we're back at vemma in 2022 we're here at the aria hotel in las vegas this is thecube's continuous coverage we're day two welcome to the cxo session we have ceo cto cso chief strategy officer brett diamond is the ceo justin jardina is the cto and dante orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11 11 systems recently named i guess today the impact cloud service provider of the year congratulations guys welcome thank you welcome back to the cube great to see you again thank you great likewise so okay brett let's start with you tell give us the overview of 11 1111 uh your focus area talk about the the the island acquisition what that what that's all about give us the setup yeah so we started 11-11 uh really with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business which are cloud connectivity and security bring them together into one platform allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on uh the three main drivers of the business uh which you know have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform okay so so justin cloud connectivity and security they all dramatically changed in march of 2020 everybody had to go to the cloud the rather rethink the network had a secure remote worker so what did you see from a from a cto's perspective what changed and how did 11 respond sure so early on when we built our cloud even back into 2008 we really focused on enterprise great features one of which being uh very flexible in the networking so we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time so if you fast forward from 2008 until today we still see that as a main component for iaz and draz and the ability to start taking into some of the things brett talked about where customers may need a point-to-point circuit to offload data connectivity to us or develop sd-wan and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud in my opinion it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008 and to couple that with the security um if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape now you have multiple clouds you have different ingress and egress points you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base so what does that mean specifically for your customers because i mean we saw obviously a rapid move toward endpoint um cloud security uh identity access you know people really started thinking rethinking that as opposed to trying to just you know build a moat around the castle right um what does that mean for for your customer you take care of all that you partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service how does that work right it does and that's a great analogy you know we have a picture of a hamburger in our office exploded with all the components and they say a good security policy is all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said so to answer your question yes we have all that baked in the platform we can offer managed services around it but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data whether it's a ui or api so dante i know you talk to a lot of customers all you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that you say okay the pandemic drove all these but but when you talk to csos and customers a lot of things are changing permanently first of all they were forced to march to digital when previously they were like we'll get there i mean a lot of customers were let's face it i mean some were serious about it but many weren't now if you're not a digital business you're out of business what have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes what are they telling you well i think we go through this for ourselves right the business continues to grow you've got tons of people that are working remotely and that are going to continue to work remotely right as much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that some folks are like hey i've worked it out i'm working out great from home right and also i think what justin was saying also is we've seen time go on that operating environment has gotten much more complex you've got stuff in the data center stuff it's somebody's you know endpoint you've got various different public clouds different sas services right that's why it's been phenomenal to work with veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists but when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about we're helping those csos you get better visibility better control and take proactive action against the infrastructure um when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when when something does happen right and i think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors right but how do you tie it all together into a single solution right with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things they're more strategic to the business i was talking to jim mercer at um red hat summit last week he's an idc analyst and he said we did a survey i think it was last summer and we asked customers to your point about there's no shortage of security tools how do you want to buy your security and you know do you want you know best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it now surprisingly they said platform provider the the problem is that's aspirational for a lot of platforms providers so they've got to look to a managed service provider so brett talk about the the island acquisition what green cloud is how that all fits together so we acquired island and green cloud last year and the reality is that the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions they were the foundational pieces to eleven eleven uh obviously the things that justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective uh at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways as well so those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint not only throughout the us but globally uh have a security product that was given to us from from the green cloud acquisition of cascade and add-on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one all three pillars so i like 11 11 11 is near and dear to my heart i am so where'd the name come from uh everybody asked me this question i think five times a day so uh growing up as a kid everyone in my family would always say 11 11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock and uh during coven we were coming up with a new name for the business my daughter looked at the microwave said dad it's 11 11. make a wish the reality was though i had no idea why i'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination derivation of the word uh it means the time of day when everything's in line um and when things are complex especially with running all the different businesses that we have aligning them so that they're working together it seemed like a perfect man when i had the big corner office at idc i had my staff meetings at 11 11. because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was nobody could forget the time so they gave him 11 minutes to be there now you'll see it all the time even when you don't want to so justin we've been talking a lot about ransomware and and not just backup but recovery my friend fred moore who you know coined the phrase backup is one thing recovery is everything and recovery time network speeds and and the like are critical especially when you're thinking cloud how are you architecting recovery for your clients maybe you could dig into that a little bit sure so it's really a multitude of things you know you mentioned ransomware seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time especially in our business with backup and dr it's very singular you know people protecting against host nodes now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment land and expand actually delete backups target backup vendors so the ransomware point i guess um trying to battle that is a multi-step process right you need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective from a networking perspective you need to think about how your workloads are protected and then when you think about backups i know we're at veeam vmon now talking about veeam there's a multitude of ways to protect that data whether it's retention whether it's immutability air gapping data so while i know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data it's really that hamburg analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection so how do you provide services i mean you say okay you want immutability there's a there's a line item for that um you want faster or you know low rpo fast rto how does that all work for as a customer what what am i buying from you is it just a managed service we'll take care of everything platinum gold silver or is it if if you don't mind so i'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us years ago his team actually built the ip because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with veeam that how do we take all the intelligence that we have in his team and all of our solution architects and scale it so they actually developed a tool called catalyst and it's a pre-sales tool it's an application you download it you install it it basically takes a snapshot of your environment you start to manipulate the data what are you trying to do dave are you trying to protect that data are you backing up to us are you trying to replicate for dr purposes um you know what are you doing for production or maybe it's a migration it analyzes the network it analyzes all your infrastructure it helps the ses know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do so nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community as well as the customer they're working with real data so we can get past all the garbage and get right to what's important for them for the outcome yeah that's huge who do you guys sell to is it is it more mid-sized businesses that maybe don't have the large teams is it larger enterprises who want to complement to their business is it both well i would say with the two acquisitions that we made the go-to-market sales strategies and the clientele were very different when you look at green cloud they're selling predominantly wholesale through msps and those msps are mostly selling to smbs right so we covered that smb market for the most part through our acquisition of green cloud island on the other hand was more focused on selling direct inbound through vars through the channel mid enterprise big enterprise so really those two acquisitions outside of the ip that we got from the systems we have every single go-to-market sale strategy and we're aligned from smb all the way up to the fortune 500. i heard a stat a couple months ago that that less than 50 of enterprises have a sock it blew me away and you know even small businesses need one they may not be able to afford but certainly a medium size or larger business should have some kind of sock is it does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace 100 if that's true the need for a managed service like this is just it's going to explode it is exploding yeah i mean 100 right there is zero unemployment in the cyberspace right just north america alone there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600 000 open wrecks just in north america right so earlier we talked about no shortage of tools right but the shortage of head count is a significant challenge big time right most importantly the people that you do have on staff they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have that's why you're seeing this massive insurgence in the managed security services provider lack of talent is number one challenge for csos that's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that and it's you know another tool and and it's amazing because you see security companies popping up all the time billion dollar evaluations i mean lacework did a billion dollar raise and so so there's no shortage of funding now maybe that'll change you know with the market but i wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning you guys got some serious love up on stage um there was a demo uh it was a pretty pretty cool demo fast recovery very very tight rpo as i recall it was i think four minutes of data loss is that right was that the right knit stat i was happy it wasn't zero data loss because there's really you know no such thing uh but so you got to feel good about that tell us about um how that all came about your relationship with with veeam who wants to take it sure i can i can take a step at it so one of the or two of the things that i'm um most excited about at least with this vmon is our team was able to work with veeam on that demo and what that demo was showing was some cdp-based features for cloud providers so we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the veeam platform it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication cdp replication on-prem backup cloud backup immutability air gap the list goes on and on and in our opinion having a singular software vendor that can provide all that through you know with a cloud provider on prem or not is really like the icing on the cake so for us it's very exciting to see that and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that veeam's doing in the sas space right so again having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases i'll tell you if you guys can get a that was a very cool demo if we can get a youtube of that that that demo i'll make sure we put it in the the show notes and uh of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it um so so how you guys feel i mean this is a new chapter for you very cool with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main mainspring of your strategy so the first veeam on in a couple years so what's the vibe been like for you what's the nighttime activity the customer interaction i know you guys are running a lot of the back end demos so you're everywhere what's the what's the vibe like at veeamon and how does it feel to be back look at that one at dante as far as yeah you got a lot of experience here yeah let me loose on this one dave i'm like so excited about this right it's been it's been far too long to get face to face again and um veeam always does it right and i think that uh for years we've been back-ending like all the hands-on lab infrastructure here but forget about that i think the part that's really exciting is getting face-to-face with such a great team right we have phenomenal architects that we work with at veeam day in and day out they put up with us pushing them pushing and pushing them and together we've been able to create a lot of magic together right but i think it's you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for for the last two years but the vibe's always fantastic at veeam if you're going to be around tonight i'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that veeam love with you at the after party yeah that's well famous after parties we'll see if that culture continues i have a feeling it will um brett where do you want to take 11 11. a new new phase in all of your careers you got a great crew out here it looks like i i love that you're all out and uh make some noise here people let's hear it all right let's see you this is the biggest audience we've had all week where do you want to take 11 11. i think you know if uh if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of green cloud and ireland obviously the integration is a key piece we're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars we've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible ip like i said earlier that just and his team have created on those front ends the user experience but you know we made two large acquisitions obviously mna is a is a key piece for us we're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security and i think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one when the when the cloud started to hit the steep part of the s-curve kind of early part of the last decade people thought oh wow these managed service providers are toast the exact opposite happened it created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services we've seen it all across the stack so guys wish you best of luck congratulations on the acquisitions thank you uh hope to have you back soon yeah thank you around the block all right keep it right there everybody dave vellante for the cube's coverage of veeamon 2022 we'll be right back after this short break

(pleasant music) >> We're back at Veeamon 2022. We're here at the Aria hotel in Las Vegas. This is theCube's continuous coverage. We're in day two. Welcome to the CXO session. We have CEO, CTO, CSO, chief strategy officer. Brett Diamond is the CEO, Justin Giardina is the CTO, and Dante Orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11:11 Systems recently named, I guess today, the impact cloud service provider of the year. Congratulations, guys. Welcome to theCube. Welcome back to theCube. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Great. >> Likewise. >> Thanks for having us. Okay, Brett, let's start with you. Give us the overview of 11:11, your focus area, talk about the Island acquisition, what that's all about, give us the setup. >> Yeah, so we started 11:11, really, with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business, which are cloud, connectivity, and security, bring them together into one platform, allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on the three main drivers of the business, which, you know, have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform. >> Okay, so Justin, cloud connectivity and security, they all dramatically changed in March of 2020. Everybody had to go to the cloud, had to rethink the network, had to secure remote workers. So what did you see, from a CTO's perspective, what changed and how did 11:11 respond? >> Sure, so early on, when we built our cloud, even back into 2008, we really focused on enterprise grade features, one of which being very flexible in the networking. So we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time. So if you fast forward from 2008 until today, we still see that as a main component for IaaS and DRaaS and the ability to start taking into some of the things Brett talked about, where customers may need a point to point circuit to offload data connectivity to us, or develop SD-WAN and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud. In my opinion, it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008. And to couple that with the security, if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape, now you have multiple clouds, you have different ingress and egress points, you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds, so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base. >> So what does that mean specifically for your customers? Because, I mean, we saw obviously a rapid move toward end point, cloud security, identity access. You know, people really started rethinking that as opposed to trying to just, you know, build a moat around the castle. >> Right. >> What does that mean for your customer? You take care of all that? You partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service? How does that work? >> Right. It does and that's a great analogy. You know, we have a picture of a hamburger in our office, exploded with all the components and they say, a good security policy has all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said. So to answer your question, yes. We have all that baked in the platform. We can offer managed services around it, but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data, whether it's a UI or API. >> So Dante, I know you talked to a lot of customers. All you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that and you say, okay, the pandemic drove all these, but when you talk to CISOs and customers, a lot of things are changing permanently. First of all, they were forced to march to digital when previously, they were like, eh, we'll get there. I mean, a lot of customers were. Let's face it. I mean, some were serious about it, but many weren't. Now, if you're not a digital business, you're out of business. What have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes? What are they telling you? >> Well, I think, you know, we go through this ourselves, right? The business continues to grow. You've got tons of people that are working remotely and they are going to continue to work remotely, right? As much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that, some folks are like, hey, I've worked it out. I'm working out great from home, right? And also, I think what Justin was saying also is, as we've seen time go on, that operating environment has gotten much more complex. You've got stuff in the data center, stuff in somebody's, you know, endpoint, you've got various different public clouds, different SAS services, right? That's why it's been phenomenal to work with Veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists. But when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about, we're helping those CSOs, you know, get better visibility, better control, and take proactive action against the infrastructure when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when something does happen, right? And I think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors, right? But how do you tie it all together into a single solution, right, with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things that are more strategic to the business? >> I was talking to Jim Mercer at Red Hat Summit last week. He's an IDC analyst and we did a survey, I think it was last summer, and we asked customers to your point about, there's no shortage of security tools. How do you want to buy your security? And, you know, do you want, you know, best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it? Now surprisingly, they said platform provider. The problem is, that's aspirational for a lot of platform providers, so they got to look to a managed service provider. So Brett, talk about the Island acquisition, what Green Cloud is, how that all fits together. >> So we acquired Island and Green Cloud last year and the reality is, the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions. They were the foundational pieces to 11:11. Obviously, the things that Justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways, as well. So, those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint, not only throughout the US but globally, have a security product that was given to us from the Green Cloud acquisition of Cascade, and add on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one, all three pillars in one. >> So I like 11:11. 11:11 is near and dear to my heart. So where'd the name come from? >> Everybody asked me this question, I think, five times a day. So growing up as a kid, everyone in my family would always say 11:11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock. And during COVID, we were coming up with a new name for the business. My daughter looked at the microwave, said, dad, it's 11:11, make a wish. The reality was though, I had no idea why I'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination, derivation of the word, it means the time of day when everything's in line and when things are complex, especially with running all the different businesses that we have, aligning them so that they're working together, it seemed like the perfect thing >> So when I had the big corner office at IDC, I had my staff meetings at 11:11. >> Yep. >> Because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was, nobody could forget the time. So they gave me 11 minutes to be there, so they were never late. >> And now you'll see it all the time, even when you don't want to. (chuckles) >> So Justin, we've been talking a lot about ransomware and not just backup, but recovery. My friend, Fred Moore, who, you know, coined the phrase backup is one thing, recovery is everything, and recovery time, network speeds and the like are critical, especially when you're thinking cloud. How are you architecting recovery for your clients? Maybe you could dig into that a little bit. >> Sure. So it's really a multitude of things. You know, you mention ransomware. Seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time, especially in our business with backup NDR, is very singular, you know, people protecting against host nodes. Now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment, land and expand, actually delete backups, target backup vendors. So the ransomware point, I guess, trying to battle that is a multi-step process, right? You need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective, from a networking perspective, you need to think about how your workloads are protected, and then when you think about backups, I know we're at Veeamon now talking about Veeam, there's a multitude of ways to protect that data, whether it's retention, whether it's immutability, air gapping data. So, while I know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data, it's really that hamburger analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection. >> So how do you provide services? I mean, do you say, okay, do you want immutability? There's a line item for that. You want low RPO, fast RTO? How does that all work as a customer? What am I buying from you? Is it just a managed service? We'll take care of everything, platinum, gold, silver, or is it? >> If you don't mind, so I'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us. Years ago, his team actually built the IP because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with Veeam that, how do we take all the intelligence that we have and his team and all of our solution architects and scale it? So they actually developed a tool called Catalyst, and it's a pre-sales tool. It's an application. You download it, you install it. It basically takes a snapshot of your environment. You start to manipulate the data. What are you trying to do, Dave? Are you trying to protect that data? Are you backing up to us? Are you trying to replicate it for DR purposes? You know, what are you doing for production, or maybe it's a migration? It analyzes the network. It analyzes all your infrastructure. It helps the SEs know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do. So, nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community, as well as the customer, they're working with real data. So we can get past all the garbage, you get right to what's important for them for the outcome. >> Yeah, that's huge. Who do you guys sell to? Is it more mid-size businesses that maybe don't have the large teams? Is it larger enterprises who want to compliment to their business? Is it both? >> Well, I would say with the two acquisitions that we made to go to market sales strategies and the clientele were very different, when you look at Green Cloud, they're selling predominantly wholesale through MSPs and those MSPs are mostly selling to SMBs, right? So we covered that SMB market for the most part through our acquisition of Green Cloud. Island, on the other hand, was more focused on selling direct, inbound, through VARs through the channel, mid-enterprise, big enterprise. So really, those two acquisitions outside of the IP that we got from the systems, we have every single go to market sales strategy and we're aligned from SMB all the way up to the Fortune 500. >> I heard a stat a couple months ago that less than 50% of enterprises have a SAQ. That blew me away. And, you know, even small businesses need one. They may not be able to afford, but there's certainly a medium size or a larger business should have some kind of SAQ. Does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace? >> A hundred percent. >> If that's true, the need for a managed service like this, it's going to explode. It is exploding, I mean. >> Yeah, I mean, a hundred percent, right? There is zero unemployment in the cyberspace, right? Just North America alone, there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600,000 open recs just in North America, right? So earlier, we talked about no shortage of tools, right? But the shortage of headcount is a significant challenge, big time, right? Most importantly, the people that you do have on staff, they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have. That's why you're seeing this massive surgence in the managed security services provider. >> Lack of talent is number one challenge for CISOs. That's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that. And it's, you know, another tool and it's amazing 'cause you see security companies popping up all the time. I mean, billion dollar valuations, I mean, Lacework did a billion dollar raise. And so, there's no shortage of funding. Now, maybe that'll change, you know, with the market but I wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning. You guys got some serious love up on stage. There was a demo. It was a pretty cool demo, fast recovery, very tight RPO, as I recall. It was, I think, four minutes of, of data loss? Is that right? Is that the right stat? I was happy it wasn't zero data loss 'cause there's really, you know, no such thing, but so you got to feel good about that. Tell us about how that all came about, your relationship with Veeam. Who wants to take it? >> Sure, I can take a stab at it. So two of the things that I'm most excited about, at least with this Veeamon, is our team was able to work with Veeam on that demo, and what that demo was showing was some CDP based features for cloud providers. So we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the Veeam platform, it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication, CDP replication, on-prem backup, cloud backup, immutability air gap, the list goes on and on. And in our opinion, having a singular software vendor that can provide all that, you know, with a cloud provider on-prem or not is really like, the icing on the cake. So for us, it's very exciting to see that, and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that's Veeam's doing in the SAS space, right? So again, having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases. >> I'll tell you, that was a very cool demo. If you can get a YouTube of that demo, I'll make sure we put it in the show notes of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it. So, how do you guys feel? I mean, this is a new chapter for you. Very cool, with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main spring of your strategy, so the first Veeamon in a couple years. So what's the vibe been like for you? What's the nighttime activity, the customer interaction? I know you guys are running a lot of the backend demos, so you're everywhere. What's the vibe like at Veeamon and how does it feel to be back? >> I'll give that one to Dante as far as the vibes, so far. >> Yeah, yeah, you got a lot of experience. >> Yeah, let me loose on this one, Dave. I'm like, so excited about this, right? It's been far too long to get face to face again and Veeam always does it right. And I think that for years, we've been back ending like, all the hands on lab infrastructure here, but forget about that. I think the part that's really exciting is getting face to face with such a great team, right? We have phenomenal architects that we work with at Veeam day in and day out. They put up with us, pushing them, pushing them, pushing them and together, we've been able to create a lot of magic together, right? But I think you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for, for the last two years. But the vibe's always fantastic at Veeam. If you're going to be around tonight, I'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that Veeam love with you at the after party. >> Yeah, well, famous after parties. We'll see if that culture continues. I have a feeling it will. Brett, where do you want to take 11:11? New phase in all of your careers. You got a great crew out here, it looks like. I love that you're all out and, make some noise here, people. Let's hear it! (audience cheering) You see, this is the biggest audience we've had all week. Where do you want to take 11:11? >> I think, you know, if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of Green Cloud and Island, obviously the integration is a key piece. We're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars. We've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible IP, like I said earlier, that Justin and his team have created on those front ends, the user experience. But, you know, we made two large acquisitions, obviously M and A is a key piece for us. We're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well, to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security. And I think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one. >> When the cloud started to hit the steep part of the S-curve, kind of early part of last decade, people thought, oh wow, these managed service providers are toast. The exact opposite happened. It created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services. We've seen it all across the stacks. So guys, wish you best of luck. Congratulations on the acquisitions, >> Thank you. >> And hope to have you back soon. >> Absolutely, thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. Dave Vellante for theCube's coverage of Veeamon 2022. We'll be right back after this short break. (pleasant music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. We've been covering Think since the beginning and this is the first year that they've gone to the virtual conference, obviously with the COVID situation. We're excited to have our next guest. She's Sarah Diamond, the Global Managing Director for Banking and Financial Markets for IBM. Sarah, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> Great, so, let's just jump into it. You've been dealing with financial services and financial markets for a long time. In getting ready for this interview, I stumbled across some old stuff you did in 2016, kind of talking about cloud adoption in financial services. But we all know financial services has special restrictions in terms of