused on cost. How do I cut my cost? How can I do with fewer resources? How can I do with fewer people, right? So the new budget right now is cut your budget in half. So every company, every exec should think about how can you be a good citizen? How can I get growth and scale? How can I do more with less? And that should be the next 12 months. >> That was a lot of the theme of conversations that I had with the VMware ecosystem, doing more with less. So that's definitely on everyone's minds. >> Right, and that's what my company is fully focused on. AISERA is all about AI automation. How can we solve your thing? We want to be solving customer problem. We are like your automation engine for your enterprise, right? We are a platform of platform. That's why I like the Supercloud. I can run AISERA as a platform on top of Supercloud. >> Excellent. >> Wow! If only we had more time! I know that you guys could really dig into Supercloud and take it even further. So you have to come back, Muddu. >> I will. >> He always wants to come back. >> I will be back. >> He's on the team. He's has contributed to the open source effort of Supercloud. Thank you. >> Yes. >> All right, thank you so much for joining John and me and kind of breaking down your vision on VMware Broadcom and the future. Next step, we've got to get some customers on here. I really want to understand what the customer experience is going to be like, but we'll have to another segment on that one. >> We will do that. Thank you, Lisa, for having me. >> My pleasure. >> John. >> Thank you very much. Thank you. >> For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live on day three of our coverage of VMware Explore. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat corporate music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

>>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >>Welcome to this Special Cube conversation. We're gonna unpack and have a casual conversation around the big news that VM Ware just announced the sphere 7.7 point. Oh, or V. Sphere seven. Chris Prasad, senior vice president, General manager of the Sphere Cloud Platform Business unit. Paul Turner, VP of product. Guys, we just chatted about the big news. Congratulations. Um, the bottom line, if I'm a customer, I'm moving into the cloud. I see this as really an either an enabler or blocker. You guys actually think it's an enabler? Um, I'm not saying it's a blocker, but as a customer, I just need to know, Is it going to help me go faster? I'm going cloud, Which means I've been told I got to get on the cloud you got Amazon might have azure or multiple clouds with workloads sitting around. I gotta pull them all together and make them work. But right now, I just got to get my operations cloud native necessarily kind of pressure point. >>Oh, for sure. One of the biggest drivers that you see happen in the industry right now is kubernetes. Why? Why is kubernetes taking off communities taking off because it gives you cloud independence. It gives you the ability to run with same operating model, whether it's in Google Cloud, Amazon's Cloud, Microsoft Cloud or any other cloud service. What we're doing with version seven instruction bring that same kubernetes cloud independent operating model directly in divisor. So now all of your infrastructure platforms that are out there, 90% of I T environments are all kubernetes ready platforms on. That's really powerful. So what we've done is just taken a totally different kind of, um ah, scope on how cloud should be Cloud should be any cloud. It should be independent of one particular flavor of it and on developers should be able to work then in a much more agile way. >>You just see, I've been following VM where you know my career since it was founded. And, you know, with the Cube coverage over the years is they see the innovation. You guys do a lot of great stuff. Of course, we keep on our teams to minimum. And David Lantz he made some good calls with these v san. We saw the early stuff with V Cloud Air Kind of saw that kind of going in this direction, But it's been really innovation going on around you guys. I'll see with NSX has exploded and V Sphere has been the core thing. As you guys look at the cloud model, you guys made some good moves with Amazon. I've always felt that you guys could be that Switzerland that that layer of connection points between as enterprise really moved from old way of provisioning, too much more seamless operating model where they have a deal with cyber security. They gotta deal with all the stuff that's going to come from APS that's going to come from the APP store. When you bought Hep D Oh, I was like, That's actually really smart move. You started bringing that cloud native vibe into V sphere, and that's what's essentially happening here. Isn't it? >>Exactly. This is like the the coming out party for that, like it's V Sphere having all the hefty oh goodness embedded in it. And what they would see is that because we have such a huge presence in the on Prem space, this provides the fastest bad for customers to get to the cloud. So today I mean this? I don't want this point to be lost on the today. You know, we are running the same VM Ware Cloud Foundation, our on Prem on Amazon in Google and many of the same code base. Same code base, right? It's the exact same thing. So now what does that give you as a customer? It gives you the same operational model across all these clouds. Because customers today, we thought that they're setting up set of processes and tools or Amazon. Then you go to Azure. You're doing a different set than their training people to do that. And, you know, you could get into compliance and other issues where things fall through the cracks. Right? When you do that here, the same platform you said your policies wants it applies to all the clouds. You can move your workloads between clouds, right? That's a V motion. Essentially, we don't know the >>last kept on that one, but that's ideal would be crippled >>today. It is happening today and we have thousands of other partners which are the tier two service providers who are all also offering that. So we have a huge grab off these providers are in which we live in the same platform. >>Yeah, I want to add something else, actually, to that as well. Which is? This is an open platform, which is really powerful, right? This is based on kubernetes for developers, which means you can run on the V sphere platform, and that is a hybrid infrastructure that is the most ubiquitous infrastructure out there. But if you actually want to take your application actually deployed onto a native application Native Cloud, you can do that as well. Um, and so it's very important for us to keep the platform open while making broadest available on >>Dev ops. I mean, first, I totally agree. I think open wins, But the end of the day, I think this operating consistency is a big story because it's kind of like nuance. But it is really the most important customers care about, because if you're operating successfully seamlessly across cloud, it's better. So the question I have on the Dev Op side because the dream has always been infrastructure as code. So are you guys there with this? Do you consider this V Sphere seven kind of infrastructures code from a developer? Is it all being taken care of. How close are we in your mind's eye to infrastructure as code. >>Now it's 100% there. I mean, we made the announcement around Hangzhou, which is a set off other products and capabilities that we add to what the sphere has and that whole stack. And the solution is for this targeted at the modern developer. So we have all the capabilities that the developers need to do infrastructure as scored, to deploy their applications and deployed across all these clouds. >>And I want I want to add to that the infrastructure as code really has two parts to it. We look at how do I provide the developers infrastructure's code, which is what we're doing with kubernetes enablement and we have our V San product is available. In fact, all storage services from V sphere available through that andare NSX services are available through kubernetes. So you've got full infrastructures code for developers. But infrastructures code also means how do you deploy large scale infrastructures and manage them as code? How do people actually manage the operations and the deployment of services? And so you're right in your admin team actually have a full layer of enhanced lifecycle management provisioning off configurations and settings across infrastructure. All of that is now managed, as >>that's almost under the hood kind of stuff. But that's important because networking is going to play a big role in all of this