>>When AWS introduced the modern cloud in 2006, many people didn't realize the impact that it would have on the industry, but some did see the future of an as a service economy coming. I mean, SAS offerings came out several years before. And the idea of applying some of these concepts to infrastructure and simplifying deployment and management, you know, kinda looked enticing to a lot of customers and a subscription model, or, but yet a consumption model was seen as a valuable proposition by many customers. Why not apply it to infrastructure? And why should the hyperscalers have all the fun welcome to at your storage service? My name is Dave ante. And as an analyst at the time, I was excited about the, as a service trend early on. And one of the companies that caught my attention back in the beginning of last decade was pure storage. >>Pure not only was delivering cloud- simplicity, but it's no forklift approach to infrastructure was ahead of its time. And that's why we're here today to dig into what's happening with the, as a service trends that we see popping up all over the world today, we're gonna dig into three sessions with noted experts in the field. First pre Darie is the general manager of the digital experience business unit at pure storage. He's gonna join us. And then we bring in Steve McDowell, Steve's a senior analyst for data and storage at more insights and strategy, a well known consultancy and analyst firm. And finally, we close with Amil sta Emil is the chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer at open line, open lines, a managed service provider. They serve the mid-market and Emil's got a very wide observation space. He's gonna share what he's seeing with customers. So sit back and enjoy the show. >>The cloud has popularized many useful concepts in the past decade, working backwards from the customer two pizza teams, a DevOps mindset, the shared responsibility model in security. And of course the shift from CapEx to OPEX and as a service consumption models. The last item is what we're here to talk about today. Pay for consumption is attractive because you're not over provisioning. At least not the way you used to you'd have to buy for peak capacity events, but there are always two sides to every story and well pay for use more closely ties. It consumption to business value procurement teams. Don't always love the uncertainty of the cloud bill each month, but consumption pricing. And as a service models are here to stay in software and hardware. Hello, I'm Dave ante and welcome to at your storage service made possible by pure storage. And with me is Pash DJI. Who's the general manager of the digital experience business unit at pure Pash. Welcome to the program. >>Thanks Dave. Thanks for having me. >>You bet. Okay. We've seen this shift to, as a service, the, as a service economy, subscription models, and this as a service movement have gained real momentum. It's it's clear over the past several years, what's driving this shift. Is it pressure from investors and technology companies that are chasing the all important ARR, their annual recurring revenue stream? Is it customer driven? Give us your insights. >>Well, look, um, I think we'll do some definitional stuff first. I think we often mix the definition of a subscription and a service, but, you know, subscription is, Hey, I can go for pay up front or pay as I go. Service is more about how do I not buy something just by the outcome. So, you know, the concept of delivering storage as a service means, what do you want in storage performance, capacity availability? Like that's what you want. Well, how do you get that without having to worry about the labor of planning capacity management, those labor elements are what's driving it. So I think in the world where you have to do more with less and in a world where security becomes increasingly important, where standardization will allow you to secure your landscape against ransomware and those types of things, those trends are driving the ation of storage and the only way to deliver that is storage as a service. >>So that's, that's good. You maybe thinking about it differently than some of the other companies that I talked to, but so you, you, you've made inroads here pretty big inroads actually, and changed the thinking in enterprise data storage with a huge emphasis on simplicity. That's really pures rayon Detra. How does storage as a service fit into your innovation agenda overall? >>Well, our innovation agenda started, as you mentioned with the simplicity, you know, a decade ago with the evergreen architecture, that architecture was beyond the box. How do you go ahead and say, I can improve performance or capacity as I need it? Well, that's a foundational element to deliver a service because once you have that technology, you can say, oh, you know what? You've subscribed to this performance level. You want to raise your performance level and yes, that'll be a higher dollar per gig or dollar per terabyte. But how do you do that without a data migration? How do you do that with a non disruptive service change? How do you do that with a delivery via a software update, those elements of non disruptive updates. When you think SAS, Salesforce, you don't know when Salesforce doesn't update, you don't know when they're increasing something, adding a new capability just shows up. It's not a disruptive event. So to drive that standardization and sation and service delivery, you need to keep that simplicity of delivery first and foremost, and you can't allow, like, if the goal was, I want to change from this service tier to that service tier and a person needed to show up and do a day data migration, that's kind of useless. You've broken the experience of flexibility for a customer. >>Okay. So I like the Salesforce analogy, but I wanna jump out, do a little side for a second. So I I've gotta, I've gotta make some commitment to pure, right. Some baseline commitment. And if I do, then I can dial up and pay for what I use and I can dial it down. Correct? Correct. Okay. I can't do that with Salesforce. <laugh> right. I could dial up, but then I'm stuck with those licenses. So you have a better model in Salesforce. I would argue. Okay. Yeah, >>I would, I would agree with that. >>Okay. So, and I gotta pay for everything up front anyway. Um, let's go back. I was kind of pushing at you a little bit at my upfront, you know, about, you know, the ARR model, the, the all important, you know, financial metric, but let's talk from the customers standpoint. What are the benefits of consuming storage as a service from your customer's perspective? >>Well, one is when you start your storage journey, do you really know what you need? And I would argue most of the time people are guessing, right? It's like, well, I think I need this. This is the performance I think I need. Or this is the capacity I think I need. And, you know, with the scientific method, you actually deploy something and you're like, do I need more? Do I need less? You find out as you're deploying. So in a storage as a service world, when you have the ability to move up performance levels or move out capacity levels, and you have that flexibility, then you have the ability to just to meet demand as you deploy. And that's the most important element of meeting business needs today. The applications you deploy are not in your control when you're providing storage to your end consumers. >>Yeah. They're gonna want different levels of storage. They're gonna want different performance thresholds. That's kind of a pay, you know, pay for performance type culture, right? You can use HR analogies for it. You pay for performance. You want top talent, you pay for it. You want top storage performance, you pay for it. Um, you don't, you can pay less and you can actually get lower performance, tiers, not everything is a tier one application. And you need the ability to deploy it. But when you start, how do you know the way your end customers are gonna be consuming? Or do you need a dictated upfront? Cause that's infrastructure dictating business inflexibility, and you never want to be in that position. >>I, I got another analogy for you. It's like, you know, we do a lot of hosting at our home and you know, like Thanksgiving, right? And you go to the liquor store and say, okay, what should I get? Should we get red wine? We gotta go white wine. We gotta get some beer. Should I get bubbles? Yeah, I get some bubbles. Cause you don't know what people are gonna have. And so you over provision everything <laugh> and then there's a run on bubbles and you're like, ah, we run outta bubbles. So you just over buy, but there's a liquor store that actually will take it back. So I gotta do business with those guys every time. Cuz it's way more flexible. I can dial up capacity or can dial up performance and dial it back down if I don't use it >>Or you or you're gonna be drinking a lot more the next few weeks. >>Yeah, exactly. Which is the last thing you want. Okay. So let's talk about how pure kind of meets this as a service demand. You've touched upon your, your differentiators from others in the market. Um, you know, love to hear about the momentum. What, what are you seeing out there? >>Yeah. Look, our business is growing well, largely built on, you know, what customers need. Um, specifically where the market is at today is there's a set of folks that are interested in the financial transformation of CapEx to OPEX, where like that definitely exists in the industry around how do I get a pay use model? The next kind of more advanced customer is interested in how do I go ahead and remove labor to deliver storage? And a service gets you there on top of a subscription. The most sophisticated customer says, how do I separate storage production with consumption and production of storage. Being a storage producer should be about standardization. So I could do policy based management. Why is that important? You know, coming back to some of the things I said earlier in the world where ransomware attacks are common, you need the standardized security policies. >>Linux has new vulnerabilities every, every other day, like find 2, 2, 3 critical vulnerabilities a week. How do you stay on top of it? The complexity of staying on top of it should be, look, let's standardize and make it a vendor problem. And assume the vendor's gonna deliver this to me. So that standardization allows you to have business policies that allow you to stay current and modern. I would argue in, you know, the traditional storage and appliance world, you buy something and the day a, the day after you buy it, it's worthless. It's like driving a car off a lot, right? The very next day, the car's not worth what it was when you bought it. Storage is the same way. So how do you ensure that your storage stays current? How do you ensure that it gets like a fine line that gets better, better with age? Well, if you're not buying storage and you're buying a performance SLA, it's up to the vendor to meet that SLA. So it actually never gets worse over time. This is the way you modernize technology and avoid technology debt as a customer. >>Yeah. I mean, just even though words you're using in the way you're thinking about this precaution, I think are, are, are different. Uh, and I love the concept of essentially taking my labor cost and transferring them to pures R and D I mean, that's essentially what you're talking about here. Um, so let's, let's, let's stick with the, the, the tech for a minute. What do you see as new or emerging technologies that are helping accelerate this shift toward the, as a service economy? >>Well, the first thing is I always tell people, you can't deliver a service without monitoring, because if you can't monitor something, how you're gonna know what your, whether you're meeting your service level obligation, right? So everything starts with data monitoring. The next step layering on the technology. Differentiation is if you need to deliver a service level, OB obligation on top of that data monitoring, you need the ability to flexibly, meet whatever performance obligations you have in a tight time window. So supply chain and being able to deliver anywhere becomes important. So if you use the analogy today of how Tesla works or a IOT system works, you have a SaaS management that actually provides instructions that push pushes those instructions and policies to the edge. In Tesla's case, that happens to be the car it'll push software updates to the car. It'll push new map updates to the car, but the car is running independently. >>It's not like if the car becomes disconnected from the internet, it's gonna crash and drive you off the road in the same way. What if you think about storage as something that needs to be wherever your application is? So people think about cloud as a destination. I think that's a fallacy. You have to think about the world in the world in the view of an application, an application needs data, and that data needs to sit in storage wherever that application sits. So for us, the storage system is just an edge device. It can be sitting in your data center, it can be sitting in a Equinix. It can be sitting in hosted, an MSP can run. It can, can even be sitting in the public cloud, but how do you have central monitoring and central management where you can push policies to update all those devices? >>Very similar to an I IOT system. So the technology advantage of doing that means that you can operate anywhere and ensure you have a consistent set of policies, a consistent set of protection, a consistent set of, you know, prevention against ransomware attack, regardless of your application, regardless of, uh, you know, where it sits, regardless of what content in you're on that approach is very similar to the way the T industry has been updating and monitoring edge devices, nest, thermostats, you know, Tesla cars, those types of things. That's the thinking that needs to come to. And that's the foundation on which we built PI as a service. >>So that implies, or at least I infer that you've obviously got control of the experience on Preem, but you're extending that, uh, into AWS, Google Azure, which suggests to me that you have to hide the underlying complexity of the primitives and APIs in that world. And then eventually, actually today, cuz you're treating everything like the edge out to the edge, you know, maybe, maybe mini pure at some point in time. But so I call that super cloud that abstraction layer that floats above all the clouds on-prem and adds that layer of value. And is this singular experience? What you're talking about pushing, you know, policy throughout, is that the right way to think about it and how does this impact the ability to deliver true storage as a service? >>Oh, uh, that's absolutely the right way of thinking about it. The things that you think about from a, an abstraction kind of fall in three buckets, first, you need management. So how do you ensure a consistent management experience creating volumes, deleting volumes, creating buckets, creating files, creating directories, like management of objects and create a consistent API across the entire landscape. The second one is monitoring, how do you measure utilization and performance obligations or capacity obligations or uh, you know, policy violations, wherever you're at. And then the third one is more of a business one, which is procurement because you can't do it independent of procurement. Meaning what happens when you run out, you need to increase your reserve commits. Do you want to go on demand? How do you integrate it into company's procurement models, such that you can say, I can use what I need and any, it's not like every change order is a request of procurement. That's gonna break an as a service delivery model. So to get embedded in a customer's landscape where they don't have to worry about storage, you have to provide that consistency on management, monitoring and procurement across the tech. And yes, this is deep technology problems, whether it's running our storage on AWS or Azure or running it on prem or, you know, at some point in the future, maybe even, um, you know, pure mini at the edge. Right. <laugh> so, you know, tho all of those things are tied to our pure, a service delivery. >>Yeah, technically non-trivial but uh, Hey, you guys are on it. Well, we gotta leave it there. Pash. Thank you. Great stuff. Really appreciate your time. >>All right. Thanks for having me, man. >>You're very welcome. Okay. In a moment, Steve McDowell from more insights and strategies, it's gonna give us the analyst perspective on, as a service, you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>Why are customers making the change to pure as a service >>Other vendors, offering flexible consumption models will promise you the world on the surface. It's just what you need. But then you notice the asterisk that dreaded fine print. That turns just what you need into long-term commitments, disruptive upgrades and unpredictable costs, pure storage, launched pure as a service to provide the flexibility to respond to your ever changing needs. With clear per unit costs, no large upfront purchases and no asterisks. A usage based model should be simple, innovative, and adapt with the changing market. Unlike other vendors, pure is offering exactly that with options, for service tiers and short term contracts in a single unified subscription that allows you to improve your discounts over time. Pure makes sure you can grow and upgrade without ever taking your environment offline and without the constant worry of hidden costs with complete billing, transparency, unlike any other, you only pay for what you use and pure one helps track and predict demand from day to day, making sure you never outgrow your storage. So why are customers making the change to pure as a service convenient solutions with unlimited potential without the dreaded fine print? It's as simple as that, >>We're back with Steve McDowell, the principal analyst for data and storage at more insights and strategy. Hey Steve, great to have you on, tell us a little bit about yourself. You got a really interesting background and kind of a blend of engineering and strategy and what's your research focus? >>Yeah, so my research, my focus area is data and storage and all the things around that, right? Whether it's OnPrim or cloud or, or, or, you know, software as a service. Uh, my background, as you said, is a blend, right? I grew up as an engineer. I started off as an OS developer at IBM. Uh, came up through the ranks and, and shifted over into corporate strategy and product marketing and product management. Uh, and I've been doing, uh, working as an industry analyst now for about five years, more insights and strategy. >>Steve, how do you see this playing out in the next three to five years? I mean, cloud got it all started. It's gonna snowballing, you know, however you look at it, percent of spending on storage that you think is gonna land in as a service. How, how do you see the evolution here? >>I think it buyers are looking at as a service, a consumption based is, is, uh, uh, you know, a natural model. It extends the data center, brings all of the flexibility, all of the goodness that I get from public cloud, but without all of the downside and uncertainty around cost and security and things like that, right. That also come with a public cloud and it's delivered by technology providers that I trust and that I know, and that I've worked with, you know, for, in some cases, decades. So I don't know that we have hard data on how much, uh, adoption there is of the model, but we do know that it's trending up, uh, you know, and every infrastructure provider at this point has some flavor of offering in the space. So it's, it's clearly popular with CIOs and, and it practitioners alike. >>So Steve organizations are at a they're different levels of maturity in their, their transformation journeys. And of course, as a result, they're gonna have different storage needs that are aligned with their bottom line business objectives. From an it buyer perspective, you may have data on this, even if it's anecdotal, where does storage as a service actually fit in and can it be a growth lever >>Can absolutely be, uh, a growth leader. Uh, it, it gives me the flexibility as, as an it architect to scale my business over time, without worrying about how much money I have to invest in, in storage hardware. Right? So I, I get kind of, again, that cloudlike flexibility in terms of procurement and deployment. Uh, but it gives me that control by oftentimes being on site within my permit. And I manage it like a storage array that I own. Uh, so you know, it, it's, it's beautiful for, for organizations that are scaling and, and it's equally nice for organizations that just wanna manage and control cost over time. Um, so it's, it's a model that makes a lot of sense and fits and, and certainly growing in adoption and popularity. >>How about from a technology vendor perspective you've worked for in the, in the tech industry mm-hmm <affirmative> for, for companies? What do you think is gonna define the winners and losers in this space? If you were running strategy for, uh, storage company, what would you say? >>I, I think the days of, of a storage administrator managing, you know, rate levels and recovering and things of that sort are over, right, what would, what these organizations like pure delivering, but they're offerings is, is simplicity. It's a push button approach to deploying storage to the applications and workloads that need it, right. It becomes storage as a utility. So it's not just the, you know, the consumption based economic model of, of, uh, as a service. Uh, it, it's also the manageability that comes with that, or the flexibility of management that comes with that. I can push a button, deploy bites to, to, uh, you know, a workload that needs it. Um, and it just becomes very simple, right. For the storage administrator in a way that, you know, kind of old school OnPrim storage can't really deliver. >>You know, I wanna, I wanna ask you, I mean, I've been thinking about this because again, a lot of companies are, are, you know, moving, hopping on the, as a service bandwagon, I feel like, okay, in and of itself, that's not where the innovation lives, the innovation is gonna come from making that singular experience from on-prem to the clouds across clouds, maybe eventually out to the edge. Um, do you, do you, where do you see the innovation in as a service? >>Well, there there's two levels of innovation, right? One, one is business model innovation, right? I, I now have an organizational flexibility to build the infrastructure, to support my digital transformation efforts. Um, but on the product side and the offering side, it really is, as you said, it's about the integration of experience. Every enterprise today touches a cloud in some way, shape or form, right. I have data spread, not just in my data center, but at the edge, uh, oftentimes in a public cloud, maybe a private cloud, I don't know where my data is and it really lands on the storage providers to help me manage that and deliver that, uh, uh, manageability experience, uh, to, to the it administrators. So when I look at innovation in this space, you know, it's not just a storage array and rack that I'm leasing, right? This is not another lease model. It's really fully integrated, you know, end to end management of my data and, and, you know, and all of the things around that. >>Yeah. So you, to your point about a lease model is if you're doing a lease, you know, yeah. You can shift CapEx to OPEX, but you're still committed to, to, you have to over provision, whereas here, and I wanted to ask you about that. It's, it's, it's, it's an interesting model, right? Cuz you gotta read the fine print. Of course the fine print says you gotta commit to some level typically. And then if, you know, if you go over you, you charge for what you use and you can scale that back down and that's, that's gotta be very attractive for folks. I, I wonder if you will ever see like true cloud-like consumption pricing, that is two edges to it. Right. You see consumption based pricing in some of the software models and you know yeah. People like it, the lines of business maybe cuz they pay in by the drink, but then procurement hates it cuz they don't have predictability. How do you see the pricing models? Do you see that maturing or do you think we're sort of locked in on, on where we're at? >>No, I, I do. I do see that maturing. Right? And, and when you work with a company like pure to understand their consumption based and as a service offerings, uh, it, it really is sitting down and understanding where your data needs are going to scale, right? You, you buy in at a certain level, uh, you have capacity planning. You can expand if you need to, you can shrink if you need to. So it really does put more control in the hands of the it buyer than uh, well certainly then traditional CapEx based on-prem but also more control than you would get, you know, working with an Amazon or an Azure. >>Okay. Thanks Steve. We'll leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back. Keep it right there at your storage service continues in a moment. >>Some things are meant to last your storage should be one of them say hello to the evergreen storage program, say goodbye to refreshes and rebates. Forget planned downtime, performance impact and data migrations. Forget forklift upgrades. Evergreen storage starts with your agile storage architecture and covers the entire life cycle of the array from first purchase to ongoing use. And whenever it's time to modernize and grow, your satisfaction is covered with an evergreen subscription. You can get a full refund within 30 days for any reason, >>Our right size guarantee lets you buy just the storage you need never too much. Never not enough. Your array software is all inclusive. Even future releases and features maintenance and support costs remain constant throughout the life of your array. Proactive expert support is a true white glove experience. Evergreen maintenance ensures availability of any replacement components. Meet the demands of your business and protect your investment. Evergreen gold includes controller upgrades every three years. And if something unplanned comes up, evergreen gold provides upgrade flex the leading anytime upgrade feature to upgrade controllers whenever you need it. As you expand evergreen gold provides credits to consolidate storage with denser more modern flash. Evergreen is your subscription to continuous innovation for storage that lasts 10 years or more. Some things are meant to last make your storage. One of them >>We're back at your storage service. Emil Stan is here. He's the chief commercial officer and chief marketing officer of open line. Thank you Emil for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thank you, David. Nice. Uh, glad to be here. >>Yes. Yeah. So tell us about open line. You're a managed service provider. What's your focus? >>Yeah, we're actually a cloud managed service provider and I do put cloud in front of the managed services because it's not just only the spheres that we manage. We have to manage the clouds as well nowadays. And then unfortunately, everybody only thinks there's one cloud, but it's always multiple layers in the cloud. So we have a lot of work in integrating it. We're a cloud manages provider in the Netherlands, focusing on, uh, companies who have head office in the Netherlands, mainly in the, uh, healthcare local government, social housing logistics department. And then in the midst size companies between say 250 to 10,000 office employees. Uh, and that's what we do. We provide 'em with excellent cloud managed services, uh, as it should be >>Interesting, you know, a lot early on in the cloud days, highly regulated industries like healthcare government were somewhat afraid of the cloud. So I'm sure that's one of the ways in which you provide value to your customers is helping them become cloud proficient. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about the value prop to customers. Why do they do business with you? >>And I think, uh, there are a number of reasons why they do business with us or choose to choose for our manage services provider that first of course are looking for stability and continuity. Uh, and, and from a cost perspective, predict predictable costs. But nowadays you also have a shortage in personnel and knowledge. So, and it's not always very easy for them to access, uh, those skill sets because most it, people just want to have, uh, a great variety in work, what they are doing, uh, towards, towards the local government, uh, healthcare, social housing. They actually, uh, a sector that, uh, that are really in between embracing the public cloud, but also have a lot of legacy and, and bringing together best of all, worlds is what we do. So we also bring them comfort. We do understand what legacy, uh, needs from a manager's perspective. We also know how to leverage the benefits in the public cloud. Uh, and, uh, I'd say from a marketing perspective, actually we focus on using an ideal cloud, being a mix of traditional and future based cloud. >>Thank you. I, you know, I'd like to get your perspective on this idea of as a service and the, as a service economy that we often talk about on the cube. I mean, you work with a lot of different companies. We talked about some of the industries and, and increasingly it seems like organizations are focused more on outcomes, continuous value delivery via, you know, suites of services and, and they're leaning into platforms versus one off product offerings, you know, do you see that? How do you see your customers reacting to this as a service trend? >>Yeah. Uh, to be honest, sometimes it makes it more complex because services like, look at your Android or iPhone, you can buy apps, uh, and download apps the way you want to. So they have a lot of apps about how do you integrate it into one excellent workflow, something that works for you, David or works for me. Uh, so the difficulty, some sometimes lies in, uh, the easy accessibility that you have to those solutions, but nobody takes into account that they're all part of a chain, a workflow supply chain, uh, and, and, uh, they're being hyped as well. So what we also have a lot of time in, in, in, in managing our customers is that the tremendous feature push feature push that there is from technology providers, SaaS providers. Whereas if you provide 10 features, you only need one or two, uh, but the other eight are very distracting from your prime core business. Uh, so there's a natural way in that people are embracing, uh, SA solutions, embracing cloud solutions. Uh, but what's not taken into account as much is that we love to see it is the way that you integrate all those solutions toward something that's workable for the person that's actually using them. And it's seldomly that somebody is only using one solution. There's always a chain of solutions. Um, so yeah, there are a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of challenges for us, but also for our customers, >>You see that trend toward, as a service continuing, or do you actually see based on what you're just saying that pendulum, you know, swinging back and forth, somebody comes out with a new sort of feature product and that, you know, changes the dynamic or do you see as a service really having legs? >>Ah, I, I think that's very, very good question, David, because that's something that's keeping our busy all the time. We do see a trend in a service looking at, uh, talk about pure later on. We also use pure as a service more or less. Yeah. And that really helps us. Uh, but you see, uh, um, that sometimes people make a step too, too fast, too quick, not well thought of, and then you see what they call sort of cloud repatriation, tend that people go back to what they're doing and then they stop innovating or stop leveraging. The possibilities are actually there. Uh, so from our consultancy, our guidance and architecture point of view, we try to help them as much as possible to think in a SA thought, but just don't use the, cloud's just another data center. Uh, and so it's all about managing the maturity on our side, but on our customer side as well. >>So I'm interested in how your sort of your philosophy and, and as relates, I think in, in, in terms of how you work with pure, but how do you stay tightly in lockstep with your customers so that you don't over rotate so that you don't and send them to over rotate, but then you're not also, you don't wanna be too late to the game. How, how do you manage all that? >>Oh, there's, there's, there's a world of interactions between us and our customers. And so I think a well known, uh, uh, thing that people is customer intimacy. That's very important for us to get to know our customers and get to predict which way they're moving. But the, the thing that we add to it is also the ecosystem intimacy. So no, the application and services landscape, our customers know the primary providers and work with them, uh, to, to, to create something that, that really fits the customers. They just not looked at from our own silo where a cloud managed service provider that we actually work in the ecosystem with, with, with, with the primary providers. And we have, I think with the average customers, I think we have, uh, uh, in a month we have so much interactions on our operational level and technical levels, strategic level. >>We do bring together our customers also, and to jointly think about what we can do together, what we independently can never reach. Uh, but we also involve our customers in, uh, defining our own strategy. So we have something we call a customer involvement board. So we present a strategy and say, does it make sense? Eh, this is actually what you need also. So we take a lot of our efforts into our customers and we do also, uh, understand the significant moments of truth. We are now in this, in this broadcast, David there. So you can imagine that at this moment, not thinking go wrong. Yeah. If, if, if the internet stops that we have a problem. And now, so we, we actually know that this broadcast is going on for our customers and we manage that. It's always on, uh, uh, where in the other moments in the week, we might have a little less attention, but this moment we should be there. And these moments of truth that we really embrace, we got them well described. Everybody working out line knows what the moment of truth is for our customers. Uh, uh, so we have a big logistics provider. For instance, you does not have to ask us to, uh, have, uh, a higher availability on black Friday or cyber Monday. We know that's the most important part in the year for him or her. Does it answer your question, David? >>Yes. We know as well. You know, when these big, the big game moments you have to be on your top, uh, top of your game, uh, you know, the other thing Emil about this as a service approach that I really like is, is it's a lot of it is consumption based and the data doesn't lie, you can see adoption, you know, daily, weekly, monthly. And so I wonder how you're leveraging pure as a service specifically in what kind of patterns you're seeing in, in, in the adoption. >>Uh, yeah, pure as a service for our customers is mainly never visible. Uh, we provide storage services to provide storage solutions, storage over is part of a bigger thing of a server of application. Uh, so the real benefits, to be honest, of course, towards our customer, it's all flash, uh, uh, and they have the fastest, fastest storage is available. But for ourself, we, uh, we use less resources to manage our storage. We have far more that we have a near to maintenance free storage solution now because we have it as a service and we work closely together with pure. Uh, so, uh, actually the way we treat our customers is that way pure treats us as well. And that's why there's a used click. So the real benefits, uh, uh, how we leverage is it normally we had a bunch of guys managing our storage. Now we only have one and knowing that's a shortage of it, personnel, the other persons can well be, uh, involved in other parts of our services or in other parts of an innovation. So, uh, that's simply great. >>You know, um, my takeaway the meal is that you've made infrastructure, at least, least the storage infrastructure, invisible to your customers, which is the way it should be. You didn't have to worry about it. And you've, you've also attacked the, the labor problem. You're not, you know, provisioning lungs anymore, or, you know, tuning the storage, you know, with, with arms and legs. So that's huge. So that gets me into the next topic, which is business transformation. That, that means that I can now start to attack the operational model. So I've got a different it model. Now I'm not managing infrastructure same way. So I have to shift those resources. And I'm presuming that it's a bus now becomes a business transformation discussion. How are you seeing your customers shift those resources and focus more on their business as a result of this sort of as a service trend? >>I think I do not know if they, they transform their business. Thanks to us. I think that they can more leverage their own business. They have less problems, less maintenance, et cetera, cetera, but we also add new, uh, certainties to it, like, uh, uh, the, the latest service we we released was imutable storage being the first in the Netherlands offering this thanks to, uh, thanks to the pure technology, but for customers, it takes them to give them a good night rest because, you know, we have some, uh, geopolitical issues in the world. Uh, there's a lot of hacking. People have a lot of ransomware attacks and, and we just give them a good night rest. So from a business transformation, does it transform their business? I think that gives them a comfort in running your business, knowing that certain things are well arranged. You don't have to worry about that. We will do that. We'll take it out of your hands and you just go ahead and run your business. Um, so to me, it's not really a transformation is just using the right opportunities at the right moment. >>The imutable piece is interesting because, because, but speaking of as a service, you know, anybody can go on the dark web and buy ransomware as a service. I mean, as it's seeing the, as a service economy hit, hit everywhere, the good and the, and the not so good. Um, and so I presume that your customers are, are looking at, I imutability as another service capability of the service offering and really rethinking, maybe because of the recent, you know, ransomware attacks, rethinking how they, they approach, uh, business continuance, business resilience, disaster recovery. Do you see that? >>Yep, definitely. Definitely. I tell not all of them yet. Imutable storage. So it's like an insurance as well, which you have when you have imutable storage and you have been, you have a ransomware attack at least have you part of data, which never, if data is corrupted, you cannot restore it. If your hardware is broken, you can order new hardware. Every data is corrupted. You cannot order new data. Now we got that safe and well. And so we offer them the possibility to, to do the forensics and free up their, uh, the data without tremendous loss of time. Uh, but you also see that you raise the new, uh, how do you say, uh, the new baseline for other providers as well? Eh, so there's security of the corporate information security officer, the CIO, they're all very happy with that. And they, they, they raise the baseline for us as well. So they can look at other security topics and look from say, security operation center. Cuz now we can really focus on our prime business risks because from a technical perspective, we got it covered. How can we manage the business risk, uh, which is a combination of people, processes and technology. >>Right. Makes sense. Okay. I'll give you the last word. Uh, talk about your relationship with pure, where you wanna see that that going in the future. >>Uh, I hope we've be working together for a long time. Uh, I, I ex experienced them very involved. Uh, it's not, we have done the sell and now it's all up to you now. We were closely working together. I know if I talk to my prime architect, Marcel height is very happy and it looks a little more or less if we work with pure, like we're working with colleagues, not with a supplier and a customer, uh, and uh, the whole pure concept is fascinating. Uh, I, uh, I had the opportunity to visit San Francisco head office and they told me to fish in how they launched, uh, pure being, if you want to implement it, it had to be on one credit card. The, the, the menu had to be on one credit card. Just a simple thought of put that as your big area, audacious goal to make the simplest, uh, implementable storage available. But for us, uh, it gives me the expectation that there will be a lot of more surprises with pur in the near future. Uh, and for us as a provider, what we, uh, literally really look forward to is that, that for us, these new developments will not be new migrations. It will be a gradual growth of our services or storage services. Uh, so that's what I expect. And that was what I, and we look forward to. >>Yeah, that's great. Uh, thank you so much, Emil, for coming on the, the cube and, and sharing your thoughts and best of luck to you in the future. >>Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. >>You're very welcome. Okay. In a moment, I'll be back to give you some closing thoughts on at your storage service. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >>Welcome to evergreen, a place where organizations grow and thrive rooted in the modern data experience in evergreen people find a seamless, simple way to leverage data through market leading sustainable technology, financial flexibility, and effortless management, allowing everyone to innovate with data confidently. Welcome to pure storage. >>Now, if you're interested in hearing more about Pure's growing portfolio of technology and services and how they're transforming the enterprise data experience, be sure to register for pure accelerate tech Fest. 22 digital event is also taking place as an in-person event. On June 8th, you can register at pure storage.com/accelerate, pure storage.com/accelerate. You're watching the cue, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. And I'm pleased to welcome onto the CUBE, our next guest, Michael Perera, who is the general manager for IBM Technology Support Services. Hello Michael, good to see you. >> Hi Dave, how are you? Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, my pleasure. Look, everybody wants to talk about transformation. And we're going to talk about how to do that while at the same time running your business. So Michael, talk about some of the challenges that businesses are facing today, they got to keep the lights on, they got to deal with remote workers, they got to continue to bring new products and services, they're dealing with cloud migration, they got new security that has to worry about endpoint and identifying their own workers in a different way. Budget serves are depressed are numbers, you know, our numbers between four minus four minus 5% last year, we're seeing a big uptick this year. But you guys TSS right in the middle of all that, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so we're kind of in the boiler room, so to speak, supporting our clients across the board, hardware, software, and everything else, and ultimately ensuring that our clients keep the lights on, while they also transform as we go forward. You know, for me, the last year has really just accelerated with the pandemic, all of the challenges. And it really brought shining light on those challenges that you just mentioned, that all of our clients are trying to deal with, you know, not just how do they keep the lights on? But how do they transform at the same time, this world of hybrid cloud? And what do they choose to keep versus what do they move? How do they integrate those things together? How do they carve out budget, as well as time in order to make all those things happen, which those are generally conflicting forces of the universe. And then, you know, on top of all that, you take COVID, and the pandemic and the shift from many of our clients 100% face to face to 100% remote, almost overnight, from 80% face to face, 20% digital sales model to the reverse almost overnight. Our retail clients, many of which in May had transaction numbers far exceeding Cyber Monday and Black Friday, not something that they plan for, but they need to be able to adapt to it. And for it, while minimizing everything that they've known historically, right, which is counting on lower volumes at certain points in time of the month, or of the year. And all of that adds up to just a tremendous number of challenges for the infrastructure of our clients. We've jumped in, you know, arm and arm with them, being able to answer things like how do we help their teams who no longer have physical access to a site, be able to go and fix things when vendors are not allowed. So leveraging technology, like augmented reality, as an example, gaining visibility into those environments to avoid outages ahead of time based on these huge peaks that they hadn't expected or seen before. And then also bringing up brand new digital services, and what does that mean to the broader infrastructure and how they extend it and expand it in a way that is constrained physically and from an access perspective. So definitely an exciting time to say the least. And it's we've been weaving and bobbing and dodging and sprinting with our clients along the way. >> Well, let's talk about (murmurs), 'cause you had this tight budget climate that we both talked about. And it had basic infrastructure, you had to buy laptops, you know, secure the endpoints, maybe spin up some VDI and do some things that I hadn't planned on, and maybe, you know, HQ, maybe there's pent up demand there. I'd be interested in your thoughts, and maybe it's been sort of, you know, neglected over the past 12-14 months. And then I've got this, you know, we talked about digital transformation, pre pandemic. And, you know, there was some movement, of course, but there was also a lot of complacency. And then he had this forced march to digital, and it wasn't planned at all, it wasn't planned for, it wasn't strategic, it was just like, go. So what do you tell clients who are facing those budget pressures, they still got to get stuff done. And they really need to rethink or think through their cloud and digital transformation strategy. What's that conversation like? >> Well, the first part is we can help and we can help very clearly by saving them 30% on average on their IT spend in terms of maintenance. So we've done in conjunction with Forrester, we've done a study of almost 300 of our clients over the last year and 30% is the number that they have spent. And that's 30% opex, straight to the bottom line or straight to reinvest directly back into their business. So it's companies like McKesson, who's a health care services provider, who's been swamped, distributing COVID vaccines across the US and enabling them to scale on IBM Power and storage along with Cisco Networking, software, including Linux, what they do around hard drive retentions, as they're swapping things in and out and expanding in order to meet regulatory requirements. It's Vodafone in New Zealand, adding 3000 network devices due to increased traffic from COVID, where we could save them 20% right off the bat as part of our overall umbrella maintenance agreement and being the single point of contact for them. It's Banco Santader in Chile, who have their own custom branch infrastructure and giving them anywhere between the two to 24 hour response time, depending on the location, the ones that are in the Andes takes a little bit more time to get there sometime by helicopter versus road, but nonetheless, you know, providing that kind of support. So those are the types of things that, you know, we've been seeing and how we've been helping our clients, they take that money reinvest it back in, but also, they start to work better and smarter as they go. So, you know, we've also introduced a cloud based support insights platform, which has helped clients like Maple Leaf Foods in Canada give them access and visibility into what is their network look like? What are the devices that they've got? Where do they have security vulnerabilities and in identifying hardware and software bugs. So giving them the ability to work smarter, so that they can also not just save on opex and the money that they're paying somebody else for maintenance, but also