privacy and regulations, and making sure that stuff stays stable and fulfills the obligations, reporting obligations. But, there's so many great things that come from cloud in terms of speed of innovation, cost, and all these other things. You've been working in this space for a long time. There's some exciting work that you've been doing. How are you helping financial institutions leverage cloud in a better way? >> Yeah, it's a great place to start. As you say, financial services clients have been looking at the cloud for several years. But actually, it's interesting that notwithstanding the great focus on the opportunity presented by cloud, in terms of the agility of the architecture, speed, resiliency, and cost savings, are less than 10% of their workload has actually moved to the cloud. And that's because, as you say, there are very, very strict requirements over what workload can move to the cloud, as it relates to data privacy, security, et cetera. And so, as we looked at how much our clients were struggling to be able to move their workloads over to the cloud, we realized the need to come up with a financial services specific cloud. And we've been very fortunate to do that in conjunction with one of our main clients, Bank of America. And we will be launching the first Financial Services Cloud for the industry. >> Wow, that is wow. First, I'm shocked that you say only 10% of the workloads have made the conversion to the cloud in the current situation, which seems very, very low. >> Actually, I said less than 10%. >> Less than 10% not even 10%. >> Even less than that. >> So what are some of the specific attributes of the Financial Services Cloud that IBM's rolling out, that will enable them to move that number, hopefully well north of 10% in the not too distant future? >> Yeah, well I think the first place to start is secure and really at a enterprise grade level for financial services so that, the financial services can provide the level of security and resiliency that's needed as they run mission-critical systems for the world. Wrapped around that then, is being absolutely sure that the way the cloud is built meets all of the regulatory requirements as it relates to both risk analysis, and again, security. And we acquired, three years ago, Promontory, which is the preeminent regulatory advisory company for financial services. And one of the huge benefits of having Promontory in our portfolio is to be able to leverage their expertise to do this. And then there's things like making sure that the cloud will support a rich catalog of the ISVs and the SaaS providers that our clients want to be able to work with and that it dovetails seamlessly into other infrastructure services, whether it's VMware, Cloud native, Red Hat OpenShift, et cetera. >> I'm just curious there, to get your take on kind of the complexity of the regulatory environment, 'cause clearly just knowing the US regulations per se, very, very complicated in financial services. But you guys are dealing with global, multinationals, as well as banks established all around the world. >> Yeah. >> Just for the laymen, how much delta is there between the various regulations that either apply to a bank within a particular country, as well as when banks do business across a lot of countries, do they have to comply with every single regulatory infrastructure in the markets in which they serve? That's got to be a crazy mess >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely, they do. So they both have to comply with the regulator of their home country and they have to comply with the regulations in any other country that they do business. And whilst there's definitely a level of consistency across the regulations, they're not a single set of regulations. So it requires a great deal of knowledge, insight and preparation to make sure that they're going to remain compliant in every country in which they do business. >> A lot of boxes to check. >> Exactly. >> And again, that interview that I saw, it was 2016, we're now in 2020, right? So it's been four or five years. And what's interesting is, on kind of the pace on digital transformation is not super, super fast. But here we are with COVID-19. And COVID-19 has just been this light switch moment that nobody had time to prepare for. So whether it's working from home or we're participating here in a digital conference, Think is not a physical event like it's been in the past. So it's been this kind of light switch forcing function on a lot of things. As you look at your client base, within the financial services industry, what are some of the impacts that maybe people aren't thinking about, of COVID, on their ability to deliver their services? >> Yes, and I think there's two parts to your question, as I think of it. One is, which of the financial services clients were able to adapt most quickly to the requirements of being able to operate in essentially, the lockdown work from home environment imposed by COVID-19? And then the second part is, what are the waves that we see going forward for the industry? It's really interesting because clearly those clients that had moved already to a much more agile, hybrid environment were much more digital in their capabilities, had much better security around their data assets, were ones that were able to make the shift quickest. And those that were somewhat behind, lagged in those areas, are the ones that struggled, or took longer to make the shift. I think the shift has come, initially, all around how to move the predominant workforce to work from home. Most clients now, 70 or 80% or more of their workforce are working from home. And that's a huge shift for most of the banks, where notwithstanding the offshore work they were doing, still virtually all of their staff are onshore. So that was a huge effort. And with that, they needed both extra security, to make sure that there was not going to open up any security risks in doing it, capacity, because obviously capacity peaked. And then obviously just the tools and the knowhow to know how to work from home. So that was a huge piece. Those clients that had significant trading operations saw huge peaks and troughs in the trading, so you got this huge volatility around trading, as well as, of course, the huge volatility around the results. And then I think a third category of this, is just how to continue to service their clients, their customers, in a remote way. And when you look at banks, for example in Italy, some of the Italian banks have closed down up to 70% of their branches, again, to create the security that was needed to withstand the epidemic. In the U.S., you hear numbers more in the 50% range. But that's a huge shift in terms of how to support your customers in a continuous way. And just with that, as you might imagine, huge peaks in call center volumes, and challenges in terms of how to deal with that. And these are all things, as you pointed out earlier, that bring intense focus on the ability to leverage digital technology and be able to support both the employees and the customers in a seamless, secure way, online. >> There's so many, kind of facets to this, if you will, and the one that strikes me, as you're talking about the work from home, we've had a lot of work from home conversations over the last several weeks, right? A big piece of this is enabling your workforce to do that. What strikes me, the difference about banks and financial institutions is, not only do they have digital security, but they have a lot of physical security. And physical security of assets that is not so easily digitized. So, where are some of those kind of physical operations, literally like moving cash around and taking deposits and some of those things? Are they just trying to consolidate those operations to fewer points of presence? How are they kind of managing that piece of it? >> Yeah, and you bring to mind a great story that one of our managing directors who supports a client in Brazil just shared with us, because this client is a huge retail bank in Brazil, and supports the Brazilian population throughout the country. And as you say, a lot of the movement of assets, cash, is still physical. So indeed, they had to put together teams that would continue to be able to take cash to different sites, up and down the Amazon River, not withstanding all the concerns about moving around in the COVID environment. So, what you've seen is that mission-critical needs are still obviously having to be done by teams, physically onsite or moving around. And typically the way the banks have bene able to do that is they've created two or three teams that basically mirror or parallel each other, so that if one team got infected, then the second or the third team could fill in. So they've created this redundancy, or this contingency, in their team structures. >> Yeah, it's really, yeah, a unique challenge 'cause that money's got to move, right? It's got to go. Again, back to the digital transformation, one of the themes that we've seen happen over the course of time is kind of going to your point, kind of from a, where can we use cloud, to kind of a cloud first. And I guess financial services is lagging that a little bit. We saw it kind of in mobile applications too, where mobile was an afterthought, and now for a lot of people, it's mobile first. And I think in a lot of underdeveloped countries, the phone, a mobile phone, is the primary conduit to a lot of services like banking and those things. So I wonder now, as you look forward and as we get used to this behavior, and as systems and infrastructure get put in place over time to support the work from home, the lockdown, and just less people moving around, how do you see that changing? Will it get to, from a workload point of view, kind of a work from home first, versus work from home is kind of this adjunct. Do you see that taking hold over the course of several months of being in this new normal? How do you think it's going to reshape the financial services industry, as we get out of this over some period of months, or maybe many, many months? >> Yes, and I think again, you're pointing to two aspects of this. So first is, how banks will continue to support their customers. And as we've just said, many customers have started to use much more online, digital banking than they had before. And so what we expect to see is now an acceleration of the banks moving to digital online services for their clients. Because there's been a breakthrough here, which has been forced by the circumstances, and suddenly, the opportunities are opened up and they'll become even more competitive advantages to be able to do that. Both because of the client experience, but also because of the cost implications and the speed and agility to market around that. And then the other part is always the employees. So it's the clients and it's the employees. And we're already hearing our clients are engaged in conversations with our client, where they're saying, "Look, even when this epidemic passes and we'll feel confident about asking our employees to return to the office, we no longer want to just go back to where we were." And there's a lot of work already being done to look at different job categories to decide which ones can be done remotely, just as effectively as onsite, and which ones will need to be onsite or in front of the client. So to your point, I think this is going to really, really, accelerate the digitization of the industry on all fronts. >> Yeah, it is kind of this new way to think of it, not can it go remote, but why can't it not? >> Exactly. >> And I can't help but think of the infrastructure for someone in financial services in terms of the VPNs and the security on those systems, and I'm sure there's all kinds of crazy firewalls and stuff within a bank's physical four walls that is just not that easy to pick that up and go stick it in somebody's house, especially with no real opportunity for planning, or resourcing, or rolling out. And then we've seen the same thing, as you mentioned, in the call centers, which are another huge piece of the customer service experience, which again, all those people are now moved out. And we're hearing those same things, how much of them can stay moved out and stay remote, and what will it take to support them to give that same level of service. >> Well, and also, how much can move to actual automation, right? So one of the things we've seen, given not just the move of the call center employees to work remotely but even more importantly, I think given the volume of call center inquiries that have been occurring, is much more eagerness to start to use automation in that. So for example, our Watson capabilities that have been used in call centers. For some years now, there's been a big uptick in the demand of using those in the call centers so that you're agents can focus on the truly complex questions and the routing questions can get answered digitally. >> Right. >> I think the other point that we should bring out in this conversation is just the financial impact on the industry, right? We've already seen huge degradation in terms of the likelihood of huge credit exposure and what's that going to mean for the financial services industry. Loss of revenue today, given the market challenges. And so, we are seeing right now, huge focus on how to take cost out of the industry dramatically. And you're hearing banks talk about needing to take up to 40% of their cost structure down, which is going to require, yet again, a massive shift in terms of how the banks operate. >> Wow, 40%, that is a huge number. But it also just begs the question for those who got ahead of the curve a little bit. They're the ones that are going to come out of this. I would assume, in a much better position because banks, we think of them as the old state institution with the fancy building down on the corner, downtown, with the columns. But in fact, they've been at the cutting edge of technology for a really long time. It's such a hyper-competitive market, the margins are so thin, the benefits, the speed and better customer experience are so huge when you're basically trading in the commodity of cash and trying to build all those services around it. So do you expect it'll really kind of a shake out between those that were already kind of on the bandwagon a little bit and really driving forward on their digital transformation, versus the laggers that just were kind of slow to the party and now suddenly, the door to the party is closing? >> Yeah, I think you'll see some of that. I also think you're going to see more, if you like, model shift. So, one of the things that has been a constant topic of conversation is, what are core competencies that banks should be in, and what are capabilities that the banks no longer need to provide? They may have provided in the past, but they no longer need to provide in the future. And, how can they leverage a broader ecosystem, right, to be able to tap into expertise that is maybe better elsewhere and doesn't need to be a core expertise of the bank? So, I think you'll see, yes, those banks that have been moved faster, have had bigger technology investment and have been able to move faster on the digital journey doing better coming out of this. I think, very importantly for the industry as a whole, you'll start to see even more of those shifts in terms of what are core competencies that the banks need to provide, versus where do they leverage an ecosystem to provide those capabilities or services for them. And again, some of the most innovative banks are quite far down, thinking in that road. And that's again, where the role of Vintex come in, right? Because banks don't need to build and develop all of their own technology assets. They create the platform, they create the access to their customer base and then other technology firms provide products onto those platforms. >> Right. Well, rough seas for financial services as it is for everybody, as we navigate these uncharted waters. We're five or six weeks into it, things seem to be settling a little bit down. And at least in terms of the daily shocks that we were going through, through the course of March. And I think we are helping to define a new normal. I don't think, and I would imagine you would agree, that coming out of this is not going to be the same as going into it. January 2021 is not going to look like January 2020 did, at all. So just give you the final word as you look forward with some hope and enthusiasm and a smile. For your clients, what do you see as some of the positive benefits that we're going to realize in the post-COVID world? >> Well, I think when you go through huge shocks like this, which have obviously had huge, huge personal impact, but they've also had huge system impact, there's always a flight to quality, and there's a flight to those players that really represent the trust and the core of a industry. And so, I think the same will be for the financial services industry. There's been a lot of discussion about non-traditional entrants into financial services. At the end of the day, I think this is also an opportunity for banks to stand up and uphold the fact that they're trusted sources of service to their customer base, they do understand how to navigate through, as you've said, these unprecedented times, securely, protecting their customers' data and their assets. So I think you will see a resurgence of the role of a trusted industry in the path forward. >> Well Sarah, thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and perspectives, and your ongoing expertise in the field. Really enjoyed the conversation, and stay safe out there. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> All right. She's Sarah Diamond. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE's continuing coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM, >>Welcome back to IBM. Think at 2021, the virtual edition, my name is Dave Volante and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of think 21. And right now we're going to talk about banking and the post isolation economy. I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. Look at Wigley's the general manager global banking financial markets at IBM and John diagonal is the global CTO and vice president and distinguished engineer for banking and financial services. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. That's my pleasure. Look at this current economic upheaval, it's quite a bit different from the last one. Isn't it? I mean, liquidity doesn't seem to be a problem for most banks these days. I mean, if anything, they're releasing loan loss reserves that they didn't need. What's from your perspective, what's the state of banking today and hopefully as we exit this pandemic soon. Okay. >>So, so Dave, I think, like you say, it's a, it's a, it's a state in a picture that, uh, in a significantly different from what people were expecting. And I, and I think some way, in some ways you're seeing the benefits of a number of the regulations that were put into, into place after the, you know, the financial crisis last time round, right? And therefore this time, you know, a health crisis did not become a financial crisis because I think the banks were in better shape. And also, you know, governments clearly have put worldwide a lot of liquidity into the, into the system. Um, I think if you look at it though, um, maybe two or three things ready to call out, firstly, there's a, there's a massive regional variation. So if you look at the U S banking industry, uh, it's extremely buoyant and I'll come back to that in a managing the way in which it's performing. >>Uh, you know, the banks that are starting to report that first quarter results are going to show a profitability that's significantly ahead of where they were last year. And probably some of those, some of that best performance for quite a long time, if you go into Europe, it's a completely different picture. I think the banks are extremely challenged at that. And I think you're going to see a much Bleaker outlook in terms of what those banks report, as far as Asia Pacific is concerned again, you know, because they did, they have come out of the pandemic much faster that consumer businesses back into growth. Again, I think they're showing some pretty buoyant up performance as far as, as far as banking performance is concerned. I think the beast that's particularly interesting. And I think Kim is a bit of a surprise to most, uh, is, is what we've seen in the U S right? >>And in the U S what's actually happened is, uh, the investment banking side of banking businesses has been doing better than they've ever done before. There's been the most unbelievable amount of acquisition activity. You've seen a lot of what's going on with the specs that's driving the res you know, deal based fee income for the banks, the volatility in the marketplace, meaning that trading income is much, much higher than it's ever been. And therefore the banks are very much seeing a profitability on that investment banking side. That was way ahead of what I think they were, they were expecting. Consumer business is definitely down. If you look at the credit card business, it's down, if you look at, uh, you know, lending activity, that's going down, going out, it's substantially less than where it was before. There's hardly any lending growth because the economy is flat at this moment in time. >>But again, the good news that, and I think this is a worldwide, but you're not just in the us. The good news here is that because of the liquidity and some of them are special mentions that government put out that there has not been, uh, the, the level of bankruptcies that people were expecting. Right. And that for most of the provisioning that the banks did, um, in expectation of non-performing loans has been, I think, a much more, much greater than what they're going to need, which is why you're starting to supervision is being released as well, which I kind of flattering, flattering the income flattering. I think going forward though, you're going to see a different picture. >>It's the, thank you for the clarification on the regional divergence is that you're right on, I mean, European central banks are, are not the same, the same position, uh, to, to affect liquidity, but is that nuance, is that variation across the globe? Is that, uh, is that a blind spot? Is that a, is that a, a concern, uh, or the other, other greater concerns, you know, inflation and, and, and the, the, the pace of the, the return to the economy. What are your thoughts on that? >>So I think, I think the, um, the, the, the concern, um, you know, as far as the European marketplace is concerned is, um, you know, whether the, the performance that in particularly, I don't think the level of Verition in there was quite as generous as we saw in other parts of the world. And therefore, um, you know, ease the issue around non-performing loans in, in Europe going to hold the European, uh, European banks back. And are they going to, you know, therefore constrained them under lending that they put into the economy. And that then, um, you know, reduces the level of economic growth that we see in Europe. Right. I think, I think that is certainly that is certainly a concern. Um, I would be surprised and I've been looking at, you know, forecasts that have been brought forward by various people around the world around infection. >>I would be surprised if inflation starts to become a genuine problem in the, in the kind of short to medium term. I think in the industry that are going to be two or three other things that are probably going to be more, you know, going to be more issues. Right. I think the first one, which is becoming top of mind for chief executives is this whole area around operational resiliency. So, you know, regulators universally are making very, very sure that banks do not have a technical debt or a complexity of legacy systems issue. They are. And, you know, the UK has taken the lead on this and they are going so far as even requiring non-executive directors to be liable. If banks are found to not have the right policies in place, this is not being followed by other regulators around the world. Right. So, so that is very much top of mind at this moment in time. >>So I think discretionary investment is going to be, uh, you know, to watch, um, uh, solving that particular problem. I think that that's one issue. I think the other issue is what the pandemic has shown is that, and, and, and this was very evident to me. I mean, I spent the last three years out in Singapore where, you know, banks have become very digital businesses. Right. When I came into the U S in my current role, it was somewhat surprising to me as to where the U S marketplace was in terms of digitization of banking. But if you look in the last 12 months, uh, you know, I think more has been achieved in terms of banks becoming digital businesses. And they've probably done in the last two or three years. Right. And then the real acceleration of that, uh, digitalization, which is going to continue to happen. But the downside of that has been that the threat to the banking industry from essentially fintechs and big decks has exactly, you know, it's really accelerated. Right, right. I mean, just to give you an example, pay Pat is the second largest financial services institution in the us, right. So that's become a real problem of my English. The banking industry is going to have to deal with, >>I want to come back to that, but now let's bring John into the conversation. Let's talk about the tech stack. Look, it was talking about whether it was resiliency going digital. We certainly saw with the pandemic remote work, huge, huge volumes of things like PPP and, and, and, and, and mortgages and with dropping rates, et cetera. So, John, how has the tech stack been altered in the past 14 months? >>Great question, Dave and it's top of mind for almost every single financial services firm, regardless of the sector within the overall industry, every single business has been taking stock of how they handled the pandemic and the economic conditions thereafter, and all of the business needs that were driven by the pandemic. In so many situations, firms were unable to service their clients or were not competitive in serving their clients. And as a result, they've had to do very deep, uh, uh, architectural, uh, transformation and digital transformation around their core platforms, their systems of analytics and their systems, their front end systems of engagement in terms of, uh, the core processing systems that many of these institutions, some in many cases, they're 50 years old. And with any 50 year old application platform, there are inherent limitations as an inflexibility and flexibility as an inability to innovate for the future as a speed of delivery issue. In, in other words, it can be very hard to accelerate delivery of new capabilities onto an aging platform. And so in every single case, um, institutions are looking to hybrid cloud and public cloud technology, and pre-packaged AI and pre-packaged solutions from an ISV ecosystem of software vendor ecosystem to say, as long as we can crack open many of these old monolithic cores and surround them with new digitization, new user experience that spans every channel and automation from the front to back of every interaction, that's where most institutions are prioritizing. Yep. >>Banks, aren't gonna migrate. Uh, they're gonna, they're going to build a abstraction layer. I want to come back to the disruption is so interesting. You had the Coinbase IPO last month, see Tesla and micro strategy. They're putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. Jamie diamond says traditional banks are playing a smaller role in the financial system because of the new fintechs. Look at, you mentioned PayPal, the Stripe does Robin hood. You get the Silicon Valley giants have this dual disruptive disruption agenda, Apple, Amazon, even Walmart, Facebook. The question is, are traditional banks going to lose control of the payment systems? >>Yeah, I mean, I think to a large extent that is, that is already happened, right? Because I think if you look at, if you look at the experience in Asia, right, and you look at particularly organizations like iron financial, uh, you know, in India, you look at organizations like ATM the, you know, very substantial trends, particularly on the consumer payment side has actually moved, uh, away from the banks. And I think you're starting to see that in the West as well, right. With organizations like, you know, cloud. Now that's coming out with this, um, you know, pay, you know, buying out the later type of schemes. You've got and then, so you've got PayPal. And as you said, Stripe, uh, and, and others as well, but it's not just, um, you know, in the payment side. Right. I think, I think what's starting to happen is that, that are very core part of the banking business, you know, especially things like lending, for instance, where again, you are getting a number of these, um, fintechs and big, big tech companies entering the marketplace. >>And I, and I think the threat for the banks is, and this is not going to be small chunks of market share that you're going to actually lose. Right. It's, it's, it's actually, uh, it could actually be a Kodak moment. Let me give you an example. Uh, you know, you will have just seen that grab is going to be acquired by one of these facts for about $40 billion. I mean, this organization started like the Uber in Singapore. It very rapidly got into both the payment side, right? So it actually went to all of these mom and pop shops and it offered QR based, um, go out code based payment capabilities to these very small retailers. They were charging about half or a third of what MasterCard or visa were charging to run those payment routes. They took market share overnight. You look at the remittance business, right? >>They, they went into the remittance business, they set up these wallets in 28 countries around the ICR and region. They took huge chunks of business completely away from DBS, which is the local bank out there from Western union and all of these, all of these others. So, so I, I think it's a real threat. I think Jamie Dimon is saying what the banking industry has said always, right? Which is the reason we are losing is because the playing field is not even, this is not about playing fields and even right. All of these businesses have been subject to exactly the same regulation that the bank shop subject to regulations in Singapore and India, more onerous than maybe in other parts of the world. This is around the banking business, recognizing that this is a threat. And exactly, as John was saying, you got to get to delivering the customer experience. >>That juniors are wanting at the level of pasta they're prepared to pay. And you're not going to do that by purely shorting out the channels and having a cool app on somebody's smartphone. Right? If that smartphone is 48 by arcade processes and legacy systems, where can I apply? You know, like, like today, you know, you make a payment, your payment does not clear for five days, right? Whereas in Singapore I make a payment, the payment is instantaneously cleared, right? That's where the banking system is going to have to get to in order to get to that. You need to order the whole stack. And the really good news is there are many examples where this has been done very successfully by incumbent banks. You don't have to set up a digital bank on the side to do it. An incumbent bank could do it, and it can do it in a sense of a period of time, or does sense for level of investment. A lot of IBM's business across our consulting, as well as our, our technology stack is very much trying to do that with our clients. So I am personally very bullish about what the industry >>Yeah. I mean, taking friction out of the system sometimes with the case of crypto taking the middle person out of the system. But I think you guys are savvy. You understand that, you know, like, yeah, Jamie diamonds a couple of years ago said, he'd fire anybody doing crypto Janet Yellen and says, ah, I don't really get it. You know, Warren buffet. But I think as technology people, we look at it and say, okay, wait a minute. This is an interesting Petri dish. There's, there's fundamental technology here that has massive funding that is going to inform, you know, the future. I think, you know, big bags are gonna lean in some of them and others, others. Won't, uh, John, give you the last word here, >>But for sure they're leaning in. Uh, so to just, to, to, to think about, uh, uh, something that Likud said a moment ago, the reason these startups were able to innovate fast was because they didn't have the legacy. They didn't have the spaghetti lying around. They were able to be relentlessly laser focused on building new, using the API ecosystem, going straight to public and hybrid cloud and not worrying about everything that had been built for the last 50 years or so. The benefit for existing institutions, the incumbents is that they can use all of the same techniques and tools and hybrid cloud accelerators in terms. And we're not just thinking about, um, uh, retail banking here, your question around the industry, that disruption from Bitcoin, blockchain technologies, new ways of processing securities. It is playing out in every single securities processing and capital markets organization. Right now I'm working with several organizations right now, exactly on how to build custody systems, to take advantage of these non fungible digital assets. It's a hot, hot topic around which there's, uh, incredible, uh, appetite to invest an incredible appetite to innovate. And we know that the center of all these technologies are going to be cloud forward cloud ready, AI infused data infuse technologies. >>So I want to have you back. I wish you had more time. I want to talk about specs. I want to talk about NFTs. I want to talk about technology behind all this really great conversation and really appreciate your time. I'm sorry. We got to go. >>Thank you. Thanks so much indeed, for having us. >>Oh, really? Pleasure. Was mine. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for IBM. Think 2021. You're watching the cube.