from a security standpoint and also compute storage. Pretty much looking, looking good, but networking becomes a huge part of what's under the hood. >>Yeah, I mean, look at networking is what enables us to connect all these clouds together, right? And NSX being the underlying platform for us enables us to have one single layer across all these clouds with the same operating model. So NSX is very critical. >>I want to get your guys thoughts on some little history lesson here or scar tissue, as we say in the industry. You know, I remember back during the Hadoop days, 2010 the big data movement hit, and it was just going to save us all. It's gonna be great, but what ended up happening was this very hard to stand up these clusters and what happened was the commitment the vision was there, but it was just really hard to manage and stand up clusters and hire people to do this. So it has some use cases, but it just really kind of fell down. We saw Open Stack have a similar trajectory where good on paper, things had used cases. But it's just so hard to manage the trends. We're moving very, very fast. Cloud was here. Cloud Computing kind of took everyone by storm and just got rid of all those things. And so they kind of dying. >>No. But if you think about why open Stack didn't go anywhere in the end, it's because of the operational complexity right? It took a lot to set it up, and he had essentially invest a lot more than keeping it running right. And then what we're doing is saying you don't have to worry about that aspect because it's built into the platform that you already know, right? So we have taken that complexity out completely, and so you just have this fear. The administrators know how to set up and run and do life cycle, and this year, and you get kubernetes, go >>back to my original question. If that's the case, which, by the way, I think that's the way to think about it. Then I found the customer acceleration. I can draft up with the movement of cloud as fast as I can Go is having any kind of blockers. >>Fastest lamb like cloud >>ran to the cloud >>and fastest fastest ramp to a cloud operating model, which means that all of your developers can now actually run as quickly as they can, building their applications independent of I t. In a much more dynamic way. So you want to move to that cloud operating model. That's why Kubernetes is so important on the infrastructure side. We've actually, of course, made it a much easier platform to manage. But but it's the agility that matters. >>You guys have done some great innovation. I think you've got a good ear to the market, made some good moves. Looking good. This is a great vision. I got to get your guys take on the edge. Big discussion. Five g. Certain years love that kind of vision. But the end of the day and edge. Now, if you talk about cloud operations, everything's an edge, right? So what does edge mean for V sphere? How do you guys look at the edge of the network. And as these applications with the sensors or whatever happening at the edges, How does this V Sphere look at that? How do you guys look? >>So, uh, for let me just I would say that, you know, we we have, ah, data center edge, right? We just think of it as, um, retail stores, Starbucks, right. They have a kind of a mini data center application running there. That's one kind of edge that people talk about. Then you have the kind of the telco edge, but a lot of the crossing of the five year data is happening, right? Where the cell tower, Selden. We're done. And then you have the devices. You just the cars, the You know what you have at home and we're not right. And then and we can play across all of these because we have the platform. I don't know if you know, but ah, v sphere, as the platform is, is embedded in many devices today. It's in the army. It's embarking leaders it. So it has a form factor that can live in all these devices. We certainly play in the data center, so we're well suited to play the >>piece for anywhere. >>Yeah, that is exactly right. >>I think we're already We're already at the data center edge, as we've talked about that is, it's a very common deployment use case for earlier versions of the sphere, and it will continue to be the value that you guys it's not not new at all. I think the telco edge is actually a very interesting one, particularly the five G switch over. So you know what's happening. There is. There's a whole radio access networks and you're looking at the V Ron as a big initiative there. Which is how do we bring virtualization as a service they're into into those networks? Container deployments becomes very important as well. So we actually have a platform with version seven that actually can give the telco edge and five G network deployments a much more secure, predictable runtime environment. So that's really powerful as well. And it's containers and VMS because many of those applications that are deployed a telco edge our container based applications. >>It's interesting, you know, we talk about stacks in our last segment and you guys talking about the news and now having all these stacks later on. But think about the evolution of the industry with cloud. A whole new sets of services are emerging mentioned Telco Edge. So it just looks different. What's the same kind of open model that open systems brought us, but just a little bit different? It's a distributed cloud security computer, same concepts, new new capabilities. >>Not just to add to that, I mean the biggest innovation John is happening in the hardware layer by the computer, sort of getting disaggregated. There is a lot of acceleration that is going on that are specialized chips, a six effigies that are being built into the servers and and memory's getting pulled outside because the interconnect is getting fast enough for those things to happen. And so a lot of the innovation that we do as a platform that we didn't talk about much today is really a data layer, because we had to virtual eyes all of that and provide it to the level. Of course, >>yeah, it's great. It's a great architecture. I think I just add more complexity that's coming and you guys can help. Abstract away is you just look at cybersecurity and the role of data. You got to get in front of all these these trends to get that automation dev ops going because without any automation and software is just people can't handle the inbounds. It's a big problem. >>Yeah, you really need, um, your platforms to provide intrinsic security. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be an option. It shouldn't be something the developers need to worry about. It should be something that's just part of the platform. And that's one of the things that we see is critical and actually built into Visa or seven. And you've seen that we've made a number of acquisitions recently. Actually, in the security piece, it's it's so that we can purposely build into your runtime environment, which is your VM environment container environment that we're running. We actually build in intrinsic security would build in a dynamic checking off the scope of an application in real time. Um, while those applications running, which is very key. >>Paul, >>Thanks for sharing all that great stuff. I want to get one final thought for both of you before we wrap up is we've been seeing and we've been reporting kind of the three ways of the cloud wave one was public. We all kind of know how that turned out. Awesome Cloud Native Born in the Cloud Wave two is well right now with a lot of intensity hybrid that's got a range of definitions. And then the third wave that's coming fast is multi cloud. So I want to get your thoughts on hybrid. A lot of energy, a lot of spend a lot of dollars investment in hard causing people in hybrid. I know we have different definitions. Is also different versions of hybrid. How do you define hybrid? And how does that become a path to the next wave? Or is it a path of next wave? What's your take? >>So it's absolutely the bad the next, I would say the hybrid, in our view, is the same platform running on which cloud do you want to use in our platform, as we talked about spans all the major clouds today giving the same operating model, and that's what we view as the hybrid cloud story. But the next one is the ability to mix native cloud workloads and services with that, and we already have a set of products and services that target that it's the times. A portfolio that I talked about is all focused on the multi cloud journey. So we kind of support both, and we're looking forward and aggressively going after the multi cloud. >>I think it's important to think of them as is completely complimentary of each other, right? A hybrid infrastructure platforms. So you know, a single I T organization can actually have one operating experience for their entire infrastructure, independent of Cloud Private Cloud Public Cloud Services. But Multi Cloud is about developers. It's about developers able to deploy their applications on any cloud environment that they need to, and they don't need to worry about infrastructure. So hybrid cloud is really about, ah, hybrid infrastructure that we can deploy everywhere, multi cloud and the services that we're providing to developers is all about how you could be independent of any cloud deployment that you want. It could be a hybrid infrastructure you deploy on. It could be on a standard public cloud service, >>and what's interesting is not. Not not all clouds are created equal. I mean, Amazon has much more capability in Azure and Google, but they're finding their swim lanes. But again it's all about the workload. The workload decides which cloud to work on. And that's right. You guys just agnostic? Yes, For the operator. Well, well, Thanks for the insight, guys. Appreciate you did a little post wrap of the news. Thanks for hiring. Thank you. Big news. These fear seven Q breakdown here. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching, >>right? Yeah.