so that they can put their resources to work more efficiently and as a result, be able to go spend more time on other things? >> So I want to double click on that. So you know, this gain sharing idea. Does IT get any of that? Or does it all go back to the CFO? In other words, you know, can they reinvest that in in technology? Or is it part of that? What are you seeing there is that pie in the sky thinking the CIO is going to be able to take that game share? >> No, I don't think it's pie in the sky at all. CIOs, in my experience, have a budget, right, and they're responsible and have control of that budget. So if they can clear headroom from that existing budget, an opex of which maintenance is a big piece of that then, you know, generally, that's their money, so to speak, to go spend on other places and redirect that investment so that as you're reporting to the CFO, then that numbers ultimately still tie back to whatever their budget is. >> So where are they spending those dollars? I mean, are there any patterns that you're discerning in terms of how they're applying them? I mean, people always say, we're going to shift it to more strategic areas. What specifically does that mean? >> Well, so you know, we're seeing a number of places which are not, you know, unique, to say the least when you look at security, as one example, if you look at move to public cloud, for certain workloads, as another enterprise agility is a third, resiliency is another. So those tend to be the top areas that we're seeing clients prioritizing, and in taking those savings that they get from working with us and then applying them other places from a technology perspective. But then you also have the workforce aspect, and where are they investing and work play safety is one training skills being another and then ultimately, employee engagement and satisfaction is the third. >> Now this might be a little bit out of your swim lane, but because you're in the boiler room, I'm going to ask I mean, when we talked about organizations, you know, shifting the focus of their teams to these more strategic initiatives to really try to get differentiation and build moats that a lot of times, there's skills gaps, so how are clients dealing with that challenge? >> Also, there's a couple of things that we're participating and co-creating with our clients on. So one of them is you're right there based on that skills gap. Training is one aspect. But you can also leverage technology in order to fill some of those skills gaps around technology, somewhat ironic. So open source as an example, and looking at what open source packages are compatible or not compatible. And people who have not necessarily spent a lot of time in open source may spend a ton of time trying to debug something which is just a matter of a mismatch on packages from different open source runtimes as an example, so that's one where we've got assets that we've developed that holds a full library of those interoperability between open source packages. Vulnerabilities is another one where, if you're highly skilled, you know where to go to find those vulnerabilities, you understand how to assess them, you understand which ones are important or which ones are not important. But if you're not, then having something that you can go use as a quick guide is can be very valuable. And again, another asset that that we've developed, and it's enabled clients to move very quickly and bring brand new applications to market. So as an example, National Telecom in Thailand who have developed an application for specifically for the COVID pandemic, based on open source in order to attract COVID testing and vaccine status for tourists, and essential personnel, all built on open source, given the critical nature of it, they needed it supported in a way that they could get immediate responses and fixes, not something that they have the skills to do on their own. So we ended up partnering them in order to do just that. >> Okay, so the training piece, you're teaching them to fish, and then you're automating the catch where possible. So let's talk about getting a lot of talk about cloud, public cloud, OnPrem, cross cloud, edge. I'm interested in hearing more about the integration challenges, the more this universe grows, the more complex it gets across all these locations. How are you helping clients address these integration challenges? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think that the ultimate promise of cloud was, oh, you just put it all in the cloud. And poof, everything magically happens. But the reality is, only 20% of the workloads are sitting in the cloud, which means 80% of them are sitting somewhere else. And the vast majority of those workloads need to interact together. And you can ask yourself, so why is it only 20%? And there's a litany of reasons why ranging from security to integration with data sources, regulatory requirements, which is why we IBM released the financial services, public cloud in order to deal with that for our clients and with ISVs. End to end visibility and scalability. So how do I know where the bottlenecks are? How do I know where the problem point was, and an end to end application that's built of microservices that are running all over the place, architectural flexibility and complexity across multiple vendors. So if I've got all of these moving parts from all of these different OEMs, or sources, how do I actually get support and know which part is broken? And who to call and when to call? And then, you know, ultimately, it boils down to skills, which we talked about before and time and money. So, again, you know, for us this is about taking the holistic approach, a heterogeneous approach, a hybrid approach, if you will, and being able to provide our clients with the end to end support for that hybrid environment. >> Alright, last question, big question. But we're not much time but, you know, the, we call it the new abnormal, look, bring out your telescope. We're not going back. Where are we going? What do you see? >> Well, so I agree 100%, that we're not going back. And the pandemic has certainly done nothing to change that perspective. In fact, it's just accelerated it from my point of view. And it's true in the adoption, and more acceptance, really, of digital everything compared to where it was. We see it today all the time with clients who may have been hesitant in remote support as an example. But now they're embracing it with arms wide open, areas where they would have asked for us to provide technical personnel to come in and fix something. Now, because of access to data centers or unlimited access to data centers, we're supporting them remotely leveraging augmented reality, and they're using their own people, we ship the parts, they use your own people, we walk them through it. And in doing all that, we've actually seen our industry leading Net Promoter Score go up, which is somewhat counterintuitive, because historically, without a pandemic, you would have thought, if we would have tried to push that type of technology on clients who are not really ready for it or accepting, our Net Promoter Scores would have gone the other direction. But you know, in practice, they're already outpacing industry by 20 points, and they've actually been going up significantly over the last few years time. So for us, this is about embracing digital, it's about embracing the hybrid cloud and hybrid environments. It's about partnering with our clients in order to give them what they need and when they need it and be flexible and agile along the way to help them scale so definitely an exciting time no doubt of where we are as well as where we're going. >> Love the story, Michael, I miss bread and butter. You know, maybe you guys don't get a lot of the headlines, I guess unless something goes wrong but so you don't get a lot of headlines. That's good news. But congratulations by the way on the NPS. That's awesome. And thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Great, thanks for having me Dave. >> You're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there for more great content from IBM Think 2021. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. (gentle music) (bright music)

(bright music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. And I'm pleased to welcome onto the CUBE, our next guest, Michael Perera, who is the general manager for IBM Technology Support Services. Hello Michael, good to see you. >> Hi Dave, how are you? Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, my pleasure. Look, everybody wants to talk about transformation. And we're going to talk about how to do that while at the same time running your business. So Michael, talk about some of the challenges that businesses are facing today, they got to keep the lights on, they got to deal with remote workers, they got to continue to bring new products and services, they're dealing with cloud migration, they got new security that has to worry about endpoint and identifying their own workers in a different way. Budget serves are depressed are numbers, you know, our numbers between four minus four minus 5% last year, we're seeing a big uptick this year. But you guys TSS right in the middle of all that, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so we're kind of in the boiler room, so to speak, supporting our clients across the board, hardware, software, and everything else, and ultimately ensuring that our clients keep the lights on, while they also transform as we go forward. You know, for me, the last year has really just accelerated with the pandemic, all of the challenges. And it really brought shining light on those challenges that you just mentioned, that all of our clients are trying to deal with, you know, not just how do they keep the lights on? But how do they transform at the same time, this world of hybrid cloud? And what do they choose to keep versus what do they move? How do they integrate those things together? How do they carve out budget, as well as time in order to make all those things happen, which those are generally conflicting forces of the universe. And then, you know, on top of all that, you take COVID, and the pandemic and the shift from many of our clients 100% face to face to 100% remote, almost overnight, from 80% face to face, 20% digital sales model to the reverse almost overnight. Our retail clients, many of which in May had transaction numbers far exceeding Cyber Monday and Black Friday, not something that they plan for, but they need to be able to adapt to it. And for it, while minimizing everything that they've known historically, right, which is counting on lower volumes at certain points in time of the month, or of the year. And all of that adds up to just a tremendous number of challenges for the infrastructure of our clients. We've jumped in, you know, arm and arm with them, being able to answer things like how do we help their teams who no longer have physical access to a site, be able to go and fix things when vendors are not allowed. So leveraging technology, like augmented reality, as an example, gaining visibility into those environments to avoid outages ahead of time based on these huge peaks that they hadn't expected or seen before. And then also bringing up brand new digital services, and what does that mean to the broader infrastructure and how they extend it and expand it in a way that is constrained physically and from an access perspective. So definitely an exciting time to say the least. And it's we've been weaving and bobbing and dodging and sprinting with our clients along the way. >> Well, let's talk about (murmurs), 'cause you had this tight budget climate that we both talked about. And it had basic infrastructure, you had to buy laptops, you know, secure the endpoints, maybe spin up some VDI and do some things that I hadn't planned on, and maybe, you know, HQ, maybe there's pent up demand there. I'd be interested in your thoughts, and maybe it's been sort of, you know, neglected over the past 12-14 months. And then I've got this, you know, we talked about digital transformation, pre pandemic. And, you know, there was some movement, of course, but there was also a lot of complacency. And then he had this forced march to digital, and it wasn't planned at all, it wasn't planned for, it wasn't strategic, it was just like, go. So what do you tell clients who are facing those budget pressures, they still got to get stuff done. And they really need to rethink or think through their cloud and digital transformation strategy. What's that conversation like? >> Well, the first part is we can help and we can help very clearly by saving them 30% on average on their IT spend in terms of maintenance. So we've done in conjunction with Forrester, we've done a study of almost 300 of our clients over the last year and 30% is the number that they have spent. And that's 30% opex, straight to the bottom line or straight to reinvest directly back into their business. So it's companies like McKesson, who's a health care services provider, who's been swamped, distributing COVID vaccines across the US and enabling them to scale on IBM Power and storage along with Cisco Networking, software, including Linux, what they do around hard drive retentions, as they're swapping things in and out and expanding in order to meet regulatory requirements. It's Vodafone in New Zealand, adding 3000 network devices due to increased traffic from COVID, where we could save them 20% right off the bat as part of our overall umbrella maintenance agreement and being the single point of contact for them. It's Banco Santader in Chile, who have their own custom branch infrastructure and giving them anywhere between the two to 24 hour response time, depending on the location, the ones that are in the Andes takes a little bit more time to get there sometime by helicopter versus road, but nonetheless, you know, providing that kind of support. So those are the types of things that, you know, we've been seeing and how we've been helping our clients, they take that money reinvest it back in, but also, they start to work better and smarter as they go. So, you know, we've also introduced a cloud based support insights platform, which has helped clients like Maple Leaf Foods in Canada give them access and visibility into what is their network look like? What are the devices that they've got? Where do they have security vulnerabilities and in identifying hardware and software bugs. So giving them the ability to work smarter, so that they can also not just save on opex and the money that they're paying somebody else for maintenance, but also so that they can put their resources to work more efficiently and as a result, be able to go spend more time on other things? >> So I want to double click on that. So you know, this gain sharing idea. Does IT get any of that? Or does it all go back to the CFO? In other words, you know, can they reinvest that in in technology? Or is it part of that? What are you seeing there is that pie in the sky thinking the CIO is going to be able to take that game share? >> No, I don't think it's pie in the sky at all. CIOs, in my experience, have a budget, right, and they're responsible and have control of that budget. So if they can clear headroom from that existing budget, an opex of which maintenance is a big piece of that then, you know, generally, that's their money, so to speak, to go spend on other places and redirect that investment so that as you're reporting to the CFO, then that numbers ultimately still tie back to whatever their budget is. >> So where are they spending those dollars? I mean, are there any patterns that you're discerning in terms of how they're applying them? I mean, people always say, we're going to shift it to more strategic areas. What specifically does that mean? >> Well, so you know, we're seeing a number of places which are not, you know, unique, to say the least when you look at security, as one example, if you look at move to public cloud, for certain workloads, as another enterprise agility is a third, resiliency is another. So those tend to be the top areas that we're seeing clients prioritizing, and in taking those savings that they get from working with us and then applying them other places from a technology perspective. But then you also have the workforce aspect, and where are they investing and work play safety is one training skills being another and then ultimately, employee engagement and satisfaction is the third. >> Now this might be a little bit out of your swim lane, but because you're in the boiler room, I'm going to ask I mean, when we talked about organizations, you know, shifting the focus of their teams to these more strategic initiatives to really try to get differentiation and build moats that a lot of times, there's skills gaps, so how are clients dealing with that challenge? >> Also, there's a couple of things that we're participating and co-creating with our clients on. So one of them is you're right there based on that skills gap. Training is one aspect. But you can also leverage technology in order to fill some of those skills gaps around technology, somewhat ironic. So open source as an example, and looking at what open source packages are compatible or not compatible. And people who have not necessarily spent a lot of time in open source may spend a ton of time trying to debug something which is just a matter of a mismatch on packages from different open source runtimes as an example, so that's one where we've got assets that we've developed that holds a full library of those interoperability between open source packages. Vulnerabilities is another one where, if you're highly skilled, you know where to go to find those vulnerabilities, you understand how to assess them, you understand which ones are important or which ones are not important. But if you're not, then having something that you can go use as a quick guide is can be very valuable. And again, another asset that that we've developed, and it's enabled clients to move very quickly and bring brand new applications to market. So as an example, National Telecom in Thailand who have developed an application for specifically for the COVID pandemic, based on open source in order to attract COVID testing and vaccine status for tourists, and essential personnel, all built on open source, given the critical nature of it, they needed it supported in a way that they could get immediate responses and fixes, not something that they have the skills to do on their own. So we ended up partnering them in order to do just that. >> Okay, so the training piece, you're teaching them to fish, and then you're automating the catch where possible. So let's talk about getting a lot of talk about cloud, public cloud, OnPrem, cross cloud, edge. I'm interested in hearing more about the integration challenges, the more this universe grows, the more complex it gets across all these locations. How are you helping clients address these integration challenges? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think that the ultimate promise of cloud was, oh, you just put it all in the cloud. And poof, everything magically happens. But the reality is, only 20% of the workloads are sitting in the cloud, which means 80% of them are sitting somewhere else. And the vast majority of those workloads need to interact together. And you can ask yourself, so why is it only 20%? And there's a litany of reasons why ranging from security to integration with data sources, regulatory requirements, which is why we IBM released the financial services, public cloud in order to deal with that for our clients and with ISVs. End to end visibility and scalability. So how do I know where the bottlenecks are? How do I know where the problem point was, and an end to end application that's built of microservices that are running all over the place, architectural flexibility and complexity across multiple vendors. So if I've got all of these moving parts from all of these different OEMs, or sources, how do I actually get support and know which part is broken? And who to call and when to call? And then, you know, ultimately, it boils down to skills, which we talked about before and time and money. So, again, you know, for us this is about taking the holistic approach, a heterogeneous approach, a hybrid approach, if you will, and being able to provide our clients with the end to end support for that hybrid environment. >> Alright, last question, big question. But we're not much time but, you know, the, we call it the new abnormal, look, bring out your telescope. We're not going back. Where are we going? What do you see? >> Well, so I agree 100%, that we're not going back. And the pandemic has certainly done nothing to change that perspective. In fact, it's just accelerated it from my point of view. And it's true in the adoption, and more acceptance, really, of digital everything compared to where it was. We see it today all the time with clients who may have been hesitant in remote support as an example. But now they're embracing it with arms wide open, areas where they would have asked for us to provide technical personnel to come in and fix something. Now, because of access to data centers or unlimited access to data centers, we're supporting them remotely leveraging augmented reality, and they're using their own people, we ship the parts, they use your own people, we walk them through it. And in doing all that, we've actually seen our industry leading Net Promoter Score go up, which is somewhat counterintuitive, because historically, without a pandemic, you would have thought, if we would have tried to push that type of technology on clients who are not really ready for it or accepting, our Net Promoter Scores would have gone the other direction. But you know, in practice, they're already outpacing industry by 20 points, and they've actually been going up significantly over the last few years time. So for us, this is about embracing digital, it's about embracing the hybrid cloud and hybrid environments. It's about partnering with our clients in order to give them what they need and when they need it and be flexible and agile along the way to help them scale so definitely an exciting time no doubt of where we are as well as where we're going. >> Love the story, Michael, I miss bread and butter. You know, maybe you guys don't get a lot of the headlines, I guess unless something goes wrong but so you don't get a lot of headlines. That's good news. But congratulations by the way on the NPS. That's awesome. And thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Great, thanks for having me Dave. >> You're welcome, and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there for more great content from IBM Think 2021. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. (gentle music) (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this Cube special presentation of Cube On CloudStartups with AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This session is the accelerate digital transformation and simplify AWS with autonomous cloud operations with Venkat Krishnamachari, who's the CEO and co-founder here with me on remote. Venkat, good to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> So this is a session on, essentially DAY2 operations. Something that we've been covering on theCUBE as you know, for a long time. But the big trend is as DevOps becomes much more mainstream, intelligent applications or agile applications, have to connect with intelligent infrastructure and your company MontyCloud has the solution that literally turns IT pros into cloud powerhouses as you guys say, it's your tagline. This is a super important area. I want to get your thoughts and showcase what you guys are doing as one of the hot 10 startups. Thanks for coming on. So take a minute to explain real quick. What is MontyCloud all about? >> Great, thank you again for the opportunity. Hey everybody, I'm Venkat Krishnamachari. I represent mandate team at MontyCloud. We are an intelligent cloud management platform company. What we help customers do, is we help them simplify their cloud operations so they can go innovate and develop intelligent applications. Our platform is called DAY2, because everything after the day one of going to Cloud, needs a lot of expertise and we decided that's a fun area to go solve for our customers. We solve everything on starting DAY2 from simplifying provisioning, to management, to operations, to autonomous cloud operations. Our platform does this for our customers so they can innovate faster and they can close the cloud skills gap that is required to empower the developers. >> Venkat, I want to get your thoughts on DAY2 operations. There's been a trend that people talk about for a long time. As people move to the cloud and see the economic advantage of certainly with COVID-19, the market has said, "Hey, if you're on cloud native, you win." Andy Jassy at re:Invent last Keynote really laid out how companies can be proficient in becoming cloud-scale advantages. One of them was have expertise in cloud. So everyone is kind of doing that. You're starting to see enterprises all build the muscle for cloud operations. That's day one, they get started. Then that's kind of the challenges and the opportunities kick in when you have to continue in production. You have things that go on in the software. The underlying scaling infrastructure needs to be scaled out or all these kinds of things happen. This is what DAY2 is all about, keeping track of and maintaining high availability, uptime and keep the cost structure in line. This is what people discover. If they don't think properly about the architecture, they have huge problems. You guys solve this problem. Could you explain why this is important. >> Sure thing, John. So cloud operations, as you described, it's a continuous operations and continuous improvement in cloud environments. What efficient cloud operations does for customers is it accelerates innovation, reduces the risk, and more importantly, all the period of time that they are using their applications in the cloud, which is future, reduces the total cost of cloud operations. This is important because there is a huge gap in cloud skills. The surface area of cloud that customers need to manage is growing by the day. And most importantly, developers are increasingly and rightfully so, getting a seat at the table in defining and accelerating company's cloud journey. Which means, now they're proposing, microservices based application, container based application. Traditional applications are still in the mix. Now the surface area becomes a challenge for the IT operators to manage. That's why it's very important to start right. See, we ask this question to our customers. Having listened to our customers as hundreds of them, one thing is clear, when we ask this question to our customers, ever wonder why and how large scale companies like AWS are able to deliver massively scalable services and operate massive data centers with fewer people? Because it's automation. And it's important to think about, as you scale, automate a way things that must be automated, eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting and help your developers move fast. All of this is vital in the day and age we live in, John. >> Yeah, I want to double down on that because I think this idea of integrating into operations is a critical key point for where success and failure kind of happen. We've seen with cloud, certainly IT departments and enterprise is going okay, cost optimization, check. Get cloud native, getting the cloud, lift and shift, I thought it through, I put some stuff in the cloud and then they go great, now I need resilience. I need resiliency, and I want to make sure things are now working okay, water flowing through the pipes, cloud's working. Then they say, "Well this is good, I got to need to integrate in with my own premises or edge or other things that are happening." Then they try to integrate into their core operations. McKinsey calls this the value driver three, integrating into core operators. We heard from them earlier in the program here at this event. This is key, it's not trivial to integrate cloud into your operations. This is what DAY2 and beyond is all about. Talk more about that. >> Yeah, that's a great point. And that's something that we've been working with customers to hands-on help learn and build it for them, right? So the acceleration of cloud adoption during the pandemic and ongoing adoption, it's going to shift the software security compliance and operational landscape dramatically. There's no escaping it. Cloud operations will no longer be an afterthought. DevOps will integrate with CloudOps. It'll provide a seamless feedback loop so that a box can be found sooner, fixed sooner, and uptime can be guaranteed. I'll give an example. One of our customers is a university. During the pandemic, their core examination application went down and they couldn't fix it on time because of lack of resources. For them, it's vital to have adopted cloud operations sooner but the runway they had was very little. Fortunately, we had the solution for them there. Within a week, they were able to take their entire on-prem application online, not just take the application but provide an autonomous cloud operations layer to their existing IT team with our platform, upscale them, and then about 14,000 students took their exams without any disruption. Now this customer and customers such as themselves have come to expect that level of integrated cloud operations into their application portfolio. It's important to address that with a platform that simplifies it. >> Venkat, real quick. Define, what is autonomous CloudOps platform? What does that mean? >> So let's take an example here, right? Customers who are trying to move an existing workload to cloud bring a traditional set of application. Then customers who are born in the cloud build microservices or server less based applications. Then there is containers. Now, all three the person surface areas that customers, particularly the IT teams have to manage. With the growing surface area, with the adoption of infrastructure as core, it becomes more nuanced to think about, how do we simplify? And in simplification comes automation. When a developer provision certain resource, previously, they used to be filing a ticket. Central IT team has to respond. Developers don't want that anymore. They want to innovate faster but at the same time Central IT team wants to have some governance in play. The best way to get out of the way of developers is automating it. And providing autonomous cloud operations means developers can deploy newer workloads faster, but with a level of guaranteed guardrail on security compliance and costs that sets them free. This is what we mean by autonomous cloud operations, closing the gap in skills, closing the gap in tooling, empowering your developers without thinking about the traditional model but enabling them to do things that's more in a rapid pace. That's what we mean by autonomous cloud operations. >> You had a great market opportunity. I think this is obviously a no brainer. As people say in the industry "cloud is scale is proven". Even post COVID if people don't have a cloud growth strategy they're pretty much going to be toast. McKinsey calls this a trillion dollar at a minimum not including potential new use cases, new pioneering applications coming. So pretty much, well the verdict is there, this is cloud. I got to ask you about MontyCloud as you guys have a business. Give or take a quick minute to explain the business of MontyCloud, some vitals or how people buy the product, the business model. Take a quick minute to explain MontyCloud business. >> Sure thing. John, see, our entire goal is to simplify cloud operations. Because what we learned is what seems to be complex about cloud adoption is that everybody is expected to be an expert on everything in the new era, but most teams are not ready to run efficient cloud operations at scale, as the cloud footprint is growing. This means we have to redefine certain conversations here. We talk directly to infrastructure architects, cloud architects, application owners. And in general, we talk to people who are leading their IT digital transformation for their companies. What we are enabling our customers is, they must demand that the traditional operation model must change to enable newer application patterns. For this, we are expecting customers want to standardize things, right? IT leaders are beginning to say, "All right, I got to standardize my provisioning, standardize my operations, reduce the heavy lifting that comes with infrastructure's code, and enable the business team and the application team to work closely together." The best way to do that is to go solve this problem with automation. So our platform is able to go help such customers, particularly leaders who demand digital transformation. With clear KPIs, our platform can help them ask the why question easily. And then our platform can also go perform, the how part of automation. That's what we solve. Those are the kinds of customers we really have been working with, John. >> So if I'm a customer, how do I know when I need to call MontyCloud? Is it because my cloud footprint is growing which is a natural sign of growth, or is it because I have more events happening, more things to manage? When do I know I have the need to call you guys? What's the signal? What's the sign? >> So we call it the day one mindset, and also the DAY2 mindset. Customers deciding to go to cloud on day one, should think about DAY2. Because without thinking about DAY2, it can become very expensive, right? When a customer's thinking about digital transformation, could be a lift and shift or it could be starting a new application pattern in the cloud, we can certainly help starting right that day because there are a couple of things they have to do, right? They have to standardize the cloud operations which means setting up the cloud accounts, setting up guardrails, enabling teams to go provision with self service. You want to start the right way. So we are happy to help on the day one journey itself and we can automate DAY2 along with it. So standardizing infrastructure operations, standardizing provisioning, security, visibility, compliance, cost. If any of this is an important milestone that customers have to achieve in their cloud journey, we can help. >> By the way, I would just point out that we were just talking on another session around lift and shift is not a no-brainer either if not thought through and remediated correctly that cost could go through the roof. I mean, we've seen evidence of lift and shift fails just because they didn't think it through. Just to your point. I mean, that's not a no brainer. Quickly explain why lift and shift is not as easy as it looks. >> Sure thing. So lift and shift is great to get started, but why sometimes it fails is that the connotations about wanting to keep your Opex down while giving up CapEx is at odds with each other, right? Cloud is great for reducing your Capex. But ongoing operations, of the DAY2 operations, can add a lot of burden to the operational expenses. What customers find out is after moving to the cloud, the cost overruns are happening because of resources that are not provisioned correctly, resources that should not be running. Wild Wild West kind of scenarios, where everybody has access to everything and they over provision. All of this together end up impacting customers' ability to go control the Opex. Then digital transformation projects are looked at from three different angles at least, right? Cost is definitely one, security is another, and then the ongoing operational tax with respect to monitoring, governance, remediation. All three when it simultaneously hits our customers, they look at lift and shift and saying, "Hey, this was cheaper on prem." But actually in the long run, this will be not just cheaper on the cloud, it can also be more efficient if they do it right. We can talk about some examples on how we help some customers with that helpful, John. >> Well, I want to get into the cloud operations, the whole dashboard in cloud operation administration. Is there anything that you could share because people are wanting more and more analytics. I mean, they're buying everything in sight. I mean, cyber security, you name it. There's more and more dashboards. No one wants another dashboard. So this is something that you guys have a strong opinion on how to think this through. Because again, at the end of the day, if you're instrumenting your network properly and your applications, your intelligence, things are changing, where's the data? Take us through your thinking around that. >> Sure thing. You are spot on. Nobody wants another dashboard that is just spewing data at them because data, without context is irrelevant in our mind, right? We want to be able to provide context, we want to be able to provide data within the context. And the dashboard to us means a customer that's looking at it, an IT leader looking at it should be able to ask the why question without working too hard at it, right? Let's bring up our dashboard. I would love to show and tell, although it's a dashboard, it is a tool that can enable IT leaders do things differently. >> John: Right, here it is. This is it right here. Okay, so this is the dashboard. Take me through it, what does it mean? >> Venkat: Yeah, let's (indistinct) right? The chart in the middle is the most important piece there. What we help our leaders, IT leaders do is, all the fullness of time of cloud adoption, we know the cloud's footprint is going to grow. The gray chart in the back, the stock chart represents the cloud footprint. As the cloud footprint continues to grow, we would like our leaders to demand that their security issues go down, their compliance issues go down and their costs to become more and more optimum. When leaders demand this, they can make things happen and our platform can help reduce all three and leaders can have this kind of dashboard to ask the why question. For example, they can compare one department with another department, ask that why question. They can compare an application that is similar in one department in another department and ask the why question, why is it more expensive? Why is it having more compliance issues? This is the kind of why questions our dashboard helps our customers perform and ask those questions, and they don't have to lift a finger, right? This entire dashboard comes to life within few minutes of them connecting their cloud accounts, where we provide visibility into operational issues, trend lines of data on how much consumption happens. And over a couple of months, they can see for themselves, make overall operation cost going down. Is my IT infrastructure now in cloud more resilient? And doesn't take more people to do it or am I able to turn on MontyClouds DAY2 bonds to go start reducing that burden or the period of time. This is what we mean by putting the power of autonomous CloudOps in our hands for customers. >> And this is what you mean by the IT powerhouse for the cloud. Is this on Amazon? So if I want to consume the product, what do I need to do to engage with you guys? What does it mean to me? Am I buying a service? Is it native? Is there agents involved? Take me through, what do I need to do? >> It's a great question. We are born in the cloud startup, which means we are super thankful for amazing technologies like Amazon infrastructure as core and the venting platform that's out there. So our platform is fully hosted, managed SaaS platform. A customer does not need to do anything but log onto montycloud.com, click a bunch of buttons, and connect their database account. They get started in under five minutes, self-service. And as they go through the platform, the guided experience where they can get to that dashboard I showed you in just a few clicks. They can get visibility, security posture assessment, compliance posture assessment, all in those few clicks. And when they decide to start using the platform more to automate and leverage the bots, they can always buy into additional services in the platform. So it's a easy to use get started in 10 minutes tops, if you will, that kind of platform >> Okay, great stuff. I want you to take me through the intelligent application flywheel that's going on here. So I can imagine that as the flywheel of success happens. Okay, got some intelligent apps, I see the dashboard, I'm getting some more visibility on the value creation, unlocking more value, new use case, all the things that happen in cloud, all good. And then I start growing, but I got builders trying to build more applications, more demand for more applications, more pressure on the infrastructure. The next question's, how do you guys simplify the cloud operation equation? Because I got to add more VPCs, I got to do more infrastructure, is it more EC Two? It can get complicated. How do you guys solve that problem? Because if the cloud footprint starts to grow because of more intelligent applications, how do you guys make it easier and simpler to scale up the intelligent infrastructure? >> Oh, that's a great question again, John. I'm going to go into a little bit of a detailed slide here. But before I do that, let's talk about two customers that we helped, right? This slide on the left, talks to those, both the customers. So what we have learned working with customers is, they have to build cloud accounts, manage cloud regions, user onboarding. Then they have to build networking infrastructure. Then they have to enable application infrastructure on top of the networking infrastructure. Application infrastructure could mean they want high-performance computing workloads or elastic services, such as queuing services, storage, or traditional VMS databases. That's a lot to build in the application infrastructure with infrastructure scope. On top of that, our customers have to deal with visibility, security, compliance costs. You get it, right? The path to intelligent applications is not easy because cloud is powerful, but it's broad, and the talent required is deep. We are able to say, how can we help our customers automate everything below the intelligent application layer. If we can do that, which we do, we can now propel our developers to go build intelligent applications without having the of also managing the underlying infrastructure. And we can help the IT operations team become cloud powerhouses because they get out of the way and enabled. Give you two examples here, right? One of our customers is a fortune 200 large ISP. They have about 10,000 servers in a particular department. And previously, when the servers were on premises, they had about a four member team managing compliance for it. When they lifted and shifted these servers into the cloud, the same model they wanted to... There are leaders that asked "Why should we continue with the same model?" They wanted MontyCloud. Now there is a DAY2 compliance board that's running, managing the 10,000 servers automatically watching on for compliance drifts, notifying them in a Slack channel, gets approval, remediates and fixes it. They were able to take those four folks and put them on the intelligent application side, I suppose to continuous infrastructure management site. Another example, a fortune 200 global networking company. It's an interesting situation, John. So on cyber Monday, they wanted to go big of obviously the cyber Monday was very important for them. The Thursday before cyber Monday, their on-premises data center and application went down and their teams wanted to move the application to cloud. And the partner that we work with, that brought this challenge to us saying hey, this fortune customer wants to go to cloud and we have this weekend. Well, we were able to go guide the partner and with our platform they were able to not only take their application from on-prem to cloud, they set up the cloud infrastructure, the networking, the application layer, the monitoring layer, the operations layer, all of that within a day. And on Monday that application delivered three X sales for this customer, without that partner or the customer being a cloud expert. That's what we mean by putting that kind of power in the hands of customers. >> Yeah, and I want to go back to that slide 'cause I think there's a second section I want to look at because what you just referred to is, I think this builds into the next comment on the right-hand side, this DAY2 kind of console vision here. The idea of getting in the weeds and getting into the troubleshooting of say, that cyber Monday example is exactly the non agility scenario, right? Because, if anyone's ever worked in tech knows when you have to get to root cause on something, it can take a while, right? So you need to have the system architecture built out. So here, classic cloud architecture on the left moves to a simple kind of console model. That's kind of what you guys are offering. Am I getting that right, Venkat? Is that kind of how this works? >> Yeah, that's kind of how it works, but the path to that maybe, a quick explanation though. We look at what's on the right--- >> Put that slide back up, let's get that slide back. Okay, there it is. >> Venkat: So what's on the right side here is, every layer on the left requires specialized talent and specialized tooling. That's all customers are currently experienced in the cloud. They either have to buy into a expensive monitoring tool or buy into an expensive security posture management tool. They have to hire, you know... It's hard to find cloud talent, right? And then they have to use infrastructure as code solutions. Sometimes that is, that can get more complex to maintain. What we have in MontyCloud is that, every layer there, they can provision by clicking away. For example, when they provision their cloud accounts setting up AWS best practices, budget guardrails, security, logging and monitoring, they can click away and do it. Setting up network infrastructure like VPC is setting up AWS transit gateway, VPNs, there's templates they can click and do it. The application infrastructure, which is a growing set of application infrastructure. Imagine this John, if a developer can come in and request the IT team they would like to set up an RDS database, right? The IT team can now with DAY2, can provide the developer options of, do you want it in dev stage prod? And do you want snapshots, backup, high availability? These are all check boxes and the developer can pick and choose and they can provision what they want without additional help from the IT team. And the IT team does not have to automate any one of those because it's pre automated in our platform. >> Yeah, this is the promise of infrastructure as code. You don't got to get in to the architecture and start throwing switches and all kinds of weird stuff can happen. Someone doesn't turn off, they don't enable auto-scale and they tested for this they forgot to revert back. I mean, there's a zillion things that could go wrong, human error, as well as automation. So once you set it up, then you provide a consumable developer friendly approach. That seems to be what's happening. Okay, cool. All right, well Venkat, this is fantastic. Final minutes we have left. I want to get your thoughts on the momentum and the vision. Talk about the momentum that you guys have now in the marketplace and what's the vision for the next five years. >> Great, it's a great question. From a momentum perspective John, we take an approach of, let's work with customers and understand that we can solve some problems for them. We've been working backups with customers. We have customers that are startups, that are born in the cloud, we have customers that are enterprise customers who are having a large footprint on-prem. Then we have everybody in between like university customers who are transitioning off. So what we did is from a momentum perspective, we worried more about, do we understand the talent gap and the tooling gap that exists across the board of all customers? Because every customer, once they go to cloud, they look to achieving the same level of efficiency and simplicity like modern cloud companies. A traditional company that moves to cloud wants to act and behave like the one in the cloud customer. For us it was very important to understand a variety of customers, a variety of use cases, and then automated away. So momentum is that we are able to go help a customer that is a Greenfield customer to go to cloud easily. And we're also able to go help brownfield customers, ensure they can reduce the total cost of cloud operations on an ongoing basis. So we've been seeing customers of all