>>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 The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of think 21. And right now we're gonna talk about banking in the post isolation economy. I'm very pleased to welcome our next guest. Look at wag lee is the general manager, Global banking financial markets at IBM and john Degnan is the global ceo and vice president and distinguished engineer for banking and financial services. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Yeah >>that's my pleasure. Look at this current economic upheaval. It's quite a bit different from the last one, isn't it? I mean liquidity doesn't seem to be a problem for most pecs these days. I mean if anything they're releasing loan loss reserves that they didn't need. What's from your perspective, what's the state of banking today and hopefully as we exit this pandemic soon. >>So so dave, I think, like you say, it's, you know, it's a it's a state and a picture that in a significantly different from what people were expecting. And I think some way, in some ways you're seeing the benefits of a number of the regulations that were put into into place after the, you know, the financial crisis last time around, right? And therefore this time, you know, a health crisis did not become a financial crisis, because I think the banks were in better shape. And also, you know, governments clearly have put worldwide a lot of liquidity into the, into the system. I think if you look at it though, maybe two or three things ready to call out firstly, there's a there's a massive regional variation. So if you look at the U. S. Banking industry, it's extremely buoyant and I'll come back to that in a minute in the way in which is performing, you know, the banks that are starting to report their first quarter results are going to show profitability. That's you know significantly ahead of where they were last year and probably some of the some of their best performance for quite a long time. If you go into europe, it's a completely different picture. I think the banks are extremely challenged out there and I think you're going to see a much bleaker outlook in terms of what those banks report and as far as Asia pacific is concerned again, you know because they they have come out of the pandemic much faster than consumer businesses back into growth. Again, I think they're showing some pretty buoyant performance as far as as far as banking performance is concerned. I think the piece that's particularly interesting and I think him as a bit of a surprise to most is what we've seen in the U. S. Right. And in the US what's actually happened is uh the investment banking side of banking businesses has been doing better than they've ever done before. There's been the most unbelievable amount of acquisition activity. You've seen a lot of what's going on with this facts that's driving deal raised, you know, deal based fee income for the banks. The volatility in the marketplace is meaning that trading income is much much higher than it's ever been. And therefore the banks are very much seeing a profitability on that investment banking side. That was way ahead of what I think they were. They were expecting consumer businesses definitely down. If you look at the credit card business, it's down. If you look at, you know, lending activity that's going down going out is substantially less than where it was before. There's hardly any lending growth because the economy clearly is flat at this moment in time. But again, the good news that, and I think this is a worldwide which are not just in us, the good news here is that because of the liquidity and and some of the special measures the government put out there, there has not been the level of bankruptcies that people were expecting, right. And therefore most of the provisioning that the banks did um in expectation of non performing loans has been, I think, a much more, much greater than what they're going to need, which is why you're starting to see provisions being released as well, which are kind of flattering, flattering the income, flattering the engine. I think going forward that you're going to see a different picture >>is the re thank you for the clarification on the regional divergence, is that and you're right on, I mean, european central banks are not the same, the same position uh to to affect liquidity. But is that nuances that variation across the globe? Is that a is that a blind spot? Is that a is that a concern or the other other greater concerns? You know, inflation and and and the the pace of the return to the economy? What are your thoughts on that? >>So, I think, I think the concern, um, you know, as far as the european marketplace is concerned is um you know, whether whether the performance that and particularly, I don't think the level of provisions in there was quite a generous, as we saw in other parts of the world, and therefore, you know, is the issue around non performing loans in in europe, going to hold the european uh european banks back? And are they going to, you know, therefore, constrain the amount of lending that they put into the economy and that then, um, you know, reduces the level of economic growth that we see in europe. Right? I think, I think that is certainly that is certainly a concern. Um I would be surprised and I've been looking at, you know, forecasts that have been put forward by various people around the world around inflation. I would be surprised if inflation starts to become a genuine problem in the, in the kind of short to medium term, I think in the industry that are going to be two or three other things that are probably going to be more, you know, going to be more issues. Right. I think the first one which is becoming top of mind for chief executives, is this whole area around operational resiliency. So, you know, regulators universally are making very very sure that banks do not have a technical debt or a complexity of legacy systems issue. They are and you know, the U. K. Has taken the lead on this and they are going so far as even requiring non executive directors to be liable if banks are found to not have the right policies in place. This is now being followed by other regulators around the world. Right. So so that is very much drop in mind at this moment in time. So I think discretionary investment is going to be put you know, towards solving that particular problem. I think that's that's one issue. I think the other issue is what the pandemic has shown is that and and and this was very evident to me and I mean I spent the last three years out in Singapore where you know, banks have become very digital businesses. Right? When I came into the U. S. In my current role, it was somewhat surprising to me as to where the U. S. Market place was in terms of digitization of banking. But if you look in the last 12 months, you know, I think more has been achieved in terms of banks becoming digital businesses and they've probably done in the last two or three years. Right. And that the real acceleration of that digitization which is going to continue to happen. But the downside of that has been that the threat to the banking industry from essentially fintech and big tex has exactly, it's really accelerated. Right, Right. Just to give you an example, Babel is the second largest financial services institutions in the US. Right. So that's become a real problem I think with the banking industry is going to have to deal with >>and I want to come back to that. But now let's bring john into the conversation. Let's talk about the tech stack. Look, it was talking about whether it was resiliency going digital, We certainly saw over the pandemic, remote work, huge, huge volumes of things like TPP and and and and and mortgages and with dropping rates, etcetera. So john, how is the tech stack Been altered in the past 14 months? >>Great question. Dave. And it's top of mind for almost every single financial services firm, regardless of the sector within the overall industry, every single business has been taking stock of how they handled the pandemic and the economic conditions thereafter and all of the business needs that were driven by the pandemic. In so many situations, firms were unable to service their clients or we're not competitive in serving their clients. And as a result they've had to do very deep uh architectural transformation and digital transformation around their core platforms. Their systems of analytics and their systems different end systems of engagement In terms of the core processing systems that many of these institutions, some in many cases there are 50 years old And with any 50 year old application platform there are inherent limitations. There's an in flex itty inflexibility. There's an inability to innovate for the future. There's a speed of delivery issue. In other words, it can be very hard to accelerate the delivery of new capabilities onto an aging platform. And so in every single case um institutions are looking to hybrid cloud and public cloud technology and pre packaged a ai and prepackaged solutions from an I. S. V. Ecosystem of software vendor ecosystem to say. As long as we can crack open many of these old monolithic cause and surround them with new digitalization, new user experience that spans every channel and automation from the front to back of every interaction. That's where most institutions are prioritizing. >>Banks aren't going to migrate, they're gonna they're gonna build an abstraction layer. I want to come back to the disruption is so interesting. The coin base I. P. O. Last month see Tesla and microstrategy. They're putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. Jamie diamonds. Traditional banks are playing a smaller role in the financial system because of the new fin text. Look at, you mentioned Paypal, the striped as Robin Hood, you get the Silicon Valley giants have this dual disrupt disruption agenda. Apple amazon even walmart facebook. The question is, are traditional banks going to lose control of the payment systems? >>Yeah. I mean I think to a large extent that is that has already happened, right? Because I think if you look at, you know, if you look at the experience in ASia, right? And you look at particularly organizations like and financial, you know, in India, you look at organizations like A T. M. You know, very substantial chance, particularly on the consumer payments side has actually moved away from the banks. And I think you're starting to see that in the west as well, right? With organizations like, you know, cloud, No, that's coming out with this, you know, you know, buying out a later type of schemes. You've got great. Um, and then so you've got paper and as you said, strike, uh and and others as well, but it's not just, you know, in the payment side. Right. I think, I think what's starting to happen is that there are very core part of the banking business. You know, especially things like lending for instance, where again, you are getting a number of these Frontex and big, big tech companies entering the marketplace. And and I think the threat for the banks is this is not going to be small chunks of market share that you're going to actually lose. Right? It's it's actually, it could actually be a Kodak moment. Let me give you an example. Uh, you know, you will have just seen that grab is going to be acquired by one of these facts for about $40 billion. I mean, this organization started like the Uber in Singapore. It very rapidly got into both the payment site. Right? So it actually went to all of these moment pop shops and then offered q are based um, 12 code based payment capabilities to these very small retailers, they were charging about half or a third or world Mastercard or Visa were charging to run those payment rails. They took market share overnight. You look at the Remittance business, right? They went into the Remittance business. They set up these wallets in 28 countries around the Asean region. They took huge chunks of business completely away from DBS, which is the local bank out there from Western Union and all of these, all of these others. So, so I think it's a real threat. I think Jamie Dimon is saying what the banking industry has said always right, which is the reason we're losing is because the playing field is not even, this is not about playing fields. Been even write, all of these businesses have been subject to exactly the same regulation that the banks are subject to. Regulations in Singapore and India are more onerous than maybe in other parts of the world. This is about the banking business, recognizing that this is a threat and exactly as john was saying, you've got to get to delivering the customer experience that consumers are wanting at the level of cost that they're prepared to pay. And you're not going to do that by purely sorting out the channels and having a cool app on somebody's smartphone, Right? If that's not funny reported by arcade processes and legacy systems when I, you know, like, like today, you know, you make a payment, your payment does not clear for five days, right? Whereas in Singapore, I make a payment. The payment is instantaneously clear, right? That's where the banking system is going to have to get to. In order to get to that. You need to water the whole stack. And the really good news is that many examples where this has been done very successfully by incumbent banks. You don't have to set up a digital bank on the site to do it. And incumbent bank can do it and it can do it in a sensible period of time at a sensible level of investment. A lot of IBM s business across our consulting as well as our technology stack is very much trying to do that with our clients. So I am personally very bullish about what the industry >>yeah, taking friction out of the system, sometimes with a case of crypto taking the middle person out of the system. But I think you guys are savvy, you understand that, you know, you yeah, Jamie Diamond a couple years ago said he'd fire anybody doing crypto Janet Yellen and says, I don't really get a Warren Buffett, but I think it's technology people we look at and say, okay, wait a minute. This is an interesting Petri dish. There's, there's a fundamental technology here that has massive funding that is going to inform, you know, the future. And I think, you know, big bags are gonna lean in some of them and others, others won't john give you the last word here >>for sure, they're leaning in. Uh so to just to to think about uh something that lick it said a moment ago, the reason these startups were able to innovate fast was because they didn't have the legacy, They didn't have the spaghetti lying around. They were able to be relentlessly laser focused on building new, using the app ecosystem going straight to public and hybrid cloud and not worrying about everything that had been built for the last 50 years or so. The benefit for existing institutions, the incumbents is that they can use all of the same techniques and tools and hybrid cloud accelerators in terms And we're not just thinking about uh retail banking here. Your question around the industry that disruption from Bitcoin Blockchain technologies, new ways of processing securities. It is playing out in every single securities processing and capital markets organization right now. I'm working with several organizations right now exactly on how to build custody systems to take advantage of these non fungible digital assets. It's a hard, hard topic around which there's an incredible appetite to invest. An incredible appetite to innovate. And we know that the center of all these technologies are going to be cloud forward cloud ready. Ai infused data infused technologies >>Guys, I want to have you back. I wish I had more time. I want to talk about SPAC. So I want to talk about N. F. T. S. I want to talk about technology behind all this. You really great conversation. I really appreciate your time. I'm sorry. We got to go. >>Thank you. Thanks very much indeed for having us. It was a real pleasure. >>Really. Pleasure was mine. Thank you for watching everybody's day. Volonte for IBM think 2021. You're watching the Cube. Mhm.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> When a piece of digital art sells for $69.3 million, more than has ever been paid for works, by Gauguin or Salvador Dali, making it created the third most expensive living artists in the world. One can't help but take notice and ask, what is going on? The latest craze around NFTs may feel a bit bubblicious, but it's yet another sign, that the digital age is now fully upon us. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon's CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we want to take a look at some of the trends, that may be difficult for observers and investors to understand, but we think offer significant insights to the future and possibly some opportunities for young investors many of whom are fans of this program. And how the trends may relate to enterprise tech. Okay, so this guy Beeple is now the hottest artist on the planet. That's his Twitter profile. That picture on the inset. His name is Mike Winkelmann. He is actually a normal looking dude, but that's the picture he chose for his Twitter. This collage reminds me of the Million Dollar Homepage. You may already know the story, but many of you may not. Back in 2005 a college kid from England named Alex Tew, T-E-W created The Million Dollar Homepage to fund his education. And his idea was to create a website with a million pixels, and sell ads at a dollar for each pixel. Guess how much money he raised. A million bucks, right? No, wrong. He raised $1,037,100. How so you ask? Well, he auctioned off the last 1000 pixels on eBay, which fetched an additional $38,000. Crazy, right? Well, maybe not. Pretty creative in a way, way early sign of things to come. Now, I'm not going to go deep into NFTs, and explain the justification behind them. There's a lot of material that's been published that can do justice to the topic better than I can. But here are the basics, NFTs stands for Non-Fungible Tokens. They are digital representations of assets that exist in a blockchain. Now, each token as a unique and immutable identifier, and it uses cryptography to ensure its authenticity. NFTs by the name, they're not fungible. So, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies, which can be traded on a like-for-like basis, in other words, if you and I each own one bitcoin we know exactly how much each of our bitcoins is worth at any point of time. Non-Fungible Tokens each have their own unique values. So, they're not comparable on a like-to-like basis. But what's the point of this? Well, NFTs can be applied to any property, identities tweets, videos, we're seeing collectables, digital art, pretty much anything. And it's really. The use cases are unlimited. And NFTs can streamline transactions, and they can be bought and sold very efficiently without the need for a trusted third party involved. Now, the other benefit is the probability of fraud, is greatly reduced. So where do NFTs fit as an asset class? Well, they're definitely a new type of asset. And again, I'm not going to try to justify their existence, but I want to talk about the choices, that investors have in the market today. The other day, I was on a call with Jay Po. He is a VC and a Principal at a company called Stage 2 Capital. He's a former Bessemer VC and one of the sharper investors around. And he was talking about the choices that investors have and he gave a nice example that I want to share with you and try to apply here. Now, as an investor, you have alternatives, of course we're showing here a few with their year to date charts. Now, as an example, you can buy Amazon stock. Now, if you bought just about exactly a year ago you did really well, you probably saw around an 80% return or more. But if you want to jump in today, your mindset might be, hmm, well, okay. Amazon, they're going to be around for a long time, so it's kind of low risk and I like the stock, but you're probably going to get, well let's say, maybe a 10% annual return over the longterm, 15% or maybe less maybe single digits, but, maybe more than that but it's unlikely that any kind of reasonable timeframe within any reasonable timeframe you're going to get a 10X return. In order to get that type of return on invested capital, Amazon would have to become a $16 trillion valued company. So, you sit there, you asked yourself, what's the probability that Amazon goes out of business? Well, that's pretty low, right? And what are the chances it becomes a $16 trillion company over the next several years? Well, it's probably more likely that it continues to grow at that more stable rate that I talked about. Okay, now let's talk about Snowflake. Now, as you know, we've covered the company quite extensively. We watched this company grow from an early stage startup and then saw its valuation increase steadily as a private company, but you know, even early last year it was valued around $12 billion, I think in February, and as late as mid September right before the IPO news hit that Marc Benioff and Warren Buffett were going to put in $250 million each at the IPO or just after the IPO and it was projected that Snowflake's valuation could go over $20 billion at that point. And on day one after the IPO Snowflake, closed worth more than $50 billion, the stock opened at 120, but unless you knew a guy, you had to hold your nose and buy on day one. And you know, maybe got it at 240, maybe you got it at 250, you might have got it at higher and at the time you might recall, I said, You're likely going to get a better price than on day one, which is usually the case with most IPOs, stock today's around 230. But you look at Snowflake today and if you want to buy in, you look at it and say, Okay, well I like the company, it's probably still overvalued, but I can see the company's value growing substantially over the next several years, maybe doubling in the near to midterm [mumbles] hit more than a hundred billion dollar valuation back as recently as December, so that's certainly feasible. The company is not likely to flame out because it's highly valued, I have to probably be patient for a couple of years. But you know, let's say I liked the management, I liked the company, maybe the company gets into the $200 billion range over time and I can make a decent return, but to get a 10X return on Snowflake you have to get to a valuation of over a half a trillion. Now, to get there, if it gets there it's going to become one of the next great software companies of our time. And you know, frankly if it gets there I think it's going to go to a trillion. So, if that's what your bet is then you know, you would be happy with that of course. But what's the likelihood? As an investor you have to evaluate that, what's the probability? So, it's a lower risk investment in Snowflake but maybe more likely that Snowflake, you know, they run into competition or the market shifts, maybe they get into the $200 billion range, but it really has to transform the industry execute for you to get in to that 10 bagger territory. Okay, now let's look at a different asset that is cryptocurrency called Compound, way more risky. But Compound is a decentralized protocol that allows you to lend and borrow cryptocurrencies. Now, I'm not saying go out and buy compound but just as a thought exercise is it's got an asset here with a lower valuation, probably much higher upside, but much higher risk. But so for Compound to get to 10X return it's got to get to $20 billion valuation. Now, maybe compound isn't the right asset for your cup of tea, but there are many cryptos that have made it that far and if you do your research and your homework you could find a project that's much, much earlier stage that yes, is higher risk but has a much higher upside that you can participate in. So, this is how investors, all investors really look at their choices and make decisions. And the more sophisticated investors, they're going to use detailed metrics and analyze things like MOIC, Multiple on Invested Capital and IRR, which is Internal Rate of Return, do TAM analysis, Total Available Market. They're going to look at competition. They're going to look at detailed company models in ARR and Churn rates and so forth. But one of the things we really want to talk about today and we brought this up at the snowflake IPO is if you were Buffet or Benioff and you had to, you know, quarter of a dollars to put in you could get an almost guaranteed return with your late in the game, but pre IPO money or a look if you were Mike Speiser or one of the earlier VCs or even someone like Jeremy Burton who was part of the inside network you could get stock or options, much cheaper. You get a 5X, 10X, 50X or even North of a hundred X return like the early VCs who took a big risk. But chances are, you're not one of these in one of these categories. So how can you as a little guy participate in something big and you might remember at the time of the snowflake IPO we showed you this picture, who are these people, Olaf Carlson-Wee, Chris Dixon, this girl Sono. And of course Tim Berners-Lee, you know, that these are some of the folks that inspired me personally to pay attention to crypto. And I want to share the premise that caught my attention. It was this. Think about the early days of the internet. If you saw what Berners-Lee was working on or Linus Torvalds, in one to invest in the internet, you really couldn't. I mean, you couldn't invest in Linux or TCP/IP or HTTP. Suppose you could have invested in Cisco after its IPO that would have paid off pretty big time, for sure. You know, he could have waited for the Netscape IPO but the core infrastructure of the internet was fundamentally not directly a candidate for investment by you or really, you know, by anybody. And Satya Nadella said the other day we have reached maximum centralization. The main protocols of the internet were largely funded by the government and they've been co-opted by the giants. But with crypto, you actually can invest in core infrastructure technologies that are building out a decentralized internet, a new internet, you know call it web three Datto. It's a big part of the investment thesis behind what Carlson-wee is doing. And Andreessen Horowitz they have two crypto funds. They've raised more than $800 million to invest and you should read the firm's crypto investment thesis and maybe even take their crypto startup classes and some great content there. Now, one of the people that I haven't mentioned in this picture is Camila Russo. She's a journalist she's turned into hardcore crypto author is doing great job explaining the white hot defining space or decentralized finance. If you're just at read her work and educate yourself and learn more about the future and be happy perhaps you'll find some 10X or even hundred X opportunities. So look, there's so much innovation going around going on around blockchain and crypto. I mean, you could listen to Warren Buffet and Janet Yellen who implied this is all going to end badly. But while look, these individuals they're smart people. I don't think they would be my go-to source on understanding the potential of the technology and the future of what it could bring. Now, we've talked earlier at the, at the start here about NFTs. DeFi is one of the most interesting and disruptive trends to FinTech, names like Celsius, Nexo, BlockFi. BlockFi let's actually the average person participate in liquidity pools is actually quite interesting. Crypto is going mainstream Tesla, micro strategy putting Bitcoin on their balance sheets. We have a 2017 Jamie diamond. He called Bitcoin a tulip bulb like fraud, yet just the other day JPM announced a structured investment vehicle to give its clients a basket of stocks that have exposure to crypto, PayPal allowing customers to buy, sell, and Hodl crypto. You can trade crypto on Robin Hood. Central banks are talking about launching digital currencies. I talked about the Fedcoin for a number of years and why not? Coinbase is doing an IPO will give it a value of over a hundred billion. Wow, that sounds frothy, but still big names like Mark Cuban and Jamaat palliate Patiala have been active in crypto for a while. Gronk is getting into NFTs. So it goes to have a little bit of that bubble feel to it. But look often when tech bubbles burst they shake out the pretenders but if there's real tech involved, some contenders emerge. So, and they often do so as dominant players. And I really believe that the innovation around crypto is going to be sustained. Now, there is a new web being built out. So if you want to participate, you got to do some research figure out things like how PolkaWorks, make a call on whether you think avalanche is an Ethereum killer dig in and find out about new projects and form a thesis. And you may, as a small player be able to find some big winners, but look you do have to be careful. There was a lot of fraud during the ICO. Craze is your risk. So understand the Tokenomics and maybe as importantly the Pump-a-nomics, because they certainly loom as dangers. This is not for the faint of heart but because I believe it involves real tech. I like it way better than Reddit stocks like GameStop for example, now not to diss Reddit. There's some good information on Reddit. If you're patient, you can find it. And there's lots of good information flowing on Discord. There's people flocking to Telegram as a hedge against big tech. Maybe there's all sounds crazy. And you know what, if you've grown up in a privileged household and you have a US Education you know, maybe it is nuts and a bit too risky for you. But if you're one of the many people who haven't been able to participate in these elite circles there are things going on, especially outside of the US that are democratizing investment opportunities. And I think that's pretty cool. You just got to be careful. So, this is a bit off topic from our typical focus and ETR survey analysis. So let's bring this back to the enterprise because there's a lot going on there as well with blockchain. Now let me first share some quotes on blockchain from a few ETR Venn Roundtables. First comment is from a CIO to diversified holdings company who says correctly, blockchain will hit the finance industry first but there are use cases in healthcare given the privacy and security concerns and logistics to ensure provenance and reduce fraud. And to that individual's point about finance. This is from the CTO of a major financial platform. We're really taking a look at payments. Yeah. Do you think traditional banks are going to lose control of the payment systems? Well, not without a fight, I guess, but look there's some real disruption possibilities here. And just last comment from a government CIO says, we're going to wait until the big platform players they get into their software. And so that is happening Oracle, IBM, VMware, Microsoft, AWS Cisco, they all have blockchain initiatives going on, now by the way, none of these tech companies wants to talk about crypto. They try to distance themselves from that topic which is understandable, I guess, but I'll tell you there's far more innovation going on in crypto than there is in enterprise tech companies at this point. But I predict that the crypto innovations will absolutely be seeping into enterprise tech players over time. But for now the cloud players, they want to support developers who are building out this new internet. The database is certainly a logical place to support a mutable transactions which allow people to do business one-on-one and have total confidence that the source hasn't been hacked or changed and infrastructure to support smart contracts. We've seen that. The use cases in the enterprise are endless asset tracking data access, food, tracking, maintenance, KYC or know your customer, there's applications in different industries, telecoms, oil and gas on and on and on. So look, think of NFTs as a signal crypto craziness is a signal. It's a signal as to how IT in other parts of companies and their data might be organized, managed and tracked and protected, and very importantly, valued. Look today. There's a lot of memes. Crypto kitties, art, of course money as well. Money is the killer app for blockchain, but in the future the underlying technology of blockchain and the many percolating innovations around it could become I think will become a fundamental component of a new digital economy. So get on board, do some research and learn for yourself. Okay, that's it for today. Remember all of these episodes they're available as podcasts, wherever you listen. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Please feel free to comment on my LinkedIn post or tweet me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action and data science. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, be careful out there in crypto land. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent Executive Summit 2020 sponsored by Accenture and AWS. What? Welcome, everyone to the Cube Virtual and our coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, part of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we're talking about the power of three. And what happens when you bring together the scientific know how of a global bias Bio pharmaceutical powerhouse in Takeda, a leading cloud services provider in AWS and Accenture's ability to innovate, execute and deliver innovation, Joining me to talk about these things we have Aaron. Sorry. Arjun, baby. He is the senior managing director and chairman of Accenture's Diamond Leadership Council. Welcome margin, you Carl Hick. He is the chief digital and information officer at Takeda. >>Pleasure to be here. Thank you. Rebecca >>and Brian Bowen, global director and head of the Accenture AWS Business Group at Amazon Web services. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you. So, as I said, we're talking today about this relationship between your three organizations. Carl, I want to talk with you. I know you're at the beginning of your cloud journey. What was the compelling reason Why? Why I moved to the cloud and why now? >>Yeah. No, thank you for the question. So you know as ah, bio pharmaceutical leader were committed toe bringing better health and a brighter future to our patients. We're doing that by translating science and toe some really innovative and life transporting therapies. But throughout, you know, we believe that there's, ah responsible use of technology of data and of innovation. And those three ingredients air really key to helping us deliver on that promise. And so, you know, while I think I'll call it this Cloud Journeys already has always been a part of our strategy. Andi have made some pretty steady progress over the last years with a number of local it diverse approaches to the digital in AI. We just weren't seeing the impact at scale that we wanted to see. Andi, I think that you know, there's a there's a need ultimately to accelerate and broaden that shift. And, you know, we were commenting on this earlier, but there's, you know, it's been highlighted by a number of factors. One of those has been certainly a number of the large acquisitions we've made Shire being the most pressing example, but also the global pandemic. Both of those highlight the need for us to move faster at the speed of cloud ultimately on. So we started thinking outside of the box because it was taking us too long and we decided to leverage the strategic partner model on. It's giving us a chance to think about our challenges very differently. We call this the power of three on. Ultimately, our focus is singularly on our patients. I mean, they're waiting for us. We need Thio. Get there faster. It can take years. And so I think that there is a focus on innovation at a rapid speed so we can move ultimately from treating conditions to keeping people healthy. >>So as you are embarking on this journey, what are some of the insights you want to share about? About what you're seeing so far? >>Yeah. No, it's a great question. So I mean, look, maybe right before I highlight some of the key insights, I would say that, you know, with Cloud now as the as a launchpad for innovation, you know, our vision all along has been that in less than 10 years we want every single to Kito associate. We're employees to be empowered by an AI assistant. And I think that, you know that's gonna help us make faster, better decisions that will help us. Uh, fundamentally, you know, deliver transformative therapies and better experiences to to that ecosystem, to our patients, to positions to payers, etcetera much faster than we previously thought possible. Um, and I think that technologies like cloud and edge computing together with a very powerful or call it data fabric is gonna help us to create this this really time. I'll call it the digital ecosystem. The data has to flow ultimately seamlessly between our patients and providers or partners or researchers. Etcetera. Uh, and so we've been thinking about this, Uh, call it. We call it sort of this pyramid. Um, that helps us describe our vision on a lot of it has to do with ultimately modernizing the foundation, modernizing and re architect ing the platforms that drive the company, heightening our focus on data, which means that there's an accelerated shift towards enterprise data platforms and digital products. And then, ultimately, a, you know, really an engine for innovation. Sitting at the very top, um, and So I think with that, you know, there's a few different I'll call it insights that you know are quickly kind of come zooming into focus. I would say one is this need to collaborate very differently. Um, you know, not only internally, but you know, how do we define ultimately and build a connected digital ecosystem with the right partners and technologies? Externally, I think the second component that maybe people don't think as much about but, you know, I find critically important is for us to find ways of really transforming our culture. We have to unlock talent and shift the culture, certainly as a large biopharmaceutical, very differently. And then, lastly, you've touched on it already. Which is, you know, innovation at the speed of cloud. How do we re imagine that you know how Doe ideas go from getting tested in months? That kind of getting tested in days, you know, how do we collaborate very differently on So I think those air three, perhaps of the larger chocolate insights that you know the three of us are spending a lot of time thinking about right now. >>So, Arjun, I want to bring you into this conversation a little bit. Let's let's delve into those a bit. Talk first about the collaboration that Carl was referencing there. How how have you seen that it is enabling colleagues and teams to communicate differently, interact in new and different ways, both internally and externally. As Carl said, >>No, thank you for that. And I've got to give called a lot of credit because as we started to think about this journey, it was clear was a bold ambition. It was, uh, something that, you know, we had all to do differently. And so the concept of the power of three that Karl has constructed has become a label for us as a way to think about what are we going to do to collectively drive this journey forward? And to me, the unique ways of collaboration means three things. The first one is that what is expected is that the three parties they're going to come together, and it's more than just the sum of our resource is, and by that I mean that we have to bring all of ourselves all of our collective capabilities as an example. Amazon has amazing supply chain capabilities there. One of the best at supply chain. So in addition to Resource is when we have supply chain innovations, that's something that they're bringing in addition to just talent and assets. Similarly, for Accenture, right, we do a lot in the talent space. So how do we bring our thinking as to how we apply best practices for talent to this partnership? So as we think about this, so that's that's the first one. The second one is about shared success. Very early on in this partnership, we started to build some foundations and actually develop seven principles that all of us would look at it as the basis for this success shared success model. And we continue to hold that sort of in the forefront as we think about this collaboration. And maybe the third thing I would say is this one team mindset. So whether it's the three of our CEO's that get together every couple of months to think about this partnership or it is the governance model that Karl has put together, which has all three parties in the governance and every level of leadership, we always think about this as a collective group so that we can keep that front and center. And what this, I think, ultimately has enabled us to do Is it allowed us to move its speed, be more flexible and ultimately all be looking at the target the same way the North south? The same way. >>Brian. What? What about you? What have you observed? What are you thinking about? In terms of how this is helping teams collaborate differently? >>Yeah, absolutely. And Georgia made some great points there. And I think if you really think about what he's talking about, it's that diversity of talent, diversity of skill and viewpoint and even culture. Right? And so we see that in the power of three. And I think if we drilled down into what we see at Takeda and frankly, Takeda was really, I think, pretty visionary and on their way here, right, and taking this kind of cross functional approach and applying it to how they operate day to day. So moving from a more functional view of the world to more of a product oriented view of the world, right? So when you think about, we're gonna be organized around a product or service or capability that we're gonna provide to our customers are patients or donors. In this case, it implies a different structure, although altogether in a different way of thinking. Right, because now you've got technical people in business experts and marketing experts all working together in This is sort of a cross collaboration, and what's great about that is it's really the only way to succeed with Cloud, right, because the old ways of thinking where you've got application people in infrastructure, people and business people is sub optimal, right, because we can all access this tools and capabilities. And the best way to do that isn't across kind of a cross collaborative way. And so this is product oriented mindset of Takeda was already on, I think is allowed us to move faster in those areas. >>Carl, I wanna go back to this idea of unlocking talent and culture, and this is something that both Brian and origin have talked about. Two people are are an essential part of their at the heart of your organization. How will their experience of work change and how are you helping reimagine and reinforce a strong organizational culture, particularly at this time when so many people are working remotely. >>Yeah, that's a great question. And it's something that, you know, I think we all have to think a lot about. I mean, I think, you know, driving this this call this this digital and data kind of capability building takes a lot of a lot of thinking. So I mean, there's a few different elements in terms of how we're tackling this one is we're recognizing. And it's not just for the technology organization or for those actors that that we're innovating with. But it's really across, you know, all of Takeda. We're working through ways of raising what I'll call the overall digital leaders literacy of the organization. You know, what are the, You know, what are the skills that are needed almost at a baseline level, even for, ah, global biopharmaceutical company? And how do we deploy? I'll call it Those learning resource is very broadly, and then secondly, I think that, you know, we're very clear that there's a number of areas where they're very specialized skills that are needed. Uh, my organization is one of those, and so, you know, we're fostering ways in which you know, were very kind of quickly kind of creating avenues, excitement for for associates in that space. So one example specifically is we use, you know, during these very much sort of remote sort of days, we use what we call global it me days, and we set a day aside every single month and this last Friday. Um, you know, we create during that time, it's time for personal development. Um, and we provide active seminars and training on things like, you know, robotic process automation, Data Analytics Cloud. Uh, in this last month, we've been doing this for months and months now, but in his last month, more than 50% of my organization participated. And there's this huge positive shift, both in terms of access and excitement about really harnessing those new skills and being able to apply them on. So I think that that's, you know, 11 element that can be considered. And then thirdly, of course, every organization has to work on. How do you prioritize talent, acquisition and management and competencies that you can't re skill? I mean, there's just some new capabilities that we don't have, And so there's a large focus that I have with our executive team in our CEO and thinking through those critical roles that we need to activate in order kind of thio build on this, uh, this business led cloud transformation and lastly, probably the hardest one. But the one that I'm most jazzed about is really this focus on changing the mindsets and behaviors. Andi, I think there, you know, this is where the power of three is really kind of coming together nicely. E mean, we're working on things like, you know, how do we create this patient obsessed curiosity? Um, and really kind of unlock innovation with a really kind of a growth mindset, Uh, and the level of curiosity that's needed not to just continue to do the same things, but to really challenge the status quo. So that's one big area of focus. We're having the agility toe act just faster. I mean, toe worry less. I guess I would say about kind of the standard chain of command, but how do you make more speedy, more courageous decisions? And this is places where we can emulate the way that ah, partner like AWS works? Or how do we collaborate across the number of boundaries, you know, and I think origin spoke eloquently to a number of partnerships that we can build so we can break down some of these barriers and use these networks. Um, whether it's within our own internal ecosystem or externally, to help to create value faster. So a lot of energy around ways of working we'll have to check back in. But, I mean, we're early in on this mindset and behavioral shift, but a lot of good early momentum. >>Carl, you've given me a good segue to talk to Brian about innovation because you said a lot of the things that I was the customer obsession and this idea of innovating much more quickly. Obviously. Now the world has its eyes on drug development, and we've all learned a lot about it in the past few months. And accelerating drug development is all of is of great interest to all of us. Brian How does a transformation like this help a company's ability to become more agile and more innovative? Add quicker speed to >>Yeah, No, absolutely. And I think some of the things that Karl talked about just now are critical to that. Right? I think, where sometimes you know, folks fall short is they think, you know, we're going to roll out the technology and the technology is going to be the Silver Bullet, where, in fact it is. The culture it is is the talent, and it's the focus on that. That's going to be, you know, the determinant of success. And I will say, You know, in this power of three arrangement, Karl talked a lot about the pyramid, um, talent and culture and that change. And that kind of thinking about that has been a first class citizen since the very beginning. Right? That absolutely is critical for being there. Um and so that's been that's been key. And so we think about innovation at Amazon and AWS, and Carl mentioned some of things that, you know, partner like AWS can bring to the table is we talk a lot about builders, right? So we're kind of obsessive about builders, Onda. We mean what we mean by that is way at Amazon, we hire for builders, we cultivate builders and we like to talk to our customers about it as well. And it also implies a different mindset. Right? When you're a builder, you have that curiosity. You have that ownership. You have that steak and whatever I am creating. I'm going to be a co owner of this product or the service right getting back to that kind of product oriented mindset. And it's not just the technical people or the I t. People who are builders. It is also the business people, as Karl talked about right. So when we start thinking about innovation again, where we see folks kind of get into a little bit of innovation, pilot paralysis is that you can focus on the technology. But if you're not focusing on the talent and the culture and the processes and the mechanisms, you're gonna be putting out technology. But you're not gonna have an organization that's ready to take it and scale and accelerated right, and so that's that's been absolutely critical. So just a couple of things we've been doing with with Takeda indicate, has really been leading the way is think about a mechanism and a process, and it's really been working backwards from the customer, right? In this case again, the patient and the donor. And that was an easy one because a key value of decadas is to be a patient focused biopharmaceutical, right? So that was embedded in their DNA. So that working back from that, that patient, that donor was a key part of that process. And that's really deep in our DNA as well in eccentrics. And so we're able to bring that together. The other one is, is getting used to experimenting and even perhaps failing right and being able to reiterate and fail fast and experiment and understanding that you know some decisions, what we call it at Amazon or to a doors meaning you could go through that door not like what you see and turn around and go back. And cloud really helps there. Because the cost of experimenting and the cost of failure is so much lower than it's ever been. You could do it much faster, and the implications there so much less so just a couple of things that we've been really driving with a kid around innovation that's been really critical. >>Carl, where are you already seeing signs of success? >>Yeah, No, it's a great question. And so we chose, you know, with our focus on innovation to try to unleash maybe the power of data digital in uh, focusing on what I call sort of a maid. And so we chose our plasma derived therapy business. Um and you know, the plasma drive therapy business unit? It develops critical lifesaving therapies for patients with a rare and complex diseases. Um, but what we're doing is by bringing kind of our energy together, we're focusing on creating called State of the art digitally connected donation centers. And we're really modernizing. You know, the donor experience right now we're trying Thio improve. Also, I'll call it the overall Plasma Collection process. And so we've selected a number of uncle at very high speed pilots that were working through right now specifically in this in this area, and we're seeing really great results already on DSO. That's that's one specific area of focus. >>Arjun, I want you to close this out here. Any ideas? Any best practices advice you would have for other pharmaceutical companies that are that are at the early stage of their cloud journey. >>Sorry. Was that for me? >>Yes. Sorry. Urgent? >>Yeah. No, I was breaking up a bit. No, I think the key is what sort of been great for me to see is that when people think about cloud, you know, you always think about infrastructure technology. The reality is that the cloud is really the true enabler for innovation at innovating at scale. And if you think about that, right and all the components that you need, ultimately, that's where the value is for the company, right? Because, yes, you're gonna get some cost synergies, and that's great. But the true value is And how do we transform the organization? The case of Takeda and a life sciences clients, right. We're trying to take a 14 year process of research and development that takes billions of dollars and compress that right. Tremendous amounts of innovation, opportunity. You think about the commercial aspect, lots of innovation can come that the plasma derived therapy is a great example of how we're gonna really innovate to change the trajectory of that business. So I think innovation is at the heart of what most organizations need to do. And the formula the cocktail that Takeda has constructed with this Fuji program really has all the ingredients, um, that are required for that success. >>Great. Well, thank you so much. Arjun, Brian and Carl was really an enlightening conversation. >>Thank you. It's been a lot of >>fun. Thank you. >>Uh, been fun. Thanks, Rebecca. >>And thank you for tuning into the Cube. Virtual is coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit.

>> Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at WTG Transform 2019, across the Mass Pike from Fenway Park where we're hoping the rain's going to stop in time for the game tonight where we have 189 users here with Winslow Technology, digging in a lot of technology, networking with their peers, and I'm thrilled to have on another one of the ED users on the program. Plamen Dimitrov is director of Information Technology at Kiawah Island Golf Resorts coming to us from South Carolina. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, as I was actually telling you, I'm familiar with Kiawah, my father is retired down to John's Island right off of Charlestown, South Carolina. You have a beautiful golf course there, there've been professional events there, we actually have one of our Cubeos, does some PGA coverage, John Walls, so he and I have talked about Kiawah a few times, but for those of our audience that aren't as familiar, haven't been able to enjoy it, tell us a little bit about Kiawah. >> Kiawah is a beautiful island, over about 10 miles of oceanfront, side, where the Kiawah Golf Resort is spread out. We have different accommodations with a lot of different activities for all ages, starting with the Sanctuary Hotel, which is a Five Star by Forbes and a Five Diamond by AAA. Or you can choose any of our villas from one to eight bedroom villas. We have five beautiful golf courses, which one of them is ocean course, previously hosted Ryder Cup in 1991, and PGA in 2012, and we are also proud to be a host of the PGA 2021, very exciting. Apart of that, we are announced to be Tennis Resort #1 in the world by tennisresortonline.com. We have over 22 tennis course, different variations from car course to clay. On top of that, we have a lot of pools, swimming pools, water parks, a lot of recreation, kayaking. It can be a beautiful journey for any visitors. >> Yeah, so, Plamen I know some of the IT people listening to this are going to be like, "Boy, he's got a tough job there!" Sounds gorgeous, right on the ocean, so many things there, bring us a little bit inside the IT, your world, what that entails, and, boy, there's got to be some different challenges and opportunities that you face, versus the kind of traditional business IT. >> As every island, we have all of our friends, like salty water and all things like that. And besides that, I've mentioned that the company's spread out over 10 miles, we have a total of 23 locations, and all they share the same systems and applications. Our current challenges, from an IT standpoint, are things that not all of the vendors that can keep up with the current technology and the all new and moderns, so we have some, what we call, old school applications, they can't keep up, and then you have the new applications that can be hosted on the Cloud, for instance. In the same time, those applications need to somewhat work with each other and have some interfaces, so this is where we face the, these days a challenge, a little bit, and where our partnership with Winslow, were able to help us determine which is the best route for us. And we determined that having a data center on island, and they have another one off the island, is the best for us to go. They helped us go through the planning of what's the right set up to be used, and I think we're in the right direction. >> Okay, great, so you have two data centers and you're also using Cloud services, if I heard right? >> Correct. >> Okay. There's been a big discussion here, is like, all right, what is the Cloud's strategy and it is an ever changing world and there is no one right answer, so, when you look at yourselves, what is your Cloud strategy today and what makes you help determine where you'll be moving in the future? >> In one of the sessions, they mentioned it's all about checks and balance, and it's to be able to measure how to apply your cash in a way that it makes sense, and one day, maybe, for some applications makes sense to be on premise, another day makes sense to bring it on the Cloud. And I can give you an example, recently what we did was, we were looking into switching to Office 365, pretty much everybody knows about it, and there's a good study that, after you go over a certain threshold, it's much easier to, and much more cost effective, to have something on premise versus going to a Cloud version. Now, again, it depends on the size of the company, it depends on the... Your future projects and goals, for some people it may be different than us. But I think that the future more and more, things will be what's called colocating the Cloud, which is mainly by other providers, and we're going to have two called a key that you can get to those applications from anywhere. >> Plam, bring us inside a little bit that the data centers, you said you have two of them, what's your infrastructure stack look like today? >> We've been looking at the various solutions, hyper-converged, and hybrids, and with the help of Winslow, we determined that sticking to the 3-2-1 traditional solution is the way we go. We use their Compellent products, all flash erase, very flexible and very reliable, very nice speed it provides, performance-wise they're a great product. Then, after that story solution, you have two data switches and then a number of servers. We use, on top of that, the VMware as our hypervisor, along with their VDI environment called Horizon for some remote clients that they don't need much, but that's basically our setup. >> Great, and how long have you been using the Compellent solutions? >> The Compellent solutions, we've been using them for a year and a half, since I joined the company, but my relationship with Winslow goes far back, since 2013 where I used to work for another company here in Nantucket. And the very first person I worked with was John Cliffords from Winslow. Very great guy, and he introduced us to the Dell world. This is when we bought the first EqualLogic and afterwards, I went to Belmont, where we also bought (mumbles), and we just keep going along. >> All right, great, Plamen, last question I have for you, what brings you to an event like this, what were you hoping to get out of it, and how's it been going for you so far? >> Well, what brings me to an event like this, most of the time is on one side to see what Dell has to offer, and some people attend, they'll conference, but I think a place like this, where you have smaller scale conference, it's much more beneficial for me. A, from a learning experience and B, from creating connections, making connections with other users, which this is the best because sales rep can say, "Yeah, this is what you need." But then, from a user perspective, it's priceless to absorb experience. >> All right, well, Plamen Dimitrov, I really appreciate you sharing your journey, and everything that Kiawah Golf Resorts is doing, thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (funky electro music)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] wake up feeling blessed peace you warned that Russia ain't afraid to show it I'll expose it if I dressed up riding in that Chester roasted nigga catch you slippin on myself rocks on I messed up like yes sir [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] our program [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you are not welcome to Red Hat summit 2018 2018 [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] Wow that is truly the coolest introduction I've ever had thank you Wow I don't think I feel cool enough to follow an interaction like that Wow well welcome to the Red Hat summit this is our 14th annual event and I have to say looking out over this audience Wow it's great to see so many people here joining us this is by far our largest summit to date not only did we blow through the numbers we've had in the past we blew through our own expectations this year so I know we have a pretty packed house and I know people are still coming in so it's great to see so many people here it's great to see so many familiar faces when I had a chance to walk around earlier it's great to see so many new people here joining us for the first time I think the record attendance is an indication that more and more enterprises around the world are seeing the power of open source to help them with their challenges that they're facing due to the digital transformation that all of enterprises around the world are going through the theme for the summit this year is ideas worth exploring and we intentionally chose that because as much as we are all going through this digital disruption and the challenges associated with it one thing I think is becoming clear no one person and certainly no one company has the answers to these challenges right this isn't a problem where you can go buy a solution this is a set of capabilities that we all need to build it's a set of cultural changes that we all need to go through and that's going to require the best ideas coming from so many different places so we're not here saying we have the answers we're trying to convene the conversation right we want to serve as a catalyst bringing great minds together to share ideas so we all walk out of here at the end of the week a little wiser than when we first came here we do have an amazing agenda for you we have over 7,000 attendees we may be pushing 8,000 by the time we got through this morning we have 36 keynote speakers and we have a hundred and twenty-five breakout sessions and have to throw in one plug scheduling 325 breakout sessions is actually pretty difficult and so we used the Red Hat business optimizer which is an AI constraint solver that's new in the Red Hat decision manager to help us plan the summit because we have individuals who have a clustered set of interests and we want to make sure that when we schedule two breakout sessions we do it in a way that we don't have overlapping sessions that are really important to the same individual so we tried to use this tool and what we understand about people's interest in history of what they wanted to do to try to make sure that we spaced out different times for things of similar interests for similar people as well as for people who stood in the back of breakouts before and I know I've done that too we've also used it to try to optimize room size so hopefully we will do our best to make sure that we've appropriately sized the spaces for those as well so it's really a phenomenal tool and I know it's helped us a lot this year in addition to the 325 breakouts we have a lot of our customers on stage during the main sessions and so you'll see demos you'll hear from partners you'll hear stories from so many of our customers not on our point of view of how to use these technologies but their point of views of how they actually are using these technologies to solve their problems and you'll hear over and over again from those keynotes that it's not just about the technology it's about how people are changing how people are working to innovate to solve those problems and while we're on the subject of people I'd like to take a moment to recognize the Red Hat certified professional of the year this is known award we do every year I love this award because it truly recognizes an individual for outstanding innovation for outstanding ideas for truly standing out in how they're able to help their organization with Red Hat technologies Red Hat certifications help system administrators application developers IT architects to further their careers and help their organizations by being able to advance their skills and knowledge of Red Hat products and this year's winner really truly is a great example about how their curiosity is helped push the limits of what's possible with technology let's hear a little more about this year's winner when I was studying at the University I had computer science as one of my subjects and that's what created the passion from the very beginning they were quite a few institutions around my University who were offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a course and a certification paths through to become an administrator Red Hat Learning subscription has offered me a lot more than any other trainings that have done so far that gave me exposure to so many products under red hair technologies that I wasn't even aware of I started to think about the better ways of how these learnings can be put into the real life use cases and we started off with a discussion with my manager saying I have to try this product and I really want to see how it really fits in our environment and that product was Red Hat virtualization we went from deploying rave and then OpenStack and then the open shift environment we wanted to overcome some of the things that we saw as challenges to the speed and rapidity of release and code etc so it made perfect sense and we were able to do it in a really short space of time so you know we truly did use it as an Innovation Lab I think idea is everything ideas can change the way you see things an Innovation Lab was such an idea that popped into my mind one fine day and it has transformed the way we think as a team and it's given that playpen to pretty much everyone to go and test their things investigate evaluate do whatever they like in a non-critical non production environment I recruited Neha almost 10 years ago now I could see there was a spark a potential with it and you know she had a real Drive a real passion and you know here we are nearly ten years