(upbeat jazz music) >> Woman: From our studio's, in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a CUBE conversation. >> John: Hello and welcome to this CUBE conversation here, exclusive coverage of Google Next 2019. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Big Google Cisco news, we're here with KD who's the vice president of the data center for compute for Cisco and Kip Compton, senior vice president of Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. Guys, welcome to this exclusive CUBE conversation. Thanks for spending the time. >> KD: Great to be here. >> So Google Next, obviously, showing the way that enterprises are now quickly moving to the cloud. Not just moving to the cloud, the cloud is part of the plan for the enterprise. Google Cloud clearly coming out with a whole new set of systems, set of software, set of relationships. Google Anthos is the big story, the platform. You guys have had a relationship previously announced with Google, your role in joint an engineering integrations. Talk about the relationship with Cisco and Google. What's the news? What's the big deal here? >> Kip: Yeah, no we're really excited. I mean as you mentioned, we've been working with Google Cloud since 2017 on hybrid and Multicloud Kubernetes technologies. We're really excited about what we're able to announce today, with Google Cloud, around Google Cloud's new Anthos system. And we're gonna be doing a lot of different integrations that really bring a lot of what we've learned through our joint work with them over the last few years, and we think that the degree of integration across our Data Center Portfolio and also our Networking and Security Portfolios, ultimately give customers one of the most secure and flexible Multicloud and hybrid architectures. >> One of the things we're seeing in the market place, I want to get your reactions to this Kip because I think this speaks to what's going on here at Google Next and the industry, is that the company's that actually get on the Cloud wave truly, not just say they're doing Cloud, but ride the wave of the enterprise Cloud, which is here. Multicloud is big conversation. Hybrids and implementation of that. Cloud is big part of it, the data center certainly isn't going away. Seeing a whole new huge wave. You guys have been big behind this at Cisco. You saw what the results are with Microsoft. Their stock has gone from where it was really low to really high because they were committed to the Cloud. How committed is Cisco to this Cloud Wave, what specifically are you guys bringing to the table for Enterprises? >> Oh we're very committed. We see it as the seminal IT transformation of our time, and clearly on of the most important topics in our discussions with CIO's across our customer base. And what we're seeing is, really not as much enterprises moving to the Cloud as much as enterprises extending or expanding into the Cloud. And their on-prem infrastructures, including our data centers as you mentioned, certainly aren't going away, and their really looking to incorporate Cloud into a complete system that enables them to run their business and their looking for agility and speed to deliver new experiences to their employees and to their customers. So we're really excited about that and we think sorta this Multicloud approaches is absolutely critical and its one of the things that Google Cloud and Cisco are aligned on. >> I'd like to get this couple talk tracks. One is the application area of Multicloud and Hybrid but first lets unpack the news of what's going on with Cisco and Google. Obviously Anthos is the new system, essentially its just the Cloud platform but that's what they're calling it, Googles anthem. How is Cisco integrating into this? Cause you guys had great integration points before Containers was a big bet that you guys had made. >> Kip: That's right. >> You certainly have, under the covers we learned at Cisco Live in Barcelona around what's going on with HyperFlex and ACI program ability, DevNet developer program going on. So good stuff going on at Cisco. What does this connect in with Google because ya got containers, you guys have been very full throttle on Kubernetes. Containers, Kubernetes, where does this all fit? How should your customers understand the relationship of how Cisco fits with Google Cloud? What's the integration? >> So let me start with, and backing it with the higher level, right? Philosophically we've been talking about Multicloud for a long time. And Google has a very different and unique view of how Cloud should be architected. They've gone 'round the open source Kubernetes Path. They've embraced Multicloud much more so then we would've expected. That's the underpinning of the relationship. Now you bring to that our deep expertise with serving Enterprise IT and our knowledge of what Enterprise IT really needs to productize some of these innovations that are born elsewhere. You get those two ingredients together and you have a powerful solution that democratizes some of the innovations that's born in the Cloud or born elsewhere. So what we've done here with Anthos, with Google HyperFlex, oh with Cisco's HyperFlex, with our Security Portfolio, our Networking Portfolio is created a mechanism for Enterprise ID to serve their constituent developers who are wanting to embrace Containers, readily packaged and easily consumable solution that they can deploy really easily. >> One of the things we're hearing is that this, the difference between moving to the Cloud versus expanding to and with the Cloud, and two kind of areas pop up. Operational's, operations, and developers. >> Kip: Yep. >> People that operate IT mention IT Democratizing IT, certainly with automation scale Cloud's a great win there. But you gotta operate it at that level at the same time serve developers, so it seems that we're hearing from customers its complicated, you got open source, you got developers who are pushing code everyday, and then you gotta run it over and over networks which have security challenges that you need to be managing everyday. Its a hardcore op's problem meets frictionalist development. >> Yeah so lets talk about both of these pieces. What do developers want? They want the latest framework. They want to embrace some of the new, the latest and greatest libraries out there. They want to get on the cutting edge of the stuff. Its great to experiment with open source, its really really hard to productize it. That's what we're bringing to the table here. With Anthos delivering a manage service with Cisco's deep expertise and taking complex technologies, packaging it, creating validated architectures that can work in an enterprise, it takes that complexity out of it. Secondly when you have a enterprise ID operator, lets talk about the complexities there, right? You've gotta tame this wild wild west of open source. You can't have drops every day. You can't have things changing every, you need a certain level of predictability. You need the infrastructure to slot in to a management framework that exists in the dollar center. It needs to slot into a sparing mechanism, to a workflow that exists. On top of that, you've got security and networking on multiple levels right? You've got physical networking, you've got container networking, you've got software define networking, you've got application level networking. Each layer has complexity around policy and intent that needs to marry across those layers. Well, you