sizes, even helping customers of all sizes move fast. And there's a bunch of case studies out there in our website. We are a startup, so we've been able to help those customers and earn their trust by delivering results for them. So the momentum is that, we are able to go scale up now, and scale up fast for our customers without us being in the way, technically. Or customers can go to our platform help themselves and accelerate the platform. That's the momentum we have. From a future perspective, you asked, where things are headed, right? There are a couple of things. First things first, it's important to not just predict the future, we got to create it, right? About two years back when we founded MontyCloud, the question my team asked me, my CTO asked me is, what really matters in cloud ranking, right? So we said, all right, this is provisioning automation management. Yeah, they all matter. But what seemed to really matter is there are three things that matter. That's how we came to... One is events. The cloud itself is an eventing machine, right? More than ever, the cloud infrastructure emits events at every turn, every resource, every activity is expressed as an event. So we made an early bet on building an event driven platform from the ground up. We are the only platform that is even driven. Every other platform is seen to try and solve problems which is awesome to have, but they take an approach of an API based model or an inference into log based model. So the future, we believe, belongs to eventing model because it's lightweight on the customer's infrastructure, it goes easy on the cloud providers. More importantly, it gets the customer as close as possible to when the event happens, right? That's very important, to be able to be even event-driven. If you noticed Cloud Native Foundation came up and announced recently cloud events is the right way to deal with modern SaaS platforms. We've been in cloud events from day one for us, right? So the future is in eventing model. >> And that's where the data angle, I think, connects here for this event and why you guys are a hot startup is, observability, all these things. It's all about a event driven infrastructure. It's all events. It's monitoring, it's management, it's data. At the end of the day, the data is the instrumentation, is what it is. Developers are coding. Media's data. Everything's data. Everything has to do with data. You guys have a unique approach. Venkat Krishnamachari, thank you for coming on. Appreciate it, and thanks for sharing your story here at the AWS Showcase. First inaugural Cube On CloudStartups, part of the 10 hot startups categories. Thanks for sharing. >> Thanks for the opportunity. And we hope to help a lot more customers, simply for the cloud operations and innovate with some intelligent applications that's going to change the world. >> Check out Venkat and his company all on Twitter, on Facebook, they're on every channel, all the channels are open, of course. theCUBE we're bringing you all the hot startups, extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE virtual coverage of AWS Summit 2020 Online. This is the 80th summit that has now moved from a physical event to a digital event, a virtual event, it's all online. Of course theCUBE, normally at the summits, are virtual as well. We have an all day program of CUBE coverage here from our Palo Alto studios with our quarantine crew. Great team, who's been sheltering in place for the past two and a half months as well as our team in Boston with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. theCUBE is virtual because we have to be and we are going to be continuing doing more coverage and we're going to continue to do that with all the other big events in the enterprise and emerging tech business. Stu and Dave are going to join me. >> Hey John, good to see you, thank you. >> Stu, we're going to do a segment later on more a breakdown in some of the news and highlights. We got Matt Garman coming on, who's the new vice president of sales and marketing. He ran EC2. He now reports to Andy Jassy he's run the field. We got Sanjay Poonen, the chief operating officer at VMware. Coming on as well. And then we got a customer there. We've got a slew of great guests, Swami, Dave Brown, who now runs EC2. The GM of Analytics. Stu, are you going to do a segment with Corey Quinn? Which should be fun. And Dave, of course, you can do a breaking analysis at the end of the day. And we've got a lot of other great content on theCUBE.net. Check it out. Guys let's just jump into it. AWS is really feeling all the pressure as all these cloud guys are. Everyone's working at home. The cloud is on the front stage of the world in terms of delivering capacity, compute everything else. And now they're got to run a digital event. So pretty crazy times. What you guys think?. Dave what's your thoughts? Stu. >> Do you want me to jump in there? >> Yeah. >> So really impressive watching Werner Vogels. First of all last year I saw him up on stage at the New York City summit. Of course, we've seen him on stage at re:Invent many times. But well produced really looks good. You know, challenging to have that keynote feel when you're sitting at home. But they did a nice job of editing. They put him up on it on a big white space here. But what Werner talked about is the scale of cloud. This is what they've been building for. You never know when you're going to have a Cyber Monday. And I just need to be able to scale. He talked about examples like Netflix more than doubling. How many minutes they're doing and walking through all the ways that Amazon is stepping up. You know something we've been looking at close, Dave has been digging into the analysis here. You know, public cloud is being put under the spotlight right now can they react? And Amazon, to their credit is doing a really good job have not been hearing any challenges. They're not leaving their customers behind. They're having lots of people coming and wanting more. They don't want to get people, yeah. >> I want to dig into that a little bit later on, in terms of uptime and high availability. The table stakes right now in this new virtualized world of living and working at home, competing with life is. What services stay up the most? Which ones are failing? Are the staffing levels there? Are they dealing with the remote workforce? All these things are going to impact the cloud. But ultimately, what we're talking about now is who's really leading this? Dave, you know you and I have been riffing on this around who really has the market share lead and what the numbers are. Clearly, Amazon is winning. The numbers all point that way. And some people even have Microsoft ahead of Amazon, don't know how they get there. But bottom line, Microsoft is catching up. But what is the real lead? What's the market share numbers look like? What are you finding in the research that we're doing? >> Well as you know John, we've been tracking this for a while now. And all three companies, the big three, Amazon, Google and Microsoft just reported it well. We actually have some data on this. Guys, if you can maybe share that with our audience. But we saw this last quarter. The reason why, John, that people some maybe people have Microsoft ahead is because they bundle a lot of the stuff into their intelligent cloud and includes GitHub, Azure stack, hybrid, private cloud services and. Oh, yeah, by the way, Azure. But nonetheless, they give us some clues as to what Azure looked like. So this is our estimate of infrastructure as a service and platform as a service. Both Google and Microsoft sort of hide the ball a little bit on the pure play. Amazon very cleanly provides that guidance. And so you can see here, I guess the key points are like you said, Azure and GCP are growing faster than Amazon. Amazon is much bigger. I would say though, if you go back to 2018, Amazon was well over 2x Azure. 2019 it was just kind of around 2x, you're seeing that now with the trailing twelve months. And this last quarter dipping a little bit below. So you are seeing Azure close that gap. But as I say, the numbers are fuzzy. So you have to do your best to squint through them. I look, I read 10ks till my eyes bleed. So you don't have to. >> Stu, what are you talking hearing in terms of uptime Azure had some fails, Google had some fails. But you starting to see the cloud starting to differentiate. See Google doing much more vertical focus. They're obviously going after retail. It's an easy one. Microsoft with Office 365. Doing well on the enterprise. The numbers are there. What's your thoughts on the reliability and uptime? >> Yes so, John first of all Amazon I'm not hearing any reports of issues there. As you noted, where are Microsoft and Google going after Amazon? Where they can. So retail is an obvious one. The ecosystem how well can they partner with companies? Because the fear of many companies is if I partner with Amazon, are they going to come after my business? So when I looked at the online events, John, I got a sneak peek last night of where the Asia-Pacific region. I kind of logged in as if I was from Australia or New Zealand. >> John: I did that too. >> You know, they have regional partner things set up. So, once again, Amazon, a huge global presence, doing a really good job there. And as Dave showed in the numbers while Azure and Google have much higher growth rates, if you just look at raw numbers, Amazon just adding another Google cloud like every quarter to their revenue. So it is still Amazon in the clear lead out in front. >> You know, I think it's important to point out that these clouds have different capabilities. You know, Microsoft put out a blog just very recently saying that it was going to prioritize some of the essential businesses some of the health care workers and several others that were, quote unquote, essentials. So if you're one of those essential business, they were going to sort of allocate capacity toward you. So they're clearly having some scaling issues and they're somewhat using the COVID-19 pandemic as a bit of a heat shield there. Or by the way, they're prioritizing teams as well for the work from home. So it's caveat emptor there, as I said in my breaking analysis, I mean unless you're one of those sort of priority customers and maybe even if you are, you might want to sort of be careful as to what you're actually running in Azure. At the same time you know, clearly Microsoft's doing well. It's got a lot of spending momentum for its platform. And so that's undeniable. A lot of workloads are kind of good enough. >> Yeah and I think just to put a quick plug, if you're watching this segment now, Dave will do a breaking analysis at three o'clock on our stream here. And of course, it'll be on demand on theCUBE.net as well as YouTube. Guys, I want to get your thoughts on some of the hot spots here. Usually around this time, Amazon comes out and shows a lot of GA, general availability. A lot of stuff they announce that reinvents. So, Kendra is going general availability as well as some other services. But one of the things that was interesting to me, I'll get your thoughts on it, because I held the processor in my hand. Jassi tweeted about yesterday, the new arm, EC2 M6G, which is their graviton two processor. It's like super small. This has really been the competitive Edge for Amazon's performance. The stuff that they're doing now is they're lowering the cost and increasing the performance. That's their Amazon law. That's what they do. So, you got the processor, you got analytics. You start to see these GAs. Can you squint through some of the announcements and try to get a feel for where this is going? How's this machine learning? If I'm an enterprise, I got to make some tough calls right now because I've got to double down on the products that are working that are going to get me through the pandemic. And on a growth trajectory and I've got to get rid of the people in the projects or redeploy them quickly. This is going to impact, positioning and ultimately revenues. >> I mean, I think if you look at the Edge specifically and you think about Arm, I think what Amazon's got right is they're not just throwing traditional data center boxes over the fence to the Edge and say, "Okay, here you go, data center in a box." What they're doing is they're sort of rethinking it and then realizing that you're going to have real time workloads running at the Edge, processing very, you have to be very efficient and very inexpensive. So that's where Arm fits. And I think you're going to have to be able to do the processing at the Edge. Much of the data, if not most of that data, is going to stay at the Edge. And it's not a traditional processing architecture. New architectures are going to emerge. David Florrick calls these things matrix workloads. He's written a lot about it. It's just a whole new way of thinking about computing architectures. And really the Edge is going to be driving that. >> Stu, I want to get your opinion on something. And Dave, you can weigh in too, that'd b great. You know, I was watching a little bit of the Down Under APACS stuff yesterday, Stu as well. And I saw Ben Capps, one of our friends, CUBE alumni and co-host, helps the Saudis live in New Zealand. He brought a couple of interesting things I want to get your thoughts on this. It's more of a community angle. Andy Jass, he's been with Amazon for 23 years. Ben mentioned the cloud rod he's still going back. You know, thinking about cloud was 2008 around that timeframe was only a small cast of characters talking about what was going on. And finally, he mentioned the point about Jass's keynote a Fireside Chat. He mentioned, "One way door decisions versus "two door decisions. "The former cannot be undone hence need to be thought over." So you start to see Jass. Twenty three years of experience, you get the cloud arod kind of ecosystem influencers that are out there that we all know. We've been covering this for that long of time. And you've got this notion of the two way door. You started to connect the dots here and what's going on. You start to see a maturation of AWS. But not only that, the community, the truth is out there and it's interesting to see how this plays out in terms of how they talk about the information as we're all on virtual online. Who are the experts? Who are the YouTubers trying to get a flash in the pan? What's the real story? The data, the misinformation is flying around. There's a ton of that going on, I want to see more of it with virtual. But you've got to experience set in the table with Amazon and the community, your thoughts? >> Yes, so John, absolutely it's about you need to have optionality. We know that things change really fast. 2020 key example of having to react to things that I weren't prepared for. Dave was just talking about Edge computing. What I need to succeed an Edge is very different from how I was attacking clouds before. So is Amazon a walled garden? Everything goes in, Hotel California that it was active for years? Or are they going to be flexible? You know, you see Google and Microsoft really trying to attack Amazon here. Many of us that are proponents of open source have attacked Microsoft, have attacked Amazon for years. They've hired some really good people for Adrian Cockcroft couple years ago, Peder Ulander more recently. They've even hired some people from Red Hat and the Linux Foundation. So getting involved in open source and they've been leading some of the efforts when you talked about Edge. But emerging technologies like Serverless and Edge computing. Is it the Amazon way or everything else? Or will they play in an open ecosystem? Will they allow things to be more flexible? You know, we we've talked for a bunch of years. They really softened on their hybrid stance in 2020. Will Amazon soften on their multi cloud stance, especially if you start burrowing in where Edge fits in this environment? It can't be a one way ladder to everything for public cloud. We know it needs to be a diverse environment. And therefore, you know that net community and ecosystem, you know, wants to play with Amazon but also wants a mature and competitive marketplace. We've all seen what happens when there's a monopoly or duopoly out there. It's not good for innovation. It's not good for the customers long term. >> Dave the reality of the marketplace is changing. Customers are going to be virtualize in their world, literally, physically and digitally. How the work's going to get done is to mention open source ones, probably see a revolution of new applications Cambrian explosion of new kinds of capabilities, new demands, new expectations. There's going to be favor here for the people with the steep learning curve who have those has that trajectory as Amazons, as you know, there's no compression algorithm for experience. This is a real kind of nuance point. It's kind of exposed for the next year. Who's got the juice in the marketplace? Your thoughts? >> Well, Werner Vogels today talked about he said, "There's a shift, a fundamental shift going on, "a sort of early COVID-19. "It's not just about the technology, "but it's about how we access applications, "how we build applications." And Amazon is clearly making some bets and betting on data. We know that. And they are also betting on video because they know that's where a lot of the data comes from. When you talk about who's got experience, I mean, clearly Amazon is seeing a huge demand for video services and we're seeing a giant disruption in content distribution networks. And Amazon, I think, is at the heart of that. So, I mean, it's you know, it's interesting to see him doubling down on that, talking about the whole workflow. So I think in terms of experience, obviously at Amazon, they're going to, that's one of their clear sweet spots. But there are obviously other. >> You know, I've heard the term reinvent many times in the past couple of months, especially during the COVID crisis. And it wasn't in context to the Amazon show. There's a real reinvention going on in the marketplace, in enterprises, in small, medium sized enterprises to every business they have to rethink and reinvent what they're doing to get a growth trajectory. And traditionally, we look at these crisis of 2008. Companies that came out on the upswing became a real master master class, examples of growth and a lot of people who weren't prepared, flatline or dropped off. So we are in this point. Even theCUBE we're are digital, we're virtual. We're rethinking it. We're open to new ideas. There's going to be an experimentation phase at the same time, how do you leverage what's out there? This is going to be an opportunity for the cloud, guys. How do you guys react to all that? >> Well, the last downturn was good for cloud, and still you we've talked about how this one certainly is shaping up to be a tailwind as well for cloud. Cloud is doing better than others. I think Gartner put out a stat today they've seen like a 5x increase in inquiries around cloud. Not surprising companies that previously wouldn't even think about cloud now they really have no choice. >> Guys, we've got to cut it there, we've got to go to Cocky. We had all day with theCUBE. CUBE Virtual AWS Summit Online. Check out they got a big portal. It's complicated. Is a lot of a lot of education going on there. It's the classic Emison Summit. We've got great interviews. Guys we've got a great interview coming up next with Matt Garman, who's the new senior vice president or vice president of sales and marketing. He runs all the field, public sector, both of those areas under massive growth opportunities. So, we're going to hear from him. Thanks for coming on, guys. Really appreciate it. Good to celebrate as well in Boston.. And thanks for the insight. So, we'll be right back with more CUBE coverage after the short break. And Matt Garman up next. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering Inform Attica! World 2019. Brought to you by in from Attica. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Coverage of Infra Matic. A world here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm doing by two guests. For the segment we have Rick Tam Daniels. He is the VP. Strategic ecosystems and technology than from Attica. Welcome, Rick and Yoav. Enough! He is the VP product for Giga Space. Welcome >> to be here. >> So this is a fun segment. You are the winner of the infirm Attica World 2,019 Solution Expo Cloud and Innovation. I want to get to you in a second and hear all about Giga Space. But I want to start with you. Rick, talk a little bit about this award and about the genesis of it. Where did the idea come from? >> Yes, So one of the things we really wanted to do it in from Attica World this year is create address Some of the most important topics that the customers want to hear about. It's a cloud and I two of the hottest tops the industry every wants to know about it and We wanted to take a lot of our emerging partners there doing some very innovative things than from Attica technology and put them front center. So if you look at the Expo Hall floor right in the middle, we have this almost like an art gallery of all this cool innovation have going on around the inn from Attica. Technology on the idea was that we had attendees come in and actually review the solutions. They had to be really full demos for working demos. Andi could vote on the app. They could say what their favorites were, and the end result is happy announced. Giga Spaces are big winner. >> And so yeah, attendees would vote on the app and so get so big a space. Tell us about it. You're based in Israel. >> Yeah, so aren't is based in Israel or H Q is in New York. Basically, the biggest bass was we've been in the market for more than a decade, deployed like in the largest enterprise in the world. You like banks like Bank of America, like international. I ot like another electric largest airline, largest railway companies, and basically we provide the speed for the application and big data infer structures so they deploy, like real time use cases like fraud detection, economic pricing, predictive maintenance, all those different types of services that required the speed on the big data side. >> You're all about speed, >> all about spirit. If you need the speed, we're the provided for you. >> Well, that's that's very exciting. So talk a little bit about the conversations that you were having with some of the attendees. What kinds of questions were you getting? >> So I think a lot of customers, during customers of ours and informative are talking about the move from kind of historical analysis to more proactive, event driven analytics when you want to be able to instead of interact with the data you want today, one so and now you want to baby toe Dr Analytical on the moment as soon as it happened to provide it that burrito Theron your online processes and instead of kind of offline processes. So, for example, fraud detection, which is the most, is the example. You want to be able to 100 further analysis on on the payment of a soon as it happens and Emilie second level and not like a few seconds after the transaction was over. So it's again. We're talking about the speed. They're very to handle high or amount of data with related sub second response time. >> And how are you using in from Attica? >> Cool So well, We've been working lately with Informatica very tightly with both their product team, and there are in the team because Israel, India, the US, on integrating with some of their different products were basically we've built kind of what Gardner calls the digital integration hub. It's like the next Jan big data architecture, which provides you both. Informatica side that allows to ingest any type of data could be taxed logs, transaction payments, anything you have together with their medal, the meta data management and on top of it, using Giga spaces for the real Time analytics and the high performance in speed. >> So, Rick, I know that this was attendee chosen, so there's no rigging here, but I'd love to hear what your thoughts are in Giga Space in terms of the innovations that they're doing in these in these very important problems, like fraud detection and predictive maintenance, these air these air big problems. That company's heir really wrestling with. >> And I think what's exciting about the solution they had. It was a great business case, right? I think that really resonated. Attendees