later I'm Neha Sandow I am a Red Hat certified engineer all right well everyone please walk into the states to the stage Neha [Music] [Applause] congratulations thank you [Applause] I think that - well welcome to the red has some of this is your first summit yes it is thanks so much well fantastic sure well it's great to have you here I hope you have a chance to engage and share some of your ideas and enjoy the week thank you thank you congratulations [Applause] neha mentioned that she first got interest in open source at university and it made me think red hats recently started our Red Hat Academy program that looks to programmatically infuse Red Hat technologies in universities around the world it's exploded in a way we had no idea it's grown just incredibly rapidly which i think shows the interest that there really is an open source and working in an open way at university so it's really a phenomenal program I'm also excited to announce that we're launching our newest open source story this year at Summit it's called the science of collective discovery and it looks at what happens when communities use open hardware to monitor the environment around them and really how they can make impactful change based on that technologies the rural premier that will be at 5:15 on Wednesday at McMaster Oni West and so please join us for a drink and we'll also have a number of the experts featured in that and you can have a conversation with them as well so with that let's officially start the show please welcome red hat president of products and technology Paul Cormier [Music] Wow morning you know I say it every year I'm gonna say it again I know I repeat myself it's just amazing we are so proud here to be here today too while you all week on how far we've come with opens with open source and with the products that we that we provide at Red Hat so so welcome and I hope the pride shows through so you know I told you Seven Summits ago on this stage that the future would be open and here we are just seven years later this is the 14th summit but just seven years later after that and much has happened and I think you'll see today and this week that that prediction that the world would be open was a pretty safe predict prediction but I want to take you just back a little bit to see how we started here and it's not just how Red Hat started here this is an open source in Linux based computing is now in an industry norm and I think that's what you'll you'll see in here this week you know we talked back then seven years ago when we put on our prediction about the UNIX error and how Hardware innovation with x86 was it was really the first step in a new era of open innovation you know companies like Sun Deck IBM and HP they really changed the world the computing industry with their UNIX models it was that was really the rise of computing but I think what we we really saw then was that single company innovation could only scale so far could really get so far with that these companies were very very innovative but they coupled hardware innovation with software innovation and as one company they could only solve so many problems and even which comp which even complicated things more they could only hire so many people in each of their companies Intel came on the scene back then as the new independent hardware player and you know that was really the beginning of the drive for horizontal computing power and computing this opened up a brand new vehicle for hardware innovation a new hardware ecosystem was built around this around this common hardware base shortly after that Stallman and leanness they had a vision of his of an open model that was created and they created Linux but it was built around Intel this was really the beginning of having a software based platform that could also drive innovation this kind of was the beginning of the changing of the world here that system-level innovation now having a hardware platform that was ubiquitous and a software platform that was open and ubiquitous it really changed this system level innovation and that continues to thrive today it was only possible because it was open this could not have happened in a closed environment it allowed the best ideas from anywhere from all over to come in in win only because it was the best idea that's what drove the rate of innovation at the pace you're seeing today and it which has never been seen before we at Red Hat we saw the need to bring this innovation to solve real-world problems in the enterprise and I think that's going to be the theme of the show today you're going to see us with our customers and partners talking about and showing you some of those real-world problems that we are sought solving with this open innovation we created rel back then for this for the enterprise it started it's it it wasn't successful because it's scaled it was secure and it was enterprise ready it once again changed the industry but this time through open innovation this gave the hardware ecosystem a software platform this open software platform gave the hardware ecosystem a software platform to build around it Unleashed them the hardware side to compete and thrive it enabled innovation from the OEMs new players building cheaper faster servers even new architectures from armed to power sprung up with this change we have seen an incredible amount of hardware innovation over the last 15 years that same innovation happened on the software side we saw powerful implementations of bare metal Linux distributions out in the market in fact at one point there were 300 there are over 300 distributions out in the market on the foundation of Linux powerful open-source equivalents were even developed in every area of Technology databases middleware messaging containers anything you could imagine innovation just exploded around the Linux platform in innovation it's at the core also drove virtualization both Linux and virtualization led to another area of innovation which you're hearing a lot about now public cloud innovation this innovation started to proceed at a rate that we had never seen before we had never experienced this in the past in this unprecedented speed of innovation and software was now possible because you didn't need a chip foundry in order to innovate you just needed great ideas in the open platform that was out there customers seeing this innovation in the public cloud sparked it sparked their desire to build their own linux based cloud platforms and customers are now are now bringing that cloud efficiency on-premise in their own data centers public clouds demonstrated so much efficiency the data centers and architects wanted to take advantage of it off premise on premise I'm sorry within their own we don't within their own controlled environments this really allowed companies to make the most of existing investments from data centers to hardware they also gained many new advantages from data sovereignty to new flexible agile approaches I want to bring Burr and his team up here to take a look at what building out an on-premise cloud can look like today Bure take it away I am super excited to be with all of you here at Red Hat summit I know we have some amazing things to show you throughout the week but before we dive into this demonstration I want you to take just a few seconds just a quick moment to think about that really important event your life that moment you turned on your first computer maybe it was a trs-80 listen Claire and Atari I even had an 83 b2 at one point but in my specific case I was sitting in a classroom in Hawaii and I could see all the way from Diamond Head to Pearl Harbor so just keep that in mind and I turn on an IBM PC with dual floppies I don't remember issuing my first commands writing my first level of code and I was totally hooked it was like a magical moment and I've been hooked on computers for the last 30 years so I want you to hold that image in your mind for just a moment just a second while we show you the computers we have here on stage let me turn this over to Jay fair and Dini here's our worldwide DevOps manager and he was going to show us his hardware what do you got Jay thank you BER good morning everyone and welcome to Red Hat summit we have so many cool things to show you this week I am so happy to be here and you know my favorite thing about red hat summit is our allowed to kind of share all of our stories much like bird just did we also love to you know talk about the hardware and the technology that we brought with us in fact it's become a bit of a competition so this year we said you know let's win this thing and we actually I think we might have won we brought a cloud with us so right now this is a private cloud for throughout the course of the week we're going to turn this into a very very interesting open hybrid cloud right before your eyes so everything you see here will be real and happening right on this thing right behind me here so thanks for our four incredible partners IBM Dell HP and super micro we've built a very vendor heterogeneous cloud here extra special thanks to IBM because they loaned us a power nine machine so now we actually have multiple architectures in this cloud so as you know one of the greatest benefits to running Red Hat technology is that we run on just about everything and you know I can't stress enough how powerful that is how cost-effective that is and it just makes my life easier to be honest so if you're interested the people that built this actual rack right here gonna be hanging out in the customer success zone this whole week it's on the second floor the lobby there and they'd be glad to show you exactly how they built this thing so let me show you what we actually have in this rack so contained in this rack we have 1056 physical chorus right here we have five and a half terabytes of RAM and just in case we threw 50 terabytes of storage in this thing so burr that's about two million times more powerful than that first machine you boot it up thanks to a PC we're actually capable of putting all the power needs and cooling right in this rack so there's your data center right there you know it occurred to me last night that I can actually pull the power cord on this thing and kick it up a notch we could have the world's first mobile portable hybrid cloud so I'm gonna go ahead and unplug no no no no no seriously it's not unplug the thing we got it working now well Berg gets a little nervous but next year we're rolling this thing around okay okay so to recap multiple vendors check multiple architectures check multiple public clouds plug right into this thing check and everything everywhere is running the same software from Red Hat so that is a giant check so burn Angus why don't we get the demos rolling awesome so we have totally we have some amazing hardware amazing computers on this stage but now we need to light it up and we have Angus Thomas who represents our OpenStack engineering team and he's going to show us what we can do with this awesome hardware Angus thank you Beth so this was an impressive rack of hardware to Joe has bought a pocket stage what I want to talk about today is putting it to work with OpenStack platform director we're going to turn it from a lot of potential into a flexible scalable private cloud we've been using director for a while now to take care of managing hardware and orchestrating the deployment of OpenStack what's new is that we're bringing the same capabilities for on-premise manager the deployment of OpenShift director deploying OpenShift in this way is the best of both worlds it's bare-metal performance but with an underlying infrastructure as a service that can take care of deploying in new instances and scaling out and a lot of the things that we expect from a cloud provider director is running on a virtual machine on Red Hat virtualization at the top of the rack and it's going to bring everything else under control what you can see on the screen right now is the director UI and as you see some of the hardware in the rack is already being managed at the top level we have information about the number of cores in the amount of RAM and the disks that each machine have if we dig in a bit there's information about MAC addresses and IPs and the management interface the BIOS kernel version dig a little deeper and there is information about the hard disks all of this is important because we want to be able to make sure that we put in workloads exactly where we want them Jay could you please power on the two new machines at the top of the rack sure all right thank you so when those two machines come up on the network director is going to see them see that they're new and not already under management and is it immediately going to go into the hardware inspection that populates this database and gets them ready for use so we also have profiles as you can see here profiles are the way that we match the hardware in a machine to the kind of workload that it's suited to this is how we make sure that machines that have all the discs run Seth and machines that have all the RAM when our application workouts for example there's two ways these can be set when you're dealing with a rack like this you could go in an individually tag each machine but director scales up to data centers so we have a rules matching engine which will automatically take the hardware profile of a new machine and make sure it gets tagged in exactly the right way so we can automatically discover new machines on the network and we can automatically match them to a profile that's how we streamline and scale up operations now I want to talk about deploying the software we have a set of validations we've learned over time about the Miss configurations in the underlying infrastructure which can cause the deployment of a multi node distributed application like OpenStack or OpenShift to fail if you have the wrong VLAN tags on a switch port or DHCP isn't running where it should be for example you can get into a situation which is really hard to debug a lot of our validations actually run before the deployment they look at what you're intending to deploy and they check in the environment is the way that it should be and they'll preempts problems and obviously preemption is a lot better than debugging something new that you probably have not seen before is director managing multiple deployments of different things side by side before we came out on stage we also deployed OpenStack on this rack just to keep me honest let me jump over to OpenStack very quickly a lot of our opens that customers will be familiar with this UI and the bare metal deployment of OpenStack on our rack is actually running a set of virtual machines which is running Gluster you're going to see that put to work later on during the summit Jay's gone to an awful lot effort to get this Hardware up on the stage so we're going to use it as many different ways as we can okay let's deploy OpenShift if I switch over to the deployed a deployment plan view there's a few steps first thing you need to do is make sure we have the hardware I already talked about how director manages hardware it's smart enough to make sure that it's not going to attempt to deploy into machines they're already in use it's only going to deploy on machines that have the right profile but I think with the rack that we have here we've got enough next thing is the deployment configuration this is where you get to customize exactly what's going to be deployed to make sure that it really matches your environment if they're external IPs for additional services you can set them here whatever it takes to make sure that the deployment is going to work for you as you can see on the screen we have a set of options around enable TLS for encryption network traffic if I dig a little deeper there are options around enabling ipv6 and network isolation so that different classes of traffic there are over different physical NICs okay then then we have roles now roles this is essentially about the software that's going to be put on each machine director comes with a set of roles for a lot of the software that RedHat supports and you can just use those or you can modify them a little bit if you need to add a monitoring agent or whatever it might be or you can create your own custom roles director has quite a rich syntax for custom role definition and custom Network topologies whatever it is you need in order to make it work in your environment so the rawls that we have right now are going to give us a working instance of openshift if I go ahead and click through the validations are all looking green so right now I can click the button start to the deploy and you will see things lighting up on the rack directors going to use IPMI to reboot the machines provisioned and with a trail image was the containers on them and start up the application stack okay so one last thing once the deployment is done you're going to want to keep director around director has a lot of capabilities around what we call de to operational management bringing in new Hardware scaling out deployments dealing with updates and critically doing upgrades as well so having said all of that it is time for me to switch over to an instance of openshift deployed by a director running on bare metal on our rack and I need to hand this over to our developer team so they can show what they can do it thank you that is so awesome Angus so what you've seen now is going from bare metal to the ultimate private cloud with OpenStack director make an open shift ready for our developers to build their next generation applications thank you so much guys that was totally awesome I love what you guys showed there now I have the honor now I have the honor of introducing a very special guest one of our earliest OpenShift customers who understands the necessity of the private cloud inside their organization and more importantly they're fundamentally redefining their industry please extend a warm welcome to deep mar Foster from Amadeus well good morning everyone a big thank you for having armadillos here and myself so as it was just set I'm at Mario's well first of all we are a large IT provider in the travel industry so serving essentially Airlines hotel chains this distributors like Expedia and others we indeed we started very early what was OpenShift like a bit more than three years ago and we jumped on it when when Retta teamed with Google to bring in kubernetes into this so let me quickly share a few figures about our Mario's to give you like a sense of what we are doing and the scale of our operations so some of our key KPIs one of our key metrics is what what we call passenger borders so that's the number of customers that physically board a plane over the year so through our systems it's roughly 1.6 billion people checking in taking the aircrafts on under the Amarillo systems close to 600 million travel agency bookings virtually all airlines are on the system and one figure I want to stress out a little bit is this one trillion availability requests per day that's when I read this figure my mind boggles a little bit so this means in continuous throughput more than 10 million hits per second so of course these are not traditional database transactions it's it's it's highly cached in memory and these applications are running over like more than 100,000 course so it's it's it's really big stuff so today I want to give some concrete feedback what we are doing so I have chosen two applications products of our Mario's that are currently running on production in different in different hosting environments as the theme here is of this talk hybrid cloud and so I want to give some some concrete feedback of how we architect the applications and of course it stays relatively high level so here I have taken one of our applications that is used in the hospitality environment so it's we have built this for a very large US hotel chain and it's currently in in full swing brought into production so like 30 percent of the globe or 5,000 plus hotels are on this platform not so here you can see that we use as the path of course on openshift on that's that's the most central piece of our hybrid cloud strategy on the database side we use Oracle and Couchbase Couchbase is used for the heavy duty fast access more key value store but also to replicate data across two data centers in this case it's running over to US based data centers east and west coast topology that are fit so run by Mario's that are fit with VMware on for the virtualization OpenStack on top of it and then open shift to host and welcome the applications on the right hand side you you see the kind of tools if you want to call them tools that we use these are the principal ones of course the real picture is much more complex but in essence we use terraform to map to the api's of the underlying infrastructure so they are obviously there are differences when you run on OpenStack or the Google compute engine or AWS Azure so some some tweaking is needed we use right at ansible a lot we also use puppet so you can see these are really the big the big pieces of of this sense installation and if we look to the to the topology again very high high level so these two locations basically map the data centers of our customers so they are in close proximity because the response time and the SLA is of this application is are very tight so that's an example of an application that is architectures mostly was high ability and high availability in minds not necessarily full global worldwide scaling but of course it could be scaled but here the idea is that we can swing from one data center to the unit to the other in matters of of minutes both take traffic data is fully synchronized across those data centers and while the switch back and forth is very fast the second example I have taken is what we call the shopping box this is when people go to kayak or Expedia and they're getting inspired where they want to travel to this is really the piece that shoots most of transit of the transactions into our Mario's so we architect here more for high scalability of course availability is also a key but here scaling and geographical spread is very important so in short it runs partially on-premise in our Amarillo Stata Center again on OpenStack and we we deploy it mostly in the first step on the Google compute engine and currently as we speak on Amazon on AWS and we work also together with Retta to qualify the whole show on Microsoft Azure here in this application it's it's the same building blocks there is a large swimming aspect to it so we bring Kafka into this working with records and another partner to bring Kafka on their open shift because at the end we want to use open shift to administrate the whole show so over time also databases and the topology here when you look to the physical deployment topology while it's very classical we use the the regions and the availability zone concept so this application is spread over three principal continental regions and so it's again it's a high-level view with different availability zones and in each of those availability zones we take a hit of several 10,000 transactions so that was it really in very short just to give you a glimpse on how we implement hybrid clouds I think that's the way forward it gives us a lot of freedom and it allows us to to discuss in a much more educated way with our customers that sometimes have already deals in place with one cloud provider or another so for us it's a lot of value to set two to leave them the choice basically what up that was a very quick overview of what we are doing we were together with records are based on open shift essentially here and more and more OpenStack coming into the picture hope you found this interesting thanks a lot and have a nice summer [Applause] thank you so much deeper great great solution we've worked with deep Marv and his team for a long for a long time great solution so I want to take us back a little bit I want to circle back I sort of ended talking a little bit about the public cloud so let's circle back there you know even so even though some applications need to run in various footprints on premise there's still great gains to be had that for running certain applications in the public cloud a public cloud will be as impactful to to the industry as as UNIX era was of computing was but by itself it'll have some of the same limitations and challenges that that model had today there's tremendous cloud innovation happening in the public cloud it's being driven by a handful of massive companies and much like the innovation that sundeck HP and others drove in a you in the UNIX era of community of computing many customers want to take advantage of the best innovation no matter where it comes from buddy but as they even eventually saw in the UNIX era they can't afford the best innovation at the cost of a siloed operating environment with the open community we are building a hybrid application platform that can give you access to the best innovation no matter which vendor or which cloud that it comes from letting public cloud providers innovate and services beyond what customers or anyone can one provider can do on their own such as large scale learning machine learning or artificial intelligence built on the data that's unique probably to that to that one cloud but consumed in a common way for the end customer across all applications in any environment on any footprint in in their overall IT infrastructure this is exactly what rel brought brought to our customers in the UNIX era of computing that consistency across any of those footprints obviously enterprises will have applications for all different uses some will live on premise some in the cloud hybrid cloud is the only practical way forward I think you've been hearing that from us for a long time it is the only practical way forward and it'll be as impactful as anything we've ever seen before I want to bring Byrne his team back to see a hybrid cloud deployment in action burr [Music] all right earlier you saw what we did with taking bare metal and lighting it up with OpenStack director and making it openshift ready for developers to build their next generation applications now we want to show you when those next turn and generation applications and what we've done is we take an open shift and spread it out and installed it across Asia and Amazon a true hybrid cloud so with me on stage today as Ted who's gonna walk us through an application and Brent Midwood who's our DevOps engineer who's gonna be making sure he's monitoring on the backside that we do make sure we do a good job so at this point Ted what have you got for us Thank You BER and good morning everybody this morning we are running on the stage in our private cloud an application that's providing its providing fraud detection detect serves for financial transactions and our customer base is rather large and we occasionally take extended bursts of traffic of heavy traffic load so in order to keep our latency down and keep our customers happy we've deployed extra service capacity in the public cloud so we have capacity with Microsoft Azure in Texas and with Amazon Web Services in Ohio so we use open chip container platform on all three locations because openshift makes it easy for us to deploy our containerized services wherever we want to put them but the question still remains how do we establish seamless communication across our entire enterprise and more importantly how do we balance the workload across these three locations in such a way that we efficiently use our resources and that we give our customers the best possible experience so this is where Red Hat amq interconnect comes in as you can see we've deployed a MQ interconnect alongside our fraud detection applications in all three locations and if I switch to the MQ console we'll see the topology of the app of the network that we've created here so the router inside the on stage here has made connections outbound to the public routers and AWS and Azure these connections are secured using mutual TLS authentication and encrypt and once these connections are established amq figures out the best way auda matically to route traffic to where it needs to get to so what we have right now is a distributed reliable broker list message bus that expands our entire enterprise now if you want to learn more about this make sure that you catch the a MQ breakout tomorrow at 11:45 with Jack Britton and David Ingham let's have a look at the message flow and we'll dive in and isolate the fraud detection API that we're interested in and what we see is that all the traffic is being handled in the private cloud that's what we expect because our latencies are low and they're acceptable but now if we take a little bit of a burst of increased traffic we're gonna see that an EQ is going to push a little a bi traffic out onto the out to the public cloud so as you're picking up some of the load now to keep the Layton sees down now when that subsides as your finishes up what it's doing and goes back offline now if we take a much bigger load increase you'll see two things first of all asher is going to take a bigger proportion than it did before and Amazon Web Services is going to get thrown into the fray as well now AWS is actually doing less work than I expected it to do I expected a little bit of bigger a slice there but this is a interesting illustration of what's going on for load balancing mq load balancing is sending requests to the services that have the lowest backlog and in order to keep the Layton sees as steady as possible so AWS is probably running slowly for some reason and that's causing a and Q to push less traffic its way now the other thing you're going to notice if you look carefully this graph fluctuate slightly and those fluctuations are caused by all the variances in the network we have the cloud on stage and we have clouds in in the various places across the country there's a lot of equipment locked layers of virtualization and networking in between and we're reacting in real-time to the reality on the digital street so BER what's the story with a to be less I noticed there's a problem right here right now we seem to have a little bit performance issue so guys I noticed that as well and a little bit ago I actually got an alert from red ahead of insights letting us know that there might be some potential optimizations we could make to our environment so let's take a look at insights so here's the Red Hat insights interface you can see our three OpenShift deployments so we have the set up here on stage in San Francisco we have our Azure deployment in Texas and we also have our AWS deployment in Ohio and insights is highlighting that that deployment in Ohio may have some issues that need some attention so Red Hat insights collects anonymized data from manage systems across our customer environment and that gives us visibility into things like vulnerabilities compliance configuration assessment and of course Red Hat subscription consumption all of this is presented in a SAS offering so it's really really easy to use it requires minimal infrastructure upfront and it provides an immediate return on investment what insights is showing us here is that we have some potential issues on the configuration side that may need some attention from this view I actually get a look at all the systems in our inventory including instances and containers and you can see here on the left that insights is highlighting one of those instances as needing some potential attention it might be a candidate for optimization this might be related to the issues that you were seeing just a minute ago insights uses machine learning and AI techniques to analyze all collected data so we combine collected data from not only the system's configuration but also with other systems from across the Red Hat customer base this allows us to compare ourselves to how we're doing across the entire set of industries including our own vertical in this case the financial services industry and we can compare ourselves to other customers we also get access to tailored recommendations that let us know what we can do to optimize our systems so in this particular case we're actually detecting an issue here where we are an outlier so our configuration has been compared to other configurations across the customer base and in this particular instance in this security group were misconfigured and so insights actually gives us the steps that we need to use to remediate the situation and the really neat thing here is that we actually get access to a custom ansible playbook so if we want to automate that type of a remediation we can use this inside of Red Hat ansible tower Red Hat satellite Red Hat cloud forms it's really really powerful the other thing here is that we can actually apply these recommendations right from within the Red Hat insights interface so with just a few clicks I can select all the recommendations that insights is making and using that built-in ansible automation I can apply those recommendations really really quickly across a variety of systems this type of intelligent automation is really cool it's really fast and powerful so really quickly here we're going to see the impact of those changes and so we can tell that we're doing a little better than