could try to stitch it together with products from different vendors but its gonna be a hot stinking mess pretty soon. Driving consistency dry across those layers from a vendor who can work in the data center, who can work across the layers of networking, who can work with security, we've got that product set. Between ACI Stealthwatch Cloud providing the security and networking pieces, our container networking expertise, HyperFlex as a hyper converge infrastructure appliance that can be delivered to IT, stood up, its scale out, its easy to deploy. Provides the underpinning for running Anthos and then, now you've got a smooth simple solution that IT can take to its developer and say Hey you know what? You wanna do containers? I've got a solution for you. >> And I think one of the things that's great about that is, you know just as enterprise's are extending into the Cloud so is Cisco. So a lot of the capabilities that KD was just talking about are things that we can deliver for our customers in our data centers but then also in the Cloud. With things like ACI Anywhere. Bringing that ACI Policy framework that they have on-prem into the Cloud, and across multiple Clouds that they get that consistency. The same with Stealthwatch Cloud. We can give them a common security model across their on-prem workloads and multiple public Cloud workload areas. So, we think its a great compliment to what Google's doing with Anthos and that's one of the reasons that we're partners. >> Kip I want to get your thoughts on this, because one of the things we've seen over the past years is that Public Cloud was a great green field, people, you know born in the Cloud no problem. (Kip laughs) And Enterprise would want to put workloads in the Cloud and kind of eliminate some of the compute pieces and some benefits that they could put in the cloud have been great. But the data center never went away, and they're a large enterprise. It's never going away. >> Kip: Yep. >> As we're seeing. But its changing. How should your customers be thinking about the evolution of the data center? Because certainly computes become commodity, okay need some Cloud from compute. Google's got some stuff there, but the network still needs to move packets around. You still got to store stuff, you still need security. They may not be a perimeter, but you still have the nuts and bolts of networking, software, these roles need to be taking place, how should these customers be thinking about Cloud, compute, integration on data primus? >> That is a great point and what we've seen is actually Cloud makes the network even more important, right? So when you have workloads and staff services in the Cloud that you rely on for your business suddenly the reliability and the performance and latency of your networks more important in many ways than it was before, and so that's something any of our customers have seen, its driving a lot of interest and offerings like SD-WAN from Cisco. But to your point on the data center side, we're seeing people modernize their data centers, and their looking to take a lot of the simplicity and agility that they see in a Public Cloud and bring it home, if you will, into the data center. Cause there are lots of reasons why data centers aren't going away. And I think that's one of the reasons we're seeing HyperFlex take off so much is it really simplifies multiple different layers and actually multiple different types of technology, storage, compute, and networking together into a sort of a very simple solution that gives them that agility, and that's why its the center piece of many of our partnerships with the Public Cloud players including Anthos. Because it really provides a Cloud like workload hosting capability on-prem. >> So the news here is that you guys are expanding your relationship with Google. What does it mean? Can you guys summarize the impact to your customers and the industry? >> Well I think that, I mean the impact for our customers is that you've two leaders working together, and in fact they're two leaders who believe in open technology and in a Multicloud approach. And we believe that both of those are fundamentally more aligned with our customers and the market than other approaches and so we're really excited about that and what it means for our customers in the future. You know and we are expanding the relationship, I mean there's not only what we're doing with Google Cloud's Anthos but also associated advances we've made about expanding our collaboration actually in the collaboration area with our Webex capabilities as well as Google Swed. So we're really excited about all of this and what we can enable together for our customers. >> You guys have a great opportunity, I always say latency is important and with low latency, moving stuff around and that's your wheelhouse. KD, talk about the relationship expanding with Google, what specifically is going on? Lets get down and dirty, is it tighter integration? Is it policy? Is it extending HyperFlex into Google? Google coming in? What's actually happening in the relationship that's expanding? >> So let me describe it in three ways. And we've talked a little bit about this already. The first is, how do we drive Cloud like simplicity on-prem? So what we've taken is HyperFlex, which is a scale out appliance, dead simple, easy to manage. We've integrated that with Anthos. Which means that now you've got not only a hyper conversion appliance that you can run workloads on, you can deliver to your developers Kubernetes eco system and tool set that is best in class, comes from Google, its managed from the Cloud and its not only the Kubernetes piece of it you can deliver the silver smash pieces of it, lot of the other pieces that come as part of that Anthos relationship. Then we've taken that and said well to be Enterprise grade, you've gotta makes sure the networking is Enterprise grade at every single layer, whether that is at the physical layer, container layers, fortune machine layer, at the software define networking layer, or in the service layer. We've been working with the teams on both sides, we've been working together to develop that solution and bring back the market for our customers. The third piece of this is to integrate security, right? So Stealthwatch Cloud was mentioned, we're working with the other pieces of our portfolio to integrate security across these offerings to make sure those flows are as secure as can be possible and if we detect anomalies, we flag them. The second big theme is driving this from the Cloud, right? So between Anthos, which is driving the Kubernetes and RAM from the Cloud our SD-WAN technology, Cisco's SD-WAN technology driven from the Cloud being able to terminate those VPN's at the end location. Whether that be a data center, whether that be an edge location and being able to do that seamlessly driven from the Cloud. Innerside, which takes the management of that infrastructure, drives it from the Cloud. Again a Cisco innovation, first in the industry. All of these marry together with driving this infrastructure from the Cloud, and what did it do for our eventual customers? Well it gave them, now a data center environment that has no boundaries. You've got an on-prem data center that's expanding into the Cloud. You can build an application in one place, deploy it in another, have it communicate with another application in the Cloud and suddenly you've kinda demolished those boundaries between data center and the Cloud, between the data center and the edge, and it all becomes a continuum and no other company other than Cisco can do something like that. >> So if I hear you saying, what you're saying is you're bringing the software and security capabilities of Cisco in the data center and around campus et cetera, and SD-WAN to Google Cloud. So the customer experience would be Cisco customer can deploy Google Cloud and Google Cloud runs best on Cisco. That's kinda, is that kind of the guiding principles here to this deal? Is that you're integrating in a deep meaningful way where its plug and play? Google Cloud meets Cisco infrastructure? >> Well we certainly think that with the work that we've done and the integrations that we're doing, that Cisco infrastructure including software capabilities like Stealthwatch Cloud will absolutely be the best way for any customer who wants to adopt Google Cloud's Anthos, to consume it, and to have really the best experience in terms of some of the integration simplicity that KD talked about but also frankly security's very important and being able to bring that consistent security model across Google Cloud, the workloads running there, as well as on-prem through things like Stealthwatch Cloud we