looking at Everyone can identify with Fraud Analytics. Everyone's unfortunately, probably on a victim of it, so they could see how it works. I think it also focuses on the aspect of a iva. How do operationalized a I? So is the whole model building piece of it, And Infra Matic has a strong player there as well. But now you say, Well, let's actually have the model we need to execute quickly. How do we do that? You know what the biggest spaces technology, but also combine it with the right historical context, right to make the right decisions. So they're really does hit on. How do you actually take a I and make it a real thing? >> And the other important part is the business case in what you were just saying in terms of if a if a customer is the victim of fraud here, she blames the institution, not the hacker on. And if there's a problem with with an airline maintenance problem, you blame the airline. Of course not the faulty problems that it was having. So so I think that that also really shows what what's in the future. What are you seeing? Kind of Mohr innovations that you want to add to the biggest space platform. So >> I think we're working to their lot about like Rick was mentioning about operationalize ing A. I so a lot of challenge today off moving from the research development training part of Day I or the machine anymore to move to production. Let's say you're a payment provider you have the more than you can detect fraud, but your ability for you to run it on millions of transactions a second in a sub lets a few millisecond level. That's the biggest challenge. And if you do it in there a few seconds after the transaction was over, then the you know the last of the fraud or the wire was already happened. So again, the operation was part of taking your more than formula that sound flat from putting in production with the scale of the ingestion rate low latest c you know, scaling on pick events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. That's the biggest challenges on the production systems. >> Now the speed is of the essence. Rick, this has been a successful experiment trying this. What are you hearing from attendees? Did they like it where they sort of How do we Dad? Does this work? What is this about? >> I think they're really enjoyed it. Every time I look, I went over to the zone. It was full of people having deep conversations, really getting into the technology and understanding. Because as I mentioned these air topics that I think everyone came here to the show to really learn more about How are they going to get where they're going There, Cloud journey where they're going to go in there, eh? I journey. It's a great feedback from attendees. Lot of active participation. So I'm going >> to do it. We're going to see it in >> your batter. It's gonna be great. >> So now that you're the winner, you're going to be up there on the main stage, getting some recognition. That's exciting. What? What are you going to take back? Teo, I know you're based in both Israel and New York. What? What? What does this mean for your company? >> So I think the next step is taking it to the business side. Right? We want to make sure that the joint offering and the joy in partnership moves to the next stage taking it to the next customer. We have some joint customer. We have some new prospect. Were a lot of late from the show here, sitting next to me, sitting side by side with the other partners of Info Matic. I like data breaks and slow flaked and clothes are so we have a lot of joint offering and solving real time like business and off the largest, most challenging enterprise we have, like, you know, largest banks, largest airlines, largest like railways companies. So I think the next step is moving, taking it from the exhibition to the field. >> Great. Well, this is terrific. Congratulations. Once again. Really exciting. Really happy for you. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. You have been watching the cubes live coverage of in from Attica, World 2019. I'm Rebecca night. Stay tuned

(upbeat pop music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CubeConversation. >> Hello, everyone welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California, I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We are here forth Inhi Cho Suh General Manager of IBM Watson, Customer Engagement, Former Cube alumni, I think she's been on dozens of times. Great to see you again. Welcome to our Palo Alto Studios. >> Yeah, great being here, John. >> So, we haven't chatted in awhile. IBM thing just happened, a little bit of a rainy event, here in February. Interesting change over since we last talked, but first give an update on what you're up to these days, what group are you leading, what's new? >> Okay, well first of all, I'm here based in California, which I'm excited about, and I lead our Watson West office, which is our Watson headquarters, here on the west coast, in downtown San Francisco, and we hosted our Think Conference, and at Think I lead with, in IBM, what we call our Watson Customer Engagement Business Unit, which is really the business applications, of how we apply Watson and other disruptive tech to a line of business audiences, both SAS and on premise software, so really excited about the areas of applying AI and machine learning as well as Blockchain to things like supply chain, and logistics, to order management, to next generation of retail. A lot of new, exciting areas. >> Yeah, we've had many conversations over the years from big data to as your career spanned across IBM, and you have a much more horizontal view of things, now. You're horizontally scalable, as we say in the cloud world. What's your observation of the trends these days? Because there's a lot waves. Actually, the waves that you guys announced, was the IBM, Watson NE ware and the cloud private ware. Marvin and I had an amazing conversation that video went viral. This is now getting a big tailwind for IBM. What's your thoughts in general about the overall ecosystem, because you're here in Silicon Valley, you've seen the big waves, you've got another big data world, cloud is here, multi cloud. What's your thoughts on the big mega-trends? >> Yeah, that's a good question. I think the first chapter of cloud, everyone ran to public cloud. When you look at it through the lens of enterprise, though, the hot topic right now in the second chapter is really about not just public cloud, but multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. Meaning, whether it's a private, public, it's about thinking about the applications and the nature of the applications and regardless of where the data sits, what are the implications of actually getting work done? Through, kind of, new container services, new ways of microservices in the development, of how APIs are integrated, and so, the hot topic right now is definitely hybrid cloud, multi cloud. And the work we've done to certify, what we call, IBM cloud private really enables us to not just take any business application to any cloud in our cloud, as well, but actually to enable Watson and Watson based applications also across multi cloud environments. >> So, chapter two, Jenny mentioned that in her key notes, I want to dig into that because we've been talking a lot about multi cloud architecture, and one of the big debates has been, in the industry, oh, don't pick a soul cloud. I've been writing a bunch of content about that at this DOD jedi deal with Amazon and Oracle, fighting for it out there, but that's also happening at the enterprise, but the reality is, everyone has multiple clouds. If you've got a sales force or if you've got this and that and the other thing, you probably have multiple clouds, so it's not so much soul cloud vs. as it is, workloads having a cloud for the right job and that seems to be validated at IBM Think, in talking to the top technical people and in the industry. They all say, pick the right cloud for the job. And we've heard that before in Big Data. Pick the right tool for the job. So, given that, workloads seem to be driving the demand for cloud. Since you're on the app side, how are you seeing that? Because the world's flipped. It used to be infrastructure and software enable the app's capabilities. Now the workloads have infrastructure as code, made with cloud, they're driving the requirements. This is a change over. >> It is a big change and part of, I would say, when people first ran to the cloud, and a lot of the public cloud services were digital SaaS services, where people were wanting to stitch multiple applications across clouds, and that became a challenge, so in this next iteration, that I'm seeing is, really, a couple things. One is, data gravity. So, where does the data actually reside, for the workload that's actually happening? Whether it's the transactions, whether it's customer information, whether it's product information, that's one piece. The second piece is a lot more analytics, right? And the spectrum of analytics running from traditional warehouse capabilities, to more, let's say, larger scale big data projects to full blown advanced algorithms and AI applications, is, people are saying, look, not only do I want to stitch these applications across multiple clouds; I also want to make sure I can actually tap into the data to apply new types of analytics and derive new services and new values out of relationships, understanding of how products are consumed, and so forth. So, for us, when we think about it is, we want to be able to enable that fluid understanding of data across the clouds, as well as protect and be thoughtful about the data privacy rights around it, compliance around GDPR, as well as how we think about the security aspects as well, for the enterprise. >> That is a great point. I think I want to drill down on the data piece, your background on data obviously is going to be key in your job now obviously, it's pretty obvious with Watson, but David Floyd, a wiki bonds research analyst, just posted a taxonomy of hybrid cloud research report that laid out the different kinds of cloud you could have. There's edge clouds, there's all kinds of things from public to edge, so when you look at that, you're thinking, okay, the data plain is the critical nature of the cloud. Now, depending on which cloud architecture for the use case, the workload, whatever, the data plain seems to be this magical opportunity. AI is going to have a big part of that. Can you just talk about how you guys see that evolving? Because, obviously, AI is a killer part of your strategy. This data piece is inter-operating across the clouds. >> Yes. >> Data management governs you're smiling, cause there's a killer answer coming. >> Totally. This is such a great set up. Actually, Ginni even said it in her keynote at Think, which was, you can't have an AI strategy without an information architecture strategy, which is an IA strategy, and information architecture is all about what you said: it's data preparation; understanding the foundation of it, making sure you've got the right governance structure, the integration of it, and then actually how you apply the more advanced analytics on top. So, information architecture and thinking about the data aspects in all kinds of data. Majority of the data actually sits behind, what I would say, the traditional public firewall. So, it sits behind the firewalls of our enterprise clients, like 80 plus percent of it, and then, many of the clients, we actually recently did a study, with about 5,000 senior executives, across many, many thousands of organizations, and 85% of them want to apply AI to improve their customer service, to improve the way they engage their clients and their products and services, so this is a huge opportunity right now for pretty much every organization to think through; kind of their data strategy. Their information architecture strategy, as part of their overall AI strategy. >> So, a question a got on twitter comes up a lot, and, also on my notes here, I wanted to ask you is, how can companies increase transparency trust and mitigate bias in AI? Because this comes up a lot and that's the questions that come in from the community is, Hey, I got my site, my apps running in Germany. I've got users over there, I'm global. I have to manage compliance, I got all this governess now, I'm over my shoulders, kind of a pain in the butt, but also I don't want to have the software be skewed on bias and other things, and then, I also get this whole Facebook dynamic going on, where it's like, I don't trust people holding my data. This is a big, huge issue. >> It is enormous. >> You guys are in the middle of it, what's your thoughts, what's the update, what's the dynamic and what's the solution? >> So, this is a big topic. I think we could do a whole episode just on this topic alone. So, trust and developing trust and transparency in AI should be a fundamental requirement across many, many different types of institutions. So, first of all, the responsibility doesn't sit only with the technology vendors; it's a shared responsibility across government institutions, the consumers, as well as the business leaders, in terms of how they're thinking about it. The more important piece, though, is when you think about the population that's available, that really understands AI, and they're actually coding and developing on it, is that we have to think about the diverse population that's participating in the governance of it, because you don't want just one tribe or one group that's coding and developing the algorithms, or deciding the decision models. >> Like the nerds or the geeks; they're a social aspect, society aspect as well, right? Social science. >> Exactly. I actually just did a recent conversational series with Northwestern Kellogg's business school, around the importance of developing trust and transparency, not only in the algorithms themselves, but the methodology of how you think about culture and value and ethics come into play through different lens, depending on the country you live in, as you kind of referenced, depending on your different values and religious backgrounds. It may because of different institutional and/or policy positions, depending on the nature, and so there has to be a general awareness of this that's thoughtful. Now, why I'm so excited about the work we're doing at IBM is we've actually launched a couple new initiatives. One is, what we call, AI OpenScale, which is really a platform and an opportunity to have the ability to begin to apply AI, see how AI operations and models function in production. We have methodologies in terms of engaging understanding fairness, so there's a 360 degree fairness kit, which is actually available in the open source world, there's a set of tools to understand and train people on recognizing bias, so even just definitions of, what do you mean by bias? It could be things like, group think, it could be, you're just self selecting on certain data sets to reinforce your hypotheses, it could be unconscious levels and it's not just traditionally socially oriented, types of bias. >> It could be data bias, too. It could be data bias, right? >> Totally. Machine generated biases in IOT world, also. >> So, contextual and behavioral biases kind of kick into play here. >> Yeah, but it starts with transparency trust. It also starts with thoughtful governance, it starts with understanding in your position on policy around data privacy, and those things are things that should be educational conversations across the entire industry. >> How far along are we on the progress bar there? I mean, it seems like it's early and we seem to be talking for awhile, but it seems even more early than most people think. Still a lot more work. Your thoughts on where the progress bar is on this whole mash up of tech and social issues around bias and data? Where are we? >> We're really at the early stages, and part of the reason we're at the early stages is I think people have, so far, really applied AI in very simple task oriented applications. The more, what we call, broad AI, meaning multi task work flow applications are starting, and we're also starting seeing in the enterprise. Now, in the enterprise world, you can still have bias, so, for example, when you talked about data bias, one of the simple examples I use is, think about loan approvals. If one of the criteria may be based on gender, you may have a sensitivity around the lack of women owned business leaders, and that could be a scoring algorithm that says, hey, maybe it's a higher risk when in fact, it's not necessarily a higher risk, it's just that the sampling is off, right. So, that would be a detection to say, hey maybe you have sensitivity around that data set, because you actually have an insufficient amount of data. So, part of data detection and understanding biases; where you have sampling of data that's incorrect, where your segmentation could be rethought, where it may just require an additional supervision or like decision making criteria as part of your governance process. >> This is actually a great area for young people to get involved, whether at their universities or curriculum, this kind of seems to be, whether it's political science and/or data science kind of coming together, you kind of have a mash. What's your advice to people watching that might be either in high school, college, or rethinking their career, because this seems to be hot area. >> It is a hot area. I would recommend it for every student at every age, quite frankly and we're at such an early stage that it's not too late to join and you're not too young nor are you too old to actually get in the industry, so that's point one. This is a great time for everyone to get involved. The second piece is, I would just start with online courses that are available, as well as participate in communities and companies like IBM, where we actually make available on a number of our web based applications, that you can actually do some online training and courses to understand the services that we have, to begin to understand the taxonomy and the language, so a very simple set, would be like, learn the language of AI first, and then, as you're learning coding, if you're more technically inclined, there's just a myriad of classes available. >> Final question, before I move on to the topic around inclusion and diversity, machine learning is impacting all verticals. I was just in an interview, talking with Don En-ju-bin-ski, she's got a company where it's neuroscience and machine learning coming together. Machine learning's being impacted all over. We mentioned basic data bias, and machine learning can help there. Machine learning meets blank every vertical, every market, is being impacted machine learning, which will trigger some of the things you're seeing on the app side. Your thoughts, looking at where you've come from in your career at IBM to now, just the evolution of what machine learning has enabled, your thoughts on the impact of machine learning. >> Oh, it's exciting and I'll give you a real simple example, so one of the great things my own team actually did was apply machine learning to, everyone loves the holiday shopping period, right? Between Thanksgiving to New Years, so we actually develop, what we call, Watson Order Optimizer and one of my favorite brands is REI, so the recreational equipment incorporated company, they actually applied our Watson Order Optimizer to optimize in real time. The best place, let's say you want to order a kayak or a T-shirt or a hiking boot, but the best way to create the algorithms to ship from different stores, and shipping from stores, for most retailers, is a high cost variable, because you don't know what the inventory positions are, you don't necessarily know the movement of traffic into that store, you may not even know what the price promotions are, so what was exciting about putting machine learning algorithms to this was, we could actually curate things like shipping and tax information, inventory positions of products in stores, pricing, a movement of goods as part of that calculation. So, this is like a set of business rules that are automatically developed, using Watson, in a way that would be almost impossible for any human to actually come up with all of the possible business roles, right? Because this is such a complex situation, and then you're trying to do it at the peak time, which is, like Black Friday, Cyber Monday Weekend, so we were able to actually apply Watson Machine Learning to create the business roles for when it should be shipped from a warehouse or a particular store. In order to meet the customer requirement, which is the fulfillment of that brand experienced, or the product experienced, so my view is, there are so many different places across the industry, that we could actually apply machine learning to, and my team is really excited about what we've been doing, especially in the next generation of supply chain. >> And it's also causing students to be really attracted to computer science, both men and women. My daughter, who is a senior at Berkeley, is interested in it, so you're starting to see the impact of machine learning is hitting all main stream, which is a good segue to my next question, we've been very passionate, I know it's one of your passions is inclusion and diversity or diversity and inclusion, there's always debates: D before I or I before D? Some say inclusion and diversity or diversity and inclusion. It's all the same thing, there's just a lot of effort going on to bring the tech industry up to par with the reality of the world, and so you have a study out. I've got a copy here. Talk about this study: Women in Leadership and the Priority Paradox. Talk about the study; what was behind it and what were some of the findings? >> Sure, and I'm excited that your daughter, that's a senior in college, is going to be another woman that's entering the workforce, and especially being in tech, so the priority paradox is that we actually looked at over 2,300 organizations, these are some of the top institutions around the world, that are curating and attracting the best talent and skills. Now, when you look at that population, we were surprised to find out that you would think by 2019-2018 that only 18% of those organizations actually had women in senior leadership positions, and what I categorize as senior leading positions, are in the see-swee, as vice presidents, maybe senior executives or senior managers; director level folks. So, that's one piece, which is, wow, given the size and the state where we are in the industry, only 18%: we could do better. Now, why do we believe that? The second piece is, you want the full population of the human capacity to think and creatively solve. Some of the world's biggest complex problems; you don't want a small population of the world trying to do this, so, the second piece of the paradox, which was the most surprising, is that 79% of these companies actually said that formalizing or prioritizing gender, fostering that kind of inclusive culture, was not a business priority, and that they had a harder time actually mapping that gap. Now, in the study, what we actually discovered though, was those companies, that did make it a priority, actually had first mover advantage, and making it a priority is quite simple. It's about understanding how to create that inclusive culture, to allow different perspectives and different experiences to be allowed in the co-creation and development. >> So, first mover advantage, in terms of what? >> Performance, actual business performance, so even though 80% of the organizations that we interviewed actually said that they've not made it a business priority, the 20% that did, we actually saw higher performance in their outcomes, in terms of business performance. >> So, this is actually a business benefit, too. I think your point is, the first mover advantage is saying, those companies that actually brought in the leadership to create that different perspective, had higher performance. >> Absolutely. >> We've talked about this before; one of the things I always say is that, tech is now mainstream, and it's 18% of the target audience of tech isn't the market, it's 50/50 or 51. Some say 51% women/men, so who's building the products for half the audience? So, again, this doesn't make any sense, so this is a good statistic. >> It is, and if you think about the students