we were a few minutes ago when compared across the customer base as well as within the financial industry and if we go back and look at the map we should see that our AWS employment in Ohio is in a much better state than it was just a few minutes ago so I'm wondering Ted if this had any effect and might be helping with some of the issues that you were seeing let's take a look looks like went green now let's see what it looks like over here yeah doesn't look like the configuration is taking effect quite yet maybe there's some delay awesome fantastic the man yeah so now we're load balancing across the three clouds very much fantastic well I have two minute Ted I truly love how we can route requests and dynamically load transactions across these three clouds a truly hybrid cloud native application you guys saw here on on stage for the first time and it's a fully portable application if you build your applications with openshift you can mover from cloud to cloud to cloud on stage private all the way out to the public said it's totally awesome we also have the application being fully managed by Red Hat insights I love having that intelligence watching over us and ensuring that we're doing everything correctly that is fundamentally awesome thank you so much for that well we actually have more to show you but you're going to wait a few minutes longer right now we'd like to welcome Paul back to the stage and we have a very special early Red Hat customer an Innovation Award winner from 2010 who's been going boldly forward with their open hybrid cloud strategy please give a warm welcome to Monty Finkelstein from Citigroup [Music] [Music] hi Marty hey Paul nice to see you thank you very much for coming so thank you for having me Oh our pleasure if you if you wanted to we sort of wanted to pick your brain a little bit about your experiences and sort of leading leading the charge in computing here so we're all talking about hybrid cloud how has the hybrid cloud strategy influenced where you are today in your computing environment so you know when we see the variable the various types of workload that we had an hour on from cloud we see the peaks we see the valleys we see the demand on the environment that we have we really determined that we have to have a much more elastic more scalable capability so we can burst and stretch our environments to multiple cloud providers these capabilities have now been proven at City and of course we consider what the data risk is as well as any regulatory requirement so how do you how do you tackle the complexity of multiple cloud environments so every cloud provider has its own unique set of capabilities they have they're own api's distributions value-added services we wanted to make sure that we could arbitrate between the different cloud providers maintain all source code and orchestration capabilities on Prem to drive those capabilities from within our platforms this requires controlling the entitlements in a cohesive fashion across our on Prem and Wolfram both for security services automation telemetry as one seamless unit can you talk a bit about how you decide when you to use your own on-premise infrastructure versus cloud resources sure so there are multiple dimensions that we take into account right so the first dimension we talk about the risk so low risk - high risk and and really that's about the data classification of the environment we're talking about so whether it's public or internal which would be considered low - ooh confidential PII restricted sensitive and so on and above which is really what would be considered a high-risk the second dimension would be would focus on demand volatility and responsiveness sensitivity so this would range from low response sensitivity and low variability of the type of workload that we have to the high response sensitivity and high variability of the workload the first combination that we focused on is the low risk and high variability and high sensitivity for response type workload of course any of the workloads we ensure that we're regulatory compliant as well as we achieve customer benefits with within this environment so how can we give developers greater control of their their infrastructure environments and still help operations maintain that consistency in compliance so the main driver is really to use the public cloud is scale speed and increased developer efficiencies as well as reducing cost as well as risk this would mean providing develop workspaces and multiple environments for our developers to quickly create products for our customers all this is done of course in a DevOps model while maintaining the source and artifacts registry on-prem this would allow our developers to test and select various middleware products another product but also ensure all the compliance activities in a centrally controlled repository so we really really appreciate you coming by and sharing that with us today Monte thank you so much for coming to the red echo thanks a lot thanks again tamati I mean you know there's these real world insight into how our products and technologies are really running the businesses today that's that's just the most exciting part so thank thanks thanks again mati no even it with as much progress as you've seen demonstrated here and you're going to continue to see all week long we're far from done so I want to just take us a little bit into the path forward and where we we go today we've talked about this a lot innovation today is driven by open source development I don't think there's any question about that certainly not in this room and even across the industry as a whole that's a long way that we've come from when we started our first summit 14 years ago with over a million open source projects out there this unit this innovation aggregates into various community platforms and it finally culminates in commercial open source based open source developed products these products run many of the mission-critical applications in business today you've heard just a couple of those today here on stage but it's everywhere it's running the world today but to make customers successful with that interact innovation to run their real-world business applications these open source products have to be able to leverage increase increasingly complex infrastructure footprints we must also ensure a common base for the developer and ultimately the application no matter which footprint they choose as you heard mati say the developers want choice here no matter which no matter which footprint they are ultimately going to run their those applications on they want that flexibility from the data center to possibly any public cloud out there in regardless of whether that application was built yesterday or has been running the business for the last 10 years and was built on 10-year old technology this is the flexibility that developers require today but what does different infrastructure we may require different pieces of the technical stack in that deployment one example of this that Effects of many things as KVM which provides the foundation for many of those use cases that require virtualization KVM offers a level of consistency from a technical perspective but rel extends that consistency to add a level of commercial and ecosystem consistency for the application across all those footprints this is very important in the enterprise but while rel and KVM formed the foundation other technologies are needed to really satisfy the functions on these different footprints traditional virtualization has requirements that are satisfied by projects like overt and products like Rev traditional traditional private cloud implementations has requirements that are satisfied on projects like OpenStack and products like Red Hat OpenStack platform and as applications begin to become more container based we are seeing many requirements driven driven natively into containers the same Linux in different forms provides this common base across these four footprints this level of compatible compatibility is critical to operators who must best utilize the infinite must better utilize secure and deploy the infrastructure that they have and they're responsible for developers on the other hand they care most about having a platform that can creates that consistency for their applications they care about their services and the services that they need to consume within those applications and they don't want limitations on where they run they want service but they want it anywhere not necessarily just from Amazon they want integration between applications no matter where they run they still want to run their Java EE now named Jakarta EE apps and bring those applications forward into containers and micro services they need able to orchestrate these frameworks and many more across all these different footprints in a consistent secure fashion this creates natural tension between development and operations frankly customers amplify this tension with organizational boundaries that are holdover from the UNIX era of computing it's really the job of our platforms to seamlessly remove these boundaries and it's the it's the goal of RedHat to seamlessly get you from the old world to the new world we're gonna show you a really cool demo demonstration now we're gonna show you how you can automate this transition first we're gonna take a Windows virtual machine from a traditional VMware deployment we're gonna convert it into a KVM based virtual machine running in a container all under the kubernetes umbrella this makes virtual machines more access more accessible to the developer this will accelerate the transformation of those virtual machines into cloud native container based form well we will work this prot we will worked as capability over the product line in the coming releases so we can strike the balance of enabling our developers to move in this direction we want to be able to do this while enabling mission-critical operations to still do their job so let's bring Byrne his team back up to show you this in action for one more thanks all right what Red Hat we recognized that large organizations large enterprises have a substantial investment and legacy virtualization technology and this is holding you back you have thousands of virtual machines that need to be modernized so what you're about to see next okay it's something very special with me here on stage we have James Lebowski he's gonna be walking us through he's represents our operations folks and he's gonna be walking us through a mass migration but also is Itamar Hine who's our lead developer of a very special application and he's gonna be modernizing container izing and optimizing our application all right so let's get started James thanks burr yeah so as you can see I have a typical VMware environment here I'm in the vSphere client I've got a number of virtual machines a handful of them that make up my one of my applications for my development environment in this case and what I want to do is migrate those over to a KVM based right at virtualization environment so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to cloud forms our cloud management platform that's our first step and you know cloud forms actually already has discovered both my rev environment and my vSphere environment and understands the compute network and storage there so you'll notice one of the capabilities we built is this new capability called migrations and underneath here I could begin to there's two steps and the first thing I need to do is start to create my infrastructure mappings what this will allow me to do is map my compute networking storage between vSphere and Rev so cloud forms understands how those relate let's go ahead and create an infrastructure mapping I'll call that summit infrastructure mapping and then I'm gonna begin to map my two environments first the compute so the clusters here next the data stores so those virtual machines happen to live on datastore - in vSphere and I'll target them a datastore data to inside of my revenue Arman and finally my networks those live on network 100 so I'll map those from vSphere to rover so once my infrastructure is map the next step I need to do is actually begin to create a plan to migrate those virtual machines so I'll continue to the plan wizard here I'll select the infrastructure mapping I just created and I'll select migrate my development environment from those virtual machines to Rev and then I need to import a CSV file the CSV file is going to contain a list of all the virtual machines that I want to migrate that were there and that's it once I hit create what's going to happen cloud forms is going to begin in an automated fashion shutting down those virtual machines begin converting them taking care of all the minutia that you'd have to do manually it's gonna do that all automatically for me so I don't have to worry about all those manual interactions and no longer do I have to go manually shut them down but it's going to take care of that all for me you can see the migrations kicked off here this is the I've got the my VMs are migrating here and if I go back to the screen here you can see that we're gonna start seeing those shutdown okay awesome but as people want to know more information about this how would they dive deeper into this technology later this week yeah it's a great question so we have a workload portability session in the hybrid cloud on Wednesday if you want to see a presentation that deep dives into this topic and how some of the methodologies to migrate and then on Thursday we actually have a hands-on lab it's the IT optimization VM migration lab that you can check out and as you can see those are shutting down here yeah we see a powering off right now that's fantastic absolutely so if I go back now that's gonna take a while you got to convert all the disks and move them over but we'll notice is previously I had already run one migration of a single application that was a Windows virtual machine running and if I browse over to Red Hat virtualization I can see on the dashboard here I could browse to virtual machines I have migrated that Windows virtual machine and if I open up a tab I can now browse to my Windows virtual machine which is running our wingtip toy store application our sample application here and now my VM has been moved over from Rev to Vita from VMware to Rev and is available for Itamar all right great available to our developers all right Itamar what are you gonna do for us here well James it's great that you can save cost by moving from VMware to reddit virtualization but I want to containerize our application and with container native virtualization I can run my virtual machine on OpenShift like any other container using Huebert a kubernetes operator to run and manage virtual machines let's look at the open ship service catalog you can see we have a new virtualization section here we can import KVM or VMware virtual machines or if there are already loaded we can create new instances of them for the developer to work with just need to give named CPU memory we can do other virtualization parameters and create our virtual machines now let's see how this looks like in the openshift console the cool thing about KVM is virtual machines are just Linux processes so they can act and behave like other open shipped applications we build in more than a decade of virtualization experience with KVM reddit virtualization and OpenStack and can now benefit from kubernetes and open shift to manage and orchestrate our virtual machines since we know this virtual machine this container is actually a virtual machine we can do virtual machine stuff with it like shutdown reboot or open a remote desktop session to it but we can also see this is just a container like any other container in openshift and even though the web application is running inside a Windows virtual machine the developer can still use open shift mechanisms like services and routes let's browse our web application using the OpenShift service it's the same wingtip toys application but this time the virtual machine is running on open shift but we're not done we want to containerize our application since it's a Windows virtual machine we can open a remote desktop session to it we see we have here Visual Studio and an asp.net application let's start container izing by moving the Microsoft sequel server database from running inside the Windows virtual machine to running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an open shipped container we'll go back to the open shipped Service Catalog this time we'll go to the database section and just as easily we'll create a sequel server container just need to accept the EULA provide password and choose the Edition we want and create a database and again we can see the sequel server is just another container running on OpenShift now let's take let's find the connection details for our database to keep this simple we'll take the IP address of our database service go back to the web application to visual studio update the IP address in the connection string publish our application and go back to browse it through OpenShift fortunately for us the user experience team heard we're modernizing our application so they pitched in and pushed new icons to use with our containerized database to also modernize the look and feel it's still the same wingtip toys application it's running in a virtual machine on openshift but it's now using a containerized database to recap we saw that we can run virtual machines natively on openshift like any other container based application modernize and mesh them together we containerize the database but we can use the same approach to containerize any part of our application so some items here to deserve repeating one thing you saw is Red Hat Enterprise Linux burning sequel server in a container on open shift and you also saw Windows VM where the dotnet native application also running inside of open ships so tell us what's special about that that seems pretty crazy what you did there exactly burr if we take a look under the hood we can use the kubernetes commands to see the list of our containers in this case the sequel server and the virtual machine containers but since Q Bert is a kubernetes operator we can actually use kubernetes commands like cube Cpl to list our virtual machines and manage our virtual machines like any other entity in kubernetes I love that so there's your crew meta gem oh we can see the kind says virtual machine that is totally awesome now people here are gonna be very excited about what they just saw we're gonna get more information and when will this be coming well you know what can they do to dive in this will be available as part of reddit Cloud suite in tech preview later this year but we are looking for early adopters now so give us a call also come check our deep dive session introducing container native virtualization Thursday 2:00 p.m. awesome that is so incredible so we went from the old to the new from the close to the open the Red Hat way you're gonna be seeing more from our demonstration team that's coming Thursday at 8 a.m. do not be late if you like what you saw this today you're gonna see a lot more of that going forward so we got some really special things in store for you so at this point thank you so much in tomorrow thank you so much you guys are awesome yeah now we have one more special guest a very early adopter of Red Hat Enterprise Linux we've had over a 12-year partnership and relationship with this organization they've been a steadfast Linux and middleware customer for many many years now please extend a warm welcome to Raj China from the Royal Bank of Canada thank you thank you it's great to be here RBC is a large global full-service is back we have the largest bank in Canada top 10 global operate in 30 countries and run five key business segments personal commercial banking investor in Treasury services capital markets wealth management and insurance but honestly unless you're in the banking segment those five business segments that I just mentioned may not mean a lot to you but what you might appreciate is the fact that we've been around in business for over 150 years we started our digital transformation journey about four years ago and we are focused on new and innovative technologies that will help deliver the capabilities and lifestyle our clients are looking for we have a very simple vision and we often refer to it as the digitally enabled bank of the future but as you can appreciate transforming a hundred fifty year old Bank is not easy it certainly does not happen overnight to that end we had a clear unwavering vision a very strong innovation agenda and most importantly a focus towards a flawless execution today in banking business strategy and IT strategy are one in the same they are not two separate things we believe that in order to be the number one bank we have to have the number one tactic there is no question that most of today's innovations happens in the open source community RBC relies on RedHat as a key partner to help us consume these open source innovations in a manner that it meets our enterprise needs RBC was an early adopter of Linux we operate one of the largest footprints of rel in Canada same with tables we had tremendous success in driving cost out of infrastructure by partnering with rahat while at the same time delivering a world-class hosting service to your business over our 12 year partnership Red Hat has proven that they have mastered the art of working closely with the upstream open source community understanding the needs of an enterprise like us in delivering these open source innovations in a manner that we can consume and build upon we are working with red hat to help increase our agility and better leverage public and private cloud offerings we adopted virtualization ansible and containers and are excited about continuing our partnership with Red Hat in this journey throughout this journey we simply cannot replace everything we've had from the past we have to bring forward these investments of the past and improve upon them with new and emerging technologies it is about utilizing emerging technologies but at the same time focusing on the business outcome the business outcome for us is serving our clients and delivering the information that they are looking for whenever they need it and in whatever form factor they're looking for but technology improvements alone are simply not sufficient to do a digital transformation creating the right culture of change and adopting new methodologies is key we introduced agile and DevOps which has boosted the number of adult projects at RBC and increase the frequency at which we do new releases to our mobile app as a matter of fact these methodologies have enabled us to deliver apps over 20x faster than before the other point about around culture that I wanted to mention was we wanted to build an engineering culture an engineering culture is one which rewards curiosity trying new things investing in new technologies and being a leader not necessarily a follower Red Hat has been a critical partner in our journey to date as we adopt elements of open source culture in engineering culture what you seen today about red hearts focus on new technology innovations while never losing sight of helping you bring forward the investments you've already made in the past is something that makes Red Hat unique we are excited to see red arts investment in leadership in open source technologies to help bring the potential of these amazing things together thank you that's great the thing you know seeing going from the old world to the new with automation so you know the things you've seen demonstrated today they're they're they're more sophisticated than any one company could ever have done on their own certainly not by using a proprietary development model because of this it's really easy to see why open source has become the center of gravity for enterprise computing today with all the progress open-source has made we're constantly looking for new ways of accelerating that into our products so we can take that into the enterprise with customers like these that you've met what you've met today now we recently made in addition to the Red Hat family we brought in core OS to the Red Hat family and you know adding core OS has really been our latest move to accelerate that innovation into our products this will help the adoption of open shift container platform even deeper into the enterprise and as we did with the Linux core platform in 2002 this is just exactly what we did with with Linux back then today we're announcing some exciting new technology directions first we'll integrate the benefits of automated operations so for example you'll see dramatic improvements in the automated intelligence about the state of your clusters in OpenShift with the core OS additions also as part of open shift will include a new variant of rel called Red Hat core OS maintaining the consistency of rel farhat for the operation side of the house while allowing for a consumption of over-the-air updates from the kernel to kubernetes later today you'll hear how we are extending automated operations beyond customers and even out to partners all of this starting with the next release of open shift in July now all of this of course will continue in an upstream open source innovation model that includes continuing container linux for the community users today while also evolving the commercial products to bring that innovation out to the enterprise this this combination is really defining the platform of the future everything we've done for the last 16 years since we first brought rel to the commercial market because get has been to get us just to this point hybrid cloud computing is now being deployed multiple times in enterprises every single day all powered by the open source model and powered by the open source model we will continue to redefine the software industry forever no in 2002 with all of you we made Linux the choice for enterprise computing this changed the innovation model forever and I started the session today talking about our prediction of seven years ago on the future being open we've all seen so much happen in those in those seven years we at Red Hat have celebrated our 25th anniversary including 16 years of rel and the enterprise it's now 2018 open hybrid cloud is not only a reality but it is the driving model in enterprise computing today and this hybrid cloud world would not even be possible without Linux as a platform in the open source development model a build around it and while we have think we may have accomplished a lot in that time and we may think we have changed the world a lot we have but I'm telling you the best is yet to come now that Linux and open source software is firmly driving that innovation in the enterprise what we've accomplished today and up till now has just set the stage for us together to change the world once again and just as we did with rel more than 15 years ago with our partners we will make hybrid cloud the default in the enterprise and I will take that bet every single day have a great show and have fun watching the future of computing unfold right in front of your eyes see you later [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] anytime [Music]

>> Narrator: From Berlin, Germany, it's theCUBE (relaxing music) covering DataWorks Summit Europe 2018. (relaxing music) Brought to you by Hortonworks. (quieting music) >> Well, hello and welcome to theCUBE. We're here at DataWorks Summit 2018 in Berlin, Germany, and it's been a great show. Who we have now is we have IBM. Specifically we have Dave McDonnell of IBM, and we're going to be talkin' with him for the next 10 minutes or so about... Dave, you explain. You are in storage for IBM, and IBM of course is a partner of Hortonworks who are of course the host of this show. So Dave, have you been introduced, give us your capacity or roll at IBM. Discuss the partnership of Hortonworks, and really what's your perspective on the market for storage systems for Big Data right now and going forward? And what kind of work loads and what kind of requirements are customers coming to you with for storage systems now? >> Okay, sure, so I lead alliances for the storage business unit, and Hortonworks, we actually partner with Hortonworks not just in our storage business unit but also with our analytics counterparts, our power counterparts, and we're in discussions with many others, right? Our partner organization services and so forth. So the nature of our relationship is quite broad compared to many of our others. We're working with them in the analytics space, so these are a lot of these Big Data Data Lakes, BDDNA a lot of people will use as an acronym. These are the types of work loads that customers are using us both for. >> Mm-hmm. >> And it's not new anymore, you know, by now they're well past their first half dozen applications. We've got customers running hundreds of applications. These are production applications now, so it's all about, "How can I be more efficient? "How can I grow this? "How can I get the best performance and scalability "and ease of management to deploy these "in a way that's manageable?" 'cause if I have 400 production applications, that's not off in any corner anymore. So that's how I'd describe it in a nutshell. >> One of the trends that we're seeing at Wikibon, of course I'm the lead analyst for Big Data Analytics at Wikibon under SiliconANGLE Media, we're seeing a trend in the marketplace towards I wouldn't call them appliances, but what I would call them is workload optimized hardware software platforms so they can combine storage with compute and are optimized for AI and machine learning and so forth. Is that something that you're hearing from customers, that they require those built-out, AI optimized storage systems, or is that far in the future or? Give me a sense for whether IBM is doing anything in that area and whether that's on your horizon. >> If you were to define all of IBM in five words or less, you would say "artificial intelligence and cloud computing," so this is something' >> Yeah. that gets a lot of thought in Mindshare. So absolutely we hear about it a lot. It's a very broad market with a lot of diverse requirements. So we hear people asking for the Converged infrastructure, for Appliance solutions. There's of course Hyper Converged. We actually have, either directly or with partners, answers to all of those. Now we do think one of the things that customers want to do is they're going to scale and grow in these environments is to take a software-defined strategy so they're not limited, they're not limited by hardware blocks. You know, they don't want to have to buy processing power and spend all that money on it when really all they need is more data. >> Yeah. >> There's pros and cons to the different (mumbles). >> You have power AI systems, I know that, so that's where they're probably heading, yeah. >> Yes, yes, yes. So of course, we have packages that we've modeled in AI. They feed off of some of the Hortonworks data lakes that we're building. Of course we see a lot of people putting these on new pieces of infrastructure because they don't want to put this on their production applications, so they're extracting data from maybe a Hortonworks data lake number one, Hortonworks data lake number two, some of the EDWs, some external data, and putting that into the AI infrastructure. >> As customers move their cloud infrastructures towards more edge facing environments, or edge applications, how are storage requirements change or evolving in terms of in the move to edge computing. Can you give us a sense for any sort of trends you're seeing in that area? >> Well, if we're going to the world of AI and cognitive applications, all that data that I mighta thrown in the cloud five years ago I now, I'm educated enough 'cause I've been paying bills for a few years on just how expensive it is, and if I'm going to be bringing that data back, some of which I don't even know I'm going to be bringing back, it gets extremely expensive. So we see a pendulum shift coming back where now a lot of data is going to be on host, ah sorry, on premise, but it's not going to stay there. They need the flexibility to move it here, there, or everywhere. So if it's going to come back, how can we bring customers some of that flexibility that they liked about the cloud, the speed, the ease of deployment, even a consumption based model? These are very big changes on a traditional storage manufacturer like ourselves, right? So that's requiring a lot of development in software, it's requiring a lot of development in our business model, and one of the biggest thing you hear us talk about this year is IBM Cloud Private, which does exactly that, >> Right. and it gives them somethin' they can work with that's flexible, it's agile, and allows you to take containerized based applications and move them back and forth as you please. >> Yeah. So containerized applications. So if you can define it for our audience, what is a containerized application? You talk about Docker and orchestrate it through Kubernetes and so forth. So you mentioned Cloud Private. Can you bring us up to speed on what exactly Cloud Private is and in terms of the storage requirements or storage architecture within that portfolio? >> Oh yes, absolutely. So this is a set of infrastructure that's optimized for on-premise deployment that gives you multi-cloud access, not just IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, et cetera, and then it also gives you multiple architectural choices basically wrapped by software to allow you to move those containers around and put them where you want them at the right time at the right place given the business requirement at that hour. >> Now is the data storager persisted in the container itself? I know that's fairly difficult to do in a Docker environment. How do ya handle persistence of data for containerized applications within your architecture? >> Okay, some of those are going to be application specific. It's the question of designing the right data management layer depending on the application. So we have software intelligence, some of it from open source, some of which we add on top of open source to bring some of the enterprise resilience and performance needed. And of course, you have to be very careful if the biggest trend in the world is unstructured data. Well, okay fine, it's a lot of sensor data. That's still fairly easy to move around. But once we get into things like medical images, lots of video, you know, HD video, 4K video, those are the things which you have to give a lot of thought to how to do that. And that's why we have lots of new partners that we work with the help us with edge cloud, which gives that on premise-like performance in really a cloud-like set up. >> Here's a question out of left field, and you may not have the answer, but I would like to hear your thoughts on this. How has Blockchain, and IBM's been making significant investments in blockchain technology database technology, how is blockchain changing the face of the storage industry in terms of customers' requirements for a storage systems to manage data in distributed blockchains? Is that something you're hearing coming from customers as a requirement? I'm just tryin' to get a sense for whether that's, you know, is it moving customers towards more flash, towards more distributed edge-oriented or edge deployed storage systems? >> Okay, so yes, yes, and yes. >> Okay. So all of a sudden, if you're doing things like a blockchain application, things become even more important than they are today. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so you can't lose a transaction. You can't have a storage going down. So there's a lot more care and thought into the resiliency of the infrastructure. If I'm, you know, buying a diamond from you, I can't accept the excuse that my $100,000 diamond, maybe that's a little optimistic, my $10,000 diamond or yours, you know, the transaction's corrupted because the data's not proper. >> Right. >> Or if I want my privacy, I need to be assured that there's good data governance around that transaction, and that that will be protected for a good 10, 20, and 30 years. So it's elevating the importance of all the infrastructure to a whole different level. >> Switching our focus slightly, so we're here at DataWorks Summit in Berlin. Where are the largest growth markets right now for cloud storage systems? Is it Apache, is it the North America, or where are the growth markets in terms of regions, in terms of vertical industries right now in the marketplace for enterprise grade storage systems for big data in the cloud? >> That's a great question, 'cause we certainly have these conversations globally. I'd say the place where we're seeing the most activity would be the Americas, we see it in China. We have a lot of interesting engagements and people reaching out to us. I would say by market, you can also point to financial services in more than those two regions. Financial services, healthcare, retail, these are probably the top verticals. I think it's probably safe to assume, and we can the federal governments also have a lot of stringent requirements and, you know, requirements, new applications around the space as well. >> Right. GDPR, how is that impacting your customers' storage requirements. The requirement for GDPR compliance, is that moving the needle in terms of their requirement for consolidated storage of the data that they need to maintain? I mean obviously there's a security, but there's just the sheer amount of, there's a leading to consolidation or centralization of storage, of customer data, that would seem to make it easier to control and monitor usage of the data. Is it making a difference at all? >> It's making a big difference. Not many people encrypt data today, so there's a whole new level of interest in encryption at many different levels, data at rest, data in motion. There's new levels of focus and attention on performance, on the ability for customers to get their arms around disparate islands of data, because now GDPR is not only a legal requirement that requires you to be able to have it, but you've also got timelines which you're expected to act on a request from a customer to have your data removed. And most of those will have a baseline of 30 days. So you can't fool around now. It's not just a nice to have. It's an actual core part of a business requirement that if you don't have a good strategy for, you could be spending tens of millions of dollars in liability if you're not ready for it. >> Well Dave, thank you very much. We're at the end of our time. This has been Dave McDonnell of IBM talking about system storage and of course a big Hortonworks partner. We are here on day two of the DataWorks Summit, and I'm James Kobielus of Wikibon SiliconANGLE Media, and have a good day. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2018, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, my name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. Gene Chao is here as the Global VP of IBM Automation and Jason Kelley, Cube Alum, is the GM of Blockchain Services. Gentlemen, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you much. >> Great to see you. >> You guys, I call you heat-seeking inefficiency missiles, so, Jason's... Just a shout-out, take it from there. What are you guys up to, what are you doing? How are you helping businesses? >> Well, we're driving trust into transactions. The elusive things that we've been trying to-- >> Gene: Whoops, there goes heat-seeking. (laughing) >> Exactly. Or we're seeking the heat. It's coming after us, as soon as we say trust, someone wants to attack you. And so what we're bringing into business is that thought that, if I can add trust into transactions, I don't need a third-party to validate it. I can now say, look, you are who you are. We both know each other. All that we do, we go way back. We know each other, and what we're about to exchange is known as well. So if I can keep that validation from happening, I'm going to remove cost, labor, time, out of it. And I'm also going to then maybe avail new market opportunities of those who could not enter the system before because we didn't trust their identities. Or we didn't trust that their goods were their goods, and they were trying to exchange it. So think of that heat-seeking missile, we're trying to bring that capability and that heat is the energy in the system now going bigger, better, faster because there's trust. >> And your role is to bring those Blockchain services to market, is that right? >> That's correct, bringing the services as a whole, because see, Blockchain isn't a product. Blockchain, you know, I don't have under the table a bucket of Blockchain. >> Dave: Let me see your Blockchain. >> Sorry, no Blockchains here. So, if in fact, we're bringing this capability to the market, there's all types of services from what's the business value design? First, what's your outcome? Why say Blockchain? Believe it or not, it says it on my chest, so it means I get paid to do it, but maybe you don't need this? And so, quite simply, maybe you need to do something else. So the first thing is, let's understand the outcome that your business is running toward, and then let's understand if it's a Blockchain, and then can we bring some automation with Gene and team? >> Okay, that's the set-up for you Gene, so you're the automation piece of the puzzle. Explain. >> So, I love the commentary around the better, faster, but we're also bringing more scale. So automation has scale. What does that mean? We're really focused on two things, guys, the first thing is around taking advantage of the new technologies to enable what I'll call software-based labor. So there's a new concept of the digital workforce model that enables how transactions or how work gets done. Coupled with that is how that workflow or process, business process, IT process, whatever it is, how does that workflow fundamentally change through these technologies. Why that's important is as we look at Blockchain, as an example, as a pivot point for trusted transactions, I need to build trusted automation around it. Trusted ways to leverage these technologies in that workflow so those transactions are easily scalable, works at machine time, and runs through very quickly. >> This is fascinating stuff, 'cause look. The way that we like to characterize the big change in the industry is we say, for the first 50 years of computing, there was no process, accounting, HR, et cetera, on known technology. How do we implement? What technology do you choose to implement? The implementation choices are becoming clear. Cloud, et cetera. What's less known is the process. The unknown process, unknown technology. Now it's unknown process, known technology. And what you guys are talking about is one of the challenges when you think about processes. Who does what? Can we verify that we've done it? Did they do it right? Did they meet to do what they said they were doing? Et cetera, the whole range of issues. And the contracting process is extremely complex, but if you set it up in a Blockchain form, you've got a simple contract, a simple definition of who is trusted, simple definitions of roles, and now we can dramatically accelerate new process creation and then automate it. Have I got that right? >> I think you got it, when you think about dramatically, dramatically accelerated, you say that it means something different to everyone. But let's think about my friend Frank Yiannas at Wal-Mart, for example, where they're working on food trust. They're trying to make sure that from farm to fork, we know where that food came from. One-third of all food that's processed goes to waste. Because we lack food trust. Food is guilty until proven innocent, right? To keep that from being-- >> Spoiled. >> Spoiled, I'm... The humor is killing me. (laughing) So, no pun intended, food trust, right? So, Frank and team wanted to understand how fast they could move this thought of tracking, tracing, with transparency, this food through the system. Just as you said, there's certain contrast, think of the handshakes from getting, in their case, a mango from a farm all the way to your home, Well, it used to take them seven days. Actually, six days, twenty-some hours, in order to figure out that process. Put it on the Blockchain? 12 seconds. And then once they cured the lag and the technology, 2.2 seconds. So think of that. Now you're shrinking this to seconds versus days, what does that do to the process? What do you do when you say, now my system can go that fast. My people can go that fast. What do you do? Think of the automation that you're bringing in now, and things that you will now have to automate, out of not just necessity, but things you will say, wow, we've opened up a whole new ecosystem of possibilities in order to do business in a different way. >> Well, so let me build on that for a second. 'Cause one of the things that potentially means is that because you can handle more complex, newly designed, process, better, faster, more automated, that you can start to expand the scope of participants in a transaction? The range of characteristics of the transaction, or the type of work? That's how you build up to new businesses and new business models, right? >> Sure. >> Right, right. >> If I can jump in on that one. There's a concept in this one, and this is where Jason and I are connected at the hip. You know, we think in terms of a smarter product, we think in terms of a smarter contract, or transaction, that the guiding principle that we're using is the old way of thinking, and I carry this narrative all over with me is, the old way of thinking is you have people following your creating process, supported by that technology. So the things that you talked about, unknown technology, unknown process, continuously sourced by people? Fundamentally changed. We're now working in a world where the process is run by the technology and supported by the people. It's not that the people are going away, it's a fundamental retooling of the skills and understanding of how to support it, but that scalability, the ability to get to that exponential growth, is because the process is the king. At the top of the food chain, now. And that technology lets it expand. >> But we could do levels of complexity in that process and the number of participants in that process, unheard of! It's scale and scope. >> Yes. >> But doesn't that force... Look, we've had some conversations, Dave and I have had some conversations, with a number of big user organizations about this stuff and we keep coming back to the issue of that they can't just look at the technology, they have to focus on the design. That one of the most crucial features of this process is the design of the Blockchain. We got that right? >> You heard me use the phrase at the very beginning, if you didn't, I'll say it again, I said, business value design. Because in fact, that design is not just a UI or UX, but let's make sure that the business and technology are doing the right thing to get to the outcome. As we say, design doesn't stop until the problem is solved. And guess what, the problem's never solved. So design happens... Many people say, "Oh we're going to do some "design thinking at the beginning. "We did that," check the block, and then they run off and do something else. For us, design's like an infinity loop. You continue to do it. From the beginning all the way to the end, and then, what you're able to do, and hint-hint, this is something that we do in our services, we start with our clients, we get them started so they understand, then we help them accelerate, and then innovate. Three steps: start, accelerate, innovate. And that's a design process in and of itself. So if you start at, you know, the days of Blockchain tourism were a couple years ago, everybody wanted to kick the tires, and then last year was PoC PoV, this year's the year of production. And people are quick in saying, "How do I quickly start "production and keep moving?" >> So let's talk about some other examples. You mentioned Wal-Mart, we heard Plastic Mag this morning, I introduced somebody, I think Evercorp was the name of the company, Diamond Providence. Others that you're excited about, that have made a business impact. >> Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Mike White and others at our JV with Maersk. And you know, you think of that, where you have the classic thought of a supply chain, this linear steps in the process, you know, these handshakes that have to happen. Now what we have is we have this process of thinking how we can bring transparency into all of that, and it's not just a supply chain, but a value chain. So you have where 80% of whatever you all are touching or have owned right now, with the shipping line. But not only through a shipping line, but then there was also ground and air, and ultimately to a retail location. Then you consumed it. Well, think of all of those processes now having the transparency where you can see from point of consumption all the way back to origin. Think of the supply chain visibility, that elusive thing called supply chain optimization. Now you can do that, but not only the supply chain, but the value chain. Someone's paying invoices under that big thing called a value chain. Someone's doing trade promotion management in that value chain. Now, if you have that visibility, what do you enable? How many more packages can go through the system? How much more shipping? And the estimate is 5% increase in GDP if we're able to get all of this shipping into the Blockchain. You start talking GDP? It opens eyes. >> Right now you're talking growth, right? >> Yes. >> Real growth. >> So, it's 20% of the four trillion associated with shipping? Is bound up in paperwork? >> Yes. >> So we're talking about 800 billion dollar change. >> And returning capital into the system. Returning capital. You think of this thought of opening up new opportunity, And I'll throw another example, another client, so we're not just talking, but you think of what's happening with We.Trade. Nine banks in Europe who compete. You think of Santander Bank and a Deustche Bank and those are now, they're all coming together, saying "How do we now share data and information "so that we can let small to medium size enterprises "into the system?" So now you're getting not just savings of cost and time, but now you're opening up markets. Getting greater throughput. High waters raise all boats. And that's what we're seeing in a lot of these examples with, it's not just taking out those old things, you're thinking of new processes running the business a different way. >> And Jason's a great lead guy. You asked for an example, our friends at DBS Bank. They are fundamentally looking at changing the business models within the bank across all different divisions of the bank, whether it's credit transactions, mortgages, personal wealth, and the way they approached it was, we know these new technologies are going to allow us to fundamentally look at the workflow and change it. But here's the question: Who will be looking at changing these things? What's going to enable these model changes, the workflow changes may not be human capital. It may be working alongside this sort of man plus machine element or formula-- >> Peter: Patterns. >> Right, to allow the technology to tell you where your efficiencies could be gained. Allow the technologies to make the correlations in those disparate business models, to fundamentally change how you do business. So that's happening today. >> So, phase one is what is this, phase two, POC, now you're sort of in real production, but you obviously doing a lot more POCs, you're scaling out. Where do you see this going over the next three or four years? >> Well, I think last year was a year of the PoC PoV. I think this year's a year of production. And when you think of some of the examples that we've given, we've talked about consumer trade with Wal-Mart, we talk about shipping trade with Maersk, we talk about trade finance with We.Trade. Each of those individual networks, where do we see it going? We see these networks becoming a network of networks. Where each one of them have their own ecosystems and they come together. And they come together with trusted data, with trusted information, access that's unparalleled. So that's where we see it heading. And you have to say then, okay, it sounds really simple in the way you've just described it, so where's the challenge? The challenge is going to be doing this from a business and technology perspective. There's a lot of things that have to be figured out here. How are you going to make those processes work at that speed? What do you rightfully automate and what things don't you automate? That's more than just a technology. You can't plug a technology in and solve this. It takes an end to end capability. And that's what we're seeing, becoming more of a differentiating capability for our teams, where they can say, "Gene, Jason, "can your teams talk to us together?" 'Cause, of course, they work together. That's a differentiating effect of moving at scale and at speed, and that's where we see it going. Scale and speed. >> So what Jason and the Blockchain frame does for us, is it's an accelerant. Okay, we talk about knowledge worker, automation, we talk about different areas of software-based labor, but that accelerant is doing one big thing, is it's forcing us into what I'll call vertically integrated processes or workflow. Gone are the days of segmentation of, "Oh, that's back office," or "That's front office." We now have to take that workflow and pivot that to vertical integration. Why? That accelerant is moving at the speed of light for trusted transactions, I have to make the systems supporting that. The process, the people, I have to keep up with that pace of change. If I don't vertically integrate those processes inter and intracompany? This doesn't work. It falls down. So that's our marriage. >> Tough to go to market. How do you go to market? >> How do we go to market? We go to market as fast as we can, and we go joined at the hip, with clear and simple understanding. >> Where's the Blockchain for going to market? >> Yeah, right? >> And is there partner ecosystem that... >> Absolutely. So we talk about a Blockchain, Blockchain's a team sport. And it is a true demonstration of Metcalfe's Law, you know, the network drives the value. And so we do. We go to market with this thought of, who's going to play in that network? And we have networks where its obvious value may have a founder network, like Wal-Mart, where you say look, we see the ecosystem, we have the ecosystem, we're the founding partner, or you have a consortium such as We.Trade, where they come in and they say, "Look, let's pull all this together "'cause we see the value." So we go to market with that ecosystem, knowing that they have to partner, they have to work together. >> Outstanding. >> There's three distinct chapters in our go to market strategy. One is the services architecture, the second one is software ecosystem, and the third is around platforms, like a Blockchain. So when we start-- >> No design? >> Sorry, say again? >> No design? >> No, there is absolutely design. Absolutely design. So at a service architecture's perspective, there is fundamental workflow design happening. At a platform level, that's an even further advancement of design, because of the frameworks and blueprints happening inside a Blockchain, inside the different next-gen technologies happening. So I have to be two things, I have to be an automation-led environment where I'm providing the way to do these things, differences in RPA versus other technologies, but I also have to be an automation-attached. I have to be attached into the Blockchain framework to make sure we're coupled in the different elements of that framework. So that's how we jointly go to market. >> Peter: RPAs, I'm sorry? >> I'm sorry, Robotic Process Automation companies, so these are the relatively new technologies that enable software-based labor components. They're replicating human activity. >> Software robots? >> Software robots. >> You have a path to automation anyway. >> Exactly right. Exactly right. >> And it's funny when you ask, you know, no design. Design's in there. And this is the way we work at IBM, I mean, we're past that calling it out. So if someone's calling it out, it's like you're going to buy a phone and say, "Oh yeah, we included the battery." Like, it's there now, right? So that's how we run. So is it in there? You mention IBM, anything that you're going to consume from us? Includes IBM design. By practice. >> Wow, you guys, today was Blockchain day. I mean, you must have been thrilled to see all the main tech-- >> You mean every day's not Blockchain day? >> Dave: Well, at IBM, thinks every day... >> Okay, alright, I was just checking. >> You guys sucked all of the air out of the morning. And we heard-- >> And by the way, I certainly hope not. (laughing) >> You hope not what? >> That every day is Blockchain day. >> I hope so. Jason here. >> Makes me not have to buy a new wardrobe. >> If every day's Blockchain day, it ain't working. This is going to be one of those technologies, the less we know about it, the more successful it's been. >> I agree, I agree. >> Well, gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Always a pleasure. >> Thank you guys. >> Thanks very much. >> Appreciate it. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from IBM Think 2018. Be right back.

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> 2010 was the first year we brought theCUBE to VMworld. At that time, VMware was a $2.5 billion company with former Microsoft exec Paul Maritz at the helm. Two years earlier, in a stunning development, VMware fired co-founder and CEO Diane Greene, which sent the company's stock tumbling almost 25%. Under pressure from investors, Joe Tucci, the chairman of EMC, made the move after a rocky four-year relationship with Ms. Greene. EMC purchased VMware in 2004 for $635 million. The Maritz years were marked by a strategy to move the company beyond the hypervisor into new areas of growth, including desktop virtualization and applications, which were met with mixed market responses. To Maritz's credit, however, the company continued to expand its presence in the data center, and under his leadership remained highly competitive with Microsoft, who was seen at the time as VMware's main rival. In 2012, the company named long-time Intel and then recently EMC exec, Pat Gelsinger as its CEO. Gelsinger inherited a roughly $4.5 billion company, staring into the teeth of the oncoming cloud megatrend. Gelsinger quickly embarked on a strategy to refocus on the core business, buoyed by a restructuring of many of the VMware assets that EMC and VMware folded into a new company called Pivotal. Gelsinger made several attempts to maintain and expand VMware's total available market with a public cloud play called vCloud Air, which ultimately failed. On the plus side of the ledger, however, Gelsinger led VMware's software-defined data center strategy grabbing pieces of its value chain that were historically left for the ecosystem. Of course, the most notable being NSX, the company's software-defined networking product, and vSan, a software storage play. Fast forward to 2017, and add to these developments the momentum of VMware's cloud management and orchestration offerings, its security and other multi-cloud services, and you now have a nearly $8 billion revenue company growing at 10% per anum, with a $40 billion market cap, and a new owner, namely, Michael Dell and company. Hello, everyone. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman, and this is our VMworld 2017 preview. Stu, thanks for joining me. >> Dave, can't believe it's bene eight years we've been doing theCUBE at VMworld. >> Right, and we have been tracking this, Stu, and now, as we were saying, we see new owners, Michael Dell, Dell buying EMC, and of course VMware maintaining the vast majority of the ownership. Stu, what has changed since Michael Dell purchased VMware? What's changed in terms of Dell, its ownership, and also in the past year? >> Yeah, so it's been one of the top questions. Last year, John Furrier and I interviewed Michael Dell, and there were still everybody trying to say after the acquisition happened, "Aren't you going to just sell of VMware because VMware "needs to be independent, "they need to be able to partner with everyone?" And Michael was basically like, just lit a fire underneath him, and he's like, "People that think I'm going to sell it "don't understand the business plan "and they don't understand math." Everybody thought, "Oh, you got to sell them off "to be able to pay down the debt," and he's like, "No. "VMware has been called the jewel of this acquisition "of EMC, the largest acquisition in tech history." And that relationship of VMware is something that's still playing out. One piece of it, you mentioned vSAN, one of the success stories, there was the failure of EVO:RAIL, which was kind of the first generation solution put together sold through a whole lot of partners. They took that whole product and marketing team and put them together with EMC and created the VxRail team, which now reports up to Chad Sakac. On the Dell/EMC side, VxRail doing quite well, vSAN doing phenomenally well. They claim to have the most number of customers for any product in the hyper-converged infrastructure space. Lots of different solutions out there. So, some of that blending of how Dell/EMC and VMware, we see a little bit of that, but still, VMware partners with everyone. VMworld, still, Dave, is probably the largest infrastructure ecosystem out there, and even if we look at cloud, it's one of the more robust ecosystems out there. The only one probably rivals it these days is Amazon. >> Stu, isn't Dell's ownership of VMware somewhat more threatening to server vendors in particular than EMCs? Especially Cisco, IBM, HPE, large volume movers of VMware licenses, how has that affected the dynamic in the ecosystem? >> Yeah, Dave, we've talked in previous years. I was at EMC back at the beginning of the VMware relationship. EMC really didn't know what it was getting when it got VMware. It was less dollars were going to go into servers because we consolidate with virtualization, and less dollars to servers should mean more dollars to storage, good for EMC. Well, Dell, number one thing that Michael Dell wants to do is sell Dell servers. So, of course, if I'm someone else in that ecosystem, if I'm selling other servers, if I'm selling storage that doesn't run on Dell gear and not part of that Dell ecosystem, absolutely it could be a threat. Micheal has maintained the they're going to keep VMware, allow them to have their independence, and I haven't heard too many rumblings from the ecosystem that they've messed up the apple cart from VMware's standpoint. >> Okay, last year the talk was that Pat Gelsinger was on his way out. >> Stu Miniman: Yeah. >> You see Pat Gelsinger doesn't appear to be on his way out. There's earnings momentum, which we'll talk about, but thoughts on management? >> Yeah, so, right, Dave. Number one thing is we thought Pat would be out. Things are doing better from a stock market. You talked about the growth, 10% per anum right now is solid VMware. We've seen a number of moves and changes, people that, there have been a lot of people that have left. There's new people that have come in. There are areas that are doing quite well, and virtualization is still a mainstay of the data center. One of the things we'll talk about, I know, is that Amazon relationship, which we expect to hear a lot about at the show. Amazon's one of the Global Diamond partners, which, a year ago if you had said that Amazon was one of the top partners up there with the likes of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OVH took over the vCloud Air business, which is, as you said, it failed from VMware's standpoint. They still have a number of partners. Companies like Rackspace, OVH that took over that vCloud Air business, and lots of service providers are doing quite well selling VMware lots of places. And virtualization still is the foundational layer for most infrastructure. >> So VMware pre-announced earnings to the upside and future growth ahead of expectations, so the stock got a nice pop out of that. What's driving that momentum? >> The two areas you talked about first. vSAN is doing quite well. It's driving a lot of adoption and trying to get VMware to be a little bit more sticky and really kind of slowly expand as opposed to big chunks. We talked about when Pat first went in as CEO, it was, VMware had to play a similar game to what Intel did, Dave, which is how do they expand what they're doing without really ostracizing their ecosystem. And, to their credit, they've done a pretty good job of that. They baked in some backup solutions, but lots of backup solutions, you and I were at the vMon conference earlier this year. VM's still doing a very solid business inside of VMware's ecosystem. Lots of other players that play well there. NSX is really starting to hit its stride, that networking piece, but where a few years ago we were talking about it was VMware versus Cisco, well, they seem to be kind of settling into their swim lanes. Cisco still has their core networking business. Cisco's trying to become more of a software company. Cisco actually recently bought Springpath, which was their hyper-converged product, but today that's far behind what vSAN's doing, revenue, users, and everything like that. AirWatch was another acquisition. Sanjay Poonen really helped drive that forward. So the mobility play, VMware's doing well. A lot of the emerging areas, we've been waiting to see where VMware goes with them. Things that I look at like containerization, server lists, open stack VMware had some plays there. They are really kind of nascent at this point and haven't really exploded. I always look at this show, are we seeing many developers there? Lots of the shows we go to have a big developer group. We'll have a little bit of developers, but it's really still a small piece of the overall picture. There's still lots of virtualization admins, people looking at where VMware fits into cloud, and that's kind of where it sits today. >> Let's talk about the competitive dynamic, which is totally