think will be very compelling for our customers, and somewhat unique in the marketplace. >> You know one of the things that interesting, TK the new CEO of Google, and I had this question to Diane Green she had enterprise try ops of VM wear, Google's been hiring a lot of strong enterprise people lately and you can see the transformation and we've interviewed a lot of them, I have personally. They're good people, they're smart, and they know what they're doing. But Google still gets dinged for not having those enterprise chops because you just can't have a trajectory of those economy of scales over night, you can't just buy your way into the enterprise. You got to earn it, there's a certain track record, it seems like Google's getting a lot with you guys here. They're bringing Cloud to the table for sure for your customer base but you're bringing, Cisco complete customer footprint to Google Cloud. That seems to be a great opportunity for Google. >> Well I mean I think its a great opportunity for both of us. I mean because we're also bringing a fantastic open Multicloud hybrid solution to our customer base. So I think there's a great opportunity for our customers and we really focus on at the end of the day our customers and what do we do to make them more successful and we think that what we're doing with Google will contribute to that. >> KD talk about, real quickly summarize what's the benefits to the customers? Customers watching the announcements, seeing all the hype and all the buzz on this Google Next, this relationship with Cisco and Google, what's the bottom line for the customer? They're dealing with complexity. What are you guys solving, what the big take away for your customers? >> So its three things. First of all, we've taken the complexity out of the equation, right? We've taken all the complexity around networking, around security, around bridging to multiple Clouds, packaged it in a scale out appliance delivered in an enterprise consistent way. And for them, that's what they want. They want that simplicity of deployment of these next gen technologies, and the second thing is as IT serves their customers, the developers in house, they're able to serve those customers much better with these latest generation technologies and frameworks, whether its Containers, Kubernetes, HDL, some of these pieces that are part of the Anthos solution. They're able to develop that, deliver it back to their internal stakeholders and do it in a way that they control, they feel comfortable with, they feel their secure, and the networking works and they can stand behind it without having to choose or have doubts on whether they should embrace this or not. At the end of the day, customers want to do the right things to develop fast. To be nimble, to act, and to do the latest and greatest and we're taking all those hurtles out of the equations. >> Its about developers. >> It is. >> Running software on secure environments for the enterprise. Guys that's awesome news. Google Next obviously gonna be great conversations. While I have you here I wanna get to a couple talk tracks that are I important around the theme's recovering around Google Next and certainly challenges and opportunities for enterprises that is the application area, Multicloud, and Hybrid Cloud. So lets start with application. You guys are enabling this application revolution, that's the sound bites we hear at your events and certainly that's been something that you guys been publicly talking about. What does that mean for the marketplace? Because certain everyone's developing applications now, (Kip laughs) you got mobile apps, you got block chain apps, we got all kinds of new apps coming out all the time. Software's not going away its a renaissance, its happening. (Kip laughs) How is the application revolution taking shape? How is and what's Cisco's roll in it? >> Sure, I mean our role is to enable that. And that really comes from the fact that we understand that the only reason anyone builds any kind of infrastructure is ultimately to deliver applications and the experiences that applications enable. And so that's why, you know, we pioneered ACI is Application Centric Infrastructure. We pioneered that and start focusing on the implications of applications in the infrastructure any years ago. You know, we think about that and the experience that we can deliver at each layer in the infrastructure and KD talked a little bit about how important it is to integrate those layers but then we also bring tools like AppDynamics. Which really gives our customers the ability to measure the performance of their applications, understand the experience that they're delivering with customers and then actually understand how each piece of the infrastructure is contributing to and affecting that performance and that's a great example of something that customers really wanna be able to do across on-prem and multiple Clouds. They really need to understand that entire thing and so I think something like App D exemplifies our focus on the application. >> Its interesting storage and compute used to be the bottle necks in developers having to stand that up. Cloud solved that problem. >> Kip: That's right. >> Stu Miniman and I always talk about on theCUBE networking's the bottle neck. Now with ACI, you guys are solving that problem, you're making it much more robust and programmable. >> It is. >> This is a key part for application developers because all that policy work can be now automated away. Is that kinda part of that enablement? >> It sure is. I mean if you look at what's happening to applications, they're becoming more consumerized, they're becoming more connected. Whether its micro services, its not just one monolithic application anymore, its all of these applications talking to each other. And they need to become more secure. You need to know what happens, who can talk to whom. Which part of the application can be accessed from where. To deliver that, when my customer tell me listen you deliver the data center, you deliver security, you deliver networking, you deliver multicloud, you've got AppDynamics. Who else can bring this together? And that's what we do. Whether its ACI that specifies policy and does that programmable, delivers that programmable framework for networking, whether its our technologies like titration, like AppDynamics as Kip mentioned. All of these integrate together to deliver the end experience that customers want which is if my application's slow, tell me where, what's happening and help me deliver this application that is not a monolith anymore its all of these bits and pieces that talk to each other. Some of these bits and pieces will reside in the Cloud, a lot of them will be on-prem, some of them will be on the edge. But it all needs to work together-- >> And developers don't care about that they just care about do I get the resources do I need, And you guys kinda take care of all the heavy lifting underneath the covers. >> Yeah and we do that in a modern programmable way. Which is the big change. We do it in intent based way. Which means we let the developers describe the intent and we control that via policy. At multiple levels. >> And that's good for the enterprises, they want to invest more in developing, building applications. Okay track number two, talk track number two Multicloud. its interesting, during the hype cycle of Hybrid Cloud which was a while, I think now people realize Hybrid Cloud is an implementation thing and so its beyond hype now getting into reality. Multicloud never had a hype cycle because people generally woke up one day and said yeah I got multiple Clouds. I'm using this over here, so it wasn't like a, there was no real socialization around the concept of Multicloud they got it right away. They can see it, >> Yep. >> They know what they're paying for. So Multicloud has been a big part of your strategy at Cisco and certainly plays well into what's happening at Google Next. What's going on with Multicloud? Why's the relation with Google important? And where do you guys see Multicloud going from a Cisco perspective? >> Sure enough, I think you're right. The latest data we saw, or have, is 94 percent of enterprises are using or expect to use multiple Clouds and I think those surveys have probably more than six points of potential error so I think for all intensive purposes its 100 percent. (John and KD laughing) I've not met a customer who's unique Cloud, if that's a thing. And so you're right, its an incredibly authentic trend compared with some of these things that seem to be hype. I think what's happening though is the definition of what a Multicloud solution is is shifting. So I think we start out as you said, with