that are actually graduating out of graduate school, recently, there's actually more women graduating out of grad school than men. When you think about that population that's now entering the workforce, and what's actually happening through the pipeline, I think there's got to be thoughtful focus and programmatic improvements across the industry, around how to develop talent and make sure that different companies and organizations can move. Like you said, problem solve for creating new products that actually serve the world, not just serve certain populations, but also do it in a way that's thoughtful about, kind of, the makeup. >> And the mainstream and prep of tech obviously makes it more attractive, I mean, you're seeing a lot more women thinking about machines, like my daughter, the question is, how do they come in and not lose their footing, mentor-ship? So, what are the priorities that you see the industry needs to do? What are some of the imperatives to keep the pipeline and keep all the mentoring, obviously mentoring is hot, we see the networking built. >> Yeah, mentoring is huge. >> What's your thoughts on the best practices that you've been involved in? >> Some of the best practices we've actually done a number with an IBM, we've done a program called, Tech Re-Entry, so women that have decided to come back into the tech workforce, we actually have a 12 week internship program to do that. Another is a big initiative that we have around P-TECH, which is the next generation of workers aren't just going to have a formal college and or PHD masters type degrees. The next generation, which we're calling, is not necessarily a white collar, blue collar, what we're calling it is, new collar, meaning these are students that are able to combine their equivalent of a high school degree and early college education in one to be kind of, if you think about it, next generation of technical vocational schools, right? That quickly enter the workforce, are able to do jobs in terms of web development, in terms of cloud management, cloud services, it could be next generation of-- >> It's a huge skill gap opportunity, this is a big opportunity for people. >> It is, and we're seeing great adoption. We've seen it on a number of states across the US, this is an effort that we partner with, the states and the governors of each state, because public education has got to be done in a systematic way that you can actually sustain it for many, many years and this is something that we were excited about championing in the state of New York first. >> The ReEntry program and other things, I always tell myself, the technology is so new now you could level up a lot faster than, there's not that linear school kind of mentality, you don't need eight years to learn something. You could literally learn something pretty quickly these days because the gap between you and someone else is so short now, because it's all new skills. >> It's true, it's true. We talk about digital disruption through the lens of businesses, but there's a huge digital disruption through the lens of what you're talking about, which is our individual development and talent, and the ability to learn through so many different channels that's available now, and the focus around micro degrees, micro skills, micro certifications, there's so many ways for everyone to get involved, but I really do encourage everyone across every industry to have some knowledge and basis and understanding of tech, because tech will redefine how services and products are delivered across every category. >> And that's not male or female: that's just everyone. Again, back to technology for good, we can solve technology problems, You guys have been doing it at IBM, solve technology problems, but now the people problem is about getting people empowered, all gender, races, et cetera, the people getting the skills, getting employed, working for clouds, this is an opportunity. >> This is a huge opportunity. I think this is an exciting time. We feel like we're entering this next phase of, what I call, chapter two of cloud, this is chapter two of digital reinvention, of the enterprise, digital reinvention of the individual, actually, and it's an opportunity for every country, every population group to get involved, in so many new and creative ways, and we're at the early foundation stages in terms of both AI development, as well as new capabilities like Blockchain. So, it's an exciting time for everybody. >> Well, that's a whole nother topic. We'll have to bring you back, Inhi. Great to see you, in fact, welcome to Palo Alto. First time in our studio. Let's co-host something together, me and you. We'll do a series: John and Inhi. >> I would love that. That would be fun. I'm excited to be here. >> You can drop by our studio anytime now that you live in Palo Alto, we're neighbors. Inhi Cho Suh here, general manager IBM Watson, customer engagement, friend of theCUBE, here inside our studios, Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> We are life back here in Las Vegas at the Sands Expo as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of re:Invent, AWS here on the fourth day of what has been a very successful show. I still hear a lot of buzz, a lot of activity on the show floor. It certainly indicative of what happened here in terms of bringing this community together in a very positive way. I'm with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. We go from Justin to Dustin, Dustin Kirkland, who is the vice president of product development for Ubuntu on the Canonical. It's good to see you again. >> Likewise, John. >> I should let the two of you probably chat about Australia. We heard these great diving stories about your adventures, your home, your native country. >> Yep. >> Maybe afterwards will get a little photos, travel thing going on. >> Yeah that's right. (laughing) >> All right, 17 years you have been diving. Were going to have to get into that a little bit later on. First off, let's talk about Ubuntu, and maybe the footprint within AWS. Maybe not only what brings you here, but what gets you there? What are you doing there? >> First of all, this is a fantastic conference. Hundreds of these organizations here are involved in Ubuntu, using Ubuntu in AWS and taking advantage of open source, using it for lots of scale out services. To date this year in 2017, over 125 million instances of Ubuntu have launched in AWS alone just this year, and the year is not even over yet. We see anything from media entertainment. Netflix is here. I spent some time with them. One of Netflix's performance engineers gave a talk yesterday about how Netflix tunes their Ubuntu instances in Amazon to the tune of 100,000 instances of Ubuntu running in Amazon to deliver the Netflix experience that I'm sure all of us have. >> John: 100,000? >> Yeah. >> That's amazing. >> It's crazy, yeah. >> I'm a big fan of Ubuntu because I am a mad person. I've been running it as my primary desktop for something like 10 years. >> All right! >> I run it on a laptop. >> Okay. >> I love it, it's great. >> Good. >> People use Ubuntu all the time but it's like it just became the de facto, it seems like overnight of pretty much, hey, if you want to run Linux in cloud, you just spin up in Ubuntu. Just run it up, so what is it about Ubuntu itself, where are you taking the product for people who are using it in cloud? We are hearing a lot about all these different services, and we are hearing about serverless, so how does Ubuntu fit into that AWS world? >> That's a great question. First of all, it's not overnight. We have been doing this since 2004, so we are going on 14 years of building the thing that is Ubuntu. We brought Ubuntu into Amazon in about 2008, which is right when I got involved at Canonical. I was working on Ubuntu before that, but working for Canonical, and that was relatively early in the entire Amazon adventure. You said Ubuntu on the desktop. That's certainly where Ubuntu got its start, but it was Amazon that really busted Ubuntu out into the server space, and so now as you said, if you are starting a new company or a new technology, you almost by default start on Ubuntu. Now where are we taking that? Here we are talking about cloud, but the other half of cloud is the edge. The edge being embedded devices, embedded IOT connected devices. The thing about every IOT device, the I in IOT is Internet. The connected part of a connected device means it has to be connected to something, and what is going to be connected to? The cloud. Every smart autonomous driving vehicle, every oil rig out in West Texas, every airplane, every boat, every ship, every place where you are going to find compute in these next couple of years as we move into the 5G revolution, are connected to services on the backend, the majority of those hosted in Amazon, and the majority of those running Ubuntu. >> When you talk about IOT though, what kind of challenges that that bring into your world? Because you are talking about this, I mean, I can't even think about the order of growth. >> Yeah, billions, literally billions. >> It's just massive connectivity, and in a mobile environment, throw that on top of that, so what does that do for you then in terms of what you are looking at down the road and the kind of capabilities that you have got to build in? >> Security, I mean it starts with security. When we think about devices in our homes accompanying our kids to school, devices that are inside of buses and hospitals, it's all about security, and security is first and foremost. We put a lot of effort into securing Ubuntu. We've created new features as part of where we are taking Ubuntu. Many of the new features we created around Ubuntu are about updates, security updates, being able to make those updates active without rebooting the system, so zero downtime kernel updates is something we call a live patch service which we deliver in Amazon for Ubuntu Amazon users. Extended security maintenance. Security for Ubuntu after end-of-life, say you said you've been using Ubuntu for a long time. Each Ubuntu release has basically a five year lifecycle but some enterprises actually need to run Ubuntu for much longer than five years, and for those enterprises, we provide security updates after the end of life, after that five-year end-of-life, and in many cases, that helps them bridge that gap until the next release of Ubuntu. We've also worked with IBM and the US government to provide FIPS certified cryptography for Ubuntu also available in Amazon, so the Department of Defense contractors, many federal contractors are required to use FIPS bits, and this actually allows them to bring their Ubuntu usage into compliance with what's required for government regulation. >> I'm so glad that you went from IOT to security in, like, a nanosecond. That was going to be my next question. >> Well that is the only answer to that. It's the only right answer to that question in my mind. >> Not enough companies put that much focus on security and you follow it up with specific concrete examples of things that are going to work. The live kernel patching without rebooting things so that you can have the-- I mean, services in the cloud, it has to be always on. You can't take a maintenance window when something is down four hours or a weekend. That's just not acceptable in the cloud world anymore. >> Especially in the retail season. We are just now getting into the retail-- you know, Black Friday was last week, Cyber Monday this week, and the roll up all the way to Christmas, Canonical works with quite a bit with the largest retailers in the world, Walmart, Best Buy, other ones like that, and downtime is just not acceptable. At the same time, security is of the utmost importance. When you are taking people's credit cards, you are placing large amounts of money on the line every time these transactions take place. Security has to be utmost, and being able to do that without impacting the downtime. Downtime is seriously hundreds of thousands of dollars per second on some of these sites during the major holiday rush. >> You just mentioned some of the big names you're working with, so what kind of assurance can you give them that you can sleep with both eyes closed? You don't have to keep that one eye open. Don't worry, if there is an incident of some kind, we are going to take care of it. If you have a problem, rest assured, we are going to be there because, as you pointed out, with the volume involved and the issues of security infiltrations being what they are today, it's hard to rest. >> Right, the return on value, the return on investment of the live patch is easily apparent. Any time someone does the math and realizes, "Let's actually look at how much it costs us "to reboot a data center, "or how much it costs us to wake up the dev ops team "on a Saturday and have them work through a weekend "to roll out this update," whereas with the live patch, at least the patch is applied in milliseconds without downtime, and then we get back on Monday and we rollout a comprehensive plan as to what do we actually need to do about this going forward? That is for the kernel side of things. The other half of it is the user space side of Ubuntu. In the user space side of Ubuntu, we continue to make Ubuntu smaller, smaller and smaller. That might be one of the reasons you are attracted to Ubuntu on your laptop early on is because we really did a good job of making a Linux that was consumable, usable, but also very small and secure. We've actually taken that same approach in the cloud where we continue to minimize the footprint of Ubuntu. That has a security impact in that if you simply leave software out of the default image you are not vulnerable to problems in that software, so we've heard that quite a bit around the container space, the work we do in the container space. We will be in Austin next week for CUBE Con talking about containers. I will save the container talk for next week, but minimizing Ubuntu is an important of that security story as well. >> All right, just reducing that attack surface is fabulous. It also means that when you are actually doing this patching, it's less things to patch, there are less opportunities for downtime, there are less things that can go wrong and cause outages in the rest of the place. Simple is better. >> Dustin : That's right, that's exactly right. >> What else are you doing? We've talked about security a lot here. What are some of the other things that you are doing around supporting the services that we are hearing here at AWS? We've heard a lot about things like serverless. We've heard a lot about high performance computing. We've had guests here on theCUBE talking about what they are doing around data analytics and machine learning, so maybe you could give us a little bit of color around that. >> Let's start with that last point, machine learning and data analytics. We work very closely with both Amazon and Nvidia to enable the GPGPUs, the general-purpose graphics processing units that Nvidia produces which go into servers and Amazon exposes in the some of the largest machine learning type instances. Those instances powered by Ubuntu are working directly with that GPU out of the box by default, and that's something that we've worked very hard on and closely with both Amazon and Nvidia to make sure the Ubuntu experience when using the graphics accelerated instance types just work, and just work out of the box. Those are important for the machine learning and the data analytics because many of those algorithms take advantage of CUDA. CUDA is a set of libraries that allows developers to write applications that scale very, very wide across the CUDA cores, so a given Nvidia GPU may have several thousand Nvidia CUDA cores. Each of those are running little process bits and then the answers are summed up, basically, at the end. That is at the heart of everything that's happening in the AI space, and that I will tie that back to our IOT space in that for those connected devices where memory discs, CPU, power are very constrained, part of the important part of that connection is that they are talking to a cloud that has essentially infinite resources, infinite data at its disposal, enough memory to load those entire data sets and crunch those. The fastest CPUs and the fastest GPUs that can crunch that data, so to really take that and make that real, that's exactly what's powering every autonomous vehicle in the world, essentially, is a little unit inside of the car, a majority of those autonomous vehicles are running Ubuntu on the auto driving unit. Tesla, Google, Uber, all running Ubuntu inside of that car. Every one of those cars are talking to a cloud. Some clouds are Amazon, other, in Google's case, certainly the Google cloud, but they are talking to GPU Nvidia powered AI instances that are crunching all the data that these Tesla cars and GM, and Ford cars are sending to the cloud and constantly making the inference engine better. What gets downloaded to the car is an updated inference engine. That inference engine comes down to the car, and that's how that car decides is it safe to change lanes right now or not? That answer has to be determined inside of the car, not in the cloud, but you can understand why data training and modeling in the cloud is powerful, far more powerful than what can happen inside of a little CPU in a the car. >> John: Let's just keep it on the right side of the road. Can we do that? (laughing) >> Well, you need to talk to this gentleman about that. >> Yeah, I drive on the left side. (laughing) >> Or the left side of the road. >> Don't cross the streams. >> How about the correct side of the road? >> Don't cross the streams. >> Dustin thanks for the time. >> Thank you, John. >> Always good seeing you. >> Likewise. >> And we'll see you next week as well. Down in your hometown, a little barbecue in Austin. >> That sounds good. >> All right, back with more here at re:Invent. We are live in Las Vegas back with more on theCUBE in just a bit.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. (soft electronic music) >> Back on the Cube we are live here in Las Vegas at re:Invent, AWS putting on a show for about 45,00 of its closest friends. You might hear some of the cheering behind us. It's happy hour here, lot of happy folks having a good time. John Walls along with Justin Warren and we're now joined by a couple of fellows from Datrium. We have Sazzala Reddy who is the co-founder of Datrium and Craig Nunes who is VP of marketing. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us here on the Cube. We appreciate the time. >> Thanks for having us here. >> First off, let's talk about Datrium for those who are watching might not be familiar with your particular offering. If you would, Sazzala, give us a little thumbnail of what you guys are doing. >> Yeah, so we're kind of a new breed of unifying compute, primary storage, and backup all built in to the same product so that it becomes convenient for the end user so they don't have to manage multiple pieces of infrastructure. It's a unifying way of managing it. It's a new way of doing convergence. It's the next evolution of hyperconvergence and now in this particular AWS event, we are here to announce that our backup extends beyond the data center to be having it as a service running in Amazon. That's our new offering today as of this event. >> Yeah, so a little bit more about the announcement, then, because this was, again, why you're here in terms of becoming even more enjoined with AWS, that offering. I mean, if you would Craig, run through that a little bit and the prominence of that announcement, why you think this is a significant moment for you all. >> So we have seen, first of all, a huge attraction with our customers to bring the backup or data protection function into their Tier 1 environment. One individual can do it all, manage it all. At the same time we talk to a lot of folks who've got an AWS strategy and they might even have some developers doing stuff with AWS but they haven't, broadly, been able to take full advantage of backup DR in the cloud because when they do the math the numbers just haven't been there in terms of the economics of that. We felt like we could do something about that with some innovative technology that Sazzala and his guys put together around what we call Global Cloud De-duplication. Might want to talk a little bit about that. >> Yeah, so before Datrium I was a CT of a company called Data Domain, you probably heard of it. So being there, what we did there was being they're one of the pioneers in doing the global de-dup. So we learned a few things there and the other thing we learned about being in that company was that I learned that many people ignore backup. Backup seems to be one of the like-- If you have a car, you don't think of the insurance you pay for it, but it's an important part. Your family jewels are there. You gotta make it too. And if you look at the backup administrators, their life is not very happy, because everybody ignores them but we didn't want to do that. >> We were just talking about that in our last segment, too, weren't we buddy? Nobody wants to be the backup guy, right? >> Actually we want to solve that problem. >> It's great until that one mistake. >> Exactly, exactly, so we want to solve that problem very nicely which is why we have converged backup into our product because it's not another thing just to the side, it is your main family jewels so that's what we've tried to do. But to make it really work well you must have the fundamentals of storage and that's a little bit of a inf-- Like, you know, the details but details do matter in how we do this. So dedupe is a old thing, but still a lot of people don't have it. If you don't have dedupe and compression, all the other data reduction features, backup, you really can't do backup. And then how do you extend it beyond the data center. So if you're gonna do like tape, you do fulls and every weeek in incrementals. If you do the same thing to the cloud, you know the expense of that story, it's a thing. So it's not really practical anymore. What we wanted to do was bring two things to the cloud. One is that we know that AWS is expensive and secondly, AWS is hard to use. It's like Lego pieces, right? If you're a developer, you can put it together, but if I want to just use it, consume it, how do you bring that to the market? So we did two things. One is that we extended the global dedupe all the way to the cloud so everything ends up there. It's all globally deduped. We got like five to like 15X dedupe over there. If you have multiple sites going into a offering, it all gets deduped. Very convenient. Over the wire transfer is very, very convenient, very, very cheap. And also the other thing we have done is that we made it as a SAS offering. See the world is moving towards a SAS offering so in the near future you'll see some of our new announcements, which I can't talk about it right now, it's still secret, but that's what the conception model is gonna be. It's a SAS model. There is developers who want Lego, right, for Amazon, but there is a lot of other people who want to run a business, not just build pieces so for that we want to build as a SAS offerings. Convenient to use, it runs in the cloud, don't have to manage it, don't have to run all these things in your data center. So this backup offering is our first entry, a backup as a service. It's very unique. It's all this global dedupe and it's a service, nothing to do. You don't have to upgrade it. You don't have to manage it. You just have to use it, consume it as a product. >> The other thing that I was gonna say is when we've introduced this to our customers, pretty much everyone has said, "Yeah, we have a strategy "to incorporate public cloud in what we're doing," but almost to an individual none of them had done it yet. I mean, certain people in their company may have accounts, but for a lot of these guys it was their first ever engagement with AWS and so for them, they understood our product. They just wanted that experience to just kind of extend to AWS and not have to figure out how much EC-2, how much Dynamo DB, how much S3 bucket size, whatever. They didn't want any of that. Just help me do what I need to do on your platform leveraging public cloud. >> Yeah, they want to run a business, not manage Lego pieces. >> John: They don't care how the watch works, just what time is