different. I mean, back when we first started covering VMworld with theCUBE, 2010, it was really Citrix, Microsoft, Citrix with VDI. You mentioned AirWatch, which kind of flipped the dynamic a little bit. Quite a bit, actually. But Microsoft was the key virtualization competitor. Now it's like competitors, partners, you've got Google Cloud, now, of course, Diane Greene running Google Cloud, which is kind of ironic. We can talk about that. Microsoft with Azure, AWS, which is, we expect to hear a lot from VMware at VMworld 2017 about the AWS relationship. Certainly, IBM with its cloud. Nutanix, which launched at VMworld several years ago, is now more competitive. You mentioned Cisco. They're clearly more competitive with NSX. How do you describe the competitive landscape? What should we be watching at this year's show? >> Yeah, Dave, first of all, you talked about how VMware grew from kind of the $2.5 billion to more like an $8 billion, so of course they're bumping into, kind of going over some of their swim lanes a little bit, and the market has matured. Absolutely, hyper convergence for the last few years has been one of the hot spots, not only for VMware, first when they launched vSAN, it actually was the tide that rose for a lot of their competitors out there. Nutanix, SimpliVity, many of these companies said that they actually stopped a lot of their outbound marketing for about a year because all the people that called up looking at vSAN went to those solutions. Now vSAN's hitting its stride. It's doing really well. I highlighted how VxRail is doing great revenue on the Dell/EMC side, and there's still lots of partners that VMware has. So hyper converge, absolutely something that we'll see there. Cloud, big piece. I mentioned Rackspace, OVH, all the service providers. The vCloud Air network is still kind of there. So how VMware is getting into the service providers, how they're getting into the cloud, I know we'll talk a little bit more about the cloud piece. Last year it was the Cloud Foundation suite, which takes vSAN, and NSX, and vSphere, puts it all together with a management, and that's something that VMware wants to be able to put on prem in a service provider or in AWS. So really, wherever you go, VMware is going to be there and stretch that, but it's like a four-node star configuration. It doesn't natively go into Amazon. That's been a lot of the lift that's been happening over the last year to try to get that VMware on AWS working, and I hear it's not 100% baked yet by the time we get to the show, but working out a lot of those details. But cloud, hyper-converged, some of the new ones. VDI will still come up too, I'm sure. >> How about Docker? Where do they fit in the competitive landscape? >> Yeah, it's interest, remember, I remember the last year we had the show in San Francisco we had Ben Golub, a CEO at Docker, on the program there. Ben's no longer the CEO. They switched CEO's. We had theCUBE at DockerCon this year. Containers, absolutely very important. VMware has something called VMware Integrated Containers. I hear a little bit about it, but most people, if they're saying, "I'm doing virtualization," they're probably doing it on Linux. So Red Hat Summit this year, heard a lot about containers. We're going to have theCUBE at Kubecon, which is the Kubernetes show, later this year. So we know VMware plays a little bit with Docker. I'd love to see VMware saying how they fit into the Kubernetes piece a little bit more. We heard of the Cloud Foundry Summit earlier this year, how Pivotal kind of fits into that environment and they've got a way to be able to spread across multiple environments there. But VMware tends to play in a little bit more traditional applications. And, Dave, when you talk about a competitive standpoint, that's what I look at for VMware. The biggest threat to them is they don't own the application, so Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and all those cloud-native apps that are getting put in the public cloud, like Google, and Amazon, and Microsoft, does that leave VMware behind? Does VMware, I heard it many times last year, become the new Legacy? >> Well, and, but they're clearly positioned as an infrastructure player, so let's talk about that. I mean, cloud has become the new, infrastructure and service, become the new big competitive threat to on-prem infrastructure. Wikibon has done some research on the true private cloud. Interestingly, I mean, true private cloud essentially is a moniker representation of public cloud-like attributes on prem, bringing cloud, cloud models, to the data, for example, and Wikibon has forecast that as the largest market. I think I've got some data here. It shows that true private cloud over time will be a $230 billion market, whereas infrastructures and service in the public cloud will be about 150 billion. So you expect that true private cloud is going to overtake that. It's growing faster. The CAG here is 33% versus public IAS at 15%, but the big thing is staff. >> Yeah. >> Staffing, getting taken out essentially, getting out of non-differentiated heavy lifting, but what is VMware's cloud strategy generally, but specifically with regard to bringing the cloud model to the data on prem? >> Yeah, so when we created the true private cloud definition, we said,"Vvirtualization alone is not cloud, "and therefore, what do we need? "We really need to have that automation, "that orchestration." And VMware had done a number of acquisitions, they're putting the suite of solutions together, and it's more than just saying, "Oh, I have six different software products; "here's a bundle." How do we fully integrate that? And that's what the Cloud Foundation suite's what VMware put together so that I can have it in a virtual private cloud in Amazon. And it's something basically VMware manages it, but it's Amazon's data center, and that's plugged into the public clouds. I can do the similar sort of thing in the service providers and that's why, with our forecast, Dave, we show in about five years, true private cloud should have more revenue than public cloud. Big reason is because there's a whole lot of Legacy out there and moving from all of my, most companies hundreds if not thousands of applications, getting all of them to the public cloud is tough. Having them in a virtualized environment and being able to slide them over to this kind of environment makes a lot of sense. I can do that. And the shift of my workloads and my applications going to microservices really starting to break apart some of the the pieces is something that a lot of times that's going to take five to 10 years. So, in the meantime, we're going to shift kind of Legacy to private cloud while we're picking off the things that we can with the public cloud. And VMware with their Cloud Foundation suite and their solutions that they're putting together, networking as, really, the inter fabric with NSX, vSAN making it easy to make those applications a little bit more portable between different types of infrastructure, but that's really, VMware is they put their cloud play, and they have a very large set of partners that they're working with in this space. >> So, Stu, how should we look at the VMware AWS deal? Is it AWS's attempt to get a piece of the true private cloud action on prem? Is it VMware's initiative to try to actually get a cloud strategy that has teeth, and works, and has longevity? How should we think about that? >> Yeah, it's, of course, a little bit of both. At its core, I think it's Amazon looks at 500,000 VMware customers that have data center deployments and they're going to stick a straw into that environment and say, "Come try out the first taste of our services," and once you get on the Amazon services which, by the way, they're launching, what, three new features every week, I think. I was at the Amazon Summit in New York City recently and it was like, "Oh, it's a regional summit," there were like three main announcements. No, I got the email. There were like 12 announcements and each one of them were kind of cool and things like that. So it absolutely is how do I get customers comfortable with moving to this new model. I think one of the things that Microsoft did really well is when they pushed everybody to Office 365, they said, "SaaS is the way you should always think "about buying your applications going forward, not, "I'm going to deploy a server for my Outlook, "I'm going to deploy infrastructure for my SharePoint." It's, "I'm going to buy Office 365 and that's just "the way it's done." So they made it the okay. Now VMware, it's really dangerous, in a way, saying, working with Amazon, now we're saying, "Hey, playing on Amazon's safe. "The water's nice." And once they get in that water and you have access to all of those cool things that Amazon keeps putting out, which, by the way, Dave, the week after they announced the partnership of VMware and AWS, what Amazon announced was, "There's a really easy "migration service that, if you have "a VMware Ware environment, "you just kind of click this button." And I'm pretty sure it's for free. "You can now be completely on AWS "and you don't have to pay for VMware licensing anymore. "Wouldn't that be nice?" >> So, okay, so the way you've phrased it or framed it, is it sounds like that VMware, with its half a million customers, has more to lose than AWS in this deal. Is that the right way to think about it or is this not a zero-sum game? >> I don't think it's a zero-sum game when, you brought up the true private cloud. The data center still, there's room for some growth with VMware, even if people are 90% virtualized now, there's some room for growth there. Public cloud, though, has a strong growth engine, so now VMware has a play there. Rather than saying, "It's the book seller, don't go there," they want to have a play. Michael Dell, Dave, I'm sure we're going to ask him, say, "Hey, what do you think the world's going to look like "in five years? "You've got your Azure Stack partnership "that you're lining up with your server division "and with EMC, you've got Amazon that VMware's playing with, "you've got your data center; "how does that go?" And, of course, Michael being the smart businessman that he is, is going to say, "Uh, yeah, you're going to buy Dell "no matter what solution you go with, "and I'm going to have a strong position "in all of them." but it definitely is, we're in a bit of a transitional phase as to how this is going to look. We've, for years, been arguing how big does public cloud get, what applications go where. I do think that this has the potential to accelerate a little bit from VMware's standpoint. VMware customers getting in this environment, trying out some of the new things. I know lots of people that were in the virtualization community that are now playing in the public cloud, getting certified, doing the same things that they did a decade ago to get on public cloud. So, as those armies of certified people kind of move over in the skillset, we have a generational shift going on and lots of people are going to be like, "Hey, I don't want to spend 12 to 18 months "building a temple for my data anymore. "I can just spin this up really fast and move." It's interesting, Dave, Cycle Computing, one of the earliest customers that we interviewed at Amazon, was just acquired by one of the other cloud guys, not Amazon. So companies that know, that was an HPC company that was, rather than spend 18 months and $10 million, we can do the same thing in, like, a few weeks and $10,000. >> They're super computing in the cloud. All right, let's wrap with what to expect at VMworld 2017. Obviously it's going to be a lot of people there. They're your peeps. A lot of partying going on. It's like, it used to be Labor Day kicked off the fall selling season, and for years it's been VMworld. What should we look for this year? >> Yeah, so, I'm excited, Dave. It's always, this community, they spend like the whole summer getting ready for it. I'm actually going to be sitting on a panel at Opening Acts, which is, the VMunderground group does on Sunday. So the event really, it doesn't start Monday, Dave, it actually, a lot of people are already flying in by the time this video goes up. They're doing things Saturday. On Sunday there's three panels. I'm sitting on one on buzz words in IT, so to things like cloud and server lists. Are those meaningful or are those a total waste of our time? So that kind of gets us started. You mentioned lot of good parties at the show always. There's the vExpert community. I was a vExpert for a number of years back when it was, you know, hundred, couple hundred people. I think there's now 1,500 vExperts worldwide. We've got a bunch of hosts coming in to help us, including John Troyer who created the vExpert program, Keith Townsend, Justin Warren, excited to have them. Lisa Martin's going to be co-hosting, along with you, me, John Furrier and Peter Burris. So we've got a big team. We've got two sets. We've got a great lineup at theCUBE. Two sets, three days in the VMvillage, which this year is on the first floor right outside of the Expo Hall. So it's one of those things I don't expect to sleep a lot. I expect to see a lot of people, bump into 'em on the show floor, stop by theCUBE, see the parties, and definitely see 'em in the after parties. >> Great. Well, as Stu says, we have two sets going on, so please stop by and see us. Stu, thanks very much for helping me with this VMworld preview. We'll see you in Vegas next week. Thanks for watching, everybody. See you in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas It's theCUBE covering Edge 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE the world-wide leader in live tech coverage. Leanne Kemp is here. She's the founder and CEO of Everledger. Leanne, good to see you. >> Hello, hello. What a great place to be. >> Good joke, Las Vegas again. Stu and I spend a lot of time here. Why did you start Everledger? >> Well, you know, some might say it's my mid-life crisis but the reality is I've been in emerging technology for 25 years. In the mid 90s, now I'm giving away my age I was in radio frequency identification so at the chip and inlay level supply chain tracking. A bit boring, really. >> Stu: No, RFID is cool. >> But in the last 10 years I've worked in jewelry and insurance. And that's given me an appreciation of the size of the problems that exist in the market. And couple that with a whole lot of nerd we have the ability to solve the problems that we're solving today. >> And describe that problem. It's a problem of provenance and transparency is that right? >> Provenance, fraud, document tampering. And when you mix all of those together you have a pretty potent formula for black market trade. And sadly, some of that trade is really running into terrorist-funded activities. So, it's a pretty big problem but I think now is a very real issue that's washing the front pages of every paper on a daily event. Diamonds, of course, is one of the vehicles for anti-money laundering. And if we can go and serve to reduce some of those problems then it's worthwhile getting out of bed for. >> Okay, so you're attacking the diamond value chain. Why that? 'Cuz you have a background in jewelry? Okay, how are you solving that problem though? Describe that in a little bit more detail. >> So, attacking's pretty aggressive. I think we're enhancing. So, we're bringing transparency in a once-opaque market. You know, we're enabling, with the use of technology to bring transparency into the market so that we can start to reduce some of the problems around fraud. When you really think about I mean most people look at us as a blockchain company. I liken us to an emerging technology company. We're using the very best of blockchain and smart contracts and machine vision as an enabler to be able to identify fraudulent-related activities and reduce them in marketplaces. And we're just starting with diamonds but it's really anything that is appreciable of value that criminals like to maybe get their grubby mitts on. >> When did you get this idea, like what timeframe? 2010, 2011, 2015? >> To be honest with you I think this has been a cocktail of experience that really has brought it together at the right time. So, you know, as I said my background has been really unfolding like a patchwork quilt. But when you really see the heightened anxiety that's going on in market now particularly around synthetic diamonds that are of gem-quality standards there's no greater time to be able to bring confidence back into the diamond industry and the consumer networks. >> I guess my question is that at what point did you say okay blockchain can be addressed to enhance this problem? Did you look at Bitcoin and say hmm, that's interesting? Not a currency, it's a technology that I can apply to all the problems. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm a technologist so I really am quite bored with Sudoku so I would rather sort of look at what's going on in the tech space. And so when I really saw the emergency of Bitcoin I understood where that application could lie. But because I wasn't from a banking background it was patently obvious to me that I could decouple the currency from the ledger and really use the currency as a vehicle or a tokenization of assets. And the assets is diamonds, a girl's best friend. So why wouldn't you want to protect your assets? (chuckles) >> Fascinating 'cuz I think the first time I heard of, you know, blockchain and Bitcoin it was about being anonymous and therefore there were concerns that some of those unscrupulous people that are trying to benefit off of like diamonds would use, you know, this crypto currency. They don't have to talk to banks. They don't have to talk to governments. So you've almost flipped the usage of the technology to something to help the world a little bit more. >> That's right. I guess when you really think about it, you know the Bitcoin has often been assimilated with the anarchic world. And we're really bringing it to clean and transparency. So, I guess there is a juxtaposition there. But everything's upside down for me. I'm from Australia so it's perfectly normal. >> Go ahead, Stu. >> Yeah, just when you look at Blockchain and kind of the core technology you think we're really in the early days? What kind of usage do you see out beyond the ledgers? Are there other applications be it beyond the diamonds that you guys are looking at? >> Yeah, you know, so it's interesting. In the early 2000s I worked in WAP, you know? And I was so excited. I thought wow, this tech is really going to do something. So, you know, I'm part of Team Asserti in Australia and wrote out an application. And I felt like nearly six months came into the tech. And all of a sudden, I woke up and I went where the bloody hell did WAP go? It just disappeared. There was a very real danger that this technology was likely to face the same ill fate. And we often see in any emerging technology where there are heightened promises. They often end in disappointment. So, actually most of the decisions I've made in a start-up, and we're only 18 months old have really been counterintuitive. You know, when it's the time to put the pedal straight down I've often held back to really wait to see where the maturity of the technology was going to lie. And in any emerging technology and if you're a CEO of a start-up you have to be completely articulate about where the problem is that you're solving. But not only that you need to take the time to really distill the technology to its purest essence and then enable that to be the potent shot that goes out first and foremost. And so this is a nascent technology. And maybe, you know, it has the parentage of a multilingual PhD scientist but the reality is it's only just been born. We're not even nappy feddy. We're not even out of out of our nappies right now. So we need to give it the time to really grow. And we've chosen a niche market. It just so happens that it's a bloody big niche. >> So what took longer to figure out the problem or the solution? >> You know, I think you know, I don't know. That's a really good question, actually. I think the problem for me I understood quite early but I just didn't appreciate the size of the problem globally and the extension of that problem into other areas. And really I think it's taken some time for the technology to be understood. We've taken a view that we'd like to see ourselves as the custodian of the technology. We don't want to go to market too early. We want to be sure that whenever the message is delivered to market that it's something we've already delivered that we have built that the engineering effort has already been afforded. You know, small acorns grow into mighty oaks. And so for us, it's about ensuring that we take the time to really give the right fertilizer to the growth. >> And that's a 50 billion dollar problem you said this morning is that right? Is that there- >> Just in insurance. But we have banks as our clients too so, you know, we're shooting hoops. >> So you're saying it's a multiplier of that 50 billion? >> Leanne: Of course. >> Yeah, big multiplier. >> I mean counterfeit good if you extend it into luxury goods it's 1.7 trillion dollars. >> And you talked about the sort of value chain of rough cut, 15 billion and you maybe triple that when it gets polished almost 50 billion and then another one and a half X at retail. Where are the holes in that value chain, everywhere? I mean are you seeing fraud occur throughout that value chain or- >> Effectively. You know, we don't have you know, visibility of complete provenance through the supply chain. And in fact, it's not just limited to the diamond industry. I mean I guess the diamond industry there's the allure of luxury. You know, there's the backdrop of affluence. And then, of course, there's the atrocity of what goes on in terms of or what used to go on so prolifically in blood diamonds. You know, effectively the industry isn't as burdened with technology as say financial services. It doesn't have the legacy of 50 years of technology that it needs to unwind. So, when you really consider what's going on in the market today to bring emerging technology into this space not limited to blockchain even enabling new technologies like high-definition photographs and machine vision our marketplace has the ability to consume that technology quite rapidly. And when you think about the problems in our market or the restrictions in our market it's really a lightning rod moment for us where we've just been fortunate enough to be able to build out a solid engineering rod to be able to capture that lightning bolt of problem. >> Dave: Mm-hmm. >> We've had a lot of discussions with IBM executives this week and they feel security is one of the things that IBM does really well. Talk a little bit about your relationship with IBM what IBM does well what they're good at partnering with. How is it to work with IBM? >> Dave: What they could do better. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely (chuckles). We, in the very first 12 months of Everledger we managed to onboard, you know, a million diamonds. And most people were applauding the efforts of our engineering team. And we certainly applauded ourselves. But Christmas was a very lonely path for me because I started to become shivered by the thought of what would this mean if I went from a million to 10 million to 15 million and then into rough being able to track 320 million carats of rough diamonds across 80 countries around the world. So, when you're a start-up and you're faced with some of the largest organizations and governments around the world let's face it, the industry's 130 years old. You want to be able to look towards a technology innovator like IBM that has been around and reinvented itself over a trusted 100 years. And that transactional trust is at the very core of this fabric. So, some of the things that you look at in terms of a start-up may be actually too isolated. A lot of technology companies that are in the blockchain space are just looking at the blockchain fabric. But for me, it was patently obvious we needed to stretch further. We needed to realize that we have to deliver this into a cloud solution. We have to deliver this technology in such a form that has to be secured. And the security needs to really be from the ground up at the root source right the way through to the front end. And there's no other partner that's actually doing that. There are other service providers in this space that shall not be mentioned. But they're, of course, taking whatever nascent technology is being built and putting it into the cloud. IBM has really taken the time to sew together the right security fabric. >> And that's about scale for you, right? I mean you wouldn't be able to scale without it. >> I sleep at night knowing that we have IBM. Like as a CEO, I sleep at night. >> My understanding, there's container technology that you're using in here. Most people think of containers as security's one of the holes there so, you know, how do you feel with the security of containers today? And maybe you can share a little bit about you know, what IBM's doing specifically for that. >> Yeah, I mean the container services team that we've been working with and today I had the absolute privilege it was a diary note moment for me to present on stage with Donna. You know, her background in security has afforded us the ability to really deliver this quite quickly. The work that they have been doing is recognized not only and I touched on the surface of the three markets that of real concern or focus for us is fraud and theft and cyber. And when you consider the container services and the security team that's wrapped this around I really think that actually one of the silent winners in this is the reduction in cyber crime. And maybe that hasn't been focused on too largely. And the 50 billion dollars that I was talking about was really around document tampering and, you know, the over-inflation of insurance claims. When you really think about it it's actually cyber crime that I think we could actually truly solve as part of the solution itself. >> So explain again, Leanne, how does it work? So each diamond has a unique identifies it's got a fingerprint on there. How does it get on there? >> So there are existing processes in industry. There are two parts to the market first is rough diamonds and the second is polished diamonds. And as diamonds are crossing borders as a part of international trade they're often inspected by gemologists. Those that, of course, have received licenses in the skill of identifying diamonds. But that's all- >> Dave: But that's a spot inspection, is that right or- >> Correct. >> Dave: Yeah. >> But there's also actual machinery. So there are certain types of science that have been applied and have been applied for a number of years. And one of the challenges that we faced with ourselves is to IoT-enable the diamond pipeline. So, some of these machines have been in existence. They're highly calibrated and they have precision but that data is often blackboxed. It's not, indeed, ledgered or stored for public view or even inter-office view. And so one of the tricks that we've enabled is the ability to take all of those data points 40 meta data points as well as the reputation or the expert opinion and lay that data into the blockchain. So we're layering really a reputation score not only of the person, the machine but also the diamond and the validity of that diamond. And that can only come over time with large aggregated data sets. >> Okay, and that is your providence. You said the world's provenance is locked in paper. So now you're locking it into- >> Leanne: You're listening >> The blockchain. Of course (chuckles). I knew we had to talk to you. We better listen. Okay, so all right. And then can you explain the banking crisis the liquidity crisis in the diamond business? >> Leanne: Yeah, absolutely. >> What's that stem from? I didn't quite understand. >> It's really affecting the middle part of the pipeline. We have very large mining companies and of course quite substantial retailers but it's the middle part of the pipeline that's really being caused in terms of a squeeze. And so they are the diamond cutters and polishers really generational businesses that have perfected the art and the skill of cutting diamonds. It's the middle part of the pipeline that's really being affected at the moment. And as I mentioned there are two brave Western banks that remain supporting industry. The largest, which has been really in industry for quite some time is ABN AMRO. And proudly, they still remain. And Barclay's Bank. But we've seen an announcement more recently with Standard pulling back out of the industry for a lack of transparency and a burden on their balance sheet. This, of course, has come from Basel III and some of the regulations that's been pushed down from them. And if we're able to take certification and extend transparency but also bring certification to the next level to enable a collateral management system to be built so banks can take the security on the underlying asset rather than just take a balance sheet position it will lift the burden on their balance sheet. It will give them security of the diamond. And let's face it, diamonds are worth something. And as I said when you start to understand the true effect of rough to polished to track the diamond through its lifecycle and give security is something that banks are open-minded about. >> Yes, okay. So it's not a chicken and egg problem it's a transparency begets liquidity is that right? That's the premise anyway >> Yeah >> Dave: That you're testing basically making that bet with your company. We don't have much time but I just wanted to ask you about your company. You're an entrepreneur. You started the company, you said 18 months ago. Funding, VC, you know, give us the lowdown. >> Sure, sure, sure. I mean I came into London in October of 2014. And I was desperate to talk to insurers. And so one of the largest insurers in the London market is Aviva. And they had a hackathon at Google so I thought hey, this would be all right. I'm just going to Trojan Horse the event and see if I can have a talk to the CFO and COO. So I went there. They opened up some APIs. And because I, of course, had a technical background I thought those APIs are hopeless there's not much I can do with that. But if you want to solve some of the problems here this is what you can do. You can take diamonds, take certification and put it on the blockchain as a way to reduce fraud. And at that hackathon I was awarded the innovation prize. But the managing director of Barclay's Techstars was one of the judges and came to me and invited me to join them as part of their accelerator in London which began in March 2015. And, of course, I thought this is crazy. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to be in London with a bank? It doesn't really make too much sense. And let's face it, I mean Australia is a much nicer country to spend your holidays in rather than London. But in any event, I returned and participated as part of the Barclay's accelerator and I've been supported through the process of the acceleration. But Barclay's is both a bank and an insurance company in Africa so the penny dropped and we put our head down. We wore some letters off the keyboard and Everledger was born. And away we go. >> And so Barclay's funded, in part the company or- >> Barclay's and the Techstars accelerator program have a seed funding event which is a part of the acceleration program for start-ups if you're chosen. And we were fortunate enough to be chosen. And since that time we've been we haven't disclosed who one of our backers are. >> Dave: Okay. >> But we will, in time. And so we've been funded by a selected name in industry. And we're actually just about to go into our Series A so we're looking towards that in the next number of months. >> Dave: You're not even in Series A yet? So you've gotten this far without even getting to your Series A? >> Leanne: Yeah. >> 980 thousand? >> Well, we have revenue, so- >> Dave: Yeah. >> This is my last start-up. I had to go through an intervention with my family to enable me to be here. >> Dave: This is my last So this is it. >> Dave: We've heard that before. >> I promise. I know, it's true, it's true. >> Opportunities beyond diamonds or is that getting too ahead of our speech here? >> Diamonds, watches, art, fine wine you know, and I'm completely empowered by how do we bring what the diamond industry did so well in the reduction of blood diamonds and bring ethical trade really to the forefront of the mind of the consumer and also the mind of the financial services market. So, you know, for me it's really around that part of the world. If that nexus point comes together then I'll keep getting out of bed for it. >> Awesome. Great story. Impressive entrepreneur. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Leanne: Yes, thank you. >> London's not so bad (chuckles). Comment? >> London's probably watching. (Dave and Leanne laugh) >> All right, thanks again. Keep it right there, buddy. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from IBM Edge in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (low tempo music)