a realization, oh wait a second we're all Multicloud this really is a thing and there's a set of problems to solve. I think you're seeing players get more and more sophisticated in how they solve those problems. And what we're seeing is its solving those problems is not about homogenizing all the Clouds and making them all the same because one of the reasons people are using multiple Clouds is to get to the unique capabilities that's in each Cloud. So I think early on there were some approaches where they said okay well we're gonna put down like a layer across all these Clouds and try to make them all look the same. That doesn't really achieve the point. The point is Google has unique capabilities in Google Cloud, certainly the tenser flow capabilities are one that people point to. AWS has unique capabilities as well and so does Dajour. And so customers wanna access all of that innovation. So that kind of answers your question of why is this relationship important to us, its for us to meet our customers needs, we need to have great relationships, partnerships, and integrations with the Clouds that are important to our customers. >> Which is all the Clouds. >> And we know that Google Cloud is important. >> Well not just Google Cloud, which I think in this relationship's got my attention because you're creating a deep relationship with them on a development side. Providing your expertise on the network and other area's you're experts at but you also have to work with other Clouds because, >> That's right we do. >> You're connecting Clouds, that's the-- >> And in fact we do. I mean we have, solutions for Hybrid with AWS and Dejour already launched in the marketplace. So we work with all of them, and what our roll, we see really is to make this simpler for our customers. So there are things like networking and security, application performance management with things like AppDynamics as well as some aspects of management that our customers consistently tell us can you just make this the same? Like these are not the area's of differentiation or unique capabilities. These are area's of friction and complexity and if you can give me a networking framework, whether its SD-WAN or ACI Anywhere that helps me connect those Clouds and manage policy in a consistent way or you can give me application performance the same over these things or security the same over these things, that's gonna make my life easier its gonna be lower friction and I'm expecting it, since your Cisco, you'll be able to integrate with my own Prime environment. >> Yeah, so then we went from hard to simple and easy, is a good business model. >> Kip: Absolutely. >> You guys have done that in the past and you certainly have the, from routing, everything up to switches and storage. KD, but talk about the complexity, because this is where it sounds complex on paper but when you actually unpack the technologies involved, you know in different Cloud suppliers, different technologies and tools. Throw in open sources into the mix is even more complex. So Multicloud, although sounds like a simple reality, the complexities pretty significant. Can you just share your thoughts on that? >> It is, and that's what we excel. We excel, I think complexity and distilling it down and making it simple. One other thing that we've done is, because each Cloud is unique and brings some unique capabilities, we've worked with those vendors along those dimension's that they're really really passionate about and strong end. So for example, with Google we've worked on the container front. They are, maybe one of the pioneers in that space, they've certainly delivered a lot of technologies into that domain. We've worked with them on the Kubeflow front on the AI front, in fact we are one of the biggest contributors to the open source projects on Kubeflow. And we've taken those technologies and then created a simple way for enterprise IT to consume them. So what we've done with Anthos, with Google, takes those technologies, takes our networking constructs, whether its ACI Anywhere, whether its other networking pieces on different parts of it, whether its SD-WAN and so forth. And it creates that environment which makes an enterprise IT feel comfortable with embracing these technologies. >> You said you're contributing to Kubeflow. A lot of people don't look at Cisco and would instantly come to the reaction that you guys are heavily contributing into open source. Can you just share, you know, the level of commitment you guys are making to open source? Just get that out there, and why? Why are you doing it? >> Yeah. For us, some of these technologies are really in need for incubation and nurturing, right? So Kubeflow is early, its really promising technology. People, in fact there's a lot of buzz about AI-- >> In your contributing to Kubeflow, significantly? >> Yes, yeah. >> Cisco? >> We're number three contributor actually. Behind Google. >> Okay so you're up there? You're up at the top of the list? >> Yeah one of the top three. >> Top of the list. >> And why? Is this getting more collaborative? More Multicloud fabric-- >> Well I mean, again it comes back to our customers. We think Kubeflow is a really interesting framework for AI and ML and we've seen our customers that workload type is becoming more and more important to them. So we're supporting that because its something we think will help our customers. In fact, Kubeflow figures into how we think about Hybrid and Multicloud with Google and the Anthos system in terms of giving customers the ability to run those workloads in Google Cloud with TPU's or on-prem with some of the incredible appliances that we've delivered in the data centers using GPU's to accelerate these workings. >> And it also certainly is compatible with the whole Multicloud mission as well-- >> Exactly, yeah. >> That's right. >> So you'll see us, we're committed to open source but that commitment comes through the lens of what we think our customers need and want. So it really again it comes back to the customer for us, and so you'll see us very active in open source areas. Sometimes, I think to your point, we should be louder about that. Talk more about that but we're really there to help our customers. DevNet, DevNet Create that Susie Wee's been working on has been a great success. I mean we've witnessed it first hand, seeing it at the Cisco Live packed house. >> In Barcelona. >> You've got developers developing on the network its a really big shift. >> Yeah absolutely. >> That's a positive shift. >> Well its a huge shift, I think its natural as you see Cisco shifting more and more towards software you see much much more developer engagement and we're thrilled with the way DevNet has grown. >> Yeah, and networking guys in your target audience gravitates easily to software it seems to be a nice fit. So good stuff there. Third talk track, Hybrid. You guys have deep bench of tech and people on network security, networking security, data center, and all the things involved in the years and years of enterprise evolution. Whether its infrastructure and all the way through the facilities, lot of expertise. Now Hybrid comes onto the scene. Went through the little hype cycle, people now get it, you gotta operate across Clouds on-prem to the Cloud and now multiple Clouds so what's the current state of Cisco-Google relationship with Hybrid? How is that fitting in, Google Next and beyond? >> So let me tease that in the context of some history, right? So if we go back, say 10 years, virtualization was the bad word of the day. Things were getting virtualized. We created the best data center infrastructure for virtualization in our UCS platforms. Completely programmable infrastructure's code, a very programmable environment that can back a lot of density of virtual machines, right? Roll forward three or four years, storage and compute were getting unwieldily. There was complexity there to be solved. We created the category of converge infrastructure, became the leader of that category whether we work with DMC and other players. Roll forward another four or five years we got into the hyper conversion infrastructure space with the most performant ACI appliance on the market anywhere. And most performant, most consistent, deeply engineered across all the stacks. Can took that complexity, took our learnings and DNA networking and married it together to create something unique for the industry. Now you think, do other domains come together? Now its the Cloud and on-prem. And if that comes together we see similar kinds of complexity. Complexity in security, complexity in networking, complexity in policy and enforcement across layers. Complexity, frankly in management, and how do