it? >> Exactly. >> Yeah, yeah, right. >> And we are very good at what we do. >> So you've taken compute and storage and you've convert, you put all of that together, and you've added backup and you're basically making it a one-stop shop for people to do something so as you say, I want to tell the time, just give me a watch. You've added this remote backup capability all in there. It's like, what's left for me to do? Do I just buy some of your stuff and say, "Okay, I'm done"? There isn't anything else. >> Actually, we have customers. They haven't talked to us for six months. We call them back, "Are you okay?" They're like, "Nothing to do. "I forgot about it because it just works and it runs." That's what you get with us. >> John: Don't tell my boss. >> Yeah sure, there is that. I mean, I think there are other things to do. >> John: But still, yeah. >> Other pieces to develop which don't work as well. So they were managing those. >> And by the way, the strategic stuff that's on their plate that they've never been able to get to in the past, maybe they're managing LUNS on the storage side or dealing with backup stuff that would give them headaches. That is out and they can focus on things that accelerate the business, drive revenue, top line, and make IT a hero again. >> Yeah, making something that's simple and easy to use like that, that takes a lot of engineering and in a lot of ways people underestimate how much work goes into making something easy to use. Now you've been working on this for a little while and you've change-- Like, people might be familiar with hyperconversion, but you guys are doing things in a slightly different way, which is clearly a much better way of doing things, so could you maybe explain a little bit more about how that global dedupe works in conjunction with the stuff that's onsite which makes it a really good fit to go and expand out into the cloud. >> Sure, so firstly we believe in the philosophy of not one click but zero click. One click is too hard. You gotta read the manual to know what the one click is. So that's where our design thinking has come from. If we can eliminate that click, that's even better. Why give a choice to the customer because it means that we have not thought about it. That's kind of what the design philosophy is of our company. For the first three years, we didn't ship our product because we spent the time to build the fundamentals of the product. We can't build this later on. Like global dedupe, it was harder to build later on. It just, it's not possible. So global dedupe is this concept that if something is there already, you can avoid sending it there. You negotiate from Site A to Site B or whatever it is. It's a multi-cloud world. Wherever it is, you can negotiate and say, "Do you have this?" "Yes and No." You don't have it, then they can send you the copy and keep it there so you tend to have this massive reduction of data that also, remember, is not just that global dedupe is gonna save you cost. Ultimately, backup is about recovery. You also need a sufficient amount of tools and workflows to be able to recover what you want efficiently and also, ultimately, backup is useful if you can recover it. If you don't check it, you're gonna-- If you ever have a problem at the time of recovery you're gonna lose your job so we also do the other thing of, okay, we saved your costs but also we check it regularly to make sure that the backup data is recoverable when you need to recover it. That's also an important aspect of it. So global dedupe is like block chain. Think of it like block chain. So how do you know, for example, if you have a piece of data here, you send it somewhere else. How do you know that it all went there? Somebody said so, but how do you verify that? Fundamentally, as architecture, so our global dedupe is like block chain a little bit. We know that they sent all these pieces over there. We can verify at the high level, yes, this is the signature of the data. It's all there and say, "okay, they're good." So now you can send the data anywhere you want and you can be sure that the data you send is what you're supposed to send. >> And Justin, you mentioned kind of the difference between what we're doing and hyperconverge and if you think of hyperconverge. It has brought compute, storage, network all in the box. Our approach is different. It's more like the modern hyper-scalers in that we split that compute and active data from durable capacity. >> I like to think of it as taking all the great advantages that you got from hyperconverge but then getting rid of some of the limitations where it's like we can scale compute and storage independently of each other but we still get all the great benefits from an integrated platform. >> Yeah and the interesting proof point is when we did the cloud-native port, not a code, not a lick of code was changed in the underlying file system that users don't ever see, but that just kind of shows you that kind of approach works in a world that's gotta embrace public cloud as part of your IT strategy. >> Well before we say goodbye, I just want to get your take on the show in general. Knowing that you both probably have some history with what AWS has been up to in the past, but this is not the same as in the past. At least, that's what we're hearing from people. What's your take on what you're seeing here, what you're feeling here? >> Fair enough. So I'm a computer science kind of guy so I kind of enjoy the show because it's all familiar stuff a little bit. So what they've done is an amazing job. It's a amazing business, to be honest, how they've built all these pieces and they've executed pretty well. Their service model is pretty good. I mean, sometimes things don't work as well, the pieces, but they're willing to spend the time to work with you, which to me is pretty awesome. They're willing to have the service level agreement to call you and they're willing to forgive you. I mean, they're willing to do all these things for you. This is why people like Amazon because of the service model. So they have a lot of building blocks so I'm talking to people, I'm going to some of the sessions. What I found is that there are two kinds of people. There is the developers. They love some of the things here because it's a building block. I mean, Lego. Who doesn't wanna play Legos? >> You love your Legos, don't you, Sazzala, yeah you do. >> But I think a lot of companies don't have the time, luxury to spend time with this. They want a simpler higher-level constructs so SAS applications for example. You can build it in Amazon, so the SAS people who are building the product can build it using Lego pieces but the higher level businesses want to use SAS model. They want to use more simpler model so that's the difference between VM Ware and Amazon. I think there's a lot of developers here. In VM Ware it was mostly I think the IT folks were there because it's about operating the business, right? So I think it's interesting to see as the future goes where is that shift? Is everybody gonna be a developer? I don't think so. It's very complicated. I think as I've used some of the Amazon API's, they're actually not trivial. Have to think about what happens if it fails, what happens if this dies? I mean, they're thinking about all these things. It's pretty complicated model. >> Craig: Well, it's a good formula though and it's working for them, obviously. >> Yeah totally. >> It's all the show here, we just had Black Friday, Cyber Monday. You look around here, this is like AWS Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I mean, everyone is here, everyone is kind of shopping the new tech that's integrated with their favorite public cloud. It's a huge mixer of technology and AWS is after all, they probably learn a lot from the e-commerce side, the store front, and they have kind of worked that in to their show and their partnership bringing in companies like Datrium to really leverage their infrastructure as a service. It's awesome. It's great for us. >> Well it's been a great show and thank- We appreciate the time here. Good luck with the Legos. >> Sazzala: Thank you. >> No, no, no, all right. Back with more live. We are in Las Vegas. We'll continue and almost coming down the home stretch of our live coverage here on the Cube. Back with a little bit more in just a moment. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's the Cube. Covering Big Data New York City 2016. Brought to you by Headline Sponsors, Cisco, IBM, NVIDIA, and our ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. >> Welcome back to New York City everybody, this is the Cube, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage, and we've been going wall to wall since Monday here at Strata plus Hadoop World, Big Data NYC is our show within the show. Omer Trajman is here, he's the CEO of Rocana, Cube alum, good to see you again. >> Yeah you too, it's good to be here again. >> What's the deal with the shirt, it says, 'your boss is useless', what are you talking about? >> So, if I wasn't on mic'd up, I'd get up and show you, ~but you can see in the faint print that it's not talking about how your boss is useless, right, it's talking about how you make better use of data and what your boss' expectations are. The point we're trying to get across is that context matters. If you're looking at a small fraction of the information then you're not going to get the full picture, you're not going understand what's actually going on. You have to look at everything, you have no choice today. >> So Rocana has some ambitious plans to enter this market, generally referred to as IT operations, if I can call it that, why does the world need another play on IT operations? >> In IT operations? If you look at the current state of IT operations in general, and specifically people think of this largely versus monitoring, is I've got a bunch of systems, I can't keep track of everything, so I'm going to pick and choose what I pay attention to. I'm going to look at data selectively, I'm only going to keep it for as long as I can afford to keep it, and I'm not going to pay attention to the stuff that's outside that hasn't caused problems, yet. The problem is, the yet, right? You all have seen the Delta outages, the Southwest issues, the Neiman Marcus website, right? There's plenty of examples of where someone just wasn't looking at information, no one was paying attention to it or collecting it and they got blindsided. And in today's pace of business where everything is digital, everyone's interacting with the machines directly, everything's got to be up all the time. Or at least you have to know that something's gone askew and fix it quickly. And so our take is, what we call total operational visibility. You got to pay attention to everything all the time and that's easier said than done. >> Well, because that requires you got to pay attention to all the data, although this reminds me of IP meta in 2010, said, "Sampling is dead", alright? Do you agree he's right? >> Trajman: I agree. And so it's much more than that, of course right, sampling is dead, you want to look at all the details all the time, you want to look at it from all sources. You want to keep enough histories so if you're the CIO of a retailer, if your CEO says, "Are we ready for Cyber Monday, can you take a look at last year's lead up and this years", and the CEO's going to look back at them and say, "I have seven days of data (chuckles), "what are you talking about, last year". You have to keep it for as long as you need to, to address business issues. But collecting the data, that's step one, right? I think that's where people struggle today, but they don't realize that you can't just collect it all and give someone a search box, or say, "go build your charts". Companies don't have data scientists to throw at these problems. You actually have to have the analytics built in. Things that are purpose built for data center and IT operations, the machine learning models, the built in cubes, the built in views, visualizations that just work out of the box, and show you billions of events a day, the way you need to look at that information. That's prebuilt, that comes out of the box, that's also a key differentiator. >> Would it be fair to say that Hadoop has historically has been this repository for all sorts of data, and but it was a tool set, and that Splunk was the anti-Hadoop, sort of out of the box. It was an application that had some... It collected certain types of data and it had views out of the box for that data. Sounds like you're trying to take the best of each world where you have the full extensibility and visibility that you can collect with all your data in Hadoop but you've pre built all the analytic infrastructure that you need to see your operations in context. >> I think when you look at Hadoop and Splunk and your concert of Rocana's the best of both worlds, is very apt. It's a prepackaged application, it just installs. You don't have to go in under the covers and stitch everything together. It has the power of scalability that Hadoop has, it has the openness, right, 'cause you can still get at the data and do what you need with it, but you get an application that's creating value, day one. >> Okay, so maybe take us... Peel back the onion one layer, if you can go back to last year's Cyber Monday and you've got out of the box functionality, tell us how you make sense out of the data for each organization, so that the context is meaningful for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. What's interesting is that it's not a one time task, right? Every time you're trying to solve a slightly different problem, or move the business in different direction, you want to look at data differently. So we think of this more as a toolkit that helps you navigate where to find the root cause or isolate where a particular problem is, or where you need to invest, or grow the business. In the Cyber Monday example, right what you want to look at is, let me take a zoom out view, I just want to see trends over time, the months leading up or the weeks leading up to Cyber Monday. Let's look at it this year. Let's look at it last year. Let's stack on the graph everything from the edge caching, to the application, to my proxy servers to my host servers through to my network, gimmie the broad view of everything, and just show me the trend lines and show me how those trend lines are deviating. Where is there unexpected patterns and behavior, and then I'm going to zoom in on those. And what's causing those, is there a new disconfiguration, did someone deploy a new network infrastructure, what has caused some change? Or is it just... It's all good, people are making more money, more people are coming to the website it's actually a capacity issue, we just need to add more servers. So you get the step back, show me everything without a query, and then drag and drop, zoom in to isolate where are there particular issues that I need to pay attention to. >> Vellante: And this is infrastructure? >> Trajman: It's infrastructure all the way through application... >> Correct? It is? So you can do application performance management, as well? >> We don't natively do the instrumentation there's a whole domain which is, bytecode instrumentation, we partner with companies that provide APM functionality, take that feed and incorporate it. Similar to a partner with companies that do wire level deep packet inspection. >> Vellante: I was going to say... >> Yeah, take that feed and incorporate it. Some stuff we do out of the box. NetFlow, things like IPFIX, STATSD, Syslog, log4j, right? There's kind of a lot of stuff that everyone needs standard interfaces that we do out of the box. And there's also pre-configured, content oriented parsers and visualizations for an OpenStack or for Cloud Foundry or for a Blue Coat System. There's certain things that we see everywhere that we can just handle out of the box, and then there's things that are very specific to each customer. >> A lot of talk about machine learning, deep learning, AI, at this event, how do you leverage that? >> How do we fit in? It's interesting 'cause we talk about the power delivers in the product but part of it is that it's transparent. Our users, who are actually on the console day to day or trying to use Rocana to solve problems, they're not data scientists. They don't understand the difference between analytic queries and full text search. They understand understand machine learning models. >> They're IT people, is that correct? >> They're IT folks, whose job it is to keep the lights on, right? And so, they expect the software to just do all of that. We employ the data scientists, we deliver the machine learning models. The software dynamically builds models continuously for everything it's looking at and then shows it in a manner that someone can just look at it and make sense of it. >> So it might be fair to say, maybe replay this, and if it's coming out right, most people, and even the focus of IBM's big roll out this week is, people have got their data links populated and they're just now beginning to experiment with the advanced analytics. You've got an application where it's already got the advanced analytics baked into such an extent that the operator doesn't really care or need to know about it. >> So here's the caveat, people have their data links populated with the data they know they need to look at. And that's largely line of business driven, which is a great area to apply big data machine learning, analytics, that's where the data scientists are employed. That's why what IBM is saying makes sense. When you get to the underlying infrastructure that runs it day to day, the data lakes are not populated. >> Interviewer: Oh, okay. >> They're data puddles. They do not have the content of information, the wealth of information, and so, instead of saying, "hey, let's populate them, "and then let's try to think about "how to analyze them, and then let's try to think about "how get insights from them, and then let's try to think "about, and then and then", how about we just have a product that does it all for you? That just shows you what to do. >> I don't want to pollute my data lake with that information, do I? >> What you want is, you want to take the business feeds that have been analyzed and you want to overlay them, so you want to send those over to probably a much larger lake, which is all the machine data underneath it. Because what you end up with especially as people move towards more elastic environments, or the hybrid cloud environments, in those environments, if a disk fails or machine fails it may not matter. Unless you can see the topline revenue have an impact, maybe it's fine to just leave the dead machine there and isolate it. How IT operates in those environments requires knowledge of the business in order to become more efficient. >> You want to link the infrastructure to the value. >> Trajman: Exactly. >> You're taking feeds essentially, from the business data and that's informing prioritization. >> That's exactly right. So take as an example, Point of Sale systems. All the Point of Sale systems today, they're just PCs, they're computers, right? I have to monitor them and the infrastructure to make sure it's up and running. As a side effect, I also know the transactions. As an IT person, I not only know that a system is up, I know that it's generating the same amount of revenue, or a different amount of revenue than it did last week, or that another system is doing. So I can both isolate a problem as an IT person, right, as an operator, but I can also go to the business and say, "Hey nothing's wrong with the system, we're not making as much money as we were, why is that", and let's have a conversation about that. So it brings IT into a conversation with the business that they've never been able to have before, using the data they've always had. They've always had access to. >> Omer, We were talking a little before about how many more companies are starting to move big parts of their workloads into public cloud. But the notion of hybrid cloud, having a hybrid cloud strategy is still a bit of a squishy term. >> Trajman: Yeah. (laughs) >> Help us fill in, for perhaps, those customers who are trying to figure out how to do it, where you add value and make that possible. >> Well, what's happening is the world's actually getting more complex with cloud, it's another place that I can use to cost effectively balance my workloads. We do see more people moving towards public cloud or setting up private cloud. We don't see anyone whole scale, saying "I'm shutting down everything", and "I'm going to send everything to Amazon" or "I'm going to send everything to Microsoft". Even in the public cloud, it's a multi cloud strategy. And so what you've done is, you've expanded the number of data centers. Maybe I add, a half dozen data centers, now I've got a half dozen more in each of these cloud providers. It actually exacerbates the need for being able to do multi-tier monitoring. Let me monitor at full fidelity, full scale, everything that's happening in each piece of my infrastructure, aggregate the key parts of that, forward them onto something central so I can see everything that's going on in one place, but also be able to dive into the details. And that hybrid model keeps you from clogging up the pipes, it keeps you from information overload, but now you need it more than ever. >> To what extent does that actually allow you, not just to monitor, but to re-mediate? >> The sooner you notice that there's an issue, the sooner you can address that issue. The sooner you see how that issue impacts other systems, the more likely you are to identify the common root cause. An example is a customer that we worked with prior to Rocana, had spent an entire weekend isolating an issue, it was a ticket that had gotten escalated, they found the root cause, it was a core system, and they looked at it and said, "Well if that core system was actually "the root cause, these other four systems "should have also had issues". They went back into the ticketing system, sure enough, there were tickets that just didn't get escalated. Had they seen all of those issues at the same time, had they been able to quickly spin the cube view of everything, they would have found it significantly faster. They would have drawn that commonality and seen the relationships much more quickly. It requires having all the data in the same place. >> Part of the actionable information is to help triage the tickets in a sense, of that's the connection to remediation. >> Trajman: Context is everything. >> Okay. >> So how's it going? Rocana's kind of a heavy lift. (Trajman laughs) You're going after some pretty entrenched businesses that have been used to doing things a certain way. How's business? How you guys doing? >> Business is, it's amazing, I mean, the need is so severe. We had a prospective customer we were talking to, who's just starting to think about this digital transformation initiative and what they needed from an operational visibility perspective. We connected them with an existing customer that had rolled out a system and, the new prospect looked at the existing customer, called us up and said, "That," (laughs) "that's what we want, right there". Everyone's got centralized log analytics, total operational visibility, people are recognizing these are necessary to support where the business has to go and businesses are now realizing they have to digitize everything. They have to have the same kind of experience that Amazon and Google and Facebook and everyone else has. Consumers have come to expect it. This is what is required from IT in order to support it, and so we're actually getting... You say it's a heavy lift, we're getting pulled by the market. I don't think we've had a conversation where someone hasn't said, "I need that", that's what we're going through today that is my number one pang. >> That's good. Heavy lifts are good if you've got the stomach for it. >> Trajman: That's what I do. >> If you got a tailwind, that's fantastic. It sounds like things are going well. Omer, congratulations on the success we really appreciate you sharing it with our Cube audience. >> Thank you very much, thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. Keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest, this is the Cube, we're live, day four from NYC. Be right back.