you make that management much more simple and consumerized? We're taking that complexity and distilling it down into developing a very simple appliance. So what we're trying to deliver to the customer is a simple appliance that they can stand and procure and set up much in the way that they're used to but now the appliance is scale out. Its much more Cloud like. Its managed from the Cloud. So its got that consumer modern feel to it. Now you can deliver on this a container environment, a container development environment, for your developer stakeholders. You can deliver security that's plumed through and across multiple layers, networking that's plumed through and across multiple layers, at the end of the day we've taken those boundaries between Cloud and data center and blown them away. >> And you've merged operational constructs of the old data center operations to Cloud like operations, >> Yeah. >> Everything's just a service, you got Microservices coming, so you didn't really lose anything, you'd mentioned democratizing IT earlier, you guys are bringing the HyperFlex to ACI to the table so you now can let customers run, is that right? Am I getting it right? >> That's right. Its all about how do you take new interesting technologies that are developed somewhere, that may have complexity because its open source and exchanging all the time or it may have complexity because it was not been for a different environment, not for the on-prem environment. How do you take that innovation and democratize it so that everybody, all of the 100's of thousands and millions of enterprise customers can use it and feel comfortable using it and feel comfortable actually embracing it in a way that gives them the security, gives them the networking that's needed and gives them a way that they can serve their internal stakeholders very easily. >> Guys thanks for taking the time for this awesome conversation. One final question, gettin you both to weigh in on, here at Google Next 2019, we're in 2019. Cloud's going a whole other level here. What's the most important story that customers should pay attention to with respect to expanding into the Cloud, taking advantage of the growing developer ecosystem as open source continues to go to the next level. What's the most important thing happening around Google Next and the industry with respect to Cloud and for the enterprise? >> Well I think certainly here at Google Next the Google Cloud's Anthos announcement is going to be of tremendous interest to enterprises cause as you said they are extending into the Cloud and this is another great option for enterprises who are looking to do that. >> Yeah and as I look at it suddenly IT has a set of new options. They used to be able to pick networking and compute and storage, now they can pick Kubeflow for AI or they can pick Kubernetes for container development, Anthos for an on-prem version. They're shopping list has suddenly gone up. We're trying to keep that simple and organized for them so that they can pick the best ingredients they can and build the best infrastructure they can, they can do it. >> Guys thanks so much. Kip Compton senior vice president Cloud Platform and Solutions Group and KD vice president of the Data Center compute group for Cisco. Its been exclusive CUBE conversation around the Google-Cisco big news at Google Next 2019 and I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat jazz music)

>> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans, it's The Cube. Covering VeeamOn 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. (funky electronic theme music) >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Ratmir Timashev is here, he's the co-founder of Veeam and he's joined by Peter McKay who's the co-CEO and president. Gentleman, good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> Welcome to the Cube, congratulations on the great keynote this morning. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> Seemed like you guys were having fun out there. >> Yeah it is, it's a lot of fun, it's a great, great time. >> So Ratmir, I want to start with you. A lot of people in our audience may not be familiar with Veeam. We've been sort of sharing with them, the rapid ascendancy of the company. But come, go back ten years, why did you start, you and your co-founder, start the company? >> Yeah, the company's ten years old. Last year we celebrated ten years, it was started in 2006 by me and my partner who is the technology side. He's my technology genius. I'm on the sales and marketing. So we started the company with the simple idea to build the new version, or new generation data protection for virtualized environments. VMware was getting hot back in 2005, 2006, 2007. It kept more and more penetration within enterprise. Back then the cloud was like, 10 or 20 percent penetrated, but we saw that, it's going to be 90 eventually, so we wanted to ride this big wave, technology revolution wave. And now I think we, looking back ten years I think we're in a very similar spot with the cloud. Cloud is where visualization was 10 years ago so and we want to ride this new wave or the cloud wave the same way exactly that we rode the VM wave, visualization and hyper-V wave. >> You know that's interesting, I was explaining to the audience this morning that your ascendancy coincided with Vmware and what happened was we consolidated resources and the one resource that was so precious was for backup and everybody had to re architect their backup and you guys were the, were an answer and obviously one of the more popular answers. Now we're into this cloud era and you see a similar opportunity, you're messaging sort of focuses on that and there's an emergent strategy that you're >> Yeah. >> putting forth. >> I mean I think everybody is moving into a multi cloud environment, right? Where there's going to be, their data's going to be all over the place, they're going to be on premise or manage service providers or in AWS or Azure and so and for us we need to be able to make it available and always on and so that's our focus is to make it very easy for our customers to store their data and run their applications and always be available no matter what the environment is. On premise, off, no matter what the infrastructure is. >> So we talk about digital transformation a lot on The Cube, every event we go to, it's digital transformation, you guys had a little bit different spin on that, digital life, always on, availability, capabilities. You're having fun with green. (laughs) >> Ratmir: Yeah. >> Peter: Oh yeah. >> Green is, >> We always have fun with green. >> Green is go. >> As you can tell. >> A lot of things you can do with green is go, color of money >> Celtics, right? Boston Celtics. >> Boston Celtics. Number one pick. >> Veeam green team. Veeam green machine. >> Veeam green machine, love it. So give us your perspective on this whole digital life. What is that all about? >> Yeah so our message in the last 10 years has evolved. Originally when we started our message was very simple. We're number one VMware backup. That message really resonated and we did deliver on the purpose of number one VMware backup. I remember first time when we introduce that concept, our competitors look at us like who knows them? But then we did in fact become the number one VMware backup, so And our message has evolved over time so from technical message to, that is focused on our core customer which is IT prone. The person that really understands the modern technologies, responsible for the modern data center. Understands the modern storage cloud technologies and visualization technologies. But that message has evolved as we are growing, becoming bigger, and we're going more into a enterprise so now solution become bigger and broader. That covers cloud. So we had to evolve our message so right now our message is, has become more consumer centric, more emotional, touching our digital life. Because we believe that that's at the end of the day, that's what we do. We enable our customers, our businesses to provide this seamless digital life experience for their users. That's what we do. >> So I love it when a successful company brings in a new leader. Because as opposed to things are bad and they have to make a change, we saw this last week, I mentioned I was at ServiceNow Knowledge, Frank Slootman, incredibly successful CEO, stepped aside, brought in a new, and part of that transition was about reaching a new constituency, so my question to you, Peter, is traditionally the Veeam audience is hardcore operational people. Your messaging is much higher level in the organization so how are you dealing with that sort of bifurcated personas, who are you targeting in this sort of new messaging? >> So as the, in the early days of Veeam it started in kind of that SMB market and kind of expanded into commercial and now very focused on the enterprise and so a lot of the enterprise are kind of working through this transition. The digital life and the new, staying relevant to the new users that are coming online and so we've found that our message needed to evolve as well and it needs to be, lines in business now are getting more involved in some of the decision making so our message wasn't where it needed to be in terms of evolving it for that enterprise customer and one that we think will foster that digital transformation for a lot of our companies customers and so we view this was the right time, especially with version 10, version 9.5 which was very successful and version 10 which really expands our enterprise capability but also we needed to, it broadens a lot of the applications down to things that we could do in an enterprise and we needed that message to also be kind of that enterprise in a broad strategic message. >> Peter, when I talk to customers these days, it's a very fragmented market out there, I think, as Ratmir said you rode that VMware wave, now customers adopting lots of sass, they're doing multiple public clouds, they're trying to figure out how they modernize their private cloud. Before it was VMware, therefore I need backup. Now it's how much does their choice on where they put their data and their application drive to you, how much do you have kind of the brand Veeam out there to kind of pull into those other environments and do customers turn to you for help in sorting out that kind of multi cloud world? >> Yeah actually I was talking to a friend of mine who is a key analyst at ESG, Jason Buffington, you know Jason. >> Yeah he's coming on. >> He had a great point about the industry, that our data industry or storage industry or data protection industry, he said that every new wave you go from mainframe to client server, from client server to visualization, from visualization to cloud. There is always a new backup leader. Because the technology changes so much and the people or the company that doesn't have this old baggage with the old technology, old agent based or supporting all these legacy platforms, that can move much faster and that's what Veeam has demonstrated with visualization. The only exception is the transition from visualization to cloud because cloud is based on visualization. So and based on the concept of the data mobility, and that's, from the mental concept to visualization and so we believe that we are very well set with our leadership position in visualization to also dominate cloud market because our technologies are modern technologies specifically built for visualization and cloud. >> And is the argument then that an Amazon or an Azure won't dominate that, because essentially they are a cloud stovepipe, is that right, can you expand on that a little bit? >> That's the way we look at it, I mean it's choice. People want to put, they should be able to put their data wherever they want or their applications, and we should make it very easy for them to do that. If they want to do an Azure, but it's not only just putting it in Azure, it's being able to get after it, get it and move it and transfer data no matter where wanted to so for us it's about providing the flexibility to move the data or run the apps no matter where you want at any time. >> Peter you ran a company that Vmware acquired that was an Azure service. Veeam has some Azure service solutions, customers often times are trying to switch from there's no more shrink wrap software anymore, models for buying it, where do you see customers in that adoption? Curious of your old role and kind of today what you're seeing. >> It's interesting, so Desktone was very much of a platform for managed service providers and cloud providers and so in coming to Veeam, a big part of our business, which is very different than I think a lot of the other people in the market is focusing on those cloud providers. Not just Amazon, Azure, the public, but also we have 15, over 15,000 managed service providers and cloud providers that run our platform as a business. And so when we rolled out a number of features here that if, unless you were a managed service provider or a cloud provider, you wouldn't get the multi-tenancy and the things that we built on scalability that are really changing the game we believe for the managed service providers. But it's also, what we saw at Desktone that went into Veeam. It's, our customers are also doing it as a service within their organization. Things like multi-tenancy are things that they need and scalability are things that they need as a business, so it's a lot of similarities between the world that I lived in and Desktone and VMware to where we are today. >> One of the impressive stats, you said 2016, 231,000 customers that you have. Are all of those paying customers, you have the free version, can you give us any insight as to how many pay versus free >> It's actually over 245,000, that was at the end of the year, so we're adding 4,000 new customers every month and those are all paid. We don't count the people who downloaded the free version of it. >> That's good to know, you could have millions of >> We have millions so far our other free products, yes. >> Awesome. >> Millions of users. >> That's important. >> And another stat you put out in the keynote was an NPS of 73 which is really, really good. Can we talk about that a little bit? Ratmir you were making the point off camera that it rose from the low 60s. What's going on there? >> Yeah so last year it was 61, the year before it was 62, so we were kind of very high but flat, so and this year it actually jumped to 73 and the reason that I personally contribute that to is because we had extremely powerful release 9.5 and customer are extremely happy with the improvements, and the easy of operate and using all these new capabilities, it was the most, the smoothest upgrade, the smoothest release and with the powerful features. The second reason I think our NPS, net promoter score, rose that much is because Peter came on board. (laughs) So in the last 10 month, Peter really, really strengthen our team. I thought that we are moving very fast but now, so we have the concept of Veeam speed, that means moving really fast but now we, actually with Peter we are moving 10 times faster, all of magnitude faster. >> I don't believe it's me but I think what Veeam has always done is done a really good job of listening to our customers and communicating with our customers on a regular basis. We built at a customer success business, part of our business that we're investing in, but we have a whole, a team of people who just solicit and communicate with our partners, and our customers on a regular basis, so they know what we're doing, it's rare that they don't really get a good sense of where we're going and the vision and strategy of Veeam so I think that goes a long way in driving our NPS score. >> We got to break but last thing we really haven't double clicked on is the ecosystem, maybe a quick word on that and then we'll wrap. >> That's a big, obviously, a partner community, we have 45,000 partners, we have 15, over 15,000 managed service providers in cloud. Probably the area that is impacting our business quite a bit now recently is a lot of the alliance partnerships that have. Today we have Veeamware, we have Cisco, very strong and successful, we announced HPE which not only is a development partnership but also a resell partnership and go to market which is dramatically impacing >> Former competitor. >> Yes yes which has opened up a tremendous amount of opportunities for us so we're going to continue to expand into other companies, we're, because 50% of this market is changing over in 2017 and 18, from legacy solutions to new, in the hardware is a piece of that and we're trying to embed as much of that into one sales motion, one bundle for our customers, making it easy to try and buy Veeam. >> Okay, founder gets the last word, bumper sticker when the buses are pulling away, the trucks are pulling away from New Orleans, what's the bumper sticker on VeeamOn 2017? >> See you in 2018. (laughs) Let's have another great year, and another stick with Veeam. >> We find out I think Thursday where 2018 is going to happen. >> Yes. >> Alright so stay with us alright thanks Gents for coming to The Cube. >> Excellent, thanks for having us. >> You're welcome alright keep it right there buddy we'll be back with our next guest, The Cube are live from VeeamOn in New Orleans, be right back. (funky electronic theme music)